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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Son of the Middle Border, by Hamlin Garland
+
+
+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: A Son of the Middle Border
+
+
+Author: Hamlin Garland
+
+
+
+Release Date: May 13, 2009  [eBook #28791]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Lee Dawei, Barbara Kosker, and the Project Gutenberg
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
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+      See 28791-h.htm or 28791-h.zip:
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28791/28791-h/28791-h.htm)
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+
+
+
+
+
+A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER
+
+by
+
+HAMLIN GARLAND
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Illustration]
+
+ January twenty-second.
+
+ Dear Mrs. LeCron:
+
+In the spring of 1898, after finishing my LIFE OF ULYSSES S. GRANT, I
+began to plan to go into the Klondike over the Telegraph Trail. One day
+in showing the maps of my route to William Dean Howells, I said, "I
+shall go in here and come out there," a trail of nearly twelve hundred
+miles through an almost unknown country. As I uttered this I suddenly
+realized that I was starting on a path holding many perils and that I
+might not come back.
+
+With this in mind, I began to dictate the story of my career up to that
+time. It was put in the third person but it was my story and the story
+of my people, the Garlands and the McClintocks. This manuscript, crude
+and hasty as it was, became the basis of A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER. It
+was the beginning of a four-volume autobiography which it has taken me
+fifteen years to write. As a typical mid-west settler I felt that the
+history of my family would be, in a sense, the chronicle of the era of
+settlement lying between 1840 and 1914. I designedly kept it intimate
+and personal, the joys and sorrows of a group of migrating families. Of
+the four books, Volume One, THE TRAIL MAKERS, is based upon my memory of
+the talk around a pioneer fireside. The other three volumes are as true
+as my own memory can make them.
+
+ Hamlin Garland
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER
+
+by
+
+HAMLIN GARLAND
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+Grosset & Dunlap Publishers
+by arrangement with
+The MacMillan Company
+
+Printed in the United States of America
+
+Copyright, 1914 And 1917
+by P. F. Collier & Son
+
+Copyright, 1917
+by Hamlin Garland
+
+Set up and electrotyped. Published August, 1917. Reprinted
+March, 1925, December, 1925. Reissued, January, 1927,
+February, 1928.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+ CHAPTER                                                  PAGE
+
+      I. HOME FROM THE WAR                                   1
+
+     II. THE MCCLINTOCKS                                    14
+
+    III. THE HOME IN THE COULEE                             27
+
+     IV. FATHER SELLS THE FARM                              42
+
+      V. THE LAST THRESHING IN THE COULEE                   50
+
+     VI. DAVID AND HIS VIOLIN                               59
+
+    VII. WINNESHEIK "WOODS AND PRAIRIE LANDS"               68
+
+   VIII. WE MOVE AGAIN                                      79
+
+     IX. OUR FIRST WINTER ON THE PRAIRIE                    85
+
+      X. THE HOMESTEAD ON THE KNOLL                         99
+
+     XI. SCHOOL LIFE                                       107
+
+    XII. CHORES AND ALMANACS                               116
+
+   XIII. BOY LIFE ON THE PRAIRIE                           125
+
+    XIV. WHEAT AND THE HARVEST                             144
+
+     XV. HARRIET GOES AWAY                                 161
+
+    XVI. WE MOVE TO TOWN                                   173
+
+   XVII. A TASTE OF VILLAGE LIFE                           189
+
+  XVIII. BACK TO THE FARM                                  204
+
+    XIX. END OF SCHOOL DAYS                                221
+
+     XX. THE LAND OF THE DAKOTAS                           234
+
+    XXI. THE GRASSHOPPER AND THE ANT                       248
+
+   XXII. WE DISCOVER NEW ENGLAND                           267
+
+  XXIII. COASTING DOWN MT. WASHINGTON                      279
+
+   XXIV. TRAMPING, NEW YORK, WASHINGTON, AND CHICAGO       287
+
+    XXV. THE LAND OF THE STRADDLE-BUG                      301
+
+   XXVI. ON TO BOSTON                                      318
+
+  XXVII. ENTER A FRIEND                                    333
+
+ XXVIII. A VISIT TO THE WEST                               353
+
+   XXIX. I JOIN THE ANTI-POVERTY BRIGADE                   375
+
+    XXX. MY MOTHER IS STRICKEN                             396
+
+   XXXI. MAIN TRAVELLED ROADS                              410
+
+  XXXII. THE SPIRIT OF REVOLT                              421
+
+ XXXIII. THE END OF THE SUNSET TRAIL                       433
+
+  XXXIV. WE GO TO CALIFORNIA                               440
+
+   XXXV. THE HOMESTEAD IN THE VALLEY                       455
+
+
+
+
+A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER [Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+A Son of the Middle Border
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+Home from the War
+
+
+All of this universe known to me in the year 1864 was bounded by the
+wooded hills of a little Wisconsin coulee, and its center was the
+cottage in which my mother was living alone--my father was in the war.
+As I project myself back into that mystical age, half lights cover most
+of the valley. The road before our doorstone begins and ends in vague
+obscurity--and Granma Green's house at the fork of the trail stands on
+the very edge of the world in a sinister region peopled with bears and
+other menacing creatures. Beyond this point all is darkness and terror.
+
+It is Sunday afternoon and my mother and her three children, Frank,
+Harriet and I (all in our best dresses) are visiting the Widow Green,
+our nearest neighbor, a plump, jolly woman whom we greatly love. The
+house swarms with stalwart men and buxom women and we are all sitting
+around the table heaped with the remains of a harvest feast. The women
+are "telling fortunes" by means of tea-grounds. Mrs. Green is the
+seeress. After shaking the cup with the grounds at the bottom, she turns
+it bottom side up in a saucer. Then whirling it three times to the right
+and three times to the left, she lifts it and silently studies the
+position of the leaves which cling to the sides of the cup, what time we
+all wait in breathless suspense for her first word.
+
+"A soldier is coming to you!" she says to my mother. "See," and she
+points into the cup. We all crowd near, and I perceive a leaf with a
+stem sticking up from its body like a bayonet over a man's shoulder. "He
+is almost home," the widow goes on. Then with sudden dramatic turn she
+waves her hand toward the road, "Heavens and earth!" she cries. "There's
+Richard now!"
+
+We all turn and look toward the road, and there, indeed, is a soldier
+with a musket on his back, wearily plodding his way up the low hill just
+north of the gate. He is too far away for mother to call, and besides I
+think she must have been a little uncertain, for he did not so much as
+turn his head toward the house. Trembling with excitement she hurries
+little Frank into his wagon and telling Hattie to bring me, sets off up
+the road as fast as she can draw the baby's cart. It all seems a dream
+to me and I move dumbly, almost stupidly like one in a mist....
+
+We did not overtake the soldier, that is evident, for my next vision is
+that of a blue-coated figure leaning upon the fence, studying with
+intent gaze our empty cottage. I cannot, even now, precisely divine why
+he stood thus, sadly contemplating his silent home,--but so it was. His
+knapsack lay at his feet, his musket was propped against a post on whose
+top a cat was dreaming, unmindful of the warrior and his folded hands.
+
+He did not hear us until we were close upon him, and even after he
+turned, my mother hesitated, so thin, so hollow-eyed, so changed was he.
+"Richard, is that you?" she quaveringly asked.
+
+His worn face lighted up. His arms rose. "Yes, Belle! Here I am," he
+answered.
+
+Nevertheless though he took my mother in his arms, I could not relate
+him to the father I had heard so much about. To me he was only a strange
+man with big eyes and care-worn face. I did not recognize in him
+anything I had ever known, but my sister, who was two years older than
+I, went to his bosom of her own motion. She knew him, whilst I submitted
+to his caresses rather for the reason that my mother urged me forward
+than because of any affection I felt for him. Frank, however, would not
+even permit a kiss. The gaunt and grizzled stranger terrified him.
+
+"Come here, my little man," my father said.--"_My little man!_" Across
+the space of half-a-century I can still hear the sad reproach in his
+voice. "Won't you come and see your poor old father when he comes home
+from the war?"
+
+"My little man!" How significant that phrase seems to me now! The war
+had in very truth come between this patriot and his sons. I had
+forgotten him--the baby had never known him.
+
+Frank crept beneath the rail fence and stood there, well out of reach,
+like a cautious kitten warily surveying an alien dog. At last the
+soldier stooped and drawing from his knapsack a big red apple, held it
+toward the staring babe, confidently calling, "Now, I guess he'll come
+to his poor old pap home from the war."
+
+The mother apologized. "He doesn't know you, Dick. How could he? He was
+only nine months old when you went away. He'll go to you by and by."
+
+The babe crept slowly toward the shining lure. My father caught him
+despite his kicking, and hugged him close. "Now I've got you," he
+exulted.
+
+Then we all went into the little front room and the soldier laid off his
+heavy army shoes. My mother brought a pillow to put under his head, and
+so at last he stretched out on the floor the better to rest his tired,
+aching bones, and there I joined him.
+
+"Oh, Belle!" he said, in tones of utter content. "This is what I've
+dreamed about a million times."
+
+Frank and I grew each moment more friendly and soon began to tumble over
+him while mother hastened to cook something for him to eat. He asked for
+"hot biscuits and honey and plenty of coffee."
+
+That was a mystic hour--and yet how little I can recover of it! The
+afternoon glides into evening while the soldier talks, and at last we
+all go out to the barn to watch mother milk the cow. I hear him ask
+about the crops, the neighbors.--The sunlight passes. Mother leads the
+way back to the house. My father follows carrying little Frank in his
+arms.
+
+He is a "strange man" no longer. Each moment his voice sinks deeper into
+my remembrance. He is my father--that I feel ringing through the dim
+halls of my consciousness. Harriet clings to his hand in perfect
+knowledge and confidence. We eat our bread and milk, the trundle-bed is
+pulled out, we children clamber in, and I go to sleep to the music of
+his resonant voice recounting the story of the battles he had seen, and
+the marches he had made.
+
+The emergence of an individual consciousness from the void is, after
+all, the most amazing fact of human life and I should like to spend much
+of this first chapter in groping about in the luminous shadow of my
+infant world because, deeply considered, childish impressions are the
+fundamentals upon which an author's fictional out-put is based; but to
+linger might weary my reader at the outset, although I count myself most
+fortunate in the fact that my boyhood was spent in the midst of a
+charming landscape and during a certain heroic era of western
+settlement.
+
+The men and women of that far time loom large in my thinking for they
+possessed not only the spirit of adventurers but the courage of
+warriors. Aside from the natural distortion of a boy's imagination I am
+quite sure that the pioneers of 1860 still retained something broad and
+fine in their action, something a boy might honorably imitate.
+
+The earliest dim scene in my memory is that of a soft warm evening. I am
+cradled in the lap of my sister Harriet who is sitting on the door-step
+beneath a low roof. It is mid-summer and at our feet lies a mat of
+dark-green grass from which a frog is croaking. The stars are out, and
+above the high hills to the east a mysterious glow is glorifying the
+sky. The cry of the small animal at last conveys to my sister's mind a
+notion of distress, and rising she peers closely along the path.
+Starting back with a cry of alarm, she calls and my mother hurries out.
+She, too, examines the ground, and at last points out to me a long
+striped snake with a poor, shrieking little tree-toad in its mouth. The
+horror of this scene fixes it in my mind. My mother beats the serpent
+with a stick. The mangled victim hastens away, and the curtain falls.
+
+I must have been about four years old at this time, although there is
+nothing to determine the precise date. Our house, a small frame cabin,
+stood on the eastern slope of a long ridge and faced across a valley
+which seemed very wide to me then, and in the middle of it lay a marsh
+filled with monsters, from which the Water People sang night by night.
+Beyond was a wooded mountain.
+
+This doorstone must have been a favorite evening seat for my sister, for
+I remember many other delicious gloamings. Bats whirl and squeak in the
+odorous dusk. Night hawks whiz and boom, and over the dark forest wall a
+prodigious moon miraculously rolls. Fire-flies dart through the grass,
+and in a lone tree just outside the fence, a whippoorwill sounds his
+plaintive note. Sweet, very sweet, and wonderful are all these!
+
+The marsh across the lane was a sinister menacing place even by day for
+there (so my sister Harriet warned me) serpents swarmed, eager to bite
+runaway boys. "And if you step in the mud between the tufts of grass,"
+she said, "you will surely sink out of sight."--At night this teeming
+bog became a place of dank and horrid mystery. Bears and wolves and
+wildcats were reported as ruling the dark woods just beyond--only the
+door yard and the road seemed safe for little men--and even there I
+wished my mother to be within immediate call.
+
+My father who had bought his farm "on time," just before the war, could
+not enlist among the first volunteers, though he was deeply moved to do
+so, till his land was paid for--but at last in 1863 on the very day that
+he made the last payment on the mortgage, he put his name down on the
+roll and went back to his wife, a soldier.
+
+I have heard my mother say that this was one of the darkest moments of
+her life and if you think about it you will understand the reason why.
+My sister was only five years old, I was three and Frank was a babe in
+the cradle. Broken hearted at the thought of the long separation, and
+scared by visions of battle my mother begged the soldier not to go; but
+he was of the stern stuff which makes patriots--and besides his name was
+already on the roll, therefore he went away to join Grant's army at
+Vicksburg. "What sacrifice! What folly!" said his pacifist
+neighbors--"to leave your wife and children for an idea, a mere
+sentiment; to put your life in peril for a striped silken rag." But he
+went. For thirteen dollars a month he marched and fought while his plow
+rusted in the shed and his cattle called to him from their stalls.
+
+My conscious memory holds nothing of my mother's agony of waiting,
+nothing of the dark days when the baby was ill and the doctor far
+away--but into my subconscious ear her voice sank, and the words
+_Grant_, _Lincoln_, _Sherman_, "_furlough_," "_mustered out_," ring like
+bells, deep-toned and vibrant. I shared dimly in every emotional
+utterance of the neighbors who came to call and a large part of what I
+am is due to the impressions of these deeply passionate and poetic
+years.
+
+Dim pictures come to me. I see my mother at the spinning wheel, I help
+her fill the candle molds. I hold in my hands the queer carding combs
+with their crinkly teeth, but my first definite connected recollection
+is the scene of my father's return at the close of the war.
+
+I was not quite five years old, and the events of that day are so
+commingled with later impressions,--experiences which came long
+after--that I cannot be quite sure which are true and which imagined,
+but the picture as a whole is very vivid and very complete.
+
+Thus it happened that my first impressions of life were martial, and my
+training military, for my father brought back from his two years'
+campaigning under Sherman and Thomas the temper and the habit of a
+soldier.
+
+He became naturally the dominant figure in my horizon, and his scheme of
+discipline impressed itself almost at once upon his children.
+
+I suspect that we had fallen into rather free and easy habits under
+mother's government, for she was too jolly, too tender-hearted, to
+engender fear in us even when she threatened us with a switch or a
+shingle. We soon learned, however, that the soldier's promise of
+punishment was swift and precise in its fulfillment. We seldom presumed
+a second time on his forgetfulness or tolerance. We knew he loved us,
+for he often took us to his knees of an evening and told us stories of
+marches and battles, or chanted war-songs for us, but the moments of his
+tenderness were few and his fondling did not prevent him from almost
+instant use of the rod if he thought either of us needed it.
+
+His own boyhood had been both hard and short. Born of farmer folk in
+Oxford County, Maine, his early life had been spent on the soil in and
+about Lock's Mills with small chance of schooling. Later, as a teamster,
+and finally as shipping clerk for Amos Lawrence, he had enjoyed three
+mightily improving years in Boston. He loved to tell of his life there,
+and it is indicative of his character to say that he dwelt with special
+joy and pride on the actors and orators he had heard. He could describe
+some of the great scenes and repeat a few of the heroic lines of
+Shakespeare, and the roll of his deep voice as he declaimed, "Now is the
+winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York,"
+thrilled us--filled us with desire of something far off and wonderful.
+But best of all we loved to hear him tell of "Logan at Peach Tree
+Creek," and "Kilpatrick on the Granny White Turnpike."
+
+He was a vivid and concise story-teller and his words brought to us
+(sometimes all too clearly), the tragic happenings of the battlefields
+of Atlanta and Nashville. To him Grant, Lincoln, Sherman and Sheridan
+were among the noblest men of the world, and he would not tolerate any
+criticism of them.
+
+Next to his stories of the war I think we loved best to have him
+picture "the pineries" of Wisconsin, for during his first years in the
+State he had been both lumberman and raftsman, and his memory held
+delightful tales of wolves and bears and Indians.
+
+He often imitated the howls and growls and actions of the wild animals
+with startling realism, and his river narratives were full of
+unforgettable phrases like "the Jinny Bull Falls," "Old Moosinee" and
+"running the rapids."
+
+He also told us how his father and mother came west by way of the Erie
+Canal, and in a steamer on the Great Lakes, of how they landed in
+Milwaukee with Susan, their twelve-year-old daughter, sick with the
+smallpox; of how a farmer from Monticello carried them in his big farm
+wagon over the long road to their future home in Green county and it was
+with deep emotion that he described the bitter reception they
+encountered in the village.
+
+It appears that some of the citizens in a panic of dread were all for
+driving the Garlands out of town--then up rose old Hugh McClintock, big
+and gray as a grizzly bear, and put himself between the leader of the
+mob and its victims, and said, "You shall not lay hands upon them. Shame
+on ye!" And such was the power of his mighty arm and such the menace of
+his flashing eyes that no one went further with the plan of casting the
+new comers into the wilderness.
+
+Old Hugh established them in a lonely cabin on the edge of the village,
+and thereafter took care of them, nursing grandfather with his own hands
+until he was well. "And that's the way the McClintocks and the Garlands
+first joined forces," my father often said in ending the tale. "But the
+name of the man who carried your Aunt Susan in his wagon from Milwaukee
+to Monticello I never knew."
+
+I cannot understand why that sick girl did not die on that long journey
+over the rough roads of Wisconsin, and what it all must have seemed to
+my gentle New England grandmother I grieve to think about. Beautiful as
+the land undoubtedly was, such an experience should have shaken her
+faith in western men and western hospitality. But apparently it did not,
+for I never heard her allude to this experience with bitterness.
+
+In addition to his military character, Dick Garland also carried with
+him the odor of the pine forest and exhibited the skill and training of
+a forester, for in those early days even at the time when I began to
+remember the neighborhood talk, nearly every young man who could get
+away from the farm or the village went north, in November, into the pine
+woods which covered the entire upper part of the State, and my father,
+who had been a raftsman and timber cruiser and pilot ever since his
+coming west, was deeply skilled with axe and steering oars. The
+lumberman's life at that time was rough but not vicious, for the men
+were nearly all of native American stock, and my father was none the
+worse for his winters in camp.
+
+His field of action as lumberman was for several years, in and around
+Big Bull Falls (as it was then called), near the present town of Wausau,
+and during that time he had charge of a crew of loggers in winter and in
+summer piloted rafts of lumber down to Dubuque and other points where
+saw mills were located. He was called at this time, "Yankee Dick, the
+Pilot."
+
+As a result of all these experiences in the woods, he was almost as much
+woodsman as soldier in his talk, and the heroic life he had led made him
+very wonderful in my eyes. According to his account (and I have no
+reason to doubt it) he had been exceedingly expert in running a raft and
+could ride a canoe like a Chippewa. I remember hearing him very
+forcefully remark, "God forgot to make the man I could not follow."
+
+He was deft with an axe, keen of perception, sure of hand and foot, and
+entirely capable of holding his own with any man of his weight. Amid
+much drinking he remained temperate, and strange to say never used
+tobacco in any form. While not a large man he was nearly six feet in
+height, deep-chested and sinewy, and of dauntless courage. The quality
+which defended him from attack was the spirit which flamed from his
+eagle-gray eyes. Terrifying eyes they were, at times, as I had many
+occasions to note.
+
+As he gathered us all around his knee at night before the fire, he loved
+to tell us of riding the whirlpools of Big Bull Falls, or of how he
+lived for weeks on a raft with the water up to his knees (sleeping at
+night in his wet working clothes), sustained by the blood of youth and
+the spirit of adventure. His endurance even after his return from the
+war, was marvellous, although he walked a little bent and with a
+peculiar measured swinging stride--the stride of Sherman's veterans.
+
+As I was born in the first smoke of the great conflict, so all of my
+early memories of Green's coulee are permeated with the haze of the
+passing war-cloud. My soldier dad taught me the manual of arms, and for
+a year Harriet and I carried broom-sticks, flourished lath sabers, and
+hammered on dishpans in imitation of officers and drummers. Canteens
+made excellent water-bottles for the men in the harvest fields, and the
+long blue overcoats which the soldiers brought back with them from the
+south lent many a vivid spot of color to that far-off landscape.
+
+All the children of our valley inhaled with every breath this mingled
+air of romance and sorrow, history and song, and through those epic days
+runs a deep-laid consciousness of maternal pain. My mother's side of
+those long months of waiting was never fully delineated, for she was
+natively reticent and shy of expression. But piece by piece in later
+years I drew from her the tale of her long vigil, and obtained some hint
+of the bitter anguish of her suspense after each great battle.
+
+It is very strange, but I cannot define her face as I peer back into
+those childish times, though I can feel her strong arms about me. She
+seemed large and quite middle-aged to me, although she was in fact a
+handsome girl of twenty-three. Only by reference to a rare daguerreotype
+of the time am I able to correct this childish impression.
+
+Our farm lay well up in what is called Green's coulee, in a little
+valley just over the road which runs along the LaCrosse river in western
+Wisconsin. It contained one hundred and sixty acres of land which
+crumpled against the wooded hills on the east and lay well upon a ridge
+to the west. Only two families lived above us, and over the height to
+the north was the land of the red people, and small bands of their
+hunters used occasionally to come trailing down across our meadow on
+their way to and from LaCrosse, which was their immemorial trading
+point.
+
+Sometimes they walked into our house, always without knocking--but then
+we understood their ways. No one knocks at the wigwam of a red neighbor,
+and we were not afraid of them, for they were friendly, and our mother
+often gave them bread and meat which they took (always without thanks)
+and ate with much relish while sitting beside our fire. All this seemed
+very curious to us, but as they were accustomed to share their food and
+lodging with one another so they accepted my mother's bounty in the same
+matter-of-fact fashion.
+
+Once two old fellows, while sitting by the fire, watched Frank and me
+bringing in wood for the kitchen stove, and smiled and muttered between
+themselves thereat. At last one of them patted my brother on the head
+and called out admiringly, "Small pappoose, heap work--good!" and we
+were very proud of the old man's praise.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+The McClintocks
+
+
+The members of my mother's family must have been often at our home
+during my father's military service in the south, but I have no mental
+pictures of them till after my father's homecoming in '65. Their names
+were familiar--were, indeed, like bits of old-fashioned song. "Richard"
+was a fine and tender word in my ear, but "David" and "Luke," "Deborah"
+and "Samantha," and especially "Hugh," suggested something alien as well
+as poetic.
+
+They all lived somewhere beyond the hills which walled our coulee on the
+east, in a place called Salem, and I was eager to visit them, for in
+that direction my universe died away in a luminous mist of unexplored
+distance. I had some notion of its near-by loveliness for I had once
+viewed it from the top of the tall bluff which stood like a warder at
+the gate of our valley, and when one bright morning my father said,
+"Belle, get ready, and we'll drive over to Grandad's," we all became
+greatly excited.
+
+In those days people did not "call," they went "visitin'." The women
+took their knitting and stayed all the afternoon and sometimes all
+night. No one owned a carriage. Each family journeyed in a heavy farm
+wagon with the father and mother riding high on the wooden spring seat
+while the children jounced up and down on the hay in the bottom of the
+box or clung desperately to the side-boards to keep from being jolted
+out. In such wise we started on our trip to the McClintocks'.
+
+The road ran to the south and east around the base of Sugar Loaf Bluff,
+thence across a lovely valley and over a high wooded ridge which was so
+steep that at times we rode above the tree tops. As father stopped the
+horses to let them rest, we children gazed about us with wondering eyes.
+Far behind us lay the LaCrosse valley through which a slender river ran,
+while before us towered wind-worn cliffs of stone. It was an exploring
+expedition for us.
+
+The top of the divide gave a grand view of wooded hills to the
+northeast, but father did not wait for us to enjoy that. He started the
+team on the perilous downward road without regard to our wishes, and so
+we bumped and clattered to the bottom, all joy of the scenery swallowed
+up in fear of being thrown from the wagon.
+
+The roar of a rapid, the gleam of a long curving stream, a sharp turn
+through a pair of bars, and we found ourselves approaching a low
+unpainted house which stood on a level bench overlooking a river and its
+meadows.
+
+"There it is. That's Grandad's house," said mother, and peering over her
+shoulder I perceived a group of people standing about the open door, and
+heard their shouts of welcome.
+
+My father laughed. "Looks as if the whole McClintock clan was on
+parade," he said.
+
+It was Sunday and all my aunts and uncles were in holiday dress and a
+merry, hearty, handsome group they were. One of the men helped my mother
+out and another, a roguish young fellow with a pock-marked face,
+snatched me from the wagon and carried me under his arm to the threshold
+where a short, gray-haired smiling woman was standing. "Mother, here's
+another grandson for you," he said as he put me at her feet.
+
+She greeted me kindly and led me into the house, in which a huge old man
+with a shock of perfectly white hair was sitting with a Bible on his
+knee. He had a rugged face framed in a circle of gray beard and his
+glance was absent-minded and remote. "Father," said my grandmother,
+"Belle has come. Here is one of her boys."
+
+Closing his book on his glasses to mark the place of his reading he
+turned to greet my mother who entered at this moment. His way of speech
+was as strange as his look and for a few moments I studied him with
+childish intentness. His face was rough-hewn as a rock but it was
+kindly, and though he soon turned from his guests and resumed his
+reading no one seemed to resent it.
+
+Young as I was I vaguely understood his mood. He was glad to see us but
+he was absorbed in something else, something of more importance, at the
+moment, than the chatter of the family. My uncles who came in a few
+moments later drew my attention and the white-haired dreamer fades from
+this scene.
+
+The room swarmed with McClintocks. There was William, a black-bearded,
+genial, quick-stepping giant who seized me by the collar with one hand
+and lifted me off the floor as if I were a puppy just to see how much I
+weighed; and David, a tall young man with handsome dark eyes and a droop
+at the outer corner of his eyelids which gave him in repose a look of
+melancholy distinction. He called me and I went to him readily for I
+loved him at once. His voice pleased me and I could see that my mother
+loved him too.
+
+From his knee I became acquainted with the girls of the family. Rachel,
+a demure and sweet-faced young woman, and Samantha, the beauty of the
+family, won my instant admiration, but Deb, as everybody called her,
+repelled me by her teasing ways. They were all gay as larks and their
+hearty clamor, so far removed from the quiet gravity of my grandmother
+Garland's house, pleased me. I had an immediate sense of being perfectly
+at home.
+
+There was an especial reason why this meeting should have been, as it
+was, a joyous hour. It was, in fact, a family reunion after the war. The
+dark days of sixty-five were over. The Nation was at peace and its
+warriors mustered out. True, some of those who had gone "down South" had
+not returned. Luke and Walter and Hugh were sleeping in The Wilderness,
+but Frank and Richard were safely at home and father was once more the
+clarion-voiced and tireless young man he had been when he went away to
+fight. So they all rejoiced, with only a passing tender word for those
+whose bodies filled a soldier's nameless grave.
+
+There were some boys of about my own age, William's sons, and as they at
+once led me away down into the grove, I can say little of what went on
+in the house after that. It must have been still in the warm September
+weather for we climbed the slender leafy trees and swayed and swung on
+their tip-tops like bobolinks. Perhaps I did not go so very high after
+all but I had the feeling of being very close to the sky.
+
+The blast of a bugle called us to dinner and we all went scrambling up
+the bank and into the "front room" like a swarm of hungry shotes
+responding to the call of the feeder. Aunt Deb, however shooed us out
+into the kitchen. "You can't stay here," she said. "Mother'll feed you
+in the kitchen."
+
+Grandmother was waiting for us and our places were ready, so what did it
+matter? We had chicken and mashed potato and nice hot biscuit and
+honey--just as good as the grown people had and could eat all we wanted
+without our mothers to bother us. I am quite certain about the honey for
+I found a bee in one of the cells of my piece of comb, and when I pushed
+my plate away in dismay grandmother laughed and said, "That is only a
+little baby bee. You see this is wild honey. William got it out of a
+tree and didn't have time to pick all the bees out of it."
+
+At this point my memories of this day fuse and flow into another visit
+to the McClintock homestead which must have taken place the next year,
+for it is my final record of my grandmother. I do not recall a single
+word that she said, but she again waited on us in the kitchen, beaming
+upon us with love and understanding. I see her also smiling in the midst
+of the joyous tumult which her children and grandchildren always
+produced when they met. She seemed content to listen and to serve.
+
+She was the mother of seven sons, each a splendid type of sturdy
+manhood, and six daughters almost equally gifted in physical beauty.
+Four of the sons stood over six feet in height and were of unusual
+strength. All of them--men and women alike--were musicians by
+inheritance, and I never think of them without hearing the sound of
+singing or the voice of the violin. Each of them could play some
+instrument and some of them could play any instrument. David, as you
+shall learn, was the finest fiddler of them all. Grandad himself was
+able to play the violin but he no longer did so. "'Tis the Devil's
+instrument," he said, but I noticed that he always kept time to it.
+
+Grandmother had very little learning. She could read and write of
+course, and she made frequent pathetic attempts to open her Bible or
+glance at a newspaper--all to little purpose, for her days were filled
+from dawn to dark with household duties.
+
+I know little of her family history. Beyond the fact that she was born
+in Maryland and had been always on the border, I have little to record.
+She was in truth overshadowed by the picturesque figure of her husband
+who was of Scotch-Irish descent and a most singular and interesting
+character.
+
+He was a mystic as well as a minstrel. He was an "Adventist"--that is to
+say a believer in the Second Coming of Christ, and a constant student of
+the Bible, especially of those parts which predicted the heavens rolling
+together as a scroll, and the destruction of the earth. Notwithstanding
+his lack of education and his rude exterior, he was a man of marked
+dignity and sobriety of manner. Indeed he was both grave and remote in
+his intercourse with his neighbors.
+
+He was like Ezekiel, a dreamer of dreams. He loved the Old Testament,
+particularly those books which consisted of thunderous prophecies and
+passionate lamentations. The poetry of _Isaiah_, The visions of _The
+Apocalypse_, formed his emotional outlet, his escape into the world of
+imaginative literature. The songs he loved best were those which
+described chariots of flaming clouds, the sound of the resurrection
+trump--or the fields of amaranth blooming "on the other side of Jordan."
+
+As I close my eyes and peer back into my obscure childish world I can
+see him sitting in his straight-backed cane-bottomed chair, drumming on
+the rungs with his fingers, keeping time to some inaudible tune--or
+chanting with faintly-moving lips the wondrous words of _John_ or
+_Daniel_. He must have been at this time about seventy years of age, but
+he seemed to me as old as a snow-covered mountain.
+
+My belief is that Grandmother did not fully share her husband's faith in
+The Second Coming but upon her fell the larger share of the burden of
+entertainment when Grandad made "the travelling brother" welcome. His
+was an open house to all who came along the road, and the fervid
+chantings, the impassioned prayers of these meetings lent a singular air
+of unreality to the business of cooking or plowing in the fields.
+
+I think he loved his wife and children, and yet I never heard him speak
+an affectionate word to them. He was kind, he was just, but he was not
+tender. With eyes turned inward, with a mind filled with visions of
+angel messengers with trumpets at their lips announcing "The Day of
+Wrath," how could he concern himself with the ordinary affairs of human
+life?
+
+Too old to bind grain in the harvest field, he was occasionally
+intrusted with the task of driving the reaper or the mower--and
+generally forgot to oil the bearings. His absent-mindedness was a source
+of laughter among his sons and sons-in-law. I've heard Frank say: "Dad
+would stop in the midst of a swath to announce the end of the world." He
+seldom remembered to put on a hat even in the blazing sun of July and
+his daughters had to keep an eye on him to be sure he had his vest on
+right-side out.
+
+Grandmother was cheerful in the midst of her toil and discomfort, for
+what other mother had such a family of noble boys and handsome girls?
+They all loved her, that she knew, and she was perfectly willing to
+sacrifice her comfort to promote theirs. Occasionally Samantha or Rachel
+remonstrated with her for working so hard, but she only put their
+protests aside and sent them back to their callers, for when the
+McClintock girls were at home, the horses of their suitors tied before
+the gate would have mounted a small troop of cavalry.
+
+It was well that this pioneer wife was rich in children, for she had
+little else. I do not suppose she ever knew what it was to have a
+comfortable well-aired bedroom, even in childbirth. She was practical
+and a good manager, and she needed to be, for her husband was as weirdly
+unworldly as a farmer could be. He was indeed a sad husbandman. Only the
+splendid abundance of the soil and the manual skill of his sons, united
+to the good management of his wife, kept his family fed and clothed.
+"What is the use of laying up a store of goods against the early
+destruction of the world?" he argued.
+
+He was bitterly opposed to secret societies, for some reason which I
+never fully understood, and the only fury I ever knew him to express was
+directed against these "dens of iniquity."
+
+Nearly all his neighbors, like those in our coulee, were native American
+as their names indicated. The Dudleys, Elwells, and Griswolds came from
+Connecticut, the McIldowneys and McKinleys from New York and Ohio, the
+Baileys and Garlands from Maine. Buoyant, vital, confident, these sons
+of the border bent to the work of breaking sod and building fence quite
+in the spirit of sportsmen.
+
+They were always racing in those days, rejoicing in their abounding
+vigor. With them reaping was a game, husking corn a test of endurance
+and skill, threshing a "bee." It was a Dudley against a McClintock, a
+Gilfillan against a Garland, and my father's laughing descriptions of
+the barn-raisings, harvestings and railsplittings of the valley filled
+my mind with vivid pictures of manly deeds. Every phase of farm work was
+carried on by hand. Strength and skill counted high and I had good
+reason for my idolatry of David and William. With the hearts of woodsmen
+and fists of sailors they were precisely the type to appeal to the
+imagination of a boy. Hunters, athletes, skilled horsemen--everything
+they did was to me heroic.
+
+Frank, smallest of all these sons of Hugh, was not what an observer
+would call puny. He weighed nearly one hundred and eighty pounds and
+never met his match except in his brothers. William could outlift him,
+David could out-run him and outleap him, but he was more agile than
+either--was indeed a skilled acrobat.
+
+His muscles were prodigious. The calves of his legs would not go into
+his top boots, and I have heard my father say that once when the
+"tumbling" in the little country "show" seemed not to his liking, Frank
+sprang over the ropes into the arena and went around the ring in a
+series of professional flip-flaps, to the unrestrained delight of the
+spectators. I did not witness this performance, I am sorry to say, but I
+have seen him do somersaults and turn cart-wheels in the door-yard just
+from the pure joy of living. He could have been a professional
+acrobat--and he came near to being a professional ball-player.
+
+He was always smiling, but his temper was fickle. Anybody could get a
+fight out of Frank McClintock at any time, simply by expressing a desire
+for it. To call him a liar was equivalent to contracting a doctor's
+bill. He loved hunting, as did all his brothers, but was too excitable
+to be a highly successful shot--whereas William and David were veritable
+Leather-stockings in their mastery of the heavy, old-fashioned rifle.
+David was especially dreaded at the turkey shoots of the county.
+
+William was over six feet in height, weighed two hundred and forty
+pounds, and stood "straight as an Injun." He was one of the most
+formidable men of the valley--even at fifty as I first recollect him, he
+walked with a quick lift of his foot like that of a young Chippewa. To
+me he was a huge gentle black bear, but I firmly believed he could whip
+any man in the world--even Uncle David--if he wanted to. I never
+expected to see him fight, for I could not imagine anybody foolish
+enough to invite his wrath.
+
+Such a man did develop, but not until William was over sixty,
+gray-haired and ill, and even then it took two strong men to engage him
+fully, and when it was all over (the contest filled but a few seconds),
+one assailant could not be found, and the other had to call in a doctor
+to piece him together again.
+
+William did not have a mark--his troubles began when he went home to his
+quaint little old wife. In some strange way she divined that he had been
+fighting, and soon drew the story from him. "William McClintock," said
+she severely, "hain't you old enough to keep your temper and not go
+brawling around like that and at a school meeting too!"
+
+William hung his head. "Well, I dunno!--I suppose my dyspepsy has made
+me kind o' irritable," he said by way of apology.
+
+My father was the historian of most of these exploits on the part of his
+brothers-in-law, for he loved to exalt their physical prowess at the
+same time that he deplored their lack of enterprise and system. Certain
+of their traits he understood well. Others he was never able to
+comprehend, and I am not sure that they ever quite understood
+themselves.
+
+A deep vein of poetry, of sub-conscious celtic sadness, ran through them
+all. It was associated with their love of music and was wordless. Only
+hints of this endowment came out now and again, and to the day of his
+death my father continued to express perplexity, and a kind of
+irritation at the curious combination of bitterness and sweetness, sloth
+and tremendous energy, slovenliness and exaltation which made Hugh
+McClintock and his sons the jest and the admiration of those who knew
+them best.
+
+Undoubtedly to the Elwells and Dudleys, as to most of their definite,
+practical, orderly and successful New England neighbors, my uncles were
+merely a good-natured, easy-going lot of "fiddlers," but to me as I grew
+old enough to understand them, they became a group of potential poets,
+bards and dreamers, inarticulate and moody. They fell easily into somber
+silence. Even Frank, the most boisterous and outspoken of them all,
+could be thrown into sudden melancholy by a melody, a line of poetry or
+a beautiful landscape.
+
+The reason for this praise of their quality, if the reason needs to be
+stated, lies in my feeling of definite indebtedness to them. They
+furnished much of the charm and poetic suggestion of my childhood. Most
+of what I have in the way of feeling for music, for rhythm, I derive
+from my mother's side of the house, for it was almost entirely Celt in
+every characteristic. She herself was a wordless poet, a sensitive
+singer of sad romantic songs.
+
+Father was by nature an orator and a lover of the drama. So far as I am
+aware, he never read a poem if he could help it, and yet he responded
+instantly to music, and was instinctively courtly in manner. His mind
+was clear, positive and definite, and his utterances fluent. Orderly,
+resolute and thorough in all that he did, he despised William
+McClintock's easy-going habits of husbandry, and found David's lack of
+"push," of business enterprise, deeply irritating. And yet he loved them
+both and respected my mother for defending them.
+
+To me, in those days, the shortcomings of the McClintocks did not appear
+particularly heinous. All our neighbors were living in log houses and
+frame shanties built beside the brooks, or set close against the
+hillsides, and William's small unpainted dwelling seemed a natural
+feature of the landscape, but as the years passed and other and more
+enterprising settlers built big barns, and shining white houses, the
+gray and leaning stables, sagging gates and roofs of my uncle's farm,
+became a reproach even in my eyes, so that when I visited it for the
+last time just before our removal to Iowa, I, too, was a little ashamed
+of it. Its disorder did not diminish my regard for the owner, but I
+wished he would clean out the stable and prop up the wagon-shed.
+
+My grandmother's death came soon after our second visit to the
+homestead. I have no personal memory of the event, but I heard Uncle
+David describe it. The setting of the final scene in the drama was
+humble. The girls were washing clothes in the yard and the silent old
+mother was getting the mid-day meal. David, as he came in from the
+field, stopped for a moment with his sisters and in their talk Samantha
+said: "Mother isn't at all well today."
+
+David, looking toward the kitchen, said, "Isn't there some way to keep
+her from working?"
+
+"You know how she is," explained Deborah. "She's worked so long she
+don't know how to rest. We tried to get her to lie down for an hour but
+she wouldn't."
+
+David was troubled. "She'll have to stop sometime," he said, and then
+they passed to other things, hearing meanwhile the tread of their
+mother's busy feet.
+
+Suddenly she appeared at the door, a frightened look on her face.
+
+"Why, mother!--what is the matter?" asked her daughter.
+
+She pointed to her mouth and shook her head, to indicate that she could
+not speak. David leaped toward her, but she dropped before he could
+reach her.
+
+Lifting her in his strong arms he laid her on her bed and hastened for
+the doctor. All in vain! She sank into unconsciousness and died without
+a word of farewell.
+
+She fell like a soldier in the ranks. Having served uncomplainingly up
+to the very edge of her evening bivouac, she passed to her final sleep
+in silent dignity.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+The Home in the Coulee
+
+
+Our postoffice was in the village of Onalaska, situated at the mouth of
+the Black River, which came down out of the wide forest lands of the
+north. It was called a "boom town" for the reason that "booms" or yards
+for holding pine logs laced the quiet bayou and supplied several large
+mills with timber. Busy saws clamored from the islands and great rafts
+of planks and lath and shingles were made up and floated down into the
+Mississippi and on to southern markets.
+
+It was a rude, rough little camp filled with raftsmen, loggers,
+mill-hands and boomsmen. Saloons abounded and deeds of violence were
+common, but to me it was a poem. From its position on a high plateau it
+commanded a lovely southern expanse of shimmering water bounded by
+purple bluffs. The spires of LaCrosse rose from the smoky distance, and
+steamships' hoarsely giving voice suggested illimitable reaches of
+travel. Some day I hoped my father would take me to that shining
+market-place whereto he carried all our grain.
+
+In this village of Onalaska, lived my grandfather and grandmother
+Garland, and their daughter Susan, whose husband, Richard Bailey, a
+quiet, kind man, was held in deep affection by us all. Of course he
+could not quite measure up to the high standards of David and William,
+even though he kept a store and sold candy, for he could neither kill a
+bear, nor play the fiddle, nor shoot a gun--much less turn hand-springs
+or tame a wild horse, but we liked him notwithstanding his limitations
+and were always glad when he came to visit us.
+
+Even at this time I recognized the wide differences which separated the
+McClintocks from the Garlands. The fact that my father's people lived to
+the west and in a town helped to emphasize the divergence.
+
+All the McClintocks were farmers, but grandfather Garland was a
+carpenter by trade, and a leader in his church which was to him a club,
+a forum and a commercial exchange. He was a native of Maine and proud of
+the fact. His eyes were keen and gray, his teeth fine and white, and his
+expression stern. His speech was neat and nipping. As a workman he was
+exact and his tools were always in perfect order. In brief he was a
+Yankee, as concentrated a bit of New England as was ever transplanted to
+the border. Hopelessly "sot" in all his eastern ways, he remained the
+doubter, the critic, all his life.
+
+We always spoke of him with formal precision as Grandfather Garland,
+never as "Grandad" or "Granpap" as we did in alluding to Hugh
+McClintock, and his long prayers (pieces of elaborate oratory) wearied
+us, while those of Grandad, which had the extravagance, the lyrical
+abandon of poetry, profoundly pleased us. Grandfather's church was a
+small white building in the edge of the village, Grandad's place of
+worship was a vision, a cloud-built temple, a house not made with hands.
+
+The contrast between my grandmothers was equally wide. Harriet Garland
+was tall and thin, with a dark and serious face. She was an invalid, and
+confined to a chair, which stood in the corner of her room. On the walls
+within reach of her hand hung many small pockets, so ordered that she
+could obtain her sewing materials without rising. She was always at work
+when I called, but it was her habit to pause and discover in some one
+of her receptacles a piece of candy or a stick of "lickerish root"
+which she gave to me "as a reward for being a good boy."
+
+She was always making needle rolls and thimble boxes and no doubt her
+skill helped to keep the family fed and clothed.
+
+Notwithstanding all divergence in the characters of Grandmother Garland
+and Grandmother McClintock, we held them both in almost equal affection.
+Serene, patient, bookish, Grandmother Garland brought to us, as to her
+neighbors in this rude river port, some of the best qualities of
+intellectual Boston, and from her lips we acquired many of the precepts
+and proverbs of our Pilgrim forbears.
+
+Her influence upon us was distinctly literary. She gloried in New
+England traditions, and taught us to love the poems of Whittier and
+Longfellow. It was she who called us to her knee and told us sadly yet
+benignly of the death of Lincoln, expressing only pity for the misguided
+assassin. She was a constant advocate of charity, piety, and learning.
+Always poor, and for many years a cripple, I never heard her complain,
+and no one, I think, ever saw her face clouded with a frown.
+
+Our neighbors in Green's Coulee were all native American. The first and
+nearest, Al Randal and his wife and son, we saw often and on the whole
+liked, but the Whitwells who lived on the farm above us were a constant
+source of comedy to my father. Old Port, as he was called, was a
+mild-mannered man who would have made very little impression on the
+community, but for his wife, a large and rather unkempt person, who
+assumed such man-like freedom of speech that my father was never without
+an amusing story of her doings.
+
+She swore in vigorous pioneer fashion, and dominated her husband by
+force of lung power as well as by a certain painful candor. "Port,
+you're an old fool," she often said to him in our presence. It was her
+habit to apologize to her guests, as they took their seats at her
+abundant table, "Wal, now, folks, I'm sorry, but there ain't a blank
+thing in this house fit for a dawg to eat--" expecting of course to have
+everyone cry out, "Oh, Mrs. Whitwell, this is a splendid dinner!" which
+they generally did. But once my father took her completely aback by
+rising resignedly from the table--"Come, Belle," said he to my mother,
+"let's go home. I'm not going to eat food not fit for a dog."
+
+The rough old woman staggered under this blow, but quickly recovered.
+"Dick Garland, you blank fool. Sit down, or I'll fetch you a swipe with
+the broom."
+
+In spite of her profanity and ignorance she was a good neighbor and in
+time of trouble no one was readier to relieve any distress in the
+coulee. However, it was upon Mrs. Randal and the widow Green that my
+mother called for aid, and I do not think Mrs. Whitwell was ever quite
+welcome even at our quilting bees, for her loud voice silenced every
+other, and my mother did not enjoy her vulgar stories.--Yes, I can
+remember several quilting bees, and I recall molding candles, and that
+our "company light" was a large kerosene lamp, in the glass globe of
+which a strip of red flannel was coiled. Probably this was merely a
+device to lengthen out the wick, but it made a memorable spot of color
+in the room--just as the watch-spring gong in the clock gave off a sound
+of fairy music to my ear. I don't know why the ring of that coil had
+such a wondrous appeal, but I often climbed upon a chair to rake its
+spirals with a nail in order that I might float away on its "dying
+fall."
+
+Life was primitive in all the homes of the coulee. Money was hard to
+get. We always had plenty to eat, but little in the way of luxuries. We
+had few toys except those we fashioned for ourselves, and our garments
+were mostly home-made. I have heard my father say, "Belle could go to
+town with me, buy the calico for a dress and be wearing it for
+supper"--but I fear that even this did not happen very often. Her "dress
+up" gowns, according to certain precious old tintypes, indicate that
+clothing was for her only a sort of uniform,--and yet I will not say
+this made her unhappy. Her face was always smiling. She knit all our
+socks, made all our shirts and suits. She even carded and spun wool, in
+addition to her housekeeping, and found time to help on our kites and
+bows and arrows.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Month by month the universe in which I lived lightened and widened. In
+my visits to Onalaska, I discovered the great Mississippi River, and the
+Minnesota Bluffs. The light of knowledge grew stronger. I began to
+perceive forms and faces which had been hidden in the dusk of babyhood.
+I heard more and more of LaCrosse, and out of the mist filled lower
+valley the booming roar of steamboats suggested to me distant countries
+and the sea.
+
+My father believed in service. At seven years of age, I had regular
+duties. I brought firewood to the kitchen and broke nubbins for the
+calves and shelled corn for the chickens. I have a dim memory of helping
+him (and grandfather) split oak-blocks into rafting pins in the kitchen.
+This seems incredible to me now, and yet it must have been so. In summer
+Harriet and I drove the cows to pasture, and carried "switchel" to the
+men in the hay-fields by means of a jug hung in the middle of a long
+stick.
+
+Haying was a delightful season to us, for the scythes of the men
+occasionally tossed up clusters of beautiful strawberries, which we
+joyfully gathered. I remember with especial pleasure the delicious
+shortcakes which my mother made of the wild fruit which we picked in the
+warm odorous grass along the edge of the meadow.
+
+Harvest time also brought a pleasing excitement (something unwonted,
+something like entertaining visitors) which compensated for the extra
+work demanded of us. The neighbors usually came in to help and life was
+a feast.
+
+There was, however, an ever-present menace in our lives, the snake!
+During mid-summer months blue racers and rattlesnakes swarmed and the
+terror of them often chilled our childish hearts. Once Harriet and I,
+with little Frank in his cart, came suddenly upon a monster diamond-back
+rattler sleeping by the roadside. In our mad efforts to escape, the cart
+was overturned and the baby scattered in the dust almost within reach of
+the snake. As soon as she realized what had happened, Harriet ran back
+bravely, caught up the child and brought him safely away.
+
+Another day, as I was riding on the load of wheat-sheaves, one of the
+men, in pitching the grain to the wagon lifted a rattlesnake with his
+fork. I saw it writhing in the bottom of the sheaf, and screamed out, "A
+snake, a snake!" It fell across the man's arm but slid harmlessly to the
+ground, and he put a tine through it.
+
+As it chanced to be just dinner time he took it with him to the house
+and fastened it down near the door of a coop in which an old hen and her
+brood of chickens were confined. I don't know why he did this but it
+threw the mother hen into such paroxysms of fear that she dashed herself
+again and again upon the slats of her house. It appeared that she
+comprehended to the full the terrible power of the writhing monster.
+
+Perhaps it was this same year that one of the men discovered another
+enormous yellow-back in the barnyard, one of the largest ever seen on
+the farm--and killed it just as it was moving across an old barrel. I
+cannot now understand why it tried to cross the barrel, but I distinctly
+visualize the brown and yellow band it made as it lay for an instant
+just before the bludgeon fell upon it, crushing it and the barrel
+together. He was thicker than my leg and glistened in the sun with
+sinister splendor. As he hung limp over the fence, a warning to his
+fellows, it was hard for me to realize that death still lay in his
+square jaws and poisonous fangs.
+
+Innumerable garter-snakes infested the marsh, and black snakes inhabited
+the edges of the woodlands, but we were not so much afraid of them. We
+accepted them as unavoidable companions in the wild. They would run from
+us. Bears and wildcats we held in real terror, though they were
+considered denizens of the darkness and hence not likely to be met with
+if one kept to the daylight.
+
+The "hoop snake" was quite as authentic to us as the blue racer,
+although no one had actually seen one. Den Green's cousin's uncle had
+killed one in Michigan, and a man over the ridge had once been stung by
+one that came rolling down the hill with his tail in his mouth. But
+Den's cousin's uncle, when he saw the one coming toward him, had stepped
+aside quick as lightning, and the serpent's sharp fangs had buried
+themselves so deep in the bark of a tree, that he could not escape.
+
+Various other of the myths common to American boyhood, were held in
+perfect faith by Den and Ellis and Ed, myths which made every woodland
+path an ambush and every marshy spot a place of evil. Horsehairs would
+turn to snakes if left in the spring, and a serpent's tail would not die
+till sundown.
+
+Once on the high hillside, I started a stone rolling, which as it went
+plunging into a hazel thicket, thrust out a deer, whose flight seemed
+fairly miraculous to me. He appeared to drift along the hillside like a
+bunch of thistle-down, and I took a singular delight in watching him
+disappear.
+
+Once my little brother and I, belated in our search for the cows, were
+far away on the hills when night suddenly came upon us. I could not have
+been more than eight years old and Frank was five. This incident reveals
+the fearless use our father made of us. True, we were hardly a mile from
+the house, but there were many serpents on the hillsides and wildcats in
+the cliffs, and eight is pretty young for such a task.
+
+We were following the cows through the tall grass and bushes, in the
+dark, when father came to our rescue, and I do not recall being sent on
+a similar expedition thereafter. I think mother protested against the
+danger of it. Her notions of our training were less rigorous.
+
+I never hear a cow-bell of a certain timbre that I do not relive in some
+degree the terror and despair of that hour on the mountain, when it
+seemed that my world had suddenly slipped away from me.
+
+Winter succeeds summer abruptly in my memory. Behind our house rose a
+sharp ridge down which we used to coast. Over this hill, fierce winds
+blew the snow, and wonderful, diamonded drifts covered the yard, and
+sometimes father was obliged to dig deep trenches in order to reach the
+barn.
+
+On winter evenings he shelled corn by drawing the ears across a spade
+resting on a wash tub, and we children built houses of the cobs, while
+mother sewed carpet rags or knit our mittens. Quilting bees of an
+afternoon were still recognized social functions and the spread quilt on
+its frame made a gorgeous tent under which my brother and I camped on
+our way to "Colorado." Lath swords and tin-pan drums remained a part of
+our equipment for a year or two.
+
+One stormy winter day, Edwin Randal, riding home in a sleigh behind his
+uncle, saw me in the yard and, picking an apple from an open barrel
+beside which he was standing, threw it at me. It was a very large apple,
+and as it struck the drift it disappeared leaving a round deep hole.
+Delving there I recovered it, and as I brushed the rime from its scarlet
+skin it seemed the most beautiful thing in this world. From this vividly
+remembered delight, I deduce the fact that apples were not very
+plentiful in our home.
+
+My favorite place in winter time was directly under the kitchen stove.
+It was one of the old-fashioned high-stepping breed, with long hind legs
+and an arching belly, and as the oven was on top, the space beneath the
+arch offered a delightful den for a cat, a dog or small boy, and I was
+usually to be found there, lying on my stomach, spelling out the
+"continued" stories which came to us in the county paper, for I was born
+with a hunger for print.
+
+We had few books in our house. Aside from the Bible I remember only one
+other, a thick, black volume filled with gaudy pictures of cherries and
+plums, and portraits of ideally fat and prosperous sheep, pigs and cows.
+It must have been a _Farmer's Annual_ or State agricultural report, but
+it contained in the midst of its dry prose, occasional poems like "_I
+remember, I remember_," "_The Old Armchair_" and other pieces of a
+domestic or rural nature. I was especially moved by The Old Armchair,
+and although some of the words and expressions were beyond my
+comprehension, I fully understood the defiant tenderness of the lines:
+
+    I love it, I love it, and who shall dare
+    To chide me for loving the old armchair?
+
+I fear the horticultural side of this volume did not interest me, but
+this sweetly-sad poem tinged even the gaudy pictures of prodigious plums
+and shining apples with a literary glamor. The preposterously plump
+cattle probably affected me as only another form of romantic fiction.
+The volume also had a pleasant smell, not so fine an odor as the Bible,
+but so delectable that I loved to bury my nose in its opened pages. What
+caused this odor I cannot tell--perhaps it had been used to press
+flowers or sprigs of sweet fern.
+
+Harriet's devotion to literature, like my own, was a nuisance. If my
+mother wanted a pan of chips she had to wrench one of us from a book, or
+tear us from a paper. If she pasted up a section of _Harper's Weekly_
+behind the washstand in the kitchen, I immediately discovered a special
+interest in that number, and likely enough forgot to wash myself. When
+mother saw this (as of course she very soon did), she turned the paper
+upside down, and thereafter accused me, with some justice, of standing
+on my head in order to continue my tale. "In fact," she often said, "it
+is easier for me to do my errands myself than to get either of you young
+ones to move."
+
+The first school which we attended was held in a neighboring farm-house,
+and there is very little to tell concerning it, but at seven I began to
+go to the public school in Onalaska and memory becomes definite, for the
+wide river which came silently out of the unknown north, carrying
+endless millions of pine logs, and the clamor of saws in the island
+mills, and especially the men walking the rolling logs with pike-poles
+in their hands filled me with a wordless joy. To be one of these brave
+and graceful "drivers" seemed almost as great an honor as to be a
+Captain in the army. Some of the boys of my acquaintance were sons of
+these hardy boomsmen, and related wonderful stories of their fathers'
+exploits--stories which we gladly believed. We all intended to be
+rivermen when we grew up.
+
+The quiet water below the booms harbored enormous fish at that time, and
+some of the male citizens who were too lazy to work in the mills got an
+easy living by capturing cat-fish, and when in liquor joined the
+rivermen in their drunken frays. My father's tales of the exploits of
+some of these redoubtable villains filled my mind with mingled
+admiration and terror. No one used the pistol, however, and very few the
+knife. Physical strength counted. Foot and fist were the weapons which
+ended each contest and no one was actually slain in these meetings of
+rival crews.
+
+In the midst of this tumult, surrounded by this coarse, unthinking life,
+my Grandmother Garland's home stood, a serene small sanctuary of lofty
+womanhood, a temple of New England virtue. From her and from my great
+aunt Bridges who lived in St. Louis, I received my first literary
+instruction, a partial offset to the vulgar yet heroic influence of the
+raftsmen and mill hands.
+
+The school-house, a wooden two story building, occupied an unkempt lot
+some distance back from the river and near a group of high sand dunes
+which possessed a sinister allurement to me. They had a mysterious
+desert quality, a flavor as of camels and Arabs. Once you got over
+behind them it seemed as if you were in another world, a far-off arid
+land where no water ran and only sear, sharp-edged grasses grew. Some of
+these mounds were miniature peaks of clear sand, so steep and dry that
+you could slide all the way down from top to bottom, and do no harm to
+your Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes. On rainy days you could dig caves in
+their sides.
+
+But the mills and the log booms were after all much more dramatic and we
+never failed to hurry away to the river if we had half an hour to spare.
+The "drivers," so brave and skilled, so graceful, held us in breathless
+admiration as they leaped from one rolling log to another, or walked the
+narrow wooden bridges above the deep and silently sweeping waters. The
+piles of slabs, the mounds of sawdust, the intermittent, ferocious snarl
+of the saws, the slap of falling lumber, the never ending fires eating
+up the refuse--all these sights and sounds made a return to school
+difficult. Even the life around the threshing machine seemed a little
+tame in comparison with the life of the booms.
+
+We were much at the Greens', our second-door neighbors to the south, and
+the doings of the men-folks fill large space in my memory. Ed, the
+oldest of the boys, a man of twenty-three or four, was as prodigious in
+his way as my Uncle David. He was mighty with the axe. His deeds as a
+railsplitter rivaled those of Lincoln. The number of cords of wood he
+could split in a single day was beyond belief. It was either seven or
+eleven, I forget which--I am perfectly certain of the number of
+buckwheat pancakes he could eat for I kept count on several occasions.
+Once he ate nine the size of a dinner plate together with a suitable
+number of sausages--but what would you expect of a man who could whirl a
+six pound axe all day in a desperate attack on the forest, without once
+looking at the sun or pausing for breath?
+
+However, he fell short of my hero in other ways. He looked like a fat
+man and his fiddling was only middling, therefore, notwithstanding his
+prowess with the axe and the maul, he remained subordinate to David, and
+though they never came to a test of strength we were perfectly sure that
+David was the finer man. His supple grace and his unconquerable pride
+made him altogether admirable.
+
+Den, the youngest of the Greens, was a boy about three years my senior,
+and a most attractive lad. I met him some years ago in California, a
+successful doctor, and we talked of the days when I was his slave and
+humbly carried his powder horn and game bag. Ellis Usher, who lived in
+Sand Lake and often hunted with Den, is an editor in Milwaukee and one
+of the political leaders of his state. In those days he had a small
+opinion of me. No doubt I _was_ a nuisance.
+
+The road which led from our farm to the village school crossed a sandy
+ridge and often in June our path became so hot that it burned the soles
+of our feet. If we went out of the road there were sand-burrs and we
+lost a great deal of time picking needles from our toes. How we hated
+those sand-burrs!--However, on these sand barrens many luscious
+strawberries grew. They were not large, but they gave off a delicious
+odor, and it sometimes took us a long time to reach home.
+
+There was a recognized element of danger in this road. Wildcats were
+plentiful around the limestone cliffs, and bears had been seen under the
+oak trees. In fact a place on the hillside was often pointed out with
+awe as "the place where Al Randal killed the bear." Our way led past the
+village cemetery also, and there was to me something vaguely awesome in
+that silent bivouac of the dead.
+
+Among the other village boys in the school were two lads named
+Gallagher, one of whom, whose name was Matt, became my daily terror. He
+was two years older than I and had all of a city gamin's cunning and
+self-command. At every intermission he sidled close to me, walking round
+me, feeling my arms, and making much of my muscle. Sometimes he came
+behind and lifted me to see how heavy I was, or called attention to my
+strong hands and wrists, insisting with the most terrifying candor of
+conviction, "I'm sure you can lick me." We never quite came to combat,
+and finally he gave up this baiting for a still more exquisite method of
+torment.
+
+My sister and I possessed a dog named Rover, a meek little yellow,
+bow-legged cur of mongrel character, but with the frankest, gentlest and
+sweetest face, it seemed to us, in all the world. He was not allowed to
+accompany us to school and scarcely ever left the yard, but Matt
+Gallagher in some way discovered my deep affection for this pet and
+thereafter played upon my fears with a malevolence which knew no mercy.
+One day he said, "Me and brother Dan are going over to your place to get
+a calf that's in your pasture. We're going to get excused fifteen
+minutes early. We'll get there before you do and we'll fix that dog of
+yours!--There won't be nothin' left of him but a grease spot when we are
+done with him."
+
+These words, spoken probably in jest, instantly filled my heart with an
+agony of fear. I saw in imagination just how my little playmate would
+come running out to meet his cruel foes, his brown eyes beaming with
+love and trust,--I saw them hiding sharp stones behind their backs while
+snapping their left-hand fingers to lure him within reach, and then I
+saw them drive their murdering weapons at his head.
+
+I could think of nothing else. I could not study, I could only sit and
+stare out of the window with tears running down my cheeks, until at
+last, the teacher observing my distress, inquired, "What is the matter?"
+And I, not knowing how to enter upon so terrible a tale, whined out,
+"I'm sick, I want to go home."
+
+"You may go," said the teacher kindly.
+
+Snatching my cap from beneath the desk where I had concealed it at
+recess, I hurried out and away over the sand-lot on the shortest way
+home. No stopping now for burrs!--I ran like one pursued. I shall never
+forget as long as I live, the pain, the panic, the frenzy of that race
+against time. The hot sand burned my feet, my side ached, my mouth was
+dry, and yet I ran on and on and on, looking back from moment to moment,
+seeing pursuers in every moving object.
+
+At last I came in sight of home, and Rover frisked out to meet me just
+as I had expected him to do, his tail wagging, his gentle eyes smiling
+up at me. Gasping, unable to utter a word, I frantically dragged the dog
+into the house and shut the door.
+
+"What is the matter?" asked my mother.
+
+I could not at the moment explain even to her what had threatened me,
+but her calm sweet words at last gave my story vent. Out it came in
+torrential flow.
+
+"Why, you poor child!" she said. "They were only fooling--they wouldn't
+dare to hurt your dog!"
+
+This was probably true. Matt had spoken without any clear idea of the
+torture he was inflicting.
+
+It is often said, "How little is required to give a child joy," but
+men--and women too--sometimes forget how little it takes to give a child
+pain.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+Father Sells the Farm
+
+
+Green's Coulee was a delightful place for boys. It offered hunting and
+coasting and many other engrossing sports, but my father, as the seasons
+went by, became thoroughly dissatisfied with its disadvantages. More and
+more he resented the stumps and ridges which interrupted his plow. Much
+of his quarter-section remained unbroken. There were ditches to be dug
+in the marsh and young oaks to be uprooted from the forest, and he was
+obliged to toil with unremitting severity. There were times, of course,
+when field duties did not press, but never a day came when the necessity
+for twelve hours' labor did not exist.
+
+Furthermore, as he grubbed or reaped he remembered the glorious prairies
+he had crossed on his exploring trip into Minnesota before the war, and
+the oftener he thought of them the more bitterly he resented his
+up-tilted, horse-killing fields, and his complaining words sank so deep
+into the minds of his sons that for years thereafter they were unable to
+look upon any rise of ground as an object to be admired.
+
+It irked him beyond measure to force his reaper along a steep slope, and
+he loathed the irregular little patches running up the ravines behind
+the timbered knolls, and so at last like many another of his neighbors
+he began to look away to the west as a fairer field for conquest. He no
+more thought of going east than a liberated eagle dreams of returning to
+its narrow cage. He loved to talk of Boston, to boast of its splendor,
+but to live there, to earn his bread there, was unthinkable. Beneath the
+sunset lay the enchanted land of opportunity and his liberation came
+unexpectedly.
+
+Sometime in the spring of 1868, a merchant from LaCrosse, a plump man
+who brought us candy and was very cordial and condescending, began
+negotiations for our farm, and in the discussion of plans which
+followed, my conception of the universe expanded. I began to understand
+that "Minnesota" was not a bluff but a wide land of romance, a prairie,
+peopled with red men, which lay far beyond the big river. And then, one
+day, I heard my father read to my mother a paragraph from the county
+paper which ran like this, "It is reported that Richard Garland has sold
+his farm in Green's Coulee to our popular grocer, Mr. Speer. Mr. Speer
+intends to make of it a model dairy farm."
+
+This intention seemed somehow to reflect a ray of glory upon us, though
+I fear it did not solace my mother, as she contemplated the loss of home
+and kindred. She was not by nature an emigrant,--few women are. She was
+content with the pleasant slopes, the kindly neighbors of Green's
+Coulee. Furthermore, most of her brothers and sisters still lived just
+across the ridge in the valley of the Neshonoc, and the thought of
+leaving them for a wild and unknown region was not pleasant.
+
+To my father, on the contrary, change was alluring. Iowa was now the
+place of the rainbow, and the pot of gold. He was eager to push on
+toward it, confident of the outcome. His spirit was reflected in one of
+the songs which we children particularly enjoyed hearing our mother
+sing, a ballad which consisted of a dialogue between a husband and wife
+on this very subject of emigration. The words as well as its wailing
+melody still stir me deeply, for they lay hold of my sub-conscious
+memory--embodying admirably the debate which went on in our home as
+well as in the homes of other farmers in the valley,--only, alas! our
+mothers did not prevail.
+
+It begins with a statement of unrest on the part of the husband who
+confesses that he is about to give up his plow and his cart--
+
+    Away to Colorado a journey I'll go,
+    For to double my fortune as other men do,
+    _While here I must labor each day in the field
+    And the winter consumes all the summer doth yield_.
+
+To this the wife replies:
+
+    Dear husband, I've noticed with a sorrowful heart
+    That you long have neglected your plow and your cart,
+    Your horses, sheep, cattle at random do run,
+    And your new Sunday jacket goes every day on.
+    _Oh, stay on your farm and you'll suffer no loss,
+    For the stone that keeps rolling will gather no moss._
+
+But the husband insists:
+
+    Oh, wife, let us go; Oh, don't let us wait;
+    I long to be there, and I long to be great,
+    While you some fair lady and who knows but I
+    May be some rich governor long 'fore I die,
+    _Whilst here I must labor each day in the field,
+    And the winter consumes all the summer doth yield_.
+
+But wife shrewdly retorts:
+
+    Dear husband, remember those lands are so dear
+    They will cost you the labor of many a year.
+    Your horses, sheep, cattle will all be to buy,
+    You will hardly get settled before you must die.
+    Oh, stay on the farm,--etc.
+
+The husband then argues that as in that country the lands are all
+cleared to the plow, and horses and cattle not very dear, they would
+soon be rich. Indeed, "we will feast on fat venison one-half of the
+year." Thereupon the wife brings in her final argument:
+
+    Oh, husband, remember those lands of delight
+    Are surrounded by Indians who murder by night.
+    Your house will be plundered and burnt to the ground
+    While your wife and your children lie mangled around.
+
+This fetches the husband up with a round turn:
+
+    Oh, wife, you've convinced me, I'll argue no more,
+    I never once thought of your dying before.
+    I love my dear children although they are small
+    And you, my dear wife, I love greatest of all.
+
+        Refrain (both together)
+
+    We'll stay on the farm and we'll suffer no loss
+    For the stone that keeps rolling will gather no moss.
+
+This song was not an especial favorite of my father. Its minor strains
+and its expressions of womanly doubts and fears were antipathetic to his
+sanguine, buoyant, self-confident nature. He was inclined to ridicule
+the conclusions of its last verse and to say that the man was a
+molly-coddle--or whatever the word of contempt was in those days. As an
+antidote he usually called for "O'er the hills in legions, boys," which
+exactly expressed his love of exploration and adventure.
+
+This ballad which dates back to the conquest of the Allegheny mountains
+opens with a fine uplifting note,
+
+    Cheer up, brothers, as we go
+    O'er the mountains, westward ho,
+    Where herds of deer and buffalo
+    Furnish the fare.
+
+and the refrain is at once a bugle call and a vision:
+
+    Then o'er the hills in legions, boys,
+    Fair freedom's star
+    Points to the sunset regions, boys,
+    Ha, ha, ha-ha!
+
+and when my mother's clear voice rose on the notes of that exultant
+chorus, our hearts responded with a surge of emotion akin to that which
+sent the followers of Daniel Boone across the Blue Ridge, and lined the
+trails of Kentucky and Ohio with the canvas-covered wagons of the
+pioneers.
+
+A little farther on in the song came these words,
+
+    When we've wood and prairie land,
+    Won by our toil,
+    We'll reign like kings in fairy land,
+    Lords of the soil!
+
+which always produced in my mind the picture of a noble farm-house in a
+park-like valley, just as the line, "Well have our rifles ready, boys,"
+expressed the boldness and self-reliance of an armed horseman.
+
+The significance of this song in the lives of the McClintocks and the
+Garlands cannot be measured. It was the marching song of my
+Grandfather's generation and undoubtedly profoundly influenced my father
+and my uncles in all that they did. It suggested shining mountains, and
+grassy vales, swarming with bear and elk. It called to green savannahs
+and endless flowery glades. It voiced as no other song did, the pioneer
+impulse throbbing deep in my father's blood. That its words will not
+bear close inspection today takes little from its power. Unquestionably
+it was a directing force in the lives of at least three generations of
+my pioneering race. Its strains will be found running through this book
+from first to last, for its pictures continued to allure my father on
+and on toward "the sunset regions," and its splendid faith carried him
+through many a dark vale of discontent.
+
+Our home was a place of song, notwithstanding the severe toil which was
+demanded of every hand, for often of an evening, especially in winter
+time, father took his seat beside the fire, invited us to his knees, and
+called on mother to sing. These moods were very sweet to us and we
+usually insisted upon his singing for us. True, he hardly knew one tune
+from another, but he had a hearty resounding chant which delighted us,
+and one of the ballads which we especially like to hear him repeat was
+called _Down the Ohio_. Only one verse survives in my memory:
+
+    The river is up, the channel is deep,
+    The winds blow high and strong.
+    The flash of the oars, the stroke we keep,
+    As we row the old boat along,
+      Down the O-h-i-o.
+
+Mother, on the contrary, was gifted with a voice of great range and
+sweetness, and from her we always demanded _Nettie Wildwood_, _Lily
+Dale_, _Lorena_ or some of Root's stirring war songs. We loved her
+noble, musical tone, and yet we always enjoyed our father's tuneless
+roar. There was something dramatic and moving in each of his ballads. He
+made the words mean so much.
+
+It is a curious fact that nearly all of the ballads which the
+McClintocks and other of these powerful young sons of the border loved
+to sing were sad. _Nellie Wildwood_, _Minnie Minturn_, _Belle Mahone_,
+_Lily Dale_ were all concerned with dead or dying maidens or with
+mocking birds still singing o'er their graves. Weeping willows and
+funeral urns ornamented the cover of each mournful ballad. Not one
+smiling face peered forth from the pages of _The Home Diadem_.
+
+    Lonely like a withered tree,
+      What is all the world to me?
+    Light and life were all in thee,
+      Sweet Belle Mahone,
+
+wailed stalwart David and buxom Deborah, and ready tears moistened my
+tanned plump cheeks.
+
+Perhaps it was partly by way of contrast that the jocund song of
+_Freedom's Star_ always meant so much to me, but however it came about,
+I am perfectly certain that it was an immense subconscious force in the
+life of my father as it had been in the westward marching of the
+McClintocks. In my own thinking it became at once a vision and a lure.
+
+The only humorous songs which my uncles knew were negro ditties, like
+_Camp Town Racetrack_ and _Jordan am a Hard Road to Trabbel_ but in
+addition to the sad ballads I have quoted, they joined my mother in _The
+Pirate's Serenade_, _Erin's Green Shore_, _Bird of the Wilderness_, and
+the memory of their mellow voices creates a golden dusk between me and
+that far-off cottage.
+
+During the summer of my eighth year, I took a part in haying and
+harvest, and I have a painful recollection of raking hay after the
+wagons, for I wore no shoes and the stubble was very sharp. I used to
+slip my feet along close to the ground, thus bending the stubble away
+from me before throwing my weight on it, otherwise walking was painful.
+If I were sent across the field on an errand I always sought out the
+path left by the broad wheels of the mowing machine and walked therein
+with a most delicious sense of safety.
+
+It cannot be that I was required to work very hard or very steadily, but
+it seemed to me then, and afterward, as if I had been made one of the
+regular hands and that I toiled the whole day through. I rode old Josh
+for the hired man to plow corn, and also guided the lead horse on the
+old McCormick reaper, my short legs sticking out at right angles from my
+body, and I carried water to the field.
+
+It appears that the blackbirds were very thick that year and
+threatened, in August, to destroy the corn. They came in gleeful clouds,
+settling with multitudinous clamor upon the stalks so that it became the
+duty of Den Green to scare them away by shooting at them, and I was
+permitted to follow and pick up the dead birds and carry them as "game."
+
+There was joy and keen excitement in this warfare. Sometimes when Den
+fired into a flock, a dozen or more came fluttering down. At other times
+vast swarms rose at the sound of the gun with a rush of wings which
+sounded like a distant storm. Once Den let me fire the gun, and I took
+great pride in this until I came upon several of the shining little
+creatures bleeding, dying in the grass. Then my heart was troubled and I
+repented of my cruelty. Mrs. Green put the birds into potpies but my
+mother would not do so. "I don't believe in such game," she said. "It's
+bad enough to shoot the poor things without eating them."
+
+Once we came upon a huge mountain rattlesnake and Den killed it with a
+shot of his gun. How we escaped being bitten is a mystery, for we
+explored every path of the hills and meadows in our bare feet, our
+trousers rolled to the knee. We hunted plums and picked blackberries and
+hazelnuts with very little fear of snakes, and yet we must have always
+been on guard. We loved our valley, and while occasionally we yielded to
+the lure of "Freedom's star," we were really content with Green's Coulee
+and its surrounding hills.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+The Last Threshing in the Coulee
+
+
+Life on a Wisconsin farm, even for the women, had its compensations.
+There were times when the daily routine of lonely and monotonous
+housework gave place to an agreeable bustle, and human intercourse
+lightened the toil. In the midst of the slow progress of the fall's
+plowing, the gathering of the threshing crew was a most dramatic event
+to my mother, as to us, for it not only brought unwonted clamor, it
+fetched her brothers William and David and Frank, who owned and ran a
+threshing machine, and their coming gave the house an air of festivity
+which offset the burden of extra work which fell upon us all.
+
+In those days the grain, after being brought in and stacked around the
+barn, was allowed to remain until October or November when all the other
+work was finished.
+
+Of course some men got the machine earlier, for all could not thresh at
+the same time, and a good part of every man's fall activities consisted
+in "changing works" with his neighbors, thus laying up a stock of unpaid
+labor against the home job. Day after day, therefore, father or the
+hired man shouldered a fork and went to help thresh, and all through the
+autumn months, the ceaseless ringing hum and the _bow-ouw, ouw-woo,
+boo-oo-oom_ of the great balance wheels on the separator and the deep
+bass purr of its cylinder could be heard in every valley like the
+droning song of some sullen and gigantic autumnal insect.
+
+I recall with especial clearness the events of that last threshing in
+the coulee.--I was eight, my brother was six. For days we had looked
+forward to the coming of "the threshers," listening with the greatest
+eagerness to father's report of the crew. At last he said, "Well, Belle,
+get ready. The machine will be here tomorrow."
+
+All day we hung on the gate, gazing down the road, watching, waiting for
+the crew, and even after supper, we stood at the windows still hoping to
+hear the rattle of the ponderous separator.
+
+Father explained that the men usually worked all day at one farm and
+moved after dark, and we were just starting to "climb the wooden hill"
+when we heard a far-off faint halloo.
+
+"There they are," shouted father, catching up his old square tin lantern
+and hurriedly lighting the candle within it. "That's Frank's voice."
+
+The night air was sharp, and as we had taken off our boots we could only
+stand at the window and watch father as he piloted the teamsters through
+the gate. The light threw fantastic shadows here and there, now lighting
+up a face, now bringing out the separator which seemed a weary and
+sullen monster awaiting its den. The men's voices sounded loud in the
+still night, causing the roused turkeys in the oaks to peer about on
+their perches, uneasy silhouettes against the sky.
+
+We would gladly have stayed awake to greet our beloved uncles, but
+mother said, "You must go to sleep in order to be up early in the
+morning," and reluctantly we turned away.
+
+Lying thus in our cot under the sloping raftered roof we could hear the
+squawk of the hens, as father wrung their innocent necks, and the crash
+of the "sweeps" being unloaded sounded loud and clear and strange. We
+longed to be out there, but at last the dance of lights and shadows on
+the plastered wall died away, and we fell into childish dreamless sleep.
+
+We were awakened at dawn by the ringing beat of the iron mauls as Frank
+and David drove the stakes to hold the "power" to the ground. The rattle
+of trace chains, the clash of iron rods, the clang of steel bars,
+intermixed with the laughter of the men, came sharply through the frosty
+air, and the smell of sizzling sausage from the kitchen warned us that
+our busy mother was hurrying the breakfast forward. Knowing that it was
+time to get up, although it was not yet light, I had a sense of being
+awakened into a romantic new world, a world of heroic action.
+
+As we stumbled down the stairs, we found the lamp-lit kitchen empty of
+the men. They had finished their coffee and were out in the stack-yard
+oiling the machine and hitching the horses to the power. Shivering yet
+entranced by the beauty of the frosty dawn we crept out to stand and
+watch the play. The frost lay white on every surface, the frozen ground
+rang like iron under the steel-shod feet of the horses, and the breath
+of the men rose up in little white puffs of steam.
+
+Uncle David on the feeder's stand was impatiently awaiting the coming of
+the fifth team. The pitchers were climbing the stacks like blackbirds,
+and the straw-stackers were scuffling about the stable door.--Finally,
+just as the east began to bloom, and long streamers of red began to
+unroll along the vast gray dome of sky Uncle Frank, the driver, lifted
+his voice in a "Chippewa war-whoop."
+
+On a still morning like this his signal could be heard for miles. Long
+drawn and musical, it sped away over the fields, announcing to all the
+world that the McClintocks were ready for the day's race. Answers came
+back faintly from the frosty fields where dim figures of laggard hands
+could be seen hurrying over the plowed ground, the last team came
+clattering in and was hooked into its place, David called "All right!"
+and the cylinder began to hum.
+
+In those days the machine was either a "J. I. Case" or a "Buffalo
+Pitts," and was moved by five pairs of horses attached to a "power"
+staked to the ground, round which they travelled pulling at the ends of
+long levers or sweeps, and to me the force seemed tremendous. "Tumbling
+rods" with "knuckle joints" carried the motion to the cylinder, and the
+driver who stood upon a square platform above the huge, greasy
+cog-wheels (round which the horses moved) was a grand figure in my eyes.
+
+Driving, to us, looked like a pleasant job, but Uncle Frank thought it
+very tiresome, and I can now see that it was. To stand on that small
+platform all through the long hours of a cold November day, when the
+cutting wind roared down the valley sweeping the dust and leaves along
+the road, was work. Even I perceived that it was far pleasanter to sit
+on the south side of the stack and watch the horses go round.
+
+It was necessary that the "driver" should be a man of judgment, for the
+horses had to be kept at just the right speed, and to do this he must
+gauge the motion of the cylinder by the pitch of its deep bass song.
+
+The three men in command of the machine were set apart as "the
+threshers."--William and David alternately "fed" or "tended," that is,
+one of them "fed" the grain into the howling cylinder while the other,
+oil-can in hand, watched the sieves, felt of the pinions and so kept the
+machine in good order. The feeder's position was the high place to which
+all boys aspired, and on this day I stood in silent admiration of Uncle
+David's easy powerful attitudes as he caught each bundle in the crook
+of his arm and spread it out into a broad, smooth band of yellow straw
+on which the whirling teeth caught and tore with monstrous fury. He was
+the ideal man in my eyes, grander in some ways than my father, and to be
+able to stand where he stood was the highest honor in the world.
+
+It was all poetry for us and we wished every day were threshing day. The
+wind blew cold, the clouds went flying across the bright blue sky, and
+the straw glistened in the sun. With jarring snarl the circling zone of
+cogs dipped into the sturdy greasy wheels, and the single-trees and
+pulley-chains chirped clear and sweet as crickets. The dust flew, the
+whip cracked, and the men working swiftly to get the sheaves to the
+feeder or to take the straw away from the tail-end of the machine, were
+like warriors, urged to desperate action by battle cries. The stackers
+wallowing to their waists in the fluffy straw-pile seemed gnomes acting
+for our amusement.
+
+The straw-pile! What delight we had in that! What joy it was to go up to
+the top where the men were stationed, one behind the other, and to have
+them toss huge forkfuls of the light fragrant stalks upon us, laughing
+to see us emerge from our golden cover. We were especially impressed by
+the bravery of Ed Green who stood in the midst of the thick dust and
+flying chaff close to the tail of the stacker. His teeth shone like a
+negro's out of his dust-blackened face and his shirt was wet with sweat,
+but he motioned for "more straw" and David, accepting the challenge,
+signalled for more speed. Frank swung his lash and yelled at the
+straining horses, the sleepy growl of the cylinder rose to a howl and
+the wheat came pulsing out at the spout in such a stream that the
+carriers were forced to trot on their path to and from the granary in
+order to keep the grain from piling up around the measurer.--There was
+a kind of splendid rivalry in this backbreaking toil--for each sack
+weighed ninety pounds.
+
+We got tired of wallowing in the straw at last, and went down to help
+Rover catch the rats which were being uncovered by the pitchers as they
+reached the stack bottom.--The horses, with their straining,
+out-stretched necks, the loud and cheery shouts, the whistling of the
+driver, the roar and hum of the great wheel, the flourishing of the
+forks, the supple movement of brawny arms, the shouts of the men, all
+blended with the wild sound of the wind in the creaking branches of the
+oaks, forming a glorious poem in our unforgetting minds.
+
+At last the call for dinner sounded. The driver began to call, "Whoa
+there, boys! Steady, Tom," and to hold his long whip before the eyes of
+the more spirited of the teams in order to convince them that he really
+meant "stop." The pitchers stuck their forks upright in the stack and
+leaped to the ground. Randal, the band-cutter, drew from his wrist the
+looped string of his big knife, the stackers slid down from the
+straw-pile, and a race began among the teamsters to see whose span would
+be first unhitched and at the watering trough. What joyous rivalry it
+seemed to us!--
+
+Mother and Mrs. Randal, wife of our neighbor, who was "changing works,"
+stood ready to serve the food as soon as the men were seated.--The table
+had been lengthened to its utmost and pieced out with boards, and planks
+had been laid on stout wooden chairs at either side.
+
+The men came in with a rush, and took seats wherever they could find
+them, and their attack on the boiled potatoes and chicken should have
+been appalling to the women, but it was not. They enjoyed seeing them
+eat. Ed Green was prodigious. One cut at a big potato, followed by two
+stabbing motions, and it was gone.--Two bites laid a leg of chicken as
+bare as a slate pencil. To us standing in the corner waiting our turn,
+it seemed that every "smitch" of the dinner was in danger, for the
+others were not far behind Ed and Dan.
+
+At last even the gauntest of them filled up and left the room and we
+were free to sit at "the second table" and eat, while the men rested
+outside. David and William, however, generally had a belt to sew or a
+bent tooth to take out of the "concave." This seemed of grave dignity to
+us and we respected their self-sacrificing labor.
+
+Nooning was brief. As soon as the horses had finished their oats, the
+roar and hum of the machine began again and continued steadily all the
+afternoon, till by and by the sun grew big and red, the night began to
+fall, and the wind died out.
+
+This was the most impressive hour of a marvellous day. Through the
+falling dusk, the machine boomed steadily with a new sound, a solemn
+roar, rising at intervals to a rattling impatient yell as the cylinder
+ran momentarily empty. The men moved now in silence, looming dim and
+gigantic in the half-light. The straw-pile mountain high, the pitchers
+in the chaff, the feeder on his platform, and especially the driver on
+his power, seemed almost superhuman to my childish eyes. Gray dust
+covered the handsome face of David, changing it into something both sad
+and stern, but Frank's cheery voice rang out musically as he called to
+the weary horses, "Come on, Tom! Hup there, Dan!"
+
+The track in which they walked had been worn into two deep circles and
+they all moved mechanically round and round, like parts of a machine,
+dull-eyed and covered with sweat.
+
+At last William raised the welcome cry, "All done!"--the men threw down
+their forks. Uncle Frank began to call in a gentle, soothing voice,
+"_Whoa_, lads! _Steady_, boys! Whoa, there!"
+
+But the horses had been going so long and so steadily that they could
+not at once check their speed. They kept moving, though slowly, on and
+on till their owners slid from the stacks and seizing the ends of the
+sweeps, held them. Even then, after the power was still, the cylinder
+kept its hum, till David throwing a last sheaf into its open maw, choked
+it into silence.
+
+Now came the sound of dropping chains, the clang of iron rods, and the
+thud of hoofs as the horses walked with laggard gait and weary
+down-falling heads to the barn. The men, more subdued than at dinner,
+washed with greater care, and combed the chaff from their beards. The
+air was still and cool, and the sky a deep cloudless blue starred with
+faint fire.
+
+Supper though quiet was more dramatic than dinner had been. The table
+lighted with kerosene lamps, the clean white linen, the fragrant dishes,
+the women flying about with steaming platters, all seemed very cheery
+and very beautiful, and the men who came into the light and warmth of
+the kitchen with aching muscles and empty stomachs, seemed gentler and
+finer than at noon. They were nearly all from neighboring farms, and my
+mother treated even the few hired men like visitors, and the talk was
+all hearty and good tempered though a little subdued.
+
+One by one the men rose and slipped away, and father withdrew to milk
+the cows and bed down the horses, leaving the women and the youngsters
+to eat what was left and "do up the dishes."
+
+After we had eaten our fill Frank and I also went out to the barn (all
+wonderfully changed now to our minds by the great stack of straw), there
+to listen to David and father chatting as they rubbed their tired
+horses.--The lantern threw a dim red light on the harness and on the
+rumps of the cattle, but left mysterious shadows in the corners. I could
+hear the mice rustling in the straw of the roof, and from the farther
+end of the dimly-lighted shed came the regular _strim-stram_ of the
+streams of milk falling into the bottom of a tin pail as the hired hand
+milked the big roan cow.
+
+All this was very momentous to me as I sat on the oat box, shivering in
+the cold air, listening with all my ears, and when we finally went
+toward the house, the stars were big and sparkling. The frost had
+already begun to glisten on the fences and well-curb, and high in the
+air, dark against the sky, the turkeys were roosting uneasily, as if
+disturbed by premonitions of approaching Thanksgiving. Rover pattered
+along by my side on the crisp grass and my brother clung to my hand.
+
+How bright and warm it was in the kitchen with mother putting things to
+rights while father and my uncles leaned their chairs against the wall
+and talked of the west and of moving. "I can't get away till after New
+Year's," father said. "But I'm going. I'll never put in another crop on
+these hills."
+
+With speechless content I listened to Uncle William's stories of bears
+and Indians, and other episodes of frontier life, until at last we were
+ordered to bed and the glorious day was done.
+
+Oh, those blessed days, those entrancing nights! How fine they were
+then, and how mellow they are now, for the slow-paced years have dropped
+nearly fifty other golden mists upon that far-off valley. From this
+distance I cannot understand how my father brought himself to leave that
+lovely farm and those good and noble friends.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+David and His Violin
+
+
+Most of the events of our last autumn in Green's Coulee have slipped
+into the fathomless gulf, but the experiences of Thanksgiving day, which
+followed closely on our threshing day, are in my treasure house. Like a
+canvas by Rembrandt only one side of the figures therein is defined, the
+other side melts away into shadow--a luminous shadow, through which
+faint light pulses, luring my wistful gaze on and on, back into the
+vanished world where the springs of my life lie hidden.
+
+It is a raw November evening. Frank and Harriet and I are riding into a
+strange land in a clattering farm wagon. Father and mother are seated
+before us on the spring seat. The ground is frozen and the floor of the
+carriage pounds and jars. We cling to the iron-lined sides of the box to
+soften the blows. It is growing dark. Before us (in a similar vehicle)
+my Uncle David is leading the way. I catch momentary glimpses of him
+outlined against the pale yellow sky. He stands erect, holding the reins
+of his swiftly-moving horses in his powerful left hand. Occasionally he
+shouts back to my father, whose chin is buried in a thick buffalo-skin
+coat. Mother is only a vague mass, a figure wrapped in shawls. The wind
+is keen, the world gray and cheerless.
+
+My sister is close beside me in the straw. Frank is asleep. I am on my
+knees looking ahead. Suddenly with rush of wind and clatter of hoofs, we
+enter the gloom of a forest and the road begins to climb. I see the
+hills on the right. I catch the sound of wheels on a bridge. I am cold.
+I snuggle down under the robes and the gurgle of ice-bound water is
+fused with my dreams.
+
+I am roused at last by Uncle David's pleasant voice, "Wake up, boys, and
+pay y'r lodging!" I look out and perceive him standing beside the wheel.
+I see a house and I hear the sound of Deborah's voice from the
+warmly-lighted open door.
+
+I climb down, heavy with cold and sleep. As I stand there my uncle
+reaches up his arms to take my mother down. Not knowing that she has a
+rheumatic elbow, he squeezes her playfully. She gives a sharp scream,
+and his team starts away on a swift run around the curve of the road
+toward the gate. Dropping my mother, he dashes across the yard to
+intercept the runaways. We all stand in silence, watching the flying
+horses and the wonderful race he is making toward the gate. He runs with
+magnificent action, his head thrown high. As the team dashes through the
+gate his outflung left hand catches the end-board of the wagon,--he
+leaps into the box, and so passes from our sight.
+
+We go into the cottage. It is a small building with four rooms and a
+kitchen on the ground floor, but in the sitting room we come upon an
+open fireplace,--the first I had ever seen, and in the light of it sits
+Grandfather McClintock, the glory of the flaming logs gilding the edges
+of his cloud of bushy white hair. He does not rise to greet us, but
+smiles and calls out, "Come in! Come in! Draw a cheer. Sit ye down."
+
+A clamor of welcome fills the place. Harriet and I are put to warm
+before the blaze. Grandad takes Frank upon his knee and the cutting wind
+of the gray outside world is forgotten.
+
+This house in which the McClintocks were living at this time, belonged
+to a rented farm. Grandad had sold the original homestead on the
+LaCrosse River, and David who had lately married a charming young
+Canadian girl, was the head of the family. Deborah, it seems, was also
+living with him and Frank was there--as a visitor probably.
+
+The room in which we sat was small and bare but to me it was very
+beautiful, because of the fire, and by reason of the merry voices which
+filled my ears with music. Aunt Rebecca brought to us a handful of
+crackers and told us that we were to have oyster soup for supper. This
+gave us great pleasure even in anticipation, for oysters were a
+delicious treat in those days.
+
+"Well, Dick," Grandad began, "so ye're plannin' to go west, air ye?"
+
+"Yes, as soon as I get all my grain and hogs marketed I'm going to pull
+out for my new farm over in Iowa."
+
+"Ye'd better stick to the old coulee," warned my grandfather, a touch of
+sadness in his voice. "Ye'll find none better."
+
+My father was disposed to resent this. "That's all very well for the few
+who have the level land in the middle of the valley," he retorted, "but
+how about those of us who are crowded against the hills? You should see
+the farm I have in Winnesheik!! Not a hill on it big enough for a boy to
+coast on. It's right on the edge of Looking Glass Prairie, and I have a
+spring of water, and a fine grove of trees just where I want them, not
+where they have to be grubbed out."
+
+"But ye belong here," repeated Grandfather. "You were married here, your
+children were born here. Ye'll find no such friends in the west as you
+have here in Neshonoc. And Belle will miss the family."
+
+My father laughed. "Oh, you'll all come along. Dave has the fever
+already. Even William is likely to catch it."
+
+Old Hugh sighed deeply. "I hope ye're wrong," he said. "I'd like to
+spend me last days here with me sons and daughters around me, sich as
+are left to me," here his voice became sterner. "It's the curse of our
+country,--this constant moving, moving. I'd have been better off had I
+stayed in Ohio, though this valley seemed very beautiful to me the first
+time I saw it."
+
+At this point David came in, and everybody shouted, "Did you stop them?"
+referring of course to the runaway team.
+
+"I did," he replied with a smile. "But how about the oysters. I'm holler
+as a beech log."
+
+The fragrance of the soup thoroughly awakened even little Frank, and
+when we drew around the table, each face shone with the light of peace
+and plenty, and all our elders tried to forget that this was the last
+Thanksgiving festival which the McClintocks and Garlands would be able
+to enjoy in the old valley. How good those oysters were! They made up
+the entire meal,--excepting mince pie which came as a closing sweet.
+
+Slowly, one by one, the men drew back and returned to the sitting room,
+leaving the women to wash up the dishes and put the kitchen to rights.
+David seized the opportunity to ask my father to tell once again of the
+trip he had made, of the lands he had seen, and the farm he had
+purchased, for his young heart was also fired with desire of
+exploration. The level lands toward the sunset allured him. In his
+visions the wild meadows were filled with game, and the free lands
+needed only to be tickled with a hoe to laugh into harvest.
+
+He said, "As soon as Dad and Frank are settled on a farm here, I'm going
+west also. I'm as tired of climbing these hills as you are. I want a
+place of my own--and besides, from all you say of that wheat country out
+there, a threshing machine would pay wonderfully well."
+
+As the women came in, my father called out, "Come, Belle, sing 'O'er the
+Hills in Legions Boys!'--Dave get out your fiddle--and tune us all up."
+
+David tuned up his fiddle and while he twanged on the strings mother
+lifted her voice in our fine old marching song.
+
+    Cheer up, brothers, as we go,
+    O'er the mountains, westward ho--
+
+and we all joined in the jubilant chorus--
+
+    Then o'er the hills in legions, boys,
+    Fair freedom's star
+    Points to the sunset regions, boys,
+    Ha, ha, ha-ha!--
+
+My father's face shone with the light of the explorer, the pioneer. The
+words of this song appealed to him as the finest poetry. It meant all
+that was fine and hopeful and buoyant in American life, to him--but on
+my mother's sweet face a wistful expression deepened and in her fine
+eyes a reflective shadow lay. To her this song meant not so much the
+acquisition of a new home as the loss of all her friends and relatives.
+She sang it submissively, not exultantly, and I think the other women
+were of the same mood though their faces were less expressive to me. To
+all of the pioneer wives of the past that song had meant deprivation,
+suffering, loneliness, heart-ache.
+
+From this they passed to other of my father's favorite songs, and it is
+highly significant to note that even in this choice of songs he
+generally had his way. He was the dominating force. "Sing 'Nellie
+Wildwood,'" he said, and they sang it.--This power of getting his will
+respected was due partly to his military training but more to a
+distinctive trait in him. He was a man of power, of decision, a natural
+commander of men.
+
+They sang "Minnie Minturn" to his request, and the refrain,--
+
+    I have heard the angels warning,
+    I have seen the golden shore--
+
+meant much to me. So did the line,
+
+    But I only hear the drummers
+    As the armies march away.
+
+Aunt Deb was also a soul of decision. She called out, "No more of these
+sad tones," and struck up "The Year of Jubilo," and we all shouted till
+the walls shook with the exultant words:
+
+    Ol' massa run--ha-ha!
+    De darkies stay,--ho-ho!
+    It must be now is the kingdom a-comin'
+    In the year of Jubilo.
+
+At this point the fire suggested an old English ballad which I loved,
+and so I piped up, "Mother, sing, 'Pile the Wood on Higher!'" and she
+complied with pleasure, for this was a song of home, of the unbroken
+fireside circle.
+
+    Oh, the winds howl mad outdoors
+      The snow clouds hurry past,
+    The giant trees sway to and fro
+      Beneath the sweeping blast.
+
+and we children joined in the chorus:
+
+    Then we'll gather round the fire
+      And we'll pile the wood on higher,
+    Let the song and jest go round;
+      What care we for the storm,
+      When the fireside is so warm,
+      And pleasure here is found?
+
+Never before did this song mean so much to me as at this moment when the
+winds were actually howling outdoors, and Uncle Frank was in very truth
+piling the logs higher. It seemed as though my stuffed bosom could not
+receive anything deeper and finer, but it did, for father was saying,
+"Well, Dave, now for some _tunes_."
+
+This was the best part of David to me. He could make any room mystical
+with the magic of his bow. True, his pieces were mainly venerable dance
+tunes, cotillions, hornpipes,--melodies which had passed from fiddler to
+fiddler until they had become veritable folk-songs,--pieces like "Money
+Musk," "Honest John," "Haste to the Wedding," and many others whose
+names I have forgotten, but with a gift of putting into even the
+simplest song an emotion which subdued us and silenced us, he played on,
+absorbed and intent. From these familiar pieces he passed to others for
+which he had no names, melodies strangely sweet and sad, full of longing
+cries, voicing something which I dimly felt but could not understand.
