435 files changed, 21526 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6833f05
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+* text=auto
+*.txt text
+*.md text
diff --git a/26207-8.txt b/26207-8.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2c04c73
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-8.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,7083 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of In Our Town, by William Allen White
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: In Our Town
+
+Author: William Allen White
+
+Illustrator: F. R. Gruger
+             W. Glackens
+
+Release Date: August 7, 2008 [EBook #26207]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN OUR TOWN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                                   In Our Town
+
+                              BY WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE
+
+           The Court of Boyville, The Real Issue, Stratagems and Spoils
+
+                   Illustrations by F. R. Gruger and W. Glackens
+
+
+
+
+    NEW YORK
+    McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.
+    MCMVI
+
+    Copyright 1906 by
+    McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.
+
+    Published April, 1906
+
+
+    Copyright 1904 by The Century Co.
+    Copyright 1905-1906 by The Curtis Publishing Co.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: He wore his collars so high that he had to order them
+from a drummer]
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+
+      I. SCRIBES AND PHARISEES
+
+     II. THE YOUNG PRINCE
+
+    III. THE SOCIETY EDITOR
+
+     IV. "AS A BREATH INTO THE WIND"
+
+      V. THE COMING OF THE LEISURE CLASS
+
+     VI. THE BOLTON GIRL'S "POSITION"
+
+    VII. "BY THE ROD OF HIS WRATH"
+
+   VIII. "A BUNDLE OF MYRRH"
+
+     IX. OUR LOATHED BUT ESTEEMED CONTEMPORARY
+
+      X. A QUESTION OF CLIMATE
+
+     XI. THE CASTING OUT OF JIMMY MYERS
+
+    XII. "'A BABBLED OF GREEN FIELDS"
+
+   XIII. A PILGRIM IN THE WILDERNESS
+
+    XIV. THE PASSING OF PRISCILLA WINTHROP
+
+     XV. "AND YET A FOOL"
+
+    XVI. A KANSAS "CHILDE ROLAND"
+
+   XVII. THE TREMOLO STOP
+
+  XVIII. SOWN IN OUR WEAKNESS
+
+    XIX. "THIRTY"
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+He Wore his Collars so High that He Had to Order Them from a Drummer
+
+Suppressing Nothing "On Account of the Respectability of the Parties
+Concerned"
+
+As an Office Joke the Boys Used to Leave a Step-Ladder by Her Desk so
+that She Could Climb Up and See How Her Top-Knot Really Looked
+
+And Brought with Him a Large Leisure and a Taste for Society
+
+Sometimes He Thought It was a Report of a Fire and at Other Times It
+Seemed Like a Dress-Goods Catalogue
+
+As the Dinner Hour Grew Near She Raged--So the Servants said--Whenever
+the Telephone Rang
+
+"Jim Purdy, Taken the Day He Left for the Army"
+
+He Advertised the Fact that He was a Good Hater by Showing Callers at
+His Office His Barrel
+
+He Likes to Sit in the Old Swayback Swivel-Chair and Tell Us His Theory
+of the Increase in the Rainfall
+
+And Camped in the Office for Two Days, Looking for Jimmy
+
+Reverend Milligan Came in with a Church Notice
+
+A Desert Scorpion, Outcast by Society and Proud of it
+
+"He Made a Lot of Money and Blew it in"
+
+Went About Town with His Cigar Pointing Toward his Hat-Brim
+
+The Traveling Men on the Veranda Craned Their Necks to Watch Her Out of
+Sight
+
+Counting the Liars and Scoundrels and Double-Dealers and Villains Who
+Pass
+
+
+
+
+IN OUR TOWN
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+Scribes and Pharisees
+
+
+Ours is a little town in that part of the country called the West by
+those who live east of the Alleghanies, and referred to lovingly as
+"back East" by those who dwell west of the Rockies. It is a country town
+where, as the song goes, "you know everybody and they all know you," and
+the country newspaper office is the social clearing-house.
+
+When a man has published a paper in a country community for many years,
+he knows his town and its people, their strength and their weakness,
+their joys and their sorrows, their failings and their prosperity--or if
+he does not know these things, he is on the road to failure, for this
+knowledge must be the spirit of his paper. The country editor and his
+reporters sooner or later pass upon everything that interests their
+town.
+
+In our little newspaper office we are all reporters, and we know many
+intimate things about our people that we do not print. We know, for
+instance, which wives will not let their husbands endorse other men's
+notes at the banks. We know about the row the Baptists are having to get
+rid of the bass singer in their choir, who has sung at funerals for
+thirty years, until it has reached a point where all good Baptists dread
+death on account of his lugubrious profundo. Perhaps we should take this
+tragedy to heart, but we know that the Methodists are having the same
+trouble with their soprano, who "flats"--and has flatted for ten years,
+and is too proud to quit the choir "under fire" as she calls it; and we
+remember what a time the Congregationalists had getting rid of their
+tenor. So that choir troubles are to us only a part of the grist that
+keeps the mill going.
+
+As the merest incident of the daily grind, it came to the office that
+the bank cashier, whose retirement we announced with half a column of
+regret, was caught $3500 short, after twenty years of faithful service,
+and that his wife sold the homestead to make his shortage good. We know
+the week that the widower sets out, and we hear with remarkable accuracy
+just when he has been refused by this particular widow or that, and,
+when he begins on a school-teacher, the whole office has candy and cigar
+and mince pie bets on the result, with the odds on the widower five to
+one. We know the woman who is always sent for when a baby comes to town,
+and who has laid more good people of the community in their shrouds than
+all the undertakers. We know the politician who gets five dollars a day
+for his "services" at the polls, the man who takes three dollars and the
+man who will work for the good of the cause in the precious hope of a
+blessed reward at some future county convention. To know these things is
+not a matter of pride; it is not a source of annoyance or shame; it is
+part of the business.
+
+Though our loathed but esteemed contemporary, the _Statesman_, speaks of
+our town as "this city," and calls the marshal "chief of police," we are
+none the less a country town. Like hundreds of its kind, our little
+daily newspaper is equipped with typesetting machines and is printed
+from a web perfecting press, yet it is only a country newspaper, and
+knowing this we refuse to put on city airs. Of course we print the
+afternoon Associated Press report on the first page, under formal heads
+and with some pretence of dignity, but that first page is the parlour of
+the paper, as it is of most of its contemporaries, and in the other
+pages they and we go around in our shirt sleeves, calling people by
+their first names; teasing the boys and girls good-naturedly; tickling
+the pompous members of the village family with straws from time to time,
+and letting out the family secrets of the community without much regard
+for the feelings of the supercilious.
+
+Nine or ten thousand people in our town go to bed on this kind of mental
+pabulum, as do country-town dwellers all over the United States, and
+although we do not claim that it is helpful, we do contend that it does
+not hurt them. Certainly by poking mild fun at the shams--the town
+pharisees--we make it more difficult to maintain the class lines which
+the pretenders would establish. Possibly by printing the news of
+everything that happens, suppressing nothing "on account of the
+respectability of the parties concerned," we may prevent some evil-doers
+from going on with their plans, but this is mere conjecture, and we do
+not set it down to our credit. What we maintain is that in printing our
+little country dailies, we, the scribes, from one end of the world to
+the other, get more than our share of fun out of life as we go along,
+and pass as much of it on to our neighbours as we can spare.
+
+[Illustration: Suppressing nothing "on account of the respectability of
+the parties concerned"]
+
+Because we live in country towns, where the only car-gongs we hear are
+on the baker's waggon, and where the horses in the fire department work
+on the streets, is no reason why city dwellers should assume that we are
+natives. We have no dialect worth recording--save that some of us
+Westerners burr our "r's" a little or drop an occasional final "g." But
+you will find that all the things advertised in the backs of the
+magazines are in our houses, and that the young men in our towns walking
+home at midnight, with their coats over their arms, whistle the same
+popular airs that lovelorn boys are whistling in New York, Portland, San
+Francisco or New Orleans that same fine evening. Our girls are those
+pretty, reliant, well-dressed young women whom you see at the summer
+resorts from Coronado Beach to Buzzard's Bay. In the fall and winter
+these girls fill the colleges of the East and the State universities of
+the West. Those wholesome, frank, good-natured people whom you met last
+winter at the Grand Cañons and who told you of the funny performance of
+"Uncle Tom's Cabin" in Yiddish at the People's Theatre on the East Side
+in New York, and insisted that you see the totem pole in Seattle; and
+then take a cottage for a month at Catalina Island; who gave you the tip
+about Abson's quaint little beefsteak chop-house up an alley in Chicago,
+who told you of Mrs. O'Hagan's second-hand furniture shop in Charleston,
+where you can get real colonial stuff dirt cheap--those people are our
+leading citizens, who run the bank or the dry-goods store or the
+flour-mill. At our annual arts and crafts show we have on exhibition
+loot from the four corners of the earth, and the club woman who has not
+heard it whispered around in our art circles that Mr. Sargent is
+painting too many portraits lately, and that a certain long-legged model
+whose face is familiar in the weekly magazines is no better than she
+should be--a club woman in our town who does not know of these things
+is out of caste in clubdom, and women say of her that she is giving too
+much time to her church.
+
+We take all the beautiful garden magazines, and our terra-cotta works
+are turning out creditable vases--which we pronounce "vahzes," you may
+be sure--for formal gardens. And though we men for the most part run our
+own lawnmowers, and personally look after the work of the college boy
+who takes care of the horse and the cow for his room, still there are a
+few of us proud and haughty creatures who have automobiles, and go
+snorting around the country scaring horses and tooting terror into the
+herds by the roadside. But the bright young reporters on our papers do
+not let an automobile come to town without printing an item stating its
+make and its cost, and whether or not it is a new one or a second-hand
+one, and what speed it can make. At the flower parade in our own little
+town last October there were ten automobiles in line, decked with paper
+flowers and laden with pretty girls in lawns and dimities and
+linens--though as a matter of fact most of the linens were only "Indian
+head." And our particular little country paper printed an item to the
+effect that the real social line of cleavage in the town lies not
+between the cut-glass set and the devotees of hand-painted china, but
+between the real nobility who wear genuine linen and the base imitations
+who wear Indian head.
+
+In some towns an item like that would make people mad, but we have our
+people trained to stand a good deal. They know that it costs them five
+cents a line for cards of thanks and resolutions of respect, so they
+never bring them in. They know that our paper never permits "one who was
+there" to report social functions, so that dear old correspondent has
+resigned; and because we have insisted for years on making an item about
+the first tomatoes that are served in spring at any dinner or reception,
+together with the cost per pound of the tomatoes, the town has become
+used to our attitude and does not buzz with indignation when we poke a
+risible finger at the homemade costumes of the Plymouth Daughters when
+they present "The Mikado" to pay for the new pipe-organ. Indeed, so used
+is the town to our ways that when there was great talk last winter about
+Mrs. Frelingheysen for serving fresh strawberries over the ice cream at
+her luncheon in February, just after her husband had gone through
+bankruptcy, she called up Miss Larrabee, our society editor, on the
+telephone and asked her to make a little item saying that the
+strawberries served by Mrs. Frelingheysen at her luncheon were not
+fresh, but merely sun dried. This we did gladly and printed her recipe.
+So used is this town to our school teachers resigning to get married
+that when one resigns for any other reason we make it a point to
+announce in the paper that it is not for the usual reason, and tell our
+readers exactly what the young woman is going to do.
+
+So, gradually, without our intending to establish it, a family
+vernacular has grown up in the paper which our people understand, but
+which--like all other family vernaculars--is Greek to those outside the
+circle. Thus we say:
+
+"Bill Parker is making his eighth biennial distribution of cigars to-day
+for a boy."
+
+City papers would print it:
+
+"Born to Mr. and Mrs. W. H. Parker, a baby boy."
+
+Again we print this item:
+
+"Mrs. Merriman is getting ready to lend her fern to the Nortons, June
+15."
+
+That doesn't mean anything, unless you happen to know that Mrs. Merriman
+has the prettiest Boston fern in town, and that no bow-window is
+properly decorated at any wedding without that fern. In larger towns the
+same news item would appear thus:
+
+"Cards are out announcing the wedding of Miss Cecil Norton and Mr.
+Collis R. Hatcher at the home of the bride's parents, Mr. and Mrs. T. J.
+Norton, 1022 High street, June 15."
+
+A plain drunk is generally referred to in our columns as a "guest of
+Marshal Furgeson's informal house-party," and when a group of
+drunk-and-disorderlies is brought in we feel free to say of their
+evening diversion that they "spent the happy hours, after refreshments,
+playing progressive hell." And this brings us to the consideration of
+the most important personage with whom we have to deal. In what we call
+"social circles," the most important personages are Mrs. Julia Neal
+Worthington and Mrs. Priscilla Winthrop Conklin, who keep two hired
+girls and can pay five dollars a week for them when the prevailing
+price is three. In financial circles the most important personage is
+John Markley, who buys real-estate mortgages; in political circles the
+most important personage is Charlie Hedrick who knows the railroad
+attorneys at the capital and always can get passes for the county
+delegation to the State convention; in the railroad-yards the most
+important personage is the division superintendent, who smokes ten-cent
+cigars and has the only "room with a bath" at the Hotel Metropole. But
+with us, in the publication of our newspaper, the most important
+personage in town is Marshal Furgeson.
+
+If you ever looked out of the car-window as you passed through town, you
+undoubtedly saw him at the depot, walking nervously up and down the
+platform, peering into the faces of strangers. He is ever on the outlook
+for crooks, though nothing more violent has happened in our county for
+years than an assault and battery. But Marshal Furgeson never
+relinquishes his watch. In winter, clad in his blue uniform and campaign
+hat, he is a familiar figure on our streets; and in summer, without coat
+or vest, with his big silver star on which is stamped "Chief of
+Police," pinned to his suspender, he may be seen at any point where
+trouble is least likely to break out. He is the only man on the town
+site whom we are afraid to tease, because he is our chief source of
+news; for if we ruffle his temper he sees to it that our paper misses
+the details of the next chicken-raid that comes under his notice. He can
+bring us to time in short order.
+
+When we particularly desire to please him we refer to him as "the
+authorities." If the Palace Grocery has been invaded through the back
+window and a box of plug tobacco stolen, Marshal Furgeson is delighted
+to read in the paper that "the authorities have an important clew and
+the arrest may be expected at any time." He is "the authorities." If
+"the authorities have their eyes on a certain barber-shop on South Main
+Street, which is supposed to be doing a back-door beer business," he
+again is "the authorities," and contends that the word strikes more
+terror into the hearts of evil-doers than the mere name, Marshal
+Furgeson.
+
+Next in rank to "the authorities," in the diplomatic corps of the
+office, come our advertisers: the proprietors of the White Front
+Dry-Goods Store, the Golden Eagle Clothing Store, and the Bee Hive.
+These men can come nearer to dictating the paper's policy than the
+bankers and politicians, who are supposed to control country newspapers.
+Though we are charged with being the "organ" of any of half-a-dozen
+politicians whom we happen to speak of kindly at various times, we have
+little real use for politicians in our office, and a business man who
+brings in sixty or seventy dollars' worth of advertising every month has
+more influence with us than all the politicians in the county. This is
+the situation in most newspaper offices that succeed, and when any other
+situation prevails, when politicians control editors, the newspapers
+don't pay well, and sooner or later the politicians are bankrupt.
+
+The only person in town whom all the merchants desire us to poke fun at
+is Mail-Order Petrie. Mail-Order Petrie is a miserly old codger who buys
+everything out of town that he can buy a penny cheaper than the home
+merchants sell it. He is a hard-working man, so far as that goes, and
+so stingy that he has been accused of going barefooted in the summer
+time to save shoes. When he is sick he sends out of town for patent
+medicines, and for ten years he worked in his truck-garden, fighting
+floods and droughts, bugs and blight, to save something like a hundred
+dollars, which he put in a mail-order bank in St. Louis. When it failed
+he grinned at the fellows who twitted him of his loss, and said: "Oh,
+come easy, go easy!"
+
+A few years ago he subscribed to a matrimonial paper, and one day he
+appeared at the office of the probate judge with a mail-order wife, who,
+when they had been married a few years, went to an orphan asylum and got
+a mail-order baby. We have had considerable sport with Mail-Order
+Petrie, and he has become so used to it that he likes it. Sometimes on
+dull days he comes around to the office to tell us what a bargain he got
+at this or that mail-order house, and last summer he came in to tell us
+about a great bargain in a cemetery lot in a new cemetery being laid out
+in Kansas City; he bought it on the installment plan, a dollar down and
+twenty-five cents a month, to be paid until he died, and he bragged a
+great deal about his shrewdness in getting the lot on those terms. He
+chuckled as he said that he would be dead in five years at the most and
+would have a seventy-five dollar lot for a mere song. He made us promise
+that when that time does come we will write up his obsequies under the
+head "A Mail-Order Funeral." He added, as he stood with his hand on the
+door screen, that he had no use for the preachers and the hypocrites in
+the churches in this town, and that he was taking a paper called the
+"Magazine of Mysteries," that teaches some new ideas on religion and
+that he expects to wind up in a mail-order Heaven.
+
+And this is the material with which we do our day's work--Mail-Order
+Petrie, Marshal Furgeson, the pretty girls in the flower parade, the
+wise clubwomen, the cut-glass society crowd, the proud owner of the
+automobile, the "respectable parties concerned," the proprietor of the
+Golden Eagle, the clerks in the Bee Hive, the country crook who aspires
+to be a professional criminal some day, "the leading citizen," who
+spends much of his time seeing the sights of his country, the college
+boys who wear funny clothes and ribbons on their hats, and the
+politicians, greedy for free advertising. They are ordinary two-legged
+men and women, and if there is one thing more than any other that marks
+our town, it is its charity, and the mercy that is at the bottom of all
+its real impulses.
+
+Our business seems to outsiders to be a cruel one, because we have to
+deal as mere business with such sacred things as death and birth, the
+meeting and parting of friends, and with tragedies as well as with
+comedies. This is true. Every man--even a piano tuner--thinks his
+business leads him a dog's life, and that it shows him only the seamy
+side of the world. But our business, though it shows the seams, shows us
+more of good than of bad in men. We are not cynics in our office; for we
+know in a thousand ways that the world is good. We know that at the end
+of the day we have set down more good deeds than bad deeds, and that the
+people in our town will keep the telephone bell ringing to-morrow, more
+to praise the recital of a good action than they will to talk to us
+about some evil thing that we had to print.
+
+Time and again we have been surprised at the charity of our people. They
+are always willing to forgive, and be it man or woman who takes a
+misstep in our town--which is the counterpart of hundreds of American
+towns--if the offender shows that he wishes to walk straight, a thousand
+hands are stretched out to help him and guide him. It is not true that a
+man or woman who makes a mistake is eternally damned by his fellows. If
+one persists in wrong after the first misdeed it is not because
+sheltering love and kindness were not thrown around the wrongdoer. We
+have in our town women who have done wrong and have lived down their
+errors just as men do, and have been forgiven. A hundred times in our
+office we have talked these things over and have been proud of our
+people and of their humanity. We are all neighbours and friends, and
+when sorrow comes, no one is alone. The town's greatest tragedies have
+proved the town's sympathy, and have been worth their cost.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+The Young Prince
+
+
+We have had many reporters for our little country newspaper--some good
+ones, who have gone up to the city and have become good newspaper men;
+some bad ones, who have gone back to the livery-stables from which they
+sprang; and some indifferent ones, who have drifted into the insurance
+business and have become silent partners in student boarding-houses,
+taking home the meat for dinner and eating finically at the second table
+of life, with a first table discrimination. But of all the boys who have
+sat at the old walnut desk by the window, the Young Prince gave us the
+most joy. Before he came on the paper he was bell-boy at the National
+Hotel--bell-hop, he called himself--and he first attracted our attention
+by handing in personal items written in a fat, florid hand. He seemed to
+have second sight. He knew more news than anyone else in town--who had
+gone away, who was entertaining company, who was getting married, and
+who was sick or dying.
+
+The day the Young Prince went to work he put on his royal garment--a
+ten-dollar ready-made costume that cost him two weeks' hard work. But it
+was worth the effort. His freckled face and his tawny shock of red hair
+rose above the gorgeous plaid of the clothes like a prairie sunset, and
+as he pranced off down the street he was clearly proud of his job. This
+pride never left him. He knew all the switchmen in the railroad yards,
+all the girls in the dry-goods stores, all the boys on the grocers'
+waggons, all the hack-drivers and all the barbers in town.
+
+These are the great sources of news for a country daily. The reporter
+who confines his acquaintance to doctors, lawyers, merchants and
+preachers is always complaining of dull days.
+
+But there was never a dull day with the Young Prince. When he could get
+the list of "those present" at a social function in no other way, he
+called up the hired girl of the festal house--we are such a small town
+that only the rich bankers keep servants--and "made a date" with her,
+and the names always appeared in the paper the next day; whereupon the
+proud hostess, who thought it was bad form to give out the names of her
+guests, sent down and bought a dozen extra copies of the paper to send
+away to her Eastern kin. He knew all the secrets of the switch shanty.
+Our paper printed the news of a change in the general superintendent's
+office of the railroad before the city papers had heard of it, and we
+usually figured it out that the day after the letter denying our story
+had come down from the Superintendent's office the change would be
+officially announced.
+
+One day when the Prince was at the depot "making the train" with his
+notebook in his hand, jotting down the names of the people who got on or
+off the cars, the general superintendent saw him, and called the youth
+to his car.
+
+"Well, kid," said the most worshipful one in his teasingest voice,
+"What's the latest news at the general offices to-day?"
+
+The Young Prince turned his head on one side like a little dog looking
+up at a big dog, and replied:
+
+"Well, if you must know it, you're going to get the can, though we
+ain't printing it till you've got a chance to land somewhere else."
+
+The longer the Prince worked the more clothes he bought. One of his most
+effective creations was a blue serge coat and vest, and a pair of white
+duck trousers linked by emotional red socks to patent-leather shoes.
+This confection, crowned with a wide, saw-edged straw hat with a blue
+band, made him the brightest bit of colour on the sombre streets of our
+dull town. He wore his collars so high that he had to order them of a
+drummer, and as he came down street from the depot, riding magnificently
+with the 'bus-driver, after the train had gone, the clerks used to cry:
+"Look out for your horses; the steam-piano is coming!"
+
+But it didn't affect the Young Prince. If he happened to have time and
+was feeling like it, he would climb down over the rear end of the 'bus
+and chase his tormentor into the back of the store where he worked, but
+generally the Young Prince took no heed of the jibes of the envious. He
+was conscious that he was cutting a figure, and this consciousness made
+him proud. But his pride did not cut down the stack of copy that he
+laid on the table every morning and every noon. He couldn't spell and he
+was innocent of grammar, and every line he wrote had to be edited, but
+he got the news. He was every where. He rushed down the streets after an
+item, dodging in and out of stores and offices like a streak of chain
+lightning having a fit. But it was beneath his dignity to run to fires.
+When the fire-bell rang, he waited nonchalantly on the corner near the
+fire-department house, and as the crowds parted to let the horses dash
+by on the dead run, he would walk calmly to the middle of the street,
+put his notebook in his pocket, and, as the fire-team plunged by, he
+would ostentatiously throw out a stiff leg behind him like the tail of a
+comet, and "flip" onto the end of the fire-waggon. Then he would turn
+slowly around, raise a hand, and wiggle his fingers patronisingly at the
+girls in front of the Racket Store as he flew past, swaying his body
+with the motion of the rolling, staggering cart.
+
+Other reporters who have been on the paper--the good ones as well as the
+bad--have had to run the gauntlet of the town jokers who delight to give
+green reporters bogus news, or start them out hunting impossible items.
+But the man who soberly told the Young Prince that O. F. C. Taylor was
+visiting at the home of the town drunkard, or that W. H. McBreyer had
+accepted a position in a town drug-store, only got a wink and a grin
+from the boy. Neither did the town wags fool him by giving him a birth
+announcement from the wrong family, nor a wedding where there was none.
+He was wise as a serpent. Where he got his wisdom, no one knows. He had
+the town catalogued in a sort of rogues' directory--the liars and the
+honest men set apart from one another, and it was a classification that
+would not have tallied with the church directories nor with the town
+blue-book nor with the commercial agency's reports. The sheep and the
+goats in the Young Prince's record would have been strangers to one
+another if they could have been assembled as he imagined them. But he
+was generally right in his estimates of men. He had a sixth sense for
+sham.
+
+The Young Prince had the sense to know the truth and the courage to
+write it. This is the essence of the genius that is required to make a
+good newspaper man. No paper has trouble getting reporters who can hand
+in copy that records events from the outside. Any blockhead can go to a
+public meeting and bring in a report that has the words "as follows"
+scattered here and there down the columns. But the reporter who can go
+and bring back the soul of the meeting, the real truth about it--what
+the inside fights meant that lay under the parliamentary politenesses of
+the occasion; who can see the wires that reach back of the speakers, and
+see the man who is moving the wires and can know why he is moving them;
+who can translate the tall talking into history--he is a real reporter.
+And the Young Prince was that kind of a youth. He went to the core of
+everything; and if we didn't dare print the truth--as sometimes we did
+not--he grumbled for a week about his luck. As passionately as he loved
+his clothes, he was always ready to get them dirty in the interests of
+his business.
+
+For three years his nimble feet pounded the sidewalks of the town. He
+knew no business hours, and ate and slept with his work. He never ceased
+to be a reporter--never took off his make-up, never let down from his
+exalted part. One day he fell sick of a fever, and for three weeks
+fretted and fumed in delirium. In his dreams he wrote pay locals, and
+made trains, and described funerals, got lists of names for the society
+column, and grumbled because his stuff was cut or left over till the
+next day. When he awoke he was weak and wan, and they felt that they
+must tell him the truth.
+
+The doctor took the boy's hands and told him very simply what they
+feared. He looked at the man for a moment in dumb wonder, and sighed a
+long, tired sigh. Then he said: "Well, if I must, here goes"--and turned
+his face to the wall and closed his eyes without a tremor.
+
+And thus the Young Prince went home.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+The Society Editor
+
+
+They say that in the newspaper offices of the city men work in ruts;
+that the editorial writer never reports an item, no matter how much he
+knows of it; that a reporter is not allowed to express an editorial view
+of a subject, even though he be well qualified to speak; but on our
+little country daily newspaper it is entirely different. We work on the
+interchangeable point system. Everyone writes items, all of us get
+advertising and job-work when it comes our way, and when one of us
+writes anything particularly good, it is marked for the editorial page.
+The religious reporter does the racing matinée in Wildwood Park, and the
+financial editor who gets the market reports from the feed-store men
+also gets any church news that comes along.
+
+The only time we ever established a department was when we made Miss
+Larrabee society editor. She came from the high school, where her
+graduating essay on Kipling attracted our attention, and, after an
+office council had decided that a Saturday society page would be a
+paying proposition.
+
+At first, say for six months after she came to the office, Miss Larrabee
+devoted herself to the accumulation of professional pride. This pride
+was as much a part of her life as her pompadour, which at that time was
+so high that she had to tiptoe to reach it. However she managed to keep
+it up was the wonder of the office. Finally, we all agreed that she must
+use chicken-fence. She denied this, but was inclined to be good-natured
+about it, and, as an office-joke, the boys used to leave a step-ladder
+by her desk so that she could climb up and see how her top-knot really
+looked. Nothing ruffled her spirits, and we soon quit teasing her and
+began to admire her work. In addition to filling six columns of the
+Saturday's paper with her society report in a town where a church social
+is important enough to justify publishing the names of those who wait on
+the tables, Miss Larrabee was a credit to the office.
+
+[Illustration: As an office joke the boys used to leave a step-ladder by
+her desk so that she could climb up and see how her top-knot really
+looked]
+
+She was always invited to the entertainments at the homes of the
+Worthingtons and the Conklins, who had stationary wash-tubs in the
+basements of their houses, and who ate dinner instead of supper in the
+evening; and when she put on what the boys called her trotting harness,
+her silk petticoats rustled louder than any others at the party. One day
+she suddenly dropped her pompadour and appeared with her hair parted in
+the middle and doused over her ears in long, undulating billows. No
+other girl in town came within a quarter of an inch of Miss Larrabee's
+dare. When straight-fronts became stylish, Miss Larrabee was a vertical
+marvel, and when she rolled up her sleeves and organized a country club,
+she referred to her shoes as boots and took the longest steps in town.
+But with it all she was no mere clothes-horse. We drilled it into her
+head during her first two weeks that "society" news in a country town
+means not merely the doings of the cut-glass set, but that it means as
+well the doings of the Happy Hoppers, the Trundle-Bed Trash, the Knights
+of Columbus, the Rathbone Sisters, the King's Daughters, the Epworth
+League, the Christian Endeavourers, the Woman's Relief Corps, the
+Ladies' Aid and the Home Missionary Societies, Miss Nelson's Dancing
+Class, the Switchmen's annual ball--if we get their job-work--and every
+kindred, every tribe, except such as gather in what is known as "kitchen
+sweats" and occasionally send in calls for the police. When Miss
+Larrabee got this into her head she began to groan under her burden, and
+by the end of the year, though she had great pride in her profession,
+she affected to loathe her department.
+
+Weddings were her especial abominations. When the first social cloud
+appeared on the horizon indicating the approach of a series of showers
+for the bride which would culminate in a cloudburst at some stone
+church, Miss Larrabee would begin to rumble like distant thunder and, as
+the storm grew thicker, she would flash out crooked chain-lightning
+imprecations on the heads of the young people, their fathers and mothers
+and uncles and aunts. By the day of the wedding she would be rolling a
+steady diapason of polite, decolourised, expurgated, ladylike profanity.
+
+While she sat at her desk writing the stereotyped account of the event,
+it was like picking up a live wire to speak to her. As she wrote, we
+could tell at just what stage she had arrived in her copy. Thus, if she
+said to the adjacent atmosphere, "What a whopper!" we knew that she had
+written, "The crowning glory of a happy fortnight of social gatherings
+found its place when----" and when she hissed out, "Mortgaged clear to
+the eaves and full of installment furniture!" we felt that she had
+reached a point something like this: "After the ceremony the gay party
+assembled at the palatial home." In a moment she would snarl: "I am dead
+tired of seeing Mrs. Merriman's sprawly old fern and the Bosworth palm.
+I wish they would stop lending them!" and then we realised that she had
+reached the part of her write-up which said: "The chancel rail was
+banked with a profusion of palms and ferns and rare tropical plants."
+She always groaned when she came to the "simple and impressive ring
+ceremony." When she wrote:
+
+"The distinguished company came forward to offer congratulations to the
+newly-wedded pair," she would say as she sharpened her pencil-point:
+"There's nothing like a wedding to reveal what a raft of common kin
+people have," and we knew that it was all over and that she was closing
+the article with: "A dazzling array of costly and beautiful presents was
+exhibited in the library," for then she would pick up her copy, dog-ear
+the sheets, and jab them on the hook as she sighed: "Another great
+American pickle-dish exhibit ended."
+
+In the way she did two things Miss Larrabee excited the wonder and
+admiration of the office. One was the way that she kept tab on brides.
+We heard through her of the brides who could cook, and of those who were
+beginning life by accumulating a bright little pile of tin cans in the
+alley. She knew the brides who could do their own sewing and those who
+could not. She had the single girl's sniff at the bride who wore her
+trousseau season after season, made over and fixed up, and she gave the
+office the benefit of her opinion of the husband in the case who had a
+new tailor-made suit every fall and spring. She scented young married
+troubles from afar, and we knew in the office whether his folks were
+edging up on her, or her people were edging up on him. If a young
+married man danced more than twice in one evening with anyone but his
+wife, Miss Larrabee made faces at his back when he passed the office
+window, and if she caught a young married woman flirting, Miss Larrabee
+regaled us by telling with whom the woman in question had opened a
+"fresh bottle of emotions."
+
+The other way in which Miss Larrabee displayed genius for her work was
+in describing women's costumes. Three or four times a year, when there
+are large social gatherings, we print descriptions of the women's gowns.
+Only three women in our town, Mrs. Worthington, Mrs. Conklin, and the
+second Mrs. Markley, have more than one new party dress in a
+twelve-month, and most of the women make a party gown last two or three
+years. Miss Larrabee was familiar with every dress in town. She knew it
+made over, and no woman was cunning enough to conceal the truth even
+with a spangled yoke, a chiffon bertha, or a net over-dress; yet Miss
+Larrabee would describe the gown, not merely twice, but half a dozen
+times, so that the woman wearing it might send the description to her
+relatives back East without arousing their suspicion that she was
+wearing the same dress year after year. Therefore, whenever Miss
+Larrabee wrote up the dresses worn at a party, we were sure to sell from
+fifty to a hundred extra papers. She could so turn a breastpin and a
+homemade point-lace handkerchief tucked in the front of a good old
+lady's best black satin into "point-lace and diamonds," that they were
+always good for a dozen copies of the paper, and she never overlooked
+the dress of the wife of a good advertiser, no matter how plain it might
+be.
+
+She was worth her wages to the office merely as a compendium of shams.
+She knew whether the bridal couple, who announced that they would spend
+their honeymoon in the East, were really going to Niagara Falls, or
+whether they were going to spend a week with his relatives in Decatur,
+Illinois. She knew every woman in town who bought two prizes for her
+whist party--one to give if her friend should win the prize, and another
+to give if the woman she hated should win. With the diabolical eye of a
+fiend she detected the woman who was wearing the dry-cleaned cast-off
+clothing of her sister in the city. What she saw the office knew,
+though she kept her conclusions out of the paper if they would do any
+harm or hurt anyone's feelings. No pretender ever dreamed that she was
+not fooling Miss Larrabee. She was willing to agree most sympathetically
+with Mrs. Conklin, who insisted that the "common people" wouldn't be
+interested in the list of names at her party; and the only place where
+we ever saw Miss Larrabee's claw in print was in the insistent
+misspelling of the name of a woman who made it a point to ridicule the
+paper.
+
+We have had other girls around the office since Miss Larrabee left, but
+they do not seem to get the work done with any system. She was not only
+industrious but practical. Friday mornings, when her work piled up,
+instead of fussing around the office and chattering at the telephone,
+she would dive into her desk and bring up her regular list of
+adjectives. These she would copy on three slips, carefully dividing the
+list so that no one had a duplicate, and in the afternoon each of the
+boys received a slip with a list of parties, and with instructions to
+scatter the adjectives she had given him through the accounts of the
+parties assigned to him--and the work was soon done. There was no
+scratching the head for synonyms for "beautiful," "superb" or "elegant."
+Miss Larrabee had doled out to each of us the adjectives necessary, and,
+given the adjectives, society reporting is easy. The editing of the copy
+is easy also, for one does not have to remember whether or not the
+refreshments were "delicious" at the Jones party when he sees the word
+in connection with the viands at the Smith party. No two parties were
+ever "elegant" the same week. No two events were "charming." No two
+women were "exquisitely" gowned. The person who was assigned the
+adjective "delightful" by Miss Larrabee might stick it in front of a
+luncheon, pin it on a hostess, or use it for an evening's entertainment.
+But he could use it only once. And with a list of those present and the
+adjectives thereunto appertaining, even a new boy could get up a column
+in half an hour. She had an artist's pride in the finished work, however
+much she might dislike the thing in making, and she used to sail down to
+the press-room as soon as the paper was out, and, picking up the paper
+from the folder, she would stand reading her page, line upon line,
+precept upon precept, though every word and syllable was familiar to
+her.
+
+During her first year she joined the Woman's State Press Club, but she
+discovered that she was the only real worker in the club and never
+attended a second meeting. She told us that too many of the women wore
+white stockings and low shoes, read their own unpublished short stories,
+and regarded her wide-shouldered shirtwaist and melodramatic openwork
+hosiery with suspicion and alarm.
+
+As the years passed, and wedding after wedding sizzled under her pen,
+she complained to us that she was beginning to be called "auntie" in too
+many houses, and that the stock of available young men who didn't wear
+their handkerchiefs under their collars at the dances had dwindled down
+to three. This reality faces every girl who lives in a country town.
+Then she is left with two alternatives: to go visiting or to begin
+bringing them up by hand.
+
+Miss Larrabee went visiting. At the end of a month she wrote: "It's all
+over with me. He is a nice fellow, and has a job doing 'Live Topics
+About Town' here on the _Sun_. Give my job to the little Wheatly girl,
+and tell her to quit writing poetry, and hike up her dress in the back.
+My adjectives are in the left-hand corner of the desk under 'When
+Knighthood Was in Flower.' And do you suppose you could get me and the
+grand keeper of the records and seals a pass home for Christmas if I'd
+do you a New York letter some time?
+
+"They say these city papers are hog tight!"
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+"As a Breath into the Wind"
+
+
+We are proud of the machinery in our office--the two linotypes, the big
+perfecting press and the little jobbers. They are endowed by office
+traditions with certain human attributes--having their moods and
+vagaries and tantrums--so we love them as men love children. And this is
+a queer thing about them: though our building is pocked with windows
+that are open by day seven months in the year, and though the air of the
+building is clean enough, save for the smell of the ink, yet at night,
+after the machines have been idle for many hours and are probably
+asleep, the place smells like the lair of wild animals. By day they are
+as clean as machines may be kept. And even in the days when David Lewis
+petted them and coddled them and gave them the core of his heart, they
+were speckless, and bright as his big, brown, Welsh eyes, but the night
+stinks of them were rank and beastly.
+
+David came to us, a stray cat, fifteen years ago. He was too small to
+wrestle with the forms--being cast in the nonpareil mould of his
+race--and so we put him to carrying papers. In school season he seemed
+to go to school, and in summer it is certain that he put a box on a high
+stool in the back room, and learned the printer's case, and fed the job
+presses at odd times, and edged on to the pay-roll without ever having
+been formally hired. In the same surreptitious manner he slipped a cot
+into the stockroom upstairs and slept there, and finally had it fitted
+up as a bedroom, and so became an office fixture.
+
+By the time his voice had stopped squeaking he was a good printer, and
+what with using the front office for a study at night, and the New York
+papers and the magazines for textbooks, he had acquired a good working
+education. Whereupon he fell in love with two divinities at once--the
+blonde one working in the Racket Store, on Main Street, and the other, a
+new linotype that we installed the year before McKinley's first
+election. His heart was sadly torn between them. He never went to bed
+under midnight after calling on either of them, and, having the Celt's
+natural aptitude to get at the soul of either women or intricate
+mechanism, in a year he was engaged to both; but naturally enough a
+brain fever overtook him, and he lay on a cot at the Sisters' Hospital
+and jabbered strange things.
+
+Among other things the priest who sat beside him one day heard Latin
+verse; whereat the father addressed David in the language of the Church
+and received reply in kind. And they talked solemnly about matters
+theological for five minutes, David's voice changing to the drone of the
+liturgist's and his face flushing with uncaged joy. In an hour there
+were three priests with the boy, and he spoke in Latin to them without
+faltering. He discussed abstruse ecclesiastical questions and claimed
+incidentally to be an Italian priest dead a score of years, and, to
+prove his claim, described Rome and the Vatican as it was before Leo's
+day. Then he fell asleep and the next day was better and knew no Latin,
+but insisted on reading the note under his pillow which his girl had
+sent him. After that he wanted to know how New York stood in the
+National League and how Hans Wagner's batting record was, and proceeded
+to get well in short order.
+
+David resumed his place in the office, and when we put in the perfecting
+press he added another string to his bow. The press and the linotype and
+his girl were his life's passions, and his position as short-stop in the
+Maroons, and as snare-drummer in the Second Regiment band, were his
+diversions. He wore clothes well and became president of the Imperial
+Dancing Club--chiefly to please his girl, who desired social position. A
+boy with twelve dollars a week in a country town, who will spend a
+dollar or two a month to have his clothes pressed, can accomplish any
+social heights which rise before him, and there is no barrier in our
+town to a girl merely because she presides at the ribbon-counter; which,
+of course, is as it should be.
+
+So David became a town personage. When the linotype operator left, we
+gave David the place. Now he courted only one of his sweethearts by
+night, and found time for other things. Also we gave him three dollars
+a week more to spend, and the Imperial Club got most of it--generally
+through the medium of the blonde in the Racket Store, who was
+cultivating a taste for diamonds, and liked to wear flowers at the more
+formal dances.
+
+Now, unless they are about to be married, a boy of twenty may not call
+on a girl of nineteen in a respectable family, a member of the Plymouth
+Daughters, and a graduate of the High School, oftener than four nights
+in the week, without exciting more or less neighbourly comment; but
+David and the girl were merely going together--as the parlance of our
+town has it--and though they were engaged they had no idea of getting
+married at any definite time. David thus had three nights in the seven
+which might be called open. The big press would not receive him by
+night, and he spent his love on his linotype by day; so he was lonesome
+and longed for the society of his kind. The billiard-hall did not tempt
+him; but at the cigar-store he met and fell under the spell of Henry
+Larmy--known of the town as "Old Hen," though he was not two score years
+gone--and the two began chumming together.
+
+"Old Hen" worked in a tin-shop, read Ruskin, regarded Debs as a prophet,
+received many papers devoted to socialism and the New Thought, and
+believed that he believed in no man, no God and no devil. Also he was a
+woman-hater, and though he never turned his head for a petticoat,
+preached free-love and bought many books which promised to tell him how
+to become a hypnotist. At various times, Larmy's category of beliefs
+included the single-tax, Buddhism, spiritualism, and a faith in the
+curative properties of blue glass. David and Henry Larmy would sit in
+the office of evenings discussing these things when honest people should
+be in bed.
+
+Henry never could tell us just how the talk drifted to hypnotism and the
+occult, nor when the current started that way. But one of the reporters
+who happened to be driven off the street by the rain one night found
+Henry and David in the office with a homemade planchette doing queer
+things. They made it tell words in the middle of pages of newspapers
+that neither had opened. They made it write answers to sums that neither
+had calculated, and they made it give the names of Henry's relatives
+dead and gone--also those that were living, whom David, who was
+operating it, did not know. The thing would not move for the man, but
+the boy's fingers on it made it fly. Some way the triangular board
+broke, and the reporter and Henry were pop-eyed with wonder to see David
+hold his hands above the pencil and make it write, dragging a splinter
+of board behind it. David yawned five or six times and lay down on the
+office couch, and when he got up a moment later his hands were fingering
+the air, his lips fluttering like the wings of fledglings, and he seemed
+to be trying some new kind of lingo. He did not look about him, but went
+straight to the table, gripped the air above the pencil with the broken
+board upon it, and the pencil came up and began writing something,
+evidently in verse. David's face was shiny and smiling the while, but
+his eyes were fixed, though his lips moved as they do when one writes
+and is unused to it. Larmy stared at the boy with open mouth, clearly
+afraid of the spectacle that was before him. A night creaking of the
+building made him jump, and he moistened his lips as the pencil wrote
+on. When the sheet was filled, the pencil fell and David looked about
+him with a smile and dropping his head on the desk began to yawn. He
+seemed to be coming out of a deep sleep, and grinned up blinking: "Gee,
+I must 'a' gone to sleep on you fellows. I was up late last night."
+
+Larmy told the boy what had happened, and the three of them looked at
+the paper, but could make nothing of it. David shook his head.
+
+"Not on your life," he laughed. "What do you fellers take me for--a
+phonograph having the D. T.'s, or a mimeograph with a past? Uh-huh! Not
+for little David! Why--say, that is some kind of Dutch!"
+
+The reporter knew enough to know that it was Latin, but his High School
+days were five years behind him, and he could not translate it. The
+Latin professor at the college, however, said that it seemed to be an
+imitation of Ovid.
+
+And the next time the reporter saw a light in the office window he broke
+into the seance. When the boy and his girl were not holding down the
+sofa at her father's home, or when there was no dance at the Imperial
+Club hall, nor any other social diversion, David and Larmy and the
+reporter would meet at the office and dive into things too deep for
+Horatio's philosophy.
+
+Their favourite theme was the immortality of the soul, and when they
+were on this theme David would get nervous, pace up and down the office,
+and finally throw himself on the lounge and begin to yawn. Whereupon a
+control, or state of mind, or personality that called itself Fra
+Guiseppi would rise to consciousness and dominate the boy. Larmy and the
+reporter called it "father," and talked to it with considerable
+jocularity, considering that the father claimed they were talking to a
+ghost. It would do odd things for them; go into rooms where David had
+never been: describe their furnishings and occupants accurately; read
+the numbers on watches of prominent citizens, which the reporter would
+verify the next day; and pretend to bring other departed spirits into
+the room to discuss various matters. Larmy had a pleasant social chat
+with Karl Marx, and had the spirits hunting all over the kingdom-come
+for Tom Paine and Murat. But the messenger either could not find them,
+or the line was busy with someone else, so these worthies never
+appeared.
+
+Still, this must be said of the "father," that it had a philosophy of
+life, and a distinct personality far deeper and more charming and in
+some way sweeter than David's; that it talked with an accent, which to
+the hearers seemed Italian, and in a voice that certainly could not have
+been the boy's by any trick of ventriloquism. One night in their talks
+Larmy said:
+
+"'Father,' you say you believe that the judgments of God are just--how
+do you account for the sufferings, the heartaches, the sorrows, the
+misery that come in the wake of those judgments? Here is a great railway
+accident that strikes down twenty people, renders some cripples for
+life, kills others. Here is a flood that sweeps away the property of
+good men and bad men. Is that just? What compensation is there for it?"
+
+The "father" put his chin in one hand and remained silent for a time, as
+one deep in thought; then he replied:
+
+"That is--what you call--life. That is what makes life, life; what
+makes it different from the existence we know now. All your misfortunes,
+your hardships, your joys, all your miseries and failures and
+triumphs--these are the school of the soul which you call life. It is a
+preparation for the hereafter."
+
+And David waking knew nothing of the thing that possessed him sleeping.
+When they told him, he would smoke his cigarette, and make reply that he
+must have had 'em pretty bad this time, or that he was glad he wasn't
+that "buggy" when he was awake.
+
+David's talent soon became known in the office. We used to call it his
+spook, but only once did we harness it to practical business and that
+was when old Charley Hedrick, the local boss, was picking a candidate
+for the Legislature. The reporter and Larmy asked the "father" one night
+if it could get us connected with Mr. Hedrick. It said it would try; it
+needed help. And there appeared another personality with which they were
+more or less familiar, called the Jew. The Jew claimed to be a literary
+man, and said it would act as receiver while the father acted as
+transmitter on Hedrick. Then they got this one-sided telephonic
+conversation in a thick, wheezy voice that was astonishingly like
+Hedrick's:
+
+"Harmony--hell, yes; we're always getting the harmony and the
+Worthington state bank gets the offices." Then a pause ensued. "Well,
+let'em bolt. I'm getting tired of giving up the whole county ticket to
+them fellows to keep 'em from bolting." After another pause, he seemed
+to answer someone: "Oh, Bill?--you can't trust him! He's played both
+sides in this town for ten years. What I want isn't a man to satisfy
+them, but just this once I want a man who won't be even under the
+suspicion of satisfying them. I want a fellow to satisfy me." The other
+side of the telephone must have spoken, for this came: "Well, then,
+we'll bust their damn bank! Did you see their last statement: cash down
+to fifteen per cent. and no dividends on half a million assets for a
+year and a half? Something's rotten there. They're a lot of 'toads in a
+poisoned tank,' as old Browning says. If they want a fight, they can
+have it." After the silence he replied: "I tell you fellows they can't
+afford a fight. And, anyway, there'll never be peace in this town till
+we get things on the basis of one bank, one newspaper, one wife and one
+country, and the way to do that is to get out in the open and fight. If
+I've got as much sense as a rabbit I say that Ab Handy is the man, and
+whether I'm right or wrong I'm going to run him." He seemed to retort to
+some objector: "Yes, and the first thing you know he'd come charging up
+to the Speaker's desk with a maximum freight-rate bill, or a stock-yards
+bill--and where would I be? I tell you he won't stand hitched. He'll
+swell up like a pizened pup, and you couldn't handle him. Where'd any of
+us be, if the Representative from this county got to pawing the air for
+reform? I know Jake as though I'd been through him with a lantern."
+There must have been a discussion of some kind among the others, for a
+lengthy interim followed; then the voice continued: "Elect him?--of
+course we can elect him. I can get five hundred from the State Committee
+and we can raise that much down here. This is a Republican year, and we
+could elect Judas Iscariot against any of the eleven brethren this year
+on the Republican ticket, and I tell you it's Ab. You fellows can do as
+you please, but I'm going to run Ab."
+
+Then, being full of political curiosity rather than impelled by a desire
+for psychological research, the reporter slipped out and waited in a
+stairway opposite the Exchange National Bank building until the light in
+Hedrick's law office was extinguished. Then he saw old Charley and his
+henchmen come out, one at a time, look cautiously up and down the street
+and go forth in different, devious ways. The story in our paper the next
+day of the candidacy of Ab Handy threw consternation into the ranks of
+the enemy. We had printed the conversation as it had occurred, after
+which five men publicly contended that one of their number was a
+traitor.
+
+The summer browned the pastures, and the coming of autumn brought
+trouble for David Lewis, president of the Imperial Dancing Club,
+short-stop for the Maroons, snare-drummer in the band, and operator of
+linotypes. We who are at the period of life where love is a harvest
+forget the days of the harrow, and are prone to smile at the season of
+the seeding. We do not know that the heaviest burden God puts on a
+young soul is a burden of the heart. A travelling silk-salesman, with a
+haughty manner and a two-hundred-dollar job, saw the blonde in the
+Racket Store and began calling at her father's home like the captain of
+an army with banners. David, being only an armour-bearer at fifteen
+dollars a week, found heartbreak in it all for him. A girl of twenty is
+so much older than a boy of twenty-one that the blonde began to assume a
+maternal attitude toward the boy, and he took to walking afield on
+Sundays, looking at the sky in agony and asking his little
+"now-I-lay-me" God, what life was given to him for. He fabricated a
+legend that she was selling herself for gold, and when the haughty
+manner and the blonde sped by David's window behind jingling
+sleigh-bells that winter, David, sitting at the machine, got back proofs
+from the front office that looked like war-maps of a strange country.
+Moreover he let his matrices go uncleaned until they were beardy as
+wheat and the bill of repairs on the machine had begun to rise like a
+cat's back.
+
+All of this may seem funny in the telling, but to see the little
+Welshman's heart breaking in him was no pleasant matter. The girls in
+the office pitied the boy, and hoped the silk-drummer would break her
+heart. The town and the Imperial Club, whereof David was much beloved,
+took sides with him, and knew his sorrow for their own. As for the
+blonde, it was only nature asserting itself in her; so David got back
+his little chip diamonds, and his bangle bracelet, and his copy of
+"Riley's Love Songs," and there was the "mist and the blinding rain" for
+him, and the snow of winter hardened on the sidewalks.
+
+To console himself, the boy traded for a music-box, which he set going
+with a long brass lever. Its various tunes were picked in holes on
+circular steel sheets, which were fed into the box and set whirling with
+the lever. At night when Larmy wasn't enjoying what David called a
+spook-fest, the boy would sit in the office by the hour and listen to
+his music-box. He must have played "Love's Golden Dream Is Past" a
+hundred lonesome times that winter (it had been their favourite
+waltz--his and the girl's--at the Imperial Club), and it was a safe
+guess that if the boys in the office, as they passed the box at noon,
+would give the lever a yank, from the abdomen of the contrivance the
+waltz song would begin deep and low to rumble and swell out with all the
+simulation of sorrow that a mechanical soul may express.
+
+As the winter deepened, Larmy and the reporter and the "father" had more
+and more converse. The "father" explained a theory of immortality which
+did not interest the reporter, but which Larmy heard eagerly. It said
+that science would resolve matter into mere forms of motion, which are
+expressions of divine will, and that the only place where this divine
+will exists in its pure state, eluding the so-called material state, is
+in the human soul. Further, the "father" explained that this soul, or
+divine will, exists without the brain, independent of brain tissue, as
+may be proved by the accepted phenomena of hypnotism, where the soul is
+commanded to leave the body and see and hear and feel and know things
+which the mere physical organs can not experience, owing to the
+interposition of space. The "father" said that at death the Divine Will
+commands the ripened seed of life to leave the body and assume
+immortality, just as that Will commands the seeds of plants and the
+sperm of animals to assume their natural functions. The Thing that
+talked through David's lips said that the body is the seed-pod of the
+soul, and that souls grow little or much as they are planted and
+environed and nurtured by life. All this it said in many nights, while
+Larmy wondered and the reporter scoffed and stuck pins in David to see
+if he could feel them. And the boy wakened from his dreams always to
+say: "Gimme a cigarette!" and to reach over and pull the lever of his
+music-box, and add: "Perfessor, give us a tune! Hen, the professor says
+he won't play unless you give me a cigarette for him."
+
+One night, after a long wrangle which ended in a discourse by the
+"father," a strange thing happened. Larmy and It were contending as to
+whether It was merely a hypnotic influence on the boy, of someone living
+whom they did not know, or what It claimed to be, a disembodied spirit.
+By way of diversion, the reporter had just run a binder's needle under
+one of the boy's finger-nails to see whether he would flinch. Then the
+Voice that was coming from David's mouth spoke and said: "I will show
+you something to prove it;" and the entranced boy rose and went to the
+back room, while the two others followed him.
+
+He turned the lever that flashed the light on his linotype, and set the
+little motor going. He lifted up the lid of the metal-pot, to see if the
+fire was keeping it molten. Then the boy sat at the machine with his
+hands folded in his lap, gazing at the empty copy-holder out of dead
+eyes. In a minute--perhaps it was a little longer--a brass matrix
+slipped from the magazine and clicked down into the assembler; in a
+second or two another fell, and then, very slowly, like the ticks of a
+great clock, the brasses slipped--slipped--slipped into their places,
+and the steel spaces dropped into theirs. A line was formed, while the
+boy's hands lay in his lap. When it was a full line he grabbed the
+lever, that sent the line over to the metal-pot to be cast, and his hand
+fell back in his lap, while the dripping of the brasses continued and
+the blue and white keys on the board sank and rose, although no finger
+touched them.
+
+Larmy squinted at the thing, and held his long, fuzzy, unshaven chin in
+his hand. When the second line was cast the reporter broke the silence
+with: "Well, I'll be damned!" And the Voice from David's mouth replied:
+"Very likely." And the clicking of the brasses grew quicker.
+
+Seven lines were cast and then the boy got up and went back to the couch
+in the front room, where he yawned himself, apparently, through three
+strata of consciousness, into his normal self. They took a proof of what
+had been cast, but it was in Latin and they could not translate it.
+David himself forgot about it the next day, but the reporter, being
+impressed and curious, took the proof to the teacher of Latin at the
+college, who translated it thus: "_He shall go away on a long journey
+across the ocean, and he shall not return, yet the whole town shall see
+him again and know him--and he shall bring back the song that is in his
+heart, and you shall hear it._"
+
+The next week the "Maine" was blown up, and in the excitement the
+troubles of David were forgotten in the office. Moreover, as he had to
+work overtime he put his soul deeper into the machine, and his nerves
+took on something of the steel in which he lived. The Associated Press
+report was long in those days, and the paper was filled with local news
+of wars and rumours of wars, so that when the call for troops came in
+the early spring, the town was eager for it, and David could not wait
+for the local company to form, but went to Lawrence and enlisted with
+the Twentieth Kansas. He was our first war-hero for thirty years, and
+the town was proud of him. Most of the town knew why he went, and there
+was reproach for the blonde in the Racket Store, who had told the girls
+it would be in June and that they were going East for a wedding trip.
+
+When David came back from Lawrence an enlisted man, with a week in which
+to prepare for the fray, the Imperial Club gave him a farewell dance of
+great pride, in that one end of Imperial Hall was decorated for the
+occasion with all the Turkish rugs, and palms, and ferns, and
+piano-lamps with red shades, and American flags draped from the electric
+fixtures, and all the cut-glass and hand-painted punch-bowls that the
+girls of the T. T. T. Club could beg or borrow; and red lemonade and
+raspberry sherbet flowed like water. Whereat David Lewis was so pleased
+that he grew tearful when he came into the hall and saw the splendour
+that had been made for him. But his soul, despite his gratitude to the
+boys and girls who gave the party, was filled with an unutterable
+sadness; and he sat out many dances under the red lamp-shades with the
+various girls who had been playing sister to him; and the boys to whom
+the girls were more than sisters were not jealous.
+
+As for the blonde, she beamed and preened and smiled on David, but her
+name was not on his card, and as the silk-salesman was on the road, she
+had many vacant lines on her programme, and she often sat alone by a
+card-table shuffling the deck that lay there. The boy's eyes were dead
+when they looked at her and her smile did not coax him to her. Once when
+the others were dancing an extra David sat across the room from her, and
+she went to him and sat by him, and said under the music:
+
+"I thought we were always going to be friends--David?" And after he had
+parried her for a while, he rose to go away, and she said: "Won't you
+dance just once with me, Dave, just for old sake's sake before you go?"
+And he put down his name for the next extra and thought of how long it
+had been since the last June dance. Old sake's sake with youth may mean
+something that happened only day before yesterday.
+
+The boy did not speak to his partner during the next dance but went
+about debating something in his mind; and when the number was ended he
+tripped over to the leader of the orchestra, whom he had hired for
+dances a score of times, and asked for "Love's Golden Dream Is Past" as
+the next "extra." It was his waltz and he didn't care if the whole town
+knew it--they would dance it together. And so when the orchestra began
+he started away, a very heart-broken, brown-eyed, olive-skinned little
+Welshman, who barely touched the finger-tips of a radiant, overdeveloped
+blonde with roses in her cheeks and moonlight in her hair. She would
+have come closer to him but he danced away and only hunted for her soul
+with his brown Celtic eyes. And because David had asked for it and they
+loved the boy, the old men in the orchestra played the waltz over and
+over again, and at the end the dancers clapped their hands for an
+encore, and when the chorus began they sang it dancing, and the boy
+found the voice which cheered the "Men of Harlech," the sweet, cadent
+voice of his race, and let out his heart in the words.
+
+When he led her to a seat, the blonde had tears on her eyelashes as she
+choked a "good-by, Dave" to him, but he turned away without answering
+her and went to find his next partner. It was growing late and the crowd
+soon went down the long, dark stairway leading from Imperial Hall, into
+the moonlight and down the street, singing and humming and whistling
+"Love's Golden Dream," and the next day they and the town and the band
+came down to the noon train to see the conquering hero go.
+
+It was lonesome in the office after David went, and his music-box in the
+corner was dumb, for we couldn't find the brass lever for it, though the
+printers and the reporters hunted in his trunk and in every place they
+could think of. But the lonesomest things in the world for him were the
+machines. The big press grew sulky and kept breaking the web, and his
+linotype took to absorbing castor-oil as if it were a kind of hasheesh.
+The new operator could run the new machine, but David's seemed to resent
+familiarity. It was six months before we got things going straight after
+he left us.
+
+He wrote us soldier letters from the Presidio, and from mid-ocean, and
+from the picket-line in front of Manila. One afternoon the messenger-boy
+came in snuffling with a sheet of the Press-report. David's name was
+among the killed. Then we turned the column rules on the first page and
+got out the paper early to give the town the news. Henry Larmy brought
+in an obituary, the next day, which needed much editing, and we printed
+it under the head "A Tribute from a Friend," and signed Larmy's name to
+it.
+
+The boy had no kith or kin--which is most unusual for a Welshman--and
+so, except in our office, he seemed to be forgotten. A month went by,
+the season changed, and changed again, and a year was gone, when the
+Government sent word to Larmy--whom the boy seemed to have named for
+his next friend--that David's body would be brought back for burial if
+his friends desired it. So in the fall of 1900, when the Presidential
+campaign was at its height, the conquering hero came home, and we gave
+him a military funeral. The body came to us on Labor Day, and in our
+office we consecrated the day to David. The band and the militia company
+took him from the big stone church where sometimes he had gone to
+Sunday-school as a child, and a long procession of townsfolk wound
+around the hill to the cemetery, where David received a salute of guns,
+and the bugler played taps, and our eyes grew wet and our hearts were
+touched. Then we covered him with flowers, whipped up the horses and
+came back to the world.
+
+That night, as it was at the end of a holiday, the Republican Committee
+had assigned to our town, for the benefit of the men in the shops, one
+of the picture-shows that Mark Hanna, like a heathen in his blindness,
+had sent to Kansas, thinking our State, after the war, needed a spur to
+its patriotism in the election. The crowd in front of the post-office
+was a hundred feet wide and two hundred feet long, looking at the
+pictures from the kinetoscope--pictures of men going to work in mills
+and factories; pictures of the troops unloading on the coast of Cuba;
+pictures of the big warships sailing by; pictures of Dewey's flagship
+coming up the Hudson to its glory; pictures of the Spanish ships lying
+crushed in Manila harbour.
+
+Larmy and the reporter were sitting kicking their heels on the stone
+steps of the post-office opposite the screen on which the pictures were
+flickering. Some they saw and others they did not notice, for their talk
+was of David and of the strange things he had shown to them.
+
+"How did you ever fix it up in your mind?" asked Larmy.
+
+"I didn't fix it up. He was too many for me," was the reporter's answer.
+
+"The little rooster couldn't have faked it up?" questioned Larmy.
+
+"No--but he might have hypnotised us--or something."
+
+"Yes--but still, he might have been hypnotised by something himself,"
+suggested Larmy, and then added: "That thing he did with the
+linotype--say, wasn't that about the limit? And yet nothing has come of
+that prophecy. That's the trouble. I've seen dozens of those things, and
+they always just come up to the edge of proving themselves, but always
+jump back. There is always----"
+
+"My God, Larmy, look--look!" cried the reporter.
+
+And the two men looked at the screen before them, just as the backward
+sway of the crowd had ceased and horror was finding a gasping voice upon
+the lips of the women; for there, walking as naturally as life, out of
+the background of the picture, came David Lewis with his dark sleeves
+rolled up, his peaked army hat on the back of his head, a bucket in his
+hand, and as he stopped and grinned at the crowd--between the
+lightning-flashes of the kinetoscope--they could see him wave his free
+hand. He stood there while a laugh covered his features, and he put his
+hand in his pocket and drew out a key-ring, which he waved, holding it
+by some long, stemlike instrument. Then he snapped back into nothing.
+
+And the operator of the machine, being in a hurry to catch the
+ten-thirty train, went on with his picture-show and gave us President
+McKinley and Mark Hanna sitting on the front steps of the home in
+Canton, then followed the photograph of the party around the big table
+signing the treaty of peace. As the crowd loosened and dissolved, Larmy
+and the reporter stood silently waiting. Then, when they could get away
+together, the reporter said:
+
+"Come, let's go over to the shop and think about this thing."
+
+When they opened the office door, the rank odour of the machinery came
+to them with sickening force. They left the front door open and raised
+the windows. The reporter began using a chisel on the top of a little
+box with a Government frank on it, that had been placed upon the
+music-box in the corner.
+
+"We may as well see what David sent home," he grunted, as he jerked at
+the stubborn nails, "anyway, I've got a theory."
+
+Larmy was smoking hard. "Yes," he replied after a time; "we might as
+well open it now as any time. The letter said all his things would be
+found there. I guess he didn't have a great deal. Poor little devil,
+there was no one much to get things for but you fellows and maybe me, if
+he thought of us."
+
+By this time the box was opened, and the reporter was scooping things
+out upon the floor. There was an army uniform, that had something clinky
+in the pockets, and wrapped in a magenta silk handkerchief was a carved
+piece of ivory. In a camera plate-box was a rose, faded and crumbly, a
+chip-diamond ring, a bangle bracelet, a woman's glove and a photograph.
+These Larmy looked at as he smoked. They meant nothing to him, but the
+reporter dived into the clothes for the clinky things. He came up with a
+bunch of keys, and on it was the long brass lever which unlocked the
+music in the box.
+
+"Here," he said as he jingled the keys, "is the last link in our chain."
+And he rose and went over to the box, uncovered it, and jabbed in the
+lever with a nervous hand. There was a rolling and clinking inside.
+Then, slowly, a harmony rose, and the tinkling that came from the box
+resolved itself into a melody that filled the room. It was strong and
+clear and powerful, and seemed to have a certain passion in it that may
+have been struck like flint fire from the time and the place and the
+spirit of the occasion. The two men stared dumbly as they listened. The
+sound rose stronger and stronger; over and over again the song repeated
+itself; then very gently its strength began to fail; and finally it sank
+into a ghostly tinkle that still carried the melody till it faded into
+silence.
+
+"That," said the reporter, "is the song that was in his heart--'Love's
+Golden Dream.' I'm satisfied."
+
+"The last link," shuddered Larmy. "That which seemed corporeal has
+melted 'as a breath into the wind.'"
+
+The reporter shovelled the debris into the box, pushed it under a desk,
+and the two men hurried to close the office. As they stood on the
+threshold a moment, while the reporter clicked the key in the lock, a
+paper rustled and they heard a mouse scamper across the floor inside the
+empty room.
+
+"Let's go home," shivered Larmy. They started north, which was the short
+way home, but Larmy took hold of his companion's arm and said: "No,
+let's go this way: there's an electric light here on the corner, and
+it's dark down there."
+
+And so they turned into the white, sputtering glare and walked on
+without words.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+The Coming of the Leisure Class
+
+
+We all are workers in our town, as people are in every small town. It is
+always proper to ask what a man does for a living with us, for none of
+us has money enough to live without work, and until the advent of
+Beverly Amidon, our leisure class consisted of Red Martin, the gambler,
+the only man in town with nothing to do in the middle of the day; and
+the black boys who loafed on the south side of the bank building through
+the long afternoons until it was time to deliver the clothes which their
+wives and mothers had washed. Everyone else in town works, and,
+excepting an occasional picnic, there is no social activity among the
+men until after sundown. But five years ago Beverly Amidon came to town,
+and brought with him a large leisure and a taste for society which made
+him easily the "glass of fashion and the mould of form" not only in our
+little community, but all over this part of the State. Beverly and his
+mother, who had come to make their home with her sister, in one of the
+big houses on the hill, had money. How much, we had no idea. In a small
+town when one has "money" no one knows just how much or how little, but
+it must be over fifteen thousand dollars, otherwise one is merely "well
+fixed."
+
+[Illustration: And brought with him a large leisure and a taste for
+society]
+
+But Beverly was a blessing to our office. We never could have filled the
+society column Saturday without him, for he was a continuous social
+performance. He was the first man in town who dared to wear a flannel
+tennis suit on the streets, and he was a whole year ahead of the other
+boys with his Panama hat. It was one of those broad-brimmed Panamas,
+full of heart-interest, that made him look like a romantic barytone, and
+when under that gala façade he came tripping into the office in his
+white duck clothes, with a wide Windsor tie, Miss Larrabee, the society
+editor, who was the only one of us with whom he ever had any business,
+would pull the string that unhooked the latch of the gate to her section
+of the room and say, without looking up: "Come into the garden, Maud."
+To which he made invariable reply: "Oh, Miss Larrabee, don't be so
+sarcastic! I have a little item for you."
+
+The little item was always an account of one of his social triumphs. And
+there was a long list of them to his credit. He introduced ping-pong; he
+gave us our first "pit party"; he held the first barn dance given in the
+county; his was our first "tacky party"; and he gave the first
+progressive buggy ride the young people had ever enjoyed, and seven
+girls afterward confessed that on the evening of that affair he hadn't
+been in the buggy with them five minutes before he began driving with
+one hand--and his right hand at that. Still, when the crowd assembled
+for supper at Flat Rock, the girls didn't hold his left handiwork
+against him, and they admitted that he was just killing when he put on
+one of their hats and gave an imitation of a girl from Bethany College
+who had been visiting in town the week before. Beverly was always the
+life of the company. He could make three kinds of salad dressing, two
+kinds of lobster Newburgh and four Welsh rarebits, and was often the
+sole guest of honour at the afternoon meetings of the T. T. T. girls,
+before whom he was always willing to show his prowess. Sometimes he
+gave chafing-dish parties whereat he served ginger ale and was real
+devilish.
+
+He used to ride around the country bare-headed with two or three girls
+when honest men were at work, and he acquired a fine leather-coloured
+tan. He tried organising a polo club, but the ponies from the delivery
+waggons that were available after six o'clock did not take training
+well, and he gave up polo. In making horse-back riding a social
+diversion he taught a lot of fine old family buggy horses a number of
+mincing steps, so that thereafter they were impossible in the family
+phaeton. He thereby became unpopular with a number of the heads of
+families, and he had to introduce bridge whist in the old married set to
+regain their favour. This cost him the goodwill of the preachers, and he
+gave a Japanese garden party for the Epworth League to restore himself
+in the church where he was accustomed to pass the plate on Sundays. Miss
+Larrabee used to call him the first aid to the ennuied. But the Young
+Prince, who chased runaways teams and wrote personal items, never
+referred to him except as "Queen of the Hand-holders." For fun we once
+printed Beverly Amidon's name among those present at a Mothers' League
+meeting, and it was almost as much of a hit in the town as the time we
+put the words, "light refreshments were served and the evening was spent
+in cards and dancing," at the close of an account of a social meeting of
+the Ministerial Alliance.
+
+The next time Beverly brought in his little item he stopped long enough
+to tell us that he thought that the people who laughed at our obvious
+mistake in the list of guests of the Mothers' League were rather coarse.
+One word brought on two, and as it was late in the afternoon, and the
+paper was out, we bade Beverly sit down and tell us the story of his
+life, and his real name; for Miss Larrabee had declared a dozen times
+that Beverly Amidon sounded so much like a stage name that she was
+willing to bet that his real name was Jabez Skaggs.
+
+Beverly's greatest joy was in talking about his social conquests in
+Tiffin, Ohio; therefore he soon was telling us that there was so much
+culture in Tiffin, such a jolly lot of girls, so many pleasant homes,
+and a most extraordinary atmosphere of refinement. He rattled along,
+telling us what great sport they used to have running down to Cleveland
+for theatre-parties, and how easy it was to 'phone to Toledo and get the
+nicest crowd of boys one could wish to come over to the parties, and how
+Tiffin was famous all over that part of Ohio for its exclusive families
+and its week-end house-parties.
+
+The Young Prince sat by listening for a time and then got up and leaned
+over the railing around Miss Larrabee's desk. Beverly was confiding to
+us how he got up the sweetest living pictures you ever saw and took them
+down to Cleveland, where they made all kinds of money for the King's
+Daughters. He told what gorgeous costumes the girls wore and what
+stunning backgrounds he rigged up. The Young Prince winked at Miss
+Larrabee as he straightened up and started for the door. Then he let
+fly: "Were you Psyche at the Pool in that show, or a Mellin's Food
+Baby?"
+
+But Beverly deigned no reply and a little later in the conversation
+remarked that the young men in this town were very bad form. He thought
+that he had seen some who were certainly not gentlemen. He really
+didn't see how the young ladies could endure to have such persons in
+their set. He confided to Miss Larrabee that at a recent lawn-party he
+had come upon a young man, who should be nameless, with his arm about a
+young woman's waist.
+
+"And, Miss Larrabee," continued Beverly in his solemnest tones, "A young
+man who will put his arm around a girl will go further--yes, Miss
+Larabee--much further. He will kiss her!" Whereat he nodded his head and
+shook it at the awful thought.
+
+Miss Larrabee drew in a shocked breath and gasped:
+
+"Do you really think so, Mr. Amidon? I couldn't imagine such a thing!"
+
+He had a most bedizened college fraternity pin, which he was forever
+lending to the girls. During his first year in town, Miss Larrabee told
+us, at least a dozen girls had worn the thing. Wherefore she used to
+call it the Amidon Loan Exhibit.
+
+He introduced golf into our town, and was able to find six men to join
+his fifteen young ladies in the ancient sport. Two preachers, a young
+dentist and three college professors were the only male creatures who
+dared walk across our town in plaid stockings and knickerbockers, and
+certainly it hurt their standing at the banks, for the town frowned on
+golf, and confined its sport to baseball in the summer, football in the
+autumn, and checkers in the winter.
+
+That was a year ago. In the autumn something happened to Beverly, and he
+had to go to work. There was nothing in our little town for him, so he
+went to Kansas City. He did not seem to "make it" socially there, for he
+wrote to the girls that Kansas City was cold and distant and that
+everything was ruled by money. He explained that there were some nice
+people, but they did not belong to the fast set. He was positively
+shocked, he wrote, at what he heard of the doings at the Country
+Club--so different from the way things went in Tiffin, Ohio.
+
+For a long time we did not hear his name mentioned in the office.
+Finally there came a letter addressed to Miss Larrabee. In it Beverly
+said that he had found his affinity. "She is not rich," he admitted,
+"but," he added, "she belongs to an old, aristocratic, Southern family,
+through reduced circumstances living in retirement; very exclusive, very
+haughty. I have counted it a privilege to be constantly associated with
+people of such rare distinction. Her mother is a grand dame of the old
+school who has opened her home to a few choice paid guests who feel, as
+I do, that it is far more refreshing socially to partake of the gracious
+hospitality of her secluded home than to live in the noisy, vulgar
+hotels of the city. It was in this relation at her mother's home that I
+met the woman who is to join her lot with mine." Thereafter followed the
+date and place of the wedding, a description of the bride's dress, an
+account of her lineage back to the "Revolutionary Georgia Governor of
+that name," and fifty cents in stamps for extra papers containing an
+account of the wedding.
+
+In time we hope to teach our young men to roll down their shirt-sleeves
+in the summer, our girls to wear their hats, our horses to quit prancing
+in the shafts of the family buggy. In time bridge whist will wear itself
+out, in time our social life will resume its old estate, and the owners
+of the five dress-suits in town will return to their former distinction.
+In time caste lines set by the advent of the leisure class will be
+obliterated, and it will be no longer bad form for the dry-goods clerk
+to dance with the grocery clerk's wife at the Charity Ball. But, come
+what may, we shall always know that there was a time in the social
+history of our town when we danced the two-step as they dance it in
+Tiffin, Ohio, and wore knee-breeches and plaid stockings, and quit work
+at four o'clock. Those were great days--"the glory that was Greece, the
+grandeur that was Rome."
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+The Bolton Girl's "Position"
+
+
+When she said she would like to "accept a position" with our paper, it
+was all over between us. After that we knew that she was at least highly
+improbable if not entirely impossible. But then we might have expected
+as much from a girl who called herself Maybelle. There is, however, this
+much to be said in Maybelle's favour: she was persistent. She did not
+let go till it thundered! We could have stood it well enough if she had
+limited her campaign for a job on the paper to an occasional call at the
+office. But she had a fiendish instinct which told her who were the
+friends we liked most to oblige: the banker, for instance, who carried
+our overdrafts, the leading advertiser, the chairman of the printing
+committee of the town council--and she found ways to make them ask if we
+couldn't do something for Miss Bolton. She could teach school; indeed,
+she had a place in the Academy. But she loathed school-teaching. She
+had always felt that, if she could once get a start, she could make a
+name for herself.
+
+She had written something that she called "A Critique on Hamlet," which
+she submitted to us, and was deeply pained when we told her that we
+didn't care for editorial matter; that what our paper needed was the
+names of the people in our own country town and county, printed as many
+times a day or a week or a month as they could be put into type. We
+tried to tell her that more important to us than the influence of the
+Celtic element on our national life and literature was the fact that
+John Jones of Lebo--that is to say, red John, as distinguished from
+black John--or Jones the tinner, or Jones of the Possum Holler
+settlement was in town with a load of hay. "Other papers," we explained
+carefully, while she looked as sympathetic and intelligent as a collie,
+"other papers might be interested in the radio-activity of uranium X;
+they might care to print articles on the psychological phenomena of
+mobs"--to which she snapped eager agreement with her eyes--"others,
+with entire propriety, might be interested in inorganic evolution"--and
+she cheeped "yes, yes" with feverish intensity--"but in our little local
+paper we cared only for the person who could tell our readers with the
+most delicacy and precision how many spoons Mrs. Worthington had to
+borrow for her party, who had the largest number of finger-bowls in
+town, what Mrs. Conklin paid for the broilers she served at her party
+last February, and the name of the country woman who raised them, and
+why it was that all the women failed to make Jennie's recipe for
+sunshine cake work when they tried it." Such are the things that
+interest our people, and he, she or it who can turn in two or three
+columns a day of items setting forth these things in a good-natured way,
+so that the persons mentioned will only grin and wonder who told it, is
+good for ten dollars of our money every Saturday night.
+
+Maybelle thought it was such interesting work, and her eyes floated in
+tears of happiness at the thought of such joy. If she could only have a
+chance! It would be just lovely--simply grand, and she knew she could do
+it! Something in her innermost soul thrilled with a tintinabulation that
+made her quiver with anticipation. Whereupon she went out and came back
+in three days with five sheets of foolscap on which she had written an
+article beginning: "When Memory draws aside the curtains of her magic
+chamber, revealing the pictures meditation paints, and we see through
+the windows of our dreams the sweet vale of yesterday, lying outside and
+beyond; when stern Ambition, with relentless hand, turns us away from
+all this to ride in the sombre chariot of Duty--then it is that
+entrancing Pleasure beckons us back to sit by Memory's fire and sip our
+tea with Maiden meditation." What it was all about no one ever found
+out; but the Young Prince at the local desk who read it clear through
+said that sometimes he thought that it was a report of a fire and at
+other times it seemed like a dress-goods catalogue. It would have made
+four columns. As he put the roll back in the drawer the Young Prince
+rose and paced grandly out. At the front door he stopped and said:
+"You'll never make anything out of her--she's a handholder! When a girl
+begins to get corns on her hands, I notice she has mush on the brain!"
+
+[Illustration: Sometimes he thought it was a report of a fire and at
+other times it seemed like a dress-goods catalogue]
+
+But Maybelle returned, and we went all over the same ground again. We
+explained that what we wanted was short items--two or three lines
+each--little references to home doings; something telling who has
+company, who is sick, who is putting shingles on the barn or an "L" on
+the house. And she said "Oh, yes!" so passionately that it seemed as
+though she would bark or put her front feet on the table. One felt like
+taking her jaws in his hands and pulling her ears.
+
+The next time she came in she said that if we would just try her--give
+her something to do--she was sure she could show us how well she could
+do it. On a venture, and partly to get rid of her, we sent her to the
+district convention of the Epworth League to write up the opening
+meeting. About noon of the next day she brought in three sermons, and
+said that she didn't get the list of officers nor the names of the choir
+because they were all people who lived here and everyone knew them. Then
+we explained in short, simple sentences that the sermons were of no
+value, and that the names were what we desired. She dropped her eyes and
+said meekly "Oh!" and told us how sorry she was. Also she said that if
+it wasn't for a meeting of the T. T. T. girls that afternoon she would
+go back and get the names. When she went out, the Young Prince, sitting
+by the window with his pencil behind his ear and his feet on the table,
+said: "I bet she can make the grandest fudge!" "And such lovely angel
+food," put in Miss Larrabee, who was busy writing up the Epworth League
+convention.
+
+Miss Bolton's name was always among the lists we printed of the guests
+at the Entre Nous Card Club, the Imperial Dancing Club, the "Giddy Young
+Things" Club, the Art Club and the Shakespeare Club. But when she came
+to the office she was full of anxiety at the frivolity of society. She
+said that she so longed for intellectual companionship that she felt
+sometimes as if she must fly to a place where she could find a soul that
+would feel in unison with the infinite that thrilled her being. Far be
+it from her to wish to coin the pulsations of her soul, but papa and
+mamma did need her help so. She accented papa and mamma on the last
+syllable and leaned forward and looked upward like a shirtwaist Madonna.
+But writing locals someway didn't appeal to her. She wondered if we
+could use a serial story. And then she went on: "Oh, I have some of the
+sweetest things in my head! I know I could write them. They just tingle
+through my blood like wine. I know I could write them--such sublime
+things--but when I sit down to put them on paper something always comes
+up that prevents my going on with them. There are dozens whirling
+through my brain begging to be written. There is one about the earl who
+has imprisoned the young princess in a dungeon, and her lover, a knight
+of the cross, comes home from a crusade and is put in the cell next to
+her. A bird that she has been feeding through her prison window takes a
+lock of her golden hair to the window where her lover is looking out
+across the beautiful world, not knowing that she, too, has fallen into
+the earl's clutches. And, oh, yes! there is another about Cornelia who
+lived in a moated tower, and all the dukes and lords and kings in the
+land had laid suit to her hand, and she could find none who came up to
+her highest ideal, so she set them a task--and, oh, a lot more about
+what they did; I haven't thought that out--but anyway she married the
+red duke Wolfang who spurned her task and took her by night with his
+retainers away from the tower, saying her love was his Holy Grail and to
+get her was the object of his pilgrimage. Oh, it's just grand."
+
+No, we don't use serials and when we do we buy them in stereotyped
+plates by the pound. This made Miss Bolton droop, with another
+disappointed "Oh." The grain of the world seems so coarse when one looks
+at it closely.
+
+We did not see Miss Bolton at the office for a long time after the duke
+abducted the lady in the moated grange, but we received a poem signed M.
+B. "To Dan Cupid," and another on "My Heart of Fire." Also there came an
+anonymous communication in strangely familiar fat vertical handwriting
+to the effect that "some people in this town think that if a young lady
+has a gentleman friend call on her more than twice a week it is their
+business to assume a courtship. They should know that there are souls
+on this earth whose tendrils reach into the infinite beyond the gross
+materiality of this mundane sphere to a destiny beyond the stars." At
+the bottom of the page were the words: "Please publish and oblige a
+subscriber."
+
+The next that we heard of Miss Bolton was that she was running pink and
+blue baby-ribbon through her white things, and was expecting a linen
+shower from the T. T. T. girls, a silver shower from the "Giddy Young
+Things," a handkerchief shower from the Entre Nous girls, and a kitchen
+shower from the Imperial Club. Miss Larrabee, the society editor, began
+to hate Miss Bolton with the white-hot hate which all society editors
+turn on all brides. Miss Larrabee was authority for the statement that
+Maybelle had used five hundred yards of baby-ribbon--pink and blue and
+white and yellow--in her trousseau, and that she was bestowing the same
+passionate fervour on her hemstitching and tucking that she had wasted
+on literature; that she was helping papa and mamma by shouldering the
+biggest wedding on them since the Tomlinsons went into bankruptcy after
+their firework ceremonial. Miss Larrabee said that Papa Bolton's
+livery-stable was burning up so fast that she wanted to call out the
+fire department, and that Mamma Bolton made her think of the
+patent-medicine testimonials we printed from "poor tired women."
+
+The day of the wedding the blow came. A very starched-up little boy with
+strawberry juice frescoed around his mouth brought in a note from
+Maybelle and a tightly-rolled manuscript tied with blue baby-ribbon. In
+the note she said that she thought it would be so romantic to "write up
+her own wedding--recalling the dear, dead days when she was a neophyte
+in letters." We handed the manuscript to Miss Larrabee, from whom, as
+she read, came snorts: "'Drawing-room!' Huh! 'Music-room.' Heavens to
+Betsy! 'Peculiar style of beauty!' Oh, joy! 'Looked like a wood-nymph in
+the morn.' Wouldn't that saturate you! 'The Apollo-like beauty of the
+groom.'" Miss Larrabee groaned as she rose, and putting her raincoat on
+the floor by her chair she exclaimed: "Do you people know what I am
+going to do? I have got to lie right down here and have a fit!"
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+"By the Rod of His Wrath"
+
+
+Saturday afternoons, when the town is full, and farmers are coming in to
+the office to pay their subscriptions for the _Weekly_, it is our habit,
+after the paper is out, to sit in the office and look over Main Street,
+where perhaps five hundred people are milling, and consider with one
+another the nature of our particular little can of angle-worms and its
+relation to the great forces that move the world. The town often seems
+to us to be dismembered from the earth, and to be a chunk of humanity
+drifting through space by itself, like a vagrant star, forgotten of the
+law that governs the universe. Go where our people will, they find
+change; but when they come home, they look out of the hack as they ride
+through town, seeing the old familiar buildings and bill-boards and
+street-signs, and say with surprise, as Mathew Boris said after a busy
+and eventful day in Kansas City, where he had been marketing his
+steers: "Well, the old town seems to keep right on, just the same."
+
+The old men in town seem always to have been old, and though the
+middle-aged do sometimes step across the old-age line, the young men
+remain perennially young, and when they grow fat or dry up, and their
+hair thins and whitens, they are still called by their diminutive names,
+and to most of us they are known as sons of the old men. Here a new
+house goes up, and there a new store is built, but they rise slowly, and
+everyone in town has time to go through them and over them and criticise
+the architectural taste of the builders, so that by the time a building
+is finished it seems to have grown into the original consciousness of
+the people, and to be a part of their earliest memories. We send our
+children to Sunday-school, and we go to church and learn how God's
+rewards or punishments fell upon the men of old, as they were faithful
+or recreant; but we don't seem to be like the men of old, for we are
+neither very good nor very bad--hardly worth God's while to sort us over
+for any uncommon lot. Only once, in the case of John Markley, did the
+Lord reach into our town and show His righteous judgment. And that
+judgment was shown so clearly through the hearts of our people that very
+likely John Markley does not consider it the judgment of God at all, but
+the prejudice of the neighbours.
+
+When we have been talking over the case of John Markley in the office we
+have generally ended by wondering whether God--or whatever one cares to
+call the force that operates the moral laws, as well as those that in
+our ignorance we set apart as the physical laws of the world--whether
+God moves by cataclysm and accidents, or whether He moves with blessing
+or chastisement, through human nature as it is, in the ordinary business
+of the lives of men. But we have never settled that in our office any
+more than they have in the great schools, and as John Markley, game to
+the end, has never said what he thought of the town's treatment of him,
+it will never be known which side of our controversy is right.
+
+Years ago, perhaps as long ago as the drought of seventy-four, men began
+calling him "Honest John Markley." He was the fairest man in town, and
+he made money by it, for when he opened his little bank Centennial year,
+which was the year of the big wheat crop, farmers stood in line half an
+hour at a time, at the door of his bank, waiting to give him their
+money. He was a plain, uncollared, short-whiskered man, brown-haired and
+grey-eyed, whose wife always made his shirts and, being a famous cook in
+town, kept him round and chubby. He referred to her as "Ma," and she
+called him "Pa Markley" so insistently that when we elected him State
+Senator, after he made his bank a National bank, in 1880, the town and
+county couldn't get used to calling him Senator Markley, so "Pa Markley"
+it was until after his Senatorial fame had been forgotten. Their
+children had grown up and left home before the boom of the eighties
+came--one girl went to California and the boy to South America;--and
+when John Markley began to write his wealth in six figures--which is
+almost beyond the dreams of avarice in a town like ours--he and his wife
+were lonely and knew little what to do with their income.
+
+They bought new furniture for the parlour, and the Ladies' Missionary
+Society of the First Methodist Church, the only souls that saw it with
+the linen jackets off, say it was lovely to behold; they bought
+everything the fruit-tree man had in his catalogue, and their five acres
+on Exchange Street were pimpled over with shrubs that never bloomed and
+with trees that never bore fruit. He passed the hat in church--being a
+brother-in-law to the organisation, as he explained; sang "Tramp, Tramp,
+Tramp, the Boys Are Marching" at Grand Army entertainments, and always
+as an encore dragged "Ma" out to sing with him "Dear, Dear, What Can the
+Matter Be." She was a skinny, sharp-eyed, shy little woman in her late
+fifties when the trouble came. She rose at every annual meeting of the
+church to give a hundred dollars but her voice never lasted until she
+got through announcing her donation, and she sat down demurely, blushing
+and looking down her nose as though she had disgraced the family. She
+had lost a brother in the war, and never came further out of mourning
+than purple flowers in her bonnet. She bought John Markley's clothes, so
+that his Sunday finery contained nothing giddier than a grey made-up
+tie, that she pinned around the collars which her own hands had ironed.
+
+Slowly as their fortune piled up, and people said they had a million,
+his brown beard grizzled a little, and his brow crept up and up and his
+girth stretched out to forty-four. But his hands did not whiten or
+soften, and though he was "Honest John," and every quarter-section of
+land that he bought doubled in value by some magic that he only seemed
+to know, he kept the habits of his youth, rose early, washed at the
+kitchen basin, and was the first man at his office in the morning. At
+night, after a hard day's work he smoked a cob-pipe in the basement,
+where he could spit into the furnace and watch the fire until nine
+o'clock, when he put out the cat and bedded down the fire, while "Ma"
+set the buckwheat cakes. They never had a servant in their house.
+
+We used to see John Markley pass the office window a dozen times a day,
+a hale, vigorous man, whose heels clicked hard on the sidewalk as he
+came hurrying along--head back and shoulders rolling. He was a powerful,
+masculine, indomitable creature, who looked out of defiant, cold,
+unblinking eyes as though he were just about to tell the whole world to
+go to hell! The town was proud of him. He was our "prominent citizen,"
+and when he was elected president of the district bankers' association,
+and his name appeared in the papers as a possible candidate for United
+States Senator or Minister to Mexico or Secretary of the Interior, we
+were glad that "Honest John Markley" was our fellow-townsman.
+
+And then came the crash. Man is a curious creature, and, even if he is
+nine parts good, the old Adam in him must burn out one way or another in
+his youth, or there comes a danger period at the height of his middle
+life when his submerged tenth that has been smouldering for years flares
+up and destroys him. Wherefore the problem which we have never been able
+to solve, though we have talked it over in the office a dozen times:
+whether John Markley had begun to feel, before he met the Hobart woman,
+that he wasn't getting enough out of life for the money he had invested
+in it; or whether she put the notion in his head.
+
+It is scarcely correct to speak of his having met her, for she grew up
+in the town, and had been working for the Markley Mortgage and
+Investment Company for half-a-dozen years before he began to notice her.
+From a brassy street-gadding child of twelve, whose mother crowded her
+into grown-up society before she left the high school, and let her spell
+her name Ysabelle, she had grown into womanhood like a rank weed; had
+married at nineteen, was divorced at twenty-one, and having tried music
+teaching and failed, china painting and failed, she learned stenography
+by sheer force of her own will, with no instruction save that in her
+book, and opened an office for such work as she could get, while aiming
+for the best job in town--the position of cashier and stenographer for
+the Markley Mortgage Company. It took her three years to get in and
+another year to make herself invaluable. She was big and strong, did the
+work of two men for the pay of one, and for five years John Markley, who
+saw that she had plenty of work to do, did not seem to know that she was
+on earth. But one day "Alphabetical" Morrison, who was in our office
+picking up his bundle of exchanges, looked rather idly out of the
+window, and suddenly rested his roving eyes upon John Markley and Mrs.
+Hobart, standing and talking in front of the post office. The man at the
+desk near Morrison happened to be looking out at that moment, and he,
+too, saw what Morrison saw--which was nothing at all, except a man
+standing beside a woman. Probably the pair had met in exactly the same
+place at exactly the same time, and had exchanged an idle word daily for
+five years! and no one had noticed it, but that day Morrison
+unconsciously put his hand to his chin and scratched his jaw, and his
+eyes and the man's at the desk beside him met in a surprised
+interrogation, and Morrison's mouth and nose twitched, and the other man
+said, as he turned his face into his work, "Well, wouldn't that get
+you!"
+
+The conversation went no further. Neither could have said what he saw.
+But there is something in every human creature--a survival of our jungle
+days, which lets our eyes see more than our consciousness records in
+language. And these men, who saw Markley and the woman, could not have
+defined the canine impression which he gave them. Yet it was there. The
+volcano was beginning to smoke.
+
+It was a month later before the town saw the flames. During that time
+John Markley had been walking to and from his midday dinner with Isabel
+Hobart, had been helping her on and off with her wraps in the office,
+and had been all but kicking up the dirt behind him and barking around
+her, as the clerks there told us, without causing comment. An honest man
+always has such a long start when he runs away from himself that no one
+misses him until he is beyond extradition. Matters went along thus for
+nearly a year before the woman in the cottage on Exchange Street knew
+how they stood. And that speaks well of our town; for we are not a mean
+town, and if anyone ever had our sympathy it was Mrs. Markley, as she
+went about her quiet ways, giving her missionary teas, looking after the
+poor of her church, making her famous doughnuts for the socials, doing
+her part at the Relief Corps chicken-pie suppers, digging her club paper
+out of the encyclopædia, and making over her black silk the third time
+for every day. If John Markley was cross with her in that time--and the
+neighbours say that he was; if he sat for hours in the house without
+saying a word, and grumbled and flew into a rage at the least ruffling
+of the domestic waters--his wife kept her grief to herself, and even
+when she left town to visit her daughter in California no one knew what
+she knew.
+
+A month passed, two months passed, and John Markley's name had become a
+by-word and a hissing. Three months passed, a year went by, and still
+the wife did not return. And then one day Ab Handy, who sometimes
+prepared John Markley's abstracts, came into our office and whispered to
+the man at the desk that there was a little paper filed in the court
+which, under the circumstances, Mr. Markley would rather we would say as
+little about as is consistent with our policy in such cases. Handy
+didn't say what it was, and backed out bowing and eating dirt, and we
+sent a boy hot-foot to the court-house to find out what had been filed.
+The boy came back with a copy of a petition for divorce that had been
+entered by John Markley, alleging desertion. John Markley did not face
+the town when he brought his suit, but left for Chicago on the
+afternoon train, and was gone nearly a month. The broken little woman
+did not come back to contest the case, and the divorce was granted.
+
+The day before his marriage to Isabel Hobart, John Markley shaved off
+his grizzled brown beard, and showed the town a face so strong and
+cunning and brutal that men were shocked; they said that she wished to
+make him appear young, and the shave did drop ten years from his
+countenance; but it uncovered his soul so shamelessly that it seemed
+immodest to look at his face. Upon the return from the wedding trip, the
+employees of the Markley Mortgage Company, at John Markley's suggestion,
+gave a reception for the bride and groom, and the Lord laid the first
+visible stripe on John Markley while he stood with his bride for three
+hours, waiting for the thousand invited guests who never came.
+"Alphabetical" Morrison, who owed John Markley money, and had to go,
+told us in the office the next day that John Markley in evening clothes,
+with his great paunch swathed in a white silk vest, smirking like a
+gorged jackal, showing his fellow-townsmen for the first time his
+coarse, yellow teeth and his thin, cruel lips, looked like some horrible
+cartoon of his former self. Colonel Morrison did not describe the bride,
+but she passed our office that day, going the rounds of the dry-goods
+stores, giggling with the men clerks--a picture of sin that made men wet
+their lips. She was big, oversexed, and feline; rattling in silks, with
+an aura of sensuousness around her which seemed to glow like a coal,
+without a flicker of kindness or shame or sweetness, and which all the
+town knew instinctively must clinker into something black and ugly as
+the years went by.
+
+So the threshold of the cottage on Exchange Street was not darkened by
+our people. And when the big house went up--a palace for a country town,
+though it only cost John Markley $25,000--he, who had been so reticent
+about his affairs in other years, tried to talk to his old friends of
+the house, telling them expansively that he was putting it up so that
+the town would have something in the way of a house for public
+gatherings; but he aroused no responsive enthusiasm, and long before the
+big opening reception his fervour had been quenched. Though we are a
+curious people, and though we all were anxious to know how the inside of
+the new house looked, we did not go to the reception; only the socially
+impossible, and the travelling men's wives at the Metropole, whom Mrs.
+Markley had met when she was boarding during the week they moved,
+gathered to hear the orchestra from Kansas City, to eat the Topeka
+caterer's food, and to fall down on the newly-waxed floors of the
+Markley mansion. But our professional instinct at the office told us
+that the town was eager for news of that house, and we took three
+columns to write up the reception. Our description of the place began
+with the swimming pool in the cellar and ended with the ballroom in the
+third story.
+
+It took John Markley a long time to realise that the town was done with
+him, for there was no uprising, no demonstration, just a gradual
+loosening of his hold upon the community. In other years his neighbours
+had urged him and expected him to serve on the school-board, of which he
+had been chairman for a dozen years, but the spring that the big house
+was opened Mrs. Julia Worthington was elected in his place. At the June
+meeting of the Methodist Conference a new director was chosen to fill
+John Markley's place on the college board, and when he cancelled his
+annual subscription no one came to ask him to renew it. In the fall his
+party selected a new ward committeeman, and though Markley had been
+treasurer of the committee for a dozen years, his successor was named
+from the Worthington bank, and they had the grace not to come to Markley
+with the subscription-paper asking for money. It took some time for the
+sense of the situation to penetrate John Markley's thick skin; whereupon
+the fight began in earnest, and men around town said that John Markley
+had knocked the lid off his barrel. He doubled his donation to the
+county campaign fund; he crowded himself at the head of every
+subscription-paper; and frequently he brought us communications to
+print, offering to give as much money himself for the library, or the
+Provident Association, or the Y. M. C. A., as the rest of the town would
+subscribe combined. He mended church roofs under which he never had
+sat; he bought church bells whose calls he never heeded; and paid the
+greater part of the pipe-organ debts in two stone churches. Colonel
+Morrison remarked in the office one day that John Markley was raising
+the price of popular esteem so high that none but the rich could afford
+it. "But," chuckled the Colonel, "I notice old John hasn't got a corner
+on it yet, and he doesn't seem to have all he needs for his own use."
+The wrench that had torn open his treasure chest, had also loosened John
+Markley's hard face, and he had begun to smile. He became as affable as
+a man may who has lived for fifty years silent and self-contained. He
+beamed upon his old friends, and once or twice a week he went the rounds
+of the stores making small purchases, to let the clerks bask in his
+sunlight.
+
+If a new preacher came to town the Markleys went to his church, and Mrs.
+Markley tried to be the first woman to call on his wife.
+
+All the noted campaign speakers assigned to our town were invited to be
+the Markleys' guests, and Mrs. Markley sent her husband, red necktied,
+high-hatted and tailor-made, to the train to meet the distinguished
+guest. If the man was as much as a United States Senator, Markley hired
+the band, and in an open hack rode in solemn state with his prize
+through the town behind the tinkling cymbals, and then, with much
+punctility, took the statesman up and down Main Street afoot, into all
+the stores and offices, introducing him to the common people. At such
+times John Markley was the soul of cordiality; he seemed hungry for a
+kind look and a pleasant word with his old friends. About this time his
+defiant eyes began to lose their boring points, and to wander and hunt
+for something they had lost. When we had a State convention of the
+dominant party, the Markleys saw to it that the Governor and all the
+important people attending, with their wives, stopped in the big house.
+The Markleys gave receptions to them, which the men in our town dared
+not ignore, but sent their wives away visiting and went alone. This
+familiarity with politicians probably gave the Markleys the idea that
+they might help their status in the community if John Markley ran for
+Governor. He announced his candidacy, and the Kansas City papers, which
+did not appreciate the local situation, spoke well of him; but his boom
+died in the first month, when some of his old friends called at the back
+room of the bank to tell him that the Democrats would air his family
+affairs if he made another move. He looked up pitiably into Ab Handy's
+face when the men were done talking and said: "Don't you suppose they'll
+ever quit? Ain't they no statute of limitation?" And then he arose and
+stood by his desk with one arm akimbo and his other hand at his temple
+as he sighed: "Oh hell, Ab--what's the use? Tell 'em I'm out of it!"
+
+Mrs. Markley seems to have shut him out of the G. A. R., thinking maybe
+that the old boys and their wives were not of her social level, or
+perhaps she had some idea of playing even with them, because their wives
+had not recognised her; but she shut away much of her husband's social
+comfort when she barred his comrades, and they in turn grew harder
+toward him than they were at first. As the Markleys entered their second
+year, Mrs. Markley alone in the big house, with only the new people from
+the hotel to eat her dinners, and with only the beer-drinking crowd from
+the West Side to dance in the attic ballroom, had much time to think,
+and she bethought her of the lecturers who were upon the college lecture
+course, whereupon John Markley had to carve for authors and explorers,
+and an occasional Senator or Congressman, who, after a hard evening's
+work on the platform, paid for his dinner and lodging by sitting up on a
+gilded high-backed and uncomfortable chair in the stately reception-room
+of the Markley home, talking John Markley into a snore, before Isabel
+let them go to bed. Isabel sent the accounts of these affairs to the
+office for us to print, with the lists of invited guests, who never
+accepted. And the town grinned.
+
+At the end of two years John Markley's fat wit told him that it was a
+losing fight. He had been dropped from the head of the Merchants'
+Association; he was cut off from the executive committee of the Fair; he
+was not asked to serve on the railroad committee. His old friends, whom
+he asked over to spend the evening at his house, always had good
+excuses, which they gave him later over the telephone, and their wives,
+who used to call him by his first name, scarcely recognised him on the
+street. He quit coming to our office with pieces for the paper telling
+the town his views on this or that local matter; and gradually gave up
+the fight for his old place on the school board.
+
+The clerks in the Markley Mortgage Company office say that he fell into
+a moody way, and would come to the office and refuse to speak to anyone
+for hours. Also, as the big house often glowed until midnight for a
+dance of the socially impossible who used the Markley ballroom, rent
+free, as a convenience, John Markley grew to have a sleepy look by day,
+and lines came into his red, shaved face. He grew anxious about his
+health, and a hundred worries tightened his belt and shook his great fat
+hand, just the least in the world, and when through some gossip that his
+wife brought him from the kitchen he felt the scorn of an old friend
+burn his soul like a caustic, for many days he would brood over it.
+Finally care began to chisel down his flinty face, to cut the fat from
+his bull neck, so that the cords stood out, and, through staring in
+impotent rage and pain at the ceiling in the darkness of the night, red
+rims began to worm around his eyes. He was not sixty years old then,
+and he had lashed himself into seventy.
+
+However his money-cunning did not grow dull. He kept his golden touch
+and his impotent dollars piled higher and higher. The pile must have
+mocked Isabel Markley, for it could bring her nothing that she wanted.
+She stopped trying to give big parties and receptions. Her social
+efforts tapered down to little dinners for the new people in town. But
+as the dinner hour grew near she raged--so the servants said--whenever
+the telephone rang, and in the end she had to give up even the dinner
+scheme.
+
+[Illustration: As the dinner hour grew near she raged--so the servants
+said--whenever the telephone rang]
+
+So there came a time when they began to take trips to the seashore and
+the mountains, flitting from hotel to hotel. In the office we knew when
+they changed quarters, for at each resort John Markley would see the
+reporters and give out a long interview, which was generally prefaced by
+the statement that he was a prominent Western capitalist, who had
+refused the nomination for Governor or for Senator, or for whatever
+Isabel Markley happened to think of; and papers containing these
+interviews, marked in green ink, came addressed to the office in her
+stylish, angular hand. During grand opera season one might see the
+Markleys hanging about the great hotels of Chicago or Kansas City, he a
+tired, sleepy-faced, prematurely old man, who seemed to be counting the
+hours till bed-time, and she a tailored, rather overfed figure, with a
+freshly varnished face and unhealthy, bright, bold eyes, walking
+slightly ahead of her shambling companion, looking nervously about her
+in search of some indefinite thing that was gone from her life.
+
+One day John Markley shuffled into our office, bedizened as usual, and
+fumbled in his pocket for several minutes before he could find the copy
+of the _Mexican Herald_ containing the news of his boy's death in Vera
+Cruz. He had passed the time of life for tears, yet when he asked us to
+reprint the item he said sadly: "The old settlers will remember
+him--maybe. I don't know whether they will or not." He seemed a pitiful
+figure as he dragged himself out of the office--so stooped and weazened,
+and so utterly alone, but when he turned around and came back upon some
+second thought, his teeth snapped viciously as he snarled: "Here, give
+it back. I guess I don't want it printed. They don't care for me,
+anyway."
+
+The boys in his office told the boys in our office that the old man was
+cross and petulant that year, and there is no doubt that Isabel Markley
+was beginning to find her mess of pottage bitter. The women around town,
+who have a wireless system of collecting news, said that the Markleys
+quarrelled, and that she was cruel to him. Certain it is that she began
+to feed on young boys, and made the old fellow sit up in his evening
+clothes until impossible hours, for sheer appearance sake, while his bed
+was piled with the wraps of boys and girls from what our paper called
+the Hand-holders' Union, who were invading the Markley home, eating the
+Markley olives and canned lobster, and dancing to the music of the
+Markley pianola. Occasionally a young travelling man would be spoken of
+by these young people as Isabel Markley's fellow.
+
+Mrs. Markley began to make fun of her husband to the girls of the
+third-rate dancing set whose mothers let them go to her house; also, she
+reviled John Markley to the servants. It was known in the town that she
+nicknamed him the "Goat." As for Markley, the fight was gone from him,
+and his whole life was devoted to getting money. That part of his brain
+which knew the accumulative secret kept its tireless energy; but his
+emotions, his sensibilities, his passions seemed to be either atrophied
+or burned out, and, sitting at his desk in the back room of the Mortgage
+Company's offices, he looked like a busy spider spinning his web of gold
+around the town. It was the town theory that he and Isabel must have
+fought it out to a finish about the night sessions; for there came a
+time when he went to bed at nine o'clock, and she either lighted up and
+prepared to celebrate with the cheap people at home, or attached one of
+her young men, and went out to some impossible gathering--generally
+where there was much beer, and many risqué things said, and the women
+were all good fellows. And thus another year flew by.
+
+One night, when the great house was still, John Markley grew sick and,
+in the terror of death that, his office people say, was always with him,
+rose to call for help. In the dark hall, feeling for an electric-light
+switch, he must have lost his way, for he fell down the hard oak
+stairs. It was never known how long he lay there unable to move one-half
+of his body, but his wife stood nearly an hour at the front door that
+night, and when she finally switched on the light, she and the man with
+her saw Markley lying before them with one eye shut and with half his
+face withered and dead, the other half around the open eye quivering
+with hate. He choked on an oath, and shook at her a gnarled bare arm.
+Her face was flushed, and her tongue was unsure, but she laughed a
+shrill, wicked laugh and cried: "Ah, you old goat; don't you double your
+fist at me!"
+
+Whereupon she shuddered away from the shaking figure at her feet and
+scurried upstairs. And the man standing in the doorway, wondering what
+the old man had heard, wakened the house, and helped to carry John
+Markley upstairs to his bed.
+
+It was nearly three months before he could be wheeled to his office,
+where he still sits every day, spinning his golden web and filling his
+soul with poison. They say that, helpless as he is, he may live for a
+score of years. Isabel Markley knows how old she will be then. A
+thousand times she has counted it.
+
+To see our town of a summer twilight, with the families riding abroad
+behind their good old nags, under the overhanging elms that meet above
+our newly-paved streets, one would not think that there could exist in
+so lovely a place as miserable a creature as John Markley is; or as
+Isabel, his wife, for that matter. The town--out beyond Main Street,
+which is always dreary and ugly with tin gorgons on the cornices--the
+town is a great grove springing from a bluegrass sod, with porch boxes
+making flecks of colour among the vines; cannas and elephant ears and
+foliage plants rise from the wide lawns; and children bloom like moving
+flowers all through the picture.
+
+There are certain streets, like the one past the Markley mansion, upon
+which we make it a point always to drive with our visitors--show streets
+we may as well frankly call them--and one of these leads down a wide,
+handsome street out to the college. There the town often goes in its
+best bib and tucker to hear the lecturers whom Mrs. Markley feeds. Last
+winter one came who converted Dan Gregg--once Governor, but for ten
+years best known among us as the town infidel. The lecturer explained
+how matter had probably evolved from some one form--even the elements
+coming in a most natural way from a common source. He made it plain that
+all matter is but a form of motion; that atoms themselves are divided
+into ions and corpuscles, which are merely different forms of electrical
+motion, and that all this motion seems to tend to one form, which is the
+spirit of the universe. Dan said he had found God there, and, although
+the pious were shocked, in our office we were glad that Dan had found
+his God anywhere. While we were sitting in front of the office one fine
+evening this spring, looking at the stars and talking of Dan Gregg's God
+and ours, we began to wonder whether or not the God that is the spirit
+of things at the base of this material world might not be indeed the
+spirit that moves men to execute His laws. Men in the colleges to-day
+think they have found the moving spirit of matter; but do they know His
+wonderful being as well as the old Hebrew prophets knew it who wrote
+the Psalms and the Proverbs and the wisdom of the Great Book. That
+brought us back to the old question about John Markley. Was it God,
+moving in us, that punished Markley "by the rod of His wrath," that used
+our hearts as wireless stations for His displeasure to travel through,
+or was it the chance prejudice of a simple people? It was late when we
+broke up and left the office--Dan Gregg, Henry Larmy, the reporter, and
+old George. As we parted, looking up at the stars where our ways divided
+out under the elms, we heard, far up Exchange Street, the clatter of the
+pianola in the Markley home, and saw the high windows glowing like lost
+souls in the night.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+"A Bundle of Myrrh"
+
+
+One of the first things that a new reporter on our paper has to learn is
+the kinology of the town. Until he knows who is kin to whom, and how, a
+reporter is likely at any time to make a bad break. Now, the kinology of
+a country town is no simple proposition. After a man has spent ten years
+writing up weddings, births and deaths, attending old settlers' picnics,
+family reunions and golden weddings, he may run into a new line of kin
+that opens a whole avenue of hitherto unexplainable facts to him,
+showing why certain families line up in the ward primaries, and why
+certain others are fighting tooth and toe-nail.
+
+The only person in town who knows all of our kinology--and most of that
+in the county, where it is a separate and interminable study--is "Aunt"
+Martha Merryfield. She has lived here since the early fifties, and was a
+Perkins, one of the eleven Perkins children that grew up in town; and
+the Perkinses were related by marriage to the Mortons, of whom there are
+over fifty living adult descendants on the town-site now. So one begins
+to see why she is called "Aunt Martha" Merryfield. She is literally aunt
+to over a hundred people here, and the habit of calling her aunt has
+spread from them to the rest of the population.
+
+She lives alone in the big brick house on the hill, though her children
+and grandchildren and great-grandchildren are in and out all day and
+most of the night, so that she is not at all lonesome. She is the only
+person to whom we can look for accurate information about local history,
+and when a man dies who has been at all prominent in affairs of the town
+or county or State, we always call up "Aunt" Martha on the 'phone, or
+send a reporter to her, to learn the real printable and unprintable
+truth about him. She knows whom he "went with" before he was married,
+and why they "broke off," and what crowd he associated with in the early
+days; how he got his money, and what they used to "say" about him. If a
+family began putting on frills, she can tell how the head of the house
+got his start by stealing "aid" sent to the grasshopper sufferers and
+opening a store with the goods. If a woman begins speaking of the hired
+girl as her "maid," contrary to the vernacular rules of the town, Aunt
+Martha does not hesitate to bring up the subject of the flour-sack
+underwear which the woman wore when she was a girl during the drought of
+'60.
+
+Aunt Martha used to bring us flowers for the office table, and it was
+her delight to sit down and take out her corn-knife--as she called
+it--and go after the town shams. She has promised a dozen times to write
+an article for the paper, which she says we dare not print, entitled
+"Self-made Women I Have Known." She says that men were always bragging
+about how they had clerked, worked on farms, dug ditches and whacked
+mules across the plains before the railroads came; but that their wives
+insisted that they were princesses of the royal blood. She says she is
+going to include in her Self-made Women only those who have worked out,
+and she maintains that we will be surprised at the list.
+
+Her particular animosity in the town is Mrs. Julia Neal Worthington.
+Aunt Martha told us that when Tim Neal came to town he had a brogue you
+could scrape with a knife and an "O" before his name you could hoop a
+hogshead with. "And that woman," exclaimed Aunt Martha, when she was
+under full sail, "that woman, because she has two bookcases in the front
+room and reads the book-reviews in the _Delineator_, thinks that she is
+cultured. When her folks first came to town they were as poor as Job's
+turkey, which was not to their discredit--everyone was poor in those
+days. The old man Neal was as honest an old Mick as you'd meet in a
+day's journey, or at a fair, and he used to run a lemonade and peanut
+stand down by the bank corner. But his girls, who were raised on it,
+until they began teaching school, used to refer to the peanut stand as
+'papa's hobby,' pretend that he only ran it for recreation, and say:
+'Now _why_ do you suppose papa enjoys it?--We just can't get him to give
+it up!' And now Julia is president of the Woman's Federation, has
+stomach trouble, has had two operations, and is suffering untold agonies
+with acute culturitis. And yet," Aunt Martha would say through a
+beatific smile, "she's a good-enough woman in many ways, and I wouldn't
+say anything against her for the world."
+
+Once Miss Larrabee, the society editor, brought back this from a visit
+to Aunt Martha: "I know, my dear, that your paper says there are no
+cliques and crowds in society in this town, and that it is so
+democratic. But you and I know the truth. We know about society in this
+town. We know that if there ever was a town that looked like a side of
+bacon--streak of lean and streak of fat all the way down--it is this
+blessed place. Crowds?--why, I've lived here over fifty years and it was
+always crowds. 'Way back in the days when the boys used to pick us up
+and carry us across Elm Creek when we went to dances, there were crowds.
+The girls who crossed on the boys' backs weren't considered quite proper
+by the girls who were carried over in the boys' arms. And they didn't
+dance in the same set."
+
+Miss Larrabee says she looked into the elder woman's eyes to find which
+crowd Aunt Martha belonged to, when she flashed out:
+
+"Oh, child, you needn't look at me--I did both; it depended on who was
+looking! But, as I was saying, if anyone knows about society in this
+town, I do. I went to every dance in town for the first twenty-five
+years, and I have made potato salad to pay the salary of every Methodist
+preacher for the past thirty years, and I ought to know what I'm talking
+about." There was fire enough to twinkle in her old eyes as she spoke.
+"Beginning at the bottom, one may say that the base of society is the
+little tads, ranging down from what your paper calls the Amalgamated
+Hand-holders, to the trundle-bed trash just out of their kissing games.
+It's funny to watch the little tads grow up and pair off and see how
+bravely they try to keep in the swim. I've seen ten grandchildren get
+out and I've a great-grandchild whose mother will be pushing her out
+before she is old enough to know anything. When young people get married
+they all say they're not going to be old-marriedy, and they hang on to
+the dances and little hops until the first baby comes. Then they don't
+get out to the dances much, but they join a card club."
+
+In her dissertation on the social progress of young married people, Aunt
+Martha explained that after the second year the couple go only to the
+big dances where everyone is invited, but they pay more attention to
+cards. The young mother begins going to afternoon parties, and has the
+other young married couples in for dinner. Then, before they know it,
+they are invited out to receptions and parties, where little tads
+preside at the punch-bowls and wait on table, and are seen and not
+heard. Aunt Martha continued:
+
+"By the time the second baby comes they take one of two shoots--either
+go in for church socials or edge into a whist club. In this town, I
+think, on the whole, that the Congregational Whist Club is younger and
+gayer than the Presbyterian Whist Club, but in most towns the
+Episcopalians have the really fashionable club. Of course, these clubs
+never call themselves by the church names, but they are generally made
+up along church lines--except we poor Methodists and Baptists--we have
+to divide ourselves out among the others to keep the preacher from going
+after us."
+
+Aunt Martha's eyes danced with the mischief in her heart as she went on:
+"Now, if after the second baby comes, the young parents begin to feel
+like saving money, and being someone at the bank, they join the church
+and go in for church socials, which don't take so much time or money as
+the whist clubs and receptions. The babies keep coming and the young
+people keep on improving their home, moving from the little house to the
+big house; the young man's name begins to creep into lists of directors
+at the bank, and they are invited out to the big parties, and she goes
+to all the stand-up and 'gabble-gobble-and-git' receptions. As they grow
+older, they are asked with the preachers and widows for the first night
+of a series of parties at a house to get them out of the way and over
+with before the young folks come later in the week. When they get to a
+point where the young folks laugh and clap their hands at little pudgy
+daddy when he dances 'Old Dan Tucker' at the big parties in the brick
+houses, it's all up with them--they are old married folks, and the next
+step takes them to the old folks' whist club, where the bankers' wives
+and the insurance widows run things. That is the inner sanctuary, the
+holy of holies in the society of this town."
+
+After a pause Aunt Martha added: "You'd think, to hear these chosen
+people talk, that the benighted souls who go to missionary teas, Woman's
+Relief Corps chicken-pie suppers, and get up bean-dinners for the church
+on election day, live on another planet. Yet I guess we're all made of
+the same kind of mud.
+
+"That reminds me of the Winthrops. When they came here, back in the
+sixties, it happened to be Fourth of July, and the band was out playing
+in the grove by the depot. Mrs. Winthrop got off the train quite grandly
+and bowed and waved her hand to the band, and the Judge walked over and
+gave the band leader five dollars. They said afterward that they felt
+deeply touched to find a raw Western town so appreciative of the coming
+of an old New England family, that it greeted them with a band. Before
+Mrs. Winthrop had been here three weeks she called on me, 'as one of the
+first ladies of the town,' she said, to organise and see if we couldn't
+break up the habit of the hired girls eating at the table with the
+family." Aunt Martha smiled and her eyes glittered as she added: "After
+they organised, the titled aristocracy of this town did their own work
+and sent the washing out for a year or more."
+
+The talk drifted back to the old days, and Aunt Martha got out her
+photograph-album and showed Miss Larrabee the pictures of those whom she
+called "the rude forefathers of the village," in their quaint old
+costumes of war-times. In the book were baby pictures of middle-aged
+men and women, and youthful pictures of the old men and women of
+the town. But most interesting of all to Miss Larrabee were the
+daguerreotypes--quaint old portraits in their little black boxes, framed
+in plush and gilt. The old woman brought out picture after picture--her
+husband's among the others, in a broad beaver hat with a high choker
+taken back in Brattleboro before he came to Kansas. She looked at it for
+a long minute, and then said gaily to Miss Larrabee: "He was a handsome
+boy--quite the beau of the State when we were married--Judge of the
+District Court at twenty-four." She held the case in her hand and went
+on opening the others. She came to one showing a moustached and goateed
+youth in a captain's uniform--a slim, straight, soldierly figure. As she
+passed it to Miss Larrabee Aunt Martha looked sidewise at her, saying:
+"You wouldn't know him now. Yet you see him every day, I suppose." After
+the girl shook her head, the elder woman continued: "Well, that's Jim
+Purdy, taken the day he left for the army." She sighed as she said: "Let
+me see, I guess I haven't happened to run across Jim for ten years or
+more, but he didn't look much like this then. Poor old Jim, they tell me
+he's not having the best time in the world. Someway, all the old-timers
+that are living seem to be hard up, or in bad health, or unhappy. It
+doesn't seem right, after what they've done and what they've gone
+through. But I guess it's the way of life. It's the way life gets even
+with us for letting us outlive the others. Compensation--as Emerson
+says."
+
+[Illustration: "Jim Purdy, taken the day he left for the army"]
+
+Miss Larrabee came down the lilac-bordered walk from the stately old
+brick house, carrying a great bouquet of sweet peas and nasturtiums and
+poppies and phlox, a fleeting memory of some association she had in her
+mind of Uncle Jimmy Purdy and Aunt Martha kept tantalising her. She
+could not get it out of the background of her consciousness, and yet it
+refused to form itself into a tangible conception. It was associated
+vaguely with her own grandmother, as though, infinite ages ago, her
+grandmother had said something that had lodged the idea in the girl's
+head.
+
+When the occasion made itself, Miss Larrabee asked her grandmother the
+question that puzzled her, and learned that Martha Perkins and Jim Purdy
+were lovers before the war, and that she was wearing his ring when he
+went away--thinking he would be back in a few weeks with the Rebellion
+put down. In his first fight he was shot in the head and was in the
+hospital for a year, demented; when he was put back in the ranks he was
+captured and his name given out among the killed. In prison his dementia
+returned and he stayed there two years. Then for a year after his
+exchange he followed the Union Army like a dumb creature, and not until
+two years after the close of the war did the poor fellow drift home
+again, as one from the dead--all uncertain of the past and unfitted for
+the future.
+
+And his sweetheart drank her cup alone. The old settlers say that she
+never flinched nor shrank, but for years, even after her marriage to the
+Judge, the young woman kept a little grave covered with flowers, that
+bore the simple words: "Martha, aged five months and three days." They
+say that she did not lose her courage and that she bent her head for no
+one. But the war brought her neighbours so many sorrows that Martha's
+trouble was forgotten, the years passed and only the old people of the
+community know about the little grave beside the Judge's and their
+little boy's. Jimmy Purdy grew into a smooth-faced, unwrinkled, rather
+blank-eyed old man, clerking in the bookstore for a time, serving as
+City Clerk for twenty years, and later living at the Palace Hotel on his
+pension. He worshipped Aunt Martha's children and her children's
+children, but he never saw her except when they met in some casual way.
+She was married when he came back from the war, and if he ever knew her
+agony he never spoke of it. Whenever he talked of the events before the
+war, his face wore a troubled, baffled look, and he did not seem to
+remember things clearly. He was a simple old man with a boyish face and
+heart who was confused by the world growing old around him.
+
+One day they found him dead in his bed. And Miss Larrabee hurried out to
+Aunt Martha's to get the facts about his life for the paper. It was a
+bright October morning as she went up the walk to the old brick house,
+and she heard someone playing on the piano, rolling the chords after the
+grandiose manner of pianists fifty years ago. A voice seemed to be
+singing an old ballad. As the girl mounted the steps the voice came more
+distinctly to her. It was quavering and unsure, but with a moan of
+passion the words came forth:
+
+     "As I lay my heart on your dead heart,--Douglas, Douglas, Douglas,
+     tender and true----"
+
+Suddenly the voice choked in a groan. As she stood by the open door Miss
+Larrabee could see in the darkened room the figure of an old woman
+racked with sobs on a great mahogany sofa, and on the floor beside her
+lay a daguerreotype, glinting its gilt and glass through the gloom.
+
+The girl tiptoed across the porch, down the steps through the garden and
+out of the gate.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+Our Loathed but Esteemed Contemporary
+
+
+No one remembers a time when there were not two newspapers in our
+town--generally quarrelling with each other. Though musicians and
+doctors and barbers are always jealous of their business rivals, and
+though they show their envy more or less to their discredit, editors are
+so jealous of one another, and so shameless about it, that the
+profession has been made a joke. Certainly in our town there is a
+deep-seated belief that if one paper takes one side of any question,
+even so fair a proposition as street-paving, the other will take the
+opposing side.
+
+Of course, our paper has not been contrary; but we have noticed a good
+many times--every one in the office has noticed it, the boys and girls
+in the back-office, and the boys and girls in the front-office--that
+whenever we take a stand for anything, say for closing the stores at
+six o'clock, the General swings the _Statesman_ into line against it. If
+he has done it once he has done it fifty times in the last ten years;
+and, though we have often felt impelled to oppose some of the schemes
+which he has brought forward, it has been because they were bad for the
+town, and perhaps because, even though they did seem plausible, we knew
+that the unscrupulous gang that was behind these schemes would in some
+way turn them into a money-making plot to rob the people. We never could
+see that justification in the _Statesman_'s position. To us it seemed
+merely pigheadedness. But the passing years are teaching us to
+appreciate the General better, and each added year is seeming to make us
+more tolerant of his shortcomings.
+
+Counting in the three years he was in the army, he has been running the
+_Statesman_ for forty-five years, and for thirty-five years he was
+master of the field. For thirty years this town was known as General A.
+Jackson Durham's town. He ran the county Republican conventions, and
+controlled the five counties next to ours, so that, though he could
+never go to Congress himself, on account of his accumulation of enemies,
+he always named the successful candidate from the district, and for a
+generation held undisturbed the selection of post-masters within his
+sphere of influence. In State politics he was more powerful than any
+Congressman he ever made. Often he came down to the State Convention
+with blood in his eye after the political scalp of some politician who
+had displeased him, and the fight he made and the disturbance he
+started, gave him the name of Old Bull Durham. On such occasions, he
+would throw back his head, shut his eyes and roar his wrath at his
+opponents in a most disquieting manner, and when he returned home,
+whether he had won or lost his fight, his paper would bristle for two or
+three weeks with rage, and his editorial page would be full of lurid
+articles written in short exclamatory sentences, pocked with italics,
+capital letters and black-faced lines.
+
+[Illustration: He advertised the fact that he was a good hater by
+showing callers at his office his barrel]
+
+For General A. Jackson Durham was a fire-eater and was proud of it. He
+advertised the fact that he was a good hater by showing his barrel to
+callers at his office. In that barrel he had filed away every
+disreputable thing that he had been able to find against friend or foe,
+far or near, and when the friend became a foe, or the foe became
+troublesome, the General opened his barrel. He kept also an office
+blacklist, on which were written the names of the men in town that were
+never to be printed in the _Statesman_. When we established our little
+handbill of a newspaper, he made all manner of fun of our "dish-rag," as
+he called it, and insisted on writing so much about our paper that
+people read it to see what we had to say. Other papers had made the
+mistake of replying to the General in kind, and people had soon tired of
+the quarrel and dropped the new quarrelling paper for the old one. The
+State never had seen the General's equal as a wrangler; but we did not
+fight back, and there was only a one-sided quarrel for the people to
+tire of. We grew and got a foothold in the town, but the General never
+admitted it. He does not admit it now, though his paper has been cut
+down time and again, and is no larger than our little dish-rag was in
+the beginning. But he still maintains his old assumption of the power
+that departed years ago. He walked proudly out of the County Convention
+the day that it rode over him, and he still begins the names of the new
+party leaders in the county in small letters to show his contempt for
+them.
+
+The day of his downfall in the County Convention marked the beginning of
+his decline in State politics. When it was known that his county was
+against him, people ceased to fear him and in time new leaders came in
+the State whom he did not know even by sight; but the General did not
+recognise them as leaders. To him they were interlopers. He sent his
+paper regularly to the old leaders, who had been shoved aside as he had
+been, and wrote letters to them urging them to arouse the people to
+throw off the chains of bossdom. Five years ago he and a number of
+lonesome and forgotten ones, who formerly ruled the State with an iron
+hand, and whose arrogance had cost the party a humiliating defeat,
+organised the "Anti-Boss League," and held semi-annual conventions at
+the capital. They made long speeches and issued long proclamations, and
+called vehemently upon the people to rend their chains, but some way the
+people didn't heed the call, and the General and his boss-busters, as
+they were called, began to have hard work getting their "calls" and
+"proclamations" and "addresses" into the city papers. The reporters
+referred to them as the Ancient Order of Has-Beens, and wounded the
+General's pride by calling him Past Master of the Grand Lodge of Hons.
+He came home from the meeting of the boss-busters at which this insult
+had been heaped upon him and bellowed like a mad bull for six months,
+using so much space in his paper that there was no room at all for local
+news.
+
+In the General's idea of what a newspaper should contain; news does not
+come first, and he does not mind crowding it out. He believes that a
+newspaper should stand for "principles." The _Statesman_ was started
+during the progress of the Civil War, when issues were news, and the
+General has never been able to realize that in times of peace people buy
+a newspaper for its news and not for its opinions. He never could
+understand our attitude toward what he called "principles." When the
+town was for free silver, we were for the gold standard, and we never
+exerted ourselves particularly for a high tariff, and when the General
+saw our paper grow in spite of its heresies, he was amazed, and
+expressed his amazement in columns of vitriolic anger. Because we often
+ignored "issues" and "principles" and "great basic and fundamental
+ideas," as he called his contentions on the silver and tariff questions,
+for lists of delegates at conventions, names of pupils at the county
+institute, and winners of prizes at the fair, he was filled with alarm
+for the future of the noble calling of journalism.
+
+Long ago we quit making fun of him. One day we wrote an article
+referring to him as "the old man," and it was gossiped among the
+printers that he was cut to the heart. He did not reply to that, and
+although a few days later he referred to us as thieves and villains, we
+never had the heart to tease him again, and now every one around the
+office has instructions to put "General" before his name whenever it is
+used. Probably this cheers him up. At least it should do so, for in
+spite of his pride and his much advertised undying wrath, he is in truth
+a tender-hearted old man, and has never been disloyal to the town. It is
+the apple of his eye. His fierceness has always been more for
+publication than as an evidence of good faith. He likes to think that he
+is unforgiving and relentless, but he has a woman's heart. He fought the
+renomination of Grant for a third term most bitterly, but when the old
+commander died, the boys in the _Statesman_ office say that Durham
+sniffled gently while he wrote the obituary, and when he closed with the
+words "Poor Grant," he laid his head on the table and his frame shook in
+real sorrow.
+
+Most of the subscribers have left his paper, and few of the advertisers
+use it, but what seems to hurt him worst is his feeling that the town
+has gone back on him. He has given all of his life to this town; he has
+spent thousands of dollars to promote its growth; he has watched every
+house on the town-site rise, and has made an item in his paper about it;
+he has written up the weddings of many of the grandmothers and
+grandfathers of the town; he has chronicled the birth of their children
+and children's children. The old scrapbooks are filled with kind things
+that the General has written. Old men and old women scan these wrinkled
+pages with eyes that have lost their lustre, and on the rusty clippings
+pasted there fall many tears. In this book many a woman reads the little
+verse below the name of a child whom only she and God remember. In some
+other scrapbook a man, long since out of the current of life, reads the
+story of his little triumph in the world; in the family Bible is a
+clipping from the _Statesman_--yellow and crisp with years--that tells
+of a daughter's wedding and the social glory that descended upon the
+house for that one great day. So, as the General goes about the streets
+of the town, in his shiny long frock-coat and his faded campaign hat,
+men do not laugh at him, nor do they hate him. He is the old buffalo,
+horned out of the herd.
+
+The profession of newspaper making is a young man's profession. The time
+will come when over at our office there will be a shrinkage. Even now
+our leading citizens never go away from town and talk to other newspaper
+men that they do not say that if someone would come over here and start
+a bright, spicy newspaper he could drive us out of town and make money.
+The best friends we have, when they talk to newspaper men in other towns
+are not above saying that our paper is so generally hated that it would
+be no trouble to put it out of business. That is what people said of the
+General in the eighties. They do not say it now.
+
+For the fight is over with him. And he is walking on an old battlefield,
+reviewing old victories, not knowing that another contest is waging
+further on. Sometimes the boys in the _Statesman_ office get their money
+Saturday night, and sometimes they do not. If they do not, the General
+grandly issues "orders" on the grocery stores. Then he takes his pen in
+hand and writes a stirring editorial on the battle of Cold Harbor, and
+closes by enquiring whether the country is going to forget the grand
+principles that inspired men in those trying days.
+
+In the days when the _Statesman_ was a power in the land, editorials
+like this were widely quoted. He was department commander of the G. A.
+R. at a time when such a personage was as important in our State as the
+Governor. The General's editorials on pensions were read before the
+Pensions Committee in Congress and had much weight there, and even in
+the White House the General's attitude was reckoned with. When he
+rallied the old soldiers to any cause the earth trembled, but now the
+General's editorials pass unheeded. When he calls to "the men who
+defended this country in one great crisis to rise and rescue her again,"
+he does not understand that he is speaking to a world of ghosts, and
+that his "clarion note" falls on empty air. The old boys whom he would
+arouse are sleeping; only he and a little handful survive. Yet to him
+they still live; to him their power is still invincible--if they would
+but rally to the old call. He believes that some day they will rally,
+and that the world, which is now going sadly wrong, will be set right.
+With his hands clasped behind him, looking through his steel-rimmed
+glasses, from under his shaggy brows, he walks through a mad world,
+waiting for it to return to reason. In his fiery black eyes one may see
+a puzzled look as he views the bewildering show. He is confused, but
+defiant. His head is still high; he has no thought of surrender. So, day
+after day, he riddles the bedlam about him with his broadsides, in the
+hourly hope of victory.
+
+It was only last week that the General was in Jim Bolton's livery stable
+office asking Jim if he had any old ledgers, that the _Statesman_ office
+might have. He explained that he tore off their covers, cut them up and
+used the unspoiled sheets for copy-paper. In Bolton's office he met a
+farmer from the Folcraft neighbourhood in the southern end of the
+county, who hadn't seen the General for half-a-dozen years. "Why--hello
+General," exclaimed the farmer with unconcealed surprise, as though
+addressing one risen from the dead. "You still around here? What are you
+doing now?" The old man tucked the ledger under his arm, straightened up
+with great dignity, and tried not to wince under the blow. He put one
+hand in his shiny, frayed, greenish-black frock-coat, and replied with
+quiet dignity, "I am following my profession, sir--that of a
+journalist." And after fixing the farmer with his piercing black eyes
+for a moment, the General turned away and was gone.
+
+When we do something to displease him, he turns all his guns on us,
+though probably his foreman has to borrow paper from our office to get
+the _Statesman_ out. The General regards us as his natural prey and his
+foreman regards our paper stock as his natural forage--but they use so
+little that we do not mind.
+
+Once a new bookkeeper in our office saw the General's old account for
+paper. She sent the General a statement, and another, and in the third
+she put the words: "Please remit." The day after he had received the
+insult the General stalked grandly into the office with the amount of
+money required by the bookkeeper. He put it down without a word and
+walked over to the desk where the proprietor was working.
+
+"Young man," said the General, as he rapped with his cane on the desk.
+"I was talking to-day with a gentleman from Norwalk, Ohio, who knew your
+father. Yes, sir; he knew your father, and speaks highly of him, sir. I
+am surprised to hear, sir, that your father was a perfect gentleman,
+sir. Good-morning, sir."
