LIFE AT LAUREL TOWN IN ANGLO-SAXON KANSAS KATE STEPHENS CQEXRIGHI OEFOSm LIFE ON A FAEM NEAE LAUREL TOWN BY THE SAME AUTHOR The Greek Spirit Workfellowa ia Social Progression American Thumb*Print9 A Woman's Heart The Mastering ol Mexico Stories from Old Chronicles And other books LIFE AT LAUREL TOWN IN ANGLO-SAXON KANSAS BY KATE STEPHENS Sometime Profetsor of Greek in the Uaiversity of Kansas Our leadintf men are not of much account, and never have been, but the average of the people is immenBe. Walt Whitman. Be folks (peuple). Your only, your real duty, is to keep democratic in your heart. George Sand, HatDtence, Hianjja^ ALUMNI ASSOCIATION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS 1920 ^-' f Copyright, 1920 By KATE STEPHENS Set up and electrotyped. Published, 1920. Limited, large-paper edition. §)CLA604339 '-V 27 I..0 ^\\\3 LIFE ON A FAEM NEAE LAUREL TOWN DIONTSUa IN KANSAS Make plod! The Lord of Growth has come; The sun has half his northward journey done. And in deep-huried roots moves the Spirit ! On the dark-earthed fields Fires of last year's husks the farmer kindles—- Sacrifices to the Lord of Growth; Smoke rises to the l)luer heavens; While hawk and solemn crow cut with long wing the spark- ling air. And little birds do sing, *'Rejoice! Rejoice! the Springing Life is here!** Mounting sap now brightens trunk of tree and vine; And every tip^most ttvig swells out its leaf -buds. The peach puts forth her bitter-tinted pink; Redbud empurples far each wooded stretch; And, by the magic of the Lord of Spring, Stand orchards, very ghosts of winter snoxcs, lohite-cloaked in blossom. Wheat, O sisters, greens in our rolling glebe! And com, O brothers, springs from its golden seed! For Sun-Warmth, and Wind-Strength, and Praise-God-Rain Are abroad in our land; Three builders of worlds, with the Spirit, Go forth hand in hand. Make glad! The Lord of Growth has come; The sun has near his northward journey run, And in deep-buried roots moves Life-Ever-Living! LIFE ON A FARM NEAR LAUREL TOWN From heights of Kansas City the lands rolling westward gleamed like a Land of Beulah that spring my Father first saw Kansas. Civil War had ended. Peace had come. And a Kansas spring was burgeoning — ^the verdure of April, indescribably luscious May days, June air fragrant with wild grape blos- soms and musical with stir of leaves. As the traveler watched and waited on Kansas City bluffs, and later turned his horse's head towards Paola and Laurel Town, the soiPs promise of overmastering harvests delighted him. A certain melancholy which broods over the state, greater in the western than eastern part, a genius loci, induced, perhaps, by the seemingly unending stretch of fertile earth, a broad sky shutting down like an inverted bowl and sug- gesting the impenetrability of heaven — some- times conveying by massing of clouds, fierce winds and rains, vaultings of IJghltning an-l 3 4 LIFE ON A FARM voices of tliunder, the impression that demiurgic forces are about to unite and grind to nothing the puny works of man — this reverse of the lov- ing exuberance of Kansas nature affected the traveler slightly. Then, too, the people at the time of his com- ing settled, and settling, in this rich environ- ment — a people for the most part of the blood of Anglo-Saxon state-makers, a democracy sav- ing to the world the traditions and courage of their forefathers; ranchers and lovers of live stock, farmers and such fosterers of growing grain that, like the Hebrew Job of old, they never *^let thistles grow instead of wheat, and cockle instead of barley" ; farmers as farms were in those days; not seeking to specialize, as in this of ours, but growing a little of every farm thing for their families' needs and comforts; having their own orchards, their own berry bushes, their own vegetable gardens, their own chickens, pigs, cows and even sheep. Sometimes these people were children of frontier dwellers for generations, cradled in supplies so slender that they had developed a godlike energy, an amazing adaptability, and what it might be unjust to call insensibility to finer shadings and yet was not wholly stoicism of feeling. NEAE LAUREL TOWN O Also tliere were the citizens — craft folks, pro- fessional folk, gathered in the community of tiny towns where no man owned material advantage over his neighbor, and therefore was not apt to assume to himself airs of superiority. This people, identical in ethics and language, identical in political ends, my Father thought as free a democracy as the world had ever seen, alert of intellect, restless in experiment, inebriate of optimism, self-confident to an aston- ishing degree, earnest in our American faith in education and local self-government; and loyal to the ideas of our f oreparents who looked upon government as a form to which they, exercising their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, contributed support and delegated their authority, not a system from which they might draw maintenance and patronage. Parasitic peoples, those not led by spiritual vigor and spiritual truth — people who go where wealth is merely because wealth is there, fervent solely for themselves, ignorant of the institu- tions of our country, or disregardful of their meaning in any other significance than affording them a protected dwelling place and opportunity to make money; and also parasitic institutions which establish themselves and fatten on present human labor and accumulations of past labors 6 LIFE ON A FASM — in those days, in Kansas, they were too few to count. These two makers of environment, the mag- nificence of nature and the spirit of Anglo- Saxon statemakers, led my Father to cast his lot in the state when an invalidism settled upon him and made change of climate needful. Years hef ore, in New York, he was a lawyer with a lucrative practice. When President Lincoln sent out the call of the 15th of April, 1861, for seventy-five thousand volunteers, how- ever, he at once locked his office-doors and went enlisting men for defense of the Union. Not many days later his recruits assemhled in the main street of the snug, little village — it was a bright, spring morning and wives and children, and folks from the neighhoring hills, were there to see. Drums beat attention, two or three men stepped forward and presenting him with a captain's sword buckled it round his waist, and the company set forth for war. ** Marched from Martinsburg [Virginia] to Bunkerhill," he wrote in his diary, under July 15th. *' Marched to Charlestown/' July 17th. ** Marched to Harper's Ferry," July 20th. '* Battle of Lovettsville," August 8th; and two days later, **Went to Baltimore sick.'' When able to travel he came home ** suffering NEAR LAUBEL TOWN 7 from fever, neuralgia and general prostration resulting from severe service/' the army-sur- geon stated. By merit of home, and rest, he so far recovered as to resume practice of law. But after a couple of years the doctors found him invalided by war's aftermath, tuberculosis of the lungs. They gave him *Hwo years to live" (a child standing by overheard their sen- tence), and sent him south for benefits of open- air healing. The south, totally disrupted, proved hostile to his family traditions. He saw he must seek an environment other, in spiritual lines, if he were once more to have wife and children with him. So, urging his horse northward, delaying sometime in Missouri because of its attractive face, but there, also, finding hatred of his home and people, he finally came to Kansas City, and from its heights looked out over fat lands roll- ing westward. Country life Pater had always loved. Years before, when practising law in New York, a farm some thirty miles from his office delighted him, and to its pleasantnesses he would often go, spending the day in the open, la^dng out work for its men. Besides gratifying his taste for close touch with the land's beauty and for thought, such outings increased his frail body's 8 LIFE ON A FARM strength. And now, when need of spending his days out of doors had shut him off from his profession, he determined to he a farmer, theoretical if not practical, hut practical as far as possihle. The land he chose for our home, summing ahout two hundred and thirty acres, lying north- ward of and adjoining Laurel Town, had many features unusual to a Kansas farm ; for instance, in its upland and lowland. And from the main- traveled road on the west line, to the Kansas river and skirting willows on the east, it held some especially lovely spots. Wooded ground which had never known the plough lay on its southern horder, along a little amher stream called ** brewery brook," and on the north a like band of primeval forest stretched from highway to river. Nature had planted the woods after her sweet fashion of making her garden, and in the shadow of the trees wild geranium and columbine blossomed, and wind-flowers nodded, and purple violets carpeted the ground in spring. The most striking figure of the south woods was a black walnut standing with a girth of toward twenty feet — rising in masjesty ^nd aloofness so apart from its brothers, and their shade, that the sun had roimded its branches to NEAR LAUEEL TOWN y an almost perfect globe. A little way off a ravine intersecting this woodland ran north, and south, and a sycamore, laid low by some wind, had spanned the gully. Upon the sycamore^s satiny bark we walked across when river-waters filled the ravine in time of flood — there, too, warm afternoons in spring, when frogs were chorusing and water-bugs skating, I found a good place for studying Virgil. Such little localities as these Pater especially loved, and, as winters passed and springs neared, he spent many a day in their company, himself gaining vigor; here rescuing from de- formity some young tree caught by freakish winds and pinned under a weight, there slipping pruning knife at a root he knew to be noxious. Than the coming of spring in Kansas nothing can be more beautiful. It is day after day of perfection. Winds do blow over rolling lands. Even in February, as if conscious of a mighty secret they purpose later to reveal, they begin a hollow murmur, and dip down chimneys, and slap house-tops and loosen cornices. Not all days are calm. Neither are all days warm. Frosts dart from upper airs. But tree-trunks brighten, and the onward push of beauty is so superb — color in sky and 10 LIFE ON A FABM budding things ; the very soil gleams back at you — so overwhelming in voice of lowing calf and whinnying mare, amorous birds and wild, sweet- scented winds, there is no telliag in words. All leading to May — to the earth inwrought with violets, flowering star-grasses, mandrake, yellow blossoms of the oxalis, native blue phlox. And above this carpet from the Eternal's loom, tree and shrub leafed in rose-velvet or fresh green, thrushes fluting, mourning dove lament- ing passion to mate, and the meadow-lark "Scattering his loose notes in the waste of air." With June ahead! Eipe-eared wheat-fields shadowed by clouds drifting across the sky. Lakes of com, their dark-green blades swishing drowsily, like little waves lapping pebbly shores, and whispering prophecies of September ker- nels. Myriads of bees booming their wares (just as brokers do) as they pass from clover- globe to purple clover-globe and then whirl away to hive their stores. Where, round a fecund earth, can you find sight more enchanting! — a heaven of sapphire blue on-spurring fruits of an ambitious, up-send- ing soil and their message for the furthering of man; standing from dawn till that veiling hour when grey sphinx-moth and ruby-throated NEAB LAXJEEIi TOWN 11 linminiiig-bird search their supper in the cup of the trumpet-flower. Those closings of the day, at times, especially in May and June, forerun by rainbows, we often gathered, like a group of Parsees, to watch the sky's tumbling, tumultuary vapors — billows crimson, golden, amethyst, sea-green and soft greys shading to black ; or a gleaming globe, im- attended by cloud seraphim, sinking in solitary splendor behind the western hills. We also knew early mornings in summer when the sun struck the river, and brightened its waters tiU they shone out behind the fringing willows and made a silver ribbon binding the land. And in depths of winter, too, when ** Phoebus 'gan to rise," we watched for the two misty sun-dogs who would now and then start him on another circuit of the heavens. One of our family cults was finding the earl- iest dog-tooth violet. Days in February we would notice winter silences giving way to those mysterious voices which bespeak the spring theophany near; and then we would slip off without others' knowledge to turn leaf-mould in the woods, or to lift fallen boughs from warm bank-sides, heckling our brains to recall where we had noted the sturdiest plants. As weeks went on our hunt grew more thorough, and some- 12 LIFE ON A FAEM times of a biting morning, we plunged out of doors to see if the plant we had chosen had not, coaxed by warm airs of the day before, put forth a pale bell, nodding now in spite of bitter skies. In this contest Pater commonly came off victor, and offered the firstling, eyes dancing and fine mouth smiling to our: **You are a winner, Daddy! Where you found it I don't see." From that hour spring had come. The legended redbud also marked the year's incoming tide. I still recall mornings when re- port went at breakfast that one of the trees had garmented itself in imperial colors, amid a group of pawpaws and coffee-beans down on the south bank — to one redbud slipping roots in level ground you will find an aspiring ten loving to climb the broken side of a hill. Redbuds be- speak Kansas. That April morning the train rolled up the valley bearing us to our new home, our fascinated eyes saw first the Kaw silvering on our left, and then, on the right, ridges far and woods near blotched with the purple of the lovely tree. Many another growth witnessed to the beauty through which nature speaks in Kansas. On a little rise between our house and Laurel Town, at the edge of the highway, just outside the fence and therefore public property, a wild crab NEAR lAURKL TOWN 13 lifted its warty trunk. It was a sturdy little fellow, tlie tree, not so tall as wild crabs some- times grow, but making up for its dwarfish stature by a particularly beautiful and sym- metrical umbrella of branches and foliage. vWe loved the wilding, just as you love some cher- ished growth, and Pater protected its sturdiness, 60 far as he was able ; and also its comrade, the weaker mandrake, that grew close to and straight up from its foot. A number of springs, as we drove to and from town, we watched for the coming of the crab- blossoms and mandrake, and when they did set out their wonders, we would climb from what- ever we were riding in, buggy, phaeton or red wagon, to look closer at the pallor of mandra- gora hiding herself in her own heavy shade, and the crab-buds holding forth their auroral pink. Somehow we never thought of picking or tear- ing the blossoms — ^that would have seemed dese- cration ; an expectancy of the future and regard 'for others' rights forbade. But at last, in an election, a new roadmaster (I think that was the name the law gave him) came into power — a man, I fancy, who endeav- ored to do his duty in whatever place it pleased heaven to call him, and to do it thoroughly. Leastwise, one day, when we were all gone about 14 LIFE ON A FAEM OUT various duties and no one by to defend the helpless, this roadmaster came with a squad of malefactors (they called themselves road- makers) and they cut down the crab tree and drove a scoop shovel over the mandrake. Back in the centuries, ancestors of ours had a legend that mandrakes cry when wrenched from their soil. "And shrieks like mandrakes, torn out of the earth, That living mortals, hearing them, run mad," said Romeo's Juliet. What wail did our mandrake send forth that morning, I wonder! But those road-makers did not run mad. They were mad before they destroyed the beauty nature had, for reasons nature alone knows, paired in intimacy. Barren ignorance only pardons their act. They gained nothing by their havoc, save another stretch of plastic clay, ready for gullying by Kansas down-pours; not protected even by such substitutes as nature in helpful mood is able to plant in Kansas — sumach and buckberry, mullein and butterfly weed, and the old, native blue-stem grass. The cutting off of crab and mandrake, beauty- bringing, not offending, proved one of our early disillusionings. NEAE lATJBEL TOWN 15 n We had gone to the farm to stay by it. Pater was not satisfied with all he found at hand, however. He remembered with affection growths of his old home, and he sent to Roches- ter, Philadelphia, Marblehead and other nnrs- ery-centres for many a tree, shrub, vine and vegetable. Orchard planting with him was al- most a passion; and he imported varieties of trees he thought fitted for the Kansas climate. One afternoon I recall, when he and another lover of apples whose name I am not so fortu- nate to bear in memory — ^how the two walked about young plantations in the mellow fall sun- shine discussing sorts new to pomologists, affec- tionately rubbing palm over a sapling's bark, opening knife now and then to strike off a sucker, and finally picking first fruits and going with heaping hands and pockets to the dining room for sampling. They had kindly included me in the excursion, and after I got silver-bladed knives for cutting the fruit (for that metal would resist the acid of the apple and not defect the taste), they invited my opinion as to flavor, tenderness and succulency of meat, and other points worth attention in the product of Eve's goodliest tree. 16 LIFE ON A FARM Among his importadons of beauty, and not of practical use, tbat we regarded with special affection was a fringe or smokebush which [Kansas suns forced to luxuriant proportions; and among roses a ** perpetual bloomer," as cata- logues say, which we knew by the name of ** Madame Laffay." The rose had a modest turn of petal, as well as a deep pink color and fragrant scent, and served Pater in his habit of picking a flower and laying it by the breakfast or dinner plate of some member of the family. The tray that bore food to the one of us confined to a sick-room often carried his greetings of a ** Madame Laffay" — one such tray laden with tender shoots he had searched the asparagus bed to find, I remember; and there beside the toast lay his good wishes, the rose. In years since then all these growths have perished — not only trees and shrubs of practi- cal value, but of touching history. Where stood an orchard from which winds of early May bore through our house the fragrance of apple blos- soms and whitened the grass with fallen petals, succulent alfalfa was lately growing. But he who cut down the orchards (alas!) had at least one pleasure — for we learned long before, at times trimmers were lopping branches, that apple-tree wood bums brightly in a fireplace. NEAR LAUREL. TOWN 17 and when tlie wind curls do^^ii tlie chimney of a gn^ty cvoTiing in November, and send wlii:ffs of smoke into the room, its scent is delicious. Although he had bought other farms lying across the river, on the home-place Pater spent his love of the growth of things. Renters, testifying to their skill in husbandry and vaunt- ing the richness of the soil, might bring water- melons weighing more than fifty pounds from ^'^Vhite Turkey'^; or from ^^ Hawk's Nest" bags of astonishing yams and com in its day of per- fection for the hungry tooth (such ears as our negro friends used to call ^^roastin' years'' ), nothing could swerve his loyalty from the home- place. In propagation he wanted to improve breeds, and he introduced strains of blood new to Kan- sas. Mares of good pedigree he brought from the old New York home ; and cows of Shorthorn variety he imported to better beef grown for market. Each offspring of these animals we rejoiced in and would discuss through a meal- time what name it should bear. None of us, however, seemed so successful as Pater in hitting the right descriptive ; as *'Miggles," after Bret Harte's heroine, for a grey colt; ^^ Beauty" for a Shorthorn calf, per- fect in color and outline; *'Lucy Lightfoot" for 18 LIFE ON A FARM a gazelle-like, chestnuit-sorel colt. A bull he named * * Robert Bums'* because of certain lines of the poet about a rantin', roarin' laddie. In one instance alone do I remember that I suc- ceeded with a name — ^when a tiger-striped tramp-cat took up abode with us and I dubbed her **Sallie Brass'' because, especially in face, she so much resembled that heroine of Dickens ; and, on looking at the cat, friends, with a burst of laughter, said they easily traced the likeness. Pigs our farm bred by scores, and although about those interesting and sagacious animals, who loved their freedom of broad fields and crunched yellow com with amazing gusto, my knowledge is somewhat hazy, I know I am safe in saying they were of the Berkshire breed — yet in my mind's eye I seem, also, to see certain! smooth sides of the Poland China. The comeliness of the piglings in their early days, their slickest of black satin skins, their shrewdest of wits, their cunningest of eyes and hungriest of ** tummies" — ^how could one forget the wights ! What a sight it was when a mother threw herself on her side with half-shut eyes of rest and satisfaction in motherdom, and h'9r brood fell to rooting, squealing and crowding for their suppers ! Was ever natural sight more mirth-provoking to on-lookers watching over the yEAB laueeij town 19 fence, or satisfactory to actors themselves I With what appetite did the tiny, scarefnl scamperers pump their milk! — and when they had their snrfeit run grunting to a bundle of straw and pack together for sleep ! In poultry Pater brought in brilliant-plumaged Spanish pheasants. The shell of their eggs had a peculiar translucence, which, we used to say, made them look like pearls. Each industrious hen was apt to meet her duty of laying an egg a day, except in midwinter. But then we may have been gifted with that power Auntie Lee said her owner ascribed to northerners: ^'De Yankees cozen de hens to make four eggs out o' three.*' Through our Father's fondness for animals and household-pets we had always various sorts indoors as well as out. Our adventures with their personalities would fill a book of days. Most wonderful of them all, I think, was a little hybrid who inherited a half-shaggy tail and upright ears from his milk-white, finely propor- tioned. Spitz mama, Nipha (named after the Greek word for snow), and for the rest the short hair and colors of his black-and-tan terrier sire. That he came to be an important member of the family would seem all the odder, if you knew my Father's care for fine strain in his dumb 20 LIFE ON A FABM friends. But this little fellow won his way by sheer truth and sincerity, his affection and un- swerving loyalty; qualities he doubtless inher- ited from his lady dam. He answered to John in everyday life, but his full-sized title was Jonathan Edwards, be- cause, just as the distinguished divine of that name, at an exceedingly precocious age, inter- ested himself in his days' burning question of freedom of the will, so this black-and-tan ter- rier, when a few weeks old, finding himself alone in the library, fell to riddling a pamphlet which treated nineteenth-century views of Liberty and Necessity. As the little creature grew in months and years, he came to be the canniest of all dumb creatures we had ever known. His knowledge passed canniness — it was uncanny. All things touching life about him he understood. Even if, knowing his eyes were shining and upright ears listening, you in circumlocutory phrase asked the man to bring up your horse at a certain hour, John knew; and just about that hour he would have pressing business calling him out of the house. TVhen he had induced you to open the door, and with apparent indifference and dignified slowness had walked to the edge of the porch. NEAR LA.XJBEL TOWN 21 he would, after a moment's leisurely survey of the landscape, set out clipping for the recesses of a hedge a little distance away. You would turn your horse's head towards town and drive past the hedge. Then John would suddenly materialize. If you did not want his company, you could not force him back, tell the truth as you might. At last, wearied of exhorting him settled on his haunches and eying you with a countenance which said, ** Suppose you have done with all this chinning and go on^' — ^when finally lyou drove forward, he would drop in the rear of your phaeton and pay whatever visits you paid, going in with you, sitting dose to your knee, and listening with only an occasional yawn. In spite of the yawn he may not have found your wit so intollerahly dull; '^When I play with my cat," said Montaigne, **who knows whether I do not make her more sport than she makes me!" After my Father went on the bench, John seemed to find he must accompany the Judge every day court sat and roads were not muddy — not in muddy weather, for he was exceedingly neat about his person, and such days he would look drearily down the road and stay behind. Keeping clean was an instinct of his. When occasion had forced him in the wet Kansas clay. 22 LIFE ON A FAKM he would glance from his feet to you and stand with a deprecatory expression on his sensitive face, till, from sheer laughter and pity you fell to and helped him restore the neatness he loved. A storm might come when he was in Laurel Town. Then, oftenest, he would drop away from his master, take the sidewalk direct to my sister, Mrs. Green's house, announce himself hy a characteristic pawing at an entrance, and when the door opened go in and pass the night as her guest, staying sometimes more than one night if the roads kept bad; hut in three days, even with **mud more 'n bootleg deep" ( as one of our black aunties once described the mire) pick- ing his way home with crestfallen looks and pleas of forgiveness in every line of his small body. He could not ride in a wagon because its motion upset him. As I have intimated, John had a most extraor- dinary sense of time — ^the time of day — and if, when my Father was holding court, the usual hour for adjoui?nment had passed, the little rascal would issue from a private room, and go to the Judge and strike him with a forepaw on the knee. Lawyers practising in the court told me this, and that Pater would pat the dog's head and answer, ''Yes, John, after a while"; when NEAE LA"CTIEL TOWN 23 John would stifle his impatience with another nap. John as house-dog companioned an out-door colUe named Tony Weller. Between the two lay an unswerving affection and days in the colder months, when John stayed at home, Tony would come upon the porch and invite him to go hunting — for Tony was excessively fond of the Nimrod business. In such weather they com- monly planned their chase through the long windows (Tony on the outside, as I said, John within with forepaws on the window sill and hind feet on the floor,) and by varying their tones, turning and twisting eyes and ears and heads, wagging tails, lolling out tongues and making other subtle motions of the body, seem- ingly fitted details to a T ; sometimes they even rubbed their noses on the window pane, but that may have been due to their anticipations of pleasures of the chase. Friends seeing their antics for the first time could hardly believe our explanation; **Tony is asking John to go hunt- ing.'' Tony did not initiate these expeditions. Be- fore Tony's day Sir Nicholas Tubbus, a liver- colored, short-haired hunting dog had played the game with John — he earned the name of Sir Nicholas because as a puppy he was the vera 24 LIFE ON A FARM ould Nick, and Tubbus on the ground of bis be- ing a vat, a tub, for food, sometimes licking bis platter clean and then curling round it and groaning from repletion. But Tubbus was more saturnine in preparing for the chase ; in accord with the heavy, wordless, melancholy disposition common to those who eat large meals and chew their food little. Tony's Scottish vivacity and vigor gave more color to hunting preliminaries. "V^Hien they had settled as to the sally, John's habit was to ask whoever chanced at hand to open the doors for him, and the twa dogs would trot away side by side. In colder weather they would commonly make a bee-line for a corn- field, and to some shack where rabbits had set up a bunny nursery and housekeeping. At this juncture the cleverness of their plan- ning became still clearer to mere humans, for John, much the smaller of the two, would enter the hole the rabbits had made in the shack, and upon his burrowing the game would start forth — leaping into the lion's mouth, poor rabbits! For Tony, waiting in intense excitement at the door of the passage, caught each one and broke its back. Oftenest they would bring what booty they had bagged up to the house, and, with gleaming eyes and considerable appearance of fatigue, lay NEAR LAUREIi TOWN 25 it on the ground. John would then paw at a door, and on entering would' attract attention by, looking steadfastly in the face of whomsoever he found and running to door or window — ^invit- ing to a view of the chase's trophies, that is. The hunters' gratification lay in their receiving approving pats and hearing themselves called **good boys" for their help in reducing the gird- lers of young apple trees and other growths. Little happening like these lightened our days. in Oversight of land, increase of basket and of flock bring the homier things to a farm's family. My Father's frail body and life-long habits of study permitted little physical labor. Driving a pair of horses from the seat of a mower and reaper one summer morning I remember seeing him ; and the few times the picturesque thresh- ing machine set up its engine and broad chute beside the stone bam, he stood not far off count- ing bags of wheat and jotting in his diary. So with other members of the family — our lending a hand to the farming came about only by some spontaneity, some whimisey. Every day the children who were at home drove off to 26 LIFE ON A FAKM Laurel Town, preparing to -enter, or already matriculated at the university. Treasures of other peoples, other centuries and other lands had captivated us ; and our parents, loyal to the ardor for education inherited of their old New England blood, gave us free leash and furthered our zeal to their utmost. Therefore, just as a story of a larger human society tells not only of its