+
+At the moment he was the somber Scotch Highlander, the true Celt, and as
+he bent above his instrument his black eyes glowing, his fine head
+drooping low, my heart bowed down in worship of his skill. He was my
+hero, the handsomest, most romantic figure in all my world.
+
+He played, "Maggie, Air Ye Sleepin," and the wind outside went to my
+soul. Voices wailed to me out of the illimitable hill-land forests,
+voices that pleaded:
+
+    Oh, let me in, for loud the linn
+    Goes roarin' o'er the moorland craggy.
+
+He appeared to forget us, even his young wife. His eyes looked away into
+gray storms. Vague longing ached in his throat. Life was a struggle,
+love a torment.
+
+He stopped abruptly, and put the violin into its box, fumbling with the
+catch to hide his emotion and my father broke the tense silence with a
+prosaic word. "Well, well! Look here, it's time you youngsters were
+asleep. Beckie, where are you going to put these children?"
+
+Aunt Rebecca, a trim little woman with brown eyes, looked at us
+reflectively, "Well, now, I don't know. I guess we'll have to make a bed
+for them on the floor."
+
+This was done, and for the first time in my life, I slept before an open
+fire. As I snuggled into my blankets with my face turned to the blaze,
+the darkness of the night and the denizens of the pineland wilderness to
+the north had no terrors for me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was awakened in the early light by Uncle David building the fire, and
+then came my father's call, and the hurly burly of jovial greeting from
+old and young. The tumult lasted till breakfast was called, and
+everybody who could find place sat around the table and attacked the
+venison and potatoes which formed the meal. I do not remember our
+leave-taking or the ride homeward. I bring to mind only the desolate
+cold of our own kitchen into which we tramped late in the afternoon,
+sitting in our wraps until the fire began to roar within its iron cage.
+
+Oh, winds of the winter night! Oh, firelight and the shine of tender
+eyes! How far away you seem tonight!
+
+    So faint and far,
+    Each dear face shineth as a star.
+
+Oh, you by the western sea, and you of the south beyond the reach of
+Christmas snow, do not your hearts hunger, like mine tonight for that
+Thanksgiving Day among the trees? For the glance of eyes undimmed of
+tears, for the hair untouched with gray?
+
+It all lies in the unchanging realm of the past--this land of my
+childhood. Its charm, its strange dominion cannot return save in the
+poet's reminiscent dream. No money, no railway train can take us back to
+it. It did not in truth exist--it was a magical world, born of the
+vibrant union of youth and firelight, of music and the voice of moaning
+winds--a union which can never come again to you or me, father, uncle,
+brother, till the coulee meadows bloom again unscarred of spade or
+plow.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+Winnesheik "Woods and Prairie Lands"
+
+
+Our last winter in the Coulee was given over to preparations for our
+removal but it made very little impression on my mind which was deeply
+engaged on my school work. As it was out of the question for us to
+attend the village school the elders arranged for a neighborhood school
+at the home of John Roche, who had an unusually large living room. John
+is but a shadowy figure in this chronicle but his daughter Indiana, whom
+we called "Ingie," stands out as the big girl of my class.
+
+Books were scarce in this house as well as in our own. I remember piles
+of newspapers but no bound volumes other than the Bible and certain
+small Sunday school books. All the homes of the valley were equally
+barren. My sister and I jointly possessed a very limp and soiled cloth
+edition of "Mother Goose." Our stories all came to us by way of the
+conversation of our elders. No one but grandmother Garland ever
+deliberately told us a tale--except the hired girls, and their romances
+were of such dark and gruesome texture that we often went to bed
+shivering with fear of the dark.
+
+Suddenly, unexpectedly, miraculously, I came into possession of two
+books, one called _Beauty and The Beast_, and the other _Aladdin and His
+Wonderful Lamp_. These volumes mark a distinct epoch in my life. The
+grace of the lovely Lady as she stood above the cringing Beast gave me
+my first clear notion of feminine dignity and charm. On the magic Flying
+Carpet I rose into the wide air of Oriental romance. I attended the
+building of towered cities and the laying of gorgeous feasts. I carried
+in my hand the shell from which, at the word of command, the cool clear
+water gushed. My feet were shod with winged boots, and on my head was
+the Cap of Invisibility. My body was captive in our snowbound little
+cabin but my mind ranged the golden palaces of Persia--so much I know.
+Where the wonder-working romances came from I cannot now tell but I
+think they were Christmas presents, for Christmas came this year with
+unusual splendor.
+
+The sale of the farm had put into my father's hands a considerable sum
+of money and I assume that some small part of this went to make our
+holiday glorious. In one of my stockings was a noble red and blue tin
+horse with a flowing mane and tail, and in the other was a monkey who
+could be made to climb a stick. Harriet had a new china doll and Frank a
+horn and china dog, and all the corners of our stockings were stuffed
+with nuts and candies. I hope mother got something beside the potatoes
+and onions which I remember seeing her pull out and unwrap with
+delightful humor--an old and rather pathetic joke but new to us.
+
+The snow fell deep in January and I have many glorious pictures of the
+whirling flakes outlined against the darkly wooded hills across the
+marsh. Father was busy with his team drawing off wheat and hogs and hay,
+and often came into the house at night, white with the storms through
+which he had passed. My trips to school were often interrupted by the
+cold, and the path which my sister and I trod was along the
+ever-deepening furrows made by the bob-sleighs of the farmers. Often
+when we met a team or were overtaken by one, we were forced out of the
+road into the drifts, and I can feel to this moment, the wedge of snow
+which caught in the tops of my tall boots and slowly melted into my gray
+socks.
+
+We were not afraid of the drifts, however. On the contrary mother had to
+fight to keep us from wallowing beyond our depth. I had now a sled which
+was my inseparable companion. I could not feed the hens or bring in a
+pan of chips without taking it with me. My heart swelled with pride and
+joy whenever I regarded it, and yet it was but a sober-colored thing, a
+frame of hickory built by the village blacksmith in exchange for a cord
+of wood--delivered. I took it to school one day, but Ed Roche abused it,
+took it up and threw it into the deep snow among the weeds.--Had I been
+large enough, I would have killed that boy with pleasure, but being
+small and fat and numb with cold I merely rescued my treasure as quickly
+as I could and hurried home to pour my indignant story into my mother's
+sympathetic ears.
+
+I seldom spoke of my defeats to my father for he had once said, "Fight
+your own battles, my son. If I hear of your being licked by a boy of
+anything like your own size, I'll give you another when you get home."
+He didn't believe in molly-coddling, you will perceive. His was a stern
+school, the school of self-reliance and resolution.
+
+Neighbors came in now and again to talk of our migration, and yet in
+spite of all that, in spite of our song, in spite of my father's
+preparation I had no definite premonition of coming change, and when the
+day of departure actually dawned, I was as surprised, as unprepared as
+though it had all happened without the slightest warning.
+
+So long as the kettle sang on the hearth and the clock ticked on its
+shelf, the idea of "moving" was pleasantly diverting, but when one raw
+winter day I saw the faithful clock stuffed with rags and laid on its
+back in a box, and the chairs and dishes being loaded into a big sleigh,
+I began to experience something very disturbing and very uncomfortable.
+"O'er the hills in legions, boys," did not sound so inspiring to me
+then. "The woods and prairie lands" of Iowa became of less account to me
+than the little cabin in which I had lived all my short life.
+
+Harriet and I wandered around, whining and shivering, our own misery
+augmented by the worried look on mother's face. It was February, and she
+very properly resented leaving her home for a long, cold ride into an
+unknown world, but as a dutiful wife she worked hard and silently in
+packing away her treasures, and clothing her children for the journey.
+
+At last the great sleigh-load of bedding and furniture stood ready at
+the door, the stove, still warm with cheerful service, was lifted in,
+and the time for saying good-bye to our coulee home had come.
+
+"Forward march!" shouted father and led the way with the big bob-sled,
+followed by cousin Jim and our little herd of kine, while mother and the
+children brought up the rear in a "pung" drawn by old Josh, a flea-bit
+gray.--It is probable that at the moment the master himself was slightly
+regretful.
+
+A couple of hours' march brought us to LaCrosse, the great city whose
+wonders I had longed to confront. It stood on the bank of a wide river
+and had all the value of a sea-port to me for in summertime great
+hoarsely bellowing steamboats came and went from its quay, and all about
+it rose high wooded hills. Halting there, we overlooked a wide expanse
+of snow-covered ice in the midst of which a dark, swift, threatening
+current of open water ran. Across this chasm stretching from one
+ice-field to another lay a flexible narrow bridge over which my father
+led the way toward hills of the western shore. There was something
+especially terrifying in the boiling heave of that black flood, and I
+shivered with terror as I passed it, having vividly in my mind certain
+grim stories of men whose teams had broken through and been swept
+beneath the ice never to reappear.
+
+It was a long ride to my mother, for she too was in terror of the ice,
+but at last the Minnesota bank was reached, La Crescent was passed, and
+our guide entering a narrow valley began to climb the snowy hills. All
+that was familiar was put behind; all that was strange and dark, all
+that was wonderful and unknown, spread out before us, and as we crawled
+along that slippery, slanting road, it seemed that we were entering on a
+new and marvellous world.
+
+We lodged that night in Hokah, a little town in a deep valley. The
+tavern stood near a river which flowed over its dam with resounding roar
+and to its sound I slept. Next day at noon we reached Caledonia, a town
+high on the snowy prairie. Caledonia! For years that word was a poem in
+my ear, part of a marvellous and epic march. Actually it consisted of a
+few frame houses and a grocery store. But no matter. Its name shall ring
+like a peal of bells in this book.
+
+It grew colder as we rose, and that night, the night of the second day,
+we reached Hesper and entered a long stretch of woods, and at last
+turned in towards a friendly light shining from a low house beneath a
+splendid oak.
+
+As we drew near my father raised a signal shout, "Hallo-o-o the House!"
+and a man in a long gray coat came out. "Is that thee, friend Richard?"
+he called, and my father replied, "Yea, neighbor Barley, here we are!"
+
+I do not know how this stranger whose manner of speech was so peculiar,
+came to be there, but he was and in answer to my question, father
+replied, "Barley is a Quaker," an answer which explained nothing at that
+time. Being too sleepy to pursue the matter, or to remark upon anything
+connected with the exterior, I dumbly followed Harriet into the kitchen
+which was still in possession of good Mrs. Barley.
+
+Having filled our stomachs with warm food mother put us to bed, and when
+we awoke late the next day the Barleys were gone, our own stove was in
+its place, and our faithful clock was ticking calmly on the shelf. So
+far as we knew, mother was again at home and entirely content.
+
+This farm, which was situated two miles west of the village of Hesper,
+immediately won our love. It was a glorious place for boys. Broad-armed
+white oaks stood about the yard, and to the east and north a deep forest
+invited to exploration. The house was of logs and for that reason was
+much more attractive to us than to our mother. It was, I suspect, both
+dark and cold. I know the roof was poor, for one morning I awoke to find
+a miniature peak of snow on the floor at my bedside. It was only a rude
+little frontier cabin, but it was perfectly satisfactory to me.
+
+Harriet and I learned much in the way of woodcraft during the months
+which followed. Night by night the rabbits, in countless numbers printed
+their tell-tale records in the snow, and quail and partridges nested
+beneath the down-drooping branches of the red oaks. Squirrels ran from
+tree to tree and we were soon able to distinguish and name most of the
+tracks made by the birds and small animals, and we took a never-failing
+delight in this study of the wild. In most of my excursions my sister
+was my companion. My brother was too small.
+
+All my memories of this farm are of the fiber of poetry. The silence of
+the snowy aisles of the forest, the whirring flight of partridges, the
+impudent bark of squirrels, the quavering voices of owls and coons, the
+music of the winds in the high trees,--all these impressions unite in my
+mind like parts of a woodland symphony. I soon learned to distinguish
+the raccoon's mournful call from the quavering cry of the owl, and I
+joined the hired man in hunting rabbits from under the piles of brush in
+the clearing. Once or twice some ferocious, larger animal, possibly a
+panther, hungrily yowled in the impenetrable thickets to the north, but
+this only lent a still more enthralling interest to the forest.
+
+To the east, an hour's walk through the timber, stood the village, built
+and named by the "Friends" who had a meeting house not far away, and
+though I saw much of them, I never attended their services.
+
+Our closest neighbor was a gruff loud-voiced old Norwegian and from his
+children (our playmates) we learned many curious facts. All Norwegians,
+it appeared, ate from wooden plates or wooden bowls. Their food was soup
+which they called "bean swaagen" and they were all yellow haired and
+blue-eyed.
+
+Harriet and I and one Lars Peterson gave a great deal of time to an
+attempt to train a yoke of yearling calves to draw our handsled. I call
+it an attempt, for we hardly got beyond a struggle to overcome the
+stubborn resentment of the stupid beasts, who very naturally objected to
+being forced into service before their time. Harriet was ten, I was not
+quite nine, and Lars was only twelve, hence we spent long hours in
+yoking and unyoking our unruly span. I believe we did actually haul
+several loads of firewood to the kitchen door, but at last Buck and Brin
+"turned the yoke" and broke it, and that ended our teaming.
+
+The man from whom we acquired our farm had in some way domesticated a
+flock of wild geese, and though they must have been a part of the
+farm-yard during the winter, they made no deep impression on my mind
+till in the spring when as the migratory instinct stirred in their blood
+they all rose on the surface of the water in a little pool near the barn
+and with beating wings lifted their voices in brazen clamor calling to
+their fellows driving by high overhead. At times their cries halted the
+flocks in their arrowy flight and brought them down to mix
+indistinguishably with the captive birds.
+
+The wings of these had been clipped but as the weeks went on their
+pinions grew again and one morning when I went out to see what had
+happened to them, I found the pool empty and silent. We all missed their
+fine voices and yet we could not blame them for a reassertion of their
+freeborn nature. They had gone back to their summer camping grounds on
+the lakes of the far north.
+
+Early in April my father hired a couple of raw Norwegians to assist in
+clearing the land, and although neither of these immigrants could speak
+a word of English, I was greatly interested in them. They slept in the
+granary but this did not prevent them from communicating to our
+house-maid a virulent case of smallpox. Several days passed before my
+mother realized what ailed the girl. The discovery must have horrified
+her, for she had been through an epidemic of this dread disease in
+Wisconsin, and knew its danger.
+
+It was a fearsome plague in those days, much more fatal than now, and my
+mother with three unvaccinated children, a helpless handmaid to be
+nursed, was in despair when father developed the disease and took to his
+bed. Surely it must have seemed to her as though the Lord had visited
+upon her more punishment than belonged to her, for to add the final
+touch, in the midst of all her other afflictions she was expecting the
+birth of another child.
+
+I do not know what we would have done had not a noble woman of the
+neighborhood volunteered to come in and help us. She was not a friend,
+hardly an acquaintance, and yet she served us like an angel of mercy.
+Whether she still lives or not I cannot say, but I wish to acknowledge
+here the splendid heroism which brought Mary Briggs, a stranger, into
+our stricken home at a time when all our other neighbors beat their
+horses into a mad gallop whenever forced to pass our gate.
+
+Young as I was I realized something of the burden which had fallen upon
+my mother, and when one night I was awakened from deep sleep by hearing
+her calling out in pain, begging piteously for help, I shuddered in my
+bed, realizing with childish, intuitive knowledge that she was passing
+through a cruel convulsion which could not be softened or put aside. I
+went to sleep again at last, and when I woke, I had a little sister.
+
+Harriet and I having been vaccinated, escaped with what was called the
+"verylide" but father was ill for several weeks. Fortunately he was
+spared, as we all were, the "pitting" which usually follows this dreaded
+disease, and in a week or two we children had forgotten all about it.
+Spring was upon us and the world was waiting to be explored.
+
+One of the noblest features of this farm was a large spring which boiled
+forth from the limestone rock about eighty rods north of the house, and
+this was a wonder-spot to us. There was something magical in this
+never-failing fountain, and we loved to play beside its waters. One of
+our delightful tasks was riding the horses to water at this spring, and
+I took many lessons in horsemanship on these trips.
+
+As the seeding time came on, enormous flocks of pigeons, in clouds
+which almost filled the sky, made it necessary for some one to sentinel
+the new-sown grain, and although I was but nine years of age, my father
+put a double-barrelled shotgun into my hands, and sent me out to defend
+the fields.
+
+This commission filled me with the spirit of the soldier. Proudly
+walking my rounds I menaced the flocks as they circled warily over my
+head, taking shot at them now and again as they came near enough,
+feeling as duty bound and as martial as any Roman sentry standing guard
+over a city. Up to this time I had not been allowed to carry arms,
+although I had been the companion of Den Green and Ellis Usher on their
+hunting expeditions in the coulee--now with entire discretion over my
+weapon, I loaded it, capped it and fired it, marching with sedate and
+manly tread, while little Frank at my heels, served as subordinate in
+his turn.
+
+The pigeons passed after a few days, but my warlike duties continued,
+for the ground-squirrels, called "gophers" by the settlers, were almost
+as destructive of the seed corn as the pigeons had been of the wheat.
+Day after day I patrolled the edge of the field listening to the saucy
+whistle of the striped little rascals, tracking them to their burrows
+and shooting them as they lifted their heads above the ground. I had
+moments of being sorry for them, but the sight of one digging up the
+seed, silenced my complaining conscience and I continued to slay.
+
+The school-house of this district stood out upon the prairie to the west
+a mile distant, and during May we trudged our way over a pleasant road,
+each carrying a small tin pail filled with luncheon. Here I came in
+contact with the Norwegian boys from the colony to the north, and a
+bitter feud arose (or existed) between the "Yankees," as they called us,
+and "the Norskies," as we called them. Often when we met on the road,
+showers of sticks and stones filled the air, and our hearts burned with
+the heat of savage conflict. War usually broke out at the moment of
+parting. Often after a fairly amicable half-mile together we suddenly
+split into hostile ranks, and warred with true tribal frenzy as long as
+we could find a stone or a clod to serve as missile. I had no personal
+animosity in this, I was merely a Pict willing to destroy my Angle
+enemies.
+
+As I look back upon my life on that woodland farm, it all seems very
+colorful and sweet. I am re-living days when the warm sun, falling on
+radiant slopes of grass, lit the meadow phlox and tall tiger lilies into
+flaming torches of color. I think of blackberry thickets and odorous
+grapevines and cherry trees and the delicious nuts which grew in
+profusion throughout the forest to the north. This forest which seemed
+endless and was of enchanted solemnity served as our wilderness. We
+explored it at every opportunity. We loved every day for the color it
+brought, each season for the wealth of its experience, and we welcomed
+the thought of spending all our years in this beautiful home where the
+wood and the prairie of our song did actually meet and mingle.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+We Move Again
+
+
+One day there came into our home a strange man who spoke in a fashion
+new to me. He was a middle-aged rather formal individual, dressed in a
+rough gray suit, and father alluded to him privately as "that English
+duke." I didn't know exactly what he meant by this, but our visitor's
+talk gave me a vague notion of "the old country."
+
+"My home," he said, "is near Manchester. I have come to try farming in
+the American wilderness."
+
+He was kindly, and did his best to be democratic, but we children stood
+away from him, wondering what he was doing in our house. My mother
+disliked him from the start for as he took his seat at our dinner table,
+he drew from his pocket a case in which he carried a silver fork and
+spoon and a silver-handled knife. Our cutlery was not good enough for
+him!
+
+Every family that we knew at that time used three-tined steel forks and
+my mother naturally resented the implied criticism of her table ware. I
+heard her say to my father, "If our ways don't suit your English friend
+he'd better go somewhere else for his meals."
+
+This fastidious pioneer also carried a revolver, for he believed that
+having penetrated far into a dangerous country, he was in danger, and I
+am not at all sure but that he was right, for the Minnesota woods at
+this time were filled with horse-thieves and counterfeiters, and it was
+known that many of these landhunting Englishmen carried large sums of
+gold on their persons.
+
+We resented our guest still more when we found that he was trying to buy
+our lovely farm and that father was already half-persuaded. We loved
+this farm. We loved the log house, and the oaks which sheltered it, and
+we especially valued the glorious spring and the plum trees which stood
+near it, but father was still dreaming of the free lands of the farther
+west, and early in March he sold to the Englishman and moved us all to a
+rented place some six miles directly west, in the township of Burr Oak.
+
+This was but a temporary lodging, a kind of camping place, for no sooner
+were his fields seeded than he set forth once again with a covered
+wagon, eager to explore the open country to the north and west of us.
+The wood and prairie land of Winnesheik County did not satisfy him,
+although it seemed to me then, as it does now, the fulfillment of his
+vision, the realization of our song.
+
+For several weeks he travelled through southern Minnesota and northern
+Iowa, always in search of the perfect farm, and when he returned, just
+before harvest, he was able to report that he had purchased a quarter
+section of "the best land in Mitchell County" and that after harvest we
+would all move again.
+
+If my mother resented this third removal she made no comment which I can
+now recall. I suspect that she went rather willingly this time, for her
+brother David wrote that he had also located in Mitchell County, not two
+miles from the place my father had decided upon for our future home, and
+Samantha, her younger sister, had settled in Minnesota. The circle in
+Neshonoc seemed about to break up. A mighty spreading and shifting was
+going on all over the west, and no doubt my mother accepted her part in
+it without especial protest.
+
+Our life in Burr Oak township that summer was joyous for us children. It
+seems to have been almost all sunshine and play. As I reflect upon it I
+relive many delightful excursions into the northern woods. It appears
+that Harriet and I were in continual harvest of nuts and berries. Our
+walks to school were explorations and we spent nearly every Saturday and
+Sunday in minute study of the country-side, devouring everything which
+was remotely edible. We gorged upon May-apples until we were ill, and
+munched black cherries until we were dizzy with their fumes. We
+clambered high trees to collect baskets of wild grapes which our mother
+could not use, and we garnered nuts with the insatiable greed of
+squirrels. We ate oak-shoots, fern-roots, leaves, bark,
+seed-balls,--everything!--not because we were hungry but because we
+loved to experiment, and we came home, only when hungry or worn out or
+in awe of the darkness.
+
+It was a delightful season, full of the most satisfying companionship
+and yet of the names of my playmates I can seize upon only two--the
+others have faded from the tablets of my memory. I remember Ned who
+permitted me to hold his plow, and Perry who taught me how to tame the
+half-wild colts that filled his father's pasture. Together we spent long
+days lassoing--or rather snaring--the feet of these horses and subduing
+them to the halter. We had many fierce struggles but came out of them
+all without a serious injury.
+
+Late in August my father again loaded our household goods into wagons,
+and with our small herd of cattle following, set out toward the west,
+bound once again to overtake the actual line of the middle border.
+
+This journey has an unforgettable epic charm as I look back upon it.
+Each mile took us farther and farther into the unsettled prairie until
+in the afternoon of the second day, we came to a meadow so wide that
+its western rim touched the sky without revealing a sign of man's
+habitation other than the road in which we travelled.
+
+The plain was covered with grass tall as ripe wheat and when my father
+stopped his team and came back to us and said, "Well, children, here we
+are on The Big Prairie," we looked about us with awe, so endless seemed
+this spread of wild oats and waving blue-joint.
+
+Far away dim clumps of trees showed, but no chimney was in sight, and no
+living thing moved save our own cattle and the hawks lazily wheeling in
+the air. My heart filled with awe as well as wonder. The majesty of this
+primeval world exalted me. I felt for the first time the poetry of the
+unplowed spaces. It seemed that the "herds of deer and buffalo" of our
+song might, at any moment, present themselves,--but they did not, and my
+father took no account even of the marsh fowl.
+
+"Forward march!" he shouted, and on we went.
+
+Hour after hour he pushed into the west, the heads of his tired horses
+hanging ever lower, and on my mother's face the shadow deepened, but her
+chieftain's voice cheerily urging his team lost nothing of its clarion
+resolution. He was in his element. He loved this shelterless sweep of
+prairie. This westward march entranced him, I think he would have gladly
+kept on until the snowy wall of the Rocky Mountains met his eyes, for he
+was a natural explorer.
+
+Sunset came at last, but still he drove steadily on through the sparse
+settlements. Just at nightfall we came to a beautiful little stream, and
+stopped to let the horses drink. I heard its rippling, reassuring song
+on the pebbles. Thereafter all is dim and vague to me until my mother
+called out sharply, "Wake up, children! Here we are!"
+
+Struggling to my feet I looked about me. Nothing could be seen but the
+dim form of a small house.--On every side the land melted into
+blackness, silent and without boundary.
+
+Driving into the yard, father hastily unloaded one of the wagons and
+taking mother and Harriet and Jessie drove away to spend the night with
+Uncle David who had preceded us, as I now learned, and was living on a
+farm not far away. My brother and I were left to camp as best we could
+with the hired man.
+
+Spreading a rude bed on the floor, he told us to "hop in" and in ten
+minutes we were all fast asleep.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The sound of a clattering poker awakened me next morning and when I
+opened my sleepy eyes and looked out a new world displayed itself before
+me.
+
+The cabin faced a level plain with no tree in sight. A mile away to the
+west stood a low stone house and immediately in front of us opened a
+half-section of unfenced sod. To the north, as far as I could see, the
+land billowed like a russet ocean, with scarcely a roof to fleck its
+lonely spread.--I cannot say that I liked or disliked it. I merely
+marvelled at it, and while I wandered about the yard, the hired man
+scorched some cornmeal mush in a skillet and this with some butter and
+gingerbread, made up my first breakfast in Mitchell County.
+
+An hour or two later father and mother and the girls returned and the
+work of setting up the stove and getting the furniture in place began.
+In a very short time the experienced clock was voicing its contentment
+on a new shelf, and the kettle was singing busily on its familiar stove.
+Once more and for the sixth time since her marriage, Belle Garland
+adjusted herself to a pioneer environment, comforted no doubt by the
+knowledge that David and Deborah were near and that her father was
+coming soon. No doubt she also congratulated herself on the fact that
+she had not been carried beyond the Missouri River--and that her house
+was not "surrounded by Indians who murder by night."
+
+A few hours later, while my brother and I were on the roof of the house
+with intent to peer "over the edge of the prairie" something grandly
+significant happened. Upon a low hill to the west a herd of horses
+suddenly appeared running swiftly, led by a beautiful sorrel pony with
+shining white mane. On they came, like a platoon of cavalry rushing down
+across the open sod which lay before our door. The leader moved with
+lofty and graceful action, easily out-stretching all his fellows.
+Forward they swept, their long tails floating in the wind like
+banners,--on in a great curve as if scenting danger in the smoke of our
+fire. The thunder of their feet filled me with delight. Surely, next to
+a herd of buffalo this squadron of wild horses was the most satisfactory
+evidence of the wilderness into which we had been thrust.
+
+Riding as if to intercept the leader, a solitary herder now appeared,
+mounted upon a horse which very evidently was the mate of the leader. He
+rode magnificently, and under him the lithe mare strove resolutely to
+overtake and head off the leader.--All to no purpose! The halterless
+steeds of the prairie snorted derisively at their former companion,
+bridled and saddled, and carrying the weight of a master. Swiftly they
+thundered across the sod, dropped into a ravine, and disappeared in a
+cloud of dust.
+
+Silently we watched the rider turn and ride slowly homeward. The plain
+had become our new domain, the horseman our ideal.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+Our First Winter on the Prairie
+
+
+For a few days my brother and I had little to do other than to keep the
+cattle from straying, and we used our leisure in becoming acquainted
+with the region round about.
+
+It burned deep into our memories, this wide, sunny, windy country. The
+sky so big, and the horizon line so low and so far away, made this new
+world of the plain more majestic than the world of the Coulee.--The
+grasses and many of the flowers were also new to us. On the uplands the
+herbage was short and dry and the plants stiff and woody, but in the
+swales the wild oat shook its quivers of barbed and twisted arrows, and
+the crow's foot, tall and sere, bowed softly under the feet of the wind,
+while everywhere, in the lowlands as well as on the ridges, the
+bleaching white antlers of by-gone herbivora lay scattered, testifying
+to "the herds of deer and buffalo" which once fed there. We were just a
+few years too late to see them.
+
+To the south the sections were nearly all settled upon, for in that
+direction lay the county town, but to the north and on into Minnesota
+rolled the unplowed sod, the feeding ground of the cattle, the home of
+foxes and wolves, and to the west, just beyond the highest ridges, we
+loved to think the bison might still be seen.
+
+The cabin on this rented farm was a mere shanty, a shell of pine boards,
+which needed re-enforcing to make it habitable and one day my father
+said, "Well, Hamlin, I guess you'll have to run the plow-team this
+fall. I must help neighbor Button wall up the house and I can't afford
+to hire another man."
+
+This seemed a fine commission for a lad of ten, and I drove my horses
+into the field that first morning with a manly pride which added an inch
+to my stature. I took my initial "round" at a "land" which stretched
+from one side of the quarter section to the other, in confident mood. I
+was grown up!
+
+But alas! my sense of elation did not last long. To guide a team for a
+few minutes as an experiment was one thing--to plow all day like a hired
+hand was another. It was not a chore, it was a job. It meant moving to
+and fro hour after hour, day after day, with no one to talk to but the
+horses. It meant trudging eight or nine miles in the forenoon and as
+many more in the afternoon, with less than an hour off at noon. It meant
+dragging the heavy implement around the corners, and it meant also many
+ship-wrecks, for the thick, wet stubble matted with wild buckwheat often
+rolled up between the coulter and the standard and threw the share
+completely out of the ground, making it necessary for me to halt the
+team and jerk the heavy plow backward for a new start.
+
+Although strong and active I was rather short, even for a ten-year-old,
+and to reach the plow handles I was obliged to lift my hands above my
+shoulders; and so with the guiding lines crossed over my back and my
+worn straw hat bobbing just above the cross-brace I must have made a
+comical figure. At any rate nothing like it had been seen in the
+neighborhood and the people on the road to town looking across the
+field, laughed and called to me, and neighbor Button said to my father
+in my hearing, "That chap's too young to run a plow," a judgment which
+pleased and flattered me greatly.
+
+Harriet cheered me by running out occasionally to meet me as I turned
+the nearest corner, and sometimes Frank consented to go all the way
+around, chatting breathlessly as he trotted along behind. At other times
+he was prevailed upon to bring to me a cookie and a glass of milk, a
+deed which helped to shorten the forenoon. And yet, notwithstanding all
+these ameliorations, plowing became tedious.
+
+The flies were savage, especially in the middle of the day, and the
+horses, tortured by their lances, drove badly, twisting and turning in
+their despairing rage. Their tails were continually getting over the
+lines, and in stopping to kick their tormentors from their bellies they
+often got astride the traces, and in other ways made trouble for me.
+Only in the early morning or when the sun sank low at night were they
+able to move quietly along their ways.
+
+The soil was the kind my father had been seeking, a smooth dark sandy
+loam, which made it possible for a lad to do the work of a man. Often
+the share would go the entire "round" without striking a root or a
+pebble as big as a walnut, the steel running steadily with a crisp
+craunching ripping sound which I rather liked to hear. In truth work
+would have been quite tolerable had it not been so long drawn out. Ten
+hours of it even on a fine day made about twice too many for a boy.
+
+Meanwhile I cheered myself in every imaginable way. I whistled. I sang.
+I studied the clouds. I gnawed the beautiful red skin from the seed
+vessels which hung upon the wild rose bushes, and I counted the prairie
+chickens as they began to come together in winter flocks running through
+the stubble in search of food. I stopped now and again to examine the
+lizards unhoused by the share, tormenting them to make them sweat their
+milky drops (they were curiously repulsive to me), and I measured the
+little granaries of wheat which the mice and gophers had deposited deep
+under the ground, storehouses which the plow had violated. My eyes dwelt
+enviously upon the sailing hawk, and on the passing of ducks. The
+occasional shadowy figure of a prairie wolf made me wish for Uncle David
+and his rifle.
+
+On certain days nothing could cheer me. When the bitter wind blew from
+the north, and the sky was filled with wild geese racing southward, with
+swiftly-hurrying clouds, winter seemed about to spring upon me. The
+horses' tails streamed in the wind. Flurries of snow covered me with
+clinging flakes, and the mud "gummed" my boots and trouser legs,
+clogging my steps. At such times I suffered from cold and
+loneliness--all sense of being a man evaporated. I was just a little
+boy, longing for the leisure of boyhood.
+
+Day after day, through the month of October and deep into November, I
+followed that team, turning over two acres of stubble each day. I would
+not believe this without proof, but it is true! At last it grew so cold
+that in the early morning everything was white with frost and I was
+obliged to put one hand in my pocket to keep it warm, while holding the
+plow with the other, but I didn't mind this so much, for it hinted at
+the close of autumn. I've no doubt facing the wind in this way was
+excellent discipline, but I didn't think it necessary then and my heart
+was sometimes bitter and rebellious.
+
+The soldier did not intend to be severe. As he had always been an early
+riser and a busy toiler it seemed perfectly natural and good discipline,
+that his sons should also plow and husk corn at ten years of age. He
+often told of beginning life as a "bound boy" at nine, and these stories
+helped me to perform my own tasks without whining. I feared to voice my
+weakness.
+
+At last there came a morning when by striking my heel upon the ground I
+convinced my boss that the soil was frozen too deep for the mold-board
+to break. "All right," he said, "you may lay off this forenoon."
+
+Oh, those beautiful hours of respite! With time to play or read I
+usually read, devouring anything I could lay my hands upon. Newspapers,
+whether old or new, or pasted on the wall or piled up in the
+attic,--anything in print was wonderful to me. One enthralling book,
+borrowed from Neighbor Button, was _The Female Spy_, a Tale of the
+Rebellion. Another treasure was a story called _Cast Ashore_, but this
+volume unfortunately was badly torn and fifty pages were missing so that
+I never knew, and do not know to this day, how those indomitable
+shipwrecked seamen reached their English homes. I dimly recall that one
+man carried a pet monkey on his back and that they all lived on
+"Bustards."
+
+Finally the day came when the ground rang like iron under the feet of
+the horses, and a bitter wind, raw and gusty, swept out of the
+northwest, bearing gray veils of sleet. Winter had come! Work in the
+furrow had ended. The plow was brought in, cleaned and greased to
+prevent its rusting, and while the horses munched their hay in
+well-earned holiday, father and I helped farmer Button husk the last of
+his corn.
+
+Osman Button, a quaint and interesting man of middle age, was a native
+of York State and retained many of the traditions of his old home
+strangely blent with a store of vivid memories of Colorado, Utah and
+California, for he had been one of the gold-seekers of the early
+fifties. He loved to spin yarns of "When I was in gold camps," and he
+spun them well. He was short and bent and spoke in a low voice with a
+curious nervous sniff, but his diction was notably precise and clear. He
+was a man of judgment, and a citizen of weight and influence. From O.
+Button I got my first definite notion of Bret Harte's country, and of
+the long journey which they of the ox team had made in search of
+Eldorado.
+
+His family "mostly boys and girls" was large, yet they all lived in a
+low limestone house which he had built (he said) to serve as a granary
+till he should find time to erect a suitable dwelling. In order to make
+the point dramatic, I will say that he was still living in the "granary"
+when last I called on him thirty years later!
+
+A warm friendship sprang up between him and my father, and he was often
+at our house but his gaunt and silent wife seldom accompanied him. She
+was kindly and hospitable, but a great sufferer. She never laughed, and
+seldom smiled, and so remains a pathetic figure in all my memories of
+the household.
+
+The younger Button children, Eva and Cyrus, became our companions in
+certain of our activities, but as they were both very sedate and slow of
+motion, they seldom joined us in our livelier sports. They were both
+much older than their years. Cyrus at this time was almost as venerable
+as his father, although his years were, I suppose, about seventeen.
+Albert and Lavinia, we heard, were much given to dancing and parties.
+
+One night as we were all seated around the kerosene lamp my father said,
+"Well, Belle, I suppose we'll have to take these young ones down to town
+and fit 'em out for school." These words so calmly uttered filled our
+minds with visions of new boots, new caps and new books, and though we
+went obediently to bed we hardly slept, so excited were we, and at
+breakfast next morning not one of us could think of food. All our
+desires converged upon the wondrous expedition--our first visit to town.
+
+Our only carriage was still the lumber wagon but it had now two spring
+seats, one for father, mother and Jessie, and one for Harriet, Frank and
+myself. No one else had anything better, hence we had no sense of being
+poorly outfitted. We drove away across the frosty prairie toward
+Osage--moderately comfortable and perfectly happy.
+
+Osage was only a little town, a village of perhaps twelve hundred
+inhabitants, but to me as we drove down its Main Street, it was almost
+as impressive as LaCrosse had been. Frank clung close to father, and
+mother led Jessie, leaving Harriet and me to stumble over nail-kegs and
+dodge whiffle trees what time our eyes absorbed jars of pink and white
+candy, and sought out boots and buckskin mittens. Whenever Harriet spoke
+she whispered, and we pointed at each shining object with cautious
+care.--Oh! the marvellous exotic smells! Odors of salt codfish and
+spices, calico and kerosene, apples and ginger-snaps mingle in my mind
+as I write.
+
+Each of us soon carried a candy marble in his or her cheek (as a
+chipmunk carries a nut) and Frank and I stood like sturdy hitching posts
+whilst the storekeeper with heavy hands screwed cotton-plush caps upon
+our heads,--but the most exciting moment, the crowning joy of the day,
+came with the buying of our new boots.--If only father had not insisted
+on our taking those which were a size too large for us!
+
+They were real boots. No one but a Congressman wore "gaiters" in those
+days. War fashions still dominated the shoe-shops, and high-topped
+cavalry boots were all but universal. They were kept in boxes under the
+counter or ranged in rows on a shelf and were of all weights and degrees
+of fineness. The ones I selected had red tops with a golden moon in the
+center but my brother's taste ran to blue tops decorated with a golden
+flag. Oh! that deliciously oily _new_ smell! My heart glowed every time
+I looked at mine. I was especially pleased because they did _not_ have
+copper toes. Copper toes belonged to little boys. A youth who had
+plowed seventy acres of land could not reasonably be expected to dress
+like a child.--How smooth and delightfully stiff they felt on my feet.
+
+Then came our new books, a McGuffey reader, a Mitchell geography, a
+Ray's arithmetic, and a slate. The books had a delightful new smell
+also, and there was singular charm in the smooth surface of the unmarked
+slates. I was eager to carve my name in the frame. At last with our
+treasures under the seat (so near that we could feel them), with our
+slates and books in our laps we jolted home, dreaming of school and
+snow. To wade in the drifts with our fine high-topped boots was now our
+desire.
+
+It is strange but I cannot recall how my mother looked on this trip.
+Even my father's image is faint and vague (I remember only his keen
+eagle-gray terrifying eyes), but I can see every acre of that rented
+farm. I can tell you exactly how the house looked. It was an unpainted
+square cottage and stood bare on the sod at the edge of Dry Run ravine.
+It had a small lean-to on the eastern side and a sitting room and
+bedroom below. Overhead was a low unplastered chamber in which we
+children slept. As it grew too cold to use the summer kitchen we cooked,
+ate and lived in the square room which occupied the entire front of the
+two story upright, and which was, I suppose, sixteen feet square. As our
+attic was warmed only by the stove-pipe, we older children of a frosty
+morning made extremely simple and hurried toilets. On very cold days we
+hurried down stairs to dress beside the kitchen fire.
+
+Our furniture was of the rudest sort. I cannot recall a single piece in
+our house or in our neighbors' houses that had either beauty or
+distinction. It was all cheap and worn, for this was the middle border,
+and nearly all our neighbors had moved as we had done in covered
+wagons. Farms were new, houses were mere shanties, and money was scarce.
+"War times" and "war prices" were only just beginning to change. Our
+clothing was all cheap and ill fitting. The women and children wore
+home-made "cotton flannel" underclothing for the most part, and the men
+wore rough, ready-made suits over which they drew brown denim blouses or
+overalls to keep them clean.
+
+Father owned a fine buffalo overcoat (so much of his song's promise was
+redeemed) and we possessed two buffalo robes for use in our winter
+sleigh, but mother had only a sad coat and a woolen shawl. How she kept
+warm I cannot now understand--I think she stayed at home on cold days.
+
+All of the boys wore long trousers, and even my eight year old brother
+looked like a miniature man with his full-length overalls, high-topped
+boots and real suspenders. As for me I carried a bandanna in my hip
+pocket and walked with determined masculine stride.
+
+My mother, like all her brothers and sisters, was musical and played the
+violin--or fiddle, as we called it,--and I have many dear remembrances
+of her playing. _Napoleon's March_, _Money Musk_, _The Devil's Dream_
+and half-a-dozen other simple tunes made up her repertoire. It was very
+crude music of course but it added to the love and admiration in which
+her children always held her. Also in some way we had fallen heir to a
+Prince melodeon--one that had belonged to the McClintocks, but only my
+sister played on that.
+
+Once at a dance in neighbor Button's house, mother took the "dare" of
+the fiddler and with shy smile played _The Fisher's Hornpipe_ or some
+other simple melody and was mightily cheered at the close of it, a brief
+performance which she refused to repeat. Afterward she and my father
+danced and this seemed a very wonderful performance, for to us they were
+"old"--far past such frolicking, although he was but forty and she
+thirty-one!
+
+At this dance I heard, for the first time, the local professional
+fiddler, old Daddy Fairbanks, as quaint a character as ever entered
+fiction, for he was not only butcher and horse doctor but a renowned
+musician as well. Tall, gaunt and sandy, with enormous nose and sparse
+projecting teeth, he was to me the most enthralling figure at this dance
+and his queer "Calls" and his "York State" accent filled us all with
+delight. "_Ally_ man left," "Chassay _by_ your pardners," "Dozy-do"
+were some of the phrases he used as he played _Honest John_ and
+_Haste to the Wedding_. At times he sang his calls in high nasal chant,
+"_First_ lady lead to the _right_, deedle, deedle dum-dum--
+_gent_ foller after--dally-deedle-do-do--_three_ hands round"--and
+everybody laughed with frank enjoyment of his words and action.
+
+It was a joy to watch him "start the set." With fiddle under his chin he
+took his seat in a big chair on the kitchen table in order to command
+the floor. "Farm on, farm on!" he called disgustedly. "Lively now!" and
+then, when all the couples were in position, with one mighty No. 14 boot
+uplifted, with bow laid to strings he snarled, "Already--GELANG!" and with
+a thundering crash his foot came down, "Honors TEW your pardners--right and
+left FOUR!" And the dance was on!
+
+I suspect his fiddlin' was not even "middlin'," but he beat time fairly
+well and kept the dancers somewhere near to rhythm, and so when his
+ragged old cap went round he often got a handful of quarters for his
+toil. He always ate two suppers, one at the beginning of the party and
+another at the end. He had a high respect for the skill of my Uncle
+David and was grateful to him and other better musicians for their
+non-interference with his professional engagements.
+
+The school-house which was to be the center of our social life stood on
+the bare prairie about a mile to the southwest and like thousands of
+other similar buildings in the west, had not a leaf to shade it in
+summer nor a branch to break the winds of savage winter. "There's been a
+good deal of talk about setting out a wind-break," neighbor Button
+explained to us, "but nothing has as yet been done." It was merely a
+square pine box painted a glaring white on the outside and a desolate
+drab within; at least drab was the original color, but the benches were
+mainly so greasy and hacked that original intentions were obscured. It
+had two doors on the eastern end and three windows on each side.
+
+A long square stove (standing on slender legs in a puddle of bricks), a
+wooden chair, and a rude table in one corner, for the use of the
+teacher, completed the movable furniture. The walls were roughly
+plastered and the windows had no curtains.
+
+It was a barren temple of the arts even to the residents of Dry Run, and
+Harriet and I, stealing across the prairie one Sunday morning to look
+in, came away vaguely depressed. We were fond of school and never missed
+a day if we could help it, but this neighborhood center seemed small and
+bleak and poor.
+
+With what fear, what excitement we approached the door on that first
+day, I can only faintly indicate. All the scholars were strange to me
+except Albert and Cyrus Button, and I was prepared for rough treatment.
+However, the experience was not so harsh as I had feared. True, Rangely
+Field did throw me down and wash my face in snow, and Jack Sweet tripped
+me up once or twice, but I bore these indignities with such grace and
+could command, and soon made a place for myself among the boys.
+
+Burton Babcock was my seat-mate, and at once became my chum. You will
+hear much of him in this chronicle. He was two years older than I and
+though pale and slim was unusually swift and strong for his age. He was
+a silent lad, curiously timid in his classes and not at ease with his
+teachers.
+
+I cannot recover much of that first winter of school. It was not an
+experience to remember for its charm. Not one line of grace, not one
+touch of color relieved the room's bare walls or softened its harsh
+windows. Perhaps this very barrenness gave to the poetry in our readers
+an appeal that seems magical, certainly it threw over the faces of
+Frances Babcock and Mary Abbie Gammons a lovelier halo.--They were "the
+big girls" of the school, that is to say, they were seventeen or
+eighteen years old,--and Frances was the special terror of the teacher,
+a pale and studious pigeon-toed young man who was preparing for college.
+
+In spite of the cold, the boys played open air games all winter. "Dog
+and Deer," "Dare Gool" and "Fox and Geese" were our favorite diversions,
+and the wonder is that we did not all die of pneumonia, for we battled
+so furiously during each recess that we often came in wet with
+perspiration and coughing so hard that for several minutes recitations
+were quite impossible.--But we were a hardy lot and none of us seemed
+the worse for our colds.
+
+There was not much chivalry in the school--quite the contrary, for it
+was dominated by two or three big rough boys and the rest of us took our
+tone from them. To protect a girl, to shield her from remark or
+indignity required a good deal of bravery and few of us were strong
+enough to do it. Girls were foolish, ridiculous creatures, set apart to
+be laughed at or preyed upon at will. To shame them was a great
+joke.--How far I shared in these barbarities I cannot say but that I did
+share in them I know, for I had very little to do with my sister Harriet
+after crossing the school-house yard. She kept to her tribe as I to
+mine.
+
+This winter was made memorable also by a "revival" which came over the
+district with sudden fury. It began late in the winter--fortunately, for
+it ended all dancing and merry-making for the time. It silenced Daddy
+Fairbanks' fiddle and subdued my mother's glorious voice to a wail. A
+cloud of puritanical gloom settled upon almost every household. Youth
+and love became furtive and hypocritic.
+
+The evangelist, one of the old-fashioned shouting, hysterical,
+ungrammatical, gasping sort, took charge of the services, and in his
+exhortations phrases descriptive of lakes of burning brimstone and ages
+of endless torment abounded. Some of the figures of speech and violent
+gestures of the man still linger in my mind, but I will not set them
+down on paper. They are too dreadful to perpetuate. At times he roared
+with such power that he could have been heard for half a mile.
+
+And yet we went, night by night, mother, father, Jessie, all of us. It
+was our theater. Some of the roughest characters in the neighborhood
+rose and professed repentance, for a season, even old Barton, the
+profanest man in the township, experienced a "change of heart."
+
+We all enjoyed the singing, and joined most lustily in the tunes. Even
+little Jessie learned to sing _Heavenly Wings_, _There is a Fountain
+filled with Blood_, and _Old Hundred_.
+
+As I peer back into that crowded little schoolroom, smothering hot and
+reeking with lamp smoke, and recall the half-lit, familiar faces of the
+congregation, it all has the quality of a vision, something experienced
+in another world. The preacher, leaping, sweating, roaring till the
+windows rattle, the mothers with sleeping babes in their arms, the
+sweet, strained faces of the girls, the immobile wondering men, are
+spectral shadows, figures encountered in the phantasmagoria of
+disordered sleep.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+The Homestead on the Knoll
+
+
+Spring came to us that year with such sudden beauty, such sweet
+significance after our long and depressing winter, that it seemed a
+release from prison, and when at the close of a warm day in March we
+heard, pulsing down through the golden haze of sunset, the mellow _boom,
+boom, boom_ of the prairie cock our hearts quickened, for this, we were
+told, was the certain sign of spring.
+
+Day by day the call of this gay herald of spring was taken up by others
+until at last the whole horizon was ringing with a sunrise symphony of
+exultant song. "_Boom, boom, boom!_" called the roosters; "_cutta,
+cutta, wha-whoop-squaw, squawk!_" answered the hens as they fluttered
+and danced on the ridges--and mingled with their jocund hymn we heard at
+last the slender, wistful piping of the prairie lark.
+
+With the coming of spring my duties as a teamster returned. My father
+put me in charge of a harrow, and with old Doll and Queen--quiet and
+faithful span--I drove upon the field which I had plowed the previous
+October, there to plod to and fro behind my drag, while in the sky above
+my head and around me on the mellowing soil the life of the season,
+thickened.
+
+Aided by my team I was able to study at close range the prairie roosters
+as they assembled for their parade. They had regular "stamping grounds"
+on certain ridges, Where the soil was beaten smooth by the pressure of
+their restless feet. I often passed within a few yards of them.--I can
+see them now, the cocks leaping and strutting, with trailing wings and
+down-thrust heads, displaying their bulbous orange-colored neck
+ornaments while the hens flutter and squawk in silly delight. All the
+charm and mystery of that prairie world comes back to me, and I ache
+with an illogical desire to recover it and hold it, and preserve it in
+some form for my children.--It seems an injustice that they should miss
+it, and yet it is probable that they are getting an equal joy of life,
+an equal exaltation from the opening flowers of the single lilac bush in
+our city back-yard or from an occasional visit to the lake in Central
+Park.
+
+Dragging is even more wearisome than plowing, in some respects, for you
+have no handles to assist you and your heels sinking deep into the soft
+loam bring such unwonted strain upon the tendons of your legs that you
+can scarcely limp home to supper, and it seems that you cannot possibly
+go on another day,--but you do--at least I did.
+
+There was something relentless as the weather in the way my soldier
+father ruled his sons, and yet he was neither hard-hearted nor
+unsympathetic. The fact is easily explained. His own boyhood had been
+task-filled and he saw nothing unnatural in the regular employment of
+his children. Having had little play-time himself, he considered that we
+were having a very comfortable boyhood. Furthermore the country was new
+and labor scarce. Every hand and foot must count under such conditions.
+
+There are certain ameliorations to child-labor on a farm. Air and
+sunshine and food are plentiful. I never lacked for meat or clothing,
+and mingled with my records of toil are exquisite memories of the joy I
+took in following the changes in the landscape, in the notes of birds,
+and in the play of small animals on the sunny soil.
+
+There were no pigeons on the prairie but enormous flocks of ducks came
+sweeping northward, alighting at sunset to feed in the fields of
+stubble. They came in countless myriads and often when they settled to
+earth they covered acres of meadow like some prodigious cataract from
+the sky. When alarmed they rose with a sound like the rumbling of
+thunder.
+
+At times the lines of their cloud-like flocks were so unending that
+those in the front rank were lost in the northern sky, while those in
+the rear were but dim bands beneath the southern sun.--I tried many
+times to shoot some of them, but never succeeded, so wary were they.
+Brant and geese in formal flocks followed and to watch these noble birds
+pushing their arrowy lines straight into the north always gave me
+special joy. On fine days they flew high--so high they were but faint
+lines against the shining clouds.
+
+I learned to imitate their cries, and often caused the leaders to turn,
+to waver in their course as I uttered my resounding call.
+
+The sand-hill crane came last of all, loitering north in lonely easeful
+flight. Often of a warm day, I heard his sovereign cry falling from the
+azure dome, so high, so far his form could not be seen, so close to the
+sun that my eyes could not detect his solitary, majestic circling sweep.
+He came after the geese. He was the herald of summer. His brazen,
+reverberating call will forever remain associated in my mind with
+mellow, pulsating earth, springing grass and cloudless glorious May-time
+skies.
+
+As my team moved to and fro over the field, ground sparrows rose in
+countless thousands, flinging themselves against the sky like grains of
+wheat from out a sower's hand, and their chatter fell upon me like the
+voices of fairy sprites, invisible and multitudinous. Long swift narrow
+flocks of a bird we called "the prairie-pigeon" swooped over the swells
+on sounding wing, winding so close to the ground, they seemed at times
+like slender air-borne serpents,--and always the brown lark whistled as
+if to cheer my lonely task.
+
+Back and forth across the wide field I drove, while the sun crawled
+slowly up the sky. It was tedious work and I was always hungry by nine,
+and famished at ten. Thereafter the sun appeared to stand still. My
+chest caved in and my knees trembled with weakness, but when at last the
+white flag fluttering from a chamber window summoned to the mid-day
+meal, I started with strength miraculously renewed and called,
+"_Dinner!_" to the hired hand. Unhitching my team, with eager haste I
+climbed upon old Queen, and rode at ease toward the barn.
+
+Oh, it was good to enter the kitchen, odorous with fresh biscuit and hot
+coffee! We all ate like dragons, devouring potatoes and salt pork
+without end, till mother mildly remarked, "Boys, boys! Don't 'founder'
+yourselves!"
+
+From such a meal I withdrew torpid as a gorged snake, but luckily I had
+half an hour in which to get my courage back,--and besides, there was
+always the stirring power of father's clarion call. His energy appeared
+superhuman to me. I was in awe of him. He kept track of everything,
+seemed hardly to sleep and never complained of weariness. Long before
+the nooning was up, (or so it seemed to me) he began to shout: "Time's
+up, boys. Grab a root!"
+
+And so, lame, stiff and sore, with the sinews of my legs shortened, so
+that my knees were bent like an old man's, I hobbled away to the barn
+and took charge of my team. Once in the field, I felt better. A subtle
+change, a mellower charm came over the afternoon earth. The ground was
+warmer, the sky more genial, the wind more amiable, and before I had
+finished my second "round" my joints were moderately pliable and my
+sinews relaxed.
+
+Nevertheless the temptation to sit on the corner of the harrow and dream
+the moments away was very great, and sometimes as I laid my tired body
+down on the tawny, sunlit grass at the edge of the field, and gazed up
+at the beautiful clouds sailing by, I wished for leisure to explore
+their purple valleys.--The wind whispered in the tall weeds, and sighed
+in the hazel bushes. The dried blades touching one another in the
+passing winds, spoke to me, and the gophers, glad of escape from their
+dark, underground prisons, chirped a cheery greeting. Such respites were
+strangely sweet.
+
+So day by day, as I walked my monotonous round upon the ever mellowing
+soil, the prairie spring unrolled its beauties before me. I saw the last
+goose pass on to the north, and watched the green grass creeping up the
+sunny slopes. I answered the splendid challenge of the loitering crane,
+and studied the ground sparrow building her grassy nest. The prairie
+hens began to seek seclusion in the swales, and the pocket gopher,
+busily mining the sod, threw up his purple-brown mounds of cool fresh
+earth. Larks, blue-birds and king-birds followed the robins, and at last
+the full tide of May covered the world with luscious green.
+
+Harriet and Frank returned to school but I was too valuable to be
+spared. The unbroken land of our new farm demanded the plow and no
+sooner was the planting on our rented place finished than my father
+began the work of fencing and breaking the sod of the homestead which
+lay a mile to the south, glowing like a garden under the summer sun. One
+day late in May my uncle David (who had taken a farm not far away),
+drove over with four horses hitched to a big breaking plow and together
+with my father set to work overturning the primeval sward whereon we
+were to be "lords of the soil."
+
+I confess that as I saw the tender plants and shining flowers bow
+beneath the remorseless beam, civilization seemed a sad business, and
+yet there was something epic, something large-gestured and splendid in
+the "breaking" season. Smooth, glossy, almost unwrinkled the thick
+ribbon of jet-black sod rose upon the share and rolled away from the
+mold-board's glistening curve to tuck itself upside down into the furrow
+behind the horse's heels, and the picture which my uncle made, gave me
+pleasure in spite of the sad changes he was making.
+
+The land was not all clear prairie and every ounce of David's great
+strength was required to guide that eighteen-inch plow as it went
+ripping and snarling through the matted roots of the hazel thickets, and
+sometimes my father came and sat on the beam in order to hold the
+coulter to its work, while the giant driver braced himself to the shock
+and the four horses strained desperately at their traces. These contests
+had the quality of a wrestling match but the men always won. My own job
+was to rake and burn the brush which my father mowed with a heavy
+scythe.--Later we dug postholes and built fences but each day was spent
+on the new land.
+
+Around us, on the swells, gray gophers whistled, and the nesting plover
+quaveringly called. Blackbirds clucked in the furrow and squat badgers
+watched with jealous eye the plow's inexorable progress toward their
+dens. The weather was perfect June. Fleecy clouds sailed like snowy
+galleons from west to east, the wind was strong but kind, and we worked
+in a glow of satisfied ownership.
+
+Many rattlesnakes ("massasaugas" Mr. Button called them), inhabited the
+moist spots and father and I killed several as we cleared the ground.
+Prairie wolves lurked in the groves and swales, but as foot by foot and
+rod by rod, the steady steel rolled the grass and the hazel brush under,
+all of these wild things died or hurried away, never to return. Some
+part of this tragedy I was able even then to understand and regret.
+
+At last the wide "quarter section" lay upturned, black to the sun and
+the garden that had bloomed and fruited for millions of years, waiting
+for man, lay torn and ravaged. The tender plants, the sweet flowers, the
+fragrant fruits, the busy insects, all the swarming lives which had been
+native here for untold centuries were utterly destroyed. It was sad and
+yet it was not all loss, even to my thinking, for I realized that over
+this desolation the green wheat would wave and the corn silks shed their
+pollen. It was not precisely the romantic valley of our song, but it was
+a rich and promiseful plot and my father seemed entirely content.
+
+Meanwhile, on a little rise of ground near the road, neighbor Gammons
+and John Bowers were building our next home. It did not in the least
+resemble the foundation of an everlasting family seat, but it deeply
+excited us all. It was of pine and had the usual three rooms below and a
+long garret above and as it stood on a plain, bare to the winds, my
+father took the precaution of lining it with brick to hold it down. It
+was as good as most of the dwellings round about us but it stood naked
+on the sod, devoid of grace as a dry goods box. Its walls were rough
+plaster, its floor of white pine, its furniture poor, scanty and worn.
+There was a little picture on the face of the clock, a chromo on the
+wall, and a printed portrait of General Grant--nothing more. It was
+home by reason of my mother's brave and cheery presence, and the prattle
+of Jessie's clear voice filled it with music. Dear child,--with her it
+was always spring!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+School Life
+
+
+Our new house was completed during July but we did not move into it till
+in September. There was much to be done in way of building sheds,
+granaries and corn-cribs and in this work father was both carpenter and
+stone-mason. An amusing incident comes to my mind in connection with the
+digging of our well.
+
+Uncle David and I were "tending mason," and father was down in the well
+laying or trying to lay the curbing. It was a tedious and difficult job
+and he was about to give it up in despair when one of our neighbors, a
+quaint old Englishman named Barker, came driving along. He was one of
+these men who take a minute inquisitive interest in the affairs of
+others; therefore he pulled his team to a halt and came in.
+
+Peering into the well he drawled out, "Hello, Garland. W'at ye doin'
+down there?"
+
+"Tryin' to lay a curb," replied my father lifting a gloomy face, "and I
+guess it's too complicated for me."
+
+"Nothin' easier," retorted the old man with a wink at my uncle, "jest
+putt two a-top o' one and one a-toppo two--and the big eend out,"--and
+with a broad grin on his red face he went back to his team and drove
+away.
+
+My father afterwards said, "I saw the whole process in a flash of light.
+He had given me all the rule I needed. I laid the rest of that wall
+without a particle of trouble."
+
+Many times after this Barker stopped to offer advice but he never quite
+equalled the startling success of his rule for masonry.
+
+The events of this harvest, even the process of moving into the new
+house, are obscured in my mind by the clouds of smoke which rose from
+calamitous fires all over the west. It was an unprecedentedly dry season
+so that not merely the prairie, but many weedy cornfields burned. I had
+a good deal of time to meditate upon this for I was again the plow-boy.
+Every day I drove away from the rented farm to the new land where I was
+cross-cutting the breaking, and the thickening haze through which the
+sun shone with a hellish red glare, produced in me a growing uneasiness
+which became terror when the news came to us that Chicago was on fire.
+It seemed to me then that the earth was about to go up in a flaming
+cloud just as my grandad had so often prophesied.
+
+This general sense of impending disaster was made keenly personal by the
+destruction of uncle David's stable with all his horses. This building
+like most of the barns of the region was not only roofed with straw but
+banked with straw, and it burned so swiftly that David was trapped in a
+stall while trying to save one of his teams. He saved himself by
+burrowing like a gigantic mole through the side of the shed, and so,
+hatless, covered with dust and chaff, emerged as if from a fiery burial
+after he had been given up for dead.
+
+This incident combined with others so filled my childish mind that I
+lived in apprehension of similar disaster. I feared the hot wind which
+roared up from the south, and I never entered our own stable in the
+middle of the day without a sense of danger. Then came the rains--the
+blessed rains--and put an end to my fears.
+
+In a week we had forgotten all the "conflagrations" except that in
+Chicago. There was something grandiose and unforgettable in the tales
+which told of the madly fleeing crowds in the narrow streets. These
+accounts pushed back the walls of my universe till its far edge included
+the ruined metropolis whose rebuilding was of the highest importance to
+us, for it was not only the source of all our supplies, but the great
+central market to which we sent our corn and hogs and wheat.
+
+My world was splendidly romantic. It was bounded on the west by THE
+PLAINS with their Indians and buffalo; on the north by THE GREAT WOODS,
+filled with thieves and counterfeiters; on the south by OSAGE AND CHICAGO;
+and on the east by HESPER, ONALASKA and BOSTON. A luminous trail ran from
+Dry Run Prairie to Neshonoc--all else was "chaos and black night."
+
+For seventy days I walked behind my plow on the new farm while my father
+finished the harvest on the rented farm and moved to the house on the
+knoll. It was lonely work for a boy of eleven but there were frequent
+breaks in the monotony and I did not greatly suffer. I disliked
+cross-cutting for the reason that the unrotted sods would often pile up
+in front of the coulter and make me a great deal of trouble. There is a
+certain pathos in the sight of that small boy tugging and kicking at the
+stubborn turf in the effort to free his plow. Such misfortunes loom
+large in a lad's horizon.
+
+One of the interludes, and a lovely one, was given over to gathering the
+hay from one of the wild meadows to the north of us. Another was the
+threshing from the shock on the rented farm. This was the first time we
+had seen this done and it interested us keenly. A great many teams were
+necessary and the crew of men was correspondingly large. Uncle David was
+again the thresher with a fine new separator, and I would have enjoyed
+the season with almost perfect contentment had it not been for the fact
+that I was detailed to hold sacks for Daddy Fairbanks who was the
+measurer.
+
+Our first winter had been without much wind but our second taught us the
+meaning of the word "blizzard" which we had just begun to hear about.
+The winds of Wisconsin were "gentle zephyrs" compared to the blasts
+which now swept down over the plain to hammer upon our desolate little
+cabin and pile the drifts around our sheds and granaries, and even my
+pioneer father was forced to admit that the hills of Green's Coulee had
+their uses after all.
+
+One such storm which leaped upon us at the close of a warm and beautiful
+day in February lasted for two days and three nights, making life on the
+open prairie impossible even to the strongest man. The thermometer fell
+to thirty degrees below zero and the snow-laden air moving at a rate of
+eighty miles an hour pressed upon the walls of our house with giant
+power. The sky of noon was darkened, so that we moved in a pallid
+half-light, and the windows thick with frost shut us in as if with gray
+shrouds.
+
+Hour after hour those winds and snows in furious battle, howled and
+roared and whistled around our frail shelter, slashing at the windows
+and piping on the chimney, till it seemed as if the Lord Sun had been
+wholly blotted out and that the world would never again be warm. Twice
+each day my father made a desperate sally toward the stable to feed the
+imprisoned cows and horses or to replenish our fuel--for the remainder
+of the long pallid day he sat beside the fire with gloomy face. Even his
+indomitable spirit was awed by the fury of that storm.
+
+So long and so continuously did those immitigable winds howl in our ears
+that their tumult persisted, in imagination, when on the third morning,
+we thawed holes in the thickened rime of the window panes and looked
+forth on a world silent as a marble sea and flaming with sunlight. My
+own relief was mingled with surprise--surprise to find the landscape so
+unchanged.
+
+True, the yard was piled high with drifts and the barns were almost lost
+to view but the far fields and the dark lines of Burr Oak Grove remained
+unchanged.
+
+We met our school-mates that day, like survivors of shipwreck, and for
+many days we listened to gruesome stories of disaster, tales of stages
+frozen deep in snow with all their passengers sitting in their seats,
+and of herders with their silent flocks around them, lying stark as
+granite among the hazel bushes in which they had sought shelter. It was
+long before we shook off the awe with which this tempest filled our
+hearts.
+
+The school-house which stood at the corner of our new farm was less than
+half a mile away, and yet on many of the winter days which followed, we
+found it quite far enough. Hattie was now thirteen, Frank nine and I a
+little past eleven but nothing, except a blizzard such as I have
+described, could keep us away from school. Facing the cutting wind,
+wallowing through the drifts, battling like small intrepid animals, we
+often arrived at the door moaning with pain yet unsubdued, our ears
+frosted, our toes numb in our boots, to meet others in similar case
+around the roaring hot stove.
+
+Often after we reached the school-house another form of suffering
+overtook us in the "thawing out" process. Our fingers and toes, swollen
+with blood, ached and itched, and our ears burned. Nearly all of us
+carried sloughing ears and scaling noses. Some of the pupils came two
+miles against these winds.
+
+The natural result of all this exposure was of course, chilblains! Every
+foot in the school was more or less touched with this disease to which
+our elders alluded as if it were an amusing trifle, but to us it was no
+joke.
+
+After getting thoroughly warmed up, along about the middle of the
+forenoon, there came into our feet a most intense itching and burning
+and aching, a sensation so acute that keeping still was impossible, and
+all over the room an uneasy shuffling and drumming arose as we pounded
+our throbbing heels against the floor or scraped our itching toes
+against the edge of our benches. The teacher understood and was kind
+enough to overlook this disorder.
+
+The wonder is that any of us lived through that winter, for at recess,
+no matter what the weather might be we flung ourselves out of doors to
+play "fox and geese" or "dare goal," until, damp with perspiration, we
+responded to the teacher's bell, and came pouring back into the entry
+ways to lay aside our wraps for another hour's study.
+
+Our readers were almost the only counterchecks to the current of
+vulgarity and baseness which ran through the talk of the older boys, and
+I wish to acknowledge my deep obligation to Professor McGuffey, whoever
+he may have been, for the dignity and literary grace of his selections.
+From the pages of his readers I learned to know and love the poems of
+Scott, Byron, Southey, Wordsworth and a long line of the English
+masters. I got my first taste of Shakespeare from the selected scenes
+which I read in these books.
+
+With terror as well as delight I rose to read _Lochiel's Warning_, _The
+Battle of Waterloo_ or _The Roman Captive_. Marco Bozzaris and William
+Tell were alike glorious to me. I soon knew not only my own reader, the
+fourth, but all the selections in the fifth and sixth as well. I could
+follow almost word for word the recitations of the older pupils and at
+such times I forgot my squat little body and my mop of hair, and became
+imaginatively a page in the train of Ivanhoe, or a bowman in the army
+of Richard the Lion Heart battling the Saracen in the Holy Land.
+
+With a high ideal of the way in which these grand selections should be
+read, I was scared almost voiceless when it came my turn to read them
+before the class. "STRIKE FOR YOUR ALTARS AND YOUR FIRES. STRIKE FOR
+THE GREEN GRAVES OF YOUR SIRES--GOD AND YOUR NATIVE LAND," always
+reduced me to a trembling breathlessness. The sight of the emphatic
+print was a call to the best that was in me and yet I could not meet the
+test. Excess of desire to do it just right often brought a ludicrous
+gasp and I often fell back into my seat in disgrace, the titter of the
+girls adding to my pain.
+
+Then there was the famous passage, "Did ye not hear it?" and the
+careless answer, "No, it was but the wind or the car rattling o'er the
+stony street."--I knew exactly how those opposing emotions should be
+expressed but to do it after I rose to my feet was impossible. Burton
+was even more terrified than I. Stricken blind as well as dumb he
+usually ended by helplessly staring at the words which, I conceive, had
+suddenly become a blur to him.
+
+No matter, we were taught to feel the force of these poems and to
+reverence the genius that produced them, and that was worth while.
+Falstaff and Prince Hal, Henry and his wooing of Kate, Wolsey and his
+downfall, Shylock and his pound of flesh all became a part of our
+thinking and helped us to measure the large figures of our own
+literature, for Whittier, Bryant and Longfellow also had place in these
+volumes. It is probable that Professor McGuffey, being a Southern man,
+did not value New England writers as highly as my grandmother did,
+nevertheless _Thanatopsis_ was there and _The Village Blacksmith_, and
+extracts from _The Deer Slayer_ and _The Pilot_ gave us a notion that
+in Cooper we had a novelist of weight and importance, one to put beside
+Scott and Dickens.
+
+A by-product of my acquaintance with one of the older boys was a stack
+of copies of the _New York Weekly_, a paper filled with stories of noble
+life in England and hair-breadth escapes on the plain, a shrewd mixture,
+designed to meet the needs of the entire membership of a prairie
+household. The pleasure I took in these tales should fill me with shame,
+but it doesn't--I rejoice in the memory of it.
+
+I soon began, also, to purchase and trade "Beadle's Dime Novels" and, to
+tell the truth, I took an exquisite delight in _Old Sleuth_ and _Jack
+Harkaway_. My taste was catholic. I ranged from _Lady Gwendolin_ to
+_Buckskin Bill_ and so far as I can now distinguish one was quite as
+enthralling as the other. It is impossible for any print to be as
+magical to any boy these days as those weeklies were to me in 1871.
+
+One day a singular test was made of us all. Through some agency now lost
+to me my father was brought to subscribe for _The Hearth and Home_ or
+some such paper for the farmer, and in this I read my first chronicle of
+everyday life.
+
+In the midst of my dreams of lords and ladies, queens and dukes, I found
+myself deeply concerned with backwoods farming, spelling schools,
+protracted meetings and the like familiar homely scenes. This serial
+(which involved my sister and myself in many a spat as to who should
+read it first) was _The Hoosier Schoolmaster_, by Edward Eggleston, and
+a perfectly successful attempt to interest western readers in a story of
+the middle border.
+
+To us "Mandy" and "Bud Means," "Ralph Hartsook," the teacher, "Little
+Shocky" and sweet patient "Hannah," were as real as Cyrus Button and
+Daddy Fairbanks. We could hardly wait for the next number of the paper,
+so concerned were we about "Hannah" and "Ralph." We quoted old lady
+Means and we made bets on "Bud" in his fight with the villainous drover.
+I hardly knew where Indiana was in those days, but Eggleston's
+characters were near neighbors.
+
+The illustrations were dreadful, even in my eyes, but the artist
+contrived to give a slight virginal charm to Hannah and a certain
+childish sweetness to Shocky, so that we accepted the more than mortal
+ugliness of old man Means and his daughter Mirandy (who simpered over
+her book at us as she did at Ralph), as a just interpretation of their
+worthlessness.
+
+This book is a milestone in my literary progress as it is in the
+development of distinctive western fiction, and years afterward I was
+glad to say so to the aged author who lived a long and honored life as a
+teacher and writer of fiction.
+
+It was always too hot or too cold in our schoolroom and on certain days
+when a savage wind beat and clamored at the loose windows, the girls,
+humped and shivering, sat upon their feet to keep them warm, and the
+younger children with shawls over their shoulders sought permission to
+gather close about the stove.
+
+Our dinner pails (stored in the entry way) were often frozen solid and
+it was necessary to thaw out our mince pie as well as our bread and
+butter by putting it on the stove. I recall, vividly, gnawing, dog-like,
+at the mollified outside of a doughnut while still its frosty heart made
+my teeth ache.
+
+Happily all days were not like this. There were afternoons when the sun
+streamed warmly into the room, when long icicles formed on the eaves,
+adding a touch of grace to the desolate building, moments when the
+jingling bells of passing wood-sleighs expressed the natural cheer and
+buoyancy of our youthful hearts.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+Chores and Almanacs
+
+
+Our farm-yard would have been uninhabitable during this winter had it
+not been for the long ricks of straw which we had piled up as a shield
+against the prairie winds. Our horse-barn, roofed with hay and banked
+with chaff, formed the west wall of the cowpen, and a long low shed gave
+shelter to the north.
+
+In this triangular space, in the lee of shed and straw-rick, the cattle
+passed a dolorous winter. Mostly they burrowed in the chaff, or stood
+about humped and shivering--only on sunny days did their arching backs
+subside. Naturally each animal grew a thick coat of long hair, and
+succeeded in coming through to grass again, but the cows of some of our
+neighbors were less fortunate. Some of them got so weak that they had to
+be "tailed" up as it was called. This meant that they were dying of
+hunger and the sight of them crawling about filled me with indignant
+wrath. I could not understand how a man, otherwise kind, could let his
+stock suffer for lack of hay when wild grass was plentiful.
+
+One of my duties, and one that I dreaded, was pumping water for our
+herd. This was no light job, especially on a stinging windy morning, for
+the cows, having only dry fodder, required an enormous amount of liquid,
+and as they could only drink while the water was fresh from the well,
+some one must work the handle till the last calf had absorbed his
+fill--and this had to be done when the thermometer was thirty below,
+just the same as at any other time.
+
+And this brings up an almost forgotten phase of bovine psychology. The
+order in which the cows drank as well as that in which they entered the
+stable was carefully determined and rigidly observed. There was always
+one old dowager who took precedence, all the others gave way before her.
+Then came the second in rank who feared the leader but insisted on
+ruling all the others, and so on down to the heifer. This order, once
+established, was seldom broken (at least by the females of the herd, the
+males were more unstable) even when the leader grew old and almost
+helpless.
+
+We took advantage of this loyalty when putting them into the barn. The
+stall furthest from the door belonged to "old Spot," the second to
+"Daisy" and so on, hence all I had to do was to open the door and let
+them in--for if any rash young thing got out of her proper place she was
+set right, very quickly, by her superiors.
+
+Some farms had ponds or streams to which their flocks were driven for
+water but this to me was a melancholy winter function, and sometimes as
+I joined Burt or Cyrus in driving the poor humped and shivering beasts
+down over the snowy plain to a hole chopped in the ice, and watched them
+lay their aching teeth to the frigid draught, trying a dozen times to
+temper their mouths to the chill I suffered with them. As they streamed
+along homeward, heavy with their sloshing load, they seemed the
+personification of a desolate and abused race.
+
+Winter mornings were a time of trial for us all. It required stern
+military command to get us out of bed before daylight, in a chamber
+warmed only by the stove-pipe, to draw on icy socks and frosty boots and
+go to the milking of cows and the currying of horses. Other boys did not
+rise by candle-light but I did, not because I was eager to make a
+record but for the very good reason that my commander believed in early
+rising. I groaned and whined but I rose--and always I found mother in
+the kitchen before me, putting the kettle on.
+
+It ought not to surprise the reader when I say that my morning toilet
+was hasty--something less than "a lick and a promise." I couldn't (or
+didn't) stop to wash my face or comb my hair; such refinements seem
+useless in an attic bedchamber at five in the morning of a December
+day--I put them off till breakfast time. Getting up at five A. M. even
+in June was a hardship, in winter it was a punishment.
+
+Our discomforts had their compensations! As we came back to the house at
+six, the kitchen was always cheery with the smell of browning flapjacks,
+sizzling sausages and steaming coffee, and mother had plenty of hot
+water on the stove so that in "half a jiffy," with shining faces and
+sleek hair we sat down to a noble feast. By this time also the eastern
+sky was gorgeous with light, and two misty "sun dogs" dimly loomed,
+watching at the gate of the new day.
+
+Now that I think of it, father was the one who took the brunt of our
+"revellee." He always built the fire in the kitchen stove before calling
+the family. Mother, silent, sleepy, came second. Sometimes she was just
+combing her hair as I passed through the kitchen, at other times she
+would be at the biscuit dough or stirring the pancake batter--but she
+was always there!
+
+"What did you gain by this disagreeable habit of early rising?"--This is
+a question I have often asked myself since. Was it only a useless
+obsession on the part of my pioneer dad? Why couldn't we have slept till
+six, or even seven? Why rise before the sun?
+
+I cannot answer this, I only know such was our habit summer and winter,
+and that most of our neighbors conformed to the same rigorous tradition.
+None of us got rich, and as I look back on the situation, I cannot
+recall that those "sluggards" who rose an hour or two later were any
+poorer than we. I am inclined to think it was all a convention of the
+border, a custom which might very well have been broken by us all.
+
+My mother would have found these winter days very long had it not been
+for baby Jessie, for father was busily hauling wood from the Cedar River
+some six or seven miles away, and the almost incessant, mournful piping
+of the wind in the chimney was dispiriting. Occasionally Mrs. Button,
+Mrs. Gammons or some other of the neighbors would drop in for a visit,
+but generally mother and Jessie were alone till Harriet and Frank and I
+came home from school at half-past four.
+
+Our evenings were more cheerful. My sister Hattie was able to play a few
+simple tunes on the melodeon and Cyrus and Eva or Mary Abbie and John
+occasionally came in to sing. In this my mother often took part. In
+church her clear soprano rose above all the others like the voice of
+some serene great bird. Of this gift my father often expressed his open
+admiration.
+
+There was very little dancing during our second winter but Fred Jewett
+started a singing school which brought the young folks together once a
+week. We boys amused ourselves with "Dare Gool" and "Dog and Deer." Cold
+had little terror for us, provided the air was still. Often we played
+"Hi Spy" around the barn with the thermometer twenty below zero, and not
+infrequently we took long walks to visit Burton and other of our boy
+friends or to borrow something to read. I was always on the trail of a
+book.
+
+Harriet joined me in my search for stories and nothing in the
+neighborhood homes escaped us. Anything in print received our most
+respectful consideration. Jane Porter's _Scottish Chiefs_ brought to us
+both anguish and delight. _Tempest and Sunshine_ was another discovery.
+I cannot tell to whom I was indebted for _Ivanhoe_ but I read and
+re-read it with the most intense pleasure. At the same time or near it I
+borrowed a huge bundle of _The New York Saturday Night_ and _The New
+York Ledger_ and from them I derived an almost equal enjoyment. "Old
+Sleuth" and "Buckskin Bill" were as admirable in their way as "Cedric
+the Saxon."
+
+At this time _Godey's Ladies Book_ and _Peterson's Magazine_ were the
+only high-class periodicals known to us. _The Toledo Blade_ and _The New
+York Tribune_ were still my father's political advisers and Horace
+Greeley and "Petroleum V. Nasby" were equally corporeal in my mind.
+
+Almanacs figured largely in my reading at this time, and were a source
+of frequent quotation by my father. They were nothing but small,
+badly-printed, patent medicine pamphlets, each with a loop of string at
+the corner so that they might be hung on a nail behind the stove, and of
+a crude green or yellow or blue. Each of them made much of a
+calm-featured man who seemed unaware of the fact that his internal
+organs were opened to the light of day. Lines radiated from his middle
+to the signs of the zodiac. I never knew what all this meant, but it
+gave me a sense of something esoteric and remote. Just what "Aries" and
+"Pisces" had to do with healing or the weather is still a mystery.
+
+These advertising bulletins could be seen in heaps on the counter at the
+drug store especially in the spring months when "Healey's Bitters" and
+"Allen's Cherry Pectoral" were most needed to "purify the blood." They
+were given out freely, but the price of the marvellous mixtures they
+celebrated was always one dollar a bottle, and many a broad coin went
+for a "bitter" which should have gone to buy a new dress for an
+overworked wife.
+
+These little books contained, also, concise aphorisms and weighty words
+of advice like "After dinner rest awhile; after supper run a mile," and
+"Be vigilant, be truthful and your life will never be ruthful." "Take
+care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves" (which
+needed a little translating to us) probably came down a long line of
+English copy books. No doubt they were all stolen from _Poor Richard_.
+
+Incidentally they called attention to the aches and pains of humankind,
+and each page presented the face, signature and address of some far-off
+person who had been miraculously relieved by the particular "balsam" or
+"bitter" which that pamphlet presented. Hollow-cheeked folk were shown
+"before taking," and the same individuals plump and hearty "after
+taking," followed by very realistic accounts of the diseases from which
+they had been relieved gave encouragement to others suffering from the
+same "complaints."
+
+Generally the almanac which presented the claims of a "pectoral" also
+had a "salve" that was "sovereign for burns" and some of them humanely
+took into account the ills of farm animals and presented a cure for bots
+or a liniment for spavins. I spent a great deal of time with these
+publications and to them a large part of my education is due.
+
+It is impossible that printed matter of any kind should possess for any
+child of today the enchantment which came to me, from a grimy,
+half-dismembered copy of Scott or Cooper. _The Life of P. T. Barnum_,
+Franklin's _Autobiography_ we owned and they were also wellsprings of
+joy to me. Sometimes I hold with the Lacedemonians that "hunger is the
+best sauce" for the mind as well as for the palate. Certainly we made
+the most of all that came our way.
+
+Naturally the school-house continued to be the center of our interest by
+day and the scene of our occasional neighborhood recreation by night. In
+its small way it was our Forum as well as our Academy and my memories of
+it are mostly pleasant.
+
+Early one bright winter day Charles Babcock and Albert Button, two of
+our big boys, suddenly appeared at the school-house door with their best
+teams hitched to great bob-sleds, and amid much shouting and laughter,
+the entire school (including the teacher) piled in on the straw which
+softened the bottom of the box, and away we raced with jangling bells,
+along the bright winter roads with intent to "surprise" the Burr Oak
+teacher and his flock.
+
+I particularly enjoyed this expedition for the Burr Oak School was
+larger than ours and stood on the edge of a forest and was protected by
+noble trees. A deep ravine near it furnished a mild form of coasting.
+The schoolroom had fine new desks with iron legs and the teacher's desk
+occupied a deep recess at the front. Altogether it possessed something
+of the dignity of a church. To go there was almost like going to town,
+for at the corners where the three roads met, four or five houses stood
+and in one of these was a postoffice.
+
+That day is memorable to me for the reason that I first saw Bettie and
+Hattie and Agnes, the prettiest girls in the township. Hattie and Bettie
+were both fair-haired and blue-eyed but Agnes was dark with great
+velvety black eyes. Neither of them was over sixteen, but they had all
+taken on the airs of young ladies and looked with amused contempt on
+lads of my age. Nevertheless, I had the right to admire them in secret
+for they added the final touch of poetry to this visit to "the Grove
+School House."
+
+Often, thereafter, on a clear night when the thermometer stood twenty
+below zero, Burton and I would trot away toward the Grove to join in
+some meeting or to coast with the boys on the banks of the creek. I feel
+again the iron clutch of my frozen boots. The tippet around my neck is
+solid ice before my lips. My ears sting. Low-hung, blazing, the stars
+light the sky, and over the diamond-dusted snow-crust the moonbeams
+splinter.
+
+Though sensing the glory of such nights as these I was careful about
+referring to it. Restraint in such matters was the rule. If you said,
+"It is a fine day," or "The night is as clear as a bell," you had gone
+quite as far as the proprieties permitted. Love was also a forbidden
+word. You might say, "I love pie," but to say "I love Bettie," was
+mawkish if not actually improper.
+
+Caresses or terms of endearment even between parents and their children
+were very seldom used. People who said "Daddy dear," or "Jim dear," were
+under suspicion. "They fight like cats and dogs when no one else is
+around" was the universal comment on a family whose members were very
+free of their terms of affection. We were a Spartan lot. We did not
+believe in letting our wives and children know that they were an
+important part of our contentment.
+
+Social changes were in progress. We held no more quilting bees or
+barn-raisings. Women visited less than in Wisconsin. The work on the new
+farms was never ending, and all teams were in constant use during week
+days. The young people got together on one excuse or another, but their
+elders met only at public meetings.
+
+Singing, even among the young people was almost entirely confined to
+hymn-tunes. The new Moody and Sankey Song Book was in every home. _Tell
+Me the Old Old Story_ did not refer to courtship but to salvation, and
+_Hold the Fort for I am Coming_ was no longer a signal from Sherman, but
+a Message from Jesus. We often spent a joyous evening singing _O, Bear
+Me Away on Your Snowy Wings_, although we had no real desire to be taken
+"to our immortal home." Father no longer asked for _Minnie Minturn_ and
+_Nellie Wildwood_,--but his love for Smith's _Grand March_ persisted and
+my sister Harriet was often called upon to play it for him while he
+explained its meaning. The war was passing into the mellow, reminiscent
+haze of memory and he loved the splendid pictures which this descriptive
+piece of martial music recalled to mind. So far as we then knew his
+pursuit of the Sunset was at an end.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+Boy Life on the Prairie
+
+
+The snows fell deep in February and when at last the warm March winds
+began to blow, lakes developed with magical swiftness in the fields, and
+streams filled every swale, transforming the landscape into something
+unexpected and enchanting. At night these waters froze, bringing fields
+of ice almost to our door. We forgot all our other interests in the joy
+of the games which we played thereon at every respite from school, or
+from the wood-pile, for splitting firewood was our first spring task.
+
+From time to time as the weather permitted, father had been cutting and
+hauling maple and hickory logs from the forests of the Cedar River, and
+these logs must now be made into stove-wood and piled for summer use.
+Even before the school term ended we began to take a hand at this work,
+after four o'clock and on Saturdays. While the hired man and father ran
+the cross-cut saw, whose pleasant song had much of the seed-time
+suggestion which vibrated in the _caw-caw_ of the hens as they burrowed
+in the dust of the chip-yard, I split the easy blocks and my brother
+helped to pile the finished product.
+
+The place where the wood-pile lay was slightly higher than the barnyard
+and was the first dry ground to appear in the almost universal slush and
+mud. Delightful memories are associated with this sunny spot and with a
+pond which appeared as if by some conjury, on the very field where I had
+husked the down-row so painfully in November. From the wood-pile I was
+often permitted to go skating and Burton was my constant companion in
+these excursions. However, my joy in his companionship was not unmixed
+with bitterness, for I deeply envied him the skates which he wore. They
+were trimmed with brass and their runners came up over his toes in
+beautiful curves and ended in brass acorns which transfigured their
+wearer. To own a pair of such skates seemed to me the summit of all
+earthly glory.
+
+My own wooden "contraptions" went on with straps and I could not make
+the runners stay in the middle of my soles where they belonged, hence my
+ankles not only tipped in awkwardly but the stiff outer edges of my boot
+counters dug holes in my skin so that my outing was a kind of torture
+after all. Nevertheless, I persisted and, while Burton circled and
+swooped like a hawk, I sprawled with flapping arms in a mist of ignoble
+rage. That I learned to skate fairly well even under these disadvantages
+argues a high degree of enthusiasm.
+
+Father was always willing to release us from labor at times when the ice
+was fine, and at night we were free to explore the whole country round
+about, finding new places for our games. Sometimes the girls joined us,
+and we built fires on the edges of the swales and played "gool" and a
+kind of "shinny" till hunger drove us home.
+
+We held to this sport to the last--till the ice with prodigious booming
+and cracking fell away in the swales and broke through the icy drifts
+(which lay like dams along the fences) and vanished, leaving the
+corn-rows littered with huge blocks of ice. Often we came in from the
+pond, wet to the middle, our boots completely soaked with water. They
+often grew hard as iron during the night, and we experienced the
+greatest trouble in getting them on again. Greasing them with hot
+tallow was a regular morning job.
+
+Then came the fanning mill. The seed grain had to be fanned up, and that
+was a dark and dusty "trick" which we did not like anything near as well
+as we did skating or even piling wood. The hired man turned the mill, I
+dipped the wheat into the hopper, Franklin held sacks and father scooped
+the grain in. I don't suppose we gave up many hours to this work, but it
+seems to me that we spent weeks at it. Probably we took spells at the
+mill in the midst of the work on the chip pile.
+
+Meanwhile, above our heads the wild ducks again pursued their northward
+flight, and the far honking of the geese fell to our ears from the
+solemn deeps of the windless night. On the first dry warm ridges the
+prairie cocks began to boom, and then at last came the day when father's
+imperious voice rang high in familiar command. "Out with the drags,
+boys! We start seeding tomorrow."
+
+Again we went forth on the land, this time to wrestle with the tough,
+unrotted sod of the new breaking, while all around us the larks and
+plover called and the gray badgers stared with disapproving bitterness
+from their ravaged hills.
+
+Maledictions on that tough northwest forty! How many times I harrowed
+and cross-harrowed it I cannot say, but I well remember the maddening
+persistency with which the masses of hazel roots clogged the teeth of
+the drag, making it necessary for me to raise the corner of it--a
+million times a day! This had to be done while the team was in motion,
+and you can see I did not lack for exercise. It was necessary also to
+"lap-half" and this requirement made careful driving needful for father
+could not be fooled. He saw every "balk."
+
+As the ground dried off the dust arose from under the teeth of the
+harrow and flew so thickly that my face was not only coated with it but
+tears of rebellious rage stained my cheeks with comic lines. At such
+times it seemed unprofitable to be the twelve-year-old son of a western
+farmer.
+
+One day, just as the early sown wheat was beginning to throw a tinge of
+green over the brown earth, a tremendous wind arose from the southwest
+and blew with such devastating fury that the soil, caught up from the
+field, formed a cloud, hundreds of feet high,--a cloud which darkened
+the sky, turning noon into dusk and sending us all to shelter. All the
+forenoon this blizzard of loam raged, filling the house with dust,
+almost smothering the cattle in the stable. Work was impossible, even
+for the men. The growing grain, its roots exposed to the air, withered
+and died. Many of the smaller plants were carried bodily away.
+
+As the day wore on father fell into dumb, despairing rage. His rigid
+face and smoldering eyes, his grim lips, terrified us all. It seemed to
+him (as to us), that the entire farm was about to take flight and the
+bitterest part of the tragic circumstance lay in the reflection that our
+loss (which was much greater than any of our neighbors) was due to the
+extra care with which we had pulverized the ground.
+
+"If only I hadn't gone over it that last time," I heard him groan in
+reference to the "smooch" with which I had crushed all the lumps making
+every acre friable as a garden. "Look at Woodring's!"
+
+Sure enough. The cloud was thinner over on Woodring's side of the line
+fence. His rough clods were hardly touched. My father's bitter revolt,
+his impotent fury appalled me, for it seemed to me (as to him), that
+nature was, at the moment, an enemy. More than seventy acres of this
+land had to be resown.
+
+Most authors in writing of "the merry merry farmer" leave out
+experiences like this--they omit the mud and the dust and the grime,
+they forget the army worm, the flies, the heat, as well as the smells
+and drudgery of the barns. Milking the cows is spoken of in the
+traditional fashion as a lovely pastoral recreation, when as a matter of
+fact it is a tedious job. We all hated it. We saw no poetry in it. We
+hated it in summer when the mosquitoes bit and the cows slashed us with
+their tails, and we hated it still more in the winter time when they
+stood in crowded malodorous stalls.
+
+In summer when the flies were particularly savage we had a way of
+jamming our heads into the cows' flanks to prevent them from kicking
+into the pail, and sometimes we tied their tails to their legs so that
+they could not lash our ears. Humboldt Bunn tied a heifer's tail to his
+boot straps once--and regretted it almost instantly.--No, no, it won't
+do to talk to me of "the sweet breath of kine." I know them too
+well--and calves are not "the lovely, fawn-like creatures" they are
+supposed to be. To the boy who is teaching them to drink out of a pail
+they are nasty brutes--quite unlike fawns. They have a way of filling
+their nostrils with milk and blowing it all over their nurse. They are
+greedy, noisy, ill-smelling and stupid. They look well when running with
+their mothers in the pasture, but as soon as they are weaned they lose
+all their charm--for me.
+
+Attendance on swine was less humiliating for the reason that we could
+keep them at arm's length, but we didn't enjoy that. We liked teaming
+and pitching hay and harvesting and making fence, and we did not greatly
+resent plowing or husking corn but we did hate the smell, the filth of
+the cow-yard. Even hostling had its "outs," especially in spring when
+the horses were shedding their hair. I never fully enjoyed the taste of
+equine dandruff, and the eternal smell of manure irked me, especially
+at the table.
+
+Clearing out from behind the animals was one of our never ending jobs,
+and hauling the compost out on the fields was one of the tasks which, as
+my father grimly said, "We always put off till it rains so hard we can't
+work out doors." This was no joke to us, for not only did we work out
+doors, we worked while standing ankle deep in the slime of the yard,
+getting full benefit of the drizzle. Our new land did not need the
+fertilizer, but we were forced to haul it away or move the barn. Some
+folks moved the barn. But then my father was an idealist.
+
+Life was not all currying or muck-raking for Burt or for me. Herding the
+cows came in to relieve the monotony of farm-work. Wide tracts of
+unbroken sod still lay open to the north and west, and these were the
+common grazing grounds for the community. Every farmer kept from
+twenty-five to a hundred head of cattle and half as many colts, and no
+sooner did the green begin to show on the fire-blackened sod in April
+than the winter-worn beasts left the straw-piles under whose lee they
+had fed during the cold months, and crawled out to nip the first tender
+spears of grass in the sheltered swales. They were still "free
+commoners" in the eyes of the law.
+
+The colts were a fuzzy, ungraceful lot at this season. Even the best of
+them had big bellies and carried dirty and tangled manes, but as the
+grazing improved, as the warmth and plenty of May filled their veins
+with new blood, they sloughed off their mangy coats and lifted their
+wide-blown nostrils to the western wind in exultant return to freedom.
+Many of them had never felt the weight of a man's hand, and even those
+that had wintered in and around the barn-yard soon lost all trace of
+domesticity. It was not unusual to find that the wildest and wariest of
+all the leaders bore a collar mark or some other ineffaceable badge of
+previous servitude.
+
+They were for the most part Morgan grades or "Canuck," with a strain of
+broncho to give them fire. It was curious, it was glorious to see how
+deeply-buried instincts broke out in these halterless herds. In a few
+days, after many trials of speed and power the bands of all the region
+united into one drove, and a leader, the swiftest and most tireless of
+them all, appeared from the ranks and led them at will.
+
+Often without apparent cause, merely for the joy of it, they left their
+feeding grounds to wheel and charge and race for hours over the swells,
+across the creeks and through the hazel thickets. Sometimes their
+movements arose from the stinging of gadflies, sometimes from a battle
+between two jealous leaders, sometimes from the passing of a wolf--often
+from no cause at all other than that of abounding vitality.
+
+In much the same fashion, but less rapidly, the cattle went forth upon
+the plain and as each herd not only contained the growing steers, but
+the family cows, it became the duty of one boy from each farm to mount a
+horse at five o'clock every afternoon and "hunt the cattle," a task
+seldom shirked. My brother and I took turn and turn about at this
+delightful task, and soon learned to ride like Comanches. In fact we
+lived in the saddle, when freed from duty in the field. Burton often met
+us on the feeding grounds, and at such times the prairie seemed an
+excellent place for boys. As we galloped along together it was easy to
+imagine ourselves Wild Bill and Buckskin Joe in pursuit of Indians or
+buffalo.
+
+We became, by force of unconscious observation, deeply learned in the
+language and the psychology of kine as well as colts. We watched the
+big bull-necked stags as they challenged one another, pawing the dust or
+kneeling to tear the sod with their horns. We possessed perfect
+understanding of their battle signs. Their boastful, defiant cries were
+as intelligible to us as those of men. Every note, every motion had a
+perfectly definite meaning. The foolish, inquisitive young heifers, the
+staid self-absorbed dowagers wearing their bells with dignity, the
+frisky two-year-olds and the lithe-bodied wide-horned, truculent
+three-year-olds all came in for interpretation.
+
+Sometimes a lone steer ranging the sod came suddenly upon a trace of
+blood. Like a hound he paused, snuffling the earth. Then with wide mouth
+and outthrust, curling tongue, uttered voice. Wild as the tiger's
+food-sick cry, his warning roar burst forth, ending in a strange, upward
+explosive whine. Instantly every head in the herd was lifted, even the
+old cows heavy with milk stood as if suddenly renewing their youth,
+alert and watchful.
+
+Again it came, that prehistoric bawling cry, and with one mind the herd
+began to center, rushing with menacing swiftness, like warriors
+answering their chieftain's call for aid. With awkward lope or jolting
+trot, snorting with fury they hastened to the rescue, only to meet in
+blind bewildered mass, swirling to and fro in search of an imaginary
+cause of some ancestral danger.
+
+At such moments we were glad of our swift ponies. From our saddles we
+could study these outbreaks of atavistic rage with serene enjoyment.
+
+In herding the cattle we came to know all the open country round about
+and found it very beautiful. On the uplands a short, light-green,
+hairlike grass grew, intermixed with various resinous weeds, while in
+the lowland feeding grounds luxuriant patches of blue-joint, wild oats,
+and other tall forage plants waved in the wind. Along the streams and
+in the "sloos" cat-tails and tiger-lilies nodded above thick mats of
+wide-bladed marsh grass. Almost without realizing it, I came to know the
+character of every weed, every flower, every living thing big enough to
+be seen from the back of a horse.