+
+And with that the General moved majestically out of the office.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+A Question of Climate
+
+
+Colonel Morrison had three initials, so the town naturally called him
+"Alphabetical" Morrison, and dropped the "Colonel." He came to our part
+of the country in an early day--he used to explain that they caught him
+in the trees, when he was drinking creek water, eating sheep-sorrel, and
+running wild with a buffalo tail for a trolley, and that the first thing
+they did, after teaching him to eat out of a plate, was to set him at
+work in the grading gang that was laying out the Cottonwood and Walnut
+Rivers and putting the limestone in the hills. He was one of the
+original five patriots who laid out the Corn Belt Railroad from the
+Mississippi to the Pacific, and was appointed one of that committee to
+take the matter to New York for the inspection of capitalists--and be it
+said to the credit of Alphabetical Morrison that he was the only person
+in the crowd with money enough to pay the ferryman when he reached the
+Missouri River, though he had only enough to get himself across. But in
+spite of that the road was built, and though it missed our town, it was
+because we didn't vote the bonds, though old Alphabetical went through
+the county, roaring in the schoolhouses, bellowing at the crossroads,
+and doing all that a good, honest pair of lungs could do for the cause.
+However, he was not dismayed at his failure, and began immediately to
+organise a company to build another road. We finally secured a railroad,
+though it was only a branch.
+
+Over his office door he had a sign--"Land Office"--painted on the false
+board front of the building in letters as big as a cow, and the first
+our newspaper knew of him was twenty years ago, when he brought in an
+order for some stationery for the Commercial Club. At that time we had
+not heard that the town supported a Commercial Club--nor had anyone else
+heard of it, for that matter--for old Alphabetical was the president,
+and his bookkeeper, with the Miss dropped off her name, was secretary.
+But he had a wonderfully alluring letterhead printed, and seemed to get
+results, for he made a living while his competitors starved. Later, when
+he found time, he organised a real Commercial Club, and had himself
+elected president of it. He used to call meetings of the club to discuss
+things, but as no one cared much for his monologues on the future of the
+town, the attendance was often light. He issued circulars referring to
+our village as "the Queen City of the Prairies," and on the circulars
+was a map, showing that the Queen City of the Prairies was "the railroad
+axis of the West." There was one road running into the town; the others
+old Alphabetical indicated with dotted lines, and explained in a
+foot-note that they were in process of construction.
+
+He became possessed of a theory that a canning factory would pay in the
+Queen City of the Prairies, and the first step he took toward building
+it was to invest in a high hat, a long coat and white vest, and a pair
+of mouse-coloured trousers. With these and his theory he went East and
+returned with a condition. The canning factory went up, but the railroad
+rates went wrong, and the factory was never opened. Alphabetical
+blinked at it through his gold-rimmed glasses for a few weeks, and then
+organised a company to turn it into a woollen mill. He elected himself
+president of that company and used to bring around to our paper, notices
+of directors' meetings, and while he was in the office he would insist
+that we devoted too much space to idle gossip and not enough to the
+commercial and industrial interests of the Queen City.
+
+At times he would bring in an editorial that he had written himself,
+highly excitable and full of cyclonic language, and if we printed it
+Alphabetical would buy a hundred copies of the paper containing it and
+send them East. His office desk gradually filled with woodcuts and zinc
+etchings of buildings that never existed save in his own dear old head,
+and about twice a year during the boom days he would bring them around
+and have a circular printed on which were the pictures showing the
+imaginary public buildings and theoretical business thoroughfares of the
+Queen City.
+
+The woollen mill naturally didn't pay, and he persuaded some Eastern
+capitalists to install an electric plant in the building and put a
+streetcar line in the town, though the longest distance from one side of
+the place to the other was less than ten blocks. But Alphabetical was
+enthusiastic about it, and had the Governor come down to drive the first
+spike. It was gold-plated, and Alphabetical pulled it up and used it for
+a paper-weight in his office for many years, and it is now the only
+reminder there is in town of the street railway, except a hard ridge of
+earth over the ties in the middle of Main Street. When someone twitted
+him on the failure of the street railway he made answer:
+
+"Of course it failed; here I go pawing up the earth, milking out the
+surplus capital of the effete East, and building up this town--and what
+happens? Four thousand old silurian fossils comb the moss on the north
+side of 'em, with mussel shell, and turn over and yawp that old
+Alphabetical is visionary. Here I get a canning factory and nobody eats
+the goods; I hustle up a woollen factory, and the community quits
+wearing trousers; I build for them a streetcar line to haul them to and
+from their palatial residences, and what do the sun-baked human mud
+turtles do but all jump off the log into the water and hide from them
+cars like they were chariots of fire? What this town needs is not
+factories, nor railroads, nor modern improvements--Old Alphabetical can
+get them--but the next great scheme I go into is to go down to the
+river, get some good red mud, and make a few thousand men who will build
+up a town."
+
+It has been fifteen years and over since Colonel Morrison put on his
+long coat and high hat and started for the money markets of the East,
+seeking whom he might devour. At the close of the eighties the Colonel
+and all his tribe found that the stock of Eastern capitalists who were
+ready to pay good prices for the fine shimmering blue sky and bracing
+ozone of the West was running low. It was said in town that the Colonel
+had come to the end of his string, for not only were the doors of
+capital closed to him in the East, but newcomers had stopped looking for
+farms at home. There was nothing to do but to sit down and swap
+jack-knives with other land agents, and as they had taken most of the
+agencies for the best insurance companies while the Colonel was on
+dress parade, there was nothing left for him to do but to run for
+justice of the peace, and, being elected, do what he could to make his
+tenure for life.
+
+Though he was elected, more out of gratitude for what he had tried to do
+for the town than because people thought he would make a fair judge, he
+got no further than his office in popular esteem. He did not seem to
+wear well with the people in the daily run and jostle of life. During
+the forty years he has been in our town, he has lived most of the time
+apart from the people--transacting his business in the East, or locating
+strangers on new lands. He has not been one of us, and there were
+stories afloat that his shrewdness had sometimes caused him to thrust a
+toe over the dead-line of exact honesty. In the town he never helped us
+to fight for those things of which the town is really proud: our
+schools, the college, the municipal ownership of electric lights and
+waterworks, the public library, the abolition of the saloon, and all of
+the dozen small matters of public interest in which good citizens take a
+pride. Colonel Morrison was living his grand life, in his tailor-made
+clothes, while his townsmen were out with their coats off making our
+town the substantial place it is. So in his latter days he is old
+Alphabetical Morrison, a man apart from us. We like him well enough, and
+so long as he cares to be justice of the peace no one will object, for
+that is his due. But, someway, there is no talk of making him County
+Clerk; and there is a reason in everyone's mind why no party names him
+to run for County Treasurer. He has been trying hard enough for ten
+years to break through the crust of the common interests that he has so
+long ignored. One sees him at public meetings--a rather wistful-looking,
+chubby-faced old man--on the edge of the crowd, ready to be called out
+for a speech. But no one calls his name; no one cares particularly what
+old Alphabetical has to say. Long ago he said all that he can say to our
+people.
+
+The only thing that Alphabetical ever organised that paid was a family.
+In the early days he managed to get a home clear of indebtedness and was
+shrewd enough to keep it out of all of his transactions. Tow-headed
+Morrisons filled the schoolhouse, and twenty years later there were so
+many of his girls teaching school that the school-board had to make a
+ruling limiting the number of teachers from one family in the city
+school, in order to force the younger Morrison girls to go to the
+country to teach. In these days the girls keep the house going and
+Alphabetical is a notary public and a justice of the peace, which keeps
+his office going in the little square board building at the end of the
+street. But every day for the past ten years he has been coming to our
+office for his bundle of old newspapers. These he reads carefully, and
+sometimes what he reads inspires him to write something for our paper on
+the future of the Queen City, though much oftener his articles are
+retrospective. He is the president of the Old Settlers' Society, and
+once or twice a year he brings in an obituary which he has written for
+the family of some of the old-timers.
+
+One would think that an idler would be a nuisance in a busy place, but,
+on the contrary, we all like old Alphabetical around our office. For he
+is an old man who has not grown sour. His smooth, fat face has not been
+wrinkled by the vinegar of failure, and the noise that came from his
+lusty lungs in the old days is subsiding. But he has never forgiven
+General Durham, of the _Statesman_, for saying of a fight between
+Alphabetical and another land agent back in the sixties that "those who
+heard it pronounced it the most vocal engagement they had ever known."
+That is why he brings his obituaries to us; that is why he does us the
+honour of borrowing papers from us; and that is why, on a dull
+afternoon, he likes to sit in the old sway-back swivel-chair and tell us
+his theory of the increase in the rainfall, his notion about the
+influence of trees upon the hot winds, his opinion of the disappearance
+of the grasshoppers. Also, that is why we always save a circus-ticket
+for old Alphabetical, just as we save one for each of the boys in the
+office.
+
+[Illustration: He likes to sit in the old sway-back swivel-chair and
+tell us his theory of the increase in the rainfall]
+
+One day he came into the office in a bad humour. He picked up a country
+paper, glanced it over, threw it down, kicked from under his feet a dog
+that had followed a subscriber into the room, and slammed his hat into
+the waste-basket with considerable feeling as he picked up a New York
+paper.
+
+"Well--well, what's the matter with the judiciary this morning?"
+someone asked the old man.
+
+He did not reply at once, but turned his paper over and over, apparently
+looking for something to interest him. Gradually the revolutions of his
+paper became slower and slower, and finally he stopped turning the paper
+and began reading. It was ten or fifteen minutes before he spoke. When
+he put down the paper his cherubic face was beaming, and he said:
+
+"Oh--I know I'm a fool, but I wish the Lord had sent me to live in a
+town large enough so that every dirty-faced brat on the street wouldn't
+feel he had a right to call me 'Alphabetical'! Dammit, I've done the
+best I could! I haven't made any alarming success. I know it. There's no
+need of rubbing it in on me."--He was silent for a time with his hands
+on his knees and his head thrown back looking at the ceiling. Almost
+imperceptibly a smile began to crack his features, and, when he turned
+his eyes to the man at the desk, they were dancing with merriment, as he
+said: "Just been reading a piece here in the _Sun_ about the influence
+of climate on human endeavour. It says that in northern latitudes there
+is more oxygen in the air and folks breathe faster, and their blood
+flows faster, and that keeps their livers going. Trouble with me has
+always been climate--sluggish liver. If I had had just a little more
+oxygen floating round in my system, the woollen mill would still be
+running, the street-cars would be going, and this town would have had
+forty thousand inhabitants. My fatal mistake was one of latitude.
+But"--and he drawled out the word mockingly--"but I guess if the Lord
+had wanted me to make a town here he would have given me a different
+kind of liver!" He slapped his knees as he sighed: "This is a funny
+world, and the more you see of it the funnier it gets." The old man
+grinned complacently at the ceiling for a minute, and before getting out
+of his chair kicked his shoe-heels together merrily, wiped his glasses
+as he rose, put his bundle of papers under his arm, and left the office
+whistling an old, old-fashioned tune.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+The Casting Out of Jimmy Myers
+
+
+It seemed a cruel thing to do, but we had to do it. For ours is
+ordinarily a quiet office. We have never had a libel suit. We have had
+fewer fights than most newspaper offices have, and while it hardly may
+be said that we strive to please, still in the main we try to get on
+with the people, and tell them as much truth as they are entitled to for
+ten cents a week. Naturally, we do our best to get up a sprightly paper,
+and in that the Myers boy had our idea exactly. He was industrious; more
+than that, he tried with all his might to exercise his best judgment,
+and no one could say that he was careless; yet everyone around the
+office admitted that he was unlucky. He was one of those persons who
+always have slivers on their doors, or tar on the knocker, when
+opportunity comes their way; so his stay in the office was marked by a
+series of seismic disturbances in the paper that came from under his
+desk, and yet he was in no way to blame for them.
+
+We took him from the college at the edge of town. He had been running
+the college paper for a year, and knew the merchants around town fairly
+well; and, since he was equipped as far as education went, he seemed to
+be a likely sort of a boy for reporter and advertising solicitor.
+
+One of the first things that happened to him was a mistake in an item
+about the opera house. He said that a syndicate had taken a lien on it.
+What he meant was a lease, and as he got the item from a man who didn't
+know the difference, and as the boy stuck to it that the man had said
+lien and not lease, we did not charge that up to him. A few days later
+he wrote for a town photographer a paid local criticising someone who
+was going around the county peddling picture-frames and taking orders
+for enlarged pictures. That was not so bad, but it turned out that the
+pedlar was a woman, and she came with a rawhide and camped in the office
+for two days waiting for Jimmy, while he came in and out of the back
+door, stuck his copy on the hook by stealth, and travelled only in the
+alleys to get his news. One could hardly say that he was to blame for
+that, either, as the photographer who paid for the item didn't say the
+pedlar was a woman, and the boy was no clairvoyant.
+
+[Illustration: And camped in the office for two days, looking for Jimmy]
+
+One dull day he wrote a piece about the gang who played poker at night
+in Red Martin's room. Jimmy said he wasn't afraid of Red, and he wasn't.
+The item was popular enough, and led to a raid on the place, which
+disclosed our best advertiser sitting in the game. To suppress his name
+meant our shame before the town; to print it meant his--at our expense.
+It was embarrassing, but it wasn't exactly the boy's fault. It was just
+one of those unfortunate circumstances that come up in life. However,
+the advertiser aforesaid began to hate the boy.
+
+He must have been used to injustice all his life, for there was a
+vertical line between his eyes that marked trouble. The line deepened as
+he went further and further into the newspaper business; for, generally
+speaking, a person who is unlucky has less to fear handling dynamite
+than he has writing local items on a country paper.
+
+A few days after the raid on the poker-room Jimmy, who had acquired a
+particularly legible hand, wrote: "The hem of her skirt was trimmed with
+pink crushed roses," and he was in no way to blame for the fact that the
+printer accidentally put an "h" for a "k" in skirt, though the woman's
+husband chased Jimmy into a culvert under Main Street and kept him there
+most of the forenoon, while the cheering crowd informed the injured
+husband whenever Jimmy tried to get out of either end of his prison.
+
+The printer that made the mistake bought Jimmy a new suit of clothes, we
+managed to print an apology that cooled the husband's wrath, and for ten
+days, or perhaps two weeks, the boy's life was one round of joy.
+Everything was done promptly, accurately and with remarkable
+intelligence. He whistled at his work and stacked up more copy than the
+printers could set up in type. No man ever got in or out of town without
+having his name in our paper. Jimmy wrote up a railroad bond election
+meeting so fairly that he pleased both sides, and reported a murder
+trial so well that the lawyers for each side kept the boy's pockets full
+of ten-cent cigars. The vertical wrinkle was fading from his forehead,
+when one fine summer morning he brought in a paid item from a hardware
+merchant, and went blithely out to write up the funeral of the wife of a
+prominent citizen. He was so cheerful that day that it bothered him.
+
+He told us in confidence that he never felt festive and gay that
+something didn't happen. He was not in the building that evening when
+the paper went to press, but after it was printed and the carriers had
+left the office he came in, singing "She's My Sweetheart, I'm Her Beau,"
+and sat down to read the paper.
+
+Suddenly the smile on his face withered as with frost, and he handed the
+paper across the table to the bookkeeper, who read this item:
+
+     DIED--MRS. LILLIAN GILSEY.
+
+     Prepare for the hot weather, my good woman. There is only one way
+     now; get a gasoline stove, of Hurley & Co., and you need not fear
+     any future heat.
+
+And it wasn't Jimmy's fault. The foreman had merely misplaced a head
+line, but that explanation did not satisfy the bereaved family.
+
+Jimmy was beginning to acquire a reputation as a joker. People refused
+to believe that such things just happened. They did not happen before
+Mr. James Myers came to the paper--why should they begin with his coming
+and continue during his engagement? Thus reasoned the comforters of the
+Gilseys, and those interested in our downfall. The next day the
+_Statesman_ wrote a burning editorial denouncing us "for an utter lack
+of all sense of common decency" that permitted us "to violate the
+sacredest feeling known to the human heart for the sake of getting a
+ribald laugh from the unthinking." We were two weeks explaining that the
+error was not the boy's fault. People assumed that the mistake could not
+have occurred in any well-regulated printing office, and it didn't seem
+probable that it could occur--yet there it was. But Jimmy wasn't to
+blame. He suffered more than we did--more than the bereaved family did.
+He went unshaven and forgot to trim his cuffs or turn his collar. He
+hated to go on the streets for news, and covered with the office
+telephone as much of his beat as possible.
+
+The summer wore away and the dog days came. The Democratic State
+campaign was about to open in our town, and orators and statesmen
+assembled from all over the Missouri valley. There was a lack of flags
+at the dry-goods stores. The Fourth of July celebration had taken all
+the stock. The only materials available were some red bunting, some
+white bunting, and some blue bunting with stars dotted upon it. With
+this bunting the Committee on Reception covered the speakers' stand,
+wrapping the canopy under which the orators stood in the solid colours
+and the star-spangled blue. It was beautiful to see, and the pride of
+the window-dresser of the Golden Eagle Clothing Store. But the old
+soldiers who walked by nudged one another and smiled.
+
+About noon of the day of the speaking the City Clerk, who wore the
+little bronze button of the G. A. R., asked Jimmy if he didn't want
+someone to take care of the Democratic meeting. Jimmy, who hated
+politics, was running his legs off to get the names of the visitors, and
+was glad to have the help. He turned in the contributed copy without
+reading it, as he had done with the City Clerk's articles many times
+before, and this is what greeted his horrified eyes when he read the
+paper:
+
+               "UNDER THE STARS & BARS"
+
+    Democracy Opens Its State Campaign Under the
+                 Rebel Emblem To-day
+                   A Fitting Token
+    Treasonable Utterances Have a Proper Setting
+
+And then followed half a column of most violent abuse of the Democrats
+who had charge of the affair. Jimmy did not appear on the street that
+night, but the next morning, when he came down, the office was crowded
+with indignant Democrats "stopping the paper."
+
+We began to feel uneasy about Jimmy. So long as his face was in the
+eclipse of grief there seemed to be a probability that we would have no
+trouble, but as soon as his moon began to shine we were nervous.
+
+Jimmy had a peculiar knack of getting up little stories of the town--not
+exactly news stories, but little odd bits that made people smile without
+rancour when they saw their names in the quaintly turned items. One day
+he wrote up a story of a little boy whose mother asked him where he got
+a dollar that he was flourishing on his return with his father from a
+visit in Kansas City. The little boy's answer was that his father gave
+it to him for calling him uncle when any ladies were around. It was
+merrily spun, and knowing that it would not make John Lusk, the boy's
+father, mad, we printed it, and Jimmy put at the head of it a foolish
+little verse of Kipling's. Miss Larrabee, at the bottom of her society
+column, announced the engagement of two prominent young people in town.
+The Saturday paper was unusually readable. But when Jimmy came in after
+the paper was out he found Miss Larrabee in tears, and the foreman
+leaning over the counter laughing so that he couldn't speak. It wasn't
+Jimmy's fault. The foreman had done it--by the mere transposition of a
+little brass rule separating the society news from Jimmy's story with
+the Kipling verse at the head of it. The rule tacked the Kipling verse
+onto Miss Larrabee's article announcing the engagement. Here is the way
+it read:
+
+"This marriage, which will take place at St. Andrew's Church, will unite
+two of the most popular people in town and two of the best-known
+families in the State.
+
+    "_And this is the sorrowful story
+      Told as the twilight fails,
+    While the monkeys are walking together,
+      Holding each other's tails!_"
+
+Now, Jimmy was no more to blame than Miss Larrabee, and many people
+thought, and think to this day, that Miss Larrabee did it--and did it on
+purpose. But for all that it cast clouds over the moon of Jimmy's
+countenance, and it was nearly a year before he regained his merry
+heart. He was nervous, and whenever he saw a man coming toward the
+office with a paper in his hand Jimmy would dash out of the room to
+avoid the meeting. For an hour after the paper was out the ringing of
+the telephone bell would make him start. He didn't know what was going
+to happen next.
+
+But as the months rolled by he became calm, and when Governor Antrobus
+died, Jimmy got up a remarkably good story of his life and achievements,
+and though there was no family left to the dear old man to buy extra
+copies, all the old settlers--who are the hardest people in the world
+to please--bought extra copies for their scrapbooks. We were proud of
+Jimmy, and assigned him to write up the funeral. That was to be a "day
+of triumph in Capua." There being no relatives to interfere, the lodges
+of the town--and the Governor was known as a "jiner"--had vied with one
+another to make the funeral the greatest rooster-feather show ever given
+in the State. The whole town turned out, and the foreman of our office,
+and everyone in the back room who could be spared, was at the Governor's
+funeral, wearing a plume, a tin sword, a red leather belt, or a sash of
+some kind. We put a tramp printer on to make up the paper, and told
+Jimmy to call by the undertaker's for a paid local which the undertaker
+had written for the paper that day.
+
+Jimmy's face was beaming as he snuggled up to his desk at three o'clock
+that afternoon. He said he had a great story--names of the pall-bearers,
+names of the double sextette choir, names of all the chaplains of all
+the lodges who read their rituals, names of distinguished guests from
+abroad, names of the ushers at the church. Page by page he tore off his
+copy and gave it to the tramp printer, who took it in to the machines.
+Trusting the foreman to read the proof, Jimmie rushed out to get from a
+United States Senator who was attending the funeral an interview on the
+sugar scandal, for the Kansas City _Star_.
+
+The rest of us did not get back from the cemetery until the carriers had
+left the office, and this is what we found:
+
+"The solemn moan of the organ had scarcely died away, like a quivering
+sob upon the fragrant air, when the mournful procession of citizens
+began filing past the flower-laden bier to view the calm face of their
+beloved friend and honoured townsman. In the grief-stricken hush that
+followed might be heard the stifled grief of some old comrade as he
+paused for the last time before the coffin.
+
+"At this particular time we desire to call the attention of our readers
+to the admirable work done by our hustling young undertaker, J. B.
+Morgan. He has been in the city but a short time, yet by his efficient
+work and careful attention to duty, he has built up an enviable
+reputation and an excellent custom among the best families of the city.
+All work done with neatness and dispatch. We strive to please.
+
+"When the last sad mourner had filed out, the pall-bearers took up their
+sorrowful task, and slowly, as the band played the 'Dead March in Saul,'
+the great throng assembled in the street viewed the mortal remains of
+Governor Antrobus start on their last long journey."
+
+Of course it wasn't Jimmy's fault. The "rising young undertaker" had
+paid the tramp printer, who made up the forms, five dollars to work his
+paid local into the funeral notice. But after that--Jimmy had to go.
+Public sentiment would no longer stand him as a reporter on the paper,
+and we gave him a good letter and sent him onward and upward. He took
+his dismissal decently enough. He realised that his luck was against
+him; he knew that we had borne with him in all patience.
+
+The day that he left he was instructing the new man in the ways of the
+town. Reverend Frank Milligan came in with a church notice. Jimmy took
+the notice and began marking it for the printer. As the door behind him
+opened and closed, Jimmy, with his head still in his work, called across
+the room to the new man: "That was old Milligan that just went
+out--beware of him. He will load you up with truck about himself. He
+rings in his sermons; trots around with church social notices that ought
+to be paid for, and tries to get them in free; likes to be referred to
+as doctor; slips in mean items about his congregation, if you don't
+watch him; and insists on talking religion Saturday morning when you are
+too busy to spit. More than that, he has an awful breath--cut him out;
+he will make life a burden if you don't--and if you do he will go to the
+old man with it, and say you are not treating him right."
+
+[Illustration: Reverend Milligan came in with a church notice]
+
+There was a rattling and a scratching on the wire partition between
+Jimmy and the door. Jimmy looked up from his work and saw the sprightly
+little figure of Parson Milligan coming over the railing like a monkey.
+He had not gone out of the door--a printer had come in when it opened
+and shut. And then Jimmy took his last flying trip out of the back door
+of the office, down the alley, "toward the sunset's purple rim." It was
+not his fault. He was only telling the truth--where it would do the most
+good.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+"'A Babbled of Green Fields"
+
+
+Our town is set upon a hillside, rising from a prairie stream. Forty
+years ago the stream ran through a thick woodland nearly a mile wide,
+and in the woodland were stately elms, spreading walnut trees, shapely
+oaks, gaunt white sycamores, and straight, bushy hackberries, that shook
+their fruit upon the ice in spots least frequented by skaters. Along the
+draws that emptied into the stream were pawpaw trees, with their tender
+foliage, and their soft wood, which little boys delighted to cut for
+stick horses. Beneath all these trees grew a dense underbrush of
+buckeyes, blackberries, raspberries, gooseberries, and little red winter
+berries called Indian beads by the children. Wild grapevines, "poison"
+grapes, and ivies of both kinds wove the woods into a mass of summer
+green. In the clearings and bordering the wood grew the sumach, that
+flared red at the very thought of Jack Frost's coming. In these woods
+the boys of our town--many of whom have been dead these twenty
+years--used to lay their traps for the monsters of the forest, and
+trudged back from the timber before breakfast, in winter, bringing home
+redbirds, and rabbits and squirrels. Sometimes a particularly doughty
+woodsman would report that there were wildcat tracks about his trap; but
+none of us ever saw a wildcat, though Enoch Haver, whose father's father
+had heard a wildcat scream, and had taught the boy its cry, would hide
+in a hollow sycamore and screech until the little boys were terrified
+and would not go alone to their traps for days. In summer, boys, usually
+from the country, or from a neighbouring town, caught 'coons, and
+dragged them chained through alleys for our boys to see, and 'Dory Paine
+had an owl which was widely sought by other boys in the circus and
+menagerie line. The boys of our town in that day seemed to live in the
+wood and around the long millpond, though little fellows were afraid
+that lurking Indians or camping gypsies might steal them--a boy's
+superstition, which experience has proved too good to be true. They
+fared forth to the riffle below the dam, which deepens in the shade
+under the water elm; this was the pool known as "baby hole," despised of
+the ten-year-olds, who plunged into the deepest of the thicket and came
+out at the limekiln, where all day long one might hear "so-deep,
+so-deep, so-deep," and "go-round, go-round, go-round," until school
+commenced in the fall. Then the rattle of little homemade wagons, and
+the shrilling of boy voices might be heard all over the wilderness, and
+the black-stained hands of schoolboys told of the day of the walnut
+harvest. It was nearly a mile from the schoolhouse to the woods, and yet
+on winter afternoons no school-ma'am could keep the boys from using
+school hours to dig out the screw-holes and heel-plates of their boots
+before wadding them with paper. At four o'clock a troop of boys would
+burst forth from that schoolhouse so wildly that General Durham of the
+_Statesman_, whose office we used to pass with a roar, always looked up
+from his work to say: "Well, I see hell's out for noon again."
+
+In the spring the boys fished, and on Saturdays go, up the river or
+down, or on either side, where one would, one was never out of sight of
+some thoughtful boy, sitting either on a stump or on a log stretching
+into the stream, or squatting on a muddy bank with his worm can beside
+him, throwing a line into the deep, green, quiet water. Always it was to
+the woods one went to find a lost boy, for the brush was alive with
+fierce pirates, and blood-bound brother-hoods, and gory Indian fighters,
+and dauntless scouts. Under the red clay banks that rose above the
+sluggish stream, robbers' caves, and treasure houses, and freebooters'
+dens, were filled with boys who, five days in the week and six hours a
+day, could "_amo amas amat, amamus amatus amant_" with the best of them.
+On Sundays these same boys sat with trousers creeping above the wrinkles
+at the ankles of their copper-toed, red-topped boots, recited golden
+texts, sang "When He Cometh," and while planning worse for their own
+little brothers, read with much virtuous indignation of little Joseph's
+wicked brothers, who put him in a pit. After Sunday School was over
+these highly respected young persons walked sedately in their best
+clothes over the scenes of their Saturday crimes.
+
+They say the woods are gone now. Certainly the trees have been cut away
+and the underbrush burned; cornfields cover the former scenes of
+valorous achievement; but none the less the woods are there; each nook
+and cranny is as it was, despite the cornfields. Scattered about the sad
+old earth live men who could walk blindfolded over the dam, across the
+millrace, around the bend, through the pawpaw patch to the grapevine
+home of the "Slaves of the Magic Tree;" who could find their trail under
+the elder bushes in Boswell's ravine, though they should come--as they
+often come--at the dead of night from great cities and from mountain
+camps and from across seas, and fore-gather there, in the smoke and dirt
+of the rendezvous to eat their unsalted sacrificial rabbit. They can
+follow the circuitous route around John Betts's hog lot, to avoid the
+enemy, as easily to-day as they could before the axe and the fire and
+the plough made their fine pretence of changing the landscape. And when
+Joe Nevison gets ready to signal them from his seat high in the crotch
+of the oak tree across the creek, the "Slaves of the Tree" will come and
+obey their leader. They say that the tree is gone, and that Joe is gone,
+but we know better; for at night, when the Tree has called us, and we
+hear the notes from the pumpkin-stem reed, we come and sit in the
+branches beneath him and plan our raids and learn our passwords, and
+swear our vengeance upon such as cross our pathway. There may have been
+a time when men thought the Slaves of the Tree were disbanded; indeed it
+did seem so, but as the years go by, one by one they come wandering
+back, take their places in the branches of the magic tree, swing far out
+over the world like birds, and summon again the _genius loci_ who has
+slept for nearly forty years.
+
+Of course we knew that Joe would be the first one back; he didn't care
+what they said--even then; he registered his oath that it made no
+difference what they did to him or what the others did, he would never
+desert the Tree. He commanded all of us to come back; if not by day then
+to gather in the moonlight and bring our chicken for the altar and our
+eggs for the ceremony, and he promised that he would be there. We were
+years and years in obeying Joe Nevison. Many of us have had long
+journeys to go; and some of us lead little children by the hand as we
+creep up the hollow, crawl through the gooseberry bushes, and 'coon the
+log over the chasm to our meeting place. But we are nearly all there
+now; and in the moonlight, when the corn seems to be waving over a wide
+field, a tree springs up as by magic and we take our places again as of
+old.
+
+Many years have passed since Marshal Furgeson stood those seven Slaves
+of the Magic Tree in line before the calaboose door and made them
+surrender the feathered cork apple-stealers and the sacred chicken
+hooks. In those years many terrors have ridden the boys who have gone
+out into the world to fight its dragons and grapple with its gorgons;
+but never have those boys felt any happiness so sweet as that which
+rested on their hearts when they heard the Marshal say, "Now you boys
+run on home--but mind you if I ever----" and he never did--except Joe
+Nevison. Once it was for boring a hole in the depot platform and
+tapping a barrel of cider; once it was for going through a window in the
+Hustler hardware store and taking a box of pocketknives and two
+revolvers, with which to reward his gang, and finally, when the boy was
+in the midst of his teens, for breaking into the schoolhouse and burning
+the books. Joe's father always bought him off, as fathers always can buy
+boys off, when mothers go to the offended person and promise, and beg,
+and weep. So Joe Nevison grew up the town bad boy--defiant of law,
+reckless and unrestrained, with the blood of border ruffianism in his
+veins and the scorn of God and man and the love of sin in his heart. The
+week after he left town, and before he was twenty, his father paid for
+"Red" Martin's grey race horse, which disappeared the night Joe's bed
+was found empty. In those days the Nevisons had more money than most of
+the people in our town, but as the years went by they began to lose
+their property, and it was said that it went in great slices to Joe, to
+keep him out of the penitentiary.
+
+We knew that Joe Nevison was in the West. People from our town, who seem
+to swarm over the earth, wrote back that they had met Joe in Dodge
+City, in Leoti, in No-Man's-Land, in Texas, in Arizona--wherever there
+was trouble. Sometimes he was the hired bad man of a desert town, whose
+business it was to shoot terror into the hearts of disturbers from rival
+towns; sometimes he was a free lance--living the devil knows how--always
+dressed like a fashion-plate of the plains in high-heeled boots, wide
+felt hat, flowing necktie, flannel shirt and velvet trousers. They say
+that he did not gamble more than was common among the sporting men of
+his class, and that he never worked. Sometimes we heard of him
+adventuring as a land dealer, sometimes as a cattleman, sometimes as a
+mining promoter, sometimes as a horseman, but always as the sharper, who
+rides on the crest of the forward wave of civilization, leaving a town
+when it tears down its tents and puts up brick buildings, and then
+appearing in the next canvas community, wherein the night is filled with
+music, and the cares that infest the day are drowned in bad whiskey or
+winked out with powder and shot. And thus Joe Nevison closed his
+twenties--a desert scorpion, outcast by society and proud of it. As he
+passed into his thirties he left the smoky human crystals that formed on
+the cow trails and at the mountain gold camps. Cripple Creek became too
+effete for him, and an electric light in a tent became a target he could
+not resist; wherefore he went into the sage brush and the short grass,
+seeking others of his kind, the human rattlesnake, the ranging coyote
+and the outlawed wolf. Joe Nevison rode with the Dalton gang, raided
+ranches and robbed banks with the McWhorters and held up stages as a
+lone highwayman. At least, so men said in the West, though no one could
+prove it, and at the opening of Lawton he appeared at the head of a band
+of cutthroats, who were herded out of town by the deputy United States
+marshals before noon of the first day. Not until popular government was
+established could they get in to open their skin-game, which was better
+and safer for them than ordinary highway faring. At Lawton our people
+saw Joe and he asked about the home people, asked about the boys--the
+old boys he called them--and becoming possessed of a post-office
+address, Joe wrote a long letter to George Kirwin, the foreman of our
+office. We call him old George, because he is still under forty. Joe
+being in an expansive mood, and with more money on his clothes than he
+cared for, sent old George ten dollars to pay for a dollar Joe had
+borrowed the day he left town in the eighties. We printed Joe's letter
+in our paper, and it pleased his mother. That was the beginning of a
+regular correspondence between the rover and the home-stayer. George
+Kirwin, gaunt, taciturn, and hard-working, had grown out of the dreamy,
+story-loving boy who had been one of the Slaves of the Magic Tree and
+into a shy old bachelor who wept over "East Lynne" whenever it came to
+the town opera house, and asked for a lay-off only when Modjeska
+appeared in Topeka, or when there was grand opera at Kansas City. But he
+ruled the back office with an iron hand and superintended the Mission
+Sunday-School across the track, putting all his spare money into
+Christmas presents for his pupils. After that first letter that came
+from Joe Nevison, no one had a hint of what passed between the two men.
+But a month never went by that Joe's letter missed. When Lawton began
+to wane, Joe Nevison seemed to mend his wayward course. He moved to
+South McAlester and opened a faro game--a square game they said it
+was--for the Territory! This meant that unless Joe was hard up every man
+had his chance before the wheel. Old George took the longest trip of his
+life, when we got him a pass to South McAlester and he put on his black
+frock coat and went to visit Joe. All that we learned from him was that
+Joe "had changed a good deal," and that he was "taking everything in the
+drug store, from the big green bottle at the right of the front door
+clear around past the red prescription case, and back to the big blue
+bottle at the left of the door." But after George came home the Mission
+Sunday-School began to thrive. George was not afraid of tainted money,
+and the school got a new library, which included "Tom Sawyer" and
+"Huckleberry Finn," as well as "Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates" for
+the boys, and all the "Pansy" books for the girls. It was a quaint old
+lot of books, and George Kirwin was nearly a year getting it together.
+Also he bought a new stove for his Sunday-School room, and a lot of
+pictures for the church walls, among others "Wide Awake and Fast
+Asleep," "Simply to Thy Cross," and "The Old Oaken Bucket." He gave to
+the school a cabinet organ with more stops than most of the children
+could count.
+
+[Illustration: A desert Scorpion, outcast by society and proud of it]
+
+A year ago a new reporter brought in this item: "Joseph Nevison, of
+South McAlester, I. T., is visiting his mother, Mrs. Julia Nevison, at
+234 South Fifth Street."
+
+We sent the reporter out for more about Joe Nevison and at noon George
+Kirwin hurried down to the little home below the tracks. From these two
+searchers after truth we learned that Joe Nevison's mother had brought
+him home from the Indian Territory mortally sick. Half-a-dozen of us who
+had played with him as boys went to see him that evening, and found a
+wan, haggard man with burned-out black eyes, lying in a clean white bed.
+He seemed to know each of us for a moment and spoke to us through his
+delirium in a tired, piping voice--like the voice of the little boy who
+had been our leader. He called us by forgotten nicknames, and he hummed
+at a tune that we had not heard for a score of years. Then he piped out
+"While the Landlubbers Lie Down Below, Below, Below," and followed that
+with "Green Grass Growing all Around, all Around," and that with the
+song about the "Tonga Islands," his voice growing into a clearer alto as
+he sang. His mother tried to quiet him, but he smiled his dead smile at
+her through his cindery eyes, shook his head and went on. When he had
+lain quiet for a moment, he turned to one of us and said: "Dock, I'm
+goin' up and dive off that stump--a back flip-flop--you dassent!" Pretty
+soon he seemed to come up snuffing and blowing and grinning and said,
+"Last man dressed got to chaw beef." Then he cried: "Dock's it--Dock's
+it; catch 'im, hold him--there he goes--duck him, strip him. O well, let
+him go if he's go'n' to cry. Say, boys, I wish you fellers'd come over
+t' my stick horse livery stable--honest I got the best hickory horse you
+ever see. Whoa, there--whoa now, I tell you. You Pilliken Dunlevy let me
+harness you; there, put it under your arm, and back of your neck--no I
+ain't go'n' to let you hold it--I'll jerk the tar out of you if you
+don't go. Whe-e-e that's the way to go, hol--hold on, whoa there. Back
+up. Let's go over to Jim's and run on his track. Say, Jim, I got the
+best little pacer in the country here--get up there, Pilliken," and he
+clucked and sawed his arms, and cracked an imaginary whip. When George
+came in, the face on the bed brightened and the treble voice said:
+"Hello Fatty--we've been waitin' for you. Now let's go on. What you got
+in your wagon--humph--bet it's a pumpkin. Did old Boswell chase you?"
+and then he laughed, and turned away from us. His trembling hands seemed
+to be fighting something from his face. "Bushes," whispered Enoch Haver,
+and then added, "Now he's climbing up the bank of the ravine." And we
+saw the lean hands on the bed clutch up the wall, and then the voice
+broke forth: "Me first--first up--get away from here, Dock--I said
+first," and we could see his hands climbing an imaginary tree.
+
+His face glowed with the excitement of his delirium as he climbed, and
+then apparently catching his breath he rested before he called out: "I'm
+comin' down, clear the track for old Dan Tucker," and from the
+convulsive gripping of his hands and arms and the hysterical intake of
+his breath we who had seen Joe Nevison dive from the top of the old
+tree, from limb to limb to the bottom, knew what he was doing. His heart
+was thumping audibly when he finished, and we tried to calm him. For a
+while we all sat about him in silence--forgetting the walls that shut us
+in, and living with him in the open, Slaves of the Magic Tree. Then one
+by one we left and only George Kirwin stayed with the sick man.
+
+Joe Nevison had lived a wicked life. He had been the friend and
+companion of vile men and the women whom such men choose, and they had
+lived lives such as we in our little town only read about--and do not
+understand. Yet all that night Joe Nevison roamed through the woods by
+the creek, a little child, and no word passed his lips that could have
+brought a hint of the vicious life that his manhood had known.
+
+In that long night, while George Kirwin sat by his dying friend,
+listening to his babble, two men were in the genii's hands. They put off
+their years as a garment. Together they ran over the roofs of buildings
+on Main Street that have been torn down for thirty years; they played
+in barns and corncribs burned down so long ago that their very site is
+in doubt; they romped over prairies where now are elm-covered streets;
+and they played with boys and girls who have lain forgotten in little
+sunken graves for a quarter of a century, out on the hill; or they
+called from the four winds of heaven playmates who left our town at a
+time so remote that to the watcher by the bed it seemed ages ago. The
+games they played were of another day than this. When Joe began crying
+"Barbaree," he summoned a troop of ghosts, and the pack went scampering
+through the spectre town in the starlight; and when that game had tired
+him the voice began to chatter of "Slap-and-a-kick," and
+"Foot-and-a-half," and of "Rolly-poley," and of the ball games--"Scrub,"
+and "Town-ball," and "Anteover," each old game conjuring up spirits from
+its own vasty deep until the room was full of phantoms and the watcher's
+memory ached with the sweet sorrow of old joys.
+
+George Kirwin says that long after midnight Joe awakened from a doze,
+fumbling through the bedclothes, looking for something. Finally he
+complained that he could not find his mouth-harp. They tried to make him
+forget it, but when they failed, his mother went to the bureau and
+pulling open the lower drawer found a little varnished box; under the
+shaded lamp she brought out a sack of marbles, a broken bean-shooter,
+with whittled prongs, a Barlow knife, a tintype picture of a boy, and
+the mouth-organ. This she gave to the hands that fluttered about the
+face on the pillow. He began to play "The Mocking Bird," opening and
+shutting his bony hands to let the music rise and fall. When he closed
+that tune he played "O the Mistletoe Bough," and after that over and
+over again he played "Tenting on the Old Camp Ground." When he dropped
+the mouth-harp, he lay very still for a time, though his lips moved
+incessantly. The morning was coming, and he was growing weak. But when
+his voice came back they knew that he was far afield again; for he said,
+"Come on, fellers, let's set down here under the hill and rest. It's a
+long ways back." When he had rested he spoke up again, "Say, fellers,
+what'll we sing?" George tried him with a gospel hymn, but Joe would
+have none of it, and reviled the song and the singer after the fashion
+of boys. In a moment he exclaimed: "Here--listen to me. Let's sing
+this," and his alto voice came out uncertainly and faintly: "Wrap Me up
+in My Tarpaulin Jacket."
+
+George Kirwin's rough voice joined the song and the mother listened and
+wept. Other old songs followed, but Joe Nevison, the man, never woke up.
+It was the little boy full of the poetry and sweetness of a child at
+play, the boy who had turned the poetry of his boyish soul into a life
+of adventure unchecked by moral restraint, whose eyes they closed that
+morning.
+
+And George Kirwin explained to us when he came down to work that
+afternoon, that maybe the bad part of Joe Nevison's soul had shrivelled
+away during his sickness, instead of waiting for death. George told us
+that what made him sad was that a soul in which there was so much that
+might have been good had been stunted by life and was entering eternity
+with so little to show for its earthly journey.
+
+When one considers it, one finds that Joe Nevison wasted his life most
+miserably. There was nothing to his credit to say in his obituary--no
+good deed to recount and there were many, many bad ones. Moreover, the
+sorrow and bitterness that he brought into his father's last days, and
+the shame that he put upon his mother, who lived to see his end, made it
+impossible for our paper to say of him any kind thing that would not
+have seemed maudlin.
+
+Yet at Joe Nevison's funeral the old settlers, many of them broken in
+years and by trouble, gathered at the little wooden church in the hollow
+below the track, to see the last of him, though certainly not to pay him
+a tribute of respect. They remembered him as the little boy who had
+trudged up the hill to school when the old stone schoolhouse was the
+only stone building in town; they remembered him as he was in the days
+when he began to turn Marshal Furgeson's hair grey with wild pranks.
+They remembered the boy's childish virtues, and could feel the remorse
+that must at times have gnawed his heart. Also these old men and women
+knew of the devil of unbridled passion that the child's father had put
+into Joe's blood. And when he started down the broad road they had seen
+his track beyond him. So as the little gathering of old people filed
+through the church door and lined up on the sidewalk waiting for the
+mourners to come out, we heard through the crowd white haired men
+sighing: "Poor Joe; poor fellow." Can one hope that God's forgiveness
+will be fuller than that!
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+A Pilgrim in the Wilderness
+
+
+A few years ago we were getting out a special edition of our paper,
+printed on book-paper, and filled with pictures of the old settlers, and
+we called it "the historical edition." In preparing the historical
+edition we had to confer with "Aunt" Martha Merrifield so often that
+George Kirwin, the foreman, who was kept trotting to her with
+proof-slips and copy for her to revise, remarked, as he was making up
+the last form of the troublesome edition, that, if the recording angel
+ever had a fire in his office, he could make up the record for our town
+from "Aunt" Martha's scrapbook. In that big, fat, crinkly-leafed book,
+she has pasted so many wedding notices and birth notices and death
+notices that one who reads the book wonders how so many people could
+have been born, married and died in a town of only ten thousand
+inhabitants. One evening, while the historical edition was growing, a
+reporter spent the evening with "Aunt" Martha. The talk drifted back to
+the early days, and "Aunt" Martha mentioned Balderson. To identify him
+she went to her scrapbook, and as she was turning the pages she said:
+
+"In those days of the early seventies, before the railroad came, when
+the town awoke in the morning and found a newly arrived covered waggon
+near a neighbour's house, it always meant that kin had come. If at
+school that day the children from the house of visitation bragged about
+their relatives, expatiating upon the power and riches that they left
+back East, the town knew that the visitors were ordinary kin; but if the
+children from the afflicted household said little about the visitors and
+evidently tried to avoid telling just who they were, then the town knew
+that the strangers were poor kin--probably some of "his folks"; for it
+was well understood that the women in this town all came from high
+connections 'back East' in Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa. Newcomers
+sometimes wondered how such a galaxy of princesses and duchesses and
+ladyships happened to marry so far beneath their station.
+
+"But the Dixons had no children, so when a covered waggon drove up to
+their place in the night, and a fussy, pussy little man with a dingy,
+stringy beard, appeared in the Dixons' back yard in the morning, looking
+after the horses hitched to the strange waggon; the town had to wait
+until the next week's issue of the _Statesman_ to get reliable news
+about their prospective fellow-citizen." With that "Aunt" Martha opened
+her scrapbook and read a clipping from the _Statesman_, under the head,
+"A Valuable Acquisition to Our City." It ran:
+
+"It has been many months since we have been favoured with a call from so
+cultured and learned a gentleman as the Hon. Andoneran P. Balderson,
+late of Quito, Hancock County, Iowa, who has finally determined to
+settle in our midst. Cramped by the irritating conventionalities of an
+effete civilisation, Colonel Balderson comes among us for that larger
+freedom and wider horizon which his growing powers demand. He comes with
+the ripened experience of a jurist, a soldier, and a publicist, and,
+when transportation facilities have been completed between this and the
+Missouri River, Judge Balderson will bring to our little city his
+magnificent law library; but until then he will be found over the Elite
+Oyster Bay, where he will be glad to welcome clients and others.
+
+"Having participated in the late War of the Rebellion, as captain in
+Company G of Colonel Jennison's famous and invincible army of the
+border, Colonel Balderson will give special attention to pension
+matters. He also will set to work to obtain a complete set of abstracts,
+and will be glad to give advice on real-estate law and the practice of
+eminent domain, to which subject he has given deep study. All business
+done with neatness and despatch.
+
+"Before leaving Iowa, and after considerable pressure, Judge Balderson
+consented to act as agent for a number of powerful Eastern fire
+insurance companies, and has in contemplation the establishment of the
+Southwestern distributing point for the Multum in Parvo Farm Gate
+Company, of which corporation Colonel Balderson owns the patent right
+for Kansas. This business, however, he would be willing to dispose of to
+proper parties. Terms on application.
+
+"The colonel desires us to announce that there will be a meeting of the
+veterans of the late war at the schoolhouse next Saturday night, for the
+purpose of organising a society to refresh and perpetuate the sacred
+memories of that gigantic struggle, and to rally around the old flag,
+touch shoulders again, and come into a closer fellowship for benevolent,
+social, and other purposes. The judge, on that occasion, will deliver
+his famous address on the 'Battle of Look Out Mountain,' in which battle
+Colonel Balderson participated as a member of an Iowa regiment.
+Admission free. Silver collection to defray necessary expenses."
+
+Accompanying this article was a slightly worn woodcut of the colonel in
+his soldier garb, a cap with the top drawn forward, the visor low over
+his eyes, and a military overcoat thrown gaily back, exposing his
+shoulder. The picture showed the soldier in profile, with a fierce
+military moustache and a stubby, runty goatee, meant to strike terror to
+the civilian heart.
+
+From "Aunt" Martha we learned that before Judge Balderson had been in
+town a week he had dyed his whiskers and had taken command of our forces
+in the county-seat war then brewing. During the judge's first month in
+the county the campaign for the county-seat election was opened, and he
+canvassed the north end of the county for our town, denouncing, with
+elaborate eloquence, as horse thieves, mendicants, and renegades from
+justice, the settlers in the south end of the county who favoured the
+rival town. The judge organised a military company and picketed the
+hills about our town day and night against a raid from the Southenders;
+and, having stirred public passion deeply, he turned his pickets loose
+on the morning of election day to set prairie fires all over the south
+end of the county to harass the settlers who might vote for the rival
+town and keep them away from the polls fighting fire.
+
+Our people won; "the hell-hounds of disorder and anarchy"--as Judge
+Balderson called the rival townspeople--were "rebuked by the stern hand
+of a just and terrible Providence." Balderson was a hero, and our people
+sent him to the legislature. "Aunt" Martha added:
+
+"He went to Topeka in his blue soldier clothes, his campaign hat, and
+brass buttons; but he came back, at the first recess, in diamonds and
+fine linen, and the town sniffed a little." Having learned this much of
+Balderson our office became interested in him, and a reporter was set to
+work to look up Balderson. The reporter found that according to Wilder's
+"Annals," Balderson hustled himself into the chairmanship of the
+railroad committee and became a power in the State. The next time
+Colonel "Alphabetical" Morrison came to the office he was asked for
+further details about Balderson. The Colonel told us that when the
+legislature finally adjourned, very proud and very drunk, in the bedlam
+of the closing hours, Judge Balderson mounted a desk, waved the Stars
+and Stripes, and told of the Battle of Look Out Mountain. Colonel
+Morrison chuckled as he added: "The next day the _State Journal_ printed
+his picture--the one with the slouching cap, the military moustache, the
+fierce goatee, and the devil-may-care cape--and referred to the judge as
+'the silver-tongued orator of the Cottonwood,' a title which began to
+amuse the fellows around town."
+
+Naturally he was a candidate for Congress. Colonel Morrison says that
+Balderson became familiarly known in State politics as Little Baldy,
+and was in demand at soldiers' meetings and posed as the soldier's
+friend.
+
+Wilder's "Annals" records the fact that Balderson failed to go to
+Congress, but went to the State Senate. He waxed fat. We learned that he
+bought a private bank and all the books recording abstracts of title to
+land in his county, and that he affected a high silk hat when he went to
+Chicago, while his townsmen were inclined to eye him askance. The lack
+of three votes from his home precinct kept him from being nominated
+lieutenant-governor by his party, but Colonel Morrison says that
+Balderson soon took on the title of governor, and was unruffled by his
+defeat. The Colonel describes Balderson as assuming the air of a kind of
+sacred white cow, and putting much hair-oil and ointment and
+frankincense upon his carcass. Other old settlers say that in those days
+his dyed whiskers fairly glistened. And when, at State conventions, in
+the fervour of his passion he unbent, unbuttoned his frock-coat, grabbed
+the old flag, and charged up and down the platform in an oratorical
+frensy, it seemed that another being had emerged from the greasy little
+roll of adipose in which "Governor" Balderson enshrined himself. His
+climax was invariably the wavering battle-line upon the mountain, the
+flag tottering and about to fall, "when suddenly it rises and goes
+forward, up--up--up the hill, through the smoke of hell, and full and
+fair into the teeth of death, with ten thousand cheering, maddened
+soldiers behind it. And who carried that flag--who carried that flag?"
+he would scream, in a tremulous voice, repeating his question over and
+over, and then answer himself in tragic bass: "The little corporal of
+Company B!" And, "Who fell into the arms of victory that great day, with
+four wounds upon his body? The little corporal of Company B!" It is
+hardly necessary to add that Governor Balderson was the little corporal.
+
+After the failure of his bank, when rumour accused him of burning the
+court-house that he might sell his abstracts to the county at a fabulous
+price, he called a public meeting to hear his defence, and repeated to
+his townsmen that query, "Who carried the flag?" adding in a hoarse
+whisper: "And yet--great God!--they say that the little corporal is an
+in-cen-di-ary. Was this great war fought in vain, that tr-e-e-sin should
+lift her hydra head to hiss out such blasphemy upon the boys who wore
+the blue?"
+
+However, the evidence was against him, and as our people had long since
+lost interest in the flag-bearer, the committee gave him five minutes to
+leave. He returned three minutes in change and struck out over the hill
+towards the west, afoot, and the town knew him no more forever.
+
+Where Balderson went after leaving town no one seems to know. The earth
+might have swallowed him up. But in 1882 someone sent a marked copy of
+the _Denver Tribune_ to the _Statesman_ office, the _Statesman_
+reprinted it, and "Aunt" Martha filed it away in her book. Here is it:
+
+"Big Burro Springs, Colorado, September 7th (Special).--Three men were
+killed yesterday in a fight between the men at Jingle-bob ranch and a
+surveying party under A. P. Balderson. The Balderson party consisted of
+four men, among whom was 'Rowdy' Joe Nevison, the famous marshal of
+Leoti, Kansas. They were locating a reservoir site which Balderson has
+taken up on Burro Creek for the Balderson Irrigation Company and for
+supplying the Look Out Townsite Company with water. These are
+Balderson's schemes, and, if established, will put the Jingle-bob ranch
+people out of business, as they have no title to the land on which they
+are operating. The remarkable part of the fight is that which Balderson
+took in it. After two of his men had been killed and the owner of the
+Jingle-bob ranch had fallen, Balderson and his two remaining men came
+forward with hands up, waving handkerchiefs. The Jingle-bob people
+recognised the flag of truce, and Balderson led his men across the creek
+to the cow-camp. Just as he approached close enough to the man who had
+the party covered, Balderson yelled, 'Watch out--back of you!' and, as
+all the captors turned their heads, Balderson knocked the pistol from
+the hand of the only man whose weapon was pointed at the Balderson
+party, and the next moment the cow-men looked into the barrels of the
+surveyors' three revolvers, and were told that if they budged a hair
+they would be killed. Balderson then disarmed the cow-men, and, after
+passing around the drinks, hired the outfit as policemen for the town
+of Look Out. It is said that he has given them two thousand dollars
+apiece in Irrigation Company stock, has promised to defend them if they
+are charged with the murder of the two surveyors, and has given each
+cow-man a deed to a corner lot on the public square of the prospective
+Balderson town. Deputy Sheriff Crosby from this place went over to
+arrest Balderson, charged with killing D. V. Sherman of the Jingle-bob
+property, and, after asking for his warrant, Balderson took it, put it
+in his pocket, advised the deputy to hurry home, and, if he found any
+coyotes or jack-rabbits that couldn't get out of his way fast enough,
+not to stop to kill them, but shoo them off the trail and save time."
+
+They say in Colorado that Balderson became an irrigation king. It is
+certain that he raised half a million dollars in New York for his dam
+and ditches. He built the "Look Out Opera House," and decorated it in
+gilded stucco and with red plush two inches deep. Morrison contributed
+this anecdote to the office Legend of Balderson: "He was in Florida in
+his private car when they finished the opera house. When he came back
+and saw a plaster bust of Shakespeare over the proscenium arch, he waved
+his cane pompously and exclaimed: 'Take her down! Bill Shakespeare is
+all right for the effete East, but out here he ain't deuce high with the
+little corporal of Company B.'" So in Shakespeare's niche is a
+plaster-cast of a soldier's face with the slouch-cap, the military
+moustache, and the goatee of great pride, after the picture that once
+adorned the columns of the _Statesman_. For a time they talked of
+Balderson for United States Senator, and, at the laying of the
+corner-stone of the capitol, the Denver papers spoke of the masterly
+oration of former Governor Balderson of Kansas, whose marvellous
+word-painting of the Battle of Look Out Mountain held the vast audience
+spellbound for an hour. A few months later a cloudburst carried away the
+Big Burro dam, and times went bad, and the stockholders in Balderson's
+company, who would have rebuilt the dam, could not find Balderson when
+they needed him, and certain creditors of the company, hitherto unknown,
+appeared, and Balderson faded away like a morning star.
+
+Here is a part of the narrative that George Kirwin got from Joe
+Nevison: Joe began with the coal strike at Castle Rock, Wyoming, in
+1893, when the strikers massed on Flat Top Mountain and day after day
+went through their drill. He told a highly dramatic story of the
+stoutish little man of fifty-five, with a fat, smooth-shaven face, who
+pounded that horde of angry men into some semblance of military order.
+All day the little man, in his shrunken seersucker coat and greasy white
+hat, would bark orders at the men, march and counter-march them, and go
+through the manual of arms, backward and forward and seven hands round.
+When the battle with the militia came, the strikers charged down Flat
+Top and fought bravely. The little man in the seersucker coat stayed
+with them, snapping orders at them, damning them, coaxing them. And when
+the deputies gathered up the strikers for the trial in court two months
+later, the little man was still there. He was prospecting on a
+gopher-hole somewhere up in the hills, and was trying to get his wildcat
+mine listed on the Salt Lake Mining Exchange. No one gave bond for the
+little man in the seersucker coat, and he went to jail. He was
+Balderson. He seemed to give little heed to the trial, and sat with the
+strikers rather stolidly. Venire after venire of jurymen was gone
+through. At last an old man wearing a Loyal Legion button went into the
+jury-box. Balderson saw him; they exchanged recognising glances, and
+Balderson turned scarlet and looked away quickly. He nudged an attorney
+for the strikers and said: "Keep him, whatever you do."
+
+After the evidence was all in and the attorneys were about to make their
+arguments, Balderson and one of the lawyers for the strikers were alone.
+
+"They told me to take the part about you, Balderson; you were in the
+Union Army, weren't you?"
+
+Balderson looked at the floor and said:
+
+"Yes; but don't say anything about it."
+
+The lawyer, who knew Balderson's record, was astonished. He had made his
+whole speech up on the line that Balderson as an old soldier would
+appeal to the sympathies of the jury. Over and over the lawyer pressed
+Balderson to know why nothing should be said of his soldier record, and
+finally in exasperation the lawyer broke out:
+
+"Lookee here, Baldy; you're too old to get coy. I'm going to make my
+speech as I've mapped it out, soldier racket and all. I guess you've
+taken enough trips up Look Out Mountain to get used to the altitude by
+this time."
+
+The lawyer started away, but Balderson grabbed him and pulled him back.
+"Don't do it; for God's sake, don't do it! There's a fellow on that jury
+that's a G. A. R. man; we were soldiers together; he knows me from away
+back. Talk of Iowy; talk of Kansas; talk of anything on God's green
+earth, but don't talk soldier. That man would wade through hell for me
+neck deep on any other basis than that." Balderson's voice was
+quivering. He added: "But don't talk soldier." Balderson slumped, with
+his head in his hands. The attorney snapped at him:
+
+"Weren't you a soldier?"
+
+"Yes; oh, yes," Balderson sighed.
+
+"Didn't you go up Look Out Mountain?"
+
+"Oh, yes--that, too."
+
+There was a silence between the men. The lawyer rasped it with, "Well,
+what then?"
+
+"Well--well," and the tousled little man sighed so deeply his sigh was
+almost a sob, and lifted up the eyes of a whipped dog to the
+lawyer's--"after that I got in the commissary department--and--and--was
+dishonourably discharged." He rubbed his eyes with his fingers a moment
+and then grinned foxily: "Ain't that enough?"
+
+Roosevelt is a mining-camp in Idaho. It is five days from a morning
+paper, and the camp is new. It is a log town with one street and no
+society, except such as may gather around the big box-stove at Johnnie
+Conyer's saloon. A number of ladies and two women lived in the camp, a
+few tin-horn "gents," and about two hundred men. It is a seven months'
+snow-camp, where men take their drama canned in the phonograph, their
+food canned, their medicine all out of one bottle, and their morals
+"without benefit of clergy." Across the front of one of the
+canvas-covered log store-rooms that fringe the single street a cloth
+sign is stretched. It reads, "Department Store," and inside a dance
+hall, a saloon, and a gambling-place are operating. A few years ago,
+when Colonel Alphabetical Morrison was travelling through the West on a
+land deal for John Markley, business took him to Roosevelt, and he found
+Balderson, grey of beard, shiny of pate, with unkempt, ratty back hair;
+he was watery-eyed, and his red-veined skin had slipped down from his
+once fat face into draperies over his lean neck and jowls. He was in the
+dealer's chair, running the game.
+
+The statute of limitations had covered all his Kansas misdeeds, and he
+nodded affably as his old acquaintance came in. Later in the day the two
+men went to Mrs. Smith's boarding-house to take a social bite. They sat
+in front of the log-house in the evening, Balderson mellow and
+reminiscent.
+
+"Seems to me this way: I ain't cut out for society as it is organised. I
+do all right in a town until the piano begins to get respectable and the
+rules of order are tucked snugly inside the decalogue, then I slip my
+belt, and my running gear doesn't track. I get a few grand and noble
+thoughts, freeze to 'em, and later find that the hereditary
+appurtenances thereunto appertaining are private property of someone
+else, and there is nothing for me to do but to stand a lawsuit or
+vanish. I have had bad luck, lost my money, lost my friends, lost my
+conscience, lost everything, pretty near"--and here he turned his watery
+eyes on his friend with a saw-toothed smile and shook his depleted
+abdomen, that had been worn off climbing many hills--"I've lost
+everything, pretty near, but my vermiform appendix and my table of
+contents, and as like as not I'll find some feller's got them
+copyrighted." He heaved a great sigh and resumed, "I suppose I could 'a'
+stood it all well enough if I had just had some sort of faith, some
+religious consolation, some creed, or god, or something." He sighed
+again, and then leered up: "But, you know--I'm so damned skeptic!"
+
+Last spring, according to the Boisé, Idaho, papers, "Governor" Balderson
+and two other old soldiers celebrated Memorial Day in Roosevelt. They
+got a muslin flag as big as the flap of a shirt, from heaven knows
+where, and in the streets of Roosevelt they hoisted this flag on the
+highest pine pole in all the Salmon River Mountains. There were
+elaborate ceremonies, and to the miners and gamblers and keepers of
+wildcat mines in the mountains assembled, "Governor" Balderson told
+eloquently of the Battle of Look Out Mountain. And Colonel Morrison who
+read the account smiled appreciatively and pointed out to us the exact
+stage in the proceedings where Balderson demanded to know who carried
+the flag. There was long and tumultuous applause at the climax.
+
+We also read in the Boisé papers that at the fall election in Roosevelt
+they made Balderson justice of the peace, which, as Colonel Morrison
+explained, was a purely honorary office in a community where every man
+is his own court and constable and jury and judge; but the Colonel said
+that Balderson was proud of official distinction, and probably levied
+mild tribute from the people who indulged in riotous living, by
+compelling them to buy drink-checks redeemable only at his department
+store.
+
+It was from the Boisé papers that we had the final word from Balderson.
+A message came to Roosevelt this spring that an outfit, thirty miles
+away at the head of Profile Creek, was sick and starving. It was a
+dangerous trip to the rescue, for snowslides were booming on every
+southern hillside. Death would literally play tag with the man who dared
+to hit the trail for Profile. Balderson did not hesitate a moment, but
+filled his pack with provisions, put a marked deck and some loaded dice
+in his pocket, and waved Roosevelt a cheery good-by as he struck out
+over the three logs that bridge Mule Creek. He was bundled to the chin
+in warm coats, and on his way met Hot Foot Higgins coming in from
+Profile. Balderson seems to have given Higgins his warmest coat before
+the snow-slide hit them. It killed them both. Hot Foot died instantly,
+but Balderson must have lived many hours, for the snow about his body
+was melted and in his pocket they found Hot Foot's watch.
+
+They buried him near the trail where they found him, and, stuck in a
+candle-box, over the heap of stones above him, flutters lonesomely in
+the desolation of the mountain-side the little muslin rag that was once
+a flag. They call the hill on which he sleeps "Look Out Mountain."
+
+Late this spring the mail brought to the office of the Boisé
+_Capital-News_ a battered woodcut half a century old. When the _News_
+came to our office we saw the familiar soldier's face in profile, with
+a cap drawn over the eyes, with a waving moustache and a fierce goatee,
+and across the shoulders of the figure a military cape thrown back
+jauntily. With the old cut in the Boisé paper was an article which the
+editor says in a note was written in a young woman's angular
+handwriting, done in pencil on wrapping-paper. The article told, in
+spelling unspeakable, of the greatness and goodness of "Ex-Governor
+Balderson of Kansas." It related that he was ever the "friend to the
+friendless"; that, "with all his worldly honours, he was modest and
+unassuming"; that "he had his faults, as who of us have not," but that
+he was "honest, tried and true"; and the memorial closed with the words:
+"Heaven's angel gained is Roosevelt's hero lost."
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+The Passing of Priscilla Winthrop
+
+
+What a dreary waste life in our office must have been before Miss
+Larrabee came to us to edit a society page for the paper! To be sure we
+had known in a vague way that there were lines of social cleavage in the
+town; that there were whist clubs and dancing clubs and women's clubs,
+and in a general way that the women who composed these clubs made up our
+best society, and that those benighted souls beyond the pale of these
+clubs were out of the caste. We knew that certain persons whose names
+were always handed in on the lists of guests at parties were what we
+called "howling swells." But it remained for Miss Larrabee to sort out
+ten or a dozen of these "howling swells" who belonged to the strictest
+social caste in town, and call them "howling dervishes." Incidentally it
+may be said that both Miss Larrabee and her mother were dervishes, but
+that did not prevent her from making sport of them. From Miss Larrabee
+we learned that the high priestess of the howling dervishes of our
+society was Mrs. Mortimer Conklin, known by the sisterhood of the mosque
+as Priscilla Winthrop. We in our office had never heard her called by
+that name, but Miss Larrabee explained, rather elaborately, that unless
+one was permitted to speak of Mrs. Conklin thus, one was quite beyond
+the hope of a social heaven.
+
+In the first place, Priscilla Winthrop was Mrs. Conklin's maiden name;
+in the second place, it links her with the Colonial Puritan stock of
+which she is so justly proud--being scornful of mere Daughters of the
+Revolution--and finally, though Mrs. Conklin is a grandmother, her
+maiden name seems to preserve the sweet, vague illusion of girlhood
+which Mrs. Conklin always carries about her like the shadow of a dream.
+And Miss Larrabee punctuated this with a wink which we took to be a
+quotation mark, and she went on with her work. So we knew we had been
+listening to the language used in the temple.
+
+Our town was organised fifty years ago by Abolitionists from New
+England, and twenty years ago, when Alphabetical Morrison was getting
+out one of the numerous boom editions of his real estate circular, he
+printed an historical article therein in which he said that Priscilla
+Winthrop was the first white child born on the town site. Her father was
+territorial judge, afterward member of the State Senate, and after ten
+years spent in mining in the far West, died in the seventies, the
+richest man in the State. It was known that he left Priscilla, his only
+child, half a million dollars in government bonds.
+
+She was the first girl in our town to go away to school. Naturally, she
+went to Oberlin, famous in those days for admitting coloured students.
+But she finished her education at Vassar, and came back so much of a
+young lady that the town could hardly contain her. She married Mortimer
+Conklin, took him to the Centennial on a wedding trip, came home,
+rebuilt her father's house, covering it with towers and minarets and
+steeples, and scroll-saw fretwork, and christened it Winthrop Hall. She
+erected a store building on Main Street, that Mortimer might have a
+luxurious office on the second floor, and then settled down to the
+serious business of life, which was building up a titled aristocracy in
+a Kansas town.
+
+The Conklin children were never sent to the public schools, but had a
+governess, yet Mortimer Conklin, who was always alert for the call,
+could not understand why the people never summoned him to any office of
+honour or trust. He kept his brass signboard polished, went to his
+office punctually every morning at ten o'clock, and returned home to
+dinner at five, and made clients wait ten minutes in the outer office
+before they could see him--at least so both of them say, and there were
+no others in all the years. He shaved every day, wore a frock-coat and a
+high hat to church--where for ten years he was the only male member of
+the Episcopalian flock--and Mrs. Conklin told the women that altogether
+he was a credit to his sex and his family--a remark which was passed
+about ribaldly in town for a dozen years, though Mortimer Conklin never
+knew that he was the subject of a town joke. Once he rebuked a man in
+the barber shop for speaking of feminine extravagance, and told the shop
+that he did not stint his wife, that when she asked him for money he
+always gave it to her without question, and that if she wanted a dress
+he told her to buy it and send the bill to him. And we are such a polite
+people that no one in the crowded shop laughed--until Mortimer Conklin
+went out.
+
+Of course at the office we have known for twenty-five years what the men
+thought of Mortimer, but not until Miss Larrabee joined the force did we
+know that among the women Mrs. Conklin was considered an oracle. Miss
+Larrabee said that her mother has a legend that when Priscilla Winthrop
+brought home from Boston the first sealskin sacque ever worn in town she
+gave a party for it, and it lay in its box on the big walnut bureau in
+the spare room of the Conklin mansion in solemn state, while
+seventy-five women salaamed to it. After that Priscilla Winthrop was the
+town authority on sealskins. When any member of the town nobility had a
+new sealskin, she took it humbly to Priscilla Winthrop to pass judgment
+upon it. If Priscilla said it was London-dyed, its owner pranced away
+on clouds of glory; but if she said it was American-dyed, its owner
+crawled away in shame, and when one admired the disgraced garment, the
+martyred owner smiled with resigned sweetness and said humbly: "Yes--but
+it's only American-dyed, you know."
+
+No dervish ever questioned the curse of the priestess. The only time a
+revolt was imminent was in the autumn of 1884 when the Conklins returned
+from their season at Duxbury, Massachusetts, and Mrs. Conklin took up
+the carpets in her house, heroically sold all of them at the second-hand
+store, put in new waxed floors and spread down rugs. The town uprose and
+hooted; the outcasts and barbarians in the Methodist and Baptist
+Missionary Societies rocked the Conklin home with their merriment, and
+ten dervishes with set faces bravely met the onslaughts of the savages;
+but among themselves in hushed whispers, behind locked doors, the
+faithful wondered if there was not a mistake some place. However, when
+Priscilla Winthrop assured them that in all the best homes in Boston
+rugs were replacing carpets, their souls were at peace.
+
+All this time we at the office knew nothing of what was going on. We
+knew that the Conklins devoted considerable time to society; but
+Alphabetical Morrison explained that by calling attention to the fact
+that Mrs. Conklin had prematurely grey hair. He said a woman with
+prematurely grey hair was as sure to be a social leader as a spotted
+horse is to join a circus. But now we know that Colonel Morrison's view
+was a superficial one, for he was probably deterred from going deeper
+into the subject by his dislike for Mortimer Conklin, who invested a
+quarter of a million dollars of the Winthrop fortune in the Wichita
+boom, and lost it. Colonel Morrison naturally thought as long as Conklin
+was going to lose that money he could have lost it just as well at home
+in the "Queen City of the Prairies," giving the Colonel a chance to win.
+And when Conklin, protecting his equities in Wichita, sent a hundred
+thousand dollars of good money after the quarter million of bad money,
+Colonel Morrison's grief could find no words; though he did find
+language for his wrath. When the Conklins draped their Oriental rugs for
+airing every Saturday over the veranda and portico railings of the
+house front, Colonel Morrison accused the Conklins of hanging out their
+stamp collection to let the neighbours see it. This was the only side of
+the rug question we ever heard in our office until Miss Larrabee came;
+then she told us that one of the first requirements of a howling dervish
+was to be able to quote from Priscilla Winthrop's Rug book from memory.
+The Rug book, the China book and the Old Furniture book were the three
+sacred scrolls of the sect.
+
+All this was news to us. However, through Colonel Morrison, we had
+received many years ago another sidelight on the social status of the
+Conklins. It came out in this way: Time honoured custom in our town
+allows the children of a home where there is an outbreak of social
+revelry, whether a church festival or a meeting of the Cold-Nosed Whist
+Club, to line up with the neighbour children on the back stoop or in the
+kitchen, like human vultures, waiting to lick the ice-cream freezer and
+to devour the bits of cake and chicken salad that are left over. Colonel
+Morrison told us that no child was ever known to adorn the back yard of
+the Conklin home while a social cataclysm was going on, but that when
+Mrs. Morrison entertained the Ladies' Literary League, children from the
+holy Conklin family went home from his back porch with their faces
+smeared with chicken croquettes and their hands sticky with jellycake.
+
+This story never gained general circulation in town, but even if it had
+been known of all men it would not have shaken the faith of the
+devotees. For they did not smile when Priscilla Winthrop began to refer
+to old Frank Hagan, who came to milk the Conklin cow and curry the
+Conklin horse, as "François, the man," or to call the girl who did the
+cooking and general housework "Cosette, the maid," though every one of
+the dozen other women in town whom "Cosette, the maid" had worked for
+knew that her name was Fanny Ropes. And shortly after that the homes of
+the rich and the great over on the hill above Main Street began to fill
+with Lisettes and Nanons and Fanchons, and Mrs. Julia Neal Worthington
+called her girl "Grisette," explaining that they had always had a
+Grisette about the house since her mother first went to housekeeping in
+Peoria, Illinois, and it sounded so natural to hear the name that they
+always gave it to a new servant. This story came to the office through
+the Young Prince, who chuckled over it during the whole hour he consumed
+in writing Ezra Worthington's obituary.
+
+Miss Larrabee says that the death of Ezra Worthington marks such a
+distinct epoch in the social life of the town that we must set down
+here--even if the narrative of the Conklins halts for a moment--how the
+Worthingtons rose and flourished. Julia Neal, eldest daughter of Thomas
+Neal--who lost the "O" before his name somewhere between the docks of
+Dublin and the west bank of the Missouri River--was for ten years
+principal of the ward school in that part of our town known as
+"Arkansaw," where her term of service is still remembered as the "reign
+of terror." It was said of her then that she could whip any man in the
+ward--and would do it if he gave her a chance. The same manner which
+made the neighbours complain that Julia Neal carried her head too high,
+later in life, when she had money to back it, gave her what the women of
+the State Federation called a "regal air." In her early thirties she
+married Ezra Worthington, bachelor, twenty year her senior. Ezra
+Worthington was at that time, had been for twenty years before, and
+continued to be until his death, proprietor of the Worthington Poultry
+and Produce Commission Company. He was owner of the stock-yards,
+president of the Worthington State Bank, vice-president, treasurer and
+general manager of the Worthington Mercantile Company, and owner of five
+brick buildings on Main Street. He bought one suit of clothes every five
+years whether he needed it or not, never let go of a dollar until the
+Goddess of Liberty on it was black in the face, and died rated "As
+$350,000" by all the commercial agencies in the country. And the first
+thing Mrs. Worthington did after the funeral was to telephone to the
+bank and ask them to send her a hundred dollars.
+
+The next important thing she did was to put a heavy, immovable granite
+monument over the deceased so that he would not be restless, and then
+she built what is known in our town as the Worthington Palace. It makes
+the Markley mansion which cost $25,000 look like a barn. The
+Worthingtons in the lifetime of Ezra had ventured no further into the
+social whirl of the town than to entertain the new Presbyterian preacher
+at tea, and to lend their lawn to the King's Daughters for a social,
+sending a bill in to the society for the eggs used in the coffee and the
+gasoline used in heating it.
+
+To the howling dervishes who surrounded Priscilla Winthrop the
+Worthingtons were as mere Christian dogs. It was not until three years
+after Ezra Worthington's death that the glow of the rising Worthington
+sun began to be seen in the Winthrop mosque. During those three years
+Mrs. Worthington had bought and read four different sets of the best
+hundred books, had consumed the Chautauqua course, had prepared and
+delivered for the Social Science Club, which she organised, five papers
+ranging in subject from the home life of Rameses I., through a Survey of
+the Forces Dominating Michael Angelo, to the Influence of Esoteric
+Buddhism on Modern Political Tendencies. More than that, she had been
+elected president of the City Federation of Clubs, and, being a delegate
+to the National Federation from the State, was talked of for the State
+Federation Presidency. When the State Federation met in our town, Mrs.
+Worthington gave a reception for the delegates in the Worthington
+Palace, a feature of which was a concert by a Kansas City organist on
+the new pipe-organ which she had erected in the music-room of her house,
+and despite the fact that the devotees of the Priscilla shrine said that
+the crowd was distinctly mixed and not at all representative of our best
+social grace and elegance, there is no question but that Mrs.
+Worthington's reception made a strong impression upon the best local
+society. The fact that, as Miss Larrabee said, "Priscilla Winthrop was
+so nice about it," also may be regarded as ominous. But the women who
+lent Mrs. Worthington the spoons and forks for the occasion were
+delighted, and formed a phalanx about her, which made up in numbers what
+it might have lacked in distinction. Yet while Mrs. Worthington was in
+Europe the faithful routed the phalanx, and Mrs. Conklin returned from
+her summer in Duxbury with half a carload of old furniture from Harrison
+Sampson's shop and gave a talk to the priestesses of the inner temple
+on "Heppelwhite in New England."
+
+Miss Larrabee reported the affair for our paper, giving the small list
+of guests and the long line of refreshments--which included
+alligator-pear salad, right out of the Smart Set Cook Book. Moreover,
+when Jefferson appeared in Topeka that fall, Priscilla Winthrop, who had
+met him through some of her Duxbury friends in Boston, invited him to
+run down for a luncheon with her and the members of the royal family who
+surrounded her. It was the proud boast of the defenders of the Winthrop
+faith in town that week, that though twenty-four people sat down to the
+table, not only did all the men wear frock-coats--not only did Uncle
+Charlie Haskins of String Town wear the old Winthrop butler's livery
+without a wrinkle in it, and with only the faint odour of mothballs to
+mingle with the perfume of the roses--but (and here the voices of the
+followers of the prophet dropped in awe) not a single knife or fork or
+spoon or napkin was borrowed! After that, when any of the sisterhood had
+occasion to speak of the absent Mrs. Worthington, whose house was
+filled with new mahogany and brass furniture, they referred to her as
+the Duchess of Grand Rapids, which gave them much comfort.
+
+But joy is short-lived. When Mrs. Worthington came back from Europe and
+opened her house to the City Federation, and gave a coloured
+lantern-slide lecture on "An evening with the Old Masters," serving
+punch from her own cut-glass punch bowl instead of renting the
+hand-painted crockery bowl of the queensware store, the old dull pain
+came back into the hearts of the dwellers in the inner circle. Then just
+in the nick of time Mrs. Conklin went to Kansas City and was operated on
+for appendicitis. She came back pale and interesting, and gave her club
+a paper called "Hospital Days," fragrant with iodoform and Henley's
+poems. Miss Larrabee told us that it was almost as pleasant as an
+operation on one's self to hear Mrs. Conklin tell about hers. And they
+thought it was rather brutal--so Miss Larrabee afterward told us--when
+Mrs. Worthington went to the hospital one month, and gave her famous
+Delsarte lecture course the next month, and explained to the women that
+if she wasn't as heavy as she used to be it was because she had had
+everything cut out of her below the windpipe. It seemed to the temple
+priestesses that, considering what a serious time poor dear Priscilla
+Winthrop had gone through, Mrs. Worthington was making light of serious
+things.
+
+There is no doubt that the formal rebellion of Mrs. Worthington, Duchess
+of Grand Rapids, and known of the town's nobility as the Pretender,
+began with the hospital contest. The Pretender planted her siege-guns
+before the walls of the temple of the priestess, and prepared for
+business. The first manoeuvre made by the beleaguered one was to give a
+luncheon in the mosque, at which, though it was midwinter, fresh
+tomatoes and fresh strawberries were served, and a real authoress from
+Boston talked upon John Fiske's philosophy and, in the presence of the
+admiring guests, made a new kind of salad dressing for the fresh lettuce
+and tomatoes. Thirty women who watched her forgot what John Fiske's
+theory of the cosmos is, and thirty husbands who afterward ate that
+salad dressing have learned to suffer and be strong. But that salad
+dressing undermined the faith of thirty mere men--raw outlanders to be
+sure--in the social omniscience of Priscilla Winthrop. Of course they
+did not see it made; the spell of the enchantress was not over them; but
+in their homes they maintained that if Priscilla Winthrop didn't know
+any more about cosmic philosophy than to pay a woman forty dollars to
+make a salad dressing like that--and the whole town knows that was the
+price--the vaunted town of Duxbury, Massachusetts, with its old
+furniture and new culture, which Priscilla spoke of in such repressed
+ecstasy, is probably no better than Manitou, Colorado, where they get
+their Indian goods from Buffalo, New York.
+
+Such is the perverse reasoning of man. And Mrs. Worthington, having
+lived with considerable of a man for fifteen years, hearing echoes of
+this sedition, attacked the fortification of the faithful on its weakest
+side. She invited the thirty seditious husbands with their wives to a
+beefsteak dinner, where she heaped their plates with planked sirloin,
+garnished the sirloin with big, fat, fresh mushrooms, and topped off the
+meal with a mince pie of her own concoction, which would make a man
+leave home to follow it. She passed cigars at the table, and after the
+guests went into the music-room ten old men with ten old fiddles
+appeared and contested with old-fashioned tunes for a prize, after which
+the company danced four quadrilles and a Virginia reel. The men threw
+down their arms going home and went over in a body to the Pretender. But
+in a social conflict men are mere non-combatants, and their surrender
+did not seriously injure the cause that they deserted.
+
+The war went on without abatement. During the spring that followed the
+winter of the beefsteak dinner many skirmishes, minor engagements,
+ambushes and midnight raids occurred. But the contest was not decisive.
+For purposes of military drill, the defenders of the Winthrop faith
+formed themselves into a Whist Club. _The_ Whist Club they called it,
+just as they spoke of Priscilla Winthrop's gowns as "the black and white
+one," "the blue brocade," "the white china silk," as if no other black
+and white or blue brocade or white china silk gowns had been created in
+the world before and could not be made again by human hands. So, in the
+language of the inner sanctuary, there was "The Whist Club," to the
+exclusion of all other possible human Whist Clubs under the stars. When
+summer came the Whist Club fled as birds to the mountains--save
+Priscilla Winthrop, who went to Duxbury, and came home with a brass
+warming-pan and a set of Royal Copenhagen china that were set up as holy
+objects in the temple.
+
+But Mrs. Worthington went to the National Federation of Women's Clubs,
+made the acquaintance of the women there who wore clothes from Paris,
+began tracing her ancestry back to the Maryland Calverts--on her
+mother's side of the house--brought home a membership in the Daughters
+of the Revolution, the Colonial Dames and a society which referred to
+Charles I. as "Charles Martyr," claimed a Stuart as the rightful king of
+England, affecting to scorn the impudence of King Edward in sitting on
+another's throne. More than this, Mrs. Worthington had secured the
+promise of Mrs. Ellen Vail Montgomery, Vice-President of the National
+Federation, to visit Cliff Crest, as Mrs. Worthington called the
+Worthington mansion, and she turned up her nose at those who worshipped
+under the towers, turrets and minarets of the Conklin mosque, and played
+the hose of her ridicule on their outer wall that she might have it
+spotless for a target when she got ready to raze it with her big gun.
+
+The week that Ellen Vail Montgomery came to town was a busy one for Miss
+Larrabee. We turned over the whole fourth page of the paper to her for a
+daily society page, and charged the Bee Hive and the White Front Dry
+Goods store people double rates to put their special sale advertisements
+on that page while the "National Vice," as the Young Prince called her,
+was in town. For the "National Vice" brought the State President and two
+State Vices down, also four District Presidents and six District Vices,
+who, as Miss Larrabee said, were monsters "of so frightful a mien, that
+to be hated need but to be seen." The entire delegation of visiting
+stateswomen--Vices and Virtues and Beatitudes as we called them--were
+entertained by Mrs. Worthington at Cliff Crest, and there was so much
+Federation politics going on in our town that the New York _Sun_ took
+five hundred words about it by wire, and Colonel Alphabetical Morrison
+said that with all those dressed-up women about he felt as though he was
+living in a Sunday supplement.
+
+The third day of the ghost-dance at Cliff Crest was to be the day of the
+big event--as the office parlance had it. The ceremonies began at
+sunrise with a breakfast to which half a dozen of the captains and kings
+of the besieging host of the Pretender were bidden. It seems to have
+been a modest orgy, with nothing more astonishing than a new gold-band
+china set to dishearten the enemy. By ten o'clock Priscilla Winthrop and
+the Whist Club had recovered from that; but they had been asked to the
+luncheon--the star feature of the week's round of gayety. It is just as
+well to be frank, and say that they went with fear and trembling. Panic
+and terror were in their ranks, for they knew a crisis was at hand. It
+came when they were "ushered into the dining-hall," as our paper so
+grandly put it, and saw in the great oak-beamed room a table laid on the
+polished bare wood--a table laid for forty-eight guests, with a doily
+for every plate, and every glass, and every salt-cellar, and--here the
+mosque fell on the heads of the howling dervishes--forty-eight
+soup-spoons, forty-eight silver-handled knives and forks; forty-eight
+butter-spreaders, forty-eight spoons, forty-eight salad forks,
+forty-eight ice-cream spoons, forty-eight coffee spoons. Little did it
+avail the beleaguered party to peep slyly under the spoon-handles--the
+word "Sterling" was there, and, more than that, a large, severely plain
+"W" with a crest glared up at them from every piece of silver. The
+service had not been rented. They knew their case was hopeless. And so
+they ate in peace.
+
+When the meal was over it was Mrs. Ellen Vail Montgomery, in her
+thousand-dollar gown, worshipped by the eyes of forty-eight women, who
+put her arm about Priscilla Winthrop and led her into the conservatory,
+where they had "a dear, sweet quarter of an hour," as Mrs. Montgomery
+afterward told her hostess. In that dear, sweet quarter of an hour
+Priscilla Winthrop Conklin unbuckled her social sword and handed it to
+the conqueror, in that she agreed absolutely with Mrs. Montgomery that
+Mrs. Worthington was "perfectly lovely," that she was "delighted to be
+of any service" to Mrs. Worthington; that Mrs. Conklin "was sure no one
+else in our town was so admirably qualified for "National Vice" as Mrs.
+Worthington," and that "it would be such a privilege" for Mrs. Conklin
+to suggest Mrs. Worthington's name for the office. And then Mrs.
+Montgomery, "National Vice" and former State Secretary for Vermont of
+the Colonial Dames, kissed Priscilla Winthrop and they came forth
+wet-eyed and radiant, holding each other's hands. When the company had
+been hushed by the magic of a State Vice and two District Virtues,
+Priscilla Winthrop rose and in the sweetest Kansas Bostonese told the
+ladies that she thought this an eminently fitting place to let the
+visiting ladies know how dearly our town esteems its most distinguished
+townswoman, Mrs. Julia Neal Worthington, and that entirely without her
+solicitation, indeed quite without her knowledge, the women of our
+town--and she hoped of our beloved State--were ready now to announce
+that they were unanimous in their wish that Mrs. Worthington should be
+National Vice-President of the Federation of Women's Clubs, and that
+she, the speaker, had entered the contest with her whole soul to bring
+this end to pass. Then there was hand-clapping and handkerchief waving
+and some tears, and a little good, honest Irish hugging, and in the
+twilight two score of women filed down through the formal garden of
+Cliff Crest and walked by twos and threes into the town.
+
+There was the usual clatter of home-going wagons; lights winked out of
+kitchen windows; the tinkle of distant cow-bells was in the air; on Main
+Street the commerce of the town was gently ebbing, and man and nature
+seemed utterly oblivious of the great event that had happened. The
+course of human events was not changed; the great world rolled on, while
+Priscilla Winthrop went home to a broken shrine to sit among the
+potsherds.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+"And Yet a Fool"
+
+
+The exchanges that come to a country newspaper like ours become familiar
+friends as the years pass. One who reads these papers regularly comes to
+know them even in their wrappers, though to an unpracticed eye the
+wrappers seem much alike. But when he has been poking his thumb through
+the paper husks in a certain pile every morning for a score of years, he
+knows by some sort of prescience when a new paper appears; and, when the
+pile looks odd to him, he goes hunting for the stranger and is not happy
+until he has found it.
+
+One morning this spring the stranger stuck its head from the bottom of
+the exchange pile, and when we had glanced at the handwriting of the
+address and at the one-cent stamp on the cover we knew it had been
+mailed to us by someone besides the publisher. For the newspaper "hand"
+is as definite a form of writing as the legal hand or the doctor's. The
+paper proved to be an Arizona newspaper full of saloon advertising,
+restaurant cards, church and school meeting notices, local items about
+the sawmill and the woman's club, land notices and paid items from wool
+dealers. On the local page in the midst of a circle of red ink was the
+announcement of the death of Horace P. Sampson. Every month we get
+notices like this, of the deaths of old settlers who have gone to the
+ends of the earth, but this notice was peculiar in that it said:
+
+"One year ago our lamented townsman deposited with the firm of Cross &
+Kurtz, the popular undertakers and dealers in Indian goods and general
+merchandise, $100 to cover his funeral expenses, and another hundred to
+provide that a huge boulder be rolled over his grave on which he desired
+the following unusual inscription: '_Horace P. Sampson, Born Dec. 6,
+1840, and died ----." And is not this a rare fellow, my lord? He's good
+at anything and yet a fool._"'"
+
+We handed the paper to Alphabetical Morrison, who happened to be in the
+office at the time, pawing through the discarded exchanges in the
+waste-basket, looking for his New York _Sun_, and, after Colonel
+Morrison had read the item, he began drumming with his finger-nails on
+the chair-seat between his knees. His eyes were full of dreams and no
+one disturbed him as he looked off into space. Finally he sighed:
+
+"And yet a fool--a motley fool! Poor old Samp--kept it up to the end! I
+take it from the guarded way the paper refers to his faults, 'as who of
+us have not,' that he died of the tremens or something like that." The
+Colonel paused and smiled just perceptibly, and went on: "Yet I see that
+he was a good fellow to the end. I notice that the Shriners and the Elks
+and the Eagles and the Hoo-hoos buried him. Nary an insurance order in
+his! Poor old Samp; he certainly went all the gaits!"
+
+We suggested that Colonel Morrison write something about the deceased
+for the paper, but though the Colonel admitted that he knew Sampson
+"like a book," there was no persuading Morrison to write the obituary.
+
+"After some urging and by way of compromise," he said, "I'm perfectly
+willing to give you fellows the facts and let you fix up what you
+please."
+
+Because the reporters were both busy we called the stenographer, and had
+the Colonel's story taken down as he told it--to be rewritten into an
+obituary later. And it is what he said and not what we printed about
+Sampson that is worth putting down here. The Colonel took the big
+leather chair, locked his hands behind his head, and began:
+
+"Let me see. Samp was born, as he says, December 6, 1840, in Wisconsin,
+and came out to Kansas right after the war closed. He was going to
+college up there, and at the second call for troops he led the whole
+senior class into forming a company, and enlisted before graduation and
+fought from that time on till the close of the war. He was a captain, I
+think, but you never heard him called that. When he came here he'd been
+admitted to the bar and was a good lawyer--a mighty good lawyer for that
+time--and had more business 'n a bird pup with a gum-shoe. He was just a
+boy then, and, like all boys, he enjoyed a good time. He drank more or
+less in the army--they all did 's far as that goes--but he kept it up in
+a desultory way after he came here, as a sort of accessory to his main
+business of life, which was being a good fellow.
+
+"And he was a good fellow--an awful good fellow. We were all young then;
+there wasn't an old man on the town-site as I remember it. We use to
+load up the whole bunch and go hunting--closing up the stores and taking
+the girls along--and did not show up till midnight. Samp would always
+have a little something to take under his buggy-seat, and we would wet
+up and sing coming home, with the beds of the spring-wagons so full of
+prairie chickens and quail that they jolted out at every rut. Samp would
+always lead the singing--being just a mite more lubricated than the rest
+of us, and the girls thought he was all hunkey dorey--as they used to
+say.
+
+[Illustration: "He made a lot of money and blew it in"]
+
+"He made a lot of money and blew it in at Jim Thomas's saloon, buying
+drinks, playing stud poker, betting on quarter horses, and lending it
+out to fellows who helped him forget they'd borrowed it. And--say in
+two or three years, after the chicken-hunting set had married off, and
+begun in a way to settle down--Samp took up with the next set coming on;
+he married and got the prettiest girl in town. We always thought that he
+married only because he wanted to be a good fellow and did not wish to
+be impolite to the girl he'd paired off with in the first crowd. Still
+he didn't stay home nights, and once or twice a year--say, election or
+Fourth of July--he and a lot of other young fellows would go out and tip
+over all the board sidewalks in town, and paint funny signs on the store
+buildings and stack beer bottles on the preacher's front porch, and
+raise Ned generally. And the fellows of his age, who owned the stores
+and were in nights, would say to Samp when they saw him coming down
+about noon the next day:
+
+"'Go it when you're young Samp, for when you're old you can't.' And he
+would wink at 'em, give 'em ten dollars apiece for their damages and
+jolly his way down the street to his office.
+
+"Now, you mustn't get the idea that Samp was the town drunkard, for he
+never was. He was just a good fellow. When the second set of young
+fellows outgrew him and settled down, he picked up with the third, and
+his wife's brown alpaca began to be noticed more or less among the
+women. But Samp's practice didn't seem to fall off--it only changed. He
+didn't have so much real estate lawing and got more criminal practice.
+Gradually he became a criminal lawyer, and his fame for wit and
+eloquence extended over all the State. When a cowpuncher got in trouble
+his folks in the East always gave Samp a big fee to get the boy out, and
+he did it. When he went to any other county-seat besides our own to try
+a case, the fellows--and you know who the fellows are in a town--the
+fellows knew that while Samp was in town there would be something going
+on with 'fireworks in the evening.' For he was a great fellow for a good
+time, and the dining-room girls at the hotel used to giggle in the
+kitchen for a week after he was gone at the awful things he would say to
+'em. He knew more girls by their first names than a drummer."
+
+Colonel Morrison chuckled and crossed his fat legs at the ankles as he
+continued, after lighting the cigar we gave him:
+
+"Well, along in the late seventies we fellows that he started out with
+got to owning our own homes and getting on in the world. That was the
+time when Samp should have been grubbing at his law books, but nary a
+grub for him. He was playing horse for dear life. And right there the
+fellows all left him behind. Some were buying real estate for
+speculation; some running for office; some starting a bank; and others
+lending money at two per cent. a month, and leading in the
+prayer-meeting. So Samp kind of hitched up his ambition and took the
+slack out of his habits for a few months and went to the legislature.
+They say that he certainly did have a good time, though, when he got
+there. They remember that session yet up there, and call it the year of
+the great flood, for the nights they were filled with music, as the poet
+says, and from the best accounts we could get the days were devoid of
+ease also, and how Mrs. Sampson stood it the women never could find out,
+for, of course, she must have known all about it, though he wouldn't
+let her come near Topeka. He began to get pursy and red-faced, and was
+clicking it off with his fifth set of young fellows. It took a big slug
+of whisky to set off his oratory, but when he got it wound up he surely
+could pull the feathers out of the bird of freedom to beat scandalous.
+But as a stump speaker you weren't always sure he'd fill the engagement.
+He could make a jury blubber and clench its fists at the prosecuting
+attorney, yet he didn't claim to know much law, and he did turn over all
+the work in the Supreme Court to his partner, Charley Hedrick. Then,
+when Charley was practising before the Supreme Court and wasn't here to
+hold him down, Samp would get out and whoop it up with the boys, quote
+Shakespeare and make stump speeches on dry-goods boxes at midnight, and
+put his arms around old Marshal Furgeson's neck and tell him he was the
+blooming flower of chivalry. Also women made a fool of him--more or
+less.
+
+"Where was I?" asked Colonel Morrison of the stenographer when she had
+finished sharpening her pencil. "Oh, yes, along in the eighties came
+the boom, and Samp tried to get in it and make some money. He seems to
+have tried to catch up with us fellows of his age, and he began to
+plunge. He got in debt, and, when the boom broke, he was still living in
+a rented house with the rent ten months behind; his partnership was gone
+and his practice was cut down to joint-keepers, gamblers, and the
+farmers who hadn't heard the stories of his financial irregularities
+that were floating around town.
+
+"Yet his wife stuck to him, forever explaining to my wife that he would
+be all right when he settled down. But he continued to soak up a
+little--not much, but a little. He never was drunk in the daytime, but I
+remember there used to be mornings when his office smelled pretty sour.
+I had an office next to his for a while and he used to come in and talk
+to me a good deal. The young fellows around town whom he would like to
+run with were beginning to find him stupid, and the old fellows--except
+me--were busy and he had no one to loaf with. He decided, I remember,
+several times to brace up, and once he kept white shirts, cuffs and
+collars on for nearly a year. But when Harrison was elected, he filled
+up from his shoes to his hat and didn't go home for three days. One day
+after that, when he had gone back to his flannel shirts and dirty
+collars, he was sitting in my office looking at the fire in the big box
+stove when he broke out with:
+
+"'Alphabetical--what's the matter with me, anyway? This town sends men
+to Congress; it makes Supreme Court judges of others. It sends fellows
+to Kansas City as rich bankers. It makes big merchants out of grocery
+clerks. Fortune just naturally flirts with everyone in town--but never a
+wink do I get. I know and you know I'm smarter than those jays. I can
+teach your Congressman economics, and your Supreme judge law. I can
+think up more schemes than the banker, and can beat the merchant in any
+kind of a game he'll name. I don't lie and I don't steal and I ain't
+stuck up. What's the matter with me, anyway?'
+
+"And of course," mused Colonel Morrison as he relighted the butt of his
+cigar, "of course I had to lie to him and say I didn't know. But I did.
+We all knew. He was too much of a good fellow. His failure to get on
+bothered him a good deal, and one day he got roaring full and went up
+and down town telling people how smart he was. Then his pride left him,
+and he let his whiskers grow frowsy and used his vest for a spittoon,
+and his eyes watered too easily for a man still in his forties.
+
+"He went West a dozen years ago, about the time of Cleveland's second
+election, expecting to get a job in Arizona and grow up with the
+country. His wife was mighty happy, and she told our folks and the rest
+of the women that when Horace got away from his old associates in this
+town she knew that he would be all right. Poor Myrtle Kenwick, the
+prettiest girl you ever saw along in the sixties--and she was through
+here not long ago and stayed with my wife and the girls--a broken old
+woman, going back to her kinfolk in Iowa after she left him. Poor
+Myrtle! I wonder where she is. I see this Arizona paper doesn't say
+anything about her."
+
+Colonel Morrison read over the item again, and smiled as he proceeded:
+
+"But it does say that he occupied many places of honour and trust in
+his former home in Kansas, which seems to indicate that whisky made old
+Samp a liar as well as a loafer at last. My, my!" sighed the Colonel as
+he rose and put the paper on the desk. "My, my! What a treacherous
+serpent it is! It gave him a good time--literally a hell of a good time.
+And he was a good fellow--literally a damned good fellow--'damned from
+here to eternity,' as your man Kipling says. God gave him every talent.
+He might have been a respected, useful citizen; no honour was beyond
+him; but he put aside fame and worth and happiness to play with whisky.
+My Lord, just think of it!" exclaimed the Colonel as he reached for his
+hat and put up his glasses. "And this is how whisky served him: brought
+him to shame, wrecked his home, made his name a by-word, and lured him
+on and on to utter ruin by holding before him the phantom of a good
+time. What a pitiful, heart-breaking mocker it is!" He sighed a long
+sigh as he stood in the door looking up at the sky with his hands
+clasped behind him, and said half audibly as he went down the steps:
+"And whoso is deceived thereby is not wise--not wise. 'He's good at
+anything--and yet a fool'!"
+
+That was what Colonel Morrison gave the stenographer. What we made for
+the paper is entirely uninteresting and need not be printed here.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+A Kansas "Childe Roland"
+
+
+One of the wisest things ever said about the newspaper business was said
+by the late J. Sterling Morton, of Nebraska. He declared that a
+newspaper's enemies were its assets, and the newspaper's liabilities its
+friends. This is particularly true of a country newspaper. For instance,
+witness the ten-years' struggle of our own little paper to get rid of
+the word "Hon." as a prefix to the names of politicians. Everyone in
+town used to laugh at us for referring to whippersnapper statesmen as
+"Honourable"; because everyone in town knew that for the most part these
+whippersnappers were entirely dishonourable. It was easy enough to stop
+calling our enemies "Hon.," for they didn't dare to complain; but if we
+dropped the title even from so mangy a man as Abner Handy, within a week
+Charley Hedrick would happen into the office with twenty or thirty
+dollars' worth of legal printing, and after doing us so important a
+favour would pause before going out to say:
+
+"Boys, what you fellows got against Ab Handy?" And the ensuing dialogue
+would conclude from old Charley: "Well, I know--I know--but Ab likes it,
+and it really isn't much, and I know he's a fool about it; I don't care
+in my own case, but if you can do it I kind of wish you would. Ab's
+funny that way; he's never given up. He's like the fellow old Browning
+tells about who has 'august anticipations, of a dim splendour ever on
+before,' and when you fellows quit calling him 'Hon.' it makes him
+blue."
+
+And old Charley would grow purple with a big, wheezy, asthmatic laugh,
+and shake his great six-foot hulk and toddle out leaving us vanquished.
+For though the whole town reviles Abner Handy, Charley Hedrick still
+looks after him.
+
+It was said for thirty years that Handy did old Charley's dirty work in
+politics, but we knew many of the mean things that Handy did were
+unjustly charged to Hedrick. People in a small community are apt to put
+two and two together and make five. Much of the talk about the alliance
+between Hedrick and Handy is, of course, down-right slander; every
+lawyer who tries lawsuits for forty years in a country town is bound to
+make enemies of small-minded people, many of whom occupy large places in
+the community, and a small-minded man, believing that his enemy is a
+villain, makes up his facts to suit his belief, and then peddles his
+story. It is always just as well to discount the home stories on an old
+lawyer ninety-five per cent. if they are bad; and seventy per cent. if
+they are good--for he may have saved the fellow who is telling them from
+the penitentiary. But Abner Handy was never enough of a lawyer to come
+within this rule. Indeed they used to say that he was not admitted to
+the bar, at all, but that when he came to town, in 1871, he erased his
+dead brother's name on a law diploma and substituted his own. Still, he
+practised on the law--as Simon Mehronay used to say of Handy--and for
+twenty years carried an advertisement in Eastern farm journals
+proclaiming that his specialty was Kansas collections. He never took as
+a fee less than ninety-five per cent. of the amount he collected. That
+was the advantage which he had as a lawyer, which advantage inspired
+Colonel Alphabetical Morrison to proclaim that a lawyer's diploma is
+nothing but a license to steal; upon hearing which Charley Hedrick sent
+back to the Colonel the retort that it would take two legal diplomas
+working day and night to keep up with the Colonel's more or less honest
+endeavours.
+
+Now Ab Handy was a lean coyote, who was forever licking his bruises, and
+some ten years later he tried to run for the school board solely to get
+the Colonel's daughters dismissed as school-teachers. It was his boast
+that he never forgot a foe; and for twenty years after Hedrick saved
+Handy from going to jail for robbing a cattleman of a thousand dollars
+in "Red" Martin's gambling-room, the only good thing the town knew of
+Handy was that he never forgot a friend.
+
+During that twenty years whenever, to further his ends in a primary or
+in an election, Charley Hedrick needed the votes of the rough element
+that gathered about our little town, Abner Handy, card-sharper and
+jack-leg lawyer, would go forth into the byways and alleys and gather
+them in. For this service, when Hedrick carried the county--which was
+about four times out of five--Handy was rewarded by being put on the
+delegation to the State convention. Thus he made his beginning in State
+politics. The second time that he attended a State convention Handy
+swelled up in his Sunday clothes, and by reason of his slight
+acquaintance with the manipulators of State politics, began to patronise
+the other members of our delegation--good, honest men, whose contempt
+for him at home was unspeakable; but when they huddled like sheep in the
+strange crowd at the convention they often accepted Handy as a guide in
+important matters. In talking with the home delegation Handy very soon
+began speaking of the convention leaders familiarly as "Jim" and "Dick"
+and "Tawm" and "Bill," and sometimes Handy brought one of these
+dignitaries to the rooms of our delegation and introduced him to our
+people with a grand flourish. Every time the legislature met, Ab Handy
+was a clerk in it, and, if he was a clerk of an important committee
+like the railroad committee or the committee on the calendar, he
+invariably came home with a few hundred dollars, three suits of clothes
+and a railroad pass. No one but Charley Hedrick could live with him for
+six months afterward.
+
+It was when he returned from one of these profitable sessions that Abner
+Handy and Nora Sinclair were married. The affinity between them was
+this: his good clothes and proud manner caught her; and her social
+position caught him. Everyone in town knew, however, that Nora Sinclair
+had been too smart for Handy. She had him hooked through the gills
+before he knew that he was more than nibbling at the bait. The town
+concurred with Colonel Morrison--our only townsman who travelled widely
+in those days--when he put it succinctly: "Ab Handy is Nora Sinclair's
+last call for the dining-car."
+
+Her influence on Abner Handy and his life was such that it is necessary
+to record something of the kind of a woman she was before he met her. A
+woman of the right sort might have made a man of Handy, even that late
+in life. Strong, good women have made weak men fairly strong, but such
+women were never girls like Nora. She was a nice enough little girl
+until she became boy-struck--as our vernacular puts it. Her mother
+thought this development of the child was "so cute," and told callers
+about the boys who came to see Nora--before she was twelve. In those
+days, and in some old-fashioned families in our town, little girls were
+asked to run out to play when the neighbours had to be discussed. But
+Mrs. Sinclair claimed Nora was "neither sugar nor salt nor anybody's
+honey," and everything was talked over before the child. We knew at the
+office from Colonel Morrison that his little girls did not play at the
+Sinclairs'. Her mother put long dresses and picture hats upon her and
+pushed her out into society, and the whole town knew that Nora was a
+mature woman, in all her instincts, by the time she was sixteen. Her
+mother, moreover, was manifestly proud that the child wasn't "one of
+those long-legged, gangling tom-boy girls, who seem so backward" and
+wear pigtails and chew slate pencils and dream.
+
+The gilded youths who boarded at the Hotel Metropole began to notice
+her. That pleased her mother also, and she said to the mothers of other
+little girls of Nora's age who were climbing fences and wiping dishes:
+"You know Nora is so popular with the gentlemen." When the girl was
+seventeen she was engaged. She kept a town fellow and had a college
+fellow. She acquired a "gentleman friend" in Kansas City who gave her
+expensive presents. These her mother took great joy in displaying, and
+never objected when he stayed after eleven o'clock; for she thought he
+was "such a good catch" and such a "swell young man." But Nora shooed
+him off the front porch in the summer following, because he objected to
+her having two or three other eleven o'clock fellows. She said he was
+"selfish, and would not let her have a good time." At nineteen she knew
+more about matters that were none of her business than most women know
+on their wedding day, and the boys said that she was soft. Every time
+that Nora left town she came back with two or three correspondents. She
+perfumed her stationery, used a seal, adopted all the latest frills,
+and learned to write an angular hand. At twenty she was going with the
+young married set, and was invited out to the afternoon card clubs. She
+was known as a dashing girl at this time, and travelling men in three
+States knew about her. Her mother used to send personal items to our
+office telling of their exalted business positions and announcing their
+visits to the Sinclair home. There was more or less talk about Nora in a
+quiet way, but her mother said that "it is because the other girls don't
+know how to wear their clothes as well as Nora does," and that "when a
+girl has a fine figure--which few enough girls in this town have, Heaven
+knows--why, she is a fool if she doesn't make the most of herself."
+
+Then, gradually, Nora went to seed. She became a faded, hard-faced
+woman, and all the sisters in town warned their brothers against her.
+She was invited out only when there was a crowd. She took up with the
+boys of the younger set, and the married women of her own age called her
+the kidnapper. She was a social joke. About once a year a strange man
+would show up in her parlour, and she kept up the illusion about being
+engaged. But in the office we shared the town's knowledge that her harp
+was on the willows. She was massaging her face at twenty-six and her
+mother was sniffing at the town and saying that there were no social
+advantages to be had here. She and the girl went to the Lakes every
+summer, and Nora always came home declaring that she had had the time of
+her life, and that she met so many lovely gentlemen. But that was all
+there was to it, and in the end it was Abner Handy or no one.
+
+After their wedding, Nora and Abner Handy set about the business of
+making politics pay. That is a difficult thing to do in a country town,
+where every voter is a watchdog of the county and city treasuries. Abner
+gave up his gambling, he and his wife joined all the lodges in town, and
+she dragged him into that coterie of people known as Society. She joined
+a woman's club, and was always anxious to be appointed on the soliciting
+committee when the women had any public work to do; so when the library
+needed books, or the trash cans at the street corners needed paint, or
+the park trees needed trimming, or the new hospital needed an additional
+bed, or the band needed new uniforms, Mrs. Handy might be seen on the
+streets with two or three women of a much better social status than she
+had, making it clear that she was a public-spirited woman and that she
+moved in the best circles. Whereupon Abner Handy got work in the
+court-house--as a deputy, or as a clerk, or as an under-sheriff, or as a
+juror--and when the legislature met he went to Topeka as a clerk.
+
+No one knew how they lived, but they did live. Every two years they gave
+a series of parties, and the splendour of these festivals made the town
+exclaim in one voice: "Well, _how_ do they do it?" But Mrs. Handy, who
+was steaming the wrinkles out of her face, and assuming more or less
+kittenish airs in her late thirties, never offered the town an
+explanation. "Hers not to answer why, hers not to make reply, hers but
+to do and dye" was the way Colonel Morrison put it the day after Mrs.
+Handy swooped down into Main Street with a golden yellow finish on her
+hair. She walked serenely between Mrs. Frelinghuysen and Mrs. Priscilla
+Winthrop Conklin. They were begging for funds with which to furnish a
+rest room for farmers' wives. And when they bore down on our office,
+Colonel Morrison folded his papers in his bosom and passed them on the
+threshold as one hurrying to a fire in the roof of his own house. It was
+interesting to observe, when the Federation Committee called on us that
+day, that Mrs. Handy did all the talking. She was as full of airs and
+graces as an actress, and ogled with her glassy eyes, and put on a sweet
+babyish innocence of the ways of business and of men--as though men were
+a race apart, greatly to be feared because they ate up little girls. But
+she got her dollar before she left the office, and George Kirwin, who
+happened to be in the front room at the time waiting for a proof, said
+he thought that the performance and the new hair were worth the price.
+
+Five years passed and in each year Mrs. Handy had found some artificial
+way of deluding herself that she was cheating time. Then Charley
+Hedrick, who needed a vote in the legislature, and was too busy to go
+there himself, nominated Abner Handy and elected him to a seat in the
+lower house. The thing that Hedrick needed was not important--merely
+the creation of a new judicial district which would remove an obnoxious
+district judge in an adjoining county from our district, and leave our
+county in a district by itself. Hedrick hated the judge, and Hedrick
+used Handy's vote for trading purposes with other statesmen desiring
+similar small matters and got the district remade as he desired it.
+
+When the Handys started to Topeka for the opening of the session, they
+began to inflame with importance as the train whistled for the junction
+east of town, and by the time they actually arrived at Topeka they were
+so highly swollen that they could not get into a boarding-house door,
+but went to the best hotel, and engaged rooms at seven dollars a day.
+The town gasped for two days and then began to laugh and wink. Two weeks
+after their arrival at the State capital, Abner Handy had been made
+chairman of the joint committee on the calendar, second member of the
+judiciary committee and member of the railroad committee, and Mrs. Handy
+had established credit at a Topeka dry-goods store and was going it
+blind. She gave her hair an extra dip, and used to come sailing down
+the corridors of the hotel in gorgeous silk house-gowns with ridiculous
+trains, and never appeared at breakfast without her diamonds. Before the
+session was well under way she had been to Kansas City to have her face
+enameled and had told the other "ladies of the hotel," as the wives of
+members of the legislature stopping at the hotel were called, that
+Topeka stores offered such a poor selection; she confided to them that
+Mr. Handy always wore silk nightshirts, and that she was unable to find
+anything in town that he would put on. She regarded herself as a
+charmer, and made great eyes at all the important lobbyists, to whom she
+put on her baby voice and manner and said that she thought politics were
+just simply awful, and added that if she were a man she would show them
+how honest a politician could be, but she wasn't, and when Abner tried
+to explain it to her it made her head ache, and all she wanted him to do
+was to help his friends, and she would add coyly: "I'm going to see that
+he helps you--whatever he does."
+
+Every bill that had a dollar in it was held at the bottom of the
+calendar until satisfactory arrangements were made with Abner Handy and
+his friends. When the legislative buccaneers under the black flag,
+sailed after an insurance company, their bill remained at the bottom of
+the calendar in one house or the other until Ab Handy had been seen, and
+no one could find out why. And so, in spite of our dislike of the man,
+our paper was forced to acknowledge that Handy was a house leader.
+Although he had never had a dozen cases above the police court, he came
+back at the end of the session with the local attorneyship of two
+railroads, and was chairman of a house committee to investigate the
+taxes paid by the railroads in the various counties. This gave him a
+year's work, so he rented an office in the Worthington block and hired a
+stenographer. Of course, we knew in town how Ab Handy had made his
+money. But he paid so many of his old debts, and dispensed so many
+favours with such a lordly hand, that it was hard to stir local
+sentiment against him. He donned the clothes of a "prominent citizen,"
+and in discussing public affairs assumed an owlish manner that impressed
+his former associates, and fooled stupid people, who began to believe
+that they had been harbouring a statesman unawares. But Charley Hedrick
+only grinned when men talked to him of the rise of Handy, and replied to
+the complaints of the scrupulous that Ab was no worse than he had always
+been, and if he was making it pay better, no one was poorer for his
+prosperity but Ab himself, and added: "Certainly he is a sincere
+spender." One day when Handy appeared on the street in a particularly
+fiery red necktie, Hedrick got him in a crowd, and began: "Just for a
+handful of silver he left us--just for a riband to stick in his coat."
+And when the crowd laughed with the joker, Hedrick continued in his
+thick, gravy-coated voice: "Old Browning's the boy. You fellows that
+want Shakespeare can have him; but Ab here knows that I take a little
+dash of Browning in mine. Since Ab's got to be a statesman, he's bought
+all of Webster's works and is learning 'em by heart. But"--and here
+Hedrick chuckled and shook his fat sides before letting out the joke
+which he enjoyed so much--"I says to Ab: as old Browning says, what does
+'the fine felicity and flower of wickedness' like you need with
+Webster; what you want to commit to memory is the penal statutes." And
+he threw back his head and gurgled down in his abdomen, while the crowd
+roared and Handy showed the wool in his teeth with a dog-like grin.
+
+No other man in town would have dared that with Handy after he became a
+statesman; but we figured it out in the office that old Charley Hedrick
+was merely exhibiting his brand on Ab Handy to show the town that his
+title to Handy was still good. For though there was considerable of the
+King Cole about Hedrick--in that he was a merry old soul--he was always
+king, and he insisted on having his divine right to rule the politics of
+the county unquestioned. That was his vanity and he knew it, and was not
+ashamed of it.
+
+He was the best lawyer in the State in those days, and one of the best
+in the West. Ten months in the year he paid no attention to politics,
+pendulating daily between his house and his office. Often, being
+preoccupied with his work, he would go the whole length of Main Street
+speaking to no one. When a tangled case was in his mind he would enter
+his office in the morning, roll up his desk top, and dig into his work
+without speaking to a soul until, about the middle of the morning, he
+would look up from his desk to say as though he had just left off
+speaking: "Jim, hand me that 32 Kansas report over there on the table."
+When he worked, law books sprang up around him and sprawled over his
+desk and lay half open on chairs and tables near him until he had found
+his point; then he would get up and begin rollicking, slamming books
+together, cleaning up his debris and playing like a great porpoise with
+the litter he had made. At such times--and, indeed, all the time unless
+he was in what he called a "legal trance"--Hedrick was bubbling with
+good spirits, and when he left his office for politics he could get out
+in his shirt-sleeves at a primary and peddle tickets, or nose up and
+down the street like a fat ferret looking for votes. So when Abner Handy
+announced that he desired to go to the State Senate, to fill an
+unexpired term for two years, he had Hedrick behind him to give strength
+and respectability to his candidacy. Between the two Handy won. That was
+before the days of reform, when it was supposed to be considerable of a
+virtue for a man to stand by his friend; and, being a lawyer, Hedrick
+naturally had the lawyer's view that no man is guilty until the jury is
+in, and its findings have been reviewed by the supreme court.
+
+So Senator and Mrs. Senator Handy--as the town put it--went to Topeka as
+grandly as ever "Childe Roland to the dark tower came"--to use Hedrick's
+language. "No one ever has been able to find out what Roland was up to
+when he went to the dark tower, but," continued Hedrick, "with Ab and
+his child-wonder it will be different. She isn't taking all that special
+scenery along in her trunks for nothing. Ab has stumbled on to this
+great truth--that clothes may not make the man, but they make the
+crook!"
+
+Handy drew a dark brow when he became a Senator, and made a point of
+trying to look ominous. He carried his chin tilted up at an angle of
+forty-five degrees, and spoke of the most obvious things with an air of
+mystery. He never admitted anything; his closest approach to committing
+himself on even so apparent a proposition as the sunrise, was that it
+had risen "ostensibly"; he became known to the reporters as "Old
+Ostensible."
+
+It was his habit to tiptoe around the Senate chamber whispering to other
+Senators, and then having sat down to rise suddenly as though some great
+impulse had come to him and hurry into the cloakroom. He inherited the
+chairmanship of the railroad committee, and all employees came to him
+for their railroad passes; so he was the god of the blue-bottle flies of
+politics that feed on legislatures, and buzz pompously about the capitol
+doing nothing, at three dollars a day. In that session Handy was for the
+"peepul." He patronised the State Shippers' Association, and told their
+committee that he would give them a better railroad bill than they were
+asking. His practice was to commit to memory a bill that he was about to
+introduce and then go into his committee-room, when it was full of
+loafers, and pretend to dictate it offhand to the stenographer, section
+by section without pausing. It was an impressive performance, and gained
+Handy the reputation of being brainy. But we at home who knew Handy
+were not impressed; and, in our office, we knew that he was the same Ab
+Handy who once did business with a marked deck; who cheated widows and
+orphans; who sold bogus bonds; who got on two sides of lawsuits, and
+whose note was never good at any bank unless backed by blackmail.
+
+When the session closed Abner Handy came home, a statesman with views on
+the tariff, and ostentatiously displayed his thousand-dollar bills. The
+Handys spent the summer in Atlantic City, and Abner came home wearing
+New York clothes of an exaggerated type, and though he never showed it
+in our town, they used to say that he put on a high hat when the train
+whistled for Topeka. Also we heard that the first time Mrs. Handy
+appeared at the political hotel in her New York regalia, adorned with
+spangles and beads and cords and tassels, the "ladies of the hotel" said
+that she was "fixed up like a Christmas tree"--a remark that we in the
+office coupled with Colonel Morrison's reflection when he spoke of Ab's
+"illustrated vests." At the meeting of the State Federation of Woman's
+Clubs, Mrs. Handy first flourished her lorgnette, and came home with
+her wedding ring made over on a pattern after the prevailing style.
+About this time she made her famous remark to "Aunt" Martha Merrifield
+that she didn't think it proper for a woman to go through her husband's
+money with too sensitive a nose; she said that men must work and women
+must weep, and that she for one would not make the work of her husband
+any harder by criticising it with her silly morals.
+
+As for Abner Handy, it would have made little difference to him then
+whether she or anyone else had tried to check his career; for he was
+cultivating a loud tone of voice and a regal sweep to his arms. He
+always signed himself on hotel registers Senator Handy, and the help
+about the Topeka hotels began to mark him for their hate, for he was
+insolent to those whom he regarded as his inferiors. But Colonel
+Morrison used to say that he wore his vest-buttons off crawling to those
+in authority. He took little notice of the town. He referred to us as
+"his people" in a fine feudal way, and went about town with his cigar
+pointing toward his hat brim and his eyes fixed on something in the next
+block. He became the attorney for a number of crooked promotion schemes,
+and the diamond rings on his wife's fingers crowded the second joint. He
+had telegraph and express franks, railway and Pullman passes in such
+quantities that it made his coat pocket bulge to carry them. Often he
+would spread out these evidences of his shame on his office table, to
+awe the local politicians, and in so far as they could influence the
+town opinion, they promulgated the idea that if Ab Handy was a
+scoundrel--and of course he was--he was a smart scoundrel. So he came to
+think this himself.
+
+[Illustration: Went about town with his cigar pointing toward his
+hat-brim]
+
+Mrs. Handy threw herself into the work of the City Federation with
+passionate zeal. Also she kept up her lodge connections, and explained
+to the women, whom she considered of a higher social caste than the
+lodge women, that she was "doing it to help Mr. Handy." She did a little
+church work for the same reason, but her soul was in the Federation, for
+it insured her social status as neither lodge nor church could do. So
+she put herself under the protecting seal-lined wing of Mrs. Julia Neal
+Worthington who on account of her efforts to clean the streets we at
+the office had been taught by Colonel Morrison to know as the Joan of
+the trash-cans. And Miss Larrabee, our society reporter, told us that
+Mrs. Handy was the only woman in town who did not smile into her
+handkerchief when Mrs. Worthington, who had trained down to one hundred
+and ninety-seven pounds five and three-eighths ounces, gave her course
+of lectures on delsarte before the Federation.
+
+It was Mrs. Handy who encouraged Mrs. Worthington to open her salon. But
+as there were lodge meetings the first three nights in the week, and
+prayer-meetings in the middle of the week, and as the choirs met for
+practice, and the whist clubs met for business the last of the week, the
+salon did not seem to take with the town, and so was discontinued. Then
+Mrs. Worthington and Mrs. Handy sought other fields. And the first field
+they stumbled into was the court-house square. For fifty years the
+farmers near our town had been hitching at the racks provided by the
+county commissioners. But Mrs. Worthington decided that the time had
+come for a change and that the town was getting large enough to take
+down the hitching-racks. So, as chairman of the Municipal Improvement
+section of the City Federation, Mrs. Worthington began war on the
+hitching-racks. At the Federation meetings for three months there were
+reports from committees appointed to interview the councilmen; reports
+of committees to interview the county commissioners--who were obdurate;
+reports of committees to lease new ground for the hitching rack stands;
+reports of the legal committee; reports of the sanitary committee, and
+through it all Mrs. Worthington rose at every meeting and declared that
+the hitching racks must be destroyed. And as she was rated in
+Bradstreet's report at nearly half a million dollars, her words had much
+force.
+
+The town was beginning to stir itself. The merchants were with the
+women--because the women bought the dry goods and groceries--and we
+forgot about the farmers. To all this milling among the people Handy was
+oblivious, for he was stepping like a hen in high oats, with his eyes on
+a seat in Congress. Matters of mere local importance did not concern
+him. The railroads were for him, and the stars in their courses seemed
+to him to be pointing his way to Washington. He knew of the
+hitching-rack trouble only when he had to go with Mrs. Handy to the
+dinners at the Worthington home given to the councilmen and their wives,
+who were lukewarm on the removal proposition.
+
+In the spring before the election of 1902 Mrs. Worthington had a
+majority in the council, and one Saturday night the hitching-racks were
+taken down by the street commissioner. And within a week the town was on
+the verge of civil war, for the farmers of the county rose as one man
+and demanded the blood of the offenders. But Abner Handy knew nothing of
+the disturbance. The county attorney had the street commissioner and his
+men arrested for trespassing upon county property; farmers threatened to
+boycott the town. But Abner Handy's ear was attuned to higher things.
+Merchants who had signed the petition asking the council to remove the
+racks began to denounce the removal as an act of treason. But Abner
+Handy conferred with State leaders on great questions, and the city
+attorney, who was a candidate for county attorney that fall, did not
+dare to defend the street commissioner. The council got stubborn, and
+Colonel Morrison, before whom as justice of the peace the case was to be
+tried, fearing for the professional safety of his three daughters in the
+town schools and his four daughters in the county schools, took a trip
+to his wife's people, and told us he was enlisted there for "ninety days
+or during the war"; and still Abner Handy looked at the green hills
+afar.
+
+We are generally accounted by ourselves a fearless newspaper; but here
+we admitted that the situation required discretion. So we straddled it.
+We wrote cautious editorials in carefully-balanced sentences demanding
+that the people keep cool. We advised both sides to realise that only
+good sense and judgment would straighten out the tangle. We demanded
+that each side recognise the other's rights and made both sides angry,
+whereas General Durham, of the _Statesman_, made his first popular
+stroke in a dozen years by insisting, in double leads and italics, that
+the tariff on hides was a divine institution, and that humanity called
+upon us to hold the Philippines. Charley Hedrick knew better than
+anyone else in town what a tempest was rising. He might have warned
+Handy, but he did not; for Handy had reached a point in his career where
+he considered that a mere county boss was beneath his confidence. More
+than that, Hedrick had refused to indorse Handy's note at the bank.
+Handy needed money, and being a shorn lamb, the wind changed in his
+direction in this wise:
+
+In the midst of the furore that week, Mrs. Worthington gave an evening
+reception for the Federation and its husbands at her mansion, fed them
+sumptuously, and, after Mrs. Handy had tapped a bell for silence, Mrs.
+Worthington rose in her jet and passementerie and announced that our
+town had come to a crisis in its career; that we must now decide whether
+we were going to be a beautiful little city or a cow pasture. She said
+that beauty was as much an essential to life as money and that we would
+be better off with more beauty and less trade, and that with the
+court-house square a mudhole the town could never rise to any real
+consequence. As the men of the town seemed to be moral cowards, she was
+going to enlist the women in this war, and as the first step in her
+campaign she proposed to hire the Honourable Abner Handy to assist the
+city attorney in fighting this case, and as a retainer she would
+herewith and now hand him her personal check for five hundred dollars.
+Whereat the women clapped their hands, their husbands winked at one
+another, and "there was a sound of revelry by night." The check was put
+on a silver card-tray by Mrs. Worthington and set on a table in the
+midst of the company waiting for Handy to come forward and take it.
+After the town had looked at the check, Mrs. Handy seemed to cut his
+leashes and Abner went after it. He was waiting at the Worthington bank
+the next morning at nine o'clock to cash it--and all the town saw that
+also.
+
+Whereupon the town grinned broadly that evening when it read in the
+_Statesman_ a most laudatory article about "our distinguished
+fellow-townsman." The article declared that it was "the duty of the hour
+to send Honourable Abner Handy to the halls of Congress." The
+_Statesman_ contended that "Judge Handy had been for a lifetime the
+defender of those grand and glorious principles of freedom and
+protection and sound money for which the Grand Old Party stood." The
+General proclaimed that "it shall be not only a duty, but a pleasure,
+for our citizens to lay aside all petty personal and factional quarrels
+and rally round the standard of our noble leader in this great contest."
+
+If Handy ever went to the city attorney's office to look after Mrs.
+Worthington's lawsuit, no one knew it. He smiled wisely when asked how
+the suit was progressing, and one day John Markley--who during the life
+of Ezra Worthington, hated him with a ten-horse-power hate and loaded it
+onto his widow's shoulders and the Worthington bank which she
+inherited--John Markley called Handy into the back room of the Markley
+Mortgage Company, and, when Handy passed the cashier's window going out,
+he cashed a check signed by John Markley for a thousand dollars on which
+was inscribed "for legal services in assisting the county attorney in
+the hitching rack case."
+
+Handy had arrived at a point where he feared nothing. He seemed to
+believe that he lived a charmed life and never would get caught. He
+bought extra copies of the _Statesman_, which was booming him for
+Congress, and sent them over the Congressional District by the
+thousands. He went to Topeka in his high silk hat and his New York
+clothes, gave out interviews on the causes of the flurry in the money
+market, and, desiring further advertisement, gave a banquet for the
+newspaper men of the capital which cost him a hundred dollars. So he
+became a great man. At home he assumed a patronising air to the people
+about Charley Hedrick. And one night in Smith's cigar store, just to be
+talking, he said that he didn't get so much of Mrs. Worthington's money
+as people thought, for part of it had to go to "square old Charley
+Hedrick." Hedrick was John Markley's attorney, and he had taken an
+active part in helping the county attorney prosecute the street
+commissioners. Naturally Handy's remark stirred up the town. It was two
+weeks, however, in getting to Hedrick, and when it came the man turned
+black and seemed to be swallowing a pint of emotional language before he
+spoke. And there Abner Handy's doom was sealed; though Hedrick did not
+make the sentence public.
+
+Now, it is well known in our county that the country people are slow to
+wrath. They were two months finding out beyond a question of doubt that
+Abner Handy had accepted Mrs. Worthington's money to act against them,
+but when they knew this there was no hope for Handy among them. They are
+a quiet people, and make no noise. For a month, only Charley Hedrick and
+the grocers and the hardware men, with whom the farmers trade, knew the
+truth about Handy's standing in the county. Hedrick bided his time. The
+Handy boom for Congress was rolling over the district, and the
+_Statesman_ italics were becoming worn, and its exclamation points
+battered in the service, when one day Handy stalked up to Hedrick's
+office, imperiously beckoned Hedrick into the private room, and blurted
+out:
+
+"Charley, I got to have some more money--need it in my business. Can't
+you touch old John Markley for me again--say for about five hundred on
+that hitching rack case? Sister Worthington is kind of wanting me to get
+action on her case."
+
+Hedrick was dumb with rage, but Handy thought it was acquiescence. He
+went on:
+
+"You just step down to the bank and say: 'John, I've noticed Ab Handy
+actin' kind of queer about that hitching rack case.' That's all you need
+say, and pretty soon I'll step in and say: 'John, I don't see how I can
+help doin' something for Aunt Julia Worthington.' And I believe I can
+tap him for five hundred more easy enough. I got an idea he is mightily
+in earnest about beating her in that suit."
+
+When Hedrick got his breath, which was churning and wheezing in his
+throat, he cut Handy's sentence off with:
+
+"You human razor-back shoat--you swill-barrel gladiator,
+why--why--I--I----" And Hedrick sparred for wind and went on before
+Handy realised the situation. "Ab Handy, I spat on the dust and breathed
+into the chaff that made you, and put you on the mud-sills of hell to
+dry, and I've got a right to turn you back into fertiliser, and I'm
+going to do it. Git out of here--git out of this office, or I----"
+
+And the hulking form of Hedrick fell on the bag of shaking bones that
+was Handy and battered him through the latched door into the crowded
+outer office; and Handy picked himself up and ran like a wolf, turning
+at the door to show his teeth before he scampered through the hall and
+scurried down the stairs. As Hedrick came puffing out of the broken door
+his coat snagged on a splinter. He grinned as he unfastened himself:
+
+"Well, the snail seems to be on the thorn; the lark certainly is on the
+wing.
+
+    "_God's in his heaven.
+      All's right with the world!_"
+
+And he batted his eyes at the group of loafing local statesmen in his
+office as he viewed the wreckage, and went to the telephone and ordered
+a carpenter, without wasting any words on the crowd.
+
+We decided long ago that the source of Hedrick's power in politics was
+what we called his "do it now" policy. All politicians have schemes.
+Hedrick puts his through before he talks about them. If he has an idea
+that satisfies his judgment, he makes it a reality in the quickest
+possible time. That is why the fellows around town who hate Hedrick call
+him the rattlesnake, and those who admire him call him the Wrath of
+God. When he put up the telephone receiver he reached for his hat and
+bolted from the office under a full head of steam. He went directly to
+John Markley's back office, got the check that Markley had given to
+Handy, dictated a letter in the anteroom of Markley's office to a Kansas
+City plate-maker, inclosed fifty dollars as he passed the draft counter,
+and, as he swung by the post-office he mailed the Handy check with
+instructions to have ten photographic half-tone cuts made of the check
+and mailed back to Hedrick in four days.
+
+Then he went to Mrs. Worthington, told her his story, as a lawyer puts
+his case before a jury--had her raging at Ab Handy--and got an order on
+the bank for the check she had given to Handy. This also he sent to the
+plate-maker, and in an hour was back at his desk dictating a half-page
+advertisement to go into every Republican weekly newspaper in the
+district. He sent that advertisement out with the half-tone cuts Monday
+morning, and it appeared all over the district that week. The
+advertisement was signed by Hedrick, and began:
+
+"Browning has a poem made after visiting a dead house, and in it he
+describes the corpse of a suicide, and says 'one clear, nice, cool
+squirt of water o'er the bust,' is the 'right thing to extinguish lust.'
+And I desire this advertisement to be 'one clear, nice, cool squirt of
+water' over the political remains of Honourable Abner Handy, to
+extinguish if possible his fatal lust for crooked money." After this
+followed the story of Handy's perfidy in the hitching rack case, a
+petition in disbarment proceedings, and the copy of the warrant for his
+arrest charged with a felony in the case sworn to by Hedrick himself.
+But the effective thing was the pictures, showing both sides of the two
+checks, each carefully inscribed by the two makers "for legal services
+in the hitching rack case," and each check indorsed by Handy in his big,
+brazen signature.