political economies, but also of its people's inward life, their spirit's wonder at this mysterious world, its beauty, its truth ; so this half-told tale of the microcosm of a farm must, in some slight way, speak of the purely inward action of its dwellers. Mental and imaginative life to many natures is the best part of their days. We were readers. Novels then appearing — of George Eliot, Charles Reade, Wilkie Collins, Walter Besant, Victor Hugo and others — came to our hands; and periodicals from New York and Boston. For instance, every week we anxiously waited the serialized ** Mystery of Edwin Drood." And dark and unhappy was the June day that brought news of the passing of its author. Charles Dickens dead ! His pen fallen ! How could all be as before ! Why did the sun shine ! Why the birds sing ! That slender figure whose NEAE LAUBEIi TOWN 27 every movement we had watched in hushed awe ! That mellow voice to which we had rapturously- listened ! Never again to tell **The Christmas Carol" ! Never again the laughter-moving trial of Bardell versus Pickwick! Why should he, wonder-worker, lie motionless at Gad's Hill, and weak and worthless lives cumber the earth? In the great scheme of justice how could it be 1 But weeping under Kansas cottonwoods; questioning the sky; listening to the threnody of the winds' voices — tears never yet restored a maker of the magic of literature. Not even so long ago as when, in old Trinacria, his work- fellow lamented the end of the singing of Bion : "Begin ye, Muses of Sicily, begin the dirge !" Evenings on a farm are, or were, aptly lacking in vacuous liveliness, such entertainment aa lighter, or merrier, natures afford. Our short hours were of reading and music. Our Mother had a voice of unusual sweetness and sympathy, and she sometimes sang with us, in the carmina sacra we Americans inherit from colonial fore- bears, parts she had known in her childhood in the city of New York. Other times Pater would, with piano accom- paniment take ** Scots wha ha' wi* Wallace bled," ** Bonnie Boon," ** Mary's Dream,'* 28 UFE ON A FABM ** Sweet Afton" and a hundred others. Then, too, he had humorous solos, such as **Vilikens and his Dinah;" and American melodies like *^ Uncle Ned," *^ Nelly Gray," *V01d Folks at Home," and the soft-voiced "On a floating scow of Ole Vlrginy, I worked from day to day, A-fishin' amongst the oyster-beds, To me it was but play. But now I'm old, and feeble too, I cannot work any more; So carry me back to Ole Virginy, To Ole Virginy shore." From one book, so aged that its music stood in ** buckwheat" notes, we took English martial tunes, as **The Moonlight March," with Bishop Heber's "I see them on their winding way, About their ranks the moonbeams play ; Their lofty deeds and daring high, Blend with the notes of victory ; And waving arms and banners bright Are glancing in the mellow light." I speak with partici^Jarity because I have heard foreigners, in our country to gain a better living than they could get in their birthlands, by speech and mannerisms constantly endeavoring to assure us that they were not Americans — ^I NEAB LAUKEL TOWN 29 have heard salad-minded foreigners (the salad Buffering an overdose of vinegar) repeatedly declare we Americans had no music, ** except Yankee Doodle/* before they projected their shallow egotism in onr midst. My sister played with no little brilliance con- cert pieces then in vogue, and had for her field Scottish melodies and Chopin's nocturnes; while I ranged in Irish and German songs and Beethoven's sonatas. English folk-songs and adaptations from operas we divided. Wagner's music was then wandering to U3 in fragments ; which grew more meaningful when Mr. J. R. G. Hassard filled the old New York Tribune with analyses of the first Bayreuth **Ring of the Nibelungs." Evenings, too, and on Sunday afternoons. Pater would now and then read aloud — I recall times he chose the Book of Job ; certain Psalms ; Hamlet; Pope's ** Essay on Man"; Bums' ** Cot- ter's Saturday Night" and **Tam 0' Shan- ter;" poems of Thomas Hood about Dame Eleanor Spearing's trumpet, **The Elm Tree," *'Miss Killmansegg and her Precious Leg"; and stories from Irving. Along with m.y Father's view of life, and love for the fundamentals of life, lay unswerving devotion to truth and loathing of pretence and 30 LIFE ON A TABM shams. This, with him, included an abhorrence of the intellectual dishonesty which twists and distorts words from their commonly accepted meaning, and cloaks itself in phrases that cant or conceal their real significance. In those times, almost fifty years ago, every day saw publication of age long hypotheses upon our world's evolution. Now, at first blush, those hypotheses seemed to war with the preva- lent theology. Therefore their popularization met many an anathema from short-sighted or fear-stricken ecclesiasts; who rose as a man to the defense of Pliny. Theories of evolution went on winning, how- ever. They appealed to those seeking enduring foundations, and not endeavoring to square their reasoning to some evanescent dogma* They appealed to thinkers in fundamental truths who were sure to create the spiritual atmosphere of heirs of the anathematize rs — ^heirs who have now come to realize that the h3rpotheses endow our earth, and all it carries, and has carried, with a divinity beyond the vision of any arrogance; spiritual heirs whom I (so great changes may one life witness !) lately heard preaching from a pulpit of old Trinity, New York, on Hebrews, xiii, 2, **Be not forgetful to entertain strangers; for thereby some have entertained angels un- NEAK LAUKEL TOWN 31 awaies;" '^angels," the sermon explained, being current theories of evolution and ** Darwinism." In all the then ferment and stir, calm thinking ruled at our house — to those standing firm on truth, first ** angels,'' and ultimately all peoples come. Of the Eternal Power "Which wields the world with never-wearied love, Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above." we spoke not readily. But the mighty works of that Power we watched with unceasing awe and interest. Darwin's books, and Huxley's, and Tyndall's, found ready readers with us ; no where more interested discussers. We brought the teachings into various, although necessarily minor, relations. For instance. Pater now and then called our attention to coloration in plants and animals, and constantly taught us to reason towards causes from effects. One occurence, but I hasten to add exceedingly minor, rises to memory at this moment: — A September morning, the sun burning through a light, veiling fog, as he and I were driving I exclaimed, *^I smell tuberoses in the wind." ^^Let us keep to the scent till we find them," he answered. At last we came upon a field of "The sweetest flower for scent that blows." 32 LIFE ON A FAKM **A field of tuberoses !'' I cried, amazed at the exotic opulence of the acres. It seemed as if an aromatic plain or fragrant garden of Lallah Rookh unfolded before us; or better still the Feast of Roses at Cashmere. * * To sell," the owner answered with occidental practicality, telling how he raised bulbs to market in colder latitudes. Another day I found a dried field-mouse on the thorn of an osage-orange hedge, and we studied how a butcher-bird had probably caught the little pilferer and impaled it against his needs. Many were such learnings. IV Men who kept our farm in order came mainly from the north of Europe. Their bodies, stunted and brawny, testified how generations of fore- bears had labored unceasingly and suffered lack of food ; calling to your mind vegetation in Ari- zona — you saw they had grown to strange forms just as (^cti do eking out a living in hostile en- vironment. Even their faces were muscular, and often looked as if carved from gutta percha, or mahogany. NEAE LAUREL TOWl^ 33 Of all the best was Nielson, a nutty little native of the fiord land — silent, ably executive, whose countenance now and then relaxed, when a smile would push through wrinkles about the eyes, trickle down his cheeks till it settled about the mouth ; and the smile's me aningf nines s made up for the face's prevalent apathy. Nielsen had a singular power. He loved ani- mals with an intensity I have never seen in any other human. Wooden and stolid towards the world at large, with a sort of ashamed suppres- sion of self, this doubtless, also, a result of cen- turies of oppression — a status you could not call stoic calm, for stoic calm connotes intellectual refinement — ^he would, when he thought no one saw him, hug a horse, lay his head alongside a cow's neck, and squeeze a satin-bound pigling till it squealed. Or, his strange power may have come from his music. From a mere mouth-organ I never heard its equal. Often of bright Sunday mornings — ^like those a Nova Scotia nurse used to describe in her poetic Scotch accent as ** God's own glory is in the air this morning" — often of a Sunday morn- ing, he would go off to the north meadow with this Pan-pipe of his, and draw forth melodies of his native land and others picked up here, walk- ing about among the animals. Having gained 34 LIFE ON A FAEM their attention, or perhaps made them aware of his comradeship, he would set off marching in military gait np and down the sward. His intimates would fall in line behind him, and he would seemingly swerve them where he chose. He would circle a high-set windmill tire- lessly pumping sweet water for their drinking troughs. They would follow. He would go round an old oak, haunt of red-winged blackbirds, then down through the ravine. They after him. First in line came Higgles, a well-bred filly with ways as graceful and coaxing as a kitten's — for whenever you went into her close, she would hasten to you with a bowing motion of her head, and walk about with you, her nose-tip on your shoulder. If you were to explain her by human reasoning, you would say it was an odd, quizzical pose of hers, that nose-tip on the shoulder business, springing from confidence in and warmheartedness towards you. Equinely, also, it may have been that. When she was at it, she seemed to be pouring loving gossip in your ear, even if she spoke none other than the lan- guage of the Houyhnhnms. Trailing in line after Higgles came Dick. Then Nick the roadster, and Betsy Bobbit, a nervous little creature with a vindictive eye and anarchis- tic notions in her small head. Then Fanny Fire- NEAE LAUKEL TOWN 3 tJU fly, as fine a buckskin mare as ever laid "back ears and hastened her gait if she heard a wagon ahead of her. Then other horses, four or five of them. Next came the mules. Poor, patient beasts ! For some reason they never associated with the horses. Somehow social lines were as clearly drawn in their meadow as in the bigger world of men. You never saw a simple-minded, melan- choly-faced mule hobnobbing with a sleek, blue- blooded horse. The two of them, mule and horse, fed in different patches, and seemingly endured each other's company — just as humans do when conventions enslave them. After the mules the cows dragged their slow feet. Shorthorns mainly; but a couple of Jerseys and a native or two had crept in. Be- tween these thorough-breds and plain-rangers, however, lurked no smug airs of upper and lower, no snobbery. Together they grazed and ruminated. Together they sought the watering troughs in the noontide heat. Together they huddled when the wind suddenly veered and a fierce norther struck down from the upper airs. And now they marched in mixed file to Nielson's music, yet so far along the line that their ears must have been very sensitive to catch the melo- dies' beat. 36 LIFE ON A FARM Oddest of all, perhaps, were the sheep. Whether they have a sense of rhythm I do not know. Yet they, too, sometimes fell in with the parade. Perhaps, in a silly, mutton-headed way they wanted to do as the bigger folk of the meadow did. At any rate they ambled along in Nielson's trail, heads down, as if in reflective mood, and tails sometimes wagging like mad. But Miggles was always at the head, and fol- lowing close after Nielson, the conjurer — ^he blowing through his pipes of Pan like a west wind through a harp, and swinging his legs just as later I saw soldaten, new at the goose-step, swing theirs on the Truppen TJehungs Platz near Berlin. How, one again wonders, could Nielson have gained this power of leadership? Through his fondling each particular friend? Or, in this marvellous world of ours, and its mysterious life, did these people of the meadow recognize in him some sib, some creature akin, which our more evolved senses were too dull to perceive; and did they honor relationship they felt by fi- delity to his will? No one can tell. But so ran history upon the bottom-land of our farm hard by Laurel Town, when cardinals whistled '^What cheer?'' in Feb- ruary ; and, too, when summer cuckoos cried over NEAK LAUKEL TOWN 37 sunlit blue grass and timothy. Under Kansas skies a minor re-acting of that wonder-worker of Greece, whose legend has brightened all cen- turies since the hour, when "Orpheus with his lute made trees, And the mountain tops that freeze, Bow themselves, when he did sing." One September the farm and all its dependent people I was in charge of. I felt the responsi- bility unceasingly, and, up and about early of mornings, one day I stood studying the egotism of a peacock as he danced before his mate, in and out a row of hemlocks on the uplands by the house. His splendid attire, his strut and vanity and topping rhythm called to mind certain be- wigged, belaced, velvet-coated, silk-stockinged ancestors I had read of — his wings sweeping at and beating the ground serving for sword- clank — When an old Sante Fe cattle-train came grind- ing down the track. The train roared with ex- haustion, for she had made hundreds of miles with least possible overhauling, aiming for Kan- sas City stock yards and rest. Through the early air, above the creak and rumble of worn iron, the engine screeched primeval A. Cottonwood leaves, and willow, 38 LIFE ON A TAEM down by the spring, quivered at the ear-splitting note; and limestone ridges, lying west, barked back A — A — A over dew-drenched grasses. For some reason of the moment I turned from the peacock to watch the train through the morn- ing's horizontal shafts of sunlight, the yellow clarity of the early fall. Suddenly a door of one of the cars slid along its groove. In the opening bristled horns. Bodies bearing the horns came in sight — bodies leaping and landing on the railway embankment. The train rolled on towards Laurel Town just round the curve. Texas steers! — stunned by a leap; but free. There they stood, a bit shaky in leg, and as if endeavoring to sense their freedom. Then, seemingly mastering the fact, up went horns and heads and out went tails. Bellowing they started for the river over a stretch of corn stub- ble ; and on to where the waters of the Kaw shot their light through the timber. Others had seen the roisterers — three farm- men not far from where I was standing, and they, too, shared my alarm. Nielson, gifted with brains and best of workers; John shy as a weasel, good at his work but sulky with the sour, wordless sulkiness I have seen in landmen from Scandinavia ; and Ole, whose thick blood hatched NEAK LAUKEIi TOWN" 39 megrims, which megrims hatched mental dis- tortions, which distortions hatched lies and love of shirking. All four of us, I say, eyed the raiders. Out on the plains from where those fellows came ^* Tex- as fever'^ had been raging, and cattle dying by thousands. The imported Shorthorns down in their yard below I grew anxious for. How happy and peaceful they looked ! — nosing golden pumpkin, crunching red-corn breakfasts, holding their heads on a line with their bodies as they munched and lifted up their eyes in gustatory satisfaction, their heavy tongues now and then lapping drooling lips. What a picture of con- tentment ! Texas steers might do for these Shorthorns what a boy does when he carries scarlet fever, or other infection, to his school. Plainly enough the Texans were bent on bat- tle. They had suffered horribly, doubtless, shut, cramped, stifled in that terrible prison, an old- fashioned cattle-car. They ached for motion, for light, air, water, food. Ceaseless roar, jar and jostle, had disordered their whole being. There they stood in the distance, soaking their dry hoofs in the river's edge. How long would they keep at it? 40 LIFE ON A FAEM But even now they were turning about, blow- ing the air from their lungs and coming up to recross the railway. A field of clover lay before them. *^ Hungry, probably" we mused. **They will pasture'\ The marauders were far hungrier for mo- tion, for equalizing action, for stretching their legs. Energy prompted their every step. The first fence they reached they stuck their heads through and sent its wires flying as if they were tow twine. Next the clover field lay a ravine, flooded when the river rose high ; at other times empty save for rabbits and chipmunks at housekeep- ing, and coveys of quail and prairie-chicken hid- ing in its matted grass. Through this gully the Texans charged and up its hither bank, their horns set for battle. Even at our distance we seemed to see their muscles twitching and nostrils dilated. Four hundred feet more and they might stand at the cattle- yard, their horns possibly ripping off its pal- ings. ** Oughtn't we to shoot the raiders?" asked one of the men. *'A pity if we had to!" **Some train-men must have seen them open the car-door", suggested another, **and now the NEAB LAUEELi TOWN 41 freigWer has side-tracked at Laurel Town, they'll send cowboys to corral the lot/' *^ Meanwhile, will the Texans disseminate the fever f' Minutes seemed long as we reflected. **A man's mad", said Nielson, with his hesi- tating, wistful, old-world-soil-tiller's smile, *^a man's mad sometimes goes away when he's had a full meal. May be it's the same with Texas steers. Let's try and see". So the three seized corn knives, and ran to fodder stacks, and fell to work; cutting up sweet pumpkins, forking green stalks of com at the feet of the strangers before our cattle- yard gates. The rough steers paused and sniffed the fra- grant food. One daring fellow ran out his tongue and curled it back loaded with pumpkin. He was quite the runt of the lot; a blind hog finding the acorns. The steer liked the fruit. Another made the same venture. He wanted more. Another tried. Then another. Till, at last, by the end of, say, half an hour, when ponies carrying cow-punch- ers came racing up the main-traveled road, there down in the bottom stood a row of rugged-brown backs — Texas steers, crunching sweet, green corn-stalks and golden pumpkins. Seemingly no 42 LIFE OIT A FABM steer in tlie world ever tasted anything so good. They could not hold from eating long enough to whip their tails at the busy flies of Sep- tember. Mild-eyed and conquered. Their feet they had softened with water. Aching throats they had wet. Empty paunches they had filled with luscious, emolient pulp. The terrors of their cattle-car, its crowded space, its racking noise, they had forgotten. They went off tamely at the crack of the cowboys' whip. From the Texans' raid no harm greater than a caging in the stone bam came to our Shorthorns, and loss of one day's sunshine on their round sides. V Not one American housewife, probably, but has longed for such golden girls as Homer sings, those rolling, likable lassies Hephaestus forged, according to accounts in the eighteenth book of *^The Illiad" — **good sense, and speech, and strength they had, and crafts they learned from the immortal gods.'' Just such maids we craved at the house my Mother conducted. Yet Hephaestus made us nothing of the sort. Instead we had manifold NEAR LAUREL. TOWN 43 human factota wlio hardly ever seemed golden ; not infrequently, it is true, silvern ; and then at times substantially brazen. The aunties were most individual — negro wo- men, more or less dark, gifted with legends and faithfulness of mammies of the old days; in every instance bom and bred in slavery, the sole echo to us of whatever poetry, whatever love, devotion and human worth may have lain in that institution. Full of strength and truth in the great turns of life ; full of beautiful earnest- ness; trustworthy in large events, what unac- countable perversions they sometimes suffered in the small ! One ' * coff ee-and-cream", Spanish-eyed, little body and cheery soul often called to my mind Homer's epithet of Aethiopians, blameless. For downright dependability Mary was golden. But if verity were the point, between what happened and what she fancied you never could tell. One seventeenth day of March some one passed our windows wearing a sprig of green. Mother, seeing the shamrock, exclaimed, '^Mary, this is St. Patrick's day!'' '^Yes'm, I know", answered Mary, ready as any polyhistor, *^I was here when they buried him". **But Mary", said Mater with a smile — 44i LIFE ON A FABM **01i, welP', broke in Mary hurriedly, ^'if it •wasn't him, it was one of his representatives". Then with introspective eyes and smiling mouth, as if in mental enjoyment of the past, she added her clincher, * ^ They had a great time''. Wish never to fail to rise to the occasion, and the tenacity of her conceptions came out again and again ; pose of the utterer of oracles is not confined to the learned alone. One evening, as I entered Mater's room to has- ten Mary's recreation hour, I pointed to the red and gold of the western sky saying, **What a wonderful sunset !" ^^Yes'm", answered Mary, turning her eyes so the light fell into their liquid depths, * ^ The sun sets in the north to-night". Then with grave voice and solemn manner, ^'It's a sure sign of rain". ^^Why, Mary", my inexperience answered, *Hhe sun always sets in the west." '^Well, I've noticed'^ rejoined Mary, with calmness and dignity, her brown-velvet hands slowly smoothing the tea-tray cover and pulling it even on all four sides, **I've noticed that before a storm the sun always sets in the north." To answer would contravene ex cathedra utterance. Like all dogmatists Mary thought that insisting on a thing made it true. NEAE LAUREL TOWN 45 The dear old bully shuffled off toward the kitchen, from the distance coming her song : •'My soul is like a new tin pan, Lord, grease it with thy grace ; And rub, and rub, and rub, dear Lord, Till I can see thy face." A son-in-law, whom Mary proudly described as **professor on the banjo^', used to come to the kitchen-door days when her pay was due and ask her for her wages — this ne'er-do-well taught her words and melodies. Mary expressed other striking cosmological notions, stoutly asserting * * the moon's a woman, wife of the sun ; haven't you noticed how change- able she isf Which recalls, if we may wander so far, a fancy of another old-time slave. Wondering at the beauty of the world, and reasoning upon it with all the knowledge his poor life could mus- ter, he told me, with solemnity of countenance showing intellectual eifort back of it, that the stars were knot-holes and gimlet-holes in the floor of heaven, and their light the glory of paradise shining through. That their light is the glory of heaven shining through, none but an unimaginative scientist would deny. Bom to the purple of a house-slave near New Orleans, Mary practiced an unconscious snob- 46 LIFE ON A FAEM bery — snobbery is commonly unconscious — and looked down on field-workers, such as Peter Vin- egar ; whose ear so loved a sonorous phrase that it led him to name his heir (the child did not long survive), Americus Disgustus Dapoleon Vinegar. Of all our aunties, most characterful, I think was Phyllis, plumb full of racy expressions, a natural narrator, and never tired telling her ex- periences, in slavery and out. Through it all, her eyes had been wide open, ears listening, judgment sane. I still see her serious, yellow- brown face, high shoulders covered with ging- ham of a generous old-time-plantation cut; and her brave hands freckled a deeper brown, in hours of rest placidly folded in her ample lap. Such speaking hands ! What work they had done for field, for house, for pickaninny ! She was not a clever, slender, golden girl of the Hephaestean type, but her face and figure might have served as model for a nineteenth century Moroni or Frans Hals. **Yes'm, I had sixteen children. My mother had only twelve. But my aunt had fifty-nine grandchildren, and eighty-five great grandchil- dren before she died''. Slavery believed in breeders. After their shackles had fallen, she and her NEAK LATJKEL TOWN 47 husband had gone to that legendary country once called *Hhe Great American Desert". **Bnt dust and sand storms was so bad we feared the children would lose their way to school, and in winter snow druv so heavy they couldn't go. Why, sometimes it was so cold that fat hogs froze half way down the back, and we had to kill and ship 'em on to a Kansas City soap factory. **We kept warm by burning cornstalks and hay — ^had burners large enough to burn a bale of hay, and three bales lasted one day. What was the burners made of? Sheet iron; and they cov- ered the stove and burnt underneath. "We cooked in the oven. Why, we ran mills two years by burning hay, had two men feeding all the time. For summer fires we used to go to the com fields and pick up a load of stalks. *'One thirtieth of April oats was in and up, when a hail-storm came and poisoned the ground — packed it so nothin' didn't grow that year. The storm killed chickens, too, and sucking pigs ; and my son-in-law went out to Cheyenne bottom and gathered a wagon-load of dead sea- gulls and all kinds of birds ; sea-gulls come be- fore a storm and rise down and rise up and fly graceful-like''. Full of the traditions and beautiful lore of folk who have lived in and by the field, * * 'Taint 48 LIFE ON A FAKM no use denyin' ", she one day declared, * * that chicken-weed grows where chickens is, or have been. And yon always find mullein where sheep feed ; and iron weed springs up in a horse-pas- ture. It^s as true as day'\ Aunt Phyllis sang many a melody in the vel- vet accent of her race — songs she had caught up in youth when one warehouse stood where Kan- sas City now stands, and ** wasn't nobody in western Missouri but Mormons and Indians". The humor of her songs forecast that of present- day vaudeville. One, possibly referring to the company of a packet plying between St. Louis and Westport, Aunt Phyllis usually prefaced by proclaiming : ' ^ There's more married now than's getting along well" ; "Four score and ten a verse, Not a penny in a purse, Something must be done for ub. Poor old maids! We're all of the Desman crew, Dressed in yellow, pink and blue. Nursing cats is all we do, Poor old maids! To the devil we do go, The bachelors will be there, too. Each of us will have a beau, Poor old maids!" NEAK LAUREL TOWN 49 Another Westport song of Aunt Phyllis^s ex- horted to temperance ; "I went down street the other night, And there by the corner there lie an old friend; I spoke to him, but 't wa' n't no use, For he knew no more of me than a goose. So, come and jine our cold-water band. Come and jine our cold-water band, And we'll unite hand in hand." Still another referred to political divisions : "The moon was shinin' silver-bright, The stars with glory crowned the night. High on that limb that same old coon Was singin' to hisself this tune; Get out the way, you're all unlucky, Clear the track for old Kentucky; Fiery, southern, brave Calhoun, Who beats the fox, and fears the coon; Let that track be dry or mucky, We'll clear the track for old Kentucky; Get out the way, you're all unlucky, Clear the track for old Kentucky." Then Aunt Phyllis had other verses worthy of a Mother Goose anthology: "De raccoon hab a ringy tail, De possum's tail is bare; De rabbit hab no tail at all. But a little bit o' bunch o' hair." 50 LIFE ON A FARM "De possum and de raccoon Went up de tree a-fightin'; De turkey-hen she scratch so hard De gobbler died a laughin'." "Possum up a gum stump. Raccoon in de hollow ; Pretty gal at Dinah's house Fat as she can wallow. Possum shank a'roastin', Wid de marow in de bone; Pretty gal at Dinah's house — And Dinah ain't to home." "Dey tie my feet, and tie my hand, And dey lay me down upon de sand; De skeeters come and eat my clothes, And bite my ears and tickle my nose; Dey leab me dar till I weep and moan, And swear I'll let dem pullets alone." VT Answering a message that our Mother would welcome a strong, trustworthy woman for cleaning — Mater tabooed the word servant be- cause of its old associations and the hostilities the word engenders — answering this call for a household orderly, sent to a tenement where folks from Sweden met, there appeared as odd a compound as you would be apt to find in all the human lees Europe has cast through Castle Gar- den or Ellis Island; Mary Peterson, stunted in NEAR LAUREL. TOWN 51 statnre, a trifle bent in shoulders, as thirty-six- years-old workers we Americans import are apt to be, but having a skin texnred and colored like a blush rose, hair as fine as floss-silk and of the dye of gold, eyes small, deep-set, a tip-tilted nose and a protruding chin; such countenance as legend has given witches and other psychically abnormal creatures. A strange and picturesque vision ! Yet, in the analysis of practical, Kansas sunlight, winning ; perhaps by a broad kindliness, even if somewhat of the elf, somewhat of the fool, somewhat of the seeress shone in the face. Mother engaged her at once. Smiling she turned and trudged off to town for her clothes, later setting forth these riches — ^underwear of the thickest linen we had ever seen, heavy, wool- en stockings, skirts woven of wool wadded in so firmly that it made the cloth clumsy and stiff. But under those terrible wearables such a will- ing heart ! Mater held her back a day or two till she had clad her in light cottons fitting our climate, and then the new recruit fell to her adept's scouring and cleaning. Learning our language after her own methods, she would point to some object and ask, **Disf ' And when one answered, for instance, ** tongs", or ** table", she would go on with her work, repeating to 52 LIFE ON A FABM herself * Hongs/, ** table'', till she had driven a furrow through her brain and planted the word in it. To distinguish her from a household-helper already established, she must have another name than Mary. ** Venus'', we children wickedly in- sisted. But when Mater explained the difficulty of having two Marys in one house, and asked the new comer's wishes, suggesting