+
+Nothing could be more generous, more joyous, than these natural meadows
+in summer. The flash and ripple and glimmer of the tall sunflowers, the
+myriad voices of gleeful bobolinks, the chirp and gurgle of red-winged
+blackbirds swaying on the willows, the meadow-larks piping from grassy
+bogs, the peep of the prairie chick and the wailing call of plover on
+the flowery green slopes of the uplands made it all an ecstatic world to
+me. It was a wide world with a big, big sky which gave alluring hint of
+the still more glorious unknown wilderness beyond.
+
+Sometimes of a Sunday afternoon, Harriet and I wandered away to the
+meadows along Dry Run, gathering bouquets of pinks, sweet-williams,
+tiger-lilies and lady slippers, thus attaining a vague perception of
+another and sweeter side of life. The sun flamed across the splendid
+serial waves of the grasses and the perfumes of a hundred spicy plants
+rose in the shimmering mid-day air. At such times the mere joy of living
+filled our young hearts with wordless satisfaction.
+
+Nor were the upland ridges less interesting, for huge antlers lying
+bleached and bare in countless numbers on the slopes told of the herds
+of elk and bison that had once fed in these splendid savannahs, living
+and dying in the days when the tall Sioux were the only hunters.
+
+The gray hermit, the badger, still clung to his deep den on the rocky
+unplowed ridges, and on sunny April days the mother fox lay out with her
+young, on southward-sloping swells. Often we met the prairie wolf or
+startled him from his sleep in hazel copse, finding in him the spirit
+of the wilderness. To us it seemed that just over the next long swell
+toward the sunset the shaggy brown bulls still fed in myriads, and in
+our hearts was a longing to ride away into the "sunset regions" of our
+song.
+
+All the boys I knew talked of Colorado, never of New England. We dreamed
+of the plains, of the Black Hills, discussing cattle raising and mining
+and hunting. "We'll have our rifles ready, boys, ha, ha, ha-ha!" was
+still our favorite chorus, "Newbrasky" and Wyoming our far-off
+wonderlands, Buffalo Bill our hero.
+
+David, my hunter uncle who lived near us, still retained his long
+old-fashioned, muzzle-loading rifle, and one day offered it to me, but
+as I could not hold it at arm's length, I sorrowfully returned it. We
+owned a shotgun, however, and this I used with all the confidence of a
+man. I was able to kill a few ducks with it and I also hunted gophers
+during May when the sprouting corn was in most danger. Later I became
+quite expert in catching chickens on the wing.
+
+On a long ridge to the north and west, the soil, too wet and cold to
+cultivate easily, remained unplowed for several years and scattered over
+these clay lands stood small groves of popple trees which we called
+"tow-heads." They were usually only two or three hundred feet in
+diameter, but they stood out like islands in the waving seas of grasses.
+Against these dark-green masses, breakers of blue-joint radiantly
+rolled.--To the east some four miles ran the Little Cedar River, and
+plum trees and crab-apples and haws bloomed along its banks. In June
+immense crops of strawberries offered from many meadows. Their delicious
+odor rose to us as we rode our way, tempting us to dismount and gather
+and eat.
+
+Over these uplands, through these thickets of hazel brush, and around
+these coverts of popple, Burton and I careered, hunting the cows,
+chasing rabbits, killing rattlesnakes, watching the battles of bulls,
+racing the half-wild colts and pursuing the prowling wolves. It was an
+alluring life, and Harriet, who rode with us occasionally, seemed to
+enjoy it quite as much as any boy. She could ride almost as well as
+Burton, and we were all expert horse-tamers.
+
+We all rode like cavalrymen,--that is to say, while holding the reins in
+our left hands we guided our horses by the pressure of the strap across
+the neck, rather than by pulling at the bit. Our ponies were never
+allowed to trot. We taught them a peculiar gait which we called "the
+lope," which was an easy canter in front and a trot behind (a very good
+gait for long distances), and we drilled them to keep this pace steadily
+and to fall at command into a swift walk without any jolting intervening
+trot.--We learned to ride like circus performers standing on our
+saddles, and practised other of the tricks we had seen, and through it
+all my mother remained unalarmed. To her a boy on a horse was as natural
+as a babe in the cradle. The chances we took of getting killed were so
+numerous that she could not afford to worry.
+
+Burton continued to be my almost inseparable companion at school and
+whenever we could get together, and while to others he seemed only a
+shy, dull boy, to me he was something more. His strength and skill were
+remarkable and his self-command amazing. Although a lad of instant,
+white-hot, dangerous temper, he suddenly, at fifteen years of age, took
+himself in hand in a fashion miraculous to me. He decided (I never knew
+just why or how)--that he would never again use an obscene or profane
+word. He kept his vow. I knew him for over thirty years and I never
+heard him raise his voice in anger or utter a word a woman would have
+shrunk from,--and yet he became one of the most fearless and indomitable
+mountaineers I ever knew.
+
+This change in him profoundly influenced me and though I said nothing
+about it, I resolved to do as well. I never quite succeeded, although I
+discouraged as well as I could the stories which some of the men and
+boys were so fond of telling, but alas! when the old cow kicked over my
+pail of milk, I fell from grace and told her just what I thought of her
+in phrases that Burton would have repressed. Still, I manfully tried to
+follow his good trail.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Corn-planting, which followed wheat-seeding, was done by hand, for a
+year or two, and this was a joyous task.--We "changed works" with
+neighbor Button, and in return Cyrus and Eva came to help us. Harriet
+and Eva and I worked side by side, "dropping" the corn, while Cyrus and
+the hired man followed with the hoes to cover it. Little Frank skittered
+about, planting with desultory action such pumpkin seeds as he did not
+eat. The presence of our young friends gave the job something of the
+nature of a party and we were sorry when it was over.
+
+After the planting a fortnight of less strenuous labor came on, a period
+which had almost the character of a holiday. The wheat needed no
+cultivation and the corn was not high enough to plow. This was a time
+for building fence and fixing up things generally. This, too, was the
+season of the circus. Each year one came along from the east, trailing
+clouds of glorified dust and filling our minds with the color of
+romance.
+
+From the time the "advance man" flung his highly colored posters over
+the fence till the coming of the glorious day we thought of little else.
+It was India and Arabia and the jungle to us. History and the magic and
+pomp of chivalry mingled in the parade of the morning, and the crowds,
+the clanging band, the haughty and alien beauty of the women, the gold
+embroidered housings, the stark majesty of the acrobats subdued us into
+silent worship.
+
+I here pay tribute to the men who brought these marvels to my eyes. To
+rob me of my memories of the circus would leave me as poor as those to
+whom life was a drab and hopeless round of toil. It was our brief season
+of imaginative life. In one day--in a part of one day--we gained a
+thousand new conceptions of the world and of human nature. It was an
+embodiment of all that was skillful and beautiful in manly action. It
+was a compendium of biologic research but more important still, it
+brought to our ears the latest band pieces and taught us the most
+popular songs. It furnished us with jokes. It relieved our dullness. It
+gave us something to talk about.
+
+We always went home wearied with excitement, and dusty and fretful--but
+content. We had seen it. We had grasped as much of it as anybody and
+could remember it as well as the best. Next day as we resumed work in
+the field the memory of its splendors went with us like a golden cloud.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Most of the duties of the farmer's life require the lapse of years to
+seem beautiful in my eyes, but haying was a season of well-defined
+charm. In Iowa, summer was at its most exuberant stage of vitality
+during the last days of June, and it was not strange that the faculties
+of even the toiling hay-maker, dulled and deadened with never ending
+drudgery, caught something of the superabundant glow and throb of
+nature's life.
+
+As I write I am back in that marvellous time.--The cornfield, dark-green
+and sweetly cool, is beginning to ripple in the wind with multitudinous
+stir of shining, swirling leaf. Waves of dusk and green and gold, circle
+across the ripening barley, and long leaves upthrust, at intervals, like
+spears. The trees are in heaviest foliage, insect life is at its height,
+and the shimmering air is filled with buzzing, dancing forms, and the
+clover is gay with the sheen of innumerable gauzy wings.
+
+The west wind comes to me laden with ecstatic voices. The bobolinks sail
+and tinkle in the sensuous hush, now sinking, now rising, their
+exquisite notes filling the air as with the sound of fairy bells. The
+king-bird, alert, aggressive, cries out sharply as he launches from the
+top of a poplar tree upon some buzzing insect, and the plover makes the
+prairie sad with his wailing call. Vast purple-and-white clouds move
+like stately ships before the breeze, dark with rain, which they drop
+momentarily in trailing garments upon the earth, and so pass in majesty
+amidst a roll of thunder.
+
+The grasshoppers move in clouds with snap and buzz, and out of the
+luxurious stagnant marshes comes the ever-thickening chorus of the
+toads, while above them the kildees and the snipe shuttle to and fro in
+sounding flight. The blackbirds on the cat-tails sway and swing,
+uttering through lifted throats their liquid gurgle, mad with delight of
+the sun and the season--and over all, and laving all, moves the slow
+wind, heavy with the breath of the far-off blooms of other lands, a wind
+which covers the sunset plain with a golden entrancing haze.
+
+At such times it seemed to me that we had reached the "sunset region" of
+our song, and that we were indeed "lords of the soil."
+
+I am not so sure that haying brought to our mothers anything like this
+rapture, for the men added to our crew made the duties of the kitchens
+just that much heavier. I doubt if the women--any of them--got out into
+the fields or meadows long enough to enjoy the birds and the breezes.
+Even on Sunday as they rode away to church, they were too tired and too
+worried to re-act to the beauties of the landscape.
+
+I now began to dimly perceive that my mother was not well. Although
+large and seemingly strong, her increasing weight made her long days of
+housework a torture. She grew very tired and her sweet face was often
+knotted with physical pain.
+
+She still made most of our garments as well as her own. She tailored
+father's shirts and underclothing, sewed carpet rags, pieced quilts and
+made butter for market,--and yet, in the midst of it all, found time to
+put covers on our baseball, and to do up all our burns and bruises.
+Being a farmer's wife in those days, meant laboring outside any
+regulation of the hours of toil. I recall hearing one of the tired
+house-wives say, "Seems like I never get a day off, not even on Sunday,"
+a protest which my mother thoroughly understood and sympathized with,
+notwithstanding its seeming inhospitality.
+
+No history of this time would be complete without a reference to the
+doctor. We were a vigorous and on the whole a healthy tribe but
+accidents sometimes happened and "Go for the doctor!" was the first
+command when the band-cutter slashed the hand of the thresher or one of
+the children fell from the hay-rick.
+
+One night as I lay buried in deep sleep close to the garret eaves I
+heard my mother call me--and something in her voice pierced me, roused
+me. A poignant note of alarm was in it.
+
+"Hamlin," she called, "get up--at once. You must go for the doctor. Your
+father is very sick. _Hurry!_"
+
+I sprang from my bed, dizzy with sleep, yet understanding her appeal. "I
+hear you, I'm coming," I called down to her as I started to dress.
+
+"Call Hattie. I need her too."
+
+The rain was pattering on the roof, and as I dressed I had a disturbing
+vision of the long cold ride which lay before me. I hoped the case was
+not so bad as mother thought. With limbs still numb and weak I stumbled
+down the stairs to the sitting room where a faint light shone.
+
+Mother met me with white, strained face. "Your father is suffering
+terribly. Go for the doctor at once."
+
+I could hear the sufferer groan even as I moved about the kitchen,
+putting on my coat and lighting the lantern. It was about one o'clock of
+the morning, and the wind was cold as I picked my way through the mud to
+the barn. The thought of the long miles to town made me shiver but as
+the son of a soldier I could not falter in my duty.
+
+In their warm stalls the horses were resting in dreamful doze. Dan and
+Dick, the big plow team, stood near the door. Jule and Dolly came next.
+Wild Frank, a fleet but treacherous Morgan, stood fifth and for a moment
+I considered taking him. He was strong and of wonderful staying powers
+but so savage and unreliable that I dared not risk an accident. I passed
+on to bay Kittie whose bright eyes seemed to inquire, "What is the
+matter?"
+
+Flinging the blanket over her and smoothing it carefully, I tossed the
+light saddle to her back and cinched it tight, so tight that she
+grunted. "I can't take any chances of a spill," I explained to her, and
+she accepted the bit willingly. She was always ready for action and
+fully dependable.
+
+Blowing out my lantern I hung it on a peg, led Kit from her stall out
+into the night, and swung to the saddle. She made off with a spattering
+rush through the yard, out into the road. It was dark as pitch but I was
+fully awake now. The dash of the rain in my face had cleared my brain
+but I trusted to the keener senses of the mare to find the road which
+showed only in the strips of water which filled the wagon tracks.
+
+We made way slowly for a few minutes until my eyes expanded to take in
+the faint lines of light along the lane. The road at last became a river
+of ink running between faint gray banks of sward, and my heart rose in
+confidence. I took on dignity. I was a courier riding through the night
+to save a city, a messenger on whose courage and skill thousands of
+lives depended.
+
+"Get out o' this!" I shouted to Kit, and she leaped away like a wolf, at
+a tearing gallop.
+
+She knew her rider. We had herded the cattle many days on the prairie,
+and in races with the wild colts I had tested her speed. Snorting with
+vigor at every leap she seemed to say, "My heart is brave, my limbs are
+strong. Call on me."
+
+Out of the darkness John Martin's Carlo barked. A half-mile had passed.
+Old Marsh's fox hound clamored next. Two miles were gone. From here the
+road ran diagonally across the prairie, a velvet-black band on the dim
+sod. The ground was firmer but there were swales full of water. Through
+these Kittie dashed with unhesitating confidence, the water flying from
+her drumming hooves. Once she went to her knees and almost unseated me,
+but I regained my saddle and shouted, "Go on, Kit."
+
+The fourth mile was in the mud, but the fifth brought us to the village
+turnpike and the mare was as glad of it as I. Her breath was labored
+now. She snorted no more in exultation and confident strength. She began
+to wonder--to doubt, and I, who knew her ways as well as I knew those of
+a human being, realized that she was beginning to flag. The mud had
+begun to tell on her.
+
+It hurt me to urge her on, but the memory of my mother's agonized face
+and the sound of my father's groan of pain steeled my heart. I set lash
+to her side and so kept her to her highest speed.
+
+At last a gleam of light! Someone in the village was awake. I passed
+another lighted window. Then the green and red lamps of the drug store
+cheered me with their promise of aid, for the doctor lived next door.
+There too a dim ray shone.
+
+Slipping from my weary horse I tied her to the rail and hurried up the
+walk toward the doctor's bell. I remembered just where the knob rested.
+Twice I pulled sharply, strongly, putting into it some part of the
+anxiety and impatience I felt. I could hear its imperative jingle as it
+died away in the silent house.
+
+At last the door opened and the doctor, a big blonde handsome man in a
+long night gown, confronted me with impassive face. "What is it, my
+boy?" he asked kindly.
+
+As I told him he looked down at my water-soaked form and wild-eyed
+countenance with gentle patience. Then he peered out over my head into
+the dismal night. He was a man of resolution but he hesitated for a
+moment. "Your father is suffering sharply, is he?"
+
+"Yes, sir. I could hear him groan.--Please hurry."
+
+He mused a moment. "He is a soldier. He would not complain of a little
+thing--I will come."
+
+Turning in relief, I ran down the walk and climbed upon my shivering
+mare. She wheeled sharply, eager to be off on her homeward way. Her
+spirit was not broken, but she was content to take a slower pace. She
+seemed to know that our errand was accomplished and that the warm
+shelter of the stall was to be her reward.
+
+Holding her down to a slow trot I turned often to see if I could detect
+the lights of the doctor's buggy which was a familiar sight on our road.
+I had heard that he kept one of his teams harnessed ready for calls
+like this, and I confidently expected him to overtake me. "It's a
+terrible night to go out, but he said he would come," I repeated as I
+rode.
+
+At last the lights of a carriage, crazily rocking, came into view and
+pulling Kit to a walk I twisted in my saddle, ready to shout with
+admiration of the speed of his team. "He's driving the 'Clay-Banks,'" I
+called in great excitement.
+
+The Clay-Banks were famous throughout the county as the doctor's
+swiftest and wildest team, a span of bronchos whose savage spirits no
+journey could entirely subdue, a team he did not spare, a team that
+scorned petting and pity, bony, sinewy, big-headed. They never walked
+and had little care of mud or snow.
+
+They came rushing now with splashing feet and foaming, half-open jaws,
+the big doctor, calm, iron-handed, masterful, sitting in the swaying top
+of his light buggy, his feet against the dash board, keeping his furious
+span in hand as easily as if they were a pair of Shetland ponies. The
+nigh horse was running, the off horse pacing, and the splatter of their
+feet, the slash of the wheels and the roaring of their heavy breathing,
+made my boyish heart leap. I could hardly repress a yell of delight.
+
+As I drew aside to let him pass the doctor called out with mellow cheer,
+"Take your time, boy, take your time!"
+
+Before I could even think of an answer, he was gone and I was alone with
+Kit and the night.
+
+My anxiety vanished with him. I had done all that could humanly be done,
+I had fetched the doctor. Whatever happened I was guiltless. I knew also
+that in a few minutes a sweet relief would come to my tortured mother,
+and with full faith and loving confidence in the man of science, I
+jogged along homeward, wet to the bone but triumphant.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+Wheat and the Harvest
+
+
+The early seventies were years of swift change on the Middle Border. Day
+by day the settlement thickened. Section by section the prairie was
+blackened by the plow. Month by month the sweet wild meadows were fenced
+and pastured and so at last the colts and cows all came into captivity,
+and our horseback riding ceased, cut short as if by some imperial
+decree. Lanes of barbed wire replaced the winding wagon trails, our
+saddles gathered dust in the grain-sheds, and groves of Lombardy poplar
+and European larch replaced the tow-heads of aspen and hazel through
+which we had pursued the wolf and fox.
+
+I will not say that this produced in me any keen sense of sorrow at the
+time, for though I missed our horse-herds and the charm of the open
+spaces, I turned to tamer sports with the resilient adaptability of
+youth. If I could not ride I could at least play baseball, and the
+swimming hole in the Little Cedar remained untouched. The coming in of
+numerous Eastern settlers brought added charm to neighborhood life.
+Picnics, conventions, Fourth of July celebrations--all intensified our
+interest, and in their increasing drama we were compensated, in some
+degree at least, for the delights which were passing with the prairie.
+
+Our school-house did not change--except for the worse. No one thought of
+adding a tree or a vine to its ugly yard. Sun-smit, bare as a nose it
+stood at the cross-roads, receiving us through its drab door-way as it
+had done from the first. Its benches, hideously hacked and thick with
+grime, were as hard and uncomfortable as when I first saw them, and the
+windows remained unshaded and unwashed. Most of the farm-houses in the
+region remained equally unadorned, but Deacon Gammons had added an "ell"
+and established a "parlor," and Anson Burtch had painted his barn. The
+plain began to take on a comfortable look, for some of the trees of the
+wind-breaks had risen above the roofs, and growing maples softened the
+effect of the bleak expanse.
+
+My mother, like most of her neighbors, still cooked and served meals in
+our one living room during the winter but moved into a "summer kitchen"
+in April. This change always gave us a sense of luxury--which is
+pathetic, if you look at it that way. Our front room became suddenly and
+happily a parlor, and was so treated. Mother at once got down the rag
+carpet and gave orders for us to shake out and bring in some clean straw
+to put under it, and when we had tacked it down and re-arranged the
+furniture, it was no longer a place for muddy boots and shirt-sleeved
+shiftlessness, it had an air of being in perpetual Sabbath leisure.
+
+The Garlands were not so poor as all this would seem to imply, for we
+were now farming over three hundred acres of land and caring for a herd
+of cattle and many swine. It merely meant that my father did not feel
+the need of a "best room" and mother and Harriet were not yet able to
+change his mind. Harriet wanted an organ like Mary Abby Gammons, mother
+longed for a real "in-grain" carpet and we all clamored for a spring
+wagon. We got the wagon first.
+
+That bleak little house is clearly defined in my mind at this moment.
+The low lean-to kitchen, the rag-carpeted sitting room with its two
+chromos of _Wide Awake_ and _Fast Asleep_--its steel engraving of
+General Grant, and its tiny melodeon in the corner--all these come back
+to me. There are very few books or magazines in the scene, but there are
+piles of newspapers, for my father was an omnivorous reader of all
+things political. It was not a hovel, it was a pioneer cabin persisting
+into a settled community, that was all.
+
+During these years the whole middle border was menaced by bands of
+horse-thieves operating under a secret well-organized system. Horses
+disappeared night by night and were never recovered, till at last the
+farmers, in despair of the local authorities, organized a Horse Thief
+Protective Association which undertook to pursue and punish the robbers
+and to pay for such animals as were not returned. Our county had an
+association of this sort and shortly after we opened our new farm my
+father became a member. My first knowledge of this fact came when he
+nailed on our barn-door the white cloth poster which proclaimed in bold
+black letters a warning and a threat signed by "the Committee."--I was
+always a little in doubt as to whether the horse-thieves or ourselves
+were to be protected, for the notice was fair warning to them as well as
+an assurance to us. Anyhow very few horses were stolen from barns thus
+protected.
+
+The campaign against the thieves gave rise to many stirring stories
+which lost nothing in my father's telling of them. Jim McCarty was agent
+for our association and its effectiveness was largely due to his swift
+and fearless action. We all had a pleasant sense of the mystery of the
+night riding which went on during this period and no man could pass with
+a led horse without being under suspicion of being either a thief or a
+deputy. Then, too, the thieves were supposed to have in every community
+a spy who gave information as to the best horses, and informed the gang
+as to the membership of the Protective Society.
+
+One of our neighbors fell under suspicion at this time and never got
+clear of it. I hope we did him no injustice in this for never after
+could I bring myself to enter his house, and he was clearly ostracized
+by all the neighbors.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As I look back over my life on that Iowa farm the song of the reaper
+fills large place in my mind. We were all worshippers of wheat in those
+days. The men thought and talked of little else between seeding and
+harvest, and you will not wonder at this if you have known and bowed
+down before such abundance as we then enjoyed.
+
+Deep as the breast of a man, wide as the sea, heavy-headed,
+supple-stocked, many-voiced, full of multitudinous, secret, whispered
+colloquies,--a meeting place of winds and of sunlight,--our fields ran
+to the world's end.
+
+We trembled when the storm lay hard upon the wheat, we exulted as the
+lilac shadows of noon-day drifted over it! We went out into it at noon
+when all was still--so still we could hear the pulse of the transforming
+sap as it crept from cool root to swaying plume. We stood before it at
+evening when the setting sun flooded it with crimson, the bearded heads
+lazily swirling under the wings of the wind, the mousing hawk dipping
+into its green deeps like the eagle into the sea, and our hearts
+expanded with the beauty and the mystery of it,--and back of all this
+was the knowledge that its abundance meant a new carriage, an addition
+to the house or a new suit of clothes.
+
+Haying was over, and day by day we boys watched with deepening interest
+while the hot sun transformed the juices of the soil into those stately
+stalks. I loved to go out into the fairy forest of it, and lying there,
+silent in its swaying deeps, hear the wild chickens peep and the wind
+sing its subtle song over our heads. Day by day I studied the barley as
+it turned yellow, first at the root and then at the neck (while the
+middle joints, rank and sappy, retained their blue-green sheen), until
+at last the lower leaves began to wither and the stems to stiffen in
+order to uphold the daily increasing weight of the milky berries, and
+then almost in an hour--lo! the edge of the field became a banded ribbon
+of green and yellow, languidly waving in and out with every rush of the
+breeze.
+
+Now we got out the reaper, put the sickles in order, and father laid in
+a store of provisions. Extra hands were hired, and at last, early on a
+hot July morning, the boss mounted to his seat on the self-rake
+"McCormick" and drove into the field. Frank rode the lead horse, four
+stalwart hands and myself took "stations" behind the reaper and the
+battle was on!
+
+Reaping generally came about the 20th of July, the hottest and dryest
+part of the summer, and was the most pressing work of the year. It
+demanded early rising for the men, and it meant an all day broiling over
+the kitchen stove for the women. Stern, incessant toil went on inside
+and out from dawn till sunset, no matter how the thermometer sizzled. On
+many days the mercury mounted to ninety-five in the shade, but with wide
+fields all yellowing at the same moment, no one thought of laying off. A
+storm might sweep it flat, or if neglected too long, it might "crinkle."
+
+Our reaper in 1874 was a new model of the McCormick self-rake,--the
+Marsh Harvester was not yet in general use. The Woods Dropper, the
+Seymour and Morgan hand-rake "contraptions" seemed a long way in the
+past. True the McCormick required four horses to drag it but it was
+effective. It was hard to believe that anything more cunning would ever
+come to claim the farmer's money. Weird tales of a machine on which two
+men rode and bound twelve acres of wheat in ten hours came to us, but
+we did not potently believe these reports--on the contrary we accepted
+the self-rake as quite the final word in harvesting machinery and
+cheerily bent to the binding of sheaves with their own straw in the good
+old time-honored way.
+
+No task save that of "cradling" surpassed in severity "binding on a
+station." It was a full-grown man's job, but every boy was ambitious to
+try his hand, and when at fourteen years of age I was promoted from
+"bundle boy" to be one of the five hands to bind after the reaper, I
+went to my corner with joy and confidence. For two years I had been
+serving as binder on the corners, (to keep the grain out of the way of
+the horses) and I knew my job.
+
+I was short and broad-shouldered with large strong hands admirably
+adapted for this work, and for the first two hours, easily held my own
+with the rest of the crew, but as the morning wore on and the sun grew
+hotter, my enthusiasm waned. A painful void developed in my chest. My
+breakfast had been ample, but no mere stomachful of food could carry a
+growing boy through five hours of desperate toil. Along about a quarter
+to ten, I began to scan the field with anxious eye, longing to see
+Harriet and the promised luncheon basket.
+
+Just when it seemed that I could endure the strain no longer she came
+bearing a jug of cool milk, some cheese and some deliciously fresh
+fried-cakes. With keen joy I set a couple of tall sheaves together like
+a tent and flung myself down flat on my back in their shadow to devour
+my lunch.
+
+Tired as I was, my dim eyes apprehended something of the splendor of the
+shining clouds which rolled like storms of snow through the deep-blue
+spaces of sky and so, resting silently as a clod I could hear the chirp
+of the crickets, the buzzing wings of flies and the faint, fairylike
+tread of smaller unseen insects hurrying their way just beneath my ear
+in the stubble. Strange green worms, grasshoppers and shining beetles
+crept over me as I dozed.
+
+This delicious, dreamful respite was broken by the far-off approaching
+purr of the sickle, flicked by the faint snap of the driver's whip, and
+out of the low rustle of the everstirring lilliputian forest came the
+wailing cry of a baby wild chicken lost from its mother--a falling,
+thrilling, piteous little pipe.
+
+Such momentary communion with nature seemed all the sweeter for the work
+which had preceded it, as well as that which was to follow it. It took
+resolution to rise and go back to my work, but I did it, sustained by a
+kind of soldierly pride.
+
+At noon we hurried to the house, surrounded the kitchen table and fell
+upon our boiled beef and potatoes with such ferocity that in fifteen
+minutes our meal was over. There was no ceremony and very little talking
+till the hid wolf was appeased. Then came a heavenly half-hour of rest
+on the cool grass in the shade of the trees, a siesta as luxurious as
+that of a Spanish monarch--but alas!--this "nooning," as we called it,
+was always cut short by father's word of sharp command, "Roll out,
+boys!" and again the big white jugs were filled at the well, the horses,
+lazy with food, led the way back to the field, and the stern contest
+began again.
+
+All nature at this hour seemed to invite to repose rather than to labor,
+and as the heat increased I longed with wordless fervor for the green
+woods of the Cedar River. At times the gentle wind hardly moved the
+bended heads of the barley, and the hawks hung in the air like trout
+sleeping in deep pools. The sunlight was a golden, silent, scorching
+cataract--yet each of us must strain his tired muscles and bend his
+aching back to the harvest.
+
+Supper came at five, another delicious interval--and then at six we all
+went out again for another hour or two in the cool of the
+sunset.--However, the pace was more leisurely now for the end of the day
+was near. I always enjoyed this period, for the shadows lengthening
+across the stubble, and the fiery sun, veiled by the gray clouds of the
+west, had wondrous charm. The air began to moisten and grow cool. The
+voices of the men pulsed powerfully and cheerfully across the narrowing
+field of unreaped grain, the prairie hens led forth their broods to
+feed, and at last, father's long-drawn and musical cry, "Turn OUT! All
+hands TURN OUT!" rang with restful significance through the dusk. Then,
+slowly, with low-hung heads the freed horses moved toward the barn,
+walking with lagging steps like weary warriors going into camp.
+
+In all the toil of the harvest field, the water jug filled a large
+place. It was a source of anxiety as well as comfort. To keep it cool,
+to keep it well filled was a part of my job. No man passed it at the
+"home corner" of the field. It is a delightful part of my recollections
+of the harvest.
+
+    O cool gray jug that touched the lips
+    In kiss that softly closed and clung,
+    No Spanish wine the tippler sips,
+    No port the poet's praise has sung--
+    Such pure, untainted sweetness yields
+    As cool gray jug in harvest fields.
+
+    I see it now!--a clover leaf
+    Out-spread upon its sweating side!--
+    As from the sheltering sheaf
+    I pluck and swing it high, the wide
+    Field glows with noon-day heat,
+    The winds are tangled in the wheat.
+
+    The swarming crickets blithely cheep,
+    Across the stir of waving grain
+    I see the burnished reaper creep--
+    The lunch-boy comes, and once again
+    The jug its crystal coolness yields--
+    O cool gray jug in harvest fields!
+
+My father did not believe in serving strong liquor to his men, and
+seldom treated them to even beer. While not a teetotaler he was strongly
+opposed to all that intemperance represented. He furnished the best of
+food, and tea and coffee, but no liquor, and the men respected him for
+it.
+
+The reaping on our farm that year lasted about four weeks. Barley came
+first, wheat followed, the oats came last of all. No sooner was the
+final swath cut than the barley was ready to be put under cover, and
+"stacking," a new and less exacting phase of the harvest, began.
+
+This job required less men than reaping, hence a part of our hands were
+paid off, only the more responsible ones were retained. The rush, the
+strain of the reaping gave place to a leisurely, steady, day-by-day
+garnering of the thoroughly seasoned shocks into great conical piles,
+four in a place in the midst of the stubble, which was already growing
+green with swiftly-springing weeds.
+
+A full crew consisted of a stacker, a boy to pass bundles, two drivers
+for the heavy wagon-racks, and a pitcher in the field who lifted the
+sheaves from the shock with a three-tined fork and threw them to the man
+on the load.
+
+At the age of ten I had been taught to "handle bundles" on the stack,
+but now at fourteen I took my father's place as stacker, whilst he
+passed the sheaves and told me how to lay them. This exalted me at the
+same time that it increased my responsibility. It made a man of me--not
+only in my own estimation, but in the eyes of my boy companions to whom
+I discoursed loftily on the value of "bulges" and the advantages of the
+stack over the rick.
+
+No sooner was the stacking ended than the dreaded task of plowing began
+for Burton and John and me. Every morning while our fathers and the
+hired men shouldered their forks and went away to help some neighbor
+thrash--("changing works") we drove our teams into the field, there to
+plod round and round in solitary course. Here I acquired the feeling
+which I afterward put into verse--
+
+    A lonely task it is to plow!
+    All day the black and shining soil
+    Rolls like a ribbon from the mold-board's
+    Glistening curve. All day the horses toil,
+    Battling with savage flies, and strain
+    Their creaking single-trees. All day
+    The crickets peer from wind-blown stacks of grain.
+
+Franklin's job was almost as lonely. He was set to herd the cattle on
+the harvested stubble and keep them out of the corn field. A little
+later, in October, when I was called to take my place as corn-husker, he
+was promoted to the plow. Our only respite during the months of October
+and November was the occasional cold rain which permitted us to read or
+play cards in the kitchen.
+
+Cards! I never look at a certain type of playing card without
+experiencing a return of the wonder and the guilty joy with which I
+bought of Metellus Kirby my first "deck," and slipped it into my pocket.
+There was an alluring oriental imaginative quality in the drawing on the
+face cards. They brought to me vague hints of mad monarchs, desperate
+stakes, and huge sudden rewards. All that I had heard or read of
+Mississippi gamblers came back to make those gaudy bits of pasteboard
+marvellous.
+
+My father did not play cards, hence, although I had no reason to think
+he would forbid them to me, I took a fearsome joy in assuming his bitter
+opposition. For a time my brother and I played in secret, and then one
+day, one cold bleak day as we were seated on the floor of the granary
+playing on an upturned half-bushel measure, shivering with the chill,
+our fingers numb and blue, the door opened and father looked in.
+
+We waited, while his round, eagle-gray eyes took in the situation and it
+seemed a long, terrifying interval, then at last he mildly said, "I
+guess you'd better go in and play by the stove. This isn't very
+comfortable."
+
+Stunned by this unexpected concession, I gathered up the cards, and as I
+took my way to the house, I thought deeply. The meaning of that quiet
+voice, that friendly invitation was not lost on me. The soldier rose to
+grand heights by that single act, and when I showed the cards to mother
+and told her that father had consented to our playing, she looked grave
+but made no objection to our use of the kitchen table. As a matter of
+fact they both soon after joined our game. "If you are going to play,"
+they said, "we'd rather you played right here with us." Thereafter rainy
+days were less dreary, and the evenings shorter.
+
+Everybody played Authors at this time also, and to this day I cannot
+entirely rid myself of the estimations which our pack of cards fixed in
+my mind. _Prue and I_ and _The Blithedale Romance_ were on an equal
+footing, so far as our game went, and Howells, Bret Harte and Dickens
+were all of far-off romantic horizon. Writers were singular, exalted
+beings found only in the East--in splendid cities. They were not folks,
+they were demigods, men and women living aloof and looking down
+benignantly on toiling common creatures like us.
+
+It never entered my mind that anyone I knew could ever by any chance
+meet an author, or even hear one lecture--although it was said that they
+did sometimes come west on altruistic educational journeys and that they
+sometimes reached our county town.
+
+I am told--I do not know that it is true--that I am one of the names on
+a present-day deck of Author cards. If so, I wish I could call in that
+small plow-boy of 1874 and let him play a game with this particular
+pack!
+
+The crops on our farms in those first years were enormous and prices
+were good, and yet the homes of the neighborhood were slow in taking on
+grace or comfort. I don't know why this was so, unless it was that the
+men were continually buying more land and more machinery. Our own
+stables were still straw-roofed sheds, but the trees which we had
+planted had grown swiftly into a grove, and a garden, tended at odd
+moments by all hands, brought small fruits and vegetables in season.
+Although a constantly improving collection of farm machinery lightened
+the burdens of the husbandman, the drudgery of the house-wife's
+dish-washing and cooking did not correspondingly lessen. I fear it
+increased, for with the widening of the fields came the doubling of the
+harvest hands, and my mother continued to do most of the housework
+herself--cooking, sewing, washing, churning, and nursing the sick from
+time to time. No one in trouble ever sent for Isabelle Garland in vain,
+and I have many recollections of neighbors riding up in the night and
+calling for her with agitated voices.
+
+Of course I did not realize, and I am sure my father did not realize,
+the heavy burden, the endless grind of her toil. Harriet helped, of
+course, and Frank and I churned and carried wood and brought water; but
+even with such aid, the round of mother's duties must have been as
+relentless as a tread-mill. Even on Sunday, when we were free for a part
+of the day, she was required to furnish forth three meals, and to help
+Frank and Jessie dress for church.--She sang less and less, and the
+songs we loved were seldom referred to.--If I could only go back for one
+little hour and take her in my arms, and tell her how much I owe her for
+those grinding days!
+
+Meanwhile we were all growing away from our life in the old Wisconsin
+Coulee. We heard from William but seldom, and David, who had bought a
+farm of his own some ten miles to the south of us, came over to see us
+only at long intervals. He still owned his long-barrelled rifle but it
+hung unused on a peg in the kitchen. Swiftly the world of the hunter was
+receding, never to return. Prairie chickens, rabbits, ducks, and other
+small game still abounded but they did not call for the bullet, and
+turkey shoots were events of the receding past. Almost in a year the
+ideals of the country-side changed. David was in truth a survival of a
+more heroic age, a time which he loved to lament with my father who was
+almost as great a lover of the wilderness as he. None of us sang "O'er
+the hills in legions, boys." Our share in the conquest of the west
+seemed complete.
+
+Threshing time, which was becoming each year less of a "bee" and more of
+a job (many of the men were mere hired hands), was made distinctive by
+David who came over from Orchard with his machine--the last time as it
+turned out--and stayed to the end. As I cut bands beside him in the dust
+and thunder of the cylinder I regained something of my boyish worship of
+his strength and skill. The tireless easy swing of his great frame was
+wonderful to me and when, in my weariness, I failed to slash a band he
+smiled and tore the sheaf apart--thus deepening my love for him. I
+looked up at him at such times as a sailor regards his captain on the
+bridge. His handsome immobile bearded face, his air of command, his
+large gestures as he rolled the broad sheaves into the howling maw of
+the machine made of him a chieftain.--The touch of melancholy which even
+then had begun to develop, added to his manly charm.
+
+One day in late September as I was plowing in the field at the back of
+the farm, I encountered a particularly troublesome thicket of weeds and
+vines in the stubble, and decided to burn the way before the coulter. We
+had been doing this ever since the frost had killed the vegetation but
+always on lands after they had been safeguarded by strips of plowing. On
+this particular land no fire had been set for the reason that four large
+stacks of wheat still stood waiting the thresher. In my irritation and
+self-confidence I decided to clear away the matted stubble on the same
+strip though at some distance from the stacks. This seemed safe enough
+at the time for the wind was blowing gently from the opposite direction.
+
+It was a lovely golden day and as I stood watching the friendly flame
+clearing the ground for me, I was filled with satisfaction. Suddenly I
+observed that the line of red was moving steadily against the wind and
+_toward_ the stacks. My satisfaction changed to alarm. The matted weeds
+furnished a thick bed of fuel, and against the progress of the flame I
+had nothing to offer. I could only hope that the thinning stubble would
+permit me to trample it out. I tore at the ground in desperation, hoping
+to make a bare spot which the flame could not leap. I trampled the fire
+with my bare feet. I beat at it with my hat. I screamed for help.--Too
+late I thought of my team and the plow with which I might have drawn a
+furrow around the stacks. The flame touched the high-piled sheaves. It
+ran lightly, beautifully up the sides--and as I stood watching it, I
+thought, "It is all a dream. It can't be true."
+
+But it was. In less than twenty minutes the towering piles had melted
+into four glowing heaps of ashes. Four hundred dollars had gone up in
+that blaze.
+
+Slowly, painfully I hobbled to the plow and drove my team to the house.
+Although badly burned, my mental suffering was so much greater that I
+felt only part of it.--Leaving the horses at the well I hobbled into the
+house to my mother. She, I knew, would sympathize with me and shield me
+from the just wrath of my father who was away, but was due to return in
+an hour or two.
+
+Mother received me in silence, bandaged my feet and put me to bed where
+I lay in shame and terror.
+
+At last I heard father come in. He questioned, mother's voice replied.
+He remained ominously silent. She went on quietly but with an eloquence
+unusual in her. What she said to him I never knew, but when he came up
+the stairs and stood looking down at me his anger had cooled. He merely
+asked me how I felt, uncovered my burned feet, examined them, put the
+sheet back, and went away, without a word either of reproof or
+consolation.
+
+None of us except little Jessie, ever alluded to this tragic matter
+again; she was accustomed to tell my story as she remembered it,--"an
+'nen the moon changed--the fire ran up the stacks and burned 'em all
+down--"
+
+When I think of the myriads of opportunities for committing mistakes of
+this sort, I wonder that we had so few accidents. The truth is our
+captain taught us to think before we acted at all times, and we had
+little of the heedlessness which less experienced children often show.
+We were in effect small soldiers and carried some of the
+responsibilities of soldiers into all that we did.
+
+While still I was hobbling about, suffering from my wounds my uncles
+William and Frank McClintock drove over from Neshonoc bringing with them
+a cloud of strangely-moving revived memories of the hills and woods of
+our old Wisconsin home. I was peculiarly delighted by this visit, for
+while the story of my folly was told, it was not dwelt upon. They soon
+forgot me and fell naturally into discussion of ancient neighbors and
+far-away events.
+
+To me it was like peering back into a dim, dawn-lit world wherein all
+forms were distorted or wondrously aggrandized. William, big,
+black-bearded and smiling, had lost little of his romantic appeal.
+Frank, still the wag, was able to turn hand-springs and somersaults
+almost as well as ever, and the talk which followed formed an absorbing
+review of early days in Wisconsin.
+
+It brought up and defined many of the events of our life in the coulee,
+pictures which were becoming a little vague, a little blurred. Al Randal
+and Ed Green, who were already almost mythical, were spoken of as living
+creatures and thus the far was brought near. Comparisons between the old
+and the new methods of seeding and harvest also gave me a sense of
+change, a perception which troubled me a little, especially as a wistful
+note had crept into the voices of these giants of the middle border.
+They all loved the wilderness too well not to be a little saddened by
+the clearing away of bosky coverts and the drying up of rippling
+streams.
+
+We sent for Uncle David who came over on Sunday to spend a night with
+his brothers and in the argument which followed, I began to sense in him
+a spirit of restlessness, a growing discontent which covered his
+handsome face with a deepening shadow. He disliked being tied down to
+the dull life of the farm, and his horse-power threshing machine no
+longer paid him enough to compensate for the loss of time and care on
+the other phases of his industry. His voice was still glorious and he
+played the violin when strongly urged, though with a sense of
+dissatisfaction.
+
+He and mother and Aunt Deborah sang _Nellie Wildwood_ and _Lily Dale_
+and _Minnie Minturn_ just as they used to do in the coulee, and I forgot
+my disgrace and the pain of my blistered feet in the rapture of that
+exquisite hour of blended melody and memory. The world they represented
+was passing and though I did not fully realize this, I sensed in some
+degree the transitory nature of this reunion. In truth it never came
+again. Never again did these three brothers meet, and when they said
+good-bye to us next morning, I wondered why it was, we must be so widely
+separated from those we loved the best.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+Harriet Goes Away
+
+
+Girls on the Border came to womanhood early. At fifteen my sister
+Harriet considered herself a young lady and began to go out to dances
+with Cyrus and Albert and Frances. She was small, moody and silent, and
+as all her interests became feminine I lost that sense of comradeship
+with which we used to ride after the cattle and I turned back to my
+brother who was growing into a hollow-chested lanky lad--and in our
+little sister Jessie we took increasing interest. She was a joyous
+child, always singing like a canary. SHE was never a "trial."
+
+Though delicate and fair and pretty, she manifested a singular
+indifference to the usual games of girls. Contemptuous of dolls, she
+never played house so far as I know. She took no interest in sewing, or
+cooking, but had a whole yard full of "horses," that is to say, sticks
+of varying sizes and shapes. Each pole had its name and its "stall" and
+she endlessly repeated the chores of leading them to water and feeding
+them hay. She loved to go with me to the field and was never so happy as
+when riding on old Jule.--Dear little sister, I fear I neglected you at
+times, turning away from your sweet face and pleading smile to lose
+myself in some worthless book. I am comforted to remember that I did
+sometimes lift you to the back of a real horse and permit you to ride "a
+round," chattering like a sparrow as we plodded back and forth across
+the field.
+
+Frank cared little for books but he could take a hand at games although
+he was not strong. Burton who at sixteen was almost as tall as his
+father was the last to surrender his saddle to the ash-bin. He often
+rode his high-headed horse past our house on his way to town, and I
+especially recall one day, when as Frank and I were walking to town (one
+fourth of July) Burt came galloping along with five dollars in his
+pocket.--We could not see the five dollars but we did get the full force
+and dignity of his cavalier approach, and his word was sufficient proof
+of the cash he had to spend. As he rode on we, in crushed humility,
+resumed our silent plodding in the dust of his horse's hooves.
+
+His round of labor, like my own, was well established. In spring he
+drove team and drag. In haying he served as stacker. In harvest he bound
+his station. In stacking he pitched bundles. After stacking he plowed or
+went out "changing works" and ended the season's work by husking corn--a
+job that increased in severity from year to year, as the fields grew
+larger. In '74 it lasted well into November. Beginning in the warm and
+golden September we kept at it (off and on) until sleety rains coated
+the ears with ice and the wet soil loaded our boots with huge balls of
+clay and grass--till the snow came whirling by on the wings of the north
+wind and the last flock of belated geese went sprawling sidewise down
+the ragged sky. Grim business this! At times our wet gloves froze on our
+hands.
+
+How primitive all our notions were! Few of the boys owned overcoats and
+the same suit served each of us for summer and winter alike. In lieu of
+ulsters most of us wore long, gay-colored woolen scarfs wound about our
+heads and necks--scarfs which our mothers, sisters or sweethearts had
+knitted for us. Our footwear continued to be boots of the tall cavalry
+model with pointed toes and high heels. Our collars were either
+home-made ginghams or "boughten" ones of paper at fifteen cents per box.
+Some men went so far as to wear "dickies," that is to say, false shirt
+fronts made of paper, but this was considered a silly cheat. No one in
+our neighborhood ever saw a tailor-made suit, and nothing that we wore
+fitted,--our clothes merely enclosed us.
+
+Harriet, like the other women, made her own dresses, assisted by my
+mother, and her best gowns in summer were white muslin tied at the waist
+with ribbons. All the girls dressed in this simple fashion, but as I
+write, recalling the glowing cheeks and shining eyes of Hattie and Agnes
+and Bess, I feel again the thrill of admiration which ran through my
+blood as they came down the aisle at church, or when at dancing parties
+they balanced or "sashayed" in _Honest John_ or _Money Musk_.--To me
+they were perfectly clothed and divinely fair.
+
+The contrast between the McClintocks, my hunter uncles, and Addison
+Garland, my father's brother who came to visit us at about this time was
+strikingly significant even to me. Tall, thoughtful, humorous and of
+frail and bloodless body, "A. Garland" as he signed himself, was of the
+Yankee merchant type. A general store in Wisconsin was slowly making him
+a citizen of substance and his quiet comment brought to me an entirely
+new conception of the middle west and its future. He was a philosopher.
+He peered into the years that were to come and paid little heed to the
+passing glories of the plain. He predicted astounding inventions and
+great cities, and advised my father to go into dairying and diversified
+crops. "This is a natural butter country," said he.
+
+He was an invalid, and it was through him that we first learned of
+graham flour. During his stay (and for some time after) we suffered an
+infliction of sticky "gems" and dark soggy bread. We all resented this
+displacement of our usual salt-rising loaf and delicious saleratus
+biscuits but we ate the hot gems, liberally splashed with butter, just
+as we would have eaten dog-biscuit or hardtack had it been put before
+us.
+
+One of the sayings of my uncle will fix his character in the mind of the
+reader. One day, apropos of some public event which displeased him, he
+said, "Men can be infinitely more foolish in their collective capacity
+than on their own individual account." His quiet utterance of these
+words and especially the phrase "collective capacity" made a deep
+impression on me. The underlying truth of the saying came to me only
+later in my life.
+
+He was full of "_citrus-belt_" enthusiasm and told us that he was about
+to sell out and move to Santa Barbara. He did not urge my father to
+accompany him, and if he had, it would have made no difference. A
+winterless climate and the raising of fruit did not appeal to my
+Commander. He loved the prairie and the raising of wheat and cattle, and
+gave little heed to anything else, but to me Addison's talk of "the
+citrus belt" had the value of a romance, and the occasional Spanish
+phrases which he used afforded me an indefinable delight. It was
+unthinkable that I should ever see an _arroyo_ but I permitted myself to
+dream of it while he talked.
+
+I think he must have encouraged my sister in her growing desire for an
+education, for in the autumn after his visit she entered the Cedar
+Valley Seminary at Osage and her going produced in me a desire to
+accompany her. I said nothing of it at the time, for my father gave but
+reluctant consent to Harriet's plan. A district school education seemed
+to him ample for any farmer's needs.
+
+Many of our social affairs were now connected with "the Grange." During
+these years on the new farm while we were busied with breaking and
+fencing and raising wheat, there had been growing up among the farmers
+of the west a social organization officially known as The Patrons of
+Husbandry. The places of meeting were called "Granges" and very
+naturally the members were at once called "Grangers."
+
+My father was an early and enthusiastic member of the order, and during
+the early seventies its meetings became very important dates on our
+calendar. In winter "oyster suppers," with debates, songs and essays,
+drew us all to the Burr Oak Grove school-house, and each spring, on the
+twelfth of June, the Grange Picnic was a grand "turn-out." It was almost
+as well attended as the circus.
+
+We all looked forward to it for weeks and every young man who owned a
+top-buggy got it out and washed and polished it for the use of his best
+girl, and those who were not so fortunate as to own "a rig" paid high
+tribute to the livery stable of the nearest town. Others, less able or
+less extravagant, doubled teams with a comrade and built a "bowery
+wagon" out of a wagon-box, and with hampers heaped with food rode away
+in state, drawn by a four or six-horse team. It seemed a splendid and
+daring thing to do, and some day I hoped to drive a six-horse bowery
+wagon myself.
+
+The central place of meeting was usually in some grove along the Big
+Cedar to the west and south of us, and early on the appointed day the
+various lodges of our region came together one by one at convenient
+places, each one moving in procession and led by great banners on which
+the women had blazoned the motto of their home lodge. Some of the
+columns had bands and came preceded by far faint strains of music, with
+marshals in red sashes galloping to and fro in fine assumption of
+military command.
+
+It was grand, it was inspiring--to us, to see those long lines of
+carriages winding down the lanes, joining one to another at the cross
+roads till at last all the granges from the northern end of the county
+were united in one mighty column advancing on the picnic ground, where
+orators awaited our approach with calm dignity and high resolve. Nothing
+more picturesque, more delightful, more helpful has ever risen out of
+American rural life. Each of these assemblies was a most grateful relief
+from the sordid loneliness of the farm.
+
+Our winter amusements were also in process of change. We held no more
+singing schools--the "Lyceum" had taken its place. Revival meetings were
+given up, although few of the church folk classed them among the
+amusements. The County Fair on the contrary was becoming each year more
+important as farming diversified. It was even more glorious than the
+Grange Picnic, was indeed second only to the fourth of July, and we
+looked forward to it all through the autumn.
+
+It came late in September and always lasted three days. We all went on
+the second day, (which was considered the best day) and mother, by
+cooking all the afternoon before our outing, provided us a dinner of
+cold chicken and cake and pie which we ate while sitting on the grass
+beside our wagon just off the racetrack while the horses munched hay and
+oats from the box. All around us other families were grouped, picnicking
+in the same fashion, and a cordial interchange of jellies and pies made
+the meal a delightful function. However, we boys never lingered over
+it,--we were afraid of missing something of the program.
+
+Our interest in the races was especially keen, for one of the citizens
+of our town owned a fine little trotting horse called "Huckleberry"
+whose honest friendly striving made him a general favorite. Our survey
+of fat sheep, broad-backed bulls and shining colts was a duty, but to
+cheer Huckleberry at the home stretch was a privilege.
+
+To us from the farm the crowds were the most absorbing show of all. We
+met our chums and their sisters with a curious sense of strangeness, of
+discovery. Our playmates seemed alien somehow--especially the girls in
+their best dresses walking about two and two, impersonal and haughty of
+glance.
+
+Cyrus and Walter were there in their top-buggies with Harriet and Bettie
+but they seemed to be having a dull time, for while they sat holding
+their horses we were dodging about in freedom--now at the contest of
+draft horses, now at the sledge-hammer throwing, now at the candy-booth.
+We were comical figures, with our long trousers, thick gray coats and
+faded hats, but we didn't know it and were happy.
+
+One day as Burton and I were wandering about on the fair grounds we came
+upon a patent medicine cart from which a faker, a handsome fellow with
+long black hair and an immense white hat, was addressing the crowd while
+a young and beautiful girl with a guitar in her lap sat in weary
+relaxation at his feet. A third member of the "troupe," a short and very
+plump man of commonplace type, was handing out bottles. It was "Doctor"
+Lightner, vending his "Magic Oil."
+
+At first I perceived only the doctor whose splendid gray suit and
+spotless linen made the men in the crowd rustic and graceless, but as I
+studied the woman I began to read into her face a sadness, a weariness,
+which appealed to my imagination. Who was she? Why was she there? I had
+never seen a girl with such an expression. She saw no one, was
+interested in nothing before her--and when her master, or husband, spoke
+to her in a low voice, she raised her guitar and joined in the song
+which he had started, all with the same air of weary disgust. Her
+voice, a childishly sweet soprano, mingled with the robust baritone of
+the doctor and the shouting tenor of the fat man, like a thread of
+silver in a skein of brass.
+
+I forgot my dusty clothes, my rough shoes,--I forgot that I was a boy.
+Absorbed and dreaming I listened to these strange new songs and studied
+the singular faces of these alien songsters. Even the shouting tenor had
+a far-away gleam in the yellow light of his cat-like eyes. The leader's
+skill, the woman's grace and the perfect blending of their voices made
+an ineffaceable impression on my sensitive, farm-bred brain.
+
+The songs which they sang were not in themselves of a character to
+warrant this ecstasy in me. One of them ran as follows:
+
+        O Mary had a little lamb,
+        Its fleece was black as jet,
+    In the little old log cabin in the lane;
+        And everywhere that Mary went,
+        The lamb went too, you bet.
+    In the little old log cabin in the lane.
+
+        In the little old log cabin O!
+        The little old log cabin O!
+    The little old log cabin in the lane,
+        They're hangin' men and women now
+        For singing songs like this
+    In the little old log cabin in the lane.
+
+Nevertheless I listened without a smile. It was art to me. It gave me
+something I had never known. The large, white, graceful hand of the
+doctor sweeping the strings, the clear ringing shout of the tenor and
+the chiming, bird-like voice of the girl lent to the absurd words of
+this ballad a singular dignity. They made all other persons and events
+of the day of no account.
+
+In the intervals between the songs the doctor talked of catarrh and its
+cure, and offered his medicines for sale, and in this dull part of the
+program the tenor assisted, but the girl, sinking back in her seat,
+resumed her impersonal and weary air.
+
+That was forty years ago, and I can still sing those songs and imitate
+the whoop of the shouting tenor, but I have never been able to put that
+woman into verse or fiction although I have tried. In a story called
+_Love or the Law_ I once made a laborious attempt to account for her,
+but I did not succeed, and the manuscript remains in the bottom of my
+desk.
+
+No doubt the doctor has gone to his long account and the girl is a gray
+old woman of sixty-five but in this book they shall be forever young,
+forever beautiful, noble with the grace of art. The medicine they
+peddled was of doubtful service, but the songs they sang, the story they
+suggested were of priceless value to us who came from the monotony of
+the farm, and went back to it like bees laden with the pollen of new
+intoxicating blooms.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Sorrowfully we left Huckleberry's unfinished race, reluctantly we
+climbed into the farm wagon, sticky with candy, dusty, tired, some of us
+suffering with sick-headache, and rolled away homeward to milk the cows,
+feed the pigs and bed down the horses.
+
+As I look at a tintype of myself taken at about this time, I can hardly
+detect the physical relationship between that mop-headed, long-lipped
+lad, and the gray-haired man of today. But the coat, the tie, the little
+stick-pin on the lapel of my coat all unite to bring back to me with
+painful stir, the curious debates, the boyish delights, the dawning
+desires which led me to these material expressions of manly pride. There
+is a kind of pathos too, in the memory of the keen pleasure I took in
+that absurd ornament--and yet my joy was genuine, my satisfaction
+complete.
+
+Harriet came home from school each Friday night but we saw little of
+her, for she was always engaged for dances or socials by the neighbors'
+sons, and had only a young lady's interest in her cub brothers. I
+resented this and was openly hostile to her admirers. She seldom rode
+with us to spelling schools or "soshybles." There was always some youth
+with a cutter, or some noisy group in a big bob-sleigh to carry her
+away, and on Monday morning father drove her back to the county town
+with growing pride in her improving manners.
+
+Her course at the Seminary was cut short in early spring by a cough
+which came from a long ride in the keen wind. She was very ill with a
+wasting fever, yet for a time refused to go to bed. She could not resign
+herself to the loss of her school-life.
+
+The lack of room in our house is brought painfully to my mind as I
+recall that she lay for a week or two in a corner of our living room
+with all the noise and bustle of the family going on around her. Her own
+attic chamber was unwarmed (like those of all her girl friends), and so
+she was forced to lie near the kitchen stove.
+
+She grew rapidly worse all through the opening days of April and as we
+were necessarily out in the fields at work, and mother was busied with
+her household affairs, the lonely sufferer was glad to have her bed in
+the living room--and there she lay, her bright eyes following mother at
+her work, growing whiter and whiter until one beautiful, tragic morning
+in early May, my father called me in to say good-bye to her.
+
+She was very weak, but her mind was perfectly clear, and as she kissed
+me farewell with a soft word about being a good boy, I turned away
+blinded with tears and fled to the barnyard, there to hide like a
+wounded animal, appalled by the weight of despair and sorrow which her
+transfigured face had suddenly thrust upon me. All about me the young
+cattle called, the spring sun shone and the gay fowls sang, but they
+could not mitigate my grief, my dismay, my sense of loss. My sister was
+passing from me--that was the agonizing fact which benumbed me. She who
+had been my playmate, my comrade, was about to vanish into air and
+earth!
+
+This was my first close contact with death, and it filled me with awe.
+Human life suddenly seemed fleeting and of a part with the impermanency
+and change of the westward moving Border Line.--Like the wild flowers
+she had gathered, Harriet was now a fragrant memory. Her dust mingled
+with the soil of the little burial ground just beyond the village
+bounds.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My mother's heart was long in recovering from the pain of this loss, but
+at last Jessie's sweet face, which had in it the light of the sky and
+the color of a flower, won back her smiles. The child's acceptance of
+the funeral as a mere incident of her busy little life, in some way
+enabled us all to take up and carry forward the routine of our shadowed
+home.
+
+Those years on the plain, from '71 to '75, held much that was alluring,
+much that was splendid. I did not live an exceptional life in any way.
+My duties and my pleasures were those of the boys around me. In all
+essentials my life was typical of the time and place. My father was
+counted a good and successful farmer. Our neighbors all lived in the
+same restricted fashion as ourselves, in barren little houses of wood or
+stone, owning few books, reading only weekly papers. It was a pure
+democracy wherein my father was a leader and my mother beloved by all
+who knew her. If anybody looked down upon us we didn't know it, and in
+all the social affairs of the township we fully shared.
+
+Nature was our compensation. As I look back upon it, I perceive
+transcendent sunsets, and a mighty sweep of golden grain beneath a sea
+of crimson clouds. The light and song and motion of the prairie return
+to me. I hear again the shrill, myriad-voiced choir of leaping insects
+whose wings flash fire amid the glorified stubble. The wind wanders by,
+lifting my torn hat-rim. The locusts rise in clouds before my weary
+feet. The prairie hen soars out of the unreaped barley and drops into
+the sheltering deeps of the tangled oats, green as emerald. The lone
+quail pipes in the hazel thicket, and far up the road the cow-bell's
+steady clang tells of the homecoming herd.
+
+Even in our hours of toil, and through the sultry skies, the sacred
+light of beauty broke; worn and grimed as we were, we still could fall
+a-dream before the marvel of a golden earth beneath a crimson sky.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+We Move to Town
+
+
+One day, soon after the death of my sister Harriet, my father came home
+from a meeting of the Grange with a message which shook our home with
+the force of an earth-quake. The officers of the order had asked him to
+become the official grain-buyer for the county, and he had agreed to do
+it. "I am to take charge of the new elevator which is just being
+completed in Osage," he said.
+
+The effect of this announcement was far-reaching. First of all it put an
+end not merely to our further pioneering but, (as the plan developed)
+promised to translate us from the farm to a new and shining world, a
+town world where circuses, baseball games and county fairs were events
+of almost daily occurrence. It awed while it delighted us for we felt
+vaguely our father's perturbation.
+
+For the first time since leaving Boston, some thirty years before, Dick
+Garland began to dream of making a living at something less backbreaking
+than tilling the soil. It was to him a most abrupt and startling
+departure from the fixed plan of his life, and I dimly understood even
+then that he came to this decision only after long and troubled
+reflection. Mother as usual sat in silence. If she showed exultation, I
+do not recall the fashion of it.
+
+Father assumed his new duties in June and during all that summer and
+autumn, drove away immediately after breakfast each morning, to the
+elevator some six miles away, leaving me in full charge of the farm and
+its tools. All his orders to the hired men were executed through me. On
+me fell the supervision of their action, always with an eye to his
+general oversight. I never forgot that fact. He possessed the eye of an
+eagle. His uncanny powers of observation kept me terrified. He could
+detect at a glance the slightest blunder or wrong doing in my day's
+activities. Every afternoon, about sunset he came whirling into the
+yard, his team flecked with foam, his big gray eyes flashing from side
+to side, and if any tool was out of place or broken, he discovered it at
+once, and his reproof was never a cause of laughter to me or my brother.
+
+As harvest came on he took command in the field, for most of the harvest
+help that year were rough, hardy wanderers from the south, nomads who
+had followed the line of ripening wheat from Missouri northward, and
+were not the most profitable companions for boys of fifteen. They
+reached our neighborhood in July, arriving like a flight of alien
+unclean birds, and vanished into the north in September as mysteriously
+as they had appeared. A few of them had been soldiers, others were the
+errant sons of the poor farmers and rough mechanics of older States,
+migrating for the adventure of it. One of them gave his name as "Harry
+Lee," others were known by such names as "Big Ed" or "Shorty." Some
+carried valises, others had nothing but small bundles containing a clean
+shirt and a few socks.
+
+They all had the most appalling yet darkly romantic conception of women.
+A "girl" was the most desired thing in the world, a prize to be worked
+for, sought for and enjoyed without remorse. She had no soul. The maid
+who yielded to temptation deserved no pity, no consideration, no aid.
+Her sufferings were amusing, her diseases a joke, her future of no
+account. From these men Burton and I acquired a desolating fund of
+information concerning South Clark Street in Chicago, and the river
+front in St. Louis. Their talk did not allure, it mostly shocked and
+horrified us. We had not known that such cruelty, such baseness was in
+the world and it stood away in such violent opposition to the teaching
+of our fathers and uncles that it did not corrupt us. That man, the
+stronger animal, owed chivalry and care to woman, had been deeply
+grounded in our concept of life, and we shrank from these vile stories
+as from something disloyal to our mothers and sisters.
+
+To those who think of the farm as a sweetly ideal place in which to
+bring up a boy, all this may be disturbing--but the truth is, low-minded
+men are low-minded everywhere, and farm hands are often creatures with
+enormous appetites and small remorse, men on whom the beauty of nature
+has very little effect.
+
+To most of our harvest hands that year Saturday night meant a visit to
+town and a drunken spree, and they did not hesitate to say so in the
+presence of Burton and myself. Some of them did not hesitate to say
+anything in our presence. After a hard week's work we all felt that a
+trip to town was only a fair reward.
+
+Saturday night in town! How it all comes back to me! I am a timid
+visitor in the little frontier village. It is sunset. A whiskey-crazed
+farmhand is walking bare footed up and down the middle of the road
+defying the world.--From a corner of the street I watch with tense
+interest another lithe, pock-marked bully menacing with cat-like action,
+a cowering young farmer in a long linen coat. The crowd jeers at him for
+his cowardice--a burst of shouting is heard. A trampling follows and
+forth from the door of a saloon bulges a throng of drunken, steaming,
+reeling, cursing ruffians followed by brave Jim McCarty, the city
+marshal, with an offender under each hand.--The scene changes to the
+middle of the street. I am one of a throng surrounding a smooth-handed
+faker who is selling prize boxes of soap and giving away dollars.--"Now,
+gentlemen," he says, "if you will hand me a dollar I will give you a
+sample package of soap to examine, afterwards if you don't want the
+soap, return it to me, and I'll return your dollar." He repeats this
+several times, returning the dollars faithfully, then slightly varies
+his invitation by saying, "so that I can return your dollars."
+
+No one appears to observe this significant change, and as he has
+hitherto returned the dollars precisely according to promise, he now
+proceeds to his harvest. Having all his boxes out he abruptly closes the
+lid of his box and calmly remarks, "I said, 'so that I _can_ return your
+dollars,' I didn't say I would.--Gentlemen, I have the dollars and _you_
+have the experience." He drops into his seat and takes up the reins to
+drive away. A tall man who has been standing silently beside the wheel
+of the carriage, snatches the whip from its socket, and lashes the
+swindler across the face. Red streaks appear on his cheek.--The crowd
+surges forward. Up from behind leaps a furious little Scotchman who
+snatches off his right boot and beats the stranger over the head with
+such fury that he falls from his carriage to the ground.--I rejoice in
+his punishment, and admire the tall man who led the assault.--The
+marshal comes, the man is led away, and the crowd smilingly scatters.--
+
+We are on the way home. Only two of my crew are with me. The others are
+roaring from one drinking place to another, having a "good time." The
+air is soothingly clean and sweet after the tumult and the reek of the
+town. Appalled, yet fascinated, I listen to the oft repeated tales of
+just how Jim McCarty sprang into the saloon and cleaned out the brawling
+mob. I feel very young, very defenceless, and very sleepy as I
+listen.--
+
+On Sunday, Burton usually came to visit me or I went over to his house
+and together we rode or walked to service at the Grove school-house. He
+was now the owner of a razor, and I was secretly planning to buy one.
+The question of dress had begun to trouble us both acutely. Our best
+suits were not only made from woolen cloth, they were of blizzard
+weight, and as on week days (in summer) our entire outfit consisted of a
+straw hat, a hickory shirt and a pair of brown denim overalls you may
+imagine what tortures we endured when fully encased in our "Sunday
+best," with starched shirts and paper collars.
+
+No one, so far as I knew, at that time possessed an extra, light-weight
+suit for hot-weather wear, although a long, yellow, linen robe called a
+"duster" was in fashion among the smart dressers. John Gammons, who was
+somewhat of a dandy in matters of toilet, was among the first of my
+circle to purchase one of these very ultra garments, and Burton soon
+followed his lead, and then my own discontent began. I, too, desired a
+duster.
+
+Unfortunately my father did not see me as I saw myself. To him I was
+still a boy and subject to his will in matters of dress as in other
+affairs, and the notion that I needed a linen coat was absurd. "If you
+are too warm, take your coat off," he said, and I not only went without
+the duster, but suffered the shame of appearing in a flat-crown black
+hat while Burton and all the other fellows were wearing light brown
+ones, of a conical shape.
+
+I was furious. After a period of bitter brooding I rebelled, and took
+the matter up with the Commander-in-Chief. I argued, "As I am not only
+doing a man's work on a boy's pay but actually superintending the stock
+and tools, I am entitled to certain individual rights in the choice of
+a hat."
+
+The soldier listened in silence but his glance was stern. When I had
+ended he said, "You'll wear the hat I provide."
+
+For the first time in my life I defied him. "I will not," I said. "And
+you can't make me."
+
+He seized me by the arm and for a moment we faced each other in silent
+clash of wills. I was desperate now. "Don't you strike me," I warned.
+"You can't do that any more."
+
+His face changed. His eyes softened. He perceived in my attitude
+something new, something unconquerable. He dropped my arm and turned
+away. After a silent struggle with himself he took two dollars from his
+pocket and extended them to me. "Get your own hat," he said, and walked
+away.
+
+This victory forms the most important event of my fifteenth year. Indeed
+the chief's recession gave me a greater shock than any punishment could
+have done. Having forced him to admit the claims of my growing
+personality as well as the value of my services, I retired in a panic.
+The fact that he, the inexorable old soldier, had surrendered to my
+furious demands awed me, making me very careful not to go too fast or
+too far in my assumption of the privileges of manhood.
+
+Another of the milestones on my road to manhood was my first employment
+of the town barber. Up to this time my hair had been trimmed by mother
+or mangled by one of the hired men,--whereas both John and Burton
+enjoyed regular hair-cuts and came to Sunday school with the backs of
+their necks neatly shaved. I wanted to look like that, and so at last,
+shortly after my victory concerning the hat, I plucked up courage to ask
+my father for a quarter and got it! With my money tightly clutched in
+my hand I timidly entered the Tonsorial Parlor of Ed Mills and took my
+seat in his marvellous chair--thus touching another high point on the
+road to self-respecting manhood. My pleasure, however, was mixed with
+ignoble childish terror, for not only did the barber seem determined to
+force upon me a shampoo (which was ten cents extra), but I was in
+unremitting fear lest I should lose my quarter, the only one I
+possessed, and find myself accused as a swindler.
+
+Nevertheless I came safely away, a neater, older and graver person,
+walking with a manlier stride, and when I confronted my classmates at
+the Grove school-house on Sunday, I gave evidence of an accession of
+self-confidence. The fact that my back hair was now in fashionable order
+was of greatest comfort to me. If only my trousers had not continued
+their distressing habit of climbing up my boot-tops I would have been
+almost at ease but every time I rose from my seat it became necessary to
+make each instep smooth the leg of the other pantaloon, and even then
+they kept their shameful wrinkles, and a knowledge of my exposed ankles
+humbled me.
+
+Burton, although better dressed than I, was quite as confused and
+wordless in the presence of girls, but John Gammons was not only
+confident, he was irritatingly facile. Furthermore, as son of the
+director of the Sunday school he had almost too much distinction. I
+bitterly resented his linen collars, his neat suit and his smiling
+assurance, for while we professed to despise everything connected with
+church, we were keenly aware of the bright eyes of Bettie and noted that
+they rested often on John's curly head. He could sing, too, and
+sometimes, with sublime audacity, held the hymn book with her.
+
+The sweetness of those girlish faces held us captive through many a long
+sermon, but there were times when not even their beauty availed. Three
+or four of us occasionally slipped away into the glorious forest to pick
+berries or nuts, or to loaf in the odorous shade of the elms along the
+creek. The cool aisles of the oaks seemed more sweetly sanctifying
+(after a week of sun-smit soil on the open plain) than the crowded
+little church with its droning preacher, and there was something
+mystical in the melody of the little brook and in the flecking of light
+and shade across the silent woodland path.
+
+To drink of the little ice-cold spring beneath the maple tree in
+Frazer's pasture was almost as delight-giving as the plate of ice-cream
+which we sometimes permitted ourselves to buy in the village on
+Saturday, and often we wandered on and on, till the sinking sun warned
+us of duties at home and sent us hurrying to the open.
+
+It was always hard to go back to the farm after one of these days of
+leisure--back to greasy overalls and milk-bespattered boots, back to the
+society of fly-bedevilled cows and steaming, salty horses, back to the
+curry-comb and swill bucket,--but it was particularly hard during this
+our last summer on the prairie. But we did it with a feeling that we
+were nearing the end of it. "Next year we'll be living in town!" I said
+to the boys exultantly. "No more cow-milking for me!"
+
+I never rebelled at hard, clean work, like haying or harvest, but the
+slavery of being nurse to calves and scrub-boy to horses cankered my
+spirits more and more, and the thought of living in town filled me with
+an incredulous anticipatory delight. A life of leisure, of intellectual
+activity seemed about to open up to me, and I met my chums in a
+restrained exaltation which must have been trying to their souls. "I'm
+sorry to leave you," I jeered, "but so it goes. Some are chosen, others
+are left. Some rise to glory, others remain plodders--" such was my airy
+attitude. I wonder that they did not roll me in the dust.
+
+Though my own joy and that of my brother was keen and outspoken, I have
+no recollection that my mother uttered a single word of pleasure. She
+must have been as deeply excited, and as pleased as we, for it meant
+more to her than to us, it meant escape from the drudgery of the farm,
+from the pain of early rising, and yet I cannot be sure of her feeling.
+So far as she knew this move was final. Her life as a farmer's wife was
+about to end after twenty years of early rising and never ending labor,
+and I think she must have palpitated with joy of her approaching freedom
+from it all.
+
+As we were not to move till the following March, and as winter came on
+we went to school as usual in the bleak little shack at the corner of
+our farm and took part in all the neighborhood festivals. I have
+beautiful memories of trotting away across the plain to spelling schools
+and "Lyceums" through the sparkling winter nights with Franklin by my
+side, while the low-hung sky blazed with stars, and great white owls
+went flapping silently away before us.--I am riding in a long sleigh to
+the north beneath a wondrous moon to witness a performance of _Lord
+Dundreary_ at the Barker school-house.--I am a neglected onlooker at a
+Christmas tree at Burr Oak. I am spelled down at the Shehan school--and
+through all these scenes runs a belief that I am leaving the district
+never to return to it, a conviction which lends to every experience a
+peculiar poignancy of appeal.
+
+Though but a shaggy colt in those days, I acknowledged a keen longing to
+join in the parties and dances of the grown-up boys and girls. I was not
+content to be merely the unnoticed cub in the corner. A place in the
+family bob-sled no longer satisfied me, and when at the "sociable" I
+stood in the corner with tousled hair and clumsy ill-fitting garments I
+was in my desire, a confident, graceful squire of dames.
+
+The dancing was a revelation to me of the beauty and grace latent in the
+awkward girls and hulking men of the farms. It amazed and delighted me
+to see how gloriously Madeleine White swayed and tip-toed through the
+figures of the "Cotillion," and the sweet aloofness of Agnes Farwell's
+face filled me with worship. I envied Edwin Blackler his supple grace,
+his fine sense of rhythm, and especially the calm audacity of his manner
+with his partners. Bill, Joe, all the great lunking farm hands seemed
+somehow uplifted, carried out of their everyday selves, ennobled by some
+deep-seated emotion, and I was eager for a chance to show that I, too,
+could balance and bow and pay court to women, but--alas, I never did, I
+kept to my corner even though Stelle Gilbert came to drag me out.
+
+Occasionally a half-dozen of these audacious young people would turn a
+church social or donation party into a dance, much to the scandal of the
+deacons. I recall one such performance which ended most dramatically. It
+was a "shower" for the minister whose salary was too small to be even an
+honorarium, and the place of meeting was at the Durrells', two
+well-to-do farmers, brothers who lived on opposite sides of the road
+just south of the Grove school-house.
+
+Mother put up a basket of food, father cast a quarter of beef into the
+back-part of the sleigh, and we were off early of a cold winter night in
+order to be on hand for the supper. My brother and I were mere
+passengers on the straw behind, along with the slab of beef, but we gave
+no outward sign of discontent. It was a clear, keen, marvellous
+twilight, with the stars coming out over the woodlands to the east. On
+every road the sound of bells and the voices of happy young people came
+to our ears. Occasionally some fellow with a fast horse and a gay cutter
+came slashing up behind us and called out "Clear the track!" Father gave
+the road, and the youth and his best girl went whirling by with a gay
+word of thanks. Watch-dogs guarding the Davis farm-house, barked in
+savage warning as we passed and mother said, "Everybody's gone. I hope
+we won't be late."
+
+We were, indeed, a little behind the others for when we stumbled into
+the Ellis Durrell house we found a crowd of merry folks clustered about
+the kitchen stove. Mrs. Ellis flattered me by saying, "The young people
+are expecting you over at Joe's." Here she laughed, "I'm afraid they are
+going to dance."
+
+As soon as I was sufficiently thawed out I went across the road to the
+other house which gave forth the sound of singing and the rhythmic tread
+of dancing feet. It was filled to overflowing with the youth of the
+neighborhood, and Agnes Farwell, Joe's niece, the queenliest of them
+all, was leading the dance, her dark face aglow, her deep brown eyes
+alight.
+
+The dance was "The Weevilly Wheat" and Ed Blackler was her partner.
+Against the wall stood Marsh Belford, a tall, crude, fierce young savage
+with eyes fixed on Agnes. He was one of her suitors and mad with
+jealousy of Blackler to whom she was said to be engaged. He was a
+singular youth, at once bashful and baleful. He could not dance, and for
+that reason keenly resented Ed's supple grace and easy manners with the
+girls.
+
+Crossing to where Burton stood, I heard Belford say as he replied to
+some remark by his companions, "I'll roll him one o' these days." He
+laughed in a constrained way, and that his mood was dangerous was
+evident. In deep excitement Burton and I awaited the outcome.
+
+The dancing was of the harmless "donation" sort. As musical instruments
+were forbidden, the rhythm was furnished by a song in which we all
+joined with clapping hands.
+
+    Come hither, my love, and trip together
+    In the morning early,
+    Give to you the parting hand
+    Although I love you dearly.
+    I won't have none of your weevilly wheat
+    I won't have none of your barley,
+    I'll have some flour
+    In half an hour
+    To bake a cake for Charley.--
+    Oh, Charley, he is a fine young man,
+    Charley he is a dandy,
+    Charley he is a fine young man
+    For he buys the girls some candy.
+
+The figures were like those in the old time "Money Musk" and as Agnes
+bowed and swung and gave hands down the line I thought her the loveliest
+creature in the world, and so did Marsh, only that which gladdened me,
+maddened him. I acknowledged Edwin's superior claim,--Marsh did not.
+
+Burton, who understood the situation, drew me aside and said, "Marsh has
+been drinking. There's going to be war."
+
+As soon as the song ceased and the dancers paused, Marsh, white with
+resolution, went up to Agnes, and said something to her. She smiled, but
+shook her head and turned away. Marsh came back to where his brother Joe
+was standing and his face was tense with fury. "I'll make her wish she
+hadn't," he muttered.
+
+Edwin, as floor manager, now called out a new "set" and as the dancers
+began to "form on," Joe Belford hunched his brother. "Go after him now,"
+he said. With deadly slowness of action, Marsh sauntered up to Blackler
+and said something in a low voice.
+
+"You're a liar!" retorted Edwin sharply.
+
+Belford struck out with a swing of his open hand, and a moment later
+they were rolling on the floor in a deadly grapple. The girls screamed
+and fled, but the boys formed a joyous ring around the contestants and
+cheered them on to keener strife while Joe Belford, tearing off his
+coat, stood above his brother, warning others to keep out of it. "This
+is to be a fair fight," he said. "The best man wins!"
+
+He was a redoubtable warrior and the ring widened. No one thought of
+interfering, in fact we were all delighted by this sudden outbreak of
+the heroic spirit.
+
+Ed threw off his antagonist and rose, bleeding but undaunted. "You
+devil," he said, "I'll smash your face."
+
+Marsh again struck him a staggering blow, and they were facing each
+other in watchful fury as Agnes forced her way through the crowd and,
+laying her hand on Belford's arm, calmly said, "Marsh Belford, what are
+you doing?"
+
+Her dignity, her beauty, her air of command, awed the bully and silenced
+every voice in the room. She was our hostess and as such assumed the
+right to enforce decorum. Fixing her glance upon Joe whom she recognized
+as the chief disturber, she said, "You'd better go home. This is no
+place for either you or Marsh."
+
+Sobered, shamed, the Belfords fell back and slipped out while Agnes
+turned to Edwin and wiped the blood from his face with self-contained
+tenderness.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This date may be taken as fairly ending my boyhood, for I was rapidly
+taking on the manners of men. True, I did not smoke or chew tobacco and
+I was not greatly given to profanity, but I was able to shoulder a two
+bushel sack of wheat and could hold my own with most of the harvesters.
+Although short and heavy, I was deft with my hands, as one or two of
+the neighborhood bullies had reason to know and in many ways I was
+counted a man.
+
+I read during this year nearly one hundred dime novels, little
+paper-bound volumes filled with stories of Indians and wild horsemen and
+dukes and duchesses and men in iron masks, and sewing girls who turned
+out to be daughters of nobility, and marvellous detectives who bore
+charmed lives and always trapped the villains at the end of the story--
+
+Of all these tales, those of the border naturally had most allurement.
+There was the _Quaker Sleuth_, for instance, and _Mad Matt the Trailer_,
+and _Buckskin Joe_ who rode disdainfully alone (like Lochinvar),
+rescuing maidens from treacherous Apaches, cutting long rows of death
+notches on the stock of his carbine. One of these narratives contained a
+phantom troop of skeleton horsemen, a grisly squadron, which came like
+an icy wind out of the darkness, striking terror to the hearts of the
+renegades and savages, only to vanish with clatter of bones, and click
+of hoofs.
+
+In addition to these delight-giving volumes, I traded stock with other
+boys of the neighborhood. From Jack Sheet I derived a bundle of
+_Saturday Nights_ in exchange for my _New York Weeklys_ and from one of
+our harvest hands, a near-sighted old German, I borrowed some
+twenty-five or thirty numbers of _The Sea Side Library_. These also cost
+a dime when new, but you could return them and get a nickel in credit
+for another,--provided your own was in good condition.
+
+It is a question whether the reading of all this exciting fiction had an
+ill effect on my mind or not. Apparently it had very little effect of
+any sort other than to make the borderland a great deal more exciting
+than the farm, and yet so far as I can discover, I had no keen desire to
+go West and fight Indians and I showed no disposition to rob or murder
+in the manner of my heroes. I devoured _Jack Harkaway_ and _The Quaker
+Sleuth_ precisely as I played ball--to pass the time and because I
+enjoyed the game.
+
+Deacon Garland was highly indignant with my father for permitting such
+reading, and argued against it furiously, but no one paid much attention
+to his protests--especially after we caught the old gentleman sitting
+with a very lurid example of "The Damnable Lies" open in his hand. "I
+was only looking into it to see how bad it was," he explained.
+
+Father was so tickled at the old man's downfall that he said, "Stick to
+it till you find how it turns out."
+
+Grandsire, we all perceived, was human after all. I think we liked him
+rather better after this sign of weakness.
+
+It would not be fair to say that we read nothing else but these
+easy-going tales. As a matter of fact, I read everything within reach,
+even the copy of _Paradise Lost_ which my mother presented to me on my
+fifteenth birthday. Milton I admit was hard work, but I got considerable
+joy out of his cursing passages. The battle scenes also interested me
+and I went about spouting the extraordinary harangues of Satan with such
+vigor that my team one day took fright of me, and ran away with the
+plow, leaving an erratic furrow to be explained. However, my father was
+glad to see me taking on the voice of the orator.
+
+The five years of life on this farm had brought swift changes into my
+world. Nearly all the open land had been fenced and plowed, and all the
+cattle and horses had been brought into pasture, and around most of the
+buildings, groves of maples were beginning to make the homesteads a
+little less barren and ugly. And yet with all these growing signs of
+prosperity I realized that something sweet and splendid was dying out of
+the prairie. The whistling pigeons, the wailing plover, the migrating
+ducks and geese, the soaring cranes, the shadowy wolves, the wary foxes,
+all the untamed things were passing, vanishing with the blue-joint
+grass, the dainty wild rose and the tiger-lily's flaming torch.
+Settlement was complete.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+A Taste of Village Life
+
+
+The change from farm to village life, though delightful, was not so
+complete as we had anticipated, for we not only carried with us several
+cows and a span of horses, but the house which we had rented stood at
+the edge of town and possessed a large plot; therefore we not only
+continued to milk cows and curry horses, but set to work at once
+planting potatoes and other vegetables almost as if still upon the farm.
+The soil had been poorly cultivated for several years, and the weeds
+sprang up like dragons' teeth. Work, it seemed, was not to be escaped
+even in the city.
+
+Though a little resentful of this labor and somewhat disappointed in our
+dwelling, we were vastly excited by certain phases of our new
+surroundings. To be within a few minutes' walk of the postoffice, and to
+be able to go to the store at any moment, were conditions quite as
+satisfactory as we had any right to expect. Also we slept later, for my
+father was less disposed to get us out of bed at dawn and this in itself
+was an enormous gain, especially to my mother.
+
+Osage, a small town, hardly more than a village, was situated on the
+edge of a belt of hardwood timber through which the Cedar River ran, and
+was quite commonplace to most people but to me it was both mysterious
+and dangerous, for it was the home of an alien tribe, hostile and
+pitiless--"The Town Boys."
+
+Up to this time I had both hated and feared them, knowing that they
+hated and despised me, and now, suddenly I was thrust among them and put
+on my own defenses. For a few weeks I felt like a young rooster in a
+strange barn-yard,--knowing that I would be called upon to prove my
+quality. In fact it took but a week or two to establish my place in the
+tribe for one of the leaders of the gang was Mitchell Scott, a powerful
+lad of about my own age, and to his friendship I owe a large part of my
+freedom from persecution.
+
+Uncle David came to see us several times during the spring and his talk
+was all about "going west." He was restless under the conditions of his
+life on a farm. I don't know why this was so, but a growing bitterness
+clouded his voice. Once I heard him say, "I don't know what use I am in
+the world. I am a failure." This was the first note of doubt, of
+discouragement that I had heard from any member of my family and it made
+a deep impression on me. Disillusionment had begun.
+
+During the early part of the summer my brother and I worked in the
+garden with frequent days off for fishing, swimming and berrying, and we
+were entirely content with life. No doubts assailed us. We swam in the
+pond at Rice's Mill and we cast our hooks in the sunny ripples below it.
+We saw the circus come to town and go into camp on a vacant lot, and we
+attended every movement of it with a delicious sense of leisure. We
+could go at night with no long ride to take after it was over.--The
+fourth of July came to seek us this year and we had but to step across
+the way to see a ball-game. We were at last in the center of our world.
+
+In June my father called me to help in the elevator and this turned out
+to be a most informing experience. "The Street," as it was called, was
+merely a wagon road which ran along in front of a row of wheat
+ware-houses of various shapes and sizes, from which the buyers emerged
+to meet the farmers as they drove into town. Two or three or more of the
+men would clamber upon the load, open the sacks, sample the grain and
+bid for it. If one man wanted the load badly, or if he chanced to be in
+a bad temper, the farmer was the gainer. Hence very few of them, even
+the members of the Grange, were content to drive up to my father's
+elevator and take the honest market price. They were all hoping to get a
+little more than the market price.
+
+This vexed and embittered my father who often spoke of it to me. "It
+only shows," he said, "how hard it will be to work out any reform among
+the farmers. They will never stand together. These other buyers will
+force me off the market and then there will be no one here to represent
+the farmers' interest."
+
+These merchants interested me greatly. Humorous, self-contained,
+remorseless in trade, they were most delightful companions when off
+duty. They liked my father in his private capacity, but as a factor of
+the Grange he was an enemy. Their kind was new to me and I loved to
+linger about and listen to their banter when there was nothing else to
+do.
+
+One of them by reason of his tailor-made suit and a large ring on his
+little finger, was especially attractive to me. He was a handsome man of
+a sinister type, and I regarded his expressionless face as that of a
+gambler. I didn't know that he was a poker player but it amused me to
+think so. Another buyer was a choleric Cornishman whom the other men
+sometimes goaded into paying five or six cents more than the market
+admitted, by shrewdly playing on his hot temper. A third was a tall
+gaunt old man of New England type, obstinate, honest, but of sanguine
+temperament. He was always on the bull side of the market and a loud
+debater.--The fourth, a quiet little man of smooth address, acted as
+peacemaker.
+
+Among these men my father moved as an equal, notwithstanding the fact of
+his country training and prejudices, and it was through the man Morley
+that we got our first outlook upon the bleak world of Agnosticism, for
+during the summer a series of lectures by Robert Ingersoll was reported
+in one of the Chicago papers and the West rang with the controversy.
+
+On Monday as soon as the paper came to town it was the habit of the
+grain-buyers to gather at their little central office, and while Morley,
+the man with the seal ring, read the lecture aloud, the others listened
+and commented on the heresies. Not all were sympathizers with the great
+iconoclast, and the arguments which followed were often heated and
+sometimes fiercely personal.
+
+After they had quite finished with the paper, I sometimes secured it for
+myself, and hurrying back to my office in the elevator pored over it
+with intense zeal. Undoubtedly my father as well as I was profoundly
+influenced by "The Mistakes of Moses." The faith in which we had been
+reared had already grown dim, and under the light of Ingersoll's
+remorseless humor most of our superstitions vanished. I do not think my
+father's essential Christianity was in any degree diminished, he merely
+lost his respect for certain outworn traditions and empty creeds.
+
+My work consisted in receiving the grain and keeping the elevator going
+and as I weighed the sacks, made out checks for the payment and kept the
+books--in all ways taking a man's place,--I lost all sense of being a
+boy.
+
+The motive power of our hoisting machinery was a blind horse, a handsome
+fellow weighing some fifteen hundred pounds, and it was not long before
+he filled a large space in my thoughts. There was something appealing
+in his sightless eyes, and I never watched him (as he patiently went his
+rounds in the dusty shed) without pity. He had a habit of kicking the
+wall with his right hind foot at a certain precise point as he circled,
+and a deep hollow in the sill attested his accuracy. He seemed to do
+this purposely--to keep count, as I imagined, of his dreary circling
+through sunless days.
+
+A part of my duty was to watch the fanning mill (in the high cupola) in
+order that the sieves should not clog. Three flights of stairs led to
+the mill and these had to be mounted many times each day. I always ran
+up the steps when the mill required my attention, but in coming down I
+usually swung from beam to beam, dropping from footway to footway like a
+monkey from a tall tree. My mother in seeing me do this called out in
+terror, but I assured her that there was not the slightest danger--and
+this was true, for I was both sure-footed and sure-handed in those days.
+
+This was a golden summer for us all. My mother found time to read. My
+father enjoyed companionship with the leading citizens of the town,
+while Franklin, as first assistant in a candy store, professed himself
+to be entirely content. My own holidays were spent in fishing or in
+roving the woods with Mitchell and George, but on Sundays the entire
+family dressed for church as for a solemn social function, fully alive
+to the dignity of Banker Brush, and the grandeur of Congressman Deering
+who came to service regularly--but on foot, so intense was the spirit of
+democracy among us.
+
+Theoretically there were no social distinctions in Osage, but after all
+a large house and a two seated carriage counted, and my mother's
+visitors were never from the few pretentious homes of the town but from
+the farms. However, I do not think she worried over her social position
+and I know she welcomed callers from Dry Run and Burr Oak with cordial
+hospitality. She was never envious or bitter.
+
+In spite of my busy life, I read more than ever before, and everything I
+saw or heard made a deep and lasting record on my mind. I recall with a
+sense of gratitude a sermon by the preacher in the Methodist Church
+which profoundly educated me. It was the first time I had ever heard the
+power of art and the value of its mission to man insisted upon. What was
+right and what was wrong had been pointed out to me, but things of
+beauty were seldom mentioned.
+
+With most eloquent gestures, with a face glowing with enthusiasm, the
+young orator enumerated the beautiful phases of nature. He painted the
+starry sky, the sunset clouds, and the purple hills in words of
+prismatic hue and his rapturous eloquence held us rigid. "We have been
+taught," he said in effect, "that beauty is a snare of the evil one;
+that it is a lure to destroy, but I assert that God desires loveliness
+and hates ugliness. He loves the shimmering of dawn, the silver light on
+the lake and the purple and snow of every summer cloud. He honors bright
+colors, for has he not set the rainbow in the heavens and made water to
+reflect the moon? He prefers joy and pleasure to hate and despair. He is
+not a God of pain, of darkness and ugliness, he is a God of beauty, of
+delight, of consolation."
+
+In some such strain he continued, and as his voice rose in fervent chant
+and his words throbbed with poetry, the sunlight falling through the
+window-pane gave out a more intense radiance, and over the faces of the
+girls, a more entrancing color fell. He opened my eyes to a new world,
+the world of art.
+
+I recognized in this man not only a moving orator but a scholar and I
+went out from that little church vaguely resolved to be a student also,
+a student of the beautiful. My father was almost equally moved and we
+all went again and again to hear our young evangel speak but never again
+did he touch my heart. That one discourse was his contribution to my
+education and I am grateful to him for it. In after life I had the
+pleasure of telling him how much he had suggested to me in that sermon.
+
+There was much to allure a farmer boy in the decorum of well-dressed men
+and the grace of daintily clad women as well as in the music and the dim
+interior of the church (which seemed to me of great dignity and charm)
+and I usually went both morning and evening to watch the regal daughters
+of the county aristocracy go up the aisle. I even joined a Sunday school
+class because charming Miss Culver was the teacher. Outwardly a stocky,
+ungraceful youth, I was inwardly a bold squire of romance, needing only
+a steed and a shield to fight for my lady love. No one could be more
+essentially romantic than I was at this time--but fortunately no one
+knew it!
+
+Mingling as I did with young people who had been students at the
+Seminary, I naturally developed a new ambition. I decided to enter for
+the autumn term, and to that end gained from my father a leave of
+absence during August and hired myself out to bind grain in the harvest
+field. I demanded full wages and when one blazing hot day I rode on a
+shining new Marsh harvester into a field of wheat just south of the Fair
+Ground, I felt myself a man, and entering upon a course which put me
+nearer the clothing and the education I desired.
+
+Binding on a harvester was desperately hard work for a sixteen-year-old
+boy for it called for endurance of heat and hunger as well as for
+unusual celerity and precision of action. But as I considered myself
+full-grown physically, I could not allow myself a word of complaint. I
+kept my place beside my partner hour after hour, taking care of my half
+of ten acres of grain each day. My fingers, raw and bleeding with the
+briars and smarting with the rust on the grain, were a torture but I
+persisted to the end of harvest. In this way I earned enough money to
+buy myself a Sunday suit, some new boots and the necessary books for the
+seminary term which began in September.
+
+Up to this time I had never owned an overcoat nor a suit that fitted me.
+My shirts had always been made by my mother and had no real cuffs. I now
+purchased two boxes of paper cuffs and a real necktie. My intense
+satisfaction in these garments made mother smile with pleasure and
+understanding humor.
+
+In spite of my store suit and my high-heeled calf-skin boots I felt very
+humble as I left our lowly roof that first day and started for the
+chapel. To me the brick building standing in the center of its ample
+yard was as imposing as I imagine the Harper Memorial Library must be to
+the youngster of today as he enters the University of Chicago.
+
+To enter the chapel meant running the gauntlet of a hundred citified
+young men and women, fairly entitled to laugh at a clod-jumper like
+myself, and I would have balked completely had not David Pointer, a
+neighbor's son, volunteered to lead the way. Gratefully I accepted his
+offer, and so passed for the first time into the little hall which came
+to mean so much to me in after years.
+
+It was a large room swarming with merry young people and the Corinthian
+columns painted on the walls, the pipe organ, the stately professors on
+the platform, the self-confident choir, were all of such majesty that I
+was reduced to hare-like humility. What right had I to share in this
+splendor? Sliding hurriedly into a seat I took refuge in the obscurity
+which my youth and short stature guaranteed to me.
+
+Soon Professor Bush, the principal of the school, gentle, blue-eyed,
+white-haired, with a sweet and mellow voice, rose to greet the old
+pupils and welcome the new ones, and his manner so won my confidence
+that at the close of the service I went to him and told him who I was.
+Fortunately he remembered my sister Harriet, and politely said, "I am
+glad to see you, Hamlin," and from that moment I considered him a
+friend, and an almost infallible guide.
+
+The school was in truth a very primitive institution, hardly more than a
+high school, but it served its purpose. It gave farmers' boys like
+myself the opportunity of meeting those who were older, finer, more
+learned than they, and every day was to me like turning a fresh and
+delightful page in a story book, not merely because it brought new
+friends, new experiences, but because it symbolized freedom from the hay
+fork and the hoe. Learning was easy for me. In all but mathematics I
+kept among the highest of my class without much effort, but it was in
+the "Friday Exercises" that I earliest distinguished myself.
+
+It was the custom at the close of every week's work to bring a section
+of the pupils upon the platform as essayists or orators, and these
+"exercises" formed the most interesting and the most passionately
+dreaded feature of the entire school. No pupil who took part in it ever
+forgot his first appearance. It was at once a pillory and a burning. It
+called for self-possession, memory, grace of gesture and a voice!
+
+My case is typical. For three or four days before my first ordeal, I
+could not eat. A mysterious uneasiness developed in my solar plexus, a
+pain which never left me--except possibly in the morning before I had
+time to think. Day by day I drilled and drilled and drilled, out in the
+fields at the edge of the town or at home when mother was away, in the
+barn while milking--at every opportunity I went through my selection
+with most impassioned voice and lofty gestures, sustained by the legends
+of Webster and Demosthenes, resolved upon a blazing victory. I did
+everything but mumble a smooth pebble--realizing that most of the boys
+in my section were going through precisely the same struggle. Each of us
+knew exactly how the others felt, and yet I cannot say that we displayed
+acute sympathy one with another; on the contrary, those in the free
+section considered the antics of the suffering section a very amusing
+spectacle and we were continually being "joshed" about our lack of
+appetite.
+
+The test was, in truth, rigorous. To ask a bashful boy or shy girl fresh
+from the kitchen to walk out upon a platform and face that crowd of
+mocking students was a kind of torture. No desk was permitted. Each
+victim stood bleakly exposed to the pitiless gaze of three hundred eyes,
+and as most of us were poorly dressed, in coats that never fitted and
+trousers that climbed our boot-tops, we suffered the miseries of the
+damned. The girls wore gowns which they themselves had made, and were,
+of course, equally self-conscious. The knowledge that their sleeves did
+not fit was of more concern to them than the thought of breaking
+down--but the fear of forgetting their lines also contributed to their
+dread and terror.
+
+While the names which preceded mine were called off that first
+afternoon, I grew colder and colder till at last I shook with a nervous
+chill, and when, in his smooth, pleasant tenor, Prof. Bush called out
+"Hamlin Garland" I rose in my seat with a spring like Jack from his box.