+
+Hedrick saw to it also that, on the day the country papers printed his
+advertisement, the Kansas City and Topeka papers printed the whole
+story, including the casting out of Handy from Hedrick's office. It did
+Handy little good to go to Topeka in his flashy clothes and give out a
+festive interview asking his friends to suspend judgment, and saying
+that he would try his case in the courts and not in the newspapers. It
+was contended by the newspapers that if Handy had an honest defence, it
+would lose no weight in court by being printed in the newspapers; and
+his enemies in the Congressional fight pushed the charges against Handy
+so relentlessly that the public faith in him melted like an April snow,
+and when the delegates to the Congressional convention were named, our
+own county instructed its delegates against Handy. The farmers opposed
+him for taking the case against them, and the town scorned him for his
+perfidy. No one who was not paid for it would peddle his tickets at the
+primaries, so Handy, with his money all spent, went home on the night of
+the local primaries a whipped dog. They said around town that all the
+whipped dog got at home was a tin can; for it is certain that at
+daylight Handy was down on Main Street viciously drunk, flourishing a
+revolver with which he said he was going to kill Charley Hedrick and
+then himself. They took the pistol from him, and then he wept and said
+he was going to jump in the river, but no one followed him when he
+started toward the bridge, and he fell asleep in the shade of the piers,
+where he was found during the morning, washed up and sent home sober.
+
+One of the curious revelations of society's partnership in crime was the
+way the grocers and butchers who despised Ab Handy's method, but shared
+his gains when he succeeded, stopped giving him credit when he failed.
+At the end of the first year after the primary wherein he was defeated,
+the Handys could not get a dime's worth of beefsteak without the dime.
+And dimes were scarce. By that time Handy was wearing his flashy New
+York clothes for every day--frayed and spotted and rusty. His
+temperament changed with his clothes, from the oily optimism of success
+to the sodden pessimism of utter failure; which inspired Colonel
+Morrison, returning after the hitching rack case had been settled in
+favour of the town, to remark, speaking of Handy, that "an optimist is a
+man who isn't caught, and is cheering to keep up his courage, and a
+pessimist is one who has been caught and thinks it will be but a
+question of time until his neighbours are found out too."
+
+Mrs. Worthington, who was a necessary witness in the disbarment
+proceedings and the criminal proceedings against Handy, always went to
+Europe when the cases were called; so rather than put a woman in jail
+for contempt of court, the court dismissed the proceedings against Handy
+and he was not allowed to be even a martyr. One morning about a year and
+a half after Handy's defeat, when Hedrick opened his office door, he
+found Handy there with his fingers clutching the chair arms and his eyes
+fixed on the floor. The man was breathing audibly, and seemed to be
+struggling with a great passion. Hedrick and Handy had not spoken since
+they came through the panels of the door together, but Hedrick went to
+the miserable creature, touched him gently on the shoulder, and motioned
+him into the private office. There, with his eyes still on the floor,
+Handy told Hedrick that the end of the rope had been reached.
+
+"I had to come down without any breakfast this
+morning--because--they--they ain't anything in the house for her to fix.
+And there ain't any show for dinner. Next week, Red Martin has promised
+me some money he's goin' to get from Jim Huddleson; but they ain't a
+soul in town but you I can come to now"; and Handy raised his eyes from
+the floor in canine self-pity as he whined--"and she's making life a
+hell for me!" When Hedrick opened his desk and got out his check-book,
+he smiled as he fancied he could detect about Handy's body the faint
+resemblance of a wagging tail. He made the check for fifty dollars and
+gave it to Handy saying, "Oh, well, Ab--we'll let bygones be bygones."
+
+Handy snapped at it and in an instant was gone.
+
+That afternoon Hedrick met Handy sailing down Main Street in his old
+manner. His head was erect, his eyes were sparkling, his big, rough,
+statesman's voice was bellowing abroad, and his thumbs were in the
+armholes of his vest. He walked straight to Hedrick and led him by the
+coat lapel into a dark stairway. There was an air of deep mystery about
+Handy and when he put his arm on Hedrick to whisper in his ear,
+Hedrick, smelling the statesman's breath heavy with whiskey and onions
+and cloves and cardamon seeds and pungent gum, heard this:
+
+"Say, Charley, I'm fooling 'em--I've got 'em all fooled. They think I'm
+poor. They think I ain't got any money. But old Ab's too smart for them.
+I've got lots of money--all I want--all anyone could want--wealth beyond
+the dreams of avar--of av--avar--avar'ce, as John Ingalls used to say.
+Just look at this!" And with that Handy pulled from his inside coat
+pocket a roll of one and two-dollar bills, that seemed to Hedrick to
+represent fifty dollars less the price of about ten drinks. "Look
+a-here," continued Handy, "ol' Ab's got 'em all fooled. Don't you say
+anything about it; but ol' Ab's goin' to make his mark." And he shook
+Hedrick's hand and took him down to the street, and shook it again and
+again before prancing grandly down the sidewalk.
+
+For three years Mrs. Handy's boarding-house has been one of the most
+exclusive in our town. They say that she pays Mr. Handy for mowing the
+lawn and helping about the rough work in the kitchen, and that he sleeps
+in the barn and pays her for such meals as he eats. Sometimes a new
+boarder makes the mistake of paying the board money to Handy, and he
+appears on Main Street ostentatiously jingling his silver and toward
+evening has ideas about the railroad situation. On election days and
+when there is a primary Handy drives a carriage and gathers up his
+cronies in the fifth ward, who, like him, are not so much in evidence as
+they were ten years ago.
+
+It was only last week that Hedrick was in our office telling us of
+Handy's "wealth beyond the dreams of avarice." He paused when he had
+finished the story, cocked his head on one side, and squinted at the
+ceiling as he said:
+
+"For three long, weary, fruitless years I've searched the drug-stores of
+this town for the brand of liquor Ab had that day. I believe if I had
+two drinks of that I could write better poetry than old Browning
+himself."
+
+Whereupon Hedrick shook himself out of the office in a gentle wheesy
+laugh.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+The Tremolo Stop
+
+
+Our business has changed greatly since Horace Greeley's day. And,
+although machines have come into little offices like ours, the greatest
+changes have come in the men who do the work in these offices. In the
+old days--the days before the great war and after it--printers and
+editors were rarely leading citizens in the community. The editor and
+the printer were just coming out of the wandering minstrel stage of
+social development, and the journeyman who went from town to town
+seeking work, and increasing his skill, was an important factor in the
+craft. One might always depend upon a tramp printer's coming in when
+there was a rush of work in the office, and also figure on one of the
+tourists in the office leaving when he was needed most.
+
+From the ranks of this wayward class came the old editors and reporters;
+they were postgraduates from the back room of newspaper offices and
+they brought to the front room their easy view of life. Some of these
+itinerant writing craftsmen had professional fame. There was Peter B.
+Lee, who had tramped the country over, who knew Greeley and Dana and
+Prentice and Bob Burdett and Henry Watterson, and to whom the cub in
+country offices looked with worshipful eyes. There was "Old Slugs"--the
+printer who carried his moulds for making lead slugs, and who, under the
+influence of improper stimulants, could recite stirring scenes from the
+tragedies of Shakespeare. There was Buzby--old Buzby, who went about
+from office to office leaving his obituary set up by his own hand,
+conveying the impression that at last the end had come to a misspent
+life. Then there was J. N. Free--the "Immortal J. N.," as he called
+himself, a gaunt, cadaverous figure in broad hat and linen duster, with
+hair flowing over his shoulders, who stalked into the offices at
+unseemly hours to "raise the veil" of ignorance and error, and "relieve
+the pressure" of psychic congestion in a town by turning upon it the
+batteries of his mind.
+
+They were a dear lot of old souls out of accord with the world about
+them, ever seeking the place where they would harmonise. They might have
+stepped out of Dickens's books or Cruikshank's pictures, and, when one
+recalls them now, their lineaments seem out of drawing and impossible in
+the modern world. And yet they did live and move in the world that was,
+and the other day when we were looking over the files we came across the
+work of Simon Mehronay,--the name which he said was spelled Dutch and
+sounded Irish,--and it does not seem fair to set down the stories of the
+others who have made our office traditions without giving some account
+of him.
+
+For to us he was the most precious of all the old tribe of journalistic
+aborigines. He came to the office one bright April day with red mud on
+his shoes that was not the mud of our river bottoms, and we knew that he
+had ridden to town "blind baggage"--as they say of men who steal their
+way--from the South. The season was ripe for the birds to come North and
+it was the mud of Texas that clung to him. His greeting as he strode
+through the front room not waiting for a reply was "How's work?" And
+when the foreman told him to hang up his coat, he found a stick, got a
+"chunk of copy," and was clicking away at his case three minutes from
+the time he darkened the threshold of the office.
+
+There he sat for two weeks--the first man down in the morning and the
+last to quit at night--before anyone knew whence he came or whither he
+was bound. He had a little "false motion," the foreman said, and
+clattered his types too audibly in the steel stick, but as he got up a
+good string of type at the end of the day and furnished his own chewing
+tobacco, he created no unfavourable comment in the office. He was a bald
+little man, with a fringe of hair above the greasy velvet collar of his
+coat, with beady, dancing black eyes, and black chin whiskers and a
+moustache that often needed dyeing. It was the opinion of the foreman
+and the printers that Mehronay's weakness was liquor, though that
+opinion did not arise from anything that he said. For during the first
+two weeks we did not hear him say much, but in the years that followed,
+his mild little voice that ever seemed to be teetering on the edge of
+the laugh into which he fell a score of times during an hour, became a
+familiar sound about the office, and the soft, flabby little hand which
+the other printers laughed about, during the first week of his
+employment with us, has rested on most of the shoulders in the shop
+guiding us through many sad ways.
+
+In those days there were only three of us in the front room. All the
+bookkeeping and collecting and reporting and editorial writing were done
+by the three, and it happened that one morning near the first of the
+month, when the books needed attention, no one had heard the performance
+of "Hamlet" given by Thomas Keene at the opera house the night before,
+and no one about the paper could write it up. Wherefore there was
+perturbation; but in an hour this came from the back room set up in type
+and proved in the galley:
+
+"There were more clean shaves in town last night than have been seen
+here for a long time. Everyone who wears cuffs and a necktie got a
+'twice-over' and was 'out amongst 'em.' In the gallery of the opera
+house roosted the college faculty and the Potter boy who holds the
+Cottonwood Valley belt as the champion lay-down collar swell, and near
+him was Everett Fowler, who was making his first public appearance in
+his new parted spring whiskers, and was the observed of all observers.
+Colonel Alphabetical Morrison, with his famous U-shaped hair-cut, lent
+the grace of his presence to the dress circle. The first Methodist
+Church was represented by Brother-in-law John Markley, who is wearing a
+new flowered necktie, sent by his daughter in California (if you must
+know), and General Durham of the _Statesman_ says that when the
+orchestra played 'Turkey in the Straw,' and Bill Master began to shake
+the sand-box--which is a new wrinkle in musical circles in our
+town--John Markley's feet began to wiggle until people thought this was
+his 'chill day.' After 'Turkey in the Straw,' the orchestra struck up
+something quick and devilish, which Charley Hedrick, who played the
+snare drum at Gettysburg, and is therefore entitled to speak on musical
+subjects, says was 'The Irish Washerwoman.' After this appropriate
+overture the curtain rose and the real show began.
+
+"Mr. Keene's Hamlet is not so familiar to our people as his Richard
+III., but it gave great satisfaction; for it is certainly a Methodist
+Hamlet from the clang of the gong to the home-stretch. The town never
+has stood for Mr. Lawrence Barrett's Unitarian Hamlet, and the high
+church Episcopal Hamlet put on the boards last winter by Mr. Frederick
+Paulding was distinctly disappointing. One of the most searching scenes
+in the play was enacted when Ophelia got the power and had to be carried
+out to the pump. The Chicago brother who plays the ghost has a great
+voice for his work. He brought many souls to a realizing sense that they
+are sin-stricken and hair-hung over the fiery pit. The groans and amens
+from the sanctified in the audience were a delicate compliment to his
+histrionic ability. The queen seems to have been a Presbyterian, and the
+king a Second Day Adventist of an argumentative type. And they were not
+popular with the audience, but the boy preacher who did Laertes was
+exceedingly blessed with the gift of tongues. Brother Polonius seems to
+have been a sort of presiding elder, and, when his exhortation rose, the
+chickens in Mike Wessner's coop, in the meat-market downstairs, gave up
+hope of life and lay down to be cut up and fried for breakfast. The
+performance was a great treat and, barring the fact that some switchmen,
+thinking Ophelia was full, giggled during the mad scene, and the further
+fact that someone yelled, 'Go for his wind, Ham!' during the fencing
+scene, the evening with Shakespeare's weirdest hero was a distinct
+credit to Mr. Keene, his company and our people."
+
+We wrote a conventional report of the performance, and printed
+Mehronay's account below it, under the caption FROM ANOTHER REPORTER,
+and it made the paper talked about for a week. Now in our town Keene was
+a histrionic god of the first order, and so many church people came to
+the office to "stop the paper" that circulation had a real impetus. We
+have never had a boom in subscription that did not begin with a lot of
+angry citizens coming in to stop the paper. It became known about town
+who wrote the Keene article, and Mehronay became in a small way a public
+character. We encouraged him to write more, so every morning the first
+proof slips that came in began to have on them ten or a dozen short
+items of Mehronay's writing. There was a smile in every one of them, and
+if he wrote more than ten lines there was a laugh. It was Mehronay who
+referred to Huddleson's livery-stable joint--where the old soaks got
+their beer in a stall and salted it from the feed-box--as "a gilded
+palace of sin." It was Mehronay who wrote the advertisement of the
+Chinese laundryman and signed his name "Fat Sam Child of the Sun,
+Brother of the Moon and Second Cousin by marriage to all the Stars." It
+was Mehronay who took a galley of pi which the office devil had set up
+from a wrecked form, and interspersed up and down the column of
+meaningless letters "Great applause"--"Tremendous cheering"--Cries of
+"Good, good!--that's the way to hit 'em!"--"Hurrah for Hancock"--and ran
+it in the paper as a report of Carl Schurz's speech to the
+German-American League at the court-house. It was Mehronay who put the
+advertisement in the paper proclaiming the fact that General Durham of
+the _Statesman_ office desired to purchase a good second-hand fiddle,
+and explaining that the owner must play five tunes on it in front of the
+_Statesman_ office door before bringing it in. Mehronay originated the
+fiction that there was an association in town formed to insure its
+members against wedding invitations which, in case of loss, paid the
+afflicted member a pickle dish or a napkin ring, to present as his
+offering to the bride.
+
+Mehronay started a mythical Widowers' Protective Foot-racing Society,
+and the town had great sport with the old boys whose names he used so
+wittily that it transcended impudence. Mehronay got up a long list of
+husbands who wiped dishes when the family was "out of a girl," as our
+people say, and organised them into a union to strike for their altars
+and their kitchen fires. When we sent him out to write up a fire,
+however, he generally forgot the amount of insurance and the extent of
+the loss, but he told all about the way the crowd tried to boss the fire
+department; and if we sent him out to gather the local markets, he made
+such a mess of it that we were a week straightening matters up. Figures
+didn't mean anything to Mehronay. When the bank failed, he tried to
+write something about it, but mixed the assets and the liabilities so
+hopelessly that we had to keep him busy with other things, so that he
+would have no time to touch the bank story. They used to say around town
+that when he laid down a piece of money, however large, on a store
+counter he never waited for his change, but be it said to the credit of
+most of the merchants that they would save it for Mehronay and give it
+to him on his next visit to the store, when he would be as joyful as a
+child.
+
+Gradually he left the back room and became a fixture in the front
+office. He wrote locals and editorials and helped with the advertising,
+drawing for this the munificent salary of fifteen dollars a week, which
+should have kept him like a prince; but it did not--though what he did
+with his money no one knew. He bought no new clothes, and never buttoned
+those he had. Before sending him out on the street in the morning,
+someone in the office had to button him up, and if it was a gala
+day--say circus day, or the day of a big political pow-wow--we had to
+put a clean paper collar on Mehronay above his brown wool shirt and
+shove out the dents in his derby hat--a procedure which he called
+"making a butterfly of fashion out of an honest workin' man." He slept
+in the press-room, on a bed which he rolled up and stowed behind the
+press by day, and in the evening he consorted with the goddess of
+nicotine--as he called his plug tobacco--and put in his time at his desk
+with a lead pencil and a pad of white paper writing copy for the next
+day's issue. Nothing delighted him so much as a fictitious personage or
+situation which held real relations with local events or home people.
+One of the best of his many inventions was a new reporter who, according
+to Mehronay's legend, had just quit work for a circus where he had been
+employed writing the posters. Mehronay's joy was to write up a local
+occurrence and pretend that the circus poster-writer had written it and
+that we had been greatly bothered to restrain his adjectives. A few days
+after the Sinclair-Handy wedding--a particularly gorgeous affair in one
+of the stone churches, which had been written up by the bride's mother,
+as the whole town knew, in a most disgusting manner--Mehronay sat
+chuckling in his corner, writing something which he put on the copy-hook
+before going out on his beat. It was headed A DAZZLING AFFAIR and it ran
+thus:
+
+"For some time we have realised that we have not been doing full justice
+to the weddings that occur in this town; we have been using a repressed
+and obsolete style which is painful to those who enter into the joyous
+spirit of such occasions, and last night's wedding in the family of the
+patrician Skinners we assigned to our gentlemanly and urbane Mr. J.
+Mortimer Montague, late of the publicity department of the world-famed
+Robinson Circus and Menagerie. The following graceful account from Mr.
+Montague's facile pen is the most accurate and satisfactory report of a
+nuptial event we have ever recorded in these columns."
+
+And thereafter followed this:
+
+"Last evening, just as the clock in the steeple struck nine, a vast
+concourse of the beauty and the chivalry of our splendid city, composing
+wealth beyond the dreams of the kings of India and forming a galaxy only
+excelled in splendour by the knightly company at the Field of the Cloth
+of Gold, assembled to witness the marriage of Miss May Skinner and Mr.
+John Fortesque. The great auditorium was a bower of smilax and
+chrysanthemums, bewildering, amazing, superb in its verdant labyrinth.
+As the clock was striking the hour, the ten-thousand-dollar pipe-organ
+filled the edifice with strains of most seductive, entrancing music,
+played by Miss Jane Brown, the only real left-handed organist in the
+civilised world. Then came the wedding party, magnificent, radiant,
+resplendent with the glittering jewels of the Orient, dazzling with
+gorgeousness, stupefying and miraculous in its revelation of beauty.
+There were six handsome ushers--count them--six, ten bridesmaids--ten--a
+bevy of real, live, flower-bearing fairies, captured at an immense
+outlay of time and money in far Caucasia. The bride's resplendent
+costume and surpassing beauty put the blush upon the Queen of Sheba,
+made Hebe's effulgence fade as the moon before the sun; and as the long
+courtly train of knights errant and ladies-in-waiting passed the
+populace, they presented a regal spectacle, never equalled since the
+proud Cleopatra sailed down the perfumed lotus-bearing Nile in her
+gilded pageant to meet Marc Antony, while all the world stood agape at
+the unheard-of triumph.
+
+"To describe the bride's costume beggars the English language; and human
+imagination falls faint and feeble before the Herculean task. From the
+everlasting stars she stole the glittering diamonds that decked her
+alabaster brow and hid them in the Stygian umbrage of her hair. From the
+fleecy, graceful cloud she snared the marvellous drapery that floated
+like a dream about her queenly figure, and from the Peri at Heaven's
+gate she captured the matchless grace that bore her like an enchanted
+wraith through the hymeneal scene.
+
+"The array of presents spread in the throne-room of the Skinner palace
+has been unexcelled in lavish expenditure of fabulous and reckless
+prodigal wealth anywhere in the world. Golden tokens literally strewed
+the apartment, merely as effulgent settings for the mammoth, appalling,
+maddening array of jewels and precious stones, sunbursts and pearls
+without price, that gleamed like a transcendent electrical display in
+the hypnotising picture."
+
+There was more of the same kind, but it need not be set down here.
+However, it should be said that nothing we ever printed in the paper
+before or since set the town to laughing as did that piece. We have
+calls to-day for papers containing the circus-poster wedding, and it was
+printed over two decades ago.
+
+It was Mehronay's first great triumph in town; then the expected
+happened. For three days he did not appear at the office and we
+suspected the truth--that by day he slept the sleep of the unjust in the
+loft of Huddleson's stable and by night he vibrated between the Elite
+oyster parlour, where he absorbed fabulous quantities of soup, and Red
+Martin's gambling-room, where he disported himself most festively before
+the gang assembled there. The morning of the fourth day Mehronay
+appeared--but not at his desk. We found him sitting glumly on his stool
+at the case in the back room, clicking the types, with his hat over his
+eyes and the smile rubbed off his face.
+
+We were a month coaxing Mehronay back in to the front room. His
+self-respect grew slowly, but finally it returned, and he sat at his
+desk turning off reams of copy so good that the people read the paper up
+one side and down the other hunting for his items. He is the only man we
+have ever had around the paper who could write. Everyone else we have
+employed has been a news-gatherer. But Mehronay cared little for what we
+call news. He went about the town asking for news, and getting more or
+less of it, but the way he put it was much more important than the thing
+itself. He had imagination. He created his own world in the town, and
+put it in the paper so vividly that before we realised it the whole town
+was living in Mehronay's world, seeing the people and events about them
+through his merry countenance. No one ever referred to him as Mr.
+Mehronay, and before he had been on the street six months he was calling
+people by their first names, or by nicknames, which he tagged onto them.
+He was so fatherly to the young people that the girls in the Bee Hive,
+or the White Front, or the Racket Store used to brush his clothes when
+they needed it, if we in the office neglected him, and smooth his back
+hair with their pocket combs, and he--never remembering the name of the
+particular ministering angel who fixed him up--called one and all of
+them "darter," smiled a grateful smile like an old dog that is petted,
+and then went his way. The girls in the White Front Drygoods Store gave
+him a cravat, and though it was made up, he brought it every morning in
+his pocket for them to pin on. He was as simple as a child, and, like a
+child, lived in a world of unrealities. He swore like a mule driver, and
+yet he told the men in the back room that he could never go to sleep
+without getting down and saying his prayers, and the only men with whom
+he ever quarrelled were a teacher of zoölogy at the College, who is an
+evolutionist, and Dan Gregg, the town infidel.
+
+One morning when we were sitting in the office before going out to the
+street for the morning's grist, Mehronay dog-eared a fat piece of copy
+and jabbed it on the hook as he started for the door.
+
+"My boy was drunk last night," he said. "Me and his mother felt so bad
+over it that I gave him a pretty straight talk this morning. There it
+is."
+
+The office dropped its jaw and bugged its eyes.
+
+"Oh, yes," he continued. "Didn't you know I had a boy? He's been the
+best kind of a boy till here lately. I can see his mother don't like it
+and his sister's worried too." His face for a second wore an expression
+of infinite sadness, and he sighed even while the smile came back on the
+face he turned to us from the door as he said: "Sometimes I think he is
+studying law with old Charley Hedrick and sometimes I think he is in the
+bank with John Markley; but he is always with me, and was such a decent
+boy when I had him out to the College. But I saw him with Joe Nevison
+last night, and I knew he'd been drinking."
+
+With that he closed the door behind him and was gone. This was the
+article that Mehronay left on the hook:
+
+"Your pa was downtown this morning, complaining about his 'old trouble,'
+that crick in his back that he got loading hay one hot day in Huron
+County, Ohio, 'before the army.' The 'old trouble,' as you will
+remember, bothers your pa a good deal, and your ma thinks that his
+father must have been a pretty hard-hearted man to let him work so hard
+when he was a boy. Your pa likes to have you and your ma think that when
+he was a boy he did nothing but work and go to prayer-meeting and go
+around doing noble deeds out of the third reader, but a number of the
+old boys of the Eleventh Kansas, who knew your pa in the sixties, are
+prepared to do a lot of forgetting for him whenever he asks it. The
+truth about your pa's 'old trouble' is that he was down at Fort
+Leavenworth just after the close of the war, and after filling up on
+laughing-water at a saloon, he got into a fight with the bartender, was
+kicked out of the saloon, and slept in the alley all night. That was his
+last whizz. He took an invoice of his stock and found that he had some
+of the most valuable experiences that a man can acquire, and he
+straightened up and came out here and grew up with the country. Your ma
+met him at a basket-meeting, and she thought he was an extremely pious
+young man, and they made a go of it.
+
+"So, Bub, when you think that by breathing on your coat sleeve to kill
+the whisky you can fool your pa, you are wrong. Your pa in his day ate
+three carloads of cardamon seeds and cloves and used listerine by the
+barrel. He knew which was the creaky step on the stairs in his father's
+house and used to avoid it coming in at night, just as you do now, and
+he knows just what you are doing. More than that, your pa speaks from
+the bitterest kind of experience when he pleads with you to quit. It is
+no goody-goody talk of a mutton-headed old deacon that he is giving you;
+it has taken him a year to get his courage up to speak to you, and every
+word that he speaks is boiled out of an agony of bitter memories. He
+knows where boys that start as you are starting end if they don't turn
+back. Your pa turned, but he recollects the career of the Blue boys, who
+are divided between the penitentiary, the poor-house and the southwest
+corner of hell; he recalls the Winklers--one dead, one a porter in a
+saloon in Peoria, one crazy; and he looks at you, and it seems to him
+that he must take you in his arms as he did when you were a little child
+in the prairie fire, and run to safety with you. And when he talks to
+you with his bashful, halting speech, you just sit there and grin, and
+cut his heart to its core, for he knows you do not understand.
+
+"It's rather up to you, Bub. In the next few months you will have to
+decide whether or not you are going to hell. Of course the 'vilest
+sinner may return' at any point along the road--but to what? To
+shattered health; to a mother heart-broken in her grave; to a wife
+damned to all eternity by your thoughtless brutality; and to children
+who are always afraid to look up the alley, when they see a group of
+boys, for fear they may be teasing you--you, drunk and dirty, lying in
+the stable filth! To that you will 'return,' with your strength spent,
+and your sportive friends, gone to the devil before you, and your chance
+in life frittered away.
+
+"Just sit down and figure it out, Bub. Of course there are a lot of good
+fellows on the road to hell; you will have a good time going; but you'll
+be a long time there. You'll dance and play cards and chase out nights,
+and soak your soul in the essence of don't-give-a-dam-tiveness, and
+you'll wonder, as you go up in the balloon, what fun there is in walking
+through this sober old earth. Friends--what are they? The love of
+humanity--what is it? Thoughtfulness to those about you? Gentility--What
+are these things? Letteroll--letteroll! But as you drop out of the
+balloon, the earth will look like a serious piece of landscape.
+
+"When you are old, the beer you have swilled will choke your throat; the
+women you have flirted with will hang round your feet and make you
+stumble. All the nights you have wasted at poker will dim your eyes. The
+garden of the days that are gone, wherein you should have planted
+kindness and consideration and thoughtfulness and manly courage to do
+right, will be grown up to weeds, that will blossom in your patches and
+in your rags and in your twisted, gnarly face that no one will love.
+
+"Go it, Bub! don't stop for your pa's sake; you know it all. Your pa is
+merely an old fogy. Tell him you can paddle your own canoe. But when you
+were a little boy, a very little boy, with a soft, round body, your pa
+used to take you in his arms and rub his beard--his rough, stubby,
+three-days' beard--against your face and pray that God would keep you
+from the path you are going in.
+
+"And so the sins of the father, Bub--but we won't talk of that."
+
+Three months later, when the Methodists opened their regular winter
+revival, Mehronay, becoming enraged at what he called the tin-horn
+clothes of the travelling evangelist conducting the meetings, began to
+make fun of him in the paper; and, as a revivalist in a church is a
+sacred person while the meetings are going on, we had to kill Mehronay's
+items about the revival; whereupon, his professional pride being hurt,
+Mehronay went forth into the streets, got haughtily drunk, and strutted
+up and down Main Street scattering sirs and misters and madams about so
+lavishly that men who did not appreciate his condition thought he had
+gone mad. That night he went to the revival, and sat upon the back seat
+alone, muttering his imprecations at the preacher until the singing
+began, when the heat of the room and the emotional music mellowed his
+pride, and he drowned out the revivalist's singing partner with a
+clear, sweet tenor that made the congregation turn to look at him.
+Mehronay knew the gospel hymns by heart, as he seemed to know his New
+Testament, and the cunning revivalist kept the song service going for an
+hour. When Mehronay was thoroughly sober there was a short prayer, and
+the singer on the platform feelingly sang "There Were Ninety and Nine"
+with an adagio movement, and Mehronay's face was wet with tears and he
+rose for prayers.
+
+He came to the office chastened and subdued next morning and wrote an
+account of the revival so eulogistic that we had to tone it down, and
+for a week he went about damning, with all the oaths in the pirate's
+log, Dan Gregg and the College professor who taught evolution. But no
+one could coax him back to the revival. As spring came we thought that
+he had forgotten the episode of his regeneration, and perhaps he had
+forgotten it, but the Saturday before Easter he put on the copy-hook an
+Easter sermon that made us in the office think that he had added another
+dream to his world. It was a curious thing for Mehronay to write;
+indeed, few people in town realised that he did write it; for he had
+been rollicking over town on his beat every day for months after the
+revival, and half the pious people in town thought he shammed his
+emotion the night he came to the church merely to mock them and their
+revivalist. But we in the office knew that Mehronay's Easter sermon had
+come as the offering of a contrite heart. It is in so many scrapbooks in
+the town that it should be reprinted here that the town may know that
+Mehronay wrote it. It read:
+
+"The celebration of Easter is the celebration of the renewal of life
+after the death that prevails in winter. People of many faiths observe a
+spring festival of rejoicing, and of prayer for future bounty. Probably
+the Easter celebration is like that at Christmas and Thanksgiving--a
+survival of some ancient pagan rite that men established out of
+overflowing hearts, rejoicing at the end of a good season and praying
+for favour at the beginning of a new one.
+
+"To the Christian world Easter symbolises a Divine tragedy. The coming
+of Easter, as it is set forth in the Great Book, is a most powerful
+story; it is the story of one of the deepest passions that may move the
+human heart--the passion of father-love.
+
+"Once there lived in the desert a man and his little child--a very
+little boy, who sometimes was a bad little boy, and who did not do as he
+was told. On a day when the father was away about his business the
+child, playing, wandered out on the desert and was lost. From home the
+desert beckoned the little boy; it seemed fair and fine to adventure in.
+When the boy had been gone for many hours the father returned and could
+not find him, and knew that the child was lost. But the father knew the
+desert; he knew how it lured men on; he knew its parching thirst; he
+knew its thorns and brambles, and its choking dust and the heat that
+beats one down.
+
+"And when he saw that the boy was lost his heart was aflame with
+anguish; he could all but feel the desert fire in the little boy's
+blood, the cactus barbs in the bleeding little feet, and the great
+lonesomeness of the desert in the little boy's heart; and as from afar
+the man heard a wailing little voice in his ears calling, 'Father,
+father!' like a lost sheep. But it was only a seeming, and the house
+where the little boy had played was silent.
+
+"Then the father went to the desert, and neither the desert fire
+murmuring at his brow, nor the sand that filled his mouth, nor the
+stones and prickles that cut his feet, nor the wild beasts that lurked
+upon the hillsides, could keep out of his ears the bleat of that little
+child's voice crying 'Father, father!' When the night fell, still and
+cold and numbing, the father pressed on, calling to the child in his
+agony; for he thought it was such a little boy, such a poor, lonesome,
+terror-stricken little boy out in the desert, lost and in pain, crying
+for help, with no one to hear.
+
+"And wandering so, the father died, with his heart full of unspeakable
+woe. But they found the wayward child in the light of another day. And
+he never knew what his father suffered, nor why his father died, nor did
+he understand it all till he had grown to a man's stature, and then he
+knew; and he tried to live his days as his father had lived, and to lay
+down his life, if need be, for his friend.
+
+"This is the Easter story that should come to every heart. The Christ
+that came into the desert of this weary life, and walked here foot-sore,
+heart-broken and athirst, came here for the love that was in His heart.
+Who put it there--whether the God that gave Shakespeare his brain and
+Wagner his harmonies, gave Christ His heart--or whether it was the God
+that paints the lily and moves the mountains in their labours--it
+matters not. It is one God, the Author and First Cause of all things. It
+is His heart that moves our own hearts to all their aspirations, to all
+the benevolence that the wicked world knows; it is His mind that is made
+manifest in our marvels of civilisation; it is His vast, unknowable plan
+that is moving the nations of the earth.
+
+"Whether it be spirit or law or tendency or person--what matter?--it is
+our Father, who went to the desert to find His sheep."
+
+All day Saturday, in order to square himself with the printers who set
+up his sermon, and to rehabilitate himself in the graces of the others
+about the office who knew of his weakness, Mehronay turned in the gayest
+lot of copy that he had ever written. There was an "assessment call of
+the Widowers' Protective Association to pay the sad wedding loss of
+Brother P. R. Cullom, of the Bee Hive," whose wedding was announced in
+the society column; there was a card of thanks from Ben Pore to those
+who had come with their sympathy and glue to nurse his wooden Indian
+which had blown down and broken the night before, and resolutions of
+respect for the same departed brother, in most mocking language, from
+the Red Men's Lodge. There was an item saying seven different varieties
+of Joneses and three kinds of Hugheses were in town from Lebo--the Welsh
+settlement; there was a call for the uniformed rank of head waiters to
+meet in regalia at Mrs. Larrabee's reception, signed by the three men in
+town who were known to have evening clothes, and there was a meeting of
+the anti-kin society announced to discuss the length of time
+Alphabetical Morrison's new son-in-law should be allowed to visit the
+Morrisons before the neighbours could ask when he was going to leave.
+But when the paper was out Mehronay got a dozen copies from the press
+and sent them away in wrappers which he addressed, and the piece his
+blue pencil marked was none of these.
+
+For many days after Mehronay wrote his Easter sermon the gentle, low,
+beelike hum that he kept up while he was at work followed the tunes of
+gospel hymns, or hymns of an older fashion. We always knew when to
+expect what he called a "piece" from Mehronay--which meant an article
+into which he put more than ordinary endeavour--for his bee-song would
+grow louder, with now and then an intelligible word in it, and if it was
+to be an exceptional piece Mehronay would whistle. When he began writing
+the music would die down, but when he was well under sail on his
+"piece," the steam of his swelling emotions would set his chin to going
+like the lid of a kettle, and he would drone and jibber the words as he
+wrote them--half audibly, humming and sputtering in the pauses while he
+thought. Scores of times we have seen the dear old fellow sitting at his
+desk when a "piece" was in the pot, and have gathered the men around
+back of his chair to watch him simmer. When it was finished he would
+whirl about in his chair, as he gathered up the sheets of paper and
+shook them together, and say: "I've writ a piece here--a damn good
+piece!" And then, as he put the copy on the hook and got his hat, he
+would tell us in most profane language what it was all about--quoting
+the best sentences and chuckling to himself as he went out onto the
+street.
+
+As the spring filled out and became summer we noticed that Mehronay was
+singing fewer gospel hymns and rather more sentimental songs than usual.
+And then the horrible report came to the office that Mehronay had been
+seen by one of the printers walking by night after bed-time under the
+State Street elms with a woman. Also his items began to indicate a
+closer knowledge of what was going on in society than Mehronay naturally
+could have. In the fall we learned through the girls in the Bee Hive
+that he had bought a white shirt and a pair of celluloid cuffs. This
+rumour set the office afire with curiosity, but no one dared to tease
+Mehronay. For no one knew who she was.
+
+Not until late in the fall, when Madame Janauschek came to the opera
+house to play "Macbeth," did Mehronay uncover his intrigue. Then for
+the first time in his three years' employment on the paper he asked for
+two show tickets! The entire office lined up at the opera house--most of
+us paying our own way, not to see the Macbeths, but to see Mehronay's
+Romeo and Juliet. The office devil, who was late mailing the papers that
+night, says that about seven o'clock Mehronay came in singing "Jean,
+Jean, my Bonnie Jean," and that he went to his trunk, took out his
+celluloid cuffs, a new sky-blue and shell-pink necktie that none of us
+had seen before, a clean paper collar--and the boy, who probably was
+mistaken, swears Mehronay also took his white shirt--in a bundle which
+he proudly tucked under his arm and toddled out of the office whistling
+a wedding march. An hour later, dressed in this regalia and a new black
+suit, buttoned primly and exactly in a fashion unknown to Mehronay, he
+appeared at the opera house with Miss Columbia Merley, spinster, teacher
+of Greek and Hellenic philosophy at the College. The office force asked
+in a gasp of wonder: "Who dressed him?" Miss Merley--late in her
+forties, steel-eyed, thin-chested, flint-faced and with hair knotted so
+tightly back from her high stony brow that she had to take out two
+hairpins to wink--Miss Merley might have done it--but she had no kith or
+kin who could have done it for her, and certainly the hand that smoothed
+the coat buttoned the vest, and the hand that buttoned the vest put on
+the collar and tie, and as for the shirt----
+
+But that was an office mystery. We never have solved it, and no one had
+the courage to tease Mehronay about it the next morning. After that we
+knew, and Mehronay knew that we knew, that he and Miss Merley went to
+church every Sunday evening--the Presbyterian church, mind you, where
+there is no foolishness--and that after church Mehronay always spent
+exactly half an hour in the parlour of the house where his divinity
+roomed. A whole year went by wherein Mehronay was sober, and did not
+look upon the wine when it was red or brown or yellow or any other
+colour. Now when he "writ a piece" there was frequently something in it
+defending women's rights. Also he severed diplomatic relations with the
+girl clerks in the White Front and the Bee Hive and the Racket, and
+bought a cane and aspired to some dignity of person. But Mehronay's
+heart was unchanged. The snows of boreal affection did not wither or
+fade his eternal spring. The sap still ran sweet in his veins and the
+bees still sang among the blossoms that sprang up along his path. He was
+everyone's friend, and spoke cheerily to the dogs and the horses, and
+was no more courteous to the preachers and the bankers, who are our most
+worshipful ones in town, than to the men from Red Martin's
+gambling-room, and even the woman in red, whom all the town knows but
+whom no one ever mentions, got a kind word from Mehronay as they met
+upon the street. He always called her sister.
+
+And so another year went by and Mehronay's "pieces" made the circulation
+grow, and we were prosperous. It became known about town long before we
+knew it in the office that if Mehronay kept sober for three years she
+would have him, and when we finally heard it he was on the last half of
+the third year and was growing sombre. "In the Cottage by the Sea" was
+his favourite song, and "Put Away the Little Playthings" also was much
+in his throat when he wrote. We thought, perhaps--and now we know--that
+he was thinking of a home that was gone. The day before Mehronay's
+wedding a child died over near the railroad, and on the morning he was
+to be married we found this on the copy hook when we came down to open
+the office, after Mehronay had gone to claim his bride:
+
+"A ten-line item appeared in last night's paper, away down in one
+corner, that brought more hearts together in a common bond--the bond of
+fear and sympathy and sorrow--than any other item has done for a long
+time. The item told of the death, by scarlet fever, of little Flossie
+Yengst. Probably the child was not known outside of her little group of
+playmates; her father and mother are not of that advertised clique known
+of men as prominent people; he is an engineer on the Santa Fé, and the
+mother moves in that small circle of friends and neighbours which
+circumscribes American motherhood of the best type. And yet last night,
+when that little ten-line item was read by a thousand firesides in this
+town, thousands and thousands of hearts turned to that desolate home by
+the track, and poured upon it the benediction of their sympathies. That
+home was the meeting-place where rich and poor, great and weak, good and
+bad, stood equals. For there is something in the death of a little
+child, something in its infinite pathos, that makes all human creatures
+mourn. Because in every heart that is not a dead heart, calloused to all
+joy or sorrow, some little child is enshrined--either dead or
+living--and so child-love is the one universal emotion of the soul, and
+child-death is the saddest thing in all the world.
+
+"A child's soul is such a small thing, and the world and the systems of
+worlds, and the infinite stretches of illimitable space, are so wide for
+a child's soul to wander in, that, sane as we may be, stolid as we may
+try to be, we think in imagery, and the figure of little feet setting
+off on the far track to the end of things, hunting God, wrings our
+heart-strings and makes our throats grip and our eyelids quiver.
+
+"And then a child dying, leaving this good world of ours, seems to have
+had so small a chance for itself. There is something in all of us
+struggling against oblivion, striving vainly to make some real impress
+on the current of time, and a child, dying, can only clutch the hands
+about it and go down--forever. It seems so merciless, so unfair. Perhaps
+that is why, all over the world, the little graves are cared for best.
+It is to the little graves that we turn in our keenest anguish and not
+to the larger mounds; to the little graves that our hearts are drawn in
+our hours of triumph. And so the child, though dead, lives its appointed
+time and dies only in the fullness of its years. The little shoes, the
+little dresses, the 'little tin soldiers covered with rust,' and the
+memories sweeter than dreams of a honeymoon, these are life's
+immortelles that never fade. And though men and women come and go upon
+the earth, though civilisations may wither and pass, these little images
+remain; and the sun and the stars, which see men come and go, may see
+these little idols before which every creature bows, and the sun and
+stars, knowing no time, may think these children's relics are also
+eternal.
+
+"It is a desperately lonely home, that Yengst home, with the little girl
+gone away on a long journey; but how tight and close other fathers and
+mothers hugged their little ones last night when their hearts came back
+from the house of sorrow. And the little ones, feeling no fear,
+unconscious of the pang of terror that was shooting through the souls
+about them--the children played on, and maybe, before dropping to sleep,
+wondered a little at anxious looks they saw in grown-up eyes.
+
+"This is the faith of a little child, curious but implicit, in the
+goodness of those things outside one's self. And 'of such is the Kingdom
+of Heaven.'"
+
+A day or so after the wedding someone said to him: "Mehronay, sometimes
+your pieces make me cry," and he replied with all the fine sincerity of
+his heart showing in his eyes: "Yes--and if you only knew how they make
+me cry! Sometimes when I have written one like--like that--I go to my
+bed and sob like a child." He turned and walked away, but he came into
+the office whistling "The Dutch Company."
+
+After his wedding we made brave, in a sly way, to rail at Mehronay about
+his love affair, and he took it good-naturedly. He knew the situation
+just as it was; his sense of humour allowed him no false view of the
+matter. One afternoon when the paper was out, George Kirwin, the
+foreman, and one of the reporters and Mehronay were in the back room
+leaning against the imposing-stones looking over the paper, when Kirwin
+said: "Say, Mehronay, how did you get yourself screwed up to ask her?"
+
+It was spoken in a joke. The two young men were grinning, but Mehronay
+looked at the floor in a study as he said:
+
+"Well, to be honest--damfino if I ever did--just exactly." He smiled
+reflectively in a pause and continued: "Nearest I remember was one night
+we was sitting with our feet on the base-burner and I looked up and
+says, 'Hell's afire, Commie'--I called her that for short--'why in the
+devil don't a fine woman like you get married? She got up and come over
+to where I was a-sitting and before I could say Lordamighty, she put her
+hand on my shoulder and says real soft and solemn: 'I'll just be damned
+if I don't believe I will.'"
+
+He did not smile when he looked up, but sighed contentedly as he added
+reverently: "And so, by hell, she did!" If Columbia Merley Mehronay had
+known this language which her husband's innocent inadvertence put into
+her mouth she would have strangled him--even then.
+
+We did not have Mehronay with us more than a year after his wedding.
+Mrs. Mehronay knew what he was worth. She asked for twenty-five dollars
+a week for him, and when we told her the office could not afford it she
+took him away. They went to New York City, where she peddled his pieces
+about town until she got him a regular place. There they have lived
+happily ever after. Mehronay brings his envelope home every Saturday
+night, and she gives him his carfare and his shaving-money and puts the
+rest where it will do the most good. When the men from our office go to
+New York--which they sometimes do--they visit with Mehronay at his
+office, and sometimes--if there is time for due and proper notice of the
+function in writing--there is an invitation to dinner. Mehronay fondles
+his old friends as a child fondles its playmates and he takes eager
+pleasure in them, but she that was Columbia Merley all but searches
+their pockets for the tempter.
+
+Mehronay has never broken his word. He knows if he does break it she
+will tear him limb from limb and eat him raw. So he goes to his work,
+writes his pieces, hums his gentle bee-song--so that men do not like to
+room with him at the office--and has learned to keep himself fairly well
+buttoned up in the great city. But Miss Larrabee that was--who used to
+edit the society page for our paper, but who now lives in New York--told
+us when she was home that as she was walking down Fourth Avenue one
+winter day when the street was empty, she saw Mehronay standing before
+the window of a liquor store looking intently at the display of bottled
+goods before him. When he saw her half a block away he turned from her
+and shuffled rapidly down the street, clicking his cane nervously.
+
+It was not for him!
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+Sown in Our Weakness
+
+
+When one comes to know an animal well--say a horse or a cow or a
+dog--and sees how sensibly it acts, following the rules of conduct laid
+down by the wisdom of its kind, one cannot help wondering how much
+happier, and healthier, and better, human beings would be if they used
+the discretion of the animals. For ages men have been taught what is
+good for their bodies and their minds and their souls. There has been no
+question about the wisdom of being temperate and industrious and honest
+and kind; and the folly of immoderation and laziness and chicanery and
+meanness is so well known that a geometrical proposition has not been
+more definitely proved. Yet only a few people in any community observe
+the rules of life, and of these few no one observes them all; and so
+misery and pain and poverty and anguish are as a pestilence among men,
+and they wonder why they are living in such a cruel world. It was Eli
+Martin who, back in the seventies, won the prize in the Bethel
+neighbourhood for reciting more chapters of the Old Testament than any
+other child in Sunday-school; and the old McGuffey's Reader that he used
+on week-days was filled with moral tales; but someway when it came to
+applying the rules he had learned, and the moral that the stories
+pointed, Eli Martin lacked the sense of a dog or a horse. Once, when the
+paper contained an account of one of Red Martin's police court
+escapades, George Kirwin recalled that, when we offered a prize during
+the Christmas season of 1880, for the best essay by a child under
+twelve, it was Ethelwylde Swaney who won the prize with an essay on the
+Weakness of Vanity; and she married Eli Martin when she and the whole
+town knew what he was.
+
+Naturally one would suppose that two persons so full of theoretical
+wisdom would have applied it, and that in applying it they would have
+been the happiest and most useful people in all the town; but instead
+they were probably the most miserable people in town, and Mrs. Martin,
+whom we knew better than Red, because she once had worked in the office,
+was forever bemoaning what she called her "lot," though we knew for many
+years that her "lot" was not the result of the fates against her, but
+merely the inevitable consequence of her temperament.
+
+Before we put in linotypes and set our type by machinery it was set by
+girls. Usually we employed half-a-dozen, who came from the town high
+school. They kept coming and going, as girls do who work in country
+towns, getting married in their twenties or finding something better
+than printing, and it is likely that in ten years as many as fifty girls
+have worked in the office, and be it said to the credit of the
+girls--which cannot be said of so many of the boys and men who have
+worked in the shop--that they were girls we were proud of--all but
+Ethelwylde Swaney.
+
+She that we called the Princess worked in the office less than two
+years, but the memory of her still lingers, though hardly could one say
+like "the scent of the roses"; for the Princess was not merely a poor
+compositor, she was the kind that would make mistakes and blame others
+for them, and that kind never learns. Though she ran away to marry Red
+Martin--which was her own mistake--this habit of blaming others for her
+faults was so strong that she never forgave her mother for making the
+match. We know in our office that Mrs. Swaney did not dream that the
+girl was even going with Red Martin until they were married. Yet the
+Martin neighbours for twenty years have blamed Mrs. Swaney. When the
+Princess was in the office we found out that the truth wasn't in her;
+also we discovered that she was lazy and that she cried too easily.
+Right at the busy hour in the afternoon we used to catch her with a type
+in her fingers and her hand poised in the air, looking off into space
+for a minute at a time, and when we spoke to her she would put her head
+on her case and cry softly; and the foreman would have to apologise
+before she would go back to work. Even then she would have to take the
+broken piece of looking-glass that she kept in her capital "K" box and
+make an elaborate toilet before settling down. Moreover, though she was
+only seventeen, much of the foreman's time was spent chasing dirty-faced
+little boys away from her case, and if some boy didn't have his elbow in
+her quad box, she was off her stool visiting either with some other
+girl, or standing by the stove drying her hands--she was eternally
+drying her hands--and talking to one of the men. In all the year and a
+half that she was in the office the Princess never learned how to help
+herself. When she had to dump her type, she had to call some man from
+his work to help her--and then there would be more conversation.
+
+But we kept her and were patient with her on account of her father, John
+Swaney, a hard-working man who was trying to make something of the
+Princess, so we put up with her perfumery and her powder rags and her
+royal airs, and did all we could to teach her the difference between a
+comma and a period--though she never really learned; and we were still
+patient with her, even when she deliberately pied a lot of type after
+being corrected for some piece of carelessness or worse. We made due
+allowances for the Rutherford temper, which her father warned us not to
+arouse. Nevertheless, her mother came to the office one winter day in
+her black straw hat with a veil around it, and with the coat she had
+worn for ten years, to tell us that she was afraid working in the shop
+would hurt her daughter's social standing. So the Princess walked out
+that night in a gust of musk--in her picture hat and sweeping cloak,
+with bangles tinkling and petticoat swishing--and the office knew her no
+more forever.
+
+About the time that the Princess left the office to improve her social
+standing, Eli Martin and his big mule team came to town from the Bethel
+neighbourhood. He was as likely a looking red-headed country boy as you
+ever saw. We were laying the town waterworks pipes that year, and Eli
+and his team had work all summer. On the street he towered above the
+other men several inches in height, and he looked big and muscular and
+masculine in his striped undershirt and blue overalls, as he worked with
+his team in the hot sun. Of course, the Princess would not have seen him
+in those days. Her nose was seeking a higher social level, and the
+clerks in the White Front dry-goods store formed the pinnacle of her
+social ideal. But Eli Martin was naturally what in our parlance we call
+a ladies' man, and he was not long in learning that the wide-brimmed
+black hat, the ready-made faded green suit and the red string necktie
+which had swept the girls down before him in the Bethel neighbourhood
+would accomplish little in town. So when winter came, and work with his
+team was hard to get, he sold his mules and bedecked himself in fine
+linen. He had a few hundred dollars saved up, so he lived in the cabbage
+smells of the Astor House, and fancied that he was enjoying the
+refinements of a great city. Time hung heavily upon him, and at night he
+joined the switchmen and certain young men of leisure in the town in a
+more or less friendly game of poker in the rooms at the head of the dark
+stairway on South Main Street.
+
+When spring came the young man had no desire and little need to go back
+to work, for by that time he was known as Lucky Red. In a year the
+sunburn left him and he grew white and thin. He went to Kansas City for
+a season, and became known among gamblers as far west as Denver; but he
+was only a tin-horn gambler in the big cities, while in our town he was
+at the head of his profession, so he came back and opened a room of his
+own. He came back in a blaze of glory; to wit: a long grey frock coat
+with trousers to match, pleated white shirts studded with blinding
+diamonds, a small white hat dented jauntily on three sides, a matted
+lump of red hair on the back of his head and a dashing red curl combed
+extravagantly low on his forehead. Before he left town for his foreign
+tour Red Martin used to hang about the churches Sunday evenings, peering
+through the blinds and making eyes at the girls; but upon his return he
+had risen to another social level. He had acquired a cart with red
+wheels and a three-minute horse; so he dropped from his social list the
+girls who "worked out" and made eyes at those young women who lived at
+home, gadding around town evenings, picking up boys on the street and
+forever talking about their "latest."
+
+It was the most natural thing in the world that Red and the Princess
+should find each other, and six months before the elopement we heard
+that the Princess was riding about the country with him in the
+red-wheeled cart. For after she left the office in one way and another
+we had kept track of the girl--sometimes through her father, who, being
+a carpenter, was frequently called to the office to fix up a door or a
+window; sometimes through the other girls in the office, and sometimes
+through Alphabetical Morrison, whose big family of girl school-teachers
+made him a storage battery of social information.
+
+It seems that the Rutherford temper developed in the Princess as she
+grew older. Mrs. Swaney was Juanita Sinclair; her father was a
+mild-mannered little man, who went out of doors to cough, but her mother
+was a Rutherford--a big, stiff-necked, beer-bottle-shaped woman, who
+bossed the missionary society until she divided the church. John Swaney,
+who is not a talkative man, once got in a crowd at Smith's cigar-store
+where they were telling ghost stories, and his contribution to the
+horror of the occasion was a relating of how, when they were fooling
+with tables, trying to make them tip at his house one night at a family
+reunion, the spirit of Grandma Rutherford appeared, split the table into
+kindling, dislocated three shoulder-blades and sprained five wrists. It
+was this Rutherford temper that the Princess wore when she slouched
+around the house in her mother-hubbard with her hair in papers. The
+girls in the office used to say that if her mother over-cooked the
+Princess's egg in the morning she would rise grandly from the breakfast
+table, tipping over her chair behind her, and rush to her room "to have
+a good cry," and the whole family had to let the breakfast cool while
+they coaxed her down. That was the Rutherford temper. Also, when they
+tried to teach her to cook, it was the Rutherford temper that broke the
+dishes. Colonel Morrison once told us that when the Princess thought it
+was time to give a party, the neighbours could see the Rutherford temper
+begin wig-wagging at the world through the Princess's proud head, and
+there was nothing for her father to do but to kill the chickens, run
+errands all day to the grocery store, and sit in the cellar freezing
+cream, and then go to the barn at night to smoke. It was known in the
+neighbourhood that the Princess dragged her shoestrings until noon, and
+that her bed was never in the memory of woman made up in the daytime. We
+are Yankees in our town, and these things made more talk to the girl's
+discredit than the story that she was keeping company with Red Martin!
+
+But we at the office saw in the proud creature that passed our window so
+grandly nothing to indicate her real self. The year that Red Martin came
+back to town the Princess used to turn into Main Street in an afternoon,
+wearing the big black hat that cost her father a week's hard work,
+looking as sweet as a jug of sorghum and as smiling as a basket of
+chips. Though women sniffed at her, the men on the veranda of the Hotel
+Metropole craned their necks to watch her out of sight. She jingled with
+chains and watches and lockets and chatelaines, carried more rings than
+a cane rack, and walked with the air of the heroine of the society drama
+at the opera house. When she was on parade she never even glanced toward
+our office, where she had jeopardised her social position. She barely
+quivered a recognising eye-brow at the girls who had worked with her,
+and they had their laugh at her, so matters were about even. But the
+office girls say that, after the Princess eloped with Red Martin, she
+was glad to rush up and shake hands with them. For we know in our town
+that the princess business does not last more than ten days or two weeks
+after marriage; it is a trade of quick sales, short seasons and small
+profits. The day that the elopement was the talk of the town, Colonel
+Alphabetical Morrison was in the office. He said that he remembered
+Juanita Sinclair when she was a princess and wore Dolly Varden clothes
+and was the playfullest kitten in the basketful that used to turn out to
+the platform dances on Fourth of July, and appear as belles of the
+suppers given for the Silver Cornet Band just after the war. "But,"
+added the Colonel, "this town is full of saffron-coloured old girls with
+wiry hair and sun-bleached eyes, who at one time or another were in the
+princess business. Not only has every dog his day, but eventually every
+kitten becomes a cat."
+
+[Illustration: The traveling men on the veranda craned their necks to
+watch her out of sight]
+
+From the night of the charivari when Red Martin handed the boys twenty
+dollars--the largest sum ever contributed to a similar purpose in the
+town's history--he and the Princess began to slump. The sloughing off of
+the veneer of civilisation was not rapid, but it was sure. The first
+pair of shoes that Red bought after his wedding were not patent leather,
+and, though the porter of his gambling place blacked them every morning,
+still they were common leather, and the boy noticed it. Likewise, the
+Princess had her hat retrimmed with her old plumes the fall after her
+wedding, bought no new clothes, and wore her giddy spring jacket, thin
+as it was, all winter, and after the second baby came no human being
+ever saw her in anything but a wrapper, except when she was on Main
+Street.
+
+The neighbours said she wore a wrapper so that she could have free use
+of her lungs, for when Red and the Princess opened a family debate, the
+neighbours had to shut the doors and windows and call in the children.
+Notwithstanding all the names that she called him in their lung-testing
+events, there was no question about her love for the man. For, after the
+first year of her marriage, though she lost interest in her clothes and
+ceased calling for the "fashion leaf" at the dress-goods counter in the
+White Front, and let her hair go stringy, we around our office knew that
+the Princess was only a child, who some way had lost interest in her old
+toys. When God gives babies to children, the children forget their other
+dolls, and the Princess, when the babies came, put away her other dolls,
+and played with the toys that came alive. And she spanked them and
+fondled them and scolded them with the same empty-headed vanity that she
+used to devote to her clothes.
+
+Red Martin was one of the Princess's dearest dolls, and she and the
+babies were his toys; but, being a boy, he did not care for them so much
+with the paint rubbed off, yet he did not neglect them. Instead, he
+neglected himself. When the babies began to put grease spots on his
+clothes, he did not clean them, and about the time his wife quit
+powdering, when she came to Main Street, he stopped wearing collars. She
+grew fat and frowsy, and her chief interest in life seemed to be to
+over-dress her children, and sometimes Red Martin encouraged her by
+bringing home the most extravagant suits for the boys, and sometimes he
+abused her when the bills came in for things which she had bought for
+the children, and asked why she did not buy something half-way
+respectable-looking to wear herself. After each of their furious
+quarrels she would go over the neighbourhood the next day and tell the
+neighbours that her mother had married her to a gambler, and ask them
+what a gambler's wife could expect. If any neighbour woman agreed with
+Mrs. Martin about her husband or her position Mrs. Martin would become
+angry and flounce out of the house, but if the women spoke kindly of her
+husband she would berate him and weep, and assure them that she had
+refused the banker, or the proprietor of the Bee Hive, or anyone else
+who seemed to make her story possible.
+
+By the time that the third baby was old enough to carry his baby sister
+and the fifth baby was in the crib, Red Martin's face had begun to grow
+purple. He lost the gambling-room which was once his pride; it was
+operated by a youth with a curly black moustache, whose clothes recalled
+the days of Red's triumph. Red was only a dealer, and his trousers were
+frayed at the bottom and he shaved but once a week. Then the Princess
+used to come slinking up Main Street at night carrying a pistol under
+her coat to use if she found the woman with him. Who the woman was the
+neighbours never knew, but the Princess gave them to understand that
+they would be surprised if she told them. It was her vanity to pretend
+that the woman was a society leader, as she called her, but the boys
+around the poker-dive knew that Red Martin's days as a heart-breaker
+were gone. For what whisky and cocaine and absinthe could do for Red to
+hurry his end they were doing, but a man is a strong beast, and it takes
+many years to kill him. Also, the Lord saves men like Red for horrible
+examples, letting them live long that He may not have to waste others;
+but women seem to have God's pity and He takes them out of their misery
+more quickly than He takes men. With the coming of the seventh baby the
+Princess died. When the news came to the office that she was gone we
+were not sorry, for life had held little for her. Her looks were gone;
+her health was gone; her dreams were smudged out--pitiful and wretched
+and sordid as they were, even at the best. Yet for all that George
+Kirwin took down to the funeral a wreath which the office force bought
+for her.
+
+To know George Kirwin casually one would say he never saw anything but
+the types and machinery in the back room of our office. When he went
+among strangers he seemed to be looking always at his hands or studying
+his knees, and his responses to those whom he did not know were "yea,
+yea," and "nay, nay"; but that night he told us more about the funeral
+of the Princess than all the reporters on the paper would have learned.
+He told us how the pitiful little parlour with its advertising chromos
+and its soap-prize lamp was filled with the women who always come to
+funerals in our town--funerals being their only diversion; how they sat
+in the undertaker's chairs with their handkerchiefs carefully folded and
+in their hands during the first part of the service, waiting for Brother
+Hopper to tell about his mother's death, which he never fails to do at
+funerals, though the elders have spoken to him about it, as all the town
+knows; how Red Martin, shaved for the occasion, and, in a borrowed suit
+of clothes, stood out by the well and did not come into the house during
+the services; how only the elder children sat in the front room with the
+other mourners, and how the prattle of the little ones in the kitchen
+ran through the parson's prayer with heart-breaking insistence.
+
+George seemed to think that the poverty-stricken little makeshifts to
+bring beauty into the miserable home and keep up the appearance of a
+kind of gentility--perhaps for the children--was the best thing he ever
+knew about the Princess, and he said that he was glad that he went to
+the funeral for the geraniums in the crêpe paper covered tomato cans,
+the cheap lace curtains at the windows, and the hair-wreath inheritance
+from the Swaneys, made him think that the best of the Princess might
+have survived all the rack and calamity of the years.
+
+When the funeral left the house the neighbour women came and put it in
+order, and there was a better supper waiting for the father and the
+children than they had eaten for many years. And then, after the dishes
+were put away, the neighbours left; and for what he tried to do and be
+for the motherless brood just that one night, God will put down a good
+mark for Eli Martin--even though the man failed most sadly.
+
+When he went back to the gambling-room the next night, where he was
+porter; men tried not to swear while he was in earshot, and the next day
+they swore only mild oaths around him, out of respect for his grief, but
+the day after they forgot their compunctions, and, within a week, Red
+Martin seemed to have forgotten, too. In time, the family was scattered
+over the earth--divided among kin, and adopted out, and as the town grew
+older its conscience quickened and the gambling-room was closed,
+whereupon Red Martin went to Huddleston's livery stable, where he worked
+for enough to keep him in whisky and laudanum, and ate only when someone
+gave him food.
+
+He grew dirty, unkempt, and dull-witted. Disease bent and twisted him
+hideously. When he was too sick to work, he went to the poor-house, and
+came back weak and pale to sit much in the sun on the south side of the
+building like a sick dog. When he is lying about the street drunk,
+little boys poke sticks at him and flee with terror before him when he
+wakes to blind rage and stumbles after them. It is hard to realise that
+this disgusting, inhuman-looking creature is the Red Martin of twenty
+years ago, who, in his long grey frock coat, patent leather shoes, white
+hat and black tie, walked serenely up the steps of the bank the day it
+failed, tapped on the door-pane with his revolver barrel, and, when a
+man came to answer, made him open, and backed out with his revolver in
+one hand and his diamonds and money in the other. He does not recall in
+any vague way the Red Martin who gave the town a month's smile when he
+said, after losing all his money on election, that he had learned never
+to bet on anything that could talk, or had less than four legs. That Red
+Martin has been dead these many years; perhaps he was no more worthy
+than this one who hangs on to life, and bears the name and the disgrace
+that his dead youth made inevitable.
+
+How strange it is that a man should wreck himself, and blight those of
+his own blood as this man has done! He knew what we all know about life
+and its rules. He had been told, as we all are told in a thousand ways,
+that bad conduct brings sorrow to the world, and that pain and
+wretchedness are the only rewards of that behaviour which men call sin.
+And yet there he is, sitting on his hunkers near the stable, with God's
+stamp of failure all over his broken, battered body--put there by Red
+Martin's own hands. But George Kirwin, who often thinks with a kindlier
+spirit than others, says we are Red Martin's partners in iniquity, for
+we all lived here with him, maintaining a town that tolerated gambling
+and debauchery, and that, in some way, we shall each of us suffer as Red
+has suffered, insomuch as each has had his share in a neighbour's shame.
+
+We tell George that he is getting old, though he is still on the bright
+side of forty, because he likes to come down town of evenings and hold a
+parliament with Henry Larmy and Dan Gregg and Colonel Morrison.
+Sometimes they hold it in the office and settle important affairs. A
+month ago they settled the immortality of the soul, and the other night,
+returning to their former subject, the question came up: "What will
+become of Red Martin when he goes to Heaven?" Dan contended that the
+poor fellow is carrying around his own little blowpipe hell as he goes
+through life. George Kirwin maintained that Red Martin will enter the
+next world with the soul that died when his body began to live in
+wickedness; that there must have been some imperishable good in him as a
+boy, and that Heaven, or whatever we decide to call the next world, must
+be full of men and women like Red Martin--some more respectable than
+he--whose hell will be the unmasking of their real selves in the world
+where we "shall know as we are known." While we were sitting in judgment
+on poor Red Martin, in toddled Simon Mehronay, who is visiting in town
+from New York in the company of the vestal virgin who had, as he
+expressed it, snatched him as a brand from the burning. Mehronay has
+been gone from town nearly twenty years, and until they told him he did
+not know how Red Martin had fallen. When he heard it, Mehronay sighed
+and tears came into his dear old eyes, as he put his hand on Colonel
+Morrison's arm and said:
+
+"Poor Red! Poor Red! A decent, brave, big-hearted chap! Why, he's taken
+whisky away from me a dozen times! He's won my money from me to keep it
+over Saturday night. Why, I'm no better than he is! Only they've caught
+Red, and they haven't caught me. And when we stand before the
+judgment-seat, I can tell a damnsight more good things about Red than he
+can about me. I'm going out to find him and get him a square meal."
+
+And so, while we were debating, Mehronay went down the Jericho road
+looking for the man who was lying there, beaten and bruised and waiting
+for the Samaritan.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+"Thirty"
+
+
+In the afternoon, between two and three o'clock, the messenger boy from
+the telegraph office brings over the final sheet of the day's report of
+the Associated Press. Always at the end is the signature "Thirty." That
+tells us that the report is closed for the day. Just why "Thirty" should
+be used to indicate the close of the day's work no one seems to know. It
+is the custom. They do so in telegraph offices all over the country, and
+in the newspaper business "Thirty" stands so significantly for the end
+that whenever a printer or a reporter dies his associates generally feel
+called upon to have a floral emblem made with that figure in the centre.
+It is therefore entirely proper that these sketches of life in a country
+town, seen through a reporter's eyes, should close with that symbolic
+word. But how to close? That is the question.
+
+Sitting here by the office window, with the smell of ink in one's
+nostrils, with the steady monotonous clatter of the linotypes in the
+ears, and the whirring of the shafting from the press-room in the
+basement throbbing through one's nerves, with the very material
+realisation of the office around one; we feel that only a small part of
+it, and of the life about it, has been set down in these sketches.
+Passing the office window every moment is someone with a story that
+should be told. Every human life, if one could know it well and
+translate it into language, has in it the making of a great story. It is
+because we are blind that we pass men and women around us, heedless of
+the tragic quality of their lives. If each man or woman could understand
+that every other human life is as full of sorrows, of joys, of base
+temptations, of heartaches and of remorse as his own, which he thinks so
+peculiarly isolated from the web of life, how much kinder, how much
+gentler he would be! And how much richer life would be for all of us!
+Life is dull to no one; but life seems dull to those dull persons who
+think life is dull for others, and who see only the drab and grey
+shades in the woof that is woven about them.
+
+Here in our town are ten thousand people, and yet these sketches have
+told of less than two score of them. In the town are thousands of others
+quite as interesting as these of whom we have written. A few minutes ago
+Jim Bolton rode by on his hack. There is no reason why others should be
+advertised of men and Jim left out; for Jim is the proudest man in town.
+
+He came here when the town was young, and was president of the
+Anti-Horse-Thief League in the days before it became an emeritus
+institution, when it was a power in politics and named the Sheriff as a
+matter of right and of course. Jim has never let the fact that he kept a
+livery-stable and drove a hack interfere with his position as leading
+citizen. He keeps a livery-stable, because that is his business, and he
+drives a hack because he cannot trust such a valuable piece of property
+in the hands of the boy. But when the street fair is to be put on, or
+the baseball team financed, or when the Baptist Church needs a new roof,
+or the petitions are to be circulated for a bond election, Jim Bolton
+gets down from his hack, puts on his crystal slipper and is the
+Cinderella of the occasion. That is why, when young men go in Jim's hack
+to take young women to parties and dances, they always invite Jim in to
+sit by the fire and get warm while the girls are primping. That is why,
+when young Ben Mercer, just home from five years at Harvard, offered Jim
+a "tip" over the usual twenty-five-cent fare, Jim quietly took off his
+coat and whipped young Ben where he stood--and the town lined up for an
+hour, each man eager for the privilege of contributing ten cents to the
+popular subscription to pay old Jim's fine and costs in police-court.
+
+Following Jim Bolton on his hack past the office window came Bill
+Harrison, once extra brakeman on the Dry Creek Branch, just promoted to
+be conductor on the main line, and so full of vainglory in his exalted
+position that he wears his brass buttons on freight trains. Bill's wife
+signs his pay-check and doles out his cigar money, a quarter at a time,
+and when he asks for a dollar, she looks at him as if she suspected him
+of leading a double life. It is her ambition to live in Topeka, for
+"there are so many conductors in Topeka," she says, "that society is not
+so mixed"--as it is in our town, where she complains that the switchmen
+and the firemen and the student-brakemen dominate society. Once a cigar
+salesman from Kansas City got on Bill's train and offered a lead dollar
+for fare.
+
+"I can't take this," protested Bill, emphasising the "I," because his
+job was new.
+
+"Well, then, you might just turn that one over to the company,"
+responded the drummer.
+
+And when the head-brakeman told it in the yards, Bill had to fuss with
+his wife for two days to get money for a box of cigars to stop the
+trouble.
+
+As these lines were being written, Miss Littleton came into the office
+with a notice for the Missionary Society. She has been teaching school
+in town for thirty years and is not so cheerful as she was once. For a
+long time the board has considered dismissing her; but it continues to
+change her around from building to building and from room to room, and
+to keep her out of sheer pity; and she knows it. There is tragedy enough
+in her story to fill a book. Yet she looks as humdrum as you please, and
+smiles so gaily as she puts down her notice, that one thinks perhaps she
+is trying to dispel the impression that she is cross and impatient with
+children.
+
+On the other side of the street, upstairs in his dusty real estate
+office, with tin placards of insurance companies on the wall, and gaudy
+calendars tacked everywhere, Silas Buckner stands at the window counting
+the liars and scoundrels, and double-dealers and villains, and thieves
+and swindlers who pass. Since Silas was defeated for Register of Deeds
+he has become a pessimist. He has soured on the town, and when he sees a
+man, Silas thinks only of the evil that man has done. Silas knows all
+men's weaknesses, forgets their strength, and looking down from the
+window hates his fellow-creatures for the wrong they have done him, or
+the wickedness that he knows of them. He has never given our reporters a
+kindly item of news since he was turned down, but if there is a
+discreditable story on any citizen going around we hear it first from
+Silas, and if we do not print it he says we have taken hush money. If
+we have to print it, he says we are stirring up strife. Seeing him over
+there, looking down on the town which to him is accursed, we have often
+thought how weary God must be looking at the world and knowing so much
+better than Silas the weakness and iniquity of men. Sometimes we have
+wondered if sin is really as important as Silas thinks it is, for with
+Silas sin is a blot that effaces a man's soul. But maybe God sees sin
+only as a blemish that men may overcome. Perhaps God is not so
+discouraged with us as Silas is. But life is a puzzle at most.
+
+[Illustration: Counting the liars and scoundrels and double-dealers and
+villains who pass]
+
+Last night Aaron Marlin died. He had lived for ninety years in this
+world, and had seen much and suffered much, and has died as a child
+turns to sleep. It was quiet and still at his home among the elms as he
+lay in his coffin. The mourners spoke in low and solemn tones, and the
+blinds were drawn as if death were shy. As he lay there in the great
+hush that was over the house, there passed before it on the sidewalk two
+who spoke as low as the mourners, though they were oblivious to the
+house of death. They trod slowly, and a great calm was on their souls.
+One of the scribes who sets down these lines stood in the shadow of the
+doorway pine-tree and saw the lovers passing; he felt the silence and
+the sorrow behind the door he was about to enter; and there he stood
+wondering--between Death and Love--the End and the Beginning of God's
+great mystery of Life. Now, with the sense of that great mystery upon
+him, with all of this pied skein of life about him, he puts down his
+pen, and looks out of the window as the thread winds down the street.
+
+For "Thirty" is in for the day.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of In Our Town, by William Allen White
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN OUR TOWN ***
+
+***** This file should be named 26207-8.txt or 26207-8.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/2/6/2/0/26207/
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/26207-8.zip b/26207-8.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..95b9834
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-8.zip
diff --git a/26207-h.zip b/26207-h.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a6822f1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-h.zip
diff --git a/26207-h/26207-h.htm b/26207-h/26207-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7d5c1f7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-h/26207-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,7344 @@
+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of In Our Town, by William Allen White.
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css">
+/*<![CDATA[  XML blockout */
+<!--
+    p {  margin-top: .75em;
+         text-align: justify;
+         margin-bottom: .75em;
+         }
+    h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 {
+         text-align: center; /* all headings centered */
+         clear: both;
+         }
+    hr { width: 33%;
+	 margin-top: 2em;
+	 margin-bottom: 2em;
+         margin-left: auto;
+         margin-right: auto;
+         clear: both;
+       }
+
+    table {margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;}
+
+    body{margin-left: 10%;
+         margin-right: 10%;
+        }
+
+    .pagenum  { /* uncomment the next line for invisible page numbers */
+            /*  visibility: hidden;  */
+                position: absolute;
+                left: 92%;
+                font-size: smaller;
+                text-align: right;
+              } /* page numbers */
+
+    .linenum  {position: absolute; top: auto; left: 4%;} /* poetry number */
+    .blockquot{margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .sidenote {width: 20%; padding-bottom: .5em; padding-top: .5em;
+               padding-left: .5em; padding-right: .5em; margin-left: 1em;
+               float: right; clear: right; margin-top: 1em;
+               font-size: smaller; color: black; background: #eeeeee; border: dashed 1px;}
+
+    .bb       {border-bottom: solid 2px;}
+    .bl       {border-left: solid 2px;}
+    .bt       {border-top: solid 2px;}
+    .br       {border-right: solid 2px;}
+    .bbox     {border: solid 2px;}
+
+    .center   {text-align: center;}
+    .smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
+    .u        {text-decoration: underline;}
+
+    .caption  {font-weight: bold;}
+
+    .figcenter   {margin: auto; text-align: center;}
+
+    .figleft     {float: left; clear: left; margin-left: 0; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top:
+                 1em; margin-right: 1em; padding: 0; text-align: center;}
+
+    .figright    {float: right; clear: right; margin-left: 1em; margin-bottom: 1em;
+                 margin-top: 1em; margin-right: 0; padding: 0; text-align: center;}
+
+    .footnotes        {border: dashed 1px;}
+    .footnote         {margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-size: 0.9em;}
+    .footnote .label  {position: absolute; right: 84%; text-align: right;}
+    .fnanchor         {vertical-align: super; font-size: .8em; text-decoration: none;}
+
+    .poem             {margin-left:10%; margin-right:10%; text-align: left;}
+    .poem br          {display: none;}
+    .poem .stanza     {margin: 1em 0em 1em 0em;}
+    .poem span.i0     {display: block; margin-left: 0em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i2     {display: block; margin-left: 2em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i4     {display: block; margin-left: 4em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    // -->
+    /* XML end  ]]>*/
+    </style>
+  </head>
+<body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of In Our Town, by William Allen White
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: In Our Town
+
+Author: William Allen White
+
+Illustrator: F. R. Gruger
+             W. Glackens
+
+Release Date: August 7, 2008 [EBook #26207]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN OUR TOWN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+<div class="figleft">
+<a href="images/cover.jpg"><img src="images/cover.jpg" alt=""/></a>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<div class="figright">
+<a href="images/tp.jpg"><img src="images/tp.jpg" alt=""/></a>
+</div>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h1>In Our Town</h1>
+
+<h2>BY WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE</h2>
+
+<h3><i>The Court of Boyville, The Real Issue, Stratagems and Spoils</i></h3>
+
+<h3>Illustrations by F. R. Gruger and W. Glackens</h3>
+
+
+
+<h3>NEW YORK<br />
+McCLURE, PHILLIPS &amp; CO.<br />
+MCMVI</h3>
+
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Copyright 1906 by</span><br />
+McCLURE, PHILLIPS &amp; CO.</h3>
+
+<h3><i>Published April, 1906</i></h3>
+
+<h3>Copyright 1904 by The Century Co.<br />
+Copyright 1905-1906 by The Curtis Publishing Co.</h3>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="gs01" id="gs01"></a>
+<img src="images/gs01.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3>He wore his collars so high that he had to order them from a drummer</h3>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+
+<h2>Contents</h2>
+
+<!-- Autogenerated TOC. Modify or delete as required. -->
+<p>
+<a href="#I">I. <span class="smcap">Scribes and Pharisees</span></a><br />
+<a href="#II">II. <span class="smcap">The Young Prince</span></a><br />
+<a href="#III">III. <span class="smcap">The Society Editor</span></a><br />
+<a href="#IV">IV. "<span class="smcap">As a Breath into the Wind</span>"</a><br />
+<a href="#V">V. <span class="smcap">The Coming of the Leisure Class</span></a><br />
+<a href="#VI">VI. <span class="smcap">The Bolton Girl's</span> "<span class="smcap">Position</span>"</a><br />
+<a href="#VII">VII. "<span class="smcap">By the Rod of His Wrath</span>"</a><br />
+<a href="#VIII">VIII. "<span class="smcap">A Bundle of Myrrh</span>"</a><br />
+<a href="#IX">IX. <span class="smcap">Our Loathed but Esteemed Contemporary</span></a><br />
+<a href="#X">X. <span class="smcap">A Question of Climate</span></a><br />
+<a href="#XI">XI. <span class="smcap">The Casting out of Jimmy Myers</span></a><br />
+<a href="#XII">XII. "'<span class="smcap">A Babbled of Green Fields</span>"</a><br />
+<a href="#XIII">XIII. <span class="smcap">A Pilgrim in the Wilderness</span></a><br />
+<a href="#XIV">XIV. <span class="smcap">The Passing of Priscilla Winthrop</span></a><br />
+<a href="#XV">XV. "<span class="smcap">And Yet a Fool</span>"</a><br />
+<a href="#XVI">XVI. <span class="smcap">A Kansas</span> "<span class="smcap">Childe Roland</span>"</a><br />
+<a href="#XVII">XVII. <span class="smcap">The Tremolo Stop</span></a><br />
+<a href="#XVIII">XVIII. <span class="smcap">Sown in our Weakness</span></a><br />
+<a href="#XIX">XIX. "<span class="smcap">Thirty</span>"</a><br />
+</p>
+<!-- End Autogenerated TOC. -->
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+
+
+<p><a href="#gs01">He Wore his Collars so High that He Had to Order Them from a Drummer</a></p>
+
+<p><a href="#gs02">Suppressing Nothing "On Account of the Respectability of the Parties
+Concerned"</a></p>
+
+<p><a href="#gs03">As an Office Joke the Boys Used to Leave a Step-Ladder by Her Desk so
+that She Could Climb Up and See How Her Top-Knot Really Looked</a></p>
+
+<p><a href="#gs04">And Brought with Him a Large Leisure and a Taste for Society</a></p>
+
+<p><a href="#gs05">Sometimes He Thought It was a Report of a Fire and at Other Times It
+Seemed Like a Dress-Goods Catalogue</a></p>
+
+<p><a href="#gs06">As the Dinner Hour Grew Near She Raged&mdash;So the Servants said&mdash;Whenever
+the Telephone Rang</a></p>
+
+<p><a href="#gs07">"Jim Purdy, Taken the Day He Left for the Army"</a></p>
+
+<p><a href="#gs08">He Advertised the Fact that He was a Good Hater by Showing Callers at
+His Office His Barrel</a></p>
+
+<p><a href="#gs09">He Likes to Sit in the Old Swayback Swivel-Chair and Tell Us His Theory
+of the Increase in the Rainfall</a></p>
+
+<p><a href="#gs10">And Camped in the Office for Two Days, Looking for Jimmy</a></p>
+
+<p><a href="#gs11">Reverend Milligan Came in with a Church Notice</a></p>
+
+<p><a href="#gs12">A Desert Scorpion, Outcast by Society and Proud of it</a></p>
+
+<p><a href="#gs13">"He Made a Lot of Money and Blew it in"</a></p>
+
+<p><a href="#gs14">Went About Town with His Cigar Pointing Toward his Hat-Brim</a></p>
+
+<p><a href="#gs15">The Traveling Men on the Veranda Craned Their Necks to Watch Her Out of
+Sight</a></p>
+
+<p><a href="#gs16">Counting the Liars and Scoundrels and Double-Dealers and Villains Who
+Pass</a></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>IN OUR TOWN</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="I" id="I"></a>I</h2>
+
+<h3>Scribes and Pharisees</h3>
+
+
+<p>Ours is a little town in that part of the country called the West by
+those who live east of the Alleghanies, and referred to lovingly as
+"back East" by those who dwell west of the Rockies. It is a country town
+where, as the song goes, "you know everybody and they all know you," and
+the country newspaper office is the social clearing-house.</p>
+
+<p>When a man has published a paper in a country community for many years,
+he knows his town and its people, their strength and their weakness,
+their joys and their sorrows, their failings and their prosperity&mdash;or if
+he does not know these things, he is on the road to failure, for this
+knowledge must be the spirit of his paper. The country editor and his
+reporters sooner or later pass upon everything that interests their
+town.</p>
+
+<p>In our little newspaper office we are all reporters, and we know many
+intimate things about our people that we do not print. We know, for
+instance, which wives will not let their husbands endorse other men's
+notes at the banks. We know about the row the Baptists are having to get
+rid of the bass singer in their choir, who has sung at funerals for
+thirty years, until it has reached a point where all good Baptists dread
+death on account of his lugubrious profundo. Perhaps we should take this
+tragedy to heart, but we know that the Methodists are having the same
+trouble with their soprano, who "flats"&mdash;and has flatted for ten years,
+and is too proud to quit the choir "under fire" as she calls it; and we
+remember what a time the Congregationalists had getting rid of their
+tenor. So that choir troubles are to us only a part of the grist that
+keeps the mill going.</p>
+
+<p>As the merest incident of the daily grind, it came to the office that
+the bank cashier, whose retirement we announced with half a column of
+regret, was caught $3500 short, after twenty years of faithful service,
+and that his wife sold the homestead to make his shortage good. We know
+the week that the widower sets out, and we hear with remarkable accuracy
+just when he has been refused by this particular widow or that, and,
+when he begins on a school-teacher, the whole office has candy and cigar
+and mince pie bets on the result, with the odds on the widower five to
+one. We know the woman who is always sent for when a baby comes to town,
+and who has laid more good people of the community in their shrouds than
+all the undertakers. We know the politician who gets five dollars a day
+for his "services" at the polls, the man who takes three dollars and the
+man who will work for the good of the cause in the precious hope of a
+blessed reward at some future county convention. To know these things is
+not a matter of pride; it is not a source of annoyance or shame; it is
+part of the business.</p>
+
+<p>Though our loathed but esteemed contemporary, the <i>Statesman</i>, speaks of
+our town as "this city," and calls the marshal "chief of police," we are
+none the less a country town. Like hundreds of its kind, our little
+daily newspaper is equipped with typesetting machines and is printed
+from a web perfecting press, yet it is only a country newspaper, and
+knowing this we refuse to put on city airs. Of course we print the
+afternoon Associated Press report on the first page, under formal heads
+and with some pretence of dignity, but that first page is the parlour of
+the paper, as it is of most of its contemporaries, and in the other
+pages they and we go around in our shirt sleeves, calling people by
+their first names; teasing the boys and girls good-naturedly; tickling
+the pompous members of the village family with straws from time to time,
+and letting out the family secrets of the community without much regard
+for the feelings of the supercilious.</p>
+
+<p>Nine or ten thousand people in our town go to bed on this kind of mental
+pabulum, as do country-town dwellers all over the United States, and
+although we do not claim that it is helpful, we do contend that it does
+not hurt them. Certainly by poking mild fun at the shams&mdash;the town
+pharisees&mdash;we make it more difficult to maintain the class lines which
+the pretenders would establish. Possibly by printing the news of
+everything that happens, suppressing nothing "on account of the
+respectability of the parties concerned," we may prevent some evil-doers
+from going on with their plans, but this is mere conjecture, and we do
+not set it down to our credit. What we maintain is that in printing our
+little country dailies, we, the scribes, from one end of the world to
+the other, get more than our share of fun out of life as we go along,
+and pass as much of it on to our neighbours as we can spare.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="gs02" id="gs02"></a>
+<img src="images/gs02.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3>Suppressing nothing "on account of the respectability of the parties concerned"</h3>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+
+
+<p>Because we live in country towns, where the only car-gongs we hear are
+on the baker's waggon, and where the horses in the fire department work
+on the streets, is no reason why city dwellers should assume that we are
+natives. We have no dialect worth recording&mdash;save that some of us
+Westerners burr our "r's" a little or drop an occasional final "g." But
+you will find that all the things advertised in the backs of the
+magazines are in our houses, and that the young men in our towns walking
+home at midnight, with their coats over their arms, whistle the same
+popular airs that lovelorn boys are whistling in New York, Portland, San
+Francisco or New Orleans that same fine evening. Our girls are those
+pretty, reliant, well-dressed young women whom you see at the summer
+resorts from Coronado Beach to Buzzard's Bay. In the fall and winter
+these girls fill the colleges of the East and the State universities of
+the West. Those wholesome, frank, good-natured people whom you met last
+winter at the Grand Ca&ntilde;ons and who told you of the funny performance of
+"Uncle Tom's Cabin" in Yiddish at the People's Theatre on the East Side
+in New York, and insisted that you see the totem pole in Seattle; and
+then take a cottage for a month at Catalina Island; who gave you the tip
+about Abson's quaint little beefsteak chop-house up an alley in Chicago,
+who told you of Mrs. O'Hagan's second-hand furniture shop in Charleston,
+where you can get real colonial stuff dirt cheap&mdash;those people are our
+leading citizens, who run the bank or the dry-goods store or the
+flour-mill. At our annual arts and crafts show we have on exhibition
+loot from the four corners of the earth, and the club woman who has not
+heard it whispered around in our art circles that Mr. Sargent is
+painting too many portraits lately, and that a certain long-legged model
+whose face is familiar in the weekly magazines is no better than she
+should be&mdash;a club woman in our town who does not know of these things
+is out of caste in clubdom, and women say of her that she is giving too
+much time to her church.</p>
+
+<p>We take all the beautiful garden magazines, and our terra-cotta works
+are turning out creditable vases&mdash;which we pronounce "vahzes," you may
+be sure&mdash;for formal gardens. And though we men for the most part run our
+own lawnmowers, and personally look after the work of the college boy
+who takes care of the horse and the cow for his room, still there are a
+few of us proud and haughty creatures who have automobiles, and go
+snorting around the country scaring horses and tooting terror into the
+herds by the roadside. But the bright young reporters on our papers do
+not let an automobile come to town without printing an item stating its
+make and its cost, and whether or not it is a new one or a second-hand
+one, and what speed it can make. At the flower parade in our own little
+town last October there were ten automobiles in line, decked with paper
+flowers and laden with pretty girls in lawns and dimities and
+linens&mdash;though as a matter of fact most of the linens were only "Indian
+head." And our particular little country paper printed an item to the
+effect that the real social line of cleavage in the town lies not
+between the cut-glass set and the devotees of hand-painted china, but
+between the real nobility who wear genuine linen and the base imitations
+who wear Indian head.</p>
+
+<p>In some towns an item like that would make people mad, but we have our
+people trained to stand a good deal. They know that it costs them five
+cents a line for cards of thanks and resolutions of respect, so they
+never bring them in. They know that our paper never permits "one who was
+there" to report social functions, so that dear old correspondent has
+resigned; and because we have insisted for years on making an item about
+the first tomatoes that are served in spring at any dinner or reception,
+together with the cost per pound of the tomatoes, the town has become
+used to our attitude and does not buzz with indignation when we poke a
+risible finger at the homemade costumes of the Plymouth Daughters when
+they present "The Mikado" to pay for the new pipe-organ. Indeed, so used
+is the town to our ways that when there was great talk last winter about
+Mrs. Frelingheysen for serving fresh strawberries over the ice cream at
+her luncheon in February, just after her husband had gone through
+bankruptcy, she called up Miss Larrabee, our society editor, on the
+telephone and asked her to make a little item saying that the
+strawberries served by Mrs. Frelingheysen at her luncheon were not
+fresh, but merely sun dried. This we did gladly and printed her recipe.
+So used is this town to our school teachers resigning to get married
+that when one resigns for any other reason we make it a point to
+announce in the paper that it is not for the usual reason, and tell our
+readers exactly what the young woman is going to do.</p>
+
+<p>So, gradually, without our intending to establish it, a family
+vernacular has grown up in the paper which our people understand, but
+which&mdash;like all other family vernaculars&mdash;is Greek to those outside the
+circle. Thus we say:</p>
+
+<p>"Bill Parker is making his eighth biennial distribution of cigars to-day
+for a boy."</p>
+
+<p>City papers would print it:</p>
+
+<p>"Born to Mr. and Mrs. W. H. Parker, a baby boy."</p>
+
+<p>Again we print this item:</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Merriman is getting ready to lend her fern to the Nortons, June
+15."</p>
+
+<p>That doesn't mean anything, unless you happen to know that Mrs. Merriman
+has the prettiest Boston fern in town, and that no bow-window is
+properly decorated at any wedding without that fern. In larger towns the
+same news item would appear thus:</p>
+
+<p>"Cards are out announcing the wedding of Miss Cecil Norton and Mr.
+Collis R. Hatcher at the home of the bride's parents, Mr. and Mrs. T. J.
+Norton, 1022 High street, June 15."</p>
+
+<p>A plain drunk is generally referred to in our columns as a "guest of
+Marshal Furgeson's informal house-party," and when a group of
+drunk-and-disorderlies is brought in we feel free to say of their
+evening diversion that they "spent the happy hours, after refreshments,
+playing progressive hell." And this brings us to the consideration of
+the most important personage with whom we have to deal. In what we call
+"social circles," the most important personages are Mrs. Julia Neal
+Worthington and Mrs. Priscilla Winthrop Conklin, who keep two hired
+girls and can pay five dollars a week for them when the prevailing
+price is three. In financial circles the most important personage is
+John Markley, who buys real-estate mortgages; in political circles the
+most important personage is Charlie Hedrick who knows the railroad
+attorneys at the capital and always can get passes for the county
+delegation to the State convention; in the railroad-yards the most
+important personage is the division superintendent, who smokes ten-cent
+cigars and has the only "room with a bath" at the Hotel Metropole. But
+with us, in the publication of our newspaper, the most important
+personage in town is Marshal Furgeson.</p>
+
+<p>If you ever looked out of the car-window as you passed through town, you
+undoubtedly saw him at the depot, walking nervously up and down the
+platform, peering into the faces of strangers. He is ever on the outlook
+for crooks, though nothing more violent has happened in our county for
+years than an assault and battery. But Marshal Furgeson never
+relinquishes his watch. In winter, clad in his blue uniform and campaign
+hat, he is a familiar figure on our streets; and in summer, without coat
+or vest, with his big silver star on which is stamped "Chief of
+Police," pinned to his suspender, he may be seen at any point where
+trouble is least likely to break out. He is the only man on the town
+site whom we are afraid to tease, because he is our chief source of
+news; for if we ruffle his temper he sees to it that our paper misses
+the details of the next chicken-raid that comes under his notice. He can
+bring us to time in short order.</p>
+
+<p>When we particularly desire to please him we refer to him as "the
+authorities." If the Palace Grocery has been invaded through the back
+window and a box of plug tobacco stolen, Marshal Furgeson is delighted
+to read in the paper that "the authorities have an important clew and
+the arrest may be expected at any time." He is "the authorities." If
+"the authorities have their eyes on a certain barber-shop on South Main
+Street, which is supposed to be doing a back-door beer business," he
+again is "the authorities," and contends that the word strikes more
+terror into the hearts of evil-doers than the mere name, Marshal
+Furgeson.</p>
+
+<p>Next in rank to "the authorities," in the diplomatic corps of the
+office, come our advertisers: the proprietors of the White Front
+Dry-Goods Store, the Golden Eagle Clothing Store, and the Bee Hive.
+These men can come nearer to dictating the paper's policy than the
+bankers and politicians, who are supposed to control country newspapers.
+Though we are charged with being the "organ" of any of half-a-dozen
+politicians whom we happen to speak of kindly at various times, we have
+little real use for politicians in our office, and a business man who
+brings in sixty or seventy dollars' worth of advertising every month has
+more influence with us than all the politicians in the county. This is
+the situation in most newspaper offices that succeed, and when any other
+situation prevails, when politicians control editors, the newspapers
+don't pay well, and sooner or later the politicians are bankrupt.</p>
+
+<p>The only person in town whom all the merchants desire us to poke fun at
+is Mail-Order Petrie. Mail-Order Petrie is a miserly old codger who buys
+everything out of town that he can buy a penny cheaper than the home
+merchants sell it. He is a hard-working man, so far as that goes, and
+so stingy that he has been accused of going barefooted in the summer
+time to save shoes. When he is sick he sends out of town for patent
+medicines, and for ten years he worked in his truck-garden, fighting
+floods and droughts, bugs and blight, to save something like a hundred
+dollars, which he put in a mail-order bank in St. Louis. When it failed
+he grinned at the fellows who twitted him of his loss, and said: "Oh,
+come easy, go easy!"</p>
+
+<p>A few years ago he subscribed to a matrimonial paper, and one day he
+appeared at the office of the probate judge with a mail-order wife, who,
+when they had been married a few years, went to an orphan asylum and got
+a mail-order baby. We have had considerable sport with Mail-Order
+Petrie, and he has become so used to it that he likes it. Sometimes on
+dull days he comes around to the office to tell us what a bargain he got
+at this or that mail-order house, and last summer he came in to tell us
+about a great bargain in a cemetery lot in a new cemetery being laid out
+in Kansas City; he bought it on the installment plan, a dollar down and
+twenty-five cents a month, to be paid until he died, and he bragged a
+great deal about his shrewdness in getting the lot on those terms. He
+chuckled as he said that he would be dead in five years at the most and
+would have a seventy-five dollar lot for a mere song. He made us promise
+that when that time does come we will write up his obsequies under the
+head "A Mail-Order Funeral." He added, as he stood with his hand on the
+door screen, that he had no use for the preachers and the hypocrites in
+the churches in this town, and that he was taking a paper called the
+"Magazine of Mysteries," that teaches some new ideas on religion and
+that he expects to wind up in a mail-order Heaven.</p>
+
+<p>And this is the material with which we do our day's work&mdash;Mail-Order
+Petrie, Marshal Furgeson, the pretty girls in the flower parade, the
+wise clubwomen, the cut-glass society crowd, the proud owner of the
+automobile, the "respectable parties concerned," the proprietor of the
+Golden Eagle, the clerks in the Bee Hive, the country crook who aspires
+to be a professional criminal some day, "the leading citizen," who
+spends much of his time seeing the sights of his country, the college
+boys who wear funny clothes and ribbons on their hats, and the
+politicians, greedy for free advertising. They are ordinary two-legged
+men and women, and if there is one thing more than any other that marks
+our town, it is its charity, and the mercy that is at the bottom of all
+its real impulses.</p>
+
+<p>Our business seems to outsiders to be a cruel one, because we have to
+deal as mere business with such sacred things as death and birth, the
+meeting and parting of friends, and with tragedies as well as with
+comedies. This is true. Every man&mdash;even a piano tuner&mdash;thinks his
+business leads him a dog's life, and that it shows him only the seamy
+side of the world. But our business, though it shows the seams, shows us
+more of good than of bad in men. We are not cynics in our office; for we
+know in a thousand ways that the world is good. We know that at the end
+of the day we have set down more good deeds than bad deeds, and that the
+people in our town will keep the telephone bell ringing to-morrow, more
+to praise the recital of a good action than they will to talk to us
+about some evil thing that we had to print.</p>
+
+<p>Time and again we have been surprised at the charity of our people. They
+are always willing to forgive, and be it man or woman who takes a
+misstep in our town&mdash;which is the counterpart of hundreds of American
+towns&mdash;if the offender shows that he wishes to walk straight, a thousand
+hands are stretched out to help him and guide him. It is not true that a
+man or woman who makes a mistake is eternally damned by his fellows. If
+one persists in wrong after the first misdeed it is not because
+sheltering love and kindness were not thrown around the wrongdoer. We
+have in our town women who have done wrong and have lived down their
+errors just as men do, and have been forgiven. A hundred times in our
+office we have talked these things over and have been proud of our
+people and of their humanity. We are all neighbours and friends, and
+when sorrow comes, no one is alone. The town's greatest tragedies have
+proved the town's sympathy, and have been worth their cost.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="II" id="II"></a>II</h2>
+
+<h3>The Young Prince</h3>
+
+
+<p>We have had many reporters for our little country newspaper&mdash;some good
+ones, who have gone up to the city and have become good newspaper men;
+some bad ones, who have gone back to the livery-stables from which they
+sprang; and some indifferent ones, who have drifted into the insurance
+business and have become silent partners in student boarding-houses,
+taking home the meat for dinner and eating finically at the second table
+of life, with a first table discrimination. But of all the boys who have
+sat at the old walnut desk by the window, the Young Prince gave us the
+most joy. Before he came on the paper he was bell-boy at the National
+Hotel&mdash;bell-hop, he called himself&mdash;and he first attracted our attention
+by handing in personal items written in a fat, florid hand. He seemed to
+have second sight. He knew more news than anyone else in town&mdash;who had
+gone away, who was entertaining company, who was getting married, and
+who was sick or dying.</p>
+
+<p>The day the Young Prince went to work he put on his royal garment&mdash;a
+ten-dollar ready-made costume that cost him two weeks' hard work. But it
+was worth the effort. His freckled face and his tawny shock of red hair
+rose above the gorgeous plaid of the clothes like a prairie sunset, and
+as he pranced off down the street he was clearly proud of his job. This
+pride never left him. He knew all the switchmen in the railroad yards,
+all the girls in the dry-goods stores, all the boys on the grocers'
+waggons, all the hack-drivers and all the barbers in town.</p>
+
+<p>These are the great sources of news for a country daily. The reporter
+who confines his acquaintance to doctors, lawyers, merchants and
+preachers is always complaining of dull days.</p>
+
+<p>But there was never a dull day with the Young Prince. When he could get
+the list of "those present" at a social function in no other way, he
+called up the hired girl of the festal house&mdash;we are such a small town
+that only the rich bankers keep servants&mdash;and "made a date" with her,
+and the names always appeared in the paper the next day; whereupon the
+proud hostess, who thought it was bad form to give out the names of her
+guests, sent down and bought a dozen extra copies of the paper to send
+away to her Eastern kin. He knew all the secrets of the switch shanty.
+Our paper printed the news of a change in the general superintendent's
+office of the railroad before the city papers had heard of it, and we
+usually figured it out that the day after the letter denying our story
+had come down from the Superintendent's office the change would be
+officially announced.</p>
+
+<p>One day when the Prince was at the depot "making the train" with his
+notebook in his hand, jotting down the names of the people who got on or
+off the cars, the general superintendent saw him, and called the youth
+to his car.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, kid," said the most worshipful one in his teasingest voice,
+"What's the latest news at the general offices to-day?"</p>
+
+<p>The Young Prince turned his head on one side like a little dog looking
+up at a big dog, and replied:</p>
+
+<p>"Well, if you must know it, you're going to get the can, though we
+ain't printing it till you've got a chance to land somewhere else."</p>
+
+<p>The longer the Prince worked the more clothes he bought. One of his most
+effective creations was a blue serge coat and vest, and a pair of white
+duck trousers linked by emotional red socks to patent-leather shoes.
+This confection, crowned with a wide, saw-edged straw hat with a blue
+band, made him the brightest bit of colour on the sombre streets of our
+dull town. He wore his collars so high that he had to order them of a
+drummer, and as he came down street from the depot, riding magnificently
+with the 'bus-driver, after the train had gone, the clerks used to cry:
+"Look out for your horses; the steam-piano is coming!"</p>
+
+<p>But it didn't affect the Young Prince. If he happened to have time and
+was feeling like it, he would climb down over the rear end of the 'bus
+and chase his tormentor into the back of the store where he worked, but
+generally the Young Prince took no heed of the jibes of the envious. He
+was conscious that he was cutting a figure, and this consciousness made
+him proud. But his pride did not cut down the stack of copy that he
+laid on the table every morning and every noon. He couldn't spell and he
+was innocent of grammar, and every line he wrote had to be edited, but
+he got the news. He was every where. He rushed down the streets after an
+item, dodging in and out of stores and offices like a streak of chain
+lightning having a fit. But it was beneath his dignity to run to fires.
+When the fire-bell rang, he waited nonchalantly on the corner near the
+fire-department house, and as the crowds parted to let the horses dash
+by on the dead run, he would walk calmly to the middle of the street,
+put his notebook in his pocket, and, as the fire-team plunged by, he
+would ostentatiously throw out a stiff leg behind him like the tail of a
+comet, and "flip" onto the end of the fire-waggon. Then he would turn
+slowly around, raise a hand, and wiggle his fingers patronisingly at the
+girls in front of the Racket Store as he flew past, swaying his body
+with the motion of the rolling, staggering cart.</p>
+
+<p>Other reporters who have been on the paper&mdash;the good ones as well as the
+bad&mdash;have had to run the gauntlet of the town jokers who delight to give
+green reporters bogus news, or start them out hunting impossible items.
+But the man who soberly told the Young Prince that O. F. C. Taylor was
+visiting at the home of the town drunkard, or that W. H. McBreyer had
+accepted a position in a town drug-store, only got a wink and a grin
+from the boy. Neither did the town wags fool him by giving him a birth
+announcement from the wrong family, nor a wedding where there was none.
+He was wise as a serpent. Where he got his wisdom, no one knows. He had
+the town catalogued in a sort of rogues' directory&mdash;the liars and the
+honest men set apart from one another, and it was a classification that
+would not have tallied with the church directories nor with the town
+blue-book nor with the commercial agency's reports. The sheep and the
+goats in the Young Prince's record would have been strangers to one
+another if they could have been assembled as he imagined them. But he
+was generally right in his estimates of men. He had a sixth sense for
+sham.</p>
+
+<p>The Young Prince had the sense to know the truth and the courage to
+write it. This is the essence of the genius that is required to make a
+good newspaper man. No paper has trouble getting reporters who can hand
+in copy that records events from the outside. Any blockhead can go to a
+public meeting and bring in a report that has the words "as follows"
+scattered here and there down the columns. But the reporter who can go
+and bring back the soul of the meeting, the real truth about it&mdash;what
+the inside fights meant that lay under the parliamentary politenesses of
+the occasion; who can see the wires that reach back of the speakers, and
+see the man who is moving the wires and can know why he is moving them;
+who can translate the tall talking into history&mdash;he is a real reporter.
+And the Young Prince was that kind of a youth. He went to the core of
+everything; and if we didn't dare print the truth&mdash;as sometimes we did
+not&mdash;he grumbled for a week about his luck. As passionately as he loved
+his clothes, he was always ready to get them dirty in the interests of
+his business.</p>
+
+<p>For three years his nimble feet pounded the sidewalks of the town. He
+knew no business hours, and ate and slept with his work. He never ceased
+to be a reporter&mdash;never took off his make-up, never let down from his
+exalted part. One day he fell sick of a fever, and for three weeks
+fretted and fumed in delirium. In his dreams he wrote pay locals, and
+made trains, and described funerals, got lists of names for the society
+column, and grumbled because his stuff was cut or left over till the
+next day. When he awoke he was weak and wan, and they felt that they
+must tell him the truth.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor took the boy's hands and told him very simply what they
+feared. He looked at the man for a moment in dumb wonder, and sighed a
+long, tired sigh. Then he said: "Well, if I must, here goes"&mdash;and turned
+his face to the wall and closed his eyes without a tremor.</p>
+
+<p>And thus the Young Prince went home.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a>III</h2>
+
+<h3>The Society Editor</h3>
+
+
+<p>They say that in the newspaper offices of the city men work in ruts;
+that the editorial writer never reports an item, no matter how much he
+knows of it; that a reporter is not allowed to express an editorial view
+of a subject, even though he be well qualified to speak; but on our
+little country daily newspaper it is entirely different. We work on the
+interchangeable point system. Everyone writes items, all of us get
+advertising and job-work when it comes our way, and when one of us
+writes anything particularly good, it is marked for the editorial page.
+The religious reporter does the racing matin&eacute;e in Wildwood Park, and the
+financial editor who gets the market reports from the feed-store men
+also gets any church news that comes along.</p>
+
+<p>The only time we ever established a department was when we made Miss
+Larrabee society editor. She came from the high school, where her
+graduating essay on Kipling attracted our attention, and, after an
+office council had decided that a Saturday society page would be a
+paying proposition.</p>
+
+<p>At first, say for six months after she came to the office, Miss Larrabee
+devoted herself to the accumulation of professional pride. This pride
+was as much a part of her life as her pompadour, which at that time was
+so high that she had to tiptoe to reach it. However she managed to keep
+it up was the wonder of the office. Finally, we all agreed that she must
+use chicken-fence. She denied this, but was inclined to be good-natured
+about it, and, as an office-joke, the boys used to leave a step-ladder
+by her desk so that she could climb up and see how her top-knot really
+looked. Nothing ruffled her spirits, and we soon quit teasing her and
+began to admire her work. In addition to filling six columns of the
+Saturday's paper with her society report in a town where a church social
+is important enough to justify publishing the names of those who wait on
+the tables, Miss Larrabee was a credit to the office.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="gs03" id="gs03"></a>
+<img src="images/gs03.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3>As an office joke the boys used to leave a step-ladder by
+her desk so that she could climb up and see how her top-knot really
+looked</h3>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>She was always invited to the entertainments at the homes of the
+Worthingtons and the Conklins, who had stationary wash-tubs in the
+basements of their houses, and who ate dinner instead of supper in the
+evening; and when she put on what the boys called her trotting harness,
+her silk petticoats rustled louder than any others at the party. One day
+she suddenly dropped her pompadour and appeared with her hair parted in
+the middle and doused over her ears in long, undulating billows. No
+other girl in town came within a quarter of an inch of Miss Larrabee's
+dare. When straight-fronts became stylish, Miss Larrabee was a vertical
+marvel, and when she rolled up her sleeves and organized a country club,
+she referred to her shoes as boots and took the longest steps in town.
+But with it all she was no mere clothes-horse. We drilled it into her
+head during her first two weeks that "society" news in a country town
+means not merely the doings of the cut-glass set, but that it means as
+well the doings of the Happy Hoppers, the Trundle-Bed Trash, the Knights
+of Columbus, the Rathbone Sisters, the King's Daughters, the Epworth
+League, the Christian Endeavourers, the Woman's Relief Corps, the
+Ladies' Aid and the Home Missionary Societies, Miss Nelson's Dancing
+Class, the Switchmen's annual ball&mdash;if we get their job-work&mdash;and every
+kindred, every tribe, except such as gather in what is known as "kitchen
+sweats" and occasionally send in calls for the police. When Miss
+Larrabee got this into her head she began to groan under her burden, and
+by the end of the year, though she had great pride in her profession,
+she affected to loathe her department.</p>
+
+<p>Weddings were her especial abominations. When the first social cloud
+appeared on the horizon indicating the approach of a series of showers
+for the bride which would culminate in a cloudburst at some stone
+church, Miss Larrabee would begin to rumble like distant thunder and, as
+the storm grew thicker, she would flash out crooked chain-lightning
+imprecations on the heads of the young people, their fathers and mothers
+and uncles and aunts. By the day of the wedding she would be rolling a
+steady diapason of polite, decolourised, expurgated, ladylike profanity.</p>
+
+<p>While she sat at her desk writing the stereotyped account of the event,
+it was like picking up a live wire to speak to her. As she wrote, we
+could tell at just what stage she had arrived in her copy. Thus, if she
+said to the adjacent atmosphere, "What a whopper!" we knew that she had
+written, "The crowning glory of a happy fortnight of social gatherings
+found its place when&mdash;&mdash;" and when she hissed out, "Mortgaged clear to
+the eaves and full of installment furniture!" we felt that she had
+reached a point something like this: "After the ceremony the gay party
+assembled at the palatial home." In a moment she would snarl: "I am dead
+tired of seeing Mrs. Merriman's sprawly old fern and the Bosworth palm.
+I wish they would stop lending them!" and then we realised that she had
+reached the part of her write-up which said: "The chancel rail was
+banked with a profusion of palms and ferns and rare tropical plants."
+She always groaned when she came to the "simple and impressive ring
+ceremony." When she wrote:</p>
+
+<p>"The distinguished company came forward to offer congratulations to the
+newly-wedded pair," she would say as she sharpened her pencil-point:
+"There's nothing like a wedding to reveal what a raft of common kin
+people have," and we knew that it was all over and that she was closing
+the article with: "A dazzling array of costly and beautiful presents was
+exhibited in the library," for then she would pick up her copy, dog-ear
+the sheets, and jab them on the hook as she sighed: "Another great
+American pickle-dish exhibit ended."</p>
+
+<p>In the way she did two things Miss Larrabee excited the wonder and
+admiration of the office. One was the way that she kept tab on brides.
+We heard through her of the brides who could cook, and of those who were
+beginning life by accumulating a bright little pile of tin cans in the
+alley. She knew the brides who could do their own sewing and those who
+could not. She had the single girl's sniff at the bride who wore her
+trousseau season after season, made over and fixed up, and she gave the
+office the benefit of her opinion of the husband in the case who had a
+new tailor-made suit every fall and spring. She scented young married
+troubles from afar, and we knew in the office whether his folks were
+edging up on her, or her people were edging up on him. If a young
+married man danced more than twice in one evening with anyone but his
+wife, Miss Larrabee made faces at his back when he passed the office
+window, and if she caught a young married woman flirting, Miss Larrabee
+regaled us by telling with whom the woman in question had opened a
+"fresh bottle of emotions."</p>
+
+<p>The other way in which Miss Larrabee displayed genius for her work was
+in describing women's costumes. Three or four times a year, when there
+are large social gatherings, we print descriptions of the women's gowns.
+Only three women in our town, Mrs. Worthington, Mrs. Conklin, and the
+second Mrs. Markley, have more than one new party dress in a
+twelve-month, and most of the women make a party gown last two or three
+years. Miss Larrabee was familiar with every dress in town. She knew it
+made over, and no woman was cunning enough to conceal the truth even
+with a spangled yoke, a chiffon bertha, or a net over-dress; yet Miss
+Larrabee would describe the gown, not merely twice, but half a dozen
+times, so that the woman wearing it might send the description to her
+relatives back East without arousing their suspicion that she was
+wearing the same dress year after year. Therefore, whenever Miss
+Larrabee wrote up the dresses worn at a party, we were sure to sell from
+fifty to a hundred extra papers. She could so turn a breastpin and a
+homemade point-lace handkerchief tucked in the front of a good old
+lady's best black satin into "point-lace and diamonds," that they were
+always good for a dozen copies of the paper, and she never overlooked
+the dress of the wife of a good advertiser, no matter how plain it might
+be.</p>
+
+<p>She was worth her wages to the office merely as a compendium of shams.
+She knew whether the bridal couple, who announced that they would spend
+their honeymoon in the East, were really going to Niagara Falls, or
+whether they were going to spend a week with his relatives in Decatur,
+Illinois. She knew every woman in town who bought two prizes for her
+whist party&mdash;one to give if her friend should win the prize, and another
+to give if the woman she hated should win. With the diabolical eye of a
+fiend she detected the woman who was wearing the dry-cleaned cast-off
+clothing of her sister in the city. What she saw the office knew,
+though she kept her conclusions out of the paper if they would do any
+harm or hurt anyone's feelings. No pretender ever dreamed that she was
+not fooling Miss Larrabee. She was willing to agree most sympathetically
+with Mrs. Conklin, who insisted that the "common people" wouldn't be
+interested in the list of names at her party; and the only place where
+we ever saw Miss Larrabee's claw in print was in the insistent
+misspelling of the name of a woman who made it a point to ridicule the
+paper.</p>
+
+<p>We have had other girls around the office since Miss Larrabee left, but
+they do not seem to get the work done with any system. She was not only
+industrious but practical. Friday mornings, when her work piled up,
+instead of fussing around the office and chattering at the telephone,
+she would dive into her desk and bring up her regular list of
+adjectives. These she would copy on three slips, carefully dividing the
+list so that no one had a duplicate, and in the afternoon each of the
+boys received a slip with a list of parties, and with instructions to
+scatter the adjectives she had given him through the accounts of the
+parties assigned to him&mdash;and the work was soon done. There was no
+scratching the head for synonyms for "beautiful," "superb" or "elegant."
+Miss Larrabee had doled out to each of us the adjectives necessary, and,
+given the adjectives, society reporting is easy. The editing of the copy
+is easy also, for one does not have to remember whether or not the
+refreshments were "delicious" at the Jones party when he sees the word
+in connection with the viands at the Smith party. No two parties were
+ever "elegant" the same week. No two events were "charming." No two
+women were "exquisitely" gowned. The person who was assigned the
+adjective "delightful" by Miss Larrabee might stick it in front of a
+luncheon, pin it on a hostess, or use it for an evening's entertainment.
+But he could use it only once. And with a list of those present and the
+adjectives thereunto appertaining, even a new boy could get up a column
+in half an hour. She had an artist's pride in the finished work, however
+much she might dislike the thing in making, and she used to sail down to
+the press-room as soon as the paper was out, and, picking up the paper
+from the folder, she would stand reading her page, line upon line,
+precept upon precept, though every word and syllable was familiar to
+her.</p>
+
+<p>During her first year she joined the Woman's State Press Club, but she
+discovered that she was the only real worker in the club and never
+attended a second meeting. She told us that too many of the women wore
+white stockings and low shoes, read their own unpublished short stories,
+and regarded her wide-shouldered shirtwaist and melodramatic openwork
+hosiery with suspicion and alarm.</p>
+
+<p>As the years passed, and wedding after wedding sizzled under her pen,
+she complained to us that she was beginning to be called "auntie" in too
+many houses, and that the stock of available young men who didn't wear
+their handkerchiefs under their collars at the dances had dwindled down
+to three. This reality faces every girl who lives in a country town.
+Then she is left with two alternatives: to go visiting or to begin
+bringing them up by hand.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Larrabee went visiting. At the end of a month she wrote: "It's all
+over with me. He is a nice fellow, and has a job doing 'Live Topics
+About Town' here on the <i>Sun</i>. Give my job to the little Wheatly girl,
+and tell her to quit writing poetry, and hike up her dress in the back.
+My adjectives are in the left-hand corner of the desk under 'When
+Knighthood Was in Flower.' And do you suppose you could get me and the
+grand keeper of the records and seals a pass home for Christmas if I'd
+do you a New York letter some time?</p>
+
+<p>"They say these city papers are hog tight!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV</h2>
+
+<h3>"As a Breath into the Wind"</h3>
+
+
+<p>We are proud of the machinery in our office&mdash;the two linotypes, the big
+perfecting press and the little jobbers. They are endowed by office
+traditions with certain human attributes&mdash;having their moods and
+vagaries and tantrums&mdash;so we love them as men love children. And this is
+a queer thing about them: though our building is pocked with windows
+that are open by day seven months in the year, and though the air of the
+building is clean enough, save for the smell of the ink, yet at night,
+after the machines have been idle for many hours and are probably
+asleep, the place smells like the lair of wild animals. By day they are
+as clean as machines may be kept. And even in the days when David Lewis
+petted them and coddled them and gave them the core of his heart, they
+were speckless, and bright as his big, brown, Welsh eyes, but the night
+stinks of them were rank and beastly.</p>
+
+<p>David came to us, a stray cat, fifteen years ago. He was too small to
+wrestle with the forms&mdash;being cast in the nonpareil mould of his
+race&mdash;and so we put him to carrying papers. In school season he seemed
+to go to school, and in summer it is certain that he put a box on a high
+stool in the back room, and learned the printer's case, and fed the job
+presses at odd times, and edged on to the pay-roll without ever having
+been formally hired. In the same surreptitious manner he slipped a cot
+into the stockroom upstairs and slept there, and finally had it fitted
+up as a bedroom, and so became an office fixture.</p>
+
+<p>By the time his voice had stopped squeaking he was a good printer, and
+what with using the front office for a study at night, and the New York
+papers and the magazines for textbooks, he had acquired a good working
+education. Whereupon he fell in love with two divinities at once&mdash;the
+blonde one working in the Racket Store, on Main Street, and the other, a
+new linotype that we installed the year before McKinley's first
+election. His heart was sadly torn between them. He never went to bed
+under midnight after calling on either of them, and, having the Celt's
+natural aptitude to get at the soul of either women or intricate
+mechanism, in a year he was engaged to both; but naturally enough a
+brain fever overtook him, and he lay on a cot at the Sisters' Hospital
+and jabbered strange things.</p>
+
+<p>Among other things the priest who sat beside him one day heard Latin
+verse; whereat the father addressed David in the language of the Church
+and received reply in kind. And they talked solemnly about matters
+theological for five minutes, David's voice changing to the drone of the
+liturgist's and his face flushing with uncaged joy. In an hour there
+were three priests with the boy, and he spoke in Latin to them without
+faltering. He discussed abstruse ecclesiastical questions and claimed
+incidentally to be an Italian priest dead a score of years, and, to
+prove his claim, described Rome and the Vatican as it was before Leo's
+day. Then he fell asleep and the next day was better and knew no Latin,
+but insisted on reading the note under his pillow which his girl had
+sent him. After that he wanted to know how New York stood in the
+National League and how Hans Wagner's batting record was, and proceeded
+to get well in short order.</p>
+
+<p>David resumed his place in the office, and when we put in the perfecting
+press he added another string to his bow. The press and the linotype and
+his girl were his life's passions, and his position as short-stop in the
+Maroons, and as snare-drummer in the Second Regiment band, were his
+diversions. He wore clothes well and became president of the Imperial
+Dancing Club&mdash;chiefly to please his girl, who desired social position. A
+boy with twelve dollars a week in a country town, who will spend a
+dollar or two a month to have his clothes pressed, can accomplish any
+social heights which rise before him, and there is no barrier in our
+town to a girl merely because she presides at the ribbon-counter; which,
+of course, is as it should be.</p>
+
+<p>So David became a town personage. When the linotype operator left, we
+gave David the place. Now he courted only one of his sweethearts by
+night, and found time for other things. Also we gave him three dollars
+a week more to spend, and the Imperial Club got most of it&mdash;generally
+through the medium of the blonde in the Racket Store, who was
+cultivating a taste for diamonds, and liked to wear flowers at the more
+formal dances.</p>
+
+<p>Now, unless they are about to be married, a boy of twenty may not call
+on a girl of nineteen in a respectable family, a member of the Plymouth
+Daughters, and a graduate of the High School, oftener than four nights
+in the week, without exciting more or less neighbourly comment; but
+David and the girl were merely going together&mdash;as the parlance of our
+town has it&mdash;and though they were engaged they had no idea of getting
+married at any definite time. David thus had three nights in the seven
+which might be called open. The big press would not receive him by
+night, and he spent his love on his linotype by day; so he was lonesome
+and longed for the society of his kind. The billiard-hall did not tempt
+him; but at the cigar-store he met and fell under the spell of Henry
+Larmy&mdash;known of the town as "Old Hen," though he was not two score years
+gone&mdash;and the two began chumming together.</p>
+
+<p>"Old Hen" worked in a tin-shop, read Ruskin, regarded Debs as a prophet,
+received many papers devoted to socialism and the New Thought, and
+believed that he believed in no man, no God and no devil. Also he was a
+woman-hater, and though he never turned his head for a petticoat,
+preached free-love and bought many books which promised to tell him how
+to become a hypnotist. At various times, Larmy's category of beliefs
+included the single-tax, Buddhism, spiritualism, and a faith in the
+curative properties of blue glass. David and Henry Larmy would sit in
+the office of evenings discussing these things when honest people should
+be in bed.</p>
+
+<p>Henry never could tell us just how the talk drifted to hypnotism and the
+occult, nor when the current started that way. But one of the reporters
+who happened to be driven off the street by the rain one night found
+Henry and David in the office with a homemade planchette doing queer
+things. They made it tell words in the middle of pages of newspapers
+that neither had opened. They made it write answers to sums that neither
+had calculated, and they made it give the names of Henry's relatives
+dead and gone&mdash;also those that were living, whom David, who was
+operating it, did not know. The thing would not move for the man, but
+the boy's fingers on it made it fly. Some way the triangular board
+broke, and the reporter and Henry were pop-eyed with wonder to see David
+hold his hands above the pencil and make it write, dragging a splinter
+of board behind it. David yawned five or six times and lay down on the
+office couch, and when he got up a moment later his hands were fingering
+the air, his lips fluttering like the wings of fledglings, and he seemed
+to be trying some new kind of lingo. He did not look about him, but went
+straight to the table, gripped the air above the pencil with the broken
+board upon it, and the pencil came up and began writing something,
+evidently in verse. David's face was shiny and smiling the while, but
+his eyes were fixed, though his lips moved as they do when one writes
+and is unused to it. Larmy stared at the boy with open mouth, clearly
+afraid of the spectacle that was before him. A night creaking of the
+building made him jump, and he moistened his lips as the pencil wrote
+on. When the sheet was filled, the pencil fell and David looked about
+him with a smile and dropping his head on the desk began to yawn. He
+seemed to be coming out of a deep sleep, and grinned up blinking: "Gee,
+I must 'a' gone to sleep on you fellows. I was up late last night."</p>
+
+<p>Larmy told the boy what had happened, and the three of them looked at
+the paper, but could make nothing of it. David shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"Not on your life," he laughed. "What do you fellers take me for&mdash;a
+phonograph having the D. T.'s, or a mimeograph with a past? Uh-huh! Not
+for little David! Why&mdash;say, that is some kind of Dutch!"</p>
+
+<p>The reporter knew enough to know that it was Latin, but his High School
+days were five years behind him, and he could not translate it. The
+Latin professor at the college, however, said that it seemed to be an
+imitation of Ovid.</p>
+
+<p>And the next time the reporter saw a light in the office window he broke
+into the seance. When the boy and his girl were not holding down the
+sofa at her father's home, or when there was no dance at the Imperial
+Club hall, nor any other social diversion, David and Larmy and the
+reporter would meet at the office and dive into things too deep for
+Horatio's philosophy.</p>
+
+<p>Their favourite theme was the immortality of the soul, and when they
+were on this theme David would get nervous, pace up and down the office,
+and finally throw himself on the lounge and begin to yawn. Whereupon a
+control, or state of mind, or personality that called itself Fra
+Guiseppi would rise to consciousness and dominate the boy. Larmy and the
+reporter called it "father," and talked to it with considerable
+jocularity, considering that the father claimed they were talking to a
+ghost. It would do odd things for them; go into rooms where David had
+never been: describe their furnishings and occupants accurately; read
+the numbers on watches of prominent citizens, which the reporter would
+verify the next day; and pretend to bring other departed spirits into
+the room to discuss various matters. Larmy had a pleasant social chat
+with Karl Marx, and had the spirits hunting all over the kingdom-come
+for Tom Paine and Murat. But the messenger either could not find them,
+or the line was busy with someone else, so these worthies never
+appeared.</p>
+
+<p>Still, this must be said of the "father," that it had a philosophy of
+life, and a distinct personality far deeper and more charming and in
+some way sweeter than David's; that it talked with an accent, which to
+the hearers seemed Italian, and in a voice that certainly could not have
+been the boy's by any trick of ventriloquism. One night in their talks
+Larmy said:</p>
+
+<p>"'Father,' you say you believe that the judgments of God are just&mdash;how
+do you account for the sufferings, the heartaches, the sorrows, the
+misery that come in the wake of those judgments? Here is a great railway
+accident that strikes down twenty people, renders some cripples for
+life, kills others. Here is a flood that sweeps away the property of
+good men and bad men. Is that just? What compensation is there for it?"</p>
+
+<p>The "father" put his chin in one hand and remained silent for a time, as
+one deep in thought; then he replied:</p>
+
+<p>"That is&mdash;what you call&mdash;life. That is what makes life, life; what
+makes it different from the existence we know now. All your misfortunes,
+your hardships, your joys, all your miseries and failures and
+triumphs&mdash;these are the school of the soul which you call life. It is a
+preparation for the hereafter."</p>
+
+<p>And David waking knew nothing of the thing that possessed him sleeping.
+When they told him, he would smoke his cigarette, and make reply that he
+must have had 'em pretty bad this time, or that he was glad he wasn't
+that "buggy" when he was awake.</p>
+
+<p>David's talent soon became known in the office. We used to call it his
+spook, but only once did we harness it to practical business and that
+was when old Charley Hedrick, the local boss, was picking a candidate
+for the Legislature. The reporter and Larmy asked the "father" one night
+if it could get us connected with Mr. Hedrick. It said it would try; it
+needed help. And there appeared another personality with which they were
+more or less familiar, called the Jew. The Jew claimed to be a literary
+man, and said it would act as receiver while the father acted as
+transmitter on Hedrick. Then they got this one-sided telephonic
+conversation in a thick, wheezy voice that was astonishingly like
+Hedrick's:</p>
+
+<p>"Harmony&mdash;hell, yes; we're always getting the harmony and the
+Worthington state bank gets the offices." Then a pause ensued. "Well,
+let'em bolt. I'm getting tired of giving up the whole county ticket to
+them fellows to keep 'em from bolting." After another pause, he seemed
+to answer someone: "Oh, Bill?&mdash;you can't trust him! He's played both
+sides in this town for ten years. What I want isn't a man to satisfy
+them, but just this once I want a man who won't be even under the
+suspicion of satisfying them. I want a fellow to satisfy me." The other
+side of the telephone must have spoken, for this came: "Well, then,
+we'll bust their damn bank! Did you see their last statement: cash down
+to fifteen per cent. and no dividends on half a million assets for a
+year and a half? Something's rotten there. They're a lot of 'toads in a
+poisoned tank,' as old Browning says. If they want a fight, they can
+have it." After the silence he replied: "I tell you fellows they can't
+afford a fight. And, anyway, there'll never be peace in this town till
+we get things on the basis of one bank, one newspaper, one wife and one
+country, and the way to do that is to get out in the open and fight. If
+I've got as much sense as a rabbit I say that Ab Handy is the man, and
+whether I'm right or wrong I'm going to run him." He seemed to retort to
+some objector: "Yes, and the first thing you know he'd come charging up
+to the Speaker's desk with a maximum freight-rate bill, or a stock-yards
+bill&mdash;and where would I be? I tell you he won't stand hitched. He'll
+swell up like a pizened pup, and you couldn't handle him. Where'd any of
+us be, if the Representative from this county got to pawing the air for
+reform? I know Jake as though I'd been through him with a lantern."
+There must have been a discussion of some kind among the others, for a
+lengthy interim followed; then the voice continued: "Elect him?&mdash;of
+course we can elect him. I can get five hundred from the State Committee
+and we can raise that much down here. This is a Republican year, and we
+could elect Judas Iscariot against any of the eleven brethren this year
+on the Republican ticket, and I tell you it's Ab. You fellows can do as
+you please, but I'm going to run Ab."</p>
+
+<p>Then, being full of political curiosity rather than impelled by a desire
+for psychological research, the reporter slipped out and waited in a
+stairway opposite the Exchange National Bank building until the light in
+Hedrick's law office was extinguished. Then he saw old Charley and his
+henchmen come out, one at a time, look cautiously up and down the street
+and go forth in different, devious ways. The story in our paper the next
+day of the candidacy of Ab Handy threw consternation into the ranks of
+the enemy. We had printed the conversation as it had occurred, after
+which five men publicly contended that one of their number was a
+traitor.</p>
+
+<p>The summer browned the pastures, and the coming of autumn brought
+trouble for David Lewis, president of the Imperial Dancing Club,
+short-stop for the Maroons, snare-drummer in the band, and operator of
+linotypes. We who are at the period of life where love is a harvest
+forget the days of the harrow, and are prone to smile at the season of
+the seeding. We do not know that the heaviest burden God puts on a
+young soul is a burden of the heart. A travelling silk-salesman, with a
+haughty manner and a two-hundred-dollar job, saw the blonde in the
+Racket Store and began calling at her father's home like the captain of
+an army with banners. David, being only an armour-bearer at fifteen
+dollars a week, found heartbreak in it all for him. A girl of twenty is
+so much older than a boy of twenty-one that the blonde began to assume a
+maternal attitude toward the boy, and he took to walking afield on
+Sundays, looking at the sky in agony and asking his little
+"now-I-lay-me" God, what life was given to him for. He fabricated a
+legend that she was selling herself for gold, and when the haughty
+manner and the blonde sped by David's window behind jingling
+sleigh-bells that winter, David, sitting at the machine, got back proofs
+from the front office that looked like war-maps of a strange country.
+Moreover he let his matrices go uncleaned until they were beardy as
+wheat and the bill of repairs on the machine had begun to rise like a
+cat's back.</p>
+
+<p>All of this may seem funny in the telling, but to see the little
+Welshman's heart breaking in him was no pleasant matter. The girls in
+the office pitied the boy, and hoped the silk-drummer would break her
+heart. The town and the Imperial Club, whereof David was much beloved,
+took sides with him, and knew his sorrow for their own. As for the
+blonde, it was only nature asserting itself in her; so David got back
+his little chip diamonds, and his bangle bracelet, and his copy of
+"Riley's Love Songs," and there was the "mist and the blinding rain" for
+him, and the snow of winter hardened on the sidewalks.</p>
+
+<p>To console himself, the boy traded for a music-box, which he set going
+with a long brass lever. Its various tunes were picked in holes on
+circular steel sheets, which were fed into the box and set whirling with
+the lever. At night when Larmy wasn't enjoying what David called a
+spook-fest, the boy would sit in the office by the hour and listen to
+his music-box. He must have played "Love's Golden Dream Is Past" a
+hundred lonesome times that winter (it had been their favourite
+waltz&mdash;his and the girl's&mdash;at the Imperial Club), and it was a safe
+guess that if the boys in the office, as they passed the box at noon,
+would give the lever a yank, from the abdomen of the contrivance the
+waltz song would begin deep and low to rumble and swell out with all the
+simulation of sorrow that a mechanical soul may express.</p>
+
+<p>As the winter deepened, Larmy and the reporter and the "father" had more
+and more converse. The "father" explained a theory of immortality which
+did not interest the reporter, but which Larmy heard eagerly. It said
+that science would resolve matter into mere forms of motion, which are
+expressions of divine will, and that the only place where this divine
+will exists in its pure state, eluding the so-called material state, is
+in the human soul. Further, the "father" explained that this soul, or
+divine will, exists without the brain, independent of brain tissue, as
+may be proved by the accepted phenomena of hypnotism, where the soul is
+commanded to leave the body and see and hear and feel and know things
+which the mere physical organs can not experience, owing to the
+interposition of space. The "father" said that at death the Divine Will
+commands the ripened seed of life to leave the body and assume
+immortality, just as that Will commands the seeds of plants and the
+sperm of animals to assume their natural functions. The Thing that
+talked through David's lips said that the body is the seed-pod of the
+soul, and that souls grow little or much as they are planted and
+environed and nurtured by life. All this it said in many nights, while
+Larmy wondered and the reporter scoffed and stuck pins in David to see
+if he could feel them. And the boy wakened from his dreams always to
+say: "Gimme a cigarette!" and to reach over and pull the lever of his
+music-box, and add: "Perfessor, give us a tune! Hen, the professor says
+he won't play unless you give me a cigarette for him."</p>
+
+<p>One night, after a long wrangle which ended in a discourse by the
+"father," a strange thing happened. Larmy and It were contending as to
+whether It was merely a hypnotic influence on the boy, of someone living
+whom they did not know, or what It claimed to be, a disembodied spirit.
+By way of diversion, the reporter had just run a binder's needle under
+one of the boy's finger-nails to see whether he would flinch. Then the
+Voice that was coming from David's mouth spoke and said: "I will show
+you something to prove it;" and the entranced boy rose and went to the
+back room, while the two others followed him.</p>
+
+<p>He turned the lever that flashed the light on his linotype, and set the
+little motor going. He lifted up the lid of the metal-pot, to see if the
+fire was keeping it molten. Then the boy sat at the machine with his
+hands folded in his lap, gazing at the empty copy-holder out of dead
+eyes. In a minute&mdash;perhaps it was a little longer&mdash;a brass matrix
+slipped from the magazine and clicked down into the assembler; in a
+second or two another fell, and then, very slowly, like the ticks of a
+great clock, the brasses slipped&mdash;slipped&mdash;slipped into their places,
+and the steel spaces dropped into theirs. A line was formed, while the
+boy's hands lay in his lap. When it was a full line he grabbed the
+lever, that sent the line over to the metal-pot to be cast, and his hand
+fell back in his lap, while the dripping of the brasses continued and
+the blue and white keys on the board sank and rose, although no finger
+touched them.</p>
+
+<p>Larmy squinted at the thing, and held his long, fuzzy, unshaven chin in
+his hand. When the second line was cast the reporter broke the silence
+with: "Well, I'll be damned!" And the Voice from David's mouth replied:
+"Very likely." And the clicking of the brasses grew quicker.</p>
+
+<p>Seven lines were cast and then the boy got up and went back to the couch
+in the front room, where he yawned himself, apparently, through three
+strata of consciousness, into his normal self. They took a proof of what
+had been cast, but it was in Latin and they could not translate it.