Peterkin, or Peter, for her special ownership, she delightedly •said either would be right ; and Peter and Peter- kin she was through all remaining time. Eighteen years, off and on, she stayed with us. Truth compels **off and on". She had an ad- venturous head, possibly you might say she had intellectual curiosity working behind the weird, elfin light that shone in her eyes. Eecurrently, after a year or two of domestic ease and rou- tine a wanderlust would seize her and she must off to some town whose name had struck her fancy. A few months never failed to bring her repentant to the door, begging to be taken back, averring **no place so good as dis". Among the Swedes who came over about her time, she soon got a reputation for riches. What her thrift saved, and it was much of her earn- ings, she turned into twenty dollar gold pieces ; which she hastened to lay in crevices of her bed- NEAB lAUBEL TOWN 53 stead. This method of banking seemed so facile and clever that she confided her device to the cook, whom the hand of the Lord has stained ebon. Then, a few days after, she cried out that she had lost an eagle. A wave of war rolled one minute from the kitchen. When Mater heard of the safe-deposit, and of the confidences, she told Peterkin she must lock up her treasures and herself keep the key. So Peter bought a trunk pasted over with yellow- brown paper and rimmed with sheet iron. But it had the dignity and individuality of a lock, and delighted her simple soul beyond telling. Still, riches engender sorrow. No surcease has ever come to that law; older even than the days of Solomon. Nor did it fail now in Peter^s experience. Her savings, not her many virtues, brought suitors. Stolid owedes, whom she met at her country-people^s houses, where on Sun- days she sought social refreshment — gruff, silent, sour-visaged fellows they looked as they shuffled towards our house, came courting. In their first visit, say on a rainy Sunday afternoon, they evinced their interest and con- fidence in her, Peter afterwards told us, by subtly suggesting that her years warranted a home of her own. What female of the human species could withstand such a hint! At their 54 LIFE ON A FARM second coining, say a short call in a week-day afternoon, they broached the subject of mar- riage. On the third they completed their pro- posal, and asked the loan of a gold-piece, or two. Peterkin^s weird eyes could not see the mean- ing of it, and through several years vari-colored jscoundrels played with her earnings; not to speak of her affections. At last appeared the slickest of them all — more refined than the others in looks, with bet- ter clothing, better shoe-leather, longish hair and a weary, sickly, dissatisfied face. **Bottin- son'* paid his sweetheart many visits, and wheedled her out of several hundred dollars be- fore he went away and never came back. Bottinson had finesse. With his fading into the unexplorable ended Peter's faith and trust in legal tenders for men. They had hurt her terribly. But she was game, poor, brave soul I — ^^and when speaking to those who had known her history, and theirs, she was never quite done joking over their lies, and how slily they had mulcted her purse. Yet, Bottinson's desertion was nothing to what another day brought. A norther blew bleakly, fine-pelleted snow fell, but Peter flung herself upon a wood-pile and lay on its rough edges far into the dark, refusing all body- NEAE LAUEEL TOWN 55 nourishment and soul-comfort, conscious only of despair. Back in Sweden she had left a father, sister and brother living together in the little cottage they owned. Possibly all the family were afiQicted with Peterkin^s mental queemesses. At any rate that winter-day in Kansas, letters and papers came telling how her sister had one night made milk-porridge for father and brother, and in the porridge had boiled matches. The two men, tired and hungry from work in excessive frosts, ate a hearty supper. Both died before morning. Their bodies were laid in such graves as the country-folk in Sweden prepare during summer for possible needs when frosts harden the ground. The sister dwelt alone. Yet not alone. The conscience of her soul awoke. Her father stood before her and told her of her sin. She could not withstand the accusing spirit. In a fortnight she set out for town to make known how she had coveted ownership so far as to kill her men-folks to whom the law gave the little house and land. A judge took testimony re- ferring to the strength of her mind, and finally confined her for life in the city, confiscating her freehold to the crown. Out in a Kansas blizzard the old story of 56 LIFE ON A FARM crime not striking the criminal alone was enact- ing. Innocent Peterkin, thousands of miles from the tragedy, sat in the numbing cold, wringing her hands and now and then uttering cries like a wounded animars, paralyzed by grief and shame. Her father and brother deadl — and dead in a way that blood of hers befouled itself! In her agony dreams of paying a visit to Sweden and carrying help to the old home van- ished. Ever after Sweden was to her a for- bidden name, and forbidden land. American she wanted to become; in many ways did become. Even the white light of her birthland faded from her face ; in course of years her skin tanned to a brown, and the exquisite gold of her hair turned to ash shades. Peterkin had characteristics we Americans admire in the land-folks of northern Europe. She had simple, direct honesty. She had self- retraint. Considerations of others' rights and needs had socialized her. She was conscious of, and felt pride in maintaining her self-re- liance ; pride, also, in doing her work finely and with great cleanliness. Consequently she had severity of bearing — any human may easily be good-natured if he has nothing to do but be good-natured ; if he has no ideal to serve. Hon- NEAE LAUREL TOWN 57 esty, self-reliance, cleanliness and even severity — ^all were in keeping with her simple, cool, ra- tionally tinctured religious phases. Perhaps ancestral-seeress proclivities got hold of her after we left Laurel Town. At any rate she passed to the emotionalism of the Salvation Army. Her zeal to labor for her new friend led to her hawking about the War Cry, Or perhaps the Army set her the task, recognizing the quaintness of her face and figure and her ready tongue. A favorite song of hers in her unregenerate days she would begin with "Shoo, fly! Bod-der me!" This now gave way to another evolved in the enthusiasm of the barracks, leastwise a favorite at that time; •'There are no flies on you ; There are no flies on me ; There are no flies — " the song went on, citing the Religious Example ; triumphantly concluding with, "So far as we can see." Begging she learned to benefit others. The habit remained when her fervor for the Army cooled. At last we heard that she was meeting 58 LIFE ON A FAUM people of a monring with * * Gi^e a penny V^ As- tonishing! — and yet one vagary of a life of mental wanderings. Society and Peterkin were now at variance. Indeed society had never understood Peter. Doubtless society did not understand those old seeresses who were her ancestors. But society did not longer uphold Peter. Nor did Peter uphold society. The lonely, old soul knew she was down and out. But she kept a room for herself, to which she took wood she gathered, and garments given in charity ; till, finally, under an August sun she fell unconscious in an alley. A singular compound! Faithful as a dog, and yet at times treacherous; perhaps the treachery developed when her mental weak- nesses recurred. Keenly honest in her dealings, and repeatedly the dupe of thieves and their absurd pretences. Proud of herself and her good name, yet at last a daily beggar. Kindly, quaint, independent, joying in life with a very genuine joy. A child of old northmen, and, still more clearly, old ^orthwomen, VII Those I have here bespoken the amplitude of our farm next Laurel Town embraced. Natu- NEAB LAUREL TOWN 59 rally we had neighbors not of the farm, the greater number known as ** mud-floor Missou- rians," natives of the richly gifted state to the east, who retained such liking for their old habits that, report said, no matter how roomy the house their affluence had come to afford, they loved best to live so that their bare feet might press the maternal soil. Such tales seemed to us very curious. Also doubtful. Experience confirmed the truth of at least one. I dropped a rain-coat from the phaeton, and having heard that the family of a large brick house hard by had picked it up, I went to their front door and rang the bell. In vain. But I so wanted to get back my coat that I walked toward the rear of the house seeking another en- trance. A pair of dogs sallied from the elms' shade. Their bark brought to a cellar door the tall, bare-footed, Indian-featured mistress of the manse. Behind her opened a large room, seemingly serving as kitchen and living- room, all comfortably floored with Mother Earth. When I told my errand, the dame handed me the coat, accepted my thanks with a nod of the head, and said, **We knew the cloak was you- alP'S 'cause nobody hyerabouts has one like it. 60 LIFE ON A FAEM But we thought we'd keep it till you-all come for it." Missourians living* in Kansas still retained no little of the hatred they inherited from days* when Kansas was the storm centre of national politics, and her history a fore-scene of the Civil War. They held themselves far from associa- tion with what their ginger speech called **the damned Yankees." From their point of view, seemingly, those bom in Missouri reached on birth the summit of earthly excellence and glory. The same sort of self-gratulation I have since heard in others — for instance, among people bom in Boston, or its neighbor Cambridge. To live in a place con- secrated by noble deeds is a great thing. But somehow our human minds can not help asking if such deeds should not quicken to like perform- ance, not to self-complacent vaunting, passivity of the closed mind and folded hand, silly critic- ism of, or weak hostilities towards those bom, *"It is evident that the time to try men's soul's has now come in Kansas. The villains who have gone there from Missouri, with clubs, bowie-knives and revolvers, to over- ride the genuine settlers, and establish slavery at whatever cost, must now be met determindly." Herald of Freedom, Lawrence, Wednesday, June 9, 1855. "No week has ever passed without . . . insult and con- tumely thrown at our people by our nearest neighbors, the Missourians," wrote the author of *'Six Months in Kansas," in November, 1855. NEAE LAUREL TOWN 61 or living, elsewhere. After all, througli the cen- turies human nature has changed little — ^assump- tion of superiority, even of moral superiority, based on place of birth did not die out of the world when dwellers of cities famed and opulent aligned against people from a little town called Nazareth. Another of our neighbors stood as far as the east from the west from the Missouri exclusives. *'With a porch at his door both for shelter and shade too, As the sunshine or rain may prevail; And a small spot of ground for the use of the spade too, With a barn for the use of the flail," Dr. Hartmann, a German physician educated in Austria, now a trifle weary of a busy world, sought retirement. Traditions of gay Vienna, however, its ** dolled-up" women, its wine, its song, spectred his life, and when handsome girls came visiting us, the Doctor would sometimes invite us to an afternoon hour at his house. Smiling, evidently gratified at our coming, he would welcome us at the front of his vine- covered porch. As for us, we were like a flock of wrens, or blue-birds, chattering about the flowers, trees and what-not till we found Kladderadatsch, Fliegende Blatter and other illustrated German 62 LIFE ON A FAItM papers lying on tables of the veranda. Then, before we were fairly settled, the housekeeper would appear bringing German huchen heaped on a plate, and German linen napkins about a yard square that we would half unfold and make do for plate and serviette. At this juncture the Doctor, delighting in his hostship, would set forth a bottle of wine, wine he himsedf. had made fromi his own grapes:. There was the vineyard, he would point it out, not far from the porch. Of a beautiful claret color and sour, the wine saved little of the grapes' aroma; yet it was the real Bacchic in- heritance, the way our ancestors, through thou- sands of years, kept fruit-acids for their winter health. The Doctor, reaching a bottle towards our glasses, would meet our protest, ** Just a spoon- ful. Doctor, to taste your vintage ; you know we don't drink wine," and some teasing tale we had at hand, say a primitive legend from **A1- Mustatraf f **In the first days of the world, after Adam had planted the grapevine, Iblis (Satan, that is, may he be cursed!) sacrificed over it a peacock. **And the vine absorbed its blood. **Soon the leaves opened out, when Iblis, ever busy, offered up a monkey. NEAR LAUEEL TOWN 63 *'The vine drank the blood. ** Later when the plant put forth its clusters, the Evil One led to it a lion for oblation. **And the vine took up its blood. **Then, at last, after the clusters ripened, Iblis drew near a swine and made sacrifice. **The swine's blood the vine also drank. * * So now it is that he who drinketh of wine is first thrilled with the proud walk and parade of the peacock. Then, after a little, he becomes as gay and playful as a monkey. Later on the strength of the wine mounting, he grows wild and fierce, even as the form of a lion. And finally overcome, he falls and wallows in the mire as swine do, and sleeps unknowing mock- ery and derision." ^*A very bad story!" the Doctor would assure us, and fall to regaling us with tales of European wine-presses, and of the great health and long life of drinkers of bottled-sunshine ; after a time seizing a decanter. ^^ISTo, no, thank you, Doctor, no more, no more. You must send speciments of your wine to your old home and win fame for it." '^Now, my dear young lady," the Doctor would answer, still smiling and turning his head shghtly on one side, gradually tipping the bottle; **Vy not? Ein man does not valk on 64' LIFE Oisr A FARM vun leg. Does he now?" — fastening us with his eye, but all the while pouring wine in our various glasses. **Tell me, does ein man valk on vun leg? You say you vill valk home. Veil, no vun can valk on vun glass vine ; immer zwei. Und noch eins, a cane you know." And by that time he would have brimmed our cups. The real German Gemuthlichkeit, you see. Its impressive Allgemeinheit drove me one day even to by-singing the great Goethe : Kennst du das Land? — ico die Lebhuchen "bliih^n, Mit dunklem Bier die kiihlen Steine gliih'n, Ein sanfter Wind vom griinen Garten weht, Pfannkuchen riecJit, und hoch Wurst-suppe stehtf Kennst du das Land? The Doctor, a bachelor many years, later on married a tiny, sweet-faced German widow. From the beginning she looked thoroughly sub- dued — recalling to my mind a sentiment about his wife from the Memoirs of an old New Eng- land preacher, somewhat known about Boston for his bullyragging ; * * She was a woman of in- comparable medkness, towards myselfe espe- cially.*' The Doctor married. Yea; but his bachelor habits of issuing sultanic orders persisted ; and the sequent life of himself and the winsome, wee lady did not brim with joy. At last the wife NEAB LAUREL TOWN 65 left their domicile ; and she, and the Doctor also, sought lawyers and begged for divorce proceed- ings. Making ready to go before the court, their legal men one morning found a meeting neces- sary, and each by chance had his client with him. The lady and her husband were therefore in ad- joining rooms. Each knew the other's nearness. A clerk passing from one room to the other carelessly left the door open. Defendant and plaintiff sat facing each other. Moved by the sad figure opposite — ^wondering perhaps who had carried in his coifee and rolls that morning — the little plaintiff, her love again aflame, sprang from her chair crying; Mein Mann! Mein Mann! and flying with outstretched arms towards the doorway. Meine Frau! Meine Frau! returned the de- fendant, his heart full of a sentiment he could not uproot, and rushing through the entrance to the second room. Their impact told the lawyers that the case of Hartmann vs. Hartmann must forthwith be taken from the docket. Nothing remained for the legal men but to felicitate the couple upon the settlement of their grievances, and wish their household unbroken happiness for all the years to come. CEETAIN WHO DWELT IN LAUREL TOWN THE LITTLE CITY OF THE GHOSTLY HEART A little city, a meet human nest, Lies snug on teeming lands of Central West; Its houses, broadly parked with neighbors', stand Mid shruh and blossom, in a friendly band; And midst bird-haunted maples, trees so tall They seem like rows of pillars, or a wall To lift the wide and open, sparkling sky By winter's sun-dogs, or July's red eye. Such to a stranger's sense this city seems; And so to youthful students, when toith dreams And hopes of gaining fruits of ages long — A self-reliant, heart-high, eager throng — They swarm in dwelling, lecture-room, and street. And seize to-day, yet would to-morrow greet. Democracy triumphant! For the state Set on this city's height learning elate, lis university — its trained, strong arm Stretched forth to succor, brain and heart to warm. Exalt the people's life and make for right Through all just works, and days of lucent light. So does the little town in beauty rest; A fellowship building an ideal best; A gem on the telluric cloak of God; A wind-flower rising from its blue-grass sod. But ever in this city's ways and shade There moves another band. All unafraid From moss-soft mounds under broad oaks they come — Where blue-bird, thrush and squirrel make their home-^ And through the busy town they wander far, These souls without the grosser body's wear; And pass on restless, driven by the fire That burns m spirits who for others aspire, 68 For their young manhood lay in that far day When folk **went wesV* to work, and fight, and pray; When men embodied ancient English zeal For each man's right — the Puritan commonweal; The Puritan intensity of soul, Visions m,illennial, a new race to mould, These Anglo-Saxon state-makers then sought, And for their building their race-ideals brought. To blaze a way, to make a trail, to plough. To plant, to build a city — never Now But ever toward the Future urged their tvill; And ever toward the future look they still. O city of these future-yearning hearts! O leaf -clad town where youths^ years now do lie! Thou hast in keeping many mounds of earth. And only those who know not pass them, by; And misty beings ever go thy ways. And tell of years agone, and sing Ood^s praise. They gave themselves and stablished here their home — These ghostly men and loomen — and they come To watch right gain through fibre-strengthening strife; They are this city's very heart and life. First soldiers buoyantly ; then in between Their Colonel marches tcith a laughing mien; The Minister whose sermons counted far — But more his deeds among his people were; A Governor with teri'itorial tales Of how he downed age-old, pro-slavery wails; A Judge, whose violet eyes still shade with pain Eis sentence — lest it fail the offenders gain; The Secretary who served Lincoln when he died; The Naturalist, whose saurian was his pride; Professor "Rob** joking in Latin speech; And gentle he, **Lord'* D., who smiled on each; 69 HeartJi-huilders, too, with honor signs aloft — The trowel, straight-edge, plummet of their craft; These, and still other souls, inebriate Of labor and of planting seeds of state; And with them, constant wives in even pace. Their homesick tears wetting a smiling face. Boil-delvers, also, milkers of the kine. Planters of orchards and the fruitful vine; Their hair dishevelled, feet oftentimes splayed, Hands brown and horny, and their forms arrayed In dress ill-fit and faded — still they go With eyes reaping the future and aglow. As when June winds drive from the southern seas. And strike the wan primroses' fragile ease. And each small bloom dips to its mellow soil, Yet rises, ghost-like, after the gusfs toil; 80 this white folk, this city*s heart and soul, Sway with a new day's zeal, a new timers toll. And yet pass ever singing old-times' joy and dole. "Had we not fought defeat, and woe and death, Our haunts would hardly house your calmer breath; To serve the truth, to see that justice guides. That all are free, that equity abides — Had we not fought for this with all our powers. You here could build no safer life than ours; To make our word incarnate in our deed. This was our offering, and our highest m^ed." Such are this city's heart. They realized Ideals for which the human spirit cried In swelling notes of Milton's sacred ^song; In Shelley's verse to right the whole world^s wrong; In Arnold's ringing cry pressing to call "Hail to the victors lying by the wall!" 70 '/So thoUf little tenon, thou purse of gold — BeyoTid the price of crtt thaVs hoiiffhf and sold-^ Thou haunt of ghostly lives firm, free and told; Thou dtoeUing, too, of lives bright, young, untold; Thou art a Land of Futures, place apart — A little city Of State-building Hearts. tt CERTAIN WHO DWELT IN LAUREL TOWN How the attractiveness of Laurel Town, its natural beauty, its people, the state's young uni- versity, led my Father to purchase land for a home adjoining the city, I have told in fore- going pages. It was not then a town of the soft, quiet beauty of nowadays, but more rugged, more individual, possibly closer to the heart of things. Suffering even to martyrdom before and during the Civil War had graved its face with startling emphasis ; it was a little city with its own physi- ognomy. North and south had sent together its people : southerners marked with strong personal senti- ment, an unvarying consciousness of self, and a social view that sometimes suggested the eight- eenth century we find in English books; the 73 74 CERTAIN WHO DWELT New England element, on the other hand, hav- ing its inevitable simplicity and directness. New England blood predominated, and espe- cially affiliated with that from Ohio, Illinois and other western states and one or two generations removed from the Atlantic slope. New England characteristics were in the fore. Therefore, to sketch the folks of Laurel Town as a body of unity and like color would not be true. The community was too newly gathered, too unlike in its elements, too nerve-fatigued by horrors of war; it was not yet closely enough knit by continuity of interests to have a general social 'Spirit. Academic life which now stamps the town had not evolved. The university was a small institution struggling with legislature after legislature for its very breath, and with no appreciable influence on the social will. Still, even then Laurel Town was what a professor of Harvard University twenty years after told me he found it; '*A New England town set in a western environment." After our flight from the east, and we were established on the farm, those with whom Pater already had acquaintance, through his open-air- seeking life and rides about Laurel Town, paid our Mother formal visits. We came to know delightful people. IIT lAUKEL TOWN" 75 First, tHe family of Judge Welch of Litch- field, Connecticut. Mrs. Welsh had great taste for sociabilities, and after the habit of those times now and then entertained our family at tea; not our present four o'clock brew with sliced lemon and wafer, but the last hearty meal of the day. Her hospitality pictures itself be- fore me yet — her table spread with damask linen hanging low, set about with cold meats, sour conserves, biscuits hot and steaming through a doily, and invariably at one side the cover cakes, and a tall, broad glass dish holding boiled custard flavored with bitter almond and flecked with white of egg beaten to a snow and centring flakes of currant jelly. The hostess herself sat behind a shining silver tea service. A lucid memory and love of anecdotes made her the life of the party, her dark eyes sparkling as she related some tale of ''Uncle Nott," a characterful president of Union College, or traditions of such ancestors as Philip van Schuyler who, about 1650, settled in Eensselaerwyck; of Anneke Jans, whose farm then lay in contest between Trinity Church of New York and her descendants ; of Mary Dyer, last martyr of religious liberty for the Quakers on Boston Common in 1660. At one of these teas our hostess told a story 76 CERTAIN WHO DWELT which still lingers in my memory : — How, when a little girl and visiting relatives in Albany, she was dining with Mrs. Alexander Hamilton. An elderly man entered the hotePs dining room. A waiter gave him a chair at the table where Mrs. Hamilton and her youthful guest were sitting. At once Mrs. Hamilton's face became white, and she seemed deeply affected. Her discomposure told the steward of the contretemps and he changed to another table the late comer — ^Aaron Burr who, twenty-six years before, had shot Alexander Hamilton on the heights of Wee- hawken. In those early summers of our farm-life near Laurel Town, the ladies calling on Mater com- monly came in strict formality, as I said, and without the men of their family. They drove out in hacks, if they had not their own convey- ance, and oftenest were clad in light-colored silks, soft greys, blues, greens and lavenders, the skirts full, reaching the ground and giving an affect of the wearers floating. We were past the hoop-skirt era. But the idea which brought the hoop-skirt forward still survived — the idea that skirts are to conceal and let escape no sug- gestion of women's nether extremities ; not even the line of the knee to show. For a woman's dress to hint that the wearer had legs was, in IN LAUBEL. TOWN 77 that mid- Victorian* day, immodest; and some went too far as to say no trace of a foot should be seen. In summer, diaphanous llama-lace shawls, white or black, pinned to the dress at the should- ers, half covered the gowns of these ladies ; and in colder weather, velvet cloaks and paisley shawls. Light colored kid gloved their hands, and in the left they almost always carried, to- gether with a lace-edged handkerchief, a card- case of mother-of-pearl, or ivory, or silver. Above their fine-spirited faces they wore filmy patches they called bonnets — ^betwitching apolo- gies for the head-covering that Paul, still some- what retentive of the Pharisee, demanded of women of unregenerate Corinth. How differently we pay our visits nowadays ; we of the serge or broadcloth suit, with a bona- fide hat on our heads! The Time-Spirit has wrought changes for women — the word women tells the whole story. We are women; they were ladies, and many of them would have re- sented any other descriptive. The converse of these dames commonly ♦Why we should repeatedly say "Victorian" when we speak of the time's fashions in dress is not clear. Most of the vogues of that day, for instance that of the "modest and pious crinoline," were due to the taste of the Spanish leader of the French court. 78 CERTAIN WHO DWELT dropped to the lugubrious note of the anaemic woman; evidences they unconsciously bore to their shuttiag-off from the companionship and ideas of the world. They would talk of the advantages of their old home, its fine spacious- ness, the narrowness and disadvantages of the new. But inanities of those who pass their days in parlors did not prevail. The optimism of founders and up-builders brightened these ladies, also. Hopeful lines of the mouth far outnumbered lines of despair. In a new com- monwealth men and women are more exactly companions than where conventions rule, their needs of each other establishing interdepend- ence. Among those early visits Mrs. Shannon^s stands clearest in memory. Governor Shannon, who had had a notable career as governor of Ohio, United States Minister to Mexico, and later governor of Kansas accompanied his wife. A late number of a magazine. Harper's, I think, lay on the table, and in it account of Tom Cor- win and a campaign of his against Governor Shannon. Naturally our parents spoke of the article, and this led to the retelling of one of its stories — how the brilliant Ohioan met Mrs. Shannon in a stage coach, and on learning who she was paid her marked courtesies; and how, IN LAUKEL TOWN 79 when change of coaches came, and he was to take another line, the orator laid her baby Wilson on her lap with the remark that he would soon lay the old Governor as flat on his back as he was now laying the young governor; thus dis- closing to Mrs. Shannon who the gentleman of cavalier politeness really was. Still, of the callers that afternoon, I recall more plainly Sallie Shannon — the most beauti- ful human creature I have ever seen. Not at- tractiveness of color, but the higher beauty, ex- quisite proportion and expression, marked her in every way — a perfectly modeled forehead, nose and chin, delicately curved mouth and fine complexion, back of which shown limpid, lus- trous eyes of grey and brown hair. She wore a close-fitting, black-silk frock (the family were in half-mourning), a band of tiny, white French roses forming the collar. A little later on, when fame of her beauty had gone abroad, she paid the penalty public admir- ation exact, whether of poet, orator or a beauti- ful woman. Self-consciousness settled on her countenance. But at this day of which I speak, she was about eighteen, like a lily blossoming out of sheer loveliness. She bore herself with grace and the repose convents stamp, or at any rate stamped, upon girls bred in their cloisters. 