+My limbs were numb, so numb that I could scarcely feel the floor beneath
+my feet and the windows were only faint gray glares of light. My head
+oscillated like a toy balloon, seemed indeed to be floating in the air,
+and my heart was pounding like a drum.
+
+However, I had pondered upon this scene so long and had figured my
+course so exactly that I made all the turns with moderate degree of
+grace and succeeded finally in facing my audience without falling up the
+steps (as several others had done) and so looked down upon my fellows
+like Tennyson's eagle on the sea. In that instant a singular calm fell
+over me, I became strangely master of myself. From somewhere above me a
+new and amazing power fell upon me and in that instant I perceived on
+the faces of my classmates a certain expression of surprise and serious
+respect. My subconscious oratorical self had taken charge.
+
+I do not at present recall what my recitation was, but it was probably
+_Catiline's Defense_ or some other of the turgid declamatory pieces of
+classic literature with which all our readers were filled. It was
+bombastic stuff, but my blind, boyish belief in it gave it dignity. As I
+went on my voice cleared. The window sashes regained their outlines. I
+saw every form before me, and the look of surprise and pleasure on the
+smiling face of my principal exalted me.
+
+Closing amid hearty applause, I stepped down with a feeling that I had
+won a place among the orators of the school, a belief which did no harm
+to others and gave me a good deal of satisfaction. As I had neither
+money nor clothes, and was not of figure to win admiration, why should I
+not express the pride I felt in my power to move an audience? Besides I
+was only sixteen!
+
+The principal spoke to me afterwards, both praising and criticising my
+method. The praise I accepted, the criticism I naturally resented. I
+realized some of my faults of course, but I was not ready to have even
+Prof. Bush tell me of them. I hated "elocution" drill in class, I
+relied on "inspiration." I believed that orators were born, not made.
+
+There was one other speaker in my section, a little girl, considerably
+younger than myself, who had the mysterious power of the born actress,
+and I recognized this quality in her at once. I perceived that she spoke
+from a deep-seated, emotional, Celtic impulse. Hardly more than a child
+in years, she was easily the most dramatic reader in the school. She
+too, loved tragic prose and passionate, sorrowful verse and to hear her
+recite,
+
+    One of them dead in the East by the sea
+    And one of them dead in the West by the sea,
+
+was to be shaken by inexplicable emotion. Her face grew pale as silver
+as she went on and her eyes darkened with the anguish of the poet
+mother.
+
+Most of the students were the sons and daughters of farmers round about
+the county, but a few were from the village homes in western Iowa and
+southern Minnesota. Two or three boys wore real tailor-made suits, and
+the easy flow of their trouser legs and the set of their linen collars
+rendered me at once envious and discontented. "Some day," I said to
+myself, "I too, will have a suit that will not gape at the neck and
+crawl at the ankle," but I did not rise to the height of expecting a
+ring and watch.
+
+Shoes were just coming into fashion and one young man wore pointed "box
+toes" which filled all the rest of us with despair. John Cutler also
+wore collars of linen--real linen--which had to be laundered, but few of
+us dared fix our hopes as high as that. John also owned three neckties,
+and wore broad cuffs with engraved gold buttons, and on Fridays waved
+these splendors before our eyes with a malicious satisfaction which
+aroused our hatred. Of such complexion are the tragedies and triumphs of
+youth!
+
+How I envied Arthur Peters his calm and haughty bearing! Most of us
+entered chapel like rabbits sneaking down a turnip patch, but Arthur and
+John and Walter loitered in with the easy and assured manner of Senators
+or Generals--so much depends upon leather and prunella. Gradually I lost
+my terror of this ordeal, but I took care to keep behind some friendly
+bulk like young Blakeslee, who stood six feet two in his gaiters.
+
+With all these anxieties I loved the school and could hardly be wrested
+from it even for a day. I bent to my books with eagerness, I joined a
+debating society, and I took a hand at all the games. The days went by
+on golden, noiseless, ball-bearing axles--and almost before I realized
+it, winter was upon the land. But oh! the luxury of that winter, with no
+snow drifts to climb, no corn-stalks to gather and no long walk to
+school. It was sweet to wake each morning in the shelter of our little
+house and know that another day of delightful schooling was ours. Our
+hands softened and lightened. Our walk became each day less of a
+"galumping plod." The companionship of bright and interesting young
+people, and the study of well-dressed men and women in attendance upon
+lectures and socials was a part of our instruction and had their
+refining effect upon us, graceless colts though we were.
+
+Sometime during this winter Wendell Phillips came to town and lectured
+on _The Lost Arts_. My father took us all to see and hear this orator
+hero of his boyhood days in Boston.
+
+I confess to a disappointment in the event. A tall old gentleman with
+handsome clean-cut features, rose from behind the pulpit in the
+Congregational Church, and read from a manuscript--read quietly,
+colloquially, like a teacher addressing a group of students, with
+scarcely a gesture and without raising his voice. Only once toward the
+end of the hour did he thrill us, and then only for a moment.
+
+Father was a little saddened. He shook his head gravely. "He isn't the
+orator he was in the good old anti-slavery days," he explained and
+passed again into a glowing account of the famous "slave speech" in
+Faneuil Hall when the pro-slavery men all but mobbed the speaker.
+
+Per contra, I liked, (and the boys all liked) a certain peripatetic
+temperance lecturer named Beale, for _he_ was an orator, one of those
+who rise on an impassioned chant, soaring above the snows of Chimborazo,
+mingling the purple and gold of sunset with the saffron and silver of
+the dawn. None of us could tell just what these gorgeous passages meant,
+but they were beautiful while they lasted, and sadly corrupted our
+oratorical style. It took some of us twenty years to recover from the
+fascination of this man's absurd and high falutin' elocutionary
+sing-song.
+
+I forgot the farm, I forgot the valley of my birth, I lived wholly and
+with joy in the present. Song, poetry, history mingled with the sports
+which made our life so unceasingly interesting. There was a certain
+girl, the daughter of the shoe merchant, who (temporarily) displaced the
+image of Agnes in the niche of my shrine, and to roll the platter for
+her at a "sociable" was a very high honor indeed, and there was another,
+a glorious contralto singer, much older than I--but there--I must not
+claim to have even attracted her eyes, and my meetings with Millie were
+so few and so public that I cannot claim to have ever conversed with
+her. They were all boyish adorations.
+
+Much as I enjoyed this winter, greatly as it instructed me, I cannot now
+recover from its luminous dark more than here and there an incident, a
+poem, a song. It was all delightful, that I know, so filled with joyous
+hours that I retain but a mingled impression of satisfaction and
+regret--satisfaction with life as I found it, regret at its inevitable
+ending--for my father, irritated by the failure of his renter, announced
+that he had decided to put us all back upon the farm.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+Back to the Farm
+
+
+Judging from the entries in a small diary of this date, I was neither an
+introspective youth nor one given to precocious literary subtleties.
+
+On March 27th, 1877, I made this entry; "Today we move back upon the
+farm."
+
+This is all of it! No more, no less. Not a word to indicate whether I
+regretted the decision or welcomed it, and from subsequent equally bald
+notes, I derive the information that my father retained his position as
+grain buyer, and that he drove back and forth daily over the five miles
+which lay between the farm and the elevator. There is no mention of my
+mother, no hint as to how she felt, although the return to the
+loneliness and drudgery of the farm must have been as grievous to her as
+to her sons.
+
+Our muscles were soft and our heads filled with new ambitions but there
+was no alternative. It was "back to the field," or "out into the cold,
+cold world," so forth we went upon the soil in the old familiar way,
+there to plod to and fro endlessly behind the seeder and the harrow. It
+was harder than ever to follow a team for ten hours over the soft
+ground, and early rising was more difficult than it had ever been
+before, but I discovered some compensations which helped me bear these
+discomforts. I saw more of the beauty of the landscape and I now had an
+aspiration to occupy my mind.
+
+My memories of the Seminary, the echoes of the songs we had heard, gave
+the morning chorus of the prairie chickens a richer meaning than before.
+The west wind, laden with the delicious smell of uncovered earth, the
+tender blue of the sky, the cheerful chirping of the ground sparrows,
+the jocund whistling of the gophers, the winding flight of the prairie
+pigeons--all these sights and sounds of spring swept back upon me,
+bringing something sweeter and more significant than before. I had
+gained in perception and also in the power to assimilate what I
+perceived.
+
+This year in town had other far-reaching effects. It tended to warp us
+from our father's designs. It placed the rigorous, filthy drudgery of
+the farm-yard in sharp contrast with the carefree companionable
+existence led by my friends in the village, and we longed to be of their
+condition. We had gained our first set of comparative ideas, and with
+them an unrest which was to carry us very far away.
+
+True, neither Burton nor I had actually shared the splendors of
+Congressman Deering's house but we had obtained revelatory glimpses of
+its well-kept lawn, and through the open windows we had watched the
+waving of its lace curtains. We had observed also how well Avery Brush's
+frock coat fitted and we comprehended something of the elegant leisure
+which the sons and daughters of Wm. Petty's general store enjoyed.
+
+Over against these comforts, these luxurious conditions, we now set our
+ugly little farmhouse, with its rag carpets, its battered furniture, its
+barren attic, and its hard, rude beds.--All that we possessed seemed
+very cheap and deplorably commonplace.
+
+My brother, who had passed a vivid and wonderful year riding race
+horses, clerking in an ice cream parlor, with frequent holidays of
+swimming and baseball, also went groaning and grumbling to the fields.
+He too resented the curry-comb and the dung fork. We both loathed the
+smell of manure and hated the greasy clothing which our tasks made
+necessary. Secretly we vowed that when we were twenty-one we would leave
+the farm, never to return to it. However, as the ground dried off, and
+the grass grew green in the door-yard some part of this bitterness, this
+resentment, faded away, and we made no further complaint.
+
+My responsibilities were now those of a man. I was nearly full grown,
+quick and powerful of hand, and vain of my strength, which was, in fact,
+unusual and of decided advantage to me. Nothing ever really tired me
+out. I could perform any of my duties with ease, and none of the men
+under me ever presumed to question my authority. As harvest came on I
+took my place on our new Marsh harvester, and bound my half of over one
+hundred acres of heavy grain.
+
+The crop that year was enormous. At times, as I looked out over the
+billowing acres of wheat which must not only be reaped and bound and
+shocked and stacked but also threshed, before there was the slightest
+chance of my returning to the Seminary, my face grew long and my heart
+heavy.
+
+Burton shared this feeling, for he, too, had become profoundly
+interested in the Seminary and was eager to return, eager to renew the
+friendships he had gained. We both wished to walk once more beneath the
+maple trees in clean well-fitting garments, and above all we hungered to
+escape the curry-comb and the cow.
+
+Both of us retained our membership in the Adelphian Debating Society,
+and occasionally drove to town after the day's work to take part in the
+Monday meetings. Having decided, definitely, to be an orator, I now went
+about with a copy of Shakespeare in my pocket and ranted the immortal
+soliloquies of _Hamlet_ and _Richard_ as I held the plow, feeling
+certain that I was following in the footprints of Lincoln and
+Demosthenes.
+
+Sundays brought a special sweet relief that summer, a note of finer
+poetry into all our lives, for often after a bath behind the barn we put
+on clean shirts and drove away to Osage to meet George and Mitchell, or
+went to church to see some of the girls we had admired at the Seminary.
+On other Sabbaths we returned to our places at the Burr Oak
+school-house, enjoying as we used to do, a few hours' forgetfulness of
+the farm.
+
+My father, I am glad to say, never insisted upon any religious
+observance on the part of his sons, and never interfered with any
+reasonable pleasure even on Sunday. If he made objection to our trips it
+was usually on behalf of the cattle. "Go where you please," he often
+said, "only get back in time to do the milking." Sometimes he would ask,
+"Don't you think the horses ought to have a rest as well as yourselves?"
+He was a stern man but a just man, and I am especially grateful to him
+for his non-interference with my religious affairs.
+
+All that summer and all the fall I worked like a hired man, assuming in
+addition the responsibilities of being boss. I bound grain until my arms
+were raw with briars and in stacking-time I wallowed round and round
+upon my knees, building great ricks of grain, taking obvious pride in
+the skill which this task required until my trousers, reinforced at the
+knees, bagged ungracefully and my hands, swollen with the act of
+grappling the heavy bundles as they were thrown to me, grew horny and
+brown and clumsy, so that I quite despaired of ever being able to write
+another letter. I was very glad not to have my Seminary friends see me
+in this unlovely condition.
+
+However, I took a well-defined pride in stacking, for it was a test of
+skill. It was clean work. Even now, as I ride a country lane, and see
+men at work handling oats or hay, I recall the pleasurable sides of work
+on the farm and long to return to it.
+
+The radiant sky of August and September on the prairie was a never
+failing source of delight to me. Nature seemed resting, opulent,
+self-satisfied and honorable. Every phase of the landscape indicated a
+task fulfilled. There were still and pulseless days when slaty-blue
+clouds piled up in the west and came drifting eastward with thunderous
+accompaniment, to break the oppressive heat and leave the earth cool and
+fresh from having passed. There were misty, windy days when the
+sounding, southern breeze swept the yellow stubble like a scythe; when
+the sky, without a cloud, was whitened by an overspreading haze; when
+the crickets sang sleepily as if in dream of eternal summer; and the
+grasshoppers clicked and buzzed from stalk to stalk in pure delight of
+sunshine and the harvest.
+
+Another humbler source of pleasure in stacking was the watermelon which,
+having been picked in the early morning and hidden under the edge of the
+stack, remained deliciously cool till mid-forenoon, when at a signal,
+the men all gathered in the shadow of the rick, and leisurely ate their
+fill of juicy "mountain sweets." Then there was the five o'clock supper,
+with its milk and doughnuts and pie which sent us back to our
+task--replete, content, ready for another hour of toil.
+
+Of course, there were unpleasant days later in the month, noons when the
+skies were filled with ragged, swiftly moving clouds, and the winds blew
+the sheaves inside out and slashed against my face the flying grain as
+well as the leaping crickets. Such days gave prophecy of the passing of
+summer and the coming of fall. But there was a mitigating charm even in
+these conditions, for they were all welcome promises of an early return
+to school.
+
+Crickets during stacking time were innumerable and voracious as rust or
+fire. They ate our coats or hats if we left them beside the stack. They
+gnawed the fork handles and devoured any straps that were left lying
+about, but their multitudinous song was a beautiful inwrought part of
+the symphony.
+
+That year the threshing was done in the fields with a traction engine.
+My uncle David came no more to help us harvest. He had almost passed out
+of our life, and I have no recollection of him till several years later.
+Much of the charm, the poetry of the old-time threshing vanished with
+the passing of horse power and the coming of the nomadic hired hand.
+There was less and less of the "changing works" which used to bring the
+young men of the farms together. The grain was no longer stacked round
+the stable. Most of it we threshed in the field and the straw after
+being spread out upon the stubble was burned. Some farmers threshed
+directly from the shock, and the new "Vibrator" took the place of the
+old Buffalo Pitts Separator with its ringing bell-metal pinions. Wheeled
+plows were common and self-binding harvesters were coming in.
+
+Although my laconic little diary does not show it, I was fiercely
+resolved upon returning to the Seminary. My father was not very
+sympathetic. In his eyes I already had a very good equipment for the
+battle of life, but mother, with a woman's ready understanding, divined
+that I had not merely set my heart on graduating at the Seminary, but
+that I was secretly dreaming of another and far more romantic career
+than that of being a farmer. Although a woman of slender schooling
+herself, she responded helpfully to every effort which her sons made to
+raise themselves above the commonplace level of neighborhood life.
+
+All through the early fall whenever Burton and I met the other boys of a
+Sunday our talk was sure to fall upon the Seminary, and Burton stoutly
+declared that he, too, was going to begin in September. As a matter of
+fact the autumn term opened while we were still hard at work around a
+threshing machine with no definite hope of release till the plowing and
+corn-husking were over. Our fathers did not seem to realize that the men
+of the future (even the farmers of the future) must have a considerable
+amount of learning and experience, and so October went by and November
+was well started before parole was granted and we were free to return to
+our books.
+
+With what sense of liberty, of exultation, we took our way down the road
+on that gorgeous autumn morning! No more dust, no more grime, no more
+mud, no more cow milking, no more horse currying! For five months we
+were to live the lives of scholars, of boarders.--Yes, through some
+mysterious channel our parents had been brought to the point of engaging
+lodgings for us in the home of a townsman named Leete. For two dollars a
+week it was arranged that we could eat and sleep from Monday night to
+Friday noon, but we were not expected to remain for supper on Friday;
+and Sunday supper, was of course, extra. I thought this a great deal of
+money then, but I cannot understand at this distance how our landlady
+was able to provide, for that sum, the raw material of her kitchen, to
+say nothing of bed linen and soap.
+
+The house, which stood on the edge of the town, was small and without
+upstairs heat, but it seemed luxurious to me, and the family straightway
+absorbed my interest. Leete, the nominal head of the establishment, was
+a short, gray, lame and rather inefficient man of changeable temper who
+teamed about the streets with a span of roans almost as dour and
+crippled as himself. His wife, who did nearly all the housework for five
+boarders as well as for the members of her own family, was a soul of
+heroic pride and most indomitable energy. She was a tall, dark, thin
+woman who had once been handsome. Poor creature--how incessantly she
+toiled, and how much she endured!
+
+She had three graceful and alluring daughters,--Ella, nineteen, Cora,
+sixteen, and Martha, a quiet little mouse of about ten years of age.
+Ella was a girl of unusual attainment, a teacher, self-contained and
+womanly, with whom we all, promptly, fell in love. Cora, a moody,
+dark-eyed, passionate girl who sometimes glowed with friendly smiles and
+sometimes glowered in anger, was less adored. Neither of them considered
+Burton or myself worthy of serious notice. On the contrary, we were
+necessary nuisances.
+
+To me Ella was a queen, a kindly queen, ever ready to help me out with
+my algebra. Everything she did seemed to me instinct with womanly grace.
+No doubt she read the worship in my eyes, but her attitude was that of
+an older sister. Cora, being nearer my own age, awed me not at all. On
+the contrary, we were more inclined to battle than to coo. Her coolness
+toward me, I soon discovered, was sustained by her growing interest in a
+young man from Cerro Gordo County.
+
+We were a happy, noisy gang, and undoubtedly gave poor Mrs. Leete a
+great deal of trouble. There was Boggs (who had lost part of one ear in
+some fracas with Jack Frost) who paced up and down his room declining
+Latin verbs with painful pertinacity, and Burton who loved a jest but
+never made one, and Joe Pritchard, who was interested mainly in politics
+and oratory, and finally that criminally well-dressed young book agent
+(with whom we had very little in common) and myself. In cold weather we
+all herded in the dining room to keep from freezing, and our weekly
+scrub took place after we got home to our own warm kitchens and the
+family wash-tubs.
+
+Life was a pure joy to Burton as to me. Each day was a poem, each night
+a dreamless sleep! Each morning at half past eight we went to the
+Seminary and at four o'clock left it with regret. I should like to say
+that we studied hard every night, burning a great deal of kerosene oil,
+but I cannot do so.--We had a good time. The learning, (so far as I can
+recall) was incidental.
+
+It happened that my closest friends, aside from Burton, were pupils of
+the public school and for that reason I kept my membership in the
+Adelphian Society which met every Monday evening. My activities there, I
+find, made up a large part of my life during this second winter. I not
+only debated furiously, disputing weighty political questions, thus
+advancing the forensic side of my education, but later in the winter I
+helped to organize a dramatic company which gave a play for the benefit
+of the Club Library.
+
+Just why I should have been chosen "stage director" of our "troupe," I
+cannot say, but something in my ability to declaim _Regulus_ probably
+led to this high responsibility. At any rate, I not only played the
+leading juvenile, I settled points of action and costume without the
+slightest hesitation. Cora was my _ingenue_ opposite, it fell out, and
+so we played at love-making, while meeting coldly at the family dining
+table.
+
+Our engagement in the town hall extended through two March evenings and
+was largely patronized. It would seem that I was a dominant figure on
+both occasions, for I declaimed a "piece" on the opening night, one of
+those resounding orations (addressed to the Carthaginians), which we all
+loved, and which permitted of thunderous, rolling periods and passionate
+gestures. If my recollection is not distorted, I was masterful that
+night--at least, Joe Pritchard agreed that I was "the best part of the
+show." Joe was my friend, and I hold him in especial affection for his
+hearty praise of my effort.
+
+On this same night I also appeared in a little sketch representing the
+death of a veteran of the Revolutionary War, in which the dying man
+beholds in a vision his beloved Leader. Walter Blakeslee was the
+"Washington" and I, with heavily powdered hair, was the veteran. On the
+second night I played the juvenile lover in a drama called _His
+Brother's Keeper_. Cora as "Shellie," my sweetheart, was very lovely in
+pink mosquito netting, and for the first time I regretted her interest
+in the book agent from Cerro Gordo. Strange to say I had no fear at all
+as I looked out over the audience which packed the town hall to the
+ceiling. Father and mother were there with Frank and Jessie, all quite
+dazed (as I imagined) by my transcendent position behind the foot
+lights.
+
+It may have been this very night that Willard Eaton, the county
+attorney, spoke to my father saying, "Richard, whenever that boy of
+yours finishes school and wants to begin to study law, you send him
+right to me," which was, of course, a very great compliment, for the
+county attorney belonged to the best known and most influential firm of
+lawyers in the town. At the moment his offer would have seemed very dull
+and commonplace to me. I would have refused it.
+
+Our success that night was so great that it appeared a pity not to
+permit other towns to witness our performance, hence we boldly organized
+a "tour." We booked a circuit which included St. Ansgar and Mitchell,
+two villages, one four, the other ten miles to the north. Audacious as
+this may seem, it was deliberately decided upon, and one pleasant day
+Mitchell and George and I loaded all our scenery into a wagon and drove
+away across the prairie to our first "stand" very much as Molière did in
+his youth, leaving the ladies to follow (in the grandeur of hired
+buggies) later in the day.
+
+That night we played with "artistic success"--that is to say, we lost
+some eighteen dollars, which so depressed the management that it
+abandoned the tour, and the entire organization returned to Osage in
+diminished glory. This cut short my career as an actor. I never again
+took part in a theatrical performance.
+
+Not long after this disaster, "Shellie," as I now called Cora, entered
+upon some mysterious and romantic drama of her own. The travelling man
+vanished, and soon after she too disappeared. Where she went, what she
+did, no one seemed to know, and none of us quite dared to ask. I never
+saw her again but last year, after nearly forty years of wandering, I
+was told that she is married and living in luxurious ease near London.
+Through what deep valleys she has travelled to reach this height, with
+what loss or gain, I cannot say, but I shall always remember her as she
+was that night in St. Ansgar, in her pink-mosquito-bar dress, her eyes
+shining with excitement, her voice vibrant with girlish gladness.
+
+Our second winter at the Seminary passed all too quickly, and when the
+prairie chickens began to boom from the ridges our hearts sank within
+us. For the first time the grouse's cheery dance was unwelcome for it
+meant the closing of our books, the loss of our pleasant companions, the
+surrender of our leisure, and a return to the mud of the fields.
+
+It was especially hard to say good-bye to Ella and Maud, for though they
+were in no sense sweethearts they were very pleasant companions. There
+were others whom it was a pleasure to meet in the halls and to emulate
+in the class-rooms, and when early in April, we went home to enter upon
+the familiar round of seeding, corn-planting, corn plowing, harvesting,
+stacking and threshing, we had only the promise of an occasional trip to
+town to cheer us.
+
+It would seem that our interest in the girls of Burr Oak had diminished,
+for we were less regular in our attendance upon services in the little
+school-house, and whenever we could gain consent to use a horse, we
+hitched up and drove away to town. These trips have golden,
+unforgettable charm, and indicate the glamor which approaching manhood
+was flinging over my world.
+
+My father's world was less jocund, was indeed filled with increasing
+anxiety, for just before harvest time a new and formidable enemy of the
+wheat appeared in the shape of a minute, ill-smelling insect called the
+chinch bug. It already bore an evil reputation with us for it was
+reported to have eaten out the crops of southern Wisconsin and northern
+Illinois, and, indeed, before barley cutting was well under way the
+county was overrun with laborers from the south who were anxious to get
+work in order to recoup them for the loss of their own harvest. These
+fugitives brought incredible tales of the ravages of the enemy and
+prophesied our destruction but, as a matter of fact, only certain dry
+ridges proclaimed the presence of the insect during this year.
+
+The crop was rather poor for other reasons, and Mr. Babcock, like my
+father, objected to paying board bills. His attitude was so unpromising
+that Burton and I cast about to see how we could lessen the expense of
+upkeep during our winter term of school.
+
+Together we decided to hire a room and board ourselves (as many of the
+other fellows did) and so cut our expenses to a mere trifle. It was
+difficult, even in those days, to live cheaper than two dollars per
+week, but we convinced our people that we could do it, and so at last
+wrung from our mothers a reluctant consent to our trying it. We got away
+in October, only two weeks behind our fellows.
+
+I well remember the lovely afternoon on which we unloaded our scanty
+furniture into the two little rooms which we had hired for the term. It
+was still glorious autumn weather, and we were young and released from
+slavery. We had a table, three chairs, a little strip of carpet, and a
+melodeon, which belonged to Burton's sister, and when we had spread our
+carpet and put up our curtains we took seats, and cocking our feet upon
+the window sill surveyed our surroundings with such satisfaction as only
+autocrats of the earth may compass. We were absolute masters of our
+time--that was our chiefest joy. We could rise when we pleased and go to
+bed when we pleased. There were no stables to clean, no pigs to feed,
+nothing marred our days. We could study or sing or dance at will. We
+could even wrestle at times with none to molest or make us afraid.
+
+My photograph shows the new suit which I had bought on my own
+responsibility this time, but no camera could possibly catch the glow of
+inward satisfaction which warmed my heart. It was a brown cassimere,
+coat, trousers and vest all alike,--and the trousers fitted me!
+Furthermore as I bought it without my father's help, my selection was
+made for esthetic reasons without regard to durability or warmth. It was
+mine--in the fullest sense--and when I next entered chapel I felt not
+merely draped, but defended. I walked to my seat with confident
+security, a well-dressed person. I had a "boughten" shirt also, two
+boxes of paper cuffs, and two new ties, a black one for every day and a
+white one for Sunday.
+
+I don't know that any of the girls perceived my new suit, but I hoped
+one or two of them did. The boys were quite outspoken in their approval
+of it.
+
+I had given up boots, also, for most of the townsmen wore shoes, thus
+marking the decline of the military spirit. I never again owned a pair
+of those man-killing top-boots--which were not only hard to get on and
+off but pinched my toes, and interrupted the flow of my trouser-legs.
+Thus one great era fades into another. The Jack-boot period was over,
+the shoe, commonplace and comfortable, had won.
+
+Our housekeeping was very simple. Each of us brought from home on Monday
+morning a huge bag of doughnuts together with several loaves of bread,
+and (with a milkman near at hand) our cooking remained rudimentary. We
+did occasionally fry a steak and boil some potatoes, and I have a dim
+memory of several disastrous attempts to make flapjacks out of flour and
+sweet milk. However we never suffered from hunger as some of the other
+fellows actually did.
+
+Pretty Ethel Beebe comes into the record of this winter, like a quaint
+illustration to an old-fashioned story, for she lived near us and went
+to school along the same sidewalk. Burton was always saying, "Some day I
+am going to brace up and ask Ethel to let me carry her books, and I'm
+going to walk beside her right down Main Street." But he never did.
+Ultimately I attained to that incredible boldness, but Burton only
+followed along behind.
+
+Ethel was a slender, smiling, brown-eyed girl with a keen appreciation
+of the ridiculous, and I have no doubt she catalogued all our
+peculiarities, for she always seemed to be laughing at us, and I think
+it must have been her smiles that prevented any romantic attachment. We
+walked and talked without any deeper interest than good comradeship.
+
+Mrs. Babcock was famous for her pies and cakes, and Burton always
+brought some delicious samples of her skill. As regularly as the clock,
+on every Tuesday evening he said, in precisely the same tone, "Well,
+now, we'll have to eat these pies right away or they'll spoil," and as I
+made no objection, we had pie for luncheon, pie and cake for supper, and
+cake and pie for breakfast until all these "goodies" which were intended
+to serve as dessert through the week were consumed. By Thursday morning
+we were usually down to dry bread and butter.
+
+We simplified our housework in other ways in order that we might have
+time to study and Burton wasted a good deal of time at the fiddle,
+sawing away till I was obliged to fall upon him and roll him on the
+floor to silence him.
+
+I still have our ledger which gives an itemized account of the cost of
+this experiment in self board, and its footings are incredibly small.
+Less than fifty cents a day for both of us! Of course our mothers,
+sisters and aunts were continually joking us about our housekeeping, and
+once or twice Mrs. Babcock called upon us unexpectedly and found the
+room "a sight." But we did not mind her very much. We only feared the
+bright eyes of Ethel and Maude and Carrie. Fortunately they could not
+properly call upon us, even if they had wished to do so, and we were
+safe. It is probable, moreover, that they fully understood our methods,
+for they often slyly hinted at hasty dish-washing and primitive cookery.
+All of this only amused us, so long as they did not actually discover
+the dirt and disorder of which our mothers complained.
+
+Our school library at that time was pitifully small and ludicrously
+prescriptive, but its shelves held a few of the fine old classics,
+Scott, Dickens and Thackeray--the kind of books which can always be had
+in sets at very low prices--and in nosing about among these I fell, one
+day, upon two small red volumes called _Mosses from an Old Manse_. Of
+course I had read of the author, for these books were listed in my
+_History of American Literature_, but I had never, up to this moment,
+dared to open one of them. I was a discoverer.
+
+I turned a page or two, and instantly my mental horizon widened. When I
+had finished the _Artist of the Beautiful_, the great Puritan romancer
+had laid his spell upon me everlastingly. Even as I walked homeward to
+my lunch, I read. I ate with the book beside my plate. I neglected my
+classes that afternoon, and as soon as I had absorbed this volume I
+secured the other and devoted myself to it with almost equal intensity.
+The stately diction, the rich and glowing imagery, the mystical
+radiance, and the aloofness of the author's personality all united to
+create in me a worshipful admiration which made all other interests pale
+and faint. It was my first profound literary passion and I was dazzled
+by the glory of it.
+
+It would be a pleasant task to say that this book determined my
+career--it would form a delightful literary assumption, but I cannot
+claim it. As a realist I must remain faithful to fact. I did not then
+and there vow to be a romantic novelist like Hawthorne. On the contrary,
+I realized that this great poet (to me he was a poet) like Edgar Allan
+Poe, was a soul that dwelt apart from ordinary mortals.
+
+To me he was a magician, a weaver of magic spells, a dreamer whose
+visions comprehended the half-lights, the borderlands, of the human
+soul. I loved the roll of his words in _The March of Time_ and the
+quaint phrasing of the _Rill from the Town Pump_; _Rappacini's Daughter_
+whose breath poisoned the insects in the air, uplifted me. _Drowne and
+His Wooden Image_, the _Great Stone Face_--each story had its special
+appeal. For days I walked amid enchanted mist, my partner--(even the
+maidens I most admired), became less appealing, less necessary to me.
+Eager to know more of this necromancer I searched the town for others of
+his books, but found only _American Notes_ and _the Scarlet Letter_.
+
+Gradually I returned to something like my normal interests in baseball
+and my classmates, but never again did I fall to the low level of _Jack
+Harkaway_. I now possessed a literary touchstone with which I tested the
+quality of other books and other minds, and my intellectual arrogance, I
+fear, sometimes made me an unpleasant companion. The fact that Ethel did
+not "like" Hawthorne, sank her to a lower level in my estimation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+End of School Days
+
+
+Though my years at the Seminary were the happiest of my life they are
+among the most difficult for me to recover and present to my readers.
+During half the year I worked on the farm fiercely, unsparing of myself,
+in order that I might have an uninterrupted season of study in the
+village. Each term was very like another so far as its broad program
+went but innumerable, minute but very important progressions carried me
+toward manhood, events which can hardly be stated to an outsider.
+
+Burton remained my room-mate and in all our vicissitudes we had no vital
+disagreements but his unconquerable shyness kept him from making a good
+impression on his teachers and this annoyed me--it made him seem stupid
+when he was not. Once, as chairman of a committee it became his duty to
+introduce a certain lecturer who was to speak on "Elihu Burritt," and by
+some curious twist in my chum's mind this name became "Lu-hi Burritt"
+and he so stated it in his introductory remarks. This amused the
+lecturer and raised a titter in the audience. Burton bled in silence
+over this mishap for he was at heart deeply ambitious to be a public
+speaker. He never alluded to that speech even to me without writhing in
+retrospective shame.
+
+Another incident will illustrate his painfully shy character. One of our
+summer vacations was made notable by the visit of an exceedingly pretty
+girl to the home of one of Burton's aunts who lived on the road to the
+Grove, and my chum's excitement over the presence of this alien bird of
+paradise was very amusing to me as well as to his brother Charles who
+was inclined, as an older brother, to "take it out" of Burt.
+
+I listened to my chum's account of his cousin's beauty with something
+more than fraternal interest. She came, it appeared, from Dubuque and
+had the true cosmopolitan's air of tolerance. Our small community amused
+her. Her hats and gowns (for it soon developed that she had at least
+two), were the envy of all the girls, and the admiration of the boys. No
+disengaged or slightly obligated beau of the district neglected to hitch
+his horse at Mrs. Knapp's gate.
+
+Burton's opportunity seemed better than that of any other youth, for he
+could visit his aunt as often as he wished without arousing comment,
+whereas for me, a call would have been equivalent to an offer of
+marriage. My only chance of seeing the radiant stranger was at church.
+Needless to say we all made it a point to attend every service during
+her stay.
+
+One Sunday afternoon as I was riding over to the Grove, I met Burton
+plodding homeward along the grassy lane, walking with hanging head and
+sagging shoulders. He looked like a man in deep and discouraged thought,
+and when he glanced up at me, with a familiar defensive smile twisting
+his long lips, I knew something had gone wrong.
+
+"Hello," I said. "Where have you been?"
+
+"Over to Aunt Sallie's," he said.
+
+His long, linen duster was sagging at the sides, and peering down at his
+pockets I perceived a couple of quarts of lovely Siberian crab-apples.
+"Where did you get all that fruit?" I demanded.
+
+"At home."
+
+"What are you going to do with it?"
+
+"Take it back again."
+
+"What do you mean by such a performance?"
+
+With the swift flush and silent laugh which always marked his
+confessions of weakness, or failure, he replied, "I went over to see
+Nettie. I intended to give her these apples," he indicated the fruit by
+a touch on each pocket, "but when I got there I found old Bill Watson,
+dressed to kill and large as life, sitting in the parlor. I was so
+afraid of his finding out what I had in my pockets that I didn't go in.
+I came away leaving him in possession."
+
+Of course I laughed--but there was an element of pathos in it after all.
+Poor Burt! He always failed to get his share of the good things in this
+world.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We continued to board ourselves,--now here, now there, and always to the
+effect of being starved out by Friday night, but we kept well and active
+even on doughnuts and pie, and were grateful of any camping place in
+town.
+
+Once Burton left a soup-bone to simmer on the stove while we went away
+to morning recitations, and when we reached home, smoke was leaking from
+every keyhole. The room was solid with the remains of our bone. It took
+six months to get the horrid smell of charred beef out of our wardrobe.
+The girls all sniffed and wondered as we came near.
+
+On Fridays we went home and during the winter months very generally
+attended the Lyceum which met in the Burr Oak school-house. We often
+debated, and on one occasion I attained to the honor of being called
+upon to preside over the session. Another memorable evening is that in
+which I read with what seemed to me distinguished success Joaquin
+Miller's magnificent new poem, _Kit Carson's Ride_ and in the splendid
+roar and trample of its lines discovered a new and powerful American
+poet. His spirit appealed to me. He was at once American and western. I
+read every line of his verse which the newspapers or magazines brought
+to me, and was profoundly influenced by its epic quality.
+
+And so, term by term, in growing joy and strength, in expanding
+knowledge of life, we hurried toward the end of our four years' course
+at this modest little school, finding in it all the essential elements
+of an education, for we caught at every chance quotation from the
+scientists, every fleeting literary allusion in the magazines,
+attaining, at last, a dim knowledge of what was going on in the great
+outside world of letters and discovery. Of course there were elections
+and tariff reforms and other comparatively unimportant matters taking
+place in the state but they made only the most transient impression on
+our minds.
+
+During the last winter of our stay at the Seminary, my associate in
+housekeeping was one Adelbert Jones, the son of a well-to-do farmer who
+lived directly east of town. "Del," as we called him, always alluded to
+himself as "Ferguson." He was tall, with a very large blond face
+inclined to freckle and his first care of a morning was to scrutinize
+himself most anxiously to see whether the troublesome brown flecks were
+increasing or diminishing in number. Often upon reaching the open air he
+would sniff the east wind and say lugubriously, "This is the kind of day
+that brings out the freckles on your Uncle Ferg."
+
+He was one of the best dressed men in the school, and especially finicky
+about his collars and ties,--was, indeed, one of the earliest to
+purchase linen. He also parted his yellow hair in the middle (which was
+a very noticeable thing in those days) and was always talking of taking
+a girl to a social or to prayer meeting. But, like Burton, he never
+did. So far as I knew he never "went double," and most of the girls
+looked upon him as more or less of a rustic, notwithstanding his fine
+figure and careful dress.
+
+As for me I did once hire a horse and carriage of a friend and took
+Alice for a drive! More than thirty-five years have passed since that
+adventure and yet I can see every turn in that road! I can hear the
+crackle of my starched shirt and the creak of my suspender buckles as I
+write.
+
+Alice, being quite as bashful as myself, kept our conversation to the
+high plane of Hawthorne and Poe and Schiller with an occasional tired
+droop to the weather, hence I infer that she was as much relieved as I
+when we reached her boarding house some two hours later. It was my first
+and only attempt at this, the most common of all ways of entertaining
+one's best girl.
+
+The youth who furnished the carriage betrayed me, and the outcry of my
+friends so intimidated me that I dared not look Alice in the face. My
+only comfort was that no one but ourselves could possibly know what an
+erratic conversationalist I had been. However, she did not seem to lay
+it up against me. I think she was as much astonished as I and I am
+persuaded that she valued the compliment of my extravagant gallantry.
+
+It is only fair to say that I had risen by this time to the dignity of
+"boughten shirts," linen collars and "Congress gaiters," and my suit
+purchased for graduating purposes was of black diagonal with a long
+tail, a garment which fitted me reasonably well. It was hot, of course,
+and nearly parboiled me of a summer evening, but I bore my suffering
+like the hero that I was, in order that I might make a presentable
+figure in the eyes of my classmates. I longed for a white vest but did
+not attain to that splendor.
+
+Life remained very simple and very democratic in our little town.
+Although the county seat, it was slow in taking on city ways. I don't
+believe a real bath-tub distinguished the place (I never heard of one)
+but its sidewalks kept our feet out of the mud (even in March or April),
+and this was a marvellous fact to us. One or two fine lawns and flower
+gardens had come in, and year by year the maples had grown until they
+now made a pleasant shade in June, and in October glorified the plank
+walks. To us it was beautiful.
+
+As county town, Osage published two papers and was, in addition, the
+home of two Judges, a state Senator and a Congressman. A new opera house
+was built in '79 and an occasional "actor troupe" presented military
+plays like _Our Boys_ or farces like _Solon Shingle_. The brass band and
+the baseball team were the best in the district, and were loyally upheld
+by us all.
+
+With all these attractions do you wonder that whenever Ed and Bill and
+Joe had a day of leisure they got out their buggies, washed them till
+they glistened like new, and called for their best girls on the way to
+town?
+
+Circuses, Fourth of Julys, County Fairs, all took place in Osage, and to
+own a "covered rig" and to take your sweetheart to the show were the
+highest forms of affluence and joy--unless you were actually able to
+live in town, as Burton and I now did for five days in each week, in
+which case you saw everything that was free and denied yourself
+everything but the circus. Nobody went so far in economy as that.
+
+As a conscientious historian I have gone carefully into the records of
+this last year, in the hope of finding something that would indicate a
+feeling on the part of the citizens that Dick Garland's boy was in some
+ways a remarkable youth, but (I regret to say) I cannot lay hands on a
+single item. It appears that I was just one of a hundred healthy,
+hearty, noisy students--but no, wait! There is one incident which has
+slight significance. One day during my final term of school, as I stood
+in the postoffice waiting for the mail to be distributed, I picked up
+from the counter a book called _The Undiscovered Country_.
+
+"What is this about?" I asked.
+
+The clerk looked up at me with an expression of disgust. "I bought it
+for a book of travel," said he, "but it is only a novel. Want it? I'll
+sell it cheap."
+
+Having no money to waste in that way, I declined, but as I had the
+volume in my hands, with a few minutes to spare, I began to read. It did
+not take me long to discover in this author a grace and precision of
+style which aroused both my admiration and my resentment. My resentment
+was vague, I could not have given a reason for it, but as a matter of
+fact, the English of this new author made some of my literary heroes
+seem either crude or stilted. I was just young enough and conservative
+enough to be irritated and repelled by the modernity of William Dean
+Howells.
+
+I put the book down and turned away, apparently uninfluenced by it.
+Indeed, I remained, if anything, more loyal to the grand manner of
+Hawthorne, but my love of realism was growing. I recall a rebuke from my
+teacher in rhetoric, condemning, in my essay on Mark Twain, an over
+praise of _Roughing It_. It is evident, therefore that I was even then a
+lover of the modern when taken off my guard.
+
+Meanwhile I had definitely decided not to be a lawyer, and it happened
+in this way. One Sunday morning as I was walking toward school, I met a
+young man named Lohr, a law student several years older than myself, who
+turned and walked with me for a few blocks.
+
+"Well, Garland," said he, "what are you going to do after you graduate
+this June?"
+
+"I don't know," I frankly replied. "I have a chance to go into a law
+office."
+
+"Don't do it," protested he with sudden and inexplicable bitterness.
+"Whatever you do, don't become a lawyer's hack."
+
+His tone and the words, "lawyer's hack" had a powerful effect upon my
+mind. The warning entered my ears and stayed there. I decided against
+the law, as I had already decided against the farm.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Yes, these were the sweetest days of my life for I was carefree and
+glowing with the happiness which streams from perfect health and
+unquestioning faith. If any shadow drifted across this sunny year it
+fell from a haunting sense of the impermanency of my leisure. Neither
+Burton nor I had an ache or a pain. We had no fear and cherished no
+sorrow, and we were both comparatively free from the lover's almost
+intolerable longing. Our loves were hardly more than admirations.
+
+As I project myself back into those days I re-experience the keen joy I
+took in the downpour of vivid sunlight, in the colorful clouds of
+evening, and in the song of the west wind harping amid the maple leaves.
+The earth was new, the moonlight magical, the dawns miraculous. I shiver
+with the boy's solemn awe in the presence of beauty. The little
+recitation rooms, dusty with floating chalk, are wide halls of romance
+and the voices of my girl classmates (even though their words are
+algebraic formulas), ring sweet as bells across the years.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+During the years '79 and '80, while Burton and I had been living our
+carefree jocund life at the Seminary, a series of crop failures had
+profoundly affected the county, producing a feeling of unrest and
+bitterness in the farmers which was to have a far-reaching effect on my
+fortunes as well as upon those of my fellows. For two years the crop had
+been almost wholly destroyed by chinch bugs.
+
+The harvest of '80 had been a season of disgust and disappointment to us
+for not only had the pestiferous mites devoured the grain, they had
+filled our stables, granaries, and even our kitchens with their
+ill-smelling crawling bodies--and now they were coming again in added
+billions. By the middle of June they swarmed at the roots of the
+wheat--innumerable as the sands of the sea. They sapped the growing
+stalks till the leaves turned yellow. It was as if the field had been
+scorched, even the edges of the corn showed signs of blight. It was
+evident that the crop was lost unless some great change took place in
+the weather, and many men began to offer their land for sale.
+
+Naturally the business of grain-buying had suffered with the decline of
+grain-growing, and my father, profoundly discouraged by the outlook,
+sold his share in the elevator and turned his face toward the free lands
+of the farther west. He became again the pioneer.
+
+DAKOTA was the magic word. The "Jim River Valley" was now the "land of
+delight," where "herds of deer and buffalo" still "furnished the cheer."
+Once more the spirit of the explorer flamed up in the soldier's heart.
+Once more the sunset allured. Once more my mother sang the marching song
+of the McClintocks,
+
+    O'er the hills in legions, boys,
+      Fair freedom's star
+    Points to the sunset regions, boys,
+      Ha, ha, ha-ha!
+
+and sometime, in May I think it was, father again set out--this time by
+train, to explore the Land of The Dakotas which had but recently been
+wrested from the control of Sitting Bull.
+
+He was gone only two weeks, but on his return announced with triumphant
+smile that he had taken up a homestead in Ordway, Brown County, Dakota.
+His face was again alight with the hope of the borderman, and he had
+much to say of the region he had explored.
+
+As graduation day came on, Burton and I became very serious. The
+question of our future pressed upon us. What were we to do when our
+schooling ended? Neither of us had any hope of going to college, and
+neither of us had any intention of going to Dakota, although I had taken
+"Going West" as the theme of my oration. We were also greatly worried
+about these essays. Burton fell off in appetite and grew silent and
+abstracted. Each of us gave much time to declaiming our speeches, and
+the question of dress troubled us. Should we wear white ties and white
+vests, or white ties and black vests?
+
+The evening fell on a dark and rainy night, but the Garlands came down
+in their best attire and so did the Babcocks, the Gilchrists and many
+other of our neighbors. Burton was hoping that his people would not
+come, he especially dreaded the humorous gaze of his brother Charles who
+took a much less serious view of Burton's powers as an orator than
+Burton considered just. Other interested parents and friends filled the
+New Opera House to the doors, producing in us a sense of awe for this
+was the first time the "Exercises" had taken place outside the chapel.
+
+Never again shall I feel the same exultation, the same pleasure mingled
+with bitter sadness, the same perception of the irrevocable passing of
+beautiful things, and the equally inexorable coming on of care and
+trouble, as filled my heart that night. Whether any of the other members
+of my class vibrated with similar emotion or not I cannot say, but I do
+recall that some of the girls annoyed me by their excessive attentions
+to unimportant ribbons, flounces, and laces. "How do I look?" seemed
+their principal concern. Only Alice expressed anything of the prophetic
+sadness which mingled with her exultation.
+
+The name of my theme, (which was made public for the first time in the
+little programme) is worthy of a moment's emphasis. _Going West_ had
+been suggested, of course by the emigration fever, then at its height,
+and upon it I had lavished a great deal of anxious care. As an oration
+it was all very excited and very florid, but it had some stirring ideas
+in it and coming in the midst of the profound political discourses of my
+fellows and the formal essays of the girls, it seemed much more singular
+and revolutionary, both in form and in substance, than it really was.
+
+As I waited my turn, I experienced that sense of nausea, that numbness
+which always preceded my platform trials, but as my name was called I
+contrived to reach the proper place behind the footlights, and to bow to
+the audience. My opening paragraph perplexed my fellows, and naturally,
+for it was exceedingly florid, filled with phrases like "the lure of the
+sunset," "the westward urge of men," and was neither prose nor verse.
+Nevertheless I detected a slight current of sympathy coming up to me,
+and in the midst of the vast expanse of faces, I began to detect here
+and there a friendly smile. Mother and father were near but their faces
+were very serious.
+
+After a few moments the blood began to circulate through my limbs and I
+was able to move about a little on the stage. My courage came back, but
+alas!--just in proportion as I attained confidence my emotional chant
+mounted too high! Since the writing was extremely ornate, my manner
+should have been studiedly cold and simple. This I knew perfectly well,
+but I could not check the perfervid rush of my song. I ranted
+deplorably, and though I closed amid fairly generous applause, no
+flowers were handed up to me. The only praise I received came from
+Charles Lohr, the man who had warned me against becoming a lawyer's
+hack. He, meeting me in the wings of the stage as I came off, remarked
+with ironic significance, "Well, that was an original piece of
+business!"
+
+This delighted me exceedingly, for I had written with special deliberate
+intent to go outside the conventional grind of graduating orations.
+Feeling dimly, but sincerely, the epic march of the American pioneer I
+had tried to express it in an address which was in fact a sloppy poem. I
+should not like to have that manuscript printed precisely as it came
+from my pen, and a phonographic record of my voice would serve admirably
+as an instrument of blackmail. However, I thought at the time that I had
+done moderately well, and my mother's shy smile confirmed me in the
+belief.
+
+Burton was white with stage-fright as he stepped from the wings but he
+got through very well, better than I, for he attempted no oratorical
+flights.
+
+Now came the usual hurried and painful farewells of classmates. With
+fervid hand-clasp we separated, some of us never again to meet. Our
+beloved principal (who was even then shadowed by the illness which
+brought about his death) clung to us as if he hated to see us go, and
+some of us could not utter a word as we took his hand in parting. What I
+said to Alice and Maud and Ethel I do not know, but I do recall that I
+had an uncomfortable lump in my throat while saying it.
+
+As a truthful historian, I must add that Burton and I, immediately after
+this highly emotional close of our school career, were both called upon
+to climb into the family carriage and drive away into the black night,
+back to the farm,--an experience which seemed to us at the time a sad
+anticlimax. When we entered our ugly attic rooms and tumbled wearily
+into our hard beds, we retained very little of our momentary sense of
+victory. Our carefree school life was ended. Our stern education in life
+had begun.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+The Land of the Dakotas
+
+
+The movement of settlers toward Dakota had now become an exodus, a
+stampede. Hardly anything else was talked about as neighbors met one
+another on the road or at the Burr Oak school-house on Sundays. Every
+man who could sell out had gone west or was going. In vain did the
+county papers and Farmer's Institute lecturers advise cattle raising and
+plead for diversified tillage, predicting wealth for those who held on;
+farmer after farmer joined the march to Kansas, Nebraska, and Dakota.
+"We are wheat raisers," they said, "and we intend to keep in the wheat
+belt."
+
+Our own family group was breaking up. My uncle David of pioneer spirit
+had already gone to the far Missouri Valley. Rachel had moved to
+Georgia, and Grandad McClintock was with his daughters, Samantha and
+Deborah, in western Minnesota. My mother, thus widely separated from her
+kin, resigned herself once more to the thought of founding a new home.
+Once more she sang, "O'er the hills in legions, boys," with such spirit
+as she could command, her clear voice a little touched with the
+huskiness of regret.
+
+I confess I sympathized in some degree with my father's new design.
+There was something large and fine in the business of wheat-growing, and
+to have a plague of insects arise just as our harvesting machinery was
+reaching such perfection that we could handle our entire crop without
+hired help, was a tragic, abominable injustice. I could not blame him
+for his resentment and dismay.
+
+My personal plans were now confused and wavering. I had no intention of
+joining this westward march; on the contrary, I was looking toward
+employment as a teacher, therefore my last weeks at the Seminary were
+shadowed by a cloud of uncertainty and vague alarm. It seemed a time of
+change, and immense, far-reaching, portentous readjustment. Our
+homestead was sold, my world was broken up. "What am I to do?" was my
+question.
+
+Father had settled upon Ordway, Brown County, South Dakota, as his
+future home, and immediately after my graduation, he and my brother set
+forth into the new country to prepare the way for the family's removal,
+leaving me to go ahead with the harvest alone. It fell out, therefore,
+that immediately after my flowery oration on _Going West_ I found myself
+more of a slave to the cattle than ever before in my life.
+
+Help was scarce; I could not secure even so much as a boy to aid in
+milking the cows; I was obliged to work double time in order to set up
+the sheaves of barley which were in danger of mouldering on the wet
+ground. I worked with a kind of bitter, desperate pleasure, saying,
+"This is the last time I shall ever lift a bundle of this accursed
+stuff."
+
+And then, to make the situation worse, in raising some heavy machinery
+connected with the self-binder, I strained my side so seriously that I
+was unable to walk. This brought the harvesting to a stand, and made my
+father's return necessary. For several weeks I hobbled about, bent like
+a gnome, and so helped to reap what the chinch bugs had left, while my
+mother prepared to "follow the sunset" with her "Boss."
+
+September first was the day set for saying good-bye to Dry Run, and it
+so happened that her wedding anniversary fell close upon the same date
+and our neighbors, having quietly passed the word around, came together
+one Sunday afternoon to combine a farewell dinner with a Silver Wedding
+"surprise party."
+
+Mother saw nothing strange in the coming of the first two carriages, the
+Buttons often came driving in that way,--but when the Babcocks, the
+Coles, and the Gilchrists clattered in with smiling faces, we all stood
+in the yard transfixed with amazement. "What's the meaning of all this?"
+asked my father.
+
+No one explained. The women calmly clambered down from their vehicles,
+bearing baskets and bottles and knobby parcels, and began instant and
+concerted bustle of preparation. The men tied their horses to the fence
+and hunted up saw-horses and planks, and soon a long table was spread
+beneath the trees on the lawn. One by one other teams came whirling into
+the yard. The assembly resembled a "vandoo" as Asa Walker said. "It's
+worse than that," laughed Mrs. Turner. "It's a silver wedding and a
+'send off' combined."
+
+They would not let either the "bride" or the "groom" do a thing, and
+with smiling resignation my mother folded her hands and sank into a
+chair. "All right," she said. "I am perfectly willing to sit by and see
+you do the work. I won't have another chance right away." And there was
+something sad in her voice. She could not forget that this was the
+beginning of a new pioneering adventure.
+
+The shadows were long on the grass when at the close of the supper old
+John Gammons rose to make a speech and present the silver tea set. His
+voice was tremulous with emotion as he spoke of the loss which the
+neighborhood was about to suffer, and tears were in many eyes when
+father made reply. The old soldier's voice failed him several times
+during his utterance of the few short sentences he was able to frame,
+and at last he was obliged to take his seat, and blow his nose very hard
+on his big bandanna handkerchief to conceal his emotion.
+
+It was a very touching and beautiful moment to me, for as I looked
+around upon that little group of men and women, rough-handed, bent and
+worn with toil, silent and shadowed with the sorrow of parting, I
+realized as never before the high place my parents had won in the
+estimation of their neighbors. It affected me still more deeply to see
+my father stammer and flush with uncontrollable emotion. I had thought
+the event deeply important before, but I now perceived that our going
+was all of a piece with the West's elemental restlessness. I could not
+express what I felt then, and I can recover but little of it now, but
+the pain which filled my throat comes back to me mixed with a singular
+longing to relive it.
+
+There, on a low mound in the midst of the prairie, in the shadow of the
+house we had built, beneath the slender trees we had planted, we were
+bidding farewell to one cycle of emigration and entering upon another.
+The border line had moved on, and my indomitable Dad was moving with it.
+I shivered with dread of the irrevocable decision thus forced upon me. I
+heard a clanging as of great gates behind me and the field of the future
+was wide and wan.
+
+From this spot we had seen the wild prairies disappear. On every hand
+wheat and corn and clover had taken the place of the wild oat, the
+hazelbush and the rose. Our house, a commonplace frame cabin, took on
+grace. Here Hattie had died. Our yard was ugly, but there Jessie's small
+feet had worn a slender path. Each of our lives was knit into these
+hedges and rooted in these fields and yet, notwithstanding all this, in
+response to some powerful yearning call, my father was about to set out
+for the fifth time into the still more remote and untrodden west. Small
+wonder that my mother sat with bowed head and tear-blinded eyes, while
+these good and faithful friends crowded around her to say good-bye.
+
+She had no enemies and no hatreds. Her rich singing voice, her smiling
+face, her ready sympathy with those who suffered, had endeared her to
+every home into which she had gone, even as a momentary visitor. No
+woman in childbirth, no afflicted family within a radius of five miles
+had ever called for her in vain. Death knew her well, for she had closed
+the eyes of youth and age, and yet she remained the same laughing,
+bounteous, whole-souled mother of men that she had been in the valley of
+the Neshonoc. Nothing could permanently cloud her face or embitter the
+sunny sweetness of her creed.
+
+One by one the women put their worn, ungraceful arms about her, kissed
+her with trembling lips, and went away in silent grief. The scene became
+too painful for me at last, and I fled away from it--out into the
+fields, bitterly asking, "Why should this suffering be? Why should
+mother be wrenched from all her dearest friends and forced to move away
+to a strange land?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I did not see the actual packing up and moving of the household goods,
+for I had determined to set forth in advance and independently, eager to
+be my own master, and at the moment I did not feel in the least like
+pioneering.
+
+Some two years before, when the failure of our crop had made the matter
+of my continuing at school an issue between my father and myself, I had
+said, "If you will send me to school until I graduate, I will ask
+nothing further of you," and these words I now took a stern pleasure in
+upholding. Without a dollar of my own, I announced my intention to fare
+forth into the world on the strength of my two hands, but my father, who
+was in reality a most affectionate parent, offered me thirty dollars to
+pay my carfare.
+
+This I accepted, feeling that I had abundantly earned this money, and
+after a sad parting with my mother and my little sister, set out one
+September morning for Osage. At the moment I was oppressed with the
+thought that this was the fork in the trail, that my family and I had
+started on differing roads. I had become a man. With all the ways of the
+world before me I suffered from a feeling of doubt. The open gate
+allured me, but the homely scenes I was leaving suddenly put forth a
+latent magic.
+
+I knew every foot of this farm. I had traversed it scores of times in
+every direction, following the plow, the harrow, or the seeder. With a
+great lumber wagon at my side I had husked corn from every acre of it,
+and now I was leaving it with no intention of returning. My action, like
+that of my father, was final. As I looked back up the lane at the tall
+Lombardy poplar trees bent like sabres in the warm western wind, the
+landscape I was leaving seemed suddenly very beautiful, and the old home
+very peaceful and very desirable. Nevertheless I went on.
+
+Try as I may, I cannot bring back out of the darkness of that night any
+memory of how I spent the time. I must have called upon some of my
+classmates, but I cannot lay hold upon a single word or look or phrase
+from any of them. Deeply as I felt my distinction in thus riding forth
+into the world, all the tender incidents of farewell are lost to me.
+Perhaps my boyish self-absorption prevented me from recording outside
+impressions, for the idea of travelling, of crossing the State line,
+profoundly engaged me. Up to this time, notwithstanding all my dreams of
+conquest in far countries, I had never ridden in a railway coach! Can
+you wonder therefore that I trembled with joyous excitement as I paced
+the platform next morning waiting for the chariot of my romance? The
+fact that it was a decayed little coach at the end of a "mixed
+accommodation train" on a stub road did not matter. I was ecstatic.
+
+However, I was well dressed, and my inexperience appeared only in a
+certain tense watchfulness. I closely observed what went on around me
+and was careful to do nothing which could be misconstrued as ignorance.
+Thrilling with excitement, feeling the mighty significance of my
+departure, I entered quietly and took my seat, while the train roared on
+through Mitchell and St. Ansgar, the little towns in which I had played
+my part as an actor,--on into distant climes and marvellous cities. My
+emotion was all very boyish, but very natural as I look back upon it.
+
+The town in which I spent my first night abroad should have been called
+Thebes or Athens or Palmyra; but it was not. On the contrary, it was
+named Ramsey, after an old pioneer, and no one but a youth of fervid
+imagination at the close of his first day of adventure in the world
+would have found it worth a second glance. To me it was both beautiful
+and inspiring, for the reason that it was new territory and because it
+was the home of Alice, my most brilliant school mate, and while I had in
+mind some notion of a conference with the county superintendent of
+schools, my real reason for stopping off was a desire to see this girl
+whom I greatly admired.
+
+I smile as I recall the feeling of pride with which I stepped into the
+'bus and started for the Grand Central Hotel. And yet, after all, values
+are relative. That boy had something which I have lost. I would give
+much of my present knowledge of the world for the keen savor of life
+which filled my nostrils at that time.
+
+The sound of a violin is mingled with my memories of Ramsey, and the
+talk of a group of rough men around the bar-room stove is full of savage
+charm. A tall, pale man, with long hair and big black eyes, one who
+impressed me as being a man of refinement and culture, reduced by drink
+to poverty and to rebellious bitterness of soul, stands out in powerful
+relief--a tragic and moving figure.
+
+Here, too, I heard my first splendid singer. A patent medicine cart was
+in the street and one of its troupe, a basso, sang _Rocked in the Cradle
+of the Deep_ with such art that I listened with delight. His lion-like
+pose, his mighty voice, his studied phrasing, revealed to me higher
+qualities of musical art than I had hitherto known.
+
+From this singer, I went directly to Alice's home. I must have appeared
+singularly exalted as I faced her. The entire family was in the sitting
+room as I entered--but after a few kindly inquiries concerning my people
+and some general remarks they each and all slipped away, leaving me
+alone with the girl--in the good old-fashioned American way.
+
+It would seem that in this farewell call I was permitting myself an
+exaggeration of what had been to Alice only a pleasant association, for
+she greeted me composedly and waited for me to justify my presence.
+
+After a few moments of explanation, I suggested that we go out and hear
+the singing of the "troupe." To this she consented, and rose
+quietly--she never did anything hurriedly or with girlish alertness--and
+put on her hat. Although so young, she had the dignity of a woman, and
+her face, pale as a silver moon, was calm and sweet, only her big gray
+eyes expressed the maiden mystery. She read my adoration and was a
+little afraid of it.
+
+As we walked, I spoke of the good days at "the Sem," of our classmates,
+and their future, and this led me to the announcement of my own plans.
+"I shall teach," I said. "I hope to be able to work into a professorship
+in literature some day.--What do you intend to do?"
+
+"I shall go on with my studies for a while," she replied. "I may go to
+some eastern college for a few years."
+
+"You must not become too learned," I urged. "You'll forget me."
+
+She did not protest this as a coquette might have done. On the contrary,
+she remained silent, and I was aware that while she liked and respected
+me, she was not profoundly moved by this farewell call. Nevertheless I
+hoped, and in that hope I repeated, "You will write to me, won't you?"
+
+"Of course!" she replied, and again I experienced a chilling perception
+that her words arose from friendliness rather than from tenderness, but
+I was glad of even this restrained promise, and I added, "I shall write
+often, for I shall be lonely--for a while."
+
+As I walked on, the girl's soft warm arm in mine, a feeling of
+uncertainty, of disquiet, took possession of me. "Success" seemed a long
+way off and the road to it long and hard. However, I said nothing
+further concerning my doubts.
+
+The street that night had all the enchantment of Granada to me. The
+girl's voice rippled with a music like that of the fountain Lindarazza,
+and when I caught glimpses of her sweet, serious face beneath her
+hat-rim, I dreaded our parting. The nearer to her gate we drew the more
+tremulous my voice became, and the more uncertain my step.
+
+At last on the door-step she turned and said, "Won't you come in again?"
+
+In her tone was friendly dismissal, but I would not have it so. "You
+will write to me, won't you?" I pleaded with choking utterance.
+
+She was moved (by pity perhaps).
+
+"Why, yes, with pleasure," she answered. "Good-bye, I hope you'll
+succeed. I'm sure you will."
+
+She extended her hand and I, recalling the instructions of my most
+romantic fiction, raised it to my lips. "Good-bye!" I huskily said, and
+turned away.
+
+My next night was spent in Faribault. Here I touched storied ground, for
+near this town Edward Eggleston had laid the scene of his novel, _The
+Mystery of Metropolisville_ and my imagination responded to the magic
+which lay in the influence of the man of letters. I wrote to Alice a
+long and impassioned account of my sensations as I stood beside the
+Cannonball River.
+
+My search for a school proving futile, I pushed on to the town of
+Farmington, where the Dakota branch of the Milwaukee railroad crossed my
+line of march. Here I felt to its full the compelling power of the swift
+stream of immigration surging to the west. The little village had
+doubled in size almost in a day. It was a junction point, a place of
+transfer, and its thin-walled unpainted pine hotels were packed with
+men, women and children laden with bags and bundles (all bound for the
+west) and the joyous excitement of these adventurers compelled me to
+change my plan. I decided to try some of the newer counties in western
+Minnesota. Romance was still in the West for me.
+
+I slept that night on the floor in company with four or five young Iowa
+farmers, and the smell of clean white shavings, the wailing of tired
+children, the excited muttering of fathers, the plaintive voices of
+mothers, came through the partitions at intervals, producing in my mind
+an effect which will never pass away. It seemed to me at the moment as
+if all America were in process of change, all hurrying to overtake the
+vanishing line of the middle border, and the women at least were
+secretly or openly doubtful of the outcome. Woman is not by nature an
+explorer. She is the home-lover.
+
+Early the next morning I bought a ticket for Aberdeen, and entered the
+train crammed with movers who had found the "prairie schooner" all too
+slow. The epoch of the canvas-covered wagon had passed. The era of the
+locomotive, the day of the chartered car, had arrived. Free land was
+receding at railroad speed, the borderline could be overtaken only by
+steam, and every man was in haste to arrive.
+
+All that day we rumbled and rattled into a strange country, feeding our
+little engine with logs of wood, which we stopped occasionally to secure
+from long ricks which lined the banks of the river. At Chaska, at
+Granite Falls, I stepped off, but did not succeed in finding employment.
+It is probable that being filled with the desire of exploration I only
+half-heartedly sought for work; at any rate, on the third day, I found
+myself far out upon the unbroken plain where only the hairlike buffalo
+grass grew--beyond trees, beyond the plow, but not beyond settlement,
+for here at the end of my third day's ride at Millbank, I found a hamlet
+six months old, and the flock of shining yellow pine shanties strewn
+upon the sod, gave me an illogical delight, but then I was
+twenty-one--and it was sunset in the Land of the Dakotas!
+
+All around me that night the talk was all of land, land! Nearly every
+man I met was bound for the "Jim River valley," and each voice was
+aquiver with hope, each eye alight with anticipation of certain
+success. Even the women had begun to catch something of this
+enthusiasm, for the night was very beautiful and the next day promised
+fair.
+
+Again I slept on a cot in a room of rough pine, slept dreamlessly, and
+was out early enough to witness the coming of dawn,--a wonderful moment
+that sunrise was to me. Again, as eleven years before, I felt myself a
+part of the new world, a world fresh from the hand of God. To the east
+nothing could be seen but a vague expanse of yellow plain, misty purple
+in its hollows, but to the west rose a long low wall of hills, the
+Eastern Coteaux, up which a red line of prairie fire was slowly
+creeping.
+
+It was middle September. The air, magnificently crisp and clear, filled
+me with desire of exploration, with vague resolution to do and dare. The
+sound of horses and mules calling for their feed, the clatter of hammers
+and the rasping of saws gave evidence of eager builders, of alert
+adventurers, and I was hotly impatient to get forward.
+
+At eight o'clock the engine drew out, pulling after it a dozen box-cars
+laden with stock and household goods, and on the roof of a freight
+caboose, together with several other young Jasons, I rode, bound for the
+valley of the James.
+
+It was a marvellous adventure. All the morning we rattled and rumbled
+along, our engine snorting with effort, struggling with a load almost
+too great for its strength. By noon we were up amid the rounded grassy
+hills of the Sisseton Reservation where only the coyote ranged and the
+Sioux made residence.
+
+Here we caught our first glimpse of the James River valley, which seemed
+to us at the moment as illimitable as the ocean and as level as a floor,
+and then pitching and tossing over the rough track, with our cars
+leaping and twisting like a herd of frightened buffaloes, we charged
+down the western slope, down into a level land of ripened grass, where
+blackbirds chattered in the willows, and prairie chickens called from
+the tall rushes which grew beside the sluggish streams.
+
+Aberdeen was the end of the line, and when we came into it that night it
+seemed a near neighbor to Sitting Bull and the bison. And so, indeed, it
+was, for a buffalo bull had been hunted across its site less than a year
+before.
+
+It was twelve miles from here to where my father had set his stakes for
+his new home, hence I must have stayed all night in some small hotel,
+but that experience has also faded from my mind. I remember only my walk
+across the dead-level plain next day. For the first time I set foot upon
+a landscape without a tree to break its sere expanse--and I was at once
+intensely interested in a long flock of gulls, apparently rolling along
+the sod, busily gathering their morning meal of frosted locusts. The
+ones left behind kept flying over the ones in front so that a ceaseless
+change of leadership took place.
+
+There was beauty in this plain, delicate beauty and a weird charm,
+despite its lack of undulation. Its lonely unplowed sweep gave me the
+satisfying sensation of being at last among the men who held the
+outposts,--sentinels for the marching millions who were approaching from
+the east. For two hours I walked, seeing Aberdeen fade to a series of
+wavering, grotesque notches on the southern horizon line, while to the
+north an equally irregular and insubstantial line of shadows gradually
+took on weight and color until it became the village in which my father
+was at this very moment busy in founding his new home.
+
+My experienced eyes saw the deep, rich soil, and my youthful imagination
+looking into the future, supplied the trees and vines and flowers which
+were to make this land a garden.
+
+I was converted. I had no doubts. It seemed at the moment that my father
+had acted wisely in leaving his Iowa farm in order to claim his share of
+Uncle Sam's rapidly-lessening unclaimed land.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+The Grasshopper and the Ant
+
+
+Without a doubt this trip, so illogical and so recklessly extravagant,
+was due entirely to a boy's thirst for adventure. Color it as I may, the
+fact of my truancy remains. I longed to explore. The valley of the James
+allured me, and though my ticket and my meals along the route had used
+up my last dollar, I felt amply repaid as I trod this new earth and
+confronted this new sky--for both earth and sky were to my perception
+subtly different from those of Iowa and Minnesota.
+
+The endless stretches of short, dry grass, the gorgeous colors of the
+dawn, the marvellous, shifting, phantom lakes and headlands, the violet
+sunset afterglow,--all were widely different from our old home, and the
+far, bare hills were delightfully suggestive of the horseman, the Indian
+and the buffalo. The village itself was hardly more than a summer camp,
+and yet its hearty, boastful citizens talked almost deliriously of
+"corner lots" and "boulevards," and their chantings were timed to the
+sound of hammers. The spirit of the builder seized me and so with my
+return ticket in my pocket, I joined the carpenters at work on my
+father's claim some two miles from the village with intent to earn money
+for further exploration.
+
+Grandfather Garland had also taken a claim (although he heartily
+disliked the country) and in order to provide for both families a double
+house was being built across the line between the two farms. I helped
+shingle the roof, and being twenty-one now, and my own master, I
+accepted wages from my father without a qualm. I earned every cent of my
+two dollars per day, I assure you, but I carefully omitted all reference
+to shingling, in my letters to my classmates.
+
+At the end of a fortnight with my pay in my pocket I started eastward on
+a trip which I fully intended to make very long and profoundly
+educational. That I was green, very green, I knew but all that could be
+changed by travel.
+
+At the end of my second day's journey, I reached Hastings, a small town
+on the Mississippi river, and from there decided to go by water to
+Redwing some thirty miles below. All my life I had longed to ride on a
+Mississippi steamboat, and now, as I waited on the wharf at the very
+instant of the fulfillment of my desire, I expanded with anticipatory
+satisfaction.
+
+The arrival of the _War Eagle_ from St. Paul carried a fine foreign
+significance, and I ascended its gang-plank with the air of a traveller
+embarking at Cairo for Assouan. Once aboard the vessel I mingled,
+aloofly, with the passengers, absorbed in study of the river winding
+down among its wooded hills.
+
+This ecstasy lasted during the entire trip--indeed it almost took on
+poetic form as the vessel approached the landing at Redwing, for at this
+point the legendary appeal made itself felt. This lovely valley had once
+been the home of a chieftain, and his body, together with that of his
+favorite warhorse, was buried on the summit of a hill which overlooks
+the river, "in order" (so runs the legend) "that the chief might see the
+first faint glow of the resurrection morn and ride to meet it."
+
+In truth Redwing was a quiet, excessively practical little town, quite
+commonplace to every other passenger, except myself. My excited
+imagination translated it into something very distinctive and far-off
+and shining.
+
+I took lodgings that night at a very exclusive boarding house at six
+dollars per week, reckless of the effect on my very slender purse. For a
+few days I permitted myself to wander and to dream. I have disturbing
+recollections of writing my friends from this little town, letters
+wherein I rhapsodized on the beauty of the scenery in terms which I
+would not now use in describing the Grand Canyon, or in picturing the
+peaks of Wyoming. After all I was right. A landscape is precisely as
+great as the impression it makes upon the perceiving mind. I was a
+traveller at last!--that seemed to be my chiefest joy and I extracted
+from each day all the ecstasy it contained.
+
+My avowed object was to obtain a school and I did not entirely neglect
+my plans but application to the county superintendent came to nothing. I
+fear I was half-hearted in my campaign.
+
+At last, at the beginning of the week and at the end of my money, I
+bought passage to Wabasha and from there took train to a small town
+where some of my mother's cousins lived. I had been in correspondence
+with one of them, a Mrs. Harris, and I landed at her door (after a
+glorious ride up through the hills, amid the most gorgeous autumn
+colors) with just three cents in my pocket--a poverty which you may be
+sure I did not publish to my relations who treated me with high respect
+and manifested keen interest in all my plans.
+
+As nothing offered in the township round about the Harris home, I
+started one Saturday morning to walk to a little cross-roads village
+some twenty miles away, in which I was told a teacher was required. My
+cousins, not knowing that I was penniless, supposed, of course, that I
+would go by train, and I was too proud to tell them the truth. It was
+very muddy, and when I reached the home of the committeeman his mid-day
+meal was over, and his wife did not ask if I had dined--although she was
+quick to tell me that the teacher had just been hired.
+
+Without a cent in my pocket, I could not ask for food--therefore, I
+turned back weary, hungry and disheartened. To make matters worse a cold
+rain was falling and the eighteen or twenty miles between me and the
+Harris farm looked long.
+
+I think it must have been at this moment that I began, for the first
+time, to take a really serious view of my plan "to see the world." It
+became evident with startling abruptness, that a man might be both
+hungry and cold in the midst of abundance. I recalled the fable of the
+grasshopper who, having wasted the summer hours in singing, was
+mendicant to the ant. My weeks of careless gayety were over. The money I
+had spent in travel looked like a noble fortune to me at this hour.
+
+The road was deep in mud, and as night drew on the rain thickened. At
+last I said, "I will go into some farm-house and ask the privilege of a
+bed." This was apparently a simple thing to do and yet I found it
+exceedingly hard to carry out. To say bluntly, "Sir, I have no money, I
+am tired and hungry," seemed a baldly disgraceful way of beginning. On
+the other hand to plead relationship with Will Harris involved a
+relative, and besides they might not know my cousin, or they might think
+my statement false.
+
+Arguing in this way I passed house after house while the water dripped
+from my hat and the mud clogged my feet. Though chilled and hungry to
+the point of weakness, my suffering was mainly mental. A sudden
+realization of the natural antagonism of the well-to-do toward the tramp
+appalled me. Once, as I turned in toward the bright light of a kitchen
+window, the roar of a watch dog stopped me before I had fairly passed
+the gate. I turned back with a savage word, hot with resentment at a
+house-owner who would keep a beast like that. At another cottage I was
+repulsed by an old woman who sharply said, "We don't feed tramps."
+
+I now had the precise feeling of the penniless outcast. With morbidly
+active imagination I conceived of myself as a being forever set apart
+from home and friends, condemned to wander the night alone. I worked on
+this idea till I achieved a bitter, furtive and ferocious manner.
+
+However, I knocked at another door and upon meeting the eyes of the
+woman at the threshold, began with formal politeness to explain, "I am a
+teacher, I have been to look for a school, and I am on my way back to
+Byron, where I have relatives. Can you keep me all night?"
+
+The woman listened in silence and at length replied with ungracious
+curtness, "I guess so. Come in."
+
+She gave me a seat by the fire, and when her husband returned from the
+barn, I explained the situation to him. He was only moderately cordial.
+"Make yourself at home. I'll be in as soon as I have finished my
+milking," he said and left me beside the kitchen fire.
+
+The woman of the house, silent, suspicious (it seemed to me) began to
+spread the table for supper while I, sitting beside the stove, began to
+suffer with the knowledge that I had, in a certain sense, deceived them.
+I was fairly well dressed and my voice and manner, as well as the fact
+that I was seeking a school, had given them, no doubt, the impression
+that I was able to pay for my entertainment, and the more I thought of
+this the more uneasy I became. To eat of their food without making an
+explanation was impossible but the longer I waited the more difficult
+the explanation grew.
+
+Suffering keenly, absurdly, I sat with hanging head going over and over
+the problem, trying to formulate an easy way of letting them know my
+predicament. There was but one way of escape--and I took it. As the
+woman stepped out of the room for a moment, I rose, seized my hat and
+rushed out into the rain and darkness like a fugitive.
+
+I have often wondered what those people thought when they found me gone.
+Perhaps I am the great mystery of their lives, an unexplained visitant
+from "the night's Plutonian shore."
+
+I plodded on for another mile or two in the darkness, which was now so
+intense I could scarcely keep the road. Only by the feel of the mud
+under my feet could I follow the pike. Like Jean Valjean, I possessed a
+tempest in my brain. I experienced my first touch of despair.
+
+Although I had never had more than thirty dollars at any one time, I had
+never been without money. Distinctions had not counted largely in the
+pioneer world to which I belonged. I was proud of my family. I came of
+good stock, and knew it and felt it, but now here I was, wet as a sponge
+and without shelter simply because I had not in my pocket a small piece
+of silver with which to buy a bed.
+
+I walked on until this dark surge of rebellious rage had spent its force
+and reason weakly resumed her throne. I said, "What nonsense! Here I am
+only a few miles from relatives. All the farmers on this road must know
+the Harris family. If I tell them who I am, they will certainly feel
+that I have the claim of a neighbor upon them."--But these deductions,
+admirable as they were, did not lighten my sky or make begging easier.
+
+After walking two miles further I found it almost impossible to proceed.
+It was black night and I did not know where I stood. The wind had risen
+and the rain was falling in slant cataracts. As I looked about me and
+caught the gleam from the windows of a small farmhouse, my stubborn
+pride gave way. Stumbling up the path I rapped on the door. It was
+opened by a middle-aged farmer in his stocking feet, smoking a pipe.
+Having finished his supper he was taking his ease beside the fire, and
+fortunately for me, was in genial mood.
+
+"Come in," he said heartily. "'Tis a wet night."
+
+I began, "I am a cousin of William Harris of Byron--"
+
+"You don't say! Well, what are you doing on the road a night like this?
+Come in!"
+
+I stepped inside and finished my explanation there.
+
+This good man and his wife will forever remain the most hospitable
+figures in my memory. They set me close beside the stove insisting that
+I put my feet in the oven to dry, talking meanwhile of my cousins and
+the crops, and complaining of the incessant rainstorms which were
+succeeding one another almost without intermission, making this one of
+the wettest and most dismal autumns the country had ever seen. Never in
+all my life has a roof seemed more heavenly, or hosts more sweet and
+gracious.
+
+After breakfast next morning I shook hands with the farmer saying: "I
+shall send you the money for my entertainment the first time my cousin
+comes to town," and under the clamor of his hospitable protestations
+against payment, set off up the road.
+
+The sun came out warm and beautiful and all about me on every farm the
+teamsters were getting into the fields. The mud began to dry up and with
+the growing cheer of the morning my heart expanded and the experience of
+the night before became as unreal as a dream and yet it had happened,
+and it had taught me a needed lesson. Hereafter I take no narrow
+chances, I vowed to myself.
+
+Upon arrival at my cousin's home I called him aside and said, "Will, you
+have work to do and I have need of wages,--I am going to strip off this
+'boiled shirt' and white collar, and I am going to work for you just
+the same as any other hand, and I shall expect the full pay of the best
+man on your place."
+
+He protested, "I don't like to see you do this. Don't give up your
+plans. I'll hitch up and we'll start out and keep going till we find you
+a school."
+
+"No," I said, "not till I earn a few dollars to put in my pocket. I've
+played the grasshopper for a few weeks--from this time on I'm the busy
+ant."
+
+So it was settled, and the grasshopper went forth into the fields and
+toiled as hard as any slave. I plowed, threshed, and husked corn, and
+when at last December came, I had acquired money enough to carry me on
+my way. I decided to visit Onalaska and the old coulee where my father's
+sister and two of the McClintocks were still living. With swift return
+of confidence, I said good-bye to my friends in Zumbrota and took the
+train. It seemed very wonderful that after a space of thirteen years I
+should be returning to the scenes of my childhood, a full-grown man and
+paying my own way. I expanded with joy of the prospect.
+
+Onalaska, the reader may remember, was the town in which I had gone to
+school when a child, and in my return to it I felt somewhat like the man
+in the song, _Twenty Years Ago_--indeed I sang, "I've wandered through
+the village, Tom, I've sat beneath the tree" for my uncle that first
+night. There was the river, filled as of old with logs, and the clamor
+of the saws still rose from the sawdust islands. Bleakly white the
+little church, in which we used to sit in our Sunday best, remained
+unchanged but the old school-house was not merely altered, it was gone!
+In its place stood a commonplace building of brick. The boys with whom I
+used to play "Mumblety Peg" were men, and some of them had developed
+into worthless loafers, lounging about the doors of the saloons, and
+although we looked at one another with eyes of sly recognition, we did
+not speak.
+
+Eagerly I visited the old coulee, but the magic was gone from the hills,
+the glamour from the meadows. The Widow Green no longer lived at the
+turn of the road, and only the Randals remained. The marsh was drained,
+the big trees cleared away. The valley was smaller, less mysterious,
+less poetic than my remembrances of it, but it had charm nevertheless,
+and I responded to the beauty of its guarding bluffs and the deep-blue
+shadows which streamed across its sunset fields.
+
+Uncle William drove down and took me home with him, over the long hill,
+back to the little farm where he was living much the same as I
+remembered him. One of his sons was dead, the other had shared in the
+rush for land, and was at this time owner of a homestead in western
+Minnesota. Grandfather McClintock, still able to walk about, was
+spending the autumn with William and we had a great deal of talk
+concerning the changes which had come to the country and especially to
+our family group. "Ye scatter like the leaves of autumn," he said
+sadly--then added, "Perhaps in the Final Day the trumpet of the Lord
+will bring us all together again."
+
+We sang some of his old Adventist hymns together and then he asked me
+what I was planning to do. "I haven't any definite plans," I answered,
+"except to travel. I want to travel. I want to see the world."
+
+"To see the world!" he exclaimed. "As for me I wait for it to pass away.
+I watch daily for the coming of the Chariot."
+
+This gray old crag of a man interested me as deeply as ever and yet, in
+a sense, he was an alien. He was not of my time--scarcely of my country.
+He was a survival of the days when the only book was the Bible, when
+the newspaper was a luxury. Migration had been his lifelong adventure
+and now he was waiting for the last great remove. His thought now was of
+"the region of the Amaranth," his new land "the other side of Jordan."
+
+He engaged my respect but I was never quite at ease with him. His
+valuations were too intensely religious; he could not understand my
+ambitions. His mind filled with singular prejudices,--notions which came
+down from the Colonial age, was impervious to new ideas. His character
+had lost something of its mellow charm--but it had gained in dramatic
+significance. Like my uncles he had ceased to be a part of my childish
+world.
+
+I went away with a sense of sadness, of loss as though a fine picture on
+the walls of memory had been dimmed or displaced. I perceived that I had
+idealized him as I had idealized all the figures and scenes of my
+boyhood--"but no matter, they were beautiful to me then and beautiful
+they shall remain," was the vague resolution with which I dismissed
+criticism.
+
+The whole region had become by contrast with Dakota, a "settled"
+community. The line of the middle border had moved on some three hundred
+miles to the west. The Dunlaps, McIldowneys, Dudleys and Elwells were
+the stay-at-homes. Having had their thrust at the job of pioneering
+before the war they were now content on their fat soil. To me they all
+seemed remote. Their very names had poetic value, for they brought up in
+my mind shadowy pictures of the Coulee country as it existed to my
+boyish memories.
+
+I spent nearly two months in Onalaska, living with my Aunt Susan, a
+woman of the loveliest character. Richard Bailey, her husband, one of
+the kindliest of men, soon found employment for me, and so, for a time,
+I was happy and secure.
+
+However, this was but a pause by the roadside. I was not satisfied. It
+was a show of weakness to settle down on one's relations. I wanted to
+make my way among strangers. I scorned to lean upon my aunt and uncle,
+though they were abundantly able to keep me. It was mid-winter, nothing
+offered and so I turned (as so many young men similarly placed have
+done), toward a very common yet difficult job. I attempted to take
+subscriptions for a book.
+
+After a few days' experience in a neighboring town I decided that
+whatever else I might be fitted for in this world, I was not intended
+for a book agent. Surrendering my prospectus to the firm, I took my way
+down to Madison, the capital of the state, a city which seemed at this
+time very remote, and very important in my world. Only when travelling
+did I have the feeling of living up to the expectations of Alice and
+Burton who put into their letters to me, an envy which was very sweet.
+To them I was a bold adventurer!
+
+Alas for me! In the shining capital of my state I felt again the world's
+rough hand. First of all I tried The State House. This was before the
+general use of typewriters and I had been told that copyists were in
+demand. I soon discovered that four men and two girls were clamoring for
+every job. Nobody needed me. I met with blunt refusals and at last
+turned to other fields.
+
+Every morning I went among the merchants seeking an opportunity to clerk
+or keep books, and at last obtained a place at six dollars per week in
+the office of an agricultural implement firm. I was put to work in the
+accounting department, as general slavey, under the immediate
+supervision of a youth who had just graduated from my position and who
+considered me his legitimate victim. He was only seventeen and not
+handsome, and I despised him with instant bitterness. Under his
+direction I swept out the office, made copies of letters, got the mail,
+stamped envelopes and performed other duties of a manual routine kind,
+to which I would have made no objection, had it not been for the
+gloating joy with which that chinless cockerel ordered me about. I had
+never been under that kind of discipline, and to have a pin-headed gamin
+order me to clean spittoons was more than I could stomach.
+
+At the end of the week I went to the proprietor, and said, "If you have
+nothing better for me to do than sweep the floor and run errands, I
+think I'll quit."
+
+With some surprise my boss studied me. At last he said: "Very well, sir,
+you can go, and from all accounts I don't think we'll miss you much,"
+which was perfectly true. I was an absolute failure so far as any
+routine work of that kind was concerned.
+
+So here again I was thrown upon a cruel world with only six dollars
+between myself and the wolf. Again I fell back upon my physical powers.
+I made the round of all the factories seeking manual labor. I went out
+on the Catfish, where, through great sheds erected for the manufacture
+of farm machinery, I passed from superintendent to foreman, from foreman
+to boss,--eager to wheel sand, paint woodwork, shovel coal--anything at
+all to keep from sending home for money--for, mind you, my father or my
+uncle would have helped me out had I written to them, but I could not do
+that. So long as I was able to keep a roof over my head, I remained
+silent. I was in the world and I intended to keep going without asking a
+cent from anyone. Besides, the grandiloquent plans for travel and
+success which I had so confidently outlined to Burton must be carried
+out.
+
+I should have been perfectly secure had it been summertime, for I knew
+the farmer's life and all that pertained to it, but it was winter. How
+to get a living in a strange town was my problem. It was a bright,
+clear, intensely cold February, and I was not very warmly dressed--hence
+I kept moving.
+
+Meanwhile I had become acquainted with a young clergyman in one of the
+churches, and had showed to him certain letters and papers to prove that
+I was not a tramp, and no doubt his word kept my boarding mistress from
+turning me into the street.
+
+Mr. Eaton was a man of books. His library contained many volumes of
+standard value and we met as equals over the pages of Scott and Dickens.
+I actually forced him to listen to a lecture which I had been writing
+during the winter and so wrought upon him that he agreed to arrange a
+date for me in a neighboring country church.--Thereafter while I glowed
+with absurd dreams of winning money and renown by delivering that
+lecture in the churches and school-houses of the state, I continued to
+seek for work, any work that would bring me food and shelter.
+
+One bitter day in my desperate need I went down upon the lake to watch
+the men cutting ice. The wind was keen, the sky gray and filled with
+glittering minute flecks of frost, and my clothing (mainly cotton)
+seemed hardly thicker than gossamer, and yet I looked upon those working
+men with a distinct feeling of envy. Had I secured "a job" I should have
+been pulling a saw up and down through the ice, at the same time that I
+dreamed of touring the west as a lecturer--of such absurd contradictions
+are the visions of youth.
+
+I don't know exactly what I would have done had not my brother happened
+along on his way to a school near Chicago. To him I confessed my
+perplexity. He paid my board bill (which was not very large) and in
+return I talked him into a scheme which promised great things for us
+both--I contracted to lecture under his management! He was delighted at
+the opportunity of advancing me, and we were both happy.
+
+Our first engagement was at Cyene, a church which really belonged to
+Eaton's circuit, and according to my remembrance the lecture was a
+moderate success. After paying all expenses we had a little money for
+carfare, and Franklin was profoundly impressed. It really seemed to us
+both that I had at last entered upon my career. It was the kind of
+service I had been preparing for during all my years at school--but
+alas! our next date was a disaster. We attempted to do that which an
+older and fully established lecturer would not have ventured. We tried
+to secure an audience with only two days' advance work, and of course we
+failed.
+
+I called a halt. I could not experiment on the small fund which my
+father had given Frank for his business education.
+
+However, I borrowed a few dollars of him and bought a ticket to Rock
+River, a town near Chicago. I longed to enter the great western
+metropolis, but dared not do so--yet. I felt safe only when in sight of
+a plowed field.
+
+At a junction seventy miles out of the city, we separated, he to attend
+a school, and I to continue my education in the grim realities of life.
+
+From office to office in Rock River I sullenly plodded, willing to work
+for fifty cents a day, until at last I secured a clerkship in a small
+stationery jobbing house which a couple of school teachers had strangely
+started, but on Saturday of the second week the proprietor called me to
+him and said kindly, but firmly, "Garland, I'm afraid you are too
+literary and too musical for this job. You have a fine baritone voice
+and your ability to vary the text set before you to copy, is remarkable,
+and yet I think we must part."
+
+The reasons for this ironical statement were (to my mind) ignoble;
+first of all he resented my musical ability, secondly, my literary skill
+shamed him, for as he had put before me a badly composed circular
+letter, telling me to copy it one hundred times, I quite naturally
+improved the English.--However, I admitted the charge of
+insubordination, and we parted quite amicably.
+
+It was still winter, and I was utterly without promise of employment. In
+this extremity, I went to the Y. M. C. A. (which had for one of its aims
+the assistance of young men out of work) and confided my homelessness to
+the secretary, a capital young fellow who knew enough about men to
+recognize that I was not a "bum." He offered me the position of
+night-watch and gave me a room and cot at the back of his office. These
+were dark hours!
+
+During the day I continued to pace the streets. Occasionally some little
+job like raking up a yard would present itself, and so I was able to buy
+a few rolls, and sometimes I indulged in milk and meat. I lived along
+from noon to noon in presentable condition, but I was always hungry. For
+four days I subsisted on five cents worth of buns.
+
+Having left my home for the purpose of securing experience in the world,
+I had this satisfaction--I was getting it! Very sweet and far away
+seemed all that beautiful life with Alice and Burton and Hattie at the
+Seminary, something to dream over, to regret, to versify, something
+which the future (at this moment) seemed utterly incapable of
+reproducing. I still corresponded with several of my classmates, but was
+careful to conceal the struggle that I was undergoing. I told them only
+of my travels and my reading.
+
+As the ironical jobber remarked, I had a good voice, and upon being
+invited to accompany the Band of Hope which went to sing and pray in the
+County Jail, I consented, at least I took part in the singing. In this
+way I partly paid the debt I owed the Association, and secured some
+vivid impressions of prison life which came into use at a later time. My
+three associates in this work were a tinner, a clothing salesman and a
+cabinet maker. More and more I longed for the spring, for with it I knew
+would come seeding, building and a chance for me.
+
+At last in the midst of a grateful job of raking up yards and planting
+shrubs, I heard the rat-tat-tat of a hammer, and resolved upon a bold
+plan. I decided to become a carpenter, justifying myself by reference to
+my apprenticeship to my grandfather. One fine April morning I started
+out towards the suburbs, and at every house in process of construction
+approached the boss and asked for a job. Almost at once I found
+encouragement. "Yes, but where are your tools?"
+
+In order to buy the tools I must work, work at anything. Therefore, at
+the next place I asked if there was any rough labor required around the
+house. The foreman replied: "Yes, there is some grading to be done."
+Accordingly I set to work with a wheelbarrow, grading the bank around
+the almost completed building. This was hard work, the crudest form of
+manual labor, but I grappled with it desperately, knowing that the pay
+(a dollar and a half a day) would soon buy a kit of tools.
+
+Oh, that terrible first day! The heavy shovel blistered my hands and
+lamed my wrists. The lifting of the heavily laden wheelbarrow strained
+my back and shoulders. Half-starved and weak, quite unfitted for
+sustained effort of this kind, I struggled on, and at the end of an
+interminable afternoon staggered home to my cot. The next morning came
+soon,--too soon. I was not merely lame, I was lacerated. My muscles
+seemed to have been torn asunder, but I toiled (or made a show of
+toiling) all the second day. On the warrant of my wages I borrowed
+twenty-five cents of a friend and with this bought a meat dinner which
+helped me through another afternoon.
+
+The third day was less painful and by the end of the week, I was able to
+do anything required of me. Upon receiving my pay I went immediately to
+the hardware store and bought a set of tools and a carpenter's apron,
+and early on Monday morning sallied forth in the _opposite direction_ as
+a carpenter seeking a job. I soon came to a big frame house in course of
+construction. "Do you need another hand?" I asked. "Yes," replied the
+boss. "Take hold, right here, with this man."
+
+"This man" turned out to be a Swede, a good-natured fellow, who made no
+comment on my deficiencies. We sawed and hammered together in very
+friendly fashion for a week, and I made rapid gains in strength and
+skill and took keen pleasure in my work. The days seemed short and life
+promising and as I was now getting two dollars per day, I moved out of
+my charity bed and took a room in a decayed mansion in the midst of a
+big lawn. My bearing became confident and easy. Money had straightened
+my back.
+
+The spring advanced rapidly while I was engaged on this work and as my
+crew occasionally took contracts in the country I have vivid pictures of
+the green and pleasant farm lands, of social farmers at barn-raisings,
+and of tables filled with fatness. I am walking again in my stocking
+feet, high on the "purline plate," beetle in hand, driving home the
+oaken "pins." I am shingling on the broad roof of a suburban house from
+which I can see the sunny slopes of a meadow and sheep feeding therein.
+I am mending a screen door for a farmer's wife while she confides to me
+the tragedy of her life--and always I have the foolish boyish notion
+that I am out in the world and seeing life.
+
+Into the midst of this busy peaceful season of manual labor came my
+first deeply romantic admiration. Edwin Booth was announced as "the
+opening attraction of the New Opera House" and I fairly trembled with
+anticipatory delight, for to me the word _Booth_ meant all that was
+splendid and tragic and glorious in the drama. I was afraid that
+something might prevent me from hearing him.
+
+At last the night came and so great was the throng, so strong the
+pressure on the doors that the lock gave way and I, with my dollar
+clutched tightly in my hand, was borne into the hall and half-way up the
+stairs without touching foot to the floor, and when at last, safe in my
+balcony seat I waited for the curtain to rise, I had a distinct
+realization that a shining milestone was about to be established in my
+youthful trail.
+
+My father had told me of the elder Booth, and of Edwin's beautiful
+Prince of Denmark I had heard many stories, therefore I waited with awe
+as well as eagerness, and when the curtain, rising upon the court scene,
+discovered the pale, handsome face and graceful form of the noble Dane,
+and the sound of his voice,--that magic velvet voice--floated to my ear
+with the words, "Seems, madame, I know not seems," neither time nor
+space nor matter existed for me--I was in an ecstasy of attention.
+
+I had read much of Shakespeare. I could recite many pages of the
+tragedies and historical plays, and I had been assured by my teachers
+that _Hamlet_ was the greatest of all dramas, but Edwin Booth in one
+hour taught me more of its wonders, more of the beauty of the English
+language than all my instructors and all my books. He did more, he
+aroused in me a secret ambition to read as he read, to make the dead
+lines of print glow with color and throb with music. There was something
+magical in his interpretation of the drama's printed page. With voice
+and face and hand he restored for duller minds the visions of the poet,
+making Hamlet's sorrows as vital as our own.
+
+From this performance, which filled me with vague ambitions and a
+glorious melancholy, I returned to my association with a tinker, a
+tailor, and a tinner, whose careless and stupid comments on the play
+both pained and angered me. I went to my work next day in such absorbed
+silence as only love is supposed to give.
+
+I re-read my _Hamlet_ now with the light of Booth's face in my eyes and
+the music of his glorious voice in my ear. As I nailed and sawed at pine
+lumber, I murmured inaudibly the lofty lines of the play, in the hope of
+fixing forever in my mind the cadences of the great tragedian's
+matchless voice.