+David himself forgot about it the next day, but the reporter, being
+impressed and curious, took the proof to the teacher of Latin at the
+college, who translated it thus: "<i>He shall go away on a long journey
+across the ocean, and he shall not return, yet the whole town shall see
+him again and know him&mdash;and he shall bring back the song that is in his
+heart, and you shall hear it.</i>"</p>
+
+<p>The next week the "Maine" was blown up, and in the excitement the
+troubles of David were forgotten in the office. Moreover, as he had to
+work overtime he put his soul deeper into the machine, and his nerves
+took on something of the steel in which he lived. The Associated Press
+report was long in those days, and the paper was filled with local news
+of wars and rumours of wars, so that when the call for troops came in
+the early spring, the town was eager for it, and David could not wait
+for the local company to form, but went to Lawrence and enlisted with
+the Twentieth Kansas. He was our first war-hero for thirty years, and
+the town was proud of him. Most of the town knew why he went, and there
+was reproach for the blonde in the Racket Store, who had told the girls
+it would be in June and that they were going East for a wedding trip.</p>
+
+<p>When David came back from Lawrence an enlisted man, with a week in which
+to prepare for the fray, the Imperial Club gave him a farewell dance of
+great pride, in that one end of Imperial Hall was decorated for the
+occasion with all the Turkish rugs, and palms, and ferns, and
+piano-lamps with red shades, and American flags draped from the electric
+fixtures, and all the cut-glass and hand-painted punch-bowls that the
+girls of the T. T. T. Club could beg or borrow; and red lemonade and
+raspberry sherbet flowed like water. Whereat David Lewis was so pleased
+that he grew tearful when he came into the hall and saw the splendour
+that had been made for him. But his soul, despite his gratitude to the
+boys and girls who gave the party, was filled with an unutterable
+sadness; and he sat out many dances under the red lamp-shades with the
+various girls who had been playing sister to him; and the boys to whom
+the girls were more than sisters were not jealous.</p>
+
+<p>As for the blonde, she beamed and preened and smiled on David, but her
+name was not on his card, and as the silk-salesman was on the road, she
+had many vacant lines on her programme, and she often sat alone by a
+card-table shuffling the deck that lay there. The boy's eyes were dead
+when they looked at her and her smile did not coax him to her. Once when
+the others were dancing an extra David sat across the room from her, and
+she went to him and sat by him, and said under the music:</p>
+
+<p>"I thought we were always going to be friends&mdash;David?" And after he had
+parried her for a while, he rose to go away, and she said: "Won't you
+dance just once with me, Dave, just for old sake's sake before you go?"
+And he put down his name for the next extra and thought of how long it
+had been since the last June dance. Old sake's sake with youth may mean
+something that happened only day before yesterday.</p>
+
+<p>The boy did not speak to his partner during the next dance but went
+about debating something in his mind; and when the number was ended he
+tripped over to the leader of the orchestra, whom he had hired for
+dances a score of times, and asked for "Love's Golden Dream Is Past" as
+the next "extra." It was his waltz and he didn't care if the whole town
+knew it&mdash;they would dance it together. And so when the orchestra began
+he started away, a very heart-broken, brown-eyed, olive-skinned little
+Welshman, who barely touched the finger-tips of a radiant, overdeveloped
+blonde with roses in her cheeks and moonlight in her hair. She would
+have come closer to him but he danced away and only hunted for her soul
+with his brown Celtic eyes. And because David had asked for it and they
+loved the boy, the old men in the orchestra played the waltz over and
+over again, and at the end the dancers clapped their hands for an
+encore, and when the chorus began they sang it dancing, and the boy
+found the voice which cheered the "Men of Harlech," the sweet, cadent
+voice of his race, and let out his heart in the words.</p>
+
+<p>When he led her to a seat, the blonde had tears on her eyelashes as she
+choked a "good-by, Dave" to him, but he turned away without answering
+her and went to find his next partner. It was growing late and the crowd
+soon went down the long, dark stairway leading from Imperial Hall, into
+the moonlight and down the street, singing and humming and whistling
+"Love's Golden Dream," and the next day they and the town and the band
+came down to the noon train to see the conquering hero go.</p>
+
+<p>It was lonesome in the office after David went, and his music-box in the
+corner was dumb, for we couldn't find the brass lever for it, though the
+printers and the reporters hunted in his trunk and in every place they
+could think of. But the lonesomest things in the world for him were the
+machines. The big press grew sulky and kept breaking the web, and his
+linotype took to absorbing castor-oil as if it were a kind of hasheesh.
+The new operator could run the new machine, but David's seemed to resent
+familiarity. It was six months before we got things going straight after
+he left us.</p>
+
+<p>He wrote us soldier letters from the Presidio, and from mid-ocean, and
+from the picket-line in front of Manila. One afternoon the messenger-boy
+came in snuffling with a sheet of the Press-report. David's name was
+among the killed. Then we turned the column rules on the first page and
+got out the paper early to give the town the news. Henry Larmy brought
+in an obituary, the next day, which needed much editing, and we printed
+it under the head "A Tribute from a Friend," and signed Larmy's name to
+it.</p>
+
+<p>The boy had no kith or kin&mdash;which is most unusual for a Welshman&mdash;and
+so, except in our office, he seemed to be forgotten. A month went by,
+the season changed, and changed again, and a year was gone, when the
+Government sent word to Larmy&mdash;whom the boy seemed to have named for
+his next friend&mdash;that David's body would be brought back for burial if
+his friends desired it. So in the fall of 1900, when the Presidential
+campaign was at its height, the conquering hero came home, and we gave
+him a military funeral. The body came to us on Labor Day, and in our
+office we consecrated the day to David. The band and the militia company
+took him from the big stone church where sometimes he had gone to
+Sunday-school as a child, and a long procession of townsfolk wound
+around the hill to the cemetery, where David received a salute of guns,
+and the bugler played taps, and our eyes grew wet and our hearts were
+touched. Then we covered him with flowers, whipped up the horses and
+came back to the world.</p>
+
+<p>That night, as it was at the end of a holiday, the Republican Committee
+had assigned to our town, for the benefit of the men in the shops, one
+of the picture-shows that Mark Hanna, like a heathen in his blindness,
+had sent to Kansas, thinking our State, after the war, needed a spur to
+its patriotism in the election. The crowd in front of the post-office
+was a hundred feet wide and two hundred feet long, looking at the
+pictures from the kinetoscope&mdash;pictures of men going to work in mills
+and factories; pictures of the troops unloading on the coast of Cuba;
+pictures of the big warships sailing by; pictures of Dewey's flagship
+coming up the Hudson to its glory; pictures of the Spanish ships lying
+crushed in Manila harbour.</p>
+
+<p>Larmy and the reporter were sitting kicking their heels on the stone
+steps of the post-office opposite the screen on which the pictures were
+flickering. Some they saw and others they did not notice, for their talk
+was of David and of the strange things he had shown to them.</p>
+
+<p>"How did you ever fix it up in your mind?" asked Larmy.</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't fix it up. He was too many for me," was the reporter's answer.</p>
+
+<p>"The little rooster couldn't have faked it up?" questioned Larmy.</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;but he might have hypnotised us&mdash;or something."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;but still, he might have been hypnotised by something himself,"
+suggested Larmy, and then added: "That thing he did with the
+linotype&mdash;say, wasn't that about the limit? And yet nothing has come of
+that prophecy. That's the trouble. I've seen dozens of those things, and
+they always just come up to the edge of proving themselves, but always
+jump back. There is always&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"My God, Larmy, look&mdash;look!" cried the reporter.</p>
+
+<p>And the two men looked at the screen before them, just as the backward
+sway of the crowd had ceased and horror was finding a gasping voice upon
+the lips of the women; for there, walking as naturally as life, out of
+the background of the picture, came David Lewis with his dark sleeves
+rolled up, his peaked army hat on the back of his head, a bucket in his
+hand, and as he stopped and grinned at the crowd&mdash;between the
+lightning-flashes of the kinetoscope&mdash;they could see him wave his free
+hand. He stood there while a laugh covered his features, and he put his
+hand in his pocket and drew out a key-ring, which he waved, holding it
+by some long, stemlike instrument. Then he snapped back into nothing.</p>
+
+<p>And the operator of the machine, being in a hurry to catch the
+ten-thirty train, went on with his picture-show and gave us President
+McKinley and Mark Hanna sitting on the front steps of the home in
+Canton, then followed the photograph of the party around the big table
+signing the treaty of peace. As the crowd loosened and dissolved, Larmy
+and the reporter stood silently waiting. Then, when they could get away
+together, the reporter said:</p>
+
+<p>"Come, let's go over to the shop and think about this thing."</p>
+
+<p>When they opened the office door, the rank odour of the machinery came
+to them with sickening force. They left the front door open and raised
+the windows. The reporter began using a chisel on the top of a little
+box with a Government frank on it, that had been placed upon the
+music-box in the corner.</p>
+
+<p>"We may as well see what David sent home," he grunted, as he jerked at
+the stubborn nails, "anyway, I've got a theory."</p>
+
+<p>Larmy was smoking hard. "Yes," he replied after a time; "we might as
+well open it now as any time. The letter said all his things would be
+found there. I guess he didn't have a great deal. Poor little devil,
+there was no one much to get things for but you fellows and maybe me, if
+he thought of us."</p>
+
+<p>By this time the box was opened, and the reporter was scooping things
+out upon the floor. There was an army uniform, that had something clinky
+in the pockets, and wrapped in a magenta silk handkerchief was a carved
+piece of ivory. In a camera plate-box was a rose, faded and crumbly, a
+chip-diamond ring, a bangle bracelet, a woman's glove and a photograph.
+These Larmy looked at as he smoked. They meant nothing to him, but the
+reporter dived into the clothes for the clinky things. He came up with a
+bunch of keys, and on it was the long brass lever which unlocked the
+music in the box.</p>
+
+<p>"Here," he said as he jingled the keys, "is the last link in our chain."
+And he rose and went over to the box, uncovered it, and jabbed in the
+lever with a nervous hand. There was a rolling and clinking inside.
+Then, slowly, a harmony rose, and the tinkling that came from the box
+resolved itself into a melody that filled the room. It was strong and
+clear and powerful, and seemed to have a certain passion in it that may
+have been struck like flint fire from the time and the place and the
+spirit of the occasion. The two men stared dumbly as they listened. The
+sound rose stronger and stronger; over and over again the song repeated
+itself; then very gently its strength began to fail; and finally it sank
+into a ghostly tinkle that still carried the melody till it faded into
+silence.</p>
+
+<p>"That," said the reporter, "is the song that was in his heart&mdash;'Love's
+Golden Dream.' I'm satisfied."</p>
+
+<p>"The last link," shuddered Larmy. "That which seemed corporeal has
+melted 'as a breath into the wind.'"</p>
+
+<p>The reporter shovelled the debris into the box, pushed it under a desk,
+and the two men hurried to close the office. As they stood on the
+threshold a moment, while the reporter clicked the key in the lock, a
+paper rustled and they heard a mouse scamper across the floor inside the
+empty room.</p>
+
+<p>"Let's go home," shivered Larmy. They started north, which was the short
+way home, but Larmy took hold of his companion's arm and said: "No,
+let's go this way: there's an electric light here on the corner, and
+it's dark down there."</p>
+
+<p>And so they turned into the white, sputtering glare and walked on
+without words.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a>V</h2>
+
+<h3>The Coming of the Leisure Class</h3>
+
+
+<p>We all are workers in our town, as people are in every small town. It is
+always proper to ask what a man does for a living with us, for none of
+us has money enough to live without work, and until the advent of
+Beverly Amidon, our leisure class consisted of Red Martin, the gambler,
+the only man in town with nothing to do in the middle of the day; and
+the black boys who loafed on the south side of the bank building through
+the long afternoons until it was time to deliver the clothes which their
+wives and mothers had washed. Everyone else in town works, and,
+excepting an occasional picnic, there is no social activity among the
+men until after sundown. But five years ago Beverly Amidon came to town,
+and brought with him a large leisure and a taste for society which made
+him easily the "glass of fashion and the mould of form" not only in our
+little community, but all over this part of the State. Beverly and his
+mother, who had come to make their home with her sister, in one of the
+big houses on the hill, had money. How much, we had no idea. In a small
+town when one has "money" no one knows just how much or how little, but
+it must be over fifteen thousand dollars, otherwise one is merely "well
+fixed."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="gs04" id="gs04"></a>
+<img src="images/gs04.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3>And brought with him a large leisure and a taste for
+society</h3>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>But Beverly was a blessing to our office. We never could have filled the
+society column Saturday without him, for he was a continuous social
+performance. He was the first man in town who dared to wear a flannel
+tennis suit on the streets, and he was a whole year ahead of the other
+boys with his Panama hat. It was one of those broad-brimmed Panamas,
+full of heart-interest, that made him look like a romantic barytone, and
+when under that gala fa&ccedil;ade he came tripping into the office in his
+white duck clothes, with a wide Windsor tie, Miss Larrabee, the society
+editor, who was the only one of us with whom he ever had any business,
+would pull the string that unhooked the latch of the gate to her section
+of the room and say, without looking up: "Come into the garden, Maud."
+To which he made invariable reply: "Oh, Miss Larrabee, don't be so
+sarcastic! I have a little item for you."</p>
+
+<p>The little item was always an account of one of his social triumphs. And
+there was a long list of them to his credit. He introduced ping-pong; he
+gave us our first "pit party"; he held the first barn dance given in the
+county; his was our first "tacky party"; and he gave the first
+progressive buggy ride the young people had ever enjoyed, and seven
+girls afterward confessed that on the evening of that affair he hadn't
+been in the buggy with them five minutes before he began driving with
+one hand&mdash;and his right hand at that. Still, when the crowd assembled
+for supper at Flat Rock, the girls didn't hold his left handiwork
+against him, and they admitted that he was just killing when he put on
+one of their hats and gave an imitation of a girl from Bethany College
+who had been visiting in town the week before. Beverly was always the
+life of the company. He could make three kinds of salad dressing, two
+kinds of lobster Newburgh and four Welsh rarebits, and was often the
+sole guest of honour at the afternoon meetings of the T. T. T. girls,
+before whom he was always willing to show his prowess. Sometimes he
+gave chafing-dish parties whereat he served ginger ale and was real
+devilish.</p>
+
+<p>He used to ride around the country bare-headed with two or three girls
+when honest men were at work, and he acquired a fine leather-coloured
+tan. He tried organising a polo club, but the ponies from the delivery
+waggons that were available after six o'clock did not take training
+well, and he gave up polo. In making horse-back riding a social
+diversion he taught a lot of fine old family buggy horses a number of
+mincing steps, so that thereafter they were impossible in the family
+phaeton. He thereby became unpopular with a number of the heads of
+families, and he had to introduce bridge whist in the old married set to
+regain their favour. This cost him the goodwill of the preachers, and he
+gave a Japanese garden party for the Epworth League to restore himself
+in the church where he was accustomed to pass the plate on Sundays. Miss
+Larrabee used to call him the first aid to the ennuied. But the Young
+Prince, who chased runaways teams and wrote personal items, never
+referred to him except as "Queen of the Hand-holders." For fun we once
+printed Beverly Amidon's name among those present at a Mothers' League
+meeting, and it was almost as much of a hit in the town as the time we
+put the words, "light refreshments were served and the evening was spent
+in cards and dancing," at the close of an account of a social meeting of
+the Ministerial Alliance.</p>
+
+<p>The next time Beverly brought in his little item he stopped long enough
+to tell us that he thought that the people who laughed at our obvious
+mistake in the list of guests of the Mothers' League were rather coarse.
+One word brought on two, and as it was late in the afternoon, and the
+paper was out, we bade Beverly sit down and tell us the story of his
+life, and his real name; for Miss Larrabee had declared a dozen times
+that Beverly Amidon sounded so much like a stage name that she was
+willing to bet that his real name was Jabez Skaggs.</p>
+
+<p>Beverly's greatest joy was in talking about his social conquests in
+Tiffin, Ohio; therefore he soon was telling us that there was so much
+culture in Tiffin, such a jolly lot of girls, so many pleasant homes,
+and a most extraordinary atmosphere of refinement. He rattled along,
+telling us what great sport they used to have running down to Cleveland
+for theatre-parties, and how easy it was to 'phone to Toledo and get the
+nicest crowd of boys one could wish to come over to the parties, and how
+Tiffin was famous all over that part of Ohio for its exclusive families
+and its week-end house-parties.</p>
+
+<p>The Young Prince sat by listening for a time and then got up and leaned
+over the railing around Miss Larrabee's desk. Beverly was confiding to
+us how he got up the sweetest living pictures you ever saw and took them
+down to Cleveland, where they made all kinds of money for the King's
+Daughters. He told what gorgeous costumes the girls wore and what
+stunning backgrounds he rigged up. The Young Prince winked at Miss
+Larrabee as he straightened up and started for the door. Then he let
+fly: "Were you Psyche at the Pool in that show, or a Mellin's Food
+Baby?"</p>
+
+<p>But Beverly deigned no reply and a little later in the conversation
+remarked that the young men in this town were very bad form. He thought
+that he had seen some who were certainly not gentlemen. He really
+didn't see how the young ladies could endure to have such persons in
+their set. He confided to Miss Larrabee that at a recent lawn-party he
+had come upon a young man, who should be nameless, with his arm about a
+young woman's waist.</p>
+
+<p>"And, Miss Larrabee," continued Beverly in his solemnest tones, "A young
+man who will put his arm around a girl will go further&mdash;yes, Miss
+Larabee&mdash;much further. He will kiss her!" Whereat he nodded his head and
+shook it at the awful thought.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Larrabee drew in a shocked breath and gasped:</p>
+
+<p>"Do you really think so, Mr. Amidon? I couldn't imagine such a thing!"</p>
+
+<p>He had a most bedizened college fraternity pin, which he was forever
+lending to the girls. During his first year in town, Miss Larrabee told
+us, at least a dozen girls had worn the thing. Wherefore she used to
+call it the Amidon Loan Exhibit.</p>
+
+<p>He introduced golf into our town, and was able to find six men to join
+his fifteen young ladies in the ancient sport. Two preachers, a young
+dentist and three college professors were the only male creatures who
+dared walk across our town in plaid stockings and knickerbockers, and
+certainly it hurt their standing at the banks, for the town frowned on
+golf, and confined its sport to baseball in the summer, football in the
+autumn, and checkers in the winter.</p>
+
+<p>That was a year ago. In the autumn something happened to Beverly, and he
+had to go to work. There was nothing in our little town for him, so he
+went to Kansas City. He did not seem to "make it" socially there, for he
+wrote to the girls that Kansas City was cold and distant and that
+everything was ruled by money. He explained that there were some nice
+people, but they did not belong to the fast set. He was positively
+shocked, he wrote, at what he heard of the doings at the Country
+Club&mdash;so different from the way things went in Tiffin, Ohio.</p>
+
+<p>For a long time we did not hear his name mentioned in the office.
+Finally there came a letter addressed to Miss Larrabee. In it Beverly
+said that he had found his affinity. "She is not rich," he admitted,
+"but," he added, "she belongs to an old, aristocratic, Southern family,
+through reduced circumstances living in retirement; very exclusive, very
+haughty. I have counted it a privilege to be constantly associated with
+people of such rare distinction. Her mother is a grand dame of the old
+school who has opened her home to a few choice paid guests who feel, as
+I do, that it is far more refreshing socially to partake of the gracious
+hospitality of her secluded home than to live in the noisy, vulgar
+hotels of the city. It was in this relation at her mother's home that I
+met the woman who is to join her lot with mine." Thereafter followed the
+date and place of the wedding, a description of the bride's dress, an
+account of her lineage back to the "Revolutionary Georgia Governor of
+that name," and fifty cents in stamps for extra papers containing an
+account of the wedding.</p>
+
+<p>In time we hope to teach our young men to roll down their shirt-sleeves
+in the summer, our girls to wear their hats, our horses to quit prancing
+in the shafts of the family buggy. In time bridge whist will wear itself
+out, in time our social life will resume its old estate, and the owners
+of the five dress-suits in town will return to their former distinction.
+In time caste lines set by the advent of the leisure class will be
+obliterated, and it will be no longer bad form for the dry-goods clerk
+to dance with the grocery clerk's wife at the Charity Ball. But, come
+what may, we shall always know that there was a time in the social
+history of our town when we danced the two-step as they dance it in
+Tiffin, Ohio, and wore knee-breeches and plaid stockings, and quit work
+at four o'clock. Those were great days&mdash;"the glory that was Greece, the
+grandeur that was Rome."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VI" id="VI"></a>VI</h2>
+
+<h3>The Bolton Girl's "Position"</h3>
+
+
+<p>When she said she would like to "accept a position" with our paper, it
+was all over between us. After that we knew that she was at least highly
+improbable if not entirely impossible. But then we might have expected
+as much from a girl who called herself Maybelle. There is, however, this
+much to be said in Maybelle's favour: she was persistent. She did not
+let go till it thundered! We could have stood it well enough if she had
+limited her campaign for a job on the paper to an occasional call at the
+office. But she had a fiendish instinct which told her who were the
+friends we liked most to oblige: the banker, for instance, who carried
+our overdrafts, the leading advertiser, the chairman of the printing
+committee of the town council&mdash;and she found ways to make them ask if we
+couldn't do something for Miss Bolton. She could teach school; indeed,
+she had a place in the Academy. But she loathed school-teaching. She
+had always felt that, if she could once get a start, she could make a
+name for herself.</p>
+
+<p>She had written something that she called "A Critique on Hamlet," which
+she submitted to us, and was deeply pained when we told her that we
+didn't care for editorial matter; that what our paper needed was the
+names of the people in our own country town and county, printed as many
+times a day or a week or a month as they could be put into type. We
+tried to tell her that more important to us than the influence of the
+Celtic element on our national life and literature was the fact that
+John Jones of Lebo&mdash;that is to say, red John, as distinguished from
+black John&mdash;or Jones the tinner, or Jones of the Possum Holler
+settlement was in town with a load of hay. "Other papers," we explained
+carefully, while she looked as sympathetic and intelligent as a collie,
+"other papers might be interested in the radio-activity of uranium X;
+they might care to print articles on the psychological phenomena of
+mobs"&mdash;to which she snapped eager agreement with her eyes&mdash;"others,
+with entire propriety, might be interested in inorganic evolution"&mdash;and
+she cheeped "yes, yes" with feverish intensity&mdash;"but in our little local
+paper we cared only for the person who could tell our readers with the
+most delicacy and precision how many spoons Mrs. Worthington had to
+borrow for her party, who had the largest number of finger-bowls in
+town, what Mrs. Conklin paid for the broilers she served at her party
+last February, and the name of the country woman who raised them, and
+why it was that all the women failed to make Jennie's recipe for
+sunshine cake work when they tried it." Such are the things that
+interest our people, and he, she or it who can turn in two or three
+columns a day of items setting forth these things in a good-natured way,
+so that the persons mentioned will only grin and wonder who told it, is
+good for ten dollars of our money every Saturday night.</p>
+
+<p>Maybelle thought it was such interesting work, and her eyes floated in
+tears of happiness at the thought of such joy. If she could only have a
+chance! It would be just lovely&mdash;simply grand, and she knew she could do
+it! Something in her innermost soul thrilled with a tintinabulation that
+made her quiver with anticipation. Whereupon she went out and came back
+in three days with five sheets of foolscap on which she had written an
+article beginning: "When Memory draws aside the curtains of her magic
+chamber, revealing the pictures meditation paints, and we see through
+the windows of our dreams the sweet vale of yesterday, lying outside and
+beyond; when stern Ambition, with relentless hand, turns us away from
+all this to ride in the sombre chariot of Duty&mdash;then it is that
+entrancing Pleasure beckons us back to sit by Memory's fire and sip our
+tea with Maiden meditation." What it was all about no one ever found
+out; but the Young Prince at the local desk who read it clear through
+said that sometimes he thought that it was a report of a fire and at
+other times it seemed like a dress-goods catalogue. It would have made
+four columns. As he put the roll back in the drawer the Young Prince
+rose and paced grandly out. At the front door he stopped and said:
+"You'll never make anything out of her&mdash;she's a handholder! When a girl
+begins to get corns on her hands, I notice she has mush on the brain!"</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="gs05" id="gs05"></a>
+<img src="images/gs05.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3>Sometimes he thought it was a report of a fire and at
+other times it seemed like a dress-goods catalogue</h3>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>But Maybelle returned, and we went all over the same ground again. We
+explained that what we wanted was short items&mdash;two or three lines
+each&mdash;little references to home doings; something telling who has
+company, who is sick, who is putting shingles on the barn or an "L" on
+the house. And she said "Oh, yes!" so passionately that it seemed as
+though she would bark or put her front feet on the table. One felt like
+taking her jaws in his hands and pulling her ears.</p>
+
+<p>The next time she came in she said that if we would just try her&mdash;give
+her something to do&mdash;she was sure she could show us how well she could
+do it. On a venture, and partly to get rid of her, we sent her to the
+district convention of the Epworth League to write up the opening
+meeting. About noon of the next day she brought in three sermons, and
+said that she didn't get the list of officers nor the names of the choir
+because they were all people who lived here and everyone knew them. Then
+we explained in short, simple sentences that the sermons were of no
+value, and that the names were what we desired. She dropped her eyes and
+said meekly "Oh!" and told us how sorry she was. Also she said that if
+it wasn't for a meeting of the T. T. T. girls that afternoon she would
+go back and get the names. When she went out, the Young Prince, sitting
+by the window with his pencil behind his ear and his feet on the table,
+said: "I bet she can make the grandest fudge!" "And such lovely angel
+food," put in Miss Larrabee, who was busy writing up the Epworth League
+convention.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Bolton's name was always among the lists we printed of the guests
+at the Entre Nous Card Club, the Imperial Dancing Club, the "Giddy Young
+Things" Club, the Art Club and the Shakespeare Club. But when she came
+to the office she was full of anxiety at the frivolity of society. She
+said that she so longed for intellectual companionship that she felt
+sometimes as if she must fly to a place where she could find a soul that
+would feel in unison with the infinite that thrilled her being. Far be
+it from her to wish to coin the pulsations of her soul, but papa and
+mamma did need her help so. She accented papa and mamma on the last
+syllable and leaned forward and looked upward like a shirtwaist Madonna.
+But writing locals someway didn't appeal to her. She wondered if we
+could use a serial story. And then she went on: "Oh, I have some of the
+sweetest things in my head! I know I could write them. They just tingle
+through my blood like wine. I know I could write them&mdash;such sublime
+things&mdash;but when I sit down to put them on paper something always comes
+up that prevents my going on with them. There are dozens whirling
+through my brain begging to be written. There is one about the earl who
+has imprisoned the young princess in a dungeon, and her lover, a knight
+of the cross, comes home from a crusade and is put in the cell next to
+her. A bird that she has been feeding through her prison window takes a
+lock of her golden hair to the window where her lover is looking out
+across the beautiful world, not knowing that she, too, has fallen into
+the earl's clutches. And, oh, yes! there is another about Cornelia who
+lived in a moated tower, and all the dukes and lords and kings in the
+land had laid suit to her hand, and she could find none who came up to
+her highest ideal, so she set them a task&mdash;and, oh, a lot more about
+what they did; I haven't thought that out&mdash;but anyway she married the
+red duke Wolfang who spurned her task and took her by night with his
+retainers away from the tower, saying her love was his Holy Grail and to
+get her was the object of his pilgrimage. Oh, it's just grand."</p>
+
+<p>No, we don't use serials and when we do we buy them in stereotyped
+plates by the pound. This made Miss Bolton droop, with another
+disappointed "Oh." The grain of the world seems so coarse when one looks
+at it closely.</p>
+
+<p>We did not see Miss Bolton at the office for a long time after the duke
+abducted the lady in the moated grange, but we received a poem signed M.
+B. "To Dan Cupid," and another on "My Heart of Fire." Also there came an
+anonymous communication in strangely familiar fat vertical handwriting
+to the effect that "some people in this town think that if a young lady
+has a gentleman friend call on her more than twice a week it is their
+business to assume a courtship. They should know that there are souls
+on this earth whose tendrils reach into the infinite beyond the gross
+materiality of this mundane sphere to a destiny beyond the stars." At
+the bottom of the page were the words: "Please publish and oblige a
+subscriber."</p>
+
+<p>The next that we heard of Miss Bolton was that she was running pink and
+blue baby-ribbon through her white things, and was expecting a linen
+shower from the T. T. T. girls, a silver shower from the "Giddy Young
+Things," a handkerchief shower from the Entre Nous girls, and a kitchen
+shower from the Imperial Club. Miss Larrabee, the society editor, began
+to hate Miss Bolton with the white-hot hate which all society editors
+turn on all brides. Miss Larrabee was authority for the statement that
+Maybelle had used five hundred yards of baby-ribbon&mdash;pink and blue and
+white and yellow&mdash;in her trousseau, and that she was bestowing the same
+passionate fervour on her hemstitching and tucking that she had wasted
+on literature; that she was helping papa and mamma by shouldering the
+biggest wedding on them since the Tomlinsons went into bankruptcy after
+their firework ceremonial. Miss Larrabee said that Papa Bolton's
+livery-stable was burning up so fast that she wanted to call out the
+fire department, and that Mamma Bolton made her think of the
+patent-medicine testimonials we printed from "poor tired women."</p>
+
+<p>The day of the wedding the blow came. A very starched-up little boy with
+strawberry juice frescoed around his mouth brought in a note from
+Maybelle and a tightly-rolled manuscript tied with blue baby-ribbon. In
+the note she said that she thought it would be so romantic to "write up
+her own wedding&mdash;recalling the dear, dead days when she was a neophyte
+in letters." We handed the manuscript to Miss Larrabee, from whom, as
+she read, came snorts: "'Drawing-room!' Huh! 'Music-room.' Heavens to
+Betsy! 'Peculiar style of beauty!' Oh, joy! 'Looked like a wood-nymph in
+the morn.' Wouldn't that saturate you! 'The Apollo-like beauty of the
+groom.'" Miss Larrabee groaned as she rose, and putting her raincoat on
+the floor by her chair she exclaimed: "Do you people know what I am
+going to do? I have got to lie right down here and have a fit!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VII" id="VII"></a>VII</h2>
+
+<h3>"By the Rod of His Wrath"</h3>
+
+
+<p>Saturday afternoons, when the town is full, and farmers are coming in to
+the office to pay their subscriptions for the <i>Weekly</i>, it is our habit,
+after the paper is out, to sit in the office and look over Main Street,
+where perhaps five hundred people are milling, and consider with one
+another the nature of our particular little can of angle-worms and its
+relation to the great forces that move the world. The town often seems
+to us to be dismembered from the earth, and to be a chunk of humanity
+drifting through space by itself, like a vagrant star, forgotten of the
+law that governs the universe. Go where our people will, they find
+change; but when they come home, they look out of the hack as they ride
+through town, seeing the old familiar buildings and bill-boards and
+street-signs, and say with surprise, as Mathew Boris said after a busy
+and eventful day in Kansas City, where he had been marketing his
+steers: "Well, the old town seems to keep right on, just the same."</p>
+
+<p>The old men in town seem always to have been old, and though the
+middle-aged do sometimes step across the old-age line, the young men
+remain perennially young, and when they grow fat or dry up, and their
+hair thins and whitens, they are still called by their diminutive names,
+and to most of us they are known as sons of the old men. Here a new
+house goes up, and there a new store is built, but they rise slowly, and
+everyone in town has time to go through them and over them and criticise
+the architectural taste of the builders, so that by the time a building
+is finished it seems to have grown into the original consciousness of
+the people, and to be a part of their earliest memories. We send our
+children to Sunday-school, and we go to church and learn how God's
+rewards or punishments fell upon the men of old, as they were faithful
+or recreant; but we don't seem to be like the men of old, for we are
+neither very good nor very bad&mdash;hardly worth God's while to sort us over
+for any uncommon lot. Only once, in the case of John Markley, did the
+Lord reach into our town and show His righteous judgment. And that
+judgment was shown so clearly through the hearts of our people that very
+likely John Markley does not consider it the judgment of God at all, but
+the prejudice of the neighbours.</p>
+
+<p>When we have been talking over the case of John Markley in the office we
+have generally ended by wondering whether God&mdash;or whatever one cares to
+call the force that operates the moral laws, as well as those that in
+our ignorance we set apart as the physical laws of the world&mdash;whether
+God moves by cataclysm and accidents, or whether He moves with blessing
+or chastisement, through human nature as it is, in the ordinary business
+of the lives of men. But we have never settled that in our office any
+more than they have in the great schools, and as John Markley, game to
+the end, has never said what he thought of the town's treatment of him,
+it will never be known which side of our controversy is right.</p>
+
+<p>Years ago, perhaps as long ago as the drought of seventy-four, men began
+calling him "Honest John Markley." He was the fairest man in town, and
+he made money by it, for when he opened his little bank Centennial year,
+which was the year of the big wheat crop, farmers stood in line half an
+hour at a time, at the door of his bank, waiting to give him their
+money. He was a plain, uncollared, short-whiskered man, brown-haired and
+grey-eyed, whose wife always made his shirts and, being a famous cook in
+town, kept him round and chubby. He referred to her as "Ma," and she
+called him "Pa Markley" so insistently that when we elected him State
+Senator, after he made his bank a National bank, in 1880, the town and
+county couldn't get used to calling him Senator Markley, so "Pa Markley"
+it was until after his Senatorial fame had been forgotten. Their
+children had grown up and left home before the boom of the eighties
+came&mdash;one girl went to California and the boy to South America;&mdash;and
+when John Markley began to write his wealth in six figures&mdash;which is
+almost beyond the dreams of avarice in a town like ours&mdash;he and his wife
+were lonely and knew little what to do with their income.</p>
+
+<p>They bought new furniture for the parlour, and the Ladies' Missionary
+Society of the First Methodist Church, the only souls that saw it with
+the linen jackets off, say it was lovely to behold; they bought
+everything the fruit-tree man had in his catalogue, and their five acres
+on Exchange Street were pimpled over with shrubs that never bloomed and
+with trees that never bore fruit. He passed the hat in church&mdash;being a
+brother-in-law to the organisation, as he explained; sang "Tramp, Tramp,
+Tramp, the Boys Are Marching" at Grand Army entertainments, and always
+as an encore dragged "Ma" out to sing with him "Dear, Dear, What Can the
+Matter Be." She was a skinny, sharp-eyed, shy little woman in her late
+fifties when the trouble came. She rose at every annual meeting of the
+church to give a hundred dollars but her voice never lasted until she
+got through announcing her donation, and she sat down demurely, blushing
+and looking down her nose as though she had disgraced the family. She
+had lost a brother in the war, and never came further out of mourning
+than purple flowers in her bonnet. She bought John Markley's clothes, so
+that his Sunday finery contained nothing giddier than a grey made-up
+tie, that she pinned around the collars which her own hands had ironed.</p>
+
+<p>Slowly as their fortune piled up, and people said they had a million,
+his brown beard grizzled a little, and his brow crept up and up and his
+girth stretched out to forty-four. But his hands did not whiten or
+soften, and though he was "Honest John," and every quarter-section of
+land that he bought doubled in value by some magic that he only seemed
+to know, he kept the habits of his youth, rose early, washed at the
+kitchen basin, and was the first man at his office in the morning. At
+night, after a hard day's work he smoked a cob-pipe in the basement,
+where he could spit into the furnace and watch the fire until nine
+o'clock, when he put out the cat and bedded down the fire, while "Ma"
+set the buckwheat cakes. They never had a servant in their house.</p>
+
+<p>We used to see John Markley pass the office window a dozen times a day,
+a hale, vigorous man, whose heels clicked hard on the sidewalk as he
+came hurrying along&mdash;head back and shoulders rolling. He was a powerful,
+masculine, indomitable creature, who looked out of defiant, cold,
+unblinking eyes as though he were just about to tell the whole world to
+go to hell! The town was proud of him. He was our "prominent citizen,"
+and when he was elected president of the district bankers' association,
+and his name appeared in the papers as a possible candidate for United
+States Senator or Minister to Mexico or Secretary of the Interior, we
+were glad that "Honest John Markley" was our fellow-townsman.</p>
+
+<p>And then came the crash. Man is a curious creature, and, even if he is
+nine parts good, the old Adam in him must burn out one way or another in
+his youth, or there comes a danger period at the height of his middle
+life when his submerged tenth that has been smouldering for years flares
+up and destroys him. Wherefore the problem which we have never been able
+to solve, though we have talked it over in the office a dozen times:
+whether John Markley had begun to feel, before he met the Hobart woman,
+that he wasn't getting enough out of life for the money he had invested
+in it; or whether she put the notion in his head.</p>
+
+<p>It is scarcely correct to speak of his having met her, for she grew up
+in the town, and had been working for the Markley Mortgage and
+Investment Company for half-a-dozen years before he began to notice her.
+From a brassy street-gadding child of twelve, whose mother crowded her
+into grown-up society before she left the high school, and let her spell
+her name Ysabelle, she had grown into womanhood like a rank weed; had
+married at nineteen, was divorced at twenty-one, and having tried music
+teaching and failed, china painting and failed, she learned stenography
+by sheer force of her own will, with no instruction save that in her
+book, and opened an office for such work as she could get, while aiming
+for the best job in town&mdash;the position of cashier and stenographer for
+the Markley Mortgage Company. It took her three years to get in and
+another year to make herself invaluable. She was big and strong, did the
+work of two men for the pay of one, and for five years John Markley, who
+saw that she had plenty of work to do, did not seem to know that she was
+on earth. But one day "Alphabetical" Morrison, who was in our office
+picking up his bundle of exchanges, looked rather idly out of the
+window, and suddenly rested his roving eyes upon John Markley and Mrs.
+Hobart, standing and talking in front of the post office. The man at the
+desk near Morrison happened to be looking out at that moment, and he,
+too, saw what Morrison saw&mdash;which was nothing at all, except a man
+standing beside a woman. Probably the pair had met in exactly the same
+place at exactly the same time, and had exchanged an idle word daily for
+five years! and no one had noticed it, but that day Morrison
+unconsciously put his hand to his chin and scratched his jaw, and his
+eyes and the man's at the desk beside him met in a surprised
+interrogation, and Morrison's mouth and nose twitched, and the other man
+said, as he turned his face into his work, "Well, wouldn't that get
+you!"</p>
+
+<p>The conversation went no further. Neither could have said what he saw.
+But there is something in every human creature&mdash;a survival of our jungle
+days, which lets our eyes see more than our consciousness records in
+language. And these men, who saw Markley and the woman, could not have
+defined the canine impression which he gave them. Yet it was there. The
+volcano was beginning to smoke.</p>
+
+<p>It was a month later before the town saw the flames. During that time
+John Markley had been walking to and from his midday dinner with Isabel
+Hobart, had been helping her on and off with her wraps in the office,
+and had been all but kicking up the dirt behind him and barking around
+her, as the clerks there told us, without causing comment. An honest man
+always has such a long start when he runs away from himself that no one
+misses him until he is beyond extradition. Matters went along thus for
+nearly a year before the woman in the cottage on Exchange Street knew
+how they stood. And that speaks well of our town; for we are not a mean
+town, and if anyone ever had our sympathy it was Mrs. Markley, as she
+went about her quiet ways, giving her missionary teas, looking after the
+poor of her church, making her famous doughnuts for the socials, doing
+her part at the Relief Corps chicken-pie suppers, digging her club paper
+out of the encyclop&aelig;dia, and making over her black silk the third time
+for every day. If John Markley was cross with her in that time&mdash;and the
+neighbours say that he was; if he sat for hours in the house without
+saying a word, and grumbled and flew into a rage at the least ruffling
+of the domestic waters&mdash;his wife kept her grief to herself, and even
+when she left town to visit her daughter in California no one knew what
+she knew.</p>
+
+<p>A month passed, two months passed, and John Markley's name had become a
+by-word and a hissing. Three months passed, a year went by, and still
+the wife did not return. And then one day Ab Handy, who sometimes
+prepared John Markley's abstracts, came into our office and whispered to
+the man at the desk that there was a little paper filed in the court
+which, under the circumstances, Mr. Markley would rather we would say as
+little about as is consistent with our policy in such cases. Handy
+didn't say what it was, and backed out bowing and eating dirt, and we
+sent a boy hot-foot to the court-house to find out what had been filed.
+The boy came back with a copy of a petition for divorce that had been
+entered by John Markley, alleging desertion. John Markley did not face
+the town when he brought his suit, but left for Chicago on the
+afternoon train, and was gone nearly a month. The broken little woman
+did not come back to contest the case, and the divorce was granted.</p>
+
+<p>The day before his marriage to Isabel Hobart, John Markley shaved off
+his grizzled brown beard, and showed the town a face so strong and
+cunning and brutal that men were shocked; they said that she wished to
+make him appear young, and the shave did drop ten years from his
+countenance; but it uncovered his soul so shamelessly that it seemed
+immodest to look at his face. Upon the return from the wedding trip, the
+employees of the Markley Mortgage Company, at John Markley's suggestion,
+gave a reception for the bride and groom, and the Lord laid the first
+visible stripe on John Markley while he stood with his bride for three
+hours, waiting for the thousand invited guests who never came.
+"Alphabetical" Morrison, who owed John Markley money, and had to go,
+told us in the office the next day that John Markley in evening clothes,
+with his great paunch swathed in a white silk vest, smirking like a
+gorged jackal, showing his fellow-townsmen for the first time his
+coarse, yellow teeth and his thin, cruel lips, looked like some horrible
+cartoon of his former self. Colonel Morrison did not describe the bride,
+but she passed our office that day, going the rounds of the dry-goods
+stores, giggling with the men clerks&mdash;a picture of sin that made men wet
+their lips. She was big, oversexed, and feline; rattling in silks, with
+an aura of sensuousness around her which seemed to glow like a coal,
+without a flicker of kindness or shame or sweetness, and which all the
+town knew instinctively must clinker into something black and ugly as
+the years went by.</p>
+
+<p>So the threshold of the cottage on Exchange Street was not darkened by
+our people. And when the big house went up&mdash;a palace for a country town,
+though it only cost John Markley $25,000&mdash;he, who had been so reticent
+about his affairs in other years, tried to talk to his old friends of
+the house, telling them expansively that he was putting it up so that
+the town would have something in the way of a house for public
+gatherings; but he aroused no responsive enthusiasm, and long before the
+big opening reception his fervour had been quenched. Though we are a
+curious people, and though we all were anxious to know how the inside of
+the new house looked, we did not go to the reception; only the socially
+impossible, and the travelling men's wives at the Metropole, whom Mrs.
+Markley had met when she was boarding during the week they moved,
+gathered to hear the orchestra from Kansas City, to eat the Topeka
+caterer's food, and to fall down on the newly-waxed floors of the
+Markley mansion. But our professional instinct at the office told us
+that the town was eager for news of that house, and we took three
+columns to write up the reception. Our description of the place began
+with the swimming pool in the cellar and ended with the ballroom in the
+third story.</p>
+
+<p>It took John Markley a long time to realise that the town was done with
+him, for there was no uprising, no demonstration, just a gradual
+loosening of his hold upon the community. In other years his neighbours
+had urged him and expected him to serve on the school-board, of which he
+had been chairman for a dozen years, but the spring that the big house
+was opened Mrs. Julia Worthington was elected in his place. At the June
+meeting of the Methodist Conference a new director was chosen to fill
+John Markley's place on the college board, and when he cancelled his
+annual subscription no one came to ask him to renew it. In the fall his
+party selected a new ward committeeman, and though Markley had been
+treasurer of the committee for a dozen years, his successor was named
+from the Worthington bank, and they had the grace not to come to Markley
+with the subscription-paper asking for money. It took some time for the
+sense of the situation to penetrate John Markley's thick skin; whereupon
+the fight began in earnest, and men around town said that John Markley
+had knocked the lid off his barrel. He doubled his donation to the
+county campaign fund; he crowded himself at the head of every
+subscription-paper; and frequently he brought us communications to
+print, offering to give as much money himself for the library, or the
+Provident Association, or the Y. M. C. A., as the rest of the town would
+subscribe combined. He mended church roofs under which he never had
+sat; he bought church bells whose calls he never heeded; and paid the
+greater part of the pipe-organ debts in two stone churches. Colonel
+Morrison remarked in the office one day that John Markley was raising
+the price of popular esteem so high that none but the rich could afford
+it. "But," chuckled the Colonel, "I notice old John hasn't got a corner
+on it yet, and he doesn't seem to have all he needs for his own use."
+The wrench that had torn open his treasure chest, had also loosened John
+Markley's hard face, and he had begun to smile. He became as affable as
+a man may who has lived for fifty years silent and self-contained. He
+beamed upon his old friends, and once or twice a week he went the rounds
+of the stores making small purchases, to let the clerks bask in his
+sunlight.</p>
+
+<p>If a new preacher came to town the Markleys went to his church, and Mrs.
+Markley tried to be the first woman to call on his wife.</p>
+
+<p>All the noted campaign speakers assigned to our town were invited to be
+the Markleys' guests, and Mrs. Markley sent her husband, red necktied,
+high-hatted and tailor-made, to the train to meet the distinguished
+guest. If the man was as much as a United States Senator, Markley hired
+the band, and in an open hack rode in solemn state with his prize
+through the town behind the tinkling cymbals, and then, with much
+punctility, took the statesman up and down Main Street afoot, into all
+the stores and offices, introducing him to the common people. At such
+times John Markley was the soul of cordiality; he seemed hungry for a
+kind look and a pleasant word with his old friends. About this time his
+defiant eyes began to lose their boring points, and to wander and hunt
+for something they had lost. When we had a State convention of the
+dominant party, the Markleys saw to it that the Governor and all the
+important people attending, with their wives, stopped in the big house.
+The Markleys gave receptions to them, which the men in our town dared
+not ignore, but sent their wives away visiting and went alone. This
+familiarity with politicians probably gave the Markleys the idea that
+they might help their status in the community if John Markley ran for
+Governor. He announced his candidacy, and the Kansas City papers, which
+did not appreciate the local situation, spoke well of him; but his boom
+died in the first month, when some of his old friends called at the back
+room of the bank to tell him that the Democrats would air his family
+affairs if he made another move. He looked up pitiably into Ab Handy's
+face when the men were done talking and said: "Don't you suppose they'll
+ever quit? Ain't they no statute of limitation?" And then he arose and
+stood by his desk with one arm akimbo and his other hand at his temple
+as he sighed: "Oh hell, Ab&mdash;what's the use? Tell 'em I'm out of it!"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Markley seems to have shut him out of the G. A. R., thinking maybe
+that the old boys and their wives were not of her social level, or
+perhaps she had some idea of playing even with them, because their wives
+had not recognised her; but she shut away much of her husband's social
+comfort when she barred his comrades, and they in turn grew harder
+toward him than they were at first. As the Markleys entered their second
+year, Mrs. Markley alone in the big house, with only the new people from
+the hotel to eat her dinners, and with only the beer-drinking crowd from
+the West Side to dance in the attic ballroom, had much time to think,
+and she bethought her of the lecturers who were upon the college lecture
+course, whereupon John Markley had to carve for authors and explorers,
+and an occasional Senator or Congressman, who, after a hard evening's
+work on the platform, paid for his dinner and lodging by sitting up on a
+gilded high-backed and uncomfortable chair in the stately reception-room
+of the Markley home, talking John Markley into a snore, before Isabel
+let them go to bed. Isabel sent the accounts of these affairs to the
+office for us to print, with the lists of invited guests, who never
+accepted. And the town grinned.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of two years John Markley's fat wit told him that it was a
+losing fight. He had been dropped from the head of the Merchants'
+Association; he was cut off from the executive committee of the Fair; he
+was not asked to serve on the railroad committee. His old friends, whom
+he asked over to spend the evening at his house, always had good
+excuses, which they gave him later over the telephone, and their wives,
+who used to call him by his first name, scarcely recognised him on the
+street. He quit coming to our office with pieces for the paper telling
+the town his views on this or that local matter; and gradually gave up
+the fight for his old place on the school board.</p>
+
+<p>The clerks in the Markley Mortgage Company office say that he fell into
+a moody way, and would come to the office and refuse to speak to anyone
+for hours. Also, as the big house often glowed until midnight for a
+dance of the socially impossible who used the Markley ballroom, rent
+free, as a convenience, John Markley grew to have a sleepy look by day,
+and lines came into his red, shaved face. He grew anxious about his
+health, and a hundred worries tightened his belt and shook his great fat
+hand, just the least in the world, and when through some gossip that his
+wife brought him from the kitchen he felt the scorn of an old friend
+burn his soul like a caustic, for many days he would brood over it.
+Finally care began to chisel down his flinty face, to cut the fat from
+his bull neck, so that the cords stood out, and, through staring in
+impotent rage and pain at the ceiling in the darkness of the night, red
+rims began to worm around his eyes. He was not sixty years old then,
+and he had lashed himself into seventy.</p>
+
+<p>However his money-cunning did not grow dull. He kept his golden touch
+and his impotent dollars piled higher and higher. The pile must have
+mocked Isabel Markley, for it could bring her nothing that she wanted.
+She stopped trying to give big parties and receptions. Her social
+efforts tapered down to little dinners for the new people in town. But
+as the dinner hour grew near she raged&mdash;so the servants said&mdash;whenever
+the telephone rang, and in the end she had to give up even the dinner
+scheme.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="gs06" id="gs06"></a>
+<img src="images/gs06.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3>As the dinner hour grew near she raged&mdash;so the servants
+said&mdash;whenever the telephone rang</h3>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>So there came a time when they began to take trips to the seashore and
+the mountains, flitting from hotel to hotel. In the office we knew when
+they changed quarters, for at each resort John Markley would see the
+reporters and give out a long interview, which was generally prefaced by
+the statement that he was a prominent Western capitalist, who had
+refused the nomination for Governor or for Senator, or for whatever
+Isabel Markley happened to think of; and papers containing these
+interviews, marked in green ink, came addressed to the office in her
+stylish, angular hand. During grand opera season one might see the
+Markleys hanging about the great hotels of Chicago or Kansas City, he a
+tired, sleepy-faced, prematurely old man, who seemed to be counting the
+hours till bed-time, and she a tailored, rather overfed figure, with a
+freshly varnished face and unhealthy, bright, bold eyes, walking
+slightly ahead of her shambling companion, looking nervously about her
+in search of some indefinite thing that was gone from her life.</p>
+
+<p>One day John Markley shuffled into our office, bedizened as usual, and
+fumbled in his pocket for several minutes before he could find the copy
+of the <i>Mexican Herald</i> containing the news of his boy's death in Vera
+Cruz. He had passed the time of life for tears, yet when he asked us to
+reprint the item he said sadly: "The old settlers will remember
+him&mdash;maybe. I don't know whether they will or not." He seemed a pitiful
+figure as he dragged himself out of the office&mdash;so stooped and weazened,
+and so utterly alone, but when he turned around and came back upon some
+second thought, his teeth snapped viciously as he snarled: "Here, give
+it back. I guess I don't want it printed. They don't care for me,
+anyway."</p>
+
+<p>The boys in his office told the boys in our office that the old man was
+cross and petulant that year, and there is no doubt that Isabel Markley
+was beginning to find her mess of pottage bitter. The women around town,
+who have a wireless system of collecting news, said that the Markleys
+quarrelled, and that she was cruel to him. Certain it is that she began
+to feed on young boys, and made the old fellow sit up in his evening
+clothes until impossible hours, for sheer appearance sake, while his bed
+was piled with the wraps of boys and girls from what our paper called
+the Hand-holders' Union, who were invading the Markley home, eating the
+Markley olives and canned lobster, and dancing to the music of the
+Markley pianola. Occasionally a young travelling man would be spoken of
+by these young people as Isabel Markley's fellow.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Markley began to make fun of her husband to the girls of the
+third-rate dancing set whose mothers let them go to her house; also, she
+reviled John Markley to the servants. It was known in the town that she
+nicknamed him the "Goat." As for Markley, the fight was gone from him,
+and his whole life was devoted to getting money. That part of his brain
+which knew the accumulative secret kept its tireless energy; but his
+emotions, his sensibilities, his passions seemed to be either atrophied
+or burned out, and, sitting at his desk in the back room of the Mortgage
+Company's offices, he looked like a busy spider spinning his web of gold
+around the town. It was the town theory that he and Isabel must have
+fought it out to a finish about the night sessions; for there came a
+time when he went to bed at nine o'clock, and she either lighted up and
+prepared to celebrate with the cheap people at home, or attached one of
+her young men, and went out to some impossible gathering&mdash;generally
+where there was much beer, and many risqu&eacute; things said, and the women
+were all good fellows. And thus another year flew by.</p>
+
+<p>One night, when the great house was still, John Markley grew sick and,
+in the terror of death that, his office people say, was always with him,
+rose to call for help. In the dark hall, feeling for an electric-light
+switch, he must have lost his way, for he fell down the hard oak
+stairs. It was never known how long he lay there unable to move one-half
+of his body, but his wife stood nearly an hour at the front door that
+night, and when she finally switched on the light, she and the man with
+her saw Markley lying before them with one eye shut and with half his
+face withered and dead, the other half around the open eye quivering
+with hate. He choked on an oath, and shook at her a gnarled bare arm.
+Her face was flushed, and her tongue was unsure, but she laughed a
+shrill, wicked laugh and cried: "Ah, you old goat; don't you double your
+fist at me!"</p>
+
+<p>Whereupon she shuddered away from the shaking figure at her feet and
+scurried upstairs. And the man standing in the doorway, wondering what
+the old man had heard, wakened the house, and helped to carry John
+Markley upstairs to his bed.</p>
+
+<p>It was nearly three months before he could be wheeled to his office,
+where he still sits every day, spinning his golden web and filling his
+soul with poison. They say that, helpless as he is, he may live for a
+score of years. Isabel Markley knows how old she will be then. A
+thousand times she has counted it.</p>
+
+<p>To see our town of a summer twilight, with the families riding abroad
+behind their good old nags, under the overhanging elms that meet above
+our newly-paved streets, one would not think that there could exist in
+so lovely a place as miserable a creature as John Markley is; or as
+Isabel, his wife, for that matter. The town&mdash;out beyond Main Street,
+which is always dreary and ugly with tin gorgons on the cornices&mdash;the
+town is a great grove springing from a bluegrass sod, with porch boxes
+making flecks of colour among the vines; cannas and elephant ears and
+foliage plants rise from the wide lawns; and children bloom like moving
+flowers all through the picture.</p>
+
+<p>There are certain streets, like the one past the Markley mansion, upon
+which we make it a point always to drive with our visitors&mdash;show streets
+we may as well frankly call them&mdash;and one of these leads down a wide,
+handsome street out to the college. There the town often goes in its
+best bib and tucker to hear the lecturers whom Mrs. Markley feeds. Last
+winter one came who converted Dan Gregg&mdash;once Governor, but for ten
+years best known among us as the town infidel. The lecturer explained
+how matter had probably evolved from some one form&mdash;even the elements
+coming in a most natural way from a common source. He made it plain that
+all matter is but a form of motion; that atoms themselves are divided
+into ions and corpuscles, which are merely different forms of electrical
+motion, and that all this motion seems to tend to one form, which is the
+spirit of the universe. Dan said he had found God there, and, although
+the pious were shocked, in our office we were glad that Dan had found
+his God anywhere. While we were sitting in front of the office one fine
+evening this spring, looking at the stars and talking of Dan Gregg's God
+and ours, we began to wonder whether or not the God that is the spirit
+of things at the base of this material world might not be indeed the
+spirit that moves men to execute His laws. Men in the colleges to-day
+think they have found the moving spirit of matter; but do they know His
+wonderful being as well as the old Hebrew prophets knew it who wrote
+the Psalms and the Proverbs and the wisdom of the Great Book. That
+brought us back to the old question about John Markley. Was it God,
+moving in us, that punished Markley "by the rod of His wrath," that used
+our hearts as wireless stations for His displeasure to travel through,
+or was it the chance prejudice of a simple people? It was late when we
+broke up and left the office&mdash;Dan Gregg, Henry Larmy, the reporter, and
+old George. As we parted, looking up at the stars where our ways divided
+out under the elms, we heard, far up Exchange Street, the clatter of the
+pianola in the Markley home, and saw the high windows glowing like lost
+souls in the night.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VIII" id="VIII"></a>VIII</h2>
+
+<h3>"A Bundle of Myrrh"</h3>
+
+
+<p>One of the first things that a new reporter on our paper has to learn is
+the kinology of the town. Until he knows who is kin to whom, and how, a
+reporter is likely at any time to make a bad break. Now, the kinology of
+a country town is no simple proposition. After a man has spent ten years
+writing up weddings, births and deaths, attending old settlers' picnics,
+family reunions and golden weddings, he may run into a new line of kin
+that opens a whole avenue of hitherto unexplainable facts to him,
+showing why certain families line up in the ward primaries, and why
+certain others are fighting tooth and toe-nail.</p>
+
+<p>The only person in town who knows all of our kinology&mdash;and most of that
+in the county, where it is a separate and interminable study&mdash;is "Aunt"
+Martha Merryfield. She has lived here since the early fifties, and was a
+Perkins, one of the eleven Perkins children that grew up in town; and
+the Perkinses were related by marriage to the Mortons, of whom there are
+over fifty living adult descendants on the town-site now. So one begins
+to see why she is called "Aunt Martha" Merryfield. She is literally aunt
+to over a hundred people here, and the habit of calling her aunt has
+spread from them to the rest of the population.</p>
+
+<p>She lives alone in the big brick house on the hill, though her children
+and grandchildren and great-grandchildren are in and out all day and
+most of the night, so that she is not at all lonesome. She is the only
+person to whom we can look for accurate information about local history,
+and when a man dies who has been at all prominent in affairs of the town
+or county or State, we always call up "Aunt" Martha on the 'phone, or
+send a reporter to her, to learn the real printable and unprintable
+truth about him. She knows whom he "went with" before he was married,
+and why they "broke off," and what crowd he associated with in the early
+days; how he got his money, and what they used to "say" about him. If a
+family began putting on frills, she can tell how the head of the house
+got his start by stealing "aid" sent to the grasshopper sufferers and
+opening a store with the goods. If a woman begins speaking of the hired
+girl as her "maid," contrary to the vernacular rules of the town, Aunt
+Martha does not hesitate to bring up the subject of the flour-sack
+underwear which the woman wore when she was a girl during the drought of
+'60.</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Martha used to bring us flowers for the office table, and it was
+her delight to sit down and take out her corn-knife&mdash;as she called
+it&mdash;and go after the town shams. She has promised a dozen times to write
+an article for the paper, which she says we dare not print, entitled
+"Self-made Women I Have Known." She says that men were always bragging
+about how they had clerked, worked on farms, dug ditches and whacked
+mules across the plains before the railroads came; but that their wives
+insisted that they were princesses of the royal blood. She says she is
+going to include in her Self-made Women only those who have worked out,
+and she maintains that we will be surprised at the list.</p>
+
+<p>Her particular animosity in the town is Mrs. Julia Neal Worthington.
+Aunt Martha told us that when Tim Neal came to town he had a brogue you
+could scrape with a knife and an "O" before his name you could hoop a
+hogshead with. "And that woman," exclaimed Aunt Martha, when she was
+under full sail, "that woman, because she has two bookcases in the front
+room and reads the book-reviews in the <i>Delineator</i>, thinks that she is
+cultured. When her folks first came to town they were as poor as Job's
+turkey, which was not to their discredit&mdash;everyone was poor in those
+days. The old man Neal was as honest an old Mick as you'd meet in a
+day's journey, or at a fair, and he used to run a lemonade and peanut
+stand down by the bank corner. But his girls, who were raised on it,
+until they began teaching school, used to refer to the peanut stand as
+'papa's hobby,' pretend that he only ran it for recreation, and say:
+'Now <i>why</i> do you suppose papa enjoys it?&mdash;We just can't get him to give
+it up!' And now Julia is president of the Woman's Federation, has
+stomach trouble, has had two operations, and is suffering untold agonies
+with acute culturitis. And yet," Aunt Martha would say through a
+beatific smile, "she's a good-enough woman in many ways, and I wouldn't
+say anything against her for the world."</p>
+
+<p>Once Miss Larrabee, the society editor, brought back this from a visit
+to Aunt Martha: "I know, my dear, that your paper says there are no
+cliques and crowds in society in this town, and that it is so
+democratic. But you and I know the truth. We know about society in this
+town. We know that if there ever was a town that looked like a side of
+bacon&mdash;streak of lean and streak of fat all the way down&mdash;it is this
+blessed place. Crowds?&mdash;why, I've lived here over fifty years and it was
+always crowds. 'Way back in the days when the boys used to pick us up
+and carry us across Elm Creek when we went to dances, there were crowds.
+The girls who crossed on the boys' backs weren't considered quite proper
+by the girls who were carried over in the boys' arms. And they didn't
+dance in the same set."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Larrabee says she looked into the elder woman's eyes to find which
+crowd Aunt Martha belonged to, when she flashed out:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, child, you needn't look at me&mdash;I did both; it depended on who was
+looking! But, as I was saying, if anyone knows about society in this
+town, I do. I went to every dance in town for the first twenty-five
+years, and I have made potato salad to pay the salary of every Methodist
+preacher for the past thirty years, and I ought to know what I'm talking
+about." There was fire enough to twinkle in her old eyes as she spoke.
+"Beginning at the bottom, one may say that the base of society is the
+little tads, ranging down from what your paper calls the Amalgamated
+Hand-holders, to the trundle-bed trash just out of their kissing games.
+It's funny to watch the little tads grow up and pair off and see how
+bravely they try to keep in the swim. I've seen ten grandchildren get
+out and I've a great-grandchild whose mother will be pushing her out
+before she is old enough to know anything. When young people get married
+they all say they're not going to be old-marriedy, and they hang on to
+the dances and little hops until the first baby comes. Then they don't
+get out to the dances much, but they join a card club."</p>
+
+<p>In her dissertation on the social progress of young married people, Aunt
+Martha explained that after the second year the couple go only to the
+big dances where everyone is invited, but they pay more attention to
+cards. The young mother begins going to afternoon parties, and has the
+other young married couples in for dinner. Then, before they know it,
+they are invited out to receptions and parties, where little tads
+preside at the punch-bowls and wait on table, and are seen and not
+heard. Aunt Martha continued:</p>
+
+<p>"By the time the second baby comes they take one of two shoots&mdash;either
+go in for church socials or edge into a whist club. In this town, I
+think, on the whole, that the Congregational Whist Club is younger and
+gayer than the Presbyterian Whist Club, but in most towns the
+Episcopalians have the really fashionable club. Of course, these clubs
+never call themselves by the church names, but they are generally made
+up along church lines&mdash;except we poor Methodists and Baptists&mdash;we have
+to divide ourselves out among the others to keep the preacher from going
+after us."</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Martha's eyes danced with the mischief in her heart as she went on:
+"Now, if after the second baby comes, the young parents begin to feel
+like saving money, and being someone at the bank, they join the church
+and go in for church socials, which don't take so much time or money as
+the whist clubs and receptions. The babies keep coming and the young
+people keep on improving their home, moving from the little house to the
+big house; the young man's name begins to creep into lists of directors
+at the bank, and they are invited out to the big parties, and she goes
+to all the stand-up and 'gabble-gobble-and-git' receptions. As they grow
+older, they are asked with the preachers and widows for the first night
+of a series of parties at a house to get them out of the way and over
+with before the young folks come later in the week. When they get to a
+point where the young folks laugh and clap their hands at little pudgy
+daddy when he dances 'Old Dan Tucker' at the big parties in the brick
+houses, it's all up with them&mdash;they are old married folks, and the next
+step takes them to the old folks' whist club, where the bankers' wives
+and the insurance widows run things. That is the inner sanctuary, the
+holy of holies in the society of this town."</p>
+
+<p>After a pause Aunt Martha added: "You'd think, to hear these chosen
+people talk, that the benighted souls who go to missionary teas, Woman's
+Relief Corps chicken-pie suppers, and get up bean-dinners for the church
+on election day, live on another planet. Yet I guess we're all made of
+the same kind of mud.</p>
+
+<p>"That reminds me of the Winthrops. When they came here, back in the
+sixties, it happened to be Fourth of July, and the band was out playing
+in the grove by the depot. Mrs. Winthrop got off the train quite grandly
+and bowed and waved her hand to the band, and the Judge walked over and
+gave the band leader five dollars. They said afterward that they felt
+deeply touched to find a raw Western town so appreciative of the coming
+of an old New England family, that it greeted them with a band. Before
+Mrs. Winthrop had been here three weeks she called on me, 'as one of the
+first ladies of the town,' she said, to organise and see if we couldn't
+break up the habit of the hired girls eating at the table with the
+family." Aunt Martha smiled and her eyes glittered as she added: "After
+they organised, the titled aristocracy of this town did their own work
+and sent the washing out for a year or more."</p>
+
+<p>The talk drifted back to the old days, and Aunt Martha got out her
+photograph-album and showed Miss Larrabee the pictures of those whom she
+called "the rude forefathers of the village," in their quaint old
+costumes of war-times. In the book were baby pictures of middle-aged
+men and women, and youthful pictures of the old men and women of
+the town. But most interesting of all to Miss Larrabee were the
+daguerreotypes&mdash;quaint old portraits in their little black boxes, framed
+in plush and gilt. The old woman brought out picture after picture&mdash;her
+husband's among the others, in a broad beaver hat with a high choker
+taken back in Brattleboro before he came to Kansas. She looked at it for
+a long minute, and then said gaily to Miss Larrabee: "He was a handsome
+boy&mdash;quite the beau of the State when we were married&mdash;Judge of the
+District Court at twenty-four." She held the case in her hand and went
+on opening the others. She came to one showing a moustached and goateed
+youth in a captain's uniform&mdash;a slim, straight, soldierly figure. As she
+passed it to Miss Larrabee Aunt Martha looked sidewise at her, saying:
+"You wouldn't know him now. Yet you see him every day, I suppose." After
+the girl shook her head, the elder woman continued: "Well, that's Jim
+Purdy, taken the day he left for the army." She sighed as she said: "Let
+me see, I guess I haven't happened to run across Jim for ten years or
+more, but he didn't look much like this then. Poor old Jim, they tell me
+he's not having the best time in the world. Someway, all the old-timers
+that are living seem to be hard up, or in bad health, or unhappy. It
+doesn't seem right, after what they've done and what they've gone
+through. But I guess it's the way of life. It's the way life gets even
+with us for letting us outlive the others. Compensation&mdash;as Emerson
+says."</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="gs07" id="gs07"></a>
+<img src="images/gs07.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3>"Jim Purdy, taken the day he left for the army"</h3>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Miss Larrabee came down the lilac-bordered walk from the stately old
+brick house, carrying a great bouquet of sweet peas and nasturtiums and
+poppies and phlox, a fleeting memory of some association she had in her
+mind of Uncle Jimmy Purdy and Aunt Martha kept tantalising her. She
+could not get it out of the background of her consciousness, and yet it
+refused to form itself into a tangible conception. It was associated
+vaguely with her own grandmother, as though, infinite ages ago, her
+grandmother had said something that had lodged the idea in the girl's
+head.</p>
+
+<p>When the occasion made itself, Miss Larrabee asked her grandmother the
+question that puzzled her, and learned that Martha Perkins and Jim Purdy
+were lovers before the war, and that she was wearing his ring when he
+went away&mdash;thinking he would be back in a few weeks with the Rebellion
+put down. In his first fight he was shot in the head and was in the
+hospital for a year, demented; when he was put back in the ranks he was
+captured and his name given out among the killed. In prison his dementia
+returned and he stayed there two years. Then for a year after his
+exchange he followed the Union Army like a dumb creature, and not until
+two years after the close of the war did the poor fellow drift home
+again, as one from the dead&mdash;all uncertain of the past and unfitted for
+the future.</p>
+
+<p>And his sweetheart drank her cup alone. The old settlers say that she
+never flinched nor shrank, but for years, even after her marriage to the
+Judge, the young woman kept a little grave covered with flowers, that
+bore the simple words: "Martha, aged five months and three days." They
+say that she did not lose her courage and that she bent her head for no
+one. But the war brought her neighbours so many sorrows that Martha's
+trouble was forgotten, the years passed and only the old people of the
+community know about the little grave beside the Judge's and their
+little boy's. Jimmy Purdy grew into a smooth-faced, unwrinkled, rather
+blank-eyed old man, clerking in the bookstore for a time, serving as
+City Clerk for twenty years, and later living at the Palace Hotel on his
+pension. He worshipped Aunt Martha's children and her children's
+children, but he never saw her except when they met in some casual way.
+She was married when he came back from the war, and if he ever knew her
+agony he never spoke of it. Whenever he talked of the events before the
+war, his face wore a troubled, baffled look, and he did not seem to
+remember things clearly. He was a simple old man with a boyish face and
+heart who was confused by the world growing old around him.</p>
+
+<p>One day they found him dead in his bed. And Miss Larrabee hurried out to
+Aunt Martha's to get the facts about his life for the paper. It was a
+bright October morning as she went up the walk to the old brick house,
+and she heard someone playing on the piano, rolling the chords after the
+grandiose manner of pianists fifty years ago. A voice seemed to be
+singing an old ballad. As the girl mounted the steps the voice came more
+distinctly to her. It was quavering and unsure, but with a moan of
+passion the words came forth:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"As I lay my heart on your dead heart,&mdash;Douglas, Douglas, Douglas,
+tender and true&mdash;&mdash;"</p></div>
+
+<p>Suddenly the voice choked in a groan. As she stood by the open door Miss
+Larrabee could see in the darkened room the figure of an old woman
+racked with sobs on a great mahogany sofa, and on the floor beside her
+lay a daguerreotype, glinting its gilt and glass through the gloom.</p>
+
+<p>The girl tiptoed across the porch, down the steps through the garden and
+out of the gate.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IX" id="IX"></a>IX</h2>
+
+<h3>Our Loathed but Esteemed Contemporary</h3>
+
+
+<p>No one remembers a time when there were not two newspapers in our
+town&mdash;generally quarrelling with each other. Though musicians and
+doctors and barbers are always jealous of their business rivals, and
+though they show their envy more or less to their discredit, editors are
+so jealous of one another, and so shameless about it, that the
+profession has been made a joke. Certainly in our town there is a
+deep-seated belief that if one paper takes one side of any question,
+even so fair a proposition as street-paving, the other will take the
+opposing side.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, our paper has not been contrary; but we have noticed a good
+many times&mdash;every one in the office has noticed it, the boys and girls
+in the back-office, and the boys and girls in the front-office&mdash;that
+whenever we take a stand for anything, say for closing the stores at
+six o'clock, the General swings the <i>Statesman</i> into line against it. If
+he has done it once he has done it fifty times in the last ten years;
+and, though we have often felt impelled to oppose some of the schemes
+which he has brought forward, it has been because they were bad for the
+town, and perhaps because, even though they did seem plausible, we knew
+that the unscrupulous gang that was behind these schemes would in some
+way turn them into a money-making plot to rob the people. We never could
+see that justification in the <i>Statesman</i>'s position. To us it seemed
+merely pigheadedness. But the passing years are teaching us to
+appreciate the General better, and each added year is seeming to make us
+more tolerant of his shortcomings.</p>
+
+<p>Counting in the three years he was in the army, he has been running the
+<i>Statesman</i> for forty-five years, and for thirty-five years he was
+master of the field. For thirty years this town was known as General A.
+Jackson Durham's town. He ran the county Republican conventions, and
+controlled the five counties next to ours, so that, though he could
+never go to Congress himself, on account of his accumulation of enemies,
+he always named the successful candidate from the district, and for a
+generation held undisturbed the selection of post-masters within his
+sphere of influence. In State politics he was more powerful than any
+Congressman he ever made. Often he came down to the State Convention
+with blood in his eye after the political scalp of some politician who
+had displeased him, and the fight he made and the disturbance he
+started, gave him the name of Old Bull Durham. On such occasions, he
+would throw back his head, shut his eyes and roar his wrath at his
+opponents in a most disquieting manner, and when he returned home,
+whether he had won or lost his fight, his paper would bristle for two or
+three weeks with rage, and his editorial page would be full of lurid
+articles written in short exclamatory sentences, pocked with italics,
+capital letters and black-faced lines.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="gs08" id="gs08"></a>
+<img src="images/gs08.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3>He advertised the fact that he was a good hater by
+showing callers at his office his barrel</h3>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>For General A. Jackson Durham was a fire-eater and was proud of it. He
+advertised the fact that he was a good hater by showing his barrel to
+callers at his office. In that barrel he had filed away every
+disreputable thing that he had been able to find against friend or foe,
+far or near, and when the friend became a foe, or the foe became
+troublesome, the General opened his barrel. He kept also an office
+blacklist, on which were written the names of the men in town that were
+never to be printed in the <i>Statesman</i>. When we established our little
+handbill of a newspaper, he made all manner of fun of our "dish-rag," as
+he called it, and insisted on writing so much about our paper that
+people read it to see what we had to say. Other papers had made the
+mistake of replying to the General in kind, and people had soon tired of
+the quarrel and dropped the new quarrelling paper for the old one. The
+State never had seen the General's equal as a wrangler; but we did not
+fight back, and there was only a one-sided quarrel for the people to
+tire of. We grew and got a foothold in the town, but the General never
+admitted it. He does not admit it now, though his paper has been cut
+down time and again, and is no larger than our little dish-rag was in
+the beginning. But he still maintains his old assumption of the power
+that departed years ago. He walked proudly out of the County Convention
+the day that it rode over him, and he still begins the names of the new
+party leaders in the county in small letters to show his contempt for
+them.</p>
+
+<p>The day of his downfall in the County Convention marked the beginning of
+his decline in State politics. When it was known that his county was
+against him, people ceased to fear him and in time new leaders came in
+the State whom he did not know even by sight; but the General did not
+recognise them as leaders. To him they were interlopers. He sent his
+paper regularly to the old leaders, who had been shoved aside as he had
+been, and wrote letters to them urging them to arouse the people to
+throw off the chains of bossdom. Five years ago he and a number of
+lonesome and forgotten ones, who formerly ruled the State with an iron
+hand, and whose arrogance had cost the party a humiliating defeat,
+organised the "Anti-Boss League," and held semi-annual conventions at
+the capital. They made long speeches and issued long proclamations, and
+called vehemently upon the people to rend their chains, but some way the
+people didn't heed the call, and the General and his boss-busters, as
+they were called, began to have hard work getting their "calls" and
+"proclamations" and "addresses" into the city papers. The reporters
+referred to them as the Ancient Order of Has-Beens, and wounded the
+General's pride by calling him Past Master of the Grand Lodge of Hons.
+He came home from the meeting of the boss-busters at which this insult
+had been heaped upon him and bellowed like a mad bull for six months,
+using so much space in his paper that there was no room at all for local
+news.</p>
+
+<p>In the General's idea of what a newspaper should contain; news does not
+come first, and he does not mind crowding it out. He believes that a
+newspaper should stand for "principles." The <i>Statesman</i> was started
+during the progress of the Civil War, when issues were news, and the
+General has never been able to realize that in times of peace people buy
+a newspaper for its news and not for its opinions. He never could
+understand our attitude toward what he called "principles." When the
+town was for free silver, we were for the gold standard, and we never
+exerted ourselves particularly for a high tariff, and when the General
+saw our paper grow in spite of its heresies, he was amazed, and
+expressed his amazement in columns of vitriolic anger. Because we often
+ignored "issues" and "principles" and "great basic and fundamental
+ideas," as he called his contentions on the silver and tariff questions,
+for lists of delegates at conventions, names of pupils at the county
+institute, and winners of prizes at the fair, he was filled with alarm
+for the future of the noble calling of journalism.</p>
+
+<p>Long ago we quit making fun of him. One day we wrote an article
+referring to him as "the old man," and it was gossiped among the
+printers that he was cut to the heart. He did not reply to that, and
+although a few days later he referred to us as thieves and villains, we
+never had the heart to tease him again, and now every one around the
+office has instructions to put "General" before his name whenever it is
+used. Probably this cheers him up. At least it should do so, for in
+spite of his pride and his much advertised undying wrath, he is in truth
+a tender-hearted old man, and has never been disloyal to the town. It is
+the apple of his eye. His fierceness has always been more for
+publication than as an evidence of good faith. He likes to think that he
+is unforgiving and relentless, but he has a woman's heart. He fought the
+renomination of Grant for a third term most bitterly, but when the old
+commander died, the boys in the <i>Statesman</i> office say that Durham
+sniffled gently while he wrote the obituary, and when he closed with the
+words "Poor Grant," he laid his head on the table and his frame shook in
+real sorrow.</p>
+
+<p>Most of the subscribers have left his paper, and few of the advertisers
+use it, but what seems to hurt him worst is his feeling that the town
+has gone back on him. He has given all of his life to this town; he has
+spent thousands of dollars to promote its growth; he has watched every
+house on the town-site rise, and has made an item in his paper about it;
+he has written up the weddings of many of the grandmothers and
+grandfathers of the town; he has chronicled the birth of their children
+and children's children. The old scrapbooks are filled with kind things
+that the General has written. Old men and old women scan these wrinkled
+pages with eyes that have lost their lustre, and on the rusty clippings
+pasted there fall many tears. In this book many a woman reads the little
+verse below the name of a child whom only she and God remember. In some
+other scrapbook a man, long since out of the current of life, reads the
+story of his little triumph in the world; in the family Bible is a
+clipping from the <i>Statesman</i>&mdash;yellow and crisp with years&mdash;that tells
+of a daughter's wedding and the social glory that descended upon the
+house for that one great day. So, as the General goes about the streets
+of the town, in his shiny long frock-coat and his faded campaign hat,
+men do not laugh at him, nor do they hate him. He is the old buffalo,
+horned out of the herd.</p>
+
+<p>The profession of newspaper making is a young man's profession. The time
+will come when over at our office there will be a shrinkage. Even now
+our leading citizens never go away from town and talk to other newspaper
+men that they do not say that if someone would come over here and start
+a bright, spicy newspaper he could drive us out of town and make money.
+The best friends we have, when they talk to newspaper men in other towns
+are not above saying that our paper is so generally hated that it would
+be no trouble to put it out of business. That is what people said of the
+General in the eighties. They do not say it now.</p>
+
+<p>For the fight is over with him. And he is walking on an old battlefield,
+reviewing old victories, not knowing that another contest is waging
+further on. Sometimes the boys in the <i>Statesman</i> office get their money
+Saturday night, and sometimes they do not. If they do not, the General
+grandly issues "orders" on the grocery stores. Then he takes his pen in
+hand and writes a stirring editorial on the battle of Cold Harbor, and
+closes by enquiring whether the country is going to forget the grand
+principles that inspired men in those trying days.</p>
+
+<p>In the days when the <i>Statesman</i> was a power in the land, editorials
+like this were widely quoted. He was department commander of the G. A.
+R. at a time when such a personage was as important in our State as the
+Governor. The General's editorials on pensions were read before the
+Pensions Committee in Congress and had much weight there, and even in
+the White House the General's attitude was reckoned with. When he
+rallied the old soldiers to any cause the earth trembled, but now the
+General's editorials pass unheeded. When he calls to "the men who
+defended this country in one great crisis to rise and rescue her again,"
+he does not understand that he is speaking to a world of ghosts, and
+that his "clarion note" falls on empty air. The old boys whom he would
+arouse are sleeping; only he and a little handful survive. Yet to him
+they still live; to him their power is still invincible&mdash;if they would
+but rally to the old call. He believes that some day they will rally,
+and that the world, which is now going sadly wrong, will be set right.
+With his hands clasped behind him, looking through his steel-rimmed
+glasses, from under his shaggy brows, he walks through a mad world,
+waiting for it to return to reason. In his fiery black eyes one may see
+a puzzled look as he views the bewildering show. He is confused, but
+defiant. His head is still high; he has no thought of surrender. So, day
+after day, he riddles the bedlam about him with his broadsides, in the
+hourly hope of victory.</p>
+
+<p>It was only last week that the General was in Jim Bolton's livery stable
+office asking Jim if he had any old ledgers, that the <i>Statesman</i> office
+might have. He explained that he tore off their covers, cut them up and
+used the unspoiled sheets for copy-paper. In Bolton's office he met a
+farmer from the Folcraft neighbourhood in the southern end of the
+county, who hadn't seen the General for half-a-dozen years. "Why&mdash;hello
+General," exclaimed the farmer with unconcealed surprise, as though
+addressing one risen from the dead. "You still around here? What are you
+doing now?" The old man tucked the ledger under his arm, straightened up
+with great dignity, and tried not to wince under the blow. He put one
+hand in his shiny, frayed, greenish-black frock-coat, and replied with
+quiet dignity, "I am following my profession, sir&mdash;that of a
+journalist." And after fixing the farmer with his piercing black eyes
+for a moment, the General turned away and was gone.</p>
+
+<p>When we do something to displease him, he turns all his guns on us,
+though probably his foreman has to borrow paper from our office to get
+the <i>Statesman</i> out. The General regards us as his natural prey and his
+foreman regards our paper stock as his natural forage&mdash;but they use so
+little that we do not mind.</p>
+
+<p>Once a new bookkeeper in our office saw the General's old account for
+paper. She sent the General a statement, and another, and in the third
+she put the words: "Please remit." The day after he had received the
+insult the General stalked grandly into the office with the amount of
+money required by the bookkeeper. He put it down without a word and
+walked over to the desk where the proprietor was working.</p>
+
+<p>"Young man," said the General, as he rapped with his cane on the desk.
+"I was talking to-day with a gentleman from Norwalk, Ohio, who knew your
+father. Yes, sir; he knew your father, and speaks highly of him, sir. I
+am surprised to hear, sir, that your father was a perfect gentleman,
+sir. Good-morning, sir."</p>
+
+<p>And with that the General moved majestically out of the office.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="X" id="X"></a>X</h2>
+
+<h3>A Question of Climate</h3>
+
+
+<p>Colonel Morrison had three initials, so the town naturally called him
+"Alphabetical" Morrison, and dropped the "Colonel." He came to our part
+of the country in an early day&mdash;he used to explain that they caught him
+in the trees, when he was drinking creek water, eating sheep-sorrel, and
+running wild with a buffalo tail for a trolley, and that the first thing
+they did, after teaching him to eat out of a plate, was to set him at
+work in the grading gang that was laying out the Cottonwood and Walnut
+Rivers and putting the limestone in the hills. He was one of the
+original five patriots who laid out the Corn Belt Railroad from the
+Mississippi to the Pacific, and was appointed one of that committee to
+take the matter to New York for the inspection of capitalists&mdash;and be it
+said to the credit of Alphabetical Morrison that he was the only person
+in the crowd with money enough to pay the ferryman when he reached the
+Missouri River, though he had only enough to get himself across. But in
+spite of that the road was built, and though it missed our town, it was
+because we didn't vote the bonds, though old Alphabetical went through
+the county, roaring in the schoolhouses, bellowing at the crossroads,
+and doing all that a good, honest pair of lungs could do for the cause.
+However, he was not dismayed at his failure, and began immediately to
+organise a company to build another road. We finally secured a railroad,
+though it was only a branch.</p>
+
+<p>Over his office door he had a sign&mdash;"Land Office"&mdash;painted on the false
+board front of the building in letters as big as a cow, and the first
+our newspaper knew of him was twenty years ago, when he brought in an
+order for some stationery for the Commercial Club. At that time we had
+not heard that the town supported a Commercial Club&mdash;nor had anyone else
+heard of it, for that matter&mdash;for old Alphabetical was the president,
+and his bookkeeper, with the Miss dropped off her name, was secretary.
+But he had a wonderfully alluring letterhead printed, and seemed to get
+results, for he made a living while his competitors starved. Later, when
+he found time, he organised a real Commercial Club, and had himself
+elected president of it. He used to call meetings of the club to discuss
+things, but as no one cared much for his monologues on the future of the
+town, the attendance was often light. He issued circulars referring to
+our village as "the Queen City of the Prairies," and on the circulars
+was a map, showing that the Queen City of the Prairies was "the railroad
+axis of the West." There was one road running into the town; the others
+old Alphabetical indicated with dotted lines, and explained in a
+foot-note that they were in process of construction.</p>
+
+<p>He became possessed of a theory that a canning factory would pay in the
+Queen City of the Prairies, and the first step he took toward building
+it was to invest in a high hat, a long coat and white vest, and a pair
+of mouse-coloured trousers. With these and his theory he went East and
+returned with a condition. The canning factory went up, but the railroad
+rates went wrong, and the factory was never opened. Alphabetical
+blinked at it through his gold-rimmed glasses for a few weeks, and then
+organised a company to turn it into a woollen mill. He elected himself
+president of that company and used to bring around to our paper, notices
+of directors' meetings, and while he was in the office he would insist
+that we devoted too much space to idle gossip and not enough to the
+commercial and industrial interests of the Queen City.</p>
+
+<p>At times he would bring in an editorial that he had written himself,
+highly excitable and full of cyclonic language, and if we printed it
+Alphabetical would buy a hundred copies of the paper containing it and
+send them East. His office desk gradually filled with woodcuts and zinc
+etchings of buildings that never existed save in his own dear old head,
+and about twice a year during the boom days he would bring them around
+and have a circular printed on which were the pictures showing the
+imaginary public buildings and theoretical business thoroughfares of the
+Queen City.</p>
+
+<p>The woollen mill naturally didn't pay, and he persuaded some Eastern
+capitalists to install an electric plant in the building and put a
+streetcar line in the town, though the longest distance from one side of
+the place to the other was less than ten blocks. But Alphabetical was
+enthusiastic about it, and had the Governor come down to drive the first
+spike. It was gold-plated, and Alphabetical pulled it up and used it for
+a paper-weight in his office for many years, and it is now the only
+reminder there is in town of the street railway, except a hard ridge of
+earth over the ties in the middle of Main Street. When someone twitted
+him on the failure of the street railway he made answer:</p>
+
+<p>"Of course it failed; here I go pawing up the earth, milking out the
+surplus capital of the effete East, and building up this town&mdash;and what
+happens? Four thousand old silurian fossils comb the moss on the north
+side of 'em, with mussel shell, and turn over and yawp that old
+Alphabetical is visionary. Here I get a canning factory and nobody eats
+the goods; I hustle up a woollen factory, and the community quits
+wearing trousers; I build for them a streetcar line to haul them to and
+from their palatial residences, and what do the sun-baked human mud
+turtles do but all jump off the log into the water and hide from them
+cars like they were chariots of fire? What this town needs is not
+factories, nor railroads, nor modern improvements&mdash;Old Alphabetical can
+get them&mdash;but the next great scheme I go into is to go down to the
+river, get some good red mud, and make a few thousand men who will build
+up a town."</p>
+
+<p>It has been fifteen years and over since Colonel Morrison put on his
+long coat and high hat and started for the money markets of the East,
+seeking whom he might devour. At the close of the eighties the Colonel
+and all his tribe found that the stock of Eastern capitalists who were
+ready to pay good prices for the fine shimmering blue sky and bracing
+ozone of the West was running low. It was said in town that the Colonel
+had come to the end of his string, for not only were the doors of
+capital closed to him in the East, but newcomers had stopped looking for
+farms at home. There was nothing to do but to sit down and swap
+jack-knives with other land agents, and as they had taken most of the
+agencies for the best insurance companies while the Colonel was on
+dress parade, there was nothing left for him to do but to run for
+justice of the peace, and, being elected, do what he could to make his
+tenure for life.</p>
+
+<p>Though he was elected, more out of gratitude for what he had tried to do
+for the town than because people thought he would make a fair judge, he
+got no further than his office in popular esteem. He did not seem to
+wear well with the people in the daily run and jostle of life. During
+the forty years he has been in our town, he has lived most of the time
+apart from the people&mdash;transacting his business in the East, or locating
+strangers on new lands. He has not been one of us, and there were
+stories afloat that his shrewdness had sometimes caused him to thrust a
+toe over the dead-line of exact honesty. In the town he never helped us
+to fight for those things of which the town is really proud: our
+schools, the college, the municipal ownership of electric lights and
+waterworks, the public library, the abolition of the saloon, and all of
+the dozen small matters of public interest in which good citizens take a
+pride. Colonel Morrison was living his grand life, in his tailor-made
+clothes, while his townsmen were out with their coats off making our
+town the substantial place it is. So in his latter days he is old
+Alphabetical Morrison, a man apart from us. We like him well enough, and
+so long as he cares to be justice of the peace no one will object, for
+that is his due. But, someway, there is no talk of making him County
+Clerk; and there is a reason in everyone's mind why no party names him
+to run for County Treasurer. He has been trying hard enough for ten
+years to break through the crust of the common interests that he has so
+long ignored. One sees him at public meetings&mdash;a rather wistful-looking,
+chubby-faced old man&mdash;on the edge of the crowd, ready to be called out
+for a speech. But no one calls his name; no one cares particularly what
+old Alphabetical has to say. Long ago he said all that he can say to our
+people.</p>
+
+<p>The only thing that Alphabetical ever organised that paid was a family.
+In the early days he managed to get a home clear of indebtedness and was
+shrewd enough to keep it out of all of his transactions. Tow-headed
+Morrisons filled the schoolhouse, and twenty years later there were so
+many of his girls teaching school that the school-board had to make a
+ruling limiting the number of teachers from one family in the city
+school, in order to force the younger Morrison girls to go to the
+country to teach. In these days the girls keep the house going and
+Alphabetical is a notary public and a justice of the peace, which keeps
+his office going in the little square board building at the end of the
+street. But every day for the past ten years he has been coming to our
+office for his bundle of old newspapers. These he reads carefully, and
+sometimes what he reads inspires him to write something for our paper on
+the future of the Queen City, though much oftener his articles are
+retrospective. He is the president of the Old Settlers' Society, and
+once or twice a year he brings in an obituary which he has written for
+the family of some of the old-timers.</p>
+
+<p>One would think that an idler would be a nuisance in a busy place, but,
+on the contrary, we all like old Alphabetical around our office. For he
+is an old man who has not grown sour. His smooth, fat face has not been
+wrinkled by the vinegar of failure, and the noise that came from his
+lusty lungs in the old days is subsiding. But he has never forgiven
+General Durham, of the <i>Statesman</i>, for saying of a fight between
+Alphabetical and another land agent back in the sixties that "those who
+heard it pronounced it the most vocal engagement they had ever known."
+That is why he brings his obituaries to us; that is why he does us the
+honour of borrowing papers from us; and that is why, on a dull
+afternoon, he likes to sit in the old sway-back swivel-chair and tell us
+his theory of the increase in the rainfall, his notion about the
+influence of trees upon the hot winds, his opinion of the disappearance
+of the grasshoppers. Also, that is why we always save a circus-ticket
+for old Alphabetical, just as we save one for each of the boys in the
+office.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="gs09" id="gs09"></a>
+<img src="images/gs09.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3>He likes to sit in the old sway-back swivel-chair and
+tell us his theory of the increase in the rainfall</h3>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>One day he came into the office in a bad humour. He picked up a country
+paper, glanced it over, threw it down, kicked from under his feet a dog
+that had followed a subscriber into the room, and slammed his hat into
+the waste-basket with considerable feeling as he picked up a New York
+paper.</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;well, what's the matter with the judiciary this morning?"
+someone asked the old man.</p>
+
+<p>He did not reply at once, but turned his paper over and over, apparently
+looking for something to interest him. Gradually the revolutions of his
+paper became slower and slower, and finally he stopped turning the paper
+and began reading. It was ten or fifteen minutes before he spoke. When
+he put down the paper his cherubic face was beaming, and he said:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh&mdash;I know I'm a fool, but I wish the Lord had sent me to live in a
+town large enough so that every dirty-faced brat on the street wouldn't
+feel he had a right to call me 'Alphabetical'! Dammit, I've done the
+best I could! I haven't made any alarming success. I know it. There's no
+need of rubbing it in on me."&mdash;He was silent for a time with his hands
+on his knees and his head thrown back looking at the ceiling. Almost
+imperceptibly a smile began to crack his features, and, when he turned
+his eyes to the man at the desk, they were dancing with merriment, as he
+said: "Just been reading a piece here in the <i>Sun</i> about the influence
+of climate on human endeavour. It says that in northern latitudes there
+is more oxygen in the air and folks breathe faster, and their blood
+flows faster, and that keeps their livers going. Trouble with me has
+always been climate&mdash;sluggish liver. If I had had just a little more
+oxygen floating round in my system, the woollen mill would still be
+running, the street-cars would be going, and this town would have had
+forty thousand inhabitants. My fatal mistake was one of latitude.
+But"&mdash;and he drawled out the word mockingly&mdash;"but I guess if the Lord
+had wanted me to make a town here he would have given me a different
+kind of liver!" He slapped his knees as he sighed: "This is a funny
+world, and the more you see of it the funnier it gets." The old man
+grinned complacently at the ceiling for a minute, and before getting out
+of his chair kicked his shoe-heels together merrily, wiped his glasses
+as he rose, put his bundle of papers under his arm, and left the office
+whistling an old, old-fashioned tune.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XI" id="XI"></a>XI</h2>
+
+<h3>The Casting Out of Jimmy Myers</h3>
+
+
+<p>It seemed a cruel thing to do, but we had to do it. For ours is
+ordinarily a quiet office. We have never had a libel suit. We have had
+fewer fights than most newspaper offices have, and while it hardly may
+be said that we strive to please, still in the main we try to get on
+with the people, and tell them as much truth as they are entitled to for
+ten cents a week. Naturally, we do our best to get up a sprightly paper,
+and in that the Myers boy had our idea exactly. He was industrious; more
+than that, he tried with all his might to exercise his best judgment,
+and no one could say that he was careless; yet everyone around the
+office admitted that he was unlucky. He was one of those persons who
+always have slivers on their doors, or tar on the knocker, when
+opportunity comes their way; so his stay in the office was marked by a
+series of seismic disturbances in the paper that came from under his
+desk, and yet he was in no way to blame for them.</p>
+
+<p>We took him from the college at the edge of town. He had been running
+the college paper for a year, and knew the merchants around town fairly
+well; and, since he was equipped as far as education went, he seemed to
+be a likely sort of a boy for reporter and advertising solicitor.</p>
+
+<p>One of the first things that happened to him was a mistake in an item
+about the opera house. He said that a syndicate had taken a lien on it.
+What he meant was a lease, and as he got the item from a man who didn't
+know the difference, and as the boy stuck to it that the man had said
+lien and not lease, we did not charge that up to him. A few days later
+he wrote for a town photographer a paid local criticising someone who
+was going around the county peddling picture-frames and taking orders
+for enlarged pictures. That was not so bad, but it turned out that the
+pedlar was a woman, and she came with a rawhide and camped in the office
+for two days waiting for Jimmy, while he came in and out of the back
+door, stuck his copy on the hook by stealth, and travelled only in the
+alleys to get his news. One could hardly say that he was to blame for
+that, either, as the photographer who paid for the item didn't say the
+pedlar was a woman, and the boy was no clairvoyant.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="gs10" id="gs10"></a>
+<img src="images/gs10.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3>And camped in the office for two days, looking for Jimmy</h3>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>One dull day he wrote a piece about the gang who played poker at night
+in Red Martin's room. Jimmy said he wasn't afraid of Red, and he wasn't.
+The item was popular enough, and led to a raid on the place, which
+disclosed our best advertiser sitting in the game. To suppress his name
+meant our shame before the town; to print it meant his&mdash;at our expense.
+It was embarrassing, but it wasn't exactly the boy's fault. It was just
+one of those unfortunate circumstances that come up in life. However,
+the advertiser aforesaid began to hate the boy.</p>
+
+<p>He must have been used to injustice all his life, for there was a
+vertical line between his eyes that marked trouble. The line deepened as
+he went further and further into the newspaper business; for, generally
+speaking, a person who is unlucky has less to fear handling dynamite
+than he has writing local items on a country paper.</p>
+
+<p>A few days after the raid on the poker-room Jimmy, who had acquired a
+particularly legible hand, wrote: "The hem of her skirt was trimmed with
+pink crushed roses," and he was in no way to blame for the fact that the
+printer accidentally put an "h" for a "k" in skirt, though the woman's
+husband chased Jimmy into a culvert under Main Street and kept him there
+most of the forenoon, while the cheering crowd informed the injured
+husband whenever Jimmy tried to get out of either end of his prison.</p>
+
+<p>The printer that made the mistake bought Jimmy a new suit of clothes, we
+managed to print an apology that cooled the husband's wrath, and for ten
+days, or perhaps two weeks, the boy's life was one round of joy.
+Everything was done promptly, accurately and with remarkable
+intelligence. He whistled at his work and stacked up more copy than the
+printers could set up in type. No man ever got in or out of town without
+having his name in our paper. Jimmy wrote up a railroad bond election
+meeting so fairly that he pleased both sides, and reported a murder
+trial so well that the lawyers for each side kept the boy's pockets full
+of ten-cent cigars. The vertical wrinkle was fading from his forehead,
+when one fine summer morning he brought in a paid item from a hardware
+merchant, and went blithely out to write up the funeral of the wife of a
+prominent citizen. He was so cheerful that day that it bothered him.</p>
+
+<p>He told us in confidence that he never felt festive and gay that
+something didn't happen. He was not in the building that evening when
+the paper went to press, but after it was printed and the carriers had
+left the office he came in, singing "She's My Sweetheart, I'm Her Beau,"
+and sat down to read the paper.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly the smile on his face withered as with frost, and he handed the
+paper across the table to the bookkeeper, who read this item:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>DIED&mdash;MRS. LILLIAN GILSEY.</p>
+
+<p>Prepare for the hot weather, my good woman. There is only one way
+now; get a gasoline stove, of Hurley &amp; Co., and you need not fear
+any future heat.</p></div>
+
+<p>And it wasn't Jimmy's fault. The foreman had merely misplaced a head
+line, but that explanation did not satisfy the bereaved family.</p>
+
+<p>Jimmy was beginning to acquire a reputation as a joker. People refused
+to believe that such things just happened. They did not happen before
+Mr. James Myers came to the paper&mdash;why should they begin with his coming
+and continue during his engagement? Thus reasoned the comforters of the
+Gilseys, and those interested in our downfall. The next day the
+<i>Statesman</i> wrote a burning editorial denouncing us "for an utter lack
+of all sense of common decency" that permitted us "to violate the
+sacredest feeling known to the human heart for the sake of getting a
+ribald laugh from the unthinking." We were two weeks explaining that the
+error was not the boy's fault. People assumed that the mistake could not
+have occurred in any well-regulated printing office, and it didn't seem
+probable that it could occur&mdash;yet there it was. But Jimmy wasn't to
+blame. He suffered more than we did&mdash;more than the bereaved family did.
+He went unshaven and forgot to trim his cuffs or turn his collar. He
+hated to go on the streets for news, and covered with the office
+telephone as much of his beat as possible.</p>
+
+<p>The summer wore away and the dog days came. The Democratic State
+campaign was about to open in our town, and orators and statesmen
+assembled from all over the Missouri valley. There was a lack of flags
+at the dry-goods stores. The Fourth of July celebration had taken all
+the stock. The only materials available were some red bunting, some
+white bunting, and some blue bunting with stars dotted upon it. With
+this bunting the Committee on Reception covered the speakers' stand,
+wrapping the canopy under which the orators stood in the solid colours
+and the star-spangled blue. It was beautiful to see, and the pride of
+the window-dresser of the Golden Eagle Clothing Store. But the old
+soldiers who walked by nudged one another and smiled.</p>
+
+<p>About noon of the day of the speaking the City Clerk, who wore the
+little bronze button of the G. A. R., asked Jimmy if he didn't want
+someone to take care of the Democratic meeting. Jimmy, who hated
+politics, was running his legs off to get the names of the visitors, and
+was glad to have the help. He turned in the contributed copy without
+reading it, as he had done with the City Clerk's articles many times
+before, and this is what greeted his horrified eyes when he read the
+paper:</p>
+
+<h3>"UNDER THE STARS &amp; BARS"</h3>
+
+
+<h4>Democracy Opens Its State Campaign Under the<br />
+Rebel Emblem To-day<br />
+A Fitting Token<br />
+Treasonable Utterances Have a Proper Setting</h4>
+
+
+<p>And then followed half a column of most violent abuse of the Democrats
+who had charge of the affair. Jimmy did not appear on the street that
+night, but the next morning, when he came down, the office was crowded
+with indignant Democrats "stopping the paper."</p>
+
+<p>We began to feel uneasy about Jimmy. So long as his face was in the
+eclipse of grief there seemed to be a probability that we would have no
+trouble, but as soon as his moon began to shine we were nervous.</p>
+
+<p>Jimmy had a peculiar knack of getting up little stories of the town&mdash;not
+exactly news stories, but little odd bits that made people smile without
+rancour when they saw their names in the quaintly turned items. One day
+he wrote up a story of a little boy whose mother asked him where he got
+a dollar that he was flourishing on his return with his father from a
+visit in Kansas City. The little boy's answer was that his father gave
+it to him for calling him uncle when any ladies were around. It was
+merrily spun, and knowing that it would not make John Lusk, the boy's
+father, mad, we printed it, and Jimmy put at the head of it a foolish
+little verse of Kipling's. Miss Larrabee, at the bottom of her society
+column, announced the engagement of two prominent young people in town.
+The Saturday paper was unusually readable. But when Jimmy came in after
+the paper was out he found Miss Larrabee in tears, and the foreman
+leaning over the counter laughing so that he couldn't speak. It wasn't
+Jimmy's fault. The foreman had done it&mdash;by the mere transposition of a
+little brass rule separating the society news from Jimmy's story with
+the Kipling verse at the head of it. The rule tacked the Kipling verse
+onto Miss Larrabee's article announcing the engagement. Here is the way
+it read:</p>
+
+<p>"This marriage, which will take place at St. Andrew's Church, will unite
+two of the most popular people in town and two of the best-known
+families in the State.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"<i>And this is the sorrowful story</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>Told as the twilight fails,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>While the monkeys are walking together,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>Holding each other's tails!</i>"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Now, Jimmy was no more to blame than Miss Larrabee, and many people
+thought, and think to this day, that Miss Larrabee did it&mdash;and did it on
+purpose. But for all that it cast clouds over the moon of Jimmy's
+countenance, and it was nearly a year before he regained his merry
+heart. He was nervous, and whenever he saw a man coming toward the
+office with a paper in his hand Jimmy would dash out of the room to
+avoid the meeting. For an hour after the paper was out the ringing of
+the telephone bell would make him start. He didn't know what was going
+to happen next.</p>
+
+<p>But as the months rolled by he became calm, and when Governor Antrobus
+died, Jimmy got up a remarkably good story of his life and achievements,
+and though there was no family left to the dear old man to buy extra
+copies, all the old settlers&mdash;who are the hardest people in the world
+to please&mdash;bought extra copies for their scrapbooks. We were proud of
+Jimmy, and assigned him to write up the funeral. That was to be a "day
+of triumph in Capua." There being no relatives to interfere, the lodges
+of the town&mdash;and the Governor was known as a "jiner"&mdash;had vied with one
+another to make the funeral the greatest rooster-feather show ever given
+in the State. The whole town turned out, and the foreman of our office,
+and everyone in the back room who could be spared, was at the Governor's
+funeral, wearing a plume, a tin sword, a red leather belt, or a sash of
+some kind. We put a tramp printer on to make up the paper, and told
+Jimmy to call by the undertaker's for a paid local which the undertaker
+had written for the paper that day.</p>
+
+<p>Jimmy's face was beaming as he snuggled up to his desk at three o'clock
+that afternoon. He said he had a great story&mdash;names of the pall-bearers,
+names of the double sextette choir, names of all the chaplains of all
+the lodges who read their rituals, names of distinguished guests from
+abroad, names of the ushers at the church. Page by page he tore off his
+copy and gave it to the tramp printer, who took it in to the machines.
+Trusting the foreman to read the proof, Jimmie rushed out to get from a
+United States Senator who was attending the funeral an interview on the
+sugar scandal, for the Kansas City <i>Star</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The rest of us did not get back from the cemetery until the carriers had
+left the office, and this is what we found:</p>
+
+<p>"The solemn moan of the organ had scarcely died away, like a quivering
+sob upon the fragrant air, when the mournful procession of citizens
+began filing past the flower-laden bier to view the calm face of their
+beloved friend and honoured townsman. In the grief-stricken hush that
+followed might be heard the stifled grief of some old comrade as he
+paused for the last time before the coffin.</p>
+
+<p>"At this particular time we desire to call the attention of our readers
+to the admirable work done by our hustling young undertaker, J. B.
+Morgan. He has been in the city but a short time, yet by his efficient
+work and careful attention to duty, he has built up an enviable
+reputation and an excellent custom among the best families of the city.
+All work done with neatness and dispatch. We strive to please.</p>
+
+<p>"When the last sad mourner had filed out, the pall-bearers took up their
+sorrowful task, and slowly, as the band played the 'Dead March in Saul,'
+the great throng assembled in the street viewed the mortal remains of
+Governor Antrobus start on their last long journey."</p>
+
+<p>Of course it wasn't Jimmy's fault. The "rising young undertaker" had
+paid the tramp printer, who made up the forms, five dollars to work his
+paid local into the funeral notice. But after that&mdash;Jimmy had to go.
+Public sentiment would no longer stand him as a reporter on the paper,
+and we gave him a good letter and sent him onward and upward. He took
+his dismissal decently enough. He realised that his luck was against
+him; he knew that we had borne with him in all patience.</p>
+
+<p>The day that he left he was instructing the new man in the ways of the
+town. Reverend Frank Milligan came in with a church notice. Jimmy took
+the notice and began marking it for the printer. As the door behind him
+opened and closed, Jimmy, with his head still in his work, called across
+the room to the new man: "That was old Milligan that just went
+out&mdash;beware of him. He will load you up with truck about himself. He
+rings in his sermons; trots around with church social notices that ought
+to be paid for, and tries to get them in free; likes to be referred to
+as doctor; slips in mean items about his congregation, if you don't
+watch him; and insists on talking religion Saturday morning when you are
+too busy to spit. More than that, he has an awful breath&mdash;cut him out;
+he will make life a burden if you don't&mdash;and if you do he will go to the
+old man with it, and say you are not treating him right."</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="gs11" id="gs11"></a>
+<img src="images/gs11.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3>Reverend Milligan came in with a church notice</h3>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>There was a rattling and a scratching on the wire partition between
+Jimmy and the door. Jimmy looked up from his work and saw the sprightly
+little figure of Parson Milligan coming over the railing like a monkey.
+He had not gone out of the door&mdash;a printer had come in when it opened
+and shut. And then Jimmy took his last flying trip out of the back door
+of the office, down the alley, "toward the sunset's purple rim." It was
+not his fault. He was only telling the truth&mdash;where it would do the most
+good.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XII" id="XII"></a>XII</h2>
+
+<h3>"'A Babbled of Green Fields"</h3>
+
+
+<p>Our town is set upon a hillside, rising from a prairie stream. Forty
+years ago the stream ran through a thick woodland nearly a mile wide,
+and in the woodland were stately elms, spreading walnut trees, shapely
+oaks, gaunt white sycamores, and straight, bushy hackberries, that shook
+their fruit upon the ice in spots least frequented by skaters. Along the
+draws that emptied into the stream were pawpaw trees, with their tender
+foliage, and their soft wood, which little boys delighted to cut for
+stick horses. Beneath all these trees grew a dense underbrush of
+buckeyes, blackberries, raspberries, gooseberries, and little red winter
+berries called Indian beads by the children. Wild grapevines, "poison"
+grapes, and ivies of both kinds wove the woods into a mass of summer
+green. In the clearings and bordering the wood grew the sumach, that
+flared red at the very thought of Jack Frost's coming. In these woods
+the boys of our town&mdash;many of whom have been dead these twenty
+years&mdash;used to lay their traps for the monsters of the forest, and
+trudged back from the timber before breakfast, in winter, bringing home
+redbirds, and rabbits and squirrels. Sometimes a particularly doughty
+woodsman would report that there were wildcat tracks about his trap; but
+none of us ever saw a wildcat, though Enoch Haver, whose father's father
+had heard a wildcat scream, and had taught the boy its cry, would hide
+in a hollow sycamore and screech until the little boys were terrified
+and would not go alone to their traps for days. In summer, boys, usually
+from the country, or from a neighbouring town, caught 'coons, and
+dragged them chained through alleys for our boys to see, and 'Dory Paine
+had an owl which was widely sought by other boys in the circus and
+menagerie line. The boys of our town in that day seemed to live in the
+wood and around the long millpond, though little fellows were afraid
+that lurking Indians or camping gypsies might steal them&mdash;a boy's
+superstition, which experience has proved too good to be true. They
+fared forth to the riffle below the dam, which deepens in the shade
+under the water elm; this was the pool known as "baby hole," despised of
+the ten-year-olds, who plunged into the deepest of the thicket and came
+out at the limekiln, where all day long one might hear "so-deep,
+so-deep, so-deep," and "go-round, go-round, go-round," until school
+commenced in the fall. Then the rattle of little homemade wagons, and
+the shrilling of boy voices might be heard all over the wilderness, and
+the black-stained hands of schoolboys told of the day of the walnut
+harvest. It was nearly a mile from the schoolhouse to the woods, and yet
+on winter afternoons no school-ma'am could keep the boys from using
+school hours to dig out the screw-holes and heel-plates of their boots
+before wadding them with paper. At four o'clock a troop of boys would
+burst forth from that schoolhouse so wildly that General Durham of the
+<i>Statesman</i>, whose office we used to pass with a roar, always looked up
+from his work to say: "Well, I see hell's out for noon again."</p>
+
+<p>In the spring the boys fished, and on Saturdays go, up the river or
+down, or on either side, where one would, one was never out of sight of
+some thoughtful boy, sitting either on a stump or on a log stretching
+into the stream, or squatting on a muddy bank with his worm can beside
+him, throwing a line into the deep, green, quiet water. Always it was to
+the woods one went to find a lost boy, for the brush was alive with
+fierce pirates, and blood-bound brother-hoods, and gory Indian fighters,
+and dauntless scouts. Under the red clay banks that rose above the
+sluggish stream, robbers' caves, and treasure houses, and freebooters'
+dens, were filled with boys who, five days in the week and six hours a
+day, could "<i>amo amas amat, amamus amatus amant</i>" with the best of them.
+On Sundays these same boys sat with trousers creeping above the wrinkles
+at the ankles of their copper-toed, red-topped boots, recited golden
+texts, sang "When He Cometh," and while planning worse for their own
+little brothers, read with much virtuous indignation of little Joseph's
+wicked brothers, who put him in a pit. After Sunday School was over
+these highly respected young persons walked sedately in their best
+clothes over the scenes of their Saturday crimes.</p>
+
+<p>They say the woods are gone now. Certainly the trees have been cut away
+and the underbrush burned; cornfields cover the former scenes of
+valorous achievement; but none the less the woods are there; each nook
+and cranny is as it was, despite the cornfields. Scattered about the sad
+old earth live men who could walk blindfolded over the dam, across the
+millrace, around the bend, through the pawpaw patch to the grapevine
+home of the "Slaves of the Magic Tree;" who could find their trail under
+the elder bushes in Boswell's ravine, though they should come&mdash;as they
+often come&mdash;at the dead of night from great cities and from mountain
+camps and from across seas, and fore-gather there, in the smoke and dirt
+of the rendezvous to eat their unsalted sacrificial rabbit. They can
+follow the circuitous route around John Betts's hog lot, to avoid the
+enemy, as easily to-day as they could before the axe and the fire and
+the plough made their fine pretence of changing the landscape. And when
+Joe Nevison gets ready to signal them from his seat high in the crotch
+of the oak tree across the creek, the "Slaves of the Tree" will come and
+obey their leader. They say that the tree is gone, and that Joe is gone,
+but we know better; for at night, when the Tree has called us, and we
+hear the notes from the pumpkin-stem reed, we come and sit in the
+branches beneath him and plan our raids and learn our passwords, and
+swear our vengeance upon such as cross our pathway. There may have been
+a time when men thought the Slaves of the Tree were disbanded; indeed it
+did seem so, but as the years go by, one by one they come wandering
+back, take their places in the branches of the magic tree, swing far out
+over the world like birds, and summon again the <i>genius loci</i> who has
+slept for nearly forty years.</p>
+
+<p>Of course we knew that Joe would be the first one back; he didn't care
+what they said&mdash;even then; he registered his oath that it made no
+difference what they did to him or what the others did, he would never
+desert the Tree. He commanded all of us to come back; if not by day then
+to gather in the moonlight and bring our chicken for the altar and our
+eggs for the ceremony, and he promised that he would be there. We were
+years and years in obeying Joe Nevison. Many of us have had long
+journeys to go; and some of us lead little children by the hand as we
+creep up the hollow, crawl through the gooseberry bushes, and 'coon the
+log over the chasm to our meeting place. But we are nearly all there
+now; and in the moonlight, when the corn seems to be waving over a wide
+field, a tree springs up as by magic and we take our places again as of
+old.</p>
+
+<p>Many years have passed since Marshal Furgeson stood those seven Slaves
+of the Magic Tree in line before the calaboose door and made them
+surrender the feathered cork apple-stealers and the sacred chicken
+hooks. In those years many terrors have ridden the boys who have gone
+out into the world to fight its dragons and grapple with its gorgons;
+but never have those boys felt any happiness so sweet as that which
+rested on their hearts when they heard the Marshal say, "Now you boys
+run on home&mdash;but mind you if I ever&mdash;&mdash;" and he never did&mdash;except Joe
+Nevison. Once it was for boring a hole in the depot platform and
+tapping a barrel of cider; once it was for going through a window in the
+Hustler hardware store and taking a box of pocketknives and two
+revolvers, with which to reward his gang, and finally, when the boy was
+in the midst of his teens, for breaking into the schoolhouse and burning
+the books. Joe's father always bought him off, as fathers always can buy
+boys off, when mothers go to the offended person and promise, and beg,
+and weep. So Joe Nevison grew up the town bad boy&mdash;defiant of law,
+reckless and unrestrained, with the blood of border ruffianism in his
+veins and the scorn of God and man and the love of sin in his heart. The
+week after he left town, and before he was twenty, his father paid for
+"Red" Martin's grey race horse, which disappeared the night Joe's bed
+was found empty. In those days the Nevisons had more money than most of
+the people in our town, but as the years went by they began to lose
+their property, and it was said that it went in great slices to Joe, to
+keep him out of the penitentiary.</p>
+
+<p>We knew that Joe Nevison was in the West. People from our town, who seem
+to swarm over the earth, wrote back that they had met Joe in Dodge
+City, in Leoti, in No-Man's-Land, in Texas, in Arizona&mdash;wherever there
+was trouble. Sometimes he was the hired bad man of a desert town, whose
+business it was to shoot terror into the hearts of disturbers from rival
+towns; sometimes he was a free lance&mdash;living the devil knows how&mdash;always
+dressed like a fashion-plate of the plains in high-heeled boots, wide
+felt hat, flowing necktie, flannel shirt and velvet trousers. They say
+that he did not gamble more than was common among the sporting men of
+his class, and that he never worked. Sometimes we heard of him
+adventuring as a land dealer, sometimes as a cattleman, sometimes as a
+mining promoter, sometimes as a horseman, but always as the sharper, who
+rides on the crest of the forward wave of civilization, leaving a town
+when it tears down its tents and puts up brick buildings, and then
+appearing in the next canvas community, wherein the night is filled with
+music, and the cares that infest the day are drowned in bad whiskey or
+winked out with powder and shot. And thus Joe Nevison closed his
+twenties&mdash;a desert scorpion, outcast by society and proud of it. As he
+passed into his thirties he left the smoky human crystals that formed on
+the cow trails and at the mountain gold camps. Cripple Creek became too
+effete for him, and an electric light in a tent became a target he could
+not resist; wherefore he went into the sage brush and the short grass,
+seeking others of his kind, the human rattlesnake, the ranging coyote
+and the outlawed wolf. Joe Nevison rode with the Dalton gang, raided
+ranches and robbed banks with the McWhorters and held up stages as a
+lone highwayman. At least, so men said in the West, though no one could
+prove it, and at the opening of Lawton he appeared at the head of a band
+of cutthroats, who were herded out of town by the deputy United States
+marshals before noon of the first day. Not until popular government was
+established could they get in to open their skin-game, which was better
+and safer for them than ordinary highway faring. At Lawton our people
+saw Joe and he asked about the home people, asked about the boys&mdash;the
+old boys he called them&mdash;and becoming possessed of a post-office
+address, Joe wrote a long letter to George Kirwin, the foreman of our
+office. We call him old George, because he is still under forty. Joe
+being in an expansive mood, and with more money on his clothes than he
+cared for, sent old George ten dollars to pay for a dollar Joe had
+borrowed the day he left town in the eighties. We printed Joe's letter
+in our paper, and it pleased his mother. That was the beginning of a
+regular correspondence between the rover and the home-stayer. George
+Kirwin, gaunt, taciturn, and hard-working, had grown out of the dreamy,
+story-loving boy who had been one of the Slaves of the Magic Tree and
+into a shy old bachelor who wept over "East Lynne" whenever it came to
+the town opera house, and asked for a lay-off only when Modjeska
+appeared in Topeka, or when there was grand opera at Kansas City. But he
+ruled the back office with an iron hand and superintended the Mission
+Sunday-School across the track, putting all his spare money into
+Christmas presents for his pupils. After that first letter that came
+from Joe Nevison, no one had a hint of what passed between the two men.
+But a month never went by that Joe's letter missed. When Lawton began
+to wane, Joe Nevison seemed to mend his wayward course. He moved to
+South McAlester and opened a faro game&mdash;a square game they said it
+was&mdash;for the Territory! This meant that unless Joe was hard up every man
+had his chance before the wheel. Old George took the longest trip of his
+life, when we got him a pass to South McAlester and he put on his black
+frock coat and went to visit Joe. All that we learned from him was that
+Joe "had changed a good deal," and that he was "taking everything in the
+drug store, from the big green bottle at the right of the front door
+clear around past the red prescription case, and back to the big blue
+bottle at the left of the door." But after George came home the Mission
+Sunday-School began to thrive. George was not afraid of tainted money,
+and the school got a new library, which included "Tom Sawyer" and
+"Huckleberry Finn," as well as "Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates" for
+the boys, and all the "Pansy" books for the girls. It was a quaint old
+lot of books, and George Kirwin was nearly a year getting it together.
+Also he bought a new stove for his Sunday-School room, and a lot of
+pictures for the church walls, among others "Wide Awake and Fast
+Asleep," "Simply to Thy Cross," and "The Old Oaken Bucket." He gave to
+the school a cabinet organ with more stops than most of the children
+could count.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="gs12" id="gs12"></a>
+<img src="images/gs12.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3>A desert Scorpion, outcast by society and proud of it</h3>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>A year ago a new reporter brought in this item: "Joseph Nevison, of
+South McAlester, I. T., is visiting his mother, Mrs. Julia Nevison, at
+234 South Fifth Street."</p>
+
+<p>We sent the reporter out for more about Joe Nevison and at noon George
+Kirwin hurried down to the little home below the tracks. From these two
+searchers after truth we learned that Joe Nevison's mother had brought
+him home from the Indian Territory mortally sick. Half-a-dozen of us who
+had played with him as boys went to see him that evening, and found a
+wan, haggard man with burned-out black eyes, lying in a clean white bed.
+He seemed to know each of us for a moment and spoke to us through his
+delirium in a tired, piping voice&mdash;like the voice of the little boy who
+had been our leader. He called us by forgotten nicknames, and he hummed
+at a tune that we had not heard for a score of years. Then he piped out
+"While the Landlubbers Lie Down Below, Below, Below," and followed that
+with "Green Grass Growing all Around, all Around," and that with the
+song about the "Tonga Islands," his voice growing into a clearer alto as
+he sang. His mother tried to quiet him, but he smiled his dead smile at
+her through his cindery eyes, shook his head and went on. When he had
+lain quiet for a moment, he turned to one of us and said: "Dock, I'm
+goin' up and dive off that stump&mdash;a back flip-flop&mdash;you dassent!" Pretty
+soon he seemed to come up snuffing and blowing and grinning and said,
+"Last man dressed got to chaw beef." Then he cried: "Dock's it&mdash;Dock's
+it; catch 'im, hold him&mdash;there he goes&mdash;duck him, strip him. O well, let
+him go if he's go'n' to cry. Say, boys, I wish you fellers'd come over
+t' my stick horse livery stable&mdash;honest I got the best hickory horse you
+ever see. Whoa, there&mdash;whoa now, I tell you. You Pilliken Dunlevy let me
+harness you; there, put it under your arm, and back of your neck&mdash;no I
+ain't go'n' to let you hold it&mdash;I'll jerk the tar out of you if you
+don't go. Whe-e-e that's the way to go, hol&mdash;hold on, whoa there. Back
+up. Let's go over to Jim's and run on his track. Say, Jim, I got the
+best little pacer in the country here&mdash;get up there, Pilliken," and he
+clucked and sawed his arms, and cracked an imaginary whip. When George
+came in, the face on the bed brightened and the treble voice said:
+"Hello Fatty&mdash;we've been waitin' for you. Now let's go on. What you got
+in your wagon&mdash;humph&mdash;bet it's a pumpkin. Did old Boswell chase you?"
+and then he laughed, and turned away from us. His trembling hands seemed
+to be fighting something from his face. "Bushes," whispered Enoch Haver,
+and then added, "Now he's climbing up the bank of the ravine." And we
+saw the lean hands on the bed clutch up the wall, and then the voice
+broke forth: "Me first&mdash;first up&mdash;get away from here, Dock&mdash;I said
+first," and we could see his hands climbing an imaginary tree.</p>
+
+<p>His face glowed with the excitement of his delirium as he climbed, and
+then apparently catching his breath he rested before he called out: "I'm
+comin' down, clear the track for old Dan Tucker," and from the
+convulsive gripping of his hands and arms and the hysterical intake of
+his breath we who had seen Joe Nevison dive from the top of the old
+tree, from limb to limb to the bottom, knew what he was doing. His heart
+was thumping audibly when he finished, and we tried to calm him. For a
+while we all sat about him in silence&mdash;forgetting the walls that shut us
+in, and living with him in the open, Slaves of the Magic Tree. Then one
+by one we left and only George Kirwin stayed with the sick man.</p>
+
+<p>Joe Nevison had lived a wicked life. He had been the friend and
+companion of vile men and the women whom such men choose, and they had
+lived lives such as we in our little town only read about&mdash;and do not
+understand. Yet all that night Joe Nevison roamed through the woods by
+the creek, a little child, and no word passed his lips that could have
+brought a hint of the vicious life that his manhood had known.</p>
+
+<p>In that long night, while George Kirwin sat by his dying friend,
+listening to his babble, two men were in the genii's hands. They put off
+their years as a garment. Together they ran over the roofs of buildings
+on Main Street that have been torn down for thirty years; they played
+in barns and corncribs burned down so long ago that their very site is
+in doubt; they romped over prairies where now are elm-covered streets;
+and they played with boys and girls who have lain forgotten in little
+sunken graves for a quarter of a century, out on the hill; or they
+called from the four winds of heaven playmates who left our town at a
+time so remote that to the watcher by the bed it seemed ages ago. The
+games they played were of another day than this. When Joe began crying
+"Barbaree," he summoned a troop of ghosts, and the pack went scampering
+through the spectre town in the starlight; and when that game had tired
+him the voice began to chatter of "Slap-and-a-kick," and
+"Foot-and-a-half," and of "Rolly-poley," and of the ball games&mdash;"Scrub,"
+and "Town-ball," and "Anteover," each old game conjuring up spirits from
+its own vasty deep until the room was full of phantoms and the watcher's
+memory ached with the sweet sorrow of old joys.</p>
+
+<p>George Kirwin says that long after midnight Joe awakened from a doze,
+fumbling through the bedclothes, looking for something. Finally he
+complained that he could not find his mouth-harp. They tried to make him
+forget it, but when they failed, his mother went to the bureau and
+pulling open the lower drawer found a little varnished box; under the
+shaded lamp she brought out a sack of marbles, a broken bean-shooter,
+with whittled prongs, a Barlow knife, a tintype picture of a boy, and
+the mouth-organ. This she gave to the hands that fluttered about the
+face on the pillow. He began to play "The Mocking Bird," opening and
+shutting his bony hands to let the music rise and fall. When he closed
+that tune he played "O the Mistletoe Bough," and after that over and
+over again he played "Tenting on the Old Camp Ground." When he dropped
+the mouth-harp, he lay very still for a time, though his lips moved
+incessantly. The morning was coming, and he was growing weak. But when
+his voice came back they knew that he was far afield again; for he said,
+"Come on, fellers, let's set down here under the hill and rest. It's a
+long ways back." When he had rested he spoke up again, "Say, fellers,
+what'll we sing?" George tried him with a gospel hymn, but Joe would
+have none of it, and reviled the song and the singer after the fashion
+of boys. In a moment he exclaimed: "Here&mdash;listen to me. Let's sing
+this," and his alto voice came out uncertainly and faintly: "Wrap Me up
+in My Tarpaulin Jacket."</p>
+
+<p>George Kirwin's rough voice joined the song and the mother listened and
+wept. Other old songs followed, but Joe Nevison, the man, never woke up.
+It was the little boy full of the poetry and sweetness of a child at
+play, the boy who had turned the poetry of his boyish soul into a life
+of adventure unchecked by moral restraint, whose eyes they closed that
+morning.</p>
+
+<p>And George Kirwin explained to us when he came down to work that
+afternoon, that maybe the bad part of Joe Nevison's soul had shrivelled
+away during his sickness, instead of waiting for death. George told us
+that what made him sad was that a soul in which there was so much that
+might have been good had been stunted by life and was entering eternity
+with so little to show for its earthly journey.</p>
+
+<p>When one considers it, one finds that Joe Nevison wasted his life most
+miserably. There was nothing to his credit to say in his obituary&mdash;no
+good deed to recount and there were many, many bad ones. Moreover, the
+sorrow and bitterness that he brought into his father's last days, and
+the shame that he put upon his mother, who lived to see his end, made it
+impossible for our paper to say of him any kind thing that would not
+have seemed maudlin.</p>
+
+<p>Yet at Joe Nevison's funeral the old settlers, many of them broken in
+years and by trouble, gathered at the little wooden church in the hollow
+below the track, to see the last of him, though certainly not to pay him
+a tribute of respect. They remembered him as the little boy who had
+trudged up the hill to school when the old stone schoolhouse was the
+only stone building in town; they remembered him as he was in the days
+when he began to turn Marshal Furgeson's hair grey with wild pranks.
+They remembered the boy's childish virtues, and could feel the remorse
+that must at times have gnawed his heart. Also these old men and women
+knew of the devil of unbridled passion that the child's father had put
+into Joe's blood. And when he started down the broad road they had seen
+his track beyond him. So as the little gathering of old people filed
+through the church door and lined up on the sidewalk waiting for the
+mourners to come out, we heard through the crowd white haired men
+sighing: "Poor Joe; poor fellow." Can one hope that God's forgiveness
+will be fuller than that!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XIII" id="XIII"></a>XIII</h2>
+
+<h3>A Pilgrim in the Wilderness</h3>
+
+
+<p>A few years ago we were getting out a special edition of our paper,
+printed on book-paper, and filled with pictures of the old settlers, and
+we called it "the historical edition." In preparing the historical
+edition we had to confer with "Aunt" Martha Merrifield so often that
+George Kirwin, the foreman, who was kept trotting to her with
+proof-slips and copy for her to revise, remarked, as he was making up
+the last form of the troublesome edition, that, if the recording angel
+ever had a fire in his office, he could make up the record for our town
+from "Aunt" Martha's scrapbook. In that big, fat, crinkly-leafed book,
+she has pasted so many wedding notices and birth notices and death
+notices that one who reads the book wonders how so many people could
+have been born, married and died in a town of only ten thousand
+inhabitants. One evening, while the historical edition was growing, a
+reporter spent the evening with "Aunt" Martha. The talk drifted back to
+the early days, and "Aunt" Martha mentioned Balderson. To identify him
+she went to her scrapbook, and as she was turning the pages she said:</p>
+
+<p>"In those days of the early seventies, before the railroad came, when
+the town awoke in the morning and found a newly arrived covered waggon
+near a neighbour's house, it always meant that kin had come. If at
+school that day the children from the house of visitation bragged about
+their relatives, expatiating upon the power and riches that they left
+back East, the town knew that the visitors were ordinary kin; but if the
+children from the afflicted household said little about the visitors and
+evidently tried to avoid telling just who they were, then the town knew
+that the strangers were poor kin&mdash;probably some of "his folks"; for it
+was well understood that the women in this town all came from high
+connections 'back East' in Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa. Newcomers
+sometimes wondered how such a galaxy of princesses and duchesses and
+ladyships happened to marry so far beneath their station.</p>
+
+<p>"But the Dixons had no children, so when a covered waggon drove up to
+their place in the night, and a fussy, pussy little man with a dingy,
+stringy beard, appeared in the Dixons' back yard in the morning, looking
+after the horses hitched to the strange waggon; the town had to wait
+until the next week's issue of the <i>Statesman</i> to get reliable news
+about their prospective fellow-citizen." With that "Aunt" Martha opened
+her scrapbook and read a clipping from the <i>Statesman</i>, under the head,
+"A Valuable Acquisition to Our City." It ran:</p>
+
+<p>"It has been many months since we have been favoured with a call from so
+cultured and learned a gentleman as the Hon. Andoneran P. Balderson,
+late of Quito, Hancock County, Iowa, who has finally determined to
+settle in our midst. Cramped by the irritating conventionalities of an
+effete civilisation, Colonel Balderson comes among us for that larger
+freedom and wider horizon which his growing powers demand. He comes with
+the ripened experience of a jurist, a soldier, and a publicist, and,
+when transportation facilities have been completed between this and the
+Missouri River, Judge Balderson will bring to our little city his
+magnificent law library; but until then he will be found over the Elite
+Oyster Bay, where he will be glad to welcome clients and others.</p>
+
+<p>"Having participated in the late War of the Rebellion, as captain in
+Company G of Colonel Jennison's famous and invincible army of the
+border, Colonel Balderson will give special attention to pension
+matters. He also will set to work to obtain a complete set of abstracts,
+and will be glad to give advice on real-estate law and the practice of
+eminent domain, to which subject he has given deep study. All business
+done with neatness and despatch.</p>
+
+<p>"Before leaving Iowa, and after considerable pressure, Judge Balderson
+consented to act as agent for a number of powerful Eastern fire
+insurance companies, and has in contemplation the establishment of the
+Southwestern distributing point for the Multum in Parvo Farm Gate
+Company, of which corporation Colonel Balderson owns the patent right
+for Kansas. This business, however, he would be willing to dispose of to
+proper parties. Terms on application.</p>
+
+<p>"The colonel desires us to announce that there will be a meeting of the
+veterans of the late war at the schoolhouse next Saturday night, for the
+purpose of organising a society to refresh and perpetuate the sacred
+memories of that gigantic struggle, and to rally around the old flag,
+touch shoulders again, and come into a closer fellowship for benevolent,
+social, and other purposes. The judge, on that occasion, will deliver
+his famous address on the 'Battle of Look Out Mountain,' in which battle
+Colonel Balderson participated as a member of an Iowa regiment.