80 CEBTAIN WHO DWELT In those days I did not know the artificiality, and her native beauty sent me, a flapper, into hushed wonder. I wanted to gaze upon her till her form and face were photographed on some sensitized tablet of memory — ^just as later I felt before the perfection of old scidpture. In those days, too, we saw Mr. John Hutch- ings, and his winsome wife who had the gift of singing English, Scottish and Irish songs with their native simplicity and tenderness. At times Mr. and Mrs. Hutchings would bring friends, for instance the later lamented Elliot V. Banks, and then we delighted in stories told with strik- ing clarity and conciseness ; a quality springing, I fancied, from lawyers' practise in brief- writing. One of these occasions an intense heat drove as out of doors, to the shade of an oak upon whose trunk a red-headed woodpecker kept re- currently drumming. Some one brought up the fact that the day was the centenary of the birth of Napoleon; and what the Corsican did, his love of the tinsel of feudalism, his rhetorical successes and the significance of his failure in- formed the talk that afternoon. At another visit, an Independence Day din- ner, our guests told how they fled the morning of Quantrell's raid, and, pointing towards acres IN LAUKEL. TOWN 81 skirting the Kaw, said the tall com* of lEat rich loam saved their lives by concealing them as they ran, n Sufferings of Laurel Town at the hands of its enemies and during its early years spoke through legends innumerable in our after-days. Let one alone bear witness ; the story of a ser- viceable hoop-skirt. Now, we know that a farthingale, as our fore- mothers of Queen Elizabeth's time called a hooped petticoat, a farthingale is hardly the best sort of a lorry for carrying valuables from a be- leaguered city. In stirring old times of Queen Bess, and in the renewed fashion of Queen Anne's day, rumors now and then went abroad that a man had in great stress, for instance to save his life, been secreted in their ample coop or go-cart. I doubt not that farthingales, and women in farthingales, in those earlier cen- turies, did heroic deeds. Else women would not have been women. But the story of what this farthingale accomplished in Laurel Town, in Kansas, in the year 1863, is so good that it ought to have a headline all to itself. There- fore, will Mr. Printer kindly insert in small, black, fat caps ; 82 CEKTAIN WHO DWELT the legend of the serviceablb hoop-skirt Quant rell and his band got into Laurel Town that morning of the 21st of August, 1863, with- out discovery. How they did no one ever could tell. One report had it that Sallie Young was seen ahorseback in the early grey of the day, her pony loping over the level towards Frank- lin, and that she led in the chief and pointed out the houses of Yankee Free-Staters — all in mem- ory of their youthful friendship over in Ohio. But the story had little credit among the clearer- minded. And from what I saw of Sallie Young years after, still a buxom woman in Governor Shannon^s household, I should call the tale ab- surd. Quantrell knew every inch of Laurel Town. In earlier years he had lived there. No one needed to point him the way. That August morning, however, no one doubt- ed Quantrell was in town. His two hundred and ninetynfour **border ruffians?', their chief at their head, came over the south-east prairie like a devastating whirlwind. Daring and deviltry had marked these bush- whackers from the beginning of the Civil War. IN LAUREL TOWN 83 Desperadoes all of them, they nested in the Sni hills near Kansas City, and from dense woods and impenetrable underbrush dashed out for raids. Then, after their plundering and burn- ing, a superb horsemanship permitted their speedily racing back and concealing themselves, at times among the brakes of the Blackwater river, but more often in their fastnesses of lofty ledged bluffs alternating with deep ravines lead- ing to the Sni and the Blue. Such deeds as these of theirs Eobin Hood is reported to have done in Sherwood Forest of England some seven hundred years ago, and in a milder manner ; Robin and his outlaws aiming to dispense rude justice by robbing rich Nor- mans and endowing poor Saxons. These bandits of the border of Missouri and its western neigh- bor carried on their guerrillas against every in- terest that sought to make Kansas a free state. Laurel Town, that child-city, forty miles, say, from their ledged hills, had centered Free-State activities through the ten years of its existence. Its people had not hesitated to declare their stand for human freedom, their hatred of human slavery. Nothing more native to those times and places, therefore, than that border bands should make the town a target for their ill-will. Already they had tried to destroy it. And now, after 84 CERTAIN WHO DWELT years of a vast, organized rebellion, they hated it with an intensity that only their own lurid invective could describe. The law-abiding folks of Laurel Town knew this resentment. Through months they kept patrol, and took turns in night guard. But only lately an order had reached them to stack their guns in an armory. This night of August the little city lay without watchers — save the stars of heaven. So it happened that Quantrell and his bush- whackers, bending forward on the neck of their mounts till each man seemed a part of the animal he strode — guiding the light-footed horses wholly by their legs, thus leaving both hands free to carry shooting irons — so it happened the bushwhackers rode through the early dawn into the sleeping city. Whooping and firing of guns awakening them, the people of Laurel Town instantly knew the fortune of the assault. Who, also, its prey. Men sprang from their beds and ran for hiding places — to an empty barrel, to a wife's fruit closet, through a bulk-head door just as a bandit eji- tered the house, pistol cocked, to shoot on sight any man there. Not only murder ; burning, too, must be essen- tial in putting the town to extremes. Women IN LAUEEL TOWN 85 worked to quench fire eating its way np the sides of their houses ; and saw husband, or father, shot dead within touch of their hand. In one dwelling a stalwart outlaw laid lighted matches against curtains and other quickly ignited furnishings, while the housewife followed beating out blazes with her blistered fingers. Every excess of par- tisan warfare held sway. On rising ground, over near the river, stood the Eldridge House, a four-story brick hotel. This summer-season many people housed within its walls — travelers from a distance ; men come to see the beauty of the country and the arduous, picturesque life of the young commonwealth; then again, others looking for investments of idle money. Among young couples living in the hotel were Mr. and Mrs. Tisdale; he interested in far- reaching stage-coach lines; she a sweet-faced bride, gifted with the liveliness and brightness of French blood, gifted, moreover, with every woman's wit in a dilemma. This 21st day of August the beating of horses' hoofs and shooting of guns woke the lady from her morning slumbers. Sensing the cause, she at once began planning how to save her hus- band's business papers ; which she felt sure he would preserve if he were there. 86 CEBTAIN WHO DWELT How terribly near those whoops and yells sounded ! She opened her door to the public hallway in hopes of another's word and counsel. An ac- quaintance, Mr. Thompson from New York, at that instant came by. The two spoke together — the hotel must suffer the raiders' fury, probably its men killed and the building fired. Like Mr. Tisdale, Mr. Thompson had papers of importance to the fortunes of himself and others. He told of his anxiety lest the records be destroyed. *^I have just taken my husband's from his sec- retary'', said the lady showing bulky folios, ** and I'll care for yours, too, if you wish". '^Can youf asked Mr. Thompson hesitating. '*I am sure'*, cried Mrs. Tisdale. **But run. Take the ferry. Or swim". **ril bring the papers", rejoined Mr. Thomp- son. *^I wish I could save some underwear", he added, hastening toward his room. **You can't", cried Mrs. Tisdale nervously. ** Fetch the papers ; and clothes. I'll see what I can do. And run. Eun for the river". Mr. Thompson brought his belongings and fled. Mrs. Tisdale turned back to her room and locked her door. IIT LAUKEL TOWN" 87 Silence now reigned in front of the hotel. The bushwhackers were parleying for delivery into their hands of the bnilding and its people. In the peace of these minutes Mrs. Tisdale hung her hoop-skirt from a nail, and with twine bound on the inner side of the steels all the legal papers in her care. Little pieces of under- wear, half the comfort of living, she also tied fast till the crinoline looked like a beehive of red-tape documents and wads of cloth. She slipped the hoops over her head and buckled the belt. A couple of petticoats. Sur- mounting the structure with a dimity frock and silk mantilla, she took her bag (in those days called reticule) in hand and passed down the stairs to the ** Ladies' Entrance'' — just round the comer from the main doors where the bandits were completing their terms of the surrender. Her hoopskirt swayed with its burden. The unexpected weight of the luggage nearly over- came her. But with heart as strong as resource- fulness clever, she would be the last to let the load affect her light step and calm countenance. Not far off she met a group of raiders ; some clad in butternut ; a few vain-gloriously rigged in red-top boots, coats with linings turned out- side to gratify their taste for color, and rad handkerchiefs tied about their swarthy necks. 88 CEKTAIN WHO DWELT ** Terrible, but picturesque !'' she said to her- self. Then she saw them demanding gold trinkets from other women, even searching the women's pockets ; and this led her to go a trifle timor- ously. One ruffian did swagger towards her and call out that here they might find booty. His companions, possibly satiated by some good for- tune, told him to come with them. At last, breathless and quivering, Mrs. Tis- dale reached the river, and in time to catch the ferry. On the other side she would find friends. There, too, her husband would join her on his return from Fort Leavenworth. The boat finally made the north bank. Why did she back away? — ^her stricken com- rades asked when they pressed' towards her as she stepped upon the sand. No word, merely waving her hand and seeking a clump of willows. A minute after she came forth "holding up to full view her freighted farthingale. And then the relaxation of a smile spread over every anx- ious countenance as she untied and handed Mr. Thompson his legal papers, adding a pair of stockings. Many had fled in scant clothing and her gifts served their needs. Yellow smoke, plumed by the wind of a soft summer morning, now rolled skyward, and the IN" LAUKEL TOWN 89 refugees stood straining eyes to lengthen their vision, guessing from whose house this cloud, or that cloud, might have risen. They had not long to wait before flames shot from the roof of the Eldridge House; and little longer till its brick walls alone remained to witness to the building's uses. Human worth — what human courage could do to save men from murder and homes from burn- ing — that day sent down maay a legacy and sanctified the little city to all posterity. But the retiring bushwhackers? Union sol- diers traced them by their horses' footprints, and, reports said, next day came upon their rear. Yet lacking orders, they made no attack. [After a fortnight, in endeavor at Paola to or- ganize retaliatory measures. General James H. Lane claimed that the ranking officers were rebel-sympathizers, and that ruffians would de- vastate the whole Kansas border: — ** There is one remedy only, and that lies in the people's hands. The way to kill wolves is to hunt them in their dens. The way to exterminate snakes is to crush them in their nests. The way to punish Quantrell and his band is to make a burning hell of Missouri." This appeal sent out several companies of cavalry; who, however, found no way to effect- 90 CEKTAIN WHO DWELT ive reprisal. In the end the guerrillas paid light- ly for their raid on Laurel Town. Unequal payment often evented in other inter- tribal wars — for instance, in the old encounters of Scotch highlander with Scotch lowlander; Irish clan with Irish clan ; English faction with Welsh. Yet with this difference in result be- tween mediaeval conditions and our own : — While in earlier centuries Quantrell might have seized the stricken town, and gained a feudal title, say, **Earl of the Douglas Marshes'', or *^Lord of Laurel Town", in our democratic and more truth-telling days he was merely branded a brutal bushwhaclifer, and, rumor told, fearing some mortal might seek vengeance, in years following the war he concealed his name and his whereabouts. in Colonization fires the fancy of nearly all kinds of people. First it seizes the strong, the ad- venturous, who must express their life in deeds, who are articulate through action rather than speech. Not infrequently high-spirited and im- aginative, such men and women gave color and individuality to Laurel Town in its earlier days. IN LAUREL TOWN 91 They liad settled with intent of working out a free state, and to found institutions embodying truth and justice— -bent, that is, on concreting such principles as Anglo-Saxons have endeav- ored after these last eight hundred years. They lived ardent, constructive lives. Their circumstances were narrow. They un- derstood the nobility of self-helpfulness, and perforce practised William Penn's advice, **Have little to do, and do it thyself '\ Their houses, a well-read Laurel Townsman once de- clared, called to mind Lord Hervey's quip about the villa an Earl of Burlington built; **Too small to live in, and too large to hang to a watch." Even in years a little later, when we knew the burg, its people retained the venture someness of the colonizer and, bristling with ** corners", re- fused to be dovetailed into community methods and community manners. They made no secret of their despising conventionalities as tyranny — in those days, one must not forget, the sane spirit of gratitude that evented from the Civil War warmed every heart ; the old, basic Ameri- can habit of mind prevailed, the benef active, the benevolent; that outlook on life that gave this country laws and stable government, and invited other peoples to share the good of their labors ; 92 CEBTAIN WHO DWELT the old American mental attitude, altruistic and helpful to the degree that when a stranger en- tered a yard and walked towards an owner sit- ting on his porch, he met the salutation: ^^Grood morning, sir, what can I do for youf '* In those old Laurel Town days a considerable percentage of the people prospered on what has repeatedly kept colonists alive; "I have always fed on illusions", wrote one, awakening to fact at the end of a long life. So often did they mis- take creatures of their mind for realities and in- sistently deceive themselves, that they did astonishing deeds. Individualists of ripest harvest, ** originals," ** eccentrics," you see, thinking their own pun- gent thoughts so vividly that they dared to speak them; piquant, often polemic, sometimes seemingly irreverent, always forceful, effective, clean, and blessed with the cool, straight-to-the- *We had not yet passed through the immigrants' gate millions of foreigners, often boorish in breeding, saturated with anarchies and socialisms generated, like malignant, febrile plagues, in ineradicable slums of Eastern Europe, and traveling westward — we had not yet passed through the immigrants' gate spouters and adherents of six)uters of vague, silly inaccurate isms ; incapable of balanced reason- ing ; transf ering their hostilities towards feudalisms of their old home to our country, and abusing us and institutions we afford them — inflooders whose only query seeming to be, "What can you do for me?" do not delay for verbalisms, but proceed by exploiture to answer their question them- selves. IN LAUREL TOWN" 93 point independence of the New Englander; ex- pressing themselves not in "Taffata phrases, silken terms precise," but, rather, baldly speaking "In russet yeas, and honest kersey noes". Of that sort was Mrs. Plympton, centre of surpassing stories; a spare dame with promi- nent nose, thin, compressed lips, broad, reflective brow and blunt action. ** Mother, what would you like for your birth- day f asked a son of hers, the one she described as *'more Christ-like" than her other children, **Blue silk for a dress or black?" * ' Oh, get it black," returned the lady sturdily, ** black does for funerals as well as weddings." There you have it — stern, stiff, old Anglo- Saxon stock, yet so vision-eyed, tear-eyed, ten- der-hearted, too, in its depths, that it keeps itself from whimpering and blubbering only by press- ing back emotion ; a stock so averse to falsehood that it distrusts emotion as a fleeting thing and wipes expression of sentiment out of its daily life; a blood that has worked out world-com- pelling ideals and in accord with the law that great thoughts come from the heart. A Vermont man whom the family had known before they trekked in white-sailed prairie- 94 CERTAIN WHO DWELT schooner over western lands — a Vermont man sought a daughter of this dame in marriage. The bride followed the habit of women-kind the world over, and went back with her husband to his home. Not long to enjoy life, however. Upon her death, naturally and conventionally, her body was laid in the Green Mountain bury- ing ground of her husband. There several years it rested. At the end of such a time, for some reason later days do not disclose, Mrs. Plympton de- termined the reliques should be brought to Laurel Town for final burial. Now, in such a settlement as Laurel Town, leastwise as Laurel Town was, each family knew the general lines of neighbors' lives. Mrs. Plympton had openly told she was going to ask Enoch for her daughter's remains. Afterwards she said he had agreed to her petition. Neigh- bors had eyes as well as ears. They knew the mortuary box arrived, and was carried to the mother's house. Time passed into weeks. One afternoon a near-door dweller dropped in for half an hour's confabulation. The caller followed her alert and busy hostess to the part of the house where her duties that hour were lying, and at last spoke of Mrs. Plympton's probable satisfaction IN LAUREL TOWN 95 in having tlie mortality of her daughter brought home. **Will there be any service at the final inter- ment at Laurel Townf **No," returned Mrs. Plympton. She stood at her ironing board, generations of refined thought illuminating her face, and her own in- nate dignity speaking from her person. '^I had the coffin put down cellar. **If I had been a man,*' she added reflectively, gazing with vision-suifused eyes into the im- personal spaces of the yard, ^'I should have been a doctor. I've always had such a longing to study the human skeleton ! But I never had a chance before.'* A ghoulish story, you exclaim. And playing back in the recesses of your mind is the wonder if Mrs. Plympton made her request of Enoch in order to satisfy her craving for the scientific analysis to which she was confessedly subjecting her daughter's poor bones. Not by measure of the average mind. Mrs. Plympton's was not the average mind, however — rather a mind with native cravings choked back through long years of devotion to husband and bairns and now, at last, finding pathetic gratification. An afterthought, doubt- less, her * ^ study of the human skeleton," spring- 96 CERTAIN WHO DWELT ing when sentiment had satisfied itself and mental equipoise supervened. In her conceal- ing and suppressing an inborn gift — ^led to such conduct plainly enough by moral sense of duties she assumed when she married — the world may have lost a notable anatomist. But listen to another tale — ^this macabre, too. Yet unadulterated truth brings a happier end. A phrase-maker of Kansas, and the state has had many, once said that its climate was ** al- ways too 'nough or too none.'* Amidst plenty of heat and no rain, Laurel Town had another ghostly happening. One summe)r-day express offices under the Eldridge House received a long, narrow box; which was pushed to one side to await its can- signee, Ephraim Quat. An odd-looking box ; and it did not strike the clerks of the office agreeably. The day after its arrival, glancing towards that part of the room where it lay, they began protesting one to an- other : '^Have you noticed? Positively offensive!'' ' * Strange name that — Ephraim Quat 1" **Quat! Quat! What Quat?'' ** Never heard anything like it here." ** Sounds as if it were made up." **I think it is fiction." IN LATJBEL TOWK 97 * 'Wouldn't wonder if those six boards con- cealed some crime." **Its very sliapc shows the box holds a coflSnl" Each hour its presence became more intoler- able. By the day's closing the whole force were sickened, as well as ghost-haunted. And when the sun sank round and red, portending hot weather still on the morrow, it was not difficult to conclude the box must be laid in a kindly, concealing earth. Next morning, just as the office-doors opened, a gentleman of the old soft-mannered type, white-haired, white-cravated, long-black-coated, a staunch Episcopaliaa, known as *^Lord'' Den- man because of punctilious courtesy and other qualities the title **lord'' supposedly connotes — Lord Denman chanced to come in errand about a parcel. He listened with sympathy to the murmurs beginning afresh, and found it not hard to sense the grounds of the complaint. ** Surely," he said to the protesting clerks, **the box is a thing intolerable.'' To aid to their relief, he added, he would accompany the body to the cemetery, and, since his rector was out of town, help bury it with last rites of the churcL ^That's the right thing for everybody," the VM CEKTAIN WHO DWELT clerks declared, *^and especially justice for the unhappy unclaimed." Without further delay they commandeered an express wagon to take away the remains, and calling a hack for Lord Denman, and such pitiful and curious bystanders as offered to serve as pall-bearers, they drove to the burying ground. There, in a peace unbroken save by the voice of birds and rustle of oak leaves, Lord Denman solemnly read the ritual for * ' The Burial of the Dead," and they sank the case in the resting place the sexton had prepared. What relief every one felt! The natural buoyancy of the younger returned as they drove back to the office. The elder estimated their work as a humane deed for some unknown, possibly mistreated mortal. All agreed they had done as they would be done by, and had freed themselves from an offence that had reached the very face of heaven. A day or two after this outpouring of com- passion, a husky, well-overhauled, young farmer drove up, and sprang from Ms mud-stained spring-wagon. **rm expecting a box," he said as he entered the express-room. **Had it sent to Laurel Town for your office is nearer than any other to my place in Tonganoxie." IIT I^UEEL TOWIT 99 **Wliat name?" asked a clerk. **Ephraim Quat/' answered Mr. Farmer. Nervous glances from every clerk. **Yes, we had such a box.'' **Had such a box!" **But we had to bury it." **Bury it!" echoed Mr. Quat, ^^Whyf' **Well, if you 'd come in the day after the box got here," called out one of the bolder of the office force, **your nose would have told you why." The consignee could make nothing out of the history they gave him, and a few minutes later the express clerks again levied on a company- wagon, and taking with them the mystified Mr. Quat, drove to the cemetery. Work now was to dig up the box. And then the task of exam- ing its contents ! They were willing to handle a digger's shovel, but at the duty of unfastening and lifting off the lid each man shied — all save Mr. Quat whose conscience made him fearless, whose zeal to get back to his work drove him on. He talked lightly, the express boys felt, when he took a screw-driver from his pocket. '*Any of you know a rain-maker?" he queried. **How I do hone for a regular, all-day drizzle," he con- tinued as he worked at loosening the cover. 100 CEKTAIN WHO DWELT **tlie sort tHat comes soft and wets deep, not a pelter that pounds down and runs off and doesn't strike in more 'n an inch. **Not a cloud as big as a tax commissioner's mercy in sight," he added, squinting at the hori- zon. ^VWell, it's ploughing this afternoon for me." Finally, all fastenings out, he carefully raisea the top board. Packed in waste and wrappeci in newspapers lay the new ** fixings" he had ordered for his farm machinery. Joy mixed with shamefacedness filled the wagon which brought men and case back to Laurel Town. **What could have been," the express boys asked themselves, *Hhat made the air of the office so insufferable those days the box stood there?" They were never able to tell. Perhaps they became sensitive about the matter. Leastwise, no word ever escaped to Lord Denman that they had resurrected the unhappy mortal over whom he, deeply moved, had conducted sacramental liturgies. As for Ephraim Quat — ^he started home be- fore noon declaring himself mighty glad to get those fittings, and he now hoped to plant his winter wheat within a fortnight. IN LAUEEL TOWN 101 IV ** Nature/' said a witty Kansan speaking of colonization appealing to others than the strong, ** Nature is profuse with her Dirt, and sparing of her Deity." Colonization does strike the fancy of a flying squadron of the Half-baked — ^people who, so far as mental grasp goes, pass through life a sort o' babe-needing-incubator-nursing; people un- able to comprehend eternal verities; incapable of standards ; with not a notion of the price the human race has paid for the modicum of truth it possesses. A citizen coming to my mind's eye as I write affords fair example; a squash- headed old boy, (his face suggested to you a gourd of the yellow variety) who bragged he had had no schooling since he was twelve; who would, for instance, go one evening to a ** spiritualistic seance," and with the same approachment sit at home next night and read Emerson. Yes, new settlements do also attract the Half- baked ; folks one-sidedly intelligent, hardly ever articulate through the hand or any medium except the tongue, but articulate through the tongue to an astounding degree; people whose main aim in the realm of morals seems, in the 102 CEKTAIN WHO DWELT phrase of our Milesian friends, *Ho give a saus- age and take a ham." That sort has long accompanied colonists. Tales nearly, or quite, three thousand years old tell of Thersites in a Greek settlement. The identical law held at Laurel Town. Half- bakeds were not lacking. Under this family name, however, stood various genera de- scribed in that day^s idiom, more often spoken than written — a speech not elegant, but grounded in truth and winged by fancy — as **sap-heads," **un-mit-i-ga-ted ahsses," **pinky- dinkies," ** bone-heads, ** pin-heads," **natural- bom-durn fools," and so on. To trade on another's strength in achieve- ment, to deplete another's vitality, and again to do deeds that made the stronger explode in a laughter darkening the eyelids with tears and as unquenchable as the immortals', seemed the role of Half-bakeds in the community drama. Commonly they acted their part well. Not infrequently their sayings, or doings, were a coming to the surface of Anglo-Saxon ** temperament;" or of that generous, laughter- loving, hey-nonny-nonny, gifted-with-words, devil-may-care blood — willingness to be led, lack of clarity and singleness of purpose that sometimes distinguishes Irish Celts, Long IN LAUKEL TOWN 103 life to them! May their number never grow less! The tragi-comedy of newly married pair liv- ing at the Eldridge House serves an example. A hotel is well enough for folks in health. In fact, for such a hotel is to be tolerated. But surely it is no place for an invalid. And now the force majeure of the newly wedded pair, the lady, that is, fell ill and had need of home nursing. She was so sick, indeed, that she could not sit up to ride from the hostel in public hack or private carriage ; and no such conveyance as an ambulance comforted Laurel Town in those days. Yet leave the hotel she must. Her husband spent the night at his wits' end. Early in the morning he called in a maid of the house, and towards noon they had the lady ready for setting out — ^having clothed her in a pale-green silk visiting-frock, shoeing her feet with white satin slippers and covering her hands with white kid gloves. Then they laid her upon a lounge and rested from their labors. Four stalwart negroes now £Qed into the room. Ranging themselves, one at each of its comers, they lifted the lounge and bore it down the broad general stairway. Out in the street a July snn struck down in 104 CERTAIN WHO DWELT the pitiless way the sun has when appearing in the guise of the Slayer. The lady must not suffer Apollo's darts. Therefore her husband, walking alongside, carried in his left hand the dame's parasol, which matched her green silk visiting-frock, and with its shade protected her face ; while he kept her from fainting by fanning her with her white-satin gilt-spangled fan. Thus the sextette, and the lounge, moved along the sidewalk of the main street of Laurel Town, and down the thoroughfare's busiest blocks. The hour was noon, when the ** panta- loon folks" of environing farms had driven in for supplies and stood smoking and gossiping under awnings, or tying their horses at the curb. Women, too, were now marketing and shopping ; and merchants setting forth their wares. Naturally everybody held up his business to look. But the sextette went on, and finally reached the home of the lady's mother-in-law ; where she was safely put to bed. Yet the adventure had a charming ending. For the invalid got back her health and bloom, and the green silk frock had merrier, even if less attention-compelling excursions. Many another laughter-laden tale went leap- ing from lip to lip. And yet not far behind lay picturesque times. Only five years before IN LAUKEL TOWN 105 the scout of a Union colonel used every day to promenade the streets in a black velvet suit. An embossed morocco belt held his coat snugly about his body, but the main end of the girdle was to carry a pair of ivory-mounted revolvers. Eed sheepskin leggings covered his calves; and a military hat, set off with a flowing black plume topped his splendor. Then there was the dame who went about in the innovating ** Bloomers" of the day. One of the town-wits, sitting on the sidewalk, his armed chair tipped back against the wall of the Eld- ride House (loafers of a town are most often wits of a town ; busy folks do not find leisure for antitheses) — one of Laurel Town's wits, slothing one afternoon as the Bloomers lady passed, ex- claimed (possibly from the habit men have long had of criticising women's ways and deeds), **They ought to catch that woman, and cut off her legs to match her skirts.'