+
+Great days! Growing days! Lonely days! Days of dream and development,
+needing only the girl to be perfect--but I had no one but Alice to whom
+I could voice my new enthusiasm and she was not only out of the reach of
+my voice, but serenely indifferent to my rhapsodic letters concerning
+_Hamlet_ and the genius of Edwin Booth.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+We Discover New England
+
+
+Edwin Booth's performance of _Hamlet_ had another effect. It brought to
+my mind the many stories of Boston which my father had so often related
+to his children. I recalled his enthusiastic accounts of the elder Booth
+and Edwin Forrest, and especially his descriptions of the wonderful
+scenic effects in _Old Put_ and _The Gold Seekers_, wherein actors rode
+down mimic stone steps or debarked from theatrical ships which sailed
+into pictured wharves, and one day in the midst of my lathing and
+sawing, I evolved a daring plan--I decided to visit Boston and explore
+New England.
+
+With all his feeling for the East my father had never revisited it. This
+was a matter of pride with him. "I never take the back trail," he said,
+and yet at times, as he dwelt on the old home in the state of Maine a
+wistful note had crept into his voice, and so now in writing to him, I
+told him that I intended to seek out his boyhood haunts in order that I
+might tell him all about the friends and relations who still lived
+there.
+
+Without in any formal way intending it the old borderman had endowed
+both his sons with a large sense of the power and historic significance
+of Massachusetts. He had contrived to make us feel some part of his
+idolatry of Wendell Phillips, for his memory of the great days of _The
+Liberator_ were keen and worshipful. From him I derived a belief that
+there were giants in those days and the thought of walking the streets
+where Garrison was mobbed and standing in the hall which Webster had
+hallowed with his voice gave me a profound anticipatory stir of delight.
+
+As first assistant to a quaint and dirty old carpenter, I was now
+earning two dollars per day, and saving it. There was no occasion in
+those days for anyone to give me instructions concerning the care of
+money. I knew how every dollar came and I was equally careful to know
+where every nickel went. Travel cost three cents per mile, and the
+number of cities to be visited depended upon the number of dimes I
+should save.
+
+With my plan of campaign mapped out to include a stop at Niagara Falls
+and fourth of July on Boston Common I wrote to my brother at Valparaiso,
+Indiana, inviting him to join me in my adventure. "If we run out of
+money and of course we shall, for I have only about thirty dollars,
+we'll flee to the country. One of my friends here says we can easily
+find work in the meadows near Concord."
+
+The audacity of my design appealed to my brother's imagination. "I'm
+your huckleberry!" he replied. "School ends the last week in June. I'll
+meet you at the Atlantic House in Chicago on the first. Have about
+twenty dollars myself."
+
+At last the day came for my start. With all my pay in my pocket and my
+trunk checked I took the train for Chicago. I shall never forget the
+feeling of dismay with which, an hour later, I perceived from the car
+window a huge smoke-cloud which embraced the whole eastern horizon, for
+this, I was told was the soaring banner of the great and gloomy inland
+metropolis, whose dens of vice and houses of greed had been so often
+reported to me by wandering hired men. It was in truth only a huge
+flimsy country town in those days, but to me it was august as well as
+terrible.
+
+Up to this moment Rockford was the largest town I had ever seen, and the
+mere thought of a million people stunned my imagination. "How can so
+many people find a living in one place?" Naturally I believed most of
+them to be robbers. "If the city is miles across, how am I to get from
+the railway station to my hotel without being assaulted?" Had it not
+been for the fear of ridicule, I think I should have turned back at the
+next stop. The shining lands beyond seemed hardly worth a struggle
+against the dragon's brood with which the dreadful city was a-swarm.
+Nevertheless I kept my seat and was carried swiftly on.
+
+Soon the straggling farm-houses thickened into groups, the villages
+merged into suburban towns, and the train began to clatter through sooty
+freight yards filled with box cars and switching engines; at last, after
+crawling through tangled, thickening webs of steel, it plunged into a
+huge, dark and noisy shed and came to a halt and a few moments later I
+faced the hackmen of Chicago, as verdant a youth as these experienced
+pirates had ever made common cause against.
+
+I knew of them (by report), and was prepared for trouble, but their
+clanging cries, their cynical eyes, their clutching insolent hands were
+more terrifying than anything I had imagined. Their faces expressed
+something remorseless, inhuman and mocking. Their grins were like those
+of wolves.
+
+In my hand I carried an imitation leather valise, and as I passed, each
+of the drivers made a snatch at it, almost tearing it from my hands, but
+being strong as well as desperate, I cleared myself of them, and so,
+following the crowd, not daring to look to right or left, reached the
+street and crossed the bridge with a sigh of relief. So much was
+accomplished.
+
+Without knowing where I should go, I wandered on, shifting my bag from
+hand to hand, till my mind recovered its balance. My bewilderment, my
+depth of distrust, was augmented by the roar and tumult of the crowd. I
+was like some wild animal with exceedingly sensitive ears. The waves of
+sound smothered me.
+
+At last, timidly approaching a policeman, I asked the way to the
+Atlantic Hotel.
+
+"Keep straight down the street five blocks and turn to the left," he
+said, and his kind voice filled me with a glow of gratitude.
+
+With ears benumbed and brain distraught, I threaded the rush, the clamor
+of Clark street and entered the door of the hotel, with such relief as a
+sailor must feel upon suddenly reaching safe harbor after having been
+buffeted on a wild and gloomy sea by a heavy northeast gale.
+
+It was an inconspicuous hotel of the "Farmer's Home" type, but I
+approached the desk with meek reluctance and explained, "I am expecting
+to meet my brother here. I'd like permission to set my bag down and
+wait."
+
+With bland impersonal courtesy the clerk replied, "Make yourself at
+home."
+
+Gratefully sinking into a chair by the window, I fell into study of the
+people streaming by, and a chilling sense of helplessness fell upon me.
+I realized my ignorance, my feebleness. As a minute bubble in this
+torrent of human life, with no friend in whom I could put trust, and
+with only a handful of silver between myself and the gray wolf, I lost
+confidence. The Boston trip seemed a foolish tempting of Providence and
+yet, scared as I was, I had no real intention of giving it up.
+
+My brother's first words as he entered the door, were gayly derisive.
+"Oh, see the whiskers!" he cried and his calm acceptance of my plan
+restored my own courage.
+
+Together we planned our itinerary. We were to see Niagara Falls, of
+course, but to spend the fourth of July on Boston Common, was our true
+objective. "When our money is used up," I said, "we'll strike out into
+the country."
+
+To all this my brother agreed. Neither of us had the slightest fear of
+hunger in the country. It was the city that gave us pause.
+
+All the afternoon and evening we wandered about the streets (being very
+careful not to go too far from our hotel), counting the stories of the
+tall buildings, and absorbing the drama of the pavement. Returning now
+and again to our sanctuary in the hotel lobby we ruminated and rested
+our weary feet.
+
+Everything interested us. The business section so sordid to others was
+grandly terrifying to us. The self-absorption of the men, the calm
+glances of the women humbled our simple souls. Nothing was commonplace,
+nothing was ugly to us.
+
+We slept that night in a room at the extreme top of the hotel. It
+couldn't have been a first class accommodation, for the frame of the bed
+fell in the moment we got into it, but we made no complaint--we would
+not have had the clerk know of our mishap for twice our bill. We merely
+spread the mattress on the floor and slept till morning.
+
+Having secured our transportation we were eager to be off, but as our
+tickets were second class, and good only on certain trains, we waited.
+We did not even think of a sleeping car. We had never known anyone rich
+enough to occupy one. Grant and Edwin Booth probably did, and senators
+were ceremonially obliged to do so, but ordinary folks never looked
+forward to such luxury. Neither of us would have known what to do with a
+berth if it had been presented to us, and the thought of spending two
+dollars for a night's sleep made the cold chills run over us. We knew of
+no easier way to earn two dollars than to save them, therefore we rode
+in the smoker.
+
+Late that night as we were sitting stoically in our places, a brakeman
+came along and having sized us up for the innocents we were,
+good-naturedly said, "Boys, if you'll get up I'll fix your seats so's
+you can lie down and catch a little sleep."
+
+Silently, gratefully we watched him while he took up the cushions and
+turned them lengthwise, thus making a couch. To be sure, it was a very
+short and very hard bed but with the health and strength of nineteen and
+twenty-two, we curled up and slept the remainder of the night like
+soldiers resting on their guns. Pain, we understood, was an unavoidable
+accompaniment of travel.
+
+When morning dawned the train was running through Canada, and excitedly
+calling upon Franklin to rouse, I peered from the window, expecting to
+see a land entirely different from Wisconsin and Illinois. We were both
+somewhat disappointed to find nothing distinctive in either the land or
+its inhabitants. However, it was a foreign soil and we had seen it. So
+much of our exploration was accomplished.
+
+It was three o'clock in the afternoon when we came in sight of the
+suspension bridge and Niagara Falls. I suppose it would be impossible
+for anyone now to feel the same profound interest in any natural
+phenomenon whatsoever. We believed that we were approaching the most
+stupendous natural wonder in all the world, and we could scarcely credit
+the marvel of our good fortune.
+
+All our lives we had heard of this colossal cataract. Our school readers
+contained stately poems and philosophical dissertations concerning it.
+Gough, the great orator, had pointed out the likeness of its resistless
+torrent to the habit of using spirituous liquors. The newspapers still
+printed descriptions of its splendor and no foreigner (so we understood)
+ever came to these shores without visiting and bowing humbly before the
+voice of its waters.--And to think that we, poor prairie boys, were soon
+to stand upon the illustrious brink of that dread chasm and listen to
+its mighty song was wonderful, incredible, benumbing!
+
+Alighting at the squalid little station on the American side, we went to
+the cheapest hotel our keen eyes could discover, and leaving our
+valises, we struck out immediately toward the towering white column of
+mist which could be seen rising like a ghostly banner behind the trees.
+We were like those who first discover a continent.
+
+As we crept nearer, the shuddering roar deepened, and our awe, our
+admiration, our patriotism deepened with it, and when at last we leaned
+against the rail and looked across the tossing spread of river swiftly
+sweeping to its fall, we held our breaths in wonder. It met our
+expectations.
+
+Of course we went below and spent two of our hard-earned dollars in
+order to be taken behind the falls. We were smothered with spray and
+forced to cling frenziedly to the hands of our guide, but it was a part
+of our duty, and we did it. No one could rob us of the glory of having
+adventured so far.
+
+That night we resumed our seats in the smoking car, and pushed on toward
+Boston in patiently-endured discomfort. Early the following morning we
+crossed the Hudson, and as the Berkshire hills began to loom against the
+dawn, I asked the brakeman, with much emotion, "Have we reached the
+Massachusetts line?" "We have," he said, and by pressing my nose against
+the glass and shading my face with my hands I was able to note the
+passing landscape.
+
+Little could be seen other than a tumbled, stormy sky with wooded
+heights dimly outlined against it, but I had all the emotions of a
+pilgrim entering upon some storied oriental vale. Massachusetts to me
+meant Whittier and Hawthorne and Wendell Phillips and Daniel Webster. It
+was the cradle of our liberty, the home of literature, the province of
+art--and it contained Boston!
+
+As the sun rose, both of us sat with eyes fixed upon the scenery,
+observant of every feature. It was all so strange, yet familiar! Barns
+with long, sloping roofs stood with their backs against the hillsides,
+precisely as in the illustrations to Hawthorne's stories, and Whittier's
+poems. The farm-houses, old and weather-beaten and guarded by giant
+elms, looked as if they might have sheltered Emerson and Lowell. The
+little villages with narrow streets lined with queer brick-walled houses
+(their sides to the gutter) reminded us of the pictures in Ben
+Franklin's _Autobiography_.
+
+Everything was old, delightfully old. Nothing was new.--Most of the
+people we saw were old. The men working in the fields were bent and
+gray, scarcely a child appeared, though elderly women abounded. (This
+was thirty-five years ago, before the Canadians and Italians had begun
+to swarm). Everywhere we detected signs of the historical, the
+traditional, the Yankee. The names of the stations rang in our ears like
+bells, _Lexington_, _Concord_, _Cambridge_, _Charlestown_, and--at last
+_Boston_!
+
+What a strange, new world this ancient city was to us, as we issued from
+the old Hoosac Tunnel station! The intersection of every street was a
+bit of history. The houses standing sidewise to the gutter, the narrow,
+ledge-like pavements, the awkward two-wheeled drays and carts, the men
+selling lobsters on the corner, the newsboys with their "papahs," the
+faces of the women so thin and pale, the men, neat, dapper, small, many
+of them walking with finicky precision as though treading on
+eggs,--everything had a Yankee tang, a special quality, and then, the
+noise! We had thought Chicago noisy, and so it was, but here the clamor
+was high-keyed, deafening for the reason that the rain-washed streets
+were paved with cobble stones over which enormous carts bumped and
+clattered with resounding riot.
+
+Bewildered,--with eyes and ears alert, we toiled up Haymarket Square
+shoulder to shoulder, seeking the Common. Of course we carried our
+hand-bags--(the railway had no parcel rooms in those days, or if it had
+we didn't know it) clinging to them like ants to their eggs and so
+slowly explored Tremont Street. Cornhill entranced us with its amazing
+curve. We passed the Granary Burying Ground and King's Chapel with awe,
+and so came to rest at last on the upper end of the Common! We had
+reached the goal of our long pilgrimage.
+
+To tell the truth, we were a little disappointed in our first view of
+it. It was much smaller than we had imagined it to be and the pond was
+ONLY a pond, but the trees were all that father had declared them to be.
+We had known broad prairies and splendid primitive woodlands--but these
+elms dated back to the days of Washington, and were to be reverenced
+along with the State House and Bunker Hill.
+
+We spent considerable time there on that friendly bench, resting in the
+shadows of the elms, and while sitting there, we ate our lunch, and
+watched the traffic of Tremont Street, in perfect content till I
+remembered that the night was coming on, and that we had no place to
+sleep.
+
+Approaching a policeman I inquired the way to a boarding house.
+
+The officer who chanced to be a good-natured Irishman, with a courtesy
+almost oppressive, minutely pointed the way to a house on Essex Street.
+Think of it--Essex Street! It sounded like Shakespeare and Merrie
+England!
+
+Following his direction, we found ourselves in the door of a small house
+on a narrow alley at the left of the Common. The landlady, a kindly
+soul, took our measure at once and gave us a room just off her little
+parlor, and as we had not slept, normally, for three nights, we decided
+to go at once to bed. It was about five o'clock, one of the noisiest
+hours of a noisy street, but we fell almost instantly into the kind of
+slumber in which time and tumult do not count.
+
+When I awoke, startled and bewildered, the sounds of screaming children,
+roaring, jarring drays, and the clatter of falling iron filled the room.
+At first I imagined this to be the business of the morning, but as I
+looked out of the window I perceived that it was sunset! "Wake up!" I
+called to Franklin. "_It's the next day!_" "We've slept twenty-four
+hours!--What will the landlady think of us?"
+
+Frank did not reply. He was still very sleepy, but he dressed, and with
+valise in hand dazedly followed me into the sitting room. The woman of
+the house was serving supper to her little family. To her I said,
+"You've been very kind to let us sleep all this time. We were very
+tired."
+
+"All this time?" she exclaimed.
+
+"Isn't it the next day?" I asked.
+
+Then she laughed, and her husband laughed, doubling himself into a knot
+of merriment. "Oh, but that's rich!" said he. "You've been asleep
+exactly an hour and a quarter," he added. "How long did you _think_
+you'd slept--two days?"
+
+Sheepishly confessing that I thought we had, I turned back to bed, and
+claimed ten hours more of delicious rest.
+
+All "the next day" we spent in seeing Bunker Hill, Faneuil Hall, the old
+North Church, King's Chapel, Longfellow's home, the Washington Elm, and
+the Navy Yard.--It was all glorious but a panic seized us as we found
+our money slipping away from us, and late in the afternoon we purchased
+tickets for Concord, and fled the roaring and turbulent capital.
+
+We had seen the best of it anyway. We had tasted the ocean and found it
+really salt, and listened to "the sailors with bearded lips" on the
+wharves where the ships rocked idly on the tide,--The tide! Yes, that
+most inexplicable wonder of all we had proved. We had watched it come in
+at the Charles River Bridge, mysterious as the winds. We knew it was so.
+
+Why Concord, do you ask? Well, because Hawthorne had lived there, and
+because the region was redolent of Emerson and Thoreau, and I am glad to
+record that upon reaching it of a perfect summer evening, we found the
+lovely old village all that it had been pictured by the poets. The wide
+and beautiful meadows, the stone walls, the slow stream, the bridge and
+the statue of the "Minute Man" guarding the famous battlefield, the gray
+old Manse where Hawthorne lived, the cemetery of Sleepy Hollow, the
+grave of Emerson--all these historic and charming places enriched and
+inspired us. This land, so mellowed, so harmonious, so significant,
+seemed hardly real. It was a vision.
+
+We rounded out our day by getting lodgings in the quaint old Wright's
+tavern which stood (and still stands) at the forks of the road, a
+building whose date painted on its chimney showed that it was nearly two
+hundred years old! I have since walked Carnarvan's famous walls, and sat
+in the circus at Nismes--but I have never had a deeper thrill of
+historic emotion than when I studied the beamed ceiling of that little
+dining room. Our pure joy in its age amused our landlord greatly.
+
+Being down to our last dollar, we struck out into the country next
+morning, for the purpose of finding work upon a farm but met with very
+little encouragement. Most of the fields were harvested and those that
+were not were well supplied with "hands." Once we entered a beautiful
+country place where the proprietor himself (a man of leisure, a type we
+had never before seen) interrogated us with quizzical humor, and at last
+sent us to his foreman with honest desire to make use of us. But the
+foreman had nothing to give, and so we went on.
+
+All day we loitered along beautiful wood roads, passing wonderful old
+homesteads gray and mossy, sheltered by trees that were almost human in
+the clasp of their protecting arms. We paused beside bright streams, and
+drank at mossy wells operated by rude and ancient sweeps, contrivances
+which we had seen only in pictures. It was all beautiful, but we got no
+work. The next day, having spent our last cent in railway tickets, we
+rode to Ayer Junction, where we left our trunks in care of the baggage
+man and resumed our tramping.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+Coasting Down Mt. Washington
+
+
+In spite of all our anxiety, we enjoyed this search for work. The
+farmers were all so comically inquisitive. A few of them took us for
+what we were, students out on a vacation. Others though kind enough,
+seemed lacking in hospitality, from the western point of view, and some
+were openly suspicious--but the roads, the roads! In the west
+thoroughfares ran on section lines and were defined by wire fences. Here
+they curved like Indian trails following bright streams, and the stone
+walls which bordered them were festooned with vines as in a garden.
+
+That night we lodged in the home of an old farmer, an octogenarian who
+had never in all his life been twenty miles from his farm. He had never
+seen Boston, or Portland, but he had been twice to Nashua, returning,
+however, in time for supper. He, as well as his wife (dear simple soul),
+looked upon us as next door to educated Indians and entertained us in a
+flutter of excited hospitality.
+
+We told them of Dakota, of the prairies, describing the wonderful farm
+machinery, and boasting of the marvellous crops our father had raised in
+Iowa, and the old people listened in delighted amaze.
+
+They put us to bed at last in a queer high-posted, corded bedstead and I
+had a feeling that we were taking part in a Colonial play. It was like
+living a story book. We stared at each other in a stupor of
+satisfaction. We had never hoped for such luck. To be thrust back
+abruptly into the very life of our forebears was magical, and the
+excitement and delight of it kept us whispering together long after we
+should have been asleep.
+
+This was thirty years ago, and those kindly old souls have long since
+returned to dust, but their big four-posted bed is doing service, no
+doubt, in the home of some rich collector. I have forgotten their names
+but they shall live here in my book as long as its print shall endure.
+
+They seemed sorry to have us go next morning, but as they had nothing
+for us to do, they could only say, "Good-bye, give our love to Jane, if
+you see her, she lives in Illinois." Illinois and Dakota were all the
+same to them!
+
+Again we started forth along the graceful, irregular, elm-shaded roads,
+which intersected the land in every direction, perfectly happy except
+when we remembered our empty pockets. We could not get accustomed to the
+trees and the beauty of the vineclad stone walls. The lanes made
+_pictures_ all the time. So did the apple trees and the elms and the
+bending streams.
+
+About noon of this day we came to a farm of very considerable size and
+fairly level, on which the hay remained uncut. "Here's our chance," I
+said to my brother, and going in, boldly accosted the farmer, a youngish
+man with a bright and pleasant face. "Do you want some skilled help?" I
+called out.
+
+The farmer admitted that he did, but eyed us as if jokers. Evidently we
+did not look precisely like workmen to him, but I jolted him by saying,
+"We are Iowa schoolboys out for a vacation. We were raised on a farm,
+and know all about haying. If you'll give us a chance we'll make you
+think you don't know much about harvesting hay."
+
+This amused him. "Come in," he said, "and after dinner we'll see about
+it."
+
+At dinner we laid ourselves out to impress our host. We told him of the
+mile-wide fields of the west, and enlarged upon the stoneless prairies
+of Dakota. We described the broadcast seeders they used in Minnesota and
+bragged of the amount of hay we could put up, and both of us professed a
+contempt for two-wheeled carts. In the end we reduced our prospective
+employer to humbleness. He consulted his wife a moment and then said,
+"All right, boys, you may take hold."
+
+We stayed with him two weeks and enjoyed every moment of our stay.
+
+"Our expedition is successful," I wrote to my parents.
+
+On Sundays we picked berries or went fishing or tumbled about the lawn.
+It was all very beautiful and delightfully secure, so that when the time
+came to part with our pleasant young boss and his bright and cheery
+wife, we were as sorry as they.
+
+"We must move on," I insisted. "There are other things to see."
+
+After a short stay in Portland we took the train for Bethel, eager to
+visit the town which our father had described so many times. We had
+resolved to climb the hills on which he had gathered berries and sit on
+the "Overset" from which he had gazed upon the landscape. We felt
+indeed, a certain keen regret that he could not be with us.
+
+At Locks Mills, we met his old playmates, Dennis and Abner Herrick, men
+bent of form and dim of eye, gnarled and knotted by their battle with
+the rocks and barren hillsides, and to them we, confident lads, with our
+tales of smooth and level plow-lands, must have seemed like denizens
+from some farmers' paradise,--or perhaps they thought us fictionists. I
+certainly put a powerful emphasis on the pleasant side of western life
+at that time.
+
+Dennis especially looked upon us with amazement, almost with awe. To
+think that we, unaided and alone, had wandered so far and dared so much,
+while he, in all his life, had not been able to visit Boston, was
+bewildering. This static condition of the population was a constant
+source of wonder to us. How could people stay all their lives in one
+place? Must be something the matter with them.--Their ox-teams and
+tipcarts amused us, their stony fields appalled us, their restricted,
+parsimonious lives saddened us, and so, not wishing to be a burden, we
+decided to cut our stay short.
+
+On the afternoon of our last day, Abner took us on a tramp over the
+country, pointing out the paths "where Dick and I played," tracing the
+lines of the old farm, which had long since been given over to pasture,
+and so to the trout brook and home. In return for our "keep" we sang
+that night, and told stories of the west, and our hosts seemed pleased
+with the exchange. Shouldering our faithful "grips" next morning, we
+started for the railway and took the train for Gorham.
+
+Each mile brought us nearer the climax of our trip. We of the plains had
+longed and dreamed of the peaks. To us the White Mountains were at once
+the crowning wonder and chief peril of our expedition. They were to be
+in a very real sense the test of our courage. The iron crest of Mount
+Washington allured us as a light-house lures sea-birds.
+
+Leaving Gorham on foot, and carrying our inseparable valises, we started
+westward along the road leading to the peaks, expecting to get lodging
+at some farm-house, but as we stood aside to let gay coaches pass laden
+with glittering women and haughty men, we began to feel abused.
+
+We were indeed, quaint objects. Each of us wore a long yellow linen
+"duster" and each bore a valise on a stick, as an Irishman carries a
+bundle. We feared neither wind nor rain, but wealth and coaches
+oppressed us.
+
+Nevertheless we trudged cheerily along, drinking at the beautiful
+springs beside the road, plucking blackberries for refreshment, lifting
+our eyes often to the snow-flecked peaks to the west. At noon we stopped
+at a small cottage to get some milk, and there again met a pathetic
+lonely old couple. The woman was at least eighty, and very crusty with
+her visitors, till I began to pet the enormous maltese cat which came
+purring to our feet. "What a magnificent animal!" I said to Frank.
+
+This softened the old woman's heart. She not only gave us bread and milk
+but sat down to gossip with us while we ate. She, too, had relatives
+"out there, somewhere in Iowa" and would hardly let us go, so eager was
+she to know all about her people. "Surely you must have met them."
+
+As we neared the foot of the great peak we came upon hotels of all sizes
+but I had not the slightest notion of staying even at the smallest.
+Having walked twelve miles to the foot of the mountain we now decided to
+set out for the top, still carrying those precious bags upon our
+shoulders.
+
+What we expected to do after we got to the summit, I cannot say, for we
+knew nothing of conditions there and were too tired to imagine--we just
+kept climbing, sturdily, doggedly, breathing heavily, more with
+excitement than with labor, for it seemed that we were approaching the
+moon,--so bleak and high the roadway ran. I had miscalculated sadly. It
+had looked only a couple of hours' brisk walk from the hotel, but the
+way lengthened out toward the last in a most disheartening fashion.
+
+"Where will we stay?" queried Frank.
+
+"Oh, we'll find a place somewhere," I answered, but I was far from being
+as confident as I sounded.
+
+We had been told that it cost five dollars for a night's lodging at the
+hotel, but I entertained some vague notion that other and cheaper places
+offered. Perhaps I thought that a little village on the summit presented
+boarding houses.
+
+"No matter, we're in for it now," I stoutly said. "We'll find a
+place--we've got to find a place."
+
+It grew cold as we rose, surprisingly, dishearteningly cold and we both
+realized that to sleep in the open would be to freeze. As the night
+fell, our clothing, wet with perspiration, became almost as clammy as
+sheet iron, and we shivered with weakness as well as with frost. The
+world became each moment more barren, more wind-swept and Frank was
+almost at his last gasp.
+
+It was long after dark, and we were both trembling with fatigue and
+hollow with hunger as we came opposite a big barn just at the top of the
+trail. The door of this shelter stood invitingly open, and creeping into
+an empty stall we went to sleep on the straw like a couple of homeless
+dogs. We did not for a moment think of going to the hotel which loomed
+like a palace a few rods further on.
+
+A couple of hours later I was awakened by the crunch of a boot upon my
+ankle, followed by an oath of surprise. The stage-driver, coming in from
+his last trip, was looking down upon me. I could not see his face, but I
+did note the bright eyes and pricking ears of a noble gray horse
+standing just behind his master and champing his bit with impatience.
+
+Sleepy, scared and bewildered, I presented my plea with such eloquence
+that the man put his team in another stall and left us to our straw.
+"But you get out o' here before the boss sees you," said he, "or
+there'll be trouble."
+
+"We'll get out before daybreak," I replied heartily.
+
+When I next awoke it was dawn, and my body was so stiff I could hardly
+move. We had slept cold and our muscles resented it. However, we hurried
+from the barn. Once safely out of reach of the "boss" we began to leap
+and dance and shout to the sun as it rose out of the mist, for this was
+precisely what we had come two thousand miles to see--sunrise on Mount
+Washington! It chanced, gloriously, that the valleys were filled with a
+misty sea, breaking soundlessly at our feet and we forgot cold, hunger,
+poverty, in the wonder of being "above the clouds!"
+
+In course of time our stomachs moderated our transports over the view
+and I persuaded my brother (who was younger and more delicate in
+appearance) to approach the kitchen and purchase a handout. Frank being
+harshly persuaded by his own need, ventured forth and soon came back
+with several slices of bread and butter and part of a cold chicken,
+which made the day perfectly satisfactory, and in high spirits we
+started to descend the western slope of the mountain.
+
+Here we performed the incredible. Our muscles were so sore and weak that
+as we attempted to walk down the railway track, our knees refused to
+bear our weight, and while creeping over the ties, groaning and sighing
+with pain, a bright idea suddenly irradiated my mind. As I studied the
+iron groove which contained the cogs in the middle of the track, I
+perceived that its edges were raised a little above the level of the
+rails and covered with oil. It occurred to me that it might be possible
+to slide down this track on a plank--if only I had a plank!
+
+I looked to the right. A miracle! There in the ditch lay a plank of
+exactly the right dimensions. I seized it, I placed it cross-wise of the
+rails. "All aboard," I called. Frank obeyed. I took my place at the
+other end, and so with our valises between us, we began to slip slowly,
+smoothly, and with joyous ease down the shining track! Hoopla! We had
+taken wing!
+
+We had solved our problem. The experiment was successful. Laughing and
+shouting with exultation, we swept on. We had but to touch every other
+tie with our heels in order to control our speed, so we coasted,
+smoothly, genially.
+
+On we went, mile after mile, slipping down the valley into the vivid
+sunlight, our eyes on the glorious scenery about us, down, down like a
+swooping bird. Once we passed above some workmen, who looked up in
+open-mouthed amazement, and cursed us in voices which seemed far and
+faint and futile. A little later the superintendent of the water tank
+warningly shouted, "_Stop that! Get Off!_" but we only laughed at him
+and swept on, out over a high trestle, where none could follow.
+
+At times our heads grew dizzy with the flicker and glitter of the rocks
+beneath us and as we rounded dangerous curves of the track, or descended
+swift slides with almost uncontrollable rapidity, I had some doubts, but
+we kept our wits, remained upon the rails, and at last spun round the
+final bend and came to a halt upon a level stretch of track, just above
+the little station.
+
+There, kicking aside our faithful plank, we took up our valises and with
+trembling knees and a sense of triumph set off down the valley of the
+wild Amonoosuc.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+Tramping, New York, Washington, and Chicago
+
+
+For two days we followed the Amonoosuc (which is a lovely stream),
+tramping along exquisite winding roads, loitering by sunny ripples or
+dreaming in the shadow of magnificent elms. It was all very, very
+beautiful to us of the level lands of Iowa and Dakota. These brooks
+rushing over their rocky beds, these stately trees and these bleak
+mountain-tops looming behind us, all glowed with the high splendor, of
+which we had dreamed.
+
+At noon we called at a farm-house to get something to eat and at night
+we paid for lodging in a rude tavern beside the way, and so at last
+reached the railway and the Connecticut River. Here we gained our trunks
+(which had been sent round by express) and as the country seemed poor
+and the farms barren, we spent nearly all our money in riding down the
+railway fifty or sixty miles. At some small town (I forget the name), we
+again took to the winding roads, looking for a job.
+
+Jobs, it turned out, were exceedingly hard to get. The haying was over,
+the oats mainly in shock, and the people on the highway suspicious and
+inhospitable. As we plodded along, our dimes melting away, hunger came,
+at last, to be a grim reality. We looked less and less like college boys
+and more and more like tramps, and the householders began to treat us
+with hostile contempt.
+
+No doubt these farmers, much beset with tramps, had reasonable excuse
+for their inhospitable ways, but to us it was all bitter and uncalled
+for. I knew that cities were filled with robbers, brigands, burglars and
+pirates, but I had held (up to this time), the belief that the country,
+though rude and barren of luxury was nevertheless a place of plenty
+where no man need suffer hunger.
+
+Frank, being younger and less hardy than I, became clean disheartened,
+and upon me fell the responsibility and burden of the campaign. I
+certainly was to blame for our predicament.
+
+We came finally to the point of calling at every house where any crops
+lay ungathered, desperately in hope of securing something to do. At last
+there came a time when we no longer had money for a bed, and were forced
+to sleep wherever we could find covert. One night we couched on the
+floor of an old school-house, the next we crawled into an oat-shock and
+covered ourselves with straw. Let those who have never slept out on the
+ground through an August night say that it is impossible that one should
+be cold! During all the early warm part of the night a family of skunks
+rustled about us, and toward morning we both woke because of the chill.
+
+On the third night we secured the blessed opportunity of nesting in a
+farmer's granary. All humor had gone out of our expedition. Each day the
+world grew blacker, and the men of the Connecticut Valley more cruel and
+relentless. We both came to understand (not to the full, but in a large
+measure) the bitter rebellion of the tramp. To plod on and on into the
+dusk, rejected of comfortable folk, to couch at last with pole-cats in a
+shock of grain is a liberal education in sociology.
+
+On the fourth day we came upon an old farmer who had a few acres of
+badly tangled oats which he wished gathered and bound. He was a large,
+loose-jointed, good-natured sloven who looked at me with stinging,
+penetrating stare, while I explained that we were students on a vacation
+tramping and in need of money. He seemed not particularly interested
+till Frank said with tragic bitterness, "If we ever get back to Dakota
+we'll never even look this way again." This interested the man. He said,
+"Turn in and cut them oats," and we gladly buckled to our job.
+
+Our spirits rose with the instant resiliency of youth, but what a task
+that reaping proved to be! The grain, tangled and flattened close to the
+ground, had to be caught up in one hand and cut with the old-fashioned
+reaping-hook, the kind they used in Egypt five thousand years ago--a
+thin crescent of steel with a straight handle, and as we bowed ourselves
+to the ground to clutch and clip the grain, we nearly broke in two
+pieces. It was hot at mid-day and the sun fell upon our bended shoulders
+with amazing power, but we toiled on, glad of the opportunity to earn a
+dollar. "Every cent means escape from this sad country," I repeated.
+
+We stayed some days with this reticent gardener, sleeping in the attic
+above his kitchen like two scullions, uttering no complaint till we had
+earned seven dollars apiece; then we said, "Good luck," and bought
+tickets for Greenfield, Massachusetts. We chose this spot for the reason
+that a great railway alluringly crossed the river at that place. We
+seemed in better situation to get west from such a point.
+
+Greenfield was so like Rockford (the western town in which I had worked
+as a carpenter), that I at once purchased a few tools and within a few
+hours secured work shingling a house on the edge of the town, while my
+brother took a hand at harvesting worms from a field of tobacco near by.
+
+The builder, a tall man, bent and grizzled, complimented me warmly at
+the close of my second day, and said, "You may consider yourself hired
+for as long as you please to stay. You're a rattler." No compliment
+since has given me more pleasure than this. A few days later he invited
+both of us to live at his home. We accepted and were at once established
+in most comfortable quarters.
+
+Tranquil days followed. The country was very attractive, and on Sundays
+we walked the neighboring lanes, or climbed the high hills, or visited
+the quaint and lonely farm-houses round about, feeling more akin each
+week to the life of the valley, but we had no intention of remaining
+beyond a certain time. Great rivers called and cities allured. New York
+was still to be explored and to return to the west before winter set in
+was our plan.
+
+At last the time came when we thought it safe to start toward Albany and
+with grateful words of thanks to the carpenter and his wife, we set
+forth upon our travels. Our courage was again at topmost gauge. My
+success with the saw had given me confidence. I was no longer afraid of
+towns, and in a glow of high resolution and with thirty dollars in my
+pocket, I planned to invade New York which was to me the wickedest and
+the most sorrowful as well as the most splendid city in the world.
+
+Doubtless the true story of how I entered Manhattan will endanger my
+social position, but as an unflinching realist, I must begin by
+acknowledging that I left the Hudson River boat carrying my own luggage.
+I shudder to think what we two boys must have looked like as we set off,
+side by side, prospecting for Union Square and the Bowery. Broadway, we
+knew, was the main street and Union Square the center of the island,
+therefore we turned north and paced along the pavement, still clamped to
+our everlasting bags.
+
+Broadway was not then the deep canon that it is today. It was walled by
+low shops of red brick--in fact, the whole city seemed low as compared
+with the high buildings of Chicago, nevertheless I was keenly worried
+over the question of housing.
+
+Food was easy. We could purchase a doughnut and a cup of coffee almost
+anywhere, or we could eat a sandwich in the park, but the matter of a
+bed, the business of sleeping in a maelstrom like New York was something
+more than serious--it was dangerous. Frank, naturally of a more prodigal
+nature, was all for going to the Broadway Hotel. "It's only for one
+night," said he. He always was rather careless of the future!
+
+I reminded him that we still had Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington
+to "do" and every cent must be husbanded--so we moved along toward Union
+Square with the question of a hotel still undecided, our arms aching
+with fatigue. "If only we could get rid of these awful bags," moaned
+Frank.
+
+To us Broadway was a storm, a cyclone, an abnormal unholy congestion of
+human souls. The friction of feet on the pavement was like the hissing
+of waves on the beach. The passing of trucks jarred upon our ears like
+the sevenfold thunders of Patmos, but we kept on, shoulder to shoulder,
+watchful, alert, till we reached Union Square, where with sighs of deep
+relief we sank upon the benches along with the other "rubes" and
+"jay-hawkers" lolling in sweet repose with weary soles laxly turned to
+the kindly indiscriminating breeze.
+
+The evening was mild, the scene enthralling, and we would have been
+perfectly happy but for the deeply disturbing question of a bed.
+Franklin, resting upon my resourceful management, made no motion even
+when the sun sank just about where that Venetian fronted building now
+stands, but whilst the insolent, teeming populace in clattering carts
+and drays charged round our peaceful sylvan haven (each driver plying
+the lash with the fierce aspect of a Roman charioteer) I rose to a
+desperate mission.
+
+With a courage born of need I led the way straight toward the basement
+portal of a small brown hotel on Fourth Avenue, and was startled almost
+into flight to find myself in a bar-room. Not knowing precisely how to
+retreat, I faltered out, "Have you a bed for us?"
+
+It is probable that the landlord, a huge foreign-looking man understood
+our timidity--at any rate, he smiled beneath his black mustache and
+directed a clerk to show us a room.
+
+In charge of this man, a slim youth, with a very bad complexion, we
+climbed a narrow stairway (which grew geometrically shabbier as we rose)
+until, at last, we came into a room so near the roof that it could
+afford only half-windows--but as we were getting the chamber at
+half-price we could not complain.
+
+No sooner had the porter left us than we both stretched out on the bed,
+in such relief and ecstasy of returning confidence as only weary youth
+and honest poverty can know.--It was heavenly sweet, this sense of
+safety in the heart of a tempest of human passion but as we rested, our
+hunger to explore returned. "Time is passing. We shall probably never
+see New York again," I argued, "and besides our bags are now safely
+_cached_. Let's go out and see how the city looks by night."
+
+To this Franklin agreed, and forth we went into the Square, rejoicing in
+our freedom from those accursed bags.
+
+Here for the first time, I observed the electric light shadows, so
+clear-cut, so marvellous. The park was lighted by several sputtering,
+sizzling arc-lamps, and their rays striking down through the trees,
+flung upon the pavement a wavering, exquisite tracery of sharply
+defined, purple-black leaves and branches. This was, indeed, an entirely
+new effect in our old world and to my mind its wonder surpassed nature.
+It was as if I had suddenly been translated to some realm of magic art.
+
+Where we dined I cannot say, probably we ate a doughnut at some lunch
+counter but I am glad to remember that we got as far as Madison
+Square--which was like discovering another and still more enchanting
+island of romance. To us the Fifth Avenue Hotel was a great and historic
+building, for in it Grant and Sherman and Lincoln and Greeley had often
+registered.
+
+Ah, what a night that was! I did not expend a dollar, not even a
+quarter, but I would give half of all I now own for the sensitive heart,
+the absorbent brain I then possessed. Each form, each shadow was a
+miracle. Romance and terror and delight peopled every dusky side street.
+
+Submerged in the wondrous, drenched with the spray of this measureless
+ocean of human life, we wandered on and on till overborne nature called
+a halt. It was ten o'clock and prudence as well as weariness advised
+retreat. Decisively, yet with a feeling that we would never again glow
+beneath the lights of this radiant city, I led the way back to our
+half-rate bed in the Union Square Hungarian hotel.
+
+It is worth recording that on reaching our room, we opened our small
+window and leaning out, gazed away over the park, what time the tumult
+and the thunder and the shouting died into a low, continuous roar. The
+poetry and the majesty of the city lost nothing of its power under the
+moon.
+
+Although I did not shake my fist over the town and vow to return and
+conquer it (as penniless writers in fiction generally do) I bowed down
+before its power. "It's too much for us," I told my brother. "Two
+millions of people--think of it--of course London is larger, but then
+London is so far off."
+
+Sleep for us both was but a moment's forgetfulness. At one moment it was
+night and at another it was morning. We were awakened by the voice of
+the pavement, that sound which Whitman calls "the loud, proud, restive
+bass of the streets," and again I leaned forth to listen to the
+widespread crescendo roar of the deepening traffic. The air being cool
+and clear, the pedestrians stepped out with brisker, braver movement,
+and we, too, rose eager to meet the day at the gate of the town.
+
+All day we tramped, absorbing everything that went on in the open.
+Having explored the park, viewed the obelisk and visited the zoo, we
+wandered up and down Broadway, mooning upon the life of the streets.
+Curbstone fights, police manoeuvres, shop-window comedies, building
+operations--everything we saw instructed us. We soaked ourselves in the
+turbulent rivers of the town with a feeling that we should never see
+them again.
+
+We had intended to stay two days but a tragic encounter with a
+restaurant bandit so embittered and alarmed us that we fled New York (as
+we supposed), forever. At one o'clock, being hungry, very hungry, we
+began to look for a cheap eating house, and somewhere in University
+Place we came upon a restaurant which looked humble enough to afford a
+twenty-five cent dinner (which was our limit of extravagance), and so,
+timidly, we ventured in.
+
+A foreign-looking waiter greeted us, and led us to one of a number of
+very small tables covered with linen which impressed even Frank's
+uncritical eyes with its mussiness. With a feeling of having
+inadvertently entered a den of thieves, I wished myself out of it but
+lacked the courage to rise and when the man returned and placed upon
+the table two glasses and a strange looking bottle with a metal stopper
+which had a kind of lever at the side, Frank said, "Hi! Good thing!--I'm
+thirsty." Quite against my judgment he fooled around with the lever till
+he succeeded in helping himself to some of the liquid with which the
+bottle was filled. It was soda water and he drank heartily, although I
+was sure it would be extra on the bill.
+
+The food came on slowly, by fits and starts, and the dishes were all so
+cold and queer of taste that even Frank complained. But we ate with a
+terrifying premonition of trouble. "This meal will cost us at least
+thirty-five cents each!" I said.
+
+"No matter, it's an experience," my spendthrift brother retorted.
+
+At last when the limp lettuce, the amazing cheese and the bitter coffee
+were all consumed, I asked the soiled, outlandish waiter the price.
+
+In reply he pencilled on a slip as though we were deaf, and finally laid
+the completed bill face down beside my plate. I turned it over and grew
+pale.
+
+It totalled _one dollar and twenty cents_!
+
+I felt weak and cold as if I had been suddenly poisoned. I trembled,
+then grew hot with indignation. "Sixty cents apiece!" I gasped. "Didn't
+I warn you?"
+
+Frank was still in reckless mood. "Well, this is the only time we have
+to do it. They won't catch us here again."
+
+I paid the bill and hurried out, bitterly exclaiming, "No more New York
+for me. I will not stay in such a robbers' den another night."
+
+And I didn't. At sunset we crossed the ferry and took the train for New
+Brunswick, New Jersey. Why we selected this town I cannot say, but I
+think it must have been because it was half-way to Philadelphia--and
+that we were just about as scared of Philadelphia as we were resentful
+of New York.
+
+After a night battle with New Jersey mosquitoes and certain plantigrade
+bed-fellows native to cheap hotels, we passed on to Philadelphia and to
+Baltimore, and at sunset of the same day reached Washington, the storied
+capital of the nation.
+
+Everything we saw here was deeply significant, national, rousing our
+patriotism. We were at once and profoundly interested by the negro life
+which flowered here in the free air of the District as under an African
+sun; the newsboys, the bootblacks, the muledrivers, all amused us. We
+spent that first night in Washington in a little lodging house just at
+the corner of the Capitol grounds where beds were offered for
+twenty-five cents. It was a dreadful place, but we slept without waking.
+It took a large odor, a sharp lance to keep either of us awake in those
+days.
+
+Tramping busily all the next day, we climbed everything that could be
+climbed. We visited the Capitol, the war building, the Treasury and the
+White House grounds. We toiled through all the museums, working harder
+than we had ever worked upon the farm, till Frank cried out for mercy. I
+was inexorable. "Our money is getting low. We must be very saving of
+carfare," I insisted. "We must see all we can. We'll never be here
+again."
+
+Once more we slept (among the negroes in a bare little lodging house),
+and on the third day, brimming with impressions, boarded the Chicago
+express and began our glorious, our exultant return over the
+Alleghanies, toward the west.
+
+It was with a feeling of joy, of distinct relief that we set our faces
+toward the sunset. Every mile brought us nearer home. I knew the West. I
+knew the people, and I had no fear of making a living beyond the
+Alleghanies. Every mile added courage and hope to our hearts, and
+increased the value of the splendid, if sometimes severe experiences
+through which we had passed. Frank was especially gay for he was
+definitely on his way home, back to Dakota.
+
+And when next day on the heights of the Alleghany mountains, the train
+dipped to the west, and swinging around a curve, disclosed to us the
+tumbled spread of mountain-land descending to the valley of the Ohio, we
+sang "O'er the hills in legions, boys" as our forefathers did of old. We
+were about to re-enter the land of the teeming furrow.
+
+Late that night as we were riding through the darkness in the smoking
+car, I rose and, placing in my brother's hands all the money I had, said
+good-bye, and at Mansfield, Ohio, swung off the train, leaving him to
+proceed on his homeward way alone.
+
+It was about one o'clock of an autumn night, sharp and clear, and I
+spent the remainder of the morning on a bench in the railway station,
+waiting for the dawn. I could not sleep, and so spent the time in
+pondering on my former experiences in seeking work. "Have I been wrong?"
+I asked myself. "Is the workman in America, as in the old world, coming
+to be a man despised?"
+
+Having been raised in the splendid patriotism, perhaps one might say
+flamboyant patriotism, of the West during and following our Civil War, I
+had been brought up to believe that labor was honorable, that idlers
+were to be despised, but now as I sat with bowed head, cold, hungry and
+penniless, knowing that I must go forth at daylight--seeking work, the
+world seemed a very hostile place to me. Of course I did not consider
+myself a workman in the ordinary hopeless sense. My need of a job was
+merely temporary, for it was my intention to return to the Middle West
+in time to secure a position as teacher in some country school.
+Nevertheless a lively imagination gave me all the sensations of the
+homeless man.
+
+The sun rose warm and golden, and with a return of my courage I started
+forth, confident of my ability to make a place for myself. With a wisdom
+which I had not hitherto shown I first sought a home, and luckily, I say
+luckily because I never could account for it, I knocked at the door of a
+modest little boarding house, whose mistress, a small blonde lady,
+invited me in and gave me a room without a moment's hesitation. Her
+dinner--a delicious mid-day meal, so heartened me that before the end of
+the day, I had secured a place as one of a crew of carpenters. My
+spirits rose. I was secure.
+
+My evenings were spent in reading Abbott's _Life of Napoleon_ which I
+found buried in an immense pile of old magazines. I had never before
+read a full history of the great Corsican, and this chronicle moved me
+almost as profoundly as Hugo's _Les Misérables_ had done the year
+before.
+
+On Sundays I walked about the country under the splendid oaks and
+beeches which covered the ridges, dreaming of the West, and of the
+future which was very vague and not very cheerful in coloring. My plan
+so far as I had a plan, was not ambitious. I had decided to return to
+some small town in Illinois and secure employment as a teacher, but as I
+lingered on at my carpenter trade till October nothing was left for me
+but a country school, and when Orrin Carter, county superintendent of
+Grundy County, (he is Judge Carter now) informed me that a district
+school some miles out would pay fifty dollars a month for a teacher, I
+gladly accepted the offer.
+
+On the following afternoon I started forth a passenger with Hank Ring
+on his way homeward in an empty corn wagon. The box had no seat,
+therefore he and I both rode standing during a drive of six miles. The
+wind was raw, and the ground, frozen hard as iron, made the ride a kind
+of torture, but our supper of buckwheat pancakes and pork sausages at
+Deacon Ring's was partial compensation. On the following Monday I
+started my school.
+
+The winter which followed appalled the oldest inhabitant. Snow fell
+almost daily, and the winds were razor-bladed. In order to save every
+dollar of my wages, I built my own fires in the school-house. This means
+that on every week-day morning, I was obliged to push out into the
+stinging dawn, walk a mile to the icy building, split kindling, start a
+flame in the rude stove, and have the room comfortable at half-past
+eight. The thermometer often went to a point twenty degrees below zero,
+and my ears were never quite free from peeling skin and fevered tissues.
+
+My pupils were boys and girls of all sizes and qualities, and while it
+would be too much to say that I made the best teacher of mathematics in
+the county, I think I helped them in their reading, writing, and
+spelling, which after all are more important than algebra. On Saturday I
+usually went to town, for I had in some way become acquainted with the
+principal of a little normal school which was being carried on in Morris
+by a young Quaker from Philadelphia. Prof. Forsythe soon recognized in
+me something more than the ordinary "elocutionist" and readily aided me
+in securing a class in oratory among his students.
+
+This work and Forsythe's comradeship helped me to bear the tedium of my
+work in the country. No Saturday was too stormy, and the roads were
+never too deep with snow to keep me from my weekly visit to Morris
+where I came in contact with people nearer to my ways of thinking and
+living.
+
+But after all this was but the final section of my eastern
+excursion--for as the spring winds set in, the call of "the sunset
+regions" again overcame my love of cities. The rush to Dakota in March
+was greater than ever before and a power stronger than my will drew me
+back to the line of the middle border which had moved on into the
+Missouri Valley, carrying my people with it. As the spring odors filled
+my nostrils, my wish to emigrate was like that of the birds. "Out there
+is my share of the government land--and, if I am to carry out my plan of
+fitting myself for a professorship," I argued--"these claims are worth
+securing. My rights to the public domain are as good as any other
+man's."
+
+My recollections of the James River Valley were all pleasant. My brother
+and father both wrote urging me to come and secure a claim, and so at
+last I replied, "I'll come as soon as my school is out," thus committing
+all my future to the hazard of the homestead.
+
+And so it came about that in the second spring after setting my face to
+the east I planned a return to the Border. I had had my glimpse of
+Boston, New York and Washington. I was twenty-three years of age, and
+eager to revisit the plain whereon my father with the faith of a
+pioneer, was again upturning the sod and building a fourth home. And
+yet, Son of the Middle Border--I had discovered that I was also a
+Grandson of New England.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+The Land of the Straddle-Bug
+
+
+A night in Chicago (where I saw Salvini play Othello), a day in Neshonoc
+to visit my Uncle Richard, and I was again in the midst of a jocund rush
+of land-seekers.
+
+The movement which had begun three years before was now at its height.
+Thousands of cars, for lack of engines to move them, were lying idle on
+the switches all over the west. Trains swarming with immigrants from
+every country of the world were haltingly creeping out upon the level
+lands. Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, Scotchmen, Englishmen, and Russians
+all mingled in this flood of land-seekers rolling toward the sundown
+plain, where a fat-soiled valley had been set aside by good Uncle Sam
+for the enrichment of every man. Such elation, such hopefulness could
+not fail to involve an excitable youth like myself.
+
+My companion, Forsythe, dropped off at Milbank, but I kept on, on into
+the James Valley, arriving at Ordway on the evening of the second day--a
+clear cloudless evening in early April, with the sun going down red in
+the west, the prairie chickens calling from the knolls and hammers still
+sounding in the village, their tattoo denoting the urgent need of roofs
+to shelter the incoming throng.
+
+The street swarmed with boomers. All talk was of lots, of land. Hour by
+hour as the sun sank, prospectors returned to the hotel from their trips
+into the unclaimed territory, hungry and tired but jubilant, and as they
+assembled in my father's store after supper, their boastful talk of
+"claims secured" made me forget all my other ambitions. I was as eager
+to clutch my share of Uncle Sam's bounty as any of them. The world
+seemed beginning anew for me as well as for these aliens from the
+crowded eastern world. "I am ready to stake a claim," I said to my
+father.
+
+Early the very next day, with a party of four (among them Charles
+Babcock, a brother of Burton), I started for the unsurveyed country
+where, some thirty miles to the west, my father had already located a
+pre-emption claim and built a rough shed, the only shelter for miles
+around.
+
+"We'll camp there," said Charles.
+
+It was an inspiring ride! The plain freshly uncovered from the snow was
+swept by a keen wind which held in spite of that an acrid prophecy of
+sudden spring. Ducks and geese rose from every icy pond and resumed
+their flight into the mystic north, and as we advanced the world
+broadened before us. The treelessness of the wide swells, the crispness
+of the air and the feeling that to the westward lay the land of the
+Sioux, all combined to make our trip a kind of epic in miniature.
+Charles also seemed to feel the essential poetry of the expedition,
+although he said little except to remark, "I wish Burton were here."
+
+It was one o'clock before we reached the cabin and two before we
+finished luncheon. The afternoon was spent in wandering over the near-by
+obtainable claims and at sundown we all returned to the shed to camp.
+
+As dusk fell, and while the geese flew low gabbling confidentially, and
+the ducks whistled by overhead in swift unerring flight, Charles and I
+lay down on the hay beside the horses, feeling ourselves to be, in some
+way, partners with God in this new world. I went to sleep hearing the
+horses munching their grain in the neighboring stalls, entirely
+contented with my day and confident of the morrow. All questions were
+answered, all doubts stilled.
+
+We arose with the sun and having eaten our rude breakfast set forth,
+some six miles to the west, to mark the location of our claims with the
+"straddle-bugs."
+
+The straddle-bug, I should explain, was composed of three boards set
+together in tripod form and was used as a monument, a sign of occupancy.
+Its presence defended a claim against the next comer. Lumber being very
+scarce at the moment, the building of a shanty was impossible, and so
+for several weeks these signs took the place of "improvements" and were
+fully respected. No one could honorably jump these claims within thirty
+days and no one did.
+
+At last, when far beyond the last claimant, we turned and looked back
+upon a score of these glittering guidons of progress, banners of the
+army of settlement, I realized that I was a vedette in the van of
+civilization, and when I turned to the west where nothing was to be seen
+save the mysterious plain and a long low line of still more mysterious
+hills, I thrilled with joy at all I had won.
+
+It seemed a true invasion, this taking possession of the virgin sod, but
+as I considered, there was a haunting sadness in it, for these shining
+pine pennons represented the inexorable plow. They prophesied the death
+of all wild creatures and assured the devastation of the beautiful, the
+destruction of all the signs and seasons of the sod.
+
+Apparently none of my companions shared this feeling, for they all
+leaped from the wagon and planted their stakes, each upon his chosen
+quarter-section with whoops of joy, cries which sounded faint and far,
+like the futile voices of insects, diminished to shrillness by the
+echoless abysses of the unclouded sky.
+
+As we had measured the distance from the township lines by counting the
+revolutions of our wagon-wheels, so now with pocket compass and a couple
+of laths, Charles and I laid out inner boundaries and claimed three
+quarter-sections, one for Frank and one each for ourselves. Level as a
+floor these acres were, and dotted with the bones of bison.
+
+We ate our dinner on the bare sod while all around us the birds of
+spring-time moved in myriads, and over the swells to the east other
+wagons laden with other land-seekers crept like wingless
+beetles--stragglers from the main skirmish line.
+
+Having erected our pine-board straddle-bugs with our names written
+thereon, we jubilantly started back toward the railway. Tired but
+peaceful, we reached Ordway at dark and Mrs. Wynn's supper of ham and
+eggs and potatoes completed our day most satisfactorily.
+
+My father, who had planned to establish a little store on his claim, now
+engaged me as his representative, his clerk, and I spent the next week
+in hauling lumber and in helping to build the shanty and ware-room on
+the section line. As soon as the place was habitable, my mother and
+sister Jessie came out to stay with me, for in order to hold his
+pre-emption my father was obliged to make it his "home."
+
+Before we were fairly settled, my mother was forced to feed and house a
+great many land-seekers who had no other place to stay. This brought
+upon her once again all the drudgery of a pioneer house-wife, and filled
+her with longing for the old home in Iowa. It must have seemed to her as
+if she were never again to find rest except beneath the sod.
+
+Nothing that I have ever been called upon to do caused me more worry
+than the act of charging those land-seekers for their meals and bunks,
+and yet it was perfectly right that they should pay. Our buildings had
+been established with great trouble and at considerable expense, and my
+father said, "We cannot afford to feed so many people without return,"
+and yet it seemed to me like taking an unfair advantage of poor and
+homeless men. It was with the greatest difficulty that I brought myself
+to charge them anything at all. Fortunately the prices had been fixed by
+my father.
+
+Night by night it became necessary to lift a lantern on a high pole in
+front of the shack, in order that those who were traversing the plain
+after dark might find their way, and often I was aroused from my bed by
+the arrival of a worn and bewildered party of pilgrims rescued from a
+sleepless couch upon the wet sod.
+
+For several weeks mother was burdened with these wayfarers, but at last
+they began to thin out. The skirmish line moved on, the ranks halted,
+and all about the Moggeson ranch hundreds of yellow shanties sparkled at
+dawn like flecks of gold on a carpet of green velvet. Before the end of
+May every claim was taken and "improved"--more or less.
+
+Meanwhile I had taken charge of the store and Frank was the stage
+driver. He was a very bad salesman, but I was worse--that must be
+confessed. If a man wanted to purchase an article and had the money to
+pay for it, we exchanged commodities right there, but as far as my
+selling anything--father used to say, "Hamlin couldn't sell gold dollars
+for ninety cents a piece," and he was right--entirely right.
+
+I found little to interest me in the people who came to the store for
+they were "just ordinary folk" from Illinois, and Iowa, and I had never
+been a youth who made acquaintances easily, so with nothing of the
+politician in me, I seldom inquired after the babies or gossiped with
+the old women about their health and housekeeping. I regretted this
+attitude afterward. A closer relationship with the settlers would have
+furnished me with a greater variety of fictional characters, but at the
+time I had no suspicion that I was missing anything.
+
+As the land dried off and the breaking plow began its course, a most
+idyllic and significant period of life came on. The plain became very
+beautiful as the soil sent forth its grasses. On the shadowed sides of
+the ridges exquisite shades of pink and purple bloomed, while the most
+radiant yellow-green flamed from slopes on which the sunlight fell. The
+days of May and June succeeded one another in perfect harmony like the
+notes in a song, broken only once or twice by thunderstorms.
+
+An opalescent mist was in the air, and everywhere, on every swell, the
+settlers could be seen moving silently to and fro with their teams,
+while the women sang at their work about the small shanties, and in
+their new gardens. On every side was the most cheerful acceptance of
+hard work and monotonous fare. No one acknowledged the transient quality
+of this life, although it was only a novel sort of picnic on the
+prairie, soon to end.
+
+Many young people and several groups of girls (teachers from the east)
+were among those who had taken claims, and some of these made life
+pleasant for themselves and helpful to others by bringing to their
+cabins, books and magazines and pictures. The store was not only the
+social center of the township but the postoffice, and Frank, who carried
+the mail (and who was much more gallant than I) seemed to draw out all
+the school ma'ams of the neighborhood. The raising of a flag on a high
+pole before the door was the signal for the post which brought the women
+pouring in from every direction eager for news of the eastern world.
+
+In accordance with my plan to become a teacher, I determined to go to
+the bottom of the laws which govern literary development, and so with
+an unexpurgated volume of Taine, a set of Chambers' _Encyclopædia of
+English Literature_, and a volume of Greene's _History of the English
+People_, I set to work to base myself profoundly in the principles which
+govern a nation's self-expression. I still believed that in order to
+properly teach an appreciation of poetry, a man should have the power of
+dramatic expression, that he should be able to read so as to make the
+printed page live in the ears of his pupils. In short I had decided to
+unite the orator and the critic.
+
+As a result, I spent more time over my desk than beside the counter. I
+did not absolutely refuse to wait on a purchaser but no sooner was his
+package tied up than I turned away to my work of digesting and
+transcribing in long hand Taine's monumental book.
+
+Day after day I bent to this task, pondering all the great Frenchman had
+to say of _race_, _environment_, and _momentum_ and on the walls of the
+cabin I mapped out in chalk the various periods of English society as he
+had indicated them. These charts were the wonder and astonishment of my
+neighbors whenever they chanced to enter the living room, and they
+appeared especially interested in the names written on the ceiling over
+my bed. I had put my favorites there so that when I opened my eyes of a
+morning, I could not help absorbing a knowledge of their dates and
+works.
+
+However, on Saturday afternoon when the young men came in from their
+claims, I was not above pitching quoits or "putting the shot" with
+them--in truth I took a mild satisfaction in being able to set a big
+boulder some ten inches beyond my strongest competitor. Occasionally I
+practiced with the rifle but was not a crack shot. I could still pitch a
+ball as well as any of them and I served as pitcher in the games which
+the men occasionally organized.
+
+As harvest came on, mother and sister returned to Ordway, and cooking
+became a part of my daily routine. Charles occasionally helped out and
+we both learned to make biscuits and even pies. Frank loyally declared
+my apple-pies to be as good as any man could make.
+
+Meanwhile an ominous change had crept over the plain. The winds were hot
+and dry and the grass, baked on the stem, had became as inflammable as
+hay. The birds were silent. The sky, absolutely cloudless, began to
+scare us with its light. The sun rose through the dusty air, sinister
+with flare of horizontal heat. The little gardens on the breaking
+withered, and many of the women began to complain bitterly of the
+loneliness, and lack of shade. The tiny cabins were like ovens at
+mid-day.
+
+Smiling faces were less frequent. Timid souls began to inquire, "Are all
+Dakota summers like this?" and those with greatest penetration reasoned,
+from the quality of the grass which was curly and fine as hair, that
+they had unwittingly settled upon an arid soil.
+
+And so, week by week the holiday spirit faded from the colony and men in
+feverish unrest uttered words of bitterness. Eyes ached with light and
+hearts sickened with loneliness. Defeat seemed facing every man.
+
+By the first of September many of those who were in greatest need of
+land were ready to abandon their advanced position on the border and
+fall back into the ranks behind. We were all nothing but squatters. The
+section lines had not been run and every pre-emptor looked and longed
+for the coming of the surveying crew, because once our filings were made
+we could all return to the east, at least for six months, or we could
+prove up and buy our land. In other words, the survey offered a chance
+to escape from the tedious monotony of the burning plain into which we
+had so confidently thrust ourselves.
+
+But the surveyors failed to appear though they were reported from day to
+day to be at work in the next township and so, one by one, those of us
+who were too poor to buy ourselves food, dropped away. Hundreds of
+shanties were battened up and deserted. The young women returned to
+their schools, and men who had counted upon getting work to support
+their families during the summer, and who had failed to do so, abandoned
+their claims and went east where settlement had produced a crop. Our
+song of emigration seemed but bitter mockery now.
+
+Moved by the same desire to escape, I began writing to various small
+towns in Minnesota and Iowa in the hope of obtaining a school, but with
+little result. My letters written from the border line did not inspire
+confidence in the School Boards of "the East." Then winter came.
+
+Winter! No man knows what winter means until he has lived through one in
+a pine-board shanty on a Dakota plain with only buffalo bones for fuel.
+There were those who had settled upon this land, not as I had done with
+intent to prove up and sell, but with plans to make a home, and many of
+these, having toiled all the early spring in hope of a crop, now at the
+beginning of winter found themselves with little money and no coal. Many
+of them would have starved and frozen had it not been for the buffalo
+skeletons which lay scattered over the sod, and for which a sudden
+market developed. Upon the proceeds of this singular harvest they almost
+literally lived. Thus "the herds of deer and buffalo" did indeed
+strangely "furnish the cheer."
+
+As for Charles and myself, we also returned to Ordway and there spent a
+part of each month, brooding darkly over the problem of our future. I
+already perceived the futility of my return to the frontier. The
+mysterious urgings of a vague yet deep-seated longing to go east
+rendered me restless, sour and difficult. I saw nothing before me, and
+yet my hard experiences in Wisconsin and in New England made me hesitate
+about going far. Teaching a country school seemed the only thing I was
+fitted for, and there shone no promise of that.
+
+Furthermore, like other pre-emptors I was forced to hold my claim by
+visiting it once every thirty days, and these trips became each time
+more painful, more menacing. February and March were of pitiless
+severity. One blizzard followed another with ever-increasing fury. No
+sooner was the snow laid by a north wind than it took wing above a
+southern blast and returned upon us sifting to and fro until at last its
+crystals were as fine as flour, so triturated that it seemed to drive
+through an inch board. Often it filled the air for hundreds of feet
+above the earth like a mist, and lay in long ridges behind every bush or
+weed. Nothing lived on these desolate uplands but the white owl and the
+wolf.
+
+One cold, bright day I started for my claim accompanied by a young
+Englishman, a fair-faced delicate young clerk from London, and before we
+had covered half our journey the west wind met us with such fury that
+the little cockney would certainly have frozen had I not forced him out
+of the sleigh to run by its side.
+
+Poor little man! This was not the romantic home he had expected to gain
+when he left his office on the Strand.
+
+Luckily, his wretched shanty was some six miles nearer than mine or he
+would have died. Leaving him safe in his den, I pushed on toward my own
+claim, in the teeth of a terrific gale, the cold growing each moment
+more intense. "The sunset regions" at that moment did not provoke me to
+song.
+
+In order to reach my cabin before darkness fell, I urged my team
+desperately, and it was well that I did, for I could scarcely see my
+horses during the last mile, and the wind was appalling even to me--an
+experienced plainsman. Arriving at the barn I was disheartened to find
+the doors heavily banked with snow, but I fell to in desperate haste,
+and soon shoveled a passageway.
+
+This warmed me, but in the delay one of my horses became so chilled that
+he could scarcely enter his stall. He refused to eat also, and this
+troubled me very much. However, I loaded him with blankets and fell to
+work rubbing his legs with wisps of hay, to start the circulation, and
+did not desist until the old fellow began nibbling his forage.
+
+By this time the wind was blowing seventy miles an hour, and black
+darkness was upon the land. With a rush I reached my shanty only to find
+that somebody had taken all my coal and nearly all my kindling, save a
+few pieces of pine. This was serious, but I kindled a fire with the
+blocks, a blaze which was especially grateful by reason of its quick
+response.
+
+Hardly was the stove in action, when a rap at the door startled me.
+"Come," I shouted. In answer to my call, a young man, a neighbor,
+entered, carrying a sack filled with coal. He explained with some
+embarrassment, that in his extremity during the preceding blizzard, he
+had borrowed from my store, and that (upon seeing my light) he had
+hurried to restore the fuel, enough, at any rate, to last out the night.
+His heroism appeased my wrath and I watched him setting out on his
+return journey with genuine anxiety.
+
+That night is still vivid in my memory. The frail shanty, cowering
+close, quivered in the wind like a frightened hare. The powdery snow
+appeared to drive directly through the solid boards, and each hour the
+mercury slowly sank. Drawing my bed close to the fire, I covered myself
+with a buffalo robe and so slept for an hour or two.
+
+When I woke it was still dark and the wind, though terrifying, was
+intermittent in its attack. The timbers of the house creaked as the
+blast lay hard upon it, and now and again the faint fine crystals came
+sifting down upon my face,--driven beneath the shingles by the tempest.
+At last I lit my oil lamp and shivered in my robe till dawn. I felt none
+of the exultation of a "king in fairyland" nor that of a "lord of the
+soil."
+
+The morning came, bright with sun but with the thermometer forty degrees
+below zero. It was so cold that the horses refused to face the northwest
+wind. I could not hitch them to the sleigh until I had blanketed them
+both beneath their harness; even then they snorted and pawed in terror.
+At last, having succeeded in hooking the traces I sprang in and,
+wrapping the robe about me, pushed eastward with all speed, seeking food
+and fire.
+
+This may be taken as a turning point in my career, for this experience
+(followed by two others almost as severe) permanently chilled my
+enthusiasm for pioneering the plain. Never again did I sing "Sunset
+Regions" with the same exultant spirit. "O'er the hills in legions,
+boys," no longer meant sunlit savannahs, flower meadows and deer-filled
+glades. The mingled "wood and prairie land" of the song was gone and
+Uncle Sam's domain, bleak, semi-arid, and wind-swept, offered little
+charm to my imagination. From that little cabin on the ridge I turned my
+face toward settlement, eager to escape the terror and the loneliness of
+the treeless sod. I began to plan for other work in other airs.
+
+Furthermore, I resented the conditions under which my mother lived and
+worked. Our home was in a small building next to the shop, and had all
+the shortcomings of a cabin and none of its charm. It is true nearly all
+our friends lived in equal discomfort, but it seemed to me that mother
+had earned something better. Was it for this she had left her home in
+Iowa. Was she never to enjoy a roomy and comfortable dwelling?
+
+She did not complain and she seldom showed her sense of discomfort. I
+knew that she longed for the friends and neighbors she had left behind,
+and yet so far from being able to help her I was even then planning to
+leave her.
+
+In a sullen rage I endured the winter and when at last the sun began to
+ride the sky with fervor and the prairie cock announced the spring, hope
+of an abundant crop, the promise of a new railroad, the incoming of
+jocund settlers created in each of us a confidence which expressed
+itself in a return to the land. With that marvellous faith which marks
+the husbandmen, we went forth once more with the drill and the harrow,
+planting seed against another harvest.
+
+Sometime during these winter days, I chanced upon a book which effected
+a profound change in my outlook on the world and led to far-reaching
+complications in my life. This volume was the Lovell edition of
+_Progress and Poverty_ which was at that time engaging the attention of
+the political economists of the world.
+
+Up to this moment I had never read any book or essay in which our land
+system had been questioned. I had been raised in the belief that this
+was the best of all nations in the best of all possible worlds, in the
+happiest of all ages. I believed (of course) that the wisdom of those
+who formulated our constitution was but little less than that of
+archangels, and that all contingencies of our progress in government had
+been provided for or anticipated in that inspired and deathless
+instrument.
+
+Now as I read this book, my mind following step by step the author's
+advance upon the citadel of privilege, I was forced to admit that his
+main thesis was right. Unrestricted individual ownership of the earth I
+acknowledged to be wrong and I caught some glimpse of the radiant
+plenty of George's ideal Commonwealth. The trumpet call of the closing
+pages filled me with a desire to battle for the right. Here was a theme
+for the great orator. Here was opportunity for the most devoted evangel.
+
+Raw as I was, inconspicuous as a grasshopper by the roadside, I still
+had something in me which responded to the call of "the prophet of San
+Francisco," and yet I had no definite intention of becoming a
+missionary. How could I?
+
+Penniless, dependent upon the labor of my hands for a livelihood,
+discontented yet unable to decide upon a plan of action, I came and went
+all through that long summer with laggard feet and sorrowful
+countenance.
+
+My brother Franklin having sold his claim had boldly advanced upon
+Chicago. His ability as a bookkeeper secured him against want, and his
+letters were confident and cheerful.
+
+At last in the hour when my perplexity was greatest--the decisive
+impetus came, brought by a chance visitor, a young clergyman from
+Portland, Maine, who arrived in the town to buy some farms for himself
+and a friend. Though a native of Madison Mr. Bashford had won a place in
+the east and had decided to put some part of his salary into Dakota's
+alluring soil. Upon hearing that we were also from Wisconsin he came to
+call and stayed to dinner, and being of a jovial and candid nature soon
+drew from me a fairly coherent statement of my desire to do something in
+the world.
+
+At the end of a long talk he said, "Why don't you come to Boston and
+take a special course at the University? I know the Professor of
+Literature, and I can also give you a letter to the principal of a
+school of Oratory."
+
+This offer threw me into such excitement that I was unable to properly
+thank my adviser, but I fell into depths of dejection as soon as he left
+town. "How can I go east? How can I carry out such a plan?" I asked
+myself with bitter emphasis.
+
+All I had in the world was a small trunk, a couple of dozen books, a
+valise and a few acres of barren unplowed land. My previous visit to
+Boston was just the sort to tempt me to return, but my experiences as a
+laborer in New England had lessened my confidence in its resources--and
+yet the thought of being able to cross the Common every day opened a
+dazzling vista. The very fact that Mr. Bashford had gone there from the
+west as a student, a poor student, made the prodigiously daring step
+seem possible to me. "If only I had a couple of hundred dollars," I said
+to my mother who listened to my delirious words in silence. She divined
+what was surging in my heart and feared it.
+
+Thereafter I walked the floor of my room or wandered the prairie roads
+in continual debate. "What is there for me to do out here?" I demanded.
+"I can farm on these windy dusty acres--that's all. I am a failure as a
+merchant and I am sick of the country."
+
+There were moments of a morning or at sunset when the plain was splendid
+as a tranquil sea, and in such moments I bowed down before its
+mysterious beauty--but for the most part it seemed an empty, desolate,
+mocking world. The harvest was again light and the earth shrunk and
+seamed for lack of moisture.
+
+A hint of winter in the autumn air made me remember the remorseless
+winds and the iron earth over which the snows swept as if across an icy
+polar sea. I shuddered as I thought of again fighting my way to that
+desolate little cabin in McPherson County. I recalled but dimly the
+exultation with which I had made my claim. Boston, by contrast, glowed
+with beauty, with romance, with history, with glory like the vision of
+some turreted town built in the eastern sky at sunset.
+
+"I'll do it," I said at last. "I'll sell my claim. I'll go east. I'll
+find some little hole to creep into. I'll study night and day and so fit
+myself for teaching, then I'll come back west to Illinois or Wisconsin.
+Never will I return to this bleak world."
+
+I offered my claim for sale and while I continued my daily labor on the
+farm, my mind was far-away amid the imagined splendors of the east.
+
+My father was puzzled and a good deal irritated by his son's dark moods.
+My failure to fit into the store was unaccountable and unreasonable. "To
+my thinking," said he, "you have all the school you need. You ought to
+find it easy to make a living in a new, progressive community like
+this."
+
+To him, a son who wanted to go east was temporarily demented. It was an
+absurd plan. "Why, it's against the drift of things. You can't make a
+living back east. Hang onto your land and you'll come out all right. The
+place for a young man is in the west."
+
+Bitter and rebellious of mood, uneasy and uncertain of purpose my talks
+with him resulted only in irritation and discord, but my mother, with an
+abiding faith in my powers, offered no objection. She could not advise,
+it was all so far above and beyond her, but she patted my hand and said,
+"Cheer up! I'm sure it will come out all right. I hate to have you go,
+but I guess Mr. Bashford is right. You need more schooling."
+
+I could see that she was saddened by the thought of the separation which
+was to follow--with a vague knowledge of the experience of all the
+mothers of pioneer sons she feared that the days of our close
+companionship were ended. The detachment was not for a few months, it
+was final. Her face was very wistful and her voice tremulous as she
+told me to go.
+
+"It is hard for me to leave you and sister," I replied, "but I must. I'm
+only rotting here. I'll come back--at least to visit you."
+
+In tremendous excitement I mortgaged my claim for two hundred dollars
+and with that in my hand, started for the land of Emerson, Longfellow,
+and Hawthorne, believing that I was in truth reversing all the laws of
+development, breasting the current of progress, stemming the tide of
+emigration. All about me other young men were streaming toward the
+sunset, pushing westward to escape the pressure of the earth-lords
+behind, whilst I alone and poor, was daring all the dangers, all the
+difficulties from which they were so eagerly escaping.
+
+There was in my heart an illogical exaltation as though I too were about
+to escape something--and yet when the actual moment of parting came, I
+embraced my sorrowing mother, and kissed my quaint little sister
+good-bye without feeling in the least heroic or self-confident. At the
+moment sadness weakened me, reducing me to boyish timidity.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+On to Boston
+
+
+With plenty of time to think, I thought, crouched low in my seat silent
+as an owl. True, I dozed off now and again but even when shortened by
+these periods of forgetfulness, the journey seemed interminable and when
+I reached the grimy old shed of a station which was the Chicago terminal
+of the Northwestern in those days, I was glad of a chance to taste
+outside air, no matter how smoky it reported itself to be.
+
+My brother, who was working in the office of a weekly farm journal, met
+me with an air of calm superiority. He had become a true Chicagoan.
+Under his confident leadership I soon found a boarding place and a
+measure of repose. I must have stayed with him for several days for I
+recall being hypnotized into ordering a twenty-dollar tailor-made suit
+from a South Clark street merchant--you know the kind. It was a "Prince
+Albert Soot"--my first made-to-order outfit, but the extravagance seemed
+justified in face of the known elegance of man's apparel in Boston.
+
+It took me thirty-six hours more to get to Boston, and as I was ill all
+the way (I again rode in the smoking car) a less triumphant Jason never
+entered the City of Light and Learning. The day was a true November day,
+dark and rainy and cold, and when I confronted my cloud-built city of
+domes and towers I was concerned only with a place to sleep--I had
+little desire of battle and no remembrance of the Golden Fleece.
+
+Up from the Hoosac Station and over the slimy, greasy pavement I trod
+with humped back, carrying my heavy valise (it was the same
+imitation-leather concern with which I had toured the city two years
+before), while gay little street cars tinkled by, so close to my
+shoulder that I could have touched them with my hand.
+
+Again I found my way through Haymarket Square to Tremont street and so
+at last to the Common, which presented a cold and dismal face at this
+time. The glory of my dream had fled. The trees, bare and brown and
+dripping with rain, offered no shelter. The benches were sodden, the
+paths muddy, and the sky, lost in a desolate mist shut down over my head
+with oppressive weight. I crawled along the muddy walk feeling about as
+important as a belated beetle in a July thunderstorm. Half of me was
+ready to surrender and go home on the next train but the other half, the
+obstinate half, sullenly forged ahead, busy with the problem of a roof
+and bed.
+
+My experience in Rock River now stood me in good hand. Stopping a
+policeman I asked the way to the Young Men's Christian Association. The
+officer pointed out a small tower not far away, and down the Tremont
+street walk I plodded as wretched a youth as one would care to see.
+
+Humbled, apologetic, I climbed the stairway, approached the desk, and in
+a weak voice requested the address of a cheap lodging place.
+
+From the cards which the clerk carelessly handed to me I selected the
+nearest address, which chanced to be on Boylston Place, a short narrow
+street just beyond the Public Library. It was a deplorably wet and
+gloomy alley, but I ventured down its narrow walk and desperately
+knocked on the door of No. 12.
+
+A handsome elderly woman with snow-white hair met me at the threshold.
+She looked entirely respectable, and as she named a price which I could
+afford to pay I accepted her invitation to enter. The house swarmed with
+life. Somebody was strumming a banjo, a girl was singing, and as I
+mounted the stair to the first floor, a slim little maid of about
+fourteen met us. "This is my daughter Fay," said the landlady with
+manifest pride.
+
+Left to myself I sank into a chair with such relief as only the poor
+homeless country boy knows when at the end of a long tramp from the
+station, he lets slip his hand-bag and looks around upon a room for
+which he has paid. It was a plain little chamber, but it meant shelter
+and sleep and I was grateful. I went to bed early.
+
+I slept soundly and the world to which I awoke was new and resplendent.
+My headache was gone, and as I left the house in search of breakfast I
+found the sun shining.
+
+Just around the corner on Tremont street I discovered a little old man
+who from a sidewalk booth, sold delicious coffee in cups of two
+sizes,--one at three cents and a larger one at five cents. He also
+offered doughnuts at a penny each.
+
+Having breakfasted at an outlay of exactly eight cents I returned to my
+chamber, which was a hall-room, eight feet by ten, and faced the north.
+It was heated (theoretically) from a register in the floor, and there
+was just space enough for my trunk, a cot and a small table at the
+window but as it cost only six dollars per month I was content. I
+figured that I could live on five dollars per week which would enable me
+to stay till spring. I had about one hundred and thirty dollars in my
+purse.
+
+From this sunless nook, this narrow niche, I began my study of Boston,
+whose historic significance quite overpowered me. I was alone. Mr.
+Bashford, in Portland, Maine, was the only person in all the east on
+whom I could call for aid or advice in case of sickness. My father wrote
+me that he had relatives living in the city but I did not know how to
+find them. No one could have been more absolutely alone than I during
+that first month. I made no acquaintances, I spoke to no one.
+
+A part of each day was spent in studying the historical monuments of the
+city, and the remaining time was given to reading at the Young Men's
+Union or in the Public Library, which stood next door to my lodging
+house.
+
+At night I made detailed studies of the habits of the cockroaches with
+which my room was peopled. There was something uncanny in the action of
+these beasts. They were new to me and apparently my like had never
+before been observed by them. They belonged to the shadow, to the cold
+and to the damp of the city, whereas I was fresh from the sunlight of
+the plain, and as I watched them peering out from behind my wash-basin,
+they appeared to marvel at me and to confer on my case with almost
+elfish intelligence.
+
+Tantalized by an occasional feeble and vacillating current of warm air
+from the register, I was forced at times to wear my overcoat as I read,
+and at night I spread it over my cot. I did not see the sun for a month.
+The wind was always filled with rain or sleet, and as the lights in
+Bates' Hall were almost always blazing, I could hardly tell when day
+left off and night began. It seemed as if I had been plunged into
+another and darker world, a world of storm, of gray clouds, of endless
+cold.
+
+Having resolved to keep all my expenses within five dollars per week, I
+laid down a scientific plan for cheap living. I first nosed out every
+low-priced eating place within ten minutes walk of my lodging and soon
+knew which of these "joints" were wholesome, and which were not. Just
+around the corner was a place where a filling dinner could be procured
+for fifteen cents, including pudding, and the little lunch counter on
+Tremont street supplied my breakfast. Not one nickel did I spend in
+carfare, and yet I saw almost every celebrated building in the city.
+However, I tenderly regarded my shoe soles each night, for the cost of
+tapping was enormous.
+
+My notion of studying at some school was never carried out. The Boston
+University classes did not attract me. The Harvard lectures were
+inaccessible, and my call upon the teacher of "Expression" to whom Mr.
+Bashford had given me a letter led to nothing. The professor was a
+nervous person and made the mistake of assuming that I was as timid as I
+was silent. His manner irritated me and the outburst of my resentment
+was astonishing to him. I was hungry at the moment and to be patronized
+was too much!
+
+This encounter plunged me into deep discouragement and I went back to my
+reading in the library with a despairing resolution to improve every
+moment, for my stay in the east could not last many weeks. At the rate
+my money was going May would see me bankrupt.
+
+I read both day and night, grappling with Darwin, Spencer, Fiske,
+Helmholtz, Haeckel,--all the mighty masters of evolution whose books I
+had not hitherto been able to open. For diversion I dived into early
+English poetry and weltered in that sea of song which marks the
+beginnings of every literature, conning the ballads of Ireland and
+Wales, the epics of Ireland, the early German and the songs of the
+troubadours, a course of reading which started me on a series of
+lectures to be written directly from a study of the authors themselves.
+This dimly took shape as a volume to be called _The Development of
+English Ideals_, a sufficiently ambitious project.
+
+Among other proscribed books I read Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_ and
+without doubt that volume changed the world for me as it did for many
+others. Its rhythmic chants, its wonderful music filled me with a keen
+sense of the mystery of the near at hand. I rose from that first reading
+with a sense of having been taken up into high places. The spiritual
+significance of America was let loose upon me.
+
+Herbert Spencer remained my philosopher and master. With eager haste I
+sought to compass the "Synthetic Philosophy." The universe took on order
+and harmony as, from my five cent breakfast, I went directly to the
+consideration of Spencer's theory of the evolution of music or painting
+or sculpture. It was thrilling, it was joyful to perceive that
+everything moved from the simple to the complex--how the bow-string
+became the harp, and the egg the chicken. My mental diaphragm creaked
+with the pressure of inrushing ideas. My brain young, sensitive to every
+touch, took hold of facts and theories like a phonographic cylinder, and
+while my body softened and my muscles wasted from disuse, I skittered
+from pole to pole of the intellectual universe like an impatient bat. I
+learned a little of everything and nothing very thoroughly. With so many
+peaks in sight, I had no time to spend on digging up the valley soil.
+
+My only exercise was an occasional slow walk. I could not afford to
+waste my food in physical effort, and besides I was thinly dressed and
+could not go out except when the sun shone. My overcoat was considerably
+more than half cotton and a poor shield against the bitter wind which
+drove straight from the arctic sea into my bones. Even when the weather
+was mild, the crossings were nearly always ankle deep in slush, and
+walking was anything but a pleasure, therefore it happened that for days
+I took no outing whatsoever. From my meals I returned to my table in
+the library and read until closing time, conserving in every way my
+thirty cents' worth of "food units."
+
+In this way I covered a wide literary and scientific territory. Humped
+over my fitful register I discussed the Nebular Hypothesis. My poets and
+scientists not merely told me of things I had never known, they
+confirmed me in certain conceptions which had come to me without effort
+in the past. I became an evolutionist in the fullest sense, accepting
+Spencer as the greatest living thinker. Fiske and Galton and Allen were
+merely assistants to the Master Mind whose generalizations included in
+their circles all modern discovery.
+
+It was a sad change when, leaving the brilliant reading room where my
+mind had been in contact with these masters of scientific world, I crept
+back to my minute den, there to sit humped and shivering (my overcoat
+thrown over my shoulders) confronting with scared resentment the sure
+wasting of my little store of dollars. In spite of all my care, the
+pennies departed from my pockets like grains of sand from an hour-glass
+and most disheartening of all I was making no apparent gain toward
+fitting myself for employment in the west.
+
+Furthermore, the greatness, the significance, the beauty of Boston was
+growing upon me. I felt the neighboring presence of its autocrats more
+definitely and powerfully each day. Their names filled the daily papers,
+their comings and goings were carefully noted. William Dean Howells,
+Oliver Wendell Holmes, John G. Whittier, Edwin Booth, James Russell
+Lowell, all these towering personalities seemed very near to me now, and
+their presence, even if I never saw their faces, was an inspiration to
+one who had definitely decided to compose essays and poems, and to write
+possibly a history of American Literature. Symphony concerts, the
+Lowell Institute Lectures, the _Atlantic Monthly_--(all the distinctive
+institutions of the Hub) had become very precious to me notwithstanding
+the fact that I had little actual share in them. Their nearness while
+making my poverty more bitter, aroused in me a vague ambition to
+succeed--in something. "I won't be beaten, I will not surrender," I
+said.
+
+Being neither a resident of the city nor a pupil of any school I could
+not take books from the library and this inhibition wore upon me till at
+last I determined to seek the aid of Edward Everett Hale who had long
+been a great and gracious figure in my mind. His name had been among the
+"Authors" of our rainy-day game on the farm. I had read his books, and I
+had heard him preach and as his "Lend-a-hand" helpfulness was
+proverbial, I resolved to call upon him at his study in the church, and
+ask his advice. I was not very definite as to what I expected him to do,
+probably I hoped for sympathy in some form.
+
+The old man received me with kindness, but with a look of weariness
+which I quickly understood. Accustomed to helping people he considered
+me just another "Case." With hesitation I explained my difficulty about
+taking out books.
+
+With a bluff roar he exclaimed, "Well, well! That is strange! Have you
+spoken to the Librarian about it?"
+
+"I have, Dr. Hale, but he told me there were twenty thousand young
+students in the city in precisely my condition. People not residents and
+with no one to vouch for them cannot take books home."
+
+"I don't like that," he said. "I will look into that. You shall be
+provided for. Present my card to Judge Chamberlain; I am one of the
+trustees, and he will see that you have all the books you want."
+
+I thanked him and withdrew, feeling that I had gained a point. I
+presented the card to the librarian whose manner softened at once. As a
+protégé of Dr. Hale I was distinguished. "I will see what can be done
+for you," said Judge Chamberlain. Thereafter I was able to take books to
+my room, a habit which still further imperilled my health, for I read
+fourteen hours a day instead of ten.
+
+Naturally I grew white and weak. My Dakota tan and my corn-fed muscle
+melted away. The only part of me which flourished was my hair. I
+begrudged every quarter which went to the barbers and I was cold most of
+the time (except when I infested the library) and I was hungry _all_ the
+time.
+
+I knew that I was physically on the down-grade, but what could I do?
+Nothing except to cut down my expenses. I was living on less than five
+dollars a week, but even at that the end of my _stay_ in the city was
+not far off. Hence I walked gingerly and read fiercely.
+
+Bates' Hall was deliciously comfortable, and every day at nine o'clock I
+was at the door eager to enter. I spent most of my day at a desk in the
+big central reading room, but at night I haunted the Young Men's Union,
+thus adding myself to a dubious collection of half-demented, ill-clothed
+derelicts, who suffered the contempt of the attendants by reason of
+their filling all the chairs and monopolizing all the newspaper racks.
+We never conversed one with another and no one knew my name, but there
+came to be a certain diplomatic understanding amongst us somewhat as
+snakes, rabbits, hyenas, and turtles sometimes form "happy families."
+
+There was one old ruffian who always sniffled and snuffled like a fat
+hog as he read, monopolizing my favorite newspaper. Another member of
+the circle perused the same page of the same book day after day,
+laughing vacuously over its contents. Never by any mistake did he call
+for a different book, and I never saw him turn a leaf. No doubt I was
+counted as one of this group of irresponsibles.
+
+All this hurt me. I saw no humor in it then, for I was even at this time
+an intellectual aristocrat. I despised brainless folk. I hated these
+loafers. I loathed the clerk at the desk who dismissed me with a
+contemptuous smirk, and I resented the formal smile and impersonal
+politeness of Mr. Baldwin, the President. Of course I understood that
+the attendants knew nothing of my dreams and my ambitions, and that they
+were treating me quite as well as my looks warranted, but I blamed them
+just the same, furious at my own helplessness to demonstrate my claims
+for higher honors.
+
+During all this time the only woman I knew was my landlady, Mrs. Davis,
+and her daughter Fay. Once a week I curtly said, "Here is your rent,
+Mrs. Davis," and yet, several times she asked with concern, "How are you
+feeling?--You don't look well. Why don't you board with me? I can feed
+you quite as cheaply as you can board yourself."
+
+It is probable that she read slow starvation in my face, but I haughtily
+answered, "Thank you, I prefer to take my meals out." As a matter of
+fact, I dreaded contact with the other boarders.
+
+As a member of the Union a certain number of lectures were open to me
+and so night by night, in company with my fellow "nuts," I called for my
+ticket and took my place in line at the door, like a charity patient at
+a hospital. However, as I seldom occupied a seat to the exclusion of
+anyone else and as my presence usually helped to keep the speaker in
+countenance, I had no qualms.
+
+The Union audience was notoriously the worst audience in Boston, being
+in truth a group of intellectual mendicants waiting for oratorical
+hand-me-outs. If we didn't happen to like the sandwiches or the dry
+doughnuts given us, we threw them down and walked away.
+
+Nevertheless in this hall I heard nearly all the great preachers of the
+city, and though some of their cant phrases worried me, I was benefited
+by the literary allusions of others. Carpenter retained nothing of the
+old-fashioned theology, and Hale was always a delight--so was Minot
+Savage. Dr. Bartol, a quaint absorbing survival of the Concord School of
+Philosophy, came once, and I often went to his Sunday service. It was
+always joy to enter the old West Meeting House for it remained almost
+precisely as it was in Revolutionary days. Its pews, its curtains, its
+footstools, its pulpit, were all deliciously suggestive of the time when
+stately elms looked in at the window, and when the minister, tall,
+white-haired, black-cravatted arose in the high pulpit and began to read
+with curious, sing-song cadences a chant from _Job_ I easily imagined
+myself listening to Ralph Waldo Emerson.
+
+His sermons held no cheap phrases and his sentences delighted me by
+their neat literary grace. Once in an address on Grant he said, "He was
+an atmospheric man. He developed from the war-cloud like a bolt of
+lightning."
+
+Perhaps Minot Savage pleased me best of all for he too was a disciple of
+Spencer, a logical, consistent, and fearless evolutionist. He often
+quoted from the poets in his sermon. Once he read Whitman's "Song of
+Myself" with such power, such sense of rhythm that his congregation
+broke into applause at the end. I heard also (at Tremont temple and
+elsewhere) men like George William Curtis, Henry Ward Beecher, and
+Frederick Douglass, but greatest of all in a certain sense was the
+influence of Edwin Booth who taught me the greatness of Shakespeare and
+the glory of English speech.
+
+Poor as I was, I visited the old Museum night after night, paying
+thirty-five cents which admitted me to a standing place in the first
+balcony, and there on my feet and in complete absorption, I saw in
+wondrous procession _Hamlet_, _Lear_, _Othello_, _Petruchio_, _Sir Giles
+Overreach_, _Macbeth_, _Iago_, and _Richelieu_ emerge from the shadow
+and re-enact their tragic lives before my eyes. These were my purple,
+splendid hours. From the light of this glorious mimic world I stumbled
+down the stairs out into the night, careless of wind or snow, my brain
+in a tumult of revolt, my soul surging with high resolves.
+
+The stimulation of these performances was very great. The art of this
+"Prince of Tragedy" was a powerful educational influence along the lines
+of oratory, poetry and the drama. He expressed to me the soul of English
+Literature. He exemplified the music of English speech. His acting was
+at once painting and sculpture and music and I became still more
+economical of food in order that I might the more often bask in the
+golden atmosphere of his world. I said, "I, too, will help to make the
+dead lines of the great poets speak to the living people of today," and
+with new fervor bent to the study of oratory as the handmaid of poetry.
+
+The boys who acted as ushers in the balcony came at length to know me,
+and sometimes when it happened that some unlucky suburbanite was forced
+to leave his seat near the railing, one of the lads would nod at me and
+allow me to slip down and take the empty place.
+
+In this way I got closer to the marvellous lines of the actor's face,
+and was enabled to read and record the subtler, fleeter shadows of his
+expression. I have never looked upon a face with such transcendent power
+of externalizing and differentiating emotions, and I have never heard a
+voice of equal beauty and majesty.
+
+Booth taught millions of Americans the dignity, the power and the music
+of the English tongue. He set a high mark in grace and precision of
+gesture, and the mysterious force of his essentially tragic spirit made
+so deep an impression upon those who heard him that they confused him
+with the characters he portrayed. As for me--I could not sleep for hours
+after leaving the theater.
+
+Line by line I made mental note of the actor's gestures, accents, and
+cadences and afterward wrote them carefully down. As I closed my eyes
+for sleep I could hear that solemn chant "_Duncan is in his grave. After
+life's fitful fever he sleeps well._" With horror and admiration I
+recalled him, when as _Sir Giles_, with palsied hand helpless by his
+side, his face distorted, he muttered as if to himself, "Some undone
+widow sits upon my sword," or when as _Petruchio_ in making a playful
+snatch at Kate's hand with the blaze of a lion's anger in his eye his
+voice rang out, "Were it the paw of an angry bear, I'd smite it off--but
+as it's Kate's I kiss it."
+
+To the boy from the cabin on the Dakota plain these stage pictures were
+of almost incommunicable beauty and significance. They justified me in
+all my daring. They made any suffering past, present, or future, worth
+while, and the knowledge that these glories were evanescent and that I
+must soon return to the Dakota plain only deepened their power and added
+to the grandeur of every scene.
+
+Booth's home at this time was on Beacon Hill, and I used to walk
+reverently by just to see where the great man housed. Once, the door
+being open, I caught a momentary glimpse of a curiously ornate umbrella
+stand, and the soft glow of a distant lamp, and the vision greatly
+enriched me. This singularly endowed artist presented to me the radiant
+summit of human happiness and glory, and to see him walk in or out of
+his door was my silent hope, but alas, this felicity was denied me!
+
+Under the spell of these performers, I wrote a series of studies of the
+tragedian in his greatest rôles. "Edwin Booth as Lear," "Edwin Booth as
+Hamlet," and so on, recording with minutest fidelity every gesture,
+every accent, till four of these impersonations were preserved on the
+page as if in amber. I re-read my Shakespeare in the light of Booth's
+eyes, in the sound of his magic voice, and when the season ended, the
+city grew dark, doubly dark for me. Thereafter I lived in the fading
+glory of that month.
+
+These were growing days! I had moments of tremendous expansion, hours
+when my mind went out over the earth like a freed eagle, but these
+flights were always succeeded by fits of depression as I realized my
+weakness and my poverty. Nevertheless I persisted in my studies.
+
+Under the influence of Spencer I traced a parallel development of the
+Arts and found a measure of scientific peace. Under the inspiration of
+Whitman I pondered the significance of democracy and caught some part of
+its spiritual import. With Henry George as guide, I discovered the main
+cause of poverty and suffering in the world, and so in my little room,
+living on forty cents a day, I was in a sense profoundly happy. So long
+as I had a dollar and a half with which to pay my rent and two dollars
+for the keepers of the various dives in which I secured my food, I was
+imaginatively the equal of Booth and brother to the kings of song.
+
+And yet one stern persistent fact remained, my money was passing and I
+was growing weaker and paler every day. The cockroaches no longer amused
+me. Coming as I did from a land where the sky made up half the world I
+resented being thus condemned to a nook from which I could see only a
+gray rag of mist hanging above a neighboring chimney.
+
+In the moments when I closely confronted my situation the glory of the
+western sky came back to me, and it must have been during one of these
+dreary storms that I began to write a poor faltering little story which
+told of the adventures of a cattleman in the city. No doubt it was the
+expression of the homesickness at my own heart but only one or two of
+the chapters ever took shape, for I was tortured by the feeling that no
+matter how great the intellectual advancement caused by hearing Edwin
+Booth in _Hamlet_ might be, it would avail me nothing when confronted by
+the school committee of Blankville, Illinois.
+
+I had moments of being troubled and uneasy and at times experienced a
+feeling that was almost despair.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+Enter a Friend
+
+
+One night seeing that the principal of a well known School of Oratory
+was bulletined to lecture at the Young Men's Union upon "The Philosophy
+of Expression" I went to hear him, more by way of routine than with any
+expectation of being enlightened or even interested, but his very first
+words surprised and delighted me. His tone was positive, his phrases
+epigrammatic, and I applauded heartily. "Here is a man of thought," I
+said.