+Admission free. Silver collection to defray necessary expenses."</p>
+
+<p>Accompanying this article was a slightly worn woodcut of the colonel in
+his soldier garb, a cap with the top drawn forward, the visor low over
+his eyes, and a military overcoat thrown gaily back, exposing his
+shoulder. The picture showed the soldier in profile, with a fierce
+military moustache and a stubby, runty goatee, meant to strike terror to
+the civilian heart.</p>
+
+<p>From "Aunt" Martha we learned that before Judge Balderson had been in
+town a week he had dyed his whiskers and had taken command of our forces
+in the county-seat war then brewing. During the judge's first month in
+the county the campaign for the county-seat election was opened, and he
+canvassed the north end of the county for our town, denouncing, with
+elaborate eloquence, as horse thieves, mendicants, and renegades from
+justice, the settlers in the south end of the county who favoured the
+rival town. The judge organised a military company and picketed the
+hills about our town day and night against a raid from the Southenders;
+and, having stirred public passion deeply, he turned his pickets loose
+on the morning of election day to set prairie fires all over the south
+end of the county to harass the settlers who might vote for the rival
+town and keep them away from the polls fighting fire.</p>
+
+<p>Our people won; "the hell-hounds of disorder and anarchy"&mdash;as Judge
+Balderson called the rival townspeople&mdash;were "rebuked by the stern hand
+of a just and terrible Providence." Balderson was a hero, and our people
+sent him to the legislature. "Aunt" Martha added:</p>
+
+<p>"He went to Topeka in his blue soldier clothes, his campaign hat, and
+brass buttons; but he came back, at the first recess, in diamonds and
+fine linen, and the town sniffed a little." Having learned this much of
+Balderson our office became interested in him, and a reporter was set to
+work to look up Balderson. The reporter found that according to Wilder's
+"Annals," Balderson hustled himself into the chairmanship of the
+railroad committee and became a power in the State. The next time
+Colonel "Alphabetical" Morrison came to the office he was asked for
+further details about Balderson. The Colonel told us that when the
+legislature finally adjourned, very proud and very drunk, in the bedlam
+of the closing hours, Judge Balderson mounted a desk, waved the Stars
+and Stripes, and told of the Battle of Look Out Mountain. Colonel
+Morrison chuckled as he added: "The next day the <i>State Journal</i> printed
+his picture&mdash;the one with the slouching cap, the military moustache, the
+fierce goatee, and the devil-may-care cape&mdash;and referred to the judge as
+'the silver-tongued orator of the Cottonwood,' a title which began to
+amuse the fellows around town."</p>
+
+<p>Naturally he was a candidate for Congress. Colonel Morrison says that
+Balderson became familiarly known in State politics as Little Baldy,
+and was in demand at soldiers' meetings and posed as the soldier's
+friend.</p>
+
+<p>Wilder's "Annals" records the fact that Balderson failed to go to
+Congress, but went to the State Senate. He waxed fat. We learned that he
+bought a private bank and all the books recording abstracts of title to
+land in his county, and that he affected a high silk hat when he went to
+Chicago, while his townsmen were inclined to eye him askance. The lack
+of three votes from his home precinct kept him from being nominated
+lieutenant-governor by his party, but Colonel Morrison says that
+Balderson soon took on the title of governor, and was unruffled by his
+defeat. The Colonel describes Balderson as assuming the air of a kind of
+sacred white cow, and putting much hair-oil and ointment and
+frankincense upon his carcass. Other old settlers say that in those days
+his dyed whiskers fairly glistened. And when, at State conventions, in
+the fervour of his passion he unbent, unbuttoned his frock-coat, grabbed
+the old flag, and charged up and down the platform in an oratorical
+frensy, it seemed that another being had emerged from the greasy little
+roll of adipose in which "Governor" Balderson enshrined himself. His
+climax was invariably the wavering battle-line upon the mountain, the
+flag tottering and about to fall, "when suddenly it rises and goes
+forward, up&mdash;up&mdash;up the hill, through the smoke of hell, and full and
+fair into the teeth of death, with ten thousand cheering, maddened
+soldiers behind it. And who carried that flag&mdash;who carried that flag?"
+he would scream, in a tremulous voice, repeating his question over and
+over, and then answer himself in tragic bass: "The little corporal of
+Company B!" And, "Who fell into the arms of victory that great day, with
+four wounds upon his body? The little corporal of Company B!" It is
+hardly necessary to add that Governor Balderson was the little corporal.</p>
+
+<p>After the failure of his bank, when rumour accused him of burning the
+court-house that he might sell his abstracts to the county at a fabulous
+price, he called a public meeting to hear his defence, and repeated to
+his townsmen that query, "Who carried the flag?" adding in a hoarse
+whisper: "And yet&mdash;great God!&mdash;they say that the little corporal is an
+in-cen-di-ary. Was this great war fought in vain, that tr-e-e-sin should
+lift her hydra head to hiss out such blasphemy upon the boys who wore
+the blue?"</p>
+
+<p>However, the evidence was against him, and as our people had long since
+lost interest in the flag-bearer, the committee gave him five minutes to
+leave. He returned three minutes in change and struck out over the hill
+towards the west, afoot, and the town knew him no more forever.</p>
+
+<p>Where Balderson went after leaving town no one seems to know. The earth
+might have swallowed him up. But in 1882 someone sent a marked copy of
+the <i>Denver Tribune</i> to the <i>Statesman</i> office, the <i>Statesman</i>
+reprinted it, and "Aunt" Martha filed it away in her book. Here is it:</p>
+
+<p>"Big Burro Springs, Colorado, September 7th (Special).&mdash;Three men were
+killed yesterday in a fight between the men at Jingle-bob ranch and a
+surveying party under A. P. Balderson. The Balderson party consisted of
+four men, among whom was 'Rowdy' Joe Nevison, the famous marshal of
+Leoti, Kansas. They were locating a reservoir site which Balderson has
+taken up on Burro Creek for the Balderson Irrigation Company and for
+supplying the Look Out Townsite Company with water. These are
+Balderson's schemes, and, if established, will put the Jingle-bob ranch
+people out of business, as they have no title to the land on which they
+are operating. The remarkable part of the fight is that which Balderson
+took in it. After two of his men had been killed and the owner of the
+Jingle-bob ranch had fallen, Balderson and his two remaining men came
+forward with hands up, waving handkerchiefs. The Jingle-bob people
+recognised the flag of truce, and Balderson led his men across the creek
+to the cow-camp. Just as he approached close enough to the man who had
+the party covered, Balderson yelled, 'Watch out&mdash;back of you!' and, as
+all the captors turned their heads, Balderson knocked the pistol from
+the hand of the only man whose weapon was pointed at the Balderson
+party, and the next moment the cow-men looked into the barrels of the
+surveyors' three revolvers, and were told that if they budged a hair
+they would be killed. Balderson then disarmed the cow-men, and, after
+passing around the drinks, hired the outfit as policemen for the town
+of Look Out. It is said that he has given them two thousand dollars
+apiece in Irrigation Company stock, has promised to defend them if they
+are charged with the murder of the two surveyors, and has given each
+cow-man a deed to a corner lot on the public square of the prospective
+Balderson town. Deputy Sheriff Crosby from this place went over to
+arrest Balderson, charged with killing D. V. Sherman of the Jingle-bob
+property, and, after asking for his warrant, Balderson took it, put it
+in his pocket, advised the deputy to hurry home, and, if he found any
+coyotes or jack-rabbits that couldn't get out of his way fast enough,
+not to stop to kill them, but shoo them off the trail and save time."</p>
+
+<p>They say in Colorado that Balderson became an irrigation king. It is
+certain that he raised half a million dollars in New York for his dam
+and ditches. He built the "Look Out Opera House," and decorated it in
+gilded stucco and with red plush two inches deep. Morrison contributed
+this anecdote to the office Legend of Balderson: "He was in Florida in
+his private car when they finished the opera house. When he came back
+and saw a plaster bust of Shakespeare over the proscenium arch, he waved
+his cane pompously and exclaimed: 'Take her down! Bill Shakespeare is
+all right for the effete East, but out here he ain't deuce high with the
+little corporal of Company B.'" So in Shakespeare's niche is a
+plaster-cast of a soldier's face with the slouch-cap, the military
+moustache, and the goatee of great pride, after the picture that once
+adorned the columns of the <i>Statesman</i>. For a time they talked of
+Balderson for United States Senator, and, at the laying of the
+corner-stone of the capitol, the Denver papers spoke of the masterly
+oration of former Governor Balderson of Kansas, whose marvellous
+word-painting of the Battle of Look Out Mountain held the vast audience
+spellbound for an hour. A few months later a cloudburst carried away the
+Big Burro dam, and times went bad, and the stockholders in Balderson's
+company, who would have rebuilt the dam, could not find Balderson when
+they needed him, and certain creditors of the company, hitherto unknown,
+appeared, and Balderson faded away like a morning star.</p>
+
+<p>Here is a part of the narrative that George Kirwin got from Joe
+Nevison: Joe began with the coal strike at Castle Rock, Wyoming, in
+1893, when the strikers massed on Flat Top Mountain and day after day
+went through their drill. He told a highly dramatic story of the
+stoutish little man of fifty-five, with a fat, smooth-shaven face, who
+pounded that horde of angry men into some semblance of military order.
+All day the little man, in his shrunken seersucker coat and greasy white
+hat, would bark orders at the men, march and counter-march them, and go
+through the manual of arms, backward and forward and seven hands round.
+When the battle with the militia came, the strikers charged down Flat
+Top and fought bravely. The little man in the seersucker coat stayed
+with them, snapping orders at them, damning them, coaxing them. And when
+the deputies gathered up the strikers for the trial in court two months
+later, the little man was still there. He was prospecting on a
+gopher-hole somewhere up in the hills, and was trying to get his wildcat
+mine listed on the Salt Lake Mining Exchange. No one gave bond for the
+little man in the seersucker coat, and he went to jail. He was
+Balderson. He seemed to give little heed to the trial, and sat with the
+strikers rather stolidly. Venire after venire of jurymen was gone
+through. At last an old man wearing a Loyal Legion button went into the
+jury-box. Balderson saw him; they exchanged recognising glances, and
+Balderson turned scarlet and looked away quickly. He nudged an attorney
+for the strikers and said: "Keep him, whatever you do."</p>
+
+<p>After the evidence was all in and the attorneys were about to make their
+arguments, Balderson and one of the lawyers for the strikers were alone.</p>
+
+<p>"They told me to take the part about you, Balderson; you were in the
+Union Army, weren't you?"</p>
+
+<p>Balderson looked at the floor and said:</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; but don't say anything about it."</p>
+
+<p>The lawyer, who knew Balderson's record, was astonished. He had made his
+whole speech up on the line that Balderson as an old soldier would
+appeal to the sympathies of the jury. Over and over the lawyer pressed
+Balderson to know why nothing should be said of his soldier record, and
+finally in exasperation the lawyer broke out:</p>
+
+<p>"Lookee here, Baldy; you're too old to get coy. I'm going to make my
+speech as I've mapped it out, soldier racket and all. I guess you've
+taken enough trips up Look Out Mountain to get used to the altitude by
+this time."</p>
+
+<p>The lawyer started away, but Balderson grabbed him and pulled him back.
+"Don't do it; for God's sake, don't do it! There's a fellow on that jury
+that's a G. A. R. man; we were soldiers together; he knows me from away
+back. Talk of Iowy; talk of Kansas; talk of anything on God's green
+earth, but don't talk soldier. That man would wade through hell for me
+neck deep on any other basis than that." Balderson's voice was
+quivering. He added: "But don't talk soldier." Balderson slumped, with
+his head in his hands. The attorney snapped at him:</p>
+
+<p>"Weren't you a soldier?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; oh, yes," Balderson sighed.</p>
+
+<p>"Didn't you go up Look Out Mountain?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes&mdash;that, too."</p>
+
+<p>There was a silence between the men. The lawyer rasped it with, "Well,
+what then?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;well," and the tousled little man sighed so deeply his sigh was
+almost a sob, and lifted up the eyes of a whipped dog to the
+lawyer's&mdash;"after that I got in the commissary department&mdash;and&mdash;and&mdash;was
+dishonourably discharged." He rubbed his eyes with his fingers a moment
+and then grinned foxily: "Ain't that enough?"</p>
+
+<p>Roosevelt is a mining-camp in Idaho. It is five days from a morning
+paper, and the camp is new. It is a log town with one street and no
+society, except such as may gather around the big box-stove at Johnnie
+Conyer's saloon. A number of ladies and two women lived in the camp, a
+few tin-horn "gents," and about two hundred men. It is a seven months'
+snow-camp, where men take their drama canned in the phonograph, their
+food canned, their medicine all out of one bottle, and their morals
+"without benefit of clergy." Across the front of one of the
+canvas-covered log store-rooms that fringe the single street a cloth
+sign is stretched. It reads, "Department Store," and inside a dance
+hall, a saloon, and a gambling-place are operating. A few years ago,
+when Colonel Alphabetical Morrison was travelling through the West on a
+land deal for John Markley, business took him to Roosevelt, and he found
+Balderson, grey of beard, shiny of pate, with unkempt, ratty back hair;
+he was watery-eyed, and his red-veined skin had slipped down from his
+once fat face into draperies over his lean neck and jowls. He was in the
+dealer's chair, running the game.</p>
+
+<p>The statute of limitations had covered all his Kansas misdeeds, and he
+nodded affably as his old acquaintance came in. Later in the day the two
+men went to Mrs. Smith's boarding-house to take a social bite. They sat
+in front of the log-house in the evening, Balderson mellow and
+reminiscent.</p>
+
+<p>"Seems to me this way: I ain't cut out for society as it is organised. I
+do all right in a town until the piano begins to get respectable and the
+rules of order are tucked snugly inside the decalogue, then I slip my
+belt, and my running gear doesn't track. I get a few grand and noble
+thoughts, freeze to 'em, and later find that the hereditary
+appurtenances thereunto appertaining are private property of someone
+else, and there is nothing for me to do but to stand a lawsuit or
+vanish. I have had bad luck, lost my money, lost my friends, lost my
+conscience, lost everything, pretty near"&mdash;and here he turned his watery
+eyes on his friend with a saw-toothed smile and shook his depleted
+abdomen, that had been worn off climbing many hills&mdash;"I've lost
+everything, pretty near, but my vermiform appendix and my table of
+contents, and as like as not I'll find some feller's got them
+copyrighted." He heaved a great sigh and resumed, "I suppose I could 'a'
+stood it all well enough if I had just had some sort of faith, some
+religious consolation, some creed, or god, or something." He sighed
+again, and then leered up: "But, you know&mdash;I'm so damned skeptic!"</p>
+
+<p>Last spring, according to the Bois&eacute;, Idaho, papers, "Governor" Balderson
+and two other old soldiers celebrated Memorial Day in Roosevelt. They
+got a muslin flag as big as the flap of a shirt, from heaven knows
+where, and in the streets of Roosevelt they hoisted this flag on the
+highest pine pole in all the Salmon River Mountains. There were
+elaborate ceremonies, and to the miners and gamblers and keepers of
+wildcat mines in the mountains assembled, "Governor" Balderson told
+eloquently of the Battle of Look Out Mountain. And Colonel Morrison who
+read the account smiled appreciatively and pointed out to us the exact
+stage in the proceedings where Balderson demanded to know who carried
+the flag. There was long and tumultuous applause at the climax.</p>
+
+<p>We also read in the Bois&eacute; papers that at the fall election in Roosevelt
+they made Balderson justice of the peace, which, as Colonel Morrison
+explained, was a purely honorary office in a community where every man
+is his own court and constable and jury and judge; but the Colonel said
+that Balderson was proud of official distinction, and probably levied
+mild tribute from the people who indulged in riotous living, by
+compelling them to buy drink-checks redeemable only at his department
+store.</p>
+
+<p>It was from the Bois&eacute; papers that we had the final word from Balderson.
+A message came to Roosevelt this spring that an outfit, thirty miles
+away at the head of Profile Creek, was sick and starving. It was a
+dangerous trip to the rescue, for snowslides were booming on every
+southern hillside. Death would literally play tag with the man who dared
+to hit the trail for Profile. Balderson did not hesitate a moment, but
+filled his pack with provisions, put a marked deck and some loaded dice
+in his pocket, and waved Roosevelt a cheery good-by as he struck out
+over the three logs that bridge Mule Creek. He was bundled to the chin
+in warm coats, and on his way met Hot Foot Higgins coming in from
+Profile. Balderson seems to have given Higgins his warmest coat before
+the snow-slide hit them. It killed them both. Hot Foot died instantly,
+but Balderson must have lived many hours, for the snow about his body
+was melted and in his pocket they found Hot Foot's watch.</p>
+
+<p>They buried him near the trail where they found him, and, stuck in a
+candle-box, over the heap of stones above him, flutters lonesomely in
+the desolation of the mountain-side the little muslin rag that was once
+a flag. They call the hill on which he sleeps "Look Out Mountain."</p>
+
+<p>Late this spring the mail brought to the office of the Bois&eacute;
+<i>Capital-News</i> a battered woodcut half a century old. When the <i>News</i>
+came to our office we saw the familiar soldier's face in profile, with
+a cap drawn over the eyes, with a waving moustache and a fierce goatee,
+and across the shoulders of the figure a military cape thrown back
+jauntily. With the old cut in the Bois&eacute; paper was an article which the
+editor says in a note was written in a young woman's angular
+handwriting, done in pencil on wrapping-paper. The article told, in
+spelling unspeakable, of the greatness and goodness of "Ex-Governor
+Balderson of Kansas." It related that he was ever the "friend to the
+friendless"; that, "with all his worldly honours, he was modest and
+unassuming"; that "he had his faults, as who of us have not," but that
+he was "honest, tried and true"; and the memorial closed with the words:
+"Heaven's angel gained is Roosevelt's hero lost."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XIV" id="XIV"></a>XIV</h2>
+
+<h3>The Passing of Priscilla Winthrop</h3>
+
+
+<p>What a dreary waste life in our office must have been before Miss
+Larrabee came to us to edit a society page for the paper! To be sure we
+had known in a vague way that there were lines of social cleavage in the
+town; that there were whist clubs and dancing clubs and women's clubs,
+and in a general way that the women who composed these clubs made up our
+best society, and that those benighted souls beyond the pale of these
+clubs were out of the caste. We knew that certain persons whose names
+were always handed in on the lists of guests at parties were what we
+called "howling swells." But it remained for Miss Larrabee to sort out
+ten or a dozen of these "howling swells" who belonged to the strictest
+social caste in town, and call them "howling dervishes." Incidentally it
+may be said that both Miss Larrabee and her mother were dervishes, but
+that did not prevent her from making sport of them. From Miss Larrabee
+we learned that the high priestess of the howling dervishes of our
+society was Mrs. Mortimer Conklin, known by the sisterhood of the mosque
+as Priscilla Winthrop. We in our office had never heard her called by
+that name, but Miss Larrabee explained, rather elaborately, that unless
+one was permitted to speak of Mrs. Conklin thus, one was quite beyond
+the hope of a social heaven.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, Priscilla Winthrop was Mrs. Conklin's maiden name;
+in the second place, it links her with the Colonial Puritan stock of
+which she is so justly proud&mdash;being scornful of mere Daughters of the
+Revolution&mdash;and finally, though Mrs. Conklin is a grandmother, her
+maiden name seems to preserve the sweet, vague illusion of girlhood
+which Mrs. Conklin always carries about her like the shadow of a dream.
+And Miss Larrabee punctuated this with a wink which we took to be a
+quotation mark, and she went on with her work. So we knew we had been
+listening to the language used in the temple.</p>
+
+<p>Our town was organised fifty years ago by Abolitionists from New
+England, and twenty years ago, when Alphabetical Morrison was getting
+out one of the numerous boom editions of his real estate circular, he
+printed an historical article therein in which he said that Priscilla
+Winthrop was the first white child born on the town site. Her father was
+territorial judge, afterward member of the State Senate, and after ten
+years spent in mining in the far West, died in the seventies, the
+richest man in the State. It was known that he left Priscilla, his only
+child, half a million dollars in government bonds.</p>
+
+<p>She was the first girl in our town to go away to school. Naturally, she
+went to Oberlin, famous in those days for admitting coloured students.
+But she finished her education at Vassar, and came back so much of a
+young lady that the town could hardly contain her. She married Mortimer
+Conklin, took him to the Centennial on a wedding trip, came home,
+rebuilt her father's house, covering it with towers and minarets and
+steeples, and scroll-saw fretwork, and christened it Winthrop Hall. She
+erected a store building on Main Street, that Mortimer might have a
+luxurious office on the second floor, and then settled down to the
+serious business of life, which was building up a titled aristocracy in
+a Kansas town.</p>
+
+<p>The Conklin children were never sent to the public schools, but had a
+governess, yet Mortimer Conklin, who was always alert for the call,
+could not understand why the people never summoned him to any office of
+honour or trust. He kept his brass signboard polished, went to his
+office punctually every morning at ten o'clock, and returned home to
+dinner at five, and made clients wait ten minutes in the outer office
+before they could see him&mdash;at least so both of them say, and there were
+no others in all the years. He shaved every day, wore a frock-coat and a
+high hat to church&mdash;where for ten years he was the only male member of
+the Episcopalian flock&mdash;and Mrs. Conklin told the women that altogether
+he was a credit to his sex and his family&mdash;a remark which was passed
+about ribaldly in town for a dozen years, though Mortimer Conklin never
+knew that he was the subject of a town joke. Once he rebuked a man in
+the barber shop for speaking of feminine extravagance, and told the shop
+that he did not stint his wife, that when she asked him for money he
+always gave it to her without question, and that if she wanted a dress
+he told her to buy it and send the bill to him. And we are such a polite
+people that no one in the crowded shop laughed&mdash;until Mortimer Conklin
+went out.</p>
+
+<p>Of course at the office we have known for twenty-five years what the men
+thought of Mortimer, but not until Miss Larrabee joined the force did we
+know that among the women Mrs. Conklin was considered an oracle. Miss
+Larrabee said that her mother has a legend that when Priscilla Winthrop
+brought home from Boston the first sealskin sacque ever worn in town she
+gave a party for it, and it lay in its box on the big walnut bureau in
+the spare room of the Conklin mansion in solemn state, while
+seventy-five women salaamed to it. After that Priscilla Winthrop was the
+town authority on sealskins. When any member of the town nobility had a
+new sealskin, she took it humbly to Priscilla Winthrop to pass judgment
+upon it. If Priscilla said it was London-dyed, its owner pranced away
+on clouds of glory; but if she said it was American-dyed, its owner
+crawled away in shame, and when one admired the disgraced garment, the
+martyred owner smiled with resigned sweetness and said humbly: "Yes&mdash;but
+it's only American-dyed, you know."</p>
+
+<p>No dervish ever questioned the curse of the priestess. The only time a
+revolt was imminent was in the autumn of 1884 when the Conklins returned
+from their season at Duxbury, Massachusetts, and Mrs. Conklin took up
+the carpets in her house, heroically sold all of them at the second-hand
+store, put in new waxed floors and spread down rugs. The town uprose and
+hooted; the outcasts and barbarians in the Methodist and Baptist
+Missionary Societies rocked the Conklin home with their merriment, and
+ten dervishes with set faces bravely met the onslaughts of the savages;
+but among themselves in hushed whispers, behind locked doors, the
+faithful wondered if there was not a mistake some place. However, when
+Priscilla Winthrop assured them that in all the best homes in Boston
+rugs were replacing carpets, their souls were at peace.</p>
+
+<p>All this time we at the office knew nothing of what was going on. We
+knew that the Conklins devoted considerable time to society; but
+Alphabetical Morrison explained that by calling attention to the fact
+that Mrs. Conklin had prematurely grey hair. He said a woman with
+prematurely grey hair was as sure to be a social leader as a spotted
+horse is to join a circus. But now we know that Colonel Morrison's view
+was a superficial one, for he was probably deterred from going deeper
+into the subject by his dislike for Mortimer Conklin, who invested a
+quarter of a million dollars of the Winthrop fortune in the Wichita
+boom, and lost it. Colonel Morrison naturally thought as long as Conklin
+was going to lose that money he could have lost it just as well at home
+in the "Queen City of the Prairies," giving the Colonel a chance to win.
+And when Conklin, protecting his equities in Wichita, sent a hundred
+thousand dollars of good money after the quarter million of bad money,
+Colonel Morrison's grief could find no words; though he did find
+language for his wrath. When the Conklins draped their Oriental rugs for
+airing every Saturday over the veranda and portico railings of the
+house front, Colonel Morrison accused the Conklins of hanging out their
+stamp collection to let the neighbours see it. This was the only side of
+the rug question we ever heard in our office until Miss Larrabee came;
+then she told us that one of the first requirements of a howling dervish
+was to be able to quote from Priscilla Winthrop's Rug book from memory.
+The Rug book, the China book and the Old Furniture book were the three
+sacred scrolls of the sect.</p>
+
+<p>All this was news to us. However, through Colonel Morrison, we had
+received many years ago another sidelight on the social status of the
+Conklins. It came out in this way: Time honoured custom in our town
+allows the children of a home where there is an outbreak of social
+revelry, whether a church festival or a meeting of the Cold-Nosed Whist
+Club, to line up with the neighbour children on the back stoop or in the
+kitchen, like human vultures, waiting to lick the ice-cream freezer and
+to devour the bits of cake and chicken salad that are left over. Colonel
+Morrison told us that no child was ever known to adorn the back yard of
+the Conklin home while a social cataclysm was going on, but that when
+Mrs. Morrison entertained the Ladies' Literary League, children from the
+holy Conklin family went home from his back porch with their faces
+smeared with chicken croquettes and their hands sticky with jellycake.</p>
+
+<p>This story never gained general circulation in town, but even if it had
+been known of all men it would not have shaken the faith of the
+devotees. For they did not smile when Priscilla Winthrop began to refer
+to old Frank Hagan, who came to milk the Conklin cow and curry the
+Conklin horse, as "Fran&ccedil;ois, the man," or to call the girl who did the
+cooking and general housework "Cosette, the maid," though every one of
+the dozen other women in town whom "Cosette, the maid" had worked for
+knew that her name was Fanny Ropes. And shortly after that the homes of
+the rich and the great over on the hill above Main Street began to fill
+with Lisettes and Nanons and Fanchons, and Mrs. Julia Neal Worthington
+called her girl "Grisette," explaining that they had always had a
+Grisette about the house since her mother first went to housekeeping in
+Peoria, Illinois, and it sounded so natural to hear the name that they
+always gave it to a new servant. This story came to the office through
+the Young Prince, who chuckled over it during the whole hour he consumed
+in writing Ezra Worthington's obituary.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Larrabee says that the death of Ezra Worthington marks such a
+distinct epoch in the social life of the town that we must set down
+here&mdash;even if the narrative of the Conklins halts for a moment&mdash;how the
+Worthingtons rose and flourished. Julia Neal, eldest daughter of Thomas
+Neal&mdash;who lost the "O" before his name somewhere between the docks of
+Dublin and the west bank of the Missouri River&mdash;was for ten years
+principal of the ward school in that part of our town known as
+"Arkansaw," where her term of service is still remembered as the "reign
+of terror." It was said of her then that she could whip any man in the
+ward&mdash;and would do it if he gave her a chance. The same manner which
+made the neighbours complain that Julia Neal carried her head too high,
+later in life, when she had money to back it, gave her what the women of
+the State Federation called a "regal air." In her early thirties she
+married Ezra Worthington, bachelor, twenty year her senior. Ezra
+Worthington was at that time, had been for twenty years before, and
+continued to be until his death, proprietor of the Worthington Poultry
+and Produce Commission Company. He was owner of the stock-yards,
+president of the Worthington State Bank, vice-president, treasurer and
+general manager of the Worthington Mercantile Company, and owner of five
+brick buildings on Main Street. He bought one suit of clothes every five
+years whether he needed it or not, never let go of a dollar until the
+Goddess of Liberty on it was black in the face, and died rated "As
+$350,000" by all the commercial agencies in the country. And the first
+thing Mrs. Worthington did after the funeral was to telephone to the
+bank and ask them to send her a hundred dollars.</p>
+
+<p>The next important thing she did was to put a heavy, immovable granite
+monument over the deceased so that he would not be restless, and then
+she built what is known in our town as the Worthington Palace. It makes
+the Markley mansion which cost $25,000 look like a barn. The
+Worthingtons in the lifetime of Ezra had ventured no further into the
+social whirl of the town than to entertain the new Presbyterian preacher
+at tea, and to lend their lawn to the King's Daughters for a social,
+sending a bill in to the society for the eggs used in the coffee and the
+gasoline used in heating it.</p>
+
+<p>To the howling dervishes who surrounded Priscilla Winthrop the
+Worthingtons were as mere Christian dogs. It was not until three years
+after Ezra Worthington's death that the glow of the rising Worthington
+sun began to be seen in the Winthrop mosque. During those three years
+Mrs. Worthington had bought and read four different sets of the best
+hundred books, had consumed the Chautauqua course, had prepared and
+delivered for the Social Science Club, which she organised, five papers
+ranging in subject from the home life of Rameses I., through a Survey of
+the Forces Dominating Michael Angelo, to the Influence of Esoteric
+Buddhism on Modern Political Tendencies. More than that, she had been
+elected president of the City Federation of Clubs, and, being a delegate
+to the National Federation from the State, was talked of for the State
+Federation Presidency. When the State Federation met in our town, Mrs.
+Worthington gave a reception for the delegates in the Worthington
+Palace, a feature of which was a concert by a Kansas City organist on
+the new pipe-organ which she had erected in the music-room of her house,
+and despite the fact that the devotees of the Priscilla shrine said that
+the crowd was distinctly mixed and not at all representative of our best
+social grace and elegance, there is no question but that Mrs.
+Worthington's reception made a strong impression upon the best local
+society. The fact that, as Miss Larrabee said, "Priscilla Winthrop was
+so nice about it," also may be regarded as ominous. But the women who
+lent Mrs. Worthington the spoons and forks for the occasion were
+delighted, and formed a phalanx about her, which made up in numbers what
+it might have lacked in distinction. Yet while Mrs. Worthington was in
+Europe the faithful routed the phalanx, and Mrs. Conklin returned from
+her summer in Duxbury with half a carload of old furniture from Harrison
+Sampson's shop and gave a talk to the priestesses of the inner temple
+on "Heppelwhite in New England."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Larrabee reported the affair for our paper, giving the small list
+of guests and the long line of refreshments&mdash;which included
+alligator-pear salad, right out of the Smart Set Cook Book. Moreover,
+when Jefferson appeared in Topeka that fall, Priscilla Winthrop, who had
+met him through some of her Duxbury friends in Boston, invited him to
+run down for a luncheon with her and the members of the royal family who
+surrounded her. It was the proud boast of the defenders of the Winthrop
+faith in town that week, that though twenty-four people sat down to the
+table, not only did all the men wear frock-coats&mdash;not only did Uncle
+Charlie Haskins of String Town wear the old Winthrop butler's livery
+without a wrinkle in it, and with only the faint odour of mothballs to
+mingle with the perfume of the roses&mdash;but (and here the voices of the
+followers of the prophet dropped in awe) not a single knife or fork or
+spoon or napkin was borrowed! After that, when any of the sisterhood had
+occasion to speak of the absent Mrs. Worthington, whose house was
+filled with new mahogany and brass furniture, they referred to her as
+the Duchess of Grand Rapids, which gave them much comfort.</p>
+
+<p>But joy is short-lived. When Mrs. Worthington came back from Europe and
+opened her house to the City Federation, and gave a coloured
+lantern-slide lecture on "An evening with the Old Masters," serving
+punch from her own cut-glass punch bowl instead of renting the
+hand-painted crockery bowl of the queensware store, the old dull pain
+came back into the hearts of the dwellers in the inner circle. Then just
+in the nick of time Mrs. Conklin went to Kansas City and was operated on
+for appendicitis. She came back pale and interesting, and gave her club
+a paper called "Hospital Days," fragrant with iodoform and Henley's
+poems. Miss Larrabee told us that it was almost as pleasant as an
+operation on one's self to hear Mrs. Conklin tell about hers. And they
+thought it was rather brutal&mdash;so Miss Larrabee afterward told us&mdash;when
+Mrs. Worthington went to the hospital one month, and gave her famous
+Delsarte lecture course the next month, and explained to the women that
+if she wasn't as heavy as she used to be it was because she had had
+everything cut out of her below the windpipe. It seemed to the temple
+priestesses that, considering what a serious time poor dear Priscilla
+Winthrop had gone through, Mrs. Worthington was making light of serious
+things.</p>
+
+<p>There is no doubt that the formal rebellion of Mrs. Worthington, Duchess
+of Grand Rapids, and known of the town's nobility as the Pretender,
+began with the hospital contest. The Pretender planted her siege-guns
+before the walls of the temple of the priestess, and prepared for
+business. The first manoeuvre made by the beleaguered one was to give a
+luncheon in the mosque, at which, though it was midwinter, fresh
+tomatoes and fresh strawberries were served, and a real authoress from
+Boston talked upon John Fiske's philosophy and, in the presence of the
+admiring guests, made a new kind of salad dressing for the fresh lettuce
+and tomatoes. Thirty women who watched her forgot what John Fiske's
+theory of the cosmos is, and thirty husbands who afterward ate that
+salad dressing have learned to suffer and be strong. But that salad
+dressing undermined the faith of thirty mere men&mdash;raw outlanders to be
+sure&mdash;in the social omniscience of Priscilla Winthrop. Of course they
+did not see it made; the spell of the enchantress was not over them; but
+in their homes they maintained that if Priscilla Winthrop didn't know
+any more about cosmic philosophy than to pay a woman forty dollars to
+make a salad dressing like that&mdash;and the whole town knows that was the
+price&mdash;the vaunted town of Duxbury, Massachusetts, with its old
+furniture and new culture, which Priscilla spoke of in such repressed
+ecstasy, is probably no better than Manitou, Colorado, where they get
+their Indian goods from Buffalo, New York.</p>
+
+<p>Such is the perverse reasoning of man. And Mrs. Worthington, having
+lived with considerable of a man for fifteen years, hearing echoes of
+this sedition, attacked the fortification of the faithful on its weakest
+side. She invited the thirty seditious husbands with their wives to a
+beefsteak dinner, where she heaped their plates with planked sirloin,
+garnished the sirloin with big, fat, fresh mushrooms, and topped off the
+meal with a mince pie of her own concoction, which would make a man
+leave home to follow it. She passed cigars at the table, and after the
+guests went into the music-room ten old men with ten old fiddles
+appeared and contested with old-fashioned tunes for a prize, after which
+the company danced four quadrilles and a Virginia reel. The men threw
+down their arms going home and went over in a body to the Pretender. But
+in a social conflict men are mere non-combatants, and their surrender
+did not seriously injure the cause that they deserted.</p>
+
+<p>The war went on without abatement. During the spring that followed the
+winter of the beefsteak dinner many skirmishes, minor engagements,
+ambushes and midnight raids occurred. But the contest was not decisive.
+For purposes of military drill, the defenders of the Winthrop faith
+formed themselves into a Whist Club. <i>The</i> Whist Club they called it,
+just as they spoke of Priscilla Winthrop's gowns as "the black and white
+one," "the blue brocade," "the white china silk," as if no other black
+and white or blue brocade or white china silk gowns had been created in
+the world before and could not be made again by human hands. So, in the
+language of the inner sanctuary, there was "The Whist Club," to the
+exclusion of all other possible human Whist Clubs under the stars. When
+summer came the Whist Club fled as birds to the mountains&mdash;save
+Priscilla Winthrop, who went to Duxbury, and came home with a brass
+warming-pan and a set of Royal Copenhagen china that were set up as holy
+objects in the temple.</p>
+
+<p>But Mrs. Worthington went to the National Federation of Women's Clubs,
+made the acquaintance of the women there who wore clothes from Paris,
+began tracing her ancestry back to the Maryland Calverts&mdash;on her
+mother's side of the house&mdash;brought home a membership in the Daughters
+of the Revolution, the Colonial Dames and a society which referred to
+Charles I. as "Charles Martyr," claimed a Stuart as the rightful king of
+England, affecting to scorn the impudence of King Edward in sitting on
+another's throne. More than this, Mrs. Worthington had secured the
+promise of Mrs. Ellen Vail Montgomery, Vice-President of the National
+Federation, to visit Cliff Crest, as Mrs. Worthington called the
+Worthington mansion, and she turned up her nose at those who worshipped
+under the towers, turrets and minarets of the Conklin mosque, and played
+the hose of her ridicule on their outer wall that she might have it
+spotless for a target when she got ready to raze it with her big gun.</p>
+
+<p>The week that Ellen Vail Montgomery came to town was a busy one for Miss
+Larrabee. We turned over the whole fourth page of the paper to her for a
+daily society page, and charged the Bee Hive and the White Front Dry
+Goods store people double rates to put their special sale advertisements
+on that page while the "National Vice," as the Young Prince called her,
+was in town. For the "National Vice" brought the State President and two
+State Vices down, also four District Presidents and six District Vices,
+who, as Miss Larrabee said, were monsters "of so frightful a mien, that
+to be hated need but to be seen." The entire delegation of visiting
+stateswomen&mdash;Vices and Virtues and Beatitudes as we called them&mdash;were
+entertained by Mrs. Worthington at Cliff Crest, and there was so much
+Federation politics going on in our town that the New York <i>Sun</i> took
+five hundred words about it by wire, and Colonel Alphabetical Morrison
+said that with all those dressed-up women about he felt as though he was
+living in a Sunday supplement.</p>
+
+<p>The third day of the ghost-dance at Cliff Crest was to be the day of the
+big event&mdash;as the office parlance had it. The ceremonies began at
+sunrise with a breakfast to which half a dozen of the captains and kings
+of the besieging host of the Pretender were bidden. It seems to have
+been a modest orgy, with nothing more astonishing than a new gold-band
+china set to dishearten the enemy. By ten o'clock Priscilla Winthrop and
+the Whist Club had recovered from that; but they had been asked to the
+luncheon&mdash;the star feature of the week's round of gayety. It is just as
+well to be frank, and say that they went with fear and trembling. Panic
+and terror were in their ranks, for they knew a crisis was at hand. It
+came when they were "ushered into the dining-hall," as our paper so
+grandly put it, and saw in the great oak-beamed room a table laid on the
+polished bare wood&mdash;a table laid for forty-eight guests, with a doily
+for every plate, and every glass, and every salt-cellar, and&mdash;here the
+mosque fell on the heads of the howling dervishes&mdash;forty-eight
+soup-spoons, forty-eight silver-handled knives and forks; forty-eight
+butter-spreaders, forty-eight spoons, forty-eight salad forks,
+forty-eight ice-cream spoons, forty-eight coffee spoons. Little did it
+avail the beleaguered party to peep slyly under the spoon-handles&mdash;the
+word "Sterling" was there, and, more than that, a large, severely plain
+"W" with a crest glared up at them from every piece of silver. The
+service had not been rented. They knew their case was hopeless. And so
+they ate in peace.</p>
+
+<p>When the meal was over it was Mrs. Ellen Vail Montgomery, in her
+thousand-dollar gown, worshipped by the eyes of forty-eight women, who
+put her arm about Priscilla Winthrop and led her into the conservatory,
+where they had "a dear, sweet quarter of an hour," as Mrs. Montgomery
+afterward told her hostess. In that dear, sweet quarter of an hour
+Priscilla Winthrop Conklin unbuckled her social sword and handed it to
+the conqueror, in that she agreed absolutely with Mrs. Montgomery that
+Mrs. Worthington was "perfectly lovely," that she was "delighted to be
+of any service" to Mrs. Worthington; that Mrs. Conklin "was sure no one
+else in our town was so admirably qualified for "National Vice" as Mrs.
+Worthington," and that "it would be such a privilege" for Mrs. Conklin
+to suggest Mrs. Worthington's name for the office. And then Mrs.
+Montgomery, "National Vice" and former State Secretary for Vermont of
+the Colonial Dames, kissed Priscilla Winthrop and they came forth
+wet-eyed and radiant, holding each other's hands. When the company had
+been hushed by the magic of a State Vice and two District Virtues,
+Priscilla Winthrop rose and in the sweetest Kansas Bostonese told the
+ladies that she thought this an eminently fitting place to let the
+visiting ladies know how dearly our town esteems its most distinguished
+townswoman, Mrs. Julia Neal Worthington, and that entirely without her
+solicitation, indeed quite without her knowledge, the women of our
+town&mdash;and she hoped of our beloved State&mdash;were ready now to announce
+that they were unanimous in their wish that Mrs. Worthington should be
+National Vice-President of the Federation of Women's Clubs, and that
+she, the speaker, had entered the contest with her whole soul to bring
+this end to pass. Then there was hand-clapping and handkerchief waving
+and some tears, and a little good, honest Irish hugging, and in the
+twilight two score of women filed down through the formal garden of
+Cliff Crest and walked by twos and threes into the town.</p>
+
+<p>There was the usual clatter of home-going wagons; lights winked out of
+kitchen windows; the tinkle of distant cow-bells was in the air; on Main
+Street the commerce of the town was gently ebbing, and man and nature
+seemed utterly oblivious of the great event that had happened. The
+course of human events was not changed; the great world rolled on, while
+Priscilla Winthrop went home to a broken shrine to sit among the
+potsherds.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XV" id="XV"></a>XV</h2>
+
+<h3>"And Yet a Fool"</h3>
+
+
+<p>The exchanges that come to a country newspaper like ours become familiar
+friends as the years pass. One who reads these papers regularly comes to
+know them even in their wrappers, though to an unpracticed eye the
+wrappers seem much alike. But when he has been poking his thumb through
+the paper husks in a certain pile every morning for a score of years, he
+knows by some sort of prescience when a new paper appears; and, when the
+pile looks odd to him, he goes hunting for the stranger and is not happy
+until he has found it.</p>
+
+<p>One morning this spring the stranger stuck its head from the bottom of
+the exchange pile, and when we had glanced at the handwriting of the
+address and at the one-cent stamp on the cover we knew it had been
+mailed to us by someone besides the publisher. For the newspaper "hand"
+is as definite a form of writing as the legal hand or the doctor's. The
+paper proved to be an Arizona newspaper full of saloon advertising,
+restaurant cards, church and school meeting notices, local items about
+the sawmill and the woman's club, land notices and paid items from wool
+dealers. On the local page in the midst of a circle of red ink was the
+announcement of the death of Horace P. Sampson. Every month we get
+notices like this, of the deaths of old settlers who have gone to the
+ends of the earth, but this notice was peculiar in that it said:</p>
+
+<p>"One year ago our lamented townsman deposited with the firm of Cross &amp;
+Kurtz, the popular undertakers and dealers in Indian goods and general
+merchandise, $100 to cover his funeral expenses, and another hundred to
+provide that a huge boulder be rolled over his grave on which he desired
+the following unusual inscription: '<i>Horace P. Sampson, Born Dec. 6,
+1840, and died &mdash;&mdash;." And is not this a rare fellow, my lord? He's good
+at anything and yet a fool.</i>"'"</p>
+
+<p>We handed the paper to Alphabetical Morrison, who happened to be in the
+office at the time, pawing through the discarded exchanges in the
+waste-basket, looking for his New York <i>Sun</i>, and, after Colonel
+Morrison had read the item, he began drumming with his finger-nails on
+the chair-seat between his knees. His eyes were full of dreams and no
+one disturbed him as he looked off into space. Finally he sighed:</p>
+
+<p>"And yet a fool&mdash;a motley fool! Poor old Samp&mdash;kept it up to the end! I
+take it from the guarded way the paper refers to his faults, 'as who of
+us have not,' that he died of the tremens or something like that." The
+Colonel paused and smiled just perceptibly, and went on: "Yet I see that
+he was a good fellow to the end. I notice that the Shriners and the Elks
+and the Eagles and the Hoo-hoos buried him. Nary an insurance order in
+his! Poor old Samp; he certainly went all the gaits!"</p>
+
+<p>We suggested that Colonel Morrison write something about the deceased
+for the paper, but though the Colonel admitted that he knew Sampson
+"like a book," there was no persuading Morrison to write the obituary.</p>
+
+<p>"After some urging and by way of compromise," he said, "I'm perfectly
+willing to give you fellows the facts and let you fix up what you
+please."</p>
+
+<p>Because the reporters were both busy we called the stenographer, and had
+the Colonel's story taken down as he told it&mdash;to be rewritten into an
+obituary later. And it is what he said and not what we printed about
+Sampson that is worth putting down here. The Colonel took the big
+leather chair, locked his hands behind his head, and began:</p>
+
+<p>"Let me see. Samp was born, as he says, December 6, 1840, in Wisconsin,
+and came out to Kansas right after the war closed. He was going to
+college up there, and at the second call for troops he led the whole
+senior class into forming a company, and enlisted before graduation and
+fought from that time on till the close of the war. He was a captain, I
+think, but you never heard him called that. When he came here he'd been
+admitted to the bar and was a good lawyer&mdash;a mighty good lawyer for that
+time&mdash;and had more business 'n a bird pup with a gum-shoe. He was just a
+boy then, and, like all boys, he enjoyed a good time. He drank more or
+less in the army&mdash;they all did 's far as that goes&mdash;but he kept it up in
+a desultory way after he came here, as a sort of accessory to his main
+business of life, which was being a good fellow.</p>
+
+<p>"And he was a good fellow&mdash;an awful good fellow. We were all young then;
+there wasn't an old man on the town-site as I remember it. We use to
+load up the whole bunch and go hunting&mdash;closing up the stores and taking
+the girls along&mdash;and did not show up till midnight. Samp would always
+have a little something to take under his buggy-seat, and we would wet
+up and sing coming home, with the beds of the spring-wagons so full of
+prairie chickens and quail that they jolted out at every rut. Samp would
+always lead the singing&mdash;being just a mite more lubricated than the rest
+of us, and the girls thought he was all hunkey dorey&mdash;as they used to
+say.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="gs13" id="gs13"></a>
+<img src="images/gs13.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3>"He made a lot of money and blew it in"</h3>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>"He made a lot of money and blew it in at Jim Thomas's saloon, buying
+drinks, playing stud poker, betting on quarter horses, and lending it
+out to fellows who helped him forget they'd borrowed it. And&mdash;say in
+two or three years, after the chicken-hunting set had married off, and
+begun in a way to settle down&mdash;Samp took up with the next set coming on;
+he married and got the prettiest girl in town. We always thought that he
+married only because he wanted to be a good fellow and did not wish to
+be impolite to the girl he'd paired off with in the first crowd. Still
+he didn't stay home nights, and once or twice a year&mdash;say, election or
+Fourth of July&mdash;he and a lot of other young fellows would go out and tip
+over all the board sidewalks in town, and paint funny signs on the store
+buildings and stack beer bottles on the preacher's front porch, and
+raise Ned generally. And the fellows of his age, who owned the stores
+and were in nights, would say to Samp when they saw him coming down
+about noon the next day:</p>
+
+<p>"'Go it when you're young Samp, for when you're old you can't.' And he
+would wink at 'em, give 'em ten dollars apiece for their damages and
+jolly his way down the street to his office.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, you mustn't get the idea that Samp was the town drunkard, for he
+never was. He was just a good fellow. When the second set of young
+fellows outgrew him and settled down, he picked up with the third, and
+his wife's brown alpaca began to be noticed more or less among the
+women. But Samp's practice didn't seem to fall off&mdash;it only changed. He
+didn't have so much real estate lawing and got more criminal practice.
+Gradually he became a criminal lawyer, and his fame for wit and
+eloquence extended over all the State. When a cowpuncher got in trouble
+his folks in the East always gave Samp a big fee to get the boy out, and
+he did it. When he went to any other county-seat besides our own to try
+a case, the fellows&mdash;and you know who the fellows are in a town&mdash;the
+fellows knew that while Samp was in town there would be something going
+on with 'fireworks in the evening.' For he was a great fellow for a good
+time, and the dining-room girls at the hotel used to giggle in the
+kitchen for a week after he was gone at the awful things he would say to
+'em. He knew more girls by their first names than a drummer."</p>
+
+<p>Colonel Morrison chuckled and crossed his fat legs at the ankles as he
+continued, after lighting the cigar we gave him:</p>
+
+<p>"Well, along in the late seventies we fellows that he started out with
+got to owning our own homes and getting on in the world. That was the
+time when Samp should have been grubbing at his law books, but nary a
+grub for him. He was playing horse for dear life. And right there the
+fellows all left him behind. Some were buying real estate for
+speculation; some running for office; some starting a bank; and others
+lending money at two per cent. a month, and leading in the
+prayer-meeting. So Samp kind of hitched up his ambition and took the
+slack out of his habits for a few months and went to the legislature.
+They say that he certainly did have a good time, though, when he got
+there. They remember that session yet up there, and call it the year of
+the great flood, for the nights they were filled with music, as the poet
+says, and from the best accounts we could get the days were devoid of
+ease also, and how Mrs. Sampson stood it the women never could find out,
+for, of course, she must have known all about it, though he wouldn't
+let her come near Topeka. He began to get pursy and red-faced, and was
+clicking it off with his fifth set of young fellows. It took a big slug
+of whisky to set off his oratory, but when he got it wound up he surely
+could pull the feathers out of the bird of freedom to beat scandalous.
+But as a stump speaker you weren't always sure he'd fill the engagement.
+He could make a jury blubber and clench its fists at the prosecuting
+attorney, yet he didn't claim to know much law, and he did turn over all
+the work in the Supreme Court to his partner, Charley Hedrick. Then,
+when Charley was practising before the Supreme Court and wasn't here to
+hold him down, Samp would get out and whoop it up with the boys, quote
+Shakespeare and make stump speeches on dry-goods boxes at midnight, and
+put his arms around old Marshal Furgeson's neck and tell him he was the
+blooming flower of chivalry. Also women made a fool of him&mdash;more or
+less.</p>
+
+<p>"Where was I?" asked Colonel Morrison of the stenographer when she had
+finished sharpening her pencil. "Oh, yes, along in the eighties came
+the boom, and Samp tried to get in it and make some money. He seems to
+have tried to catch up with us fellows of his age, and he began to
+plunge. He got in debt, and, when the boom broke, he was still living in
+a rented house with the rent ten months behind; his partnership was gone
+and his practice was cut down to joint-keepers, gamblers, and the
+farmers who hadn't heard the stories of his financial irregularities
+that were floating around town.</p>
+
+<p>"Yet his wife stuck to him, forever explaining to my wife that he would
+be all right when he settled down. But he continued to soak up a
+little&mdash;not much, but a little. He never was drunk in the daytime, but I
+remember there used to be mornings when his office smelled pretty sour.
+I had an office next to his for a while and he used to come in and talk
+to me a good deal. The young fellows around town whom he would like to
+run with were beginning to find him stupid, and the old fellows&mdash;except
+me&mdash;were busy and he had no one to loaf with. He decided, I remember,
+several times to brace up, and once he kept white shirts, cuffs and
+collars on for nearly a year. But when Harrison was elected, he filled
+up from his shoes to his hat and didn't go home for three days. One day
+after that, when he had gone back to his flannel shirts and dirty
+collars, he was sitting in my office looking at the fire in the big box
+stove when he broke out with:</p>
+
+<p>"'Alphabetical&mdash;what's the matter with me, anyway? This town sends men
+to Congress; it makes Supreme Court judges of others. It sends fellows
+to Kansas City as rich bankers. It makes big merchants out of grocery
+clerks. Fortune just naturally flirts with everyone in town&mdash;but never a
+wink do I get. I know and you know I'm smarter than those jays. I can
+teach your Congressman economics, and your Supreme judge law. I can
+think up more schemes than the banker, and can beat the merchant in any
+kind of a game he'll name. I don't lie and I don't steal and I ain't
+stuck up. What's the matter with me, anyway?'</p>
+
+<p>"And of course," mused Colonel Morrison as he relighted the butt of his
+cigar, "of course I had to lie to him and say I didn't know. But I did.
+We all knew. He was too much of a good fellow. His failure to get on
+bothered him a good deal, and one day he got roaring full and went up
+and down town telling people how smart he was. Then his pride left him,
+and he let his whiskers grow frowsy and used his vest for a spittoon,
+and his eyes watered too easily for a man still in his forties.</p>
+
+<p>"He went West a dozen years ago, about the time of Cleveland's second
+election, expecting to get a job in Arizona and grow up with the
+country. His wife was mighty happy, and she told our folks and the rest
+of the women that when Horace got away from his old associates in this
+town she knew that he would be all right. Poor Myrtle Kenwick, the
+prettiest girl you ever saw along in the sixties&mdash;and she was through
+here not long ago and stayed with my wife and the girls&mdash;a broken old
+woman, going back to her kinfolk in Iowa after she left him. Poor
+Myrtle! I wonder where she is. I see this Arizona paper doesn't say
+anything about her."</p>
+
+<p>Colonel Morrison read over the item again, and smiled as he proceeded:</p>
+
+<p>"But it does say that he occupied many places of honour and trust in
+his former home in Kansas, which seems to indicate that whisky made old
+Samp a liar as well as a loafer at last. My, my!" sighed the Colonel as
+he rose and put the paper on the desk. "My, my! What a treacherous
+serpent it is! It gave him a good time&mdash;literally a hell of a good time.
+And he was a good fellow&mdash;literally a damned good fellow&mdash;'damned from
+here to eternity,' as your man Kipling says. God gave him every talent.
+He might have been a respected, useful citizen; no honour was beyond
+him; but he put aside fame and worth and happiness to play with whisky.
+My Lord, just think of it!" exclaimed the Colonel as he reached for his
+hat and put up his glasses. "And this is how whisky served him: brought
+him to shame, wrecked his home, made his name a by-word, and lured him
+on and on to utter ruin by holding before him the phantom of a good
+time. What a pitiful, heart-breaking mocker it is!" He sighed a long
+sigh as he stood in the door looking up at the sky with his hands
+clasped behind him, and said half audibly as he went down the steps:
+"And whoso is deceived thereby is not wise&mdash;not wise. 'He's good at
+anything&mdash;and yet a fool'!"</p>
+
+<p>That was what Colonel Morrison gave the stenographer. What we made for
+the paper is entirely uninteresting and need not be printed here.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XVI" id="XVI"></a>XVI</h2>
+
+<h3>A Kansas "Childe Roland"</h3>
+
+
+<p>One of the wisest things ever said about the newspaper business was said
+by the late J. Sterling Morton, of Nebraska. He declared that a
+newspaper's enemies were its assets, and the newspaper's liabilities its
+friends. This is particularly true of a country newspaper. For instance,
+witness the ten-years' struggle of our own little paper to get rid of
+the word "Hon." as a prefix to the names of politicians. Everyone in
+town used to laugh at us for referring to whippersnapper statesmen as
+"Honourable"; because everyone in town knew that for the most part these
+whippersnappers were entirely dishonourable. It was easy enough to stop
+calling our enemies "Hon.," for they didn't dare to complain; but if we
+dropped the title even from so mangy a man as Abner Handy, within a week
+Charley Hedrick would happen into the office with twenty or thirty
+dollars' worth of legal printing, and after doing us so important a
+favour would pause before going out to say:</p>
+
+<p>"Boys, what you fellows got against Ab Handy?" And the ensuing dialogue
+would conclude from old Charley: "Well, I know&mdash;I know&mdash;but Ab likes it,
+and it really isn't much, and I know he's a fool about it; I don't care
+in my own case, but if you can do it I kind of wish you would. Ab's
+funny that way; he's never given up. He's like the fellow old Browning
+tells about who has 'august anticipations, of a dim splendour ever on
+before,' and when you fellows quit calling him 'Hon.' it makes him
+blue."</p>
+
+<p>And old Charley would grow purple with a big, wheezy, asthmatic laugh,
+and shake his great six-foot hulk and toddle out leaving us vanquished.
+For though the whole town reviles Abner Handy, Charley Hedrick still
+looks after him.</p>
+
+<p>It was said for thirty years that Handy did old Charley's dirty work in
+politics, but we knew many of the mean things that Handy did were
+unjustly charged to Hedrick. People in a small community are apt to put
+two and two together and make five. Much of the talk about the alliance
+between Hedrick and Handy is, of course, down-right slander; every
+lawyer who tries lawsuits for forty years in a country town is bound to
+make enemies of small-minded people, many of whom occupy large places in
+the community, and a small-minded man, believing that his enemy is a
+villain, makes up his facts to suit his belief, and then peddles his
+story. It is always just as well to discount the home stories on an old
+lawyer ninety-five per cent. if they are bad; and seventy per cent. if
+they are good&mdash;for he may have saved the fellow who is telling them from
+the penitentiary. But Abner Handy was never enough of a lawyer to come
+within this rule. Indeed they used to say that he was not admitted to
+the bar, at all, but that when he came to town, in 1871, he erased his
+dead brother's name on a law diploma and substituted his own. Still, he
+practised on the law&mdash;as Simon Mehronay used to say of Handy&mdash;and for
+twenty years carried an advertisement in Eastern farm journals
+proclaiming that his specialty was Kansas collections. He never took as
+a fee less than ninety-five per cent. of the amount he collected. That
+was the advantage which he had as a lawyer, which advantage inspired
+Colonel Alphabetical Morrison to proclaim that a lawyer's diploma is
+nothing but a license to steal; upon hearing which Charley Hedrick sent
+back to the Colonel the retort that it would take two legal diplomas
+working day and night to keep up with the Colonel's more or less honest
+endeavours.</p>
+
+<p>Now Ab Handy was a lean coyote, who was forever licking his bruises, and
+some ten years later he tried to run for the school board solely to get
+the Colonel's daughters dismissed as school-teachers. It was his boast
+that he never forgot a foe; and for twenty years after Hedrick saved
+Handy from going to jail for robbing a cattleman of a thousand dollars
+in "Red" Martin's gambling-room, the only good thing the town knew of
+Handy was that he never forgot a friend.</p>
+
+<p>During that twenty years whenever, to further his ends in a primary or
+in an election, Charley Hedrick needed the votes of the rough element
+that gathered about our little town, Abner Handy, card-sharper and
+jack-leg lawyer, would go forth into the byways and alleys and gather
+them in. For this service, when Hedrick carried the county&mdash;which was
+about four times out of five&mdash;Handy was rewarded by being put on the
+delegation to the State convention. Thus he made his beginning in State
+politics. The second time that he attended a State convention Handy
+swelled up in his Sunday clothes, and by reason of his slight
+acquaintance with the manipulators of State politics, began to patronise
+the other members of our delegation&mdash;good, honest men, whose contempt
+for him at home was unspeakable; but when they huddled like sheep in the
+strange crowd at the convention they often accepted Handy as a guide in
+important matters. In talking with the home delegation Handy very soon
+began speaking of the convention leaders familiarly as "Jim" and "Dick"
+and "Tawm" and "Bill," and sometimes Handy brought one of these
+dignitaries to the rooms of our delegation and introduced him to our
+people with a grand flourish. Every time the legislature met, Ab Handy
+was a clerk in it, and, if he was a clerk of an important committee
+like the railroad committee or the committee on the calendar, he
+invariably came home with a few hundred dollars, three suits of clothes
+and a railroad pass. No one but Charley Hedrick could live with him for
+six months afterward.</p>
+
+<p>It was when he returned from one of these profitable sessions that Abner
+Handy and Nora Sinclair were married. The affinity between them was
+this: his good clothes and proud manner caught her; and her social
+position caught him. Everyone in town knew, however, that Nora Sinclair
+had been too smart for Handy. She had him hooked through the gills
+before he knew that he was more than nibbling at the bait. The town
+concurred with Colonel Morrison&mdash;our only townsman who travelled widely
+in those days&mdash;when he put it succinctly: "Ab Handy is Nora Sinclair's
+last call for the dining-car."</p>
+
+<p>Her influence on Abner Handy and his life was such that it is necessary
+to record something of the kind of a woman she was before he met her. A
+woman of the right sort might have made a man of Handy, even that late
+in life. Strong, good women have made weak men fairly strong, but such
+women were never girls like Nora. She was a nice enough little girl
+until she became boy-struck&mdash;as our vernacular puts it. Her mother
+thought this development of the child was "so cute," and told callers
+about the boys who came to see Nora&mdash;before she was twelve. In those
+days, and in some old-fashioned families in our town, little girls were
+asked to run out to play when the neighbours had to be discussed. But
+Mrs. Sinclair claimed Nora was "neither sugar nor salt nor anybody's
+honey," and everything was talked over before the child. We knew at the
+office from Colonel Morrison that his little girls did not play at the
+Sinclairs'. Her mother put long dresses and picture hats upon her and
+pushed her out into society, and the whole town knew that Nora was a
+mature woman, in all her instincts, by the time she was sixteen. Her
+mother, moreover, was manifestly proud that the child wasn't "one of
+those long-legged, gangling tom-boy girls, who seem so backward" and
+wear pigtails and chew slate pencils and dream.</p>
+
+<p>The gilded youths who boarded at the Hotel Metropole began to notice
+her. That pleased her mother also, and she said to the mothers of other
+little girls of Nora's age who were climbing fences and wiping dishes:
+"You know Nora is so popular with the gentlemen." When the girl was
+seventeen she was engaged. She kept a town fellow and had a college
+fellow. She acquired a "gentleman friend" in Kansas City who gave her
+expensive presents. These her mother took great joy in displaying, and
+never objected when he stayed after eleven o'clock; for she thought he
+was "such a good catch" and such a "swell young man." But Nora shooed
+him off the front porch in the summer following, because he objected to
+her having two or three other eleven o'clock fellows. She said he was
+"selfish, and would not let her have a good time." At nineteen she knew
+more about matters that were none of her business than most women know
+on their wedding day, and the boys said that she was soft. Every time
+that Nora left town she came back with two or three correspondents. She
+perfumed her stationery, used a seal, adopted all the latest frills,
+and learned to write an angular hand. At twenty she was going with the
+young married set, and was invited out to the afternoon card clubs. She
+was known as a dashing girl at this time, and travelling men in three
+States knew about her. Her mother used to send personal items to our
+office telling of their exalted business positions and announcing their
+visits to the Sinclair home. There was more or less talk about Nora in a
+quiet way, but her mother said that "it is because the other girls don't
+know how to wear their clothes as well as Nora does," and that "when a
+girl has a fine figure&mdash;which few enough girls in this town have, Heaven
+knows&mdash;why, she is a fool if she doesn't make the most of herself."</p>
+
+<p>Then, gradually, Nora went to seed. She became a faded, hard-faced
+woman, and all the sisters in town warned their brothers against her.
+She was invited out only when there was a crowd. She took up with the
+boys of the younger set, and the married women of her own age called her
+the kidnapper. She was a social joke. About once a year a strange man
+would show up in her parlour, and she kept up the illusion about being
+engaged. But in the office we shared the town's knowledge that her harp
+was on the willows. She was massaging her face at twenty-six and her
+mother was sniffing at the town and saying that there were no social
+advantages to be had here. She and the girl went to the Lakes every
+summer, and Nora always came home declaring that she had had the time of
+her life, and that she met so many lovely gentlemen. But that was all
+there was to it, and in the end it was Abner Handy or no one.</p>
+
+<p>After their wedding, Nora and Abner Handy set about the business of
+making politics pay. That is a difficult thing to do in a country town,
+where every voter is a watchdog of the county and city treasuries. Abner
+gave up his gambling, he and his wife joined all the lodges in town, and
+she dragged him into that coterie of people known as Society. She joined
+a woman's club, and was always anxious to be appointed on the soliciting
+committee when the women had any public work to do; so when the library
+needed books, or the trash cans at the street corners needed paint, or
+the park trees needed trimming, or the new hospital needed an additional
+bed, or the band needed new uniforms, Mrs. Handy might be seen on the
+streets with two or three women of a much better social status than she
+had, making it clear that she was a public-spirited woman and that she
+moved in the best circles. Whereupon Abner Handy got work in the
+court-house&mdash;as a deputy, or as a clerk, or as an under-sheriff, or as a
+juror&mdash;and when the legislature met he went to Topeka as a clerk.</p>
+
+<p>No one knew how they lived, but they did live. Every two years they gave
+a series of parties, and the splendour of these festivals made the town
+exclaim in one voice: "Well, <i>how</i> do they do it?" But Mrs. Handy, who
+was steaming the wrinkles out of her face, and assuming more or less
+kittenish airs in her late thirties, never offered the town an
+explanation. "Hers not to answer why, hers not to make reply, hers but
+to do and dye" was the way Colonel Morrison put it the day after Mrs.
+Handy swooped down into Main Street with a golden yellow finish on her
+hair. She walked serenely between Mrs. Frelinghuysen and Mrs. Priscilla
+Winthrop Conklin. They were begging for funds with which to furnish a
+rest room for farmers' wives. And when they bore down on our office,
+Colonel Morrison folded his papers in his bosom and passed them on the
+threshold as one hurrying to a fire in the roof of his own house. It was
+interesting to observe, when the Federation Committee called on us that
+day, that Mrs. Handy did all the talking. She was as full of airs and
+graces as an actress, and ogled with her glassy eyes, and put on a sweet
+babyish innocence of the ways of business and of men&mdash;as though men were
+a race apart, greatly to be feared because they ate up little girls. But
+she got her dollar before she left the office, and George Kirwin, who
+happened to be in the front room at the time waiting for a proof, said
+he thought that the performance and the new hair were worth the price.</p>
+
+<p>Five years passed and in each year Mrs. Handy had found some artificial
+way of deluding herself that she was cheating time. Then Charley
+Hedrick, who needed a vote in the legislature, and was too busy to go
+there himself, nominated Abner Handy and elected him to a seat in the
+lower house. The thing that Hedrick needed was not important&mdash;merely
+the creation of a new judicial district which would remove an obnoxious
+district judge in an adjoining county from our district, and leave our
+county in a district by itself. Hedrick hated the judge, and Hedrick
+used Handy's vote for trading purposes with other statesmen desiring
+similar small matters and got the district remade as he desired it.</p>
+
+<p>When the Handys started to Topeka for the opening of the session, they
+began to inflame with importance as the train whistled for the junction
+east of town, and by the time they actually arrived at Topeka they were
+so highly swollen that they could not get into a boarding-house door,
+but went to the best hotel, and engaged rooms at seven dollars a day.
+The town gasped for two days and then began to laugh and wink. Two weeks
+after their arrival at the State capital, Abner Handy had been made
+chairman of the joint committee on the calendar, second member of the
+judiciary committee and member of the railroad committee, and Mrs. Handy
+had established credit at a Topeka dry-goods store and was going it
+blind. She gave her hair an extra dip, and used to come sailing down
+the corridors of the hotel in gorgeous silk house-gowns with ridiculous
+trains, and never appeared at breakfast without her diamonds. Before the
+session was well under way she had been to Kansas City to have her face
+enameled and had told the other "ladies of the hotel," as the wives of
+members of the legislature stopping at the hotel were called, that
+Topeka stores offered such a poor selection; she confided to them that
+Mr. Handy always wore silk nightshirts, and that she was unable to find
+anything in town that he would put on. She regarded herself as a
+charmer, and made great eyes at all the important lobbyists, to whom she
+put on her baby voice and manner and said that she thought politics were
+just simply awful, and added that if she were a man she would show them
+how honest a politician could be, but she wasn't, and when Abner tried
+to explain it to her it made her head ache, and all she wanted him to do
+was to help his friends, and she would add coyly: "I'm going to see that
+he helps you&mdash;whatever he does."</p>
+
+<p>Every bill that had a dollar in it was held at the bottom of the
+calendar until satisfactory arrangements were made with Abner Handy and
+his friends. When the legislative buccaneers under the black flag,
+sailed after an insurance company, their bill remained at the bottom of
+the calendar in one house or the other until Ab Handy had been seen, and
+no one could find out why. And so, in spite of our dislike of the man,
+our paper was forced to acknowledge that Handy was a house leader.
+Although he had never had a dozen cases above the police court, he came
+back at the end of the session with the local attorneyship of two
+railroads, and was chairman of a house committee to investigate the
+taxes paid by the railroads in the various counties. This gave him a
+year's work, so he rented an office in the Worthington block and hired a
+stenographer. Of course, we knew in town how Ab Handy had made his
+money. But he paid so many of his old debts, and dispensed so many
+favours with such a lordly hand, that it was hard to stir local
+sentiment against him. He donned the clothes of a "prominent citizen,"
+and in discussing public affairs assumed an owlish manner that impressed
+his former associates, and fooled stupid people, who began to believe
+that they had been harbouring a statesman unawares. But Charley Hedrick
+only grinned when men talked to him of the rise of Handy, and replied to
+the complaints of the scrupulous that Ab was no worse than he had always
+been, and if he was making it pay better, no one was poorer for his
+prosperity but Ab himself, and added: "Certainly he is a sincere
+spender." One day when Handy appeared on the street in a particularly
+fiery red necktie, Hedrick got him in a crowd, and began: "Just for a
+handful of silver he left us&mdash;just for a riband to stick in his coat."
+And when the crowd laughed with the joker, Hedrick continued in his
+thick, gravy-coated voice: "Old Browning's the boy. You fellows that
+want Shakespeare can have him; but Ab here knows that I take a little
+dash of Browning in mine. Since Ab's got to be a statesman, he's bought
+all of Webster's works and is learning 'em by heart. But"&mdash;and here
+Hedrick chuckled and shook his fat sides before letting out the joke
+which he enjoyed so much&mdash;"I says to Ab: as old Browning says, what does
+'the fine felicity and flower of wickedness' like you need with
+Webster; what you want to commit to memory is the penal statutes." And
+he threw back his head and gurgled down in his abdomen, while the crowd
+roared and Handy showed the wool in his teeth with a dog-like grin.</p>
+
+<p>No other man in town would have dared that with Handy after he became a
+statesman; but we figured it out in the office that old Charley Hedrick
+was merely exhibiting his brand on Ab Handy to show the town that his
+title to Handy was still good. For though there was considerable of the
+King Cole about Hedrick&mdash;in that he was a merry old soul&mdash;he was always
+king, and he insisted on having his divine right to rule the politics of
+the county unquestioned. That was his vanity and he knew it, and was not
+ashamed of it.</p>
+
+<p>He was the best lawyer in the State in those days, and one of the best
+in the West. Ten months in the year he paid no attention to politics,
+pendulating daily between his house and his office. Often, being
+preoccupied with his work, he would go the whole length of Main Street
+speaking to no one. When a tangled case was in his mind he would enter
+his office in the morning, roll up his desk top, and dig into his work
+without speaking to a soul until, about the middle of the morning, he
+would look up from his desk to say as though he had just left off
+speaking: "Jim, hand me that 32 Kansas report over there on the table."
+When he worked, law books sprang up around him and sprawled over his
+desk and lay half open on chairs and tables near him until he had found
+his point; then he would get up and begin rollicking, slamming books
+together, cleaning up his debris and playing like a great porpoise with
+the litter he had made. At such times&mdash;and, indeed, all the time unless
+he was in what he called a "legal trance"&mdash;Hedrick was bubbling with
+good spirits, and when he left his office for politics he could get out
+in his shirt-sleeves at a primary and peddle tickets, or nose up and
+down the street like a fat ferret looking for votes. So when Abner Handy
+announced that he desired to go to the State Senate, to fill an
+unexpired term for two years, he had Hedrick behind him to give strength
+and respectability to his candidacy. Between the two Handy won. That was
+before the days of reform, when it was supposed to be considerable of a
+virtue for a man to stand by his friend; and, being a lawyer, Hedrick
+naturally had the lawyer's view that no man is guilty until the jury is
+in, and its findings have been reviewed by the supreme court.</p>
+
+<p>So Senator and Mrs. Senator Handy&mdash;as the town put it&mdash;went to Topeka as
+grandly as ever "Childe Roland to the dark tower came"&mdash;to use Hedrick's
+language. "No one ever has been able to find out what Roland was up to
+when he went to the dark tower, but," continued Hedrick, "with Ab and
+his child-wonder it will be different. She isn't taking all that special
+scenery along in her trunks for nothing. Ab has stumbled on to this
+great truth&mdash;that clothes may not make the man, but they make the
+crook!"</p>
+
+<p>Handy drew a dark brow when he became a Senator, and made a point of
+trying to look ominous. He carried his chin tilted up at an angle of
+forty-five degrees, and spoke of the most obvious things with an air of
+mystery. He never admitted anything; his closest approach to committing
+himself on even so apparent a proposition as the sunrise, was that it
+had risen "ostensibly"; he became known to the reporters as "Old
+Ostensible."</p>
+
+<p>It was his habit to tiptoe around the Senate chamber whispering to other
+Senators, and then having sat down to rise suddenly as though some great
+impulse had come to him and hurry into the cloakroom. He inherited the
+chairmanship of the railroad committee, and all employees came to him
+for their railroad passes; so he was the god of the blue-bottle flies of
+politics that feed on legislatures, and buzz pompously about the capitol
+doing nothing, at three dollars a day. In that session Handy was for the
+"peepul." He patronised the State Shippers' Association, and told their
+committee that he would give them a better railroad bill than they were
+asking. His practice was to commit to memory a bill that he was about to
+introduce and then go into his committee-room, when it was full of
+loafers, and pretend to dictate it offhand to the stenographer, section
+by section without pausing. It was an impressive performance, and gained
+Handy the reputation of being brainy. But we at home who knew Handy
+were not impressed; and, in our office, we knew that he was the same Ab
+Handy who once did business with a marked deck; who cheated widows and
+orphans; who sold bogus bonds; who got on two sides of lawsuits, and
+whose note was never good at any bank unless backed by blackmail.</p>
+
+<p>When the session closed Abner Handy came home, a statesman with views on
+the tariff, and ostentatiously displayed his thousand-dollar bills. The
+Handys spent the summer in Atlantic City, and Abner came home wearing
+New York clothes of an exaggerated type, and though he never showed it
+in our town, they used to say that he put on a high hat when the train
+whistled for Topeka. Also we heard that the first time Mrs. Handy
+appeared at the political hotel in her New York regalia, adorned with
+spangles and beads and cords and tassels, the "ladies of the hotel" said
+that she was "fixed up like a Christmas tree"&mdash;a remark that we in the
+office coupled with Colonel Morrison's reflection when he spoke of Ab's
+"illustrated vests." At the meeting of the State Federation of Woman's
+Clubs, Mrs. Handy first flourished her lorgnette, and came home with
+her wedding ring made over on a pattern after the prevailing style.
+About this time she made her famous remark to "Aunt" Martha Merrifield
+that she didn't think it proper for a woman to go through her husband's
+money with too sensitive a nose; she said that men must work and women
+must weep, and that she for one would not make the work of her husband
+any harder by criticising it with her silly morals.</p>
+
+<p>As for Abner Handy, it would have made little difference to him then
+whether she or anyone else had tried to check his career; for he was
+cultivating a loud tone of voice and a regal sweep to his arms. He
+always signed himself on hotel registers Senator Handy, and the help
+about the Topeka hotels began to mark him for their hate, for he was
+insolent to those whom he regarded as his inferiors. But Colonel
+Morrison used to say that he wore his vest-buttons off crawling to those
+in authority. He took little notice of the town. He referred to us as
+"his people" in a fine feudal way, and went about town with his cigar
+pointing toward his hat brim and his eyes fixed on something in the next
+block. He became the attorney for a number of crooked promotion schemes,
+and the diamond rings on his wife's fingers crowded the second joint. He
+had telegraph and express franks, railway and Pullman passes in such
+quantities that it made his coat pocket bulge to carry them. Often he
+would spread out these evidences of his shame on his office table, to
+awe the local politicians, and in so far as they could influence the
+town opinion, they promulgated the idea that if Ab Handy was a
+scoundrel&mdash;and of course he was&mdash;he was a smart scoundrel. So he came to
+think this himself.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="gs14" id="gs14"></a>
+<img src="images/gs14.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3>Went about town with his cigar pointing toward his
+hat-brim</h3>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Mrs. Handy threw herself into the work of the City Federation with
+passionate zeal. Also she kept up her lodge connections, and explained
+to the women, whom she considered of a higher social caste than the
+lodge women, that she was "doing it to help Mr. Handy." She did a little
+church work for the same reason, but her soul was in the Federation, for
+it insured her social status as neither lodge nor church could do. So
+she put herself under the protecting seal-lined wing of Mrs. Julia Neal
+Worthington who on account of her efforts to clean the streets we at
+the office had been taught by Colonel Morrison to know as the Joan of
+the trash-cans. And Miss Larrabee, our society reporter, told us that
+Mrs. Handy was the only woman in town who did not smile into her
+handkerchief when Mrs. Worthington, who had trained down to one hundred
+and ninety-seven pounds five and three-eighths ounces, gave her course
+of lectures on delsarte before the Federation.</p>
+
+<p>It was Mrs. Handy who encouraged Mrs. Worthington to open her salon. But
+as there were lodge meetings the first three nights in the week, and
+prayer-meetings in the middle of the week, and as the choirs met for
+practice, and the whist clubs met for business the last of the week, the
+salon did not seem to take with the town, and so was discontinued. Then
+Mrs. Worthington and Mrs. Handy sought other fields. And the first field
+they stumbled into was the court-house square. For fifty years the
+farmers near our town had been hitching at the racks provided by the
+county commissioners. But Mrs. Worthington decided that the time had
+come for a change and that the town was getting large enough to take
+down the hitching-racks. So, as chairman of the Municipal Improvement
+section of the City Federation, Mrs. Worthington began war on the
+hitching-racks. At the Federation meetings for three months there were
+reports from committees appointed to interview the councilmen; reports
+of committees to interview the county commissioners&mdash;who were obdurate;
+reports of committees to lease new ground for the hitching rack stands;
+reports of the legal committee; reports of the sanitary committee, and
+through it all Mrs. Worthington rose at every meeting and declared that
+the hitching racks must be destroyed. And as she was rated in
+Bradstreet's report at nearly half a million dollars, her words had much
+force.</p>
+
+<p>The town was beginning to stir itself. The merchants were with the
+women&mdash;because the women bought the dry goods and groceries&mdash;and we
+forgot about the farmers. To all this milling among the people Handy was
+oblivious, for he was stepping like a hen in high oats, with his eyes on
+a seat in Congress. Matters of mere local importance did not concern
+him. The railroads were for him, and the stars in their courses seemed
+to him to be pointing his way to Washington. He knew of the
+hitching-rack trouble only when he had to go with Mrs. Handy to the
+dinners at the Worthington home given to the councilmen and their wives,
+who were lukewarm on the removal proposition.</p>
+
+<p>In the spring before the election of 1902 Mrs. Worthington had a
+majority in the council, and one Saturday night the hitching-racks were
+taken down by the street commissioner. And within a week the town was on
+the verge of civil war, for the farmers of the county rose as one man
+and demanded the blood of the offenders. But Abner Handy knew nothing of
+the disturbance. The county attorney had the street commissioner and his
+men arrested for trespassing upon county property; farmers threatened to
+boycott the town. But Abner Handy's ear was attuned to higher things.
+Merchants who had signed the petition asking the council to remove the
+racks began to denounce the removal as an act of treason. But Abner
+Handy conferred with State leaders on great questions, and the city
+attorney, who was a candidate for county attorney that fall, did not
+dare to defend the street commissioner. The council got stubborn, and
+Colonel Morrison, before whom as justice of the peace the case was to be
+tried, fearing for the professional safety of his three daughters in the
+town schools and his four daughters in the county schools, took a trip
+to his wife's people, and told us he was enlisted there for "ninety days
+or during the war"; and still Abner Handy looked at the green hills
+afar.</p>
+
+<p>We are generally accounted by ourselves a fearless newspaper; but here
+we admitted that the situation required discretion. So we straddled it.
+We wrote cautious editorials in carefully-balanced sentences demanding
+that the people keep cool. We advised both sides to realise that only
+good sense and judgment would straighten out the tangle. We demanded
+that each side recognise the other's rights and made both sides angry,
+whereas General Durham, of the <i>Statesman</i>, made his first popular
+stroke in a dozen years by insisting, in double leads and italics, that
+the tariff on hides was a divine institution, and that humanity called
+upon us to hold the Philippines. Charley Hedrick knew better than
+anyone else in town what a tempest was rising. He might have warned
+Handy, but he did not; for Handy had reached a point in his career where
+he considered that a mere county boss was beneath his confidence. More
+than that, Hedrick had refused to indorse Handy's note at the bank.
+Handy needed money, and being a shorn lamb, the wind changed in his
+direction in this wise:</p>
+
+<p>In the midst of the furore that week, Mrs. Worthington gave an evening
+reception for the Federation and its husbands at her mansion, fed them
+sumptuously, and, after Mrs. Handy had tapped a bell for silence, Mrs.
+Worthington rose in her jet and passementerie and announced that our
+town had come to a crisis in its career; that we must now decide whether
+we were going to be a beautiful little city or a cow pasture. She said
+that beauty was as much an essential to life as money and that we would
+be better off with more beauty and less trade, and that with the
+court-house square a mudhole the town could never rise to any real
+consequence. As the men of the town seemed to be moral cowards, she was
+going to enlist the women in this war, and as the first step in her
+campaign she proposed to hire the Honourable Abner Handy to assist the
+city attorney in fighting this case, and as a retainer she would
+herewith and now hand him her personal check for five hundred dollars.
+Whereat the women clapped their hands, their husbands winked at one
+another, and "there was a sound of revelry by night." The check was put
+on a silver card-tray by Mrs. Worthington and set on a table in the
+midst of the company waiting for Handy to come forward and take it.
+After the town had looked at the check, Mrs. Handy seemed to cut his
+leashes and Abner went after it. He was waiting at the Worthington bank
+the next morning at nine o'clock to cash it&mdash;and all the town saw that
+also.</p>
+
+<p>Whereupon the town grinned broadly that evening when it read in the
+<i>Statesman</i> a most laudatory article about "our distinguished
+fellow-townsman." The article declared that it was "the duty of the hour
+to send Honourable Abner Handy to the halls of Congress." The
+<i>Statesman</i> contended that "Judge Handy had been for a lifetime the
+defender of those grand and glorious principles of freedom and
+protection and sound money for which the Grand Old Party stood." The
+General proclaimed that "it shall be not only a duty, but a pleasure,
+for our citizens to lay aside all petty personal and factional quarrels
+and rally round the standard of our noble leader in this great contest."</p>
+
+<p>If Handy ever went to the city attorney's office to look after Mrs.
+Worthington's lawsuit, no one knew it. He smiled wisely when asked how
+the suit was progressing, and one day John Markley&mdash;who during the life
+of Ezra Worthington, hated him with a ten-horse-power hate and loaded it
+onto his widow's shoulders and the Worthington bank which she
+inherited&mdash;John Markley called Handy into the back room of the Markley
+Mortgage Company, and, when Handy passed the cashier's window going out,
+he cashed a check signed by John Markley for a thousand dollars on which
+was inscribed "for legal services in assisting the county attorney in
+the hitching rack case."</p>
+
+<p>Handy had arrived at a point where he feared nothing. He seemed to
+believe that he lived a charmed life and never would get caught. He
+bought extra copies of the <i>Statesman</i>, which was booming him for
+Congress, and sent them over the Congressional District by the
+thousands. He went to Topeka in his high silk hat and his New York
+clothes, gave out interviews on the causes of the flurry in the money
+market, and, desiring further advertisement, gave a banquet for the
+newspaper men of the capital which cost him a hundred dollars. So he
+became a great man. At home he assumed a patronising air to the people
+about Charley Hedrick. And one night in Smith's cigar store, just to be
+talking, he said that he didn't get so much of Mrs. Worthington's money
+as people thought, for part of it had to go to "square old Charley
+Hedrick." Hedrick was John Markley's attorney, and he had taken an
+active part in helping the county attorney prosecute the street
+commissioners. Naturally Handy's remark stirred up the town. It was two
+weeks, however, in getting to Hedrick, and when it came the man turned
+black and seemed to be swallowing a pint of emotional language before he
+spoke. And there Abner Handy's doom was sealed; though Hedrick did not
+make the sentence public.</p>
+
+<p>Now, it is well known in our county that the country people are slow to
+wrath. They were two months finding out beyond a question of doubt that
+Abner Handy had accepted Mrs. Worthington's money to act against them,
+but when they knew this there was no hope for Handy among them. They are
+a quiet people, and make no noise. For a month, only Charley Hedrick and
+the grocers and the hardware men, with whom the farmers trade, knew the
+truth about Handy's standing in the county. Hedrick bided his time. The
+Handy boom for Congress was rolling over the district, and the
+<i>Statesman</i> italics were becoming worn, and its exclamation points
+battered in the service, when one day Handy stalked up to Hedrick's
+office, imperiously beckoned Hedrick into the private room, and blurted
+out:</p>
+
+<p>"Charley, I got to have some more money&mdash;need it in my business. Can't
+you touch old John Markley for me again&mdash;say for about five hundred on
+that hitching rack case? Sister Worthington is kind of wanting me to get
+action on her case."</p>
+
+<p>Hedrick was dumb with rage, but Handy thought it was acquiescence. He
+went on:</p>
+
+<p>"You just step down to the bank and say: 'John, I've noticed Ab Handy
+actin' kind of queer about that hitching rack case.' That's all you need
+say, and pretty soon I'll step in and say: 'John, I don't see how I can
+help doin' something for Aunt Julia Worthington.' And I believe I can
+tap him for five hundred more easy enough. I got an idea he is mightily
+in earnest about beating her in that suit."</p>
+
+<p>When Hedrick got his breath, which was churning and wheezing in his
+throat, he cut Handy's sentence off with:</p>
+
+<p>"You human razor-back shoat&mdash;you swill-barrel gladiator,
+why&mdash;why&mdash;I&mdash;I&mdash;&mdash;" And Hedrick sparred for wind and went on before
+Handy realised the situation. "Ab Handy, I spat on the dust and breathed
+into the chaff that made you, and put you on the mud-sills of hell to
+dry, and I've got a right to turn you back into fertiliser, and I'm
+going to do it. Git out of here&mdash;git out of this office, or I&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>And the hulking form of Hedrick fell on the bag of shaking bones that
+was Handy and battered him through the latched door into the crowded
+outer office; and Handy picked himself up and ran like a wolf, turning
+at the door to show his teeth before he scampered through the hall and
+scurried down the stairs. As Hedrick came puffing out of the broken door
+his coat snagged on a splinter. He grinned as he unfastened himself:</p>
+
+<p>"Well, the snail seems to be on the thorn; the lark certainly is on the
+wing.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"<i>God's in his heaven.</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>All's right with the world!</i>"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And he batted his eyes at the group of loafing local statesmen in his
+office as he viewed the wreckage, and went to the telephone and ordered
+a carpenter, without wasting any words on the crowd.</p>
+
+<p>We decided long ago that the source of Hedrick's power in politics was
+what we called his "do it now" policy. All politicians have schemes.
+Hedrick puts his through before he talks about them. If he has an idea
+that satisfies his judgment, he makes it a reality in the quickest
+possible time. That is why the fellows around town who hate Hedrick call
+him the rattlesnake, and those who admire him call him the Wrath of
+God. When he put up the telephone receiver he reached for his hat and
+bolted from the office under a full head of steam. He went directly to
+John Markley's back office, got the check that Markley had given to
+Handy, dictated a letter in the anteroom of Markley's office to a Kansas
+City plate-maker, inclosed fifty dollars as he passed the draft counter,
+and, as he swung by the post-office he mailed the Handy check with
+instructions to have ten photographic half-tone cuts made of the check
+and mailed back to Hedrick in four days.</p>
+
+<p>Then he went to Mrs. Worthington, told her his story, as a lawyer puts
+his case before a jury&mdash;had her raging at Ab Handy&mdash;and got an order on
+the bank for the check she had given to Handy. This also he sent to the
+plate-maker, and in an hour was back at his desk dictating a half-page
+advertisement to go into every Republican weekly newspaper in the
+district. He sent that advertisement out with the half-tone cuts Monday
+morning, and it appeared all over the district that week. The
+advertisement was signed by Hedrick, and began:</p>
+
+<p>"Browning has a poem made after visiting a dead house, and in it he
+describes the corpse of a suicide, and says 'one clear, nice, cool
+squirt of water o'er the bust,' is the 'right thing to extinguish lust.'
+And I desire this advertisement to be 'one clear, nice, cool squirt of
+water' over the political remains of Honourable Abner Handy, to
+extinguish if possible his fatal lust for crooked money." After this
+followed the story of Handy's perfidy in the hitching rack case, a
+petition in disbarment proceedings, and the copy of the warrant for his
+arrest charged with a felony in the case sworn to by Hedrick himself.
+But the effective thing was the pictures, showing both sides of the two
+checks, each carefully inscribed by the two makers "for legal services
+in the hitching rack case," and each check indorsed by Handy in his big,
+brazen signature.</p>
+
+<p>Hedrick saw to it also that, on the day the country papers printed his
+advertisement, the Kansas City and Topeka papers printed the whole
+story, including the casting out of Handy from Hedrick's office. It did
+Handy little good to go to Topeka in his flashy clothes and give out a
+festive interview asking his friends to suspend judgment, and saying
+that he would try his case in the courts and not in the newspapers. It
+was contended by the newspapers that if Handy had an honest defence, it
+would lose no weight in court by being printed in the newspapers; and
+his enemies in the Congressional fight pushed the charges against Handy
+so relentlessly that the public faith in him melted like an April snow,
+and when the delegates to the Congressional convention were named, our
+own county instructed its delegates against Handy. The farmers opposed
+him for taking the case against them, and the town scorned him for his
+perfidy. No one who was not paid for it would peddle his tickets at the
+primaries, so Handy, with his money all spent, went home on the night of
+the local primaries a whipped dog. They said around town that all the
+whipped dog got at home was a tin can; for it is certain that at
+daylight Handy was down on Main Street viciously drunk, flourishing a
+revolver with which he said he was going to kill Charley Hedrick and
+then himself. They took the pistol from him, and then he wept and said
+he was going to jump in the river, but no one followed him when he
+started toward the bridge, and he fell asleep in the shade of the piers,
+where he was found during the morning, washed up and sent home sober.</p>
+
+<p>One of the curious revelations of society's partnership in crime was the
+way the grocers and butchers who despised Ab Handy's method, but shared
+his gains when he succeeded, stopped giving him credit when he failed.
+At the end of the first year after the primary wherein he was defeated,
+the Handys could not get a dime's worth of beefsteak without the dime.
+And dimes were scarce. By that time Handy was wearing his flashy New
+York clothes for every day&mdash;frayed and spotted and rusty. His
+temperament changed with his clothes, from the oily optimism of success
+to the sodden pessimism of utter failure; which inspired Colonel
+Morrison, returning after the hitching rack case had been settled in
+favour of the town, to remark, speaking of Handy, that "an optimist is a
+man who isn't caught, and is cheering to keep up his courage, and a
+pessimist is one who has been caught and thinks it will be but a
+question of time until his neighbours are found out too."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Worthington, who was a necessary witness in the disbarment
+proceedings and the criminal proceedings against Handy, always went to
+Europe when the cases were called; so rather than put a woman in jail
+for contempt of court, the court dismissed the proceedings against Handy
+and he was not allowed to be even a martyr. One morning about a year and
+a half after Handy's defeat, when Hedrick opened his office door, he
+found Handy there with his fingers clutching the chair arms and his eyes
+fixed on the floor. The man was breathing audibly, and seemed to be
+struggling with a great passion. Hedrick and Handy had not spoken since
+they came through the panels of the door together, but Hedrick went to
+the miserable creature, touched him gently on the shoulder, and motioned
+him into the private office. There, with his eyes still on the floor,
+Handy told Hedrick that the end of the rope had been reached.</p>
+
+<p>"I had to come down without any breakfast this
+morning&mdash;because&mdash;they&mdash;they ain't anything in the house for her to fix.
+And there ain't any show for dinner. Next week, Red Martin has promised
+me some money he's goin' to get from Jim Huddleson; but they ain't a
+soul in town but you I can come to now"; and Handy raised his eyes from
+the floor in canine self-pity as he whined&mdash;"and she's making life a
+hell for me!" When Hedrick opened his desk and got out his check-book,
+he smiled as he fancied he could detect about Handy's body the faint
+resemblance of a wagging tail. He made the check for fifty dollars and
+gave it to Handy saying, "Oh, well, Ab&mdash;we'll let bygones be bygones."</p>
+
+<p>Handy snapped at it and in an instant was gone.</p>
+
+<p>That afternoon Hedrick met Handy sailing down Main Street in his old
+manner. His head was erect, his eyes were sparkling, his big, rough,
+statesman's voice was bellowing abroad, and his thumbs were in the
+armholes of his vest. He walked straight to Hedrick and led him by the
+coat lapel into a dark stairway. There was an air of deep mystery about
+Handy and when he put his arm on Hedrick to whisper in his ear,
+Hedrick, smelling the statesman's breath heavy with whiskey and onions
+and cloves and cardamon seeds and pungent gum, heard this:</p>
+
+<p>"Say, Charley, I'm fooling 'em&mdash;I've got 'em all fooled. They think I'm
+poor. They think I ain't got any money. But old Ab's too smart for them.
+I've got lots of money&mdash;all I want&mdash;all anyone could want&mdash;wealth beyond
+the dreams of avar&mdash;of av&mdash;avar&mdash;avar'ce, as John Ingalls used to say.
+Just look at this!" And with that Handy pulled from his inside coat
+pocket a roll of one and two-dollar bills, that seemed to Hedrick to
+represent fifty dollars less the price of about ten drinks. "Look
+a-here," continued Handy, "ol' Ab's got 'em all fooled. Don't you say
+anything about it; but ol' Ab's goin' to make his mark." And he shook
+Hedrick's hand and took him down to the street, and shook it again and
+again before prancing grandly down the sidewalk.</p>
+
+<p>For three years Mrs. Handy's boarding-house has been one of the most
+exclusive in our town. They say that she pays Mr. Handy for mowing the
+lawn and helping about the rough work in the kitchen, and that he sleeps
+in the barn and pays her for such meals as he eats. Sometimes a new
+boarder makes the mistake of paying the board money to Handy, and he
+appears on Main Street ostentatiously jingling his silver and toward
+evening has ideas about the railroad situation. On election days and
+when there is a primary Handy drives a carriage and gathers up his
+cronies in the fifth ward, who, like him, are not so much in evidence as
+they were ten years ago.</p>
+
+<p>It was only last week that Hedrick was in our office telling us of
+Handy's "wealth beyond the dreams of avarice." He paused when he had
+finished the story, cocked his head on one side, and squinted at the
+ceiling as he said:</p>
+
+<p>"For three long, weary, fruitless years I've searched the drug-stores of
+this town for the brand of liquor Ab had that day. I believe if I had
+two drinks of that I could write better poetry than old Browning
+himself."</p>
+
+<p>Whereupon Hedrick shook himself out of the office in a gentle wheesy
+laugh.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XVII" id="XVII"></a>XVII</h2>
+
+<h3>The Tremolo Stop</h3>
+
+
+<p>Our business has changed greatly since Horace Greeley's day. And,
+although machines have come into little offices like ours, the greatest
+changes have come in the men who do the work in these offices. In the
+old days&mdash;the days before the great war and after it&mdash;printers and
+editors were rarely leading citizens in the community. The editor and
+the printer were just coming out of the wandering minstrel stage of
+social development, and the journeyman who went from town to town
+seeking work, and increasing his skill, was an important factor in the
+craft. One might always depend upon a tramp printer's coming in when
+there was a rush of work in the office, and also figure on one of the
+tourists in the office leaving when he was needed most.</p>
+
+<p>From the ranks of this wayward class came the old editors and reporters;
+they were postgraduates from the back room of newspaper offices and
+they brought to the front room their easy view of life. Some of these
+itinerant writing craftsmen had professional fame. There was Peter B.
+Lee, who had tramped the country over, who knew Greeley and Dana and
+Prentice and Bob Burdett and Henry Watterson, and to whom the cub in
+country offices looked with worshipful eyes. There was "Old Slugs"&mdash;the
+printer who carried his moulds for making lead slugs, and who, under the
+influence of improper stimulants, could recite stirring scenes from the
+tragedies of Shakespeare. There was Buzby&mdash;old Buzby, who went about
+from office to office leaving his obituary set up by his own hand,
+conveying the impression that at last the end had come to a misspent
+life. Then there was J. N. Free&mdash;the "Immortal J. N.," as he called
+himself, a gaunt, cadaverous figure in broad hat and linen duster, with
+hair flowing over his shoulders, who stalked into the offices at
+unseemly hours to "raise the veil" of ignorance and error, and "relieve
+the pressure" of psychic congestion in a town by turning upon it the
+batteries of his mind.</p>
+
+<p>They were a dear lot of old souls out of accord with the world about
+them, ever seeking the place where they would harmonise. They might have
+stepped out of Dickens's books or Cruikshank's pictures, and, when one
+recalls them now, their lineaments seem out of drawing and impossible in
+the modern world. And yet they did live and move in the world that was,
+and the other day when we were looking over the files we came across the
+work of Simon Mehronay,&mdash;the name which he said was spelled Dutch and
+sounded Irish,&mdash;and it does not seem fair to set down the stories of the
+others who have made our office traditions without giving some account
+of him.</p>
+
+<p>For to us he was the most precious of all the old tribe of journalistic
+aborigines. He came to the office one bright April day with red mud on
+his shoes that was not the mud of our river bottoms, and we knew that he
+had ridden to town "blind baggage"&mdash;as they say of men who steal their
+way&mdash;from the South. The season was ripe for the birds to come North and
+it was the mud of Texas that clung to him. His greeting as he strode
+through the front room not waiting for a reply was "How's work?" And
+when the foreman told him to hang up his coat, he found a stick, got a
+"chunk of copy," and was clicking away at his case three minutes from
+the time he darkened the threshold of the office.</p>
+
+<p>There he sat for two weeks&mdash;the first man down in the morning and the
+last to quit at night&mdash;before anyone knew whence he came or whither he
+was bound. He had a little "false motion," the foreman said, and
+clattered his types too audibly in the steel stick, but as he got up a
+good string of type at the end of the day and furnished his own chewing
+tobacco, he created no unfavourable comment in the office. He was a bald
+little man, with a fringe of hair above the greasy velvet collar of his
+coat, with beady, dancing black eyes, and black chin whiskers and a
+moustache that often needed dyeing. It was the opinion of the foreman
+and the printers that Mehronay's weakness was liquor, though that
+opinion did not arise from anything that he said. For during the first
+two weeks we did not hear him say much, but in the years that followed,
+his mild little voice that ever seemed to be teetering on the edge of
+the laugh into which he fell a score of times during an hour, became a
+familiar sound about the office, and the soft, flabby little hand which
+the other printers laughed about, during the first week of his
+employment with us, has rested on most of the shoulders in the shop
+guiding us through many sad ways.</p>
+
+<p>In those days there were only three of us in the front room. All the
+bookkeeping and collecting and reporting and editorial writing were done
+by the three, and it happened that one morning near the first of the
+month, when the books needed attention, no one had heard the performance
+of "Hamlet" given by Thomas Keene at the opera house the night before,
+and no one about the paper could write it up. Wherefore there was
+perturbation; but in an hour this came from the back room set up in type
+and proved in the galley:</p>
+
+<p>"There were more clean shaves in town last night than have been seen
+here for a long time. Everyone who wears cuffs and a necktie got a
+'twice-over' and was 'out amongst 'em.' In the gallery of the opera
+house roosted the college faculty and the Potter boy who holds the
+Cottonwood Valley belt as the champion lay-down collar swell, and near
+him was Everett Fowler, who was making his first public appearance in
+his new parted spring whiskers, and was the observed of all observers.
+Colonel Alphabetical Morrison, with his famous U-shaped hair-cut, lent
+the grace of his presence to the dress circle. The first Methodist
+Church was represented by Brother-in-law John Markley, who is wearing a
+new flowered necktie, sent by his daughter in California (if you must
+know), and General Durham of the <i>Statesman</i> says that when the
+orchestra played 'Turkey in the Straw,' and Bill Master began to shake
+the sand-box&mdash;which is a new wrinkle in musical circles in our
+town&mdash;John Markley's feet began to wiggle until people thought this was
+his 'chill day.' After 'Turkey in the Straw,' the orchestra struck up
+something quick and devilish, which Charley Hedrick, who played the
+snare drum at Gettysburg, and is therefore entitled to speak on musical
+subjects, says was 'The Irish Washerwoman.' After this appropriate
+overture the curtain rose and the real show began.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Keene's Hamlet is not so familiar to our people as his Richard
+III., but it gave great satisfaction; for it is certainly a Methodist
+Hamlet from the clang of the gong to the home-stretch. The town never
+has stood for Mr. Lawrence Barrett's Unitarian Hamlet, and the high
+church Episcopal Hamlet put on the boards last winter by Mr. Frederick
+Paulding was distinctly disappointing. One of the most searching scenes
+in the play was enacted when Ophelia got the power and had to be carried
+out to the pump. The Chicago brother who plays the ghost has a great
+voice for his work. He brought many souls to a realizing sense that they
+are sin-stricken and hair-hung over the fiery pit. The groans and amens
+from the sanctified in the audience were a delicate compliment to his
+histrionic ability. The queen seems to have been a Presbyterian, and the
+king a Second Day Adventist of an argumentative type. And they were not
+popular with the audience, but the boy preacher who did Laertes was
+exceedingly blessed with the gift of tongues. Brother Polonius seems to
+have been a sort of presiding elder, and, when his exhortation rose, the
+chickens in Mike Wessner's coop, in the meat-market downstairs, gave up
+hope of life and lay down to be cut up and fried for breakfast. The
+performance was a great treat and, barring the fact that some switchmen,
+thinking Ophelia was full, giggled during the mad scene, and the further
+fact that someone yelled, 'Go for his wind, Ham!' during the fencing
+scene, the evening with Shakespeare's weirdest hero was a distinct
+credit to Mr. Keene, his company and our people."</p>
+
+<p>We wrote a conventional report of the performance, and printed
+Mehronay's account below it, under the caption <span class="smcap">From Another Reporter</span>,
+and it made the paper talked about for a week. Now in our town Keene was
+a histrionic god of the first order, and so many church people came to
+the office to "stop the paper" that circulation had a real impetus. We
+have never had a boom in subscription that did not begin with a lot of
+angry citizens coming in to stop the paper. It became known about town
+who wrote the Keene article, and Mehronay became in a small way a public
+character. We encouraged him to write more, so every morning the first
+proof slips that came in began to have on them ten or a dozen short
+items of Mehronay's writing. There was a smile in every one of them, and
+if he wrote more than ten lines there was a laugh. It was Mehronay who
+referred to Huddleson's livery-stable joint&mdash;where the old soaks got
+their beer in a stall and salted it from the feed-box&mdash;as "a gilded
+palace of sin." It was Mehronay who wrote the advertisement of the
+Chinese laundryman and signed his name "Fat Sam Child of the Sun,
+Brother of the Moon and Second Cousin by marriage to all the Stars." It
+was Mehronay who took a galley of pi which the office devil had set up
+from a wrecked form, and interspersed up and down the column of
+meaningless letters "Great applause"&mdash;"Tremendous cheering"&mdash;Cries of
+"Good, good!&mdash;that's the way to hit 'em!"&mdash;"Hurrah for Hancock"&mdash;and ran
+it in the paper as a report of Carl Schurz's speech to the
+German-American League at the court-house. It was Mehronay who put the
+advertisement in the paper proclaiming the fact that General Durham of
+the <i>Statesman</i> office desired to purchase a good second-hand fiddle,
+and explaining that the owner must play five tunes on it in front of the
+<i>Statesman</i> office door before bringing it in. Mehronay originated the
+fiction that there was an association in town formed to insure its
+members against wedding invitations which, in case of loss, paid the
+afflicted member a pickle dish or a napkin ring, to present as his
+offering to the bride.</p>
+
+<p>Mehronay started a mythical Widowers' Protective Foot-racing Society,
+and the town had great sport with the old boys whose names he used so
+wittily that it transcended impudence. Mehronay got up a long list of
+husbands who wiped dishes when the family was "out of a girl," as our
+people say, and organised them into a union to strike for their altars
+and their kitchen fires. When we sent him out to write up a fire,
+however, he generally forgot the amount of insurance and the extent of
+the loss, but he told all about the way the crowd tried to boss the fire
+department; and if we sent him out to gather the local markets, he made
+such a mess of it that we were a week straightening matters up. Figures
+didn't mean anything to Mehronay. When the bank failed, he tried to
+write something about it, but mixed the assets and the liabilities so
+hopelessly that we had to keep him busy with other things, so that he
+would have no time to touch the bank story. They used to say around town
+that when he laid down a piece of money, however large, on a store
+counter he never waited for his change, but be it said to the credit of
+most of the merchants that they would save it for Mehronay and give it
+to him on his next visit to the store, when he would be as joyful as a
+child.</p>
+
+<p>Gradually he left the back room and became a fixture in the front
+office. He wrote locals and editorials and helped with the advertising,
+drawing for this the munificent salary of fifteen dollars a week, which
+should have kept him like a prince; but it did not&mdash;though what he did
+with his money no one knew. He bought no new clothes, and never buttoned
+those he had. Before sending him out on the street in the morning,
+someone in the office had to button him up, and if it was a gala
+day&mdash;say circus day, or the day of a big political pow-wow&mdash;we had to
+put a clean paper collar on Mehronay above his brown wool shirt and
+shove out the dents in his derby hat&mdash;a procedure which he called
+"making a butterfly of fashion out of an honest workin' man." He slept
+in the press-room, on a bed which he rolled up and stowed behind the
+press by day, and in the evening he consorted with the goddess of
+nicotine&mdash;as he called his plug tobacco&mdash;and put in his time at his desk
+with a lead pencil and a pad of white paper writing copy for the next
+day's issue. Nothing delighted him so much as a fictitious personage or
+situation which held real relations with local events or home people.
+One of the best of his many inventions was a new reporter who, according
+to Mehronay's legend, had just quit work for a circus where he had been
+employed writing the posters. Mehronay's joy was to write up a local
+occurrence and pretend that the circus poster-writer had written it and
+that we had been greatly bothered to restrain his adjectives. A few days
+after the Sinclair-Handy wedding&mdash;a particularly gorgeous affair in one
+of the stone churches, which had been written up by the bride's mother,
+as the whole town knew, in a most disgusting manner&mdash;Mehronay sat
+chuckling in his corner, writing something which he put on the copy-hook
+before going out on his beat. It was headed <span class="smcap">A Dazzling Affair</span> and it ran
+thus:</p>
+
+<p>"For some time we have realised that we have not been doing full justice
+to the weddings that occur in this town; we have been using a repressed
+and obsolete style which is painful to those who enter into the joyous
+spirit of such occasions, and last night's wedding in the family of the
+patrician Skinners we assigned to our gentlemanly and urbane Mr. J.
+Mortimer Montague, late of the publicity department of the world-famed
+Robinson Circus and Menagerie. The following graceful account from Mr.
+Montague's facile pen is the most accurate and satisfactory report of a
+nuptial event we have ever recorded in these columns."</p>
+
+<p>And thereafter followed this:</p>
+
+<p>"Last evening, just as the clock in the steeple struck nine, a vast
+concourse of the beauty and the chivalry of our splendid city, composing
+wealth beyond the dreams of the kings of India and forming a galaxy only
+excelled in splendour by the knightly company at the Field of the Cloth
+of Gold, assembled to witness the marriage of Miss May Skinner and Mr.
+John Fortesque. The great auditorium was a bower of smilax and
+chrysanthemums, bewildering, amazing, superb in its verdant labyrinth.
+As the clock was striking the hour, the ten-thousand-dollar pipe-organ
+filled the edifice with strains of most seductive, entrancing music,
+played by Miss Jane Brown, the only real left-handed organist in the
+civilised world. Then came the wedding party, magnificent, radiant,
+resplendent with the glittering jewels of the Orient, dazzling with
+gorgeousness, stupefying and miraculous in its revelation of beauty.
+There were six handsome ushers&mdash;count them&mdash;six, ten bridesmaids&mdash;ten&mdash;a
+bevy of real, live, flower-bearing fairies, captured at an immense
+outlay of time and money in far Caucasia. The bride's resplendent
+costume and surpassing beauty put the blush upon the Queen of Sheba,
+made Hebe's effulgence fade as the moon before the sun; and as the long
+courtly train of knights errant and ladies-in-waiting passed the
+populace, they presented a regal spectacle, never equalled since the
+proud Cleopatra sailed down the perfumed lotus-bearing Nile in her
+gilded pageant to meet Marc Antony, while all the world stood agape at
+the unheard-of triumph.</p>
+
+<p>"To describe the bride's costume beggars the English language; and human
+imagination falls faint and feeble before the Herculean task. From the
+everlasting stars she stole the glittering diamonds that decked her
+alabaster brow and hid them in the Stygian umbrage of her hair. From the
+fleecy, graceful cloud she snared the marvellous drapery that floated
+like a dream about her queenly figure, and from the Peri at Heaven's
+gate she captured the matchless grace that bore her like an enchanted
+wraith through the hymeneal scene.</p>
+
+<p>"The array of presents spread in the throne-room of the Skinner palace
+has been unexcelled in lavish expenditure of fabulous and reckless
+prodigal wealth anywhere in the world. Golden tokens literally strewed
+the apartment, merely as effulgent settings for the mammoth, appalling,
+maddening array of jewels and precious stones, sunbursts and pearls
+without price, that gleamed like a transcendent electrical display in
+the hypnotising picture."</p>
+
+<p>There was more of the same kind, but it need not be set down here.
+However, it should be said that nothing we ever printed in the paper
+before or since set the town to laughing as did that piece. We have
+calls to-day for papers containing the circus-poster wedding, and it was
+printed over two decades ago.</p>
+
+<p>It was Mehronay's first great triumph in town; then the expected
+happened. For three days he did not appear at the office and we
+suspected the truth&mdash;that by day he slept the sleep of the unjust in the
+loft of Huddleson's stable and by night he vibrated between the Elite
+oyster parlour, where he absorbed fabulous quantities of soup, and Red
+Martin's gambling-room, where he disported himself most festively before
+the gang assembled there. The morning of the fourth day Mehronay
+appeared&mdash;but not at his desk. We found him sitting glumly on his stool
+at the case in the back room, clicking the types, with his hat over his
+eyes and the smile rubbed off his face.</p>
+
+<p>We were a month coaxing Mehronay back in to the front room. His
+self-respect grew slowly, but finally it returned, and he sat at his
+desk turning off reams of copy so good that the people read the paper up
+one side and down the other hunting for his items. He is the only man we
+have ever had around the paper who could write. Everyone else we have
+employed has been a news-gatherer. But Mehronay cared little for what we
+call news. He went about the town asking for news, and getting more or
+less of it, but the way he put it was much more important than the thing
+itself. He had imagination. He created his own world in the town, and
+put it in the paper so vividly that before we realised it the whole town
+was living in Mehronay's world, seeing the people and events about them
+through his merry countenance. No one ever referred to him as Mr.
+Mehronay, and before he had been on the street six months he was calling
+people by their first names, or by nicknames, which he tagged onto them.
+He was so fatherly to the young people that the girls in the Bee Hive,
+or the White Front, or the Racket Store used to brush his clothes when
+they needed it, if we in the office neglected him, and smooth his back
+hair with their pocket combs, and he&mdash;never remembering the name of the
+particular ministering angel who fixed him up&mdash;called one and all of
+them "darter," smiled a grateful smile like an old dog that is petted,
+and then went his way. The girls in the White Front Drygoods Store gave
+him a cravat, and though it was made up, he brought it every morning in
+his pocket for them to pin on. He was as simple as a child, and, like a
+child, lived in a world of unrealities. He swore like a mule driver, and
+yet he told the men in the back room that he could never go to sleep
+without getting down and saying his prayers, and the only men with whom
+he ever quarrelled were a teacher of zo&ouml;logy at the College, who is an
+evolutionist, and Dan Gregg, the town infidel.</p>
+
+<p>One morning when we were sitting in the office before going out to the
+street for the morning's grist, Mehronay dog-eared a fat piece of copy
+and jabbed it on the hook as he started for the door.</p>
+
+<p>"My boy was drunk last night," he said. "Me and his mother felt so bad
+over it that I gave him a pretty straight talk this morning. There it
+is."</p>
+
+<p>The office dropped its jaw and bugged its eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes," he continued. "Didn't you know I had a boy? He's been the
+best kind of a boy till here lately. I can see his mother don't like it
+and his sister's worried too." His face for a second wore an expression
+of infinite sadness, and he sighed even while the smile came back on the
+face he turned to us from the door as he said: "Sometimes I think he is
+studying law with old Charley Hedrick and sometimes I think he is in the
+bank with John Markley; but he is always with me, and was such a decent
+boy when I had him out to the College. But I saw him with Joe Nevison
+last night, and I knew he'd been drinking."</p>
+
+<p>With that he closed the door behind him and was gone. This was the
+article that Mehronay left on the hook:</p>
+
+<p>"Your pa was downtown this morning, complaining about his 'old trouble,'
+that crick in his back that he got loading hay one hot day in Huron
+County, Ohio, 'before the army.' The 'old trouble,' as you will
+remember, bothers your pa a good deal, and your ma thinks that his
+father must have been a pretty hard-hearted man to let him work so hard
+when he was a boy. Your pa likes to have you and your ma think that when
+he was a boy he did nothing but work and go to prayer-meeting and go
+around doing noble deeds out of the third reader, but a number of the
+old boys of the Eleventh Kansas, who knew your pa in the sixties, are
+prepared to do a lot of forgetting for him whenever he asks it. The
+truth about your pa's 'old trouble' is that he was down at Fort
+Leavenworth just after the close of the war, and after filling up on
+laughing-water at a saloon, he got into a fight with the bartender, was
+kicked out of the saloon, and slept in the alley all night. That was his
+last whizz. He took an invoice of his stock and found that he had some
+of the most valuable experiences that a man can acquire, and he
+straightened up and came out here and grew up with the country. Your ma
+met him at a basket-meeting, and she thought he was an extremely pious
+young man, and they made a go of it.</p>
+
+<p>"So, Bub, when you think that by breathing on your coat sleeve to kill
+the whisky you can fool your pa, you are wrong. Your pa in his day ate
+three carloads of cardamon seeds and cloves and used listerine by the
+barrel. He knew which was the creaky step on the stairs in his father's
+house and used to avoid it coming in at night, just as you do now, and
+he knows just what you are doing. More than that, your pa speaks from
+the bitterest kind of experience when he pleads with you to quit. It is
+no goody-goody talk of a mutton-headed old deacon that he is giving you;
+it has taken him a year to get his courage up to speak to you, and every
+word that he speaks is boiled out of an agony of bitter memories. He
+knows where boys that start as you are starting end if they don't turn
+back. Your pa turned, but he recollects the career of the Blue boys, who
+are divided between the penitentiary, the poor-house and the southwest
+corner of hell; he recalls the Winklers&mdash;one dead, one a porter in a
+saloon in Peoria, one crazy; and he looks at you, and it seems to him
+that he must take you in his arms as he did when you were a little child
+in the prairie fire, and run to safety with you. And when he talks to
+you with his bashful, halting speech, you just sit there and grin, and
+cut his heart to its core, for he knows you do not understand.</p>
+
+<p>"It's rather up to you, Bub. In the next few months you will have to
+decide whether or not you are going to hell. Of course the 'vilest
+sinner may return' at any point along the road&mdash;but to what? To
+shattered health; to a mother heart-broken in her grave; to a wife
+damned to all eternity by your thoughtless brutality; and to children
+who are always afraid to look up the alley, when they see a group of
+boys, for fear they may be teasing you&mdash;you, drunk and dirty, lying in
+the stable filth! To that you will 'return,' with your strength spent,
+and your sportive friends, gone to the devil before you, and your chance
+in life frittered away.</p>
+
+<p>"Just sit down and figure it out, Bub. Of course there are a lot of good
+fellows on the road to hell; you will have a good time going; but you'll
+be a long time there. You'll dance and play cards and chase out nights,
+and soak your soul in the essence of don't-give-a-dam-tiveness, and
+you'll wonder, as you go up in the balloon, what fun there is in walking
+through this sober old earth. Friends&mdash;what are they? The love of
+humanity&mdash;what is it? Thoughtfulness to those about you? Gentility&mdash;What
+are these things? Letteroll&mdash;letteroll! But as you drop out of the
+balloon, the earth will look like a serious piece of landscape.</p>
+
+<p>"When you are old, the beer you have swilled will choke your throat; the
+women you have flirted with will hang round your feet and make you
+stumble. All the nights you have wasted at poker will dim your eyes. The
+garden of the days that are gone, wherein you should have planted
+kindness and consideration and thoughtfulness and manly courage to do
+right, will be grown up to weeds, that will blossom in your patches and
+in your rags and in your twisted, gnarly face that no one will love.</p>
+
+<p>"Go it, Bub! don't stop for your pa's sake; you know it all. Your pa is
+merely an old fogy. Tell him you can paddle your own canoe. But when you
+were a little boy, a very little boy, with a soft, round body, your pa
+used to take you in his arms and rub his beard&mdash;his rough, stubby,
+three-days' beard&mdash;against your face and pray that God would keep you
+from the path you are going in.</p>
+
+<p>"And so the sins of the father, Bub&mdash;but we won't talk of that."</p>
+
+<p>Three months later, when the Methodists opened their regular winter
+revival, Mehronay, becoming enraged at what he called the tin-horn
+clothes of the travelling evangelist conducting the meetings, began to
+make fun of him in the paper; and, as a revivalist in a church is a
+sacred person while the meetings are going on, we had to kill Mehronay's
+items about the revival; whereupon, his professional pride being hurt,
+Mehronay went forth into the streets, got haughtily drunk, and strutted
+up and down Main Street scattering sirs and misters and madams about so
+lavishly that men who did not appreciate his condition thought he had
+gone mad. That night he went to the revival, and sat upon the back seat
+alone, muttering his imprecations at the preacher until the singing
+began, when the heat of the room and the emotional music mellowed his
+pride, and he drowned out the revivalist's singing partner with a
+clear, sweet tenor that made the congregation turn to look at him.
+Mehronay knew the gospel hymns by heart, as he seemed to know his New
+Testament, and the cunning revivalist kept the song service going for an
+hour. When Mehronay was thoroughly sober there was a short prayer, and
+the singer on the platform feelingly sang "There Were Ninety and Nine"
+with an adagio movement, and Mehronay's face was wet with tears and he
+rose for prayers.</p>
+
+<p>He came to the office chastened and subdued next morning and wrote an
+account of the revival so eulogistic that we had to tone it down, and
+for a week he went about damning, with all the oaths in the pirate's
+log, Dan Gregg and the College professor who taught evolution. But no
+one could coax him back to the revival. As spring came we thought that
+he had forgotten the episode of his regeneration, and perhaps he had
+forgotten it, but the Saturday before Easter he put on the copy-hook an
+Easter sermon that made us in the office think that he had added another
+dream to his world. It was a curious thing for Mehronay to write;
+indeed, few people in town realised that he did write it; for he had
+been rollicking over town on his beat every day for months after the
+revival, and half the pious people in town thought he shammed his
+emotion the night he came to the church merely to mock them and their
+revivalist. But we in the office knew that Mehronay's Easter sermon had
+come as the offering of a contrite heart. It is in so many scrapbooks in
+the town that it should be reprinted here that the town may know that
+Mehronay wrote it. It read:</p>
+
+<p>"The celebration of Easter is the celebration of the renewal of life
+after the death that prevails in winter. People of many faiths observe a
+spring festival of rejoicing, and of prayer for future bounty. Probably
+the Easter celebration is like that at Christmas and Thanksgiving&mdash;a
+survival of some ancient pagan rite that men established out of
+overflowing hearts, rejoicing at the end of a good season and praying
+for favour at the beginning of a new one.</p>
+
+<p>"To the Christian world Easter symbolises a Divine tragedy. The coming
+of Easter, as it is set forth in the Great Book, is a most powerful
+story; it is the story of one of the deepest passions that may move the
+human heart&mdash;the passion of father-love.</p>
+
+<p>"Once there lived in the desert a man and his little child&mdash;a very
+little boy, who sometimes was a bad little boy, and who did not do as he
+was told. On a day when the father was away about his business the
+child, playing, wandered out on the desert and was lost. From home the
+desert beckoned the little boy; it seemed fair and fine to adventure in.
+When the boy had been gone for many hours the father returned and could
+not find him, and knew that the child was lost. But the father knew the
+desert; he knew how it lured men on; he knew its parching thirst; he
+knew its thorns and brambles, and its choking dust and the heat that
+beats one down.</p>
+
+<p>"And when he saw that the boy was lost his heart was aflame with
+anguish; he could all but feel the desert fire in the little boy's
+blood, the cactus barbs in the bleeding little feet, and the great
+lonesomeness of the desert in the little boy's heart; and as from afar
+the man heard a wailing little voice in his ears calling, 'Father,
+father!' like a lost sheep. But it was only a seeming, and the house
+where the little boy had played was silent.</p>
+
+<p>"Then the father went to the desert, and neither the desert fire
+murmuring at his brow, nor the sand that filled his mouth, nor the
+stones and prickles that cut his feet, nor the wild beasts that lurked
+upon the hillsides, could keep out of his ears the bleat of that little
+child's voice crying 'Father, father!' When the night fell, still and
+cold and numbing, the father pressed on, calling to the child in his
+agony; for he thought it was such a little boy, such a poor, lonesome,
+terror-stricken little boy out in the desert, lost and in pain, crying
+for help, with no one to hear.</p>
+
+<p>"And wandering so, the father died, with his heart full of unspeakable
+woe. But they found the wayward child in the light of another day. And
+he never knew what his father suffered, nor why his father died, nor did
+he understand it all till he had grown to a man's stature, and then he
+knew; and he tried to live his days as his father had lived, and to lay
+down his life, if need be, for his friend.</p>
+
+<p>"This is the Easter story that should come to every heart. The Christ
+that came into the desert of this weary life, and walked here foot-sore,
+heart-broken and athirst, came here for the love that was in His heart.
+Who put it there&mdash;whether the God that gave Shakespeare his brain and
+Wagner his harmonies, gave Christ His heart&mdash;or whether it was the God
+that paints the lily and moves the mountains in their labours&mdash;it
+matters not. It is one God, the Author and First Cause of all things. It
+is His heart that moves our own hearts to all their aspirations, to all
+the benevolence that the wicked world knows; it is His mind that is made
+manifest in our marvels of civilisation; it is His vast, unknowable plan
+that is moving the nations of the earth.</p>
+
+<p>"Whether it be spirit or law or tendency or person&mdash;what matter?&mdash;it is
+our Father, who went to the desert to find His sheep."</p>
+
+<p>All day Saturday, in order to square himself with the printers who set
+up his sermon, and to rehabilitate himself in the graces of the others
+about the office who knew of his weakness, Mehronay turned in the gayest
+lot of copy that he had ever written. There was an "assessment call of
+the Widowers' Protective Association to pay the sad wedding loss of
+Brother P. R. Cullom, of the Bee Hive," whose wedding was announced in
+the society column; there was a card of thanks from Ben Pore to those
+who had come with their sympathy and glue to nurse his wooden Indian
+which had blown down and broken the night before, and resolutions of
+respect for the same departed brother, in most mocking language, from
+the Red Men's Lodge. There was an item saying seven different varieties
+of Joneses and three kinds of Hugheses were in town from Lebo&mdash;the Welsh
+settlement; there was a call for the uniformed rank of head waiters to
+meet in regalia at Mrs. Larrabee's reception, signed by the three men in
+town who were known to have evening clothes, and there was a meeting of
+the anti-kin society announced to discuss the length of time
+Alphabetical Morrison's new son-in-law should be allowed to visit the
+Morrisons before the neighbours could ask when he was going to leave.
+But when the paper was out Mehronay got a dozen copies from the press
+and sent them away in wrappers which he addressed, and the piece his
+blue pencil marked was none of these.</p>
+
+<p>For many days after Mehronay wrote his Easter sermon the gentle, low,
+beelike hum that he kept up while he was at work followed the tunes of
+gospel hymns, or hymns of an older fashion. We always knew when to
+expect what he called a "piece" from Mehronay&mdash;which meant an article
+into which he put more than ordinary endeavour&mdash;for his bee-song would
+grow louder, with now and then an intelligible word in it, and if it was
+to be an exceptional piece Mehronay would whistle. When he began writing
+the music would die down, but when he was well under sail on his
+"piece," the steam of his swelling emotions would set his chin to going
+like the lid of a kettle, and he would drone and jibber the words as he
+wrote them&mdash;half audibly, humming and sputtering in the pauses while he
+thought. Scores of times we have seen the dear old fellow sitting at his
+desk when a "piece" was in the pot, and have gathered the men around
+back of his chair to watch him simmer. When it was finished he would
+whirl about in his chair, as he gathered up the sheets of paper and
+shook them together, and say: "I've writ a piece here&mdash;a damn good
+piece!" And then, as he put the copy on the hook and got his hat, he
+would tell us in most profane language what it was all about&mdash;quoting
+the best sentences and chuckling to himself as he went out onto the
+street.</p>
+
+<p>As the spring filled out and became summer we noticed that Mehronay was
+singing fewer gospel hymns and rather more sentimental songs than usual.
+And then the horrible report came to the office that Mehronay had been
+seen by one of the printers walking by night after bed-time under the
+State Street elms with a woman. Also his items began to indicate a
+closer knowledge of what was going on in society than Mehronay naturally
+could have. In the fall we learned through the girls in the Bee Hive
+that he had bought a white shirt and a pair of celluloid cuffs. This
+rumour set the office afire with curiosity, but no one dared to tease
+Mehronay. For no one knew who she was.</p>
+
+<p>Not until late in the fall, when Madame Janauschek came to the opera
+house to play "Macbeth," did Mehronay uncover his intrigue. Then for
+the first time in his three years' employment on the paper he asked for
+two show tickets! The entire office lined up at the opera house&mdash;most of
+us paying our own way, not to see the Macbeths, but to see Mehronay's
+Romeo and Juliet. The office devil, who was late mailing the papers that
+night, says that about seven o'clock Mehronay came in singing "Jean,
+Jean, my Bonnie Jean," and that he went to his trunk, took out his
+celluloid cuffs, a new sky-blue and shell-pink necktie that none of us
+had seen before, a clean paper collar&mdash;and the boy, who probably was
+mistaken, swears Mehronay also took his white shirt&mdash;in a bundle which
+he proudly tucked under his arm and toddled out of the office whistling
+a wedding march. An hour later, dressed in this regalia and a new black
+suit, buttoned primly and exactly in a fashion unknown to Mehronay, he
+appeared at the opera house with Miss Columbia Merley, spinster, teacher
+of Greek and Hellenic philosophy at the College. The office force asked
+in a gasp of wonder: "Who dressed him?" Miss Merley&mdash;late in her
+forties, steel-eyed, thin-chested, flint-faced and with hair knotted so
+tightly back from her high stony brow that she had to take out two
+hairpins to wink&mdash;Miss Merley might have done it&mdash;but she had no kith or
+kin who could have done it for her, and certainly the hand that smoothed
+the coat buttoned the vest, and the hand that buttoned the vest put on
+the collar and tie, and as for the shirt&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>But that was an office mystery. We never have solved it, and no one had
+the courage to tease Mehronay about it the next morning. After that we
+knew, and Mehronay knew that we knew, that he and Miss Merley went to
+church every Sunday evening&mdash;the Presbyterian church, mind you, where
+there is no foolishness&mdash;and that after church Mehronay always spent
+exactly half an hour in the parlour of the house where his divinity
+roomed. A whole year went by wherein Mehronay was sober, and did not
+look upon the wine when it was red or brown or yellow or any other
+colour. Now when he "writ a piece" there was frequently something in it
+defending women's rights. Also he severed diplomatic relations with the
+girl clerks in the White Front and the Bee Hive and the Racket, and
+bought a cane and aspired to some dignity of person. But Mehronay's
+heart was unchanged. The snows of boreal affection did not wither or
+fade his eternal spring. The sap still ran sweet in his veins and the
+bees still sang among the blossoms that sprang up along his path. He was
+everyone's friend, and spoke cheerily to the dogs and the horses, and
+was no more courteous to the preachers and the bankers, who are our most
+worshipful ones in town, than to the men from Red Martin's
+gambling-room, and even the woman in red, whom all the town knows but
+whom no one ever mentions, got a kind word from Mehronay as they met
+upon the street. He always called her sister.</p>
+
+<p>And so another year went by and Mehronay's "pieces" made the circulation
+grow, and we were prosperous. It became known about town long before we
+knew it in the office that if Mehronay kept sober for three years she
+would have him, and when we finally heard it he was on the last half of
+the third year and was growing sombre. "In the Cottage by the Sea" was
+his favourite song, and "Put Away the Little Playthings" also was much
+in his throat when he wrote. We thought, perhaps&mdash;and now we know&mdash;that
+he was thinking of a home that was gone. The day before Mehronay's
+wedding a child died over near the railroad, and on the morning he was
+to be married we found this on the copy hook when we came down to open
+the office, after Mehronay had gone to claim his bride:</p>
+
+<p>"A ten-line item appeared in last night's paper, away down in one
+corner, that brought more hearts together in a common bond&mdash;the bond of
+fear and sympathy and sorrow&mdash;than any other item has done for a long
+time. The item told of the death, by scarlet fever, of little Flossie
+Yengst. Probably the child was not known outside of her little group of
+playmates; her father and mother are not of that advertised clique known
+of men as prominent people; he is an engineer on the Santa F&eacute;, and the
+mother moves in that small circle of friends and neighbours which
+circumscribes American motherhood of the best type. And yet last night,
+when that little ten-line item was read by a thousand firesides in this
+town, thousands and thousands of hearts turned to that desolate home by
+the track, and poured upon it the benediction of their sympathies. That
+home was the meeting-place where rich and poor, great and weak, good and
+bad, stood equals. For there is something in the death of a little
+child, something in its infinite pathos, that makes all human creatures
+mourn. Because in every heart that is not a dead heart, calloused to all
+joy or sorrow, some little child is enshrined&mdash;either dead or
+living&mdash;and so child-love is the one universal emotion of the soul, and
+child-death is the saddest thing in all the world.</p>
+
+<p>"A child's soul is such a small thing, and the world and the systems of
+worlds, and the infinite stretches of illimitable space, are so wide for
+a child's soul to wander in, that, sane as we may be, stolid as we may
+try to be, we think in imagery, and the figure of little feet setting
+off on the far track to the end of things, hunting God, wrings our
+heart-strings and makes our throats grip and our eyelids quiver.</p>
+
+<p>"And then a child dying, leaving this good world of ours, seems to have
+had so small a chance for itself. There is something in all of us
+struggling against oblivion, striving vainly to make some real impress
+on the current of time, and a child, dying, can only clutch the hands
+about it and go down&mdash;forever. It seems so merciless, so unfair. Perhaps
+that is why, all over the world, the little graves are cared for best.
+It is to the little graves that we turn in our keenest anguish and not
+to the larger mounds; to the little graves that our hearts are drawn in
+our hours of triumph. And so the child, though dead, lives its appointed
+time and dies only in the fullness of its years. The little shoes, the
+little dresses, the 'little tin soldiers covered with rust,' and the
+memories sweeter than dreams of a honeymoon, these are life's
+immortelles that never fade. And though men and women come and go upon
+the earth, though civilisations may wither and pass, these little images
+remain; and the sun and the stars, which see men come and go, may see
+these little idols before which every creature bows, and the sun and
+stars, knowing no time, may think these children's relics are also
+eternal.</p>
+
+<p>"It is a desperately lonely home, that Yengst home, with the little girl
+gone away on a long journey; but how tight and close other fathers and
+mothers hugged their little ones last night when their hearts came back
+from the house of sorrow. And the little ones, feeling no fear,
+unconscious of the pang of terror that was shooting through the souls
+about them&mdash;the children played on, and maybe, before dropping to sleep,
+wondered a little at anxious looks they saw in grown-up eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"This is the faith of a little child, curious but implicit, in the
+goodness of those things outside one's self. And 'of such is the Kingdom
+of Heaven.'"</p>
+
+<p>A day or so after the wedding someone said to him: "Mehronay, sometimes
+your pieces make me cry," and he replied with all the fine sincerity of
+his heart showing in his eyes: "Yes&mdash;and if you only knew how they make
+me cry! Sometimes when I have written one like&mdash;like that&mdash;I go to my
+bed and sob like a child." He turned and walked away, but he came into
+the office whistling "The Dutch Company."</p>
+
+<p>After his wedding we made brave, in a sly way, to rail at Mehronay about
+his love affair, and he took it good-naturedly. He knew the situation
+just as it was; his sense of humour allowed him no false view of the
+matter. One afternoon when the paper was out, George Kirwin, the
+foreman, and one of the reporters and Mehronay were in the back room
+leaning against the imposing-stones looking over the paper, when Kirwin
+said: "Say, Mehronay, how did you get yourself screwed up to ask her?"</p>
+
+<p>It was spoken in a joke. The two young men were grinning, but Mehronay
+looked at the floor in a study as he said:</p>
+
+<p>"Well, to be honest&mdash;damfino if I ever did&mdash;just exactly." He smiled
+reflectively in a pause and continued: "Nearest I remember was one night
+we was sitting with our feet on the base-burner and I looked up and
+says, 'Hell's afire, Commie'&mdash;I called her that for short&mdash;'why in the
+devil don't a fine woman like you get married? She got up and come over
+to where I was a-sitting and before I could say Lordamighty, she put her
+hand on my shoulder and says real soft and solemn: 'I'll just be damned
+if I don't believe I will.'"</p>
+
+<p>He did not smile when he looked up, but sighed contentedly as he added
+reverently: "And so, by hell, she did!" If Columbia Merley Mehronay had
+known this language which her husband's innocent inadvertence put into
+her mouth she would have strangled him&mdash;even then.</p>
+
+<p>We did not have Mehronay with us more than a year after his wedding.