* The force of this remark is plainer, possibly, if you turn back to pages seventy-six and seven foregoing, and read of the power of the petticoat in those days. But you may be crying, ** Monstrous, an in- tolerable deal of sack to one half -pennyworth of bread !" Still, after all, a whole pennyworth of truth lies in what garrulous, old Jean de Join- ville told in his chronicles, some three hundred 106 CERTAIN WHO DWELT years, by the bye, before Shakespeare wrote the famous advice of Polonius; ^'We ought to dress in such a way that the more observing of man- kind may not think we clothe ourselves too finely, nor the younger too meanly." An Anglo-Saxon child-city in Kansas is, after all, much like the rest of the world. To say its folks in those earlier years of Laurel Town were of like dye would, I repeat, not be true. Yet all bore the shade of the Kansan; a possibility a greater fact exemplifies: — In this country our Anglo-Saxon foreparents erected on Anglo- Saxon principles, attracting peoples from all round the globe — else why do they come here? to get advantages and opportunities they could not obtain in their old home — in this country, west and east even to the seas, neither are the people of the various states of like dye ; and yet you see every child of them, whatever the shade of his state, stamped with the unmistakable color of the American. Mysteries at times haunted Laurel Town. For instance, there was the English lady whose face bore the imprint of imbecility; a young woman of the fleshly, Eubens type, fastidiously dressed, guarded, never speaking to any one, every day taking a constitutional with two young men walking either side of her. Gossip IN LAUBEL. TOWN 107 said the men were her husband and brother, and that the lady owned the fortune upon which the three lived. They suddenly appeared in Laurel Town ; then after a time were gone. Men and women at that day mysteries, to this day mysteries — lives which had not met conven- tional demands **back east," or in England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany and other countries ; people who had, possibly, made a marriage dis- tasteful to relatives, or had deviated from rule, maxim, or even the written law, such were at times shipped or themselves wandered to the Middle West. When they had the best of luck they got off the train at Laurel Town. Provided they staid put and did not disturb the comfort of stronger factors in the old home, they lived at ease upon transmitted support. To all such incomers Laurel Town was undeniably a Utopia, if they were thankful-hearted, and a bit of a Cairo in Egypt, refuge of mysterious folks from sundry parts of the world, or a Bot- any Bay, also receptacle of nondescripts, if they longed for their own blood and its associations. Then others besides those abounding in strength and love of adventure, and high-spirit- edness, and imaginativeness; and besides those suffering minor moral misadventures; other folk came who had failed elsewhere — a shoe- 108 CEKTAIN WHO DWELT inercliant, a general store-keeper, clergymen of various denominations, each unfortunate want- ing to bury past experiences and try to win life's guerdon again. And prosperous issue often took up abode with such workers — praise be to their persistence ! Again there occasionally landed in Laurel Town people so successful that they seemingly astonished themselves — people whom fate had lifted to a condition more prosperous than their ambition had ever vaulted to ; and they had un- consciously come to attribute their own stunned state of the mind to their neighbors. Such possibly was Colonel Perry. His colonel's title may have been a relic of militia training, or remains of the Civil War. Be that as it may, although from the old, refined Ameri- can stock, he entered Laurel Town with a hoop- la, buying speedily one of its most spacious dwellings, driving about with spanking bays in clattering harnesses, setting up a bank, and de- claring his wife had **nothing else to do but sit in her parlor and cut off coupons." As to him- self I hesitate to report his exact words. Well, then, mind you, in a low voice and only for the reason you insist — ^he said — ^he was **f airly lousy with money." That comes of your in- sisting I IK lAURETi TOWN" 109 ** Dramatic !'' you exclaim, recovering from the shock. Yes. You know old New England blood is not given to attitudinizing. Large natures are simple, direct, straightforward, truthful, not addicted to tricks and sinuosities. Old New England blood is not apt to be dramatio in the cramping, three-wall stage of a theatre built by man ; rather only in the vast theatre which has earth^s mountains for its back-curtain, river- valleys for its wings, rolling prairies for its floor and the Almighty as scene-shifter; and in dramas of self-denial, self-reliance, religious consecration; works which would shame the Titans. In such theatres of God Anglo-Saxon blood has played, here in America, various of the greatest dramas of mankind. That blood is commonly too sincere, too un- conscious of any but its duties to be dramatic in posturings, in phrases. **He that is lavish in words," said our kinsman of the stock. Sir Wal- ter Ealeigh, **he that is lavish in words, is a niggard in deeds.'' And yet Colonel Perry and his family came from a Connecticut town! How it happened, what urgency led to the exodus, no one could tell. The Colonel may have fallen heir, as we above intimated, to a sum which, to an unimag- inative mind, had no end. Mortals sometimes 110 CERTAIN WHO DWELT suffer that way. And when the experience comes, they not infrequently want to slough off the old home and find new fields for their ac- tivities. In this instance in Laurel Town, as reports elsewhere, money made the mare go. Griitter of new things, and rattle, especially of harnesses of high-stepping steeds, attract. Folk's less colorful, less temperamental^ of the soft-grey weave of respectahility and quiet manners, rushed to call upon the new arrivals. The daughter Maggie, not openly disdainful of, hut seemingly disregarding Laurel Town girls, imported a confidante from her old home. One evening the two were at a party Mrs. Means gave to her visiting sister. A thunder storm had crashed down upon Laurel Town that afternoon. Eain came in sheets. Thunder rolled so continuously that it seemed one vast rumble, now in the zenith, now off on the horizon. And electricity had been so fluidly intense that it fairly balled in red light and shot about amid the greenery. After the storm the air stood in drenched stillness, weary with excessive action. From the land vapors slowly rose and stood envelop- ing Mount Oread. Birds kept silent. Leaves hung in perpendicular from weight of the waters IN LAUKEL TOWN 111 which had washed them. Masses stood out, their every feather-tip surfeited. The evening of this superb spectacle, when supper was serving a thin, little voice shrilled, **Do bring me some pepper. "Why! I never eat ice-cream without pepper.'' The speaker was Maggie. ** Pepper!" I exclaimed to myself. ** Shades of Brillat-Savarin ! If it were ginger; that might conserve taste."* Not long after the pepper-box service Miss Maggie married a suitor who had come for her all the way from the Connecticut valley. Her daddy's bank closed its doors. G^ossip said he had fallen by the wiles of Income, a jade ever deceitful and flippant in intimacies ; and in spite of the parasitic conditions which he declared he suffered at the time of his dramatic debut in Laurel Town, Income had given him the mitten. Purse-pride rarely touched Laurel Townf oik. Their self-gratulation had its fountain in self- reliant honesty of purpose, action, speech, for the most part, and in like sturdy qualities of ♦Perhaps the order was more qualmish because in those days I was delighting in the twenty-four books of "The Iliad," even to the heroes' feasts. Then, too, that was years before I had seen much besides our old Anglo-Ameri- can cookery ; before I had seen foreign epicures, and Americans imitating foreigners, serve such mix-ups as roast chicken en garniture with onions and cauliflower. 112 CERTAIN WHO DWELT ancestor and race. After all, it was only the newly rich who flaunted pride of purse and put their money into display. The social life of the little burg fell mainly along cleavages of church membership — a fact often true of older and larger cities. In Laurel Town it was sun-clear. Now, just as the Puritan, his self-government, his demand for individual freedom, is the very core of our American nationality to-day, so his compelling spirituality has colored all religions in our midst. At times you met the Puritaas' stem sincerity, their fidelity to principle, their contempt for riches and prosperity when weighed against the moral law. Again you found the touching con- viction, deep-seated in our hearts and causing rigid self-examination — again and again you saw the rudimentary moral conviction, pathetic in its reversion to early Hebrew ideas, that ma- terial prosperity walks hand in hand with moral goodness, an enduring witness of the approval of the Supreme Giver. And you heard over and over the demand that IN LAUBEL TOWN 113 no power stand between the weak human and the Lasting Type — naturally you would in a state whose life, not far back, had been intense and dramatic. ^^Don^t you," hotly asked a clergyman of a staid and blameless resident of the little city, *^ Don't you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ f **Yes, I do," returned the laic, rising to the same degree of heat. **But there are too damned many middlemen. **I have sometimes feared," the layman went on, *Hhat Kansas might become what Andrew Lang defined India to be." **What! — ^what's that?" asked the cleric turn- ing swiftly and eying his companion. * * The secular home of driveling creeds and of religion in her sacerdotage," calmly answered the citizen. Religion's practical expression-— we do not speak of religion itself, communion between the soul and the Infinite and consequent peace and trust; but practical religion, our duty to give ourselves to human works in helpfulness, in truth and joy had open force those days in Laurel Town. All citizens knew that a man may hide himself in every other way, but he can not in his works — a momentous law which holds true of women, also. 114 CEKTAIN WHO DWELT The story of how the Episcopal ladies took in washing bears witness: — Those workers of picturesque Trinity wanted to buy a new carpet for the main aisle ; or per- haps they were after new bellows for the organ ; something of the sort, at any rate. **It happened years ago,^ said the man who told the tale, * *and I've been doing a lot of think- ing ever since, till IVe concluded roping in our wives and mothers is a sneaking way we have of fixing up our churches — ^we men in business meetings voting a thing shall be done and leav- ing the women to gath-er money to pay for it. **In this town, and in others, too, I've seen the game played a^ain and again. And did you ever find the women failing to rise to the occa- sion? — ^wh'at with their oyster-suppers and chicken-dinners^ their Saturday morning sales of pies and cakes, their rummage-auctions and every other means their clever heads and faith- ful hearts can plan and willing hands execute! **I notice the Presbyterians, at least in Laurel Town, don't so often resort to such subterfuges for church up-keep. There's some incalculable thing in Presbyterian teachings, it seems to me, that makes good financiers — some indefinable quality acting on the mind and judgment. That's irue of the Unitarians', also; and true of the IN LAUEELi TOWN 115 Jews\ Perhaps it is because their religion is not so emotional. They don't submerge them- selves in a surging sea of sensations which have no deedy outlet. Their devotees are more mas- ters of themselves, calmly abiding in a sort of practical religiosity — like a Jacob's, prayerful, yet subtle — not swaying in mysticism, choking for utterance of what can not be put into human words. Where Prcsbyterianism prevails the people are canny. **But I'm losing my story. As I was saying, in those times the ladies of Trinity Church were taking in washing, I used to lay my way home to mid-day meal just to see the plucky workers hard at it, **They met at Mrs. Green's because she had no end of soft cistern water, plenty of yard; plenty of curtain stretchers^ too. Then she her- self had such a faculty for putting things through ! Out in her side-yard, or back behind the grape trellis, I'd see the women skirmishing with the tubs. ** There was Mra Arnold who took mathe- matical honors at Cornell ; and washing was not included in her curriculum. Like as not she'd be standing before a tub sozzling and pounding with one of these suction punchers. A couple of others would be dashing the white things in 116 CERTAIN WHO DWELT blue water, and another group chattering and laughing while they hooked the lace and thin stujff along stretcher-poles. • *And above would arch the Kansas sky, and below would roll Kansas blue grass, and in mid- air of elmrbranches robins would carol and jays scream, and wrens chatter from porch crannies, and perhaps you would catch sight of a rose- breasted grosbeak hiding in the shade. Lord! I used to say to myself as I passed by, could there be a prettier sight ! Or one more indica- tive of our race's active, bold, progressive self- respect! Or of our religion of helpfulness, holding together, protective defence of the group ! Or of our state's motto, * Work through trials and we shall reach the stars !' '*0f course the women woiu They always do win. They washed all the curtains in town, I guess. I don't know whether they washed all the curtains of neighboring towns, or not. I rather think they did. **And in the end they laughed right merrily at us men, who had lacked gumption to devise means to buy the carpet, or whatever it was, after we had voted the church must have it. **Then, too, thei women laughed at certain critics who, 'when they started out, laughed at them. But it was the gentle laughter of the IN LAUREL TOWN 117 one who laughs best because he laughs right- eously and last.'' Other congregations, also, had their legends founded on folk characteristics. There was, for instance, the tale about Adoniram KeUner. You will probably agree with his workfellows that the most merciful, the final, judgment is that Adoniram meant better than he did. To say Adoniram KeUner is to call before your eyes Mary Louise, daughter of a whole- some mother who enjoyed an apron string forty inches long; and an equally plethoric father, a coal merchant with a bank-account as plethoric as himself and his amiable consort. A red-brick, broad-door dwelling, that also large in girth and smiling-eyed, in the midst of lawn, shrubs and graceful elms, formed the shell of their blessed home. The joy and sunshine of that home was a daughter, coddled and petted all her short life. By gentle askings, by loving mildness, ready obedience and duty to parents, Mary Louise had gained whatever ends her little mind chanced to seek. The family-life was as the angels' in heaven. In church work and the Sunday-school to which Mary Louise devoted her sweet effi- ciencies, was another laborer, a young man 118 CERTAIIT WHO DWELT studying at the university — ^Adoniram KeUner himseK, built after an ample, well-fleshed, Teu- tonic model, features indefinitely cut and small eyes looking out from a rubescent complexion and thatch of reddish hair. Not a joy forever in looks, you say. But in devoutness, we answer, in what he termed devo- tion to the vineyard of the Lord he led every junior member. No one at the Sunday-school so always early and at hand ; to see chairs were in line, singing books in place, temperature at sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. No one else stayed so late. No other so apt at making Scrip- ture quotations in just the right place, at just the telling second. Any one with half an eye could see he was bent on doing the right thing. This mere gate-keeping in the vineyard, to use his phrase, at one time so lifted his spirit that he felt he had a call from On High. Yet, after completer examination of his heart in the privacy of his closet, he determined he could benefit a world waiting for energetic, efficient practicians, by giving himself to banking six days in the week, supplemented by teachings of a zealous faith whenever opportunity afforded. Therefore Adoniram dismissed thought of the ministry. Yet he frequented canvas tents into which evangelists, devoted to the awakening of IN LAUEEL T0V7N 119 souls, gathered friends of summer evenings. At such meetings Adoniram's petitions excited out- spoken admiration. *^The sweet humility of them!^* the ladies said. **We give thanks/' ho cried one evening, ^^for this new and beautiful tent in which we meet — ahem — for this piano to lead us in joyous song — ahem — ^for these chairs — ahem — for this sawdust; we give thanks for this sawdust r' Adoniram had a rather striking voice; it sounded just as unbaked cake tastes ; that is, to the aural palate it had the savors of raw, sweet dough to the tongue. In his duty as general aide to the superintend- ent of the Sunday-school Adoniram gathered re- ports from teachers, and so it fell that he had )ften to go over to the corner where Mary Louise lisped stories of Noah's dove, and Moses in the bulrushes, and Elisha and his bears to a group of little girls. Out of her frills of lace, or furs, as weather might demand, Mary Louise's blue eyes would look up to Adoniram' s face, and smiles would play about her innocent mouth as she told what the children of her class were learning and giving. Now, if you have any fancy for reading the future without a crystal ball, and if you had seen the expression in Adoniram's eyes, and if 120 CERTAIN WHO DWELT you had noticed Ms carriage toward thosQ pos- sessed of this world^s goods — for a pinch of Uriah Heep as well as a dash of Pecksniff had gone to the making of Adoniram; moreover, if you took into consideration Mary Louise^s proh- able, ultimate bank account, you could reason with moderate exactness that the young man would seek the lady^s hand in marriage. It all happened that away. Adoniram pro- posed the winter he was a college senior. Papa and Mama Huddleston considered his devout- ness, his irreproachable conduct wherever they had seen him, his clear, logical thinking, his very evident helpfulness. With results that the month that brought Adoniram's winning of a bachelor's degree, gave also to Adoniram that happiest circle of a man's life — his wedding day. One luscious June evening Mary Louise's Sunday-school associates gathered in the ample parlors of her home, full-lit and hung with roses, and then and there her pastor united her to the greatest hero within her horizon. Long before the wedding came, in planning the journey to follow their espousal, Adoniram had completely given Mary Louise her wilL "Just as you wish; whatever you like;" he had said; and so she determined they were to stay IN LAUBEL TOWN 121 at her home till they should take flight the morning following the marriage. From this arrangement it fell that that night, after the wedding, Mary Louise stood with tooth- brush in hand and clad in little beruffled, belaced nightgown, when, after pacing half an hour in the shrubbery, Adoniram entered her room. In he walked calmly enough; just as if he were used to that chamber, into which he had merely peeped before when it had served as ladies' cloak-room for church societies — ^in he walked and pulled a chair to the middle of the room and sat down. **Come here, missy," he called to the smiling bride, signing with his right forefinger from her to himself, but without any other word or ac- tion, **Come here." Mary Louise came. **Now kneel down here at my knee," laying a hand over that articulation of his body, *'and say your prayers. .We'll begin as we expect to go on," he added. A malleable little soul, dutiful, unacquainted with rebellion in all her twenty protected years, never necessarily assertive of self — ^what did Mary Louise do? Through all her life she had done what those she trusted told her to do. Naturally she did that now. 122 CEIIIAIN WHO DWELT She knelt, and covering her face with her hands resting against her bridegroom's knee, she prayed aloud — Adoniram improving her expres- sion as she went on. Next morning the couple stood waiting on the porch for the family-carriage to take them to the train. June sunlight, song of turtle-dove and thrush, fragrance of clustering roses had put last night's humiliation from the tender heart of Mary Louise, and her sweet face told how her mind was turned towards the journey. ** Daughter darling," called her mother at the last moment, bustling forward with purse in hand, **when you are in New York you'll want to buy a few pretties;" and she handed Mary Louise a hundred dollar bill. Adoniram's ears heard the mother's cooing voice. His eyes saw the gift. That afternoon, when the train had nosed its way out of Kansas City and was leaping east- ward over the sunset-dyed lands of Missouri, he said to the trusting lady at his side, *^Hand that one hundred dollars to me, missy, I can take care of it." The wife undid her porte-monnaie and gave her husband the bill. Yet her spirits were not daunted. Such glori- ous days ahead! The great metropolis, its IN LAUKEL TOWN 123 churches, its music, its hotels, its tens of thousands of people every waking hour! May- be Adoniram would take her to a theatre or two! The train sped on. Tzu-tzu-tzu it sang. Kickety-rick, rickety-rick, rickety-rick through many hours. And finally, in the calm of an evening, leaped alongside the waters of the Hudson till its monster eyes sighted the metropolis. Mary Louise now spoke of a hotel, the Fifth Avenue over on Twenty-third Street, where her mother told her they should put up. *^ Which way from the station did it lie V^ she wondered. **No," answered Adoniram, **we^ll take a fur- nished room.'' They walked about till they found one. For their comfort, in case of railway accident, Mary Louise's mother had packed food in a lunch basket. After they had eaten what the lady's generous hands stowed away, Adoniram replenished the store at grocers' counters. They picniced in the midst of enticing eating-houses. Still, their days were full of wonders and joys which an English poet, after his own nuptials, declared should belong to the '^treacle-moon.'^ At last time came for winging their way home- ward. Their journey ended in the dwelling 124 CEKTAIN WHO DWELT Adoniram had chosen not far from the bank in his home-town, Minnehaha. Summer passed. Autumn's chill lay over the land. One eve- ning they had in a few friends, and the com- pany sat about the dining-table cracking nuts and telling stories. Finally the talk drifted to what would make each ** perfectly happy." One would start next week for a hunting trip in Australia. Another would buy an orange grove in Florida. A third would spend summers on his own yacht off the New England coast. Adoniram was silent. At last, upon appeal, he fell to telling his supreme choice: G-ranting at the outset an income that would free him from need of counting costs — ^then, broad, spacious rooms; a fireplace in which crackled logs; a piano for improvising, if he chose; carefully chosen books lining the walls, with now and then a Eaffael Morghen. So spoke Adoniram. **And me," added Mary Louise after a mo- ment's pause, looking towards her husband with a wistful smile. **No-o-o," answered Adoniram slowly, eyes narrowing as if balancing values, and voice taking a downward inflection, **Not necessarily you-u-u.'' !>?■ LAUREL. TOWN 125 Winter pushed forward; and storms which held Adoniram at home even of daylight hours, and found him keeping on as he had started. Every night, after her day spent according to the meticulous direction of her spouse, Mary Louise knelt at his knee and said her prayer, which, before its flight to The Giver, Adoniram crit- icised and *^ bettered." Her face had lost the soft, laughing sweetness of her girlhood. Her smile seemed a ghost of habit. Still, no word of complaint escaped the littlo woman, or colored her letters to her old home. Save once, '*I had no idea what life was, mama darling," her sad heart at last dared to say. **Why, I didn't know I had always been carried about like a kitten in a basket on your dear arm." But springs do come in spite of the distortion of man, and when lilac bushes purpled at Minne- haha, and snow-ball trees whitened, Mary Louise's boy was bom. What a doting, delighted grandmother ! — ^who had declared a new milch cow should welcome that blessed baby; a grandmother who had em- ployed a dairyman to search the county and find the best. A few hours after the birth of her child Mary 126 ceetaijST who dwelt Louise lay half asleep, shutting out the light by snuggling towards the wall, when her hus- band came to her bedside and asked a question. In her weakness the little woman only half- sensed his presence. But when he repeated, ** Where did you put the cream from last night's milk!" seizing the tip of her nose between his right forefinger and thumb and turning her face towards himself, adding, **ril teach you to answer me, missy," he thoroughly roused her. Day by day after that, the nurse could get little cream for the invalid^s use ; it seemed as if someone took it off, or the new milch cow did not give normal milk. Moreover, wrote the nurse to the grandparents in Laurel Town — moreover, her patient suffered depression, had spells of silent weeping and showed no reaction to enjoyment. **What is the mystery!" queried the dame of the ample apron-string; and she took the train for Minnehaha. In that little borough she vi- brated between her daughter's bedside and the milk pans, dipping off the cream in precious spoonfuls, her mother-tenderness coaxing world- weary Mary Louise back to strength — till, at last, in the flood of early June beauty, just as Michigan creepers and Baltimore bells were again hanging out their clusters, she could bring IN LAUREL TOWN 127 the poor ewe lamb, and her lambkin, to dwell in the broad-door, smiling-eyed home. Suit for separation and divorce Mary Lonise based on grounds of incompatibility of habits. The court listened to her testimony, granted her plea and gave her baby to her keeping. Adoniram went from one success to another. Still, time had its effect on him, too. Years after he spoke of the need of straightening dis- torted conceptions, and of humanizing old-time practices, if we would meet present-day prob- lems. VI. '*A notable occasion'' the newspapers of Laurel Town called the Honorable Robert Bor- row's birthday party. History was making, Kansas struggling for rights and look toward stateship, when Mr. Bor- row came from New Jersey. He served in the first Kansas senate and, *^a man of high char- acter and fine abilities," helped make Kansas a state; local papers said **a great state.'' And now serene old age, an easing sense of triumph at having left the tragedies of action behind, of a peace forerunning the ultimate sleep, blessed him. This cool, clear evening in October men who had shared with him the good 128 CERTAIN WHO DWELT and ill of fortune were assembling at his bidding, each enjoying, also, harvests of long-yeared in- telligence and energy. For, in Laurel Town, what Pericles told his fellow citizens in Athens some twenty-three hundred and fifty years ago held true; **To avow poverty with us is no dis- grace ; the true disgrace is in doing nothing to avoid it.'' They came through the open doorway, these elderly men, and put their names, adding also their ages, in a guest-book at hand: W. S. Mc- Curdy, eighty-eight; Wm. Yates, eighty-two; Forest Savage, seventy-nine; C. L. Edwards, seventy-six ; C. A. Hanscom, seventy-four ; 0. E. Learnard, seventy-two; Ely Moore, seventy- three; George Banks, sixty-nine; George Gros- venor, seventy-five; R. G. Elliott, seventy- seven; Frank H. Snow, sixty-five; a complete list would be long. Colonel Learnard had been member of the first Territorial Council. Five of the guests were in Laurel Town the first win- ter Free-State men spent in Kansas. After the dinner, which had not forgotten the nectar best loved by Pomona, Douglas County cider — after the dinner, the company, retired to the spaciousness of the parlors, resting in easy chairs, called to your mind those grey- beards of one outstanding day that Homer IN LAUREL TOWN 129 sings, *^ hoary elders, done with war but good at counselling in assembly, sitting rejoicing like grasshoppers on a tree down in the woods, and talking, but in a voice as slender as a lily." They had no repining, no lament at growing old, those old-young men — a gracious pride, rather, that they stored so many golden deeds in memory. And their eagerness in reviving minutest details of old-time joys, and now veiled sorrows, was heart-moving to see. To their vision every picture of their stirring early years stood suffused with its own brilliant colors. Recollections of later days might be dimming. But that past of theirs ! — robbed of every poig- nant pain they had felt in its moment, fear of defeat forgotten, hostilities overcome, rivalries of younger years given way to admiration for others' accomplishment; their past shown with refulgent glory. Involuntary impulse of Anglo- Saxons against display of sentiment alone kept them from what they might term "slopping over"; making the sentiment they voiced the sincerer. ''The old boys were young again," Laurel Town papers reported of the meeting. * * Sharp wits undulled by age engaged in apt repartee. . . One incident recalled another, one story another, and laughter and song filled the hours." 