+
+At the close of the address I ventured to the platform and expressed to
+him my interest in what he had said. He was a large man with a broad and
+smiling face, framed in a brown beard. He appeared pleased with my
+compliments and asked if I were a resident of Boston. "No, I am a
+western man," I replied. "I am here to study and I was especially
+interested in your quotations from Darwin's book on _Expression in Man
+and Animals_."
+
+His eyes expressed surprise and after a few minutes' conversation, he
+gave me his card saying, "Come and see me tomorrow morning at my
+office."
+
+I went home pleasantly excited by this encounter. After months of
+unbroken solitude in the midst of throngs of strangers, this man's
+cordial invitation meant much to me.
+
+On the following morning, at the hour set, I called at the door of his
+office on the top floor of No. 7 Beacon Street, which was an
+old-fashioned one-story building without an elevator.
+
+Brown asked me where I came from, what my plans were, and I replied with
+eager confidence. Then we grew harmoniously enthusiastic over Herbert
+Spencer and Darwin and Mantegazza and I talked a stream. My long silence
+found vent. Words poured from me in a torrent but he listened smilingly,
+his big head cocked on one side, waiting patiently for me to blow off
+steam. Later, when given a chance, he showed me the manuscript of a book
+upon which he was at work and together we discussed its main thesis. He
+asked me my opinion of this passage and that--and I replied, not as a
+pupil but as an equal, and the author seemed pleased at my candor.
+
+Two hours passed swiftly in this way and as the interview was about to
+end he asked, "Where do you live?"
+
+I told him and explained that I was trying to fit myself for teaching
+and that I was living as cheaply as possible. "I haven't any money for
+tuition," I confessed.
+
+He mused a moment, then said, "If you wish to come into my school I
+shall be glad to have you do so. Never mind about tuition,--pay me when
+you can."
+
+This generous offer sent me away filled with gratitude and an illogical
+hope. Not only had I gained a friend, I had found an intellectual
+comrade, one who was far more widely read, at least in science, than I.
+I went to my ten-cent lunch with a feeling that a door had unexpectedly
+opened and that it led into broader, sunnier fields of toil.
+
+The school, which consisted of several plain offices and a large
+class-room, was attended by some seventy or eighty pupils, mostly girls
+from New England and Canada with a few from Indiana and Ohio. It was a
+simple little workshop but to me it was the most important institution
+in Boston. It gave me welcome, and as I came into it on Monday morning
+at nine o'clock and was introduced to the pretty teacher of Delsarte,
+Miss Maida Craigen, whose smiling lips and big Irish-gray eyes made her
+beloved of all her pupils, I felt that my lonely life in Boston was
+ended.
+
+The teachers met me with formal kindliness, finding in me only another
+crude lump to be moulded into form, and while I did not blame them for
+it, I instantly drew inside my shell and remained there--thus robbing
+myself of much that would have done me good. Some of the girls went out
+of their way to be nice to me, but I kept aloof, filled with a savage
+resentment of my poverty and my threadbare clothing.
+
+Before the week was over, Professor Brown asked me to assist in reading
+the proof-sheets of his new book and this I did, going over it with him
+line by line. His deference to my judgment was a sincere compliment to
+my reading and warmed my heart like some elixir. It was my first
+authoritative appreciation and when at the end of the third session he
+said, "I shall consider your criticism more than equal to the sum of
+your tuition," I began to faintly forecast the time when my brain would
+make me self-supporting.
+
+My days were now cheerful. My life had direction. For two hours each
+afternoon (when work in the school was over) I sat with Brown discussing
+the laws of dramatic art, and to make myself still more valuable in this
+work, I read every listed book or article upon expression, and
+translated several French authorities, transcribing them in longhand for
+his use.
+
+In this work the weeks went by and spring approached. In a certain sense
+I felt that I was gaining an education which would be of value to me but
+I was not earning one cent of money, and my out-go was more than five
+dollars per week, for I occasionally went to the theater, and I had
+also begun attendance at the Boston Symphony concerts in Music Hall.
+
+By paying twenty-five cents students were allowed to fill the gallery
+and to stand on the ground floor, and Friday afternoons generally found
+me leaning against the wall listening to Brahms and Wagner. At such
+times I often thought of my mother, and my uncle David and wished that
+they too might hear these wondrous harmonies. I tried to imagine what
+the effect of this tumult of sound would be, as it beat in upon their
+inherited deeply musical brain-cells!
+
+One by one I caught up the threads of certain other peculiar Boston
+interests, and by careful reading of the _Transcript_ was enabled to
+vibrate in full harmony with the local hymn of gratitude. New York
+became a mere emporium, a town without a library, a city without a first
+class orchestra, the home of a few commercial painters and several
+journalistic poets! Chicago was a huge dirty town on the middle border.
+Washington a vulgar political camp--only Philadelphia was admitted to
+have the quality of a real city and her literary and artistic resources
+were pitiably slender and failing!
+
+But all the time that I was feasting on these insubstantial glories, my
+meat was being cut down and my coat hung ever more loosely over my ribs.
+Pale and languid I longed for spring, for sunshine, with all the passion
+of a prisoner, and when at last the grass began to show green in the
+sheltered places on the Common and the sparrows began to utter their
+love notes, I went often of an afternoon to a bench in lee of a clump of
+trees and there sprawled out like a debilitated fox, basking in the
+tepid rays of a diminished sun.
+
+For all his expressed admiration of my literary and scientific acumen,
+Brown did not see fit to invite me to dinner, probably because of my
+rusty suit and frayed cuffs. I did not blame him. I was in truth a
+shabby figure, and the dark-brown beard which had come upon me added to
+the unhealthy pallor of my skin, so that Mrs. Brown, a rather smart and
+socially ambitious lady, must have regarded me as something of an
+anarchist, a person to avoid. She always smiled as we met, but her smile
+was defensive.
+
+However, a blessed break in the monotony of my fare came during April
+when my friend Bashford invited me to visit him in Portland. I accepted
+his invitation with naïve precipitation and furbished up my wardrobe as
+best I could, feeling that even the wife of a clergyman might not
+welcome a visitor with fringed cuffs and celluloid collars.
+
+This was my first sea voyage and I greatly enjoyed the trip--after I got
+there!
+
+Mrs. Bashford received me kindly, but (I imagined) with a trace of
+official hospitality in her greeting. It was plain that she (like Mrs.
+Brown) considered me a "Charity Patient." Well, no matter, Bashford and
+I got on smoothly.
+
+Their house was large and its grandeur was almost oppressive to me, but
+I spent nearly a week in it. As I was leaving, Bashford gave me a card
+to Dr. Cross, a former parishioner in Jamaica Plain, saying, "Call upon
+the Doctor as soon as you return. He'll be glad to hear of Dakota."
+
+My little den in Boylston Place was almost intolerable to me now. Spring
+sunshine, real sunshine flooded the land and my heart was full of
+longing for the country. Therefore--though I dreaded meeting another
+stranger,--I decided to risk a dime and make the trip to Jamaica Plains,
+to call upon Dr. Cross.
+
+This ride was a further revelation of the beauty of New England. For
+half an hour the little horse-car ran along winding lanes under great
+overarching elm trees, past apple-orchards in bursting bloom. On every
+hand luscious lawns spread, filled with crocuses and dandelions just
+beginning to spangle the green. The effect upon me was somewhat like
+that which would be produced in the mind of a convict who should
+suddenly find his prison doors opening into a June meadow. Standing with
+the driver on the front platform, I drank deep of the flower-scented
+air. I had never seen anything more beautiful.
+
+Dr. Cross, a sweet and gentle man of about sixty years of age (not
+unlike in manner and habit Professor Bush, my principal at the Cedar
+Valley Seminary) received his seedy visitor with a kindly smile. I liked
+him and trusted him at once. He was tall and very thin, with dark eyes
+and a long gray beard. His face was absolutely without suspicion or
+guile. It was impossible to conceive of his doing an unkind or hasty
+act, and he afterward said that I had the pallor of a man who had been
+living in a cellar. "I was genuinely alarmed about you," he said.
+
+His small frame house was simple, but it stood in the midst of a clump
+of pear trees, and when I broke out in lyrical praise of the beauty of
+the grass and glory of the flowers, the doctor smiled and became even
+more distinctly friendly. It appeared that through Mr. Bashford he had
+purchased a farm in Dakota, and the fact that I knew all about it and
+all about wheat farming gave me distinction.
+
+He introduced me to his wife, a wholesome hearty soul who invited me to
+dinner. I stayed. It was my first chance at a real meal since my visit
+to Portland, and I left the house with a full stomach, as well as a full
+heart, feeling that the world was not quite so unfriendly after all.
+"Come again on Sunday," the doctor almost commanded. "We shall expect
+you."
+
+My money had now retired to the lower corner of my left-hand pocket and
+it was evident that unless I called upon my father for help I must go
+back to the West; and much as I loved to talk of the broad fields and
+pleasant streams of Dakota, I dreaded the approach of the hour when I
+must leave Boston, which was coming to mean more and more to me every
+day.
+
+In a blind vague way I felt that to leave Boston was to leave all hope
+of a literary career and yet I saw no way of earning money in the city.
+In the stress of my need I thought of an old friend, a carpenter in
+Greenfield. "I'm sure he will give me a job," I said.
+
+With this in mind I went into Professor Brown's office one morning and I
+said, "Well, Professor, I must leave you."
+
+"What's that? What's the matter?" queried the principal shrilly.
+
+"My money's gone. I've got to get out and earn more," I answered sadly.
+
+He eyed me gravely. "What are you going to do?" he inquired.
+
+"I am going back to shingling," I said with tragic accent.
+
+"Shingling!" the old man exclaimed, and then began to laugh, his big
+paunch shaking up and down with the force of his mirth. "Shingling!" he
+shouted finally. "Can _you_ shingle?"
+
+"You bet I can," I replied with comical access of pride, "but I don't
+like to. That is to say I don't like to give up my work here in Boston
+just when I am beginning to feel at home."
+
+Brown continued to chuckle. To hear that a man who knew Mantegazza and
+Darwin and Whitman and Browning could even _think_ of shingling, was
+highly humorous, but as he studied my forlorn face he sensed the
+despairing quiver in my voice and his kind heart softened. He ceased to
+smile. "Oh, you mustn't do that," he said earnestly. "You mustn't
+surrender now. We'll fix up some way for you to earn your keep. Can't
+you borrow a little?"
+
+"Yes, I could get a few dollars from home, but I don't feel justified in
+doing so,--times are hard out there and besides I see no way of repaying
+a loan."
+
+He pondered a moment, "Well, now I'll tell you what we'll do. I'll make
+you our Instructor in Literature for the summer term and I'll put your
+Booth lecture on the programme. That will give you a start, and perhaps
+something else will develop for the autumn."
+
+This noble offer so emboldened me that I sent west for twenty-five
+dollars to pay my board, and to have my suit dyed.--It was the very same
+suit I had bought of the Clark Street tailor, and the aniline purple had
+turned pink along the seams--or if not pink it was some other color
+equally noticeable in the raiment of a lecturer, and not to be endured.
+I also purchased a new pair of shoes and a necktie of the Windsor
+pattern. This cravat and my long Prince Albert frock, while not strictly
+in fashion, made me feel at least presentable.
+
+Another piece of good fortune came to me soon after. Dr. Cross again
+invited me to dine and after dinner as we were driving together along
+one of the country lanes, the good doctor said, "Mrs. Cross is going up
+into New Hampshire for the summer and I shall be alone in the house. Why
+don't you come and stay with me? You need the open air, and I need
+company."
+
+This generous offer nearly shipwrecked my dignity. Several moments
+passed before I could control my voice to thank him. At last I said,
+"That's very kind of you, Doctor. I'll come if you will let me pay at
+least the cost of my board."
+
+The Doctor understood this feeling and asked, "How much are you paying
+now?"
+
+With slight evasion I replied, "Well, I try to keep within five dollars
+a week."
+
+He smiled. "I don't see how you do it, but I can give you an attic room
+and you can pay me at your convenience."
+
+This noble invitation translated me from my dark, cold, cramped den
+(with its night-guard of redoubtable cockroaches) into the light and air
+of a comfortable suburban home. It took me back to the sky and the birds
+and the grass--and Irish Mary, the cook, put red blood into my veins. In
+my sabbath walks along the beautiful country roads, I heard again the
+song of the cat-bird and the trill of the bobolink. For the first time
+in months I slept in freedom from hunger, in security of the morrow. Oh,
+good Hiram Cross, your golden crown should be studded with jewels, for
+your life was filled with kindnesses like this!
+
+Meanwhile, in preparation for the summer term I gladly helped stamp and
+mail Brown's circulars. The lecture "Edwin Booth as Iago" I carefully
+re-wrote--for Brown had placed it on his printed programme and had also
+announced me as "Instructor in Literature." I took care to send this
+circular to all my friends and relatives in the west.
+
+Decidedly that summer of Taine in a Dakota cabin was bearing fruit, and
+yet just in proportion as Brown came to believe in my ability so did he
+proceed to "hector" me. He never failed to ask of a morning, "Well, when
+are you going back to shingling?"
+
+The Summer School opened in July. It was well attended, and the
+membership being made up of teachers of English and Oratory from
+several states was very impressive to me. Professors of elocution and of
+literature from well-known colleges and universities gave dignity and
+distinction to every session.
+
+My class was very small and paid me very little but it brought me to
+know Mrs. Payne, a studious, kindly woman (a resident of Hyde Park), who
+for some reason which will forever remain obscure, considered me not
+merely a youth of promise, but a lecturer of value. Having heard from
+Brown how sadly I needed money--perhaps she even detected poverty in my
+dyed coat, she not only invited me to deliver an immediate course of
+lectures at her house in Hyde Park but proceeded to force tickets upon
+all her friends.
+
+The importance of this engagement will appear when the reader is
+informed that I was owing the Doctor for a month's board, and saw no way
+of paying it, and that my one suit was distressingly threadbare. There
+are other and more interesting ways of getting famous but alas! I rose
+only by inches and incredible effort. My reader must be patient with me.
+
+My subjects were ambitious enough, "The Art of Edwin Booth," was ready
+for delivery, but "Victor Hugo and his Prose Masterpieces," was only
+partly composed and "The Modern German Novel" and "The American Novel"
+were in notes merely, therefore with puckered brow and sturdy pen I set
+to work in my little attic room, and there I toiled day and night to put
+on paper the notions I had acquired concerning these grandiose subjects.
+
+In after years I was appalled at the audacity of that schedule, and I
+think I had the grace to be scared at the time, but I swung into it
+recklessly. Tickets had been taken by some of the best known men among
+the teachers, and I was assured by Mrs. Payne that we would have the
+most distinguished audience that ever graced Hyde Park. "Among your
+listeners will be the literary editors of several Boston papers, two
+celebrated painters, and several well-known professors of oratory," she
+said, and like Lieutenant Napoleon called upon to demonstrate his
+powers, I graved with large and ruthless fist, and approached my opening
+date with palpitating but determined heart.
+
+It was a tense moment for me as (while awaiting my introduction) I
+looked into the faces of the men and women seated in that crowded
+parlor. Just before the dais, shading his eyes with his hand, was a
+small man with a pale face and brown beard. This was Charles E. Hurd,
+literary editor of the _Transcript_. Near him sat Theodore Weld, as
+venerable in appearance as Socrates (with long white hair and rosy
+cheeks), well known as one of the anti-slavery guard, a close friend of
+Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison. Beside him was Professor
+Raymond of Princeton, the author of several books, while Churchill of
+Andover and half a dozen other representatives of great colleges loomed
+behind him. I faced them all with a gambler's composure but behind my
+mask I was jellied with fear.
+
+However, when I rose to speak, the tremor passed out of my limbs, the
+blood came back to my brain, and I began without stammering. This first
+paper, fortunately for us all, dealt with Edwin Booth, whom I revered.
+To my mind he not only expressed the highest reach of dramatic art in
+his day, he was the best living interpreter of Shakespeare, and no doubt
+it was the sincerity of my utterance which held my hearers, for they all
+listened intently while I analyzed the character of _Iago_, and
+disclosed what seemed to me to be the sources of the great tragedian's
+power, and when I finished they applauded with unmistakable approval,
+and Mrs. Payne glowed with a sense of proprietorship in her protégé who
+had seized the opportunity and made it his. I was absurd but
+triumphant.
+
+Many of the guests (kindly of spirit) came up to shake hands and
+congratulate me. Mr. Hurd gave me a close grip and said, "Come up to the
+_Transcript_ office and see me." John J. Enneking, a big, awkward
+red-bearded painter, elbowed up and in his queer German way spoke in
+approval. Churchill, Raymond, both said, "You'll do," and Brown finally
+came along with a mocking smile on his big face, eyed me with an air of
+quizzical comradeship, nudged me slyly with his elbow as he went by, and
+said, "Going back to shingling, are you?"
+
+On the homeward drive, Dr. Cross said very solemnly, "You have no need
+to fear the future."
+
+It was a very small event in the history of Hyde Park, but it was a
+veritable bridge of Lodi for me. I never afterward felt lonely or
+disheartened in Boston. I had been tested both as teacher and orator and
+I must be pardoned for a sudden growth of boyish self-confidence.
+
+The three lectures which followed were not so successful as the first,
+but my audience remained. Indeed I think it would have increased night
+by night had the room permitted it, and Mrs. Payne was still perfectly
+sure that her protégé had in him all the elements of success, but I fear
+Prof. Church expressed the sad truth when he said in writing, "Your man
+Garland is a diamond in the rough!" Of course I must have appeared very
+seedy and uncouth to these people and I am filled with wonder at their
+kindness to me. My accent was western. My coat sleeves shone at the
+elbows, my trousers bagged at the knees. Considering the anarch I must
+have been, I marvel at their toleration. No western audience could have
+been more hospitable, more cordial.
+
+The ninety dollars which I gained from this series of lectures was, let
+me say, the less important part of my victory, and yet it was wondrous
+opportune. They enabled me to cancel my indebtedness to the Doctor, and
+still have a little something to keep me going until my classes began in
+October, and as my landlord did not actually evict me, I stayed on
+shamelessly, fattening visibly on the puddings and roasts which Mrs.
+Cross provided and dear old Mary cooked with joy. She was the true
+artist. She loved to see her work appreciated.
+
+My class in English literature that term numbered twenty and the money
+which this brought carried me through till the mid-winter vacation, and
+permitted another glorious season of Booth and the Symphony Orchestra.
+In the month of January I organized a class in American Literature, and
+so at last became self-supporting in the city of Boston! No one who has
+not been through it can realize the greatness of this victory.
+
+I permitted myself a few improvements in hose and linen. I bought a
+leather hand-bag with a shoulder strap, and every day joined the stream
+of clerks and students crossing the Common. I began to feel a
+proprietary interest in the Hub. My sleeping room (also my study),
+continued to be in the attic (a true attic with a sloping roof and one
+window) but the window faced the south, and in it I did all my reading
+and writing. It was hot on sunny days and dark on cloudy days, but it
+was a refuge.
+
+As a citizen with a known habitation I was permitted to carry away books
+from the library, and each morning from eight until half-past twelve I
+sat at my desk writing, tearing away at some lecture, or historical
+essay, and once in a while I composed a few lines of verse. Five
+afternoons in each week I went to my classes and to the library,
+returning at six o'clock to my dinner and to my reading. This was my
+routine, and I was happy in it. My letters to my people in the west
+were confident, more confident than I ofttimes felt.
+
+During my second summer Burton Babcock, who had decided to study for the
+Unitarian ministry, came east with intent to enter the Divinity School
+at Harvard. He was the same old Burton, painfully shy, thoughtful,
+quaintly abrupt in manner, and together we visited the authorities at
+Cambridge and presented his case as best we could.
+
+For some reason not clear to either of us, the school refused to aid and
+after a week's stay with me Burton, a little disheartened but not
+resentful, went to Meadville, Pennsylvania. Boston seemed very wonderful
+to him and I enjoyed his visit keenly. We talked inevitably of old
+friends and old days in the manner of middle-aged men, and he told me
+that John Gammons had entered the Methodist ministry and was stationed
+in Decorah, that Charles, my former partner in Dakota, had returned to
+the old home very ill with some obscure disease. Mitchell Morrison was a
+watch-maker and jeweler in Winona and Lee Moss had gone to Superior. The
+scattering process had begun. The diverging wind-currents of destiny had
+already parted our little group and every year would see its members
+farther apart. How remote it all seems to me now,--like something
+experienced on another planet!
+
+Each month saw me more and more the Bostonian by adoption. My teaching
+paid my board, leaving me free to study and to write. I never did any
+hack-work for the newspapers. Hawthorne's influence over me was still
+powerful, and in my first attempts at writing fiction I kept to the
+essay form and sought for a certain distinction in tone. In poetry,
+however, Bret Harte, Joaquin Miller, and Walt Whitman were more to my
+way of thinking than either Poe or Emerson. In brief I was sadly
+"mixed." Perhaps the enforced confinement of my city life gave all poems
+of the open air, of the prairies, their great and growing power over me
+for I had resolved to remain in Boston until such time as I could return
+to the West in the guise of a conqueror. Just what I was about to
+conquer and in what way I was to secure eminence was not very clear to
+me, but I was resolved none the less, and had no immediate intention of
+returning.
+
+In the summer of 1886 Brown held another Summer School and again I
+taught a class. Autumn brought a larger success. Mrs. Lee started a
+Browning Class in Chelsea, and another loyal pupil organized a
+Shakespeare class in Waltham. I enjoyed my trips to these classes very
+much and one of the first stories I ever wrote was suggested by some
+characters I saw in an old grocery store in Waltham. As I recall my
+method of teaching, it consisted chiefly of readings. My critical
+comment could not have been profound.
+
+I was earning now twelve dollars per week, part of this went for railway
+fare, but I still had a margin of profit. True I still wore reversible
+cuffs and carried my laundry bundles in order to secure the discount,
+but I dressed in better style and looked a little less like a starving
+Russian artist, and I was becoming an author!
+
+My entrance into print came about through my good friend, Mr. Hurd, the
+book reviewer of the _Transcript_. For him I began to write an
+occasional critical article or poem just to try my hand. One of my
+regular "beats" was up the three long flights of stairs which led to
+Hurd's little den above Washington Street, for there I felt myself a
+little more of the literary man, a little nearer the current of American
+fiction.
+
+Let me repeat my appreciation of the fact that I met with the quickest
+response and the most generous aid among the people of Boston. There was
+nothing cold or critical in their treatment of me. My success,
+admittedly, came from some sympathy in them rather than from any real
+deserving on my part. I cannot understand at this distance why those
+charming people should have consented to receive from me, opinions
+concerning anything whatsoever,--least of all notions of
+literature,--but they did, and they seemed delighted at "discovering"
+me. Perhaps they were surprised at finding so much intelligence in a man
+from the plains.
+
+It was well that I was earning my own living at last, for things were
+not going especially well at home. A couple of dry seasons had made a
+great change in the fortunes of my people. Frank, with his usual
+careless good nature as clerk in the store had given credit to almost
+every comer, and as the hard times came on, many of those indebted
+failed to pay, and father was forced to give up his business and go back
+to the farm which he understood and could manage without the aid of an
+accountant.
+
+"The Junior" as I called my brother, being footloose and discontented,
+wrote to say that he was planning to go farther west--to Montana, I
+think it was. His letter threw me into dismay. I acknowledged once again
+that my education had in a sense been bought at his expense. I recalled
+the many weeks when the little chap had plowed in my stead whilst I was
+enjoying the inspiration of Osage. It gave me distress to think of him
+separating himself from the family as David had done, and yet my own
+position was too insecure to warrant me promising much in his aid.
+Nevertheless, realizing that mother would suffer less if she knew her
+two sons were together, I wrote, saying, "If you have definitely decided
+on leaving home, don't go west. Come to Boston, and I will see if I
+cannot get you something to do."
+
+It ended in his coming to Boston, and my mother was profoundly
+relieved. Father gave no sign either of pleasure or regret. He set to
+work once more increasing his acreage, vigorous and unsubdued.
+
+Frank's coming added to my burden of responsibility and care, but
+increased my pleasure in the city, for I now had someone to show it to.
+He secured a position as an accountant in a railway office and though we
+seldom met during the week, on Sundays we roamed the parks, or took
+excursions down the bay, and in a short time he too became an
+enthusiastic Bostonian with no thought of returning to Dakota. Little
+Jessie was now the sole stay and comfort of our mother.
+
+As I look back now upon the busy, happy days of 1885 and 1886, I can
+grasp only a few salient experiences.... A terrific storm is on the sea.
+We are at Nantasket to study it. The enormous waves are charging in from
+the illimitable sky like an army of horses, only to fall and waste
+themselves in wrath upon the sand. I feel the stinging blast against my
+face.... I am riding on a train over the marshes on my way to my class
+in Chelsea. I look across the level bay and behold a soaring banner of
+sunshot mist, spun by a passing engine, rising, floating, vanishing in
+the air.... I am sitting in an old grocery shop in Waltham listening to
+the quaint aphorism of a group of loafers around the stove.... I am
+lecturing before a summer school in Pepperel, New Hampshire.... I am at
+the theater, I hear Salvini thunderously clamoring on the stage. I see
+Modjeska's beautiful hands. I thrill to Sarah Bernhardt's velvet somber
+voice....
+
+It is summer, Frank and I are walking the lovely lanes of Milton under
+gigantic elms, or lying on the grass of the park in West Roxbury,
+watching the wild birds come and go, hearing the sound of the
+scythestone in the meadow. Day by day, week by week, Boston, New
+England, comes to fuse that part of me which is eastern. I grow at last
+into thinking myself a fixture. Boston is the center of music, of art,
+of literature. My only wish now is to earn money enough to visit my
+people in the West.
+
+And yet, notwithstanding all this, neither of us ever really became a
+Bostonian. We never got beyond a feeling for the beauty, the
+picturesqueness and the charm of our surroundings. The East caused me to
+cry out in admiration, but it did not inspire me to write. It did not
+appeal to me as my material. It was rather as a story already told, a
+song already sung.
+
+When I walked a lane, or saw the sloping roof of a house set against a
+hillside I thought of Whittier or Hawthorne and was silent. The sea
+reminded me of Celia Thaxter or Lucy Larcom. The marshes brought up the
+_Wayside Inn_ of Longfellow; all, all was of the past. New England, rich
+with its memories of great men and noble women, had no direct
+inspiration for me, a son of the West. It did not lay hold upon my
+creative imagination, neither did it inspire me to sing of its glory. I
+remained immutably of the Middle Border and strange to say, my desire to
+celebrate the West was growing.
+
+Each season dropped a thickening veil of mist between me and the scenes
+of my youth, adding a poetic glamour to every rememberable form and
+fact. Each spring when the smell of fresh, uncovered earth returned to
+fret my nostrils I thought of the wide fields of Iowa, of the level
+plains of Dakota, and a desire to hear once more the prairie chicken
+calling from the ridges filled my heart. In the autumn when the wind
+swept through the bare branches of the elm, I thought of the lonely days
+of plowing on the prairie, and the poetry and significance of those wild
+gray days came over me with such power that I instinctively seized my
+pen to write of them.
+
+One day, a man shoveling coal in the alley below my window reminded me
+of that peculiar ringing _scrape_ which the farm shovel used to make
+when (on the Iowa farm) at dusk I scooped my load of corn from the wagon
+box to the crib, and straightway I fell a-dreaming, and from dreaming I
+came to composition, and so it happened that my first writing of any
+significance was an article depicting an Iowa corn-husking scene.
+
+It was not merely a picture of the life my brother and I had lived,--it
+was an attempt to set forth a typical scene of the Middle Border. "The
+Farm Life of New England has been fully celebrated by means of
+innumerable stories and poems," I began, "its husking bees, its dances,
+its winter scenes are all on record; is it not time that we of the west
+should depict our own distinctive life? The middle border has its
+poetry, its beauty, if we can only see it."
+
+To emphasize these differences I called this first article "The Western
+Corn Husking," and put into it the grim report of the man who had "been
+there," an insistence on the painful as well as the pleasant truth, a
+quality which was discovered afterwards to be characteristic of my work.
+The bitter truth was strongly developed in this first article.
+
+Up to this time I had composed nothing except several more or less
+high-falutin' essays, a few poems and one or two stories somewhat in
+imitation of Hawthorne, but in this my first real shot at the
+delineation of prairie life, I had no models. Perhaps this clear field
+helped me to be true. It was not fiction, as I had no intention at that
+time of becoming a fictionist, but it was fact, for it included the mud
+and cold of the landscape as well as its bloom and charm.
+
+I sent "The Corn Husking" to the _New American Magazine_, and almost by
+return mail the editor, William Wyckoff, wrote an inspiring letter to
+the effect that the life I had described was familiar to him, and that
+it had never been treated in this way. "I shall be very glad to read
+anything you have written or may write, and I suggest that you follow up
+this article by others of the same nature."
+
+It was just the encouragement I needed. I fell to work at once upon
+other articles, taking up the seasons one by one. Wyckoff accepted them
+gladly, but paid for them slowly and meagerly--but I did not blame him
+for that. His magazine was even then struggling for life.
+
+It must have been about this time that I sold to _Harper's Weekly_ a
+long poem of the prairie, for which I was paid the enormous sum of
+twenty-five dollars. With this, the first money I ever had received for
+magazine writing, I hastened to purchase some silk for my mother, and
+the _Memoirs of General Grant_ for my father, with intent to suitably
+record and celebrate my entrance into literature. For the first time in
+her life, my mother was able to wear a silk dress, and she wrote, soon
+after, a proud and grateful letter saying things which blurred my eyes
+and put a lump into my throat. If only I could have laid the silk in her
+lap, and caught the light of her happy smile!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+A Visit to the West
+
+
+At twenty-seven years of age, and after having been six years absent
+from Osage, the little town in which I went to school, I found myself
+able to revisit it. My earnings were still humiliatingly less than those
+of a hod-carrier, but by shameless economy I had saved a little over one
+hundred dollars and with this as a travelling fund, I set forth at the
+close of school, on a vacation tour which was planned to include the old
+home in the Coulee, the Iowa farm, and my father's house in Dakota. I
+took passage in a first class coach this time, but was still a long way
+from buying a berth in a sleeping car.
+
+To find myself actually on the train and speeding westward was deeply
+and pleasurably exciting, but I did not realize how keen my hunger for
+familiar things had grown, till the next day when I reached the level
+lands of Indiana. Every field of wheat, every broad hat, every honest
+treatment of the letter "r" gave me assurance that I was approaching my
+native place. The reapers at work in the fields filled my mind with
+visions of the past. The very weeds at the roadside had a magical appeal
+and yet, eager as I was to reach old friends, I found in Chicago a new
+friend whose sympathy was so stimulating, so helpful that I delayed my
+journey for two days in order that I might profit by his critical
+comment.
+
+This meeting came about in a literary way. Some months earlier, in May,
+to be exact, Hurd of the _Transcript_ had placed in my hands a novel
+called _Zury_ and my review of it had drawn from its author, a western
+man, a letter of thanks and a cordial invitation to visit him as I
+passed through Chicago, on my way to my old home. This I had gladly
+accepted, and now with keen interest, I was on my way to his home.
+
+Joseph Kirkland was at this time nearly sixty years of age, a small,
+alert, dark-eyed man, a lawyer, who lived in what seemed to me at the
+time, plutocratic grandeur, but in spite of all this, and
+notwithstanding the difference in our ages, I liked him and we formed an
+immediate friendship. "Mrs. Kirkland and my daughters are in Michigan
+for the summer," he explained, "and I am camping in my study." I was
+rather glad of this arrangement for, having the house entirely to
+ourselves, we could discuss realism, Howells and the land-question with
+full vigor and all night if we felt like it.
+
+Kirkland had read some of my western sketches and in the midst of his
+praise of them suddenly asked, "Why don't you write fiction?"
+
+To this I replied, "I can't manage the dialogue."
+
+"Nonsense!" said he. "You're lazy, that's all. You use the narrative
+form because it's easier. Buckle to it--you can write stories as well as
+I can--but you must sweat!"
+
+This so surprised me that I was unable to make any denial of his charge.
+The fact is he was right. To compose a page of conversation, wherein
+each actor uses his own accent and speaks from his own point of view,
+was not easy. I had dodged the hard spots.
+
+The older man's bluntness and humor, and his almost wistful appreciation
+of my youth and capacity for being moved, troubled me, absorbed my mind
+even during our talk. Some of his words stuck like burrs, because they
+seemed so absurd. "When your name is known all over the West," he said
+in parting, "remember what I say. You can go far if you'll only work. I
+began too late. I can't emotionalize present day western life--you can,
+but you must bend to your desk like a man. You must grind!"
+
+I didn't feel in the least like a successful fictionist and being a
+household word seemed very remote,--but I went away resolved to "grind"
+if grinding would do any good.
+
+Once out of the city, I absorbed "atmosphere" like a sponge. It was with
+me no longer (as in New England) a question of warmed-over themes and
+appropriated characters. Whittier, Hawthorne, Holmes, had no connection
+with the rude life of these prairies. Each weedy field, each wire fence,
+the flat stretches of grass, the leaning Lombardy trees,--everything was
+significant rather than beautiful, familiar rather than picturesque.
+
+Something deep and resonant vibrated within my brain as I looked out
+upon this monotonous commonplace landscape. I realized for the first
+time that the east had surfeited me with picturesqueness. It appeared
+that I had been living for six years amidst painted, neatly arranged
+pasteboard scenery. Now suddenly I dropped to the level of nature
+unadorned, down to the ugly unkempt lanes I knew so well, back to the
+pungent realities of the streamless plain.
+
+Furthermore I acknowledged a certain responsibility for the conditions
+of the settlers. I felt related to them, an intolerant part of them.
+Once fairly out among the fields of northern Illinois everything became
+so homely, uttered itself so piercingly to me that nothing less than
+song could express my sense of joy, of power. This was my country--these
+my people.
+
+It was the third of July, a beautiful day with a radiant sky, darkened
+now and again with sudden showers. Great clouds, trailing veils of
+rain, enveloped the engine as it roared straight into the west,--for an
+instant all was dark, then forth we burst into the brilliant sunshine
+careening over the green ridges as if drawn by runaway dragons with
+breath of flame.
+
+It was sundown when I crossed the Mississippi river (at Dubuque) and the
+scene which I looked out upon will forever remain a splendid page in my
+memory. The coaches lay under the western bluffs, but away to the south
+the valley ran, walled with royal purple, and directly across the flood,
+a beach of sand flamed under the sunset light as if it were a bed of
+pure untarnished gold. Behind this an island rose, covered with noble
+trees which suggested all the romance of the immemorial river. The
+redman's canoe, the explorer's batteau, the hunter's lodge, the
+emigrant's cabin, all stood related to that inspiring vista. For the
+first time in my life I longed to put this noble stream into verse.
+
+All that day I had studied the land, musing upon its distinctive
+qualities, and while I acknowledged the natural beauty of it, I revolted
+from the gracelessness of its human habitations. The lonely boxlike
+farm-houses on the ridges suddenly appeared to me like the dens of wild
+animals. The lack of color, of charm in the lives of the people
+anguished me. I wondered why I had never before perceived the futility
+of woman's life on a farm.
+
+I asked myself, "Why have these stern facts never been put into our
+literature as they have been used in Russia and in England? Why has this
+land no story-tellers like those who have made Massachusetts and New
+Hampshire illustrious?"
+
+These and many other speculations buzzed in my brain. Each moment was a
+revelation of new uglinesses as well as of remembered beauties.
+
+At four o'clock of a wet morning I arrived at Charles City, from which
+I was to take "the spur" for Osage. Stiffened and depressed by my
+night's ride, I stepped out upon the platform and watched the train as
+it passed on, leaving me, with two or three other silent and sleepy
+passengers, to wait until seven o'clock in the morning for the
+"accommodation train." I was still busy with my problem, but the salient
+angles of my interpretation were economic rather than literary.
+
+Walking to and fro upon the platform, I continued to ponder my
+situation. In a few hours I would be among my old friends and
+companions, to measure and be measured. Six years before I had left them
+to seek my fortune in the eastern world. I had promised
+little,--fortunately--and I was returning, without the pot of gold and
+with only a tinge of glory.
+
+Exteriorly I had nothing but a crop of sturdy whiskers to show for my
+years of exile but mentally I was much enriched. Twenty years of
+development lay between my thought at the moment and those of my simpler
+days. My study of Spencer, Whitman and other of the great leaders of the
+world, my years of absorbed reading in the library, my days of
+loneliness and hunger in the city had swept me into a far bleak land of
+philosophic doubt where even the most daring of my classmates would
+hesitate to follow me.
+
+A violent perception of the mysterious, the irrevocable march of human
+life swept over me and I shivered before a sudden realization of the
+ceaseless change and shift of western life and landscape. How few of
+those I knew were there to greet me! Walter and Charles were dead, Maud
+and Lena were both married, and Burton was preaching somewhere in the
+West.
+
+Six short years had made many changes in the little town and it was in
+thinking upon these changes that I reached a full realization of the
+fact that I was no longer a "promising boy" of the prairie but a man,
+with a notion of human life and duty and responsibility which was
+neither cheerful nor resigned. I was returning as from deep valleys,
+from the most alien climate.
+
+Looking at the sky above me, feeling the rush of the earth beneath my
+feet I saw how much I had dared and how little, how pitifully little I
+had won. Over me the ragged rainclouds swept, obscuring the stars and in
+their movement and in the feeling of the dawn lay something illimitable
+and prophetic. Such moments do not come to men often--but to me for an
+hour, life was painfully purposeless. "What does it all mean?" I asked
+myself.
+
+At last the train came, and as it rattled away to the north and I drew
+closer to the scenes of my boyhood, my memory quickened. The Cedar
+rippling over its limestone ledges, the gray old mill and the pond where
+I used to swim, the farm-houses with their weedy lawns, all seemed not
+only familiar but friendly, and when at last I reached the station (the
+same grimy little den from which I had started forth six years before),
+I rose from my seat with the air of a world-traveller and descended upon
+the warped and splintered platform, among my one time friends and
+neighbors, with quickened pulse and seeking eye.
+
+It was the fourth of July and a crowd was at the station, but though I
+recognized half the faces, not one of them lightened at sight of me. The
+'bus driver, the ragged old dray-man (scandalously profane), the common
+loafers shuffling about, chewing and spitting, seemed absolutely
+unchanged. One or two elderly citizens eyed me closely as I slung my
+little Boston valise with a long strap over my shoulder and started up
+the billowing board sidewalk toward the center of the town, but I gave
+out no word of recognition. Indeed I took a boyish pride in the
+disguising effect of my beard.
+
+How small and flat and leisurely the village seemed. The buildings which
+had once been so imposing in my eyes were now of very moderate elevation
+indeed, and the opera house was almost indistinguishable from the
+two-story structures which flanked it; but the trees had increased in
+dignity, and some of the lawns were lovely.
+
+With eyes singling out each familiar object I loitered along the walk.
+There stood the grimy wagon shop from which a hammer was ringing
+cheerily, like the chirp of a cricket,--just as aforetime. Orrin Blakey
+stood at the door of his lumber yard surveying me with curious eyes but
+I passed him in silence. I wished to spend an hour or two in going about
+in guise of a stranger. There was something instructive as well as
+deliciously exciting in thus seeing old acquaintances as from behind a
+mask. They were at once familiar and mysterious--mysterious with my new
+question, "Is this life worth living?"
+
+The Merchants' Hotel which once appeared so luxurious (within the reach
+only of great lecturers like Joseph Cook and Wendell Phillips) had
+declined to a shabby frame tavern, but entering the dining room I
+selected a seat near an open window, from which I could look out upon
+the streets and survey the throng of thickening sightseers as they moved
+up and down before me like the figures in a vitascope.
+
+I was waited upon by a slatternly girl and the breakfast she brought to
+me was so bad (after Mary's cooking) that I could only make a pretense
+of eating it, but I kept my seat, absorbed by the forms coming and
+going, almost within the reach of my hand. Among the first to pace
+slowly by was Lawyer Ricker, stately, solemn and bibulous as ever, his
+red beard flowing over a vest unbuttoned in the manner of the
+old-fashioned southern gentleman, his spotless linen and neat tie
+showing that his careful, faithful wife was still on guard.
+
+Him I remembered for his astounding ability to recite poetry by the hour
+and also because of a florid speech which I once heard him make in the
+court room. For six mortal hours he spoke on a case involving the
+stealing of a horse-blanket worth about four dollars and a half. In the
+course of his argument he ranged with leisurely self-absorption, from
+ancient Egypt and the sacred Crocodile down through the dark ages,
+touching at Athens and Mount Olympus, reviewing Rome and the court of
+Charlemagne, winding up at four P. M. with an impassioned appeal to the
+jury to remember the power of environment upon his client. I could not
+remember how the suit came out, but I did recall the look of
+stupefaction which rested on the face of the accused as he found himself
+likened to Gurth the swine-herd and a peasant of Carcassone.
+
+Ricker seemed quite unchanged save for the few gray hairs which had come
+into his beard and, as he stood in conversation with one of the
+merchants of the town, his nasal voice, his formal speech and the
+grandiloquent gesture of his right hand brought back to me all the
+stories I had heard of his drinking and of his wife's heroic rescuing
+expeditions to neighboring saloons. A strange, unsatisfactory end to a
+man of great natural ability.
+
+Following him came a young girl leading a child of ten. I knew them at
+once. Ella McKee had been of the size of the little one, her sister,
+when I went away, and nothing gave me a keener realization of the years
+which had passed than the flowering of the child I had known into this
+charming maiden of eighteen. Her resemblance to her sister Flora was too
+marked to be mistaken, and the little one by her side had the same
+flashing eyes and radiant smile with which both of her grown up sisters
+were endowed. Their beauty fairly glorified the dingy street as they
+walked past my window.
+
+Then an old farmer, bent and worn of frame, halted before me to talk
+with a merchant. This was David Babcock, Burton's father, one of our old
+time neighbors, a little more bent, a little thinner, a little
+grayer--that was all, and as I listened to his words I asked, "What
+purpose does a man serve by toiling like that for sixty years with no
+increase of leisure, with no growth in mental grace?"
+
+There was a wistful note in his voice which went straight to my heart.
+He said: "No, our wheat crop ain't a-going to amount to much this year.
+Of course we don't try to raise much grain--it's mostly stock, but I
+thought I'd try wheat again. I wisht we could get back to the good old
+days of wheat raising--it w'ant so confining as stock-raisin'." His good
+days were also in the past!
+
+As I walked the street I met several neighbors from Dry Run as well as
+acquaintances from the Grove. Nearly all, even the young men, looked
+worn and weather-beaten and some appeared both silent and sad. Laughter
+was curiously infrequent and I wondered whether in my days on the farm
+they had all been as rude of dress, as misshapen of form and as wistful
+of voice as they now seemed to me to be. "Have times changed? Has a
+spirit of unrest and complaining developed in the American farmer?"
+
+I perceived the town from the triple viewpoint of a former resident, a
+man from the city, and a reformer, and every minutest detail of dress,
+tone and gesture revealed new meaning to me. Fancher and Gammons were
+feebler certainly, and a little more querulous with age, and their faded
+beards and rough hands gave pathetic evidence of the hard wear of wind
+and toil. At the moment nothing glozed the essential tragic futility of
+their existence.
+
+Then down the street came "The Ragamuffins," the little Fourth of July
+procession, which in the old days had seemed so funny, so exciting to
+me. I laughed no more. It filled me with bitterness to think that such a
+makeshift spectacle could amuse anyone. "How dull and eventless life
+must be to enable such a pitiful travesty to attract and hold the
+attention of girls like Ella and Flora," I thought as I saw them
+standing with their little sister to watch "the parade."
+
+From the window of a law office, Emma and Matilda Leete were leaning and
+I decided to make myself known to them. Emma, who had been one of my
+high admirations, had developed into a handsome and interesting woman
+with very little of the village in her dress or expression, and when I
+stepped up to her and asked, "Do you know me?" her calm gray eyes and
+smiling lips denoted humor. "Of course I know you--in spite of the
+beard. Come in and sit with us and tell all of us about yourself."
+
+As we talked, I found that they, at least, had kept in touch with the
+thought of the east, and Ella understood in some degree the dark mood
+which I voiced. She, too, occasionally doubted whether the life they
+were all living was worth while. "We make the best of it," she said,
+"but none of us are living up to our dreams."
+
+Her musical voice, thoughtful eyes and quick intelligence, re-asserted
+their charm, and I spent an hour or more in her company talking of old
+friends. It was not necessary to talk down to her. She was essentially
+urban in tone while other of the girls who had once impressed me with
+their beauty had taken on the airs of village matrons and did not
+interest me. If they retained aspirations they concealed the fact. Their
+husbands and children entirely occupied their minds.
+
+Returning to the street, I introduced myself to Uncle Billy Fraser and
+Osmund Button and other Sun Prairie neighbors and when it became known
+that "Dick Garland's boy" was in town, many friends gathered about to
+shake my hand and inquire concerning "Belle" and "Dick."
+
+The hard, crooked fingers, which they laid in my palm completed the
+sorrowful impression which their faces had made upon me. A twinge of
+pain went through my heart as I looked into their dim eyes and studied
+their heavy knuckles. I thought of the hand of Edwin Booth, of the
+flower-like palm of Helena Modjeska, of the subtle touch of Inness, and
+I said, "Is it not time that the human hand ceased to be primarily a
+bludgeon for hammering a bare living out of the earth? Nature all
+bountiful, undiscriminating, would, under justice, make such toil
+unnecessary." My heart burned with indignation. With William Morris and
+Henry George I exclaimed, "Nature is not to blame. Man's laws are to
+blame,"--but of this I said nothing at the time--at least not to men
+like Babcock and Fraser.
+
+Next day I rode forth among the farms of Dry Run, retracing familiar
+lanes, standing under the spreading branches of the maple trees I had
+planted fifteen years before. I entered the low stone cabin wherein
+Neighbor Button had lived for twenty years (always intending sometime to
+build a house and make a granary of this), and at the table with the
+family and the hired men, I ate again of Ann's "riz" biscuit and sweet
+melon pickles. It was not a pleasant meal, on the contrary it was
+depressing to me. The days of the border were over, and yet Arvilla his
+wife was ill and aging, still living in pioneer discomfort toiling like
+a slave.
+
+At neighbor Gardner's home, I watched his bent complaining old wife
+housekeeping from dawn to dark, literally dying on her feet. William
+Knapp's home was somewhat improved but the men still came to the table
+in their shirt sleeves smelling of sweat and stinking of the stable,
+just as they used to do, and Mrs. Knapp grown more gouty, more unwieldy
+than ever (she spent twelve or fourteen hours each day on her swollen
+and aching feet), moved with a waddling motion because, as she
+explained, "I can't limp--I'm just as lame in one laig as I am in
+t'other. But 'tain't no use to complain, I've just so much work to do
+and I might as well go ahead and do it."
+
+I slept that night in her "best room," yes, at last, after thirty years
+of pioneer life, she had a guest chamber and a new "bedroom soot." With
+open pride and joy she led Belle Garland's boy in to view this precious
+acquisition, pointing out the soap and towels, and carefully removing
+the counterpane! I understood her pride, for my mother had not yet
+acquired anything so luxurious as this. She was still on the border!
+
+Next day, I called upon Andrew Ainsley and while the women cooked in a
+red-hot kitchen, Andy stubbed about the barnyard in his bare feet,
+showing me his hogs and horses. Notwithstanding his town-visitor and the
+fact that it was Sunday, he came to dinner in a dirty, sweaty,
+collarless shirt, and I, sitting at his oil-cloth covered table, slipped
+back, deeper, ever deeper among the stern realities of the life from
+which I had emerged. I recalled that while my father had never allowed
+his sons or the hired men to come to the table unwashed or uncombed, we
+usually ate while clothed in our sweaty garments, glad to get food into
+our mouths in any decent fashion, while the smell of the horse and the
+cow mingled with the savor of the soup. There is no escape even on a
+modern "model farm" from the odor of the barn.
+
+Every house I visited had its individual message of sordid struggle and
+half-hidden despair. Agnes had married and moved away to Dakota, and
+Bess had taken upon her girlish shoulders the burdens of wifehood and
+motherhood almost before her girlhood had reached its first period of
+bloom. In addition to the work of being cook and scrub-woman, she was
+now a mother and nurse. As I looked around upon her worn chairs, faded
+rag carpets, and sagging sofas,--the bare walls of her pitiful little
+house seemed a prison. I thought of her as she was in the days of her
+radiant girlhood and my throat filled with rebellious pain.
+
+All the gilding of farm life melted away. The hard and bitter realities
+came back upon me in a flood. Nature was as beautiful as ever. The
+soaring sky was filled with shining clouds, the tinkle of the bobolink's
+fairy bells rose from the meadow, a mystical sheen was on the odorous
+grass and waving grain, but no splendor of cloud, no grace of sunset
+could conceal the poverty of these people, on the contrary they brought
+out, with a more intolerable poignancy, the gracelessness of these
+homes, and the sordid quality of the mechanical daily routine of these
+lives.
+
+I perceived beautiful youth becoming bowed and bent. I saw lovely
+girlhood wasting away into thin and hopeless age. Some of the women I
+had known had withered into querulous and complaining spinsterhood, and
+I heard ambitious youth cursing the bondage of the farm. "Of such pain
+and futility are the lives of the average man and woman of both city and
+country composed," I acknowledged to myself with savage candor, "Why lie
+about it?"
+
+Some of my playmates opened their acrid hearts to me. My presence
+stimulated their discontent. I was one of them, one who having escaped
+had returned as from some far-off glorious land of achievement. My
+improved dress, my changed manner of speech, everything I said, roused
+in them a kind of rebellious rage and gave them unwonted power of
+expression. Their mood was no doubt transitory, but it was as real as my
+own.
+
+Men who were growing bent in digging into the soil spoke to me of their
+desire to see something of the great eastern world before they died.
+Women whose eyes were faded and dim with tears, listened to me with
+almost breathless interest whilst I told them of the great cities I had
+seen, of wonderful buildings, of theaters, of the music of the sea.
+Young girls expressed to me their longing for a life which was better
+worth while, and lads, eager for adventure and excitement, confided to
+me their secret intention to leave the farm at the earliest moment. "I
+don't intend to wear out my life drudging on this old place," said
+Wesley Fancher with a bitter oath.
+
+In those few days, I perceived life without its glamor. I no longer
+looked upon these toiling women with the thoughtless eyes of youth. I
+saw no humor in the bent forms and graying hair of the men. I began to
+understand that my own mother had trod a similar slavish round with
+never a full day of leisure, with scarcely an hour of escape from the
+tugging hands of children, and the need of mending and washing clothes.
+I recalled her as she passed from the churn to the stove, from the stove
+to the bedchamber, and from the bedchamber back to the kitchen, day
+after day, year after year, rising at daylight or before, and going to
+her bed only after the evening dishes were washed and the stockings and
+clothing mended for the night.
+
+The essential tragedy and hopelessness of most human life under the
+conditions into which our society was swiftly hardening embittered me,
+called for expression, but even then I did not know that I had found my
+theme. I had no intention at the moment of putting it into fiction.
+
+The reader may interrupt at this point to declare that all life, even
+the life of the city is futile, if you look at it in that way, and I
+reply by saying that I still have moments when I look at it that way.
+What is it all about, anyhow, this life of ours? Certainly to be forever
+weary and worried, to be endlessly soiled with thankless labor and to
+grow old before one's time soured and disappointed, is not the whole
+destiny of man!
+
+Some of these things I said to Emma and Matilda but their optimism was
+too ingrained to yield to my gray mood. "We can't afford to grant too
+much," said Emma. "We are in it, you see."
+
+Leaving the village of Osage, with my mind still in a tumult of revolt,
+I took the train for the Northwest, eager to see my mother and my little
+sister, yet beginning to dread the changes which I must surely find in
+them. Not only were my senses exceedingly alert and impressionable, my
+eyes saw nothing but the loneliness and the lack of beauty in the
+landscape, and the farther west I went, the lonelier became the boxlike
+habitations of the plain. Here were the lands over which we had hurried
+in 1881, lured by the "Government Land" of the farther west. Here, now,
+a kind of pioneering behind the lines was going on. The free lands were
+gone and so, at last, the price demanded by these speculators must be
+paid.
+
+This wasteful method of pioneering, this desolate business of lonely
+settlement took on a new and tragic significance as I studied it.
+Instructed by my new philosophy I now perceived that these plowmen,
+these wives and daughters had been pushed out into these lonely ugly
+shacks by the force of landlordism behind. These plodding Swedes and
+Danes, these thrifty Germans, these hairy Russians had all fled from the
+feudalism of their native lands and were here because they had no share
+in the soil from which they sprung, and because in the settled
+communities of the eastern states, the speculative demand for land had
+hindered them from acquiring even a leasing right to the surface of the
+earth.
+
+I clearly perceived that our Song of Emigration had been, in effect, the
+hymn of fugitives!
+
+And yet all this did not prevent me from acknowledging the beauty of the
+earth. On the contrary, social injustice intensified nature's
+prodigality. I said, "Yes, the landscape is beautiful, but how much of
+its beauty penetrates to the heart of the men who are in the midst of it
+and battling with it? How much of consolation does the worn and weary
+renter find in the beauty of cloud and tree or in the splendor of the
+sunset?--Grace of flower does not feed or clothe the body, and when the
+toiler is both badly clothed and badly fed, bird-song and leaf-shine
+cannot bring content." Like Millet, I asked, "Why should all of a man's
+waking hours be spent in an effort to feed and clothe his family? Is
+there not something wrong in our social scheme when the unremitting
+toiler remains poor?"
+
+With such thoughts filling my mind, I passed through this belt of recent
+settlement and came at last into the valley of the James. One by one the
+familiar flimsy little wooden towns were left behind (strung like beads
+upon a string), and at last the elevator at Ordway appeared on the edge
+of the horizon, a minute, wavering projection against the sky-line, and
+half an hour later we entered the village, a sparse collection of
+weather-beaten wooden houses, without shade of trees or grass of lawns,
+a desolate, drab little town.
+
+Father met me at the train, grayer of beard and hair, but looking hale
+and cheerful, and his voice, his peculiar expressions swept away all my
+city experience. In an instant I was back precisely where I had been
+when I left the farm. He was Captain, I was a corporal in the rear
+ranks.
+
+And yet he was distinctly less harsh, less keen. He had mellowed. He had
+gained in sentiment, in philosophy, that was evident, and as we rode
+away toward the farm we fell into intimate, almost tender talk.
+
+I was glad to note that he had lost nothing either in dignity or
+manliness in my eyes. His speech though sometimes ungrammatical was
+vigorous and precise and his stories gave evidence of his native
+constructive skill. "Your mother is crazy to see you," he said, "but I
+have only this one-seated buggy, and she couldn't come down to meet
+you."
+
+When nearly a mile away I saw her standing outside the door of the house
+waiting for us, so eager that she could not remain seated, and as I
+sprang from the carriage she came hurrying out to meet me, uttering a
+curious little murmuring sound which touched me to the heart.
+
+The changes in her shocked me, filled me with a sense of guilt.
+Hesitation was in her speech. Her voice once so glowing and so jocund,
+was tremulous, and her brown hair, once so abundant, was thin and gray.
+I realized at once that in the three years of my absence she had topped
+the high altitude of her life and was now descending swiftly toward
+defenseless age, and in bitter sadness I entered the house to meet my
+sister Jessie who was almost a stranger to me.
+
+She had remained small and was quaintly stooped in neck and shoulders
+but retained something of her childish charm. To her I was quite alien,
+in no sense a brother. She was very reticent, but it did not take me
+long to discover that in her quiet fashion she commanded the camp. For
+all his military bluster, the old soldier was entirely subject to her.
+She was never wilful concerning anything really important, but she
+assumed all the rights of an individual and being the only child left in
+the family, went about her affairs without remark or question, serene,
+sweet but determined.
+
+The furniture and pictures of the house were quite as humble as I had
+remembered them to be, but mother wore with pride the silk dress I had
+sent to her and was so happy to have me at home that she sat in silent
+content, while I told her of my life in Boston (boasting of my success
+of course, I had to do that to justify myself), and explaining that I
+must return, in time to resume my teaching in September.
+
+Harvest was just beginning, and I said, "Father, if you'll pay me full
+wages, I'll take a hand."
+
+This pleased him greatly, but he asked, "Do you think you can stand it?"
+
+"I can try," I responded. Next day I laid off my city clothes and took
+my place as of old on the stack.
+
+On the broad acres of the arid plains the header and not the binder was
+then in use for cutting the wheat, and as stacker I had to take care of
+the grain brought to me by the three header boxes.
+
+It was very hard work that first day. It seemed that I could not last
+out the afternoon, but I did, and when at night I went to the house for
+supper, I could hardly sit at the table with the men, so weary were my
+bones. I sought my bed early and rose next day so sore that movement was
+torture. This wore away at last and on the third day I had no difficulty
+in keeping up my end of the whiffletree.
+
+The part of labor that I hated was the dirt. Night after night as I came
+in covered with dust, too tired to bathe, almost too weary to change my
+shirt, I declared against any further harvesting. However, I generally
+managed to slosh myself with cold water from the well, and so went to my
+bed with a measure of self-respect, but even the "spare room" was hot
+and small, and the conditions of my mother's life saddened me. It was so
+hot and drear for her!
+
+Every detail of the daily life of the farm now assumed literary
+significance in my mind. The quick callousing of my hands, the swelling
+of my muscles, the sweating of my scalp, all the unpleasant results of
+severe physical labor I noted down, but with no intention of exalting
+toil into a wholesome and regenerative thing as Tolstoi, an aristocrat,
+had attempted to do. Labor when so prolonged and severe as at this time
+my toil had to be, is warfare. I was not working as a visitor but as a
+hired hand, and doing my full day's work and more.
+
+At the end of the week I wrote to my friend Kirkland, enclosing some of
+my detailed notes and his reply set me thinking. "You're the first
+actual farmer in American fiction,--now tell the truth about it," he
+wrote.
+
+Thereafter I studied the glory of the sky and the splendor of the wheat
+with a deepening sense of the generosity of nature and monstrous
+injustice of social creeds. In the few moments of leisure which came to
+me as I lay in the shade of a grain-rick, I pencilled rough outlines of
+poems. My mind was in a condition of tantalizing productivity and I felt
+vaguely that I ought to be writing books instead of pitching grain.
+Conceptions for stories began to rise from the subconscious deeps of my
+thought like bubbles, noiseless and swift--and still I did not realize
+that I had entered upon a new career.
+
+At night or on Sunday I continued my conferences with father and mother.
+Together we went over the past, talking of old neighbors and from one of
+these conversations came the theme of my first story. It was a very
+simple tale (told by my mother) of an old woman, who made a trip back
+to her York state home after an absence in the West of nearly thirty
+years. I was able to remember some of the details of her experience and
+when my mother had finished speaking I said to her, "That is too good to
+lose. I'm going to write it out." Then to amuse her, I added, "Why,
+that's worth seventy-five dollars to me. I'll go halves with you."
+
+Smilingly she held out her hand. "Very well, you may give me my share
+now."
+
+"Wait till I write it," I replied, a little taken aback.
+
+Going to my room I set to work and wrote nearly two thousand words of
+the sketch. This I brought out later in the day and read to her with
+considerable excitement. I really felt that I had struck out a character
+which, while it did not conform to the actual woman in the case, was
+almost as vivid in my mind.
+
+Mother listened very quietly until I had finished, then remarked with
+sententious approval. "That's good. Go on." She had no doubt of my
+ability to go on--indefinitely!
+
+I explained to her that it wasn't so easy as all that, but that I could
+probably finish it in a day or two. (As a matter of fact, I completed
+the story in Boston but mother got her share of the "loot" just the
+same.)
+
+Soon afterward, while sitting in the door looking out over the fields, I
+pencilled the first draft of a little poem called _Color in the Wheat_
+which I also read to her.
+
+She received this in the same manner as before, from which it appeared
+that nothing I wrote could surprise her. Her belief in my powers was
+quite boundless. Father was inclined to ask, "What's the good of it?"
+
+Of course all of my visit was not entirely made up of hard labor in the
+field. There were Sundays when we could rest or entertain the neighbors,
+and sometimes a shower gave us a few hours' respite, but for the most
+part the weeks which I spent at home were weeks of stern service in the
+ranks of the toilers.
+
+There was a very good reason for my close application to the
+fork-handle. Father paid me an extra price as "boss stacker," and I
+could not afford to let a day pass without taking the fullest advantage
+of it. At the same time, I was careful not to convey to my pupils and
+friends from Boston the disgraceful fact that I was still dependent upon
+my skill with a pitch-fork to earn a living. I was not quite sure of
+their approval of the case.
+
+At last there came the time when I must set my face toward the east.
+
+It seemed a treachery to say good-bye to my aging parents, leaving them
+and my untrained sister to this barren, empty, laborious life on the
+plain, whilst I returned to the music, the drama, the inspiration, the
+glory of Boston. Opposite poles of the world could not be farther apart.
+Acute self-accusation took out of my return all of the exaltation and
+much of the pleasure which I had expected to experience as I dropped my
+harvester's fork and gloves and put on the garments of civilization once
+more.
+
+With heart sore with grief and rebellion at "the inexorable trend of
+things," I entered the car, and when from its window I looked back upon
+my grieving mother, my throat filled with a suffocating sense of guilt.
+I was deserting her, recreant to my blood!--That I was re-enacting the
+most characteristic of all American dramas in thus pursuing an ambitious
+career in a far-off city I most poignantly realized and yet--I went! It
+seemed to me at the time that my duty lay in the way of giving up all my
+selfish plans in order that I might comfort my mother in her growing
+infirmity, and counsel and defend my sister--but I did not. I went away
+borne on a stream of purpose so strong that I seemed but a leak in its
+resistless flood.
+
+This feeling of bitterness, of rebellion, of dissatisfaction with
+myself, wore gradually away, and by the time I reached Chicago I had
+resolved to climb high. "I will carry mother and Jessie to comfort and
+to some small share, at least, in the world of art," was my resolve. In
+this way I sought to palliate my selfish plan.
+
+Obscurely forming in my mind were two great literary concepts--that
+truth was a higher quality than beauty, and that to spread the reign of
+justice should everywhere be the design and intent of the artist. The
+merely beautiful in art seemed petty, and success at the cost of the
+happiness of others a monstrous egotism.
+
+In the spirit of these ideals I returned to my small attic room in
+Jamaica Plain and set to work to put my new conceptions into some sort
+of literary form.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+I Join the Anti-Poverty Brigade
+
+
+In the slow procession of my struggling fortunes this visit to the West
+seems important, for it was the beginning of my career as a fictionist.
+My talk with Kirkland and my perception of the sordid monotony of farm
+life had given me a new and very definite emotional relationship to my
+native state. I perceived now the tragic value of scenes which had
+hitherto appeared merely dull or petty. My eyes were opened to the
+enforced misery of the pioneer. As a reformer my blood was stirred to
+protest. As a writer I was beset with a desire to record in some form
+this newly-born conception of the border.
+
+No sooner did I reach my little desk in Jamaica Plain than I began to
+write, composing in the glow of a flaming conviction. With a delightful
+(and deceptive) sense of power, I graved with heavy hand, as if with pen
+of steel on brazen tablets, picture after picture of the plain. I had no
+doubts, no hesitations about the kind of effect I wished to produce. I
+perceived little that was poetic, little that was idyllic, and nothing
+that was humorous in the man, who, with hands like claws, was scratching
+a scanty living from the soil of a rented farm, while his wife walked
+her ceaseless round from tub to churn and from churn to tub. On the
+contrary, the life of such a family appealed to me as an almost
+unrelievedly tragic futility.
+
+In the few weeks between my return and the beginning of my teaching, I
+wrote several short stories, and outlined a propagandist play. With very
+little thought as to whether such stories would sell rapidly or not at
+all I began to send them away, to the _Century_, to _Harper's_, and
+other first class magazines without permitting myself any deep
+disappointment when they came back--as they all did!
+
+However, having resolved upon being printed by the best periodicals I
+persisted. Notwithstanding rejection after rejection I maintained an
+elevated aim and continued to fire away.
+
+There was a certain arrogance in all this, I will admit, but there was
+also sound logic, for I was seeking the ablest editorial judgment and in
+this way I got it. My manuscripts were badly put together (I used cheap
+paper and could not afford a typist), hence I could not blame the
+readers who hurried my stories back at me. No doubt my illegible writing
+as well as the blunt, unrelenting truth of my pictures repelled them.
+One or two friendly souls wrote personal notes protesting against my
+"false interpretation of western life."
+
+The fact that I, a working farmer, was presenting for the first time in
+fiction the actualities of western country life did not impress them as
+favorably as I had expected it to do. My own pleasure in being true was
+not shared, it would seem, by others. "Give us charming love stories!"
+pleaded the editors.
+
+"No, we've had enough of lies," I replied. "Other writers are telling
+the truth about the city,--the artisan's narrow, grimy, dangerous job is
+being pictured, and it appears to me that the time has come to tell the
+truth about the barn-yard's daily grind. I have lived the life and I
+know that farming is not entirely made up of berrying, tossing the
+new-mown hay and singing _The Old Oaken Bucket_ on the porch by
+moonlight.
+
+"The working farmer," I went on to argue, "has to live in February as
+well as June. He must pitch manure as well as clover. Milking as
+depicted on a blue china plate where a maid in a flounced petticoat is
+caressing a gentle Jersey cow in a field of daisies, is quite unlike
+sitting down to the steaming flank of a stinking brindle heifer in
+flytime. Pitching odorous timothy in a poem and actually putting it into
+a mow with the temperature at ninety-eight in the shade are widely
+separated in fact as they should be in fiction. For me," I concluded,
+"the grime and the mud and the sweat and the dust exist. They still form
+a large part of life on the farm, and I intend that they shall go into
+my stories in their proper proportions."
+
+Alas! Each day made me more and more the dissenter from accepted
+economic as well as literary conventions. I became less and less of the
+booming, indiscriminating patriot. Precisely as successful politicians,
+popular preachers and vast traders diminished in importance in my mind,
+so the significance of Whitman, and Tolstoi and George increased, for
+they all represented qualities which make for saner, happier and more
+equitable conditions in the future. Perhaps I despised idlers and
+time-savers unduly, but I was of an age to be extreme.
+
+During the autumn Henry George was announced to speak in Faneuil Hall,
+sacred ark of liberty, and with eager feet my brother and I hastened to
+the spot to hear this reformer whose fame already resounded throughout
+the English-speaking world. Beginning his campaign in California he had
+carried it to Ireland, where he had been twice imprisoned for speaking
+his mind, and now after having set Bernard Shaw and other English
+Fabians aflame with indignant protest, was about to run for mayor of New
+York City.
+
+I have an impression that the meeting was a noon-day meeting for men,
+at any rate the historical old hall, which had echoed to the voices of
+Garrison and Phillips and Webster was filled with an eager expectant
+throng. The sanded floor was packed with auditors standing shoulder to
+shoulder and the galleries were crowded with these who, like ourselves,
+had gone early in order to ensure seats. From our places in the front
+row we looked down upon an almost solid mosaic of derby hats, the
+majority of which were rusty by exposure to wind and rain.
+
+As I waited I recalled my father's stories of the stern passions of
+anti-slavery days. In this hall Wendell Phillips in the pride and power
+of his early manhood, had risen to reply to the cowardly apologies of
+entrenched conservatism, and here now another voice was about to be
+raised in behalf of those whom the law oppressed. My brother had also
+read _Progress and Poverty_ and both of us felt that we were taking part
+in a distinctly historical event, the beginning of a new abolition
+movement.
+
+At last, a stir at the back of the platform announced the approach of
+the speaker. Three or four men suddenly appeared from some concealed
+door and entered upon the stage. One of them, a short man with a full
+red beard, we recognized at once,--"The prophet of San Francisco" as he
+was then called (in fine derision) was not a noticeable man till he
+removed his hat. Then the fine line of his face from the crown of his
+head to the tip of his chin printed itself ineffaceably upon our minds.
+The dome-like brow was that of one highly specialized on lines of logic
+and sympathy. There was also something in the tense poise of his body
+which foretold the orator.
+
+Impatiently the audience endured the speakers who prepared the way and
+then, finally, George stepped forward, but prolonged waves of cheering
+again and again prevented his beginning. Thereupon he started pacing to
+and fro along the edge of the platform, his big head thrown back, his
+small hands clenched as if in anticipation of coming battle. He no
+longer appeared small. His was the master mind of that assembly.
+
+His first words cut across the air with singular calmness. Coming after
+the applause, following the nervous movement of a moment before, his
+utterance was surprisingly cold, masterful, and direct. Action had
+condensed into speech. Heat was transformed into light.
+
+His words were orderly and well chosen. They had precision and grace as
+well as power. He spoke as other men write, with style and arrangement.
+His address could have been printed word for word as it fell from his
+lips. This self-mastery, this graceful lucidity of utterance combined
+with a personal presence distinctive and dignified, reduced even his
+enemies to respectful silence. His altruism, his sincere pity and his
+hatred of injustice sent me away in the mood of a disciple.
+
+Meanwhile a few of his followers had organized an "Anti-Poverty Society"
+similar to those which had already sprung up in New York, and my brother
+and I used to go of a Sunday evening to the old Horticultural Hall on
+Tremont Street, contributing our presence and our dimes in aid of the
+meeting. Speakers were few and as the weeks went by the audiences grew
+smaller and smaller till one night Chairman Roche announced with sad
+intonation that the meetings could not go on. "You've all got tired of
+hearing us repeat ourselves and we have no new speaker, none at all for
+next week. I am afraid we'll have to quit."
+
+My brother turned to me--"Here's your 'call,'" he said. "Volunteer to
+speak for them."
+
+Recognizing my duty I rose just as the audience was leaving and sought
+the chairman. With a tremor of excitement in my voice I said, "If you
+can use me as a speaker for next Sunday I will do my best for you."
+
+Roche glanced at me for an instant, and then without a word of question,
+shouted to the audience, "Wait a moment! We _have_ a speaker for next
+Sunday." Then, bending down, he asked of me, "What is your name and
+occupation?"
+
+I told him, and again he lifted his voice, this time in triumphant
+shout, "Professor Hamlin Garland will speak for us next Sunday at eight
+o'clock. Come and bring all your friends."
+
+"You are in for it now," laughed my brother gleefully. "You'll be lined
+up with the anarchists sure!"
+
+That evening was in a very real sense a parting of the ways for me. To
+refuse this call was to go selfishly and comfortably along the lines of
+literary activity I had chosen. To accept was to enter the arena where
+problems of economic justice were being sternly fought out. I understood
+already something of the disadvantage which attached to being called a
+reformer, but my sense of duty and the influence of Herbert Spencer and
+Walt Whitman rose above my doubts. I decided to do my part.
+
+All the week I agonized over my address, and on Sunday spoke to a
+crowded house with a kind of partisan success. On Monday my good friend
+Chamberlin, _The Listener_ of _The Transcript_ filled his column with a
+long review of my heretical harangue.--With one leap I had reached the
+lime-light of conservative Boston's disapproval!
+
+Chamberlin, himself a "philosophical anarchist," was pleased with the
+individualistic note which ran through my harangue. The Single Taxers
+were of course, delighted for I admitted my discipleship to George, and
+my socialistic friends urged that the general effect of my argument was
+on their side. Altogether, for a penniless student and struggling story
+writer, I created something of a sensation. All my speeches thereafter
+helped to dye me deeper than ever with the color of reform.
+
+However, in the midst of my Anti-Poverty Campaign, I did not entirely
+forget my fiction and my teaching. I was becoming more and more a
+companion of artists and poets, and my devotion to things literary
+deepened from day to day. A dreadful theorist in some ways, I was, after
+all, more concerned with literary than with social problems. Writing was
+my life, land reform one of my convictions.
+
+High in my attic room I bent above my manuscript with a fierce resolve.
+From eight o'clock in the morning until half past twelve, I dug and
+polished. In the afternoon, I met my classes. In the evening I revised
+what I had written and in case I did not go to the theater or to a
+lecture (I had no social engagements) I wrote until ten o'clock. For
+recreation I sometimes drove with Dr. Cross on his calls or walked the
+lanes and climbed the hills with my brother.
+
+In this way most of my stories of the west were written. Happy in my own
+work, I bitterly resented the laws which created millionaires at the
+expense of the poor.
+
+These were days of security and tranquillity, and good friends
+thickened. Each week I felt myself in less danger of being obliged to
+shingle, though I still had difficulty in clothing myself properly.
+
+Again I saw Booth play his wondrous round of parts and was able to
+complete my monograph which I called _The Art of Edwin Booth_. I even
+went so far as to send to the great actor the chapter on his _Macbeth_
+and received from him grateful acknowledgments, in a charming letter.
+
+A little later I had the great honor of meeting him for a moment and it
+happened in this way. The veteran reader, James E. Murdock, was giving a
+recital in a small hall on Park Street, and it was privately announced
+that Edwin Booth and Lawrence Barrett would be present. This was enough
+to justify me in giving up one of my precious dollars on the chance of
+seeing the great tragedian enter the room.
+
+He came in a little late, flushing, timid, apologetic! It seemed to me a
+very curious and wonderful thing that this man who had spoken to
+millions of people from behind the footlights should be timid as a maid
+when confronted by less than two hundred of his worshipful fellow
+citizens in a small hall. So gentle and kindly did he seem.
+
+My courage grew, and after the lecture I approached the spot where he
+stood, and Mr. Barrett introduced me to him as "the author of the
+lecture on _Macbeth_."--Never had I looked into such eyes--deep and dark
+and sad--and my tongue failed me miserably. I could not say a word.
+Booth smiled with kindly interest and murmured his thanks for my
+critique, and I went away, down across the Common in a glow of delight
+and admiration.
+
+In the midst of all my other duties I was preparing my brother Franklin
+for the stage. Yes, through some mischance, this son of the prairie had
+obtained the privilege of studying with a retired "leading lady" who
+still occasionally made tours of the "Kerosene Circuit" and who had
+agreed to take him out with her, provided he made sufficient progress to
+warrant it. It was to prepare him for this trip that I met him three
+nights in the week at his office (he was bookkeeper in a cutlery firm)
+and there rehearsed _East Lynne_, _Leah the Forsaken_, and _The Lady of
+Lyons_.
+
+From seven o'clock until nine I held the book whilst he pranced and
+shouted and gesticulated through his lines.
+
+At last, emboldened by his star's praise, he cut loose from his ledger
+and went out on a tour which was extremely diverting but not at all
+remunerative. The company ran on a reef and Frank sent for carfare which
+I cheerfully remitted, crediting it to his educational account.
+
+The most vital literary man in all America at this time was Wm. Dean
+Howells who was in the full tide of his powers and an issue. All through
+the early eighties, reading Boston was divided into two parts,--those
+who liked Howells and those who fought him, and the most fiercely
+debated question at the clubs was whether his heroines were true to life
+or whether they were caricatures. In many homes he was read aloud with
+keen enjoyment of his delicate humor, and his graceful, incisive
+English; in other circles he was condemned because of his "injustice to
+the finer sex."
+
+As for me, having begun my literary career (as the reader may recall) by
+assaulting this leader of the realistic school I had ended, naturally,
+by becoming his public advocate. How could I help it?
+
+It is true a large part of one of my lectures consisted of a gratuitous
+slam at "Mr. Howells and the so-called realists," but further reading
+and deeper thought along the lines indicated by Whitman, had changed my
+view. One of Walt's immortal invitations which had appealed to me with
+special power was this:
+
+    Stop this day and night with me
+    And you shall possess the origin of all poems;
+    You shall no longer take things at second or third hand
+    Nor look through the eyes of the dead,
+    Nor through my eyes either,
+    But through your own eyes....
+    You shall listen to all sides,
+    And filter them from yourself.
+
+Thus by a circuitous route I had arrived at a position where I found
+myself inevitably a supporter not only of Howells but of Henry James
+whose work assumed ever larger significance in my mind. I was ready to
+concede with the realist that the poet might go round the earth and come
+back to find the things nearest at hand the sweetest and best after all,
+but that certain injustices, certain cruel facts must not be blinked at,
+and so, while admiring the grace, the humor, the satire of Howells'
+books, I was saved from anything like imitation by the sterner and
+darker material in which I worked.
+
+My wall of prejudice against the author of _A Modern Instance_ really
+began to sag when during the second year of my stay in Boston, I took up
+and finished _The Undiscovered Country_ (which I had begun five or six
+years before), but it was _The Minister's Charge_ which gave the final
+push to my defenses and fetched them tumbling about my ears in a cloud
+of dust. In fact, it was a review of this book, written for the
+_Transcript_ which brought about a meeting with the great novelist.
+
+My friend Hurd liked the review and had it set up. The editor, Mr.
+Clement, upon reading it in proof said to Hurd, "This is an able review.
+Put it in as an editorial. Who is the writer of it?" Hurd told him about
+me and Clement was interested. "Send him to me," he said.
+
+On Saturday I was not only surprised and delighted by the sight of my
+article in large type at the head of the literary page, I was fluttered
+by the word which Mr. Clement had sent to me.
+
+Humbly as a minstrel might enter the court of his king, I went before
+the editor, and stood expectantly while he said: "That was an excellent
+article. I have sent it to Mr. Howells. You should know him and sometime
+I will give you a letter to him, but not now. Wait awhile. War is being
+made upon him just now, and if you were to meet him your criticism
+would have less weight. His enemies would say that you had come under
+his personal influence. Go ahead with the work you have in hand, and
+after you have put yourself on record concerning him and his books I
+will see that you meet him."
+
+Like a knight enlisted in a holy war I descended the long narrow
+stairway to the street, and went to my home without knowing what passed
+me.
+
+I ruminated for hours on Mr. Clement's praise. I read and re-read my
+"able article" till I knew it by heart and then I started in, seriously,
+to understand and estimate the school of fiction to which Mr. Howells
+belonged. I read every one of his books as soon as I could obtain them.
+I read James, too, and many of the European realists, but it must have
+been two years before I called upon Mr. Clement to redeem his promise.
+
+Deeply excited, with my note of introduction carefully stowed in my
+inside pocket, I took the train one summer afternoon bound for Lee's
+Hotel in Auburndale, where Mr. Howells was at this time living.
+
+I fervently hoped that the building would not be too magnificent for I
+felt very small and very poor on alighting at the station, and every rod
+of my advance sensibly decreased my self-esteem. Starting with faltering
+feet I came to the entrance of the grounds in a state of panic, and as I
+looked up the path toward the towering portico of the hotel, it seemed
+to me the palace of an emperor and my resolution entirely left me.
+Actually I walked up the street for some distance before I was able to
+secure sufficient grip on myself to return and enter.
+
+"It is entirely unwarranted and very presumptuous in me to be thus
+intruding on a great author's time," I admitted, but it was too late to
+retreat, and so I kept on. Entering the wide central hall I crept warily
+across its polished, hardwood floor to the desk where a highly ornate
+clerk presided. In a meek, husky voice I asked, "Is Mr. Howells in?"
+
+"He is, but he's at dinner," the despot on the other side of the counter
+coldly replied, and his tone implied that he didn't think the great
+author would relish being disturbed by an individual who didn't even
+know the proper time to call. However, I produced my letter of
+introduction and with some access of spirit requested His Highness to
+have it sent in.
+
+A colored porter soon returned, showed me to a reception room off the
+hall, and told me that Mr. Howells would be out in a few minutes. During
+these minutes I sat with eyes on the portieres and a frog in my throat.
+"How will he receive me? How will he look? What shall I say to him?" I
+asked myself, and behold I hadn't an idea left!
+
+Suddenly the curtains parted and a short man with a large head stood
+framed in the opening. His face was impassive but his glance was one of
+the most piercing I had ever encountered. In the single instant before
+he smiled he discovered my character and my thought as though his eyes
+had been the lenses of some singular and powerful x-ray instrument. It
+was the glance of a novelist.
+
+Of course all this took but a moment's time. Then his face softened,
+became winning and his glance was gracious. "I'm glad to see you," he
+said, and his tone was cordial. "Won't you be seated?"
+
+We took seats at the opposite ends of a long sofa, and Mr. Howells began
+at once to inquire concerning the work and the purposes of his visitor.
+He soon drew forth the story of my coming to Boston and developed my
+theory of literature, listening intently while I told him of my history
+of American Ideals and my attempt at fiction.
+
+My conception of the local novel and of its great importance in American
+literature, especially interested the master who listened intently while
+I enlarged upon my reasons for believing that the local novel would
+continue to grow in power and insight. At the end I said, "In my
+judgment the men and women of the south, the west and the east, are
+working (without knowing it) in accordance with a great principle, which
+is this: American literature, in order to be great, must be national,
+and in order to be national, must deal with conditions peculiar to our
+own land and climate. Every genuinely American writer must deal with the
+life he knows best and for which he cares the most. Thus Joel Chandler
+Harris, George W. Cable, Joseph Kirkland, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary
+Wilkins, like Bret Harte, are but varying phases of the same movement, a
+movement which is to give us at last a really vital and original
+literature!"
+
+Once set going I fear I went on like the political orator who doesn't
+know how to sit down. I don't think I did quit. Howells stopped me with
+a compliment. "You're doing a fine and valuable work," he said, and I
+thought he meant it--and he did mean it. "Each of us has had some
+perception of this movement but no one has correlated it as you have
+done. I hope you will go on and finish and publish your essays."
+
+These words uttered, perhaps, out of momentary conviction brought the
+blood to my face and filled me with conscious satisfaction. Words of
+praise by this keen thinker were like golden medals. I had good reason
+to know how discriminating he was in his use of adjectives for he was
+even then the undisputed leader in the naturalistic school of fiction
+and to gain even a moment's interview with him would have been a rich
+reward for a youth who had only just escaped from spreading manure on
+an Iowa farm. Emboldened by his gracious manner, I went on. I confessed
+that I too was determined to do a little at recording by way of fiction
+the manners and customs of my native West. "I don't know that I can
+write a novel, but I intend to try," I added.
+
+He was kind enough then to say that he would like to see some of my
+stories of Iowa. "You have almost a clear field out there--no one but
+Howe seems to be tilling it."
+
+How long he talked or how long I talked, I do not know, but at last
+(probably in self-defense), he suggested that we take a walk. We
+strolled about the garden a few minutes and each moment my spirits rose,
+for he treated me, not merely as an aspiring student, but as a fellow
+author in whom he could freely confide. At last, in his gentle way, he
+turned me toward my train.
+
+It was then as we were walking slowly down the street, that he faced me
+with the trust of a comrade and asked, "What would you think of a story
+dealing with the effect of a dream on the life of a man?--I have in mind
+a tale to be called _The Shadow of a Dream_, or something like that,
+wherein a man is to be influenced in some decided way by the memory of a
+vision, a ghostly figure which is to pursue him and have some share in
+the final catastrophe, whatever it may turn out to be. What would you
+think of such a plot?"
+
+Filled with surprise at his trust and confidence, I managed to stammer a
+judgment. "It would depend entirely upon the treatment," I answered.
+"The theme is a little like Hawthorne, but I can understand how, under
+your hand, it would not be in the least like Hawthorne."
+
+His assent was instant. "You think it not quite like me? You are right.
+It does sound a little lurid. I may never write it, but if I do, you
+may be sure it will be treated in my own way and not in Hawthorne's
+way."
+
+Stubbornly I persisted. "There are plenty who can do the weird kind of
+thing, Mr. Howells, but there is only one man who can write books like
+_A Modern Instance_ and _Silas Lapham_."
+
+All that the novelist said, as well as his manner of saying it was
+wonderfully enriching to me. To have such a man, one whose fame was even
+at this time international, desire an expression of my opinion as to the
+fitness of his chosen theme, was like feeling on my shoulder the touch
+of a kingly accolade.
+
+I went away, exalted. My apprenticeship seemed over! To America's chief
+literary man I was a fellow-writer, a critic, and with this recognition
+the current of my ambition shifted course. I began to hope that I, too,
+might some day become a social historian as well as a teacher of
+literature. The reformer was still present, but the literary man had
+been reinforced, and yet, even here, I had chosen the unpopular,
+unprofitable side!
+
+Thereafter the gentle courtesy, the tact, the exquisite, yet simple
+English of this man was my education. Every hour of his delicious humor,
+his wise advice, his ready sympathy sent me away in mingled exaltation
+and despair--despair of my own blunt and common diction, exaltation over
+his continued interest and friendship.
+
+How I must have bored that sweet and gracious soul! He could not escape
+me. If he moved to Belmont I pursued him. If he went to Nahant or
+Magnolia or Kittery I spent my money like water in order to follow him
+up and bother him about my work, or worry him into a public acceptance
+of the single tax, and yet every word he spoke, every letter he wrote
+was a benediction and an inspiration.
+
+He was a constant revelation to me of the swift transitions of mood to
+which a Celtic man of letters is liable. His humor was like a low, sweet
+bubbling geyser spring. It rose with a chuckle close upon some very
+somber mood and broke into exquisite phrases which lingered in my mind
+for weeks. Side by side with every jest was a bitter sigh, for he, too,
+had been deeply moved by new social ideals, and we talked much of the
+growing contrasts of rich and poor, of the suffering and loneliness of
+the farmer, the despair of the proletariat, and though I could never
+quite get him to perceive the difference between his program and ours
+(he was always for some vague socialistic reform), he readily admitted
+that land monopoly was the chief cause of poverty, and the first
+injustice to be destroyed. "But you must go farther, much farther," he
+would sadly say.
+
+Of all of my literary friends at this time, Edgar Chamberlin of the
+_Transcript_ was the most congenial. He, too, was from Wisconsin, and
+loved the woods and fields with passionate fervor. At his house I met
+many of the young writers of Boston--at least they were young
+then--Sylvester Baxter, Imogene Guiney, Minna Smith, Alice Brown, Mary
+E. Wilkins, and Bradford Torrey were often there. No events in my life
+except my occasional calls on Mr. Howells were more stimulating to me
+than my visits to the circle about Chamberlin's hearth--(he was the kind
+of man who could not live without an open fire) and Mrs. Chamberlin's
+boundlessly hospitable table was an equally appealing joy.
+
+How they regarded me at that time I cannot surely define--perhaps they
+tolerated me out of love for the West. But I here acknowledge my
+obligation to "The Listener." He taught me to recognize literary themes
+in the city, for he brought the same keen insight, the same tender
+sympathy to bear upon the crowds of the streets that he used in
+describing the songs of the thrush or the whir of the partridge.
+
+He was especially interested in the Italians who were just beginning to
+pour into The North End, displacing the Irish as workmen in the streets,
+and often in his column made gracious and charming references to them,
+softening without doubt the suspicion and dislike with which many
+citizens regarded them.
+
+Hurd, on the contrary, was a very bookish man. He sat amidst mountains
+of "books for review" and yet he was always ready to welcome the slender
+volume of the new poet. To him I owe much. From him I secured my first
+knowledge of James Whitcomb Riley, and it was Hurd who first called my
+attention to Kirkland's _Zury_. Through him I came to an enthusiasm for
+the study of Ibsen and Bjornsen, for he was widely read in the
+literature of the north.
+
+On the desk of this hard-working, ill-paid man of letters (who never
+failed to utter words of encouragement to me) I wish to lay a tardy
+wreath of grateful praise. He deserves the best of the world beyond, for
+he got little but hard work from this. He loved poetry of all kinds and
+enjoyed a wide correspondence with those "who could not choose but
+sing." His desk was crammed with letters from struggling youths whose
+names are familiar now, and in whom he took an almost paternal interest.
+
+One day as I was leaving Hurd's office he said, "By the way, Garland,
+you ought to know Jim Herne. He's doing much the same sort of work on
+the stage that you and Miss Wilkins are putting into the short story.
+Here are a couple of tickets to his play. Go and see it and come back
+and tell what you think of it."
+
+Herne's name was new to me but Hurd's commendation was enough to take me
+down to the obscure theater in the South End where _Drifting Apart_ was
+playing. The play was advertised as "a story of the Gloucester
+fishermen" and Katharine Herne was the "Mary Miller" of the piece.
+Herne's part was that of a stalwart fisherman, married to a delicate
+young girl, and when the curtain went up on his first scene I was
+delighted with the setting. It was a veritable cottage interior--not an
+English cottage but an American working man's home. The worn chairs, the
+rag rugs, the sewing machine doing duty as a flowerstand, all were in
+keeping.
+
+The dialogue was homely, intimate, almost trivial and yet contained a
+sweet and touching quality. It was, indeed, of a piece with the work of
+Miss Jewett only more humorous, and the action of Katharine and James
+Herne was in key with the text. The business of "Jack's" shaving and
+getting ready to go down the street was most delightful in spirit and
+the act closed with a touch of true pathos.
+
+The second act, a "dream act" was not so good, but the play came back to
+realities in the last act and sent us all away in joyous mood. It was
+for me the beginning of the local color American drama, and before I
+went to sleep that night I wrote a letter to Herne telling him how
+significant I found his play and wishing him the success he deserved.
+
+Almost by return mail came his reply thanking me for my good wishes and
+expressing a desire to meet me. "We are almost always at home on Sunday
+and shall be very glad to see you whenever you can find time to come."
+
+A couple of weeks later--as soon as I thought it seemly--I went out to
+Ashmont to see them, for my interest was keen. I knew no one connected
+with the stage at this time and I was curious to know--I was almost
+frenziedly eager to know the kind of folk the Hernes were.
+
+My first view of their house was a disappointment. It was quite like any
+other two-story suburban cottage. It had a small garden but it faced
+directly on the walk and was a most uninspiring color. But if the house
+disappointed me the home did not. Herne, who looked older than when on
+the stage, met me with a curiously impassive face but I felt his
+friendship through this mask. Katharine who was even more charming than
+"Mary Miller" wore no mask. She was radiantly cordial and we were
+friends at once. Both persisted in calling me "professor" although I
+explained that I had no right to any such title. In the end they
+compromised by calling me "the Dean," and "the Dean" I remained in all
+the happy years of our friendship.
+
+Not the least of the charms of this home was the companionship of
+Herne's three lovely little daughters Julie, Chrystal and Dorothy, who
+liked "the Dean"--I don't know why--and were always at the door to greet
+me when I came. No other household meant as much to me. No one
+understood more clearly than the Hernes the principles I stood for, and
+no one was more interested in my plans for uniting the scattered members
+of my family. Before I knew it I had told them all about my mother and
+her pitiful condition, and Katharine's expressive face clouded with
+sympathetic pain. "You'll work it out," she said, "I am sure of it," and
+her confident words were a comfort to me.
+
+They were true Celts, swift to laughter and quick with tears; they
+inspired me to bolder flights. They met me on every plane of my
+intellectual interests, and our discussions of Herbert Spencer, Henry
+George, and William Dean Howells often lasted deep into the night. In
+all matters concerning the American Drama we were in accord.
+
+Having found these rare and inspiring souls I was not content until I
+had introduced them to all my literary friends. I became their publicity
+agent without authority and without pay, for I felt the injustice of a
+situation where such artists could be shunted into a theater in The
+South End where no one ever saw them--at least no one of the world of
+art and letters. Their cause was my cause, their success my chief
+concern.
+
+_Drifting Apart_, I soon discovered, was only the beginning of Herne's
+ambitious design to write plays which should be as true in their local
+color as Howells' stories. He was at this time working on two plays
+which were to bring lasting fame and a considerable fortune. One of
+these was a picture of New England coast life and the other was a study
+of factory life. One became _Shore Acres_ and the other _Margaret
+Fleming_.
+
+From time to time as we met he read me these plays, scene by scene, as
+he wrote them, and when _Margaret Fleming_ was finished I helped him put
+it on at Chickering Hall. My brother was in the cast and I served as
+"Man in Front" for six weeks--again without pay of course--and did my
+best to let Boston know what was going on there in that little
+theater--the first of all the "Little Theaters" in America. Then came
+the success of _Shore Acres_ at the Boston Museum and my sense of
+satisfaction was complete.
+
+How all this puts me back into that other shining Boston! I am climbing
+again those three long flights of stairs to the _Transcript_ office.
+Chamberlin extends a cordial hand, Clement nods as I pass his door. It
+is raining, and in the wet street the vivid reds, greens, and yellows of
+the horse-cars, splash the pavement with gaudy color. Round the tower of
+the Old South Church the doves are whirling.
+
+It is Saturday. I am striding across the Common to Park Square, hurrying
+to catch the 5:02 train. The trees of the Mall are shaking their heavy
+tears upon me. Drays thunder afar off. Bells tinkle.--How simple, quiet,
+almost village-like this city of my vision seems in contrast with the
+Boston of today with its diabolic subways, its roaring overhead trains,
+its electric cars and its streaming automobiles!
+
+Over and over again I have tried to re-discover that Boston, but it is
+gone, never to return. Herne is dead, Hurd is dead, Clement no longer
+edits the _Transcript_, Howells and Mary Wilkins live in New York.
+Louise Chandler Moulton lies deep in that grave of whose restful quiet
+she so often sang, and Edward Everett Hale, type of a New England that
+was old when I was young, has also passed into silence. His name like
+that of Higginson and Holmes is only a faint memory in the marble
+splendors of the New Public Library. The ravening years--how they
+destroy!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+My Mother is Stricken
+
+
+In the summer of 1889, notwithstanding a widening opportunity for
+lectures in the East, I decided to make another trip to the West. In all
+my mother's letters I detected a tremulous undertone of sadness, of
+longing, and this filled me with unrest even in the midst of the
+personal security I had won. I could not forget the duty I owed to her
+who had toiled so uncomplainingly that I might be clothed and fed and
+educated, and so I wrote to her announcing the date of my arrival.
+
+My friend, Dr. Cross, eager to see The Short-Grass Country which was a
+far-off and romantic territory to him, arranged to go with me. It was in
+July, and very hot the day we started, but we were both quite disposed
+to make the most of every good thing and to ignore all discomforts. I'm
+not entirely certain, but I think I occupied a sleeping car berth on
+this trip; if I did so it was for the first time in my life. Anyhow, I
+must have treated myself to regular meals, for I cannot recall being ill
+on the train. This, in itself, was remarkable.
+
+Strange to say, most of the incidents of the journey between Boston and
+Wisconsin are blended like the faded figures on a strip of sun-smit
+cloth, nothing remains definitely distinguishable except the memory of
+our visit to my Uncle William's farm in Neshonoc, and the recollection
+of the pleasure we took in the vivid bands of wild flowers which spun,
+like twin ribbons of satin, from beneath the wheels of the rear coach as
+we rushed across the state. All else has vanished as though it had
+never been.
+
+These primitive blossoms along the railroad's right-of-way deeply
+delighted my friend, but to me they were more than flowers, they were
+cups of sorcery, torches of magic incense. Each nodding pink brought
+back to me the sights and sounds and smells of the glorious meadows of
+my boyhood's vanished world. Every weed had its mystic tale. The slopes
+of the hills, the cattle grouped under the trees, all wrought upon me
+like old half-forgotten poems.
+
+My uncle, big, shaggy, gentle and reticent, met us at the faded little
+station and drove us away toward the sun-topped "sleeping camel" whose
+lines and shadows were so lovely and so familiar. In an hour we were at
+the farm-house where quaint Aunt Maria made us welcome in true pioneer
+fashion, and cooked a mess of hot biscuit to go with the honey from the
+bees in the garden. They both seemed very remote, very primitive even to
+me, to my friend Cross they were exactly like characters in a story. He
+could only look and listen and smile from his seat in the corner.
+
+William, a skilled bee-man, described to us his methods of tracking wild
+swarms, and told us how he handled those in his hives. "I can scoop 'em
+up as if they were so many kernels of corn," he said. After supper as we
+all sat on the porch watching the sunset, he reverted to the brave days
+of fifty-five when deer and bear came down over the hills, when a rifle
+was almost as necessary as a hoe, and as he talked I revived in him the
+black-haired smiling young giant of my boyhood days, untouched of age or
+care.
+
+He was a poet, in his dreamy reticent way, for when next morning I
+called attention to the beauty of the view down the valley, his face
+took on a kind of wistful sweetness and a certain shyness as he
+answered with a visible effort to conceal his feeling--"I like it--No
+place better. I wish your father and mother had never left the valley."
+And in this wish I joined.
+
+On the third day we resumed our journey toward Dakota, and the Doctor,
+though outwardly undismayed by the long hard ride and the increasing
+barrenness of the level lands, sighed with relief when at last I pointed
+out against the level sky-line the wavering bulk of the grain elevator
+which alone marked the wind-swept deserted site of Ordway, the end of
+our journey. He was tired.
+
+Business, I soon learned, had not been going well on the border during
+the two years of my absence. None of the towns had improved. On the
+contrary, all had lost ground.
+
+Another dry year was upon the land and the settlers were deeply
+disheartened. The holiday spirit of eight years before had entirely
+vanished. In its place was a sullen rebellion against government and
+against God. The stress of misfortune had not only destroyed hope, it
+had brought out the evil side of many men. Dissensions had grown common.