+Mrs. Mehronay knew what he was worth. She asked for twenty-five dollars
+a week for him, and when we told her the office could not afford it she
+took him away. They went to New York City, where she peddled his pieces
+about town until she got him a regular place. There they have lived
+happily ever after. Mehronay brings his envelope home every Saturday
+night, and she gives him his carfare and his shaving-money and puts the
+rest where it will do the most good. When the men from our office go to
+New York&mdash;which they sometimes do&mdash;they visit with Mehronay at his
+office, and sometimes&mdash;if there is time for due and proper notice of the
+function in writing&mdash;there is an invitation to dinner. Mehronay fondles
+his old friends as a child fondles its playmates and he takes eager
+pleasure in them, but she that was Columbia Merley all but searches
+their pockets for the tempter.</p>
+
+<p>Mehronay has never broken his word. He knows if he does break it she
+will tear him limb from limb and eat him raw. So he goes to his work,
+writes his pieces, hums his gentle bee-song&mdash;so that men do not like to
+room with him at the office&mdash;and has learned to keep himself fairly well
+buttoned up in the great city. But Miss Larrabee that was&mdash;who used to
+edit the society page for our paper, but who now lives in New York&mdash;told
+us when she was home that as she was walking down Fourth Avenue one
+winter day when the street was empty, she saw Mehronay standing before
+the window of a liquor store looking intently at the display of bottled
+goods before him. When he saw her half a block away he turned from her
+and shuffled rapidly down the street, clicking his cane nervously.</p>
+
+<p>It was not for him!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XVIII" id="XVIII"></a>XVIII</h2>
+
+<h3>Sown in Our Weakness</h3>
+
+
+<p>When one comes to know an animal well&mdash;say a horse or a cow or a
+dog&mdash;and sees how sensibly it acts, following the rules of conduct laid
+down by the wisdom of its kind, one cannot help wondering how much
+happier, and healthier, and better, human beings would be if they used
+the discretion of the animals. For ages men have been taught what is
+good for their bodies and their minds and their souls. There has been no
+question about the wisdom of being temperate and industrious and honest
+and kind; and the folly of immoderation and laziness and chicanery and
+meanness is so well known that a geometrical proposition has not been
+more definitely proved. Yet only a few people in any community observe
+the rules of life, and of these few no one observes them all; and so
+misery and pain and poverty and anguish are as a pestilence among men,
+and they wonder why they are living in such a cruel world. It was Eli
+Martin who, back in the seventies, won the prize in the Bethel
+neighbourhood for reciting more chapters of the Old Testament than any
+other child in Sunday-school; and the old McGuffey's Reader that he used
+on week-days was filled with moral tales; but someway when it came to
+applying the rules he had learned, and the moral that the stories
+pointed, Eli Martin lacked the sense of a dog or a horse. Once, when the
+paper contained an account of one of Red Martin's police court
+escapades, George Kirwin recalled that, when we offered a prize during
+the Christmas season of 1880, for the best essay by a child under
+twelve, it was Ethelwylde Swaney who won the prize with an essay on the
+Weakness of Vanity; and she married Eli Martin when she and the whole
+town knew what he was.</p>
+
+<p>Naturally one would suppose that two persons so full of theoretical
+wisdom would have applied it, and that in applying it they would have
+been the happiest and most useful people in all the town; but instead
+they were probably the most miserable people in town, and Mrs. Martin,
+whom we knew better than Red, because she once had worked in the office,
+was forever bemoaning what she called her "lot," though we knew for many
+years that her "lot" was not the result of the fates against her, but
+merely the inevitable consequence of her temperament.</p>
+
+<p>Before we put in linotypes and set our type by machinery it was set by
+girls. Usually we employed half-a-dozen, who came from the town high
+school. They kept coming and going, as girls do who work in country
+towns, getting married in their twenties or finding something better
+than printing, and it is likely that in ten years as many as fifty girls
+have worked in the office, and be it said to the credit of the
+girls&mdash;which cannot be said of so many of the boys and men who have
+worked in the shop&mdash;that they were girls we were proud of&mdash;all but
+Ethelwylde Swaney.</p>
+
+<p>She that we called the Princess worked in the office less than two
+years, but the memory of her still lingers, though hardly could one say
+like "the scent of the roses"; for the Princess was not merely a poor
+compositor, she was the kind that would make mistakes and blame others
+for them, and that kind never learns. Though she ran away to marry Red
+Martin&mdash;which was her own mistake&mdash;this habit of blaming others for her
+faults was so strong that she never forgave her mother for making the
+match. We know in our office that Mrs. Swaney did not dream that the
+girl was even going with Red Martin until they were married. Yet the
+Martin neighbours for twenty years have blamed Mrs. Swaney. When the
+Princess was in the office we found out that the truth wasn't in her;
+also we discovered that she was lazy and that she cried too easily.
+Right at the busy hour in the afternoon we used to catch her with a type
+in her fingers and her hand poised in the air, looking off into space
+for a minute at a time, and when we spoke to her she would put her head
+on her case and cry softly; and the foreman would have to apologise
+before she would go back to work. Even then she would have to take the
+broken piece of looking-glass that she kept in her capital "K" box and
+make an elaborate toilet before settling down. Moreover, though she was
+only seventeen, much of the foreman's time was spent chasing dirty-faced
+little boys away from her case, and if some boy didn't have his elbow in
+her quad box, she was off her stool visiting either with some other
+girl, or standing by the stove drying her hands&mdash;she was eternally
+drying her hands&mdash;and talking to one of the men. In all the year and a
+half that she was in the office the Princess never learned how to help
+herself. When she had to dump her type, she had to call some man from
+his work to help her&mdash;and then there would be more conversation.</p>
+
+<p>But we kept her and were patient with her on account of her father, John
+Swaney, a hard-working man who was trying to make something of the
+Princess, so we put up with her perfumery and her powder rags and her
+royal airs, and did all we could to teach her the difference between a
+comma and a period&mdash;though she never really learned; and we were still
+patient with her, even when she deliberately pied a lot of type after
+being corrected for some piece of carelessness or worse. We made due
+allowances for the Rutherford temper, which her father warned us not to
+arouse. Nevertheless, her mother came to the office one winter day in
+her black straw hat with a veil around it, and with the coat she had
+worn for ten years, to tell us that she was afraid working in the shop
+would hurt her daughter's social standing. So the Princess walked out
+that night in a gust of musk&mdash;in her picture hat and sweeping cloak,
+with bangles tinkling and petticoat swishing&mdash;and the office knew her no
+more forever.</p>
+
+<p>About the time that the Princess left the office to improve her social
+standing, Eli Martin and his big mule team came to town from the Bethel
+neighbourhood. He was as likely a looking red-headed country boy as you
+ever saw. We were laying the town waterworks pipes that year, and Eli
+and his team had work all summer. On the street he towered above the
+other men several inches in height, and he looked big and muscular and
+masculine in his striped undershirt and blue overalls, as he worked with
+his team in the hot sun. Of course, the Princess would not have seen him
+in those days. Her nose was seeking a higher social level, and the
+clerks in the White Front dry-goods store formed the pinnacle of her
+social ideal. But Eli Martin was naturally what in our parlance we call
+a ladies' man, and he was not long in learning that the wide-brimmed
+black hat, the ready-made faded green suit and the red string necktie
+which had swept the girls down before him in the Bethel neighbourhood
+would accomplish little in town. So when winter came, and work with his
+team was hard to get, he sold his mules and bedecked himself in fine
+linen. He had a few hundred dollars saved up, so he lived in the cabbage
+smells of the Astor House, and fancied that he was enjoying the
+refinements of a great city. Time hung heavily upon him, and at night he
+joined the switchmen and certain young men of leisure in the town in a
+more or less friendly game of poker in the rooms at the head of the dark
+stairway on South Main Street.</p>
+
+<p>When spring came the young man had no desire and little need to go back
+to work, for by that time he was known as Lucky Red. In a year the
+sunburn left him and he grew white and thin. He went to Kansas City for
+a season, and became known among gamblers as far west as Denver; but he
+was only a tin-horn gambler in the big cities, while in our town he was
+at the head of his profession, so he came back and opened a room of his
+own. He came back in a blaze of glory; to wit: a long grey frock coat
+with trousers to match, pleated white shirts studded with blinding
+diamonds, a small white hat dented jauntily on three sides, a matted
+lump of red hair on the back of his head and a dashing red curl combed
+extravagantly low on his forehead. Before he left town for his foreign
+tour Red Martin used to hang about the churches Sunday evenings, peering
+through the blinds and making eyes at the girls; but upon his return he
+had risen to another social level. He had acquired a cart with red
+wheels and a three-minute horse; so he dropped from his social list the
+girls who "worked out" and made eyes at those young women who lived at
+home, gadding around town evenings, picking up boys on the street and
+forever talking about their "latest."</p>
+
+<p>It was the most natural thing in the world that Red and the Princess
+should find each other, and six months before the elopement we heard
+that the Princess was riding about the country with him in the
+red-wheeled cart. For after she left the office in one way and another
+we had kept track of the girl&mdash;sometimes through her father, who, being
+a carpenter, was frequently called to the office to fix up a door or a
+window; sometimes through the other girls in the office, and sometimes
+through Alphabetical Morrison, whose big family of girl school-teachers
+made him a storage battery of social information.</p>
+
+<p>It seems that the Rutherford temper developed in the Princess as she
+grew older. Mrs. Swaney was Juanita Sinclair; her father was a
+mild-mannered little man, who went out of doors to cough, but her mother
+was a Rutherford&mdash;a big, stiff-necked, beer-bottle-shaped woman, who
+bossed the missionary society until she divided the church. John Swaney,
+who is not a talkative man, once got in a crowd at Smith's cigar-store
+where they were telling ghost stories, and his contribution to the
+horror of the occasion was a relating of how, when they were fooling
+with tables, trying to make them tip at his house one night at a family
+reunion, the spirit of Grandma Rutherford appeared, split the table into
+kindling, dislocated three shoulder-blades and sprained five wrists. It
+was this Rutherford temper that the Princess wore when she slouched
+around the house in her mother-hubbard with her hair in papers. The
+girls in the office used to say that if her mother over-cooked the
+Princess's egg in the morning she would rise grandly from the breakfast
+table, tipping over her chair behind her, and rush to her room "to have
+a good cry," and the whole family had to let the breakfast cool while
+they coaxed her down. That was the Rutherford temper. Also, when they
+tried to teach her to cook, it was the Rutherford temper that broke the
+dishes. Colonel Morrison once told us that when the Princess thought it
+was time to give a party, the neighbours could see the Rutherford temper
+begin wig-wagging at the world through the Princess's proud head, and
+there was nothing for her father to do but to kill the chickens, run
+errands all day to the grocery store, and sit in the cellar freezing
+cream, and then go to the barn at night to smoke. It was known in the
+neighbourhood that the Princess dragged her shoestrings until noon, and
+that her bed was never in the memory of woman made up in the daytime. We
+are Yankees in our town, and these things made more talk to the girl's
+discredit than the story that she was keeping company with Red Martin!</p>
+
+<p>But we at the office saw in the proud creature that passed our window so
+grandly nothing to indicate her real self. The year that Red Martin came
+back to town the Princess used to turn into Main Street in an afternoon,
+wearing the big black hat that cost her father a week's hard work,
+looking as sweet as a jug of sorghum and as smiling as a basket of
+chips. Though women sniffed at her, the men on the veranda of the Hotel
+Metropole craned their necks to watch her out of sight. She jingled with
+chains and watches and lockets and chatelaines, carried more rings than
+a cane rack, and walked with the air of the heroine of the society drama
+at the opera house. When she was on parade she never even glanced toward
+our office, where she had jeopardised her social position. She barely
+quivered a recognising eye-brow at the girls who had worked with her,
+and they had their laugh at her, so matters were about even. But the
+office girls say that, after the Princess eloped with Red Martin, she
+was glad to rush up and shake hands with them. For we know in our town
+that the princess business does not last more than ten days or two weeks
+after marriage; it is a trade of quick sales, short seasons and small
+profits. The day that the elopement was the talk of the town, Colonel
+Alphabetical Morrison was in the office. He said that he remembered
+Juanita Sinclair when she was a princess and wore Dolly Varden clothes
+and was the playfullest kitten in the basketful that used to turn out to
+the platform dances on Fourth of July, and appear as belles of the
+suppers given for the Silver Cornet Band just after the war. "But,"
+added the Colonel, "this town is full of saffron-coloured old girls with
+wiry hair and sun-bleached eyes, who at one time or another were in the
+princess business. Not only has every dog his day, but eventually every
+kitten becomes a cat."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="gs15" id="gs15"></a>
+<img src="images/gs15.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3>The traveling men on the veranda craned their necks to
+watch her out of sight</h3>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>From the night of the charivari when Red Martin handed the boys twenty
+dollars&mdash;the largest sum ever contributed to a similar purpose in the
+town's history&mdash;he and the Princess began to slump. The sloughing off of
+the veneer of civilisation was not rapid, but it was sure. The first
+pair of shoes that Red bought after his wedding were not patent leather,
+and, though the porter of his gambling place blacked them every morning,
+still they were common leather, and the boy noticed it. Likewise, the
+Princess had her hat retrimmed with her old plumes the fall after her
+wedding, bought no new clothes, and wore her giddy spring jacket, thin
+as it was, all winter, and after the second baby came no human being
+ever saw her in anything but a wrapper, except when she was on Main
+Street.</p>
+
+<p>The neighbours said she wore a wrapper so that she could have free use
+of her lungs, for when Red and the Princess opened a family debate, the
+neighbours had to shut the doors and windows and call in the children.
+Notwithstanding all the names that she called him in their lung-testing
+events, there was no question about her love for the man. For, after the
+first year of her marriage, though she lost interest in her clothes and
+ceased calling for the "fashion leaf" at the dress-goods counter in the
+White Front, and let her hair go stringy, we around our office knew that
+the Princess was only a child, who some way had lost interest in her old
+toys. When God gives babies to children, the children forget their other
+dolls, and the Princess, when the babies came, put away her other dolls,
+and played with the toys that came alive. And she spanked them and
+fondled them and scolded them with the same empty-headed vanity that she
+used to devote to her clothes.</p>
+
+<p>Red Martin was one of the Princess's dearest dolls, and she and the
+babies were his toys; but, being a boy, he did not care for them so much
+with the paint rubbed off, yet he did not neglect them. Instead, he
+neglected himself. When the babies began to put grease spots on his
+clothes, he did not clean them, and about the time his wife quit
+powdering, when she came to Main Street, he stopped wearing collars. She
+grew fat and frowsy, and her chief interest in life seemed to be to
+over-dress her children, and sometimes Red Martin encouraged her by
+bringing home the most extravagant suits for the boys, and sometimes he
+abused her when the bills came in for things which she had bought for
+the children, and asked why she did not buy something half-way
+respectable-looking to wear herself. After each of their furious
+quarrels she would go over the neighbourhood the next day and tell the
+neighbours that her mother had married her to a gambler, and ask them
+what a gambler's wife could expect. If any neighbour woman agreed with
+Mrs. Martin about her husband or her position Mrs. Martin would become
+angry and flounce out of the house, but if the women spoke kindly of her
+husband she would berate him and weep, and assure them that she had
+refused the banker, or the proprietor of the Bee Hive, or anyone else
+who seemed to make her story possible.</p>
+
+<p>By the time that the third baby was old enough to carry his baby sister
+and the fifth baby was in the crib, Red Martin's face had begun to grow
+purple. He lost the gambling-room which was once his pride; it was
+operated by a youth with a curly black moustache, whose clothes recalled
+the days of Red's triumph. Red was only a dealer, and his trousers were
+frayed at the bottom and he shaved but once a week. Then the Princess
+used to come slinking up Main Street at night carrying a pistol under
+her coat to use if she found the woman with him. Who the woman was the
+neighbours never knew, but the Princess gave them to understand that
+they would be surprised if she told them. It was her vanity to pretend
+that the woman was a society leader, as she called her, but the boys
+around the poker-dive knew that Red Martin's days as a heart-breaker
+were gone. For what whisky and cocaine and absinthe could do for Red to
+hurry his end they were doing, but a man is a strong beast, and it takes
+many years to kill him. Also, the Lord saves men like Red for horrible
+examples, letting them live long that He may not have to waste others;
+but women seem to have God's pity and He takes them out of their misery
+more quickly than He takes men. With the coming of the seventh baby the
+Princess died. When the news came to the office that she was gone we
+were not sorry, for life had held little for her. Her looks were gone;
+her health was gone; her dreams were smudged out&mdash;pitiful and wretched
+and sordid as they were, even at the best. Yet for all that George
+Kirwin took down to the funeral a wreath which the office force bought
+for her.</p>
+
+<p>To know George Kirwin casually one would say he never saw anything but
+the types and machinery in the back room of our office. When he went
+among strangers he seemed to be looking always at his hands or studying
+his knees, and his responses to those whom he did not know were "yea,
+yea," and "nay, nay"; but that night he told us more about the funeral
+of the Princess than all the reporters on the paper would have learned.
+He told us how the pitiful little parlour with its advertising chromos
+and its soap-prize lamp was filled with the women who always come to
+funerals in our town&mdash;funerals being their only diversion; how they sat
+in the undertaker's chairs with their handkerchiefs carefully folded and
+in their hands during the first part of the service, waiting for Brother
+Hopper to tell about his mother's death, which he never fails to do at
+funerals, though the elders have spoken to him about it, as all the town
+knows; how Red Martin, shaved for the occasion, and, in a borrowed suit
+of clothes, stood out by the well and did not come into the house during
+the services; how only the elder children sat in the front room with the
+other mourners, and how the prattle of the little ones in the kitchen
+ran through the parson's prayer with heart-breaking insistence.</p>
+
+<p>George seemed to think that the poverty-stricken little makeshifts to
+bring beauty into the miserable home and keep up the appearance of a
+kind of gentility&mdash;perhaps for the children&mdash;was the best thing he ever
+knew about the Princess, and he said that he was glad that he went to
+the funeral for the geraniums in the cr&ecirc;pe paper covered tomato cans,
+the cheap lace curtains at the windows, and the hair-wreath inheritance
+from the Swaneys, made him think that the best of the Princess might
+have survived all the rack and calamity of the years.</p>
+
+<p>When the funeral left the house the neighbour women came and put it in
+order, and there was a better supper waiting for the father and the
+children than they had eaten for many years. And then, after the dishes
+were put away, the neighbours left; and for what he tried to do and be
+for the motherless brood just that one night, God will put down a good
+mark for Eli Martin&mdash;even though the man failed most sadly.</p>
+
+<p>When he went back to the gambling-room the next night, where he was
+porter; men tried not to swear while he was in earshot, and the next day
+they swore only mild oaths around him, out of respect for his grief, but
+the day after they forgot their compunctions, and, within a week, Red
+Martin seemed to have forgotten, too. In time, the family was scattered
+over the earth&mdash;divided among kin, and adopted out, and as the town grew
+older its conscience quickened and the gambling-room was closed,
+whereupon Red Martin went to Huddleston's livery stable, where he worked
+for enough to keep him in whisky and laudanum, and ate only when someone
+gave him food.</p>
+
+<p>He grew dirty, unkempt, and dull-witted. Disease bent and twisted him
+hideously. When he was too sick to work, he went to the poor-house, and
+came back weak and pale to sit much in the sun on the south side of the
+building like a sick dog. When he is lying about the street drunk,
+little boys poke sticks at him and flee with terror before him when he
+wakes to blind rage and stumbles after them. It is hard to realise that
+this disgusting, inhuman-looking creature is the Red Martin of twenty
+years ago, who, in his long grey frock coat, patent leather shoes, white
+hat and black tie, walked serenely up the steps of the bank the day it
+failed, tapped on the door-pane with his revolver barrel, and, when a
+man came to answer, made him open, and backed out with his revolver in
+one hand and his diamonds and money in the other. He does not recall in
+any vague way the Red Martin who gave the town a month's smile when he
+said, after losing all his money on election, that he had learned never
+to bet on anything that could talk, or had less than four legs. That Red
+Martin has been dead these many years; perhaps he was no more worthy
+than this one who hangs on to life, and bears the name and the disgrace
+that his dead youth made inevitable.</p>
+
+<p>How strange it is that a man should wreck himself, and blight those of
+his own blood as this man has done! He knew what we all know about life
+and its rules. He had been told, as we all are told in a thousand ways,
+that bad conduct brings sorrow to the world, and that pain and
+wretchedness are the only rewards of that behaviour which men call sin.
+And yet there he is, sitting on his hunkers near the stable, with God's
+stamp of failure all over his broken, battered body&mdash;put there by Red
+Martin's own hands. But George Kirwin, who often thinks with a kindlier
+spirit than others, says we are Red Martin's partners in iniquity, for
+we all lived here with him, maintaining a town that tolerated gambling
+and debauchery, and that, in some way, we shall each of us suffer as Red
+has suffered, insomuch as each has had his share in a neighbour's shame.</p>
+
+<p>We tell George that he is getting old, though he is still on the bright
+side of forty, because he likes to come down town of evenings and hold a
+parliament with Henry Larmy and Dan Gregg and Colonel Morrison.
+Sometimes they hold it in the office and settle important affairs. A
+month ago they settled the immortality of the soul, and the other night,
+returning to their former subject, the question came up: "What will
+become of Red Martin when he goes to Heaven?" Dan contended that the
+poor fellow is carrying around his own little blowpipe hell as he goes
+through life. George Kirwin maintained that Red Martin will enter the
+next world with the soul that died when his body began to live in
+wickedness; that there must have been some imperishable good in him as a
+boy, and that Heaven, or whatever we decide to call the next world, must
+be full of men and women like Red Martin&mdash;some more respectable than
+he&mdash;whose hell will be the unmasking of their real selves in the world
+where we "shall know as we are known." While we were sitting in judgment
+on poor Red Martin, in toddled Simon Mehronay, who is visiting in town
+from New York in the company of the vestal virgin who had, as he
+expressed it, snatched him as a brand from the burning. Mehronay has
+been gone from town nearly twenty years, and until they told him he did
+not know how Red Martin had fallen. When he heard it, Mehronay sighed
+and tears came into his dear old eyes, as he put his hand on Colonel
+Morrison's arm and said:</p>
+
+<p>"Poor Red! Poor Red! A decent, brave, big-hearted chap! Why, he's taken
+whisky away from me a dozen times! He's won my money from me to keep it
+over Saturday night. Why, I'm no better than he is! Only they've caught
+Red, and they haven't caught me. And when we stand before the
+judgment-seat, I can tell a damnsight more good things about Red than he
+can about me. I'm going out to find him and get him a square meal."</p>
+
+<p>And so, while we were debating, Mehronay went down the Jericho road
+looking for the man who was lying there, beaten and bruised and waiting
+for the Samaritan.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XIX" id="XIX"></a>XIX</h2>
+
+<h3>"Thirty"</h3>
+
+
+<p>In the afternoon, between two and three o'clock, the messenger boy from
+the telegraph office brings over the final sheet of the day's report of
+the Associated Press. Always at the end is the signature "Thirty." That
+tells us that the report is closed for the day. Just why "Thirty" should
+be used to indicate the close of the day's work no one seems to know. It
+is the custom. They do so in telegraph offices all over the country, and
+in the newspaper business "Thirty" stands so significantly for the end
+that whenever a printer or a reporter dies his associates generally feel
+called upon to have a floral emblem made with that figure in the centre.
+It is therefore entirely proper that these sketches of life in a country
+town, seen through a reporter's eyes, should close with that symbolic
+word. But how to close? That is the question.</p>
+
+<p>Sitting here by the office window, with the smell of ink in one's
+nostrils, with the steady monotonous clatter of the linotypes in the
+ears, and the whirring of the shafting from the press-room in the
+basement throbbing through one's nerves, with the very material
+realisation of the office around one; we feel that only a small part of
+it, and of the life about it, has been set down in these sketches.
+Passing the office window every moment is someone with a story that
+should be told. Every human life, if one could know it well and
+translate it into language, has in it the making of a great story. It is
+because we are blind that we pass men and women around us, heedless of
+the tragic quality of their lives. If each man or woman could understand
+that every other human life is as full of sorrows, of joys, of base
+temptations, of heartaches and of remorse as his own, which he thinks so
+peculiarly isolated from the web of life, how much kinder, how much
+gentler he would be! And how much richer life would be for all of us!
+Life is dull to no one; but life seems dull to those dull persons who
+think life is dull for others, and who see only the drab and grey
+shades in the woof that is woven about them.</p>
+
+<p>Here in our town are ten thousand people, and yet these sketches have
+told of less than two score of them. In the town are thousands of others
+quite as interesting as these of whom we have written. A few minutes ago
+Jim Bolton rode by on his hack. There is no reason why others should be
+advertised of men and Jim left out; for Jim is the proudest man in town.</p>
+
+<p>He came here when the town was young, and was president of the
+Anti-Horse-Thief League in the days before it became an emeritus
+institution, when it was a power in politics and named the Sheriff as a
+matter of right and of course. Jim has never let the fact that he kept a
+livery-stable and drove a hack interfere with his position as leading
+citizen. He keeps a livery-stable, because that is his business, and he
+drives a hack because he cannot trust such a valuable piece of property
+in the hands of the boy. But when the street fair is to be put on, or
+the baseball team financed, or when the Baptist Church needs a new roof,
+or the petitions are to be circulated for a bond election, Jim Bolton
+gets down from his hack, puts on his crystal slipper and is the
+Cinderella of the occasion. That is why, when young men go in Jim's hack
+to take young women to parties and dances, they always invite Jim in to
+sit by the fire and get warm while the girls are primping. That is why,
+when young Ben Mercer, just home from five years at Harvard, offered Jim
+a "tip" over the usual twenty-five-cent fare, Jim quietly took off his
+coat and whipped young Ben where he stood&mdash;and the town lined up for an
+hour, each man eager for the privilege of contributing ten cents to the
+popular subscription to pay old Jim's fine and costs in police-court.</p>
+
+<p>Following Jim Bolton on his hack past the office window came Bill
+Harrison, once extra brakeman on the Dry Creek Branch, just promoted to
+be conductor on the main line, and so full of vainglory in his exalted
+position that he wears his brass buttons on freight trains. Bill's wife
+signs his pay-check and doles out his cigar money, a quarter at a time,
+and when he asks for a dollar, she looks at him as if she suspected him
+of leading a double life. It is her ambition to live in Topeka, for
+"there are so many conductors in Topeka," she says, "that society is not
+so mixed"&mdash;as it is in our town, where she complains that the switchmen
+and the firemen and the student-brakemen dominate society. Once a cigar
+salesman from Kansas City got on Bill's train and offered a lead dollar
+for fare.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't take this," protested Bill, emphasising the "I," because his
+job was new.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, you might just turn that one over to the company,"
+responded the drummer.</p>
+
+<p>And when the head-brakeman told it in the yards, Bill had to fuss with
+his wife for two days to get money for a box of cigars to stop the
+trouble.</p>
+
+<p>As these lines were being written, Miss Littleton came into the office
+with a notice for the Missionary Society. She has been teaching school
+in town for thirty years and is not so cheerful as she was once. For a
+long time the board has considered dismissing her; but it continues to
+change her around from building to building and from room to room, and
+to keep her out of sheer pity; and she knows it. There is tragedy enough
+in her story to fill a book. Yet she looks as humdrum as you please, and
+smiles so gaily as she puts down her notice, that one thinks perhaps she
+is trying to dispel the impression that she is cross and impatient with
+children.</p>
+
+<p>On the other side of the street, upstairs in his dusty real estate
+office, with tin placards of insurance companies on the wall, and gaudy
+calendars tacked everywhere, Silas Buckner stands at the window counting
+the liars and scoundrels, and double-dealers and villains, and thieves
+and swindlers who pass. Since Silas was defeated for Register of Deeds
+he has become a pessimist. He has soured on the town, and when he sees a
+man, Silas thinks only of the evil that man has done. Silas knows all
+men's weaknesses, forgets their strength, and looking down from the
+window hates his fellow-creatures for the wrong they have done him, or
+the wickedness that he knows of them. He has never given our reporters a
+kindly item of news since he was turned down, but if there is a
+discreditable story on any citizen going around we hear it first from
+Silas, and if we do not print it he says we have taken hush money. If
+we have to print it, he says we are stirring up strife. Seeing him over
+there, looking down on the town which to him is accursed, we have often
+thought how weary God must be looking at the world and knowing so much
+better than Silas the weakness and iniquity of men. Sometimes we have
+wondered if sin is really as important as Silas thinks it is, for with
+Silas sin is a blot that effaces a man's soul. But maybe God sees sin
+only as a blemish that men may overcome. Perhaps God is not so
+discouraged with us as Silas is. But life is a puzzle at most.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="gs16" id="gs16"></a>
+<img src="images/gs16.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3>Counting the liars and scoundrels and double-dealers and
+villains who pass</h3>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Last night Aaron Marlin died. He had lived for ninety years in this
+world, and had seen much and suffered much, and has died as a child
+turns to sleep. It was quiet and still at his home among the elms as he
+lay in his coffin. The mourners spoke in low and solemn tones, and the
+blinds were drawn as if death were shy. As he lay there in the great
+hush that was over the house, there passed before it on the sidewalk two
+who spoke as low as the mourners, though they were oblivious to the
+house of death. They trod slowly, and a great calm was on their souls.
+One of the scribes who sets down these lines stood in the shadow of the
+doorway pine-tree and saw the lovers passing; he felt the silence and
+the sorrow behind the door he was about to enter; and there he stood
+wondering&mdash;between Death and Love&mdash;the End and the Beginning of God's
+great mystery of Life. Now, with the sense of that great mystery upon
+him, with all of this pied skein of life about him, he puts down his
+pen, and looks out of the window as the thread winds down the street.</p>
+
+<p>For "Thirty" is in for the day.</p>
+
+<h4>THE END</h4>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of In Our Town, by William Allen White
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN OUR TOWN ***
+
+***** This file should be named 26207-h.htm or 26207-h.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/2/6/2/0/26207/
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
+
+</pre>
+
+</body>
+</html>
diff --git a/26207-h/images/cover.jpg b/26207-h/images/cover.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c309860
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-h/images/cover.jpg
diff --git a/26207-h/images/gs01.jpg b/26207-h/images/gs01.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..daf25d8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-h/images/gs01.jpg
diff --git a/26207-h/images/gs02.jpg b/26207-h/images/gs02.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..69ed6e1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-h/images/gs02.jpg
diff --git a/26207-h/images/gs03.jpg b/26207-h/images/gs03.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8fe28ca
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-h/images/gs03.jpg
diff --git a/26207-h/images/gs04.jpg b/26207-h/images/gs04.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..93f2bdc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-h/images/gs04.jpg
diff --git a/26207-h/images/gs05.jpg b/26207-h/images/gs05.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a851190
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-h/images/gs05.jpg
diff --git a/26207-h/images/gs06.jpg b/26207-h/images/gs06.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fb46cf5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-h/images/gs06.jpg
diff --git a/26207-h/images/gs07.jpg b/26207-h/images/gs07.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a8c03be
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-h/images/gs07.jpg
diff --git a/26207-h/images/gs08.jpg b/26207-h/images/gs08.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6db4305
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-h/images/gs08.jpg
diff --git a/26207-h/images/gs09.jpg b/26207-h/images/gs09.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..118404b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-h/images/gs09.jpg
diff --git a/26207-h/images/gs10.jpg b/26207-h/images/gs10.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8ed9b32
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-h/images/gs10.jpg
diff --git a/26207-h/images/gs11.jpg b/26207-h/images/gs11.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..50a38e3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-h/images/gs11.jpg
diff --git a/26207-h/images/gs12.jpg b/26207-h/images/gs12.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a01e3e9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-h/images/gs12.jpg
diff --git a/26207-h/images/gs13.jpg b/26207-h/images/gs13.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7c1b814
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-h/images/gs13.jpg
diff --git a/26207-h/images/gs14.jpg b/26207-h/images/gs14.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..50124aa
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-h/images/gs14.jpg
diff --git a/26207-h/images/gs15.jpg b/26207-h/images/gs15.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..991a320
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-h/images/gs15.jpg
diff --git a/26207-h/images/gs16.jpg b/26207-h/images/gs16.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c530d3f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-h/images/gs16.jpg
diff --git a/26207-h/images/tp.jpg b/26207-h/images/tp.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..329ade5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-h/images/tp.jpg
diff --git a/26207-page-images/c0001.jpg b/26207-page-images/c0001.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1c1dc3c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/c0001.jpg
diff --git a/26207-page-images/f0002.png b/26207-page-images/f0002.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..575b200
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/f0002.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/f0003.png b/26207-page-images/f0003.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1bbd6df
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/f0003.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/f0005-image1.jpg b/26207-page-images/f0005-image1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0248e49
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/f0005-image1.jpg
diff --git a/26207-page-images/f0005.png b/26207-page-images/f0005.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fedcf5d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/f0005.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/f0006-image1.png b/26207-page-images/f0006-image1.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..653c3c5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/f0006-image1.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/f0006.png b/26207-page-images/f0006.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0b490ea
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/f0006.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/f0007.png b/26207-page-images/f0007.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6a193f3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/f0007.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/f0008.png b/26207-page-images/f0008.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b8308e6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/f0008.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/f0010.png b/26207-page-images/f0010.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e6b9faa
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/f0010.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0001.png b/26207-page-images/p0001.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5f5c7c1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0001.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0003.png b/26207-page-images/p0003.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..14516a3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0003.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0004.png b/26207-page-images/p0004.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0bf844d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0004.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0005.png b/26207-page-images/p0005.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ee926c5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0005.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0006-insert1.png b/26207-page-images/p0006-insert1.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bbcdf70
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0006-insert1.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0006-insert2.jpg b/26207-page-images/p0006-insert2.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..41458ab
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0006-insert2.jpg
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0006.png b/26207-page-images/p0006.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0ec34e1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0006.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0007.png b/26207-page-images/p0007.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3e87046
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0007.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0008.png b/26207-page-images/p0008.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..962a6a1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0008.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0009.png b/26207-page-images/p0009.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..83bf25e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0009.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0010.png b/26207-page-images/p0010.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2493b89
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0010.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0011.png b/26207-page-images/p0011.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8eb4c07
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0011.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0012.png b/26207-page-images/p0012.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8a2a7c2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0012.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0013.png b/26207-page-images/p0013.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0dceb9e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0013.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0014.png b/26207-page-images/p0014.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9b75098
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0014.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0015.png b/26207-page-images/p0015.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..df6422c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0015.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0016.png b/26207-page-images/p0016.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..74d3056
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0016.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0017.png b/26207-page-images/p0017.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bea7281
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0017.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0018.png b/26207-page-images/p0018.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ced81c3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0018.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0019.png b/26207-page-images/p0019.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d3b6d0f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0019.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0020.png b/26207-page-images/p0020.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b0a2fd4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0020.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0021.png b/26207-page-images/p0021.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e74959e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0021.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0022.png b/26207-page-images/p0022.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1ff5cbc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0022.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0023.png b/26207-page-images/p0023.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..856437a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0023.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0024.png b/26207-page-images/p0024.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..cb0739c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0024.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0025.png b/26207-page-images/p0025.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..97f525a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0025.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0026.png b/26207-page-images/p0026.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0c33fa8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0026.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0027.png b/26207-page-images/p0027.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7abb8db
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0027.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0028-insert1.png b/26207-page-images/p0028-insert1.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..30acd8f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0028-insert1.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0028-insert2.jpg b/26207-page-images/p0028-insert2.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..32807e0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0028-insert2.jpg
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0028.png b/26207-page-images/p0028.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..49e7247
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0028.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0029.png b/26207-page-images/p0029.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..318a11a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0029.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0030.png b/26207-page-images/p0030.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..632471a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0030.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0031.png b/26207-page-images/p0031.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fb016e3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0031.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0032.png b/26207-page-images/p0032.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..328debf
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0032.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0033.png b/26207-page-images/p0033.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..61ae223
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0033.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0034.png b/26207-page-images/p0034.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1e69939
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0034.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0035.png b/26207-page-images/p0035.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fa30dff
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0035.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0036.png b/26207-page-images/p0036.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9c4adc6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0036.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0037.png b/26207-page-images/p0037.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2f85da0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0037.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0038.png b/26207-page-images/p0038.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fe41f9f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0038.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0039.png b/26207-page-images/p0039.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7decf24
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0039.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0040.png b/26207-page-images/p0040.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f75c1cd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0040.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0041.png b/26207-page-images/p0041.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0619366
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0041.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0042.png b/26207-page-images/p0042.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d2e7c20
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0042.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0043.png b/26207-page-images/p0043.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..db8d51a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0043.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0044.png b/26207-page-images/p0044.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7171007
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0044.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0045.png b/26207-page-images/p0045.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2a42f73
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0045.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0046.png b/26207-page-images/p0046.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d0ffa47
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0046.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0047.png b/26207-page-images/p0047.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b1d0e55
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0047.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0048.png b/26207-page-images/p0048.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8fe3106
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0048.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0049.png b/26207-page-images/p0049.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bbe6fca
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0049.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0050.png b/26207-page-images/p0050.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f54370b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0050.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0051.png b/26207-page-images/p0051.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f85f0d9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0051.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0052.png b/26207-page-images/p0052.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..afb8598
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0052.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0053.png b/26207-page-images/p0053.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e784a55
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0053.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0054.png b/26207-page-images/p0054.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..14cb241
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0054.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0055.png b/26207-page-images/p0055.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8dbc929
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0055.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0056.png b/26207-page-images/p0056.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1c19948
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0056.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0057.png b/26207-page-images/p0057.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..781c58f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0057.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0058.png b/26207-page-images/p0058.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..399f0cc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0058.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0059.png b/26207-page-images/p0059.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ad37ef1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0059.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0060.png b/26207-page-images/p0060.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f86010e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0060.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0061.png b/26207-page-images/p0061.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1429969
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0061.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0062.png b/26207-page-images/p0062.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7b5fc1e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0062.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0063.png b/26207-page-images/p0063.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..af66695
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0063.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0064.png b/26207-page-images/p0064.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ede1f18
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0064.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0065.png b/26207-page-images/p0065.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..464027a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0065.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0066.png b/26207-page-images/p0066.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6ab781e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0066.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0067.png b/26207-page-images/p0067.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a599e03
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0067.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0068.png b/26207-page-images/p0068.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b55385e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0068.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0069.png b/26207-page-images/p0069.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..99068bb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0069.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0070.png b/26207-page-images/p0070.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ee065f5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0070.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0071.png b/26207-page-images/p0071.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fc89d0f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0071.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0072-insert1.png b/26207-page-images/p0072-insert1.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ecd56d6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0072-insert1.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0072-insert2.jpg b/26207-page-images/p0072-insert2.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4bfa7f5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0072-insert2.jpg
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0072.png b/26207-page-images/p0072.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e0a549e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0072.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0073.png b/26207-page-images/p0073.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a6ac4d8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0073.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0074.png b/26207-page-images/p0074.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d3efb0b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0074.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0075.png b/26207-page-images/p0075.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..72abead
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0075.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0076.png b/26207-page-images/p0076.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a550947
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0076.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0077.png b/26207-page-images/p0077.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b2b296f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0077.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0078.png b/26207-page-images/p0078.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5dd321b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0078.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0079.png b/26207-page-images/p0079.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..047a4eb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0079.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0080.png b/26207-page-images/p0080.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..358ce97
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0080.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0081.png b/26207-page-images/p0081.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6973170
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0081.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0082.png b/26207-page-images/p0082.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..12c490d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0082.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0083.png b/26207-page-images/p0083.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..23ebe41
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0083.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0084-insert1.png b/26207-page-images/p0084-insert1.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..28fbf0a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0084-insert1.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0084-insert2.jpg b/26207-page-images/p0084-insert2.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f0bfdd7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0084-insert2.jpg
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0084.png b/26207-page-images/p0084.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2305d39
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0084.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0085.png b/26207-page-images/p0085.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4bb4111
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0085.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0086.png b/26207-page-images/p0086.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5dc2280
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0086.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0087.png b/26207-page-images/p0087.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6828c3a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0087.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0088.png b/26207-page-images/p0088.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e09513f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0088.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0089.png b/26207-page-images/p0089.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..03bde02
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0089.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0090.png b/26207-page-images/p0090.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..595290c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0090.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0091.png b/26207-page-images/p0091.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b932fb7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0091.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0092.png b/26207-page-images/p0092.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c77b311
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0092.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0093.png b/26207-page-images/p0093.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a4231a0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0093.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0094.png b/26207-page-images/p0094.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ece0761
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0094.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0095.png b/26207-page-images/p0095.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3271b3b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0095.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0096.png b/26207-page-images/p0096.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..30e1aba
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0096.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0097.png b/26207-page-images/p0097.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..beb52b1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0097.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0098.png b/26207-page-images/p0098.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d17e78b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0098.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0099.png b/26207-page-images/p0099.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ed6f5e0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0099.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0100.png b/26207-page-images/p0100.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4961304
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0100.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0101.png b/26207-page-images/p0101.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3011e3d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0101.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0102.png b/26207-page-images/p0102.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2b361da
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0102.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0103.png b/26207-page-images/p0103.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6ca8b09
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0103.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0104.png b/26207-page-images/p0104.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a8e8b23
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0104.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0105.png b/26207-page-images/p0105.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..75851d9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0105.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0106.png b/26207-page-images/p0106.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1832209
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0106.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0107.png b/26207-page-images/p0107.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b18b3c3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0107.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0108.png b/26207-page-images/p0108.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..df172d8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0108.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0109.png b/26207-page-images/p0109.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a6a0047
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0109.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0110.png b/26207-page-images/p0110.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..855ca64
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0110.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0111.png b/26207-page-images/p0111.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5a8ac08
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0111.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0112-insert1.png b/26207-page-images/p0112-insert1.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a652f76
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0112-insert1.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0112-insert2.jpg b/26207-page-images/p0112-insert2.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..eab2ebe
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0112-insert2.jpg
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0112.png b/26207-page-images/p0112.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..03f0a9d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0112.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0113.png b/26207-page-images/p0113.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f897114
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0113.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0114.png b/26207-page-images/p0114.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fd62cd9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0114.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0115.png b/26207-page-images/p0115.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8f8868a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0115.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0116.png b/26207-page-images/p0116.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..528aacb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0116.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0117.png b/26207-page-images/p0117.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3e0aeb2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0117.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0118.png b/26207-page-images/p0118.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..dac3ba8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0118.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0119.png b/26207-page-images/p0119.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..68521c8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0119.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0120.png b/26207-page-images/p0120.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3701f52
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0120.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0121.png b/26207-page-images/p0121.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6befa1e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0121.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0122.png b/26207-page-images/p0122.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..87190f9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0122.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0123.png b/26207-page-images/p0123.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e959fb7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0123.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0124.png b/26207-page-images/p0124.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bb26844
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0124.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0125.png b/26207-page-images/p0125.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ea418e4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0125.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0126.png b/26207-page-images/p0126.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..505b403
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0126.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0127.png b/26207-page-images/p0127.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..696c664
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0127.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0128.png b/26207-page-images/p0128.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8c58109
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0128.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0129.png b/26207-page-images/p0129.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9840b8a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0129.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0130-insert1.png b/26207-page-images/p0130-insert1.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..cc6eca8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0130-insert1.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0130-insert2.jpg b/26207-page-images/p0130-insert2.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..cd3a54c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0130-insert2.jpg
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0130.png b/26207-page-images/p0130.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1b687da
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0130.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0131.png b/26207-page-images/p0131.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..43966e0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0131.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0132.png b/26207-page-images/p0132.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..14612e7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0132.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0133.png b/26207-page-images/p0133.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c476828
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0133.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0134.png b/26207-page-images/p0134.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c94e3c0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0134.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0135.png b/26207-page-images/p0135.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f41df66
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0135.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0136-insert1.png b/26207-page-images/p0136-insert1.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8fc3640
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0136-insert1.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0136-insert2.jpg b/26207-page-images/p0136-insert2.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..eaaf3a9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0136-insert2.jpg
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0136.png b/26207-page-images/p0136.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..99997b3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0136.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0137.png b/26207-page-images/p0137.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..218762e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0137.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0138.png b/26207-page-images/p0138.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..93cb4fb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0138.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0139.png b/26207-page-images/p0139.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..764ca64
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0139.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0140.png b/26207-page-images/p0140.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0f1c14c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0140.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0141.png b/26207-page-images/p0141.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..77b36b1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0141.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0142.png b/26207-page-images/p0142.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4f5f024
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0142.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0143.png b/26207-page-images/p0143.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..efe2a0d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0143.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0144.png b/26207-page-images/p0144.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..54c2a3b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0144.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0145.png b/26207-page-images/p0145.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8bff393
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0145.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0146.png b/26207-page-images/p0146.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3478388
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0146.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0147.png b/26207-page-images/p0147.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a77da4a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0147.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0148.png b/26207-page-images/p0148.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8cbc3bb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0148.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0149.png b/26207-page-images/p0149.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..24de51a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0149.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0150.png b/26207-page-images/p0150.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6344467
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0150.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0151.png b/26207-page-images/p0151.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d18202b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0151.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0152.png b/26207-page-images/p0152.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9f7fa34
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0152.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0153.png b/26207-page-images/p0153.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9bcfcd1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0153.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0154.png b/26207-page-images/p0154.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9e6ff7d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0154.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0155.png b/26207-page-images/p0155.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..129c67a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0155.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0156-insert1.png b/26207-page-images/p0156-insert1.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fb67f5d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0156-insert1.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0156-insert2.jpg b/26207-page-images/p0156-insert2.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ee566bc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0156-insert2.jpg
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0156.png b/26207-page-images/p0156.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..472841e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0156.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0157.png b/26207-page-images/p0157.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e241127
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0157.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0158.png b/26207-page-images/p0158.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9584f63
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0158.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0159.png b/26207-page-images/p0159.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..dd8c1ff
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0159.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0160-insert1.png b/26207-page-images/p0160-insert1.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4c638e6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0160-insert1.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0160-insert2.jpg b/26207-page-images/p0160-insert2.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1ca24b6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0160-insert2.jpg
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0160.png b/26207-page-images/p0160.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c0ebbf7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0160.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0161.png b/26207-page-images/p0161.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..788c8f2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0161.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0162.png b/26207-page-images/p0162.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..32f1de6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0162.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0163.png b/26207-page-images/p0163.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..19812dd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0163.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0164.png b/26207-page-images/p0164.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b76bcae
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0164.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0165.png b/26207-page-images/p0165.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bef1ee5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0165.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0166.png b/26207-page-images/p0166.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d6ccd89
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0166.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0167.png b/26207-page-images/p0167.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..94e3938
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0167.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0168.png b/26207-page-images/p0168.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f5d5a22
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0168.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0169.png b/26207-page-images/p0169.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a71831c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0169.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0170.png b/26207-page-images/p0170.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b90ebf6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0170.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0171.png b/26207-page-images/p0171.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a573b0a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0171.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0172-insert1.png b/26207-page-images/p0172-insert1.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5cc6501
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0172-insert1.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0172-insert2.jpg b/26207-page-images/p0172-insert2.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e3268f8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0172-insert2.jpg
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0172.png b/26207-page-images/p0172.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c7ceb8d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0172.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0173.png b/26207-page-images/p0173.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1c5ddbd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0173.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0174.png b/26207-page-images/p0174.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..19a56b9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0174.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0175.png b/26207-page-images/p0175.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..011d991
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0175.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0176.png b/26207-page-images/p0176.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5e9fc84
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0176.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0177.png b/26207-page-images/p0177.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b8002d8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0177.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0178.png b/26207-page-images/p0178.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..892bc8f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0178.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0179.png b/26207-page-images/p0179.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..60bd6f5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0179.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0180.png b/26207-page-images/p0180.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6e3b30e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0180.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0181.png b/26207-page-images/p0181.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8d8a1dd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0181.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0182-insert1.png b/26207-page-images/p0182-insert1.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f69c244
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0182-insert1.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0182-insert2.jpg b/26207-page-images/p0182-insert2.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2297c60
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0182-insert2.jpg
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0182.png b/26207-page-images/p0182.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..85ad7b2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0182.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0183.png b/26207-page-images/p0183.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bbd9054
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0183.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0184.png b/26207-page-images/p0184.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9a4f8fe
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0184.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0185.png b/26207-page-images/p0185.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0e650c1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0185.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0186.png b/26207-page-images/p0186.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..589f9f6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0186.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0187.png b/26207-page-images/p0187.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3ff62ee
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0187.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0188.png b/26207-page-images/p0188.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f324616
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0188.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0189.png b/26207-page-images/p0189.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9697c7f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0189.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0190.png b/26207-page-images/p0190.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..90b0fa4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0190.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0191.png b/26207-page-images/p0191.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9027ed5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0191.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0192.png b/26207-page-images/p0192.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5bdf290
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0192.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0193.png b/26207-page-images/p0193.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7921aa4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0193.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0194.png b/26207-page-images/p0194.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..747d687
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0194.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0195.png b/26207-page-images/p0195.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ddf13a9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0195.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0196.png b/26207-page-images/p0196.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..185f9af
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0196.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0197.png b/26207-page-images/p0197.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..07a2e72
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0197.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0198.png b/26207-page-images/p0198.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d2ecd50
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0198.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0199.png b/26207-page-images/p0199.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..db402b0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0199.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0200.png b/26207-page-images/p0200.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..127ee6b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0200.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0201.png b/26207-page-images/p0201.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fd60f8e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0201.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0202.png b/26207-page-images/p0202.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ef7e769
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0202.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0203.png b/26207-page-images/p0203.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fbd7df4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0203.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0204.png b/26207-page-images/p0204.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d709de8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0204.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0205.png b/26207-page-images/p0205.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8ac2087
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0205.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0206.png b/26207-page-images/p0206.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f829f2f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0206.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0207.png b/26207-page-images/p0207.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3a2c38b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0207.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0208.png b/26207-page-images/p0208.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f51c823
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0208.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0209.png b/26207-page-images/p0209.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4beb859
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0209.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0210.png b/26207-page-images/p0210.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..13c7d75
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0210.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0211.png b/26207-page-images/p0211.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..02f3fde
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0211.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0212.png b/26207-page-images/p0212.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e960fac
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0212.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0213.png b/26207-page-images/p0213.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..22c35b8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0213.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0214.png b/26207-page-images/p0214.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c07d636
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0214.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0215.png b/26207-page-images/p0215.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0be8b0a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0215.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0216.png b/26207-page-images/p0216.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..65ff593
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0216.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0217.png b/26207-page-images/p0217.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..17b4921
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0217.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0218.png b/26207-page-images/p0218.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2d7681c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0218.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0219.png b/26207-page-images/p0219.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..618f698
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0219.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0220.png b/26207-page-images/p0220.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e93977b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0220.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0221.png b/26207-page-images/p0221.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..25ff6e5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0221.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0222.png b/26207-page-images/p0222.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..04d0ff6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0222.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0223.png b/26207-page-images/p0223.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1c1f3d9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0223.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0224.png b/26207-page-images/p0224.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..771624c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0224.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0225.png b/26207-page-images/p0225.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e82c012
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0225.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0226.png b/26207-page-images/p0226.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ba4d679
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0226.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0227.png b/26207-page-images/p0227.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2922ad6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0227.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0228.png b/26207-page-images/p0228.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ed37c97
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0228.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0229.png b/26207-page-images/p0229.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..32fb1bd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0229.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0230.png b/26207-page-images/p0230.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..84fe1d4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0230.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0231.png b/26207-page-images/p0231.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..da163c4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0231.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0232.png b/26207-page-images/p0232.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ef6df5a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0232.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0233.png b/26207-page-images/p0233.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..16e2297
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0233.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0234.png b/26207-page-images/p0234.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9efff22
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0234.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0235.png b/26207-page-images/p0235.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..eee90ed
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0235.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0236.png b/26207-page-images/p0236.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..23685ef
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0236.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0237.png b/26207-page-images/p0237.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..523a8ec
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0237.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0238.png b/26207-page-images/p0238.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7b93c4d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0238.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0239.png b/26207-page-images/p0239.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..dbea7b9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0239.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0240.png b/26207-page-images/p0240.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e47b835
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0240.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0241.png b/26207-page-images/p0241.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8ef6c5a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0241.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0242.png b/26207-page-images/p0242.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..503d5ff
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0242.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0243.png b/26207-page-images/p0243.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6b96523
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0243.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0244-insert1.png b/26207-page-images/p0244-insert1.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8f18e6d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0244-insert1.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0244-insert2.jpg b/26207-page-images/p0244-insert2.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..176f465
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0244-insert2.jpg
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0244.png b/26207-page-images/p0244.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..724d143
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0244.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0245.png b/26207-page-images/p0245.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4b7c36f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0245.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0246.png b/26207-page-images/p0246.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bac3cbd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0246.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0247.png b/26207-page-images/p0247.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d012ebb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0247.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0248.png b/26207-page-images/p0248.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..94346e4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0248.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0249.png b/26207-page-images/p0249.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..161ca47
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0249.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0250.png b/26207-page-images/p0250.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3387b1f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0250.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0251.png b/26207-page-images/p0251.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..645d47b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0251.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0252.png b/26207-page-images/p0252.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..249812f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0252.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0253.png b/26207-page-images/p0253.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ba6160a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0253.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0254.png b/26207-page-images/p0254.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e853125
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0254.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0255.png b/26207-page-images/p0255.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d583e66
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0255.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0256.png b/26207-page-images/p0256.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f9a227a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0256.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0257.png b/26207-page-images/p0257.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f6b14a5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0257.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0258.png b/26207-page-images/p0258.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d17eb86
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0258.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0259.png b/26207-page-images/p0259.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f968447
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0259.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0260.png b/26207-page-images/p0260.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a6df43b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0260.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0261.png b/26207-page-images/p0261.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f6d74f9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0261.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0262.png b/26207-page-images/p0262.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fd045df
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0262.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0263.png b/26207-page-images/p0263.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..76a47ed
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0263.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0264.png b/26207-page-images/p0264.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f0b9490
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0264.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0265.png b/26207-page-images/p0265.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..46001f2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0265.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0266.png b/26207-page-images/p0266.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f6fffd8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0266.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0267.png b/26207-page-images/p0267.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3462722
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0267.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0268.png b/26207-page-images/p0268.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..af4162b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0268.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0269.png b/26207-page-images/p0269.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7126f13
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0269.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0270.png b/26207-page-images/p0270.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5beeba1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0270.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0271.png b/26207-page-images/p0271.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..36ccef0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0271.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0272.png b/26207-page-images/p0272.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b1ddc83
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0272.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0273.png b/26207-page-images/p0273.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4ec2ed6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0273.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0274.png b/26207-page-images/p0274.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..96c2c24
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0274.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0275.png b/26207-page-images/p0275.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4801998
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0275.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0276-insert1.png b/26207-page-images/p0276-insert1.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b361753
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0276-insert1.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0276-insert2.jpg b/26207-page-images/p0276-insert2.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..229c3a6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0276-insert2.jpg
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0276.png b/26207-page-images/p0276.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..238ab08
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0276.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0277.png b/26207-page-images/p0277.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6a511f1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0277.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0278.png b/26207-page-images/p0278.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5e9afd9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0278.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0279.png b/26207-page-images/p0279.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..73fcbc5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0279.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0280.png b/26207-page-images/p0280.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f0ee83e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0280.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0281.png b/26207-page-images/p0281.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a194968
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0281.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0282.png b/26207-page-images/p0282.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..12a46a8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0282.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0283.png b/26207-page-images/p0283.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8d0121d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0283.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0284.png b/26207-page-images/p0284.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0ac94d5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0284.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0285.png b/26207-page-images/p0285.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f0f770c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0285.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0286.png b/26207-page-images/p0286.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3a3e455
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0286.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0287.png b/26207-page-images/p0287.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..277bfa8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0287.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0288.png b/26207-page-images/p0288.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1c3794b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0288.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0289.png b/26207-page-images/p0289.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6310cd4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0289.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0290.png b/26207-page-images/p0290.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e1aa056
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0290.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0291.png b/26207-page-images/p0291.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8d70bff
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0291.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0292.png b/26207-page-images/p0292.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8446c51
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0292.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0293.png b/26207-page-images/p0293.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9cc9f4a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0293.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0294.png b/26207-page-images/p0294.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7378b25
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0294.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0295.png b/26207-page-images/p0295.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7d446ca
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0295.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0296.png b/26207-page-images/p0296.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3e157c4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0296.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0297.png b/26207-page-images/p0297.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0fb61b2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0297.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0298.png b/26207-page-images/p0298.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fcb87e9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0298.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0299.png b/26207-page-images/p0299.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bfa12eb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0299.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0300.png b/26207-page-images/p0300.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..544f920
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0300.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0301.png b/26207-page-images/p0301.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4932886
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0301.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0302.png b/26207-page-images/p0302.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..99e158d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0302.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0303.png b/26207-page-images/p0303.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b109c97
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0303.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0304.png b/26207-page-images/p0304.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..86bc443
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0304.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0305.png b/26207-page-images/p0305.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d0f0b1d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0305.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0306.png b/26207-page-images/p0306.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5b07839
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0306.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0307.png b/26207-page-images/p0307.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c785bd7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0307.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0308.png b/26207-page-images/p0308.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..40769a6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0308.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0309.png b/26207-page-images/p0309.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8c55860
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0309.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0310.png b/26207-page-images/p0310.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..cf3978d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0310.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0311.png b/26207-page-images/p0311.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6d52ee7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0311.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0312.png b/26207-page-images/p0312.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..99fca39
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0312.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0313.png b/26207-page-images/p0313.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..766418f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0313.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0314.png b/26207-page-images/p0314.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7ec1dfd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0314.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0315.png b/26207-page-images/p0315.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c090565
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0315.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0316.png b/26207-page-images/p0316.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c77afe5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0316.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0317.png b/26207-page-images/p0317.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7dc16b5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0317.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0318.png b/26207-page-images/p0318.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7fb0941
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0318.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0319.png b/26207-page-images/p0319.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e5fe538
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0319.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0320.png b/26207-page-images/p0320.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..dbb7122
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0320.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0321.png b/26207-page-images/p0321.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..82ab812
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0321.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0322.png b/26207-page-images/p0322.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ddd682a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0322.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0323.png b/26207-page-images/p0323.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1574fed
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0323.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0324.png b/26207-page-images/p0324.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c0aee17
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0324.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0325.png b/26207-page-images/p0325.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..65c9967
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0325.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0326.png b/26207-page-images/p0326.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..edf100e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0326.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0327.png b/26207-page-images/p0327.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a1abea4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0327.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0328.png b/26207-page-images/p0328.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..aec9ba3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0328.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0329.png b/26207-page-images/p0329.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..07296ec
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0329.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0330.png b/26207-page-images/p0330.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4c94af2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0330.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0331.png b/26207-page-images/p0331.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0e4644b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0331.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0332.png b/26207-page-images/p0332.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b25ceee
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0332.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0333.png b/26207-page-images/p0333.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e372431
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0333.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0334.png b/26207-page-images/p0334.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0a054be
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0334.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0335.png b/26207-page-images/p0335.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3d024fb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0335.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0336.png b/26207-page-images/p0336.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..677240b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0336.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0337.png b/26207-page-images/p0337.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..039eecb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0337.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0338.png b/26207-page-images/p0338.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2924ba6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0338.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0339.png b/26207-page-images/p0339.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..cd11aa3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0339.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0340.png b/26207-page-images/p0340.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..914b4a6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0340.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0341.png b/26207-page-images/p0341.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..abf5f67
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0341.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0342.png b/26207-page-images/p0342.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6834ce9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0342.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0343.png b/26207-page-images/p0343.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1ffbedb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0343.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0344.png b/26207-page-images/p0344.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..634e881
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0344.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0345.png b/26207-page-images/p0345.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2043ce3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0345.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0346.png b/26207-page-images/p0346.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3e54db5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0346.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0347.png b/26207-page-images/p0347.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..347c0bc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0347.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0348-insert1.png b/26207-page-images/p0348-insert1.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2353293
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0348-insert1.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0348-insert2.jpg b/26207-page-images/p0348-insert2.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0fd378e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0348-insert2.jpg
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0348.png b/26207-page-images/p0348.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3ec2a5f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0348.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0349.png b/26207-page-images/p0349.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ccf2241
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0349.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0350.png b/26207-page-images/p0350.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..cdfad58
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0350.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0351.png b/26207-page-images/p0351.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..15f5a9c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0351.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0352.png b/26207-page-images/p0352.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..969d140
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0352.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0353.png b/26207-page-images/p0353.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..deee7e8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0353.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0354.png b/26207-page-images/p0354.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6f95b49
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0354.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0355.png b/26207-page-images/p0355.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a9b1229
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0355.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0356.png b/26207-page-images/p0356.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..02c7f6f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0356.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0357.png b/26207-page-images/p0357.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8dc95c1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0357.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0358.png b/26207-page-images/p0358.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..58d8b40
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0358.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0359.png b/26207-page-images/p0359.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0ca9f63
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0359.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0360.png b/26207-page-images/p0360.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a3d0073
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0360.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0361.png b/26207-page-images/p0361.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3033cdd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0361.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0362.png b/26207-page-images/p0362.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f55ae1f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0362.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0363.png b/26207-page-images/p0363.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e51f62e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0363.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0364.png b/26207-page-images/p0364.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bf2eb12
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0364.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0365.png b/26207-page-images/p0365.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0bde77e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0365.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0366-insert1.png b/26207-page-images/p0366-insert1.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9303162
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0366-insert1.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0366-insert2.jpg b/26207-page-images/p0366-insert2.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..59590e1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0366-insert2.jpg
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0366.png b/26207-page-images/p0366.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0fb0c64
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0366.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0367.png b/26207-page-images/p0367.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8a886f3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0367.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0368.png b/26207-page-images/p0368.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..38cdf97
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0368.png
diff --git a/26207-page-images/p0369.png b/26207-page-images/p0369.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6cff895
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207-page-images/p0369.png
diff --git a/26207.txt b/26207.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..217c1aa
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,7083 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of In Our Town, by William Allen White
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: In Our Town
+
+Author: William Allen White
+
+Illustrator: F. R. Gruger
+             W. Glackens
+
+Release Date: August 7, 2008 [EBook #26207]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN OUR TOWN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                                   In Our Town
+
+                              BY WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE
+
+           The Court of Boyville, The Real Issue, Stratagems and Spoils
+
+                   Illustrations by F. R. Gruger and W. Glackens
+
+
+
+
+    NEW YORK
+    McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.
+    MCMVI
+
+    Copyright 1906 by
+    McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.
+
+    Published April, 1906
+
+
+    Copyright 1904 by The Century Co.
+    Copyright 1905-1906 by The Curtis Publishing Co.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: He wore his collars so high that he had to order them
+from a drummer]
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+
+      I. SCRIBES AND PHARISEES
+
+     II. THE YOUNG PRINCE
+
+    III. THE SOCIETY EDITOR
+
+     IV. "AS A BREATH INTO THE WIND"
+
+      V. THE COMING OF THE LEISURE CLASS
+
+     VI. THE BOLTON GIRL'S "POSITION"
+
+    VII. "BY THE ROD OF HIS WRATH"
+
+   VIII. "A BUNDLE OF MYRRH"
+
+     IX. OUR LOATHED BUT ESTEEMED CONTEMPORARY
+
+      X. A QUESTION OF CLIMATE
+
+     XI. THE CASTING OUT OF JIMMY MYERS
+
+    XII. "'A BABBLED OF GREEN FIELDS"
+
+   XIII. A PILGRIM IN THE WILDERNESS
+
+    XIV. THE PASSING OF PRISCILLA WINTHROP
+
+     XV. "AND YET A FOOL"
+
+    XVI. A KANSAS "CHILDE ROLAND"
+
+   XVII. THE TREMOLO STOP
+
+  XVIII. SOWN IN OUR WEAKNESS
+
+    XIX. "THIRTY"
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+He Wore his Collars so High that He Had to Order Them from a Drummer
+
+Suppressing Nothing "On Account of the Respectability of the Parties
+Concerned"
+
+As an Office Joke the Boys Used to Leave a Step-Ladder by Her Desk so
+that She Could Climb Up and See How Her Top-Knot Really Looked
+
+And Brought with Him a Large Leisure and a Taste for Society
+
+Sometimes He Thought It was a Report of a Fire and at Other Times It
+Seemed Like a Dress-Goods Catalogue
+
+As the Dinner Hour Grew Near She Raged--So the Servants said--Whenever
+the Telephone Rang
+
+"Jim Purdy, Taken the Day He Left for the Army"
+
+He Advertised the Fact that He was a Good Hater by Showing Callers at
+His Office His Barrel
+
+He Likes to Sit in the Old Swayback Swivel-Chair and Tell Us His Theory
+of the Increase in the Rainfall
+
+And Camped in the Office for Two Days, Looking for Jimmy
+
+Reverend Milligan Came in with a Church Notice
+
+A Desert Scorpion, Outcast by Society and Proud of it
+
+"He Made a Lot of Money and Blew it in"
+
+Went About Town with His Cigar Pointing Toward his Hat-Brim
+
+The Traveling Men on the Veranda Craned Their Necks to Watch Her Out of
+Sight
+
+Counting the Liars and Scoundrels and Double-Dealers and Villains Who
+Pass
+
+
+
+
+IN OUR TOWN
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+Scribes and Pharisees
+
+
+Ours is a little town in that part of the country called the West by
+those who live east of the Alleghanies, and referred to lovingly as
+"back East" by those who dwell west of the Rockies. It is a country town
+where, as the song goes, "you know everybody and they all know you," and
+the country newspaper office is the social clearing-house.
+
+When a man has published a paper in a country community for many years,
+he knows his town and its people, their strength and their weakness,
+their joys and their sorrows, their failings and their prosperity--or if
+he does not know these things, he is on the road to failure, for this
+knowledge must be the spirit of his paper. The country editor and his
+reporters sooner or later pass upon everything that interests their
+town.
+
+In our little newspaper office we are all reporters, and we know many
+intimate things about our people that we do not print. We know, for
+instance, which wives will not let their husbands endorse other men's
+notes at the banks. We know about the row the Baptists are having to get
+rid of the bass singer in their choir, who has sung at funerals for
+thirty years, until it has reached a point where all good Baptists dread
+death on account of his lugubrious profundo. Perhaps we should take this
+tragedy to heart, but we know that the Methodists are having the same
+trouble with their soprano, who "flats"--and has flatted for ten years,
+and is too proud to quit the choir "under fire" as she calls it; and we
+remember what a time the Congregationalists had getting rid of their
+tenor. So that choir troubles are to us only a part of the grist that
+keeps the mill going.
+
+As the merest incident of the daily grind, it came to the office that
+the bank cashier, whose retirement we announced with half a column of
+regret, was caught $3500 short, after twenty years of faithful service,
+and that his wife sold the homestead to make his shortage good. We know
+the week that the widower sets out, and we hear with remarkable accuracy
+just when he has been refused by this particular widow or that, and,
+when he begins on a school-teacher, the whole office has candy and cigar
+and mince pie bets on the result, with the odds on the widower five to
+one. We know the woman who is always sent for when a baby comes to town,
+and who has laid more good people of the community in their shrouds than
+all the undertakers. We know the politician who gets five dollars a day
+for his "services" at the polls, the man who takes three dollars and the
+man who will work for the good of the cause in the precious hope of a
+blessed reward at some future county convention. To know these things is
+not a matter of pride; it is not a source of annoyance or shame; it is
+part of the business.
+
+Though our loathed but esteemed contemporary, the _Statesman_, speaks of
+our town as "this city," and calls the marshal "chief of police," we are
+none the less a country town. Like hundreds of its kind, our little
+daily newspaper is equipped with typesetting machines and is printed
+from a web perfecting press, yet it is only a country newspaper, and
+knowing this we refuse to put on city airs. Of course we print the
+afternoon Associated Press report on the first page, under formal heads
+and with some pretence of dignity, but that first page is the parlour of
+the paper, as it is of most of its contemporaries, and in the other
+pages they and we go around in our shirt sleeves, calling people by
+their first names; teasing the boys and girls good-naturedly; tickling
+the pompous members of the village family with straws from time to time,
+and letting out the family secrets of the community without much regard
+for the feelings of the supercilious.
+
+Nine or ten thousand people in our town go to bed on this kind of mental
+pabulum, as do country-town dwellers all over the United States, and
+although we do not claim that it is helpful, we do contend that it does
+not hurt them. Certainly by poking mild fun at the shams--the town
+pharisees--we make it more difficult to maintain the class lines which
+the pretenders would establish. Possibly by printing the news of
+everything that happens, suppressing nothing "on account of the
+respectability of the parties concerned," we may prevent some evil-doers
+from going on with their plans, but this is mere conjecture, and we do
+not set it down to our credit. What we maintain is that in printing our
+little country dailies, we, the scribes, from one end of the world to
+the other, get more than our share of fun out of life as we go along,
+and pass as much of it on to our neighbours as we can spare.
+
+[Illustration: Suppressing nothing "on account of the respectability of
+the parties concerned"]
+
+Because we live in country towns, where the only car-gongs we hear are
+on the baker's waggon, and where the horses in the fire department work
+on the streets, is no reason why city dwellers should assume that we are
+natives. We have no dialect worth recording--save that some of us
+Westerners burr our "r's" a little or drop an occasional final "g." But
+you will find that all the things advertised in the backs of the
+magazines are in our houses, and that the young men in our towns walking
+home at midnight, with their coats over their arms, whistle the same
+popular airs that lovelorn boys are whistling in New York, Portland, San
+Francisco or New Orleans that same fine evening. Our girls are those
+pretty, reliant, well-dressed young women whom you see at the summer
+resorts from Coronado Beach to Buzzard's Bay. In the fall and winter
+these girls fill the colleges of the East and the State universities of
+the West. Those wholesome, frank, good-natured people whom you met last
+winter at the Grand Canyons and who told you of the funny performance of
+"Uncle Tom's Cabin" in Yiddish at the People's Theatre on the East Side
+in New York, and insisted that you see the totem pole in Seattle; and
+then take a cottage for a month at Catalina Island; who gave you the tip
+about Abson's quaint little beefsteak chop-house up an alley in Chicago,
+who told you of Mrs. O'Hagan's second-hand furniture shop in Charleston,
+where you can get real colonial stuff dirt cheap--those people are our
+leading citizens, who run the bank or the dry-goods store or the
+flour-mill. At our annual arts and crafts show we have on exhibition
+loot from the four corners of the earth, and the club woman who has not
+heard it whispered around in our art circles that Mr. Sargent is
+painting too many portraits lately, and that a certain long-legged model
+whose face is familiar in the weekly magazines is no better than she
+should be--a club woman in our town who does not know of these things
+is out of caste in clubdom, and women say of her that she is giving too
+much time to her church.
+
+We take all the beautiful garden magazines, and our terra-cotta works
+are turning out creditable vases--which we pronounce "vahzes," you may
+be sure--for formal gardens. And though we men for the most part run our
+own lawnmowers, and personally look after the work of the college boy
+who takes care of the horse and the cow for his room, still there are a
+few of us proud and haughty creatures who have automobiles, and go
+snorting around the country scaring horses and tooting terror into the
+herds by the roadside. But the bright young reporters on our papers do
+not let an automobile come to town without printing an item stating its
+make and its cost, and whether or not it is a new one or a second-hand
+one, and what speed it can make. At the flower parade in our own little
+town last October there were ten automobiles in line, decked with paper
+flowers and laden with pretty girls in lawns and dimities and
+linens--though as a matter of fact most of the linens were only "Indian
+head." And our particular little country paper printed an item to the
+effect that the real social line of cleavage in the town lies not
+between the cut-glass set and the devotees of hand-painted china, but
+between the real nobility who wear genuine linen and the base imitations
+who wear Indian head.
+
+In some towns an item like that would make people mad, but we have our
+people trained to stand a good deal. They know that it costs them five
+cents a line for cards of thanks and resolutions of respect, so they
+never bring them in. They know that our paper never permits "one who was
+there" to report social functions, so that dear old correspondent has
+resigned; and because we have insisted for years on making an item about
+the first tomatoes that are served in spring at any dinner or reception,
+together with the cost per pound of the tomatoes, the town has become
+used to our attitude and does not buzz with indignation when we poke a
+risible finger at the homemade costumes of the Plymouth Daughters when
+they present "The Mikado" to pay for the new pipe-organ. Indeed, so used
+is the town to our ways that when there was great talk last winter about
+Mrs. Frelingheysen for serving fresh strawberries over the ice cream at
+her luncheon in February, just after her husband had gone through
+bankruptcy, she called up Miss Larrabee, our society editor, on the
+telephone and asked her to make a little item saying that the
+strawberries served by Mrs. Frelingheysen at her luncheon were not
+fresh, but merely sun dried. This we did gladly and printed her recipe.
+So used is this town to our school teachers resigning to get married
+that when one resigns for any other reason we make it a point to
+announce in the paper that it is not for the usual reason, and tell our
+readers exactly what the young woman is going to do.
+
+So, gradually, without our intending to establish it, a family
+vernacular has grown up in the paper which our people understand, but
+which--like all other family vernaculars--is Greek to those outside the
+circle. Thus we say:
+
+"Bill Parker is making his eighth biennial distribution of cigars to-day
+for a boy."
+
+City papers would print it:
+
+"Born to Mr. and Mrs. W. H. Parker, a baby boy."
+
+Again we print this item:
+
+"Mrs. Merriman is getting ready to lend her fern to the Nortons, June
+15."
+
+That doesn't mean anything, unless you happen to know that Mrs. Merriman
+has the prettiest Boston fern in town, and that no bow-window is
+properly decorated at any wedding without that fern. In larger towns the
+same news item would appear thus:
+
+"Cards are out announcing the wedding of Miss Cecil Norton and Mr.
+Collis R. Hatcher at the home of the bride's parents, Mr. and Mrs. T. J.
+Norton, 1022 High street, June 15."
+
+A plain drunk is generally referred to in our columns as a "guest of
+Marshal Furgeson's informal house-party," and when a group of
+drunk-and-disorderlies is brought in we feel free to say of their
+evening diversion that they "spent the happy hours, after refreshments,
+playing progressive hell." And this brings us to the consideration of
+the most important personage with whom we have to deal. In what we call
+"social circles," the most important personages are Mrs. Julia Neal
+Worthington and Mrs. Priscilla Winthrop Conklin, who keep two hired
+girls and can pay five dollars a week for them when the prevailing
+price is three. In financial circles the most important personage is
+John Markley, who buys real-estate mortgages; in political circles the
+most important personage is Charlie Hedrick who knows the railroad
+attorneys at the capital and always can get passes for the county
+delegation to the State convention; in the railroad-yards the most
+important personage is the division superintendent, who smokes ten-cent
+cigars and has the only "room with a bath" at the Hotel Metropole. But
+with us, in the publication of our newspaper, the most important
+personage in town is Marshal Furgeson.
+
+If you ever looked out of the car-window as you passed through town, you
+undoubtedly saw him at the depot, walking nervously up and down the
+platform, peering into the faces of strangers. He is ever on the outlook
+for crooks, though nothing more violent has happened in our county for
+years than an assault and battery. But Marshal Furgeson never
+relinquishes his watch. In winter, clad in his blue uniform and campaign
+hat, he is a familiar figure on our streets; and in summer, without coat
+or vest, with his big silver star on which is stamped "Chief of
+Police," pinned to his suspender, he may be seen at any point where
+trouble is least likely to break out. He is the only man on the town
+site whom we are afraid to tease, because he is our chief source of
+news; for if we ruffle his temper he sees to it that our paper misses
+the details of the next chicken-raid that comes under his notice. He can
+bring us to time in short order.
+
+When we particularly desire to please him we refer to him as "the
+authorities." If the Palace Grocery has been invaded through the back
+window and a box of plug tobacco stolen, Marshal Furgeson is delighted
+to read in the paper that "the authorities have an important clew and
+the arrest may be expected at any time." He is "the authorities." If
+"the authorities have their eyes on a certain barber-shop on South Main
+Street, which is supposed to be doing a back-door beer business," he
+again is "the authorities," and contends that the word strikes more
+terror into the hearts of evil-doers than the mere name, Marshal
+Furgeson.
+
+Next in rank to "the authorities," in the diplomatic corps of the
+office, come our advertisers: the proprietors of the White Front
+Dry-Goods Store, the Golden Eagle Clothing Store, and the Bee Hive.
+These men can come nearer to dictating the paper's policy than the
+bankers and politicians, who are supposed to control country newspapers.
+Though we are charged with being the "organ" of any of half-a-dozen
+politicians whom we happen to speak of kindly at various times, we have
+little real use for politicians in our office, and a business man who
+brings in sixty or seventy dollars' worth of advertising every month has
+more influence with us than all the politicians in the county. This is
+the situation in most newspaper offices that succeed, and when any other
+situation prevails, when politicians control editors, the newspapers
+don't pay well, and sooner or later the politicians are bankrupt.
+
+The only person in town whom all the merchants desire us to poke fun at
+is Mail-Order Petrie. Mail-Order Petrie is a miserly old codger who buys
+everything out of town that he can buy a penny cheaper than the home
+merchants sell it. He is a hard-working man, so far as that goes, and
+so stingy that he has been accused of going barefooted in the summer
+time to save shoes. When he is sick he sends out of town for patent
+medicines, and for ten years he worked in his truck-garden, fighting
+floods and droughts, bugs and blight, to save something like a hundred
+dollars, which he put in a mail-order bank in St. Louis. When it failed
+he grinned at the fellows who twitted him of his loss, and said: "Oh,
+come easy, go easy!"
+
+A few years ago he subscribed to a matrimonial paper, and one day he
+appeared at the office of the probate judge with a mail-order wife, who,
+when they had been married a few years, went to an orphan asylum and got
+a mail-order baby. We have had considerable sport with Mail-Order
+Petrie, and he has become so used to it that he likes it. Sometimes on
+dull days he comes around to the office to tell us what a bargain he got
+at this or that mail-order house, and last summer he came in to tell us
+about a great bargain in a cemetery lot in a new cemetery being laid out
+in Kansas City; he bought it on the installment plan, a dollar down and
+twenty-five cents a month, to be paid until he died, and he bragged a
+great deal about his shrewdness in getting the lot on those terms. He
+chuckled as he said that he would be dead in five years at the most and
+would have a seventy-five dollar lot for a mere song. He made us promise
+that when that time does come we will write up his obsequies under the
+head "A Mail-Order Funeral." He added, as he stood with his hand on the
+door screen, that he had no use for the preachers and the hypocrites in
+the churches in this town, and that he was taking a paper called the
+"Magazine of Mysteries," that teaches some new ideas on religion and
+that he expects to wind up in a mail-order Heaven.
+
+And this is the material with which we do our day's work--Mail-Order
+Petrie, Marshal Furgeson, the pretty girls in the flower parade, the
+wise clubwomen, the cut-glass society crowd, the proud owner of the
+automobile, the "respectable parties concerned," the proprietor of the
+Golden Eagle, the clerks in the Bee Hive, the country crook who aspires
+to be a professional criminal some day, "the leading citizen," who
+spends much of his time seeing the sights of his country, the college
+boys who wear funny clothes and ribbons on their hats, and the
+politicians, greedy for free advertising. They are ordinary two-legged
+men and women, and if there is one thing more than any other that marks
+our town, it is its charity, and the mercy that is at the bottom of all
+its real impulses.
+
+Our business seems to outsiders to be a cruel one, because we have to
+deal as mere business with such sacred things as death and birth, the
+meeting and parting of friends, and with tragedies as well as with
+comedies. This is true. Every man--even a piano tuner--thinks his
+business leads him a dog's life, and that it shows him only the seamy
+side of the world. But our business, though it shows the seams, shows us
+more of good than of bad in men. We are not cynics in our office; for we
+know in a thousand ways that the world is good. We know that at the end
+of the day we have set down more good deeds than bad deeds, and that the
+people in our town will keep the telephone bell ringing to-morrow, more
+to praise the recital of a good action than they will to talk to us
+about some evil thing that we had to print.
+
+Time and again we have been surprised at the charity of our people. They
+are always willing to forgive, and be it man or woman who takes a
+misstep in our town--which is the counterpart of hundreds of American
+towns--if the offender shows that he wishes to walk straight, a thousand
+hands are stretched out to help him and guide him. It is not true that a
+man or woman who makes a mistake is eternally damned by his fellows. If
+one persists in wrong after the first misdeed it is not because
+sheltering love and kindness were not thrown around the wrongdoer. We
+have in our town women who have done wrong and have lived down their
+errors just as men do, and have been forgiven. A hundred times in our
+office we have talked these things over and have been proud of our
+people and of their humanity. We are all neighbours and friends, and
+when sorrow comes, no one is alone. The town's greatest tragedies have
+proved the town's sympathy, and have been worth their cost.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+The Young Prince
+
+
+We have had many reporters for our little country newspaper--some good
+ones, who have gone up to the city and have become good newspaper men;
+some bad ones, who have gone back to the livery-stables from which they
+sprang; and some indifferent ones, who have drifted into the insurance
+business and have become silent partners in student boarding-houses,
+taking home the meat for dinner and eating finically at the second table
+of life, with a first table discrimination. But of all the boys who have
+sat at the old walnut desk by the window, the Young Prince gave us the
+most joy. Before he came on the paper he was bell-boy at the National
+Hotel--bell-hop, he called himself--and he first attracted our attention
+by handing in personal items written in a fat, florid hand. He seemed to
+have second sight. He knew more news than anyone else in town--who had
+gone away, who was entertaining company, who was getting married, and
+who was sick or dying.
+
+The day the Young Prince went to work he put on his royal garment--a
+ten-dollar ready-made costume that cost him two weeks' hard work. But it
+was worth the effort. His freckled face and his tawny shock of red hair
+rose above the gorgeous plaid of the clothes like a prairie sunset, and
+as he pranced off down the street he was clearly proud of his job. This
+pride never left him. He knew all the switchmen in the railroad yards,
+all the girls in the dry-goods stores, all the boys on the grocers'
+waggons, all the hack-drivers and all the barbers in town.
+
+These are the great sources of news for a country daily. The reporter
+who confines his acquaintance to doctors, lawyers, merchants and
+preachers is always complaining of dull days.
+
+But there was never a dull day with the Young Prince. When he could get
+the list of "those present" at a social function in no other way, he
+called up the hired girl of the festal house--we are such a small town
+that only the rich bankers keep servants--and "made a date" with her,
+and the names always appeared in the paper the next day; whereupon the
+proud hostess, who thought it was bad form to give out the names of her
+guests, sent down and bought a dozen extra copies of the paper to send
+away to her Eastern kin. He knew all the secrets of the switch shanty.
+Our paper printed the news of a change in the general superintendent's
+office of the railroad before the city papers had heard of it, and we
+usually figured it out that the day after the letter denying our story
+had come down from the Superintendent's office the change would be
+officially announced.
+
+One day when the Prince was at the depot "making the train" with his
+notebook in his hand, jotting down the names of the people who got on or
+off the cars, the general superintendent saw him, and called the youth
+to his car.
+
+"Well, kid," said the most worshipful one in his teasingest voice,
+"What's the latest news at the general offices to-day?"
+
+The Young Prince turned his head on one side like a little dog looking
+up at a big dog, and replied:
+
+"Well, if you must know it, you're going to get the can, though we
+ain't printing it till you've got a chance to land somewhere else."
+
+The longer the Prince worked the more clothes he bought. One of his most
+effective creations was a blue serge coat and vest, and a pair of white
+duck trousers linked by emotional red socks to patent-leather shoes.
+This confection, crowned with a wide, saw-edged straw hat with a blue
+band, made him the brightest bit of colour on the sombre streets of our
+dull town. He wore his collars so high that he had to order them of a
+drummer, and as he came down street from the depot, riding magnificently
+with the 'bus-driver, after the train had gone, the clerks used to cry:
+"Look out for your horses; the steam-piano is coming!"
+
+But it didn't affect the Young Prince. If he happened to have time and
+was feeling like it, he would climb down over the rear end of the 'bus
+and chase his tormentor into the back of the store where he worked, but
+generally the Young Prince took no heed of the jibes of the envious. He
+was conscious that he was cutting a figure, and this consciousness made
+him proud. But his pride did not cut down the stack of copy that he
+laid on the table every morning and every noon. He couldn't spell and he
+was innocent of grammar, and every line he wrote had to be edited, but
+he got the news. He was every where. He rushed down the streets after an
+item, dodging in and out of stores and offices like a streak of chain
+lightning having a fit. But it was beneath his dignity to run to fires.
+When the fire-bell rang, he waited nonchalantly on the corner near the
+fire-department house, and as the crowds parted to let the horses dash
+by on the dead run, he would walk calmly to the middle of the street,
+put his notebook in his pocket, and, as the fire-team plunged by, he
+would ostentatiously throw out a stiff leg behind him like the tail of a
+comet, and "flip" onto the end of the fire-waggon. Then he would turn
+slowly around, raise a hand, and wiggle his fingers patronisingly at the
+girls in front of the Racket Store as he flew past, swaying his body
+with the motion of the rolling, staggering cart.
+
+Other reporters who have been on the paper--the good ones as well as the
+bad--have had to run the gauntlet of the town jokers who delight to give
+green reporters bogus news, or start them out hunting impossible items.
+But the man who soberly told the Young Prince that O. F. C. Taylor was
+visiting at the home of the town drunkard, or that W. H. McBreyer had
+accepted a position in a town drug-store, only got a wink and a grin
+from the boy. Neither did the town wags fool him by giving him a birth
+announcement from the wrong family, nor a wedding where there was none.
+He was wise as a serpent. Where he got his wisdom, no one knows. He had
+the town catalogued in a sort of rogues' directory--the liars and the
+honest men set apart from one another, and it was a classification that
+would not have tallied with the church directories nor with the town
+blue-book nor with the commercial agency's reports. The sheep and the
+goats in the Young Prince's record would have been strangers to one
+another if they could have been assembled as he imagined them. But he
+was generally right in his estimates of men. He had a sixth sense for
+sham.
+
+The Young Prince had the sense to know the truth and the courage to
+write it. This is the essence of the genius that is required to make a
+good newspaper man. No paper has trouble getting reporters who can hand
+in copy that records events from the outside. Any blockhead can go to a
+public meeting and bring in a report that has the words "as follows"
+scattered here and there down the columns. But the reporter who can go
+and bring back the soul of the meeting, the real truth about it--what
+the inside fights meant that lay under the parliamentary politenesses of
+the occasion; who can see the wires that reach back of the speakers, and
+see the man who is moving the wires and can know why he is moving them;
+who can translate the tall talking into history--he is a real reporter.
+And the Young Prince was that kind of a youth. He went to the core of
+everything; and if we didn't dare print the truth--as sometimes we did
+not--he grumbled for a week about his luck. As passionately as he loved
+his clothes, he was always ready to get them dirty in the interests of
+his business.
+
+For three years his nimble feet pounded the sidewalks of the town. He
+knew no business hours, and ate and slept with his work. He never ceased
+to be a reporter--never took off his make-up, never let down from his
+exalted part. One day he fell sick of a fever, and for three weeks
+fretted and fumed in delirium. In his dreams he wrote pay locals, and
+made trains, and described funerals, got lists of names for the society
+column, and grumbled because his stuff was cut or left over till the
+next day. When he awoke he was weak and wan, and they felt that they
+must tell him the truth.
+
+The doctor took the boy's hands and told him very simply what they
+feared. He looked at the man for a moment in dumb wonder, and sighed a
+long, tired sigh. Then he said: "Well, if I must, here goes"--and turned
+his face to the wall and closed his eyes without a tremor.
+
+And thus the Young Prince went home.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+The Society Editor
+
+
+They say that in the newspaper offices of the city men work in ruts;
+that the editorial writer never reports an item, no matter how much he
+knows of it; that a reporter is not allowed to express an editorial view
+of a subject, even though he be well qualified to speak; but on our
+little country daily newspaper it is entirely different. We work on the
+interchangeable point system. Everyone writes items, all of us get
+advertising and job-work when it comes our way, and when one of us
+writes anything particularly good, it is marked for the editorial page.
+The religious reporter does the racing matinee in Wildwood Park, and the
+financial editor who gets the market reports from the feed-store men
+also gets any church news that comes along.
+
+The only time we ever established a department was when we made Miss
+Larrabee society editor. She came from the high school, where her
+graduating essay on Kipling attracted our attention, and, after an
+office council had decided that a Saturday society page would be a
+paying proposition.
+
+At first, say for six months after she came to the office, Miss Larrabee
+devoted herself to the accumulation of professional pride. This pride
+was as much a part of her life as her pompadour, which at that time was
+so high that she had to tiptoe to reach it. However she managed to keep
+it up was the wonder of the office. Finally, we all agreed that she must
+use chicken-fence. She denied this, but was inclined to be good-natured
+about it, and, as an office-joke, the boys used to leave a step-ladder
+by her desk so that she could climb up and see how her top-knot really
+looked. Nothing ruffled her spirits, and we soon quit teasing her and
+began to admire her work. In addition to filling six columns of the
+Saturday's paper with her society report in a town where a church social
+is important enough to justify publishing the names of those who wait on
+the tables, Miss Larrabee was a credit to the office.
+
+[Illustration: As an office joke the boys used to leave a step-ladder by
+her desk so that she could climb up and see how her top-knot really
+looked]
+
+She was always invited to the entertainments at the homes of the
+Worthingtons and the Conklins, who had stationary wash-tubs in the
+basements of their houses, and who ate dinner instead of supper in the
+evening; and when she put on what the boys called her trotting harness,
+her silk petticoats rustled louder than any others at the party. One day
+she suddenly dropped her pompadour and appeared with her hair parted in
+the middle and doused over her ears in long, undulating billows. No
+other girl in town came within a quarter of an inch of Miss Larrabee's
+dare. When straight-fronts became stylish, Miss Larrabee was a vertical
+marvel, and when she rolled up her sleeves and organized a country club,
+she referred to her shoes as boots and took the longest steps in town.
+But with it all she was no mere clothes-horse. We drilled it into her
+head during her first two weeks that "society" news in a country town
+means not merely the doings of the cut-glass set, but that it means as
+well the doings of the Happy Hoppers, the Trundle-Bed Trash, the Knights
+of Columbus, the Rathbone Sisters, the King's Daughters, the Epworth
+League, the Christian Endeavourers, the Woman's Relief Corps, the
+Ladies' Aid and the Home Missionary Societies, Miss Nelson's Dancing
+Class, the Switchmen's annual ball--if we get their job-work--and every
+kindred, every tribe, except such as gather in what is known as "kitchen
+sweats" and occasionally send in calls for the police. When Miss
+Larrabee got this into her head she began to groan under her burden, and
+by the end of the year, though she had great pride in her profession,
+she affected to loathe her department.
+
+Weddings were her especial abominations. When the first social cloud
+appeared on the horizon indicating the approach of a series of showers
+for the bride which would culminate in a cloudburst at some stone
+church, Miss Larrabee would begin to rumble like distant thunder and, as
+the storm grew thicker, she would flash out crooked chain-lightning
+imprecations on the heads of the young people, their fathers and mothers
+and uncles and aunts. By the day of the wedding she would be rolling a
+steady diapason of polite, decolourised, expurgated, ladylike profanity.
+
+While she sat at her desk writing the stereotyped account of the event,
+it was like picking up a live wire to speak to her. As she wrote, we
+could tell at just what stage she had arrived in her copy. Thus, if she
+said to the adjacent atmosphere, "What a whopper!" we knew that she had
+written, "The crowning glory of a happy fortnight of social gatherings
+found its place when----" and when she hissed out, "Mortgaged clear to
+the eaves and full of installment furniture!" we felt that she had
+reached a point something like this: "After the ceremony the gay party
+assembled at the palatial home." In a moment she would snarl: "I am dead
+tired of seeing Mrs. Merriman's sprawly old fern and the Bosworth palm.
+I wish they would stop lending them!" and then we realised that she had
+reached the part of her write-up which said: "The chancel rail was
+banked with a profusion of palms and ferns and rare tropical plants."
+She always groaned when she came to the "simple and impressive ring
+ceremony." When she wrote:
+
+"The distinguished company came forward to offer congratulations to the
+newly-wedded pair," she would say as she sharpened her pencil-point:
+"There's nothing like a wedding to reveal what a raft of common kin
+people have," and we knew that it was all over and that she was closing
+the article with: "A dazzling array of costly and beautiful presents was
+exhibited in the library," for then she would pick up her copy, dog-ear
+the sheets, and jab them on the hook as she sighed: "Another great
+American pickle-dish exhibit ended."
+
+In the way she did two things Miss Larrabee excited the wonder and
+admiration of the office. One was the way that she kept tab on brides.
+We heard through her of the brides who could cook, and of those who were
+beginning life by accumulating a bright little pile of tin cans in the
+alley. She knew the brides who could do their own sewing and those who
+could not. She had the single girl's sniff at the bride who wore her
+trousseau season after season, made over and fixed up, and she gave the
+office the benefit of her opinion of the husband in the case who had a
+new tailor-made suit every fall and spring. She scented young married
+troubles from afar, and we knew in the office whether his folks were
+edging up on her, or her people were edging up on him. If a young
+married man danced more than twice in one evening with anyone but his
+wife, Miss Larrabee made faces at his back when he passed the office
+window, and if she caught a young married woman flirting, Miss Larrabee
+regaled us by telling with whom the woman in question had opened a
+"fresh bottle of emotions."
+
+The other way in which Miss Larrabee displayed genius for her work was
+in describing women's costumes. Three or four times a year, when there
+are large social gatherings, we print descriptions of the women's gowns.
+Only three women in our town, Mrs. Worthington, Mrs. Conklin, and the
+second Mrs. Markley, have more than one new party dress in a
+twelve-month, and most of the women make a party gown last two or three
+years. Miss Larrabee was familiar with every dress in town. She knew it
+made over, and no woman was cunning enough to conceal the truth even
+with a spangled yoke, a chiffon bertha, or a net over-dress; yet Miss
+Larrabee would describe the gown, not merely twice, but half a dozen
+times, so that the woman wearing it might send the description to her
+relatives back East without arousing their suspicion that she was
+wearing the same dress year after year. Therefore, whenever Miss
+Larrabee wrote up the dresses worn at a party, we were sure to sell from
+fifty to a hundred extra papers. She could so turn a breastpin and a
+homemade point-lace handkerchief tucked in the front of a good old
+lady's best black satin into "point-lace and diamonds," that they were
+always good for a dozen copies of the paper, and she never overlooked
+the dress of the wife of a good advertiser, no matter how plain it might
+be.
+
+She was worth her wages to the office merely as a compendium of shams.
+She knew whether the bridal couple, who announced that they would spend
+their honeymoon in the East, were really going to Niagara Falls, or
+whether they were going to spend a week with his relatives in Decatur,
+Illinois. She knew every woman in town who bought two prizes for her
+whist party--one to give if her friend should win the prize, and another
+to give if the woman she hated should win. With the diabolical eye of a
+fiend she detected the woman who was wearing the dry-cleaned cast-off
+clothing of her sister in the city. What she saw the office knew,
+though she kept her conclusions out of the paper if they would do any
+harm or hurt anyone's feelings. No pretender ever dreamed that she was
+not fooling Miss Larrabee. She was willing to agree most sympathetically
+with Mrs. Conklin, who insisted that the "common people" wouldn't be
+interested in the list of names at her party; and the only place where
+we ever saw Miss Larrabee's claw in print was in the insistent
+misspelling of the name of a woman who made it a point to ridicule the
+paper.
+
+We have had other girls around the office since Miss Larrabee left, but
+they do not seem to get the work done with any system. She was not only
+industrious but practical. Friday mornings, when her work piled up,
+instead of fussing around the office and chattering at the telephone,
+she would dive into her desk and bring up her regular list of
+adjectives. These she would copy on three slips, carefully dividing the
+list so that no one had a duplicate, and in the afternoon each of the
+boys received a slip with a list of parties, and with instructions to
+scatter the adjectives she had given him through the accounts of the
+parties assigned to him--and the work was soon done. There was no
+scratching the head for synonyms for "beautiful," "superb" or "elegant."
+Miss Larrabee had doled out to each of us the adjectives necessary, and,
+given the adjectives, society reporting is easy. The editing of the copy
+is easy also, for one does not have to remember whether or not the
+refreshments were "delicious" at the Jones party when he sees the word
+in connection with the viands at the Smith party. No two parties were
+ever "elegant" the same week. No two events were "charming." No two
+women were "exquisitely" gowned. The person who was assigned the
+adjective "delightful" by Miss Larrabee might stick it in front of a
+luncheon, pin it on a hostess, or use it for an evening's entertainment.
+But he could use it only once. And with a list of those present and the
+adjectives thereunto appertaining, even a new boy could get up a column
+in half an hour. She had an artist's pride in the finished work, however
+much she might dislike the thing in making, and she used to sail down to
+the press-room as soon as the paper was out, and, picking up the paper
+from the folder, she would stand reading her page, line upon line,
+precept upon precept, though every word and syllable was familiar to
+her.
+
+During her first year she joined the Woman's State Press Club, but she
+discovered that she was the only real worker in the club and never
+attended a second meeting. She told us that too many of the women wore
+white stockings and low shoes, read their own unpublished short stories,
+and regarded her wide-shouldered shirtwaist and melodramatic openwork
+hosiery with suspicion and alarm.
+
+As the years passed, and wedding after wedding sizzled under her pen,
+she complained to us that she was beginning to be called "auntie" in too
+many houses, and that the stock of available young men who didn't wear
+their handkerchiefs under their collars at the dances had dwindled down
+to three. This reality faces every girl who lives in a country town.
+Then she is left with two alternatives: to go visiting or to begin
+bringing them up by hand.
+
+Miss Larrabee went visiting. At the end of a month she wrote: "It's all
+over with me. He is a nice fellow, and has a job doing 'Live Topics
+About Town' here on the _Sun_. Give my job to the little Wheatly girl,
+and tell her to quit writing poetry, and hike up her dress in the back.
+My adjectives are in the left-hand corner of the desk under 'When
+Knighthood Was in Flower.' And do you suppose you could get me and the
+grand keeper of the records and seals a pass home for Christmas if I'd
+do you a New York letter some time?
+
+"They say these city papers are hog tight!"
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+"As a Breath into the Wind"
+
+
+We are proud of the machinery in our office--the two linotypes, the big
+perfecting press and the little jobbers. They are endowed by office
+traditions with certain human attributes--having their moods and
+vagaries and tantrums--so we love them as men love children. And this is
+a queer thing about them: though our building is pocked with windows
+that are open by day seven months in the year, and though the air of the
+building is clean enough, save for the smell of the ink, yet at night,
+after the machines have been idle for many hours and are probably
+asleep, the place smells like the lair of wild animals. By day they are
+as clean as machines may be kept. And even in the days when David Lewis
+petted them and coddled them and gave them the core of his heart, they
+were speckless, and bright as his big, brown, Welsh eyes, but the night
+stinks of them were rank and beastly.
+
+David came to us, a stray cat, fifteen years ago. He was too small to
+wrestle with the forms--being cast in the nonpareil mould of his
+race--and so we put him to carrying papers. In school season he seemed
+to go to school, and in summer it is certain that he put a box on a high
+stool in the back room, and learned the printer's case, and fed the job
+presses at odd times, and edged on to the pay-roll without ever having
+been formally hired. In the same surreptitious manner he slipped a cot
+into the stockroom upstairs and slept there, and finally had it fitted
+up as a bedroom, and so became an office fixture.
+
+By the time his voice had stopped squeaking he was a good printer, and
+what with using the front office for a study at night, and the New York
+papers and the magazines for textbooks, he had acquired a good working
+education. Whereupon he fell in love with two divinities at once--the
+blonde one working in the Racket Store, on Main Street, and the other, a
+new linotype that we installed the year before McKinley's first
+election. His heart was sadly torn between them. He never went to bed
+under midnight after calling on either of them, and, having the Celt's
+natural aptitude to get at the soul of either women or intricate
+mechanism, in a year he was engaged to both; but naturally enough a
+brain fever overtook him, and he lay on a cot at the Sisters' Hospital
+and jabbered strange things.
+
+Among other things the priest who sat beside him one day heard Latin
+verse; whereat the father addressed David in the language of the Church
+and received reply in kind. And they talked solemnly about matters
+theological for five minutes, David's voice changing to the drone of the
+liturgist's and his face flushing with uncaged joy. In an hour there
+were three priests with the boy, and he spoke in Latin to them without
+faltering. He discussed abstruse ecclesiastical questions and claimed
+incidentally to be an Italian priest dead a score of years, and, to
+prove his claim, described Rome and the Vatican as it was before Leo's
+day. Then he fell asleep and the next day was better and knew no Latin,
+but insisted on reading the note under his pillow which his girl had
+sent him. After that he wanted to know how New York stood in the
+National League and how Hans Wagner's batting record was, and proceeded
+to get well in short order.
+
+David resumed his place in the office, and when we put in the perfecting
+press he added another string to his bow. The press and the linotype and
+his girl were his life's passions, and his position as short-stop in the
+Maroons, and as snare-drummer in the Second Regiment band, were his
+diversions. He wore clothes well and became president of the Imperial
+Dancing Club--chiefly to please his girl, who desired social position. A
+boy with twelve dollars a week in a country town, who will spend a
+dollar or two a month to have his clothes pressed, can accomplish any
+social heights which rise before him, and there is no barrier in our
+town to a girl merely because she presides at the ribbon-counter; which,
+of course, is as it should be.
+
+So David became a town personage. When the linotype operator left, we
+gave David the place. Now he courted only one of his sweethearts by
+night, and found time for other things. Also we gave him three dollars
+a week more to spend, and the Imperial Club got most of it--generally
+through the medium of the blonde in the Racket Store, who was
+cultivating a taste for diamonds, and liked to wear flowers at the more
+formal dances.
+
+Now, unless they are about to be married, a boy of twenty may not call
+on a girl of nineteen in a respectable family, a member of the Plymouth
+Daughters, and a graduate of the High School, oftener than four nights
+in the week, without exciting more or less neighbourly comment; but
+David and the girl were merely going together--as the parlance of our
+town has it--and though they were engaged they had no idea of getting
+married at any definite time. David thus had three nights in the seven
+which might be called open. The big press would not receive him by
+night, and he spent his love on his linotype by day; so he was lonesome
+and longed for the society of his kind. The billiard-hall did not tempt
+him; but at the cigar-store he met and fell under the spell of Henry
+Larmy--known of the town as "Old Hen," though he was not two score years
+gone--and the two began chumming together.
+
+"Old Hen" worked in a tin-shop, read Ruskin, regarded Debs as a prophet,
+received many papers devoted to socialism and the New Thought, and
+believed that he believed in no man, no God and no devil. Also he was a
+woman-hater, and though he never turned his head for a petticoat,
+preached free-love and bought many books which promised to tell him how
+to become a hypnotist. At various times, Larmy's category of beliefs
+included the single-tax, Buddhism, spiritualism, and a faith in the
+curative properties of blue glass. David and Henry Larmy would sit in
+the office of evenings discussing these things when honest people should
+be in bed.
+
+Henry never could tell us just how the talk drifted to hypnotism and the
+occult, nor when the current started that way. But one of the reporters
+who happened to be driven off the street by the rain one night found
+Henry and David in the office with a homemade planchette doing queer
+things. They made it tell words in the middle of pages of newspapers
+that neither had opened. They made it write answers to sums that neither
+had calculated, and they made it give the names of Henry's relatives
+dead and gone--also those that were living, whom David, who was
+operating it, did not know. The thing would not move for the man, but
+the boy's fingers on it made it fly. Some way the triangular board
+broke, and the reporter and Henry were pop-eyed with wonder to see David
+hold his hands above the pencil and make it write, dragging a splinter
+of board behind it. David yawned five or six times and lay down on the
+office couch, and when he got up a moment later his hands were fingering
+the air, his lips fluttering like the wings of fledglings, and he seemed
+to be trying some new kind of lingo. He did not look about him, but went
+straight to the table, gripped the air above the pencil with the broken
+board upon it, and the pencil came up and began writing something,
+evidently in verse. David's face was shiny and smiling the while, but
+his eyes were fixed, though his lips moved as they do when one writes
+and is unused to it. Larmy stared at the boy with open mouth, clearly
+afraid of the spectacle that was before him. A night creaking of the
+building made him jump, and he moistened his lips as the pencil wrote
+on. When the sheet was filled, the pencil fell and David looked about
+him with a smile and dropping his head on the desk began to yawn. He
+seemed to be coming out of a deep sleep, and grinned up blinking: "Gee,
+I must 'a' gone to sleep on you fellows. I was up late last night."
+
+Larmy told the boy what had happened, and the three of them looked at
+the paper, but could make nothing of it. David shook his head.
+
+"Not on your life," he laughed. "What do you fellers take me for--a
+phonograph having the D. T.'s, or a mimeograph with a past? Uh-huh! Not
+for little David! Why--say, that is some kind of Dutch!"
+
+The reporter knew enough to know that it was Latin, but his High School
+days were five years behind him, and he could not translate it. The
+Latin professor at the college, however, said that it seemed to be an
+imitation of Ovid.
+
+And the next time the reporter saw a light in the office window he broke
+into the seance. When the boy and his girl were not holding down the
+sofa at her father's home, or when there was no dance at the Imperial
+Club hall, nor any other social diversion, David and Larmy and the
+reporter would meet at the office and dive into things too deep for
+Horatio's philosophy.
+
+Their favourite theme was the immortality of the soul, and when they
+were on this theme David would get nervous, pace up and down the office,
+and finally throw himself on the lounge and begin to yawn. Whereupon a
+control, or state of mind, or personality that called itself Fra
+Guiseppi would rise to consciousness and dominate the boy. Larmy and the
+reporter called it "father," and talked to it with considerable
+jocularity, considering that the father claimed they were talking to a
+ghost. It would do odd things for them; go into rooms where David had
+never been: describe their furnishings and occupants accurately; read
+the numbers on watches of prominent citizens, which the reporter would
+verify the next day; and pretend to bring other departed spirits into
+the room to discuss various matters. Larmy had a pleasant social chat
+with Karl Marx, and had the spirits hunting all over the kingdom-come
+for Tom Paine and Murat. But the messenger either could not find them,
+or the line was busy with someone else, so these worthies never
+appeared.
+
+Still, this must be said of the "father," that it had a philosophy of
+life, and a distinct personality far deeper and more charming and in
+some way sweeter than David's; that it talked with an accent, which to
+the hearers seemed Italian, and in a voice that certainly could not have
+been the boy's by any trick of ventriloquism. One night in their talks
+Larmy said:
+
+"'Father,' you say you believe that the judgments of God are just--how
+do you account for the sufferings, the heartaches, the sorrows, the
+misery that come in the wake of those judgments? Here is a great railway
+accident that strikes down twenty people, renders some cripples for
+life, kills others. Here is a flood that sweeps away the property of
+good men and bad men. Is that just? What compensation is there for it?"
+
+The "father" put his chin in one hand and remained silent for a time, as
+one deep in thought; then he replied:
+
+"That is--what you call--life. That is what makes life, life; what
+makes it different from the existence we know now. All your misfortunes,
+your hardships, your joys, all your miseries and failures and
+triumphs--these are the school of the soul which you call life. It is a
+preparation for the hereafter."
+
+And David waking knew nothing of the thing that possessed him sleeping.
+When they told him, he would smoke his cigarette, and make reply that he
+must have had 'em pretty bad this time, or that he was glad he wasn't
+that "buggy" when he was awake.
+
+David's talent soon became known in the office. We used to call it his
+spook, but only once did we harness it to practical business and that
+was when old Charley Hedrick, the local boss, was picking a candidate
+for the Legislature. The reporter and Larmy asked the "father" one night
+if it could get us connected with Mr. Hedrick. It said it would try; it
+needed help. And there appeared another personality with which they were
+more or less familiar, called the Jew. The Jew claimed to be a literary
+man, and said it would act as receiver while the father acted as
+transmitter on Hedrick. Then they got this one-sided telephonic
+conversation in a thick, wheezy voice that was astonishingly like
+Hedrick's:
+
+"Harmony--hell, yes; we're always getting the harmony and the
+Worthington state bank gets the offices." Then a pause ensued. "Well,
+let'em bolt. I'm getting tired of giving up the whole county ticket to
+them fellows to keep 'em from bolting." After another pause, he seemed
+to answer someone: "Oh, Bill?--you can't trust him! He's played both
+sides in this town for ten years. What I want isn't a man to satisfy
+them, but just this once I want a man who won't be even under the
+suspicion of satisfying them. I want a fellow to satisfy me." The other
+side of the telephone must have spoken, for this came: "Well, then,
+we'll bust their damn bank! Did you see their last statement: cash down
+to fifteen per cent. and no dividends on half a million assets for a
+year and a half? Something's rotten there. They're a lot of 'toads in a
+poisoned tank,' as old Browning says. If they want a fight, they can
+have it." After the silence he replied: "I tell you fellows they can't
+afford a fight. And, anyway, there'll never be peace in this town till
+we get things on the basis of one bank, one newspaper, one wife and one
+country, and the way to do that is to get out in the open and fight. If
+I've got as much sense as a rabbit I say that Ab Handy is the man, and
+whether I'm right or wrong I'm going to run him." He seemed to retort to
+some objector: "Yes, and the first thing you know he'd come charging up
+to the Speaker's desk with a maximum freight-rate bill, or a stock-yards
+bill--and where would I be? I tell you he won't stand hitched. He'll
+swell up like a pizened pup, and you couldn't handle him. Where'd any of
+us be, if the Representative from this county got to pawing the air for
+reform? I know Jake as though I'd been through him with a lantern."
+There must have been a discussion of some kind among the others, for a
+lengthy interim followed; then the voice continued: "Elect him?--of
+course we can elect him. I can get five hundred from the State Committee
+and we can raise that much down here. This is a Republican year, and we
+could elect Judas Iscariot against any of the eleven brethren this year
+on the Republican ticket, and I tell you it's Ab. You fellows can do as
+you please, but I'm going to run Ab."
+
+Then, being full of political curiosity rather than impelled by a desire
+for psychological research, the reporter slipped out and waited in a
+stairway opposite the Exchange National Bank building until the light in
+Hedrick's law office was extinguished. Then he saw old Charley and his
+henchmen come out, one at a time, look cautiously up and down the street
+and go forth in different, devious ways. The story in our paper the next
+day of the candidacy of Ab Handy threw consternation into the ranks of
+the enemy. We had printed the conversation as it had occurred, after
+which five men publicly contended that one of their number was a
+traitor.
+
+The summer browned the pastures, and the coming of autumn brought
+trouble for David Lewis, president of the Imperial Dancing Club,
+short-stop for the Maroons, snare-drummer in the band, and operator of
+linotypes. We who are at the period of life where love is a harvest
+forget the days of the harrow, and are prone to smile at the season of
+the seeding. We do not know that the heaviest burden God puts on a
+young soul is a burden of the heart. A travelling silk-salesman, with a
+haughty manner and a two-hundred-dollar job, saw the blonde in the
+Racket Store and began calling at her father's home like the captain of
+an army with banners. David, being only an armour-bearer at fifteen
+dollars a week, found heartbreak in it all for him. A girl of twenty is
+so much older than a boy of twenty-one that the blonde began to assume a
+maternal attitude toward the boy, and he took to walking afield on
+Sundays, looking at the sky in agony and asking his little
+"now-I-lay-me" God, what life was given to him for. He fabricated a
+legend that she was selling herself for gold, and when the haughty
+manner and the blonde sped by David's window behind jingling
+sleigh-bells that winter, David, sitting at the machine, got back proofs
+from the front office that looked like war-maps of a strange country.
+Moreover he let his matrices go uncleaned until they were beardy as
+wheat and the bill of repairs on the machine had begun to rise like a
+cat's back.
+
+All of this may seem funny in the telling, but to see the little
+Welshman's heart breaking in him was no pleasant matter. The girls in
+the office pitied the boy, and hoped the silk-drummer would break her
+heart. The town and the Imperial Club, whereof David was much beloved,
+took sides with him, and knew his sorrow for their own. As for the
+blonde, it was only nature asserting itself in her; so David got back
+his little chip diamonds, and his bangle bracelet, and his copy of
+"Riley's Love Songs," and there was the "mist and the blinding rain" for
+him, and the snow of winter hardened on the sidewalks.
+
+To console himself, the boy traded for a music-box, which he set going
+with a long brass lever. Its various tunes were picked in holes on
+circular steel sheets, which were fed into the box and set whirling with
+the lever. At night when Larmy wasn't enjoying what David called a
+spook-fest, the boy would sit in the office by the hour and listen to
+his music-box. He must have played "Love's Golden Dream Is Past" a
+hundred lonesome times that winter (it had been their favourite
+waltz--his and the girl's--at the Imperial Club), and it was a safe
+guess that if the boys in the office, as they passed the box at noon,
+would give the lever a yank, from the abdomen of the contrivance the
+waltz song would begin deep and low to rumble and swell out with all the
+simulation of sorrow that a mechanical soul may express.
+
+As the winter deepened, Larmy and the reporter and the "father" had more
+and more converse. The "father" explained a theory of immortality which
+did not interest the reporter, but which Larmy heard eagerly. It said
+that science would resolve matter into mere forms of motion, which are
+expressions of divine will, and that the only place where this divine
+will exists in its pure state, eluding the so-called material state, is
+in the human soul. Further, the "father" explained that this soul, or
+divine will, exists without the brain, independent of brain tissue, as
+may be proved by the accepted phenomena of hypnotism, where the soul is
+commanded to leave the body and see and hear and feel and know things
+which the mere physical organs can not experience, owing to the
+interposition of space. The "father" said that at death the Divine Will
+commands the ripened seed of life to leave the body and assume
+immortality, just as that Will commands the seeds of plants and the
+sperm of animals to assume their natural functions. The Thing that
+talked through David's lips said that the body is the seed-pod of the
+soul, and that souls grow little or much as they are planted and
+environed and nurtured by life. All this it said in many nights, while
+Larmy wondered and the reporter scoffed and stuck pins in David to see
+if he could feel them. And the boy wakened from his dreams always to
+say: "Gimme a cigarette!" and to reach over and pull the lever of his
+music-box, and add: "Perfessor, give us a tune! Hen, the professor says
+he won't play unless you give me a cigarette for him."
+
+One night, after a long wrangle which ended in a discourse by the
+"father," a strange thing happened. Larmy and It were contending as to
+whether It was merely a hypnotic influence on the boy, of someone living
+whom they did not know, or what It claimed to be, a disembodied spirit.
+By way of diversion, the reporter had just run a binder's needle under
+one of the boy's finger-nails to see whether he would flinch. Then the
+Voice that was coming from David's mouth spoke and said: "I will show
+you something to prove it;" and the entranced boy rose and went to the
+back room, while the two others followed him.
+
+He turned the lever that flashed the light on his linotype, and set the
+little motor going. He lifted up the lid of the metal-pot, to see if the
+fire was keeping it molten. Then the boy sat at the machine with his
+hands folded in his lap, gazing at the empty copy-holder out of dead
+eyes. In a minute--perhaps it was a little longer--a brass matrix
+slipped from the magazine and clicked down into the assembler; in a
+second or two another fell, and then, very slowly, like the ticks of a
+great clock, the brasses slipped--slipped--slipped into their places,
+and the steel spaces dropped into theirs. A line was formed, while the
+boy's hands lay in his lap. When it was a full line he grabbed the
+lever, that sent the line over to the metal-pot to be cast, and his hand
+fell back in his lap, while the dripping of the brasses continued and
+the blue and white keys on the board sank and rose, although no finger
+touched them.
+
+Larmy squinted at the thing, and held his long, fuzzy, unshaven chin in
+his hand. When the second line was cast the reporter broke the silence
+with: "Well, I'll be damned!" And the Voice from David's mouth replied:
+"Very likely." And the clicking of the brasses grew quicker.
+
+Seven lines were cast and then the boy got up and went back to the couch
+in the front room, where he yawned himself, apparently, through three
+strata of consciousness, into his normal self. They took a proof of what
+had been cast, but it was in Latin and they could not translate it.
+David himself forgot about it the next day, but the reporter, being
+impressed and curious, took the proof to the teacher of Latin at the
+college, who translated it thus: "_He shall go away on a long journey
+across the ocean, and he shall not return, yet the whole town shall see
+him again and know him--and he shall bring back the song that is in his
+heart, and you shall hear it._"
+
+The next week the "Maine" was blown up, and in the excitement the
+troubles of David were forgotten in the office. Moreover, as he had to
+work overtime he put his soul deeper into the machine, and his nerves
+took on something of the steel in which he lived. The Associated Press
+report was long in those days, and the paper was filled with local news
+of wars and rumours of wars, so that when the call for troops came in
+the early spring, the town was eager for it, and David could not wait
+for the local company to form, but went to Lawrence and enlisted with
+the Twentieth Kansas. He was our first war-hero for thirty years, and
+the town was proud of him. Most of the town knew why he went, and there
+was reproach for the blonde in the Racket Store, who had told the girls
+it would be in June and that they were going East for a wedding trip.
+
+When David came back from Lawrence an enlisted man, with a week in which
+to prepare for the fray, the Imperial Club gave him a farewell dance of
+great pride, in that one end of Imperial Hall was decorated for the
+occasion with all the Turkish rugs, and palms, and ferns, and
+piano-lamps with red shades, and American flags draped from the electric
+fixtures, and all the cut-glass and hand-painted punch-bowls that the
+girls of the T. T. T. Club could beg or borrow; and red lemonade and
+raspberry sherbet flowed like water. Whereat David Lewis was so pleased
+that he grew tearful when he came into the hall and saw the splendour
+that had been made for him. But his soul, despite his gratitude to the
+boys and girls who gave the party, was filled with an unutterable
+sadness; and he sat out many dances under the red lamp-shades with the
+various girls who had been playing sister to him; and the boys to whom
+the girls were more than sisters were not jealous.
+
+As for the blonde, she beamed and preened and smiled on David, but her
+name was not on his card, and as the silk-salesman was on the road, she
+had many vacant lines on her programme, and she often sat alone by a
+card-table shuffling the deck that lay there. The boy's eyes were dead
+when they looked at her and her smile did not coax him to her. Once when
+the others were dancing an extra David sat across the room from her, and
+she went to him and sat by him, and said under the music:
+
+"I thought we were always going to be friends--David?" And after he had
+parried her for a while, he rose to go away, and she said: "Won't you
+dance just once with me, Dave, just for old sake's sake before you go?"
+And he put down his name for the next extra and thought of how long it
+had been since the last June dance. Old sake's sake with youth may mean
+something that happened only day before yesterday.
+
+The boy did not speak to his partner during the next dance but went
+about debating something in his mind; and when the number was ended he
+tripped over to the leader of the orchestra, whom he had hired for
+dances a score of times, and asked for "Love's Golden Dream Is Past" as
+the next "extra." It was his waltz and he didn't care if the whole town
+knew it--they would dance it together. And so when the orchestra began
+he started away, a very heart-broken, brown-eyed, olive-skinned little
+Welshman, who barely touched the finger-tips of a radiant, overdeveloped
+blonde with roses in her cheeks and moonlight in her hair. She would
+have come closer to him but he danced away and only hunted for her soul
+with his brown Celtic eyes. And because David had asked for it and they
+loved the boy, the old men in the orchestra played the waltz over and
+over again, and at the end the dancers clapped their hands for an
+encore, and when the chorus began they sang it dancing, and the boy
+found the voice which cheered the "Men of Harlech," the sweet, cadent
+voice of his race, and let out his heart in the words.
+
+When he led her to a seat, the blonde had tears on her eyelashes as she
+choked a "good-by, Dave" to him, but he turned away without answering
+her and went to find his next partner. It was growing late and the crowd
+soon went down the long, dark stairway leading from Imperial Hall, into
+the moonlight and down the street, singing and humming and whistling
+"Love's Golden Dream," and the next day they and the town and the band
+came down to the noon train to see the conquering hero go.
+
+It was lonesome in the office after David went, and his music-box in the
+corner was dumb, for we couldn't find the brass lever for it, though the
+printers and the reporters hunted in his trunk and in every place they
+could think of. But the lonesomest things in the world for him were the
+machines. The big press grew sulky and kept breaking the web, and his
+linotype took to absorbing castor-oil as if it were a kind of hasheesh.
+The new operator could run the new machine, but David's seemed to resent
+familiarity. It was six months before we got things going straight after
+he left us.
+
+He wrote us soldier letters from the Presidio, and from mid-ocean, and
+from the picket-line in front of Manila. One afternoon the messenger-boy
+came in snuffling with a sheet of the Press-report. David's name was
+among the killed. Then we turned the column rules on the first page and
+got out the paper early to give the town the news. Henry Larmy brought
+in an obituary, the next day, which needed much editing, and we printed
+it under the head "A Tribute from a Friend," and signed Larmy's name to
+it.
+
+The boy had no kith or kin--which is most unusual for a Welshman--and
+so, except in our office, he seemed to be forgotten. A month went by,
+the season changed, and changed again, and a year was gone, when the
+Government sent word to Larmy--whom the boy seemed to have named for
+his next friend--that David's body would be brought back for burial if
+his friends desired it. So in the fall of 1900, when the Presidential
+campaign was at its height, the conquering hero came home, and we gave
+him a military funeral. The body came to us on Labor Day, and in our
+office we consecrated the day to David. The band and the militia company
+took him from the big stone church where sometimes he had gone to
+Sunday-school as a child, and a long procession of townsfolk wound
+around the hill to the cemetery, where David received a salute of guns,
+and the bugler played taps, and our eyes grew wet and our hearts were
+touched. Then we covered him with flowers, whipped up the horses and
+came back to the world.
+
+That night, as it was at the end of a holiday, the Republican Committee
+had assigned to our town, for the benefit of the men in the shops, one
+of the picture-shows that Mark Hanna, like a heathen in his blindness,
+had sent to Kansas, thinking our State, after the war, needed a spur to
+its patriotism in the election. The crowd in front of the post-office
+was a hundred feet wide and two hundred feet long, looking at the
+pictures from the kinetoscope--pictures of men going to work in mills
+and factories; pictures of the troops unloading on the coast of Cuba;
+pictures of the big warships sailing by; pictures of Dewey's flagship
+coming up the Hudson to its glory; pictures of the Spanish ships lying
+crushed in Manila harbour.
+
+Larmy and the reporter were sitting kicking their heels on the stone
+steps of the post-office opposite the screen on which the pictures were
+flickering. Some they saw and others they did not notice, for their talk
+was of David and of the strange things he had shown to them.
+
+"How did you ever fix it up in your mind?" asked Larmy.
+
+"I didn't fix it up. He was too many for me," was the reporter's answer.
+
+"The little rooster couldn't have faked it up?" questioned Larmy.
+
+"No--but he might have hypnotised us--or something."
+
+"Yes--but still, he might have been hypnotised by something himself,"
+suggested Larmy, and then added: "That thing he did with the
+linotype--say, wasn't that about the limit? And yet nothing has come of
+that prophecy. That's the trouble. I've seen dozens of those things, and
+they always just come up to the edge of proving themselves, but always
+jump back. There is always----"
+
+"My God, Larmy, look--look!" cried the reporter.
+
+And the two men looked at the screen before them, just as the backward
+sway of the crowd had ceased and horror was finding a gasping voice upon
+the lips of the women; for there, walking as naturally as life, out of
+the background of the picture, came David Lewis with his dark sleeves
+rolled up, his peaked army hat on the back of his head, a bucket in his
+hand, and as he stopped and grinned at the crowd--between the
+lightning-flashes of the kinetoscope--they could see him wave his free
+hand. He stood there while a laugh covered his features, and he put his
+hand in his pocket and drew out a key-ring, which he waved, holding it
+by some long, stemlike instrument. Then he snapped back into nothing.
+
+And the operator of the machine, being in a hurry to catch the
+ten-thirty train, went on with his picture-show and gave us President
+McKinley and Mark Hanna sitting on the front steps of the home in
+Canton, then followed the photograph of the party around the big table
+signing the treaty of peace. As the crowd loosened and dissolved, Larmy
+and the reporter stood silently waiting. Then, when they could get away
+together, the reporter said:
+
+"Come, let's go over to the shop and think about this thing."
+
+When they opened the office door, the rank odour of the machinery came
+to them with sickening force. They left the front door open and raised
+the windows. The reporter began using a chisel on the top of a little
+box with a Government frank on it, that had been placed upon the
+music-box in the corner.
+
+"We may as well see what David sent home," he grunted, as he jerked at
+the stubborn nails, "anyway, I've got a theory."
+
+Larmy was smoking hard. "Yes," he replied after a time; "we might as
+well open it now as any time. The letter said all his things would be
+found there. I guess he didn't have a great deal. Poor little devil,
+there was no one much to get things for but you fellows and maybe me, if
+he thought of us."
+
+By this time the box was opened, and the reporter was scooping things
+out upon the floor. There was an army uniform, that had something clinky
+in the pockets, and wrapped in a magenta silk handkerchief was a carved
+piece of ivory. In a camera plate-box was a rose, faded and crumbly, a
+chip-diamond ring, a bangle bracelet, a woman's glove and a photograph.
+These Larmy looked at as he smoked. They meant nothing to him, but the
+reporter dived into the clothes for the clinky things. He came up with a
+bunch of keys, and on it was the long brass lever which unlocked the
+music in the box.
+
+"Here," he said as he jingled the keys, "is the last link in our chain."
+And he rose and went over to the box, uncovered it, and jabbed in the
+lever with a nervous hand. There was a rolling and clinking inside.
+Then, slowly, a harmony rose, and the tinkling that came from the box
+resolved itself into a melody that filled the room. It was strong and
+clear and powerful, and seemed to have a certain passion in it that may
+have been struck like flint fire from the time and the place and the
+spirit of the occasion. The two men stared dumbly as they listened. The
+sound rose stronger and stronger; over and over again the song repeated
+itself; then very gently its strength began to fail; and finally it sank
+into a ghostly tinkle that still carried the melody till it faded into
+silence.
+
+"That," said the reporter, "is the song that was in his heart--'Love's
+Golden Dream.' I'm satisfied."
+
+"The last link," shuddered Larmy. "That which seemed corporeal has
+melted 'as a breath into the wind.'"
+
+The reporter shovelled the debris into the box, pushed it under a desk,
+and the two men hurried to close the office. As they stood on the
+threshold a moment, while the reporter clicked the key in the lock, a
+paper rustled and they heard a mouse scamper across the floor inside the
+empty room.
+
+"Let's go home," shivered Larmy. They started north, which was the short
+way home, but Larmy took hold of his companion's arm and said: "No,
+let's go this way: there's an electric light here on the corner, and
+it's dark down there."
+
+And so they turned into the white, sputtering glare and walked on
+without words.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+The Coming of the Leisure Class
+
+
+We all are workers in our town, as people are in every small town. It is
+always proper to ask what a man does for a living with us, for none of
+us has money enough to live without work, and until the advent of
+Beverly Amidon, our leisure class consisted of Red Martin, the gambler,
+the only man in town with nothing to do in the middle of the day; and
+the black boys who loafed on the south side of the bank building through
+the long afternoons until it was time to deliver the clothes which their
+wives and mothers had washed. Everyone else in town works, and,
+excepting an occasional picnic, there is no social activity among the
+men until after sundown. But five years ago Beverly Amidon came to town,
+and brought with him a large leisure and a taste for society which made
+him easily the "glass of fashion and the mould of form" not only in our
+little community, but all over this part of the State. Beverly and his
+mother, who had come to make their home with her sister, in one of the
+big houses on the hill, had money. How much, we had no idea. In a small
+town when one has "money" no one knows just how much or how little, but
+it must be over fifteen thousand dollars, otherwise one is merely "well
+fixed."
+
+[Illustration: And brought with him a large leisure and a taste for
+society]
+
+But Beverly was a blessing to our office. We never could have filled the
+society column Saturday without him, for he was a continuous social
+performance. He was the first man in town who dared to wear a flannel
+tennis suit on the streets, and he was a whole year ahead of the other
+boys with his Panama hat. It was one of those broad-brimmed Panamas,
+full of heart-interest, that made him look like a romantic barytone, and
+when under that gala facade he came tripping into the office in his
+white duck clothes, with a wide Windsor tie, Miss Larrabee, the society
+editor, who was the only one of us with whom he ever had any business,
+would pull the string that unhooked the latch of the gate to her section
+of the room and say, without looking up: "Come into the garden, Maud."
+To which he made invariable reply: "Oh, Miss Larrabee, don't be so
+sarcastic! I have a little item for you."
+
+The little item was always an account of one of his social triumphs. And
+there was a long list of them to his credit. He introduced ping-pong; he
+gave us our first "pit party"; he held the first barn dance given in the
+county; his was our first "tacky party"; and he gave the first
+progressive buggy ride the young people had ever enjoyed, and seven
+girls afterward confessed that on the evening of that affair he hadn't
+been in the buggy with them five minutes before he began driving with
+one hand--and his right hand at that. Still, when the crowd assembled
+for supper at Flat Rock, the girls didn't hold his left handiwork
+against him, and they admitted that he was just killing when he put on
+one of their hats and gave an imitation of a girl from Bethany College
+who had been visiting in town the week before. Beverly was always the
+life of the company. He could make three kinds of salad dressing, two
+kinds of lobster Newburgh and four Welsh rarebits, and was often the
+sole guest of honour at the afternoon meetings of the T. T. T. girls,
+before whom he was always willing to show his prowess. Sometimes he
+gave chafing-dish parties whereat he served ginger ale and was real
+devilish.
+
+He used to ride around the country bare-headed with two or three girls
+when honest men were at work, and he acquired a fine leather-coloured
+tan. He tried organising a polo club, but the ponies from the delivery
+waggons that were available after six o'clock did not take training
+well, and he gave up polo. In making horse-back riding a social
+diversion he taught a lot of fine old family buggy horses a number of
+mincing steps, so that thereafter they were impossible in the family
+phaeton. He thereby became unpopular with a number of the heads of
+families, and he had to introduce bridge whist in the old married set to
+regain their favour. This cost him the goodwill of the preachers, and he
+gave a Japanese garden party for the Epworth League to restore himself
+in the church where he was accustomed to pass the plate on Sundays. Miss
+Larrabee used to call him the first aid to the ennuied. But the Young
+Prince, who chased runaways teams and wrote personal items, never
+referred to him except as "Queen of the Hand-holders." For fun we once
+printed Beverly Amidon's name among those present at a Mothers' League
+meeting, and it was almost as much of a hit in the town as the time we
+put the words, "light refreshments were served and the evening was spent
+in cards and dancing," at the close of an account of a social meeting of
+the Ministerial Alliance.
+
+The next time Beverly brought in his little item he stopped long enough
+to tell us that he thought that the people who laughed at our obvious
+mistake in the list of guests of the Mothers' League were rather coarse.
+One word brought on two, and as it was late in the afternoon, and the
+paper was out, we bade Beverly sit down and tell us the story of his
+life, and his real name; for Miss Larrabee had declared a dozen times
+that Beverly Amidon sounded so much like a stage name that she was
+willing to bet that his real name was Jabez Skaggs.
+
+Beverly's greatest joy was in talking about his social conquests in
+Tiffin, Ohio; therefore he soon was telling us that there was so much
+culture in Tiffin, such a jolly lot of girls, so many pleasant homes,
+and a most extraordinary atmosphere of refinement. He rattled along,
+telling us what great sport they used to have running down to Cleveland
+for theatre-parties, and how easy it was to 'phone to Toledo and get the
+nicest crowd of boys one could wish to come over to the parties, and how
+Tiffin was famous all over that part of Ohio for its exclusive families
+and its week-end house-parties.
+
+The Young Prince sat by listening for a time and then got up and leaned
+over the railing around Miss Larrabee's desk. Beverly was confiding to
+us how he got up the sweetest living pictures you ever saw and took them
+down to Cleveland, where they made all kinds of money for the King's
+Daughters. He told what gorgeous costumes the girls wore and what
+stunning backgrounds he rigged up. The Young Prince winked at Miss
+Larrabee as he straightened up and started for the door. Then he let
+fly: "Were you Psyche at the Pool in that show, or a Mellin's Food
+Baby?"
+
+But Beverly deigned no reply and a little later in the conversation
+remarked that the young men in this town were very bad form. He thought
+that he had seen some who were certainly not gentlemen. He really
+didn't see how the young ladies could endure to have such persons in
+their set. He confided to Miss Larrabee that at a recent lawn-party he
+had come upon a young man, who should be nameless, with his arm about a
+young woman's waist.
+
+"And, Miss Larrabee," continued Beverly in his solemnest tones, "A young
+man who will put his arm around a girl will go further--yes, Miss
+Larabee--much further. He will kiss her!" Whereat he nodded his head and
+shook it at the awful thought.
+
+Miss Larrabee drew in a shocked breath and gasped:
+
+"Do you really think so, Mr. Amidon? I couldn't imagine such a thing!"
+
+He had a most bedizened college fraternity pin, which he was forever
+lending to the girls. During his first year in town, Miss Larrabee told
+us, at least a dozen girls had worn the thing. Wherefore she used to
+call it the Amidon Loan Exhibit.
+
+He introduced golf into our town, and was able to find six men to join
+his fifteen young ladies in the ancient sport. Two preachers, a young
+dentist and three college professors were the only male creatures who
+dared walk across our town in plaid stockings and knickerbockers, and
+certainly it hurt their standing at the banks, for the town frowned on
+golf, and confined its sport to baseball in the summer, football in the
+autumn, and checkers in the winter.