130 CEKTAIN WHO DWELT ** Eastern people and papers jest about Kan- sas/' cried one white-head, **they say we are erratic, impulsive, even that we are insane. Pd rather be insane in Kansas than sane where there isn't an idea afloat but money-getting and money-spending. I take notice there are some- things they don't say about Kansas. They don't say we haven't convictions. They don't say we don't act what we think. In those early days of Kansas we fought for human liberty, and to-day, and, I believe, for all days, we'll fight on the same line. **My experience when I went down into Per- simmon County is fair example of those boom- ing old times. No state in the Union had had so phenomenal a growth. No wheat fields had yielded such harvests. No com lands had ever run miles on miles together over a fat loam. ** Streams of wagons, caravan after caravan, came over the hills. Their folks would camp by a likely stream. Straightway a town was there. And before the nearby field of oats could turn its heads from green to yellow, the town would be a city. **But its rival would spring up a few miles away. Then the politicians of the two settle- ments would battle to make their town the county seat. IN LAUBEL TOWN 131 **Soon the healthy young county-seat would want a railway. Not many days, and along would meander some promoter, like Isaac L. Monash. You've all heard of Isaac L. I knew him. Oh, he was not the only pebble on the beach in those times ! **Grip in hand Isaac stepped off the train, climbed into the bus for the Central House, and registered there. Then he called on the editor of the city's daily. Over in Wall Street Abra- ham and Emanuel Shekels were wanting to build a railroad. In his pocket Isaac had printed slips telling about Abraham, living in New York; and Emanuel, the younger, head of the London house, who had married an English wife and got himself a knighthood and was known as Sir Emanuel. Isaac L. had come west representing the Shekelses, to find out a way for a new rail- road — a clean cut to Texas cattle-plains and the Eockies. *^Now, if the Shekelses and Isaac L. built that road it would be a road to brag about, an A. number one — not the road alone, but all its roll- ing stock, its total management from the first furrow for its grading to its daily cannon-ball express. It would cross the Neosho and the Verdigris. It would travel the limitless lengths of the Arkansas. It would pierce the mountains 132 CEBTAIN WHO DWELT of Colorado, bring the metal of the mines to our furnaces and farmers, and take back fruits of their labors to folks living on the whole east side of the Rockies. **Did we people want that road? Isaac L. asked through the editor of the city's daily. **Want the road? Folks were mad for it. They could hardly wait for Isaac L. to tell them what to do. ^*So, just like the orientals in books we read when we were kids, Isaac L. clapped his hands, so to speak, and a gang of husky Irish lads came over the hills lugging chain and transit. And every farm-owner in the neighborhood went about bidding for a chance to entertain those road-makers. **By the way, the law broke on me then, for the first time, that it is the Jew who employs the Irish, not the Irish who employ the Jew. One day I asked a soncie woman why all their clannish hanging together. * * * Sor,' she returned, true to the Irish instinct for putting a question in answer, *And haven't the pair of us the two oldest religions in the world! Is it asleep ye are?' '*Well, down there in Persimmon County, after the Irish boys had measured the land, people met to vote the bonds. How it happened IN LAUREL TOWN 133 I never could see. Strangely enough the town- ship voting the biggest aid in bonds was found to offer the only available route for the road! County donations and perpetual exemption from taxes followed. Land-owners claimed the priv- ilege of themselves giving the right of way. *^Then they turned out with their teams, and ploughs, and scrapers, and hired men, and put bed-making through, carrying on the grade more than a mile a day. **Ah, those were jubilee times! Farmers with timber cut down their noble old trees and turned beams for bridges from the sawmills. Free- Soilers whose life had been a total self-denial, who had fought border-rujB&ans and even taken a turn with John Brown ; and after the war was over had got as fat as sculpins on hopes deferred — rugged old fellows who had conscientiously followed Socrates' advice to a disciple to ^bor- row money of himself by diminishing his wants' — hearts-of-oak, blessed with Anglo-Saxon sense of courtesy, blessed with their inborn, in- expugnable conviction of the worth and dignity of even the humblest, said *Yes, sir,Ho Isaac L. ; and when they went in-doors took off their hats to him. Think of it ! Shades of our grand- fathers and their Revolution ! — Isaac L. and his whole blamed outfit not more than a generation 134 CEKTAIN WHO DWELT out of a me aching, Vilna ghetto, beggars ahorse- back, and destitute of that idea of civil liberty which was the very breath of our old warriors' nostrils; liberty for which their blood had up- built this country. *^So far Isaac L. had not paid a dollar for his board at the Central House. He was all things to all men, and he had the best the town afforded. He even hobnobbed with the county-treasurer, and secured an advance in cash pending collec- tion of taxes. '* Finally, one morning, the bonds came down, all printed at Topeka and signed by the proper officials. They were placed in an iron-bound safe which Ikey called a vault. Not a bond, according to conditions, should be surrendered to the railroad company, till the road was ready for the ties. Half the funds should then be ad- vanced, and the rest the day the first train ran over the track. *^So our folks worked away at the grading, and got it done to the banks of the Wahoo. Then Isaac L. received half the issue of the bonds. He solemnly executed a formal receipt; and started east for the iron. **He never came back. Springs came back,, and crimson stars of the prairie-verbena studded the raw embanlnnent. Falls came back and dry IN LAUEEL TOWN 135 September winds swayed sunflowers over the rotting oak sleepers. ^'I used to feel kind o' sorry for the ilk of Isaac L. But after years of observation on this little pippin of ours, I conclude I am sorry for the other fellow. Tell the truth, I say, without prejudice and without fear. *'Our people were, and are imaginers, dream- ers about an ideal, minds bent on the general end, selfish with the statebuilders' selfishness. Isaac L., on the other hand, had two almost un- failing characteristics of his blood; what Marx calls its commercialism — a shallow, puny prac- ticality, and rapaciousness always for his nub- bin, unsocialized self; *0 my ducats! O my daughter!' never other peoples' ducats! other peoples' daughters !" Tales less stem came forward as the evening wore on. **You speak of the growth of churches in Laurel Town within the last forty years," said one of the hoary boys, laughing. ^ ^Do you recall how a couple of students locked in a congrega- tion ? No ? Never heard of it ! Well ! '*One Sunday night, early in a September, Ned Stetson and Jim Galway went strolling down Kentucky Street. The fall term of the university had not yet opened and buckled the 136 CEETAIN WHO DWELT lads down to work. That's the same as saying a little grinding hadn't taken the devil out of their summer-plethora hides. They were too good-natured to live; in the mood of over-fed, under-exercised puppies, full of the pointless rage for action that, when four-footed, chews up rugs and gnaws off dictionary bindings. ^^ We're all of us puppies, I've been a-noticing these last seventy years ; or more likely calves that God has tethered out in this orchard of the earth — not exactly orchard, either, for some of us are staked on bleak hillsides, and others in warm sunny valleys. But whatever our fortune in this world, each of us sometime in life is apt to wind himself in his rope and splash himself in a puddle. *^ Those two boys came near doing it that eve- ning. It was a little after nine when, in their meanderings, they reached an African church; the very moment the parson was giving out the last hymn. Doors stood wide open, for the weather was hot as Tophet. ^^The two students, or calves, stopped on the sidewalk and peered in upon the congregated negroes. As they looked, they saw a large key in the outer side of the double-leaf doors; the only doors of the building, by the bye. '*With every soul in the church that moment IN LAUEEL TOWN 137 intent on the singing, no one saw those doors swing to ; nor heard the lock click ; nor the draw- ing out of the key and the laying it on the outer sill. ** Satan having prompted the cubs so far, his majesty then led them to cross the street and seat themselves in the shadow of a hedge to see what would happen. *^The hymn was long, the singers' enjoyment of it intense, and their velvet voices went through every line and verse. Then the congre- gation turned to go. **One brother, amazed to find the doors shut, grabbed the knob and turned it. Without re- sult. ** Another, thinking the first incompetent, im- patiently seized the handle and shook the door till hinges and lintels rattled. ** * Strange dat do oh shet dis hot night!' * ^ Other worshippers crowded about and tried their strength. * * * Open dat dooh !' they yelled. **But no answer came. ** *Dat dooh is shuh done locked!' *' Other efforts to force the opening brought the same judgment. *' * Gimme a chair, Elder Johnson,' cried one of the men after a few minutes of reflection, 138 CEKTAIN WHO DWELT ^ gimme a chair or two an I'll set em on de groun, an we can holp de ladies outer de windows/ **No other plan seemed feasible^ and the brethren fell to working out this one. Two or three climbed on the sills and jumped to the grass beneath. Inside others were soon busy boosting to window ledges, and passing down on the outer wall the giggling, or squealing, but al- ways ^ indiginant,' sisters. ** Meanwhile, across the street sat two young Satanites, peering through the branches of a hedge, holding their congested sides and rock- ing to and fro in soundless laughter. ^* Before all the congregation emerged win- dow-wise, however, one of the elders on outside duty had, by dint of striking matches and exam- ining doorway, found the key, and the tag-end of the congregation passed out as usual." *^That Jim Galway you tell of," broke in a Laurel Town character, '* isn't he the one who went over to London!" ** Somebody asked his nationality the other day, said he was a Hebrew," answered the well- read man. '*He used, when a lad loitering through our streets, to remind me of what Dr. Johnson told about a man of his century; *It was said by himself that he owed his nativity to IN LAUKEL TOWN 139 England, Kuf by everybody else, that be was bom in Ireland/ " * *I'd like to know bow Jim came to cut a swatb in London literary fields — editor, and so on. I thougbt solidity a necessity over tbere." **0b, Jim's able," put in tbe well-read man. ** Everlasting bigbbrow ! Can't you see a plain American's point? I tbougbt a man, to bold a post wielding power in literary matters in Lon- don, bad to bave stability, veracity, moral re- sponsibility, etbical sense — ^wbat you call char- acter. We're more fluid over bere and slosb- abouts get more protracted bearing. But over tbere! Jim interpreting tbis country to con- servative Englisbmen ! Geewbilikins ! Wbat pre- tence! He says be * secured control' of a paper, rbat paper's name became a by-word, a synonym for batred of America. No little ill-will sprang in England from its sordid misrepresentations of our people and our institutions." '*0b, yes," returned tbe well-read man, an austere smile brigbtening bis face, **but Jim's a cbild. Every Irisbman of tbe exuberant sort is a cbild." *' Treat bim as you treat a cbild, tben. Don't spoil tbe cbild by sparing tbe rod." ** Unabated Irishmen suffer from lack of sense of tbe golden mean," tbe well-read man went on. 140 CERTAIN WHO DWELT **Maiiy we get over here have been abated by various pressures. Jim wasn't. Hybris got hold of him early in life. The unabated knows no awe before the everlasting moralities ; embodies the old Greek hybris, insolent assumption, law- less disregard of the rights of others." **I don't know anything about your Greek, but I do know that wanting to appear cheek by jowl with riches and rank, chasing after the ad- vertised, sneering at the retiring, with anarch- ists an anarchist, with socialists a socialist, hat- ing order except to exploit it for his own fur- therance, ever of the off-side ; in short a natural- bom incendiary, intoxicated with egotism — that's Jim. With microscope and scalpel he dis- sects the by-sayings and by-doings of gifted people ; then, after dislocating their speech and action, sets himself before the reader as the * smart Alec' of the occasion." **Portrayers of men of extraordinary accom- plishments," put in the well-read man, **seem sometimes set on coloring their picture, be the cost to truth what it may. Airs of superiority and patronage their writings at times assume are nauseating; parvenu, too." *'0h, Jim's a whole heap of a rhetorical pad- dy," burst in the persistent old boy, **even if he does advertise himself like the dickens and do IN LAUREL TOWN 141 other Hebraic stunts. Over in England, when he tried to stand for Parliament, he must have claimed entry to the try out on the ground that he was an Englishman ; voted as an Englishman. Who knows but someday hell declare he is an American! That would be the acme of brass! Well, our government has spread wings of pro- tection over refuse of Europe and got kicks in return for kindness before now. **Why, the other day, down in Kansas City, I heard that little runt, Sol Einstein who made his pile in wheat-deals — I heard little Sol snarl, *I have no respect for your country, or your flag. I didn't want to come here.' Damn such a parasite! Who cares for his * respect!' Not our blood that made this country what it is, and works all the time to make it better. These United States suit us real Americans pretty well, I notice, in spite of the vilifications of all the psychically-twisted immigrants who seek our advantages and repay our generosity by mud- slinging — Sol Einsteins and Jim Galways.'' **0h, what does it signify anyway?" called one of the company crabbedly, knocking ashes off his cigar and cocking his eye at a chandelier, **If men do halloo your name, and crowd to listen to your speech ! What does it all amount to! 142 CERTAIN WHO DWELT n Does it mean that you are more fitted to teach than another whom they don^t crowd to, whom they don't applaud? No. Many are the ill-fitted fools I've seen run after here in Kan- sas, just because the fool advertised himself, blew his own horn, pushed on with subterfuges, while men better equipped were passed by and forgotten. Of all this humbug-loving world this Kansas of ours is greatest for chasing after blatant mouthers and persistent posers ; after a hero not worth a hill of beans ; some fellow who moles along always intent on his own advantage, till the nothing that has always been in him finally oozes out. **But supposing you have an idea, and sup- posing you are a better word-carpenter than the next fellow, more competent to set forth our current interests, is it worth the effort? Isn't it better to chew the cud of contemplation with one's cows in cloisters of the country? '•The Bird of Time lias but a little way To flutter— and the Bird is on the Wing.' ** Nerve-ache ! You know how it pierces your body; down your spinal cord and to your very finger-tips! Staring, sleepless nights! Anxious days ! And all for what ? Our Kaw over there goes on carrying down its mud. Waters of the Great Salt Lake are just as heavy with sodium. IN LAUREL TOWN 143 Why all this fuss and strutting? Telescopes show us suns without end ; and microscopes de- clare that trees grow on our finger-nails. **Why all this strutting, I say; 'The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop, 'Tlie Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.* *^ Better be like the robins. No dyspepsia for them; no palsy; no heart-disease. Life with them is joy; they do what they want to do, whether in clear aether above, or fertile fields and forests below." '^Your naming robins," smilingly broke in our naturalist, Professor Snow, ** brings up a story I know, and since it is antidotal to the philos- ophy of this pessimist here," nodding at the last speaker, **I'll tell you of a robin, We're talking to-night about Kansas folks. Laurel Town folks, and if robins aren't folks, who is? **Did you ever think what a democrat the Eobin is I Have you noticed how he walks the earth? What solidity and security of gait! What serenity! What dignity from sense of membership in a community where the snob does not exist ! — where the word classes is in minds and mouths only of those so unfortunate as to be underbred ! — where no other social order than his own supervenes! Self-contentment gives him a breast projection that would put to blush 144 CEKTAIN WHO DWELT a chesty West Pointer gala-marching down Fifth Avenue. ' ^ The Robin, too, has a big capacity for tend- ing to his own business; seeing it successfully through, and not minding other people's. He grubs his living from Mother Earth. To be a good provider and look well after the ways of his household, he is up and off early in the morn- ing. In this he is a true son of American soil, a thorough democrat. **When twilight settles over the land you see him still hustling, for, after the habit of Ameri- cans, he likes a sustaining supper. His children grow like Kansas weeds, and his wife is as com- petent a mother and house-wife as her husband in his providing. **As for his voice — a whole folk-song lies in his warble. If you think Pm overestimating call to mind how, in early springtime, your spirit rises when his first note starts upon your ear; how your heart lightens when his melody waves along a May air laden with the scent of apple- blossoms. Not only is it as if you heard songs your mother sang as you lay in your cradle ; its echoes seem to trail further back and rouse sub- conscious, race memories. **Then Robins have another American charac- teristic. Last spring, over by Green Hall, I saw IN LAUEEL TOWN 145 a lusty member of the tribe walking sedately on the grass. Suddenly eagerness struck him. His eye fastened on a bit of tissue paper about four by six inches. He ran to it, picked it in his beak, and rose to the overhanging tree. ** Toward the end of the long pliant bough on which he lighted was a small crotch, and in it he began packing the tissue. Gentle winds blew against him, and he had worked but a couple of minutes when a whirl of air caught the paper and bore it away. *'0nly for a second, however. Down he darted, and, about ten feet below his building site, caught the floating piece, took it back, and again began packing in his foundation. **Not long and another gust caught the sheet, that part he could not grasp formed a sail for the wind to seize, and a second time bore it still farther before he nipped it in his bill. Again he rose to the crotch and began hammering it down. *'A third time the wind played thief. A fourth — the bird trying to pack the paper, some mis- chievous harpy snatching it from under his beak and bearing it off. '* Class-time neared, and I had to go. I thought of Rlobert Bruce and his spider. With draughty winds I feared for Mr. Robin's house- raising. 146 CEKTAIN WHO DWELT ^^A few days after I went round to see what headway so good an American had made, and if by chance Mrs. Robin had had her infare. **In a notch of the limb lay a nest; and from one side gleamed smutty tissue-paper. Mrs. Robin's cap glanced in the sunlight; and the dame herself seemed brooding and drowsing in peace. '• * Just start in to sing as you tacMe the tiling That can not be done, and you'll do it/ I said to myself. Do as Mr. Robin did. **We talk about an emblem of our country — and the Robin at our door! A thrush migrant; as our people are. Yet of supremely social in- stinct — like our people. Loving his own peculiar, self -built home — as our people do ; but wanting that home by the abode and groupings of men." **I know a story of another bird of supremely social instinct/' called another of the company, *'It concerns some of our town-folks, too." '*Tell it," invited the assembly. '*My story is about the little stone house be- low the university. Nowadays winds blow through that house's shattered windows. Yet there a lady once met a bird — a big, brilliant- plumed, gawky, Shanghai rooster; eager, im- pudent, earth-scratching, always searching IN LAUKEL TOWN 147 something to put in his maw, and totally devoid of reverence for people of distinction. * * The lady, a dignified spinster, almost if not quite six feet in height, broad-shouldered, doing all she did in what Miss Oliver has described as *the grand manner^ — a lady the very epitome of mid- Victorian propriety and formalism. In after times she held the chair of French in the university, an institution not founded on the day of her encounter with the Shanghai. ** Fifty years or so ago Dr. Charles Eobinson lived in the little stone house. Perhaps he built it. Who knows? ** Anyhow, at that time, and, as you may easily discover, summer-time, the formal, mid- Victo- rian spinster, doing everything in her matchless way, this lady was the guest of her friend, Mrs. Robinson. **The two dames lived each day under some- what pioneering conditions — as who did not in Kansas in the eighteen fifties? Such a little stone house was a cramped affair to those used to the acreage and sweep of a New England dwelling. But there was all-out-doors — and who can deny the breadth of out-of-doors in Kansas ? So the two New England ladies thought of out- of-doors when within-doors seemed a trifle narrow. 148 CERTAIN WHO DWELT *^To these two intimates, and the little stone house, Dr. Eobinson brought home, one day for mid-day dinner, a friend passing through town. And quite f orehandedly he brought a beefsteak. Those days distances to butchers were long, and meat not easy to come by. Then, why shouldn't the mayor of Laurel Town and coming gover- nor of the democratic state of Kansas bring home his own steak, in his own right hand, if he wanted to? *^ According to plan and division of household duties the two ladies had hit upon, dinner-get- ting that day was to fall to the tall, mid- Victo- rian dame. Then, of course, the cooking of the steak would be hers also. **Now right here you get at the reason why I said I could tell a tale about a bird. ' * The lady, beginning her task, laid the steak on the table by the open window ; near the win- dow-sill that comes almost on a level with the slooping ground, as you may easily see the next time you go by and peer into the dilapidated little stone house. **Next the lady turned to get coals ready for the broiling. For a time she gave all her atten- tion to the fire. Then, when she had it nicely coaled, she reached for the steak — ^jnst in time to see Mr. Shanghai on a dead run up the hill, hold- IN LAUREL TOWN 149 ing his head far above its usual height in order to save himself from turning heels over head in making off with the meat, * ^Parbleu ! What would a lady, dignified, some- what slow in movement, but blessed with the New England conscience — what would such a lady, in such an extremity, do! Dinner would be lost without the steak. Those were hungry men. **The lady would give chase. Being from New England she would not call for help. She would rely on her own breathing and running ability. Precisely this Miss Elizabeth Leonard did. **The fowl went up the hill. The lady after him. Then a vacillating mind led him down the hill. The lady followed. But before h^ had ar- rived quite at the bottom, he thought he Would again ascend. The lady pursued his divagations. ''Till, finally, after a few more of the ups and downs of life, possibly feeling in his moral make-up that he was really the one at fault, Mr. Shanghai seemingly became discouraged. At any rate he dropped the steak. ''When the lady got back to the table, the win- dow and the fire, there was still a bed of blazing coals, and, after sousing the meat in water, she spread it on a gridiron, and at last set it hot, juicy and redolent, before the hungry; flanking 150 CEETAIN WHO DWELT it with ivory cobs obtruding milky kernels, pota- toes taken that morning from between grey blankets of earth, and other goodies such as women in Kansas do set forth. ** *And they did eat their meat, just as in older times when Luke, workfellow and physi- cian of Paul, told of others leading a simple life, yet a life carrying a message to the world — ^they 'did eat their meat with gladness and single- ness of heart.' **But the story of her encounter with the rooster the lady did not relate till the dinner was over/' ** While Professor Snow was talking of his Simon-pure American," broke in the smiling- faced insurance-man, ^*and our old Tory Squire here,'' laying his hand on the arm of the pessi- mist, ** telling of his clear aether, I could not help thinking of how I met Bud Hightower. But Bud didn't live in Laurel Town, and so he's prob- ably taboo here to-night. Mighty little of Kan- sas in Bud, He lived just across the line in Missouri." '* Before you strike in on Missouri," faltered one of the elder of the guard, *^ let's have a real Kansas song. Let's have the 'Com Song;' a good old sing for all corn-raising folks." ''Say," chortled the well-read man, his native IIT LAUREL TOWN 151 austerity melting into a laughing eye, **you re- mind me of a little story about Napoleon. * They don't speak well of my Arc de Triomphe/ he complained one day. * There are two persons I have heard praise it,' answered Antoine Daru, 'your majesty and its architect.' " *^Well, now, old top, busy as a bee and about as touchy! *^You can n't say the *Oom Song' hasn't Kansas color. You can n't say it doesn't bring a Kansas cornfield of a dewy June morn- ing before your eyes. To your ears, too, the click of a young darkey's hoe as he sings among the whispering blades. '*You can n't say *Com Song' would n't sound good after those war songs we've been singing, heartening as their memories are. I'm not a doddering old fussbudget, and don't you forget it. ''Start the 'Com Song,' James Horton; wont you ? You're leader of this glee club. And you basses come on." Corn Song hoe-in in motto e tempre crttc. ^ Hopper^rasscomeandhe gnawdittcom,De BlctckSmutcomeand he spoil ilatcomiSorse 152 dttitgt tfhr 6o«>ift_ M fir* io d« aom • in I'se ho«-in _ — hc»«ia tofOf graduoBy intmanng lioe*ta m dft>rows (rf tfo com. Mas-tar SunshimsmSe he wjQ grow daUcora, Mam 153 pradveUy fatter Ole -Miss Moo n fai Sep-tem-ber is ,ftfl) And Ise got- my nx)n«ey in Toy animato mg'esHeaUtf and with eti^hatis pbctcet forJ6chool>Mas-ter Jack FroEt comewitb tus sbaip hard nitei And de 154 IN LAUKEL TOWN 155 * ' Now for Bud Hightower/^ cnonised the com- pany sinking back in relaxation after their sing- ing, ^*We want Bud Hightovfer. Fetching name !" *^rve seen Missourians who shut car- windows when the train neared Kansas/' quavered one of the cronies. ^^They said they * didn't want any air from the damned Yankees to get in.' Was Bud that sort r The insurance-man smiled the query to si- lence, and began : — ^*I met him on the road, in a park nature made and civilization had not yet reduced to utility and com. Eye-measuring room for me to pass, and slowing his team, he called ^ Howdy!' **I had just pedaled up a hill and was not averse to stopping. *^ * Ain't you that there inshoorance-man what was down to Burning Bush t'morrer a week?' ^*He sat on a board laid across his wagon- box. An old, white sombrero, turned up in front and sagging behind, formed a nimbus about his head. Blue hickory shirt and butternut- jean trousers covered his raw-boned body. **Six days before I was in Burning Bush, I answered; I didn't know whether I was the in- surance-man he meant. 156 CERTAIN WHO DWELT ^* *Wall, ain't you ther feller what writ some life inshoorance fur Tom Linn thar at the bank!' ** *Wall, stranger/ he continued, putting his worn plough shoes on the upright board, lean- ing towards them and shutting his body like a jackknife, ^Pve bin er wanting ter see you-all ever sence that day. Ther fact is I was settin on er box, er whittlin and er dreamin just out- side ther window from Tom's desk, when you wuz er preachin ter him — an I want to say right hyer that yer done it powerful strong, too; an what you-all wuz er sayin hez set me ter think- in right smart f ** ^Now I live down hyer in Buck Crick er- bout four mile, an it's this erway. We-uns has got er forty acre patch that ain't so powerful bad, ceptin one corner what's a bit rocky. Er piecin uv it out with twenty what we rent from Squire Haldeman, me and Sabiny manages ter git emough com bread and long sweetnin fer ther young ones. *^ 'How many? yer say — ** 'Wall,' in lower voice, 'ther ain't but two now. Ther dipthery took ther twin babies last winter's a year ago, and ther oldest boy he got drowned in ther crick last summer' — and then IN LAUKEL TOWN 157 the blue faded out of the goodman^s eyes and a misty whiteness overspread them. ** *Yes, stranger, it were tolable hard on ther woman but I reckon ther Lord knows best ; least- wise that's what ther preacher wuz er tellin us. ** ^Yes, we've got er boy and gal left, and they're powerful good children, too. I'm pretty peart myself; but mam, she's been ailin and er punyin considerable, and it's been er worryin uv me heaps. Sence ther children were took she don't seem ter have no ambition, not anything that erway. She ain't complainin none; ain't doctorin none; jest kind er pinin. I lowed I'd send her back ter her mother's in Callaway soon's corn's laid by, ter see ef 'twont help her out. ** *But that ain't altogether what's er worryin nv me. It's this : — ^With me er workin ther place, and what I kin tend besides, and er doin odd jobs when I kin git em, we ain't layin by much. An that ther boy uv ours is goin to be growed up soon, if we raise him, an I've lowed as how he'll have ter go ter school right smart, fur he's er goin ter have an edication, even ef his dad ain't got none. " *Now, stranger, suppose I should be tuk off! Why, after I heerd you-all er talkin ter Tom t'other day, I went to bed that night and got ter 158 CERTAIN WHO DWELT think erabout this hyer dyin, and I couldn't sleep no moreen a rabbit. An ever sence it's been er worryin nv me, an I jest made up my mind Td hunt you-uns up and see what you could do f er me. a ^ We're middlin poor, an I don't know ef we can pay out all ther money it'll take, but I jest 'lowed what er rich man needs bad, er poor man needs a powerful sight worse. When craps is good, and cattle and hogs is high, we do tolable well, specially when mam has luck with the but- ter and aigs and turkeys. *^ ^TThat might be yer charges fur er thousand dollars inshoorance? '* ^Wall, I were thirty-nine month before last. '' ^Most forty dollars er year! That's a heap uv money. Why, ef I should take that much er year and buy calves, I'd soon have er thousand dollars — ^ ' Ef I didn't die, and the calves didn't die, and ef I kep er doin uv it, yer say. Wall, yes, ther air chances, I reckon. '' ^What's that? Ef I live twenty years I'll git my money back anyhow, or won't have more to pay! ** * Stranger, I'll tell yer what I want ter do. I want ter talk this hyer over with Sabiny and IN LAUKKL TOWN 159 see what slie says. And I'd like ter know whar I kin find yer ter-morrer.