+Two of my father's neighbors had gone insane over the failure of their
+crops. Several had slipped away "between two days" to escape their
+debts, and even little Jessie, who met us at the train, brave as a
+meadow lark, admitted that something gray had settled down over the
+plain.
+
+Graveyards, jails, asylums, all the accompaniments of civilization, were
+now quite firmly established. On the west lay the lands of the Sioux and
+beyond them the still more arid foot-hills. The westward movement of the
+Middle Border for the time seemed at an end.
+
+My father, Jessie told me, was now cultivating more than five hundred
+acres of land, and deeply worried, for his wheat was thin and light and
+the price less than sixty cents per bushel.
+
+It was nearly sunset as we approached the farm, and a gorgeous sky was
+overarching it, but the bare little house in which my people lived
+seemed a million miles distant from Boston. The trees which my father
+had planted, the flowers which my mother had so faithfully watered, had
+withered in the heat. The lawn was burned brown. No green thing was in
+sight, and no shade offered save that made by the little cabin. On every
+side stretched scanty yellowing fields of grain, and from every worn
+road, dust rose like smoke from crevices, giving upon deep-hidden
+subterranean fires. It was not a good time to bring a visitor to the
+homestead, but it was too late to retreat.
+
+Mother, grayer, older, much less vigorous than she had been two years
+before, met us, silently, shyly, and I bled, inwardly, every time I
+looked at her. A hesitation had come into her speech, and the indecision
+of her movements scared me, but she was too excited and too happy to
+admit of any illness. Her smile was as sweet as ever.
+
+Dr. Cross quietly accepted the hot narrow bedroom which was the best we
+could offer him, and at supper took his place among the harvest help
+without any noticeable sign of repugnance. It was all so remote, so
+characteristic of the border that interest dominated disgust.
+
+He was much touched, as indeed was I, by the handful of wild roses which
+father brought in to decorate the little sitting-room. "There's nothing
+I like better," he said, "than a wild rose." The old trailer had
+noticeably softened. While retaining his clarion voice and much of his
+sleepless energy, he was plainly less imperious of manner, less harsh of
+speech.
+
+Jessie's case troubled me. As I watched her, studied her, I perceived
+that she possessed uncommon powers, but that she must be taken out of
+this sterile environment. "She must be rescued at once or she will live
+and die the wife of some Dakota farmer," I said to mother.
+
+Again I was disturbed by the feeling that in some way my own career was
+disloyal, something built upon the privations of my sister as well as
+upon those of my mother. I began definitely to plan their rescue. "They
+must not spend the rest of their days on this barren farm," I said to
+Dr. Cross, and my self-accusation spurred me to sterner resolve.
+
+It was not a pleasant time for my good friend, but, as it turned out,
+there was a special providence in his being there, for a few days later,
+while Jessie and I were seated in the little sitting-room busily
+discussing plans for her schooling we heard a short, piercing cry,
+followed by low sobbing.
+
+Hurrying out into the yard, I saw my mother standing a few yards from
+the door, her sweet face distorted, the tears streaming down her cheeks.
+"What is it, mother?" I called out.
+
+"I can't lift my feet," she stammered, putting her arms about my neck.
+"I can't move!" and in her voice was such terror and despair that my
+blood chilled.
+
+It was true! She was helpless. From the waist downward all power of
+locomotion had departed. Her feet were like lead, drawn to the earth by
+some terrible magnetic power.
+
+In a frenzy of alarm, Jessie and I carried her into the house and laid
+her on her bed. My heart burned with bitter indignation. "This is the
+end," I said. "Here is the result of long years of ceaseless toil. She
+has gone as her mother went, in the midst of the battle."
+
+At the moment I cursed the laws of man, I cursed myself. I accused my
+father. Each moment my remorse and horror deepened, and yet I could do
+nothing, nothing but kneel beside the bed and hold her hand while
+Jessie ran to call the doctor. She returned soon to say she could not
+find him.
+
+Slowly the stricken one grew calmer and at last, hearing a wagon drive
+into the yard, I hurried out to tell my father what had happened. He
+read in my face something wrong. "What's the matter?" he asked as I drew
+near.
+
+"Mother is stricken," I said. "She cannot walk."
+
+He stared at me in silence, his gray eyes expanding like those of an
+eagle, then calmly, mechanically he got down and began to unhitch the
+team. He performed each habitual act with most minute care, till I,
+impatient of his silence, his seeming indifference, repeated, "Don't you
+understand? Mother has had a stroke! She is absolutely helpless."
+
+Then he asked, "Where is your friend Dr. Cross?"
+
+"I don't know, I thought he was with you."
+
+Even as I was calling for him, Dr. Cross came into the cabin, his arms
+laden with roses. He had been strolling about on the prairie.
+
+With his coming hope returned. Calmly yet skillfully he went to the aid
+of the sufferer, while father, Jessie and I sat in agonized suspense
+awaiting his report.
+
+At last he came back to us with gentle reassuring smile.
+
+"There is no immediate danger," he said, and the tone in which he spoke
+was even more comforting than his words. "As soon as she recovers from
+her terror she will not suffer"--then he added gravely, "A minute blood
+vessel has ruptured in her brain, and a small clot has formed there. If
+this is absorbed, as I think it will be, she will recover. Nothing can
+be done for her. No medicine can reach her. It is just a question of
+rest and quiet." Then to me he added something which stung like a
+poisoned dart. "She should have been relieved from severe household
+labor years ago."
+
+My heart filled with bitterness and rebellion, bitterness against the
+pioneering madness which had scattered our family, and rebellion toward
+my father who had kept my mother always on the border, working like a
+slave long after the time when she should have been taking her ease.
+Above all, I resented my own failure, my own inability to help in the
+case. Here was I, established in a distant city, with success just
+opening her doors to me, and yet still so much the struggler that my
+will to aid was futile for lack of means.
+
+Sleep was difficult that night, and for days thereafter my mind was rent
+with a continual and ineffectual attempt to reach a solution of my
+problem, which was indeed typical of ambitious young America everywhere.
+"Shall I give up my career at this point? How can I best serve my
+mother?" These were my questions and I could not answer either of them.
+
+At the end of a week the sufferer was able to sit up, and soon recovered
+a large part of her native cheerfulness although it was evident to me
+that she would never again be the woman of the ready hand. Her days of
+labor were over.
+
+Her magnificent voice was now weak and uncertain. Her speech painfully
+hesitant. She who had been so strong, so brave, was now both easily
+frightened and readily confused. She who had once walked with the grace
+and power of an athlete was now in terror of an up-rolled rug upon the
+floor. Every time I looked at her my throat ached with remorseful pain.
+Every plan I made included a vow to make her happy if I could. My
+success now meant only service to her. In no other way could I justify
+my career.
+
+Dr. Cross though naturally eager to return to the comfort of his own
+home stayed on until his patient had regained her poise. "The clot seems
+in process of being taken up," he said to me, one morning, "and I think
+it safe to leave her. But you had better stay on for a few weeks."
+
+"I shall stay until September, at least," I replied. "I will not go back
+at all if I am needed here."
+
+"Don't fail to return," he earnestly advised. "The field is just opening
+for you in Boston, and your earning capacity is greater there than it is
+here. Success is almost won. Your mother knows this and tells me that
+she will insist on your going on with your work."
+
+Heroic soul! She was always ready to sacrifice herself for others.
+
+The Doctor's parting words comforted me as I returned to the shadeless
+farmstead to share in the work of harvesting the grain which was already
+calling for the reaper, and could not wait either upon sickness or age.
+Again I filled the place of stacker while my father drove the four-horse
+header, and when at noon, covered with sweat and dust, I looked at
+myself, I had very little sense of being a "rising literary man."
+
+I got back once again to the solid realities of farm life, and the
+majesty of the colorful sunsets which ended many of our days could not
+conceal from me the starved lives and lonely days of my little sister
+and my aging mother.
+
+"Think of it!" I wrote to my brother. "After eight years of cultivation,
+father's farm possesses neither tree nor vine. Mother's head has no
+protection from the burning rays of the sun, except the shadow which the
+house casts on the dry, hard door-yard. Where are the 'woods and prairie
+lands' of our song? Is this the 'fairy land' in which we were all to
+'reign like kings'? Doesn't the whole migration of the Garlands and
+McClintocks seem a madness?"
+
+Thereafter when alone, my mother and I often talked of the good old days
+in Wisconsin, of David and Deborah and William and Frank. I told her of
+Aunt Loretta's peaceful life, of the green hills and trees.
+
+"Oh, I wish we had never left Green's Coulee!" she said.
+
+But this was as far as her complaint ever went, for father was still
+resolute and undismayed. "We'll try again," he declared. "Next year will
+surely bring a crop."
+
+In a couple of weeks our patient, though unable to lift her feet, was
+able to shuffle across the floor into the kitchen, and thereafter
+insisted on helping Jessie at her tasks. From a seat in a convenient
+corner she picked over berries, stirred cake dough, ground coffee and
+wiped dishes, almost as cheerfully as ever, but to me it was a pitiful
+picture of bravery, and I burned ceaselessly with desire to do something
+to repay her for this almost hopeless disaster.
+
+The worst of the whole situation lay in the fact that my earnings both
+as teacher and as story writer were as yet hardly more than enough to
+pay my own carefully estimated expenses, and I saw no way of immediately
+increasing my income. On the face of it, my plain duty was to remain on
+the farm, and yet I could not bring myself to sacrifice my Boston life.
+In spite of my pitiful gains thus far, I held a vital hope of
+soon,--very soon--being in condition to bring my mother and my sister
+east. I argued, selfishly of course, "It must be that Dr. Cross is
+right. My only chance of success lies in the east."
+
+Mother did her best to comfort me. "Don't worry about us," she said. "Go
+back to your work. I am gaining. I'll be all right in a little while."
+Her brave heart was still unsubdued.
+
+While I was still debating my problem, a letter came which greatly
+influenced me, absurdly influenced all of us. It contained an invitation
+from the Secretary of the Cedar Valley Agriculture Society to be "the
+Speaker of the Day" at the County Fair on the twenty-fifth of September.
+This honor not only flattered me, it greatly pleased my mother. It was
+the kind of honor she could fully understand. In imagination she saw her
+son standing up before a throng of old-time friends and neighbors
+introduced by Judge Daly and applauded by all the bankers and merchants
+of the town. "You must do it," she said, and her voice was decisive.
+
+Father, though less open in his expression, was equally delighted. "You
+can go round that way just as well as not," he said. "I'd like to visit
+the old town myself."
+
+This letter relieved the situation in the most unexpected way. We all
+became cheerful. I began to say, "Of course you are going to get well,"
+and I turned again to my plan of taking my sister back to the seminary.
+"We'll hire a woman to stay with you," I said, "and Jessie can run up
+during vacation, or you and father can go down and spend Christmas with
+old friends."
+
+Yes, I confess it, I was not only planning to leave my mother again--I
+was intriguing to take her only child away from her. There is no excuse
+for this, none whatever except the fact that I had her co-operation in
+the plan. She wanted her daughter to be educated quite as strongly as I
+could wish, and was willing to put up with a little more loneliness and
+toil if only her children were on the road to somewhere.
+
+Jessie was the obstructionist. She was both scared and resentful. She
+had no desire to go to school in Osage. She wanted to stay where she
+was. Mother needed her,--and besides she didn't have any decent clothes
+to wear.
+
+Ultimately I overcame all her scruples, and by promising her a visit to
+the great city of Minneapolis (with the privilege of returning if she
+didn't like the school) I finally got her to start with me. Poor, little
+scared sister, I only half realized the agony of mind through which you
+passed as we rode away into the Minnesota prairies!
+
+The farther she got from home the shabbier her gown seemed and the more
+impossible her coat and hat. At last, as we were leaving Minneapolis on
+our way to Osage she leaned her tired head against me and sobbed out a
+wild wish to go home.
+
+Her grief almost wrecked my own self-control but I soothed her as best I
+could by telling her that she would soon be among old friends and that
+she couldn't turn back now. "Go on and make a little visit anyway," I
+added. "It's only a few hours from Ordway and you can go home at any
+time."
+
+She grew more cheerful as we entered familiar scenes, and one of the
+girls she had known when a child took charge of her, leaving me free to
+play the part of distinguished citizen.
+
+The last day of the races was in action when I, with a certain amount of
+justifiable pride, rode through the gate (the old familiar sagging gate)
+seated beside the President of the Association. I wish I could believe
+that as "Speaker of the Day," I filled the sons of my neighbors with
+some small part of the awe with which the speakers of other days filled
+me, and if I assumed something of the polite condescension with which
+all public personages carry off such an entrance, I trust it will be
+forgiven me.
+
+The event, even to me, was more inspiring in anticipation than in
+fulfillment, for when I rose to speak in the band-stand the wind was
+blowing hard, and other and less intellectual attractions were in full
+tide. My audience remained distressingly small--and calm. I have a dim
+recollection of howling into the face of the equatorical current certain
+disconnected sentences concerning my reform theory, and of seeing on the
+familiar faces of David Babcock, John Gammons and others of my bronzed
+and bent old neighbors a mild wonder as to what I was talking about.
+
+On the whole I considered it a defeat. In the evening I spoke in the
+Opera House appearing on the same platform whence, eight years before, I
+had delivered my impassioned graduating oration on "Going West." True, I
+had gone east but then, advice is for others, not for oneself. Lee Moss,
+one of my classmates, and in those Seminary days a rival orator, was in
+my audience, and so was Burton, wordless as ever, and a little sad, for
+his attempt at preaching had not been successful--his ineradicable
+shyness had been against him. Hattie was there looking thin and old, and
+Ella and Matilda with others of the girls I had known eight years
+before. Some were accompanied by their children.
+
+I suspect I aroused their wonder rather than their admiration. My
+radicalism was only an astonishment to them. However, a few of the men,
+the more progressive of them, came to me at the close of my talk and
+shook hands and said, "Go on! The country needs just such talks." One of
+these was Uncle Billy Frazer and his allegiance surprised me, for he had
+never shown radical tendencies before.
+
+Summing it all up on my way to Chicago I must admit that as a great man
+returning to his native village I had not been a success.
+
+After a few hours of talk with Kirkland I started east by way of
+Washington in order that I might stop at Camden and call upon old Walt
+Whitman whose work I had been lecturing about, and who had expressed a
+willingness to receive me.
+
+It was hot and dry in the drab little city in which he lived, and the
+street on which the house stood was as cheerless as an ash-barrel, even
+to one accustomed to poverty, like myself, and when I reached the door
+of his small, decaying wooden tenement, I was dismayed. It was all so
+unlike the home of a world-famous poet.
+
+It was indeed very like that in which a very destitute mechanic might be
+living, and as I mounted the steps to Walt's room on the second story my
+resentment increased. Not a line of beauty or distinction or grace
+rewarded my glance. It was all of the same unesthetic barrenness, and
+not overly clean at that.
+
+The old man, majestic as a stranded sea-God, was sitting in an arm
+chair, his broad Quaker hat on his head, waiting to receive me. He was
+spotlessly clean. His white hair, his light gray suit, his fine linen
+all gave the effect of exquisite neatness and wholesome living. His
+clear tenor voice, his quiet smile, his friendly hand-clasp charmed me
+and calmed me. He was so much gentler and sweeter than I had expected
+him to be.
+
+He sat beside a heap of half-read books, marked newspapers, clippings
+and letters, a welter of concerns which he refused to have removed by
+the broom of the caretaker, and now and again as he wished to show me
+something he rose and hobbled a step or two to fish a book or a letter
+out of the pile. He was quite lame but could move without a crutch. He
+talked mainly of his good friends in Boston and elsewhere, and alluded
+to his enemies without a particle of rancor. The lines on his noble face
+were as placid as those on the brow of an ox--not one showed petulance
+or discouragement. He was the optimist in every word.
+
+He spoke of one of my stories to which Traubel had called his attention,
+and reproved me gently for not "letting in the light."
+
+It was a memorable meeting for me and I went away back to my work in
+Boston with a feeling that I had seen one of the very greatest literary
+personalities of the century, a notion I have had no cause to change in
+the twenty-seven years which have intervened.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+Main Travelled Roads
+
+
+My second visit to the West confirmed me in all my sorrowful notions of
+life on the plain, and I resumed my writing in a mood of bitter
+resentment, with full intention of telling the truth about western farm
+life, irrespective of the land-boomer or the politicians. I do not
+defend this mood, I merely report it.
+
+In this spirit I finished a story which I called _A Prairie Heroine_ (in
+order that no one should mistake my meaning, for it was the study of a
+crisis in the life of a despairing farmer's wife), and while even here,
+I did not tell the whole truth, I succeeded in suggesting to the
+sympathetic observer a tragic and hopeless common case.
+
+It was a tract, that must be admitted, and realizing this, knowing that
+it was entirely too grim to find a place in the pages of the _Century_
+or _Harper's_ I decided to send it to the _Arena_, a new Boston review
+whose spirit, so I had been told, was frankly radical.
+
+A few days later I was amazed to receive from the editor a letter of
+acceptance enclosing a check, but a paragraph in the letter astonished
+me more than the check which was for one hundred dollars.
+
+"I herewith enclose a check," wrote the editor, "which I hope you will
+accept in payment of your story.... I note that you have cut out certain
+paragraphs of description with the fear, no doubt, that the editor would
+object to them. I hope you will restore the manuscript to its original
+form and return it. When I ask a man to write for me, I want him to
+utter his mind with perfect freedom. My magazine is not one that is
+afraid of strong opinions."
+
+This statement backed up by the writer's signature on a blue slip
+produced in me a moment of stupefaction. Entertaining no real hope of
+acceptance, I had sent the manuscript in accordance with my principle of
+trying every avenue, and to get such an answer--an immediate
+answer--with a check!
+
+As soon as I recovered the use of my head and hand, I replied in eager
+acknowledgment. I do not recall the precise words of my letter, but it
+brought about an early meeting between B. O. Flower, the editor, and
+myself.
+
+Flower's personality pleased me. Hardly more than a boy at this time, he
+met me with the friendliest smile, and in our talk we discovered many
+common lines of thought.
+
+"Your story," he said, "is the kind of fiction I need. If you have any
+more of that sort let me see it. My magazine is primarily for discussion
+but I want to include at least one story in each issue. I cannot match
+the prices of magazines like the _Century_ of course, but I will do the
+best I can for you."
+
+It would be difficult to exaggerate the value of this meeting to me, for
+no matter what anyone may now say of the _Arena's_ logic or literary
+style, its editor's life was nobly altruistic. I have never known a man
+who strove more single-heartedly for social progress, than B. O. Flower.
+He was the embodiment of unselfish public service, and his ready
+sympathy for every genuine reform made his editorial office a center of
+civic zeal. As champions of various causes we all met in his open lists.
+
+In the months which followed he accepted for his magazine several of my
+short stories and bought and printed _Under the Wheel_, an entire play,
+not to mention an essay or two on _The New Declaration of Rights_. He
+named me among his "regular contributors," and became not merely my
+comforter and active supporter but my banker, for the regularity of his
+payments raised me to comparative security. I was able to write home the
+most encouraging reports of my progress.
+
+At about the same time (or a little later) the _Century_ accepted a
+short story which I called _A Spring Romance_, and a three-part tale of
+Wisconsin. For these I received nearly five hundred dollars!
+Accompanying the note of acceptance was a personal letter from Richard
+Watson Gilder, so hearty in its words of appreciation that I was assured
+of another and more distinctive avenue of expression.
+
+It meant something to get into the _Century_ in those days. The praise
+of its editor was equivalent to a diploma. I regarded Gilder as second
+only to Howells in all that had to do with the judgment of fiction.
+Flower's interests were ethical, Gilder's esthetic, and after all my
+ideals were essentially literary. My reform notions were subordinate to
+my desire to take honors as a novelist.
+
+I cannot be quite sure of the precise date of this good fortune, but I
+think it must have been in the winter of 1890 for I remember writing a
+lofty letter to my father, in which I said, "If you want any money, let
+me know."
+
+As it happened he had need of seed wheat, and it was with deep
+satisfaction that I repaid the money I had borrowed of him, together
+with three hundred dollars more and so faced the new year clear of debt.
+
+Like the miner who, having suddenly uncovered a hidden vein of gold,
+bends to his pick in a confident belief in his "find" so I humped above
+my desk without doubts, without hesitations. I had found my work in the
+world. If I had any thought of investment at this time, which I am sure
+I had not, it was concerned with the west. I had no notion of settling
+permanently in the east.
+
+My success in entering both the _Century_ and the _Arena_ emboldened me
+to say to Dr. Cross, "I shall be glad to come down out of the attic and
+take a full-sized chamber at regular rates."
+
+Alas! he had no such room, and so after much perturbation, my brother
+and I hired a little apartment on Moreland street in Roxbury and moved
+into it joyously. With a few dollars in my pocket, I went so far as to
+buy a couple of pictures and a new book rack, the first property I had
+ever owned, and when, on that first night, with everything in place we
+looked around upon our "suite," we glowed with such exultant pride as
+only struggling youth can feel. After years of privation, I had, at
+last, secured a niche in the frowning escarpment of Boston's social
+palisade.
+
+Frank was twenty-seven, I was thirty, and had it not been for a haunting
+sense of our father's defeat and a growing fear of mother's decline, we
+would have been entirely content. "How can we share our good fortune
+with her and with sister Jessie?" was the question which troubled us
+most. Jessie's fate seemed especially dreary by contrast with our busy
+and colorful life.
+
+"We can't bring them here," I argued. "They would never be happy here.
+Father is a borderman. He would enjoy coming east on a visit, but to
+shut him up in Boston would be like caging an eagle. The case seems
+hopeless."
+
+The more we discussed it the more insoluble the problem became. The best
+we could do was to write often and to plan for frequent visits to them.
+
+One day, late in March, Flower, who had been using my stories in almost
+every issue of his magazine, said to me: "Why don't you put together
+some of your tales of the west, and let us bring them out in book form?
+I believe they would have instant success."
+
+His words delighted me for I had not yet begun to hope for an appearance
+as the author of a book. Setting to work at once to prepare such a
+volume I put into it two unpublished novelettes called _Up the Cooley_
+and _The Branch Road_, for the very good reason that none of the
+magazines, not even _The Arena_, found them "available." This reduced
+the number of sketches to six so that the title page read:
+
+ MAIN TRAVELLED ROADS
+ Six Mississippi Valley Stories
+ BY HAMLIN GARLAND
+
+The phrase "main travelled road" is common in the west. Ask a man to
+direct you to a farmhouse and he will say, "Keep the main travelled road
+till you come to the second crossing and turn to the left." It seemed to
+me not only a picturesque title, significant of my native country, but
+one which permitted the use of a grimly sardonic foreword. This I
+supplied.
+
+"The main travelled road in the west (as everywhere) is hot and dusty in
+summer and desolate and drear with mud in fall and spring, and in winter
+the winds sweep the snows across it, but it does sometimes cross a rich
+meadow where the songs of the larks and blackbirds and bobolinks are
+tangled. Follow it far enough, it may lead past a bend in the river
+where the water laughs eternally over its shallows. Mainly it is long
+and weariful and has a dull little town at one end, and a home of toil
+at the other. Like the main travelled road of life it is traversed by
+many classes of people, but the poor and the weary predominate."
+
+This, my first book, was put together during a time of deep personal
+sorrow. My little sister died suddenly, leaving my father and mother
+alone on the bleak plain, seventeen hundred miles from both their sons.
+Hopelessly crippled, my mother now mourned the loss of her "baby" and
+the soldier's keen eyes grew dim, for he loved this little daughter
+above anything else in the world. The flag of his sunset march was
+drooping on its staff. Nothing but poverty and a lonely old age seemed
+before him, and yet, in his letters to me, he gave out only the briefest
+hints of his despair.
+
+All this will explain, if the reader is interested to know, why the
+dedication of my little book was bitter with revolt: "To my father and
+mother, whose half-century of pilgrimage on the main travelled road of
+life has brought them only pain and weariness, these stories are
+dedicated by a son to whom every day brings a deepening sense of his
+parents' silent heroism." It will explain also why the comfortable, the
+conservative, those who farmed the farmer, resented my thin gray volume
+and its message of acrid accusation.
+
+It was published in 1891 and the outcry against it was instant and
+astonishing--to me. I had a foolish notion that the literary folk of the
+west would take a local pride in the color of my work, and to find
+myself execrated by nearly every critic as "a bird willing to foul his
+own nest" was an amazement. Editorials and criticisms poured into the
+office, all written to prove that my pictures of the middle border were
+utterly false.
+
+Statistics were employed to show that pianos and Brussels carpets
+adorned almost every Iowa farmhouse. Tilling the prairie soil was
+declared to be "the noblest vocation in the world, not in the least like
+the pictures this eastern author has drawn of it."
+
+True, corn was only eleven cents per bushel at that time, and the number
+of alien farm-renters was increasing. True, all the bright boys and
+girls were leaving the farm, following the example of my critics, but
+these I was told were all signs of prosperity and not of decay. The
+American farmer was getting rich, and moving to town, only the renters
+and the hired man were uneasy and clamorous.
+
+My answer to all this criticism was a blunt statement of facts. "Butter
+is not always golden nor biscuits invariably light and flaky in my farm
+scenes, because they're not so in real life," I explained. "I grew up on
+a farm and I am determined once for all to put the essential ugliness of
+its life into print. I will not lie, even to be a patriot. A proper
+proportion of the sweat, flies, heat, dirt and drudgery of it all shall
+go in. I am a competent witness and I intend to tell the whole truth."
+
+But I didn't! Even my youthful zeal faltered in the midst of a
+revelation of the lives led by the women on the farms of the middle
+border. Before the tragic futility of their suffering, my pen refused to
+shed its ink. Over the hidden chamber of their maternal agonies I drew
+the veil.
+
+The old soldier had nothing to say but mother wrote to me, "It scares me
+to read some of your stories--they are so true. You might have said
+more," she added, "but I'm glad you didn't. Farmers' wives have enough
+to bear as it is."
+
+"My stories were not written for farmers' wives," I replied. "They were
+written to convict the selfish monopolistic liars of the towns."
+
+"I hope the liars read 'em," was her laconic retort.
+
+Nevertheless, in spite of all the outcry against my book, words of
+encouragement came in from a few men and women who had lived out the
+precise experiences which I had put into print. "You have delineated my
+life," one man said. "Every detail of your description is true. The
+sound of the prairie chickens, the hum of the threshing machine, the
+work of seeding, corn husking, everything is familiar to me and new in
+literature."
+
+A woman wrote, "You are entirely right about the loneliness, the
+stagnation, the hardship. We are sick of lies. Give the world the
+truth."
+
+Another critic writing from the heart of a great university said, "I
+value your stories highly as literature, but I suspect that in the
+social war which is coming you and I will be at each other's throats."
+
+This controversy naturally carried me farther and farther from the
+traditional, the respectable. As a rebel in art I was prone to arouse
+hate. Every letter I wrote was a challenge, and one of my conservative
+friends frankly urged the folly of my course. "It is a mistake for you
+to be associated with cranks like Henry George and writers like
+Whitman," he said. "It is a mistake to be published by the _Arena_. Your
+book should have been brought out by one of the old established firms.
+If you will fling away your radical notions and consent to amuse the
+governing classes, you will succeed."
+
+Fling away my convictions! It were as easy to do that as to cast out my
+bones. I was not wearing my indignation as a cloak. My rebellious
+tendencies came from something deep down. They formed an element in my
+blood. My patriotism resented the failure of our government. Therefore
+such advice had very little influence upon me. The criticism that really
+touched and influenced me was that which said, "Don't preach,--exemplify.
+Don't let your stories degenerate into tracts." Howells said, "Be fine,
+be fine--but not too fine!" and Gilder warned me not to leave Beauty out
+of the picture.
+
+In the light of this friendly council I perceived my danger, and set
+about to avoid the fault of mixing my fiction with my polemics.
+
+The editor of the _Arena_ remained my most loyal supporter. He filled
+the editorial section of his magazine with praise of my fiction and
+loudly proclaimed my non-conformist character. No editor ever worked
+harder to give his author a national reputation and the book sold, not
+as books sell now, but moderately, steadily, and being more widely read
+than sold, went far. This proved of course, that my readers were poor
+and could not afford to pay a dollar for a book, at least they didn't,
+and I got very little royalty from the sale. If I had any illusions
+about that they were soon dispelled. On the paper bound book I got five
+cents, on the cloth bound, ten. The sale was mainly in the fifty-cent
+edition.
+
+It was not for me to criticise the methods by which my publisher was
+trying to make me known, and I do not at this moment regret Flower's
+insistence upon the reforming side of me,--but for the reason that he
+was essentially ethical rather than esthetic, some part of the literary
+significance of my work escaped him. It was from the praise of Howells,
+Matthews and Stedman, that I received my enlightenment. I began to
+perceive that in order to make my work carry its message, I must be
+careful to keep a certain balance between Significance and Beauty. The
+artist began to check the preacher.
+
+Howells gave the book large space in "The Study" in _Harper's_ and what
+he said of it profoundly instructed me. Edward Everett Hale, Mary E.
+Wilkins, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Charles Dudley Warner, Edmund
+Clarence Stedman, and many others were most generous of applause. In
+truth I was welcomed into the circle of American realists with an
+instant and generous greeting which astonished, at the same time that it
+delighted me.
+
+I marvel at this appreciation as I look back upon it, and surely in
+view of its reception, no one can blame me for considering my drab
+little volume a much more important contribution to American fiction
+than it really was.
+
+It was my first book, and so, perhaps, the reader will excuse me for
+being a good deal uplifted by the noise it made. Then too, it is only
+fair to call attention to the fact that aside from Edward Eggleston's
+_Hoosier Schoolmaster_, _Howe's Story of a Country Town_, and _Zury_, by
+Joseph Kirkland, I had the middle west almost entirely to myself. Not
+one of the group of western writers who have since won far greater fame,
+and twenty times more dollars than I, had at that time published a
+single volume. William Allen White, Albert Bigelow Payne, Stewart Edward
+White, Jack London, Emerson Hough, George Ade, Meredith Nicholson, Booth
+Tarkington, and Rex Beach were all to come. "Octave Thanet" was writing
+her stories of Arkansas life for _Scribners_ but had published only one
+book.
+
+Among all my letters of encouragement of this time, not one, except
+perhaps that from Mr. Howells, meant more to me than a word which came
+from Walt Whitman, who hailed me as one of the literary pioneers of the
+west for whom he had been waiting. His judgment, so impersonal, so
+grandly phrased, gave me the feeling of having been "praised by
+posterity."
+
+In short, I was assured that my face was set in the right direction and
+that the future was mine, for I was not yet thirty-one years of age, and
+thirty-one is a most excellent period of life!
+
+And yet, by a singular fatality, at this moment came another sorrow, the
+death of Alice, my boyhood's adoration. I had known for years that she
+was not for me, but I loved to think of her as out there walking the
+lanes among the roses and the wheat as of old. My regard for her was no
+longer that of the lover desiring and hoping, and though I acknowledged
+defeat I had been too broadly engaged in my ambitious literary plans to
+permit her deflection to permanently cloud my life. She had been a
+radiant and charming figure in my prairie world, and when I read the
+letter telling of her passing, my mind was irradiated with the picture
+she had made when last she said good-bye to me. Her gentle friendship
+had been very helpful through all my years of struggle and now in the
+day of my security, her place was empty.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+The Spirit of Revolt
+
+
+During all this time while I had been living so busily and happily in
+Boston, writing stories, discussing Ibsen and arguing the cause of
+Impressionism, a portentous and widespread change of sentiment was
+taking place among the farmers of the Middle Border. The discouragement
+which I had discovered in old friends and neighbors in Dakota was
+finding collective expression. A vast and non-sectional union of the
+corn-growers, wheat-raisers, and cotton-growers had been effected and
+the old time politicians were uneasy.
+
+As ten cent corn and ten per cent interest were troubling Kansas so
+six-cent cotton was inflaming Georgia--and both were frankly sympathetic
+with Montana and Colorado whose miners were suffering from a drop in the
+price of silver. To express the meaning of this revolt a flying squadron
+of radical orators had been commissioned and were in the field. Mary
+Ellen Lease with Cassandra voice, and Jerry Simpson with shrewd humor
+were voicing the demands of the plainsman, while "Coin" Harvey as
+champion of the Free Silver theory had stirred the Mountaineer almost to
+a frenzy. It was an era of fervent meetings and fulminating resolutions.
+The Grange had been social, or at most commercially co-operative in its
+activities, but The Farmers' Alliance came as a revolt.
+
+The People's Party which was the natural outcome of this unrest involved
+my father. He wrote me that he had joined "the Populists," and was one
+of their County officers. I was not surprised at this action on his
+part, for I had known how high in honor he held General Weaver who was
+the chief advocate of a third party.
+
+Naturally Flower sympathized with this movement, and kept the pages of
+his magazine filled with impassioned defenses of it. One day, early in
+'91, as I was calling upon him in his office, he suddenly said,
+"Garland, why can't you write a serial story for us? One that shall deal
+with this revolt of the farmers? It's perfectly legitimate material for
+a novel, as picturesque in its way as _The Rise of the Vendée_--Can't
+you make use of it?"
+
+To this I replied, with some excitement--"Why yes, I think I can. I have
+in my desk at this moment, several chapters of an unfinished story which
+uses the early phases of the Grange movement as a background. If it
+pleases you I can easily bring it down to date. It might be necessary
+for me to go into the field, and make some fresh studies, but I believe
+I can treat the two movements in the same story. Anyhow I should like to
+try."
+
+"Bring the manuscript in at once," replied Flower. "It may be just what
+we are looking for. If it is we will print it as a serial this summer,
+and bring it out in book form next winter."
+
+In high excitement I hurried home to dig up and re-read the fragment
+which I called at this time _Bradley Talcott_. It contained about thirty
+thousand words and its hero was a hired man on an Iowa farm. Of course I
+saw possibilities in this manuscript--I was in the mood to do that--and
+sent it in.
+
+Flower read it and reported almost by return mail.
+
+"We'll take it," he said. "And as soon as you can get away, I think that
+you'd better go out to Kansas and Nebraska and make the studies
+necessary to complete the story. We'll pay all your expenses and pay
+you for the serial besides."
+
+The price agreed upon would seem very small in these days of millionaire
+authors, but to me the terms of Flower's commission were nobly generous.
+They set me free. They gave me wings!--For the first time in my life I
+was able to travel in comfort. I could not only eat in the dining car,
+and sleep in the sleeping car, but I could go to a hotel at the end of
+my journey with a delightful sense of freedom from worry about the
+bills. Do you wonder that when I left Boston a week or two later, I did
+so with elation--with a sense of conquest?
+
+Eager to explore--eager to know every state of the Union and especially
+eager to study the far plains and the Rocky Mountains, I started
+westward and kept going until I reached Colorado. My stay in the
+mountain country was short, but my glimpses of Ouray and Telluride
+started me on a long series of stories of "the high trails."
+
+On the way out as well as on the way back, I took part in meetings of
+rebellious farmers in bare-walled Kansas school-houses, and watched
+protesting processions of weather-worn Nebraska Populists as they filed
+through the shadeless cities of their sun-baked plain. I attended
+barbecues on drab and dusty fair grounds, meeting many of the best known
+leaders in the field.
+
+Everywhere I came in contact with the discontented. I saw only those
+whose lives seemed about to end in failure, and my grim notions of farm
+life were in no wise softened by these experiences.
+
+How far away all this seems in these days of three-dollar wheat and
+twenty-six cent cotton--these days of automobiles, tractor plows, and
+silos!
+
+As I kept no diary in those days, I am a little uncertain about dates
+and places--and no wonder, for I was doing something every moment (I
+travelled almost incessantly for nearly two years) but one event of that
+summer does stand clearly out--that of a meeting with my father at Omaha
+in July.
+
+It seems that some sort of convention was being held there and that my
+father was a delegate from Brown County, Dakota. At any rate I
+distinctly recall meeting him at the train and taking him to my hotel
+and introducing him to General Weaver. As a representative of the
+_Arena_ I had come to know many of the most prominent men in the
+movement, and my father was deeply impressed with their recognition of
+me. For the first time in his life, he deferred to me. He not only let
+me take charge of him, he let me pay the bills.
+
+He said nothing to me of his pride in my position, but my good friends
+Robert and Elia Peattie told me that to them he expressed the keenest
+satisfaction. "I never thought Hamlin would make a success of writing,"
+he said, "although he was always given to books. I couldn't believe that
+he would ever earn a living that way, but it seems that he is doing it."
+My commission from Flower and the fact that the _Arena_ was willing to
+pay my way about the country, were to him indubitable signs of
+prosperity. They could not be misinterpreted by his neighbors.
+
+Elia Peattie sat beside him at a meeting when I spoke, and she heard him
+say to an old soldier on the right, "I never knew just what that boy of
+mine was fitted for, but I guess he has struck his gait at last."
+
+It may seem illogical to the reader, but this deference on the part of
+the old soldier did not amuse me. On the contrary it hurt me. A little
+pang went through me every time he yielded his leadership. I hated to
+see him display the slightest evidence of age, of weakness. I would
+rather have had him storm than sigh. Part of his irresolution, his
+timidity, was due, as I could see, to the unwonted noise, and to the
+crowds of excited men, but more of it came from the vague alarm of
+self-distrust which are signs of advancing years.
+
+For two days we went about together, attending all the sessions and
+meeting many of the delegates, but we found time to discuss the problems
+which confronted us both. "I am farming nearly a thousand acres this
+year," he said, "and I'm getting the work systematized so that I can
+raise wheat at sixty cents a bushel--if I can only get fifteen bushels
+to the acre. But there's no money in the country. We seem to be at the
+bottom of our resources. I never expected to see this country in such a
+state. I can't get money enough to pay my taxes. Look at my clothes! I
+haven't had a new suit in three years. Your mother is in the same fix. I
+wanted to bring her down, but she had no clothes to wear--and then,
+besides, it's hard for her to travel. The heat takes hold of her
+terribly."
+
+This statement of the Border's poverty and drought was the more moving
+to me for the reason that the old pioneer had always been so patriotic,
+so confident, so sanguine of his country's future. He had come a long
+way from the buoyant faith of '66, and the change in him was typical of
+the change in the West--in America--and it produced in me a sense of
+dismay, of rebellious bitterness. Why should our great new land fall
+into this slough of discouragement?
+
+My sympathy with the Alliance took on a personal tinge. My pride in my
+own "success" sank away. How pitiful it all seemed in the midst of the
+almost universal disappointment and suffering of the West! In the face
+of my mother's need my resources were pitifully inadequate.
+
+"I can't go up to see mother this time," I explained to my father, "but
+I am coming out again this fall to speak in the campaign and I shall
+surely run up and visit her then."
+
+"I'll arrange for you to speak in Aberdeen," he said. "I'm on the County
+Committee."
+
+All the way back to Boston, and during the weeks of my work on my novel,
+I pondered the significance of the spiritual change which had swept over
+the whole nation--but above all others the problem of my father's
+desperate attempt to retrieve his fortunes engaged my sympathy. "Unless
+he gets a crop this year," I reported to my brother--"he is going to
+need help. It fills me with horror to think of those old people spending
+another winter out there on the plain."
+
+My brother who was again engaged by Herne to play one of the leading
+parts in _Shore Acres_ was beginning to see light ahead. His pay was not
+large but he was saving a little of it and was willing to use his
+savings to help me out in my plan of rescue. It was to be a rescue
+although we were careful never to put it in that form in our letters to
+the old pioneer.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Up to this month I had retained my position in the Boston School of
+Oratory, but I now notified Brown that I should teach no more in his
+school or any other school.
+
+His big shoulders began to shake and a chuckle preceded his irritating
+joke--"Going back to shingling?" he demanded.
+
+"No," I replied, "I'm not going to shingle any more--except for exercise
+after I get my homestead in the west--but I think--I'm not sure--I
+_think_ I can make a living with my pen."
+
+He became serious at this and said, "I'm sorry to have you go--but you
+are entirely right. You have found your work and I give you my blessing
+on it. But you must always count yourself one of my teachers and come
+and speak for us whenever you can." This I promised to do and so we
+parted.
+
+Early in September I went west and having put myself in the hands of the
+State Central Committee of Iowa, entered the field, campaigning in the
+interests of the People's Party. For six weeks I travelled, speaking
+nearly every day--getting back to the farms of the west and harvesting a
+rich fund of experiences.
+
+It was delightful autumn weather, and in central Iowa the crops were
+fairly abundant. On every hand fields of corn covered the gentle hills
+like wide rugs of lavender velvet, and the odor of melons and ripening
+leaves filled the air. Nature's songs of cheer and abundance (uttered by
+innumerable insects) set forth the monstrous injustice of man's law by
+way of contrast. Why should children cry for food in our cities whilst
+fruits rotted on the vines and wheat had no value to the harvester?
+
+With other eager young reformers, I rode across the odorous prairie
+swells, journeying from one meeting place to another, feeling as my
+companions did that something grandly beneficial was about to be enacted
+into law. In this spirit I spoke at Populist picnics, standing beneath
+great oaks, surrounded by men and women, work-worn like my own father
+and mother, shadowed by the same cloud of dismay. I smothered in small
+halls situated over saloons and livery stables, travelling by
+freight-train at night in order to ride in triumph as "Orator of the
+Day" at some county fair, until at last I lost all sense of being the
+writer and recluse.
+
+As I went north my indignation burned brighter, for the discontent of
+the people had been sharpened by the drought which had again cut short
+the crop. At Millbank, Cyrus, one of my old Dry Run neighbors, met me.
+He was now a grave, stooping middle-aged man also in the midst of
+disillusionment. "Going west" had been a mistake for him as for my
+father--"But here we are," he said, "and I see nothing for it but to
+stick to the job."
+
+Mother and father came to Aberdeen to hear me speak, and as I looked
+down on them from the platform of the opera house, I detected on their
+faces an expression which was not so much attention, as preoccupation.
+They were not listening to my words, they were thinking of my
+relationship to them, of the mystery involved in my being there on the
+platform surrounded by the men of the county whom they most respected.
+They could not take my theories seriously, but they did value and to the
+full, the honor which their neighbors paid me--their son! Their presence
+so affected me that I made, I fear, but an indifferent address.
+
+We did not have much time to talk over family affairs but it was good to
+see them even for a few moments and to know that mother was slowly
+regaining the use of her limbs.
+
+Another engagement made it necessary for me to take the night train for
+St. Paul and so they both went down to the station with me, and as the
+time came to part I went out to the little covered buggy (which was all
+the carriage my father owned) to start them off on their lonely
+twelve-mile trip back to the farm. "I don't know how it is all coming
+about, mother, but sometime, somewhere you and I are going to live
+together,--not here, back in Osage, or perhaps in Boston. It won't be
+long now."
+
+She smiled, but her voice was tremulous. "Don't worry about me. I'm all
+right again--at least I am better. I shall be happy if only you are
+successful."
+
+This meeting did me good. My mother's smile lessened my bitterness, and
+her joy in me, her faith in me, sent me away in renewed determination to
+rescue her from the destitution and loneliness of this arid land.
+
+My return to Boston in November discovered a startling change in my
+relationship to it. The shining city in which I had lived for seven
+years, and which had become so familiar to me (and so necessary to my
+progress), had begun to dwindle, to recede. The warm, broad, unkempt and
+tumultuous west, with its clamorous movement, its freedom from
+tradition, its vitality of political thought, re-asserted its power over
+me. New England again became remote. It was evident that I had not
+really taken root in Massachusetts after all. I perceived that Boston
+was merely the capital of New England while New York was fast coming to
+be the all-conquering capital of The Nation.
+
+My realization of this shift of values was sharpened by the announcement
+that Howells had definitely decided to move to the Metropolis, and that
+Herne had broken up his little home in Ashmont and was to make his
+future home on Convent Avenue in Harlem. The process of stripping Boston
+to build up Manhattan had begun.
+
+My brother who was still one of Herne's company of players in _Shore
+Acres_, had no home to break up, but he said, "I'm going to get some
+sort of headquarters in New York. If you'll come on we'll hire a little
+apartment up town and 'bach' it. I'm sick of theatrical boarding
+houses."
+
+With suddenly acquired conviction that New York was about to become the
+Literary Center of America, I replied, "Very well. Get your flat. I'd
+like to spend a winter in the old town anyway."
+
+My brother took a small furnished apartment on 105th Street, and
+together we camped above the tumult. It was only twelve-and-a-half feet
+wide and about forty-eight long, and its furnishings were ugly, frayed
+and meager, but its sitting room opened upon the sun, and there, of a
+morning, I continued to write in growing content. At about noon the
+actor commonly cooked a steak or a chop and boiled a pot of coffee, and
+after the dishes were washed, we both merrily descended upon Broadway by
+means of a Ninth Avenue elevated train. Sometimes we dined down town in
+reckless luxury at one of the French restaurants, "where the tip was but
+a nickel and the dinner thirty cents," but usually even our evening meal
+was eaten at home.
+
+Herne was playing an unlimited engagement at the Broadway theater and I
+spent a good deal of time behind the scenes with him. His house on
+Convent Avenue was a handsome mansion and on a Sunday, I often dined
+there, and when we all got going the walls resounded with argument. Jim
+was a great wag and a delightful story teller, but he was in deadly
+earnest as a reformer, and always ready to speak on The Single Tax. He
+took his art very seriously also, and was one of the best stage
+directors of his day. Some of his dramatic methods were so far in
+advance of his time that they puzzled or disgusted many of his patrons,
+but without doubt he profoundly influenced the art of the American
+stage. Men like William Gillette and Clyde Fitch quite frankly
+acknowledged their indebtedness to him.
+
+Jim and Katharine both had an exaggerated notion of my importance in the
+world of art and letters, and listened to me with a respect, a
+fellowship and an appreciation which increased my sense of
+responsibility and inspired me to greater effort as a novelist. Together
+we hammered out questions of art and economics, and planned new plays.
+Those were inspiring hours to us all and we still refer to them as "the
+good old Convent Avenue days!"
+
+New York City itself was incredibly simpler and quieter than it is now,
+but to me it was a veritable hell because of the appalling inequality
+which lay between the palaces of the landlords and the tenements of the
+proletariat. The monstrous injustice of permitting a few men to own the
+land on which millions toiled for the barest living tore at my heart
+strings then, as it does now, and the worst of it rested in the fact
+that the landless seemed willing to be robbed for the pleasure of those
+who could not even dissipate the wealth which rolled in upon them in
+waves of unearned rent.
+
+And yet, much as I felt this injustice and much as the city affected me,
+I could not put it into fiction. "It is not my material," I said. "My
+dominion is the West."
+
+Though at ease, I had no feeling of being at home in this tumult. I was
+only stopping in it in order to be near the Hernes, my brother, and
+Howells. The Georges, whom I had come to know very well, interested me
+greatly and often of an evening I went over to the East Side, to the
+unpretentious brick house in which The Prophet and his delightful family
+lived. Of course this home was doctrinaire, but then I liked that
+flavor, and so did the Hernes, although Katharine's keen sense of humor
+sometimes made us all seem rather like thorough-going cranks--which we
+were.
+
+In the midst of our growing security and expanding acquaintanceship, my
+brother and I often returned to the problem of our aging parents.
+
+My brother was all for bringing them east but to this I replied, "No,
+that is out of the question. The old pioneer would never be happy in a
+city."
+
+"We could buy a farm over in Jersey."
+
+"What would he do there? He would be among strangers and in strange
+conditions.--No, the only solution is to get him to go back either to
+Iowa or to Wisconsin. He will find even that very hard to do for it
+will seem like failure but he must do it. For mother's sake I'd rather
+see him go back to the LaCrosse valley. It would be a pleasure to visit
+them there."
+
+"That is the thing to do," my brother agreed. "I'll never get out to
+Dakota again."
+
+The more I thought about this the lovelier it seemed. The hills, the
+farmhouses, the roads, the meadows all had delightful associations in my
+mind, as I knew they must have in my mother's mind and the idea of a
+regained homestead in the place of my birth began to engage my thought
+whenever I had leisure to ponder my problem and especially whenever I
+received a letter from my mother.
+
+There was a certain poetic justice in the return of my father and mother
+to the land from which they had been lured a quarter of a century
+before, and I was willing to make any sacrifice to bring it about. I
+take no credit for this, it was a purely selfish plan, for so long as
+they were alone out there on the plain my own life must continue to be
+troubled and uneasy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+The End of the Sunset Trail
+
+
+In February while attending a conference of reformers in St. Louis I
+received a letter from my mother which greatly disturbed me. "I wish I
+could see you," she wrote. "I am not very well this winter, I can't go
+out very often and I get very lonesome for my boys. If only you did not
+live so far away!"
+
+There was something in this letter which made all that I was doing in
+the convention of no account, and on the following evening I took the
+train for Columbia, the little village in which my parents were spending
+the winter, filled with remorseful forebodings. My pain and
+self-accusation would not let me rest. Something clutched my heart every
+time I thought of my crippled mother prisoned in a Dakota shanty and no
+express train was swift enough to satisfy my desire to reach her. The
+letter had been forwarded to me and I was afraid that she might be
+actually ill.
+
+That ride next day from Sioux City to Aberdeen was one of the gloomiest
+I had ever experienced. Not only was my conscience uneasy, it seemed
+that I was being hurled into a region of arctic storms. A terrific
+blizzard possessed the plain, and the engine appeared to fight its way
+like a brave animal. All day it labored forward while the coaches behind
+it swayed in the ever-increasing power of the tempest, their wheels
+emitting squeals of pain as they ground through the drifts, and I
+sitting in my overcoat with collar turned high above my ears, my hands
+thrust deep in my pockets, sullenly counted the hours of my discomfort.
+The windows, furred deep with frost, let in but a pallid half-light,
+thus adding a mental dusk to the actual menace of the storm.
+
+After each station the brakemen re-entered as if blown in by the blast,
+and a vapor, white as a shower of flour, filled the door-way, behind
+them. Occasionally as I cleared a space for a peephole through the rimy
+panes, I caught momentary glimpses of a level, treeless earth, desolate
+as the polar ocean swept by ferocious elemental warfare.
+
+No life was to be seen save here and there a suffering steer or colt,
+humped under the lee of a straw-stack. The streets of the small wooden
+towns were deserted. No citizen was abroad, only the faint smoke of
+chimneys testified to the presence of life beneath the roof-trees.
+
+Occasionally a local passenger came in, puffing and whistling with loud
+explosions of excited comment over the storm which he seemed to treat as
+an agreeable diversion, but the conductor, who followed, threshing his
+hands and nursing his ears, swore in emphatic dislike of the country and
+climate, but even this controversy offered no relief to the through
+passengers who sat in frozen stoical silence. There was very little
+humor in a Dakota blizzard for them--or for me.
+
+At six o'clock that night I reached the desolate end of my journey. My
+father met me at the station and led the way to the low square bleak
+cottage which he had rented for the winter. Mother, still unable to lift
+her feet from the floor, opened the door to us, and reaching her, as I
+did, through that terrifying tempest, made her seem as lonely as a
+castaway on some gelid Greenland coast.
+
+Father was in unwonted depression. His crop had again failed to mature.
+With nearly a thousand acres of wheat, he had harvested barely enough
+for the next year's seed. He was not entirely at the end of his faith,
+however; on the contrary, he was filled with desire of the farther west.
+"The irrigated country is the next field for development. I'm going to
+sell out here and try irrigation in Montana. I want to get where I can
+regulate the water for my crops."
+
+"You'll do nothing of the kind," I retorted. "You'll go no further west.
+I have a better plan than that."
+
+The wind roared on, all that night and all the next day, and during this
+time we did little but feed the stove and argue our widely separated
+plans. I told them of Franklin's success on the stage with Herne, and I
+described my own busy, though unremunerative life as a writer, and as I
+talked the world from which I came shone with increasing splendor.
+
+Little by little the story of the country's decay came out. The village
+of Ordway had been moved away, nothing remained but the grain elevator.
+Many of our old neighbors had gone "to the irrigation country" and more
+were planning to go as soon as they could sell their farms. Columbia was
+also in desolate decline. Its hotel stood empty, its windows broken, its
+doors sagging.
+
+Nothing could have been more depressing, more hopeless, and my throat
+burned with bitter rage every time my mother shuffled across the floor,
+and when she shyly sat beside me and took my hand in hers as if to hold
+me fast, my voice almost failed me. I began to plead "Father, let's get
+a home together, somewhere. Suppose we compromise on old Neshonoc where
+you were married and where I was born. Let's buy a house and lot there
+and put the deed in mother's name so that it can never be alienated, and
+make it the Garland Homestead. Come! Mother's brothers are there, your
+sister is there, all your old pioneer comrades are there. It's in a
+rich and sheltered valley and is filled with associations of your
+youth.--Haven't you had enough of pioneering? Why not go back and be
+sheltered by the hills and trees for the rest of your lives? If you'll
+join us in this plan, Frank and I will spend our summers with you and
+perhaps we can all eat our Thanksgiving dinners together in the good old
+New England custom and be happy."
+
+Mother yielded at once to the earnestness of my appeal. "I'm ready to go
+back," she said. "There's only one thing to keep me here, and that is
+Jessie's grave," (Poor little girl! It did seem a bleak place in which
+to leave her lying alone) but the old soldier was still too proud, too
+much the pioneer, to bring himself at once to a surrender of his hopes.
+He shook his head and said, "I can't do it, Hamlin. I've got to fight it
+out right here or farther west."
+
+To this I darkly responded, "If you go farther west you go alone.
+Mother's pioneering is done. She is coming with me, back to comfort,
+back to a real home beside her brothers."
+
+As I grew calmer, we talked of the past, of the early days in Iowa, of
+the dimmer, yet still more beautiful valleys of Wisconsin, till mother
+sighed, and said, "I'd like to see the folks and the old coulee once
+more, but I never shall."
+
+"Yes, you shall," I asserted.
+
+We spoke of David whose feet were still marching to the guidons of the
+sunset, of Burton far away on an Island in Puget Sound, and together we
+decided that placid old William, sitting among his bees in Gill's
+Coulee, was after all the wiser man. Of what avail this constant quest
+of gold, beneath the far horizon's rim?
+
+"Father," I bluntly said, "you've been chasing a will-o'-the-wisp. For
+fifty years you've been moving westward, and always you have gone from
+certainty to uncertainty, from a comfortable home to a shanty. For
+thirty years you've carried mother on a ceaseless journey--to what end?
+Here you are,--snowbound on a treeless plain with mother old and
+crippled. It's a hard thing to say but the time has come for a 'bout
+face. _You must take the back trail._ It will hurt, but it must be
+done."
+
+"I can't do it!" he exclaimed. "I've never 'backed water' in my life,
+and I won't do it now. I'm not beaten yet. We've had three bad years in
+succession--we'll surely have a crop next year. I won't surrender so
+long as I can run a team."
+
+"Then, let me tell you something else," I resumed. "I will never visit
+you on this accursed plain again. You can live here if you want to, but
+I'm going to take mother out of it. She shall not grow old and die in
+such surroundings as these. I won't have it--it isn't right."
+
+At last the stern old Captain gave in, at least to the point of saying,
+"Well, we'll see. I'll come down next summer, and we'll visit William
+and look the ground over.--But I won't consider going back to stay till
+I've had a crop. I won't go back to the old valley dead-broke. I can't
+stand being called a failure. If I have a crop and can sell out I'll
+talk with you."
+
+"Very well. I'm going to stop off at Salem on my way East and tell the
+folks that you are about to sell out and come back to the old valley."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This victory over my pioneer father gave me such relief from my gnawing
+conscience that my whole sky lightened. The thought of establishing a
+family hearth at the point where my life began, had a fine appeal. All
+my schooling had been to migrate, to keep moving. "If your crop fails,
+go west and try a new soil. If disagreeable neighbors surround you,
+sell out and move,--always toward the open country. To remain quietly in
+your native place is a sign of weakness, of irresolution. Happiness
+dwells afar. Wealth and fame are to be found by journeying toward the
+sunset star!" Such had been the spirit, the message of all the songs and
+stories of my youth.
+
+Now suddenly I perceived the futility of our quest. I felt the value, I
+acknowledged the peace of the old, the settled. The valley of my birth
+even in the midst of winter had a quiet beauty. The bluffs were draped
+with purple and silver. Steel-blue shadows filled the hollows of the
+sunlit snow. The farmhouses all put forth a comfortable, settled, homey
+look. The farmers themselves, shaggy, fur-clad and well-fed, came into
+town driving fat horses whose bells uttered a song of plenty. On the
+plain we had feared the wind with a mortal terror, here the hills as
+well as the sheltering elms (which defended almost every roof) stood
+against the blast like friendly warders.
+
+The village life, though rude and slow-moving, was hearty and cheerful.
+As I went about the streets with my uncle William--gray-haired old
+pioneers whose names were startlingly familiar, called out, "Hello,
+Bill"--adding some homely jest precisely as they had been doing for
+forty years. As young men they had threshed or cradled or husked corn
+with my father, whom they still called by his first name. "So you are
+Dick's boy? How is Dick getting along?"
+
+"He has a big farm," I replied, "nearly a thousand acres, but he's going
+to sell out next year and come back here."
+
+They were all frankly pleased. "Is that so! Made his pile, I s'pose?"
+
+"Enough to live on, I guess," I answered evasively.
+
+"I'm glad to hear of it. I always liked Dick. We were in the woods
+together. I hated to see him leave the valley. How's Belle?"
+
+This question always brought the shadow back to my face. "Not very
+well,--but we hope she'll be better when she gets back here among her
+own folks."
+
+"Well, we'll all be glad to see them both," was the hearty reply.
+
+In this hope, with this plan in mind, I took my way back to New York,
+well pleased with my plan.
+
+After nearly a third of a century of migration, the Garlands were about
+to double on their trail, and their decision was deeply significant. It
+meant that a certain phase of American pioneering had ended, that "the
+woods and prairie lands" having all been taken up, nothing remained but
+the semi-arid valleys of the Rocky Mountains. "Irrigation" was a new
+word and a vague word in the ears of my father's generation, and had
+little of the charm which lay in the "flowery savannahs" of the
+Mississippi valley. In the years between 1865 and 1892 the nation had
+swiftly passed through the buoyant era of free land settlement, and now
+the day of reckoning had come.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+We Go to California
+
+
+The idea of a homestead now became an obsession with me. As a
+proletariat I knew the power of the landlord and the value of land. My
+love of the wilderness was increasing year by year, but all desire to
+plow the wild land was gone. My desire for a home did not involve a
+lonely cabin in a far-off valley, on the contrary I wanted roads and
+bridges and neighbors. My hope now was to possess a minute isle of
+safety in the midst of the streaming currents of western life--a little
+solid ground in my native valley on which the surviving members of my
+family could catch and cling.
+
+All about me as I travelled, I now perceived the mournful side of
+American "enterprise." Sons were deserting their work-worn fathers,
+daughters were forgetting their tired mothers. Families were everywhere
+breaking up. Ambitious young men and unsuccessful old men were in
+restless motion, spreading, swarming, dragging their reluctant women and
+their helpless and wondering children into unfamiliar hardships--At
+times I visioned the Middle Border as a colony of ants--which was an
+injustice to the ants, for ants have a reason for their apparently
+futile and aimless striving.
+
+My brother and I discussed my notion in detail as we sat in our
+six-by-nine dining room, high in our Harlem flat. "The house must be in
+a village. It must be New England in type and stand beneath tall elm
+trees," I said. "It must be broad-based and low--you know the kind, we
+saw dozens of them on our tramp-trip down the Connecticut Valley and
+we'll have a big garden and a tennis court. We'll need a barn, too, for
+father will want to keep a driving team. Mother shall have a girl to do
+the housework so that we can visit her often,"--and so on and on!
+
+Things were not coming our way very fast but they were coming, and it
+really looked as though my dream might become a reality. My brother was
+drawing a small but regular salary as a member of Herne's company, my
+stories were selling moderately well and as neither of us was given to
+drink or cards, whatever we earned we saved. To some minds our lives
+seemed stupidly regular, but we were happy in our quiet way.
+
+It was in my brother's little flat on One Hundred and Fifth Street that
+Stephen Crane renewed a friendship which had begun a couple of years
+before, while I was lecturing in Avon, New Jersey. He was a slim, pale,
+hungry looking boy at this time and had just written _The Red Badge of
+Courage_, in fact he brought the first half of it in his pocket on his
+second visit, and I loaned him fifteen dollars to redeem the other half
+from the keep of a cruel typist.
+
+He came again and again to see me, always with a new roll of manuscript
+in his ulster. Now it was _The Men in the Storm_, now a bunch of _The
+Black Riders_, curious poems, which he afterwards dedicated to me, and
+while my brother browned a steak, Steve and I usually sat in council
+over his dark future.
+
+"You will laugh over these lean years," I said to him, but he found
+small comfort in that prospect.
+
+To him I was a man established, and I took an absurd pleasure in playing
+the part of Successful Author. It was all very comical--for my study was
+the ratty little parlor of a furnished flat for which we paid thirty
+dollars per month. Still to the man at the bottom of a pit the fellow
+on top, in the sunlight, is a king, and to Crane my brother and I were
+at least dukes.
+
+An expression used by Suderman in his preface to _Dame Care_ had made a
+great impression on my mind and in discussing my future with the Hernes
+I quoted these lines and said, "I am resolved that _my_ mother shall not
+'rise from the feast of life empty.' Think of it! She has never seen a
+real play in a real theater in all her life. She has never seen a
+painting or heard a piece of fine music. She knows nothing of the
+splendors of our civilization except what comes to her in the
+newspapers, while here am I in the midst of every intellectual delight.
+I take no credit for my desire to comfort her--it's just my way of
+having fun. It's a purely selfish enterprise on my part."
+
+Katharine who was familiar with the theory of Egoistic Altruism would
+not let my statement go uncontradicted. She tried to make a virtue of my
+devotion to my parents.
+
+"No," I insisted,--"if batting around town gave me more real pleasure I
+would do it. It don't, in fact I shall never be quite happy till I have
+shown mother _Shore Acres_ and given her an opportunity to hear a
+symphony concert."
+
+Meanwhile, having no business adviser, I was doing honorable things in a
+foolish way. With no knowledge of how to publish my work I was bringing
+out a problem novel here, a realistic novelette there and a book of
+short stories in a third place, all to the effect of confusing my public
+and disgusting the book-seller. But then, no one in those days had any
+very clear notion of how to launch a young writer, and so (as I had
+entered the literary field by way of a side-gate) I was doing as well as
+could have been expected of me. My idea, it appears, was to get as many
+books into the same market at the same time as possible. As a matter of
+fact none of them paid me any royalty, my subsistence came from the
+sale of such short stories as I was able to lodge with _The Century_,
+and _Harper's_, _The Youth's Companion_ and _The Arena_.
+
+The "Bacheller Syndicate" took a kindly interest in me, and I came to
+like the big, blonde, dreaming youth from The North Country who was the
+nominal head of the firm. Irving Bacheller, even at that time struck me
+as more of a poet than a business man, though I was always glad to get
+his check, for it brought the Garland Homestead just that much nearer.
+On the whole it was a prosperous and busy winter for both my brother and
+myself.
+
+Chicago was in the early stages of building a World's Fair, and as
+spring came on I spent a couple of weeks in the city putting _Prairie
+Folks_ into shape for the printer. Kirkland introduced me to the Chicago
+Literary Club, and my publisher, Frances Schulte, took me to the Press
+Club and I began to understand and like the city.
+
+As May deepened I went on up to Wisconsin, full of my plan for a
+homestead, and the green and luscious slopes of the old valley gave me a
+new delight, a kind of proprietary delight. I began to think of it as
+home. It seemed not only a natural deed but a dutiful deed, this return
+to the land of my birth, it was the beginning of a more settled order of
+life.
+
+My aunt, Susan Bailey, who was living alone in the old house in Onalaska
+made me welcome, and showed grateful interest when I spoke to her of my
+ambition. "I'll be glad to help you pay for such a place," she said,
+"provided you will set aside a room in it for me. I am lonely now. Your
+father is all I have and I'd like to spend my old age with him. But
+don't buy a farm. Buy a house and lot here or in LaCrosse."
+
+"Mother wants to be in West Salem," I replied. "All our talk has been of
+West Salem, and if you can content yourself to live with us there, I
+shall be very glad of your co-operation. Father is still skittish. He
+will not come back till he can sell to advantage. However, the season
+has started well and I am hoping that he will at least come down with
+mother and talk the matter over with us."
+
+To my delight, almost to my surprise, mother came, alone. "Father will
+follow in a few days," she said--"if he can find someone to look after
+his stock and tools while he is gone."
+
+She was able to walk a little now and together we went about the
+village, and visited relatives and neighbors in the country. We ate
+"company dinners" of fried chicken and shortcake, and sat out on the
+grass beneath the shelter of noble trees during the heat of the day.
+There was something profoundly restful and satisfying in this
+atmosphere. No one seemed in a hurry and no one seemed to fear either
+the wind or the sun.
+
+The talk was largely of the past, of the fine free life of the "early
+days" and my mother's eyes often filled with happy tears as she met
+friends who remembered her as a girl. There was no doubt in her mind.
+"I'd like to live here," she said. "It's more like home than any other
+place. But I don't see how your father could stand it on a little piece
+of land. He likes his big fields."
+
+One night as we were sitting on William's porch, talking of war times
+and of Hugh and Jane and Walter, a sweet and solemn mood came over us.
+It seemed as if the spirits of the pioneers, the McClintocks and Dudleys
+had been called back and were all about us. It seemed to me (as to my
+mother) as if Luke or Leonard might at any moment emerge from the
+odorous June dusk and speak to us. We spoke of David, and my mother's
+love for him vibrated in her voice as she said, "I don't suppose I'll
+ever see him again. He's too poor and too proud to come back here, and
+I'm too old and lame and poor to visit him."
+
+This produced in me a sudden and most audacious change of plan. "I'm not
+so certain about that," I retorted. "Frank's company is going to play in
+California this winter, and I am arranging a lecture tour--I've just
+decided that you and father shall go along."
+
+The boldness of my plan startled her. "Oh, we can't do a crazy thing
+like that," she declared.
+
+"It's not so crazy. Father has been talking for years of a visit to his
+brother in Santa Barbara. Aunt Susan tells me she wants to spend one
+more winter in California, and so I see no reason in the world why you
+and father should not go. I'll pay for your tickets and Addison will be
+glad to house you. We're going!" I asserted firmly. "We'll put off
+buying our homestead till next year and make this the grandest trip of
+your life."
+
+Aunt Maria here put in a word, "You do just what Hamlin tells you to do.
+If he wants to spend his money giving you a good time, you let him."
+
+Mother smiled wistfully but incredulously. To her it all seemed as
+remote, as improbable as a trip to Egypt, but I continued to talk of it
+as settled and so did William and Maria.
+
+I wrote at once to my father outlining my trip and pleading strongly for
+his consent and co-operation. "All your life long you and mother have
+toiled with hardly a day off. Your travelling has been mainly in a
+covered wagon. You have seen nothing of cities for thirty years. Addison
+wants you to spend the winter with him, and mother wants to see David
+once more--why not go? Begin to plan right now and as soon as your crops
+are harvested, meet me at Omaha or Kansas City and we'll all go along
+together."
+
+He replied with unexpected half-promise. "The crops look pretty well.
+Unless something very destructive turns up I shall have a few dollars to
+spend. I'd like to make that trip. I'd like to see Addison once more."
+
+I replied, "The more I think about it, the more wonderful it all seems.
+It will enable you to see the mountains, and the great plains. You can
+visit Los Angeles and San Francisco. You can see the ocean. Frank is to
+play for a month in Frisco, and we can all meet at Uncle David's for
+Christmas."
+
+The remainder of the summer was taken up with the preparations for this
+gorgeous excursion. Mother went back to help father through the harvest,
+whilst I returned to Boston and completed arrangements for my lecture
+tour which was to carry me as far north as Puget Sound.
+
+At last in November, when the grain was all safely marketed, the old
+people met me in Kansas City, and from there as if in a dream, started
+westward with me in such holiday spirits as mother's health permitted.
+Father was like a boy. Having cut loose from the farm--at least for the
+winter, he declared his intention to have a good time, "as good as the
+law allows," he added with a smile.
+
+Of course they both expected to suffer on the journey, that's what
+travel had always meant to them, but I surprised them. I not only took
+separate lower berths in the sleeping car, I insisted on regular meals
+at the eating houses along the way, and they were amazed to find travel
+almost comfortable. The cost of all this disturbed my mother a good deal
+till I explained to her that my own expenses were paid by the lecture
+committees and that she need not worry about the price of her fare.
+Perhaps I even boasted about a recent sale of a story! If I did I hope
+it will be forgiven me for I was determined that this should be the
+greatest event in her life.
+
+My father's interest in all that came to view was as keen as my own.
+During all his years of manhood he had longed to cross the plains and to
+see Pike's Peak, and now while his approach was not as he had dreamed
+it, he was actually on his way into Colorado. "By the great Horn
+Spoons," he exclaimed as we neared the foot hills, "I'd like to have
+been here before the railroad."
+
+Here spoke the born explorer. His eyes sparkled, his face flushed. The
+farther we got into the houseless cattle range, the better he liked it.
+"The best times I've ever had in my life," he remarked as we were
+looking away across the plain at the faint shapes of the Spanish Peaks,
+"was when I was cruising the prairie in a covered wagon."
+
+Then he told me once again of his long trip into Minnesota before the
+war, and of the cavalry lieutenant who rounded the settlers up and sent
+them back to St. Paul to escape the Sioux who were on the warpath. "I
+never saw such a country for game as Northern Minnesota was in those
+days. It swarmed with water-fowl and chicken and deer. If the soldiers
+hadn't driven me out I would have had a farm up there. I was just
+starting to break a garden when the troops came."
+
+It was all glorious to me as to them. The Spanish life of Las Vegas
+where we rested for a day, the Indians of Laguna, the lava beds and
+painted buttes of the desert, the beautiful slopes of the San Francisco
+Mountains, the herds of cattle, the careering cowboys, the mines and
+miners--all came in for study and comment. We resented the nights which
+shut us out from so much that was interesting. Then came the hot sand of
+the Colorado valley, the swift climb to the bleak heights of the coast
+range--and, at last, the swift descent to the orange groves and singing
+birds of Riverside. A dozen times father cried out, "This alone is worth
+the cost of the trip."
+
+Mother was weary, how weary I did not know till we reached our room in
+the hotel. She did not complain but her face was more dejected than I
+had ever seen it, and I was greatly disturbed by it. Our grand excursion
+had come too late for her.
+
+A good night's sleep and a hearty breakfast restored her to something
+like her smiling self and when we took the train for Santa Barbara she
+betrayed more excitement than at any time on our trip. "Do we really
+_see_ the ocean?" she asked.
+
+"Yes," I explained, "we run close along the shore. You'll see waves and
+ships and sharks--may be a whale or two."
+
+Father was even more excited. He spent most of his time on the platform
+or hanging from the window. "Well, I never really expected to see the
+Pacific," he said as we were nearing the end of our journey. "Now I'm
+determined to see Frisco and the Golden Gate."
+
+"Of course--that is a part of our itinerary. You can see Frisco when you
+come up to visit David."
+
+My uncle Addison who was living in a plain but roomy house, was
+genuinely glad to see us, and his wife made us welcome in the spirit of
+the Middle Border for she was one of the early settlers of Green County,
+Wisconsin. In an hour we were at home.
+
+Our host was, as I remembered him, a tall thin man of quiet dignity and
+notable power of expression. His words were well chosen and his manner
+urbane. "I want you people to settle right down here with me for the
+winter," he said. "In fact I shall try to persuade Richard to buy a
+place here."
+
+This brought out my own plan for a home in West Salem and he agreed
+with me that the old people should never again spend a winter in Dakota.
+
+There was no question in my mind about the hospitality of this home and
+so with a very comfortable, a delightful sense of peace, of
+satisfaction, of security, I set out on my way to San Francisco,
+Portland and Olympia, eager to see California--all of it. Its mountains,
+its cities and above all its poets had long called to me. It meant the
+_Argonauts_ and _The Songs of the Sierras_ to me, and one of my main
+objects of destination was Joaquin Miller's home in Oakland Heights.
+
+No one else, so far as I knew, was transmitting this Coast life into
+literature. Edwin Markham was an Oakland school teacher, Frank Norris, a
+college student, and Jack London a boy in short trousers. Miller
+dominated the coast landscape. The mountains, the streams, the pines
+were his. A dozen times as I passed some splendid peak I quoted his
+lines. "Sierras! Eternal tents of snow that flash o'er battlements of
+mountains."
+
+Nevertheless, in all my journeying, throughout all my other interests, I
+kept in mind our design for a reunion at my uncle David's home in San
+José, and I wrote him to tell him when to expect us. Franklin, who was
+playing in San Francisco, arranged to meet me, and father and mother
+were to come up from Santa Barbara.
+
+It all fell out quite miraculously as we had planned it. On the 24th of
+December we all met at my uncle's door.
+
+This reunion, so American in its unexpectedness, deserves closer
+analysis. My brother had come from New York City. Father and mother were
+from central Dakota. My own home was still in Boston. David and his
+family had reached this little tenement by way of a long trail through
+Iowa, Dakota, Montana, Oregon and Northern California. We who had all
+started, from the same little Wisconsin Valley were here drawn together,
+as if by the magic of a conjuror's wand, in a city strange to us all.
+Can any other country on earth surpass the United States in the ruthless
+broadcast dispersion of its families? Could any other land furnish a
+more incredible momentary re-assembling of scattered units?
+
+The reader of this tale will remember that David was my boyish hero, and
+as I had not seen him for fifteen years, I had looked forward, with
+disquieting question concerning our meeting. Alas! My fears were
+justified. There was more of pain than pleasure in the visit, for us
+all. Although my brother and I did our best to make it joyous, the
+conditions of the reunion were sorrowful, for David, who like my father,
+had been following the lure of the sunset all his life, was in deep
+discouragement.
+
+From his fruitful farm in Iowa he had sought the free soil of Dakota.
+From Dakota he had been lured to Montana. In the forests of Montana he
+had been robbed by his partner, reduced in a single day to the rank of a
+day laborer, and so in the attempt to retrieve his fortunes, had again
+moved westward--ever westward, and here now at last in San José, at the
+end of his means and almost at the end of his courage, he was working at
+whatever he could find to do.
+
+Nevertheless, he was still the borderer, still the man of the open.
+Something in his face and voice, something in his glance set him apart
+from the ordinary workman. He still carried with him something of the
+hunter, something which came from the broad spaces of the Middle Border,
+and though his bushy hair and beard were streaked with white, and his
+eyes sad and dim, I could still discern in him some part of the physical
+strength and beauty which had made his young manhood so glorious to
+me--and deeper yet, I perceived in him the dreamer, the Celtic minstrel,
+the poet.
+
+His limbs, mighty as of old, were heavy, and his towering frame was
+beginning to stoop. His brave heart was beating slow. Fortune had been
+harshly inimical to him and his outlook on life was bitter. With all his
+tremendous physical power he had not been able to regain his former
+footing among men.
+
+In talking of his misfortunes, I asked him why he had not returned to
+Wisconsin after his loss in Montana, and he replied, as my father had
+done. "How could I do that? How could I sneak back with empty pockets?"
+
+Inevitably, almost at once, father spoke of the violin. "Have you got it
+yet?" he asked.
+
+"Yes," David replied. "But I seldom play on it now. In fact, I don't
+think there are any strings on it."
+
+I could tell from the tone of his voice that he had no will to play, but
+he dug the almost forgotten instrument out of a closet, strung it and
+tuned it, and that evening after dinner, when my father called out in
+familiar imperious fashion, "Come, come! now for a tune," David was
+prepared, reluctantly, to comply.
+
+"My hands are so stiff and clumsy now," he said by way of apology to me.
+
+It was a sad pleasure to me, as to him, this revival of youthful
+memories, and I would have spared him if I could, but my father insisted
+upon having all of the jocund dances and sweet old songs. Although a man
+of deep feeling in many ways, he could not understand the tragedy of my
+uncle's failing skill.
+
+But mother did! Her ear was too acute not to detect the difference in
+tone between his playing at this time and the power of expression he had
+once possessed, and in her shadowy corner she suffered sympathetically
+when beneath his work-worn fingers the strings cried out discordantly.
+The wrist, once so strong and sure, the hands so supple and swift were
+now hooks of horn and bronze. The magic touch of youth had vanished,
+and yet as he went on, some little part of his wizardry came back.
+
+At father's request he played once more _Maggie, Air Ye Sleepin'_, and
+while the strings wailed beneath his bow I shivered as of old, stirred
+by the winds of the past "roaring o'er Moorland craggy." Deep in my
+brain the sob of the song sank, filling my inner vision with flitting
+shadows of vanished faces, brows untouched of care, and sweet kind eyes
+lit by the firelight of a secure abundant hearth. I was lying once more
+before the fire in David's little cabin in the deep Wisconsin valley and
+Grandfather McClintock, a dreaming giant, was drumming on his chair, his
+face flame-lit, his hair a halo of snow and gold.
+
+Tune after tune the old Borderman played, in answer to my father's
+insistent demands, until at last the pain of it all became unendurable
+and he ended abruptly. "I can't play any more.--I'll never play again,"
+he added harshly as he laid the violin away in its box like a child in
+its coffin.
+
+We sat in silence, for we all realized that never again would we hear
+those wistful, meaningful melodies. Wordless, with aching throats,
+resentful of the present, my mother and my aunt dreamed of the bright
+and beautiful Neshonoc days when they were young and David was young and
+all the west was a land of hope.
+
+My father now joined in urging David to go back to the middle border.
+"I'll put you on my farm," he said. "Or if you want to go back to
+Neshonoc, we'll help you do that. We are thinking of going back there
+ourselves."
+
+David sadly shook his grizzled head. "No, I can't do that," he repeated.
+"I haven't money enough to pay my carfare, and besides, Becky and the
+children would never consent to it."
+
+I understood. His proud heart rebelled at the thought of the pitying or
+contemptuous eyes of his stay-at home neighbors. He who had gone forth
+so triumphantly thirty years before could not endure the notion of going
+back on borrowed money. Better to die among strangers like a soldier.
+
+Father, stern old pioneer though he was, could not think of leaving his
+wife's brother here, working like a Chinaman. "Dave has acted the fool,"
+he privately said to me, "but we will help him. If you can spare a
+little, we'll lend him enough to buy one of these fruit farms he's
+talking about."
+
+To this I agreed. Together we loaned him enough to make the first
+payment on a small farm. He was deeply grateful for this and hope again
+sprang up in his heart. "You won't regret it," he said brokenly. "This
+will put me on my feet, and by and by perhaps we'll meet in the old
+valley."--But we never did. I never saw him again.
+
+I shall always insist that a true musician, a superb violinist was lost
+to the world in David McClintock--but as he was born on the border and
+always remained on the border, how could he find himself? His hungry
+heart, his need of change, his search for the pot of gold beyond the
+sunset, had carried him from one adventure to another and always farther
+and farther from the things he most deeply craved. He might have been a
+great singer, for he had a beautiful voice and a keen appreciation of
+the finer elements of song.
+
+It was hard for me to adjust myself to his sorrowful decline into old
+age. I thought of him as he appeared to me when riding his threshing
+machine up the coulee road. I recalled the long rifle with which he used
+to carry off the prizes at the turkey shoots, and especially I
+remembered him as he looked while playing the violin on that far off
+Thanksgiving night in Lewis Valley.
+
+I left California with the feeling that his life was almost ended, and
+my heart was heavy with indignant pity for I must now remember him only
+as a broken and discouraged man. The David of my idolatry, the laughing
+giant of my boyhood world, could be found now, only in the mist which
+hung above the hills and valleys of Neshonoc.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV
+
+The Homestead in the Valley
+
+
+To my father the Golden Gate of San Francisco was grandly romantic. It
+was associated in his mind with Bret Harte and the Goldseekers of Forty
+Nine, as well as with Fremont and the Mexican War, hence one of his
+expressed desires for many years had been to stand on the hills above
+the bay and look out on the ocean. "I know Boston," he said, "and I want
+to know Frisco."
+
+My mother's interest in the city was more personal. She was eager to see
+her son Franklin play his part in a real play on a real stage. For that
+reward she was willing to undertake considerable extra fatigue and so to
+please her, to satisfy my father and to gratify myself, I accompanied
+them to San Francisco and for several days with a delightful sense of
+accomplishment, my brother and I led them about the town. We visited the
+Seal Rocks and climbed Nob Hill, explored Chinatown and walked through
+the Old Spanish Quarter, and as each of these pleasures was tasted my
+father said, "Well now, that's done!" precisely as if he were getting
+through a list of tedious duties.
+
+There was no hint of obligation, however, in the hours which they spent
+in seeing my brother's performance as one of the "Three Twins" in
+_Incog_. The piece was in truth very funny and Franklin hardly to be
+distinguished from his "Star," a fact which astonished and delighted my
+mother. She didn't know he could look so unlike himself. She laughed
+herself quite breathless over the absurd situations of the farce but
+father was not so easily satisfied. "This foolery is all well enough,"
+said he, "but I'd rather see you and your friend Herne in _Shore
+Acres_."
+
+At last the day came when they both expressed a desire to return to
+Santa Barbara. "We've had about all we can stand this trip," they
+confessed, whereupon, leaving Franklin at his job, we started down the
+valley on our way to Addison Garland's home which had come to have
+something of the quality of home to us all.
+
+We were tired but triumphant. One by one the things we had promised
+ourselves to see we had seen. The Plains, the Mountains, the Desert, the
+Orange Groves, the Ocean, all had been added to the list of our
+achievements. We had visited David and watched Franklin play in his
+"troupe," and now with a sense of fullness, of victory, we were on our
+way back to a safe harbor among the fruits and flowers of Southern
+California.
+
+This was the pleasantest thought of all to me and in private I said to
+my uncle, "I hope you can keep these people till spring. They must not
+go back to Dakota now."
+
+"Give yourself no concern about that!" replied Addison. "I have a
+program laid out which will keep them busy until May. We're going out to
+Catalina and up into the Ojai valley and down to Los Angeles. We are to
+play for the rest of the winter like a couple of boys."
+
+With mind entirely at ease I left them on the rose-embowered porch of my
+uncle's home, and started east by way of Denver and Chicago, eager to
+resume work on a book which I had promised for the autumn.
+
+Chicago was now full in the spot-light of the National Stage. In spite
+of the business depression which still engulfed the west, the promoters
+of the Columbian Exposition were going steadily forward with their
+plans, and when I arrived in the city about the middle of January, the
+bustle of preparation was at a very high point.
+
+The newly-acquired studios were swarming with eager and aspiring young
+artists, and I believed, (as many others believed) that the city was
+entering upon an era of swift and shining development. All the near-by
+states were stirred and heartened by this esthetic awakening of a
+metropolis which up to this time had given but little thought to the
+value of art in the life of a community. From being a huge, muddy windy
+market-place, it seemed about to take its place among the literary
+capitals of the world.
+
+Colonies of painters, sculptors, decorators and other art experts now
+colored its life in gratifying degree. Beauty was a work to advertise
+with, and writers like Harriet Monroe, Henry B. Fuller, George Ade,
+Peter Finley Dunne, and Eugene Field were at work celebrating, each in
+his kind, the changes in the thought and aspect of the town. Ambitious
+publishing houses were springing up and "dummies" of new magazines were
+being thumbed by reckless young editors. The talk was all of Art, and
+the Exposition. It did, indeed seem as if culture were about to hum.
+
+Naturally this flare of esthetic enthusiasm lit the tow of my
+imagination. I predicted a publishing center and a literary market-place
+second only to New York, a publishing center which by reason of its
+geographical position would be more progressive than Boston, and more
+American than Manhattan. "Here flames the spirit of youth. Here throbs
+the heart of America," I declared in _Crumbling Idols_, an essay which I
+was at this time writing for the _Forum_.
+
+In the heat of this conviction, I decided to give up my residence in
+Boston and establish headquarters in Chicago. I belonged here. My
+writing was of the Middle Border, and must continue to be so. Its
+spirit was mine. All of my immediate relations were dwellers in the
+west, and as I had also definitely set myself the task of depicting
+certain phases of mountain life, it was inevitable that I should
+ultimately bring my workshop to Chicago which was my natural pivot, the
+hinge on which my varied activities would revolve. And, finally, to live
+here would enable me to keep in closer personal touch with my father and
+mother in the Wisconsin homestead which I had fully determined to
+acquire.
+
+Following this decision, I returned to Boston, and at once announced my
+plan to Howells, Flower and other of my good friends who had meant so
+much to me in the past. Each was kind enough to express regret and all
+agreed that my scheme was logical. "It should bring you happiness and
+success," they added.
+
+Alas! The longer I stayed, the deeper I settled into my groove and the
+more difficult my removal became. It was not easy to surrender the busy
+and cheerful life I had been leading for nearly ten years. It was hard
+to say good-bye to the artists and writers and musicians with whom I had
+so long been associated. To leave the Common, the parks, the Library and
+the lovely walks and drives of Roxbury, was sorrowful business--but I
+did it! I packed my books ready for shipment and returned to Chicago in
+May just as the Exposition was about to open its doors.
+
+Like everyone else who saw it at this time I was amazed at the grandeur
+of "The White City," and impatiently anxious to have all my friends and
+relations share in my enjoyment of it. My father was back on the farm in
+Dakota and I wrote to him at once urging him to come down. "Frank will
+be here in June and we will take charge of you. Sell the cook stove if
+necessary and come. You _must_ see this fair. On the way back I will go
+as far as West Salem and we'll buy that homestead I've been talking
+about."
+
+My brother whose season closed about the twenty-fifth of May, joined me
+in urging them not to miss the fair and a few days later we were both
+delighted and a little surprised to get a letter from mother telling us
+when to expect them. "I can't walk very well," she explained, "but I'm
+coming. I am so hungry to see my boys that I don't mind the long
+journey."
+
+Having secured rooms for them at a small hotel near the west gate of the
+exposition grounds, we were at the station to receive them as they came
+from the train surrounded by other tired and dusty pilgrims of the
+plains. Father was in high spirits and mother was looking very well
+considering the tiresome ride of nearly seven hundred miles. "Give us a
+chance to wash up and we'll be ready for anything," she said with brave
+intonation.
+
+We took her at her word. With merciless enthusiasm we hurried them to
+their hotel and as soon as they had bathed and eaten a hasty lunch, we
+started out with intent to astonish and delight them. Here was another
+table at "the feast of life" from which we did not intend they should
+rise unsatisfied. "This shall be the richest experience of their lives,"
+we said.
+
+With a wheeled chair to save mother from the fatigue of walking we
+started down the line and so rapidly did we pass from one stupendous
+vista to another that we saw in a few hours many of the inside exhibits
+and all of the finest exteriors--not to mention a glimpse of the
+polyglot amazements of the Midway.
+
+In pursuance of our plan to watch the lights come on, we ate our supper
+in one of the big restaurants on the grounds and at eight o'clock
+entered the Court of Honor. It chanced to be a moonlit night, and as
+lamps were lit and the waters of the lagoon began to reflect the
+gleaming walls of the great palaces with their sculptured ornaments,
+and boats of quaint shape filled with singers came and went beneath the
+arching bridges, the wonder and the beauty of it all moved these
+dwellers of the level lands to tears of joy which was almost as poignant
+as pain. In addition to its grandeur the scene had for them the
+transitory quality of an autumn sunset, a splendor which they would
+never see again.
+
+Stunned by the majesty of the vision, my mother sat in her chair,
+visioning it all yet comprehending little of its meaning. Her life had
+been spent among homely small things, and these gorgeous scenes dazzled
+her, overwhelmed her, letting in upon her in one mighty flood a thousand
+stupefying suggestions of the art and history and poetry of the world.
+She was old and she was ill, and her brain ached with the weight of its
+new conceptions. Her face grew troubled and wistful, and her eyes as big
+and dark as those of a child.
+
+At last utterly overcome she leaned her head against my arm, closed her
+eyes and said, "Take me home. I can't stand any more of it."
+
+Sadly I took her away, back to her room, realizing that we had been too
+eager. We had oppressed her with the exotic, the magnificent. She was
+too old and too feeble to enjoy as we had hoped she would enjoy, the
+color and music and thronging streets of The Magic City.
+
+At the end of the third day father said, "Well, I've had enough." He
+too, began to long for the repose of the country, the solace of familiar
+scenes. In truth they were both surfeited with the alien, sick of the
+picturesque. Their ears suffered from the clamor of strange sounds as
+their eyes ached with the clash of unaccustomed color. My insistent
+haste, my desire to make up in a few hours for all their past
+deprivations seemed at the moment to have been a mistake.
+
+Seeing this, knowing that all the splendors of the Orient could not
+compensate them for another sleepless night, I decided to cut their
+visit short and hurry them back to quietude. Early on the fourth morning
+we started for the LaCrosse Valley by way of Madison--they with a sense
+of relief, I with a feeling of disappointment. "The feast was too rich,
+too highly spiced for their simple tastes," I now admitted.
+
+However, a certain amount of comfort came to me as I observed that the
+farther they got from the Fair the keener their enjoyment of it
+became!--With bodies at ease and minds untroubled, they now relived in
+pleasant retrospect all the excitement and bustle of the crowds, all the
+bewildering sights and sounds of the Midway. Scenes which had worried as
+well as amazed them were now recalled with growing enthusiasm, as our
+train, filled with other returning sightseers of like condition, rushed
+steadily northward into the green abundance of the land they knew so
+well, and when at six o'clock of a lovely afternoon, they stepped down
+upon the platform of the weather-beaten little station at West Salem,
+both were restored to their serene and buoyant selves. The leafy
+village, so green, so muddy, so lush with grass, seemed the perfection
+of restful security. The chuckle of robins on the lawns, the songs of
+cat-birds in the plum trees and the whistle of larks in the pasture
+appealed to them as parts of a familiar sweet and homely hymn.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Just in the edge of the village, on a four-acre plot of rich level
+ground, stood an old two-story frame cottage on which I had fixed my
+interest. It was not beautiful, not in the least like the ideal New
+England homestead my brother and I had so long discussed, but it was
+sheltered on the south by three enormous maples and its gate fronted
+upon a double row of New England elms whose branches almost arched the
+wide street. Its gardens, rich in grape vines, asparagus beds, plums,
+raspberries and other fruiting shrubs, appealed with especial power to
+my mother who had lived so long on the sun-baked plains that the sight
+of green things growing was very precious in her eyes. Clumps of lilacs,
+syringa and snow-ball, and beds of old-fashioned flowers gave further
+evidence of the love and care which the former owners of the place had
+lavished upon it.
+
+As for myself, the desire to see my aging parents safely sheltered
+beneath the benignant branches of those sturdy trees would have made me
+content even with a log cabin. In imagination I perceived this angular
+cottage growing into something fine and sweet and--our own!
+
+There was charm also in the fact that its western windows looked out
+upon the wooded hills over which I had wandered as a boy, and whose
+sky-line had printed itself deep into the lowest stratum of my
+subconscious memory; and so it happened that on the following night, as
+we stood before the gate looking out upon that sunset wall of purple
+bluffs from beneath the double row of elms stretching like a peristyle
+to the west, my decision came.
+
+"This is my choice," I declared. "Right here we take root. This shall be
+the Garland Homestead." I turned to my father. "When can you move?"
+
+"Not till after my grain is threshed and marketed," he replied.
+
+"Very well, let's call it the first of November, and we'll all meet here
+for our Thanksgiving dinner."
+
+Thanksgiving with us, as with most New Englanders, had always been a
+date-mark, something to count upon and to count from, and no sooner were
+we in possession of a deed, than my mother and I began to plan for a
+dinner which should be at once a reunion of the Garlands and
+McClintocks, a homecoming and a housewarming. With this understanding I
+let them go back for a final harvest in Dakota.
+
+The purchase of this small lot and commonplace house may seem very
+unimportant to the reader but to me and to my father it was in very
+truth epoch-marking. To me it was the ending of one life and the
+beginning of another. To him it was decisive and not altogether joyous.
+To accept this as his home meant a surrender of his faith in the Golden
+West, a tacit admission that all his explorations of the open lands with
+whatsoever they had meant of opportunity, had ended in a sense of
+failure on a barren soil. It was not easy for him to enter into the
+spirit of our Thanksgiving plans although he had given his consent to
+them. He was still the tiller of broad acres, the speculator hoping for
+a boom.
+
+Early in October, as soon as I could displace the renter of the house, I
+started in rebuilding and redecorating it as if for the entrance of a
+bride. I widened the dining room, refitted the kitchen and ordered new
+rugs, curtains and furniture from Chicago. I engaged a cook and maid,
+and bought a horse so that on November first, the date of my mother's
+arrival, I was able to meet her at the station and drive her in a
+carriage of her own to an almost completely outfitted home.
+
+It was by no means what I intended it to be, but it seemed luxurious to
+her. Tears dimmed her eyes as she stepped across the threshold, but when
+I said, "Mother, hereafter my headquarters are to be in Chicago, and my
+home here with you," she put her arms around my neck and wept. Her
+wanderings were over, her heart at peace.
+
+My father arrived a couple of weeks later, and with his coming, mother
+sent out the invitations for our dinner. So far as we could, we
+intended to bring together the scattered units of our family group.
+
+At last the great day came! My brother was unable to be present and
+there were other empty chairs, but the McClintocks were well
+represented. William, white-haired, gigantic, looking almost exactly
+like Grandad at the same age, came early, bringing his wife, his two
+sons, and his daughter-in-law. Frank and Lorette drove over from Lewis
+Valley, with both of their sons and a daughter-in-law. Samantha and Dan
+could not come, but Deborah and Susan were present and completed the
+family roll. Several of my father's old friends promised to come in
+after dinner.
+
+The table, reflecting the abundance of the valley in those peaceful
+times, was stretched to its full length and as we gathered about it
+William congratulated my father on getting back where cranberries and
+turkeys and fat squashes grew.
+
+My mother smiled at this jest, but my father, still loyal to Dakota, was
+quick to defend it. "I like it out there," he insisted. "I like wheat
+raising on a big scale. I don't know how I'm going to come down from
+operating a six-horse header to scraping with a hoe in a garden patch."
+
+Mother, wearing her black silk dress and lace collar, sat at one end of
+the table, while I, to relieve my father of the task of carving the
+twenty-pound turkey, sat opposite her. For the first time in my life I
+took position as head of the family and the significance of this fact
+did not escape the company. The pen had proved itself to be mightier
+than the plow. Going east had proved more profitable than going west!
+
+It was a noble dinner! As I regard it from the standpoint of today, with
+potatoes six dollars per bushel and turkeys forty cents per pound, it
+all seems part of a kindlier world, a vanished world--as it is! There
+were squashes and turnips and cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie and mince
+pie, (made under mother's supervision) and coffee with real cream,--all
+the things which are so precious now, and the talk was in praise of the
+delicious food and the Exposition which was just closing, and reports of
+the crops which were abundant and safely garnered. The wars of the world
+were all behind us and the nation on its way back to prosperity--and we
+were unafraid.
+
+The gay talk lasted well through the meal, but as mother's pies came on,
+Aunt Maria regretfully remarked, "It's a pity Frank can't help eat this
+dinner."
+
+"I wish Dave and Mantie were here," put in Deborah.
+
+"And Rachel," added mother.
+
+This brought the note of sadness which is inevitable in such a
+gathering, and the shadow deepened as we gathered about the fire a
+little later. The dead claimed their places.
+
+Since leaving the valley thirty years before our group had suffered many
+losses. All my grandparents were gone. My sisters Harriet and Jessie and
+my uncle Richard had fallen on the march. David and Rebecca were
+stranded in the foot hills of the Cascade mountains. Rachel, a widow,
+was in Georgia. The pioneers of '48 were old and their bright world a
+memory.
+
+My father called on mother for some of the old songs. "You and Deb sing
+_Nellie Wildwood_," he urged, and to me it was a call to all the absent
+ones, an invitation to gather about us in order that the gaps in our
+hearth-fire's broken circle might be filled.
+
+Sweet and clear though in diminished volume, my mother's voice rose on
+the tender refrain:
+
+    Never more to part, Nellie Wildwood
+    Never more to long for the spring.
+
+and I thought of Hattie and Jessie and tried to believe that they too
+were sharing in the comfort and contentment of our fire.
+
+George, who resembled his uncle David, and had much of his skill with
+the fiddle bow, had brought his violin with him, but when father asked
+Frank to play _Maggie, air ye sleepin'_, he shook his head, saying,
+"That's Dave's tune," and his loyalty touched us all.
+
+Quick tears sprang to mother's eyes. She knew all too well that never
+again would she hear her best-beloved brother touch the strings or join
+his voice to hers.
+
+It was a moment of sorrow for us all but only for a moment, for Deborah
+struck up one of the lively "darky pieces" which my father loved so
+well, and with its jubilant patter young and old returned to smiling.
+
+    It must be now in the Kingdom a-comin'
+    In the year of Jubilo!
+
+we shouted, and so translated the words of the song into an expression
+of our own rejoicing present.
+
+Song after song followed, war chants which renewed my father's military
+youth, ballads which deepened the shadows in my mother's eyes, and then
+at last, at my request, she sang _The Rolling Stone_, and with a smile
+at father, we all joined the chorus.
+
+    We'll stay on the farm and we'll suffer no loss
+    For the stone that keeps rolling will gather no moss.