+
+That was a year ago. In the autumn something happened to Beverly, and he
+had to go to work. There was nothing in our little town for him, so he
+went to Kansas City. He did not seem to "make it" socially there, for he
+wrote to the girls that Kansas City was cold and distant and that
+everything was ruled by money. He explained that there were some nice
+people, but they did not belong to the fast set. He was positively
+shocked, he wrote, at what he heard of the doings at the Country
+Club--so different from the way things went in Tiffin, Ohio.
+
+For a long time we did not hear his name mentioned in the office.
+Finally there came a letter addressed to Miss Larrabee. In it Beverly
+said that he had found his affinity. "She is not rich," he admitted,
+"but," he added, "she belongs to an old, aristocratic, Southern family,
+through reduced circumstances living in retirement; very exclusive, very
+haughty. I have counted it a privilege to be constantly associated with
+people of such rare distinction. Her mother is a grand dame of the old
+school who has opened her home to a few choice paid guests who feel, as
+I do, that it is far more refreshing socially to partake of the gracious
+hospitality of her secluded home than to live in the noisy, vulgar
+hotels of the city. It was in this relation at her mother's home that I
+met the woman who is to join her lot with mine." Thereafter followed the
+date and place of the wedding, a description of the bride's dress, an
+account of her lineage back to the "Revolutionary Georgia Governor of
+that name," and fifty cents in stamps for extra papers containing an
+account of the wedding.
+
+In time we hope to teach our young men to roll down their shirt-sleeves
+in the summer, our girls to wear their hats, our horses to quit prancing
+in the shafts of the family buggy. In time bridge whist will wear itself
+out, in time our social life will resume its old estate, and the owners
+of the five dress-suits in town will return to their former distinction.
+In time caste lines set by the advent of the leisure class will be
+obliterated, and it will be no longer bad form for the dry-goods clerk
+to dance with the grocery clerk's wife at the Charity Ball. But, come
+what may, we shall always know that there was a time in the social
+history of our town when we danced the two-step as they dance it in
+Tiffin, Ohio, and wore knee-breeches and plaid stockings, and quit work
+at four o'clock. Those were great days--"the glory that was Greece, the
+grandeur that was Rome."
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+The Bolton Girl's "Position"
+
+
+When she said she would like to "accept a position" with our paper, it
+was all over between us. After that we knew that she was at least highly
+improbable if not entirely impossible. But then we might have expected
+as much from a girl who called herself Maybelle. There is, however, this
+much to be said in Maybelle's favour: she was persistent. She did not
+let go till it thundered! We could have stood it well enough if she had
+limited her campaign for a job on the paper to an occasional call at the
+office. But she had a fiendish instinct which told her who were the
+friends we liked most to oblige: the banker, for instance, who carried
+our overdrafts, the leading advertiser, the chairman of the printing
+committee of the town council--and she found ways to make them ask if we
+couldn't do something for Miss Bolton. She could teach school; indeed,
+she had a place in the Academy. But she loathed school-teaching. She
+had always felt that, if she could once get a start, she could make a
+name for herself.
+
+She had written something that she called "A Critique on Hamlet," which
+she submitted to us, and was deeply pained when we told her that we
+didn't care for editorial matter; that what our paper needed was the
+names of the people in our own country town and county, printed as many
+times a day or a week or a month as they could be put into type. We
+tried to tell her that more important to us than the influence of the
+Celtic element on our national life and literature was the fact that
+John Jones of Lebo--that is to say, red John, as distinguished from
+black John--or Jones the tinner, or Jones of the Possum Holler
+settlement was in town with a load of hay. "Other papers," we explained
+carefully, while she looked as sympathetic and intelligent as a collie,
+"other papers might be interested in the radio-activity of uranium X;
+they might care to print articles on the psychological phenomena of
+mobs"--to which she snapped eager agreement with her eyes--"others,
+with entire propriety, might be interested in inorganic evolution"--and
+she cheeped "yes, yes" with feverish intensity--"but in our little local
+paper we cared only for the person who could tell our readers with the
+most delicacy and precision how many spoons Mrs. Worthington had to
+borrow for her party, who had the largest number of finger-bowls in
+town, what Mrs. Conklin paid for the broilers she served at her party
+last February, and the name of the country woman who raised them, and
+why it was that all the women failed to make Jennie's recipe for
+sunshine cake work when they tried it." Such are the things that
+interest our people, and he, she or it who can turn in two or three
+columns a day of items setting forth these things in a good-natured way,
+so that the persons mentioned will only grin and wonder who told it, is
+good for ten dollars of our money every Saturday night.
+
+Maybelle thought it was such interesting work, and her eyes floated in
+tears of happiness at the thought of such joy. If she could only have a
+chance! It would be just lovely--simply grand, and she knew she could do
+it! Something in her innermost soul thrilled with a tintinabulation that
+made her quiver with anticipation. Whereupon she went out and came back
+in three days with five sheets of foolscap on which she had written an
+article beginning: "When Memory draws aside the curtains of her magic
+chamber, revealing the pictures meditation paints, and we see through
+the windows of our dreams the sweet vale of yesterday, lying outside and
+beyond; when stern Ambition, with relentless hand, turns us away from
+all this to ride in the sombre chariot of Duty--then it is that
+entrancing Pleasure beckons us back to sit by Memory's fire and sip our
+tea with Maiden meditation." What it was all about no one ever found
+out; but the Young Prince at the local desk who read it clear through
+said that sometimes he thought that it was a report of a fire and at
+other times it seemed like a dress-goods catalogue. It would have made
+four columns. As he put the roll back in the drawer the Young Prince
+rose and paced grandly out. At the front door he stopped and said:
+"You'll never make anything out of her--she's a handholder! When a girl
+begins to get corns on her hands, I notice she has mush on the brain!"
+
+[Illustration: Sometimes he thought it was a report of a fire and at
+other times it seemed like a dress-goods catalogue]
+
+But Maybelle returned, and we went all over the same ground again. We
+explained that what we wanted was short items--two or three lines
+each--little references to home doings; something telling who has
+company, who is sick, who is putting shingles on the barn or an "L" on
+the house. And she said "Oh, yes!" so passionately that it seemed as
+though she would bark or put her front feet on the table. One felt like
+taking her jaws in his hands and pulling her ears.
+
+The next time she came in she said that if we would just try her--give
+her something to do--she was sure she could show us how well she could
+do it. On a venture, and partly to get rid of her, we sent her to the
+district convention of the Epworth League to write up the opening
+meeting. About noon of the next day she brought in three sermons, and
+said that she didn't get the list of officers nor the names of the choir
+because they were all people who lived here and everyone knew them. Then
+we explained in short, simple sentences that the sermons were of no
+value, and that the names were what we desired. She dropped her eyes and
+said meekly "Oh!" and told us how sorry she was. Also she said that if
+it wasn't for a meeting of the T. T. T. girls that afternoon she would
+go back and get the names. When she went out, the Young Prince, sitting
+by the window with his pencil behind his ear and his feet on the table,
+said: "I bet she can make the grandest fudge!" "And such lovely angel
+food," put in Miss Larrabee, who was busy writing up the Epworth League
+convention.
+
+Miss Bolton's name was always among the lists we printed of the guests
+at the Entre Nous Card Club, the Imperial Dancing Club, the "Giddy Young
+Things" Club, the Art Club and the Shakespeare Club. But when she came
+to the office she was full of anxiety at the frivolity of society. She
+said that she so longed for intellectual companionship that she felt
+sometimes as if she must fly to a place where she could find a soul that
+would feel in unison with the infinite that thrilled her being. Far be
+it from her to wish to coin the pulsations of her soul, but papa and
+mamma did need her help so. She accented papa and mamma on the last
+syllable and leaned forward and looked upward like a shirtwaist Madonna.
+But writing locals someway didn't appeal to her. She wondered if we
+could use a serial story. And then she went on: "Oh, I have some of the
+sweetest things in my head! I know I could write them. They just tingle
+through my blood like wine. I know I could write them--such sublime
+things--but when I sit down to put them on paper something always comes
+up that prevents my going on with them. There are dozens whirling
+through my brain begging to be written. There is one about the earl who
+has imprisoned the young princess in a dungeon, and her lover, a knight
+of the cross, comes home from a crusade and is put in the cell next to
+her. A bird that she has been feeding through her prison window takes a
+lock of her golden hair to the window where her lover is looking out
+across the beautiful world, not knowing that she, too, has fallen into
+the earl's clutches. And, oh, yes! there is another about Cornelia who
+lived in a moated tower, and all the dukes and lords and kings in the
+land had laid suit to her hand, and she could find none who came up to
+her highest ideal, so she set them a task--and, oh, a lot more about
+what they did; I haven't thought that out--but anyway she married the
+red duke Wolfang who spurned her task and took her by night with his
+retainers away from the tower, saying her love was his Holy Grail and to
+get her was the object of his pilgrimage. Oh, it's just grand."
+
+No, we don't use serials and when we do we buy them in stereotyped
+plates by the pound. This made Miss Bolton droop, with another
+disappointed "Oh." The grain of the world seems so coarse when one looks
+at it closely.
+
+We did not see Miss Bolton at the office for a long time after the duke
+abducted the lady in the moated grange, but we received a poem signed M.
+B. "To Dan Cupid," and another on "My Heart of Fire." Also there came an
+anonymous communication in strangely familiar fat vertical handwriting
+to the effect that "some people in this town think that if a young lady
+has a gentleman friend call on her more than twice a week it is their
+business to assume a courtship. They should know that there are souls
+on this earth whose tendrils reach into the infinite beyond the gross
+materiality of this mundane sphere to a destiny beyond the stars." At
+the bottom of the page were the words: "Please publish and oblige a
+subscriber."
+
+The next that we heard of Miss Bolton was that she was running pink and
+blue baby-ribbon through her white things, and was expecting a linen
+shower from the T. T. T. girls, a silver shower from the "Giddy Young
+Things," a handkerchief shower from the Entre Nous girls, and a kitchen
+shower from the Imperial Club. Miss Larrabee, the society editor, began
+to hate Miss Bolton with the white-hot hate which all society editors
+turn on all brides. Miss Larrabee was authority for the statement that
+Maybelle had used five hundred yards of baby-ribbon--pink and blue and
+white and yellow--in her trousseau, and that she was bestowing the same
+passionate fervour on her hemstitching and tucking that she had wasted
+on literature; that she was helping papa and mamma by shouldering the
+biggest wedding on them since the Tomlinsons went into bankruptcy after
+their firework ceremonial. Miss Larrabee said that Papa Bolton's
+livery-stable was burning up so fast that she wanted to call out the
+fire department, and that Mamma Bolton made her think of the
+patent-medicine testimonials we printed from "poor tired women."
+
+The day of the wedding the blow came. A very starched-up little boy with
+strawberry juice frescoed around his mouth brought in a note from
+Maybelle and a tightly-rolled manuscript tied with blue baby-ribbon. In
+the note she said that she thought it would be so romantic to "write up
+her own wedding--recalling the dear, dead days when she was a neophyte
+in letters." We handed the manuscript to Miss Larrabee, from whom, as
+she read, came snorts: "'Drawing-room!' Huh! 'Music-room.' Heavens to
+Betsy! 'Peculiar style of beauty!' Oh, joy! 'Looked like a wood-nymph in
+the morn.' Wouldn't that saturate you! 'The Apollo-like beauty of the
+groom.'" Miss Larrabee groaned as she rose, and putting her raincoat on
+the floor by her chair she exclaimed: "Do you people know what I am
+going to do? I have got to lie right down here and have a fit!"
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+"By the Rod of His Wrath"
+
+
+Saturday afternoons, when the town is full, and farmers are coming in to
+the office to pay their subscriptions for the _Weekly_, it is our habit,
+after the paper is out, to sit in the office and look over Main Street,
+where perhaps five hundred people are milling, and consider with one
+another the nature of our particular little can of angle-worms and its
+relation to the great forces that move the world. The town often seems
+to us to be dismembered from the earth, and to be a chunk of humanity
+drifting through space by itself, like a vagrant star, forgotten of the
+law that governs the universe. Go where our people will, they find
+change; but when they come home, they look out of the hack as they ride
+through town, seeing the old familiar buildings and bill-boards and
+street-signs, and say with surprise, as Mathew Boris said after a busy
+and eventful day in Kansas City, where he had been marketing his
+steers: "Well, the old town seems to keep right on, just the same."
+
+The old men in town seem always to have been old, and though the
+middle-aged do sometimes step across the old-age line, the young men
+remain perennially young, and when they grow fat or dry up, and their
+hair thins and whitens, they are still called by their diminutive names,
+and to most of us they are known as sons of the old men. Here a new
+house goes up, and there a new store is built, but they rise slowly, and
+everyone in town has time to go through them and over them and criticise
+the architectural taste of the builders, so that by the time a building
+is finished it seems to have grown into the original consciousness of
+the people, and to be a part of their earliest memories. We send our
+children to Sunday-school, and we go to church and learn how God's
+rewards or punishments fell upon the men of old, as they were faithful
+or recreant; but we don't seem to be like the men of old, for we are
+neither very good nor very bad--hardly worth God's while to sort us over
+for any uncommon lot. Only once, in the case of John Markley, did the
+Lord reach into our town and show His righteous judgment. And that
+judgment was shown so clearly through the hearts of our people that very
+likely John Markley does not consider it the judgment of God at all, but
+the prejudice of the neighbours.
+
+When we have been talking over the case of John Markley in the office we
+have generally ended by wondering whether God--or whatever one cares to
+call the force that operates the moral laws, as well as those that in
+our ignorance we set apart as the physical laws of the world--whether
+God moves by cataclysm and accidents, or whether He moves with blessing
+or chastisement, through human nature as it is, in the ordinary business
+of the lives of men. But we have never settled that in our office any
+more than they have in the great schools, and as John Markley, game to
+the end, has never said what he thought of the town's treatment of him,
+it will never be known which side of our controversy is right.
+
+Years ago, perhaps as long ago as the drought of seventy-four, men began
+calling him "Honest John Markley." He was the fairest man in town, and
+he made money by it, for when he opened his little bank Centennial year,
+which was the year of the big wheat crop, farmers stood in line half an
+hour at a time, at the door of his bank, waiting to give him their
+money. He was a plain, uncollared, short-whiskered man, brown-haired and
+grey-eyed, whose wife always made his shirts and, being a famous cook in
+town, kept him round and chubby. He referred to her as "Ma," and she
+called him "Pa Markley" so insistently that when we elected him State
+Senator, after he made his bank a National bank, in 1880, the town and
+county couldn't get used to calling him Senator Markley, so "Pa Markley"
+it was until after his Senatorial fame had been forgotten. Their
+children had grown up and left home before the boom of the eighties
+came--one girl went to California and the boy to South America;--and
+when John Markley began to write his wealth in six figures--which is
+almost beyond the dreams of avarice in a town like ours--he and his wife
+were lonely and knew little what to do with their income.
+
+They bought new furniture for the parlour, and the Ladies' Missionary
+Society of the First Methodist Church, the only souls that saw it with
+the linen jackets off, say it was lovely to behold; they bought
+everything the fruit-tree man had in his catalogue, and their five acres
+on Exchange Street were pimpled over with shrubs that never bloomed and
+with trees that never bore fruit. He passed the hat in church--being a
+brother-in-law to the organisation, as he explained; sang "Tramp, Tramp,
+Tramp, the Boys Are Marching" at Grand Army entertainments, and always
+as an encore dragged "Ma" out to sing with him "Dear, Dear, What Can the
+Matter Be." She was a skinny, sharp-eyed, shy little woman in her late
+fifties when the trouble came. She rose at every annual meeting of the
+church to give a hundred dollars but her voice never lasted until she
+got through announcing her donation, and she sat down demurely, blushing
+and looking down her nose as though she had disgraced the family. She
+had lost a brother in the war, and never came further out of mourning
+than purple flowers in her bonnet. She bought John Markley's clothes, so
+that his Sunday finery contained nothing giddier than a grey made-up
+tie, that she pinned around the collars which her own hands had ironed.
+
+Slowly as their fortune piled up, and people said they had a million,
+his brown beard grizzled a little, and his brow crept up and up and his
+girth stretched out to forty-four. But his hands did not whiten or
+soften, and though he was "Honest John," and every quarter-section of
+land that he bought doubled in value by some magic that he only seemed
+to know, he kept the habits of his youth, rose early, washed at the
+kitchen basin, and was the first man at his office in the morning. At
+night, after a hard day's work he smoked a cob-pipe in the basement,
+where he could spit into the furnace and watch the fire until nine
+o'clock, when he put out the cat and bedded down the fire, while "Ma"
+set the buckwheat cakes. They never had a servant in their house.
+
+We used to see John Markley pass the office window a dozen times a day,
+a hale, vigorous man, whose heels clicked hard on the sidewalk as he
+came hurrying along--head back and shoulders rolling. He was a powerful,
+masculine, indomitable creature, who looked out of defiant, cold,
+unblinking eyes as though he were just about to tell the whole world to
+go to hell! The town was proud of him. He was our "prominent citizen,"
+and when he was elected president of the district bankers' association,
+and his name appeared in the papers as a possible candidate for United
+States Senator or Minister to Mexico or Secretary of the Interior, we
+were glad that "Honest John Markley" was our fellow-townsman.
+
+And then came the crash. Man is a curious creature, and, even if he is
+nine parts good, the old Adam in him must burn out one way or another in
+his youth, or there comes a danger period at the height of his middle
+life when his submerged tenth that has been smouldering for years flares
+up and destroys him. Wherefore the problem which we have never been able
+to solve, though we have talked it over in the office a dozen times:
+whether John Markley had begun to feel, before he met the Hobart woman,
+that he wasn't getting enough out of life for the money he had invested
+in it; or whether she put the notion in his head.
+
+It is scarcely correct to speak of his having met her, for she grew up
+in the town, and had been working for the Markley Mortgage and
+Investment Company for half-a-dozen years before he began to notice her.
+From a brassy street-gadding child of twelve, whose mother crowded her
+into grown-up society before she left the high school, and let her spell
+her name Ysabelle, she had grown into womanhood like a rank weed; had
+married at nineteen, was divorced at twenty-one, and having tried music
+teaching and failed, china painting and failed, she learned stenography
+by sheer force of her own will, with no instruction save that in her
+book, and opened an office for such work as she could get, while aiming
+for the best job in town--the position of cashier and stenographer for
+the Markley Mortgage Company. It took her three years to get in and
+another year to make herself invaluable. She was big and strong, did the
+work of two men for the pay of one, and for five years John Markley, who
+saw that she had plenty of work to do, did not seem to know that she was
+on earth. But one day "Alphabetical" Morrison, who was in our office
+picking up his bundle of exchanges, looked rather idly out of the
+window, and suddenly rested his roving eyes upon John Markley and Mrs.
+Hobart, standing and talking in front of the post office. The man at the
+desk near Morrison happened to be looking out at that moment, and he,
+too, saw what Morrison saw--which was nothing at all, except a man
+standing beside a woman. Probably the pair had met in exactly the same
+place at exactly the same time, and had exchanged an idle word daily for
+five years! and no one had noticed it, but that day Morrison
+unconsciously put his hand to his chin and scratched his jaw, and his
+eyes and the man's at the desk beside him met in a surprised
+interrogation, and Morrison's mouth and nose twitched, and the other man
+said, as he turned his face into his work, "Well, wouldn't that get
+you!"
+
+The conversation went no further. Neither could have said what he saw.
+But there is something in every human creature--a survival of our jungle
+days, which lets our eyes see more than our consciousness records in
+language. And these men, who saw Markley and the woman, could not have
+defined the canine impression which he gave them. Yet it was there. The
+volcano was beginning to smoke.
+
+It was a month later before the town saw the flames. During that time
+John Markley had been walking to and from his midday dinner with Isabel
+Hobart, had been helping her on and off with her wraps in the office,
+and had been all but kicking up the dirt behind him and barking around
+her, as the clerks there told us, without causing comment. An honest man
+always has such a long start when he runs away from himself that no one
+misses him until he is beyond extradition. Matters went along thus for
+nearly a year before the woman in the cottage on Exchange Street knew
+how they stood. And that speaks well of our town; for we are not a mean
+town, and if anyone ever had our sympathy it was Mrs. Markley, as she
+went about her quiet ways, giving her missionary teas, looking after the
+poor of her church, making her famous doughnuts for the socials, doing
+her part at the Relief Corps chicken-pie suppers, digging her club paper
+out of the encyclopaedia, and making over her black silk the third time
+for every day. If John Markley was cross with her in that time--and the
+neighbours say that he was; if he sat for hours in the house without
+saying a word, and grumbled and flew into a rage at the least ruffling
+of the domestic waters--his wife kept her grief to herself, and even
+when she left town to visit her daughter in California no one knew what
+she knew.
+
+A month passed, two months passed, and John Markley's name had become a
+by-word and a hissing. Three months passed, a year went by, and still
+the wife did not return. And then one day Ab Handy, who sometimes
+prepared John Markley's abstracts, came into our office and whispered to
+the man at the desk that there was a little paper filed in the court
+which, under the circumstances, Mr. Markley would rather we would say as
+little about as is consistent with our policy in such cases. Handy
+didn't say what it was, and backed out bowing and eating dirt, and we
+sent a boy hot-foot to the court-house to find out what had been filed.
+The boy came back with a copy of a petition for divorce that had been
+entered by John Markley, alleging desertion. John Markley did not face
+the town when he brought his suit, but left for Chicago on the
+afternoon train, and was gone nearly a month. The broken little woman
+did not come back to contest the case, and the divorce was granted.
+
+The day before his marriage to Isabel Hobart, John Markley shaved off
+his grizzled brown beard, and showed the town a face so strong and
+cunning and brutal that men were shocked; they said that she wished to
+make him appear young, and the shave did drop ten years from his
+countenance; but it uncovered his soul so shamelessly that it seemed
+immodest to look at his face. Upon the return from the wedding trip, the
+employees of the Markley Mortgage Company, at John Markley's suggestion,
+gave a reception for the bride and groom, and the Lord laid the first
+visible stripe on John Markley while he stood with his bride for three
+hours, waiting for the thousand invited guests who never came.
+"Alphabetical" Morrison, who owed John Markley money, and had to go,
+told us in the office the next day that John Markley in evening clothes,
+with his great paunch swathed in a white silk vest, smirking like a
+gorged jackal, showing his fellow-townsmen for the first time his
+coarse, yellow teeth and his thin, cruel lips, looked like some horrible
+cartoon of his former self. Colonel Morrison did not describe the bride,
+but she passed our office that day, going the rounds of the dry-goods
+stores, giggling with the men clerks--a picture of sin that made men wet
+their lips. She was big, oversexed, and feline; rattling in silks, with
+an aura of sensuousness around her which seemed to glow like a coal,
+without a flicker of kindness or shame or sweetness, and which all the
+town knew instinctively must clinker into something black and ugly as
+the years went by.
+
+So the threshold of the cottage on Exchange Street was not darkened by
+our people. And when the big house went up--a palace for a country town,
+though it only cost John Markley $25,000--he, who had been so reticent
+about his affairs in other years, tried to talk to his old friends of
+the house, telling them expansively that he was putting it up so that
+the town would have something in the way of a house for public
+gatherings; but he aroused no responsive enthusiasm, and long before the
+big opening reception his fervour had been quenched. Though we are a
+curious people, and though we all were anxious to know how the inside of
+the new house looked, we did not go to the reception; only the socially
+impossible, and the travelling men's wives at the Metropole, whom Mrs.
+Markley had met when she was boarding during the week they moved,
+gathered to hear the orchestra from Kansas City, to eat the Topeka
+caterer's food, and to fall down on the newly-waxed floors of the
+Markley mansion. But our professional instinct at the office told us
+that the town was eager for news of that house, and we took three
+columns to write up the reception. Our description of the place began
+with the swimming pool in the cellar and ended with the ballroom in the
+third story.
+
+It took John Markley a long time to realise that the town was done with
+him, for there was no uprising, no demonstration, just a gradual
+loosening of his hold upon the community. In other years his neighbours
+had urged him and expected him to serve on the school-board, of which he
+had been chairman for a dozen years, but the spring that the big house
+was opened Mrs. Julia Worthington was elected in his place. At the June
+meeting of the Methodist Conference a new director was chosen to fill
+John Markley's place on the college board, and when he cancelled his
+annual subscription no one came to ask him to renew it. In the fall his
+party selected a new ward committeeman, and though Markley had been
+treasurer of the committee for a dozen years, his successor was named
+from the Worthington bank, and they had the grace not to come to Markley
+with the subscription-paper asking for money. It took some time for the
+sense of the situation to penetrate John Markley's thick skin; whereupon
+the fight began in earnest, and men around town said that John Markley
+had knocked the lid off his barrel. He doubled his donation to the
+county campaign fund; he crowded himself at the head of every
+subscription-paper; and frequently he brought us communications to
+print, offering to give as much money himself for the library, or the
+Provident Association, or the Y. M. C. A., as the rest of the town would
+subscribe combined. He mended church roofs under which he never had
+sat; he bought church bells whose calls he never heeded; and paid the
+greater part of the pipe-organ debts in two stone churches. Colonel
+Morrison remarked in the office one day that John Markley was raising
+the price of popular esteem so high that none but the rich could afford
+it. "But," chuckled the Colonel, "I notice old John hasn't got a corner
+on it yet, and he doesn't seem to have all he needs for his own use."
+The wrench that had torn open his treasure chest, had also loosened John
+Markley's hard face, and he had begun to smile. He became as affable as
+a man may who has lived for fifty years silent and self-contained. He
+beamed upon his old friends, and once or twice a week he went the rounds
+of the stores making small purchases, to let the clerks bask in his
+sunlight.
+
+If a new preacher came to town the Markleys went to his church, and Mrs.
+Markley tried to be the first woman to call on his wife.
+
+All the noted campaign speakers assigned to our town were invited to be
+the Markleys' guests, and Mrs. Markley sent her husband, red necktied,
+high-hatted and tailor-made, to the train to meet the distinguished
+guest. If the man was as much as a United States Senator, Markley hired
+the band, and in an open hack rode in solemn state with his prize
+through the town behind the tinkling cymbals, and then, with much
+punctility, took the statesman up and down Main Street afoot, into all
+the stores and offices, introducing him to the common people. At such
+times John Markley was the soul of cordiality; he seemed hungry for a
+kind look and a pleasant word with his old friends. About this time his
+defiant eyes began to lose their boring points, and to wander and hunt
+for something they had lost. When we had a State convention of the
+dominant party, the Markleys saw to it that the Governor and all the
+important people attending, with their wives, stopped in the big house.
+The Markleys gave receptions to them, which the men in our town dared
+not ignore, but sent their wives away visiting and went alone. This
+familiarity with politicians probably gave the Markleys the idea that
+they might help their status in the community if John Markley ran for
+Governor. He announced his candidacy, and the Kansas City papers, which
+did not appreciate the local situation, spoke well of him; but his boom
+died in the first month, when some of his old friends called at the back
+room of the bank to tell him that the Democrats would air his family
+affairs if he made another move. He looked up pitiably into Ab Handy's
+face when the men were done talking and said: "Don't you suppose they'll
+ever quit? Ain't they no statute of limitation?" And then he arose and
+stood by his desk with one arm akimbo and his other hand at his temple
+as he sighed: "Oh hell, Ab--what's the use? Tell 'em I'm out of it!"
+
+Mrs. Markley seems to have shut him out of the G. A. R., thinking maybe
+that the old boys and their wives were not of her social level, or
+perhaps she had some idea of playing even with them, because their wives
+had not recognised her; but she shut away much of her husband's social
+comfort when she barred his comrades, and they in turn grew harder
+toward him than they were at first. As the Markleys entered their second
+year, Mrs. Markley alone in the big house, with only the new people from
+the hotel to eat her dinners, and with only the beer-drinking crowd from
+the West Side to dance in the attic ballroom, had much time to think,
+and she bethought her of the lecturers who were upon the college lecture
+course, whereupon John Markley had to carve for authors and explorers,
+and an occasional Senator or Congressman, who, after a hard evening's
+work on the platform, paid for his dinner and lodging by sitting up on a
+gilded high-backed and uncomfortable chair in the stately reception-room
+of the Markley home, talking John Markley into a snore, before Isabel
+let them go to bed. Isabel sent the accounts of these affairs to the
+office for us to print, with the lists of invited guests, who never
+accepted. And the town grinned.
+
+At the end of two years John Markley's fat wit told him that it was a
+losing fight. He had been dropped from the head of the Merchants'
+Association; he was cut off from the executive committee of the Fair; he
+was not asked to serve on the railroad committee. His old friends, whom
+he asked over to spend the evening at his house, always had good
+excuses, which they gave him later over the telephone, and their wives,
+who used to call him by his first name, scarcely recognised him on the
+street. He quit coming to our office with pieces for the paper telling
+the town his views on this or that local matter; and gradually gave up
+the fight for his old place on the school board.
+
+The clerks in the Markley Mortgage Company office say that he fell into
+a moody way, and would come to the office and refuse to speak to anyone
+for hours. Also, as the big house often glowed until midnight for a
+dance of the socially impossible who used the Markley ballroom, rent
+free, as a convenience, John Markley grew to have a sleepy look by day,
+and lines came into his red, shaved face. He grew anxious about his
+health, and a hundred worries tightened his belt and shook his great fat
+hand, just the least in the world, and when through some gossip that his
+wife brought him from the kitchen he felt the scorn of an old friend
+burn his soul like a caustic, for many days he would brood over it.
+Finally care began to chisel down his flinty face, to cut the fat from
+his bull neck, so that the cords stood out, and, through staring in
+impotent rage and pain at the ceiling in the darkness of the night, red
+rims began to worm around his eyes. He was not sixty years old then,
+and he had lashed himself into seventy.
+
+However his money-cunning did not grow dull. He kept his golden touch
+and his impotent dollars piled higher and higher. The pile must have
+mocked Isabel Markley, for it could bring her nothing that she wanted.
+She stopped trying to give big parties and receptions. Her social
+efforts tapered down to little dinners for the new people in town. But
+as the dinner hour grew near she raged--so the servants said--whenever
+the telephone rang, and in the end she had to give up even the dinner
+scheme.
+
+[Illustration: As the dinner hour grew near she raged--so the servants
+said--whenever the telephone rang]
+
+So there came a time when they began to take trips to the seashore and
+the mountains, flitting from hotel to hotel. In the office we knew when
+they changed quarters, for at each resort John Markley would see the
+reporters and give out a long interview, which was generally prefaced by
+the statement that he was a prominent Western capitalist, who had
+refused the nomination for Governor or for Senator, or for whatever
+Isabel Markley happened to think of; and papers containing these
+interviews, marked in green ink, came addressed to the office in her
+stylish, angular hand. During grand opera season one might see the
+Markleys hanging about the great hotels of Chicago or Kansas City, he a
+tired, sleepy-faced, prematurely old man, who seemed to be counting the
+hours till bed-time, and she a tailored, rather overfed figure, with a
+freshly varnished face and unhealthy, bright, bold eyes, walking
+slightly ahead of her shambling companion, looking nervously about her
+in search of some indefinite thing that was gone from her life.
+
+One day John Markley shuffled into our office, bedizened as usual, and
+fumbled in his pocket for several minutes before he could find the copy
+of the _Mexican Herald_ containing the news of his boy's death in Vera
+Cruz. He had passed the time of life for tears, yet when he asked us to
+reprint the item he said sadly: "The old settlers will remember
+him--maybe. I don't know whether they will or not." He seemed a pitiful
+figure as he dragged himself out of the office--so stooped and weazened,
+and so utterly alone, but when he turned around and came back upon some
+second thought, his teeth snapped viciously as he snarled: "Here, give
+it back. I guess I don't want it printed. They don't care for me,
+anyway."
+
+The boys in his office told the boys in our office that the old man was
+cross and petulant that year, and there is no doubt that Isabel Markley
+was beginning to find her mess of pottage bitter. The women around town,
+who have a wireless system of collecting news, said that the Markleys
+quarrelled, and that she was cruel to him. Certain it is that she began
+to feed on young boys, and made the old fellow sit up in his evening
+clothes until impossible hours, for sheer appearance sake, while his bed
+was piled with the wraps of boys and girls from what our paper called
+the Hand-holders' Union, who were invading the Markley home, eating the
+Markley olives and canned lobster, and dancing to the music of the
+Markley pianola. Occasionally a young travelling man would be spoken of
+by these young people as Isabel Markley's fellow.
+
+Mrs. Markley began to make fun of her husband to the girls of the
+third-rate dancing set whose mothers let them go to her house; also, she
+reviled John Markley to the servants. It was known in the town that she
+nicknamed him the "Goat." As for Markley, the fight was gone from him,
+and his whole life was devoted to getting money. That part of his brain
+which knew the accumulative secret kept its tireless energy; but his
+emotions, his sensibilities, his passions seemed to be either atrophied
+or burned out, and, sitting at his desk in the back room of the Mortgage
+Company's offices, he looked like a busy spider spinning his web of gold
+around the town. It was the town theory that he and Isabel must have
+fought it out to a finish about the night sessions; for there came a
+time when he went to bed at nine o'clock, and she either lighted up and
+prepared to celebrate with the cheap people at home, or attached one of
+her young men, and went out to some impossible gathering--generally
+where there was much beer, and many risque things said, and the women
+were all good fellows. And thus another year flew by.
+
+One night, when the great house was still, John Markley grew sick and,
+in the terror of death that, his office people say, was always with him,
+rose to call for help. In the dark hall, feeling for an electric-light
+switch, he must have lost his way, for he fell down the hard oak
+stairs. It was never known how long he lay there unable to move one-half
+of his body, but his wife stood nearly an hour at the front door that
+night, and when she finally switched on the light, she and the man with
+her saw Markley lying before them with one eye shut and with half his
+face withered and dead, the other half around the open eye quivering
+with hate. He choked on an oath, and shook at her a gnarled bare arm.
+Her face was flushed, and her tongue was unsure, but she laughed a
+shrill, wicked laugh and cried: "Ah, you old goat; don't you double your
+fist at me!"
+
+Whereupon she shuddered away from the shaking figure at her feet and
+scurried upstairs. And the man standing in the doorway, wondering what
+the old man had heard, wakened the house, and helped to carry John
+Markley upstairs to his bed.
+
+It was nearly three months before he could be wheeled to his office,
+where he still sits every day, spinning his golden web and filling his
+soul with poison. They say that, helpless as he is, he may live for a
+score of years. Isabel Markley knows how old she will be then. A
+thousand times she has counted it.
+
+To see our town of a summer twilight, with the families riding abroad
+behind their good old nags, under the overhanging elms that meet above
+our newly-paved streets, one would not think that there could exist in
+so lovely a place as miserable a creature as John Markley is; or as
+Isabel, his wife, for that matter. The town--out beyond Main Street,
+which is always dreary and ugly with tin gorgons on the cornices--the
+town is a great grove springing from a bluegrass sod, with porch boxes
+making flecks of colour among the vines; cannas and elephant ears and
+foliage plants rise from the wide lawns; and children bloom like moving
+flowers all through the picture.
+
+There are certain streets, like the one past the Markley mansion, upon
+which we make it a point always to drive with our visitors--show streets
+we may as well frankly call them--and one of these leads down a wide,
+handsome street out to the college. There the town often goes in its
+best bib and tucker to hear the lecturers whom Mrs. Markley feeds. Last
+winter one came who converted Dan Gregg--once Governor, but for ten
+years best known among us as the town infidel. The lecturer explained
+how matter had probably evolved from some one form--even the elements
+coming in a most natural way from a common source. He made it plain that
+all matter is but a form of motion; that atoms themselves are divided
+into ions and corpuscles, which are merely different forms of electrical
+motion, and that all this motion seems to tend to one form, which is the
+spirit of the universe. Dan said he had found God there, and, although
+the pious were shocked, in our office we were glad that Dan had found
+his God anywhere. While we were sitting in front of the office one fine
+evening this spring, looking at the stars and talking of Dan Gregg's God
+and ours, we began to wonder whether or not the God that is the spirit
+of things at the base of this material world might not be indeed the
+spirit that moves men to execute His laws. Men in the colleges to-day
+think they have found the moving spirit of matter; but do they know His
+wonderful being as well as the old Hebrew prophets knew it who wrote
+the Psalms and the Proverbs and the wisdom of the Great Book. That
+brought us back to the old question about John Markley. Was it God,
+moving in us, that punished Markley "by the rod of His wrath," that used
+our hearts as wireless stations for His displeasure to travel through,
+or was it the chance prejudice of a simple people? It was late when we
+broke up and left the office--Dan Gregg, Henry Larmy, the reporter, and
+old George. As we parted, looking up at the stars where our ways divided
+out under the elms, we heard, far up Exchange Street, the clatter of the
+pianola in the Markley home, and saw the high windows glowing like lost
+souls in the night.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+"A Bundle of Myrrh"
+
+
+One of the first things that a new reporter on our paper has to learn is
+the kinology of the town. Until he knows who is kin to whom, and how, a
+reporter is likely at any time to make a bad break. Now, the kinology of
+a country town is no simple proposition. After a man has spent ten years
+writing up weddings, births and deaths, attending old settlers' picnics,
+family reunions and golden weddings, he may run into a new line of kin
+that opens a whole avenue of hitherto unexplainable facts to him,
+showing why certain families line up in the ward primaries, and why
+certain others are fighting tooth and toe-nail.
+
+The only person in town who knows all of our kinology--and most of that
+in the county, where it is a separate and interminable study--is "Aunt"
+Martha Merryfield. She has lived here since the early fifties, and was a
+Perkins, one of the eleven Perkins children that grew up in town; and
+the Perkinses were related by marriage to the Mortons, of whom there are
+over fifty living adult descendants on the town-site now. So one begins
+to see why she is called "Aunt Martha" Merryfield. She is literally aunt
+to over a hundred people here, and the habit of calling her aunt has
+spread from them to the rest of the population.
+
+She lives alone in the big brick house on the hill, though her children
+and grandchildren and great-grandchildren are in and out all day and
+most of the night, so that she is not at all lonesome. She is the only
+person to whom we can look for accurate information about local history,
+and when a man dies who has been at all prominent in affairs of the town
+or county or State, we always call up "Aunt" Martha on the 'phone, or
+send a reporter to her, to learn the real printable and unprintable
+truth about him. She knows whom he "went with" before he was married,
+and why they "broke off," and what crowd he associated with in the early
+days; how he got his money, and what they used to "say" about him. If a
+family began putting on frills, she can tell how the head of the house
+got his start by stealing "aid" sent to the grasshopper sufferers and
+opening a store with the goods. If a woman begins speaking of the hired
+girl as her "maid," contrary to the vernacular rules of the town, Aunt
+Martha does not hesitate to bring up the subject of the flour-sack
+underwear which the woman wore when she was a girl during the drought of
+'60.
+
+Aunt Martha used to bring us flowers for the office table, and it was
+her delight to sit down and take out her corn-knife--as she called
+it--and go after the town shams. She has promised a dozen times to write
+an article for the paper, which she says we dare not print, entitled
+"Self-made Women I Have Known." She says that men were always bragging
+about how they had clerked, worked on farms, dug ditches and whacked
+mules across the plains before the railroads came; but that their wives
+insisted that they were princesses of the royal blood. She says she is
+going to include in her Self-made Women only those who have worked out,
+and she maintains that we will be surprised at the list.
+
+Her particular animosity in the town is Mrs. Julia Neal Worthington.
+Aunt Martha told us that when Tim Neal came to town he had a brogue you
+could scrape with a knife and an "O" before his name you could hoop a
+hogshead with. "And that woman," exclaimed Aunt Martha, when she was
+under full sail, "that woman, because she has two bookcases in the front
+room and reads the book-reviews in the _Delineator_, thinks that she is
+cultured. When her folks first came to town they were as poor as Job's
+turkey, which was not to their discredit--everyone was poor in those
+days. The old man Neal was as honest an old Mick as you'd meet in a
+day's journey, or at a fair, and he used to run a lemonade and peanut
+stand down by the bank corner. But his girls, who were raised on it,
+until they began teaching school, used to refer to the peanut stand as
+'papa's hobby,' pretend that he only ran it for recreation, and say:
+'Now _why_ do you suppose papa enjoys it?--We just can't get him to give
+it up!' And now Julia is president of the Woman's Federation, has
+stomach trouble, has had two operations, and is suffering untold agonies
+with acute culturitis. And yet," Aunt Martha would say through a
+beatific smile, "she's a good-enough woman in many ways, and I wouldn't
+say anything against her for the world."
+
+Once Miss Larrabee, the society editor, brought back this from a visit
+to Aunt Martha: "I know, my dear, that your paper says there are no
+cliques and crowds in society in this town, and that it is so
+democratic. But you and I know the truth. We know about society in this
+town. We know that if there ever was a town that looked like a side of
+bacon--streak of lean and streak of fat all the way down--it is this
+blessed place. Crowds?--why, I've lived here over fifty years and it was
+always crowds. 'Way back in the days when the boys used to pick us up
+and carry us across Elm Creek when we went to dances, there were crowds.
+The girls who crossed on the boys' backs weren't considered quite proper
+by the girls who were carried over in the boys' arms. And they didn't
+dance in the same set."
+
+Miss Larrabee says she looked into the elder woman's eyes to find which
+crowd Aunt Martha belonged to, when she flashed out:
+
+"Oh, child, you needn't look at me--I did both; it depended on who was
+looking! But, as I was saying, if anyone knows about society in this
+town, I do. I went to every dance in town for the first twenty-five
+years, and I have made potato salad to pay the salary of every Methodist
+preacher for the past thirty years, and I ought to know what I'm talking
+about." There was fire enough to twinkle in her old eyes as she spoke.
+"Beginning at the bottom, one may say that the base of society is the
+little tads, ranging down from what your paper calls the Amalgamated
+Hand-holders, to the trundle-bed trash just out of their kissing games.
+It's funny to watch the little tads grow up and pair off and see how
+bravely they try to keep in the swim. I've seen ten grandchildren get
+out and I've a great-grandchild whose mother will be pushing her out
+before she is old enough to know anything. When young people get married
+they all say they're not going to be old-marriedy, and they hang on to
+the dances and little hops until the first baby comes. Then they don't
+get out to the dances much, but they join a card club."
+
+In her dissertation on the social progress of young married people, Aunt
+Martha explained that after the second year the couple go only to the
+big dances where everyone is invited, but they pay more attention to
+cards. The young mother begins going to afternoon parties, and has the
+other young married couples in for dinner. Then, before they know it,
+they are invited out to receptions and parties, where little tads
+preside at the punch-bowls and wait on table, and are seen and not
+heard. Aunt Martha continued:
+
+"By the time the second baby comes they take one of two shoots--either
+go in for church socials or edge into a whist club. In this town, I
+think, on the whole, that the Congregational Whist Club is younger and
+gayer than the Presbyterian Whist Club, but in most towns the
+Episcopalians have the really fashionable club. Of course, these clubs
+never call themselves by the church names, but they are generally made
+up along church lines--except we poor Methodists and Baptists--we have
+to divide ourselves out among the others to keep the preacher from going
+after us."
+
+Aunt Martha's eyes danced with the mischief in her heart as she went on:
+"Now, if after the second baby comes, the young parents begin to feel
+like saving money, and being someone at the bank, they join the church
+and go in for church socials, which don't take so much time or money as
+the whist clubs and receptions. The babies keep coming and the young
+people keep on improving their home, moving from the little house to the
+big house; the young man's name begins to creep into lists of directors
+at the bank, and they are invited out to the big parties, and she goes
+to all the stand-up and 'gabble-gobble-and-git' receptions. As they grow
+older, they are asked with the preachers and widows for the first night
+of a series of parties at a house to get them out of the way and over
+with before the young folks come later in the week. When they get to a
+point where the young folks laugh and clap their hands at little pudgy
+daddy when he dances 'Old Dan Tucker' at the big parties in the brick
+houses, it's all up with them--they are old married folks, and the next
+step takes them to the old folks' whist club, where the bankers' wives
+and the insurance widows run things. That is the inner sanctuary, the
+holy of holies in the society of this town."
+
+After a pause Aunt Martha added: "You'd think, to hear these chosen
+people talk, that the benighted souls who go to missionary teas, Woman's
+Relief Corps chicken-pie suppers, and get up bean-dinners for the church
+on election day, live on another planet. Yet I guess we're all made of
+the same kind of mud.
+
+"That reminds me of the Winthrops. When they came here, back in the
+sixties, it happened to be Fourth of July, and the band was out playing
+in the grove by the depot. Mrs. Winthrop got off the train quite grandly
+and bowed and waved her hand to the band, and the Judge walked over and
+gave the band leader five dollars. They said afterward that they felt
+deeply touched to find a raw Western town so appreciative of the coming
+of an old New England family, that it greeted them with a band. Before
+Mrs. Winthrop had been here three weeks she called on me, 'as one of the
+first ladies of the town,' she said, to organise and see if we couldn't
+break up the habit of the hired girls eating at the table with the
+family." Aunt Martha smiled and her eyes glittered as she added: "After
+they organised, the titled aristocracy of this town did their own work
+and sent the washing out for a year or more."
+
+The talk drifted back to the old days, and Aunt Martha got out her
+photograph-album and showed Miss Larrabee the pictures of those whom she
+called "the rude forefathers of the village," in their quaint old
+costumes of war-times. In the book were baby pictures of middle-aged
+men and women, and youthful pictures of the old men and women of
+the town. But most interesting of all to Miss Larrabee were the
+daguerreotypes--quaint old portraits in their little black boxes, framed
+in plush and gilt. The old woman brought out picture after picture--her
+husband's among the others, in a broad beaver hat with a high choker
+taken back in Brattleboro before he came to Kansas. She looked at it for
+a long minute, and then said gaily to Miss Larrabee: "He was a handsome
+boy--quite the beau of the State when we were married--Judge of the
+District Court at twenty-four." She held the case in her hand and went
+on opening the others. She came to one showing a moustached and goateed
+youth in a captain's uniform--a slim, straight, soldierly figure. As she
+passed it to Miss Larrabee Aunt Martha looked sidewise at her, saying:
+"You wouldn't know him now. Yet you see him every day, I suppose." After
+the girl shook her head, the elder woman continued: "Well, that's Jim
+Purdy, taken the day he left for the army." She sighed as she said: "Let
+me see, I guess I haven't happened to run across Jim for ten years or
+more, but he didn't look much like this then. Poor old Jim, they tell me
+he's not having the best time in the world. Someway, all the old-timers
+that are living seem to be hard up, or in bad health, or unhappy. It
+doesn't seem right, after what they've done and what they've gone
+through. But I guess it's the way of life. It's the way life gets even
+with us for letting us outlive the others. Compensation--as Emerson
+says."
+
+[Illustration: "Jim Purdy, taken the day he left for the army"]
+
+Miss Larrabee came down the lilac-bordered walk from the stately old
+brick house, carrying a great bouquet of sweet peas and nasturtiums and
+poppies and phlox, a fleeting memory of some association she had in her
+mind of Uncle Jimmy Purdy and Aunt Martha kept tantalising her. She
+could not get it out of the background of her consciousness, and yet it
+refused to form itself into a tangible conception. It was associated
+vaguely with her own grandmother, as though, infinite ages ago, her
+grandmother had said something that had lodged the idea in the girl's
+head.
+
+When the occasion made itself, Miss Larrabee asked her grandmother the
+question that puzzled her, and learned that Martha Perkins and Jim Purdy
+were lovers before the war, and that she was wearing his ring when he
+went away--thinking he would be back in a few weeks with the Rebellion
+put down. In his first fight he was shot in the head and was in the
+hospital for a year, demented; when he was put back in the ranks he was
+captured and his name given out among the killed. In prison his dementia
+returned and he stayed there two years. Then for a year after his
+exchange he followed the Union Army like a dumb creature, and not until
+two years after the close of the war did the poor fellow drift home
+again, as one from the dead--all uncertain of the past and unfitted for
+the future.
+
+And his sweetheart drank her cup alone. The old settlers say that she
+never flinched nor shrank, but for years, even after her marriage to the
+Judge, the young woman kept a little grave covered with flowers, that
+bore the simple words: "Martha, aged five months and three days." They
+say that she did not lose her courage and that she bent her head for no
+one. But the war brought her neighbours so many sorrows that Martha's
+trouble was forgotten, the years passed and only the old people of the
+community know about the little grave beside the Judge's and their
+little boy's. Jimmy Purdy grew into a smooth-faced, unwrinkled, rather
+blank-eyed old man, clerking in the bookstore for a time, serving as
+City Clerk for twenty years, and later living at the Palace Hotel on his
+pension. He worshipped Aunt Martha's children and her children's
+children, but he never saw her except when they met in some casual way.
+She was married when he came back from the war, and if he ever knew her
+agony he never spoke of it. Whenever he talked of the events before the
+war, his face wore a troubled, baffled look, and he did not seem to
+remember things clearly. He was a simple old man with a boyish face and
+heart who was confused by the world growing old around him.
+
+One day they found him dead in his bed. And Miss Larrabee hurried out to
+Aunt Martha's to get the facts about his life for the paper. It was a
+bright October morning as she went up the walk to the old brick house,
+and she heard someone playing on the piano, rolling the chords after the
+grandiose manner of pianists fifty years ago. A voice seemed to be
+singing an old ballad. As the girl mounted the steps the voice came more
+distinctly to her. It was quavering and unsure, but with a moan of
+passion the words came forth:
+
+     "As I lay my heart on your dead heart,--Douglas, Douglas, Douglas,
+     tender and true----"
+
+Suddenly the voice choked in a groan. As she stood by the open door Miss
+Larrabee could see in the darkened room the figure of an old woman
+racked with sobs on a great mahogany sofa, and on the floor beside her
+lay a daguerreotype, glinting its gilt and glass through the gloom.
+
+The girl tiptoed across the porch, down the steps through the garden and
+out of the gate.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+Our Loathed but Esteemed Contemporary
+
+
+No one remembers a time when there were not two newspapers in our
+town--generally quarrelling with each other. Though musicians and
+doctors and barbers are always jealous of their business rivals, and
+though they show their envy more or less to their discredit, editors are
+so jealous of one another, and so shameless about it, that the
+profession has been made a joke. Certainly in our town there is a
+deep-seated belief that if one paper takes one side of any question,
+even so fair a proposition as street-paving, the other will take the
+opposing side.
+
+Of course, our paper has not been contrary; but we have noticed a good
+many times--every one in the office has noticed it, the boys and girls
+in the back-office, and the boys and girls in the front-office--that
+whenever we take a stand for anything, say for closing the stores at
+six o'clock, the General swings the _Statesman_ into line against it. If
+he has done it once he has done it fifty times in the last ten years;
+and, though we have often felt impelled to oppose some of the schemes
+which he has brought forward, it has been because they were bad for the
+town, and perhaps because, even though they did seem plausible, we knew
+that the unscrupulous gang that was behind these schemes would in some
+way turn them into a money-making plot to rob the people. We never could
+see that justification in the _Statesman_'s position. To us it seemed
+merely pigheadedness. But the passing years are teaching us to
+appreciate the General better, and each added year is seeming to make us
+more tolerant of his shortcomings.
+
+Counting in the three years he was in the army, he has been running the
+_Statesman_ for forty-five years, and for thirty-five years he was
+master of the field. For thirty years this town was known as General A.
+Jackson Durham's town. He ran the county Republican conventions, and
+controlled the five counties next to ours, so that, though he could
+never go to Congress himself, on account of his accumulation of enemies,
+he always named the successful candidate from the district, and for a
+generation held undisturbed the selection of post-masters within his
+sphere of influence. In State politics he was more powerful than any
+Congressman he ever made. Often he came down to the State Convention
+with blood in his eye after the political scalp of some politician who
+had displeased him, and the fight he made and the disturbance he
+started, gave him the name of Old Bull Durham. On such occasions, he
+would throw back his head, shut his eyes and roar his wrath at his
+opponents in a most disquieting manner, and when he returned home,
+whether he had won or lost his fight, his paper would bristle for two or
+three weeks with rage, and his editorial page would be full of lurid
+articles written in short exclamatory sentences, pocked with italics,
+capital letters and black-faced lines.
+
+[Illustration: He advertised the fact that he was a good hater by
+showing callers at his office his barrel]
+
+For General A. Jackson Durham was a fire-eater and was proud of it. He
+advertised the fact that he was a good hater by showing his barrel to
+callers at his office. In that barrel he had filed away every
+disreputable thing that he had been able to find against friend or foe,
+far or near, and when the friend became a foe, or the foe became
+troublesome, the General opened his barrel. He kept also an office
+blacklist, on which were written the names of the men in town that were
+never to be printed in the _Statesman_. When we established our little
+handbill of a newspaper, he made all manner of fun of our "dish-rag," as
+he called it, and insisted on writing so much about our paper that
+people read it to see what we had to say. Other papers had made the
+mistake of replying to the General in kind, and people had soon tired of
+the quarrel and dropped the new quarrelling paper for the old one. The
+State never had seen the General's equal as a wrangler; but we did not
+fight back, and there was only a one-sided quarrel for the people to
+tire of. We grew and got a foothold in the town, but the General never
+admitted it. He does not admit it now, though his paper has been cut
+down time and again, and is no larger than our little dish-rag was in
+the beginning. But he still maintains his old assumption of the power
+that departed years ago. He walked proudly out of the County Convention
+the day that it rode over him, and he still begins the names of the new
+party leaders in the county in small letters to show his contempt for
+them.
+
+The day of his downfall in the County Convention marked the beginning of
+his decline in State politics. When it was known that his county was
+against him, people ceased to fear him and in time new leaders came in
+the State whom he did not know even by sight; but the General did not
+recognise them as leaders. To him they were interlopers. He sent his
+paper regularly to the old leaders, who had been shoved aside as he had
+been, and wrote letters to them urging them to arouse the people to
+throw off the chains of bossdom. Five years ago he and a number of
+lonesome and forgotten ones, who formerly ruled the State with an iron
+hand, and whose arrogance had cost the party a humiliating defeat,
+organised the "Anti-Boss League," and held semi-annual conventions at
+the capital. They made long speeches and issued long proclamations, and
+called vehemently upon the people to rend their chains, but some way the
+people didn't heed the call, and the General and his boss-busters, as
+they were called, began to have hard work getting their "calls" and
+"proclamations" and "addresses" into the city papers. The reporters
+referred to them as the Ancient Order of Has-Beens, and wounded the
+General's pride by calling him Past Master of the Grand Lodge of Hons.
+He came home from the meeting of the boss-busters at which this insult
+had been heaped upon him and bellowed like a mad bull for six months,
+using so much space in his paper that there was no room at all for local
+news.
+
+In the General's idea of what a newspaper should contain; news does not
+come first, and he does not mind crowding it out. He believes that a
+newspaper should stand for "principles." The _Statesman_ was started
+during the progress of the Civil War, when issues were news, and the
+General has never been able to realize that in times of peace people buy
+a newspaper for its news and not for its opinions. He never could
+understand our attitude toward what he called "principles." When the
+town was for free silver, we were for the gold standard, and we never
+exerted ourselves particularly for a high tariff, and when the General
+saw our paper grow in spite of its heresies, he was amazed, and
+expressed his amazement in columns of vitriolic anger. Because we often
+ignored "issues" and "principles" and "great basic and fundamental
+ideas," as he called his contentions on the silver and tariff questions,
+for lists of delegates at conventions, names of pupils at the county
+institute, and winners of prizes at the fair, he was filled with alarm
+for the future of the noble calling of journalism.
+
+Long ago we quit making fun of him. One day we wrote an article
+referring to him as "the old man," and it was gossiped among the
+printers that he was cut to the heart. He did not reply to that, and
+although a few days later he referred to us as thieves and villains, we
+never had the heart to tease him again, and now every one around the
+office has instructions to put "General" before his name whenever it is
+used. Probably this cheers him up. At least it should do so, for in
+spite of his pride and his much advertised undying wrath, he is in truth
+a tender-hearted old man, and has never been disloyal to the town. It is
+the apple of his eye. His fierceness has always been more for
+publication than as an evidence of good faith. He likes to think that he
+is unforgiving and relentless, but he has a woman's heart. He fought the
+renomination of Grant for a third term most bitterly, but when the old
+commander died, the boys in the _Statesman_ office say that Durham
+sniffled gently while he wrote the obituary, and when he closed with the
+words "Poor Grant," he laid his head on the table and his frame shook in
+real sorrow.
+
+Most of the subscribers have left his paper, and few of the advertisers
+use it, but what seems to hurt him worst is his feeling that the town
+has gone back on him. He has given all of his life to this town; he has
+spent thousands of dollars to promote its growth; he has watched every
+house on the town-site rise, and has made an item in his paper about it;
+he has written up the weddings of many of the grandmothers and
+grandfathers of the town; he has chronicled the birth of their children
+and children's children. The old scrapbooks are filled with kind things
+that the General has written. Old men and old women scan these wrinkled
+pages with eyes that have lost their lustre, and on the rusty clippings
+pasted there fall many tears. In this book many a woman reads the little
+verse below the name of a child whom only she and God remember. In some
+other scrapbook a man, long since out of the current of life, reads the
+story of his little triumph in the world; in the family Bible is a
+clipping from the _Statesman_--yellow and crisp with years--that tells
+of a daughter's wedding and the social glory that descended upon the
+house for that one great day. So, as the General goes about the streets
+of the town, in his shiny long frock-coat and his faded campaign hat,
+men do not laugh at him, nor do they hate him. He is the old buffalo,
+horned out of the herd.
+
+The profession of newspaper making is a young man's profession. The time
+will come when over at our office there will be a shrinkage. Even now
+our leading citizens never go away from town and talk to other newspaper
+men that they do not say that if someone would come over here and start
+a bright, spicy newspaper he could drive us out of town and make money.
+The best friends we have, when they talk to newspaper men in other towns
+are not above saying that our paper is so generally hated that it would
+be no trouble to put it out of business. That is what people said of the
+General in the eighties. They do not say it now.
+
+For the fight is over with him. And he is walking on an old battlefield,
+reviewing old victories, not knowing that another contest is waging
+further on. Sometimes the boys in the _Statesman_ office get their money
+Saturday night, and sometimes they do not. If they do not, the General
+grandly issues "orders" on the grocery stores. Then he takes his pen in
+hand and writes a stirring editorial on the battle of Cold Harbor, and
+closes by enquiring whether the country is going to forget the grand
+principles that inspired men in those trying days.
+
+In the days when the _Statesman_ was a power in the land, editorials
+like this were widely quoted. He was department commander of the G. A.
+R. at a time when such a personage was as important in our State as the
+Governor. The General's editorials on pensions were read before the
+Pensions Committee in Congress and had much weight there, and even in
+the White House the General's attitude was reckoned with. When he
+rallied the old soldiers to any cause the earth trembled, but now the
+General's editorials pass unheeded. When he calls to "the men who
+defended this country in one great crisis to rise and rescue her again,"
+he does not understand that he is speaking to a world of ghosts, and
+that his "clarion note" falls on empty air. The old boys whom he would
+arouse are sleeping; only he and a little handful survive. Yet to him
+they still live; to him their power is still invincible--if they would
+but rally to the old call. He believes that some day they will rally,
+and that the world, which is now going sadly wrong, will be set right.
+With his hands clasped behind him, looking through his steel-rimmed
+glasses, from under his shaggy brows, he walks through a mad world,
+waiting for it to return to reason. In his fiery black eyes one may see
+a puzzled look as he views the bewildering show. He is confused, but
+defiant. His head is still high; he has no thought of surrender. So, day
+after day, he riddles the bedlam about him with his broadsides, in the
+hourly hope of victory.
+
+It was only last week that the General was in Jim Bolton's livery stable
+office asking Jim if he had any old ledgers, that the _Statesman_ office
+might have. He explained that he tore off their covers, cut them up and
+used the unspoiled sheets for copy-paper. In Bolton's office he met a
+farmer from the Folcraft neighbourhood in the southern end of the
+county, who hadn't seen the General for half-a-dozen years. "Why--hello
+General," exclaimed the farmer with unconcealed surprise, as though
+addressing one risen from the dead. "You still around here? What are you
+doing now?" The old man tucked the ledger under his arm, straightened up
+with great dignity, and tried not to wince under the blow. He put one
+hand in his shiny, frayed, greenish-black frock-coat, and replied with
+quiet dignity, "I am following my profession, sir--that of a
+journalist." And after fixing the farmer with his piercing black eyes
+for a moment, the General turned away and was gone.
+
+When we do something to displease him, he turns all his guns on us,
+though probably his foreman has to borrow paper from our office to get
+the _Statesman_ out. The General regards us as his natural prey and his
+foreman regards our paper stock as his natural forage--but they use so
+little that we do not mind.
+
+Once a new bookkeeper in our office saw the General's old account for
+paper. She sent the General a statement, and another, and in the third
+she put the words: "Please remit." The day after he had received the
+insult the General stalked grandly into the office with the amount of
+money required by the bookkeeper. He put it down without a word and
+walked over to the desk where the proprietor was working.
+
+"Young man," said the General, as he rapped with his cane on the desk.
+"I was talking to-day with a gentleman from Norwalk, Ohio, who knew your
+father. Yes, sir; he knew your father, and speaks highly of him, sir. I
+am surprised to hear, sir, that your father was a perfect gentleman,
+sir. Good-morning, sir."
+
+And with that the General moved majestically out of the office.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+A Question of Climate
+
+
+Colonel Morrison had three initials, so the town naturally called him
+"Alphabetical" Morrison, and dropped the "Colonel." He came to our part
+of the country in an early day--he used to explain that they caught him
+in the trees, when he was drinking creek water, eating sheep-sorrel, and
+running wild with a buffalo tail for a trolley, and that the first thing
+they did, after teaching him to eat out of a plate, was to set him at
+work in the grading gang that was laying out the Cottonwood and Walnut
+Rivers and putting the limestone in the hills. He was one of the
+original five patriots who laid out the Corn Belt Railroad from the
+Mississippi to the Pacific, and was appointed one of that committee to
+take the matter to New York for the inspection of capitalists--and be it
+said to the credit of Alphabetical Morrison that he was the only person
+in the crowd with money enough to pay the ferryman when he reached the
+Missouri River, though he had only enough to get himself across. But in
+spite of that the road was built, and though it missed our town, it was
+because we didn't vote the bonds, though old Alphabetical went through
+the county, roaring in the schoolhouses, bellowing at the crossroads,
+and doing all that a good, honest pair of lungs could do for the cause.
+However, he was not dismayed at his failure, and began immediately to
+organise a company to build another road. We finally secured a railroad,
+though it was only a branch.
+
+Over his office door he had a sign--"Land Office"--painted on the false
+board front of the building in letters as big as a cow, and the first
+our newspaper knew of him was twenty years ago, when he brought in an
+order for some stationery for the Commercial Club. At that time we had
+not heard that the town supported a Commercial Club--nor had anyone else
+heard of it, for that matter--for old Alphabetical was the president,
+and his bookkeeper, with the Miss dropped off her name, was secretary.
+But he had a wonderfully alluring letterhead printed, and seemed to get
+results, for he made a living while his competitors starved. Later, when
+he found time, he organised a real Commercial Club, and had himself
+elected president of it. He used to call meetings of the club to discuss
+things, but as no one cared much for his monologues on the future of the
+town, the attendance was often light. He issued circulars referring to
+our village as "the Queen City of the Prairies," and on the circulars
+was a map, showing that the Queen City of the Prairies was "the railroad
+axis of the West." There was one road running into the town; the others
+old Alphabetical indicated with dotted lines, and explained in a
+foot-note that they were in process of construction.
+
+He became possessed of a theory that a canning factory would pay in the
+Queen City of the Prairies, and the first step he took toward building
+it was to invest in a high hat, a long coat and white vest, and a pair
+of mouse-coloured trousers. With these and his theory he went East and
+returned with a condition. The canning factory went up, but the railroad
+rates went wrong, and the factory was never opened. Alphabetical
+blinked at it through his gold-rimmed glasses for a few weeks, and then
+organised a company to turn it into a woollen mill. He elected himself
+president of that company and used to bring around to our paper, notices
+of directors' meetings, and while he was in the office he would insist
+that we devoted too much space to idle gossip and not enough to the
+commercial and industrial interests of the Queen City.
+
+At times he would bring in an editorial that he had written himself,
+highly excitable and full of cyclonic language, and if we printed it
+Alphabetical would buy a hundred copies of the paper containing it and
+send them East. His office desk gradually filled with woodcuts and zinc
+etchings of buildings that never existed save in his own dear old head,
+and about twice a year during the boom days he would bring them around
+and have a circular printed on which were the pictures showing the
+imaginary public buildings and theoretical business thoroughfares of the
+Queen City.
+
+The woollen mill naturally didn't pay, and he persuaded some Eastern
+capitalists to install an electric plant in the building and put a
+streetcar line in the town, though the longest distance from one side of
+the place to the other was less than ten blocks. But Alphabetical was
+enthusiastic about it, and had the Governor come down to drive the first
+spike. It was gold-plated, and Alphabetical pulled it up and used it for
+a paper-weight in his office for many years, and it is now the only
+reminder there is in town of the street railway, except a hard ridge of
+earth over the ties in the middle of Main Street. When someone twitted
+him on the failure of the street railway he made answer:
+
+"Of course it failed; here I go pawing up the earth, milking out the
+surplus capital of the effete East, and building up this town--and what
+happens? Four thousand old silurian fossils comb the moss on the north
+side of 'em, with mussel shell, and turn over and yawp that old
+Alphabetical is visionary. Here I get a canning factory and nobody eats
+the goods; I hustle up a woollen factory, and the community quits
+wearing trousers; I build for them a streetcar line to haul them to and
+from their palatial residences, and what do the sun-baked human mud
+turtles do but all jump off the log into the water and hide from them
+cars like they were chariots of fire? What this town needs is not
+factories, nor railroads, nor modern improvements--Old Alphabetical can
+get them--but the next great scheme I go into is to go down to the
+river, get some good red mud, and make a few thousand men who will build
+up a town."
+
+It has been fifteen years and over since Colonel Morrison put on his
+long coat and high hat and started for the money markets of the East,
+seeking whom he might devour. At the close of the eighties the Colonel
+and all his tribe found that the stock of Eastern capitalists who were
+ready to pay good prices for the fine shimmering blue sky and bracing
+ozone of the West was running low. It was said in town that the Colonel
+had come to the end of his string, for not only were the doors of
+capital closed to him in the East, but newcomers had stopped looking for
+farms at home. There was nothing to do but to sit down and swap
+jack-knives with other land agents, and as they had taken most of the
+agencies for the best insurance companies while the Colonel was on
+dress parade, there was nothing left for him to do but to run for
+justice of the peace, and, being elected, do what he could to make his
+tenure for life.
+
+Though he was elected, more out of gratitude for what he had tried to do
+for the town than because people thought he would make a fair judge, he
+got no further than his office in popular esteem. He did not seem to
+wear well with the people in the daily run and jostle of life. During
+the forty years he has been in our town, he has lived most of the time
+apart from the people--transacting his business in the East, or locating
+strangers on new lands. He has not been one of us, and there were
+stories afloat that his shrewdness had sometimes caused him to thrust a
+toe over the dead-line of exact honesty. In the town he never helped us
+to fight for those things of which the town is really proud: our
+schools, the college, the municipal ownership of electric lights and
+waterworks, the public library, the abolition of the saloon, and all of
+the dozen small matters of public interest in which good citizens take a
+pride. Colonel Morrison was living his grand life, in his tailor-made
+clothes, while his townsmen were out with their coats off making our
+town the substantial place it is. So in his latter days he is old
+Alphabetical Morrison, a man apart from us. We like him well enough, and
+so long as he cares to be justice of the peace no one will object, for
+that is his due. But, someway, there is no talk of making him County
+Clerk; and there is a reason in everyone's mind why no party names him
+to run for County Treasurer. He has been trying hard enough for ten
+years to break through the crust of the common interests that he has so
+long ignored. One sees him at public meetings--a rather wistful-looking,
+chubby-faced old man--on the edge of the crowd, ready to be called out
+for a speech. But no one calls his name; no one cares particularly what
+old Alphabetical has to say. Long ago he said all that he can say to our
+people.
+
+The only thing that Alphabetical ever organised that paid was a family.
+In the early days he managed to get a home clear of indebtedness and was
+shrewd enough to keep it out of all of his transactions. Tow-headed
+Morrisons filled the schoolhouse, and twenty years later there were so
+many of his girls teaching school that the school-board had to make a
+ruling limiting the number of teachers from one family in the city
+school, in order to force the younger Morrison girls to go to the
+country to teach. In these days the girls keep the house going and
+Alphabetical is a notary public and a justice of the peace, which keeps
+his office going in the little square board building at the end of the
+street. But every day for the past ten years he has been coming to our
+office for his bundle of old newspapers. These he reads carefully, and
+sometimes what he reads inspires him to write something for our paper on
+the future of the Queen City, though much oftener his articles are
+retrospective. He is the president of the Old Settlers' Society, and
+once or twice a year he brings in an obituary which he has written for
+the family of some of the old-timers.
+
+One would think that an idler would be a nuisance in a busy place, but,
+on the contrary, we all like old Alphabetical around our office. For he
+is an old man who has not grown sour. His smooth, fat face has not been
+wrinkled by the vinegar of failure, and the noise that came from his
+lusty lungs in the old days is subsiding. But he has never forgiven
+General Durham, of the _Statesman_, for saying of a fight between
+Alphabetical and another land agent back in the sixties that "those who
+heard it pronounced it the most vocal engagement they had ever known."
+That is why he brings his obituaries to us; that is why he does us the
+honour of borrowing papers from us; and that is why, on a dull
+afternoon, he likes to sit in the old sway-back swivel-chair and tell us
+his theory of the increase in the rainfall, his notion about the
+influence of trees upon the hot winds, his opinion of the disappearance
+of the grasshoppers. Also, that is why we always save a circus-ticket
+for old Alphabetical, just as we save one for each of the boys in the
+office.
+
+[Illustration: He likes to sit in the old sway-back swivel-chair and
+tell us his theory of the increase in the rainfall]
+
+One day he came into the office in a bad humour. He picked up a country
+paper, glanced it over, threw it down, kicked from under his feet a dog
+that had followed a subscriber into the room, and slammed his hat into
+the waste-basket with considerable feeling as he picked up a New York
+paper.
+
+"Well--well, what's the matter with the judiciary this morning?"
+someone asked the old man.
+
+He did not reply at once, but turned his paper over and over, apparently
+looking for something to interest him. Gradually the revolutions of his
+paper became slower and slower, and finally he stopped turning the paper
+and began reading. It was ten or fifteen minutes before he spoke. When
+he put down the paper his cherubic face was beaming, and he said:
+
+"Oh--I know I'm a fool, but I wish the Lord had sent me to live in a
+town large enough so that every dirty-faced brat on the street wouldn't
+feel he had a right to call me 'Alphabetical'! Dammit, I've done the
+best I could! I haven't made any alarming success. I know it. There's no
+need of rubbing it in on me."--He was silent for a time with his hands
+on his knees and his head thrown back looking at the ceiling. Almost
+imperceptibly a smile began to crack his features, and, when he turned
+his eyes to the man at the desk, they were dancing with merriment, as he
+said: "Just been reading a piece here in the _Sun_ about the influence
+of climate on human endeavour. It says that in northern latitudes there
+is more oxygen in the air and folks breathe faster, and their blood
+flows faster, and that keeps their livers going. Trouble with me has
+always been climate--sluggish liver. If I had had just a little more
+oxygen floating round in my system, the woollen mill would still be
+running, the street-cars would be going, and this town would have had
+forty thousand inhabitants. My fatal mistake was one of latitude.
+But"--and he drawled out the word mockingly--"but I guess if the Lord
+had wanted me to make a town here he would have given me a different
+kind of liver!" He slapped his knees as he sighed: "This is a funny
+world, and the more you see of it the funnier it gets." The old man
+grinned complacently at the ceiling for a minute, and before getting out
+of his chair kicked his shoe-heels together merrily, wiped his glasses
+as he rose, put his bundle of papers under his arm, and left the office
+whistling an old, old-fashioned tune.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+The Casting Out of Jimmy Myers
+
+
+It seemed a cruel thing to do, but we had to do it. For ours is
+ordinarily a quiet office. We have never had a libel suit. We have had
+fewer fights than most newspaper offices have, and while it hardly may
+be said that we strive to please, still in the main we try to get on
+with the people, and tell them as much truth as they are entitled to for
+ten cents a week. Naturally, we do our best to get up a sprightly paper,
+and in that the Myers boy had our idea exactly. He was industrious; more
+than that, he tried with all his might to exercise his best judgment,
+and no one could say that he was careless; yet everyone around the
+office admitted that he was unlucky. He was one of those persons who
+always have slivers on their doors, or tar on the knocker, when
+opportunity comes their way; so his stay in the office was marked by a
+series of seismic disturbances in the paper that came from under his
+desk, and yet he was in no way to blame for them.
+
+We took him from the college at the edge of town. He had been running
+the college paper for a year, and knew the merchants around town fairly
+well; and, since he was equipped as far as education went, he seemed to
+be a likely sort of a boy for reporter and advertising solicitor.
+
+One of the first things that happened to him was a mistake in an item
+about the opera house. He said that a syndicate had taken a lien on it.
+What he meant was a lease, and as he got the item from a man who didn't
+know the difference, and as the boy stuck to it that the man had said
+lien and not lease, we did not charge that up to him. A few days later
+he wrote for a town photographer a paid local criticising someone who
+was going around the county peddling picture-frames and taking orders
+for enlarged pictures. That was not so bad, but it turned out that the
+pedlar was a woman, and she came with a rawhide and camped in the office
+for two days waiting for Jimmy, while he came in and out of the back
+door, stuck his copy on the hook by stealth, and travelled only in the
+alleys to get his news. One could hardly say that he was to blame for
+that, either, as the photographer who paid for the item didn't say the
+pedlar was a woman, and the boy was no clairvoyant.
+
+[Illustration: And camped in the office for two days, looking for Jimmy]
+
+One dull day he wrote a piece about the gang who played poker at night
+in Red Martin's room. Jimmy said he wasn't afraid of Red, and he wasn't.
+The item was popular enough, and led to a raid on the place, which
+disclosed our best advertiser sitting in the game. To suppress his name
+meant our shame before the town; to print it meant his--at our expense.
+It was embarrassing, but it wasn't exactly the boy's fault. It was just
+one of those unfortunate circumstances that come up in life. However,
+the advertiser aforesaid began to hate the boy.
+
+He must have been used to injustice all his life, for there was a
+vertical line between his eyes that marked trouble. The line deepened as
+he went further and further into the newspaper business; for, generally
+speaking, a person who is unlucky has less to fear handling dynamite
+than he has writing local items on a country paper.
+
+A few days after the raid on the poker-room Jimmy, who had acquired a
+particularly legible hand, wrote: "The hem of her skirt was trimmed with
+pink crushed roses," and he was in no way to blame for the fact that the
+printer accidentally put an "h" for a "k" in skirt, though the woman's
+husband chased Jimmy into a culvert under Main Street and kept him there
+most of the forenoon, while the cheering crowd informed the injured
+husband whenever Jimmy tried to get out of either end of his prison.
+
+The printer that made the mistake bought Jimmy a new suit of clothes, we
+managed to print an apology that cooled the husband's wrath, and for ten
+days, or perhaps two weeks, the boy's life was one round of joy.
+Everything was done promptly, accurately and with remarkable
+intelligence. He whistled at his work and stacked up more copy than the
+printers could set up in type. No man ever got in or out of town without
+having his name in our paper. Jimmy wrote up a railroad bond election
+meeting so fairly that he pleased both sides, and reported a murder
+trial so well that the lawyers for each side kept the boy's pockets full
+of ten-cent cigars. The vertical wrinkle was fading from his forehead,
+when one fine summer morning he brought in a paid item from a hardware
+merchant, and went blithely out to write up the funeral of the wife of a
+prominent citizen. He was so cheerful that day that it bothered him.
+
+He told us in confidence that he never felt festive and gay that
+something didn't happen. He was not in the building that evening when
+the paper went to press, but after it was printed and the carriers had
+left the office he came in, singing "She's My Sweetheart, I'm Her Beau,"
+and sat down to read the paper.
+
+Suddenly the smile on his face withered as with frost, and he handed the
+paper across the table to the bookkeeper, who read this item:
+
+     DIED--MRS. LILLIAN GILSEY.
+
+     Prepare for the hot weather, my good woman. There is only one way
+     now; get a gasoline stove, of Hurley & Co., and you need not fear
+     any future heat.
+
+And it wasn't Jimmy's fault. The foreman had merely misplaced a head
+line, but that explanation did not satisfy the bereaved family.
+
+Jimmy was beginning to acquire a reputation as a joker. People refused
+to believe that such things just happened. They did not happen before
+Mr. James Myers came to the paper--why should they begin with his coming
+and continue during his engagement? Thus reasoned the comforters of the
+Gilseys, and those interested in our downfall. The next day the
+_Statesman_ wrote a burning editorial denouncing us "for an utter lack
+of all sense of common decency" that permitted us "to violate the
+sacredest feeling known to the human heart for the sake of getting a
+ribald laugh from the unthinking." We were two weeks explaining that the
+error was not the boy's fault. People assumed that the mistake could not
+have occurred in any well-regulated printing office, and it didn't seem
+probable that it could occur--yet there it was. But Jimmy wasn't to
+blame. He suffered more than we did--more than the bereaved family did.
+He went unshaven and forgot to trim his cuffs or turn his collar. He
+hated to go on the streets for news, and covered with the office
+telephone as much of his beat as possible.
+
+The summer wore away and the dog days came. The Democratic State
+campaign was about to open in our town, and orators and statesmen
+assembled from all over the Missouri valley. There was a lack of flags
+at the dry-goods stores. The Fourth of July celebration had taken all
+the stock. The only materials available were some red bunting, some
+white bunting, and some blue bunting with stars dotted upon it. With
+this bunting the Committee on Reception covered the speakers' stand,
+wrapping the canopy under which the orators stood in the solid colours
+and the star-spangled blue. It was beautiful to see, and the pride of
+the window-dresser of the Golden Eagle Clothing Store. But the old
+soldiers who walked by nudged one another and smiled.
+
+About noon of the day of the speaking the City Clerk, who wore the
+little bronze button of the G. A. R., asked Jimmy if he didn't want
+someone to take care of the Democratic meeting. Jimmy, who hated
+politics, was running his legs off to get the names of the visitors, and
+was glad to have the help. He turned in the contributed copy without
+reading it, as he had done with the City Clerk's articles many times
+before, and this is what greeted his horrified eyes when he read the
+paper:
+
+               "UNDER THE STARS & BARS"
+
+    Democracy Opens Its State Campaign Under the
+                 Rebel Emblem To-day
+                   A Fitting Token
+    Treasonable Utterances Have a Proper Setting
+
+And then followed half a column of most violent abuse of the Democrats
+who had charge of the affair. Jimmy did not appear on the street that
+night, but the next morning, when he came down, the office was crowded
+with indignant Democrats "stopping the paper."
+
+We began to feel uneasy about Jimmy. So long as his face was in the
+eclipse of grief there seemed to be a probability that we would have no
+trouble, but as soon as his moon began to shine we were nervous.
+
+Jimmy had a peculiar knack of getting up little stories of the town--not
+exactly news stories, but little odd bits that made people smile without
+rancour when they saw their names in the quaintly turned items. One day
+he wrote up a story of a little boy whose mother asked him where he got
+a dollar that he was flourishing on his return with his father from a
+visit in Kansas City. The little boy's answer was that his father gave
+it to him for calling him uncle when any ladies were around. It was
+merrily spun, and knowing that it would not make John Lusk, the boy's
+father, mad, we printed it, and Jimmy put at the head of it a foolish
+little verse of Kipling's. Miss Larrabee, at the bottom of her society
+column, announced the engagement of two prominent young people in town.
+The Saturday paper was unusually readable. But when Jimmy came in after
+the paper was out he found Miss Larrabee in tears, and the foreman
+leaning over the counter laughing so that he couldn't speak. It wasn't
+Jimmy's fault. The foreman had done it--by the mere transposition of a
+little brass rule separating the society news from Jimmy's story with
+the Kipling verse at the head of it. The rule tacked the Kipling verse
+onto Miss Larrabee's article announcing the engagement. Here is the way
+it read:
+
+"This marriage, which will take place at St. Andrew's Church, will unite
+two of the most popular people in town and two of the best-known
+families in the State.
+
+    "_And this is the sorrowful story
+      Told as the twilight fails,
+    While the monkeys are walking together,
+      Holding each other's tails!_"
+
+Now, Jimmy was no more to blame than Miss Larrabee, and many people
+thought, and think to this day, that Miss Larrabee did it--and did it on
+purpose. But for all that it cast clouds over the moon of Jimmy's
+countenance, and it was nearly a year before he regained his merry
+heart. He was nervous, and whenever he saw a man coming toward the
+office with a paper in his hand Jimmy would dash out of the room to
+avoid the meeting. For an hour after the paper was out the ringing of
+the telephone bell would make him start. He didn't know what was going
+to happen next.
+
+But as the months rolled by he became calm, and when Governor Antrobus
+died, Jimmy got up a remarkably good story of his life and achievements,
+and though there was no family left to the dear old man to buy extra
+copies, all the old settlers--who are the hardest people in the world
+to please--bought extra copies for their scrapbooks. We were proud of
+Jimmy, and assigned him to write up the funeral. That was to be a "day
+of triumph in Capua." There being no relatives to interfere, the lodges
+of the town--and the Governor was known as a "jiner"--had vied with one
+another to make the funeral the greatest rooster-feather show ever given
+in the State. The whole town turned out, and the foreman of our office,
+and everyone in the back room who could be spared, was at the Governor's
+funeral, wearing a plume, a tin sword, a red leather belt, or a sash of
+some kind. We put a tramp printer on to make up the paper, and told
+Jimmy to call by the undertaker's for a paid local which the undertaker
+had written for the paper that day.
+
+Jimmy's face was beaming as he snuggled up to his desk at three o'clock
+that afternoon. He said he had a great story--names of the pall-bearers,
+names of the double sextette choir, names of all the chaplains of all
+the lodges who read their rituals, names of distinguished guests from
+abroad, names of the ushers at the church. Page by page he tore off his
+copy and gave it to the tramp printer, who took it in to the machines.
+Trusting the foreman to read the proof, Jimmie rushed out to get from a
+United States Senator who was attending the funeral an interview on the
+sugar scandal, for the Kansas City _Star_.
+
+The rest of us did not get back from the cemetery until the carriers had
+left the office, and this is what we found:
+
+"The solemn moan of the organ had scarcely died away, like a quivering
+sob upon the fragrant air, when the mournful procession of citizens
+began filing past the flower-laden bier to view the calm face of their
+beloved friend and honoured townsman. In the grief-stricken hush that
+followed might be heard the stifled grief of some old comrade as he
+paused for the last time before the coffin.
+
+"At this particular time we desire to call the attention of our readers
+to the admirable work done by our hustling young undertaker, J. B.
+Morgan. He has been in the city but a short time, yet by his efficient
+work and careful attention to duty, he has built up an enviable
+reputation and an excellent custom among the best families of the city.
+All work done with neatness and dispatch. We strive to please.
+
+"When the last sad mourner had filed out, the pall-bearers took up their
+sorrowful task, and slowly, as the band played the 'Dead March in Saul,'
+the great throng assembled in the street viewed the mortal remains of
+Governor Antrobus start on their last long journey."
+
+Of course it wasn't Jimmy's fault. The "rising young undertaker" had
+paid the tramp printer, who made up the forms, five dollars to work his
+paid local into the funeral notice. But after that--Jimmy had to go.
+Public sentiment would no longer stand him as a reporter on the paper,
+and we gave him a good letter and sent him onward and upward. He took
+his dismissal decently enough. He realised that his luck was against
+him; he knew that we had borne with him in all patience.
+
+The day that he left he was instructing the new man in the ways of the
+town. Reverend Frank Milligan came in with a church notice. Jimmy took
+the notice and began marking it for the printer. As the door behind him
+opened and closed, Jimmy, with his head still in his work, called across
+the room to the new man: "That was old Milligan that just went
+out--beware of him. He will load you up with truck about himself. He
+rings in his sermons; trots around with church social notices that ought
+to be paid for, and tries to get them in free; likes to be referred to
+as doctor; slips in mean items about his congregation, if you don't
+watch him; and insists on talking religion Saturday morning when you are
+too busy to spit. More than that, he has an awful breath--cut him out;
+he will make life a burden if you don't--and if you do he will go to the
+old man with it, and say you are not treating him right."
+
+[Illustration: Reverend Milligan came in with a church notice]
+
+There was a rattling and a scratching on the wire partition between
+Jimmy and the door. Jimmy looked up from his work and saw the sprightly
+little figure of Parson Milligan coming over the railing like a monkey.
+He had not gone out of the door--a printer had come in when it opened
+and shut. And then Jimmy took his last flying trip out of the back door
+of the office, down the alley, "toward the sunset's purple rim." It was
+not his fault. He was only telling the truth--where it would do the most
+good.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+"'A Babbled of Green Fields"
+
+
+Our town is set upon a hillside, rising from a prairie stream. Forty
+years ago the stream ran through a thick woodland nearly a mile wide,
+and in the woodland were stately elms, spreading walnut trees, shapely
+oaks, gaunt white sycamores, and straight, bushy hackberries, that shook
+their fruit upon the ice in spots least frequented by skaters. Along the
+draws that emptied into the stream were pawpaw trees, with their tender
+foliage, and their soft wood, which little boys delighted to cut for
+stick horses. Beneath all these trees grew a dense underbrush of
+buckeyes, blackberries, raspberries, gooseberries, and little red winter
+berries called Indian beads by the children. Wild grapevines, "poison"
+grapes, and ivies of both kinds wove the woods into a mass of summer
+green. In the clearings and bordering the wood grew the sumach, that
+flared red at the very thought of Jack Frost's coming. In these woods
+the boys of our town--many of whom have been dead these twenty
+years--used to lay their traps for the monsters of the forest, and
+trudged back from the timber before breakfast, in winter, bringing home
+redbirds, and rabbits and squirrels. Sometimes a particularly doughty
+woodsman would report that there were wildcat tracks about his trap; but
+none of us ever saw a wildcat, though Enoch Haver, whose father's father
+had heard a wildcat scream, and had taught the boy its cry, would hide
+in a hollow sycamore and screech until the little boys were terrified
+and would not go alone to their traps for days. In summer, boys, usually
+from the country, or from a neighbouring town, caught 'coons, and
+dragged them chained through alleys for our boys to see, and 'Dory Paine
+had an owl which was widely sought by other boys in the circus and
+menagerie line. The boys of our town in that day seemed to live in the
+wood and around the long millpond, though little fellows were afraid
+that lurking Indians or camping gypsies might steal them--a boy's
+superstition, which experience has proved too good to be true. They
+fared forth to the riffle below the dam, which deepens in the shade
+under the water elm; this was the pool known as "baby hole," despised of
+the ten-year-olds, who plunged into the deepest of the thicket and came
+out at the limekiln, where all day long one might hear "so-deep,
+so-deep, so-deep," and "go-round, go-round, go-round," until school
+commenced in the fall. Then the rattle of little homemade wagons, and
+the shrilling of boy voices might be heard all over the wilderness, and
+the black-stained hands of schoolboys told of the day of the walnut
+harvest. It was nearly a mile from the schoolhouse to the woods, and yet
+on winter afternoons no school-ma'am could keep the boys from using
+school hours to dig out the screw-holes and heel-plates of their boots
+before wadding them with paper. At four o'clock a troop of boys would
+burst forth from that schoolhouse so wildly that General Durham of the
+_Statesman_, whose office we used to pass with a roar, always looked up
+from his work to say: "Well, I see hell's out for noon again."
+
+In the spring the boys fished, and on Saturdays go, up the river or
+down, or on either side, where one would, one was never out of sight of
+some thoughtful boy, sitting either on a stump or on a log stretching
+into the stream, or squatting on a muddy bank with his worm can beside
+him, throwing a line into the deep, green, quiet water. Always it was to
+the woods one went to find a lost boy, for the brush was alive with
+fierce pirates, and blood-bound brother-hoods, and gory Indian fighters,
+and dauntless scouts. Under the red clay banks that rose above the
+sluggish stream, robbers' caves, and treasure houses, and freebooters'
+dens, were filled with boys who, five days in the week and six hours a
+day, could "_amo amas amat, amamus amatus amant_" with the best of them.
+On Sundays these same boys sat with trousers creeping above the wrinkles
+at the ankles of their copper-toed, red-topped boots, recited golden
+texts, sang "When He Cometh," and while planning worse for their own
+little brothers, read with much virtuous indignation of little Joseph's
+wicked brothers, who put him in a pit. After Sunday School was over
+these highly respected young persons walked sedately in their best
+clothes over the scenes of their Saturday crimes.
+
+They say the woods are gone now. Certainly the trees have been cut away
+and the underbrush burned; cornfields cover the former scenes of
+valorous achievement; but none the less the woods are there; each nook
+and cranny is as it was, despite the cornfields. Scattered about the sad
+old earth live men who could walk blindfolded over the dam, across the
+millrace, around the bend, through the pawpaw patch to the grapevine
+home of the "Slaves of the Magic Tree;" who could find their trail under
+the elder bushes in Boswell's ravine, though they should come--as they
+often come--at the dead of night from great cities and from mountain
+camps and from across seas, and fore-gather there, in the smoke and dirt
+of the rendezvous to eat their unsalted sacrificial rabbit. They can
+follow the circuitous route around John Betts's hog lot, to avoid the
+enemy, as easily to-day as they could before the axe and the fire and
+the plough made their fine pretence of changing the landscape. And when
+Joe Nevison gets ready to signal them from his seat high in the crotch
+of the oak tree across the creek, the "Slaves of the Tree" will come and
+obey their leader. They say that the tree is gone, and that Joe is gone,
+but we know better; for at night, when the Tree has called us, and we
+hear the notes from the pumpkin-stem reed, we come and sit in the
+branches beneath him and plan our raids and learn our passwords, and
+swear our vengeance upon such as cross our pathway. There may have been
+a time when men thought the Slaves of the Tree were disbanded; indeed it
+did seem so, but as the years go by, one by one they come wandering
+back, take their places in the branches of the magic tree, swing far out
+over the world like birds, and summon again the _genius loci_ who has
+slept for nearly forty years.
+
+Of course we knew that Joe would be the first one back; he didn't care
+what they said--even then; he registered his oath that it made no
+difference what they did to him or what the others did, he would never
+desert the Tree. He commanded all of us to come back; if not by day then
+to gather in the moonlight and bring our chicken for the altar and our
+eggs for the ceremony, and he promised that he would be there. We were
+years and years in obeying Joe Nevison. Many of us have had long
+journeys to go; and some of us lead little children by the hand as we
+creep up the hollow, crawl through the gooseberry bushes, and 'coon the
+log over the chasm to our meeting place. But we are nearly all there
+now; and in the moonlight, when the corn seems to be waving over a wide
+field, a tree springs up as by magic and we take our places again as of
+old.
+
+Many years have passed since Marshal Furgeson stood those seven Slaves
+of the Magic Tree in line before the calaboose door and made them
+surrender the feathered cork apple-stealers and the sacred chicken
+hooks. In those years many terrors have ridden the boys who have gone
+out into the world to fight its dragons and grapple with its gorgons;
+but never have those boys felt any happiness so sweet as that which
+rested on their hearts when they heard the Marshal say, "Now you boys
+run on home--but mind you if I ever----" and he never did--except Joe
+Nevison. Once it was for boring a hole in the depot platform and
+tapping a barrel of cider; once it was for going through a window in the
+Hustler hardware store and taking a box of pocketknives and two
+revolvers, with which to reward his gang, and finally, when the boy was
+in the midst of his teens, for breaking into the schoolhouse and burning
+the books. Joe's father always bought him off, as fathers always can buy
+boys off, when mothers go to the offended person and promise, and beg,
+and weep. So Joe Nevison grew up the town bad boy--defiant of law,
+reckless and unrestrained, with the blood of border ruffianism in his
+veins and the scorn of God and man and the love of sin in his heart. The
+week after he left town, and before he was twenty, his father paid for
+"Red" Martin's grey race horse, which disappeared the night Joe's bed
+was found empty. In those days the Nevisons had more money than most of
+the people in our town, but as the years went by they began to lose
+their property, and it was said that it went in great slices to Joe, to
+keep him out of the penitentiary.
+
+We knew that Joe Nevison was in the West. People from our town, who seem
+to swarm over the earth, wrote back that they had met Joe in Dodge
+City, in Leoti, in No-Man's-Land, in Texas, in Arizona--wherever there
+was trouble. Sometimes he was the hired bad man of a desert town, whose
+business it was to shoot terror into the hearts of disturbers from rival
+towns; sometimes he was a free lance--living the devil knows how--always
+dressed like a fashion-plate of the plains in high-heeled boots, wide
+felt hat, flowing necktie, flannel shirt and velvet trousers. They say
+that he did not gamble more than was common among the sporting men of
+his class, and that he never worked. Sometimes we heard of him
+adventuring as a land dealer, sometimes as a cattleman, sometimes as a
+mining promoter, sometimes as a horseman, but always as the sharper, who
+rides on the crest of the forward wave of civilization, leaving a town
+when it tears down its tents and puts up brick buildings, and then
+appearing in the next canvas community, wherein the night is filled with
+music, and the cares that infest the day are drowned in bad whiskey or
+winked out with powder and shot. And thus Joe Nevison closed his
+twenties--a desert scorpion, outcast by society and proud of it. As he
+passed into his thirties he left the smoky human crystals that formed on
+the cow trails and at the mountain gold camps. Cripple Creek became too
+effete for him, and an electric light in a tent became a target he could
+not resist; wherefore he went into the sage brush and the short grass,
+seeking others of his kind, the human rattlesnake, the ranging coyote
+and the outlawed wolf. Joe Nevison rode with the Dalton gang, raided
+ranches and robbed banks with the McWhorters and held up stages as a
+lone highwayman. At least, so men said in the West, though no one could
+prove it, and at the opening of Lawton he appeared at the head of a band
+of cutthroats, who were herded out of town by the deputy United States
+marshals before noon of the first day. Not until popular government was
+established could they get in to open their skin-game, which was better
+and safer for them than ordinary highway faring. At Lawton our people
+saw Joe and he asked about the home people, asked about the boys--the
+old boys he called them--and becoming possessed of a post-office
+address, Joe wrote a long letter to George Kirwin, the foreman of our
+office. We call him old George, because he is still under forty. Joe
+being in an expansive mood, and with more money on his clothes than he
+cared for, sent old George ten dollars to pay for a dollar Joe had
+borrowed the day he left town in the eighties. We printed Joe's letter
+in our paper, and it pleased his mother. That was the beginning of a
+regular correspondence between the rover and the home-stayer. George
+Kirwin, gaunt, taciturn, and hard-working, had grown out of the dreamy,
+story-loving boy who had been one of the Slaves of the Magic Tree and
+into a shy old bachelor who wept over "East Lynne" whenever it came to
+the town opera house, and asked for a lay-off only when Modjeska
+appeared in Topeka, or when there was grand opera at Kansas City. But he
+ruled the back office with an iron hand and superintended the Mission
+Sunday-School across the track, putting all his spare money into
+Christmas presents for his pupils. After that first letter that came
+from Joe Nevison, no one had a hint of what passed between the two men.
+But a month never went by that Joe's letter missed. When Lawton began
+to wane, Joe Nevison seemed to mend his wayward course. He moved to
+South McAlester and opened a faro game--a square game they said it
+was--for the Territory! This meant that unless Joe was hard up every man
+had his chance before the wheel. Old George took the longest trip of his
+life, when we got him a pass to South McAlester and he put on his black
+frock coat and went to visit Joe. All that we learned from him was that
+Joe "had changed a good deal," and that he was "taking everything in the
+drug store, from the big green bottle at the right of the front door
+clear around past the red prescription case, and back to the big blue
+bottle at the left of the door." But after George came home the Mission
+Sunday-School began to thrive. George was not afraid of tainted money,
+and the school got a new library, which included "Tom Sawyer" and
+"Huckleberry Finn," as well as "Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates" for
+the boys, and all the "Pansy" books for the girls. It was a quaint old
+lot of books, and George Kirwin was nearly a year getting it together.
+Also he bought a new stove for his Sunday-School room, and a lot of
+pictures for the church walls, among others "Wide Awake and Fast
+Asleep," "Simply to Thy Cross," and "The Old Oaken Bucket." He gave to
+the school a cabinet organ with more stops than most of the children
+could count.
+
+[Illustration: A desert Scorpion, outcast by society and proud of it]
+
+A year ago a new reporter brought in this item: "Joseph Nevison, of
+South McAlester, I. T., is visiting his mother, Mrs. Julia Nevison, at
+234 South Fifth Street."
+
+We sent the reporter out for more about Joe Nevison and at noon George
+Kirwin hurried down to the little home below the tracks. From these two
+searchers after truth we learned that Joe Nevison's mother had brought
+him home from the Indian Territory mortally sick. Half-a-dozen of us who
+had played with him as boys went to see him that evening, and found a
+wan, haggard man with burned-out black eyes, lying in a clean white bed.
+He seemed to know each of us for a moment and spoke to us through his
+delirium in a tired, piping voice--like the voice of the little boy who
+had been our leader. He called us by forgotten nicknames, and he hummed
+at a tune that we had not heard for a score of years. Then he piped out
+"While the Landlubbers Lie Down Below, Below, Below," and followed that
+with "Green Grass Growing all Around, all Around," and that with the
+song about the "Tonga Islands," his voice growing into a clearer alto as
+he sang. His mother tried to quiet him, but he smiled his dead smile at
+her through his cindery eyes, shook his head and went on. When he had
+lain quiet for a moment, he turned to one of us and said: "Dock, I'm
+goin' up and dive off that stump--a back flip-flop--you dassent!" Pretty
+soon he seemed to come up snuffing and blowing and grinning and said,
+"Last man dressed got to chaw beef." Then he cried: "Dock's it--Dock's
+it; catch 'im, hold him--there he goes--duck him, strip him. O well, let
+him go if he's go'n' to cry. Say, boys, I wish you fellers'd come over
+t' my stick horse livery stable--honest I got the best hickory horse you
+ever see. Whoa, there--whoa now, I tell you. You Pilliken Dunlevy let me
+harness you; there, put it under your arm, and back of your neck--no I
+ain't go'n' to let you hold it--I'll jerk the tar out of you if you
+don't go. Whe-e-e that's the way to go, hol--hold on, whoa there. Back
+up. Let's go over to Jim's and run on his track. Say, Jim, I got the
+best little pacer in the country here--get up there, Pilliken," and he
+clucked and sawed his arms, and cracked an imaginary whip. When George
+came in, the face on the bed brightened and the treble voice said:
+"Hello Fatty--we've been waitin' for you. Now let's go on. What you got
+in your wagon--humph--bet it's a pumpkin. Did old Boswell chase you?"
+and then he laughed, and turned away from us. His trembling hands seemed
+to be fighting something from his face. "Bushes," whispered Enoch Haver,
+and then added, "Now he's climbing up the bank of the ravine." And we
+saw the lean hands on the bed clutch up the wall, and then the voice
+broke forth: "Me first--first up--get away from here, Dock--I said
+first," and we could see his hands climbing an imaginary tree.
+
+His face glowed with the excitement of his delirium as he climbed, and
+then apparently catching his breath he rested before he called out: "I'm
+comin' down, clear the track for old Dan Tucker," and from the
+convulsive gripping of his hands and arms and the hysterical intake of
+his breath we who had seen Joe Nevison dive from the top of the old
+tree, from limb to limb to the bottom, knew what he was doing. His heart
+was thumping audibly when he finished, and we tried to calm him. For a
+while we all sat about him in silence--forgetting the walls that shut us
+in, and living with him in the open, Slaves of the Magic Tree. Then one
+by one we left and only George Kirwin stayed with the sick man.
+
+Joe Nevison had lived a wicked life. He had been the friend and
+companion of vile men and the women whom such men choose, and they had
+lived lives such as we in our little town only read about--and do not
+understand. Yet all that night Joe Nevison roamed through the woods by
+the creek, a little child, and no word passed his lips that could have
+brought a hint of the vicious life that his manhood had known.
+
+In that long night, while George Kirwin sat by his dying friend,
+listening to his babble, two men were in the genii's hands. They put off
+their years as a garment. Together they ran over the roofs of buildings
+on Main Street that have been torn down for thirty years; they played
+in barns and corncribs burned down so long ago that their very site is
+in doubt; they romped over prairies where now are elm-covered streets;
+and they played with boys and girls who have lain forgotten in little
+sunken graves for a quarter of a century, out on the hill; or they
+called from the four winds of heaven playmates who left our town at a
+time so remote that to the watcher by the bed it seemed ages ago. The
+games they played were of another day than this. When Joe began crying
+"Barbaree," he summoned a troop of ghosts, and the pack went scampering
+through the spectre town in the starlight; and when that game had tired
+him the voice began to chatter of "Slap-and-a-kick," and
+"Foot-and-a-half," and of "Rolly-poley," and of the ball games--"Scrub,"
+and "Town-ball," and "Anteover," each old game conjuring up spirits from
+its own vasty deep until the room was full of phantoms and the watcher's
+memory ached with the sweet sorrow of old joys.
+
+George Kirwin says that long after midnight Joe awakened from a doze,
+fumbling through the bedclothes, looking for something. Finally he
+complained that he could not find his mouth-harp. They tried to make him
+forget it, but when they failed, his mother went to the bureau and
+pulling open the lower drawer found a little varnished box; under the
+shaded lamp she brought out a sack of marbles, a broken bean-shooter,
+with whittled prongs, a Barlow knife, a tintype picture of a boy, and
+the mouth-organ. This she gave to the hands that fluttered about the
+face on the pillow. He began to play "The Mocking Bird," opening and
+shutting his bony hands to let the music rise and fall. When he closed
+that tune he played "O the Mistletoe Bough," and after that over and
+over again he played "Tenting on the Old Camp Ground." When he dropped
+the mouth-harp, he lay very still for a time, though his lips moved
+incessantly. The morning was coming, and he was growing weak. But when
+his voice came back they knew that he was far afield again; for he said,
+"Come on, fellers, let's set down here under the hill and rest. It's a
+long ways back." When he had rested he spoke up again, "Say, fellers,
+what'll we sing?" George tried him with a gospel hymn, but Joe would
+have none of it, and reviled the song and the singer after the fashion
+of boys. In a moment he exclaimed: "Here--listen to me. Let's sing
+this," and his alto voice came out uncertainly and faintly: "Wrap Me up
+in My Tarpaulin Jacket."
+
+George Kirwin's rough voice joined the song and the mother listened and
+wept. Other old songs followed, but Joe Nevison, the man, never woke up.
+It was the little boy full of the poetry and sweetness of a child at
+play, the boy who had turned the poetry of his boyish soul into a life
+of adventure unchecked by moral restraint, whose eyes they closed that
+morning.
+
+And George Kirwin explained to us when he came down to work that
+afternoon, that maybe the bad part of Joe Nevison's soul had shrivelled
+away during his sickness, instead of waiting for death. George told us
+that what made him sad was that a soul in which there was so much that
+might have been good had been stunted by life and was entering eternity
+with so little to show for its earthly journey.
+
+When one considers it, one finds that Joe Nevison wasted his life most
+miserably. There was nothing to his credit to say in his obituary--no
+good deed to recount and there were many, many bad ones. Moreover, the
+sorrow and bitterness that he brought into his father's last days, and
+the shame that he put upon his mother, who lived to see his end, made it
+impossible for our paper to say of him any kind thing that would not
+have seemed maudlin.
+
+Yet at Joe Nevison's funeral the old settlers, many of them broken in
+years and by trouble, gathered at the little wooden church in the hollow
+below the track, to see the last of him, though certainly not to pay him
+a tribute of respect. They remembered him as the little boy who had
+trudged up the hill to school when the old stone schoolhouse was the
+only stone building in town; they remembered him as he was in the days
+when he began to turn Marshal Furgeson's hair grey with wild pranks.
+They remembered the boy's childish virtues, and could feel the remorse
+that must at times have gnawed his heart. Also these old men and women
+knew of the devil of unbridled passion that the child's father had put
+into Joe's blood. And when he started down the broad road they had seen
+his track beyond him. So as the little gathering of old people filed
+through the church door and lined up on the sidewalk waiting for the
+mourners to come out, we heard through the crowd white haired men
+sighing: "Poor Joe; poor fellow." Can one hope that God's forgiveness
+will be fuller than that!
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+A Pilgrim in the Wilderness
+
+
+A few years ago we were getting out a special edition of our paper,
+printed on book-paper, and filled with pictures of the old settlers, and
+we called it "the historical edition." In preparing the historical
+edition we had to confer with "Aunt" Martha Merrifield so often that
+George Kirwin, the foreman, who was kept trotting to her with
+proof-slips and copy for her to revise, remarked, as he was making up
+the last form of the troublesome edition, that, if the recording angel
+ever had a fire in his office, he could make up the record for our town
+from "Aunt" Martha's scrapbook. In that big, fat, crinkly-leafed book,
+she has pasted so many wedding notices and birth notices and death
+notices that one who reads the book wonders how so many people could
+have been born, married and died in a town of only ten thousand
+inhabitants. One evening, while the historical edition was growing, a
+reporter spent the evening with "Aunt" Martha. The talk drifted back to
+the early days, and "Aunt" Martha mentioned Balderson. To identify him
+she went to her scrapbook, and as she was turning the pages she said:
+
+"In those days of the early seventies, before the railroad came, when
+the town awoke in the morning and found a newly arrived covered waggon
+near a neighbour's house, it always meant that kin had come. If at
+school that day the children from the house of visitation bragged about
+their relatives, expatiating upon the power and riches that they left
+back East, the town knew that the visitors were ordinary kin; but if the
+children from the afflicted household said little about the visitors and
+evidently tried to avoid telling just who they were, then the town knew
+that the strangers were poor kin--probably some of "his folks"; for it
+was well understood that the women in this town all came from high
+connections 'back East' in Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa. Newcomers
+sometimes wondered how such a galaxy of princesses and duchesses and
+ladyships happened to marry so far beneath their station.
+
+"But the Dixons had no children, so when a covered waggon drove up to
+their place in the night, and a fussy, pussy little man with a dingy,
+stringy beard, appeared in the Dixons' back yard in the morning, looking
+after the horses hitched to the strange waggon; the town had to wait
+until the next week's issue of the _Statesman_ to get reliable news
+about their prospective fellow-citizen." With that "Aunt" Martha opened
+her scrapbook and read a clipping from the _Statesman_, under the head,
+"A Valuable Acquisition to Our City." It ran:
+
+"It has been many months since we have been favoured with a call from so
+cultured and learned a gentleman as the Hon. Andoneran P. Balderson,
+late of Quito, Hancock County, Iowa, who has finally determined to
+settle in our midst. Cramped by the irritating conventionalities of an
+effete civilisation, Colonel Balderson comes among us for that larger
+freedom and wider horizon which his growing powers demand. He comes with
+the ripened experience of a jurist, a soldier, and a publicist, and,
+when transportation facilities have been completed between this and the
+Missouri River, Judge Balderson will bring to our little city his
+magnificent law library; but until then he will be found over the Elite
+Oyster Bay, where he will be glad to welcome clients and others.
+
+"Having participated in the late War of the Rebellion, as captain in
+Company G of Colonel Jennison's famous and invincible army of the
+border, Colonel Balderson will give special attention to pension
+matters. He also will set to work to obtain a complete set of abstracts,
+and will be glad to give advice on real-estate law and the practice of
+eminent domain, to which subject he has given deep study. All business
+done with neatness and despatch.
+
+"Before leaving Iowa, and after considerable pressure, Judge Balderson
+consented to act as agent for a number of powerful Eastern fire
+insurance companies, and has in contemplation the establishment of the
+Southwestern distributing point for the Multum in Parvo Farm Gate
+Company, of which corporation Colonel Balderson owns the patent right
+for Kansas. This business, however, he would be willing to dispose of to
+proper parties. Terms on application.
+
+"The colonel desires us to announce that there will be a meeting of the
+veterans of the late war at the schoolhouse next Saturday night, for the
+purpose of organising a society to refresh and perpetuate the sacred
+memories of that gigantic struggle, and to rally around the old flag,
+touch shoulders again, and come into a closer fellowship for benevolent,
+social, and other purposes. The judge, on that occasion, will deliver
+his famous address on the 'Battle of Look Out Mountain,' in which battle
+Colonel Balderson participated as a member of an Iowa regiment.
+Admission free. Silver collection to defray necessary expenses."
+
+Accompanying this article was a slightly worn woodcut of the colonel in
+his soldier garb, a cap with the top drawn forward, the visor low over
+his eyes, and a military overcoat thrown gaily back, exposing his
+shoulder. The picture showed the soldier in profile, with a fierce
+military moustache and a stubby, runty goatee, meant to strike terror to
+the civilian heart.
+
+From "Aunt" Martha we learned that before Judge Balderson had been in
+town a week he had dyed his whiskers and had taken command of our forces
+in the county-seat war then brewing. During the judge's first month in
+the county the campaign for the county-seat election was opened, and he
+canvassed the north end of the county for our town, denouncing, with
+elaborate eloquence, as horse thieves, mendicants, and renegades from
+justice, the settlers in the south end of the county who favoured the
+rival town. The judge organised a military company and picketed the
+hills about our town day and night against a raid from the Southenders;
+and, having stirred public passion deeply, he turned his pickets loose
+on the morning of election day to set prairie fires all over the south
+end of the county to harass the settlers who might vote for the rival
+town and keep them away from the polls fighting fire.
+
+Our people won; "the hell-hounds of disorder and anarchy"--as Judge
+Balderson called the rival townspeople--were "rebuked by the stern hand
+of a just and terrible Providence." Balderson was a hero, and our people
+sent him to the legislature. "Aunt" Martha added:
+
+"He went to Topeka in his blue soldier clothes, his campaign hat, and
+brass buttons; but he came back, at the first recess, in diamonds and
+fine linen, and the town sniffed a little." Having learned this much of
+Balderson our office became interested in him, and a reporter was set to
+work to look up Balderson. The reporter found that according to Wilder's
+"Annals," Balderson hustled himself into the chairmanship of the
+railroad committee and became a power in the State. The next time
+Colonel "Alphabetical" Morrison came to the office he was asked for
+further details about Balderson. The Colonel told us that when the
+legislature finally adjourned, very proud and very drunk, in the bedlam
+of the closing hours, Judge Balderson mounted a desk, waved the Stars
+and Stripes, and told of the Battle of Look Out Mountain. Colonel
+Morrison chuckled as he added: "The next day the _State Journal_ printed
+his picture--the one with the slouching cap, the military moustache, the
+fierce goatee, and the devil-may-care cape--and referred to the judge as
+'the silver-tongued orator of the Cottonwood,' a title which began to
+amuse the fellows around town."
+
+Naturally he was a candidate for Congress. Colonel Morrison says that
+Balderson became familiarly known in State politics as Little Baldy,
+and was in demand at soldiers' meetings and posed as the soldier's
+friend.
+
+Wilder's "Annals" records the fact that Balderson failed to go to
+Congress, but went to the State Senate. He waxed fat. We learned that he
+bought a private bank and all the books recording abstracts of title to
+land in his county, and that he affected a high silk hat when he went to
+Chicago, while his townsmen were inclined to eye him askance. The lack
+of three votes from his home precinct kept him from being nominated
+lieutenant-governor by his party, but Colonel Morrison says that
+Balderson soon took on the title of governor, and was unruffled by his
+defeat. The Colonel describes Balderson as assuming the air of a kind of
+sacred white cow, and putting much hair-oil and ointment and
+frankincense upon his carcass. Other old settlers say that in those days
+his dyed whiskers fairly glistened. And when, at State conventions, in
+the fervour of his passion he unbent, unbuttoned his frock-coat, grabbed
+the old flag, and charged up and down the platform in an oratorical
+frensy, it seemed that another being had emerged from the greasy little
+roll of adipose in which "Governor" Balderson enshrined himself. His
+climax was invariably the wavering battle-line upon the mountain, the
+flag tottering and about to fall, "when suddenly it rises and goes
+forward, up--up--up the hill, through the smoke of hell, and full and
+fair into the teeth of death, with ten thousand cheering, maddened
+soldiers behind it. And who carried that flag--who carried that flag?"
+he would scream, in a tremulous voice, repeating his question over and
+over, and then answer himself in tragic bass: "The little corporal of
+Company B!" And, "Who fell into the arms of victory that great day, with
+four wounds upon his body? The little corporal of Company B!" It is
+hardly necessary to add that Governor Balderson was the little corporal.
+
+After the failure of his bank, when rumour accused him of burning the
+court-house that he might sell his abstracts to the county at a fabulous
+price, he called a public meeting to hear his defence, and repeated to
+his townsmen that query, "Who carried the flag?" adding in a hoarse
+whisper: "And yet--great God!--they say that the little corporal is an
+in-cen-di-ary. Was this great war fought in vain, that tr-e-e-sin should
+lift her hydra head to hiss out such blasphemy upon the boys who wore
+the blue?"
+
+However, the evidence was against him, and as our people had long since
+lost interest in the flag-bearer, the committee gave him five minutes to
+leave. He returned three minutes in change and struck out over the hill
+towards the west, afoot, and the town knew him no more forever.
+
+Where Balderson went after leaving town no one seems to know. The earth
+might have swallowed him up. But in 1882 someone sent a marked copy of
+the _Denver Tribune_ to the _Statesman_ office, the _Statesman_
+reprinted it, and "Aunt" Martha filed it away in her book. Here is it:
+
+"Big Burro Springs, Colorado, September 7th (Special).--Three men were
+killed yesterday in a fight between the men at Jingle-bob ranch and a
+surveying party under A. P. Balderson. The Balderson party consisted of
+four men, among whom was 'Rowdy' Joe Nevison, the famous marshal of
+Leoti, Kansas. They were locating a reservoir site which Balderson has
+taken up on Burro Creek for the Balderson Irrigation Company and for
+supplying the Look Out Townsite Company with water. These are
+Balderson's schemes, and, if established, will put the Jingle-bob ranch
+people out of business, as they have no title to the land on which they
+are operating. The remarkable part of the fight is that which Balderson
+took in it. After two of his men had been killed and the owner of the
+Jingle-bob ranch had fallen, Balderson and his two remaining men came
+forward with hands up, waving handkerchiefs. The Jingle-bob people
+recognised the flag of truce, and Balderson led his men across the creek
+to the cow-camp. Just as he approached close enough to the man who had
+the party covered, Balderson yelled, 'Watch out--back of you!' and, as
+all the captors turned their heads, Balderson knocked the pistol from
+the hand of the only man whose weapon was pointed at the Balderson
+party, and the next moment the cow-men looked into the barrels of the
+surveyors' three revolvers, and were told that if they budged a hair
+they would be killed. Balderson then disarmed the cow-men, and, after
+passing around the drinks, hired the outfit as policemen for the town
+of Look Out. It is said that he has given them two thousand dollars
+apiece in Irrigation Company stock, has promised to defend them if they
+are charged with the murder of the two surveyors, and has given each
+cow-man a deed to a corner lot on the public square of the prospective
+Balderson town. Deputy Sheriff Crosby from this place went over to
+arrest Balderson, charged with killing D. V. Sherman of the Jingle-bob
+property, and, after asking for his warrant, Balderson took it, put it
+in his pocket, advised the deputy to hurry home, and, if he found any
+coyotes or jack-rabbits that couldn't get out of his way fast enough,
+not to stop to kill them, but shoo them off the trail and save time."
+
+They say in Colorado that Balderson became an irrigation king. It is
+certain that he raised half a million dollars in New York for his dam
+and ditches. He built the "Look Out Opera House," and decorated it in
+gilded stucco and with red plush two inches deep. Morrison contributed
+this anecdote to the office Legend of Balderson: "He was in Florida in
+his private car when they finished the opera house. When he came back
+and saw a plaster bust of Shakespeare over the proscenium arch, he waved
+his cane pompously and exclaimed: 'Take her down! Bill Shakespeare is
+all right for the effete East, but out here he ain't deuce high with the
+little corporal of Company B.'" So in Shakespeare's niche is a
+plaster-cast of a soldier's face with the slouch-cap, the military
+moustache, and the goatee of great pride, after the picture that once
+adorned the columns of the _Statesman_. For a time they talked of
+Balderson for United States Senator, and, at the laying of the
+corner-stone of the capitol, the Denver papers spoke of the masterly
+oration of former Governor Balderson of Kansas, whose marvellous
+word-painting of the Battle of Look Out Mountain held the vast audience
+spellbound for an hour. A few months later a cloudburst carried away the
+Big Burro dam, and times went bad, and the stockholders in Balderson's
+company, who would have rebuilt the dam, could not find Balderson when
+they needed him, and certain creditors of the company, hitherto unknown,
+appeared, and Balderson faded away like a morning star.
+
+Here is a part of the narrative that George Kirwin got from Joe
+Nevison: Joe began with the coal strike at Castle Rock, Wyoming, in
+1893, when the strikers massed on Flat Top Mountain and day after day
+went through their drill. He told a highly dramatic story of the
+stoutish little man of fifty-five, with a fat, smooth-shaven face, who
+pounded that horde of angry men into some semblance of military order.
+All day the little man, in his shrunken seersucker coat and greasy white
+hat, would bark orders at the men, march and counter-march them, and go
+through the manual of arms, backward and forward and seven hands round.
+When the battle with the militia came, the strikers charged down Flat
+Top and fought bravely. The little man in the seersucker coat stayed
+with them, snapping orders at them, damning them, coaxing them. And when
+the deputies gathered up the strikers for the trial in court two months
+later, the little man was still there. He was prospecting on a
+gopher-hole somewhere up in the hills, and was trying to get his wildcat
+mine listed on the Salt Lake Mining Exchange. No one gave bond for the
+little man in the seersucker coat, and he went to jail. He was
+Balderson. He seemed to give little heed to the trial, and sat with the
+strikers rather stolidly. Venire after venire of jurymen was gone
+through. At last an old man wearing a Loyal Legion button went into the
+jury-box. Balderson saw him; they exchanged recognising glances, and
+Balderson turned scarlet and looked away quickly. He nudged an attorney
+for the strikers and said: "Keep him, whatever you do."
+
+After the evidence was all in and the attorneys were about to make their
+arguments, Balderson and one of the lawyers for the strikers were alone.
+
+"They told me to take the part about you, Balderson; you were in the
+Union Army, weren't you?"
+
+Balderson looked at the floor and said:
+
+"Yes; but don't say anything about it."
+
+The lawyer, who knew Balderson's record, was astonished. He had made his
+whole speech up on the line that Balderson as an old soldier would
+appeal to the sympathies of the jury. Over and over the lawyer pressed
+Balderson to know why nothing should be said of his soldier record, and
+finally in exasperation the lawyer broke out:
+
+"Lookee here, Baldy; you're too old to get coy. I'm going to make my
+speech as I've mapped it out, soldier racket and all. I guess you've
+taken enough trips up Look Out Mountain to get used to the altitude by
+this time."
+
+The lawyer started away, but Balderson grabbed him and pulled him back.
+"Don't do it; for God's sake, don't do it! There's a fellow on that jury
+that's a G. A. R. man; we were soldiers together; he knows me from away
+back. Talk of Iowy; talk of Kansas; talk of anything on God's green
+earth, but don't talk soldier. That man would wade through hell for me
+neck deep on any other basis than that." Balderson's voice was
+quivering. He added: "But don't talk soldier." Balderson slumped, with
+his head in his hands. The attorney snapped at him:
+
+"Weren't you a soldier?"
+
+"Yes; oh, yes," Balderson sighed.
+
+"Didn't you go up Look Out Mountain?"
+
+"Oh, yes--that, too."
+
+There was a silence between the men. The lawyer rasped it with, "Well,
+what then?"
+
+"Well--well," and the tousled little man sighed so deeply his sigh was
+almost a sob, and lifted up the eyes of a whipped dog to the
+lawyer's--"after that I got in the commissary department--and--and--was
+dishonourably discharged." He rubbed his eyes with his fingers a moment
+and then grinned foxily: "Ain't that enough?"
+
+Roosevelt is a mining-camp in Idaho. It is five days from a morning
+paper, and the camp is new. It is a log town with one street and no
+society, except such as may gather around the big box-stove at Johnnie
+Conyer's saloon. A number of ladies and two women lived in the camp, a
+few tin-horn "gents," and about two hundred men. It is a seven months'
+snow-camp, where men take their drama canned in the phonograph, their
+food canned, their medicine all out of one bottle, and their morals
+"without benefit of clergy." Across the front of one of the
+canvas-covered log store-rooms that fringe the single street a cloth
+sign is stretched. It reads, "Department Store," and inside a dance
+hall, a saloon, and a gambling-place are operating. A few years ago,
+when Colonel Alphabetical Morrison was travelling through the West on a
+land deal for John Markley, business took him to Roosevelt, and he found
+Balderson, grey of beard, shiny of pate, with unkempt, ratty back hair;
+he was watery-eyed, and his red-veined skin had slipped down from his
+once fat face into draperies over his lean neck and jowls. He was in the
+dealer's chair, running the game.
+
+The statute of limitations had covered all his Kansas misdeeds, and he
+nodded affably as his old acquaintance came in. Later in the day the two
+men went to Mrs. Smith's boarding-house to take a social bite. They sat
+in front of the log-house in the evening, Balderson mellow and
+reminiscent.
+
+"Seems to me this way: I ain't cut out for society as it is organised. I
+do all right in a town until the piano begins to get respectable and the
+rules of order are tucked snugly inside the decalogue, then I slip my
+belt, and my running gear doesn't track. I get a few grand and noble
+thoughts, freeze to 'em, and later find that the hereditary
+appurtenances thereunto appertaining are private property of someone
+else, and there is nothing for me to do but to stand a lawsuit or
+vanish. I have had bad luck, lost my money, lost my friends, lost my
+conscience, lost everything, pretty near"--and here he turned his watery
+eyes on his friend with a saw-toothed smile and shook his depleted
+abdomen, that had been worn off climbing many hills--"I've lost
+everything, pretty near, but my vermiform appendix and my table of
+contents, and as like as not I'll find some feller's got them
+copyrighted." He heaved a great sigh and resumed, "I suppose I could 'a'
+stood it all well enough if I had just had some sort of faith, some
+religious consolation, some creed, or god, or something." He sighed
+again, and then leered up: "But, you know--I'm so damned skeptic!"
+
+Last spring, according to the Boise, Idaho, papers, "Governor" Balderson
+and two other old soldiers celebrated Memorial Day in Roosevelt. They
+got a muslin flag as big as the flap of a shirt, from heaven knows
+where, and in the streets of Roosevelt they hoisted this flag on the
+highest pine pole in all the Salmon River Mountains. There were
+elaborate ceremonies, and to the miners and gamblers and keepers of
+wildcat mines in the mountains assembled, "Governor" Balderson told
+eloquently of the Battle of Look Out Mountain. And Colonel Morrison who
+read the account smiled appreciatively and pointed out to us the exact
+stage in the proceedings where Balderson demanded to know who carried
+the flag. There was long and tumultuous applause at the climax.
+
+We also read in the Boise papers that at the fall election in Roosevelt
+they made Balderson justice of the peace, which, as Colonel Morrison
+explained, was a purely honorary office in a community where every man
+is his own court and constable and jury and judge; but the Colonel said
+that Balderson was proud of official distinction, and probably levied
+mild tribute from the people who indulged in riotous living, by
+compelling them to buy drink-checks redeemable only at his department
+store.
+
+It was from the Boise papers that we had the final word from Balderson.
+A message came to Roosevelt this spring that an outfit, thirty miles
+away at the head of Profile Creek, was sick and starving. It was a
+dangerous trip to the rescue, for snowslides were booming on every
+southern hillside. Death would literally play tag with the man who dared
+to hit the trail for Profile. Balderson did not hesitate a moment, but
+filled his pack with provisions, put a marked deck and some loaded dice
+in his pocket, and waved Roosevelt a cheery good-by as he struck out
+over the three logs that bridge Mule Creek. He was bundled to the chin
+in warm coats, and on his way met Hot Foot Higgins coming in from
+Profile. Balderson seems to have given Higgins his warmest coat before
+the snow-slide hit them. It killed them both. Hot Foot died instantly,
+but Balderson must have lived many hours, for the snow about his body
+was melted and in his pocket they found Hot Foot's watch.
+
+They buried him near the trail where they found him, and, stuck in a
+candle-box, over the heap of stones above him, flutters lonesomely in
+the desolation of the mountain-side the little muslin rag that was once
+a flag. They call the hill on which he sleeps "Look Out Mountain."
+
+Late this spring the mail brought to the office of the Boise
+_Capital-News_ a battered woodcut half a century old. When the _News_
+came to our office we saw the familiar soldier's face in profile, with
+a cap drawn over the eyes, with a waving moustache and a fierce goatee,
+and across the shoulders of the figure a military cape thrown back
+jauntily. With the old cut in the Boise paper was an article which the
+editor says in a note was written in a young woman's angular
+handwriting, done in pencil on wrapping-paper. The article told, in
+spelling unspeakable, of the greatness and goodness of "Ex-Governor
+Balderson of Kansas." It related that he was ever the "friend to the
+friendless"; that, "with all his worldly honours, he was modest and
+unassuming"; that "he had his faults, as who of us have not," but that
+he was "honest, tried and true"; and the memorial closed with the words:
+"Heaven's angel gained is Roosevelt's hero lost."
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+The Passing of Priscilla Winthrop
+
+
+What a dreary waste life in our office must have been before Miss
+Larrabee came to us to edit a society page for the paper! To be sure we
+had known in a vague way that there were lines of social cleavage in the
+town; that there were whist clubs and dancing clubs and women's clubs,
+and in a general way that the women who composed these clubs made up our
+best society, and that those benighted souls beyond the pale of these
+clubs were out of the caste. We knew that certain persons whose names
+were always handed in on the lists of guests at parties were what we
+called "howling swells." But it remained for Miss Larrabee to sort out
+ten or a dozen of these "howling swells" who belonged to the strictest
+social caste in town, and call them "howling dervishes." Incidentally it
+may be said that both Miss Larrabee and her mother were dervishes, but
+that did not prevent her from making sport of them. From Miss Larrabee
+we learned that the high priestess of the howling dervishes of our
+society was Mrs. Mortimer Conklin, known by the sisterhood of the mosque
+as Priscilla Winthrop. We in our office had never heard her called by
+that name, but Miss Larrabee explained, rather elaborately, that unless
+one was permitted to speak of Mrs. Conklin thus, one was quite beyond
+the hope of a social heaven.
+
+In the first place, Priscilla Winthrop was Mrs. Conklin's maiden name;
+in the second place, it links her with the Colonial Puritan stock of
+which she is so justly proud--being scornful of mere Daughters of the
+Revolution--and finally, though Mrs. Conklin is a grandmother, her
+maiden name seems to preserve the sweet, vague illusion of girlhood
+which Mrs. Conklin always carries about her like the shadow of a dream.
+And Miss Larrabee punctuated this with a wink which we took to be a
+quotation mark, and she went on with her work. So we knew we had been
+listening to the language used in the temple.
+
+Our town was organised fifty years ago by Abolitionists from New
+England, and twenty years ago, when Alphabetical Morrison was getting
+out one of the numerous boom editions of his real estate circular, he
+printed an historical article therein in which he said that Priscilla
+Winthrop was the first white child born on the town site. Her father was
+territorial judge, afterward member of the State Senate, and after ten
+years spent in mining in the far West, died in the seventies, the
+richest man in the State. It was known that he left Priscilla, his only
+child, half a million dollars in government bonds.
+
+She was the first girl in our town to go away to school. Naturally, she
+went to Oberlin, famous in those days for admitting coloured students.
+But she finished her education at Vassar, and came back so much of a
+young lady that the town could hardly contain her. She married Mortimer
+Conklin, took him to the Centennial on a wedding trip, came home,
+rebuilt her father's house, covering it with towers and minarets and
+steeples, and scroll-saw fretwork, and christened it Winthrop Hall. She
+erected a store building on Main Street, that Mortimer might have a
+luxurious office on the second floor, and then settled down to the
+serious business of life, which was building up a titled aristocracy in
+a Kansas town.
+
+The Conklin children were never sent to the public schools, but had a
+governess, yet Mortimer Conklin, who was always alert for the call,
+could not understand why the people never summoned him to any office of
+honour or trust. He kept his brass signboard polished, went to his
+office punctually every morning at ten o'clock, and returned home to
+dinner at five, and made clients wait ten minutes in the outer office
+before they could see him--at least so both of them say, and there were
+no others in all the years. He shaved every day, wore a frock-coat and a
+high hat to church--where for ten years he was the only male member of
+the Episcopalian flock--and Mrs. Conklin told the women that altogether
+he was a credit to his sex and his family--a remark which was passed
+about ribaldly in town for a dozen years, though Mortimer Conklin never
+knew that he was the subject of a town joke. Once he rebuked a man in
+the barber shop for speaking of feminine extravagance, and told the shop
+that he did not stint his wife, that when she asked him for money he
+always gave it to her without question, and that if she wanted a dress
+he told her to buy it and send the bill to him. And we are such a polite
+people that no one in the crowded shop laughed--until Mortimer Conklin
+went out.
+
+Of course at the office we have known for twenty-five years what the men
+thought of Mortimer, but not until Miss Larrabee joined the force did we
+know that among the women Mrs. Conklin was considered an oracle. Miss
+Larrabee said that her mother has a legend that when Priscilla Winthrop
+brought home from Boston the first sealskin sacque ever worn in town she
+gave a party for it, and it lay in its box on the big walnut bureau in
+the spare room of the Conklin mansion in solemn state, while
+seventy-five women salaamed to it. After that Priscilla Winthrop was the
+town authority on sealskins. When any member of the town nobility had a
+new sealskin, she took it humbly to Priscilla Winthrop to pass judgment
+upon it. If Priscilla said it was London-dyed, its owner pranced away
+on clouds of glory; but if she said it was American-dyed, its owner
+crawled away in shame, and when one admired the disgraced garment, the
+martyred owner smiled with resigned sweetness and said humbly: "Yes--but
+it's only American-dyed, you know."
+
+No dervish ever questioned the curse of the priestess. The only time a
+revolt was imminent was in the autumn of 1884 when the Conklins returned
+from their season at Duxbury, Massachusetts, and Mrs. Conklin took up
+the carpets in her house, heroically sold all of them at the second-hand
+store, put in new waxed floors and spread down rugs. The town uprose and
+hooted; the outcasts and barbarians in the Methodist and Baptist
+Missionary Societies rocked the Conklin home with their merriment, and
+ten dervishes with set faces bravely met the onslaughts of the savages;
+but among themselves in hushed whispers, behind locked doors, the
+faithful wondered if there was not a mistake some place. However, when
+Priscilla Winthrop assured them that in all the best homes in Boston
+rugs were replacing carpets, their souls were at peace.
+
+All this time we at the office knew nothing of what was going on. We
+knew that the Conklins devoted considerable time to society; but
+Alphabetical Morrison explained that by calling attention to the fact
+that Mrs. Conklin had prematurely grey hair. He said a woman with
+prematurely grey hair was as sure to be a social leader as a spotted
+horse is to join a circus. But now we know that Colonel Morrison's view
+was a superficial one, for he was probably deterred from going deeper
+into the subject by his dislike for Mortimer Conklin, who invested a
+quarter of a million dollars of the Winthrop fortune in the Wichita
+boom, and lost it. Colonel Morrison naturally thought as long as Conklin
+was going to lose that money he could have lost it just as well at home
+in the "Queen City of the Prairies," giving the Colonel a chance to win.
+And when Conklin, protecting his equities in Wichita, sent a hundred
+thousand dollars of good money after the quarter million of bad money,
+Colonel Morrison's grief could find no words; though he did find
+language for his wrath. When the Conklins draped their Oriental rugs for
+airing every Saturday over the veranda and portico railings of the
+house front, Colonel Morrison accused the Conklins of hanging out their
+stamp collection to let the neighbours see it. This was the only side of
+the rug question we ever heard in our office until Miss Larrabee came;
+then she told us that one of the first requirements of a howling dervish
+was to be able to quote from Priscilla Winthrop's Rug book from memory.
+The Rug book, the China book and the Old Furniture book were the three
+sacred scrolls of the sect.
+
+All this was news to us. However, through Colonel Morrison, we had
+received many years ago another sidelight on the social status of the
+Conklins. It came out in this way: Time honoured custom in our town
+allows the children of a home where there is an outbreak of social
+revelry, whether a church festival or a meeting of the Cold-Nosed Whist
+Club, to line up with the neighbour children on the back stoop or in the
+kitchen, like human vultures, waiting to lick the ice-cream freezer and
+to devour the bits of cake and chicken salad that are left over. Colonel
+Morrison told us that no child was ever known to adorn the back yard of
+the Conklin home while a social cataclysm was going on, but that when
+Mrs. Morrison entertained the Ladies' Literary League, children from the
+holy Conklin family went home from his back porch with their faces
+smeared with chicken croquettes and their hands sticky with jellycake.