* **I told him he'd better close the deal then and there. ** *No, stranger/ he said, *I wont do er thing till I see mam. It wouldn't be right. She wouldn't spend all that money without askin uv me, and tain't right fur me ter do it unbeknownst ter her. She helps ter earn this hyer money, an I'll have to see her.' ^*I answered I should be in Burning Bush to- morrow, and on my way back would stop at his house to learn their decision. **As I rode away I could not help wondering why the Lord had seemingly put so many hearts in the wrong place. Here was one that should have worn ermine, and over it was nothing but a Missouri cotton shirt. *^Next day, with the sun still three hours high, I rounded the divide that looked into Sabiny's vale. Century-old oaks capped the hills and stood down to fields green with com and yelloAV with ripening wheat. To the right, through the wood-pasture, nestled the couple's domicile. I got off my wheel and walked. '*But no sooner had I turned the comer of the hog-lot than out rushed a pack of hounds and coon dogs, reinforced by the two canines that had 160 CEETAIN WHO DWELT flopped under Bud's wagon when it came to a standstill the day before. **Eyes gleamed, and hair turned the wrong way, and it looked as if the brutes were to have a lunch at their own counter — when the door flew open and out came Madam, humble in her shame that a stranger should receive such a welcome at the house of a bom Missourian. *'She wielded her broom vigorously, and talked as emphatically as she struck out. The curs smothered their growls and fled for refuge, one under an ash-barrel, another round the corner of the meat-house, a third peered over chicken-coops and others from behind the cur- rant bushes. **I was saved. To confront Sabiny! 'Holy smoke,' I thought, 'is this the she those honest eyes look upon with such affection!' Hair thin and lustreless, black and nervous beads of eyes, complection in hue like a pumpkin, topping a lank, stoop-shouldered figure close to six feet in height. You would not call Sabina beautiful. ''I thanked the lady for her defense, adding that dogs seldom attacked me and I wondered why theirs did. ** 'It's jest Bud's way o keepin them hounds,' she answered. *He will hunt coons and foxes, and them hounds has to be kep up till they git IN I^UEEL TOWN 161 SO oncivilized they purty nigh worries the life out uv me/ ^*I enquired for the goodman. ** ^I reckon you'll find him down to the branch fixin o the water gap,' she answered, and asked as I walked away, * Air you that inshoorance-man what Bud were a-tellin about V ** *Yes,' I said and braced myself for an on- slaught. < * * For goodness' sake ! Now, why didn't you tell me? Wait till I git a cheer, and you set down here in the gallery while I call Bud.' '^In the yard stood a tall pole, topped by a bell swinging in an iron frame. From the lever arm of the frame hung a rope which she grasped and pulled till the bell rang. ^*The log-house was typical — two separate rooms about ten feet apart set in a grove of honey-locusts. One roof covered both rooms and the passage between them ; then, without change of pitch, reaching down to a row of posts, sheltered a porch or gallery. The shingles had been hand-riven and shaven, logs and posts of the house squared by a broad axe, and floors of rooms and gallery made of oak puncheons. '* A great iron kettle in which Sabina tried out lard at hog-killing time lay bottom-side up against the house-logs, in one comer of the 162 CERTAIN WHO DWELT gallery. Not far o:ff, on a peg, hung her side- saddle and riding skirt. Spinning-wheel and sewing-machine stood inside near a window. *^And everywhere pecked chickens, old chickens, young chickens of all degrees of famil- iarity. Sabiny with a swish of her broom drove the intruders away. Then bringing another chair she sat down beside me. * ' * Bud was a-tellin about that inshoorance of yours,' she began, *but we ain't come to no con- clusions about it. You see, if Bud should die, and you-all should come yere and bring that money, I'd sort o feel as if I were takin it for Bud — as is I were a sellin him, in fact kind o like it wuz blood-money.' *' 'I've bin tryin to think it's right,' she con- tinued, *but I declare to goodness it's powerful hard to get it straight in my mind. I reckon as how the fault's mine, though, for some of our best preachers of the Word are insurin, and I allow they've done got at the right of it.' **We sat facing the west. A bunch of glossy green water-oaks cut off the sun's rays. As Sabina spoke a catbird flew into the nearest tree and stood in questioning mien, cocking at us first one eye and then the other. In his bill he was carrying a wriggling fishworm for his offspring. I spoke of the bird to Sabina. IN LAUKEL TOWN 163 *^ *Yes/ she answered, *Bud sets a heap o store by them thrushes. Nestin with us five years now, seems like they wuz part o the family.' ^ * Here was my text. * Mrs. Hightower,' I said, Hhat poor bird is doing all it can, is exercising all the intelligence its Creator gave it, when it feeds and guards its little ones till they can use their wings. If it dies, and its nestlings come to want, still it has done well because the Lord granted it no ability to extend protection longer than its life. '^ *But suppose this father-bird were endowed, together with all the rest of his kind, with in- telligence enough to band with other father-cat- birds and agree that if death befell him, the others would help care for his little ones till they could care for themselves. Then, if he per- sisted in exposing his young ones to cold, hunger and death, when he could help them merely by helping save others when occasion required, he would seem a neglectful, mean catbird, wouldn't her **I went on. Sabina's eyes looked further and further beyond the water-oaks, grew bigger and bigger, more and more moist, until tears gathered and slowly worked down her sun- browned cheeks. 164 CEKTAIN WHO DWELT ^^Just at that moment Bud called out * Howdy r ^^ ^Wall, Mr. Inshoorance Man/ he continued, *I jest 'lowed as how yer couldn't git time ter light hyer ter see us poor folks. But I'm glad yer come and hope yer's got Sabiny ter listen ter reason ; f er she says she don't want no inshoor- ance on me.' ^* ^May be I were wrong,' answered his wife slowly, ' and if Bud kin keep up the payments, it might be a good thing for the children.' ^ ^ This led to description of policies, in which Sabina evinced brisk interest. ** Hardly was I done when she asked, *Why don't you-all write inshoorance for women-folks, too?' ^^We do in favor of their children. ** *Then I reckon we can settle this yere ques- tion mighty easy. Bud kin take out a policy, if I kin have one. For he shaint do more for the children than I do ; and I kin pay for mine out o the chicken and aig money.' *'From some hiding-place between the logs Sabina produced coin for the premiums, and we closed the business at once. * ^ Only after T had partaken of her supper of * smothered chicken,' had met the two children and promised to join Bud in a fox or coon hunt IN LAUKEL TOWN 165 when frosts next came, was I able to get away to Kansas City/'* The insurance-man ended his story. Kobert Borrow's birthday party was drawing to its close. Still, each of the company must drink a couple of glasses of fruity punch, and all must join in singing **Auld Lang Syne" before they made final wishes of health and added years to their host. At last, after putting on top-coats in the hall, and lighting fresh * ^ face-warmers," the guests set forth, still rallying one another. Yet do not suppose they went in the limping gait commonly attributed to oldsters. Rather each one might have vied with Mr. A. P. Clark, who ran down the steps, and on the walk in front of the house — out in the full moonlight where everybody could see — cut a pigeon-wing merely to prove that, although eighty-four, he was the youngest of the party. In such wise the Honorable Robert Borrow celebrated his four-score birthday. And if this slight record bears no conviction that the occa- sion was beautiful and human, it is because, after all, the story we love is vain and inadequate ♦Not in "the ordinary 'Pike County' dialect" to which Mark Twain bears witness in "Huckleberry Finn," but in one of its Missouri varieties this story has been written and spelled, as Bud and Sabiny spoke, by N. J. S. 166 CERTAIN WHO DWELT when compared to life itself — because, if one may reach so high, it is better to be Achilles, or high-helmeted Hector, than a commemorator, even snch as Father Homer. VII As years went on Laurel Town was drifting into the moorings of an academic, residence- town, where the old, democratic estimate of the person maintains itself and yet standards of good breeding prevail; where an easy humor thrives ; where houses have an air of retirement, leisure, and women exchange cooking receipts and embroidery patterns, and the home life of the men is comfortable and constant, proving the law John Stuart Mill stated, ** Whoever has a wife and children has given hostages to Mrs. Grundy." In all this maturing clubs figured; for in- stances, the men's *^01d and New.'' Meeting every fortnight for logomachy, its host of the evening chose a subject on which his thoughts and studies had turned, and presented his views ; continuing lighter arguments upon his guests going in to his table for oysters. Before the end of the discussion each man commonly ac- IIT LAUKEL TOWN 167 cepted the ground posited or gave reasons for dissent. Tuesday afternoons, too, their alert minds bent on invigoration, women gathered under variously named unions — the first about fifty years ago as ** Friends in Council," a title bor- rowed from an English book. Decorous and as radical and vigorous as that time's estimate* permitted *^ ladies'' to be, the club, one year for example, studied the history of painting in Europe. A whetter of interest to house-cireumscribed women ! A sweetener and expander of the mind ! In their founder the ** Friends" honored a spinster of best American traditions; and tall, high-shouldered, of dark hair, Juno brow and eyes, and a mouth filled with burnished teeth; a lady carefully habited also in prevailing fashions.f ♦Terribly unconventional it was for a woman to be vigor- ous in those days, when "The Little Health of Ladles" excited public discussion; and ridicule of strength and independence in women, such gibes as you find in pages of Thackeray and Tennyson and countless other writers, still bore their sting. tHer broaches, "lady-trifles . . . Immoment toys, things of such dignity As we greet modem friends withal," ranged from carved gold to Florentine mosaic and Neapolitan coral. Sitting before her every morning, I counted a new one twenty-eight days, and then gave up numbering for fear I should repeat and so exaggerate. 168 CERTAIN WHO DWELT Along with ttiis massive physical impressive- ness, a native intelligence increased through study of various tongues of Europe, and a quiet, decisive, formal, nay, icily conventional man- ner, which, like her figure, always seemed well- corseted. One March day this ceremonious dame issued from Fraser Hall at the moment with myself, a slender student. During the morning she had been speaking French with classes reading Mo- liere, or Racine. I had listened to stories by our Latin-tongued professor and Englished Tully. A March day, we say, and in Kansas. Spank- ing gales enlivened the noon hour, and I ac- cepted her invitation to join the lady. It was a professor's invitation; one, like royalty's, you can not easily refuse. Then, too, her talk was delightful; and at this juncture walking surer-footed in her lee. As we went on our chat somehow, perhaps because of her founder's interest, fell about the ** Friends in Council," that year studying the history of the French people. Next week, she said, they would be reading and talking about the war in La Vendee. **You will probably read Swinburne's **Les Noyades," I ventured, the mention of Vendee bring Carrier to my mind. IN LAUREL TOWN 169 **Don^t know it," answered the lady. **Wliat isitr **0h, I mean the poem turning on an event when Carrier was torturing in Nantes.'' *^I never heard of it," returned the lady. **Is it long? If it isn't, won't you read it to us?" So it came that next Tuesday afternoon I met with the wives and mothers. They received me with the measured, Anglo-American good-breed- ing of that time, and when they were done with their tasks the founder-president smiling toward me explained why a student was with them — because of a beautiful poem with which she would supplement their day's programme. At once I began : "In the wild fifth year of the change of things, When France was glorious and blood-red, fair With the dust of battle and death of kings, A queen among men, with helmeted hair. Carrier came down to the Loire and slew, Till all the ways and the waves waxed red ; Bound and drowned, slaying two by two. Maidens and young men, naked and wed." The poem held me. I did not think of auditors till I came to its end. Saturated with its beauty, I looked up. Did I see aright? — dismay, perhaps, on nearly every face ! 170 CERTAIN WHO DWELT Had I not read the poem well? I thought shiv- ering. Had I wronged the work? an unusual subject treated with the adroitness of genius. Possibility of negation, that others would not enjoy it, had not crossed my mind. An awful pause. Then one lady, who seemed to me more prunes-and-prisms than any I knew, remarked that it was an undesirable subject for a young lady to deal with — in fact, (this with a compression of lips and a side-glance) the poem was not decent. Oh, what a sudden, striking humiliation! It was personal, then! The trouble was not with Swinburne's poem, but with me ! These women evidently united in their estimate. No voice spoke for the poem ; or for the reader of it. Why had I merited such a rebuff? I ques- tioned the blue-bound **Laus Veneris" in my hand. The poet believed in the poem; else he would not have published it. Swinburne would defend me ; he knew why I had read his verses. Pulling on of wraps, and getting together books and papers, sounded a relief. Then echoing good-byes. I went forth in a cold per- spiration, marvelling at the mysterious deeds of Friends when in Council — and yet, after re- acting from the shock of their condemnation, with an underlying feeling of triumph that I had IN- LAUREL TOWN 171 somewhat those dames did not, perhaps some power of contemplation and enjoyment of the art of letters. Years after, only, did a glimmer come to me of what the mature women of that afternoon may have thought, and mentally endued me with thinking. Long after, only, did I see what pos- sibly their horizon had not ascribed to me — ^that solely because of innocence of the world could I, elated with its music and historic picture, un- conscious of its fleshliness, read the poem to their audience. Nor did matters end there. They had illu- minating corollaries. Later when I told this **Les Noyades" adventure to a literary man of Boston, upon his asking me how, when a student, in classes with men-students, reading Greek and Latin with men-instructors — ^how I managed when I came upon sentences saying what we modems deem immodest. The literator said he was seeking my help to arguments he purposed to make for the admission of women to univer- sities. At that hour, I should for clarity add, a quota of men wrote and talked against the education of women, and women's study of Greek and Latin ; saying, for instance, that passages in the old classics written in the naturalism of the 172 CERTAIN WHO DWELT ancients, would instruct our American girls in what they should not know; would brush the bloom from the grape, harden tender minds, sug- gest there was sex in the world. To read that a poet kissed a maid might be permitted girls — staid Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen would allow that; but without loss of mental cleanli- ness, even, perhaps, of moral standards, young women could not know how many times Catullus sang he had kissed, or was going to kiss, Lesbia. All expression as to sex that girls might, without contamination, assimilate, seemed, to these men's thinking, to lie in an Old Testament ; if sex-knowledge defiles, a defiler outstripping the classics.* '*What.'' said the literator in the interview he had sought, **What did yon do when you, a student, came upon Greek and Latin passages not in accord with our view of modesty?" * *I saw them in my reading at home. In class- room I skipped the matter and made no refer- ence to it." ♦Again, "What changes may one life see!" A study- enamoured Anglo-American girl shocking a group of married women by reading to them a Swinburne ballad, in the eighteen-seventies ! An Anglo-American literary man analyzing the women's prejudices, in the eighteen-eighties, in his labor to overcome other prejudices! And to-day's girl! — her Thais plays and Thais operas; her clothing, de- vised mainly by an exotic, oriental people and reflecting the character of the parasitic odalisque. IN LAUREL TOWN 173 **Aiid the professor — didn't hef' pursued the doctor of letters in probing spirit. ' * Never. Spontaneously, tacitly, such matters were passed by. You pass them by, everybody passes them by when they come up in readings in churches and other public places. Our stu- dents, men and women alike, merely treated sentences objectionable from our day's point of view as if they were not there." ** Didn't anything embarrassing ever happen?" persisted the literary man. **Not while I was a student. When I had the chair of Greek a boy one day snickered on com- ing to such a passage. His laugh was not em- barrassing, nauseating rather, and the young men of the class treated his amusement in a way that taught him better manners — ^you can always trust the clean instincts of the university boy. Passages, such, for instance, as the last of the third book of **The Iliad," students merely passed over. They saw what they were outside class-room." **You say you were fond of Swinburne's poetry, even when you were seventeen," con- tinued the litterateur (if one may report to the very limit of digression), **What about his out- speaking?" I loved Swinburne for his freshness, his (t 174 CERTAIN WHO DWELT Greek quality, his marvellous music. You do not go to Swinburne for ideas — perhaps we may except impassioned democracy, praise of the glory of liberty. The sexuality of his poems and ballads an American girl does not think of, sees only as a faint shadow. His music, as the choruses in **Atalanta in Calydon," his love of freedom, his revolt from inept, smoothly-pol- ished phrases, his color, his tumbling waves of rhythm recalling the motion of the salt sea he sang — these kept his books in my hands for years. *^You can not deny American girls of Protes- tant training a native purity. For some reason they do not know^ or do not understand the meretricious. They don't interpret it when it is set before them. Of Protestant training, I say, because I have seen other girls more sophis- ticated.'' If what I told the literator enriched his argu- ment I do not now recall. In those days the Boston mind, whether of Beacon Hill, Back Bay or Columbus Avenue, not yet fully con- scious of its new status of loss of leadership, still maintaining a de haut en has attitude toward the rest of the country, showed distrust of whatever generated outside, especially west- ward of, its circumference. EAELIEE DAYS AT THE UNIVERSITY OP KANSAS WINDS OF DELPHIC KANSAS Salf'West, half-east; half-north, half-south; As in Grecian Delphi in days of old, The centre of the world as men then told; The ivinds hlow ever, and through a god's mouth. O the snow-footed, ice-armored winds of the prairiCt Rushing out mightily Fr(ym cosmic caves of the north. From glacial forces of earth and air, The winter winds of the prairie! They drive dark clouds from morn to mom; They shake the light o''er stuhhles of com; They whistle through woods of leaves all shonif With never a hint of the spring to he horn; The flesh-freezing winds of the prairie! Half-north, half-south; half-east, half-west; The airs pour ever; the winds never rest; O the sun-lifted, cotton-soft winds of the prairie. Cheering right merrily From tillage lands of the south, From warmth of hreeding southern seas. The June-sweet winds of the prairie! They drive silver clouds all day to its close, And shake glowing light on young corn in rows; They rock the trees till the small hirds drowse; They stoirl the fragrance of wild-grape and rose; The seminal winds of the prairie! 176 Half-south, half-north; half-west, half-east; A people intoxicate ; and icinds do not cease; O the free-state, Purita^uspirited winds of the prairie. Singing right heartily That gods were lut folk who were free^ That folk who are free are as gods; The human-voiced winds of the prairie! They call Brown of hloody-hlade from Osawatomie; They smite swift the shackle — the slave is free; To all the world they say in their humanity *'Come here and tuild a home loyal to me;** The primal-souled winds of the prairie! Half-east, half-west; half-south, half-north; All forces here meet, hut the free alone art toorth; O the self-reliant, right-seeking winds of the prairie^ Bloxcing out lustily From the race-hrood of 'New England In this western New England; The altruistic, rainbow-future winds of the prairie! They strive ever after the ideal — Better! Better! Till to-day they sing "Melior! Brook no fetter! Of freedom the spirit seek ye; not the letter! Melior! Melior! Better! Better!*' The cloud-dispelling, star-climMng winds of the prairie! So, prophetic in seal, through hot loinds and cold; As in Grecian Delphi in days of old; The centre of the world as msn then told; Half-west, half-east; half-north, half-south; The Spirit speaks ever, and through a god's mouth. 177 TO THE UNIVERSITY As moon-drawn waters rise to heightB From deep, far places in the sea; 80 shall thy people seek the Right Led by a steadfast strength in thee. What Light thy folk shall have is thine; Their darkness — they did not aspire To reach toward thy gleaming shrine. And seize they all-illuming fire. ''WITNESS UNTO THE TRUTH" "Thou Shalt not bear false witness'*, spoke the God of Israel on Horeh's barren height. ''Unto the truth bear loitness", speaks the Voice Of every folk who strengthens in the Right : — To men of Athens in vast jury courts Judging their brother Greek by law and fact; To Romans in their order and reports Of the Twelve Tables and juridic act; To Paul, the evangel, who flamed his faith For Jew and Gentile round the Midland shore; To Mahomet, the Arab, him who saith "Thy justice knoweth God for evermore", "Unto the truth bear witness", urge tmth awe All codes and ethics of our School of Law. 178 A SOWER TO THE SPIRIT To he razed, first fane of the state's pure learning! Thou, North College! After twenty thousand suns thy walls have watched rising beyond the river! Now, hy ice-freighted storms of winter thou h^ast withstood; hy tcinds of March thou hast buffeted; by cloud-em- battled, thunder-bolted June rains thou hast braved : Yea, wA)re — By the unconquerable spirit of man! By all civic loyalties since Demosthenes lifted the heart of the people of Athens; By all sincerities and pieties since the singing of Corner and Virgil; By Anglo-Saxon state-makers, from whose fiaming ardor for freedom, thou didst spring; by craftsmen tcho set thy brick on brick, puncheon over puncheon, that wisdom might house within their inchoate commonwealth; Thou Shalt not perish. Whatever generations Kansas folk stand fast fixed in loyalty to their state-founders* ideals — loyalty to truth, to justice and exalting teachings; Whatever generations Kansas folk abide sensible of the mightiest of gifts; Thou Shalt live on. "He that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting.** Through all generations, seeder of ¥>isdom of tJie ages, t?iou Shalt endure. 179 EARLIER DAYS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS L Founders of our government and old-time prophets of our people, the Puritans are, we repeat, to-day the heart of the American nation- ality. Their instinct for state-building did away with the autocrat, and showed all peoples of the earth the road to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They would purify life of mouthing profes- sions ; and stand only by truth. In their think- ing truth could not be too hard provender for any mind. Therefore they would do away with symbols in every relation of the individual. Symbols to their earnestness intruded upon truth, distorted truth, at last displaced truth, and by substitutions weakened and disordered the people's intellect. The Puritan was an unalienable democrat. He loved simple form in his government, simple statements in his religion, simple humanity in 181 182 EARLIER DAYS AT his morals; even simple form and color in his dwelling and meeting house. The Puritan was a utilitarian as well as an idealist. Such also were Puritan offspring, the early people of Kansas, carrying onward Puritan traditions. They aimed to clean life of the lie that equitable work degrades, and of supersti- tions hostile to the fellowship of man. They were futurists, zealots, old-time Americans, the strong and even the weak striving for an idea, steeped in constructive optimism, laborers towards a utilitarian Utopia, seeking conditions which they knew had never existed anywhere, first of all giving themselves. Our democratic, Puritan way, you see, whose course here in America started when the Eng- lish devouts set foot on this continent. Through their blood and their transmitted spirit, it has gone on to this hour. So our human kind goes forward, driving on, blundering on through lives of generations, eying sl light afar off, aiming at the right thing, sometimes doing it, often failing, but never put- ting aside effort to reach its shining goal. Now, in this paragraph only, let us look back to centuries before our Puritans, when schools were for the education of churchmen, when THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS 183 priests and brotherhoods were the reservoirs of learning ; preserves, transcribers, commentators, employing their time and strength to keep and exalt rules and authorities upon which their ease, their honor and life itself rested. What their schools taught served theologians and the ends of theology. The people at large were sunk in gross ignorance; their natural growth dwarfed, their minds unawakened, stupefied by unremitting toil to gain their scantiest physical sustenance. Events brought about emancipation of intellectual life in the Restoration of Learn- ing. In the next century sprang forward eman- cipation of religious life in the Great Reforma- tion. Then, in the seventeenth century, followed emancipation of political life in the Puritan Revolution. In their heirship of these three great move- ments our Puritans embodied a regnant prin- ciple of Protestantism whose preciousness has been put by many, but by none better than Shakespeare in this sentence; "Ignorance is the curse of God ; Knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven". Puritans, that is, developed a passion for founding schools and teaching children. ** After God had carried us safe to New England, and we 184 KABJJRR DATS AT had builded our houses, provided necessaries for our livelihood, reared convenient places for God^s worship, and settled the civil government, one of the next things we longed for, and looked after, was to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity." With the result that those Puritans who came to American soil made our race's early history, in good degree, the effort of an earnest people to set in sun-bright clarity education's benefac- tions. These old Puritan ideas the early Kansans inherited.