+
+This story never gained general circulation in town, but even if it had
+been known of all men it would not have shaken the faith of the
+devotees. For they did not smile when Priscilla Winthrop began to refer
+to old Frank Hagan, who came to milk the Conklin cow and curry the
+Conklin horse, as "Francois, the man," or to call the girl who did the
+cooking and general housework "Cosette, the maid," though every one of
+the dozen other women in town whom "Cosette, the maid" had worked for
+knew that her name was Fanny Ropes. And shortly after that the homes of
+the rich and the great over on the hill above Main Street began to fill
+with Lisettes and Nanons and Fanchons, and Mrs. Julia Neal Worthington
+called her girl "Grisette," explaining that they had always had a
+Grisette about the house since her mother first went to housekeeping in
+Peoria, Illinois, and it sounded so natural to hear the name that they
+always gave it to a new servant. This story came to the office through
+the Young Prince, who chuckled over it during the whole hour he consumed
+in writing Ezra Worthington's obituary.
+
+Miss Larrabee says that the death of Ezra Worthington marks such a
+distinct epoch in the social life of the town that we must set down
+here--even if the narrative of the Conklins halts for a moment--how the
+Worthingtons rose and flourished. Julia Neal, eldest daughter of Thomas
+Neal--who lost the "O" before his name somewhere between the docks of
+Dublin and the west bank of the Missouri River--was for ten years
+principal of the ward school in that part of our town known as
+"Arkansaw," where her term of service is still remembered as the "reign
+of terror." It was said of her then that she could whip any man in the
+ward--and would do it if he gave her a chance. The same manner which
+made the neighbours complain that Julia Neal carried her head too high,
+later in life, when she had money to back it, gave her what the women of
+the State Federation called a "regal air." In her early thirties she
+married Ezra Worthington, bachelor, twenty year her senior. Ezra
+Worthington was at that time, had been for twenty years before, and
+continued to be until his death, proprietor of the Worthington Poultry
+and Produce Commission Company. He was owner of the stock-yards,
+president of the Worthington State Bank, vice-president, treasurer and
+general manager of the Worthington Mercantile Company, and owner of five
+brick buildings on Main Street. He bought one suit of clothes every five
+years whether he needed it or not, never let go of a dollar until the
+Goddess of Liberty on it was black in the face, and died rated "As
+$350,000" by all the commercial agencies in the country. And the first
+thing Mrs. Worthington did after the funeral was to telephone to the
+bank and ask them to send her a hundred dollars.
+
+The next important thing she did was to put a heavy, immovable granite
+monument over the deceased so that he would not be restless, and then
+she built what is known in our town as the Worthington Palace. It makes
+the Markley mansion which cost $25,000 look like a barn. The
+Worthingtons in the lifetime of Ezra had ventured no further into the
+social whirl of the town than to entertain the new Presbyterian preacher
+at tea, and to lend their lawn to the King's Daughters for a social,
+sending a bill in to the society for the eggs used in the coffee and the
+gasoline used in heating it.
+
+To the howling dervishes who surrounded Priscilla Winthrop the
+Worthingtons were as mere Christian dogs. It was not until three years
+after Ezra Worthington's death that the glow of the rising Worthington
+sun began to be seen in the Winthrop mosque. During those three years
+Mrs. Worthington had bought and read four different sets of the best
+hundred books, had consumed the Chautauqua course, had prepared and
+delivered for the Social Science Club, which she organised, five papers
+ranging in subject from the home life of Rameses I., through a Survey of
+the Forces Dominating Michael Angelo, to the Influence of Esoteric
+Buddhism on Modern Political Tendencies. More than that, she had been
+elected president of the City Federation of Clubs, and, being a delegate
+to the National Federation from the State, was talked of for the State
+Federation Presidency. When the State Federation met in our town, Mrs.
+Worthington gave a reception for the delegates in the Worthington
+Palace, a feature of which was a concert by a Kansas City organist on
+the new pipe-organ which she had erected in the music-room of her house,
+and despite the fact that the devotees of the Priscilla shrine said that
+the crowd was distinctly mixed and not at all representative of our best
+social grace and elegance, there is no question but that Mrs.
+Worthington's reception made a strong impression upon the best local
+society. The fact that, as Miss Larrabee said, "Priscilla Winthrop was
+so nice about it," also may be regarded as ominous. But the women who
+lent Mrs. Worthington the spoons and forks for the occasion were
+delighted, and formed a phalanx about her, which made up in numbers what
+it might have lacked in distinction. Yet while Mrs. Worthington was in
+Europe the faithful routed the phalanx, and Mrs. Conklin returned from
+her summer in Duxbury with half a carload of old furniture from Harrison
+Sampson's shop and gave a talk to the priestesses of the inner temple
+on "Heppelwhite in New England."
+
+Miss Larrabee reported the affair for our paper, giving the small list
+of guests and the long line of refreshments--which included
+alligator-pear salad, right out of the Smart Set Cook Book. Moreover,
+when Jefferson appeared in Topeka that fall, Priscilla Winthrop, who had
+met him through some of her Duxbury friends in Boston, invited him to
+run down for a luncheon with her and the members of the royal family who
+surrounded her. It was the proud boast of the defenders of the Winthrop
+faith in town that week, that though twenty-four people sat down to the
+table, not only did all the men wear frock-coats--not only did Uncle
+Charlie Haskins of String Town wear the old Winthrop butler's livery
+without a wrinkle in it, and with only the faint odour of mothballs to
+mingle with the perfume of the roses--but (and here the voices of the
+followers of the prophet dropped in awe) not a single knife or fork or
+spoon or napkin was borrowed! After that, when any of the sisterhood had
+occasion to speak of the absent Mrs. Worthington, whose house was
+filled with new mahogany and brass furniture, they referred to her as
+the Duchess of Grand Rapids, which gave them much comfort.
+
+But joy is short-lived. When Mrs. Worthington came back from Europe and
+opened her house to the City Federation, and gave a coloured
+lantern-slide lecture on "An evening with the Old Masters," serving
+punch from her own cut-glass punch bowl instead of renting the
+hand-painted crockery bowl of the queensware store, the old dull pain
+came back into the hearts of the dwellers in the inner circle. Then just
+in the nick of time Mrs. Conklin went to Kansas City and was operated on
+for appendicitis. She came back pale and interesting, and gave her club
+a paper called "Hospital Days," fragrant with iodoform and Henley's
+poems. Miss Larrabee told us that it was almost as pleasant as an
+operation on one's self to hear Mrs. Conklin tell about hers. And they
+thought it was rather brutal--so Miss Larrabee afterward told us--when
+Mrs. Worthington went to the hospital one month, and gave her famous
+Delsarte lecture course the next month, and explained to the women that
+if she wasn't as heavy as she used to be it was because she had had
+everything cut out of her below the windpipe. It seemed to the temple
+priestesses that, considering what a serious time poor dear Priscilla
+Winthrop had gone through, Mrs. Worthington was making light of serious
+things.
+
+There is no doubt that the formal rebellion of Mrs. Worthington, Duchess
+of Grand Rapids, and known of the town's nobility as the Pretender,
+began with the hospital contest. The Pretender planted her siege-guns
+before the walls of the temple of the priestess, and prepared for
+business. The first manoeuvre made by the beleaguered one was to give a
+luncheon in the mosque, at which, though it was midwinter, fresh
+tomatoes and fresh strawberries were served, and a real authoress from
+Boston talked upon John Fiske's philosophy and, in the presence of the
+admiring guests, made a new kind of salad dressing for the fresh lettuce
+and tomatoes. Thirty women who watched her forgot what John Fiske's
+theory of the cosmos is, and thirty husbands who afterward ate that
+salad dressing have learned to suffer and be strong. But that salad
+dressing undermined the faith of thirty mere men--raw outlanders to be
+sure--in the social omniscience of Priscilla Winthrop. Of course they
+did not see it made; the spell of the enchantress was not over them; but
+in their homes they maintained that if Priscilla Winthrop didn't know
+any more about cosmic philosophy than to pay a woman forty dollars to
+make a salad dressing like that--and the whole town knows that was the
+price--the vaunted town of Duxbury, Massachusetts, with its old
+furniture and new culture, which Priscilla spoke of in such repressed
+ecstasy, is probably no better than Manitou, Colorado, where they get
+their Indian goods from Buffalo, New York.
+
+Such is the perverse reasoning of man. And Mrs. Worthington, having
+lived with considerable of a man for fifteen years, hearing echoes of
+this sedition, attacked the fortification of the faithful on its weakest
+side. She invited the thirty seditious husbands with their wives to a
+beefsteak dinner, where she heaped their plates with planked sirloin,
+garnished the sirloin with big, fat, fresh mushrooms, and topped off the
+meal with a mince pie of her own concoction, which would make a man
+leave home to follow it. She passed cigars at the table, and after the
+guests went into the music-room ten old men with ten old fiddles
+appeared and contested with old-fashioned tunes for a prize, after which
+the company danced four quadrilles and a Virginia reel. The men threw
+down their arms going home and went over in a body to the Pretender. But
+in a social conflict men are mere non-combatants, and their surrender
+did not seriously injure the cause that they deserted.
+
+The war went on without abatement. During the spring that followed the
+winter of the beefsteak dinner many skirmishes, minor engagements,
+ambushes and midnight raids occurred. But the contest was not decisive.
+For purposes of military drill, the defenders of the Winthrop faith
+formed themselves into a Whist Club. _The_ Whist Club they called it,
+just as they spoke of Priscilla Winthrop's gowns as "the black and white
+one," "the blue brocade," "the white china silk," as if no other black
+and white or blue brocade or white china silk gowns had been created in
+the world before and could not be made again by human hands. So, in the
+language of the inner sanctuary, there was "The Whist Club," to the
+exclusion of all other possible human Whist Clubs under the stars. When
+summer came the Whist Club fled as birds to the mountains--save
+Priscilla Winthrop, who went to Duxbury, and came home with a brass
+warming-pan and a set of Royal Copenhagen china that were set up as holy
+objects in the temple.
+
+But Mrs. Worthington went to the National Federation of Women's Clubs,
+made the acquaintance of the women there who wore clothes from Paris,
+began tracing her ancestry back to the Maryland Calverts--on her
+mother's side of the house--brought home a membership in the Daughters
+of the Revolution, the Colonial Dames and a society which referred to
+Charles I. as "Charles Martyr," claimed a Stuart as the rightful king of
+England, affecting to scorn the impudence of King Edward in sitting on
+another's throne. More than this, Mrs. Worthington had secured the
+promise of Mrs. Ellen Vail Montgomery, Vice-President of the National
+Federation, to visit Cliff Crest, as Mrs. Worthington called the
+Worthington mansion, and she turned up her nose at those who worshipped
+under the towers, turrets and minarets of the Conklin mosque, and played
+the hose of her ridicule on their outer wall that she might have it
+spotless for a target when she got ready to raze it with her big gun.
+
+The week that Ellen Vail Montgomery came to town was a busy one for Miss
+Larrabee. We turned over the whole fourth page of the paper to her for a
+daily society page, and charged the Bee Hive and the White Front Dry
+Goods store people double rates to put their special sale advertisements
+on that page while the "National Vice," as the Young Prince called her,
+was in town. For the "National Vice" brought the State President and two
+State Vices down, also four District Presidents and six District Vices,
+who, as Miss Larrabee said, were monsters "of so frightful a mien, that
+to be hated need but to be seen." The entire delegation of visiting
+stateswomen--Vices and Virtues and Beatitudes as we called them--were
+entertained by Mrs. Worthington at Cliff Crest, and there was so much
+Federation politics going on in our town that the New York _Sun_ took
+five hundred words about it by wire, and Colonel Alphabetical Morrison
+said that with all those dressed-up women about he felt as though he was
+living in a Sunday supplement.
+
+The third day of the ghost-dance at Cliff Crest was to be the day of the
+big event--as the office parlance had it. The ceremonies began at
+sunrise with a breakfast to which half a dozen of the captains and kings
+of the besieging host of the Pretender were bidden. It seems to have
+been a modest orgy, with nothing more astonishing than a new gold-band
+china set to dishearten the enemy. By ten o'clock Priscilla Winthrop and
+the Whist Club had recovered from that; but they had been asked to the
+luncheon--the star feature of the week's round of gayety. It is just as
+well to be frank, and say that they went with fear and trembling. Panic
+and terror were in their ranks, for they knew a crisis was at hand. It
+came when they were "ushered into the dining-hall," as our paper so
+grandly put it, and saw in the great oak-beamed room a table laid on the
+polished bare wood--a table laid for forty-eight guests, with a doily
+for every plate, and every glass, and every salt-cellar, and--here the
+mosque fell on the heads of the howling dervishes--forty-eight
+soup-spoons, forty-eight silver-handled knives and forks; forty-eight
+butter-spreaders, forty-eight spoons, forty-eight salad forks,
+forty-eight ice-cream spoons, forty-eight coffee spoons. Little did it
+avail the beleaguered party to peep slyly under the spoon-handles--the
+word "Sterling" was there, and, more than that, a large, severely plain
+"W" with a crest glared up at them from every piece of silver. The
+service had not been rented. They knew their case was hopeless. And so
+they ate in peace.
+
+When the meal was over it was Mrs. Ellen Vail Montgomery, in her
+thousand-dollar gown, worshipped by the eyes of forty-eight women, who
+put her arm about Priscilla Winthrop and led her into the conservatory,
+where they had "a dear, sweet quarter of an hour," as Mrs. Montgomery
+afterward told her hostess. In that dear, sweet quarter of an hour
+Priscilla Winthrop Conklin unbuckled her social sword and handed it to
+the conqueror, in that she agreed absolutely with Mrs. Montgomery that
+Mrs. Worthington was "perfectly lovely," that she was "delighted to be
+of any service" to Mrs. Worthington; that Mrs. Conklin "was sure no one
+else in our town was so admirably qualified for "National Vice" as Mrs.
+Worthington," and that "it would be such a privilege" for Mrs. Conklin
+to suggest Mrs. Worthington's name for the office. And then Mrs.
+Montgomery, "National Vice" and former State Secretary for Vermont of
+the Colonial Dames, kissed Priscilla Winthrop and they came forth
+wet-eyed and radiant, holding each other's hands. When the company had
+been hushed by the magic of a State Vice and two District Virtues,
+Priscilla Winthrop rose and in the sweetest Kansas Bostonese told the
+ladies that she thought this an eminently fitting place to let the
+visiting ladies know how dearly our town esteems its most distinguished
+townswoman, Mrs. Julia Neal Worthington, and that entirely without her
+solicitation, indeed quite without her knowledge, the women of our
+town--and she hoped of our beloved State--were ready now to announce
+that they were unanimous in their wish that Mrs. Worthington should be
+National Vice-President of the Federation of Women's Clubs, and that
+she, the speaker, had entered the contest with her whole soul to bring
+this end to pass. Then there was hand-clapping and handkerchief waving
+and some tears, and a little good, honest Irish hugging, and in the
+twilight two score of women filed down through the formal garden of
+Cliff Crest and walked by twos and threes into the town.
+
+There was the usual clatter of home-going wagons; lights winked out of
+kitchen windows; the tinkle of distant cow-bells was in the air; on Main
+Street the commerce of the town was gently ebbing, and man and nature
+seemed utterly oblivious of the great event that had happened. The
+course of human events was not changed; the great world rolled on, while
+Priscilla Winthrop went home to a broken shrine to sit among the
+potsherds.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+"And Yet a Fool"
+
+
+The exchanges that come to a country newspaper like ours become familiar
+friends as the years pass. One who reads these papers regularly comes to
+know them even in their wrappers, though to an unpracticed eye the
+wrappers seem much alike. But when he has been poking his thumb through
+the paper husks in a certain pile every morning for a score of years, he
+knows by some sort of prescience when a new paper appears; and, when the
+pile looks odd to him, he goes hunting for the stranger and is not happy
+until he has found it.
+
+One morning this spring the stranger stuck its head from the bottom of
+the exchange pile, and when we had glanced at the handwriting of the
+address and at the one-cent stamp on the cover we knew it had been
+mailed to us by someone besides the publisher. For the newspaper "hand"
+is as definite a form of writing as the legal hand or the doctor's. The
+paper proved to be an Arizona newspaper full of saloon advertising,
+restaurant cards, church and school meeting notices, local items about
+the sawmill and the woman's club, land notices and paid items from wool
+dealers. On the local page in the midst of a circle of red ink was the
+announcement of the death of Horace P. Sampson. Every month we get
+notices like this, of the deaths of old settlers who have gone to the
+ends of the earth, but this notice was peculiar in that it said:
+
+"One year ago our lamented townsman deposited with the firm of Cross &
+Kurtz, the popular undertakers and dealers in Indian goods and general
+merchandise, $100 to cover his funeral expenses, and another hundred to
+provide that a huge boulder be rolled over his grave on which he desired
+the following unusual inscription: '_Horace P. Sampson, Born Dec. 6,
+1840, and died ----." And is not this a rare fellow, my lord? He's good
+at anything and yet a fool._"'"
+
+We handed the paper to Alphabetical Morrison, who happened to be in the
+office at the time, pawing through the discarded exchanges in the
+waste-basket, looking for his New York _Sun_, and, after Colonel
+Morrison had read the item, he began drumming with his finger-nails on
+the chair-seat between his knees. His eyes were full of dreams and no
+one disturbed him as he looked off into space. Finally he sighed:
+
+"And yet a fool--a motley fool! Poor old Samp--kept it up to the end! I
+take it from the guarded way the paper refers to his faults, 'as who of
+us have not,' that he died of the tremens or something like that." The
+Colonel paused and smiled just perceptibly, and went on: "Yet I see that
+he was a good fellow to the end. I notice that the Shriners and the Elks
+and the Eagles and the Hoo-hoos buried him. Nary an insurance order in
+his! Poor old Samp; he certainly went all the gaits!"
+
+We suggested that Colonel Morrison write something about the deceased
+for the paper, but though the Colonel admitted that he knew Sampson
+"like a book," there was no persuading Morrison to write the obituary.
+
+"After some urging and by way of compromise," he said, "I'm perfectly
+willing to give you fellows the facts and let you fix up what you
+please."
+
+Because the reporters were both busy we called the stenographer, and had
+the Colonel's story taken down as he told it--to be rewritten into an
+obituary later. And it is what he said and not what we printed about
+Sampson that is worth putting down here. The Colonel took the big
+leather chair, locked his hands behind his head, and began:
+
+"Let me see. Samp was born, as he says, December 6, 1840, in Wisconsin,
+and came out to Kansas right after the war closed. He was going to
+college up there, and at the second call for troops he led the whole
+senior class into forming a company, and enlisted before graduation and
+fought from that time on till the close of the war. He was a captain, I
+think, but you never heard him called that. When he came here he'd been
+admitted to the bar and was a good lawyer--a mighty good lawyer for that
+time--and had more business 'n a bird pup with a gum-shoe. He was just a
+boy then, and, like all boys, he enjoyed a good time. He drank more or
+less in the army--they all did 's far as that goes--but he kept it up in
+a desultory way after he came here, as a sort of accessory to his main
+business of life, which was being a good fellow.
+
+"And he was a good fellow--an awful good fellow. We were all young then;
+there wasn't an old man on the town-site as I remember it. We use to
+load up the whole bunch and go hunting--closing up the stores and taking
+the girls along--and did not show up till midnight. Samp would always
+have a little something to take under his buggy-seat, and we would wet
+up and sing coming home, with the beds of the spring-wagons so full of
+prairie chickens and quail that they jolted out at every rut. Samp would
+always lead the singing--being just a mite more lubricated than the rest
+of us, and the girls thought he was all hunkey dorey--as they used to
+say.
+
+[Illustration: "He made a lot of money and blew it in"]
+
+"He made a lot of money and blew it in at Jim Thomas's saloon, buying
+drinks, playing stud poker, betting on quarter horses, and lending it
+out to fellows who helped him forget they'd borrowed it. And--say in
+two or three years, after the chicken-hunting set had married off, and
+begun in a way to settle down--Samp took up with the next set coming on;
+he married and got the prettiest girl in town. We always thought that he
+married only because he wanted to be a good fellow and did not wish to
+be impolite to the girl he'd paired off with in the first crowd. Still
+he didn't stay home nights, and once or twice a year--say, election or
+Fourth of July--he and a lot of other young fellows would go out and tip
+over all the board sidewalks in town, and paint funny signs on the store
+buildings and stack beer bottles on the preacher's front porch, and
+raise Ned generally. And the fellows of his age, who owned the stores
+and were in nights, would say to Samp when they saw him coming down
+about noon the next day:
+
+"'Go it when you're young Samp, for when you're old you can't.' And he
+would wink at 'em, give 'em ten dollars apiece for their damages and
+jolly his way down the street to his office.
+
+"Now, you mustn't get the idea that Samp was the town drunkard, for he
+never was. He was just a good fellow. When the second set of young
+fellows outgrew him and settled down, he picked up with the third, and
+his wife's brown alpaca began to be noticed more or less among the
+women. But Samp's practice didn't seem to fall off--it only changed. He
+didn't have so much real estate lawing and got more criminal practice.
+Gradually he became a criminal lawyer, and his fame for wit and
+eloquence extended over all the State. When a cowpuncher got in trouble
+his folks in the East always gave Samp a big fee to get the boy out, and
+he did it. When he went to any other county-seat besides our own to try
+a case, the fellows--and you know who the fellows are in a town--the
+fellows knew that while Samp was in town there would be something going
+on with 'fireworks in the evening.' For he was a great fellow for a good
+time, and the dining-room girls at the hotel used to giggle in the
+kitchen for a week after he was gone at the awful things he would say to
+'em. He knew more girls by their first names than a drummer."
+
+Colonel Morrison chuckled and crossed his fat legs at the ankles as he
+continued, after lighting the cigar we gave him:
+
+"Well, along in the late seventies we fellows that he started out with
+got to owning our own homes and getting on in the world. That was the
+time when Samp should have been grubbing at his law books, but nary a
+grub for him. He was playing horse for dear life. And right there the
+fellows all left him behind. Some were buying real estate for
+speculation; some running for office; some starting a bank; and others
+lending money at two per cent. a month, and leading in the
+prayer-meeting. So Samp kind of hitched up his ambition and took the
+slack out of his habits for a few months and went to the legislature.
+They say that he certainly did have a good time, though, when he got
+there. They remember that session yet up there, and call it the year of
+the great flood, for the nights they were filled with music, as the poet
+says, and from the best accounts we could get the days were devoid of
+ease also, and how Mrs. Sampson stood it the women never could find out,
+for, of course, she must have known all about it, though he wouldn't
+let her come near Topeka. He began to get pursy and red-faced, and was
+clicking it off with his fifth set of young fellows. It took a big slug
+of whisky to set off his oratory, but when he got it wound up he surely
+could pull the feathers out of the bird of freedom to beat scandalous.
+But as a stump speaker you weren't always sure he'd fill the engagement.
+He could make a jury blubber and clench its fists at the prosecuting
+attorney, yet he didn't claim to know much law, and he did turn over all
+the work in the Supreme Court to his partner, Charley Hedrick. Then,
+when Charley was practising before the Supreme Court and wasn't here to
+hold him down, Samp would get out and whoop it up with the boys, quote
+Shakespeare and make stump speeches on dry-goods boxes at midnight, and
+put his arms around old Marshal Furgeson's neck and tell him he was the
+blooming flower of chivalry. Also women made a fool of him--more or
+less.
+
+"Where was I?" asked Colonel Morrison of the stenographer when she had
+finished sharpening her pencil. "Oh, yes, along in the eighties came
+the boom, and Samp tried to get in it and make some money. He seems to
+have tried to catch up with us fellows of his age, and he began to
+plunge. He got in debt, and, when the boom broke, he was still living in
+a rented house with the rent ten months behind; his partnership was gone
+and his practice was cut down to joint-keepers, gamblers, and the
+farmers who hadn't heard the stories of his financial irregularities
+that were floating around town.
+
+"Yet his wife stuck to him, forever explaining to my wife that he would
+be all right when he settled down. But he continued to soak up a
+little--not much, but a little. He never was drunk in the daytime, but I
+remember there used to be mornings when his office smelled pretty sour.
+I had an office next to his for a while and he used to come in and talk
+to me a good deal. The young fellows around town whom he would like to
+run with were beginning to find him stupid, and the old fellows--except
+me--were busy and he had no one to loaf with. He decided, I remember,
+several times to brace up, and once he kept white shirts, cuffs and
+collars on for nearly a year. But when Harrison was elected, he filled
+up from his shoes to his hat and didn't go home for three days. One day
+after that, when he had gone back to his flannel shirts and dirty
+collars, he was sitting in my office looking at the fire in the big box
+stove when he broke out with:
+
+"'Alphabetical--what's the matter with me, anyway? This town sends men
+to Congress; it makes Supreme Court judges of others. It sends fellows
+to Kansas City as rich bankers. It makes big merchants out of grocery
+clerks. Fortune just naturally flirts with everyone in town--but never a
+wink do I get. I know and you know I'm smarter than those jays. I can
+teach your Congressman economics, and your Supreme judge law. I can
+think up more schemes than the banker, and can beat the merchant in any
+kind of a game he'll name. I don't lie and I don't steal and I ain't
+stuck up. What's the matter with me, anyway?'
+
+"And of course," mused Colonel Morrison as he relighted the butt of his
+cigar, "of course I had to lie to him and say I didn't know. But I did.
+We all knew. He was too much of a good fellow. His failure to get on
+bothered him a good deal, and one day he got roaring full and went up
+and down town telling people how smart he was. Then his pride left him,
+and he let his whiskers grow frowsy and used his vest for a spittoon,
+and his eyes watered too easily for a man still in his forties.
+
+"He went West a dozen years ago, about the time of Cleveland's second
+election, expecting to get a job in Arizona and grow up with the
+country. His wife was mighty happy, and she told our folks and the rest
+of the women that when Horace got away from his old associates in this
+town she knew that he would be all right. Poor Myrtle Kenwick, the
+prettiest girl you ever saw along in the sixties--and she was through
+here not long ago and stayed with my wife and the girls--a broken old
+woman, going back to her kinfolk in Iowa after she left him. Poor
+Myrtle! I wonder where she is. I see this Arizona paper doesn't say
+anything about her."
+
+Colonel Morrison read over the item again, and smiled as he proceeded:
+
+"But it does say that he occupied many places of honour and trust in
+his former home in Kansas, which seems to indicate that whisky made old
+Samp a liar as well as a loafer at last. My, my!" sighed the Colonel as
+he rose and put the paper on the desk. "My, my! What a treacherous
+serpent it is! It gave him a good time--literally a hell of a good time.
+And he was a good fellow--literally a damned good fellow--'damned from
+here to eternity,' as your man Kipling says. God gave him every talent.
+He might have been a respected, useful citizen; no honour was beyond
+him; but he put aside fame and worth and happiness to play with whisky.
+My Lord, just think of it!" exclaimed the Colonel as he reached for his
+hat and put up his glasses. "And this is how whisky served him: brought
+him to shame, wrecked his home, made his name a by-word, and lured him
+on and on to utter ruin by holding before him the phantom of a good
+time. What a pitiful, heart-breaking mocker it is!" He sighed a long
+sigh as he stood in the door looking up at the sky with his hands
+clasped behind him, and said half audibly as he went down the steps:
+"And whoso is deceived thereby is not wise--not wise. 'He's good at
+anything--and yet a fool'!"
+
+That was what Colonel Morrison gave the stenographer. What we made for
+the paper is entirely uninteresting and need not be printed here.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+A Kansas "Childe Roland"
+
+
+One of the wisest things ever said about the newspaper business was said
+by the late J. Sterling Morton, of Nebraska. He declared that a
+newspaper's enemies were its assets, and the newspaper's liabilities its
+friends. This is particularly true of a country newspaper. For instance,
+witness the ten-years' struggle of our own little paper to get rid of
+the word "Hon." as a prefix to the names of politicians. Everyone in
+town used to laugh at us for referring to whippersnapper statesmen as
+"Honourable"; because everyone in town knew that for the most part these
+whippersnappers were entirely dishonourable. It was easy enough to stop
+calling our enemies "Hon.," for they didn't dare to complain; but if we
+dropped the title even from so mangy a man as Abner Handy, within a week
+Charley Hedrick would happen into the office with twenty or thirty
+dollars' worth of legal printing, and after doing us so important a
+favour would pause before going out to say:
+
+"Boys, what you fellows got against Ab Handy?" And the ensuing dialogue
+would conclude from old Charley: "Well, I know--I know--but Ab likes it,
+and it really isn't much, and I know he's a fool about it; I don't care
+in my own case, but if you can do it I kind of wish you would. Ab's
+funny that way; he's never given up. He's like the fellow old Browning
+tells about who has 'august anticipations, of a dim splendour ever on
+before,' and when you fellows quit calling him 'Hon.' it makes him
+blue."
+
+And old Charley would grow purple with a big, wheezy, asthmatic laugh,
+and shake his great six-foot hulk and toddle out leaving us vanquished.
+For though the whole town reviles Abner Handy, Charley Hedrick still
+looks after him.
+
+It was said for thirty years that Handy did old Charley's dirty work in
+politics, but we knew many of the mean things that Handy did were
+unjustly charged to Hedrick. People in a small community are apt to put
+two and two together and make five. Much of the talk about the alliance
+between Hedrick and Handy is, of course, down-right slander; every
+lawyer who tries lawsuits for forty years in a country town is bound to
+make enemies of small-minded people, many of whom occupy large places in
+the community, and a small-minded man, believing that his enemy is a
+villain, makes up his facts to suit his belief, and then peddles his
+story. It is always just as well to discount the home stories on an old
+lawyer ninety-five per cent. if they are bad; and seventy per cent. if
+they are good--for he may have saved the fellow who is telling them from
+the penitentiary. But Abner Handy was never enough of a lawyer to come
+within this rule. Indeed they used to say that he was not admitted to
+the bar, at all, but that when he came to town, in 1871, he erased his
+dead brother's name on a law diploma and substituted his own. Still, he
+practised on the law--as Simon Mehronay used to say of Handy--and for
+twenty years carried an advertisement in Eastern farm journals
+proclaiming that his specialty was Kansas collections. He never took as
+a fee less than ninety-five per cent. of the amount he collected. That
+was the advantage which he had as a lawyer, which advantage inspired
+Colonel Alphabetical Morrison to proclaim that a lawyer's diploma is
+nothing but a license to steal; upon hearing which Charley Hedrick sent
+back to the Colonel the retort that it would take two legal diplomas
+working day and night to keep up with the Colonel's more or less honest
+endeavours.
+
+Now Ab Handy was a lean coyote, who was forever licking his bruises, and
+some ten years later he tried to run for the school board solely to get
+the Colonel's daughters dismissed as school-teachers. It was his boast
+that he never forgot a foe; and for twenty years after Hedrick saved
+Handy from going to jail for robbing a cattleman of a thousand dollars
+in "Red" Martin's gambling-room, the only good thing the town knew of
+Handy was that he never forgot a friend.
+
+During that twenty years whenever, to further his ends in a primary or
+in an election, Charley Hedrick needed the votes of the rough element
+that gathered about our little town, Abner Handy, card-sharper and
+jack-leg lawyer, would go forth into the byways and alleys and gather
+them in. For this service, when Hedrick carried the county--which was
+about four times out of five--Handy was rewarded by being put on the
+delegation to the State convention. Thus he made his beginning in State
+politics. The second time that he attended a State convention Handy
+swelled up in his Sunday clothes, and by reason of his slight
+acquaintance with the manipulators of State politics, began to patronise
+the other members of our delegation--good, honest men, whose contempt
+for him at home was unspeakable; but when they huddled like sheep in the
+strange crowd at the convention they often accepted Handy as a guide in
+important matters. In talking with the home delegation Handy very soon
+began speaking of the convention leaders familiarly as "Jim" and "Dick"
+and "Tawm" and "Bill," and sometimes Handy brought one of these
+dignitaries to the rooms of our delegation and introduced him to our
+people with a grand flourish. Every time the legislature met, Ab Handy
+was a clerk in it, and, if he was a clerk of an important committee
+like the railroad committee or the committee on the calendar, he
+invariably came home with a few hundred dollars, three suits of clothes
+and a railroad pass. No one but Charley Hedrick could live with him for
+six months afterward.
+
+It was when he returned from one of these profitable sessions that Abner
+Handy and Nora Sinclair were married. The affinity between them was
+this: his good clothes and proud manner caught her; and her social
+position caught him. Everyone in town knew, however, that Nora Sinclair
+had been too smart for Handy. She had him hooked through the gills
+before he knew that he was more than nibbling at the bait. The town
+concurred with Colonel Morrison--our only townsman who travelled widely
+in those days--when he put it succinctly: "Ab Handy is Nora Sinclair's
+last call for the dining-car."
+
+Her influence on Abner Handy and his life was such that it is necessary
+to record something of the kind of a woman she was before he met her. A
+woman of the right sort might have made a man of Handy, even that late
+in life. Strong, good women have made weak men fairly strong, but such
+women were never girls like Nora. She was a nice enough little girl
+until she became boy-struck--as our vernacular puts it. Her mother
+thought this development of the child was "so cute," and told callers
+about the boys who came to see Nora--before she was twelve. In those
+days, and in some old-fashioned families in our town, little girls were
+asked to run out to play when the neighbours had to be discussed. But
+Mrs. Sinclair claimed Nora was "neither sugar nor salt nor anybody's
+honey," and everything was talked over before the child. We knew at the
+office from Colonel Morrison that his little girls did not play at the
+Sinclairs'. Her mother put long dresses and picture hats upon her and
+pushed her out into society, and the whole town knew that Nora was a
+mature woman, in all her instincts, by the time she was sixteen. Her
+mother, moreover, was manifestly proud that the child wasn't "one of
+those long-legged, gangling tom-boy girls, who seem so backward" and
+wear pigtails and chew slate pencils and dream.
+
+The gilded youths who boarded at the Hotel Metropole began to notice
+her. That pleased her mother also, and she said to the mothers of other
+little girls of Nora's age who were climbing fences and wiping dishes:
+"You know Nora is so popular with the gentlemen." When the girl was
+seventeen she was engaged. She kept a town fellow and had a college
+fellow. She acquired a "gentleman friend" in Kansas City who gave her
+expensive presents. These her mother took great joy in displaying, and
+never objected when he stayed after eleven o'clock; for she thought he
+was "such a good catch" and such a "swell young man." But Nora shooed
+him off the front porch in the summer following, because he objected to
+her having two or three other eleven o'clock fellows. She said he was
+"selfish, and would not let her have a good time." At nineteen she knew
+more about matters that were none of her business than most women know
+on their wedding day, and the boys said that she was soft. Every time
+that Nora left town she came back with two or three correspondents. She
+perfumed her stationery, used a seal, adopted all the latest frills,
+and learned to write an angular hand. At twenty she was going with the
+young married set, and was invited out to the afternoon card clubs. She
+was known as a dashing girl at this time, and travelling men in three
+States knew about her. Her mother used to send personal items to our
+office telling of their exalted business positions and announcing their
+visits to the Sinclair home. There was more or less talk about Nora in a
+quiet way, but her mother said that "it is because the other girls don't
+know how to wear their clothes as well as Nora does," and that "when a
+girl has a fine figure--which few enough girls in this town have, Heaven
+knows--why, she is a fool if she doesn't make the most of herself."
+
+Then, gradually, Nora went to seed. She became a faded, hard-faced
+woman, and all the sisters in town warned their brothers against her.
+She was invited out only when there was a crowd. She took up with the
+boys of the younger set, and the married women of her own age called her
+the kidnapper. She was a social joke. About once a year a strange man
+would show up in her parlour, and she kept up the illusion about being
+engaged. But in the office we shared the town's knowledge that her harp
+was on the willows. She was massaging her face at twenty-six and her
+mother was sniffing at the town and saying that there were no social
+advantages to be had here. She and the girl went to the Lakes every
+summer, and Nora always came home declaring that she had had the time of
+her life, and that she met so many lovely gentlemen. But that was all
+there was to it, and in the end it was Abner Handy or no one.
+
+After their wedding, Nora and Abner Handy set about the business of
+making politics pay. That is a difficult thing to do in a country town,
+where every voter is a watchdog of the county and city treasuries. Abner
+gave up his gambling, he and his wife joined all the lodges in town, and
+she dragged him into that coterie of people known as Society. She joined
+a woman's club, and was always anxious to be appointed on the soliciting
+committee when the women had any public work to do; so when the library
+needed books, or the trash cans at the street corners needed paint, or
+the park trees needed trimming, or the new hospital needed an additional
+bed, or the band needed new uniforms, Mrs. Handy might be seen on the
+streets with two or three women of a much better social status than she
+had, making it clear that she was a public-spirited woman and that she
+moved in the best circles. Whereupon Abner Handy got work in the
+court-house--as a deputy, or as a clerk, or as an under-sheriff, or as a
+juror--and when the legislature met he went to Topeka as a clerk.
+
+No one knew how they lived, but they did live. Every two years they gave
+a series of parties, and the splendour of these festivals made the town
+exclaim in one voice: "Well, _how_ do they do it?" But Mrs. Handy, who
+was steaming the wrinkles out of her face, and assuming more or less
+kittenish airs in her late thirties, never offered the town an
+explanation. "Hers not to answer why, hers not to make reply, hers but
+to do and dye" was the way Colonel Morrison put it the day after Mrs.
+Handy swooped down into Main Street with a golden yellow finish on her
+hair. She walked serenely between Mrs. Frelinghuysen and Mrs. Priscilla
+Winthrop Conklin. They were begging for funds with which to furnish a
+rest room for farmers' wives. And when they bore down on our office,
+Colonel Morrison folded his papers in his bosom and passed them on the
+threshold as one hurrying to a fire in the roof of his own house. It was
+interesting to observe, when the Federation Committee called on us that
+day, that Mrs. Handy did all the talking. She was as full of airs and
+graces as an actress, and ogled with her glassy eyes, and put on a sweet
+babyish innocence of the ways of business and of men--as though men were
+a race apart, greatly to be feared because they ate up little girls. But
+she got her dollar before she left the office, and George Kirwin, who
+happened to be in the front room at the time waiting for a proof, said
+he thought that the performance and the new hair were worth the price.
+
+Five years passed and in each year Mrs. Handy had found some artificial
+way of deluding herself that she was cheating time. Then Charley
+Hedrick, who needed a vote in the legislature, and was too busy to go
+there himself, nominated Abner Handy and elected him to a seat in the
+lower house. The thing that Hedrick needed was not important--merely
+the creation of a new judicial district which would remove an obnoxious
+district judge in an adjoining county from our district, and leave our
+county in a district by itself. Hedrick hated the judge, and Hedrick
+used Handy's vote for trading purposes with other statesmen desiring
+similar small matters and got the district remade as he desired it.
+
+When the Handys started to Topeka for the opening of the session, they
+began to inflame with importance as the train whistled for the junction
+east of town, and by the time they actually arrived at Topeka they were
+so highly swollen that they could not get into a boarding-house door,
+but went to the best hotel, and engaged rooms at seven dollars a day.
+The town gasped for two days and then began to laugh and wink. Two weeks
+after their arrival at the State capital, Abner Handy had been made
+chairman of the joint committee on the calendar, second member of the
+judiciary committee and member of the railroad committee, and Mrs. Handy
+had established credit at a Topeka dry-goods store and was going it
+blind. She gave her hair an extra dip, and used to come sailing down
+the corridors of the hotel in gorgeous silk house-gowns with ridiculous
+trains, and never appeared at breakfast without her diamonds. Before the
+session was well under way she had been to Kansas City to have her face
+enameled and had told the other "ladies of the hotel," as the wives of
+members of the legislature stopping at the hotel were called, that
+Topeka stores offered such a poor selection; she confided to them that
+Mr. Handy always wore silk nightshirts, and that she was unable to find
+anything in town that he would put on. She regarded herself as a
+charmer, and made great eyes at all the important lobbyists, to whom she
+put on her baby voice and manner and said that she thought politics were
+just simply awful, and added that if she were a man she would show them
+how honest a politician could be, but she wasn't, and when Abner tried
+to explain it to her it made her head ache, and all she wanted him to do
+was to help his friends, and she would add coyly: "I'm going to see that
+he helps you--whatever he does."
+
+Every bill that had a dollar in it was held at the bottom of the
+calendar until satisfactory arrangements were made with Abner Handy and
+his friends. When the legislative buccaneers under the black flag,
+sailed after an insurance company, their bill remained at the bottom of
+the calendar in one house or the other until Ab Handy had been seen, and
+no one could find out why. And so, in spite of our dislike of the man,
+our paper was forced to acknowledge that Handy was a house leader.
+Although he had never had a dozen cases above the police court, he came
+back at the end of the session with the local attorneyship of two
+railroads, and was chairman of a house committee to investigate the
+taxes paid by the railroads in the various counties. This gave him a
+year's work, so he rented an office in the Worthington block and hired a
+stenographer. Of course, we knew in town how Ab Handy had made his
+money. But he paid so many of his old debts, and dispensed so many
+favours with such a lordly hand, that it was hard to stir local
+sentiment against him. He donned the clothes of a "prominent citizen,"
+and in discussing public affairs assumed an owlish manner that impressed
+his former associates, and fooled stupid people, who began to believe
+that they had been harbouring a statesman unawares. But Charley Hedrick
+only grinned when men talked to him of the rise of Handy, and replied to
+the complaints of the scrupulous that Ab was no worse than he had always
+been, and if he was making it pay better, no one was poorer for his
+prosperity but Ab himself, and added: "Certainly he is a sincere
+spender." One day when Handy appeared on the street in a particularly
+fiery red necktie, Hedrick got him in a crowd, and began: "Just for a
+handful of silver he left us--just for a riband to stick in his coat."
+And when the crowd laughed with the joker, Hedrick continued in his
+thick, gravy-coated voice: "Old Browning's the boy. You fellows that
+want Shakespeare can have him; but Ab here knows that I take a little
+dash of Browning in mine. Since Ab's got to be a statesman, he's bought
+all of Webster's works and is learning 'em by heart. But"--and here
+Hedrick chuckled and shook his fat sides before letting out the joke
+which he enjoyed so much--"I says to Ab: as old Browning says, what does
+'the fine felicity and flower of wickedness' like you need with
+Webster; what you want to commit to memory is the penal statutes." And
+he threw back his head and gurgled down in his abdomen, while the crowd
+roared and Handy showed the wool in his teeth with a dog-like grin.
+
+No other man in town would have dared that with Handy after he became a
+statesman; but we figured it out in the office that old Charley Hedrick
+was merely exhibiting his brand on Ab Handy to show the town that his
+title to Handy was still good. For though there was considerable of the
+King Cole about Hedrick--in that he was a merry old soul--he was always
+king, and he insisted on having his divine right to rule the politics of
+the county unquestioned. That was his vanity and he knew it, and was not
+ashamed of it.
+
+He was the best lawyer in the State in those days, and one of the best
+in the West. Ten months in the year he paid no attention to politics,
+pendulating daily between his house and his office. Often, being
+preoccupied with his work, he would go the whole length of Main Street
+speaking to no one. When a tangled case was in his mind he would enter
+his office in the morning, roll up his desk top, and dig into his work
+without speaking to a soul until, about the middle of the morning, he
+would look up from his desk to say as though he had just left off
+speaking: "Jim, hand me that 32 Kansas report over there on the table."
+When he worked, law books sprang up around him and sprawled over his
+desk and lay half open on chairs and tables near him until he had found
+his point; then he would get up and begin rollicking, slamming books
+together, cleaning up his debris and playing like a great porpoise with
+the litter he had made. At such times--and, indeed, all the time unless
+he was in what he called a "legal trance"--Hedrick was bubbling with
+good spirits, and when he left his office for politics he could get out
+in his shirt-sleeves at a primary and peddle tickets, or nose up and
+down the street like a fat ferret looking for votes. So when Abner Handy
+announced that he desired to go to the State Senate, to fill an
+unexpired term for two years, he had Hedrick behind him to give strength
+and respectability to his candidacy. Between the two Handy won. That was
+before the days of reform, when it was supposed to be considerable of a
+virtue for a man to stand by his friend; and, being a lawyer, Hedrick
+naturally had the lawyer's view that no man is guilty until the jury is
+in, and its findings have been reviewed by the supreme court.
+
+So Senator and Mrs. Senator Handy--as the town put it--went to Topeka as
+grandly as ever "Childe Roland to the dark tower came"--to use Hedrick's
+language. "No one ever has been able to find out what Roland was up to
+when he went to the dark tower, but," continued Hedrick, "with Ab and
+his child-wonder it will be different. She isn't taking all that special
+scenery along in her trunks for nothing. Ab has stumbled on to this
+great truth--that clothes may not make the man, but they make the
+crook!"
+
+Handy drew a dark brow when he became a Senator, and made a point of
+trying to look ominous. He carried his chin tilted up at an angle of
+forty-five degrees, and spoke of the most obvious things with an air of
+mystery. He never admitted anything; his closest approach to committing
+himself on even so apparent a proposition as the sunrise, was that it
+had risen "ostensibly"; he became known to the reporters as "Old
+Ostensible."
+
+It was his habit to tiptoe around the Senate chamber whispering to other
+Senators, and then having sat down to rise suddenly as though some great
+impulse had come to him and hurry into the cloakroom. He inherited the
+chairmanship of the railroad committee, and all employees came to him
+for their railroad passes; so he was the god of the blue-bottle flies of
+politics that feed on legislatures, and buzz pompously about the capitol
+doing nothing, at three dollars a day. In that session Handy was for the
+"peepul." He patronised the State Shippers' Association, and told their
+committee that he would give them a better railroad bill than they were
+asking. His practice was to commit to memory a bill that he was about to
+introduce and then go into his committee-room, when it was full of
+loafers, and pretend to dictate it offhand to the stenographer, section
+by section without pausing. It was an impressive performance, and gained
+Handy the reputation of being brainy. But we at home who knew Handy
+were not impressed; and, in our office, we knew that he was the same Ab
+Handy who once did business with a marked deck; who cheated widows and
+orphans; who sold bogus bonds; who got on two sides of lawsuits, and
+whose note was never good at any bank unless backed by blackmail.
+
+When the session closed Abner Handy came home, a statesman with views on
+the tariff, and ostentatiously displayed his thousand-dollar bills. The
+Handys spent the summer in Atlantic City, and Abner came home wearing
+New York clothes of an exaggerated type, and though he never showed it
+in our town, they used to say that he put on a high hat when the train
+whistled for Topeka. Also we heard that the first time Mrs. Handy
+appeared at the political hotel in her New York regalia, adorned with
+spangles and beads and cords and tassels, the "ladies of the hotel" said
+that she was "fixed up like a Christmas tree"--a remark that we in the
+office coupled with Colonel Morrison's reflection when he spoke of Ab's
+"illustrated vests." At the meeting of the State Federation of Woman's
+Clubs, Mrs. Handy first flourished her lorgnette, and came home with
+her wedding ring made over on a pattern after the prevailing style.
+About this time she made her famous remark to "Aunt" Martha Merrifield
+that she didn't think it proper for a woman to go through her husband's
+money with too sensitive a nose; she said that men must work and women
+must weep, and that she for one would not make the work of her husband
+any harder by criticising it with her silly morals.
+
+As for Abner Handy, it would have made little difference to him then
+whether she or anyone else had tried to check his career; for he was
+cultivating a loud tone of voice and a regal sweep to his arms. He
+always signed himself on hotel registers Senator Handy, and the help
+about the Topeka hotels began to mark him for their hate, for he was
+insolent to those whom he regarded as his inferiors. But Colonel
+Morrison used to say that he wore his vest-buttons off crawling to those
+in authority. He took little notice of the town. He referred to us as
+"his people" in a fine feudal way, and went about town with his cigar
+pointing toward his hat brim and his eyes fixed on something in the next
+block. He became the attorney for a number of crooked promotion schemes,
+and the diamond rings on his wife's fingers crowded the second joint. He
+had telegraph and express franks, railway and Pullman passes in such
+quantities that it made his coat pocket bulge to carry them. Often he
+would spread out these evidences of his shame on his office table, to
+awe the local politicians, and in so far as they could influence the
+town opinion, they promulgated the idea that if Ab Handy was a
+scoundrel--and of course he was--he was a smart scoundrel. So he came to
+think this himself.
+
+[Illustration: Went about town with his cigar pointing toward his
+hat-brim]
+
+Mrs. Handy threw herself into the work of the City Federation with
+passionate zeal. Also she kept up her lodge connections, and explained
+to the women, whom she considered of a higher social caste than the
+lodge women, that she was "doing it to help Mr. Handy." She did a little
+church work for the same reason, but her soul was in the Federation, for
+it insured her social status as neither lodge nor church could do. So
+she put herself under the protecting seal-lined wing of Mrs. Julia Neal
+Worthington who on account of her efforts to clean the streets we at
+the office had been taught by Colonel Morrison to know as the Joan of
+the trash-cans. And Miss Larrabee, our society reporter, told us that
+Mrs. Handy was the only woman in town who did not smile into her
+handkerchief when Mrs. Worthington, who had trained down to one hundred
+and ninety-seven pounds five and three-eighths ounces, gave her course
+of lectures on delsarte before the Federation.
+
+It was Mrs. Handy who encouraged Mrs. Worthington to open her salon. But
+as there were lodge meetings the first three nights in the week, and
+prayer-meetings in the middle of the week, and as the choirs met for
+practice, and the whist clubs met for business the last of the week, the
+salon did not seem to take with the town, and so was discontinued. Then
+Mrs. Worthington and Mrs. Handy sought other fields. And the first field
+they stumbled into was the court-house square. For fifty years the
+farmers near our town had been hitching at the racks provided by the
+county commissioners. But Mrs. Worthington decided that the time had
+come for a change and that the town was getting large enough to take
+down the hitching-racks. So, as chairman of the Municipal Improvement
+section of the City Federation, Mrs. Worthington began war on the
+hitching-racks. At the Federation meetings for three months there were
+reports from committees appointed to interview the councilmen; reports
+of committees to interview the county commissioners--who were obdurate;
+reports of committees to lease new ground for the hitching rack stands;
+reports of the legal committee; reports of the sanitary committee, and
+through it all Mrs. Worthington rose at every meeting and declared that
+the hitching racks must be destroyed. And as she was rated in
+Bradstreet's report at nearly half a million dollars, her words had much
+force.
+
+The town was beginning to stir itself. The merchants were with the
+women--because the women bought the dry goods and groceries--and we
+forgot about the farmers. To all this milling among the people Handy was
+oblivious, for he was stepping like a hen in high oats, with his eyes on
+a seat in Congress. Matters of mere local importance did not concern
+him. The railroads were for him, and the stars in their courses seemed
+to him to be pointing his way to Washington. He knew of the
+hitching-rack trouble only when he had to go with Mrs. Handy to the
+dinners at the Worthington home given to the councilmen and their wives,
+who were lukewarm on the removal proposition.
+
+In the spring before the election of 1902 Mrs. Worthington had a
+majority in the council, and one Saturday night the hitching-racks were
+taken down by the street commissioner. And within a week the town was on
+the verge of civil war, for the farmers of the county rose as one man
+and demanded the blood of the offenders. But Abner Handy knew nothing of
+the disturbance. The county attorney had the street commissioner and his
+men arrested for trespassing upon county property; farmers threatened to
+boycott the town. But Abner Handy's ear was attuned to higher things.
+Merchants who had signed the petition asking the council to remove the
+racks began to denounce the removal as an act of treason. But Abner
+Handy conferred with State leaders on great questions, and the city
+attorney, who was a candidate for county attorney that fall, did not
+dare to defend the street commissioner. The council got stubborn, and
+Colonel Morrison, before whom as justice of the peace the case was to be
+tried, fearing for the professional safety of his three daughters in the
+town schools and his four daughters in the county schools, took a trip
+to his wife's people, and told us he was enlisted there for "ninety days
+or during the war"; and still Abner Handy looked at the green hills
+afar.
+
+We are generally accounted by ourselves a fearless newspaper; but here
+we admitted that the situation required discretion. So we straddled it.
+We wrote cautious editorials in carefully-balanced sentences demanding
+that the people keep cool. We advised both sides to realise that only
+good sense and judgment would straighten out the tangle. We demanded
+that each side recognise the other's rights and made both sides angry,
+whereas General Durham, of the _Statesman_, made his first popular
+stroke in a dozen years by insisting, in double leads and italics, that
+the tariff on hides was a divine institution, and that humanity called
+upon us to hold the Philippines. Charley Hedrick knew better than
+anyone else in town what a tempest was rising. He might have warned
+Handy, but he did not; for Handy had reached a point in his career where
+he considered that a mere county boss was beneath his confidence. More
+than that, Hedrick had refused to indorse Handy's note at the bank.
+Handy needed money, and being a shorn lamb, the wind changed in his
+direction in this wise:
+
+In the midst of the furore that week, Mrs. Worthington gave an evening
+reception for the Federation and its husbands at her mansion, fed them
+sumptuously, and, after Mrs. Handy had tapped a bell for silence, Mrs.
+Worthington rose in her jet and passementerie and announced that our
+town had come to a crisis in its career; that we must now decide whether
+we were going to be a beautiful little city or a cow pasture. She said
+that beauty was as much an essential to life as money and that we would
+be better off with more beauty and less trade, and that with the
+court-house square a mudhole the town could never rise to any real
+consequence. As the men of the town seemed to be moral cowards, she was
+going to enlist the women in this war, and as the first step in her
+campaign she proposed to hire the Honourable Abner Handy to assist the
+city attorney in fighting this case, and as a retainer she would
+herewith and now hand him her personal check for five hundred dollars.
+Whereat the women clapped their hands, their husbands winked at one
+another, and "there was a sound of revelry by night." The check was put
+on a silver card-tray by Mrs. Worthington and set on a table in the
+midst of the company waiting for Handy to come forward and take it.
+After the town had looked at the check, Mrs. Handy seemed to cut his
+leashes and Abner went after it. He was waiting at the Worthington bank
+the next morning at nine o'clock to cash it--and all the town saw that
+also.
+
+Whereupon the town grinned broadly that evening when it read in the
+_Statesman_ a most laudatory article about "our distinguished
+fellow-townsman." The article declared that it was "the duty of the hour
+to send Honourable Abner Handy to the halls of Congress." The
+_Statesman_ contended that "Judge Handy had been for a lifetime the
+defender of those grand and glorious principles of freedom and
+protection and sound money for which the Grand Old Party stood." The
+General proclaimed that "it shall be not only a duty, but a pleasure,
+for our citizens to lay aside all petty personal and factional quarrels
+and rally round the standard of our noble leader in this great contest."
+
+If Handy ever went to the city attorney's office to look after Mrs.
+Worthington's lawsuit, no one knew it. He smiled wisely when asked how
+the suit was progressing, and one day John Markley--who during the life
+of Ezra Worthington, hated him with a ten-horse-power hate and loaded it
+onto his widow's shoulders and the Worthington bank which she
+inherited--John Markley called Handy into the back room of the Markley
+Mortgage Company, and, when Handy passed the cashier's window going out,
+he cashed a check signed by John Markley for a thousand dollars on which
+was inscribed "for legal services in assisting the county attorney in
+the hitching rack case."
+
+Handy had arrived at a point where he feared nothing. He seemed to
+believe that he lived a charmed life and never would get caught. He
+bought extra copies of the _Statesman_, which was booming him for
+Congress, and sent them over the Congressional District by the
+thousands. He went to Topeka in his high silk hat and his New York
+clothes, gave out interviews on the causes of the flurry in the money
+market, and, desiring further advertisement, gave a banquet for the
+newspaper men of the capital which cost him a hundred dollars. So he
+became a great man. At home he assumed a patronising air to the people
+about Charley Hedrick. And one night in Smith's cigar store, just to be
+talking, he said that he didn't get so much of Mrs. Worthington's money
+as people thought, for part of it had to go to "square old Charley
+Hedrick." Hedrick was John Markley's attorney, and he had taken an
+active part in helping the county attorney prosecute the street
+commissioners. Naturally Handy's remark stirred up the town. It was two
+weeks, however, in getting to Hedrick, and when it came the man turned
+black and seemed to be swallowing a pint of emotional language before he
+spoke. And there Abner Handy's doom was sealed; though Hedrick did not
+make the sentence public.
+
+Now, it is well known in our county that the country people are slow to
+wrath. They were two months finding out beyond a question of doubt that
+Abner Handy had accepted Mrs. Worthington's money to act against them,
+but when they knew this there was no hope for Handy among them. They are
+a quiet people, and make no noise. For a month, only Charley Hedrick and
+the grocers and the hardware men, with whom the farmers trade, knew the
+truth about Handy's standing in the county. Hedrick bided his time. The
+Handy boom for Congress was rolling over the district, and the
+_Statesman_ italics were becoming worn, and its exclamation points
+battered in the service, when one day Handy stalked up to Hedrick's
+office, imperiously beckoned Hedrick into the private room, and blurted
+out:
+
+"Charley, I got to have some more money--need it in my business. Can't
+you touch old John Markley for me again--say for about five hundred on
+that hitching rack case? Sister Worthington is kind of wanting me to get
+action on her case."
+
+Hedrick was dumb with rage, but Handy thought it was acquiescence. He
+went on:
+
+"You just step down to the bank and say: 'John, I've noticed Ab Handy
+actin' kind of queer about that hitching rack case.' That's all you need
+say, and pretty soon I'll step in and say: 'John, I don't see how I can
+help doin' something for Aunt Julia Worthington.' And I believe I can
+tap him for five hundred more easy enough. I got an idea he is mightily
+in earnest about beating her in that suit."
+
+When Hedrick got his breath, which was churning and wheezing in his
+throat, he cut Handy's sentence off with:
+
+"You human razor-back shoat--you swill-barrel gladiator,
+why--why--I--I----" And Hedrick sparred for wind and went on before
+Handy realised the situation. "Ab Handy, I spat on the dust and breathed
+into the chaff that made you, and put you on the mud-sills of hell to
+dry, and I've got a right to turn you back into fertiliser, and I'm
+going to do it. Git out of here--git out of this office, or I----"
+
+And the hulking form of Hedrick fell on the bag of shaking bones that
+was Handy and battered him through the latched door into the crowded
+outer office; and Handy picked himself up and ran like a wolf, turning
+at the door to show his teeth before he scampered through the hall and
+scurried down the stairs. As Hedrick came puffing out of the broken door
+his coat snagged on a splinter. He grinned as he unfastened himself:
+
+"Well, the snail seems to be on the thorn; the lark certainly is on the
+wing.
+
+    "_God's in his heaven.
+      All's right with the world!_"
+
+And he batted his eyes at the group of loafing local statesmen in his
+office as he viewed the wreckage, and went to the telephone and ordered
+a carpenter, without wasting any words on the crowd.
+
+We decided long ago that the source of Hedrick's power in politics was
+what we called his "do it now" policy. All politicians have schemes.
+Hedrick puts his through before he talks about them. If he has an idea
+that satisfies his judgment, he makes it a reality in the quickest
+possible time. That is why the fellows around town who hate Hedrick call
+him the rattlesnake, and those who admire him call him the Wrath of
+God. When he put up the telephone receiver he reached for his hat and
+bolted from the office under a full head of steam. He went directly to
+John Markley's back office, got the check that Markley had given to
+Handy, dictated a letter in the anteroom of Markley's office to a Kansas
+City plate-maker, inclosed fifty dollars as he passed the draft counter,
+and, as he swung by the post-office he mailed the Handy check with
+instructions to have ten photographic half-tone cuts made of the check
+and mailed back to Hedrick in four days.
+
+Then he went to Mrs. Worthington, told her his story, as a lawyer puts
+his case before a jury--had her raging at Ab Handy--and got an order on
+the bank for the check she had given to Handy. This also he sent to the
+plate-maker, and in an hour was back at his desk dictating a half-page
+advertisement to go into every Republican weekly newspaper in the
+district. He sent that advertisement out with the half-tone cuts Monday
+morning, and it appeared all over the district that week. The
+advertisement was signed by Hedrick, and began:
+
+"Browning has a poem made after visiting a dead house, and in it he
+describes the corpse of a suicide, and says 'one clear, nice, cool
+squirt of water o'er the bust,' is the 'right thing to extinguish lust.'
+And I desire this advertisement to be 'one clear, nice, cool squirt of
+water' over the political remains of Honourable Abner Handy, to
+extinguish if possible his fatal lust for crooked money." After this
+followed the story of Handy's perfidy in the hitching rack case, a
+petition in disbarment proceedings, and the copy of the warrant for his
+arrest charged with a felony in the case sworn to by Hedrick himself.
+But the effective thing was the pictures, showing both sides of the two
+checks, each carefully inscribed by the two makers "for legal services
+in the hitching rack case," and each check indorsed by Handy in his big,
+brazen signature.
+
+Hedrick saw to it also that, on the day the country papers printed his
+advertisement, the Kansas City and Topeka papers printed the whole
+story, including the casting out of Handy from Hedrick's office. It did
+Handy little good to go to Topeka in his flashy clothes and give out a
+festive interview asking his friends to suspend judgment, and saying
+that he would try his case in the courts and not in the newspapers. It
+was contended by the newspapers that if Handy had an honest defence, it
+would lose no weight in court by being printed in the newspapers; and
+his enemies in the Congressional fight pushed the charges against Handy
+so relentlessly that the public faith in him melted like an April snow,
+and when the delegates to the Congressional convention were named, our
+own county instructed its delegates against Handy. The farmers opposed
+him for taking the case against them, and the town scorned him for his
+perfidy. No one who was not paid for it would peddle his tickets at the
+primaries, so Handy, with his money all spent, went home on the night of
+the local primaries a whipped dog. They said around town that all the
+whipped dog got at home was a tin can; for it is certain that at
+daylight Handy was down on Main Street viciously drunk, flourishing a
+revolver with which he said he was going to kill Charley Hedrick and
+then himself. They took the pistol from him, and then he wept and said
+he was going to jump in the river, but no one followed him when he
+started toward the bridge, and he fell asleep in the shade of the piers,
+where he was found during the morning, washed up and sent home sober.
+
+One of the curious revelations of society's partnership in crime was the
+way the grocers and butchers who despised Ab Handy's method, but shared
+his gains when he succeeded, stopped giving him credit when he failed.
+At the end of the first year after the primary wherein he was defeated,
+the Handys could not get a dime's worth of beefsteak without the dime.
+And dimes were scarce. By that time Handy was wearing his flashy New
+York clothes for every day--frayed and spotted and rusty. His
+temperament changed with his clothes, from the oily optimism of success
+to the sodden pessimism of utter failure; which inspired Colonel
+Morrison, returning after the hitching rack case had been settled in
+favour of the town, to remark, speaking of Handy, that "an optimist is a
+man who isn't caught, and is cheering to keep up his courage, and a
+pessimist is one who has been caught and thinks it will be but a
+question of time until his neighbours are found out too."
+
+Mrs. Worthington, who was a necessary witness in the disbarment
+proceedings and the criminal proceedings against Handy, always went to
+Europe when the cases were called; so rather than put a woman in jail
+for contempt of court, the court dismissed the proceedings against Handy
+and he was not allowed to be even a martyr. One morning about a year and
+a half after Handy's defeat, when Hedrick opened his office door, he
+found Handy there with his fingers clutching the chair arms and his eyes
+fixed on the floor. The man was breathing audibly, and seemed to be
+struggling with a great passion. Hedrick and Handy had not spoken since
+they came through the panels of the door together, but Hedrick went to
+the miserable creature, touched him gently on the shoulder, and motioned
+him into the private office. There, with his eyes still on the floor,
+Handy told Hedrick that the end of the rope had been reached.
+
+"I had to come down without any breakfast this
+morning--because--they--they ain't anything in the house for her to fix.
+And there ain't any show for dinner. Next week, Red Martin has promised
+me some money he's goin' to get from Jim Huddleson; but they ain't a
+soul in town but you I can come to now"; and Handy raised his eyes from
+the floor in canine self-pity as he whined--"and she's making life a
+hell for me!" When Hedrick opened his desk and got out his check-book,
+he smiled as he fancied he could detect about Handy's body the faint
+resemblance of a wagging tail. He made the check for fifty dollars and
+gave it to Handy saying, "Oh, well, Ab--we'll let bygones be bygones."
+
+Handy snapped at it and in an instant was gone.
+
+That afternoon Hedrick met Handy sailing down Main Street in his old
+manner. His head was erect, his eyes were sparkling, his big, rough,
+statesman's voice was bellowing abroad, and his thumbs were in the
+armholes of his vest. He walked straight to Hedrick and led him by the
+coat lapel into a dark stairway. There was an air of deep mystery about
+Handy and when he put his arm on Hedrick to whisper in his ear,
+Hedrick, smelling the statesman's breath heavy with whiskey and onions
+and cloves and cardamon seeds and pungent gum, heard this:
+
+"Say, Charley, I'm fooling 'em--I've got 'em all fooled. They think I'm
+poor. They think I ain't got any money. But old Ab's too smart for them.
+I've got lots of money--all I want--all anyone could want--wealth beyond
+the dreams of avar--of av--avar--avar'ce, as John Ingalls used to say.
+Just look at this!" And with that Handy pulled from his inside coat
+pocket a roll of one and two-dollar bills, that seemed to Hedrick to
+represent fifty dollars less the price of about ten drinks. "Look
+a-here," continued Handy, "ol' Ab's got 'em all fooled. Don't you say
+anything about it; but ol' Ab's goin' to make his mark." And he shook
+Hedrick's hand and took him down to the street, and shook it again and
+again before prancing grandly down the sidewalk.
+
+For three years Mrs. Handy's boarding-house has been one of the most
+exclusive in our town. They say that she pays Mr. Handy for mowing the
+lawn and helping about the rough work in the kitchen, and that he sleeps
+in the barn and pays her for such meals as he eats. Sometimes a new
+boarder makes the mistake of paying the board money to Handy, and he
+appears on Main Street ostentatiously jingling his silver and toward
+evening has ideas about the railroad situation. On election days and
+when there is a primary Handy drives a carriage and gathers up his
+cronies in the fifth ward, who, like him, are not so much in evidence as
+they were ten years ago.
+
+It was only last week that Hedrick was in our office telling us of
+Handy's "wealth beyond the dreams of avarice." He paused when he had
+finished the story, cocked his head on one side, and squinted at the
+ceiling as he said:
+
+"For three long, weary, fruitless years I've searched the drug-stores of
+this town for the brand of liquor Ab had that day. I believe if I had
+two drinks of that I could write better poetry than old Browning
+himself."
+
+Whereupon Hedrick shook himself out of the office in a gentle wheesy
+laugh.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+The Tremolo Stop
+
+
+Our business has changed greatly since Horace Greeley's day. And,
+although machines have come into little offices like ours, the greatest
+changes have come in the men who do the work in these offices. In the
+old days--the days before the great war and after it--printers and
+editors were rarely leading citizens in the community. The editor and
+the printer were just coming out of the wandering minstrel stage of
+social development, and the journeyman who went from town to town
+seeking work, and increasing his skill, was an important factor in the
+craft. One might always depend upon a tramp printer's coming in when
+there was a rush of work in the office, and also figure on one of the
+tourists in the office leaving when he was needed most.
+
+From the ranks of this wayward class came the old editors and reporters;
+they were postgraduates from the back room of newspaper offices and
+they brought to the front room their easy view of life. Some of these
+itinerant writing craftsmen had professional fame. There was Peter B.
+Lee, who had tramped the country over, who knew Greeley and Dana and
+Prentice and Bob Burdett and Henry Watterson, and to whom the cub in
+country offices looked with worshipful eyes. There was "Old Slugs"--the
+printer who carried his moulds for making lead slugs, and who, under the
+influence of improper stimulants, could recite stirring scenes from the
+tragedies of Shakespeare. There was Buzby--old Buzby, who went about
+from office to office leaving his obituary set up by his own hand,
+conveying the impression that at last the end had come to a misspent
+life. Then there was J. N. Free--the "Immortal J. N.," as he called
+himself, a gaunt, cadaverous figure in broad hat and linen duster, with
+hair flowing over his shoulders, who stalked into the offices at
+unseemly hours to "raise the veil" of ignorance and error, and "relieve
+the pressure" of psychic congestion in a town by turning upon it the
+batteries of his mind.
+
+They were a dear lot of old souls out of accord with the world about
+them, ever seeking the place where they would harmonise. They might have
+stepped out of Dickens's books or Cruikshank's pictures, and, when one
+recalls them now, their lineaments seem out of drawing and impossible in
+the modern world. And yet they did live and move in the world that was,
+and the other day when we were looking over the files we came across the
+work of Simon Mehronay,--the name which he said was spelled Dutch and
+sounded Irish,--and it does not seem fair to set down the stories of the
+others who have made our office traditions without giving some account
+of him.
+
+For to us he was the most precious of all the old tribe of journalistic
+aborigines. He came to the office one bright April day with red mud on
+his shoes that was not the mud of our river bottoms, and we knew that he
+had ridden to town "blind baggage"--as they say of men who steal their
+way--from the South. The season was ripe for the birds to come North and
+it was the mud of Texas that clung to him. His greeting as he strode
+through the front room not waiting for a reply was "How's work?" And
+when the foreman told him to hang up his coat, he found a stick, got a
+"chunk of copy," and was clicking away at his case three minutes from
+the time he darkened the threshold of the office.
+
+There he sat for two weeks--the first man down in the morning and the
+last to quit at night--before anyone knew whence he came or whither he
+was bound. He had a little "false motion," the foreman said, and
+clattered his types too audibly in the steel stick, but as he got up a
+good string of type at the end of the day and furnished his own chewing
+tobacco, he created no unfavourable comment in the office. He was a bald
+little man, with a fringe of hair above the greasy velvet collar of his
+coat, with beady, dancing black eyes, and black chin whiskers and a
+moustache that often needed dyeing. It was the opinion of the foreman
+and the printers that Mehronay's weakness was liquor, though that
+opinion did not arise from anything that he said. For during the first
+two weeks we did not hear him say much, but in the years that followed,
+his mild little voice that ever seemed to be teetering on the edge of
+the laugh into which he fell a score of times during an hour, became a
+familiar sound about the office, and the soft, flabby little hand which
+the other printers laughed about, during the first week of his
+employment with us, has rested on most of the shoulders in the shop
+guiding us through many sad ways.
+
+In those days there were only three of us in the front room. All the
+bookkeeping and collecting and reporting and editorial writing were done
+by the three, and it happened that one morning near the first of the
+month, when the books needed attention, no one had heard the performance
+of "Hamlet" given by Thomas Keene at the opera house the night before,
+and no one about the paper could write it up. Wherefore there was
+perturbation; but in an hour this came from the back room set up in type
+and proved in the galley:
+
+"There were more clean shaves in town last night than have been seen
+here for a long time. Everyone who wears cuffs and a necktie got a
+'twice-over' and was 'out amongst 'em.' In the gallery of the opera
+house roosted the college faculty and the Potter boy who holds the
+Cottonwood Valley belt as the champion lay-down collar swell, and near
+him was Everett Fowler, who was making his first public appearance in
+his new parted spring whiskers, and was the observed of all observers.
+Colonel Alphabetical Morrison, with his famous U-shaped hair-cut, lent
+the grace of his presence to the dress circle. The first Methodist
+Church was represented by Brother-in-law John Markley, who is wearing a
+new flowered necktie, sent by his daughter in California (if you must
+know), and General Durham of the _Statesman_ says that when the
+orchestra played 'Turkey in the Straw,' and Bill Master began to shake
+the sand-box--which is a new wrinkle in musical circles in our
+town--John Markley's feet began to wiggle until people thought this was
+his 'chill day.' After 'Turkey in the Straw,' the orchestra struck up
+something quick and devilish, which Charley Hedrick, who played the
+snare drum at Gettysburg, and is therefore entitled to speak on musical
+subjects, says was 'The Irish Washerwoman.' After this appropriate
+overture the curtain rose and the real show began.
+
+"Mr. Keene's Hamlet is not so familiar to our people as his Richard
+III., but it gave great satisfaction; for it is certainly a Methodist
+Hamlet from the clang of the gong to the home-stretch. The town never
+has stood for Mr. Lawrence Barrett's Unitarian Hamlet, and the high
+church Episcopal Hamlet put on the boards last winter by Mr. Frederick
+Paulding was distinctly disappointing. One of the most searching scenes
+in the play was enacted when Ophelia got the power and had to be carried
+out to the pump. The Chicago brother who plays the ghost has a great
+voice for his work. He brought many souls to a realizing sense that they
+are sin-stricken and hair-hung over the fiery pit. The groans and amens
+from the sanctified in the audience were a delicate compliment to his
+histrionic ability. The queen seems to have been a Presbyterian, and the
+king a Second Day Adventist of an argumentative type. And they were not
+popular with the audience, but the boy preacher who did Laertes was
+exceedingly blessed with the gift of tongues. Brother Polonius seems to
+have been a sort of presiding elder, and, when his exhortation rose, the
+chickens in Mike Wessner's coop, in the meat-market downstairs, gave up
+hope of life and lay down to be cut up and fried for breakfast. The
+performance was a great treat and, barring the fact that some switchmen,
+thinking Ophelia was full, giggled during the mad scene, and the further
+fact that someone yelled, 'Go for his wind, Ham!' during the fencing
+scene, the evening with Shakespeare's weirdest hero was a distinct
+credit to Mr. Keene, his company and our people."
+
+We wrote a conventional report of the performance, and printed
+Mehronay's account below it, under the caption FROM ANOTHER REPORTER,
+and it made the paper talked about for a week. Now in our town Keene was
+a histrionic god of the first order, and so many church people came to
+the office to "stop the paper" that circulation had a real impetus. We
+have never had a boom in subscription that did not begin with a lot of
+angry citizens coming in to stop the paper. It became known about town
+who wrote the Keene article, and Mehronay became in a small way a public
+character. We encouraged him to write more, so every morning the first
+proof slips that came in began to have on them ten or a dozen short
+items of Mehronay's writing. There was a smile in every one of them, and
+if he wrote more than ten lines there was a laugh. It was Mehronay who
+referred to Huddleson's livery-stable joint--where the old soaks got
+their beer in a stall and salted it from the feed-box--as "a gilded
+palace of sin." It was Mehronay who wrote the advertisement of the
+Chinese laundryman and signed his name "Fat Sam Child of the Sun,
+Brother of the Moon and Second Cousin by marriage to all the Stars." It
+was Mehronay who took a galley of pi which the office devil had set up
+from a wrecked form, and interspersed up and down the column of
+meaningless letters "Great applause"--"Tremendous cheering"--Cries of
+"Good, good!--that's the way to hit 'em!"--"Hurrah for Hancock"--and ran
+it in the paper as a report of Carl Schurz's speech to the
+German-American League at the court-house. It was Mehronay who put the
+advertisement in the paper proclaiming the fact that General Durham of
+the _Statesman_ office desired to purchase a good second-hand fiddle,
+and explaining that the owner must play five tunes on it in front of the
+_Statesman_ office door before bringing it in. Mehronay originated the
+fiction that there was an association in town formed to insure its
+members against wedding invitations which, in case of loss, paid the
+afflicted member a pickle dish or a napkin ring, to present as his
+offering to the bride.
+
+Mehronay started a mythical Widowers' Protective Foot-racing Society,
+and the town had great sport with the old boys whose names he used so
+wittily that it transcended impudence. Mehronay got up a long list of
+husbands who wiped dishes when the family was "out of a girl," as our
+people say, and organised them into a union to strike for their altars
+and their kitchen fires. When we sent him out to write up a fire,
+however, he generally forgot the amount of insurance and the extent of
+the loss, but he told all about the way the crowd tried to boss the fire
+department; and if we sent him out to gather the local markets, he made
+such a mess of it that we were a week straightening matters up. Figures
+didn't mean anything to Mehronay. When the bank failed, he tried to
+write something about it, but mixed the assets and the liabilities so
+hopelessly that we had to keep him busy with other things, so that he
+would have no time to touch the bank story. They used to say around town
+that when he laid down a piece of money, however large, on a store
+counter he never waited for his change, but be it said to the credit of
+most of the merchants that they would save it for Mehronay and give it
+to him on his next visit to the store, when he would be as joyful as a
+child.
+
+Gradually he left the back room and became a fixture in the front
+office. He wrote locals and editorials and helped with the advertising,
+drawing for this the munificent salary of fifteen dollars a week, which
+should have kept him like a prince; but it did not--though what he did
+with his money no one knew. He bought no new clothes, and never buttoned
+those he had. Before sending him out on the street in the morning,
+someone in the office had to button him up, and if it was a gala
+day--say circus day, or the day of a big political pow-wow--we had to
+put a clean paper collar on Mehronay above his brown wool shirt and
+shove out the dents in his derby hat--a procedure which he called
+"making a butterfly of fashion out of an honest workin' man." He slept
+in the press-room, on a bed which he rolled up and stowed behind the
+press by day, and in the evening he consorted with the goddess of
+nicotine--as he called his plug tobacco--and put in his time at his desk
+with a lead pencil and a pad of white paper writing copy for the next
+day's issue. Nothing delighted him so much as a fictitious personage or
+situation which held real relations with local events or home people.
+One of the best of his many inventions was a new reporter who, according
+to Mehronay's legend, had just quit work for a circus where he had been
+employed writing the posters. Mehronay's joy was to write up a local
+occurrence and pretend that the circus poster-writer had written it and
+that we had been greatly bothered to restrain his adjectives. A few days
+after the Sinclair-Handy wedding--a particularly gorgeous affair in one
+of the stone churches, which had been written up by the bride's mother,
+as the whole town knew, in a most disgusting manner--Mehronay sat
+chuckling in his corner, writing something which he put on the copy-hook
+before going out on his beat. It was headed A DAZZLING AFFAIR and it ran
+thus:
+
+"For some time we have realised that we have not been doing full justice
+to the weddings that occur in this town; we have been using a repressed
+and obsolete style which is painful to those who enter into the joyous
+spirit of such occasions, and last night's wedding in the family of the
+patrician Skinners we assigned to our gentlemanly and urbane Mr. J.
+Mortimer Montague, late of the publicity department of the world-famed
+Robinson Circus and Menagerie. The following graceful account from Mr.
+Montague's facile pen is the most accurate and satisfactory report of a
+nuptial event we have ever recorded in these columns."
+
+And thereafter followed this:
+
+"Last evening, just as the clock in the steeple struck nine, a vast
+concourse of the beauty and the chivalry of our splendid city, composing
+wealth beyond the dreams of the kings of India and forming a galaxy only
+excelled in splendour by the knightly company at the Field of the Cloth
+of Gold, assembled to witness the marriage of Miss May Skinner and Mr.
+John Fortesque. The great auditorium was a bower of smilax and
+chrysanthemums, bewildering, amazing, superb in its verdant labyrinth.
+As the clock was striking the hour, the ten-thousand-dollar pipe-organ
+filled the edifice with strains of most seductive, entrancing music,
+played by Miss Jane Brown, the only real left-handed organist in the
+civilised world. Then came the wedding party, magnificent, radiant,
+resplendent with the glittering jewels of the Orient, dazzling with
+gorgeousness, stupefying and miraculous in its revelation of beauty.
+There were six handsome ushers--count them--six, ten bridesmaids--ten--a
+bevy of real, live, flower-bearing fairies, captured at an immense
+outlay of time and money in far Caucasia. The bride's resplendent
+costume and surpassing beauty put the blush upon the Queen of Sheba,
+made Hebe's effulgence fade as the moon before the sun; and as the long
+courtly train of knights errant and ladies-in-waiting passed the
+populace, they presented a regal spectacle, never equalled since the
+proud Cleopatra sailed down the perfumed lotus-bearing Nile in her
+gilded pageant to meet Marc Antony, while all the world stood agape at
+the unheard-of triumph.
+
+"To describe the bride's costume beggars the English language; and human
+imagination falls faint and feeble before the Herculean task. From the
+everlasting stars she stole the glittering diamonds that decked her
+alabaster brow and hid them in the Stygian umbrage of her hair. From the
+fleecy, graceful cloud she snared the marvellous drapery that floated
+like a dream about her queenly figure, and from the Peri at Heaven's
+gate she captured the matchless grace that bore her like an enchanted
+wraith through the hymeneal scene.
+
+"The array of presents spread in the throne-room of the Skinner palace
+has been unexcelled in lavish expenditure of fabulous and reckless
+prodigal wealth anywhere in the world. Golden tokens literally strewed
+the apartment, merely as effulgent settings for the mammoth, appalling,
+maddening array of jewels and precious stones, sunbursts and pearls
+without price, that gleamed like a transcendent electrical display in
+the hypnotising picture."
+
+There was more of the same kind, but it need not be set down here.
+However, it should be said that nothing we ever printed in the paper
+before or since set the town to laughing as did that piece. We have
+calls to-day for papers containing the circus-poster wedding, and it was
+printed over two decades ago.
+
+It was Mehronay's first great triumph in town; then the expected
+happened. For three days he did not appear at the office and we
+suspected the truth--that by day he slept the sleep of the unjust in the
+loft of Huddleson's stable and by night he vibrated between the Elite
+oyster parlour, where he absorbed fabulous quantities of soup, and Red
+Martin's gambling-room, where he disported himself most festively before
+the gang assembled there. The morning of the fourth day Mehronay
+appeared--but not at his desk. We found him sitting glumly on his stool
+at the case in the back room, clicking the types, with his hat over his
+eyes and the smile rubbed off his face.
+
+We were a month coaxing Mehronay back in to the front room. His
+self-respect grew slowly, but finally it returned, and he sat at his
+desk turning off reams of copy so good that the people read the paper up
+one side and down the other hunting for his items. He is the only man we
+have ever had around the paper who could write. Everyone else we have
+employed has been a news-gatherer. But Mehronay cared little for what we
+call news. He went about the town asking for news, and getting more or
+less of it, but the way he put it was much more important than the thing
+itself. He had imagination. He created his own world in the town, and
+put it in the paper so vividly that before we realised it the whole town
+was living in Mehronay's world, seeing the people and events about them
+through his merry countenance. No one ever referred to him as Mr.
+Mehronay, and before he had been on the street six months he was calling
+people by their first names, or by nicknames, which he tagged onto them.
+He was so fatherly to the young people that the girls in the Bee Hive,
+or the White Front, or the Racket Store used to brush his clothes when
+they needed it, if we in the office neglected him, and smooth his back
+hair with their pocket combs, and he--never remembering the name of the
+particular ministering angel who fixed him up--called one and all of
+them "darter," smiled a grateful smile like an old dog that is petted,
+and then went his way. The girls in the White Front Drygoods Store gave
+him a cravat, and though it was made up, he brought it every morning in
+his pocket for them to pin on. He was as simple as a child, and, like a
+child, lived in a world of unrealities. He swore like a mule driver, and
+yet he told the men in the back room that he could never go to sleep
+without getting down and saying his prayers, and the only men with whom
+he ever quarrelled were a teacher of zoology at the College, who is an
+evolutionist, and Dan Gregg, the town infidel.
+
+One morning when we were sitting in the office before going out to the
+street for the morning's grist, Mehronay dog-eared a fat piece of copy
+and jabbed it on the hook as he started for the door.
+
+"My boy was drunk last night," he said. "Me and his mother felt so bad
+over it that I gave him a pretty straight talk this morning. There it
+is."
+
+The office dropped its jaw and bugged its eyes.
+
+"Oh, yes," he continued. "Didn't you know I had a boy? He's been the
+best kind of a boy till here lately. I can see his mother don't like it
+and his sister's worried too." His face for a second wore an expression
+of infinite sadness, and he sighed even while the smile came back on the
+face he turned to us from the door as he said: "Sometimes I think he is
+studying law with old Charley Hedrick and sometimes I think he is in the
+bank with John Markley; but he is always with me, and was such a decent
+boy when I had him out to the College. But I saw him with Joe Nevison
+last night, and I knew he'd been drinking."
+
+With that he closed the door behind him and was gone. This was the
+article that Mehronay left on the hook:
+
+"Your pa was downtown this morning, complaining about his 'old trouble,'
+that crick in his back that he got loading hay one hot day in Huron
+County, Ohio, 'before the army.' The 'old trouble,' as you will
+remember, bothers your pa a good deal, and your ma thinks that his
+father must have been a pretty hard-hearted man to let him work so hard
+when he was a boy. Your pa likes to have you and your ma think that when
+he was a boy he did nothing but work and go to prayer-meeting and go
+around doing noble deeds out of the third reader, but a number of the
+old boys of the Eleventh Kansas, who knew your pa in the sixties, are
+prepared to do a lot of forgetting for him whenever he asks it. The
+truth about your pa's 'old trouble' is that he was down at Fort
+Leavenworth just after the close of the war, and after filling up on
+laughing-water at a saloon, he got into a fight with the bartender, was
+kicked out of the saloon, and slept in the alley all night. That was his
+last whizz. He took an invoice of his stock and found that he had some
+of the most valuable experiences that a man can acquire, and he
+straightened up and came out here and grew up with the country. Your ma
+met him at a basket-meeting, and she thought he was an extremely pious
+young man, and they made a go of it.
+
+"So, Bub, when you think that by breathing on your coat sleeve to kill
+the whisky you can fool your pa, you are wrong. Your pa in his day ate
+three carloads of cardamon seeds and cloves and used listerine by the
+barrel. He knew which was the creaky step on the stairs in his father's
+house and used to avoid it coming in at night, just as you do now, and
+he knows just what you are doing. More than that, your pa speaks from
+the bitterest kind of experience when he pleads with you to quit. It is
+no goody-goody talk of a mutton-headed old deacon that he is giving you;
+it has taken him a year to get his courage up to speak to you, and every
+word that he speaks is boiled out of an agony of bitter memories. He
+knows where boys that start as you are starting end if they don't turn
+back. Your pa turned, but he recollects the career of the Blue boys, who
+are divided between the penitentiary, the poor-house and the southwest
+corner of hell; he recalls the Winklers--one dead, one a porter in a
+saloon in Peoria, one crazy; and he looks at you, and it seems to him
+that he must take you in his arms as he did when you were a little child
+in the prairie fire, and run to safety with you. And when he talks to
+you with his bashful, halting speech, you just sit there and grin, and
+cut his heart to its core, for he knows you do not understand.
+
+"It's rather up to you, Bub. In the next few months you will have to
+decide whether or not you are going to hell. Of course the 'vilest
+sinner may return' at any point along the road--but to what? To
+shattered health; to a mother heart-broken in her grave; to a wife
+damned to all eternity by your thoughtless brutality; and to children
+who are always afraid to look up the alley, when they see a group of
+boys, for fear they may be teasing you--you, drunk and dirty, lying in
+the stable filth! To that you will 'return,' with your strength spent,
+and your sportive friends, gone to the devil before you, and your chance
+in life frittered away.
+
+"Just sit down and figure it out, Bub. Of course there are a lot of good
+fellows on the road to hell; you will have a good time going; but you'll
+be a long time there. You'll dance and play cards and chase out nights,
+and soak your soul in the essence of don't-give-a-dam-tiveness, and
+you'll wonder, as you go up in the balloon, what fun there is in walking
+through this sober old earth. Friends--what are they? The love of
+humanity--what is it? Thoughtfulness to those about you? Gentility--What
+are these things? Letteroll--letteroll! But as you drop out of the
+balloon, the earth will look like a serious piece of landscape.
+
+"When you are old, the beer you have swilled will choke your throat; the
+women you have flirted with will hang round your feet and make you
+stumble. All the nights you have wasted at poker will dim your eyes. The
+garden of the days that are gone, wherein you should have planted
+kindness and consideration and thoughtfulness and manly courage to do
+right, will be grown up to weeds, that will blossom in your patches and
+in your rags and in your twisted, gnarly face that no one will love.
+
+"Go it, Bub! don't stop for your pa's sake; you know it all. Your pa is
+merely an old fogy. Tell him you can paddle your own canoe. But when you
+were a little boy, a very little boy, with a soft, round body, your pa
+used to take you in his arms and rub his beard--his rough, stubby,
+three-days' beard--against your face and pray that God would keep you
+from the path you are going in.
+
+"And so the sins of the father, Bub--but we won't talk of that."
+
+Three months later, when the Methodists opened their regular winter
+revival, Mehronay, becoming enraged at what he called the tin-horn
+clothes of the travelling evangelist conducting the meetings, began to
+make fun of him in the paper; and, as a revivalist in a church is a
+sacred person while the meetings are going on, we had to kill Mehronay's
+items about the revival; whereupon, his professional pride being hurt,
+Mehronay went forth into the streets, got haughtily drunk, and strutted
+up and down Main Street scattering sirs and misters and madams about so
+lavishly that men who did not appreciate his condition thought he had
+gone mad. That night he went to the revival, and sat upon the back seat
+alone, muttering his imprecations at the preacher until the singing
+began, when the heat of the room and the emotional music mellowed his
+pride, and he drowned out the revivalist's singing partner with a
+clear, sweet tenor that made the congregation turn to look at him.
+Mehronay knew the gospel hymns by heart, as he seemed to know his New
+Testament, and the cunning revivalist kept the song service going for an
+hour. When Mehronay was thoroughly sober there was a short prayer, and
+the singer on the platform feelingly sang "There Were Ninety and Nine"
+with an adagio movement, and Mehronay's face was wet with tears and he
+rose for prayers.
+
+He came to the office chastened and subdued next morning and wrote an
+account of the revival so eulogistic that we had to tone it down, and
+for a week he went about damning, with all the oaths in the pirate's
+log, Dan Gregg and the College professor who taught evolution. But no
+one could coax him back to the revival. As spring came we thought that
+he had forgotten the episode of his regeneration, and perhaps he had
+forgotten it, but the Saturday before Easter he put on the copy-hook an
+Easter sermon that made us in the office think that he had added another
+dream to his world. It was a curious thing for Mehronay to write;
+indeed, few people in town realised that he did write it; for he had
+been rollicking over town on his beat every day for months after the
+revival, and half the pious people in town thought he shammed his
+emotion the night he came to the church merely to mock them and their
+revivalist. But we in the office knew that Mehronay's Easter sermon had
+come as the offering of a contrite heart. It is in so many scrapbooks in
+the town that it should be reprinted here that the town may know that
+Mehronay wrote it. It read:
+
+"The celebration of Easter is the celebration of the renewal of life
+after the death that prevails in winter. People of many faiths observe a
+spring festival of rejoicing, and of prayer for future bounty. Probably
+the Easter celebration is like that at Christmas and Thanksgiving--a
+survival of some ancient pagan rite that men established out of
+overflowing hearts, rejoicing at the end of a good season and praying
+for favour at the beginning of a new one.
+
+"To the Christian world Easter symbolises a Divine tragedy. The coming
+of Easter, as it is set forth in the Great Book, is a most powerful
+story; it is the story of one of the deepest passions that may move the
+human heart--the passion of father-love.
+
+"Once there lived in the desert a man and his little child--a very
+little boy, who sometimes was a bad little boy, and who did not do as he
+was told. On a day when the father was away about his business the
+child, playing, wandered out on the desert and was lost. From home the
+desert beckoned the little boy; it seemed fair and fine to adventure in.
+When the boy had been gone for many hours the father returned and could
+not find him, and knew that the child was lost. But the father knew the
+desert; he knew how it lured men on; he knew its parching thirst; he
+knew its thorns and brambles, and its choking dust and the heat that
+beats one down.
+
+"And when he saw that the boy was lost his heart was aflame with
+anguish; he could all but feel the desert fire in the little boy's
+blood, the cactus barbs in the bleeding little feet, and the great
+lonesomeness of the desert in the little boy's heart; and as from afar
+the man heard a wailing little voice in his ears calling, 'Father,
+father!' like a lost sheep. But it was only a seeming, and the house
+where the little boy had played was silent.
+
+"Then the father went to the desert, and neither the desert fire
+murmuring at his brow, nor the sand that filled his mouth, nor the
+stones and prickles that cut his feet, nor the wild beasts that lurked
+upon the hillsides, could keep out of his ears the bleat of that little
+child's voice crying 'Father, father!' When the night fell, still and
+cold and numbing, the father pressed on, calling to the child in his
+agony; for he thought it was such a little boy, such a poor, lonesome,
+terror-stricken little boy out in the desert, lost and in pain, crying
+for help, with no one to hear.
+
+"And wandering so, the father died, with his heart full of unspeakable
+woe. But they found the wayward child in the light of another day. And
+he never knew what his father suffered, nor why his father died, nor did
+he understand it all till he had grown to a man's stature, and then he
+knew; and he tried to live his days as his father had lived, and to lay
+down his life, if need be, for his friend.
+
+"This is the Easter story that should come to every heart. The Christ
+that came into the desert of this weary life, and walked here foot-sore,
+heart-broken and athirst, came here for the love that was in His heart.
+Who put it there--whether the God that gave Shakespeare his brain and
+Wagner his harmonies, gave Christ His heart--or whether it was the God
+that paints the lily and moves the mountains in their labours--it
+matters not. It is one God, the Author and First Cause of all things. It
+is His heart that moves our own hearts to all their aspirations, to all
+the benevolence that the wicked world knows; it is His mind that is made
+manifest in our marvels of civilisation; it is His vast, unknowable plan
+that is moving the nations of the earth.
+
+"Whether it be spirit or law or tendency or person--what matter?--it is
+our Father, who went to the desert to find His sheep."
+
+All day Saturday, in order to square himself with the printers who set
+up his sermon, and to rehabilitate himself in the graces of the others
+about the office who knew of his weakness, Mehronay turned in the gayest
+lot of copy that he had ever written. There was an "assessment call of
+the Widowers' Protective Association to pay the sad wedding loss of
+Brother P. R. Cullom, of the Bee Hive," whose wedding was announced in
+the society column; there was a card of thanks from Ben Pore to those
+who had come with their sympathy and glue to nurse his wooden Indian
+which had blown down and broken the night before, and resolutions of
+respect for the same departed brother, in most mocking language, from
+the Red Men's Lodge. There was an item saying seven different varieties
+of Joneses and three kinds of Hugheses were in town from Lebo--the Welsh
+settlement; there was a call for the uniformed rank of head waiters to
+meet in regalia at Mrs. Larrabee's reception, signed by the three men in
+town who were known to have evening clothes, and there was a meeting of
+the anti-kin society announced to discuss the length of time
+Alphabetical Morrison's new son-in-law should be allowed to visit the
+Morrisons before the neighbours could ask when he was going to leave.
+But when the paper was out Mehronay got a dozen copies from the press
+and sent them away in wrappers which he addressed, and the piece his
+blue pencil marked was none of these.
+
+For many days after Mehronay wrote his Easter sermon the gentle, low,
+beelike hum that he kept up while he was at work followed the tunes of
+gospel hymns, or hymns of an older fashion. We always knew when to
+expect what he called a "piece" from Mehronay--which meant an article
+into which he put more than ordinary endeavour--for his bee-song would
+grow louder, with now and then an intelligible word in it, and if it was
+to be an exceptional piece Mehronay would whistle. When he began writing
+the music would die down, but when he was well under sail on his
+"piece," the steam of his swelling emotions would set his chin to going
+like the lid of a kettle, and he would drone and jibber the words as he
+wrote them--half audibly, humming and sputtering in the pauses while he
+thought. Scores of times we have seen the dear old fellow sitting at his
+desk when a "piece" was in the pot, and have gathered the men around
+back of his chair to watch him simmer. When it was finished he would
+whirl about in his chair, as he gathered up the sheets of paper and
+shook them together, and say: "I've writ a piece here--a damn good
+piece!" And then, as he put the copy on the hook and got his hat, he
+would tell us in most profane language what it was all about--quoting
+the best sentences and chuckling to himself as he went out onto the
+street.
+
+As the spring filled out and became summer we noticed that Mehronay was
+singing fewer gospel hymns and rather more sentimental songs than usual.
+And then the horrible report came to the office that Mehronay had been
+seen by one of the printers walking by night after bed-time under the
+State Street elms with a woman. Also his items began to indicate a
+closer knowledge of what was going on in society than Mehronay naturally
+could have. In the fall we learned through the girls in the Bee Hive
+that he had bought a white shirt and a pair of celluloid cuffs. This
+rumour set the office afire with curiosity, but no one dared to tease
+Mehronay. For no one knew who she was.
+
+Not until late in the fall, when Madame Janauschek came to the opera
+house to play "Macbeth," did Mehronay uncover his intrigue. Then for
+the first time in his three years' employment on the paper he asked for
+two show tickets! The entire office lined up at the opera house--most of
+us paying our own way, not to see the Macbeths, but to see Mehronay's
+Romeo and Juliet. The office devil, who was late mailing the papers that
+night, says that about seven o'clock Mehronay came in singing "Jean,
+Jean, my Bonnie Jean," and that he went to his trunk, took out his
+celluloid cuffs, a new sky-blue and shell-pink necktie that none of us
+had seen before, a clean paper collar--and the boy, who probably was
+mistaken, swears Mehronay also took his white shirt--in a bundle which
+he proudly tucked under his arm and toddled out of the office whistling
+a wedding march. An hour later, dressed in this regalia and a new black
+suit, buttoned primly and exactly in a fashion unknown to Mehronay, he
+appeared at the opera house with Miss Columbia Merley, spinster, teacher
+of Greek and Hellenic philosophy at the College. The office force asked
+in a gasp of wonder: "Who dressed him?" Miss Merley--late in her
+forties, steel-eyed, thin-chested, flint-faced and with hair knotted so
+tightly back from her high stony brow that she had to take out two
+hairpins to wink--Miss Merley might have done it--but she had no kith or
+kin who could have done it for her, and certainly the hand that smoothed
+the coat buttoned the vest, and the hand that buttoned the vest put on
+the collar and tie, and as for the shirt----
+
+But that was an office mystery. We never have solved it, and no one had
+the courage to tease Mehronay about it the next morning. After that we
+knew, and Mehronay knew that we knew, that he and Miss Merley went to
+church every Sunday evening--the Presbyterian church, mind you, where
+there is no foolishness--and that after church Mehronay always spent
+exactly half an hour in the parlour of the house where his divinity
+roomed. A whole year went by wherein Mehronay was sober, and did not
+look upon the wine when it was red or brown or yellow or any other
+colour. Now when he "writ a piece" there was frequently something in it
+defending women's rights. Also he severed diplomatic relations with the
+girl clerks in the White Front and the Bee Hive and the Racket, and
+bought a cane and aspired to some dignity of person. But Mehronay's
+heart was unchanged. The snows of boreal affection did not wither or
+fade his eternal spring. The sap still ran sweet in his veins and the
+bees still sang among the blossoms that sprang up along his path. He was
+everyone's friend, and spoke cheerily to the dogs and the horses, and
+was no more courteous to the preachers and the bankers, who are our most
+worshipful ones in town, than to the men from Red Martin's
+gambling-room, and even the woman in red, whom all the town knows but
+whom no one ever mentions, got a kind word from Mehronay as they met
+upon the street. He always called her sister.
+
+And so another year went by and Mehronay's "pieces" made the circulation
+grow, and we were prosperous. It became known about town long before we
+knew it in the office that if Mehronay kept sober for three years she
+would have him, and when we finally heard it he was on the last half of
+the third year and was growing sombre. "In the Cottage by the Sea" was
+his favourite song, and "Put Away the Little Playthings" also was much
+in his throat when he wrote. We thought, perhaps--and now we know--that
+he was thinking of a home that was gone. The day before Mehronay's
+wedding a child died over near the railroad, and on the morning he was
+to be married we found this on the copy hook when we came down to open
+the office, after Mehronay had gone to claim his bride:
+
+"A ten-line item appeared in last night's paper, away down in one
+corner, that brought more hearts together in a common bond--the bond of
+fear and sympathy and sorrow--than any other item has done for a long
+time. The item told of the death, by scarlet fever, of little Flossie
+Yengst. Probably the child was not known outside of her little group of
+playmates; her father and mother are not of that advertised clique known
+of men as prominent people; he is an engineer on the Santa Fe, and the
+mother moves in that small circle of friends and neighbours which
+circumscribes American motherhood of the best type. And yet last night,
+when that little ten-line item was read by a thousand firesides in this
+town, thousands and thousands of hearts turned to that desolate home by
+the track, and poured upon it the benediction of their sympathies. That
+home was the meeting-place where rich and poor, great and weak, good and
+bad, stood equals. For there is something in the death of a little
+child, something in its infinite pathos, that makes all human creatures
+mourn. Because in every heart that is not a dead heart, calloused to all
+joy or sorrow, some little child is enshrined--either dead or
+living--and so child-love is the one universal emotion of the soul, and
+child-death is the saddest thing in all the world.
+
+"A child's soul is such a small thing, and the world and the systems of
+worlds, and the infinite stretches of illimitable space, are so wide for
+a child's soul to wander in, that, sane as we may be, stolid as we may
+try to be, we think in imagery, and the figure of little feet setting
+off on the far track to the end of things, hunting God, wrings our
+heart-strings and makes our throats grip and our eyelids quiver.
+
+"And then a child dying, leaving this good world of ours, seems to have
+had so small a chance for itself. There is something in all of us
+struggling against oblivion, striving vainly to make some real impress
+on the current of time, and a child, dying, can only clutch the hands
+about it and go down--forever. It seems so merciless, so unfair. Perhaps
+that is why, all over the world, the little graves are cared for best.
+It is to the little graves that we turn in our keenest anguish and not
+to the larger mounds; to the little graves that our hearts are drawn in
+our hours of triumph. And so the child, though dead, lives its appointed
+time and dies only in the fullness of its years. The little shoes, the
+little dresses, the 'little tin soldiers covered with rust,' and the
+memories sweeter than dreams of a honeymoon, these are life's
+immortelles that never fade. And though men and women come and go upon
+the earth, though civilisations may wither and pass, these little images
+remain; and the sun and the stars, which see men come and go, may see
+these little idols before which every creature bows, and the sun and
+stars, knowing no time, may think these children's relics are also
+eternal.
+
+"It is a desperately lonely home, that Yengst home, with the little girl
+gone away on a long journey; but how tight and close other fathers and
+mothers hugged their little ones last night when their hearts came back
+from the house of sorrow. And the little ones, feeling no fear,
+unconscious of the pang of terror that was shooting through the souls
+about them--the children played on, and maybe, before dropping to sleep,
+wondered a little at anxious looks they saw in grown-up eyes.
+
+"This is the faith of a little child, curious but implicit, in the
+goodness of those things outside one's self. And 'of such is the Kingdom
+of Heaven.'"
+
+A day or so after the wedding someone said to him: "Mehronay, sometimes
+your pieces make me cry," and he replied with all the fine sincerity of
+his heart showing in his eyes: "Yes--and if you only knew how they make
+me cry! Sometimes when I have written one like--like that--I go to my
+bed and sob like a child." He turned and walked away, but he came into
+the office whistling "The Dutch Company."
+
+After his wedding we made brave, in a sly way, to rail at Mehronay about
+his love affair, and he took it good-naturedly. He knew the situation
+just as it was; his sense of humour allowed him no false view of the
+matter. One afternoon when the paper was out, George Kirwin, the
+foreman, and one of the reporters and Mehronay were in the back room
+leaning against the imposing-stones looking over the paper, when Kirwin
+said: "Say, Mehronay, how did you get yourself screwed up to ask her?"
+
+It was spoken in a joke. The two young men were grinning, but Mehronay
+looked at the floor in a study as he said:
+
+"Well, to be honest--damfino if I ever did--just exactly." He smiled
+reflectively in a pause and continued: "Nearest I remember was one night
+we was sitting with our feet on the base-burner and I looked up and
+says, 'Hell's afire, Commie'--I called her that for short--'why in the
+devil don't a fine woman like you get married? She got up and come over
+to where I was a-sitting and before I could say Lordamighty, she put her
+hand on my shoulder and says real soft and solemn: 'I'll just be damned
+if I don't believe I will.'"
+
+He did not smile when he looked up, but sighed contentedly as he added
+reverently: "And so, by hell, she did!" If Columbia Merley Mehronay had
+known this language which her husband's innocent inadvertence put into
+her mouth she would have strangled him--even then.
+
+We did not have Mehronay with us more than a year after his wedding.
+Mrs. Mehronay knew what he was worth. She asked for twenty-five dollars
+a week for him, and when we told her the office could not afford it she
+took him away. They went to New York City, where she peddled his pieces
+about town until she got him a regular place. There they have lived
+happily ever after. Mehronay brings his envelope home every Saturday
+night, and she gives him his carfare and his shaving-money and puts the
+rest where it will do the most good. When the men from our office go to
+New York--which they sometimes do--they visit with Mehronay at his
+office, and sometimes--if there is time for due and proper notice of the
+function in writing--there is an invitation to dinner. Mehronay fondles
+his old friends as a child fondles its playmates and he takes eager
+pleasure in them, but she that was Columbia Merley all but searches
+their pockets for the tempter.
+
+Mehronay has never broken his word. He knows if he does break it she
+will tear him limb from limb and eat him raw. So he goes to his work,
+writes his pieces, hums his gentle bee-song--so that men do not like to
+room with him at the office--and has learned to keep himself fairly well
+buttoned up in the great city. But Miss Larrabee that was--who used to
+edit the society page for our paper, but who now lives in New York--told
+us when she was home that as she was walking down Fourth Avenue one
+winter day when the street was empty, she saw Mehronay standing before
+the window of a liquor store looking intently at the display of bottled
+goods before him. When he saw her half a block away he turned from her
+and shuffled rapidly down the street, clicking his cane nervously.
+
+It was not for him!
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+Sown in Our Weakness
+
+
+When one comes to know an animal well--say a horse or a cow or a
+dog--and sees how sensibly it acts, following the rules of conduct laid
+down by the wisdom of its kind, one cannot help wondering how much
+happier, and healthier, and better, human beings would be if they used
+the discretion of the animals. For ages men have been taught what is
+good for their bodies and their minds and their souls. There has been no
+question about the wisdom of being temperate and industrious and honest
+and kind; and the folly of immoderation and laziness and chicanery and
+meanness is so well known that a geometrical proposition has not been
+more definitely proved. Yet only a few people in any community observe
+the rules of life, and of these few no one observes them all; and so
+misery and pain and poverty and anguish are as a pestilence among men,
+and they wonder why they are living in such a cruel world. It was Eli
+Martin who, back in the seventies, won the prize in the Bethel
+neighbourhood for reciting more chapters of the Old Testament than any
+other child in Sunday-school; and the old McGuffey's Reader that he used
+on week-days was filled with moral tales; but someway when it came to
+applying the rules he had learned, and the moral that the stories
+pointed, Eli Martin lacked the sense of a dog or a horse. Once, when the
+paper contained an account of one of Red Martin's police court
+escapades, George Kirwin recalled that, when we offered a prize during
+the Christmas season of 1880, for the best essay by a child under
+twelve, it was Ethelwylde Swaney who won the prize with an essay on the
+Weakness of Vanity; and she married Eli Martin when she and the whole
+town knew what he was.
+
+Naturally one would suppose that two persons so full of theoretical
+wisdom would have applied it, and that in applying it they would have
+been the happiest and most useful people in all the town; but instead
+they were probably the most miserable people in town, and Mrs. Martin,
+whom we knew better than Red, because she once had worked in the office,
+was forever bemoaning what she called her "lot," though we knew for many
+years that her "lot" was not the result of the fates against her, but
+merely the inevitable consequence of her temperament.
+
+Before we put in linotypes and set our type by machinery it was set by
+girls. Usually we employed half-a-dozen, who came from the town high
+school. They kept coming and going, as girls do who work in country
+towns, getting married in their twenties or finding something better
+than printing, and it is likely that in ten years as many as fifty girls
+have worked in the office, and be it said to the credit of the
+girls--which cannot be said of so many of the boys and men who have
+worked in the shop--that they were girls we were proud of--all but
+Ethelwylde Swaney.
+
+She that we called the Princess worked in the office less than two
+years, but the memory of her still lingers, though hardly could one say
+like "the scent of the roses"; for the Princess was not merely a poor
+compositor, she was the kind that would make mistakes and blame others
+for them, and that kind never learns. Though she ran away to marry Red
+Martin--which was her own mistake--this habit of blaming others for her
+faults was so strong that she never forgave her mother for making the
+match. We know in our office that Mrs. Swaney did not dream that the
+girl was even going with Red Martin until they were married. Yet the
+Martin neighbours for twenty years have blamed Mrs. Swaney. When the
+Princess was in the office we found out that the truth wasn't in her;
+also we discovered that she was lazy and that she cried too easily.
+Right at the busy hour in the afternoon we used to catch her with a type
+in her fingers and her hand poised in the air, looking off into space
+for a minute at a time, and when we spoke to her she would put her head
+on her case and cry softly; and the foreman would have to apologise
+before she would go back to work. Even then she would have to take the
+broken piece of looking-glass that she kept in her capital "K" box and
+make an elaborate toilet before settling down. Moreover, though she was
+only seventeen, much of the foreman's time was spent chasing dirty-faced
+little boys away from her case, and if some boy didn't have his elbow in
+her quad box, she was off her stool visiting either with some other
+girl, or standing by the stove drying her hands--she was eternally
+drying her hands--and talking to one of the men. In all the year and a
+half that she was in the office the Princess never learned how to help
+herself. When she had to dump her type, she had to call some man from
+his work to help her--and then there would be more conversation.
+
+But we kept her and were patient with her on account of her father, John
+Swaney, a hard-working man who was trying to make something of the
+Princess, so we put up with her perfumery and her powder rags and her
+royal airs, and did all we could to teach her the difference between a
+comma and a period--though she never really learned; and we were still
+patient with her, even when she deliberately pied a lot of type after
+being corrected for some piece of carelessness or worse. We made due
+allowances for the Rutherford temper, which her father warned us not to
+arouse. Nevertheless, her mother came to the office one winter day in
+her black straw hat with a veil around it, and with the coat she had
+worn for ten years, to tell us that she was afraid working in the shop
+would hurt her daughter's social standing. So the Princess walked out
+that night in a gust of musk--in her picture hat and sweeping cloak,
+with bangles tinkling and petticoat swishing--and the office knew her no
+more forever.
+
+About the time that the Princess left the office to improve her social
+standing, Eli Martin and his big mule team came to town from the Bethel
+neighbourhood. He was as likely a looking red-headed country boy as you
+ever saw. We were laying the town waterworks pipes that year, and Eli
+and his team had work all summer. On the street he towered above the
+other men several inches in height, and he looked big and muscular and
+masculine in his striped undershirt and blue overalls, as he worked with
+his team in the hot sun. Of course, the Princess would not have seen him
+in those days. Her nose was seeking a higher social level, and the
+clerks in the White Front dry-goods store formed the pinnacle of her
+social ideal. But Eli Martin was naturally what in our parlance we call
+a ladies' man, and he was not long in learning that the wide-brimmed
+black hat, the ready-made faded green suit and the red string necktie
+which had swept the girls down before him in the Bethel neighbourhood
+would accomplish little in town. So when winter came, and work with his
+team was hard to get, he sold his mules and bedecked himself in fine
+linen. He had a few hundred dollars saved up, so he lived in the cabbage
+smells of the Astor House, and fancied that he was enjoying the
+refinements of a great city. Time hung heavily upon him, and at night he
+joined the switchmen and certain young men of leisure in the town in a
+more or less friendly game of poker in the rooms at the head of the dark
+stairway on South Main Street.
+
+When spring came the young man had no desire and little need to go back
+to work, for by that time he was known as Lucky Red. In a year the
+sunburn left him and he grew white and thin. He went to Kansas City for
+a season, and became known among gamblers as far west as Denver; but he
+was only a tin-horn gambler in the big cities, while in our town he was
+at the head of his profession, so he came back and opened a room of his
+own. He came back in a blaze of glory; to wit: a long grey frock coat
+with trousers to match, pleated white shirts studded with blinding
+diamonds, a small white hat dented jauntily on three sides, a matted
+lump of red hair on the back of his head and a dashing red curl combed
+extravagantly low on his forehead. Before he left town for his foreign
+tour Red Martin used to hang about the churches Sunday evenings, peering
+through the blinds and making eyes at the girls; but upon his return he
+had risen to another social level. He had acquired a cart with red
+wheels and a three-minute horse; so he dropped from his social list the
+girls who "worked out" and made eyes at those young women who lived at
+home, gadding around town evenings, picking up boys on the street and
+forever talking about their "latest."
+
+It was the most natural thing in the world that Red and the Princess
+should find each other, and six months before the elopement we heard
+that the Princess was riding about the country with him in the
+red-wheeled cart. For after she left the office in one way and another
+we had kept track of the girl--sometimes through her father, who, being
+a carpenter, was frequently called to the office to fix up a door or a
+window; sometimes through the other girls in the office, and sometimes
+through Alphabetical Morrison, whose big family of girl school-teachers
+made him a storage battery of social information.
+
+It seems that the Rutherford temper developed in the Princess as she
+grew older. Mrs. Swaney was Juanita Sinclair; her father was a
+mild-mannered little man, who went out of doors to cough, but her mother
+was a Rutherford--a big, stiff-necked, beer-bottle-shaped woman, who
+bossed the missionary society until she divided the church. John Swaney,
+who is not a talkative man, once got in a crowd at Smith's cigar-store
+where they were telling ghost stories, and his contribution to the
+horror of the occasion was a relating of how, when they were fooling
+with tables, trying to make them tip at his house one night at a family
+reunion, the spirit of Grandma Rutherford appeared, split the table into
+kindling, dislocated three shoulder-blades and sprained five wrists. It
+was this Rutherford temper that the Princess wore when she slouched
+around the house in her mother-hubbard with her hair in papers. The
+girls in the office used to say that if her mother over-cooked the
+Princess's egg in the morning she would rise grandly from the breakfast
+table, tipping over her chair behind her, and rush to her room "to have
+a good cry," and the whole family had to let the breakfast cool while
+they coaxed her down. That was the Rutherford temper. Also, when they
+tried to teach her to cook, it was the Rutherford temper that broke the
+dishes. Colonel Morrison once told us that when the Princess thought it
+was time to give a party, the neighbours could see the Rutherford temper
+begin wig-wagging at the world through the Princess's proud head, and
+there was nothing for her father to do but to kill the chickens, run
+errands all day to the grocery store, and sit in the cellar freezing
+cream, and then go to the barn at night to smoke. It was known in the
+neighbourhood that the Princess dragged her shoestrings until noon, and
+that her bed was never in the memory of woman made up in the daytime. We
+are Yankees in our town, and these things made more talk to the girl's
+discredit than the story that she was keeping company with Red Martin!
+
+But we at the office saw in the proud creature that passed our window so
+grandly nothing to indicate her real self. The year that Red Martin came
+back to town the Princess used to turn into Main Street in an afternoon,
+wearing the big black hat that cost her father a week's hard work,
+looking as sweet as a jug of sorghum and as smiling as a basket of
+chips. Though women sniffed at her, the men on the veranda of the Hotel
+Metropole craned their necks to watch her out of sight. She jingled with
+chains and watches and lockets and chatelaines, carried more rings than
+a cane rack, and walked with the air of the heroine of the society drama
+at the opera house. When she was on parade she never even glanced toward
+our office, where she had jeopardised her social position. She barely
+quivered a recognising eye-brow at the girls who had worked with her,
+and they had their laugh at her, so matters were about even. But the
+office girls say that, after the Princess eloped with Red Martin, she
+was glad to rush up and shake hands with them. For we know in our town
+that the princess business does not last more than ten days or two weeks
+after marriage; it is a trade of quick sales, short seasons and small
+profits. The day that the elopement was the talk of the town, Colonel
+Alphabetical Morrison was in the office. He said that he remembered
+Juanita Sinclair when she was a princess and wore Dolly Varden clothes
+and was the playfullest kitten in the basketful that used to turn out to
+the platform dances on Fourth of July, and appear as belles of the
+suppers given for the Silver Cornet Band just after the war. "But,"
+added the Colonel, "this town is full of saffron-coloured old girls with
+wiry hair and sun-bleached eyes, who at one time or another were in the
+princess business. Not only has every dog his day, but eventually every
+kitten becomes a cat."
+
+[Illustration: The traveling men on the veranda craned their necks to
+watch her out of sight]
+
+From the night of the charivari when Red Martin handed the boys twenty
+dollars--the largest sum ever contributed to a similar purpose in the
+town's history--he and the Princess began to slump. The sloughing off of
+the veneer of civilisation was not rapid, but it was sure. The first
+pair of shoes that Red bought after his wedding were not patent leather,
+and, though the porter of his gambling place blacked them every morning,
+still they were common leather, and the boy noticed it. Likewise, the
+Princess had her hat retrimmed with her old plumes the fall after her
+wedding, bought no new clothes, and wore her giddy spring jacket, thin
+as it was, all winter, and after the second baby came no human being
+ever saw her in anything but a wrapper, except when she was on Main
+Street.
+
+The neighbours said she wore a wrapper so that she could have free use
+of her lungs, for when Red and the Princess opened a family debate, the
+neighbours had to shut the doors and windows and call in the children.
+Notwithstanding all the names that she called him in their lung-testing
+events, there was no question about her love for the man. For, after the
+first year of her marriage, though she lost interest in her clothes and
+ceased calling for the "fashion leaf" at the dress-goods counter in the
+White Front, and let her hair go stringy, we around our office knew that
+the Princess was only a child, who some way had lost interest in her old
+toys. When God gives babies to children, the children forget their other
+dolls, and the Princess, when the babies came, put away her other dolls,
+and played with the toys that came alive. And she spanked them and
+fondled them and scolded them with the same empty-headed vanity that she
+used to devote to her clothes.
+
+Red Martin was one of the Princess's dearest dolls, and she and the
+babies were his toys; but, being a boy, he did not care for them so much
+with the paint rubbed off, yet he did not neglect them. Instead, he
+neglected himself. When the babies began to put grease spots on his
+clothes, he did not clean them, and about the time his wife quit
+powdering, when she came to Main Street, he stopped wearing collars. She
+grew fat and frowsy, and her chief interest in life seemed to be to
+over-dress her children, and sometimes Red Martin encouraged her by
+bringing home the most extravagant suits for the boys, and sometimes he
+abused her when the bills came in for things which she had bought for
+the children, and asked why she did not buy something half-way
+respectable-looking to wear herself. After each of their furious
+quarrels she would go over the neighbourhood the next day and tell the
+neighbours that her mother had married her to a gambler, and ask them
+what a gambler's wife could expect. If any neighbour woman agreed with
+Mrs. Martin about her husband or her position Mrs. Martin would become
+angry and flounce out of the house, but if the women spoke kindly of her
+husband she would berate him and weep, and assure them that she had
+refused the banker, or the proprietor of the Bee Hive, or anyone else
+who seemed to make her story possible.
+
+By the time that the third baby was old enough to carry his baby sister
+and the fifth baby was in the crib, Red Martin's face had begun to grow
+purple. He lost the gambling-room which was once his pride; it was
+operated by a youth with a curly black moustache, whose clothes recalled
+the days of Red's triumph. Red was only a dealer, and his trousers were
+frayed at the bottom and he shaved but once a week. Then the Princess
+used to come slinking up Main Street at night carrying a pistol under
+her coat to use if she found the woman with him. Who the woman was the
+neighbours never knew, but the Princess gave them to understand that
+they would be surprised if she told them. It was her vanity to pretend
+that the woman was a society leader, as she called her, but the boys
+around the poker-dive knew that Red Martin's days as a heart-breaker
+were gone. For what whisky and cocaine and absinthe could do for Red to
+hurry his end they were doing, but a man is a strong beast, and it takes
+many years to kill him. Also, the Lord saves men like Red for horrible
+examples, letting them live long that He may not have to waste others;
+but women seem to have God's pity and He takes them out of their misery
+more quickly than He takes men. With the coming of the seventh baby the
+Princess died. When the news came to the office that she was gone we
+were not sorry, for life had held little for her. Her looks were gone;
+her health was gone; her dreams were smudged out--pitiful and wretched
+and sordid as they were, even at the best. Yet for all that George
+Kirwin took down to the funeral a wreath which the office force bought
+for her.
+
+To know George Kirwin casually one would say he never saw anything but
+the types and machinery in the back room of our office. When he went
+among strangers he seemed to be looking always at his hands or studying
+his knees, and his responses to those whom he did not know were "yea,
+yea," and "nay, nay"; but that night he told us more about the funeral
+of the Princess than all the reporters on the paper would have learned.
+He told us how the pitiful little parlour with its advertising chromos
+and its soap-prize lamp was filled with the women who always come to
+funerals in our town--funerals being their only diversion; how they sat
+in the undertaker's chairs with their handkerchiefs carefully folded and
+in their hands during the first part of the service, waiting for Brother
+Hopper to tell about his mother's death, which he never fails to do at
+funerals, though the elders have spoken to him about it, as all the town
+knows; how Red Martin, shaved for the occasion, and, in a borrowed suit
+of clothes, stood out by the well and did not come into the house during
+the services; how only the elder children sat in the front room with the
+other mourners, and how the prattle of the little ones in the kitchen
+ran through the parson's prayer with heart-breaking insistence.
+
+George seemed to think that the poverty-stricken little makeshifts to
+bring beauty into the miserable home and keep up the appearance of a
+kind of gentility--perhaps for the children--was the best thing he ever
+knew about the Princess, and he said that he was glad that he went to
+the funeral for the geraniums in the crepe paper covered tomato cans,
+the cheap lace curtains at the windows, and the hair-wreath inheritance
+from the Swaneys, made him think that the best of the Princess might
+have survived all the rack and calamity of the years.
+
+When the funeral left the house the neighbour women came and put it in
+order, and there was a better supper waiting for the father and the
+children than they had eaten for many years. And then, after the dishes
+were put away, the neighbours left; and for what he tried to do and be
+for the motherless brood just that one night, God will put down a good
+mark for Eli Martin--even though the man failed most sadly.
+
+When he went back to the gambling-room the next night, where he was
+porter; men tried not to swear while he was in earshot, and the next day
+they swore only mild oaths around him, out of respect for his grief, but
+the day after they forgot their compunctions, and, within a week, Red
+Martin seemed to have forgotten, too. In time, the family was scattered
+over the earth--divided among kin, and adopted out, and as the town grew
+older its conscience quickened and the gambling-room was closed,
+whereupon Red Martin went to Huddleston's livery stable, where he worked
+for enough to keep him in whisky and laudanum, and ate only when someone
+gave him food.
+
+He grew dirty, unkempt, and dull-witted. Disease bent and twisted him
+hideously. When he was too sick to work, he went to the poor-house, and
+came back weak and pale to sit much in the sun on the south side of the
+building like a sick dog. When he is lying about the street drunk,
+little boys poke sticks at him and flee with terror before him when he
+wakes to blind rage and stumbles after them. It is hard to realise that
+this disgusting, inhuman-looking creature is the Red Martin of twenty
+years ago, who, in his long grey frock coat, patent leather shoes, white
+hat and black tie, walked serenely up the steps of the bank the day it
+failed, tapped on the door-pane with his revolver barrel, and, when a
+man came to answer, made him open, and backed out with his revolver in
+one hand and his diamonds and money in the other. He does not recall in
+any vague way the Red Martin who gave the town a month's smile when he
+said, after losing all his money on election, that he had learned never
+to bet on anything that could talk, or had less than four legs. That Red
+Martin has been dead these many years; perhaps he was no more worthy
+than this one who hangs on to life, and bears the name and the disgrace
+that his dead youth made inevitable.
+
+How strange it is that a man should wreck himself, and blight those of
+his own blood as this man has done! He knew what we all know about life
+and its rules. He had been told, as we all are told in a thousand ways,
+that bad conduct brings sorrow to the world, and that pain and
+wretchedness are the only rewards of that behaviour which men call sin.
+And yet there he is, sitting on his hunkers near the stable, with God's
+stamp of failure all over his broken, battered body--put there by Red
+Martin's own hands. But George Kirwin, who often thinks with a kindlier
+spirit than others, says we are Red Martin's partners in iniquity, for
+we all lived here with him, maintaining a town that tolerated gambling
+and debauchery, and that, in some way, we shall each of us suffer as Red
+has suffered, insomuch as each has had his share in a neighbour's shame.
+
+We tell George that he is getting old, though he is still on the bright
+side of forty, because he likes to come down town of evenings and hold a
+parliament with Henry Larmy and Dan Gregg and Colonel Morrison.
+Sometimes they hold it in the office and settle important affairs. A
+month ago they settled the immortality of the soul, and the other night,
+returning to their former subject, the question came up: "What will
+become of Red Martin when he goes to Heaven?" Dan contended that the
+poor fellow is carrying around his own little blowpipe hell as he goes
+through life. George Kirwin maintained that Red Martin will enter the
+next world with the soul that died when his body began to live in
+wickedness; that there must have been some imperishable good in him as a
+boy, and that Heaven, or whatever we decide to call the next world, must
+be full of men and women like Red Martin--some more respectable than
+he--whose hell will be the unmasking of their real selves in the world
+where we "shall know as we are known." While we were sitting in judgment
+on poor Red Martin, in toddled Simon Mehronay, who is visiting in town
+from New York in the company of the vestal virgin who had, as he
+expressed it, snatched him as a brand from the burning. Mehronay has
+been gone from town nearly twenty years, and until they told him he did
+not know how Red Martin had fallen. When he heard it, Mehronay sighed
+and tears came into his dear old eyes, as he put his hand on Colonel
+Morrison's arm and said:
+
+"Poor Red! Poor Red! A decent, brave, big-hearted chap! Why, he's taken
+whisky away from me a dozen times! He's won my money from me to keep it
+over Saturday night. Why, I'm no better than he is! Only they've caught
+Red, and they haven't caught me. And when we stand before the
+judgment-seat, I can tell a damnsight more good things about Red than he
+can about me. I'm going out to find him and get him a square meal."
+
+And so, while we were debating, Mehronay went down the Jericho road
+looking for the man who was lying there, beaten and bruised and waiting
+for the Samaritan.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+"Thirty"
+
+
+In the afternoon, between two and three o'clock, the messenger boy from
+the telegraph office brings over the final sheet of the day's report of
+the Associated Press. Always at the end is the signature "Thirty." That
+tells us that the report is closed for the day. Just why "Thirty" should
+be used to indicate the close of the day's work no one seems to know. It
+is the custom. They do so in telegraph offices all over the country, and
+in the newspaper business "Thirty" stands so significantly for the end
+that whenever a printer or a reporter dies his associates generally feel
+called upon to have a floral emblem made with that figure in the centre.
+It is therefore entirely proper that these sketches of life in a country
+town, seen through a reporter's eyes, should close with that symbolic
+word. But how to close? That is the question.
+
+Sitting here by the office window, with the smell of ink in one's
+nostrils, with the steady monotonous clatter of the linotypes in the
+ears, and the whirring of the shafting from the press-room in the
+basement throbbing through one's nerves, with the very material
+realisation of the office around one; we feel that only a small part of
+it, and of the life about it, has been set down in these sketches.
+Passing the office window every moment is someone with a story that
+should be told. Every human life, if one could know it well and
+translate it into language, has in it the making of a great story. It is
+because we are blind that we pass men and women around us, heedless of
+the tragic quality of their lives. If each man or woman could understand
+that every other human life is as full of sorrows, of joys, of base
+temptations, of heartaches and of remorse as his own, which he thinks so
+peculiarly isolated from the web of life, how much kinder, how much
+gentler he would be! And how much richer life would be for all of us!
+Life is dull to no one; but life seems dull to those dull persons who
+think life is dull for others, and who see only the drab and grey
+shades in the woof that is woven about them.
+
+Here in our town are ten thousand people, and yet these sketches have
+told of less than two score of them. In the town are thousands of others
+quite as interesting as these of whom we have written. A few minutes ago
+Jim Bolton rode by on his hack. There is no reason why others should be
+advertised of men and Jim left out; for Jim is the proudest man in town.
+
+He came here when the town was young, and was president of the
+Anti-Horse-Thief League in the days before it became an emeritus
+institution, when it was a power in politics and named the Sheriff as a
+matter of right and of course. Jim has never let the fact that he kept a
+livery-stable and drove a hack interfere with his position as leading
+citizen. He keeps a livery-stable, because that is his business, and he
+drives a hack because he cannot trust such a valuable piece of property
+in the hands of the boy. But when the street fair is to be put on, or
+the baseball team financed, or when the Baptist Church needs a new roof,
+or the petitions are to be circulated for a bond election, Jim Bolton
+gets down from his hack, puts on his crystal slipper and is the
+Cinderella of the occasion. That is why, when young men go in Jim's hack
+to take young women to parties and dances, they always invite Jim in to
+sit by the fire and get warm while the girls are primping. That is why,
+when young Ben Mercer, just home from five years at Harvard, offered Jim
+a "tip" over the usual twenty-five-cent fare, Jim quietly took off his
+coat and whipped young Ben where he stood--and the town lined up for an
+hour, each man eager for the privilege of contributing ten cents to the
+popular subscription to pay old Jim's fine and costs in police-court.
+
+Following Jim Bolton on his hack past the office window came Bill
+Harrison, once extra brakeman on the Dry Creek Branch, just promoted to
+be conductor on the main line, and so full of vainglory in his exalted
+position that he wears his brass buttons on freight trains. Bill's wife
+signs his pay-check and doles out his cigar money, a quarter at a time,
+and when he asks for a dollar, she looks at him as if she suspected him
+of leading a double life. It is her ambition to live in Topeka, for
+"there are so many conductors in Topeka," she says, "that society is not
+so mixed"--as it is in our town, where she complains that the switchmen
+and the firemen and the student-brakemen dominate society. Once a cigar
+salesman from Kansas City got on Bill's train and offered a lead dollar
+for fare.
+
+"I can't take this," protested Bill, emphasising the "I," because his
+job was new.
+
+"Well, then, you might just turn that one over to the company,"
+responded the drummer.
+
+And when the head-brakeman told it in the yards, Bill had to fuss with
+his wife for two days to get money for a box of cigars to stop the
+trouble.
+
+As these lines were being written, Miss Littleton came into the office
+with a notice for the Missionary Society. She has been teaching school
+in town for thirty years and is not so cheerful as she was once. For a
+long time the board has considered dismissing her; but it continues to
+change her around from building to building and from room to room, and
+to keep her out of sheer pity; and she knows it. There is tragedy enough
+in her story to fill a book. Yet she looks as humdrum as you please, and
+smiles so gaily as she puts down her notice, that one thinks perhaps she
+is trying to dispel the impression that she is cross and impatient with
+children.
+
+On the other side of the street, upstairs in his dusty real estate
+office, with tin placards of insurance companies on the wall, and gaudy
+calendars tacked everywhere, Silas Buckner stands at the window counting
+the liars and scoundrels, and double-dealers and villains, and thieves
+and swindlers who pass. Since Silas was defeated for Register of Deeds
+he has become a pessimist. He has soured on the town, and when he sees a
+man, Silas thinks only of the evil that man has done. Silas knows all
+men's weaknesses, forgets their strength, and looking down from the
+window hates his fellow-creatures for the wrong they have done him, or
+the wickedness that he knows of them. He has never given our reporters a
+kindly item of news since he was turned down, but if there is a
+discreditable story on any citizen going around we hear it first from
+Silas, and if we do not print it he says we have taken hush money. If
+we have to print it, he says we are stirring up strife. Seeing him over
+there, looking down on the town which to him is accursed, we have often
+thought how weary God must be looking at the world and knowing so much
+better than Silas the weakness and iniquity of men. Sometimes we have
+wondered if sin is really as important as Silas thinks it is, for with
+Silas sin is a blot that effaces a man's soul. But maybe God sees sin
+only as a blemish that men may overcome. Perhaps God is not so
+discouraged with us as Silas is. But life is a puzzle at most.
+
+[Illustration: Counting the liars and scoundrels and double-dealers and
+villains who pass]
+
+Last night Aaron Marlin died. He had lived for ninety years in this
+world, and had seen much and suffered much, and has died as a child
+turns to sleep. It was quiet and still at his home among the elms as he
+lay in his coffin. The mourners spoke in low and solemn tones, and the
+blinds were drawn as if death were shy. As he lay there in the great
+hush that was over the house, there passed before it on the sidewalk two
+who spoke as low as the mourners, though they were oblivious to the
+house of death. They trod slowly, and a great calm was on their souls.
+One of the scribes who sets down these lines stood in the shadow of the
+doorway pine-tree and saw the lovers passing; he felt the silence and
+the sorrow behind the door he was about to enter; and there he stood
+wondering--between Death and Love--the End and the Beginning of God's
+great mystery of Life. Now, with the sense of that great mystery upon
+him, with all of this pied skein of life about him, he puts down his
+pen, and looks out of the window as the thread winds down the street.
+
+For "Thirty" is in for the day.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of In Our Town, by William Allen White
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN OUR TOWN ***
+
+***** This file should be named 26207.txt or 26207.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/2/6/2/0/26207/
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/26207.zip b/26207.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5c2fc1d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26207.zip
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6312041
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a5756dc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #26207 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26207)