* Obedient to their mighty estate, in the evolution of order in their commonwealth, they proceeded to build toward their educa- tional ideal. The ideal took on the form of a pyramid, you might say — yet a pyramid greater than any people before their times had ever reared. Cen- turies ago, near three-score, old Khufu — to cite the most renowned of all who built pyramids heretofore — old Cheops set the vast pyramid ♦So early as October, 1854 (shortly after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill) the first governor of Kansas territory, Andrew H. Reeder, said in a speech at Lawrence City (reported in the Herald of Freedom, No. 3, Vol. 1) ; "It is important to a state that the people should be edu- cated; for when they are thoroughly educated they under- stand their own rights, and know how to defend the rights of others." THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS 185 which bears his name upon Sahara's sands, cov- ering upwards of thirteen acres. With the labor of slaves he vaiagloriously made a dead-house to preserve the embalmed flesh of an absolute sovereign. But the early individualists of Kansas built their pyramid, greater than any pyramid ever raised save in other states building with like ideals — the early individualists of Kansas built their pyramid as a living-house for making best possible, forward-looking citizens of a democ- racy, any one loyal citizen being worth many absolute sovereigns; a living-house, not upon sands of a desert, but rock-founded in a rich soil materially and spiritually housing and fur- thering the soul of its people. This greatest of pyramids, the educational, the Kansans reared over the whole vast acreage of their state — its base the common school for every child ; and, superimposed on the common, high schools for all who would seek them. And above these secondary schools university teach- ings of what is for all ages true — teachings affording Everybody content of that which the spirit of man has wrung from his own soul, and from the nature about him, through the aeons of our human evolution. A pyramid, you see, built on preserving and glorifying everlastingly 186 EARLIER DAYS AT not one dead prince, but a whole, united, vital people. This educational pyramid, stretching the length of Kansas, four hundred miles, and its breadth, two hundred miles, has then for its apex a university, a House of Light, testifying that its supporters apply ideas to life with over- whelming force. For any democracy must be loyal to the truth that instruction of the people in the imperish- able ideals of humanity forwards that people, and raises the plane of their knowledge and of their ethics. And the Kansans set it, this Light-House of their educational ideal, upon a wind-driven hill ; with result that all comers to Laurel Town, and all passers-by Laurel Town, may see its outer beauty and behold what a beacon the people have, what a treasure and guide to safe-joumey- ings, if in the future, they shall welter through any void of mystery and dread. In another way, also, this university of the Kansans should embody their educational ideals. With genuine democratic spirit those lonely, passionate, experimental founders would have education broaden and deepen all human life. Not men's alone. Women, as well, should be students. A golden leaf from Aristotle's THE UNIVEESITY OF KANSAS 187 ** Politics^' they carried in their hearts — a prin- ciple, in fact, which affected nearly all their foundation: ** Women and children must be trained by education with an eye to the state, if the virtues of either make any difference in the virtue of the state. And they must make a dif- ference ; for the children grow up to be citizens, and half the free persons in a state are women/' The sentiment that would abolish women- competitors in what men esteem their fields of labor has often worked against women in democ- racies, overbalanced men's judgment and led to malignant injustices. Men have been little dis- posed to raise women from ages-long position as handmaid in their works and ambitions to a rivalship in the same ambitions and works. As a rule aristocracies have been more generous to women than democracies. But in Kansas, when a state-making ideal, in angry revolt against social iniquities, would take the people in its arms and lift them heavenward, deepen consciousness of their life and vocation by competent knowledge of the mysteries of the great nature about them, by ideas of what other dwellers on earth have done; in Kansas, when state-making ideals dominated, their or- gans of expression determined that women, with men, should profit by whatever education the 188 EAELIEB DATS AT state afforded. ** Where there is no vision," said an old maxim-maker, **the people perish." Contrariwise, where there is vision, the people thrive. So came the University of Kansas — result of the leaguing of a long-visioned people. Strange that through its history short-vis- ioned folks should assail the institution, its every evolving interest, its every expanding am- bition. Fortunately for the state the myopic have numbered fewer than the far-sighted. At times in the world^s history long-visioned people have counted less than the short. Ten righteous men could once save a city; and old Abram prayed. Yet the city perished. n It was now the eighteen-sixties ; in Kansas; and Civil War ended. Hardly had the people eased their hands of the rifle, however, and strengthened their gaunt forms from the win- ning, when booms began assailing their ears — money-mad bondsellers exciting the futurists to town-building and county-forming, to railway construction, to cattle-raising, to irrigation- ditch-digging. In other words, astute financiers in eastern counting houses played with the vir- tuous weaknesses of idealistic pioneer-agricul- THE UNIVEKSITY OF KANSAS 189 turists — sanguine temperaments always ** going to be'' prosperous; and so fired their imagina- tion that at times they called special poll-days for voting their little moneys to the conscience- less counter-desks ; and gave not only their own strength and time, hut their men and horses, their machinery to fill the counter-desks' pockets — something of the old-time saint, something of the old-time martyr; quite as much Tartarin of Tarascon as Don Quixote, you see. But disappointments came and reactions set in. Discontent with the farmers' social condi- tion, demand for a voice in affairs commensur- ate with their economic value, dissatisfaction with charges of middlemen and with discrimina- tion of railways, protest against lessening prices of the soil-tillers product, at last led farmers to co-operate, and to their forming a party which entered practical politics under the name of Grangers. The Granger movement was a protest, we say. *'The old feudal system," farmers reas- oned, '* sprang up when the chief form of wealth was land. On one side was the rich man who, to get an income from his tenure, rented it for service. On the other was the man who had his service to sell ; which he traded for the use of the ground. 190 EAELIER DAYS AT ^^In this new feudal system burgeoning about us, where the chief form of wealth is commerce, the man rich in all the vast material of commerce is the baron. He gets an income by renting berths to the poor man with labor to barter, pinches us land-workers as his legitimate spoil and cheapens our product. **Just as in old centuries the baron, or rich man, gobbled small lands and demanded service from the freeholder, so now *Big Interests,' railways and other corporations, swallow little businesses, crowd to the wall few-acre, inde- pendent farmers and small traders, starve them into selling out, and force them to gain support in dependencies and ofi&ces of their employ. To-day in the huge armies of commerce-clerks and meagre farmings, we have incipient serf conditions. **In the old time the strong seized the rights of government. The court that enforced the law was their court." By such reasonings the Granger movement strengthened, and became an outstanding pro- test of the American pioneer against develop- ments and complexities he could not meet; his organized declaration against gradual enchain- ing — in fact, the first united agriculturists'- voice in the now world-wide cry for the eman- THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS 191 cipation of the workers' life; an on-coming emancipation whose final fruits must be men and women so large-souled that money to them means what the word itseK, in an early use, signified, the adviser; people so honorable in word and deed that their simplicity makes decked-out show and pomp ridiculous. Spread of Grangers' tenets accomplished great good. Kansas stump-speakers from Granger cohorts, however, during one of the hottest campaigns of the eighteen-seventies, misrepresented the university. They threatened to cut off legislative appropriations which sup- ported it, and cried out that the professors were a lot of **old barnacles;" that they would dis- member the institution altogether if they should win at the polls. Twilight of election day showed Grangers sweeping the state. As we look back now, the threats of these cam- paigners become mere perf ervid ignorance, red- rsg oratory. The university was not dilacer- ated. It lived on, and to-day bears proof of health in its survival after certain ideas and men inducted into its life-current — its vigor remind- ing you of a super-healthy human body immune from stated maladies after fever-giving serums have been injected in its blood. This night of the Granger election in the early 192 EAELIER DAYS AT seventies, however, when Laurel Town had re- ceived returns and closed her polls, a group of young men-students, eagerly watching incoming figures, saw for the future only a ruthless carry- ing out of Granger threats and the crushing of a university they loved. Before a single adverse act of the party arriv- ing at power, their loyalty was forecasting oppo- sition, plotting revenge, giving itself as inex- perience will, as youth will, to sudden, blind, retaliatory feeling, to the raging reprisal of the herd. An impulse struck them to arm with staves and raid the country-side. They had no clear thought, no definite plan of action. Grangers were farmers; farmers Grangers; therefore all soil-tillers, no matter how unoffending, however non-Granger, object of their spirit of vengeance. Precisely such instincts as led our forebears to forays famed in song and story gripped these boys. Back in the centuries, and yet not so very far back either, when our ancestors lived in Eng- land and Scotland and Ireland and other parts of Europe, neighbors in armed bands pillaged one another to gain some possession, or for sport. In early Ireland, when all land was com- mon and property lay mainly in herds, men took their every-day exercise in cattle-spoiling. THE UNIVEKSITY OF KANSAS 193 **Tlie Cattle-raid of Cooley" incited the greatest of Irish epics. ** Fleet foot in the foray^' stood on every march between old Wales and Eng- land, Scotland and England, and even on bound- ary lands of France and Italy. Our race bal- lads, such as **The Hunting of the Cheviot,'* make this clear. So also our chronicles. Frois- sart's tale of the battle of Otterboum pictures the Scots ** doing many sore displeasures," ** burning and exiling the country" when they penetrated England. That night of the Grangers' victory in Kan- sas, we say, these university students were pos- sessed of impulses inherited by our north-of- Europe races. Who knows but the very blood of Hotspur, or of James Douglas, went cours- ing through veins of more than one of the boys ? Not a soul of them, probably, who had not come down from fighters at Chevy Chase, or like con- tests. Then, besides this, there were the group- impulses of forefathers in town-against-gown, gown-against-town life. m. A north-west wind had cleared the sky, and a fulling moon filled the night with such splendor that the earth whitened where its light struck, 194 EARLIER DAYS AT and bold, black shadows lay back of all that op- posed its pale glory. The dry, packed ground, frost-hardened, rang under footsteps as if it were iron. An exhilerating night ! With its stimulus of cold, brilliant, electric air, undeniably a night to develop a temper for walking. To study such a night! To sleep such a night! Not when Grangers had swept the state. '^Whafs the use, anyway! A fortnight and there won't be a university to go to.'' *'Then why worry about that assignment of Tacitus r^ **And those problems in calculus !" ''That Bestimmung of Fichte!" ''Have at 'em ! Have at 'em," the band roared, ' ' Grangers ! Grangers !" Noise is necessary in a sally — ^unless secrecy and victory are pledged. Not merely one hot, flashing shout — that does not let off electric cur- rents. Ehythm leads the blood to even beating, unifies feeling and chokes back individual con- science pressing to the fore. Sing they must. "Marching through Georgia" they began; and soon "Maryland, my Maryland.'* A buoyant air carried their voices far. Wives who had gathered husband and children round the family reading lamp — a favorite way of THE UNIVEESITY OF KANSAS 195 spending the evening in those days — ^listened wondering, and sent ** honey" to the door to see what the passing singers meant. **Only nniver- sity-boys, mother dear/' the scout reported. These student-forayers, we say, bore through the town northwestwardly, till street and honse no longer hemmed their way and they had traversed the big ravine. A country road, picketed on either side by osage-orange hedges opened before their eyes. Through such brambles f orayers might not enter Grangers' acres. Forward then ! Forward to the little ravine; then across it, and so on till at last they reached the north woods spoken of on page eight foregoing — ^those north woods from whose depths the music of whip-poor-wills wailed in moon-lit, summer nights. Fate no man can explicate. What lot now swerved these self-appointed requiters off the main road and down a by-path not one of them could ever afterwards tell. From their spirit reason, good-sense, had fled. Youth's fun-mak- ing and youth's rage for mere action^ even if inept, had the lead. William Crooks, an American of the old bound-to-win-out, **over-the-mountains" stock. 196 EAELIER DATS AT had united his fortune with a buxom wife back in his native state; and after tacking and veering their prairie-schooner to Kansas, they had settled in a little house near the north woods, with such belongings as delight thrifty soil- dwellers gathered about them. This moonlit night their cottage stood calm and silent. Inside Mr. and Mrs. Crooks were sleeping the sleep of tired muscles and peace of mind ; and on their perches in an outhouse hard by sat the lady^s birds, snugly somnolent, fold- ing wings over twenty to thirty pounds apiece avoirdupois — fat bronze turkeys, and at this November election-night ready for Thanksgiv- ing and Christmas markets. A roost so remote from the main road had little need of padlock. Any one might take the pin from the post and swing back the door. '*Whafs thisr **A roost r **A roost r A f orayer's hand draws the pin and opens the door. **Do I see chickens ?'' — ^peering inside. ^^Do ir All try to thrust their heads in. **No, I do not see chickens.*' ''What do I seer THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS 197 ** Turkeys!" **T-u-r-k-s/' ** A brace of the birds ! What d^ye say f ' ** Three would make it surer!" '^ A feast!' * * Draw their blood and pledge everlasting war on Grangers." '^Careful! Gemini! Grab their throats so they won't squawk." The f orayers rush up the hill, toward the main- traveled road, hugging the fowls so tight that not a sound could escape their beaks. ** Let's find a place to roast 'em." **Not round here. What'd we cook 'em int" A moment's pause. *■* Confound it! What shall we do with the blamed things now we've got 'em I Can n't take 'em to a landlady — she'd say why this? — and why that ? — and go off on her ear." *'Got to cook 'em ourselves." * * Cook 'em ourselves ! You know a lot about it!" '*Huh ! I helped two summers in our Colorado camp." ''Well, then, where!" Chorus: *'Yes, oh-h-h where!" * ' I've got it ! Donegal, that fellow with grades in zoology — janitor — ^batches in basement of old 198 EAELIER DAYS AT North College; probably hasn't had a bite of anything but corn pone and bacon since Sep- tember." *^Will he keep 'em till to-morrow night, do you think!'* **Gee! By that time we can get bread and things ; cook 'em by his stove !" "A grasshopper sat on a sweet potato Tine", struck up the van entering the main road. "A sweet potato vine, a sweet potato vine!" echoed the rear line. "A turkey gobbler waltzed up behind, And yanked him off that sweet potato vine", yelled every cub-forayer. But singing was too poor. They must dram- atize the song. One forayer must be a sweet potato vine. Another the grasshopper. Still another must waltz about and, with great show of a pecking turkey, *^yank" the grasshopper off the vine. In such mental and moral vacuity they trooped back to Laurel Town, the marvellous moonlight casting their figures on the broad highway in a blackness as dark as their deeds. Town gained, they made for North College, and by dint of beating on windows roused the THE UNIVEESITY OF KANSAS 199 student-janitor to half-awake, and left their booty in his hands. Next night witnessed the sacrifice of the birds. And barbarians never used more binding rites, each of the company daubing forehead and hand with the victims' blood, pledging and vowing, as our earlier men used, to gird his body with thorns, to go about with ash-strewn, shaven head, and undertake other penance, if he failed in retaliatory vengence upon all Grangers dis- membering his faculty and withholding legisla- tive support of his university. Oaths sealed and ablutions made, the feast followed — turkeys, and by their side such dishes as to boys' zestful palates enhanced the meat's lusciousness. The morning of the evening of this merry- making Mr. Crooks rose early. Mr. Crooks rose early every morning, but now unwonted noises got him out of bed. His wife's turkeys were loose, scratching close by the house. Every evening, after enjoying the well- balanced supper Mrs. Crooks prepared, Mr. Crooks fastened the roost^oor with its pin. He knew he shut the door last night. Yet here the birds were outside their pen. He surveyed the industrious fowls through the window. **Annabella," he called, buttoning 200 EAKLIER DAYS AT up his waistcoat, '*did you say you now have fourteen turkeys?'' *^No, seventeen/' answered his wife from her milk-skimming in the pantry. * * They're all out, and I can n't count but four- teen," returned Mr. Crooks. Mrs. Crooks hastened to his side, and even after another numbering, and after a searching of the roost and looking in the woods for wan- derers, fourteen were all they could muster. *' Niggers!" ejaculated Mr. Crooks. *^ Niggers!" echoed Mrs. Crooks. **ril get a dog," threatened Mr. Crooks, *'If it were the first time those brickyard darkies had swiped a meal from us, I might stand it. Them shoats they stole last July made a mighty fine dinner for their Fourth. A dog '11 settle their hash." *^ That's the way it always is with everything I have !" weakly wailed Mrs. Crooks, wiping her eyes on a comer of her Kentucky homespun apron, ^^I never can have things like other people !" A few days after these happenings, Mr. Crooks came to see Judge Stephens about the^ rent of more acres. Business done, he sat back in his chair, crossed his legs and told of his wife's loss. So it went. A farmer was the most THE UNIVEESITY OF KA:tTSAS 201 bedeviled fellow on earth. Everybody tried to skin him, from brokers off in Wall Street to brickyard darkies here in Laurel Town. Months and months, from the day they hatched, Mrs. Crooks had tended those birds, picking the turkey-chicks out of dew-laden weeds, wrapping them in flannel, stuffing pepper- corns down their throats to ward off deadly chills and keep away the pip. Half of her hatch- ings always die, for turkeys are hard to raise ; and now, just now, holidays coming on and fowls getting highest market prices, here comes a nigger and picks off the finest three. Mrs. Crooks is just broken-hearted about it ; was cal- culating how her turkey-money would buy her a new winter dress and 'low her to send a Christ- mas present to the folks back in Kaintucky. So Mr. Crooks went on, conscious he was meeting sympathy. He knew many shoats and turkeys and chickens went off from our barns between sunset and sunrise, and never camo back. Still the Judge listened in silence. He had on his thinking-cap — but he always had on that. What was the celebration to which certain students, who often visited us, had invited a scion of the house the night after election? Why had the young freshman told nothing about where he had been and what he had done ? Com- 202 EARLIER DAYS AT monly he was fond of rehearsing his merrymak- ings. But of this not a word. Then why had he said at dinner, only the night before, ^^ Turkey's good; but there is such a thing as seeing too much of it !" Again, what was the new badge he was wear- ing with evident satisfaction, in the way Greek letter societies wear their pins? What did the cross patee and its letters conceal? T — Turkey? Eh? C — Catchers — Crusaders? Looks that way. Had a band of students leagued for some pur- pose? What purpose? Social? Could it have any other incentive? Who but they knew! When the family met at next meal, the Judge asked about the cross dangling from a bit of red ribbon. '^Oh, T. C.'s — a new secret society." ^'Who are the members?" Odd! The very students hotly interested in politics and vigorously defensive of the uni- versity against Grangerism ! ^^Did the boys take the Grangers' victory at the polls much to heart?" ^ ' Oh, they're getting used to it by this time" — here an ill-concealed smile. ^*Do they still think the Grangers will wipe the university off the state's educational map?" '*They don't know yet." THE UNIVERSITY OP KANSAS 203 Every answer fenced off definite inf onnation. To an expert reasoner, clever in examining wit- nesses, one with so native a gift at reading human nature, a freshman may tell more than he thinks he does. The history, or mystery, of Mrs. Crooks' turkeys cleared to definite narra- tive. The Judge talked the matter over with the Good Genius of our household and determined upon trying to recall the lightminded young rogues to sense of, and reverence for, law. And wishing to do this in a way they should not for- get, he sent the fraternity word that he had heard of its foundation and had interest in its development — ^would the memhers, therefore, take supper with him on a certain Friday even- ing? The young rascals confessed they felt flattered hy so speedy a recognition of their union, and every son of them showed his estimate by com- ing on the night named. Flushed in face from their long walk in the raw November air, they grouped about a blaz- ing fire, and their host, standing with arm on the shelf of the chimney piece told stories in the captivating, story-telling way he had. The boys seemed delighted — these were true human rela- tions, a masterly, white-haired man extendin<^ 204 EAKLIER DAYS AT the hand of fellowship to their untriedness in life. Supper announced, the company filed into the dining room. The Judge took the head of the table. In front of him a huge turkey lay upon a platter, and midway, and at the table's foot, rested its fellows, smoking, fresh from the oven. But before he fell to the old-fashioned gentle- man^s carving of the fowl in front of him, the host paused and began telling how he had noted that the fraternity had its birth about the day of the Grangers' victory — in fact he connected its foundation with a story Mr. Crooks, who lived over by his north woods, told him. The badge of the society seemed, moreover, to con- firm his reasoning. And now he had invited the members to sup with him in hopes of for once satisfying their inordinate craving for the sus- tenance before them. Still further, he wanted to say that if ever again they needed the flesh of their totem for any T. C. orgies, they should come to him, and he would furnish it ; but he begged them never again to stoop to robberies, or to any breaking of the law, even in sport. He added that their raid on Mrs. Crook's roost had deprived the dame of her pin-money, and THE TJNIVEKSITY OF KANSAS 205 upon his concluding the thieves were not unlight- ened, brickyard darkies, but enlightened uni- versity students ! ! ! — he had sent her full value for the turkeys they had taken. At sight of the big, trussed birds lying quite alone upon the table, that is, with neither sauces nor vegetables commonly served with their meat just then at hand, and at the beginning of the talk, T. C. faces showed confusion and consterna- tion. But as the Judge went on, what he said making clear his interest and affection and the humor that irradiated his life, the boys recovered their color and poise, and his speech ended amid their self-convicting laughter and applause and cries of ''We will come to you!^' In those days many merry dinners and sup- pers consorted with my Mother's table. Of all this to the T. C.'s was the jovialest. The foray- ers had so good a time, in fact, that after mid- night adieus and they had got almost to the big ravine on their star-lit walk to Laurel Town, they turned and came back to sing under our windows. **This supper broke up the society ,'* wrote Professor Robinson in his ''Reminiscences," "the Turkey Crusaders disbanded and their badges were seen no more." 206 EARLIER DAYS AT IV Men such as Professor David Hamilton Rob- inson gave the university conservative strength in those days — men rooted in right, loyal to the university, not lobbying with whatever board controlled its administration, not among those constantly casting a hook afar (possibly a bit conscious pretensions had been uncovered) to see what seemingly better float they could pull in, but standing by the simple, indeterminate conditions they had accepted with their call, making the university's interest their interest, its democracy their democracy, their character its character ; not egotists, not prigs, not mental light-weights, but men of full merit and rounded development. Such was the university's first Latinist — ^hon- est, loyal, sincere, ever and abundantly radiating simple, luminous kindness; the soul of him re- calling a mellow-ground meadow, overspread with sunshine, supporting healthful, pleasant airs and fruitful harvests, of use for everyday wont and everyday living. It was the fine habit of Professor Robinson to open his classes' work of a morning by telling a story in Latin ; he meanwhile striding up and down the lecture-room, often measuring turns of THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS 207 the tale by wheeling a pencil between right thumb and forefinger, or by stroking his rufous beard with his left hand. Doubtless he looked upon such beginnings as excellent for familiariz- ing our ears with a language not commonly spoken, and as zest-givers, catching our atten- tion and rapidly inducting us into another en- vironment. His open, serene countenance must still stand before many eyes ; his quiet, mellow voice still sound in many ears, rehearsing some world-important matter, or perhaps a local hap- pening, for instance, '^T, C/s Horribles/'* or ^'In Re T. Cy Never a man enjoyed humor more. "T. C.'S" HOERIBILES.* Idm nociis media hora. In coelo nutila spissa Stellas alfstulerant. Vmbrarum tempus erat quo Horrenda ignavis monstra apparent. Pueri turn Parvi matrihus intus adhaerent. Non gratiorem 'Noctem fur unquam invenit. Sed qui veniunt post Eanc aedem veterem? Celehrantne aliqua horrida sacra Mercurio furum patronof Discipulinef Non possunt! Tuti in lectis omnes requiescunt! Estne sodalicium studiosorum relevans se Magnis a curisf Sed cur hue conveniunt tarn Furtivif In manibus quidnam est vel sul) tegumentisf pudor! Et pullos et turkey non dene raptos! Vina etiam suhrepta professoris alien jus (Eorresco ref evens) e cella! Dedecus! Est nil Tutum a furibusf En pullos nunc faucihus illis Sorhent! "Nunc sunt in terra, turn in ictu oculi non Apparehunt omne in aetemum! Miseros pullos, 208 EARLIER DAYS AT One morning Professor Robinson met a class with account of the making at his home of some wine. Possibly he detailed the process to illus- trate a verse of Horace, or to show old Roman usages and customs. Whatever the incentive he told his story. There, you would suppose, the pleasure ended. Itifelices pueros! Uli male capti A pueris, sed hi capicntur mox male {01 Oil) A Plutone atrol Forsan lupsis quinque diehus, cum sapiens vir Omnes hos juvenes ad cenam magniflcenter Invitavit. Tempore satie adsunt. Bene laeti Judex aecipiunt et ftlia pulcJura sodales Eos furtivos. Ad mensam veniunt. Juvenes cur Tarn agitanturf Quid portentum conspiciunt nunef Protrudunt ocuU quasi ranaruml Nihil est in Mensa praeter turkeys I Vnus quoque catino! Solum hoc, praeterea nil I IN BE T. c. Quatuor youths ad suhur'bs venunt, Quatuor lads their cursus tenunt, Versus granger's domum. Nunquam stop to rest their pedes, Nunquam find sequestered sedes, Sul) the shades arhorum. Saepe look in partis omnis, Fearing quidam, waked from somnis, Eos sequiturus. OalVus from some far off tectum, TuJ>a sounds with .great effectum, Putit day futurus. THE UNIVEESITY OF KANSAS 209 Presumptions based on general experience always proved inadequate when T. C.s were by. Tbe Professor's Latin formulae worked into fer- menting minds, and roused memories in several members of that disbanded fraternity. Now, and now only, they forgot the exhortation to right living with which the Judge had prefaced the last T. C. supper. *^ Their old ardor returned," wrote Professor Robinson, **and they fairly burned to get hold of those wine bottles. It would be the best joke of their lives. **A few evenings after two of them called at the prof essor^s house, they seemed in especially happy mood, telling stories, joking and laughing Mox they reach a procul valley j Bound a fallen truncus rally, Nuhes expecterunt. Turn with cordes faintly heatinff, 77unc advancing, nunc retreating, Castris repererunt. Noio ad portum Crito venit. Captures hostem, duos tenet. Whispers *'cave canem" Wild the pugna, charge they fecunt, Wilder tarn en viam maJcunt, Homeward primam lucem. 210 EARLIER DAYS AT almost immoderately. Finally one of them, pro- ducing some music, offered to play it. With a big crash he began. And such playing ! He ran, and galloped, and cantered, and jumped up and down the keyboard until the old house fairly rattled from chimney-top to cellar — especially the cellar. Then college songs were roared with equal force and energy. This went on an hour or two, when the guests withdrew, with many expressions of pleasure at the delightful evening they had passed. *^The professor and his wife were a little sur- prised at the call of these young men, who had never called before, and especially at their rather long stay and boistrous conduct. Still they were glad to receive the visit, and retired greatly pleased to think that these T. C.'s, lately so wild, were now disposed to give up their dis- reputable practices and cultivate the graces and amenities. *^In the morning, on opening the house, many evidences of burglary were plainly visible — in fact, too plainly visible. The hoe and axe and pieces of candle were left near the cellar-window in plain sight, as if courting investigation. It was soon found that the cellar had been entered, the wine taken, and a note left in its place. *^The professor, for obvious reasons, never THE UNIYEESITY OF KANSAS 211 mentioned his loss, but the boys thought it too good a joke to keep/^* Pranks such as these colored and individual- ized student-days at Laurel Town more than forty years ago. Their childlikeness witnesses reaction of youthful spirits from strain, relief- seeking in play — reversions to our race's younger years when a Rob Hoy's rule sufficed, "the simple plan That they should take who have the power And they should keep who can ;" unconscious returns, we say, to ancestral action when our people's moral nature had not evolved to the social heights of forming their govern- ment and fitting their life to laws of their own making. And the same ebullience — that had stolen the turkeys and industriously read Plato, Tacitus, Shakespeare and Goethe ; that had pilfered the Latin professor's wine and figured the orbit of remote planets — the same effervescing strength prompted unwearied muscles, one Hallow'en in ♦This chorus from "University Legends" gives the gist of the note. Professor Robinson upheld prohibition then coming to the fore in Kansas politics : "Oh, the doleful, doleful ditty, If a man should break his pledge! So we'll drink up all your wine, and Save you from temptation's edge." 212 EAEUBB DAYS AT the eighteen-seventies, to keep the night when, old lore avers, wizzard and witch in ** hellish legion sally.^' Unseasonable chill, housing and leading folks to hng their fires, hung over Laurel Town all that afternoon. Finally dark grey clou