+
+My father was not entirely convinced, but I, surrounded by these farmer
+folk, hearing from their lips these quaint melodies, responded like some
+tensely-strung instrument, whose chords are being played upon by
+searching winds. I acknowledged myself at home and for all time. Beneath
+my feet lay the rugged country rock of my nativity. It pleased me to
+discover my mental characteristics striking so deep into this typically
+American soil.
+
+One by one our guests rose and went away, jocularly saying to my father,
+"Well, Dick, you've done the right thing at last. It's a comfort to have
+you so handy. We'll come to dinner often." To me they said, "We'll
+expect to see more of you, now that the old folks are here."
+
+"This is my home," I repeated.
+
+When we were alone I turned to mother in the spirit of the builder.
+"Give me another year and I'll make this a homestead worth talking
+about. My head is full of plans for its improvement."
+
+"It's good enough for me as it is," she protested.
+
+"No, it isn't," I retorted quickly. "Nothing that I can do is good
+enough for you, but I intend to make you entirely happy if I can."
+
+Here I make an end of this story, here at the close of an epoch of
+western settlement, here with my father and mother sitting beside me in
+the light of a tender Thanksgiving, in our new old home and facing a
+peaceful future. I was thirty-three years of age, and in a certain very
+real sense this plot of ground, this protecting roof may be taken as the
+symbols of my hard-earned first success as well as the defiant gages of
+other necessary battles which I must fight and win.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As I was leaving next day for Chicago, I said, "Mother, what shall I
+bring you from the city?"
+
+With a shy smile she answered, "There is only one thing more you can
+bring me,--one thing more that I want."
+
+"What is that?"
+
+"A daughter. I need a daughter--and some grandchildren."
+
+
+
+
+    +-----------------------------------------------+
+    | Transcriber's Note:                           |
+    |                                               |
+    | Some inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in |
+    | the original document have been preserved.    |
+    |                                               |
+    | Typographical errors corrected in the text:   |
+    |                                               |
+    | Page  21  McEldowney changed to McIldowney    |
+    | Page  61  Winneshiek changed to Winnesheik    |
+    | Page  80  Winneshiek changed to Winnesheik    |
+    | Page  80  Winnesheik changed to Winnesheik    |
+    | Page 164  arroya changed to arroyo            |
+    | Page 202  luminious changed to luminous       |
+    | Page 250  Canon changed to Canyon             |
+    | Page 259  missing word "he" inserted          |
+    | Page 270  buffetted changed to buffeted       |
+    | Page 294  maneuvres changed to manoeuvres     |
+    | Page 309  these changed to those              |
+    | Page 316  turretted changed to turreted       |
+    | Page 328  Douglas changed to Douglass         |
+    | Page 334  gratitud changed to gratitude       |
+    | Page 362  "of" added between "all us"         |
+    | Page 364  unwieldly changed to unwieldy       |
+    | Page 376  Harpers changed to Harper's         |
+    | Page 378  Proverty changed to Poverty         |
+    | Page 383  gratuitious changed to gratuitous   |
+    | Page 391  Kurd's changed to Hurd's            |
+    | Page 393  discusssions changed to discussions |
+    | Page 410  Harpers changed to Harper's         |
+    | Page 414  wearyful changed to weariful        |
+    | Page 418  Harpers changed to Harper's         |
+    | Page 418  other changed to others             |
+    | Page 443  Harpers changed to Harper's         |
+    | Page 448  that changed to than                |
+    +-----------------------------------------------+
+
+
+
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+<body>
+<h1 class="pg">The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Son of the Middle Border, by Hamlin Garland</h1>
+<pre>
+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 <a href = "http://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: A Son of the Middle Border</p>
+<p>Author: Hamlin Garland</p>
+<p>Release Date: May 13, 2009  [eBook #28791]</p>
+<p>Language: English</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER***</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3 class="pg">E-text prepared by Lee Dawei, Barbara Kosker,<br />
+    and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team<br />
+    (http://www.pgdp.net)</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<a href="images/frontis.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/frontis.jpg" width="50%" alt="Hamlin Garland" /></a>
+</div>
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<p class="right">January twenty-second.</p><br />
+
+<p class="noin">Dear Mrs. LeCron:<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>In the spring of 1898, after finishing my LIFE OF ULYSSES S. GRANT, I
+began to plan to go into the Klondike over the Telegraph Trail. One day
+in showing the maps of my route to William Dean Howells, I said, "I
+shall go in here and come out there," a trail of nearly twelve hundred
+miles through an almost unknown country. As I uttered this I suddenly
+realized that I was starting on a path holding many perils and that I
+might not come back.</p>
+
+<p>With this in mind, I began to dictate the story of my career up to that
+time. It was put in the third person but it was my story and the story
+of my people, the Garlands and the McClintocks. This manuscript, crude
+and hasty as it was, became the basis of A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER. It
+was the beginning of a four-volume autobiography which it has taken me
+fifteen years to write. As a typical mid-west settler I felt that the
+history of my family would be, in a sense, the chronicle of the era of
+settlement lying between 1840 and 1914. I designedly kept it intimate
+and personal, the joys and sorrows of a group of migrating families. Of
+the four books, Volume One, THE TRAIL MAKERS, is based upon my memory of
+the talk around a pioneer fireside. The other three volumes are as true
+as my own memory can make them.</p>
+
+<p class="right">Hamlin Garland<br />
+</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<h2>A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER</h2>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<br />
+
+
+<h1>A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER</h1>
+
+<h4><i>by</i></h4>
+
+<h2 class="smcap">Hamlin Garland</h2>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<div class="img">
+<a href="images/titlepage.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/titlepage.jpg" width="40%" alt="Title page image" /></a>
+</div>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<h4>GROSSET &amp; DUNLAP&nbsp;&nbsp; &mdash;&nbsp;&nbsp; <i>Publishers</i><br />
+
+<i>by arrangement with</i><br />
+
+THE MACMILLAN COMPANY</h4>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<p class="cen">PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<p class="cen"><span class="smcap">Copyright, 1914 and 1917</span><br />
+<span class="smcap">By</span> P. F. COLLIER &amp; SON</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 10%;" />
+
+<p class="cen"><span class="smcap">Copyright, 1917</span><br />
+<span class="smcap">By</span> HAMLIN GARLAND</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 10%;" />
+
+
+<p class="cen">Set up and electrotyped. Published August, 1917. Reprinted<br />
+March, 1925, December, 1925. Reissued, January, 1927,<br />
+February, 1928.
+</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[Pg v]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<div class="centered">
+<table border="0" width="70%" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary="Table of Contents">
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp" width="13%" style="font-size: 80%;">CHAPTER</td>
+  <td class="tdl" width="75%">&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdr" width="12%" style="font-size: 80%;">PAGE</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp"><a href="#I">I.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl smcap">Home From the War</td>
+  <td class="tdr">1</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp"><a href="#II">II.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl smcap">The McClintocks</td>
+  <td class="tdr">14</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp"><a href="#III">III.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl smcap">The Home in the Coulee</td>
+  <td class="tdr">27</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp"><a href="#IV">IV.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl smcap">Father Sells the Farm</td>
+  <td class="tdr">42</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp"><a href="#V">V.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl smcap">The Last Threshing in the Coulee</td>
+  <td class="tdr">50</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp"><a href="#VI">VI.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl smcap">David and his Violin</td>
+  <td class="tdr">59</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp"><a href="#VII">VII.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl smcap">Winnesheik "Woods and Prairie Lands"</td>
+  <td class="tdr">68</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp"><a href="#VIII">VIII.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl smcap">We Move Again</td>
+  <td class="tdr">79</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp"><a href="#IX">IX.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl smcap">Our First Winter on the Prairie</td>
+  <td class="tdr">85</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp"><a href="#X">X.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl smcap">The Homestead on the Knoll</td>
+  <td class="tdr">99</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp"><a href="#XI">XI.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl smcap">School Life</td>
+  <td class="tdr">107</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp"><a href="#XII">XII.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl smcap">Chores and Almanacs</td>
+  <td class="tdr">116</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp"><a href="#XIII">XIII.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl smcap">Boy Life on the Prairie</td>
+  <td class="tdr">125</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp"><a href="#XIV">XIV.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl smcap">Wheat and the Harvest</td>
+  <td class="tdr">144</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp"><a href="#XV">XV.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl smcap">Harriet Goes Away</td>
+  <td class="tdr">161</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp"><a href="#XVI">XVI.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl smcap">We Move to Town</td>
+  <td class="tdr">173</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp"><a href="#XVII">XVII.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl smcap">A Taste of Village Life</td>
+  <td class="tdr">189</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp"><a href="#XVIII">XVIII.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl smcap">Back to the Farm</td>
+  <td class="tdr">204</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp"><a href="#XIX">XIX.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl smcap">End of School Days</td>
+  <td class="tdr">221</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp"><a href="#XX">XX.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl smcap">The Land of the Dakotas</td>
+  <td class="tdr">234</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp"><a href="#XXI">XXI.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl smcap">The Grasshopper and the Ant</td>
+  <td class="tdr">248</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp"><a href="#XXII">XXII.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl smcap">We Discover New England</td>
+  <td class="tdr">267</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp"><a href="#XXIII">XXIII.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl smcap">Coasting down Mt. Washington</td>
+  <td class="tdr">279<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">[Pg vi]</a></span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp" style="vertical-align: top;"><a href="#XXIV">XXIV.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl smcap">Tramping, New York, Washington, and Chicago</td>
+  <td class="tdr" style="vertical-align: bottom;">287</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp"><a href="#XXV">XXV.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl smcap">The Land of the Straddle-Bug</td>
+  <td class="tdr">301</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp"><a href="#XXVI">XXVI.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl smcap">On to Boston</td>
+  <td class="tdr">318</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp"><a href="#XXVII">XXVII.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl smcap">Enter a Friend</td>
+  <td class="tdr">333</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp"><a href="#XXVIII">XXVIII.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl smcap">A Visit to the West</td>
+  <td class="tdr">353</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp"><a href="#XXIX">XXIX.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl smcap">I Join the Anti-Poverty Brigade</td>
+  <td class="tdr">375</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp"><a href="#XXX">XXX.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl smcap">My Mother is Stricken</td>
+  <td class="tdr">396</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp"><a href="#XXXI">XXXI.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl smcap">Main Travelled Roads</td>
+  <td class="tdr">410</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp"><a href="#XXXII">XXXII.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl smcap">The Spirit of Revolt</td>
+  <td class="tdr">421</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp"><a href="#XXXIII">XXXIII.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl smcap">The End of the Sunset Trail</td>
+  <td class="tdr">433</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp"><a href="#XXXIV">XXXIV.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl smcap">We Go to California</td>
+  <td class="tdr">440</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp"><a href="#XXXV">XXXV.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl smcap">The Homestead in the Valley</td>
+  <td class="tdr">455</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<h2>A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER</h2>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[Pg viii]</a></span><br />
+<br />
+
+<div class="img">
+<a href="images/imagep001.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/imagep001.jpg" width="55%" alt="Sunset Image" /></a>
+</div>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span><br />
+
+<br />
+<h1>A Son of the Middle Border</h1>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br /><a name="I" id="I"></a>
+<br />
+
+<h2>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<h2>Home from the War</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>All of this universe known to me in the year 1864 was bounded by the
+wooded hills of a little Wisconsin coulee, and its center was the
+cottage in which my mother was living alone&mdash;my father was in the war.
+As I project myself back into that mystical age, half lights cover most
+of the valley. The road before our doorstone begins and ends in vague
+obscurity&mdash;and Granma Green's house at the fork of the trail stands on
+the very edge of the world in a sinister region peopled with bears and
+other menacing creatures. Beyond this point all is darkness and terror.</p>
+
+<p>It is Sunday afternoon and my mother and her three children, Frank,
+Harriet and I (all in our best dresses) are visiting the Widow Green,
+our nearest neighbor, a plump, jolly woman whom we greatly love. The
+house swarms with stalwart men and buxom women and we <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span>are all sitting
+around the table heaped with the remains of a harvest feast. The women
+are "telling fortunes" by means of tea-grounds. Mrs. Green is the
+seeress. After shaking the cup with the grounds at the bottom, she turns
+it bottom side up in a saucer. Then whirling it three times to the right
+and three times to the left, she lifts it and silently studies the
+position of the leaves which cling to the sides of the cup, what time we
+all wait in breathless suspense for her first word.</p>
+
+<p>"A soldier is coming to you!" she says to my mother. "See," and she
+points into the cup. We all crowd near, and I perceive a leaf with a
+stem sticking up from its body like a bayonet over a man's shoulder. "He
+is almost home," the widow goes on. Then with sudden dramatic turn she
+waves her hand toward the road, "Heavens and earth!" she cries. "There's
+Richard now!"</p>
+
+<p>We all turn and look toward the road, and there, indeed, is a soldier
+with a musket on his back, wearily plodding his way up the low hill just
+north of the gate. He is too far away for mother to call, and besides I
+think she must have been a little uncertain, for he did not so much as
+turn his head toward the house. Trembling with excitement she hurries
+little Frank into his wagon and telling Hattie to bring me, sets off up
+the road as fast as she can draw the baby's cart. It all seems a dream
+to me and I move dumbly, almost stupidly like one in a mist....</p>
+
+<p>We did not overtake the soldier, that is evident, for my next vision is
+that of a blue-coated figure leaning upon the fence, studying with
+intent gaze our empty cottage. I cannot, even now, precisely divine why
+he stood thus, sadly contemplating his silent home,&mdash;but so it was. His
+knapsack lay at his feet, his musket was propped against a post on whose
+top a cat was dreaming, unmindful of the warrior and his folded hands.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span>He did not hear us until we were close upon him, and even after he
+turned, my mother hesitated, so thin, so hollow-eyed, so changed was he.
+"Richard, is that you?" she quaveringly asked.</p>
+
+<p>His worn face lighted up. His arms rose. "Yes, Belle! Here I am," he
+answered.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless though he took my mother in his arms, I could not relate
+him to the father I had heard so much about. To me he was only a strange
+man with big eyes and care-worn face. I did not recognize in him
+anything I had ever known, but my sister, who was two years older than
+I, went to his bosom of her own motion. She knew him, whilst I submitted
+to his caresses rather for the reason that my mother urged me forward
+than because of any affection I felt for him. Frank, however, would not
+even permit a kiss. The gaunt and grizzled stranger terrified him.</p>
+
+<p>"Come here, my little man," my father said.&mdash;"<i>My little man!</i>" Across
+the space of half-a-century I can still hear the sad reproach in his
+voice. "Won't you come and see your poor old father when he comes home
+from the war?"</p>
+
+<p>"My little man!" How significant that phrase seems to me now! The war
+had in very truth come between this patriot and his sons. I had
+forgotten him&mdash;the baby had never known him.</p>
+
+<p>Frank crept beneath the rail fence and stood there, well out of reach,
+like a cautious kitten warily surveying an alien dog. At last the
+soldier stooped and drawing from his knapsack a big red apple, held it
+toward the staring babe, confidently calling, "Now, I guess he'll come
+to his poor old pap home from the war."</p>
+
+<p>The mother apologized. "He doesn't know you, Dick. How could he? He was
+only nine months old when you went away. He'll go to you by and by."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span>The babe crept slowly toward the shining lure. My father caught him
+despite his kicking, and hugged him close. "Now I've got you," he
+exulted.</p>
+
+<p>Then we all went into the little front room and the soldier laid off his
+heavy army shoes. My mother brought a pillow to put under his head, and
+so at last he stretched out on the floor the better to rest his tired,
+aching bones, and there I joined him.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Belle!" he said, in tones of utter content. "This is what I've
+dreamed about a million times."</p>
+
+<p>Frank and I grew each moment more friendly and soon began to tumble over
+him while mother hastened to cook something for him to eat. He asked for
+"hot biscuits and honey and plenty of coffee."</p>
+
+<p>That was a mystic hour&mdash;and yet how little I can recover of it! The
+afternoon glides into evening while the soldier talks, and at last we
+all go out to the barn to watch mother milk the cow. I hear him ask
+about the crops, the neighbors.&mdash;The sunlight passes. Mother leads the
+way back to the house. My father follows carrying little Frank in his
+arms.</p>
+
+<p>He is a "strange man" no longer. Each moment his voice sinks deeper into
+my remembrance. He is my father&mdash;that I feel ringing through the dim
+halls of my consciousness. Harriet clings to his hand in perfect
+knowledge and confidence. We eat our bread and milk, the trundle-bed is
+pulled out, we children clamber in, and I go to sleep to the music of
+his resonant voice recounting the story of the battles he had seen, and
+the marches he had made.</p>
+
+<p>The emergence of an individual consciousness from the void is, after
+all, the most amazing fact of human life and I should like to spend much
+of this first chapter in groping about in the luminous shadow of my
+infant world because, deeply considered, childish impressions are the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span>fundamentals upon which an author's fictional out-put is based; but to
+linger might weary my reader at the outset, although I count myself most
+fortunate in the fact that my boyhood was spent in the midst of a
+charming landscape and during a certain heroic era of western
+settlement.</p>
+
+<p>The men and women of that far time loom large in my thinking for they
+possessed not only the spirit of adventurers but the courage of
+warriors. Aside from the natural distortion of a boy's imagination I am
+quite sure that the pioneers of 1860 still retained something broad and
+fine in their action, something a boy might honorably imitate.</p>
+
+<p>The earliest dim scene in my memory is that of a soft warm evening. I am
+cradled in the lap of my sister Harriet who is sitting on the door-step
+beneath a low roof. It is mid-summer and at our feet lies a mat of
+dark-green grass from which a frog is croaking. The stars are out, and
+above the high hills to the east a mysterious glow is glorifying the
+sky. The cry of the small animal at last conveys to my sister's mind a
+notion of distress, and rising she peers closely along the path.
+Starting back with a cry of alarm, she calls and my mother hurries out.
+She, too, examines the ground, and at last points out to me a long
+striped snake with a poor, shrieking little tree-toad in its mouth. The
+horror of this scene fixes it in my mind. My mother beats the serpent
+with a stick. The mangled victim hastens away, and the curtain falls.</p>
+
+<p>I must have been about four years old at this time, although there is
+nothing to determine the precise date. Our house, a small frame cabin,
+stood on the eastern slope of a long ridge and faced across a valley
+which seemed very wide to me then, and in the middle of it lay a marsh
+filled with monsters, from which the Water <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span>People sang night by night.
+Beyond was a wooded mountain.</p>
+
+<p>This doorstone must have been a favorite evening seat for my sister, for
+I remember many other delicious gloamings. Bats whirl and squeak in the
+odorous dusk. Night hawks whiz and boom, and over the dark forest wall a
+prodigious moon miraculously rolls. Fire-flies dart through the grass,
+and in a lone tree just outside the fence, a whippoorwill sounds his
+plaintive note. Sweet, very sweet, and wonderful are all these!</p>
+
+<p>The marsh across the lane was a sinister menacing place even by day for
+there (so my sister Harriet warned me) serpents swarmed, eager to bite
+runaway boys. "And if you step in the mud between the tufts of grass,"
+she said, "you will surely sink out of sight."&mdash;At night this teeming
+bog became a place of dank and horrid mystery. Bears and wolves and
+wildcats were reported as ruling the dark woods just beyond&mdash;only the
+door yard and the road seemed safe for little men&mdash;and even there I
+wished my mother to be within immediate call.</p>
+
+<p>My father who had bought his farm "on time," just before the war, could
+not enlist among the first volunteers, though he was deeply moved to do
+so, till his land was paid for&mdash;but at last in 1863 on the very day that
+he made the last payment on the mortgage, he put his name down on the
+roll and went back to his wife, a soldier.</p>
+
+<p>I have heard my mother say that this was one of the darkest moments of
+her life and if you think about it you will understand the reason why.
+My sister was only five years old, I was three and Frank was a babe in
+the cradle. Broken hearted at the thought of the long separation, and
+scared by visions of battle my mother begged the soldier not to go; but
+he was of the stern stuff which makes patriots&mdash;and besides his name was
+already on the roll, therefore he went away to join <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span>Grant's army at
+Vicksburg. "What sacrifice! What folly!" said his pacifist
+neighbors&mdash;"to leave your wife and children for an idea, a mere
+sentiment; to put your life in peril for a striped silken rag." But he
+went. For thirteen dollars a month he marched and fought while his plow
+rusted in the shed and his cattle called to him from their stalls.</p>
+
+<p>My conscious memory holds nothing of my mother's agony of waiting,
+nothing of the dark days when the baby was ill and the doctor far
+away&mdash;but into my subconscious ear her voice sank, and the words
+<i>Grant</i>, <i>Lincoln</i>, <i>Sherman</i>, "<i>furlough</i>," "<i>mustered out</i>," ring like
+bells, deep-toned and vibrant. I shared dimly in every emotional
+utterance of the neighbors who came to call and a large part of what I
+am is due to the impressions of these deeply passionate and poetic
+years.</p>
+
+<p>Dim pictures come to me. I see my mother at the spinning wheel, I help
+her fill the candle molds. I hold in my hands the queer carding combs
+with their crinkly teeth, but my first definite connected recollection
+is the scene of my father's return at the close of the war.</p>
+
+<p>I was not quite five years old, and the events of that day are so
+commingled with later impressions,&mdash;experiences which came long
+after&mdash;that I cannot be quite sure which are true and which imagined,
+but the picture as a whole is very vivid and very complete.</p>
+
+<p>Thus it happened that my first impressions of life were martial, and my
+training military, for my father brought back from his two years'
+campaigning under Sherman and Thomas the temper and the habit of a
+soldier.</p>
+
+<p>He became naturally the dominant figure in my horizon, and his scheme of
+discipline impressed itself almost at once upon his children.</p>
+
+<p>I suspect that we had fallen into rather free and easy habits under
+mother's government, for she was too jolly, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span>too tender-hearted, to
+engender fear in us even when she threatened us with a switch or a
+shingle. We soon learned, however, that the soldier's promise of
+punishment was swift and precise in its fulfillment. We seldom presumed
+a second time on his forgetfulness or tolerance. We knew he loved us,
+for he often took us to his knees of an evening and told us stories of
+marches and battles, or chanted war-songs for us, but the moments of his
+tenderness were few and his fondling did not prevent him from almost
+instant use of the rod if he thought either of us needed it.</p>
+
+<p>His own boyhood had been both hard and short. Born of farmer folk in
+Oxford County, Maine, his early life had been spent on the soil in and
+about Lock's Mills with small chance of schooling. Later, as a teamster,
+and finally as shipping clerk for Amos Lawrence, he had enjoyed three
+mightily improving years in Boston. He loved to tell of his life there,
+and it is indicative of his character to say that he dwelt with special
+joy and pride on the actors and orators he had heard. He could describe
+some of the great scenes and repeat a few of the heroic lines of
+Shakespeare, and the roll of his deep voice as he declaimed, "Now is the
+winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York,"
+thrilled us&mdash;filled us with desire of something far off and wonderful.
+But best of all we loved to hear him tell of "Logan at Peach Tree
+Creek," and "Kilpatrick on the Granny White Turnpike."</p>
+
+<p>He was a vivid and concise story-teller and his words brought to us
+(sometimes all too clearly), the tragic happenings of the battlefields
+of Atlanta and Nashville. To him Grant, Lincoln, Sherman and Sheridan
+were among the noblest men of the world, and he would not tolerate any
+criticism of them.</p>
+
+<p>Next to his stories of the war I think we loved best <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span>to have him
+picture "the pineries" of Wisconsin, for during his first years in the
+State he had been both lumberman and raftsman, and his memory held
+delightful tales of wolves and bears and Indians.</p>
+
+<p>He often imitated the howls and growls and actions of the wild animals
+with startling realism, and his river narratives were full of
+unforgettable phrases like "the Jinny Bull Falls," "Old Moosinee" and
+"running the rapids."</p>
+
+<p>He also told us how his father and mother came west by way of the Erie
+Canal, and in a steamer on the Great Lakes, of how they landed in
+Milwaukee with Susan, their twelve-year-old daughter, sick with the
+smallpox; of how a farmer from Monticello carried them in his big farm
+wagon over the long road to their future home in Green county and it was
+with deep emotion that he described the bitter reception they
+encountered in the village.</p>
+
+<p>It appears that some of the citizens in a panic of dread were all for
+driving the Garlands out of town&mdash;then up rose old Hugh McClintock, big
+and gray as a grizzly bear, and put himself between the leader of the
+mob and its victims, and said, "You shall not lay hands upon them. Shame
+on ye!" And such was the power of his mighty arm and such the menace of
+his flashing eyes that no one went further with the plan of casting the
+new comers into the wilderness.</p>
+
+<p>Old Hugh established them in a lonely cabin on the edge of the village,
+and thereafter took care of them, nursing grandfather with his own hands
+until he was well. "And that's the way the McClintocks and the Garlands
+first joined forces," my father often said in ending the tale. "But the
+name of the man who carried your Aunt Susan in his wagon from Milwaukee
+to Monticello I never knew."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span>I cannot understand why that sick girl did not die on that long journey
+over the rough roads of Wisconsin, and what it all must have seemed to
+my gentle New England grandmother I grieve to think about. Beautiful as
+the land undoubtedly was, such an experience should have shaken her
+faith in western men and western hospitality. But apparently it did not,
+for I never heard her allude to this experience with bitterness.</p>
+
+<p>In addition to his military character, Dick Garland also carried with
+him the odor of the pine forest and exhibited the skill and training of
+a forester, for in those early days even at the time when I began to
+remember the neighborhood talk, nearly every young man who could get
+away from the farm or the village went north, in November, into the pine
+woods which covered the entire upper part of the State, and my father,
+who had been a raftsman and timber cruiser and pilot ever since his
+coming west, was deeply skilled with axe and steering oars. The
+lumberman's life at that time was rough but not vicious, for the men
+were nearly all of native American stock, and my father was none the
+worse for his winters in camp.</p>
+
+<p>His field of action as lumberman was for several years, in and around
+Big Bull Falls (as it was then called), near the present town of Wausau,
+and during that time he had charge of a crew of loggers in winter and in
+summer piloted rafts of lumber down to Dubuque and other points where
+saw mills were located. He was called at this time, "Yankee Dick, the
+Pilot."</p>
+
+<p>As a result of all these experiences in the woods, he was almost as much
+woodsman as soldier in his talk, and the heroic life he had led made him
+very wonderful in my eyes. According to his account (and I have no
+reason to doubt it) he had been exceedingly expert in running a raft and
+could ride a canoe like a Chippewa. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span>I remember hearing him very
+forcefully remark, "God forgot to make the man I could not follow."</p>
+
+<p>He was deft with an axe, keen of perception, sure of hand and foot, and
+entirely capable of holding his own with any man of his weight. Amid
+much drinking he remained temperate, and strange to say never used
+tobacco in any form. While not a large man he was nearly six feet in
+height, deep-chested and sinewy, and of dauntless courage. The quality
+which defended him from attack was the spirit which flamed from his
+eagle-gray eyes. Terrifying eyes they were, at times, as I had many
+occasions to note.</p>
+
+<p>As he gathered us all around his knee at night before the fire, he loved
+to tell us of riding the whirlpools of Big Bull Falls, or of how he
+lived for weeks on a raft with the water up to his knees (sleeping at
+night in his wet working clothes), sustained by the blood of youth and
+the spirit of adventure. His endurance even after his return from the
+war, was marvellous, although he walked a little bent and with a
+peculiar measured swinging stride&mdash;the stride of Sherman's veterans.</p>
+
+<p>As I was born in the first smoke of the great conflict, so all of my
+early memories of Green's coulee are permeated with the haze of the
+passing war-cloud. My soldier dad taught me the manual of arms, and for
+a year Harriet and I carried broom-sticks, flourished lath sabers, and
+hammered on dishpans in imitation of officers and drummers. Canteens
+made excellent water-bottles for the men in the harvest fields, and the
+long blue overcoats which the soldiers brought back with them from the
+south lent many a vivid spot of color to that far-off landscape.</p>
+
+<p>All the children of our valley inhaled with every breath this mingled
+air of romance and sorrow, history and song, and through those epic days
+runs a deep-laid <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span>consciousness of maternal pain. My mother's side of
+those long months of waiting was never fully delineated, for she was
+natively reticent and shy of expression. But piece by piece in later
+years I drew from her the tale of her long vigil, and obtained some hint
+of the bitter anguish of her suspense after each great battle.</p>
+
+<p>It is very strange, but I cannot define her face as I peer back into
+those childish times, though I can feel her strong arms about me. She
+seemed large and quite middle-aged to me, although she was in fact a
+handsome girl of twenty-three. Only by reference to a rare daguerreotype
+of the time am I able to correct this childish impression.</p>
+
+<p>Our farm lay well up in what is called Green's coulee, in a little
+valley just over the road which runs along the LaCrosse river in western
+Wisconsin. It contained one hundred and sixty acres of land which
+crumpled against the wooded hills on the east and lay well upon a ridge
+to the west. Only two families lived above us, and over the height to
+the north was the land of the red people, and small bands of their
+hunters used occasionally to come trailing down across our meadow on
+their way to and from LaCrosse, which was their immemorial trading
+point.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes they walked into our house, always without knocking&mdash;but then
+we understood their ways. No one knocks at the wigwam of a red neighbor,
+and we were not afraid of them, for they were friendly, and our mother
+often gave them bread and meat which they took (always without thanks)
+and ate with much relish while sitting beside our fire. All this seemed
+very curious to us, but as they were accustomed to share their food and
+lodging with one another so they accepted my mother's bounty in the same
+matter-of-fact fashion.</p>
+
+<p>Once two old fellows, while sitting by the fire, watched <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span>Frank and me
+bringing in wood for the kitchen stove, and smiled and muttered between
+themselves thereat. At last one of them patted my brother on the head
+and called out admiringly, "Small pappoose, heap work&mdash;good!" and we
+were very proud of the old man's praise.</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br /><a name="II" id="II"></a>
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<h2>The McClintocks</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>The members of my mother's family must have been often at our home
+during my father's military service in the south, but I have no mental
+pictures of them till after my father's homecoming in '65. Their names
+were familiar&mdash;were, indeed, like bits of old-fashioned song. "Richard"
+was a fine and tender word in my ear, but "David" and "Luke," "Deborah"
+and "Samantha," and especially "Hugh," suggested something alien as well
+as poetic.</p>
+
+<p>They all lived somewhere beyond the hills which walled our coulee on the
+east, in a place called Salem, and I was eager to visit them, for in
+that direction my universe died away in a luminous mist of unexplored
+distance. I had some notion of its near-by loveliness for I had once
+viewed it from the top of the tall bluff which stood like a warder at
+the gate of our valley, and when one bright morning my father said,
+"Belle, get ready, and we'll drive over to Grandad's," we all became
+greatly excited.</p>
+
+<p>In those days people did not "call," they went "visitin'." The women
+took their knitting and stayed all the afternoon and sometimes all
+night. No one owned a carriage. Each family journeyed in a heavy farm
+wagon with the father and mother riding high on the wooden spring seat
+while the children jounced up and down on the hay in the bottom of the
+box or clung desperately to the side-boards to keep from being jolted
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span>out. In such wise we started on our trip to the McClintocks'.</p>
+
+<p>The road ran to the south and east around the base of Sugar Loaf Bluff,
+thence across a lovely valley and over a high wooded ridge which was so
+steep that at times we rode above the tree tops. As father stopped the
+horses to let them rest, we children gazed about us with wondering eyes.
+Far behind us lay the LaCrosse valley through which a slender river ran,
+while before us towered wind-worn cliffs of stone. It was an exploring
+expedition for us.</p>
+
+<p>The top of the divide gave a grand view of wooded hills to the
+northeast, but father did not wait for us to enjoy that. He started the
+team on the perilous downward road without regard to our wishes, and so
+we bumped and clattered to the bottom, all joy of the scenery swallowed
+up in fear of being thrown from the wagon.</p>
+
+<p>The roar of a rapid, the gleam of a long curving stream, a sharp turn
+through a pair of bars, and we found ourselves approaching a low
+unpainted house which stood on a level bench overlooking a river and its
+meadows.</p>
+
+<p>"There it is. That's Grandad's house," said mother, and peering over her
+shoulder I perceived a group of people standing about the open door, and
+heard their shouts of welcome.</p>
+
+<p>My father laughed. "Looks as if the whole McClintock clan was on
+parade," he said.</p>
+
+<p>It was Sunday and all my aunts and uncles were in holiday dress and a
+merry, hearty, handsome group they were. One of the men helped my mother
+out and another, a roguish young fellow with a pock-marked face,
+snatched me from the wagon and carried me under his arm to the threshold
+where a short, gray-haired smiling <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span>woman was standing. "Mother, here's
+another grandson for you," he said as he put me at her feet.</p>
+
+<p>She greeted me kindly and led me into the house, in which a huge old man
+with a shock of perfectly white hair was sitting with a Bible on his
+knee. He had a rugged face framed in a circle of gray beard and his
+glance was absent-minded and remote. "Father," said my grandmother,
+"Belle has come. Here is one of her boys."</p>
+
+<p>Closing his book on his glasses to mark the place of his reading he
+turned to greet my mother who entered at this moment. His way of speech
+was as strange as his look and for a few moments I studied him with
+childish intentness. His face was rough-hewn as a rock but it was
+kindly, and though he soon turned from his guests and resumed his
+reading no one seemed to resent it.</p>
+
+<p>Young as I was I vaguely understood his mood. He was glad to see us but
+he was absorbed in something else, something of more importance, at the
+moment, than the chatter of the family. My uncles who came in a few
+moments later drew my attention and the white-haired dreamer fades from
+this scene.</p>
+
+<p>The room swarmed with McClintocks. There was William, a black-bearded,
+genial, quick-stepping giant who seized me by the collar with one hand
+and lifted me off the floor as if I were a puppy just to see how much I
+weighed; and David, a tall young man with handsome dark eyes and a droop
+at the outer corner of his eyelids which gave him in repose a look of
+melancholy distinction. He called me and I went to him readily for I
+loved him at once. His voice pleased me and I could see that my mother
+loved him too.</p>
+
+<p>From his knee I became acquainted with the girls of the family. Rachel,
+a demure and sweet-faced young woman, and Samantha, the beauty of the
+family, won <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span>my instant admiration, but Deb, as everybody called her,
+repelled me by her teasing ways. They were all gay as larks and their
+hearty clamor, so far removed from the quiet gravity of my grandmother
+Garland's house, pleased me. I had an immediate sense of being perfectly
+at home.</p>
+
+<p>There was an especial reason why this meeting should have been, as it
+was, a joyous hour. It was, in fact, a family reunion after the war. The
+dark days of sixty-five were over. The Nation was at peace and its
+warriors mustered out. True, some of those who had gone "down South" had
+not returned. Luke and Walter and Hugh were sleeping in The Wilderness,
+but Frank and Richard were safely at home and father was once more the
+clarion-voiced and tireless young man he had been when he went away to
+fight. So they all rejoiced, with only a passing tender word for those
+whose bodies filled a soldier's nameless grave.</p>
+
+<p>There were some boys of about my own age, William's sons, and as they at
+once led me away down into the grove, I can say little of what went on
+in the house after that. It must have been still in the warm September
+weather for we climbed the slender leafy trees and swayed and swung on
+their tip-tops like bobolinks. Perhaps I did not go so very high after
+all but I had the feeling of being very close to the sky.</p>
+
+<p>The blast of a bugle called us to dinner and we all went scrambling up
+the bank and into the "front room" like a swarm of hungry shotes
+responding to the call of the feeder. Aunt Deb, however shooed us out
+into the kitchen. "You can't stay here," she said. "Mother'll feed you
+in the kitchen."</p>
+
+<p>Grandmother was waiting for us and our places were ready, so what did it
+matter? We had chicken and mashed potato and nice hot biscuit and
+honey&mdash;just as <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span>good as the grown people had and could eat all we wanted
+without our mothers to bother us. I am quite certain about the honey for
+I found a bee in one of the cells of my piece of comb, and when I pushed
+my plate away in dismay grandmother laughed and said, "That is only a
+little baby bee. You see this is wild honey. William got it out of a
+tree and didn't have time to pick all the bees out of it."</p>
+
+<p>At this point my memories of this day fuse and flow into another visit
+to the McClintock homestead which must have taken place the next year,
+for it is my final record of my grandmother. I do not recall a single
+word that she said, but she again waited on us in the kitchen, beaming
+upon us with love and understanding. I see her also smiling in the midst
+of the joyous tumult which her children and grandchildren always
+produced when they met. She seemed content to listen and to serve.</p>
+
+<p>She was the mother of seven sons, each a splendid type of sturdy
+manhood, and six daughters almost equally gifted in physical beauty.
+Four of the sons stood over six feet in height and were of unusual
+strength. All of them&mdash;men and women alike&mdash;were musicians by
+inheritance, and I never think of them without hearing the sound of
+singing or the voice of the violin. Each of them could play some
+instrument and some of them could play any instrument. David, as you
+shall learn, was the finest fiddler of them all. Grandad himself was
+able to play the violin but he no longer did so. "'Tis the Devil's
+instrument," he said, but I noticed that he always kept time to it.</p>
+
+<p>Grandmother had very little learning. She could read and write of
+course, and she made frequent pathetic attempts to open her Bible or
+glance at a newspaper&mdash;all to little purpose, for her days were filled
+from dawn to dark with household duties.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span>I know little of her family history. Beyond the fact that she was born
+in Maryland and had been always on the border, I have little to record.
+She was in truth overshadowed by the picturesque figure of her husband
+who was of Scotch-Irish descent and a most singular and interesting
+character.</p>
+
+<p>He was a mystic as well as a minstrel. He was an "Adventist"&mdash;that is to
+say a believer in the Second Coming of Christ, and a constant student of
+the Bible, especially of those parts which predicted the heavens rolling
+together as a scroll, and the destruction of the earth. Notwithstanding
+his lack of education and his rude exterior, he was a man of marked
+dignity and sobriety of manner. Indeed he was both grave and remote in
+his intercourse with his neighbors.</p>
+
+<p>He was like Ezekiel, a dreamer of dreams. He loved the Old Testament,
+particularly those books which consisted of thunderous prophecies and
+passionate lamentations. The poetry of <i>Isaiah</i>, The visions of <i>The
+Apocalypse</i>, formed his emotional outlet, his escape into the world of
+imaginative literature. The songs he loved best were those which
+described chariots of flaming clouds, the sound of the resurrection
+trump&mdash;or the fields of amaranth blooming "on the other side of Jordan."</p>
+
+<p>As I close my eyes and peer back into my obscure childish world I can
+see him sitting in his straight-backed cane-bottomed chair, drumming on
+the rungs with his fingers, keeping time to some inaudible tune&mdash;or
+chanting with faintly-moving lips the wondrous words of <i>John</i> or
+<i>Daniel</i>. He must have been at this time about seventy years of age, but
+he seemed to me as old as a snow-covered mountain.</p>
+
+<p>My belief is that Grandmother did not fully share her husband's faith in
+The Second Coming but upon <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span>her fell the larger share of the burden of
+entertainment when Grandad made "the travelling brother" welcome. His
+was an open house to all who came along the road, and the fervid
+chantings, the impassioned prayers of these meetings lent a singular air
+of unreality to the business of cooking or plowing in the fields.</p>
+
+<p>I think he loved his wife and children, and yet I never heard him speak
+an affectionate word to them. He was kind, he was just, but he was not
+tender. With eyes turned inward, with a mind filled with visions of
+angel messengers with trumpets at their lips announcing "The Day of
+Wrath," how could he concern himself with the ordinary affairs of human
+life?</p>
+
+<p>Too old to bind grain in the harvest field, he was occasionally
+intrusted with the task of driving the reaper or the mower&mdash;and
+generally forgot to oil the bearings. His absent-mindedness was a source
+of laughter among his sons and sons-in-law. I've heard Frank say: "Dad
+would stop in the midst of a swath to announce the end of the world." He
+seldom remembered to put on a hat even in the blazing sun of July and
+his daughters had to keep an eye on him to be sure he had his vest on
+right-side out.</p>
+
+<p>Grandmother was cheerful in the midst of her toil and discomfort, for
+what other mother had such a family of noble boys and handsome girls?
+They all loved her, that she knew, and she was perfectly willing to
+sacrifice her comfort to promote theirs. Occasionally Samantha or Rachel
+remonstrated with her for working so hard, but she only put their
+protests aside and sent them back to their callers, for when the
+McClintock girls were at home, the horses of their suitors tied before
+the gate would have mounted a small troop of cavalry.</p>
+
+<p>It was well that this pioneer wife was rich in children, for she had
+little else. I do not suppose she ever knew <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>what it was to have a
+comfortable well-aired bedroom, even in childbirth. She was practical
+and a good manager, and she needed to be, for her husband was as weirdly
+unworldly as a farmer could be. He was indeed a sad husbandman. Only the
+splendid abundance of the soil and the manual skill of his sons, united
+to the good management of his wife, kept his family fed and clothed.
+"What is the use of laying up a store of goods against the early
+destruction of the world?" he argued.</p>
+
+<p>He was bitterly opposed to secret societies, for some reason which I
+never fully understood, and the only fury I ever knew him to express was
+directed against these "dens of iniquity."</p>
+
+<p>Nearly all his neighbors, like those in our coulee, were native American
+as their names indicated. The Dudleys, Elwells, and Griswolds came from
+Connecticut, the McIldowneys and McKinleys from New York and Ohio, the
+Baileys and Garlands from Maine. Buoyant, vital, confident, these sons
+of the border bent to the work of breaking sod and building fence quite
+in the spirit of sportsmen.</p>
+
+<p>They were always racing in those days, rejoicing in their abounding
+vigor. With them reaping was a game, husking corn a test of endurance
+and skill, threshing a "bee." It was a Dudley against a McClintock, a
+Gilfillan against a Garland, and my father's laughing descriptions of
+the barn-raisings, harvestings and railsplittings of the valley filled
+my mind with vivid pictures of manly deeds. Every phase of farm work was
+carried on by hand. Strength and skill counted high and I had good
+reason for my idolatry of David and William. With the hearts of woodsmen
+and fists of sailors they were precisely the type to appeal to the
+imagination of a boy. Hunters, athletes, skilled horsemen&mdash;everything
+they did was to me heroic.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span>Frank, smallest of all these sons of Hugh, was not what an observer
+would call puny. He weighed nearly one hundred and eighty pounds and
+never met his match except in his brothers. William could outlift him,
+David could out-run him and outleap him, but he was more agile than
+either&mdash;was indeed a skilled acrobat.</p>
+
+<p>His muscles were prodigious. The calves of his legs would not go into
+his top boots, and I have heard my father say that once when the
+"tumbling" in the little country "show" seemed not to his liking, Frank
+sprang over the ropes into the arena and went around the ring in a
+series of professional flip-flaps, to the unrestrained delight of the
+spectators. I did not witness this performance, I am sorry to say, but I
+have seen him do somersaults and turn cart-wheels in the door-yard just
+from the pure joy of living. He could have been a professional
+acrobat&mdash;and he came near to being a professional ball-player.</p>
+
+<p>He was always smiling, but his temper was fickle. Anybody could get a
+fight out of Frank McClintock at any time, simply by expressing a desire
+for it. To call him a liar was equivalent to contracting a doctor's
+bill. He loved hunting, as did all his brothers, but was too excitable
+to be a highly successful shot&mdash;whereas William and David were veritable
+Leather-stockings in their mastery of the heavy, old-fashioned rifle.
+David was especially dreaded at the turkey shoots of the county.</p>
+
+<p>William was over six feet in height, weighed two hundred and forty
+pounds, and stood "straight as an Injun." He was one of the most
+formidable men of the valley&mdash;even at fifty as I first recollect him, he
+walked with a quick lift of his foot like that of a young Chippewa. To
+me he was a huge gentle black bear, but I firmly believed he could whip
+any man in the world&mdash;even Uncle David&mdash;if he wanted to. I never
+expected to see him fight, for <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>I could not imagine anybody foolish
+enough to invite his wrath.</p>
+
+<p>Such a man did develop, but not until William was over sixty,
+gray-haired and ill, and even then it took two strong men to engage him
+fully, and when it was all over (the contest filled but a few seconds),
+one assailant could not be found, and the other had to call in a doctor
+to piece him together again.</p>
+
+<p>William did not have a mark&mdash;his troubles began when he went home to his
+quaint little old wife. In some strange way she divined that he had been
+fighting, and soon drew the story from him. "William McClintock," said
+she severely, "hain't you old enough to keep your temper and not go
+brawling around like that and at a school meeting too!"</p>
+
+<p>William hung his head. "Well, I dunno!&mdash;I suppose my dyspepsy has made
+me kind o' irritable," he said by way of apology.</p>
+
+<p>My father was the historian of most of these exploits on the part of his
+brothers-in-law, for he loved to exalt their physical prowess at the
+same time that he deplored their lack of enterprise and system. Certain
+of their traits he understood well. Others he was never able to
+comprehend, and I am not sure that they ever quite understood
+themselves.</p>
+
+<p>A deep vein of poetry, of sub-conscious celtic sadness, ran through them
+all. It was associated with their love of music and was wordless. Only
+hints of this endowment came out now and again, and to the day of his
+death my father continued to express perplexity, and a kind of
+irritation at the curious combination of bitterness and sweetness, sloth
+and tremendous energy, slovenliness and exaltation which made Hugh
+McClintock and his sons the jest and the admiration of those who knew
+them best.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>Undoubtedly to the Elwells and Dudleys, as to most of their definite,
+practical, orderly and successful New England neighbors, my uncles were
+merely a good-natured, easy-going lot of "fiddlers," but to me as I grew
+old enough to understand them, they became a group of potential poets,
+bards and dreamers, inarticulate and moody. They fell easily into somber
+silence. Even Frank, the most boisterous and outspoken of them all,
+could be thrown into sudden melancholy by a melody, a line of poetry or
+a beautiful landscape.</p>
+
+<p>The reason for this praise of their quality, if the reason needs to be
+stated, lies in my feeling of definite indebtedness to them. They
+furnished much of the charm and poetic suggestion of my childhood. Most
+of what I have in the way of feeling for music, for rhythm, I derive
+from my mother's side of the house, for it was almost entirely Celt in
+every characteristic. She herself was a wordless poet, a sensitive
+singer of sad romantic songs.</p>
+
+<p>Father was by nature an orator and a lover of the drama. So far as I am
+aware, he never read a poem if he could help it, and yet he responded
+instantly to music, and was instinctively courtly in manner. His mind
+was clear, positive and definite, and his utterances fluent. Orderly,
+resolute and thorough in all that he did, he despised William
+McClintock's easy-going habits of husbandry, and found David's lack of
+"push," of business enterprise, deeply irritating. And yet he loved them
+both and respected my mother for defending them.</p>
+
+<p>To me, in those days, the shortcomings of the McClintocks did not appear
+particularly heinous. All our neighbors were living in log houses and
+frame shanties built beside the brooks, or set close against the
+hillsides, and William's small unpainted dwelling seemed a natural
+feature of the landscape, but as the years passed <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span>and other and more
+enterprising settlers built big barns, and shining white houses, the
+gray and leaning stables, sagging gates and roofs of my uncle's farm,
+became a reproach even in my eyes, so that when I visited it for the
+last time just before our removal to Iowa, I, too, was a little ashamed
+of it. Its disorder did not diminish my regard for the owner, but I
+wished he would clean out the stable and prop up the wagon-shed.</p>
+
+<p>My grandmother's death came soon after our second visit to the
+homestead. I have no personal memory of the event, but I heard Uncle
+David describe it. The setting of the final scene in the drama was
+humble. The girls were washing clothes in the yard and the silent old
+mother was getting the mid-day meal. David, as he came in from the
+field, stopped for a moment with his sisters and in their talk Samantha
+said: "Mother isn't at all well today."</p>
+
+<p>David, looking toward the kitchen, said, "Isn't there some way to keep
+her from working?"</p>
+
+<p>"You know how she is," explained Deborah. "She's worked so long she
+don't know how to rest. We tried to get her to lie down for an hour but
+she wouldn't."</p>
+
+<p>David was troubled. "She'll have to stop sometime," he said, and then
+they passed to other things, hearing meanwhile the tread of their
+mother's busy feet.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly she appeared at the door, a frightened look on her face.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, mother!&mdash;what is the matter?" asked her daughter.</p>
+
+<p>She pointed to her mouth and shook her head, to indicate that she could
+not speak. David leaped toward her, but she dropped before he could
+reach her.</p>
+
+<p>Lifting her in his strong arms he laid her on her bed and hastened for
+the doctor. All in vain! She <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span>sank into unconsciousness and died without
+a word of farewell.</p>
+
+<p>She fell like a soldier in the ranks. Having served uncomplainingly up
+to the very edge of her evening bivouac, she passed to her final sleep
+in silent dignity.</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br /><a name="III" id="III"></a>
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<h2>The Home in the Coulee</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>Our postoffice was in the village of Onalaska, situated at the mouth of
+the Black River, which came down out of the wide forest lands of the
+north. It was called a "boom town" for the reason that "booms" or yards
+for holding pine logs laced the quiet bayou and supplied several large
+mills with timber. Busy saws clamored from the islands and great rafts
+of planks and lath and shingles were made up and floated down into the
+Mississippi and on to southern markets.</p>
+
+<p>It was a rude, rough little camp filled with raftsmen, loggers,
+mill-hands and boomsmen. Saloons abounded and deeds of violence were
+common, but to me it was a poem. From its position on a high plateau it
+commanded a lovely southern expanse of shimmering water bounded by
+purple bluffs. The spires of LaCrosse rose from the smoky distance, and
+steamships' hoarsely giving voice suggested illimitable reaches of
+travel. Some day I hoped my father would take me to that shining
+market-place whereto he carried all our grain.</p>
+
+<p>In this village of Onalaska, lived my grandfather and grandmother
+Garland, and their daughter Susan, whose husband, Richard Bailey, a
+quiet, kind man, was held in deep affection by us all. Of course he
+could not quite measure up to the high standards of David and William,
+even though he kept a store and sold candy, for he could neither kill a
+bear, nor play the fiddle, nor shoot a gun&mdash;much less turn hand-springs
+or tame a wild horse, but <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span>we liked him notwithstanding his limitations
+and were always glad when he came to visit us.</p>
+
+<p>Even at this time I recognized the wide differences which separated the
+McClintocks from the Garlands. The fact that my father's people lived to
+the west and in a town helped to emphasize the divergence.</p>
+
+<p>All the McClintocks were farmers, but grandfather Garland was a
+carpenter by trade, and a leader in his church which was to him a club,
+a forum and a commercial exchange. He was a native of Maine and proud of
+the fact. His eyes were keen and gray, his teeth fine and white, and his
+expression stern. His speech was neat and nipping. As a workman he was
+exact and his tools were always in perfect order. In brief he was a
+Yankee, as concentrated a bit of New England as was ever transplanted to
+the border. Hopelessly "sot" in all his eastern ways, he remained the
+doubter, the critic, all his life.</p>
+
+<p>We always spoke of him with formal precision as Grandfather Garland,
+never as "Grandad" or "Granpap" as we did in alluding to Hugh
+McClintock, and his long prayers (pieces of elaborate oratory) wearied
+us, while those of Grandad, which had the extravagance, the lyrical
+abandon of poetry, profoundly pleased us. Grandfather's church was a
+small white building in the edge of the village, Grandad's place of
+worship was a vision, a cloud-built temple, a house not made with hands.</p>
+
+<p>The contrast between my grandmothers was equally wide. Harriet Garland
+was tall and thin, with a dark and serious face. She was an invalid, and
+confined to a chair, which stood in the corner of her room. On the walls
+within reach of her hand hung many small pockets, so ordered that she
+could obtain her sewing materials without rising. She was always at work
+when I called, but it was her habit to pause and discover in some one
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span>of her receptacles a piece of candy or a stick of "lickerish root"
+which she gave to me "as a reward for being a good boy."</p>
+
+<p>She was always making needle rolls and thimble boxes and no doubt her
+skill helped to keep the family fed and clothed.</p>
+
+<p>Notwithstanding all divergence in the characters of Grandmother Garland
+and Grandmother McClintock, we held them both in almost equal affection.
+Serene, patient, bookish, Grandmother Garland brought to us, as to her
+neighbors in this rude river port, some of the best qualities of
+intellectual Boston, and from her lips we acquired many of the precepts
+and proverbs of our Pilgrim forbears.</p>
+
+<p>Her influence upon us was distinctly literary. She gloried in New
+England traditions, and taught us to love the poems of Whittier and
+Longfellow. It was she who called us to her knee and told us sadly yet
+benignly of the death of Lincoln, expressing only pity for the misguided
+assassin. She was a constant advocate of charity, piety, and learning.
+Always poor, and for many years a cripple, I never heard her complain,
+and no one, I think, ever saw her face clouded with a frown.</p>
+
+<p>Our neighbors in Green's Coulee were all native American. The first and
+nearest, Al Randal and his wife and son, we saw often and on the whole
+liked, but the Whitwells who lived on the farm above us were a constant
+source of comedy to my father. Old Port, as he was called, was a
+mild-mannered man who would have made very little impression on the
+community, but for his wife, a large and rather unkempt person, who
+assumed such man-like freedom of speech that my father was never without
+an amusing story of her doings.</p>
+
+<p>She swore in vigorous pioneer fashion, and dominated her husband by
+force of lung power as well as by a certain <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span>painful candor. "Port,
+you're an old fool," she often said to him in our presence. It was her
+habit to apologize to her guests, as they took their seats at her
+abundant table, "Wal, now, folks, I'm sorry, but there ain't a blank
+thing in this house fit for a dawg to eat&mdash;" expecting of course to have
+everyone cry out, "Oh, Mrs. Whitwell, this is a splendid dinner!" which
+they generally did. But once my father took her completely aback by
+rising resignedly from the table&mdash;"Come, Belle," said he to my mother,
+"let's go home. I'm not going to eat food not fit for a dog."</p>
+
+<p>The rough old woman staggered under this blow, but quickly recovered.
+"Dick Garland, you blank fool. Sit down, or I'll fetch you a swipe with
+the broom."</p>
+
+<p>In spite of her profanity and ignorance she was a good neighbor and in
+time of trouble no one was readier to relieve any distress in the
+coulee. However, it was upon Mrs. Randal and the widow Green that my
+mother called for aid, and I do not think Mrs. Whitwell was ever quite
+welcome even at our quilting bees, for her loud voice silenced every
+other, and my mother did not enjoy her vulgar stories.&mdash;Yes, I can
+remember several quilting bees, and I recall molding candles, and that
+our "company light" was a large kerosene lamp, in the glass globe of
+which a strip of red flannel was coiled. Probably this was merely a
+device to lengthen out the wick, but it made a memorable spot of color
+in the room&mdash;just as the watch-spring gong in the clock gave off a sound
+of fairy music to my ear. I don't know why the ring of that coil had
+such a wondrous appeal, but I often climbed upon a chair to rake its
+spirals with a nail in order that I might float away on its "dying
+fall."</p>
+
+<p>Life was primitive in all the homes of the coulee. Money was hard to
+get. We always had plenty to eat, but little in the way of luxuries. We
+had few toys <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span>except those we fashioned for ourselves, and our garments
+were mostly home-made. I have heard my father say, "Belle could go to
+town with me, buy the calico for a dress and be wearing it for
+supper"&mdash;but I fear that even this did not happen very often. Her "dress
+up" gowns, according to certain precious old tintypes, indicate that
+clothing was for her only a sort of uniform,&mdash;and yet I will not say
+this made her unhappy. Her face was always smiling. She knit all our
+socks, made all our shirts and suits. She even carded and spun wool, in
+addition to her housekeeping, and found time to help on our kites and
+bows and arrows.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Month by month the universe in which I lived lightened and widened. In
+my visits to Onalaska, I discovered the great Mississippi River, and the
+Minnesota Bluffs. The light of knowledge grew stronger. I began to
+perceive forms and faces which had been hidden in the dusk of babyhood.
+I heard more and more of LaCrosse, and out of the mist filled lower
+valley the booming roar of steamboats suggested to me distant countries
+and the sea.</p>
+
+<p>My father believed in service. At seven years of age, I had regular
+duties. I brought firewood to the kitchen and broke nubbins for the
+calves and shelled corn for the chickens. I have a dim memory of helping
+him (and grandfather) split oak-blocks into rafting pins in the kitchen.
+This seems incredible to me now, and yet it must have been so. In summer
+Harriet and I drove the cows to pasture, and carried "switchel" to the
+men in the hay-fields by means of a jug hung in the middle of a long
+stick.</p>
+
+<p>Haying was a delightful season to us, for the scythes of the men
+occasionally tossed up clusters of beautiful strawberries, which we
+joyfully gathered. I remember <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span>with especial pleasure the delicious
+shortcakes which my mother made of the wild fruit which we picked in the
+warm odorous grass along the edge of the meadow.</p>
+
+<p>Harvest time also brought a pleasing excitement (something unwonted,
+something like entertaining visitors) which compensated for the extra
+work demanded of us. The neighbors usually came in to help and life was
+a feast.</p>
+
+<p>There was, however, an ever-present menace in our lives, the snake!
+During mid-summer months blue racers and rattlesnakes swarmed and the
+terror of them often chilled our childish hearts. Once Harriet and I,
+with little Frank in his cart, came suddenly upon a monster diamond-back
+rattler sleeping by the roadside. In our mad efforts to escape, the cart
+was overturned and the baby scattered in the dust almost within reach of
+the snake. As soon as she realized what had happened, Harriet ran back
+bravely, caught up the child and brought him safely away.</p>
+
+<p>Another day, as I was riding on the load of wheat-sheaves, one of the
+men, in pitching the grain to the wagon lifted a rattlesnake with his
+fork. I saw it writhing in the bottom of the sheaf, and screamed out, "A
+snake, a snake!" It fell across the man's arm but slid harmlessly to the
+ground, and he put a tine through it.</p>
+
+<p>As it chanced to be just dinner time he took it with him to the house
+and fastened it down near the door of a coop in which an old hen and her
+brood of chickens were confined. I don't know why he did this but it
+threw the mother hen into such paroxysms of fear that she dashed herself
+again and again upon the slats of her house. It appeared that she
+comprehended to the full the terrible power of the writhing monster.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps it was this same year that one of the men <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span>discovered another
+enormous yellow-back in the barnyard, one of the largest ever seen on
+the farm&mdash;and killed it just as it was moving across an old barrel. I
+cannot now understand why it tried to cross the barrel, but I distinctly
+visualize the brown and yellow band it made as it lay for an instant
+just before the bludgeon fell upon it, crushing it and the barrel
+together. He was thicker than my leg and glistened in the sun with
+sinister splendor. As he hung limp over the fence, a warning to his
+fellows, it was hard for me to realize that death still lay in his
+square jaws and poisonous fangs.</p>
+
+<p>Innumerable garter-snakes infested the marsh, and black snakes inhabited
+the edges of the woodlands, but we were not so much afraid of them. We
+accepted them as unavoidable companions in the wild. They would run from
+us. Bears and wildcats we held in real terror, though they were
+considered denizens of the darkness and hence not likely to be met with
+if one kept to the daylight.</p>
+
+<p>The "hoop snake" was quite as authentic to us as the blue racer,
+although no one had actually seen one. Den Green's cousin's uncle had
+killed one in Michigan, and a man over the ridge had once been stung by
+one that came rolling down the hill with his tail in his mouth. But
+Den's cousin's uncle, when he saw the one coming toward him, had stepped
+aside quick as lightning, and the serpent's sharp fangs had buried
+themselves so deep in the bark of a tree, that he could not escape.</p>
+
+<p>Various other of the myths common to American boyhood, were held in
+perfect faith by Den and Ellis and Ed, myths which made every woodland
+path an ambush and every marshy spot a place of evil. Horsehairs would
+turn to snakes if left in the spring, and a serpent's tail would not die
+till sundown.</p>
+
+<p>Once on the high hillside, I started a stone rolling, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span>which as it went
+plunging into a hazel thicket, thrust out a deer, whose flight seemed
+fairly miraculous to me. He appeared to drift along the hillside like a
+bunch of thistle-down, and I took a singular delight in watching him
+disappear.</p>
+
+<p>Once my little brother and I, belated in our search for the cows, were
+far away on the hills when night suddenly came upon us. I could not have
+been more than eight years old and Frank was five. This incident reveals
+the fearless use our father made of us. True, we were hardly a mile from
+the house, but there were many serpents on the hillsides and wildcats in
+the cliffs, and eight is pretty young for such a task.</p>
+
+<p>We were following the cows through the tall grass and bushes, in the
+dark, when father came to our rescue, and I do not recall being sent on
+a similar expedition thereafter. I think mother protested against the
+danger of it. Her notions of our training were less rigorous.</p>
+
+<p>I never hear a cow-bell of a certain timbre that I do not relive in some
+degree the terror and despair of that hour on the mountain, when it
+seemed that my world had suddenly slipped away from me.</p>
+
+<p>Winter succeeds summer abruptly in my memory. Behind our house rose a
+sharp ridge down which we used to coast. Over this hill, fierce winds
+blew the snow, and wonderful, diamonded drifts covered the yard, and
+sometimes father was obliged to dig deep trenches in order to reach the
+barn.</p>
+
+<p>On winter evenings he shelled corn by drawing the ears across a spade
+resting on a wash tub, and we children built houses of the cobs, while
+mother sewed carpet rags or knit our mittens. Quilting bees of an
+afternoon were still recognized social functions and the spread quilt on
+its frame made a gorgeous tent under which my brother and I camped on
+our way to "Colorado." <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span>Lath swords and tin-pan drums remained a part of
+our equipment for a year or two.</p>
+
+<p>One stormy winter day, Edwin Randal, riding home in a sleigh behind his
+uncle, saw me in the yard and, picking an apple from an open barrel
+beside which he was standing, threw it at me. It was a very large apple,
+and as it struck the drift it disappeared leaving a round deep hole.
+Delving there I recovered it, and as I brushed the rime from its scarlet
+skin it seemed the most beautiful thing in this world. From this vividly
+remembered delight, I deduce the fact that apples were not very
+plentiful in our home.</p>
+
+<p>My favorite place in winter time was directly under the kitchen stove.
+It was one of the old-fashioned high-stepping breed, with long hind legs
+and an arching belly, and as the oven was on top, the space beneath the
+arch offered a delightful den for a cat, a dog or small boy, and I was
+usually to be found there, lying on my stomach, spelling out the
+"continued" stories which came to us in the county paper, for I was born
+with a hunger for print.</p>
+
+<p>We had few books in our house. Aside from the Bible I remember only one
+other, a thick, black volume filled with gaudy pictures of cherries and
+plums, and portraits of ideally fat and prosperous sheep, pigs and cows.
+It must have been a <i>Farmer's Annual</i> or State agricultural report, but
+it contained in the midst of its dry prose, occasional poems like "<i>I
+remember, I remember</i>," "<i>The Old Armchair</i>" and other pieces of a
+domestic or rural nature. I was especially moved by The Old Armchair,
+and although some of the words and expressions were beyond my
+comprehension, I fully understood the defiant tenderness of the lines:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I love it, I love it, and who shall dare<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To chide me for loving the old armchair?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>I fear the horticultural side of this volume did not interest me, but
+this sweetly-sad poem tinged even the gaudy pictures of prodigious plums
+and shining apples with a literary glamor. The preposterously plump
+cattle probably affected me as only another form of romantic fiction.
+The volume also had a pleasant smell, not so fine an odor as the Bible,
+but so delectable that I loved to bury my nose in its opened pages. What
+caused this odor I cannot tell&mdash;perhaps it had been used to press
+flowers or sprigs of sweet fern.</p>
+
+<p>Harriet's devotion to literature, like my own, was a nuisance. If my
+mother wanted a pan of chips she had to wrench one of us from a book, or
+tear us from a paper. If she pasted up a section of <i>Harper's Weekly</i>
+behind the washstand in the kitchen, I immediately discovered a special
+interest in that number, and likely enough forgot to wash myself. When
+mother saw this (as of course she very soon did), she turned the paper
+upside down, and thereafter accused me, with some justice, of standing
+on my head in order to continue my tale. "In fact," she often said, "it
+is easier for me to do my errands myself than to get either of you young
+ones to move."</p>
+
+<p>The first school which we attended was held in a neighboring farm-house,
+and there is very little to tell concerning it, but at seven I began to
+go to the public school in Onalaska and memory becomes definite, for the
+wide river which came silently out of the unknown north, carrying
+endless millions of pine logs, and the clamor of saws in the island
+mills, and especially the men walking the rolling logs with pike-poles
+in their hands filled me with a wordless joy. To be one of these brave
+and graceful "drivers" seemed almost as great an honor as to be a
+Captain in the army. Some of the boys of my acquaintance were sons of
+these hardy boomsmen, and related wonderful stories of their fathers'
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span>exploits&mdash;stories which we gladly believed. We all intended to be
+rivermen when we grew up.</p>
+
+<p>The quiet water below the booms harbored enormous fish at that time, and
+some of the male citizens who were too lazy to work in the mills got an
+easy living by capturing cat-fish, and when in liquor joined the
+rivermen in their drunken frays. My father's tales of the exploits of
+some of these redoubtable villains filled my mind with mingled
+admiration and terror. No one used the pistol, however, and very few the
+knife. Physical strength counted. Foot and fist were the weapons which
+ended each contest and no one was actually slain in these meetings of
+rival crews.</p>
+
+<p>In the midst of this tumult, surrounded by this coarse, unthinking life,
+my Grandmother Garland's home stood, a serene small sanctuary of lofty
+womanhood, a temple of New England virtue. From her and from my great
+aunt Bridges who lived in St. Louis, I received my first literary
+instruction, a partial offset to the vulgar yet heroic influence of the
+raftsmen and mill hands.</p>
+
+<p>The school-house, a wooden two story building, occupied an unkempt lot
+some distance back from the river and near a group of high sand dunes
+which possessed a sinister allurement to me. They had a mysterious
+desert quality, a flavor as of camels and Arabs. Once you got over
+behind them it seemed as if you were in another world, a far-off arid
+land where no water ran and only sear, sharp-edged grasses grew. Some of
+these mounds were miniature peaks of clear sand, so steep and dry that
+you could slide all the way down from top to bottom, and do no harm to
+your Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes. On rainy days you could dig caves in
+their sides.</p>
+
+<p>But the mills and the log booms were after all much more dramatic and we
+never failed to hurry away to the river if we had half an hour to spare.
+The "drivers," <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span>so brave and skilled, so graceful, held us in breathless
+admiration as they leaped from one rolling log to another, or walked the
+narrow wooden bridges above the deep and silently sweeping waters. The
+piles of slabs, the mounds of sawdust, the intermittent, ferocious snarl
+of the saws, the slap of falling lumber, the never ending fires eating
+up the refuse&mdash;all these sights and sounds made a return to school
+difficult. Even the life around the threshing machine seemed a little
+tame in comparison with the life of the booms.</p>
+
+<p>We were much at the Greens', our second-door neighbors to the south, and
+the doings of the men-folks fill large space in my memory. Ed, the
+oldest of the boys, a man of twenty-three or four, was as prodigious in
+his way as my Uncle David. He was mighty with the axe. His deeds as a
+railsplitter rivaled those of Lincoln. The number of cords of wood he
+could split in a single day was beyond belief. It was either seven or
+eleven, I forget which&mdash;I am perfectly certain of the number of
+buckwheat pancakes he could eat for I kept count on several occasions.
+Once he ate nine the size of a dinner plate together with a suitable
+number of sausages&mdash;but what would you expect of a man who could whirl a
+six pound axe all day in a desperate attack on the forest, without once
+looking at the sun or pausing for breath?</p>
+
+<p>However, he fell short of my hero in other ways. He looked like a fat
+man and his fiddling was only middling, therefore, notwithstanding his
+prowess with the axe and the maul, he remained subordinate to David, and
+though they never came to a test of strength we were perfectly sure that
+David was the finer man. His supple grace and his unconquerable pride
+made him altogether admirable.</p>
+
+<p>Den, the youngest of the Greens, was a boy about three years my senior,
+and a most attractive lad. I met him some years ago in California, a
+successful doctor, and we <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span>talked of the days when I was his slave and
+humbly carried his powder horn and game bag. Ellis Usher, who lived in
+Sand Lake and often hunted with Den, is an editor in Milwaukee and one
+of the political leaders of his state. In those days he had a small
+opinion of me. No doubt I <i>was</i> a nuisance.</p>
+
+<p>The road which led from our farm to the village school crossed a sandy
+ridge and often in June our path became so hot that it burned the soles
+of our feet. If we went out of the road there were sand-burrs and we
+lost a great deal of time picking needles from our toes. How we hated
+those sand-burrs!&mdash;However, on these sand barrens many luscious
+strawberries grew. They were not large, but they gave off a delicious
+odor, and it sometimes took us a long time to reach home.</p>
+
+<p>There was a recognized element of danger in this road. Wildcats were
+plentiful around the limestone cliffs, and bears had been seen under the
+oak trees. In fact a place on the hillside was often pointed out with
+awe as "the place where Al Randal killed the bear." Our way led past the
+village cemetery also, and there was to me something vaguely awesome in
+that silent bivouac of the dead.</p>
+
+<p>Among the other village boys in the school were two lads named
+Gallagher, one of whom, whose name was Matt, became my daily terror. He
+was two years older than I and had all of a city gamin's cunning and
+self-command. At every intermission he sidled close to me, walking round
+me, feeling my arms, and making much of my muscle. Sometimes he came
+behind and lifted me to see how heavy I was, or called attention to my
+strong hands and wrists, insisting with the most terrifying candor of
+conviction, "I'm sure you can lick me." We never quite came to combat,
+and finally he gave up this baiting for a still more exquisite method of
+torment.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span>My sister and I possessed a dog named Rover, a meek little yellow,
+bow-legged cur of mongrel character, but with the frankest, gentlest and
+sweetest face, it seemed to us, in all the world. He was not allowed to
+accompany us to school and scarcely ever left the yard, but Matt
+Gallagher in some way discovered my deep affection for this pet and
+thereafter played upon my fears with a malevolence which knew no mercy.
+One day he said, "Me and brother Dan are going over to your place to get
+a calf that's in your pasture. We're going to get excused fifteen
+minutes early. We'll get there before you do and we'll fix that dog of
+yours!&mdash;There won't be nothin' left of him but a grease spot when we are
+done with him."</p>
+
+<p>These words, spoken probably in jest, instantly filled my heart with an
+agony of fear. I saw in imagination just how my little playmate would
+come running out to meet his cruel foes, his brown eyes beaming with
+love and trust,&mdash;I saw them hiding sharp stones behind their backs while
+snapping their left-hand fingers to lure him within reach, and then I
+saw them drive their murdering weapons at his head.</p>
+
+<p>I could think of nothing else. I could not study, I could only sit and
+stare out of the window with tears running down my cheeks, until at
+last, the teacher observing my distress, inquired, "What is the matter?"
+And I, not knowing how to enter upon so terrible a tale, whined out,
+"I'm sick, I want to go home."</p>
+
+<p>"You may go," said the teacher kindly.</p>
+
+<p>Snatching my cap from beneath the desk where I had concealed it at
+recess, I hurried out and away over the sand-lot on the shortest way
+home. No stopping now for burrs!&mdash;I ran like one pursued. I shall never
+forget as long as I live, the pain, the panic, the frenzy of that race
+against time. The hot sand burned my feet, my <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span>side ached, my mouth was
+dry, and yet I ran on and on and on, looking back from moment to moment,
+seeing pursuers in every moving object.</p>
+
+<p>At last I came in sight of home, and Rover frisked out to meet me just
+as I had expected him to do, his tail wagging, his gentle eyes smiling
+up at me. Gasping, unable to utter a word, I frantically dragged the dog
+into the house and shut the door.</p>
+
+<p>"What is the matter?" asked my mother.</p>
+
+<p>I could not at the moment explain even to her what had threatened me,
+but her calm sweet words at last gave my story vent. Out it came in
+torrential flow.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, you poor child!" she said. "They were only fooling&mdash;they wouldn't
+dare to hurt your dog!"</p>
+
+<p>This was probably true. Matt had spoken without any clear idea of the
+torture he was inflicting.</p>
+
+<p>It is often said, "How little is required to give a child joy," but
+men&mdash;and women too&mdash;sometimes forget how little it takes to give a child
+pain.</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br /><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+<h2>Father Sells the Farm</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>Green's Coulee was a delightful place for boys. It offered hunting and
+coasting and many other engrossing sports, but my father, as the seasons
+went by, became thoroughly dissatisfied with its disadvantages. More and
+more he resented the stumps and ridges which interrupted his plow. Much
+of his quarter-section remained unbroken. There were ditches to be dug
+in the marsh and young oaks to be uprooted from the forest, and he was
+obliged to toil with unremitting severity. There were times, of course,
+when field duties did not press, but never a day came when the necessity
+for twelve hours' labor did not exist.</p>
+
+<p>Furthermore, as he grubbed or reaped he remembered the glorious prairies
+he had crossed on his exploring trip into Minnesota before the war, and
+the oftener he thought of them the more bitterly he resented his
+up-tilted, horse-killing fields, and his complaining words sank so deep
+into the minds of his sons that for years thereafter they were unable to
+look upon any rise of ground as an object to be admired.</p>
+
+<p>It irked him beyond measure to force his reaper along a steep slope, and
+he loathed the irregular little patches running up the ravines behind
+the timbered knolls, and so at last like many another of his neighbors
+he began to look away to the west as a fairer field for conquest. He no
+more thought of going east than a liberated eagle dreams of returning to
+its narrow cage. He loved to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>talk of Boston, to boast of its splendor,
+but to live there, to earn his bread there, was unthinkable. Beneath the
+sunset lay the enchanted land of opportunity and his liberation came
+unexpectedly.</p>
+
+<p>Sometime in the spring of 1868, a merchant from LaCrosse, a plump man
+who brought us candy and was very cordial and condescending, began
+negotiations for our farm, and in the discussion of plans which
+followed, my conception of the universe expanded. I began to understand
+that "Minnesota" was not a bluff but a wide land of romance, a prairie,
+peopled with red men, which lay far beyond the big river. And then, one
+day, I heard my father read to my mother a paragraph from the county
+paper which ran like this, "It is reported that Richard Garland has sold
+his farm in Green's Coulee to our popular grocer, Mr. Speer. Mr. Speer
+intends to make of it a model dairy farm."</p>
+
+<p>This intention seemed somehow to reflect a ray of glory upon us, though
+I fear it did not solace my mother, as she contemplated the loss of home
+and kindred. She was not by nature an emigrant,&mdash;few women are. She was
+content with the pleasant slopes, the kindly neighbors of Green's
+Coulee. Furthermore, most of her brothers and sisters still lived just
+across the ridge in the valley of the Neshonoc, and the thought of
+leaving them for a wild and unknown region was not pleasant.</p>
+
+<p>To my father, on the contrary, change was alluring. Iowa was now the
+place of the rainbow, and the pot of gold. He was eager to push on
+toward it, confident of the outcome. His spirit was reflected in one of
+the songs which we children particularly enjoyed hearing our mother
+sing, a ballad which consisted of a dialogue between a husband and wife
+on this very subject of emigration. The words as well as its wailing
+melody still stir me deeply, for they lay hold of my sub-conscious
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span>memory&mdash;embodying admirably the debate which went on in our home as
+well as in the homes of other farmers in the valley,&mdash;only, alas! our
+mothers did not prevail.</p>
+
+<p>It begins with a statement of unrest on the part of the husband who
+confesses that he is about to give up his plow and his cart&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Away to Colorado a journey I'll go,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For to double my fortune as other men do,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>While here I must labor each day in the field</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>And the winter consumes all the summer doth yield</i>.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">To this the wife replies:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Dear husband, I've noticed with a sorrowful heart<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That you long have neglected your plow and your cart,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Your horses, sheep, cattle at random do run,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And your new Sunday jacket goes every day on.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Oh, stay on your farm and you'll suffer no loss,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>For the stone that keeps rolling will gather no moss.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">But the husband insists:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Oh, wife, let us go; Oh, don't let us wait;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I long to be there, and I long to be great,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">While you some fair lady and who knows but I<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">May be some rich governor long 'fore I die,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Whilst here I must labor each day in the field,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>And the winter consumes all the summer doth yield</i>.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">But wife shrewdly retorts:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Dear husband, remember those lands are so dear<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They will cost you the labor of many a year.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Your horses, sheep, cattle will all be to buy,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You will hardly get settled before you must die.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Oh, stay on the farm,&mdash;etc.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">The husband then argues that as in that country the lands are all
+cleared to the plow, and horses and cattle not very dear, they would
+soon be rich. Indeed, "we will <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span>feast on fat venison one-half of the
+year." Thereupon the wife brings in her final argument:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Oh, husband, remember those lands of delight<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Are surrounded by Indians who murder by night.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Your house will be plundered and burnt to the ground<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">While your wife and your children lie mangled around.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">This fetches the husband up with a round turn:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Oh, wife, you've convinced me, I'll argue no more,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I never once thought of your dying before.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I love my dear children although they are small<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And you, my dear wife, I love greatest of all.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">Refrain (both together)<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">We'll stay on the farm and we'll suffer no loss<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For the stone that keeps rolling will gather no moss.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This song was not an especial favorite of my father. Its minor strains
+and its expressions of womanly doubts and fears were antipathetic to his
+sanguine, buoyant, self-confident nature. He was inclined to ridicule
+the conclusions of its last verse and to say that the man was a
+molly-coddle&mdash;or whatever the word of contempt was in those days. As an
+antidote he usually called for "O'er the hills in legions, boys," which
+exactly expressed his love of exploration and adventure.</p>
+
+<p>This ballad which dates back to the conquest of the Allegheny mountains
+opens with a fine uplifting note,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Cheer up, brothers, as we go<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O'er the mountains, westward ho,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where herds of deer and buffalo<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Furnish the fare.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">and the refrain is at once a bugle call and a vision:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Then o'er the hills in legions, boys,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fair freedom's star<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Points to the sunset regions, boys,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ha, ha, ha-ha!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin"><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span>and when my mother's clear voice rose on the notes of that exultant
+chorus, our hearts responded with a surge of emotion akin to that which
+sent the followers of Daniel Boone across the Blue Ridge, and lined the
+trails of Kentucky and Ohio with the canvas-covered wagons of the
+pioneers.</p>
+
+<p>A little farther on in the song came these words,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">When we've wood and prairie land,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Won by our toil,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We'll reign like kings in fairy land,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lords of the soil!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">which always produced in my mind the picture of a noble farm-house in a
+park-like valley, just as the line, "Well have our rifles ready, boys,"
+expressed the boldness and self-reliance of an armed horseman.</p>
+
+<p>The significance of this song in the lives of the McClintocks and the
+Garlands cannot be measured. It was the marching song of my
+Grandfather's generation and undoubtedly profoundly influenced my father
+and my uncles in all that they did. It suggested shining mountains, and
+grassy vales, swarming with bear and elk. It called to green savannahs
+and endless flowery glades. It voiced as no other song did, the pioneer
+impulse throbbing deep in my father's blood. That its words will not
+bear close inspection today takes little from its power. Unquestionably
+it was a directing force in the lives of at least three generations of
+my pioneering race. Its strains will be found running through this book
+from first to last, for its pictures continued to allure my father on
+and on toward "the sunset regions," and its splendid faith carried him
+through many a dark vale of discontent.</p>
+
+<p>Our home was a place of song, notwithstanding the severe toil which was
+demanded of every hand, for often <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>of an evening, especially in winter
+time, father took his seat beside the fire, invited us to his knees, and
+called on mother to sing. These moods were very sweet to us and we
+usually insisted upon his singing for us. True, he hardly knew one tune
+from another, but he had a hearty resounding chant which delighted us,
+and one of the ballads which we especially like to hear him repeat was
+called <i>Down the Ohio</i>. Only one verse survives in my memory:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The river is up, the channel is deep,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The winds blow high and strong.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The flash of the oars, the stroke we keep,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As we row the old boat along,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Down the O-h-i-o.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Mother, on the contrary, was gifted with a voice of great range and
+sweetness, and from her we always demanded <i>Nettie Wildwood</i>, <i>Lily
+Dale</i>, <i>Lorena</i> or some of Root's stirring war songs. We loved her
+noble, musical tone, and yet we always enjoyed our father's tuneless
+roar. There was something dramatic and moving in each of his ballads. He
+made the words mean so much.</p>
+
+<p>It is a curious fact that nearly all of the ballads which the
+McClintocks and other of these powerful young sons of the border loved
+to sing were sad. <i>Nellie Wildwood</i>, <i>Minnie Minturn</i>, <i>Belle Mahone</i>,
+<i>Lily Dale</i> were all concerned with dead or dying maidens or with
+mocking birds still singing o'er their graves. Weeping willows and
+funeral urns ornamented the cover of each mournful ballad. Not one
+smiling face peered forth from the pages of <i>The Home Diadem</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Lonely like a withered tree,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">What is all the world to me?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Light and life were all in thee,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Sweet Belle Mahone,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span>wailed stalwart David and buxom Deborah, and ready tears moistened my
+tanned plump cheeks.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps it was partly by way of contrast that the jocund song of
+<i>Freedom's Star</i> always meant so much to me, but however it came about,
+I am perfectly certain that it was an immense subconscious force in the
+life of my father as it had been in the westward marching of the
+McClintocks. In my own thinking it became at once a vision and a lure.</p>
+
+<p>The only humorous songs which my uncles knew were negro ditties, like
+<i>Camp Town Racetrack</i> and <i>Jordan am a Hard Road to Trabbel</i> but in
+addition to the sad ballads I have quoted, they joined my mother in <i>The
+Pirate's Serenade</i>, <i>Erin's Green Shore</i>, <i>Bird of the Wilderness</i>, and
+the memory of their mellow voices creates a golden dusk between me and
+that far-off cottage.</p>
+
+<p>During the summer of my eighth year, I took a part in haying and
+harvest, and I have a painful recollection of raking hay after the
+wagons, for I wore no shoes and the stubble was very sharp. I used to
+slip my feet along close to the ground, thus bending the stubble away
+from me before throwing my weight on it, otherwise walking was painful.
+If I were sent across the field on an errand I always sought out the
+path left by the broad wheels of the mowing machine and walked therein
+with a most delicious sense of safety.</p>
+
+<p>It cannot be that I was required to work very hard or very steadily, but
+it seemed to me then, and afterward, as if I had been made one of the
+regular hands and that I toiled the whole day through. I rode old Josh
+for the hired man to plow corn, and also guided the lead horse on the
+old McCormick reaper, my short legs sticking out at right angles from my
+body, and I carried water to the field.</p>
+
+<p>It appears that the blackbirds were very thick that <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span>year and
+threatened, in August, to destroy the corn. They came in gleeful clouds,
+settling with multitudinous clamor upon the stalks so that it became the
+duty of Den Green to scare them away by shooting at them, and I was
+permitted to follow and pick up the dead birds and carry them as "game."</p>
+
+<p>There was joy and keen excitement in this warfare. Sometimes when Den
+fired into a flock, a dozen or more came fluttering down. At other times
+vast swarms rose at the sound of the gun with a rush of wings which
+sounded like a distant storm. Once Den let me fire the gun, and I took
+great pride in this until I came upon several of the shining little
+creatures bleeding, dying in the grass. Then my heart was troubled and I
+repented of my cruelty. Mrs. Green put the birds into potpies but my
+mother would not do so. "I don't believe in such game," she said. "It's
+bad enough to shoot the poor things without eating them."</p>
+
+<p>Once we came upon a huge mountain rattlesnake and Den killed it with a
+shot of his gun. How we escaped being bitten is a mystery, for we
+explored every path of the hills and meadows in our bare feet, our
+trousers rolled to the knee. We hunted plums and picked blackberries and
+hazelnuts with very little fear of snakes, and yet we must have always
+been on guard. We loved our valley, and while occasionally we yielded to
+the lure of "Freedom's star," we were really content with Green's Coulee
+and its surrounding hills.</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br /><a name="V" id="V"></a>
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+<h2>The Last Threshing in the Coulee</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>Life on a Wisconsin farm, even for the women, had its compensations.
+There were times when the daily routine of lonely and monotonous
+housework gave place to an agreeable bustle, and human intercourse
+lightened the toil. In the midst of the slow progress of the fall's
+plowing, the gathering of the threshing crew was a most dramatic event
+to my mother, as to us, for it not only brought unwonted clamor, it
+fetched her brothers William and David and Frank, who owned and ran a
+threshing machine, and their coming gave the house an air of festivity
+which offset the burden of extra work which fell upon us all.</p>
+
+<p>In those days the grain, after being brought in and stacked around the
+barn, was allowed to remain until October or November when all the other
+work was finished.</p>
+
+<p>Of course some men got the machine earlier, for all could not thresh at
+the same time, and a good part of every man's fall activities consisted
+in "changing works" with his neighbors, thus laying up a stock of unpaid
+labor against the home job. Day after day, therefore, father or the
+hired man shouldered a fork and went to help thresh, and all through the
+autumn months, the ceaseless ringing hum and the <i>bow-ouw, ouw-woo,
+boo-oo-oom</i> of the great balance wheels on the separator and the deep
+bass purr of its cylinder could be heard in every valley like the
+droning song of some sullen and gigantic autumnal insect.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span>I recall with especial clearness the events of that last threshing in
+the coulee.&mdash;I was eight, my brother was six. For days we had looked
+forward to the coming of "the threshers," listening with the greatest
+eagerness to father's report of the crew. At last he said, "Well, Belle,
+get ready. The machine will be here tomorrow."</p>
+
+<p>All day we hung on the gate, gazing down the road, watching, waiting for
+the crew, and even after supper, we stood at the windows still hoping to
+hear the rattle of the ponderous separator.</p>
+
+<p>Father explained that the men usually worked all day at one farm and
+moved after dark, and we were just starting to "climb the wooden hill"
+when we heard a far-off faint halloo.</p>
+
+<p>"There they are," shouted father, catching up his old square tin lantern
+and hurriedly lighting the candle within it. "That's Frank's voice."</p>
+
+<p>The night air was sharp, and as we had taken off our boots we could only
+stand at the window and watch father as he piloted the teamsters through
+the gate. The light threw fantastic shadows here and there, now lighting
+up a face, now bringing out the separator which seemed a weary and
+sullen monster awaiting its den. The men's voices sounded loud in the
+still night, causing the roused turkeys in the oaks to peer about on
+their perches, uneasy silhouettes against the sky.</p>
+
+<p>We would gladly have stayed awake to greet our beloved uncles, but
+mother said, "You must go to sleep in order to be up early in the
+morning," and reluctantly we turned away.</p>
+
+<p>Lying thus in our cot under the sloping raftered roof we could hear the
+squawk of the hens, as father wrung their innocent necks, and the crash
+of the "sweeps" being unloaded sounded loud and clear and strange. We
+longed to be out there, but at last the dance of lights <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span>and shadows on
+the plastered wall died away, and we fell into childish dreamless sleep.</p>
+
+<p>We were awakened at dawn by the ringing beat of the iron mauls as Frank
+and David drove the stakes to hold the "power" to the ground. The rattle
+of trace chains, the clash of iron rods, the clang of steel bars,
+intermixed with the laughter of the men, came sharply through the frosty
+air, and the smell of sizzling sausage from the kitchen warned us that
+our busy mother was hurrying the breakfast forward. Knowing that it was
+time to get up, although it was not yet light, I had a sense of being
+awakened into a romantic new world, a world of heroic action.</p>
+
+<p>As we stumbled down the stairs, we found the lamp-lit kitchen empty of
+the men. They had finished their coffee and were out in the stack-yard
+oiling the machine and hitching the horses to the power. Shivering yet
+entranced by the beauty of the frosty dawn we crept out to stand and
+watch the play. The frost lay white on every surface, the frozen ground
+rang like iron under the steel-shod feet of the horses, and the breath
+of the men rose up in little white puffs of steam.</p>
+
+<p>Uncle David on the feeder's stand was impatiently awaiting the coming of
+the fifth team. The pitchers were climbing the stacks like blackbirds,
+and the straw-stackers were scuffling about the stable door.&mdash;Finally,
+just as the east began to bloom, and long streamers of red began to
+unroll along the vast gray dome of sky Uncle Frank, the driver, lifted
+his voice in a "Chippewa war-whoop."</p>
+
+<p>On a still morning like this his signal could be heard for miles. Long
+drawn and musical, it sped away over the fields, announcing to all the
+world that the McClintocks were ready for the day's race. Answers came
+back faintly from the frosty fields where dim figures of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span>laggard hands
+could be seen hurrying over the plowed ground, the last team came
+clattering in and was hooked into its place, David called "All right!"
+and the cylinder began to hum.</p>
+
+<p>In those days the machine was either a "J. I. Case" or a "Buffalo
+Pitts," and was moved by five pairs of horses attached to a "power"
+staked to the ground, round which they travelled pulling at the ends of
+long levers or sweeps, and to me the force seemed tremendous. "Tumbling
+rods" with "knuckle joints" carried the motion to the cylinder, and the
+driver who stood upon a square platform above the huge, greasy
+cog-wheels (round which the horses moved) was a grand figure in my eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Driving, to us, looked like a pleasant job, but Uncle Frank thought it
+very tiresome, and I can now see that it was. To stand on that small
+platform all through the long hours of a cold November day, when the
+cutting wind roared down the valley sweeping the dust and leaves along
+the road, was work. Even I perceived that it was far pleasanter to sit
+on the south side of the stack and watch the horses go round.</p>
+
+<p>It was necessary that the "driver" should be a man of judgment, for the
+horses had to be kept at just the right speed, and to do this he must
+gauge the motion of the cylinder by the pitch of its deep bass song.</p>
+
+<p>The three men in command of the machine were set apart as "the
+threshers."&mdash;William and David alternately "fed" or "tended," that is,
+one of them "fed" the grain into the howling cylinder while the other,
+oil-can in hand, watched the sieves, felt of the pinions and so kept the
+machine in good order. The feeder's position was the high place to which
+all boys aspired, and on this day I stood in silent admiration of Uncle
+David's easy powerful attitudes as he caught each bundle in the crook
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span>of his arm and spread it out into a broad, smooth band of yellow straw
+on which the whirling teeth caught and tore with monstrous fury. He was
+the ideal man in my eyes, grander in some ways than my father, and to be
+able to stand where he stood was the highest honor in the world.</p>
+
+<p>It was all poetry for us and we wished every day were threshing day. The
+wind blew cold, the clouds went flying across the bright blue sky, and
+the straw glistened in the sun. With jarring snarl the circling zone of
+cogs dipped into the sturdy greasy wheels, and the single-trees and
+pulley-chains chirped clear and sweet as crickets. The dust flew, the
+whip cracked, and the men working swiftly to get the sheaves to the
+feeder or to take the straw away from the tail-end of the machine, were
+like warriors, urged to desperate action by battle cries. The stackers
+wallowing to their waists in the fluffy straw-pile seemed gnomes acting
+for our amusement.</p>
+
+<p>The straw-pile! What delight we had in that! What joy it was to go up to
+the top where the men were stationed, one behind the other, and to have
+them toss huge forkfuls of the light fragrant stalks upon us, laughing
+to see us emerge from our golden cover. We were especially impressed by
+the bravery of Ed Green who stood in the midst of the thick dust and
+flying chaff close to the tail of the stacker. His teeth shone like a
+negro's out of his dust-blackened face and his shirt was wet with sweat,
+but he motioned for "more straw" and David, accepting the challenge,
+signalled for more speed. Frank swung his lash and yelled at the
+straining horses, the sleepy growl of the cylinder rose to a howl and
+the wheat came pulsing out at the spout in such a stream that the
+carriers were forced to trot on their path to and from the granary in
+order to keep the grain from piling <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span>up around the measurer.&mdash;There was
+a kind of splendid rivalry in this backbreaking toil&mdash;for each sack
+weighed ninety pounds.</p>
+
+<p>We got tired of wallowing in the straw at last, and went down to help
+Rover catch the rats which were being uncovered by the pitchers as they
+reached the stack bottom.&mdash;The horses, with their straining,
+out-stretched necks, the loud and cheery shouts, the whistling of the
+driver, the roar and hum of the great wheel, the flourishing of the
+forks, the supple movement of brawny arms, the shouts of the men, all
+blended with the wild sound of the wind in the creaking branches of the
+oaks, forming a glorious poem in our unforgetting minds.</p>
+
+<p>At last the call for dinner sounded. The driver began to call, "Whoa
+there, boys! Steady, Tom," and to hold his long whip before the eyes of
+the more spirited of the teams in order to convince them that he really
+meant "stop." The pitchers stuck their forks upright in the stack and
+leaped to the ground. Randal, the band-cutter, drew from his wrist the
+looped string of his big knife, the stackers slid down from the
+straw-pile, and a race began among the teamsters to see whose span would
+be first unhitched and at the watering trough. What joyous rivalry it
+seemed to us!&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Mother and Mrs. Randal, wife of our neighbor, who was "changing works,"
+stood ready to serve the food as soon as the men were seated.&mdash;The table
+had been lengthened to its utmost and pieced out with boards, and planks
+had been laid on stout wooden chairs at either side.</p>
+
+<p>The men came in with a rush, and took seats wherever they could find
+them, and their attack on the boiled potatoes and chicken should have
+been appalling to the women, but it was not. They enjoyed seeing them
+eat. Ed Green was prodigious. One cut at a big potato, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span>followed by two
+stabbing motions, and it was gone.&mdash;Two bites laid a leg of chicken as
+bare as a slate pencil. To us standing in the corner waiting our turn,
+it seemed that every "smitch" of the dinner was in danger, for the
+others were not far behind Ed and Dan.</p>
+
+<p>At last even the gauntest of them filled up and left the room and we
+were free to sit at "the second table" and eat, while the men rested
+outside. David and William, however, generally had a belt to sew or a
+bent tooth to take out of the "concave." This seemed of grave dignity to
+us and we respected their self-sacrificing labor.</p>
+
+<p>Nooning was brief. As soon as the horses had finished their oats, the
+roar and hum of the machine began again and continued steadily all the
+afternoon, till by and by the sun grew big and red, the night began to
+fall, and the wind died out.</p>
+
+<p>This was the most impressive hour of a marvellous day. Through the
+falling dusk, the machine boomed steadily with a new sound, a solemn
+roar, rising at intervals to a rattling impatient yell as the cylinder
+ran momentarily empty. The men moved now in silence, looming dim and
+gigantic in the half-light. The straw-pile mountain high, the pitchers
+in the chaff, the feeder on his platform, and especially the driver on
+his power, seemed almost superhuman to my childish eyes. Gray dust
+covered the handsome face of David, changing it into something both sad
+and stern, but Frank's cheery voice rang out musically as he called to
+the weary horses, "Come on, Tom! Hup there, Dan!"</p>
+
+<p>The track in which they walked had been worn into two deep circles and
+they all moved mechanically round and round, like parts of a machine,
+dull-eyed and covered with sweat.</p>
+
+<p>At last William raised the welcome cry, "All done!"&mdash;the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span>men threw down
+their forks. Uncle Frank began to call in a gentle, soothing voice,
+"<i>Whoa</i>, lads! <i>Steady</i>, boys! Whoa, there!"</p>
+
+<p>But the horses had been going so long and so steadily that they could
+not at once check their speed. They kept moving, though slowly, on and
+on till their owners slid from the stacks and seizing the ends of the
+sweeps, held them. Even then, after the power was still, the cylinder
+kept its hum, till David throwing a last sheaf into its open maw, choked
+it into silence.</p>
+
+<p>Now came the sound of dropping chains, the clang of iron rods, and the
+thud of hoofs as the horses walked with laggard gait and weary
+down-falling heads to the barn. The men, more subdued than at dinner,
+washed with greater care, and combed the chaff from their beards. The
+air was still and cool, and the sky a deep cloudless blue starred with
+faint fire.</p>
+
+<p>Supper though quiet was more dramatic than dinner had been. The table
+lighted with kerosene lamps, the clean white linen, the fragrant dishes,
+the women flying about with steaming platters, all seemed very cheery
+and very beautiful, and the men who came into the light and warmth of
+the kitchen with aching muscles and empty stomachs, seemed gentler and
+finer than at noon. They were nearly all from neighboring farms, and my
+mother treated even the few hired men like visitors, and the talk was
+all hearty and good tempered though a little subdued.</p>
+
+<p>One by one the men rose and slipped away, and father withdrew to milk
+the cows and bed down the horses, leaving the women and the youngsters
+to eat what was left and "do up the dishes."</p>
+
+<p>After we had eaten our fill Frank and I also went out to the barn (all
+wonderfully changed now to our minds by the great stack of straw), there
+to listen to David and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span>father chatting as they rubbed their tired
+horses.&mdash;The lantern threw a dim red light on the harness and on the
+rumps of the cattle, but left mysterious shadows in the corners. I could
+hear the mice rustling in the straw of the roof, and from the farther
+end of the dimly-lighted shed came the regular <i>strim-stram</i> of the
+streams of milk falling into the bottom of a tin pail as the hired hand
+milked the big roan cow.</p>
+
+<p>All this was very momentous to me as I sat on the oat box, shivering in
+the cold air, listening with all my ears, and when we finally went
+toward the house, the stars were big and sparkling. The frost had
+already begun to glisten on the fences and well-curb, and high in the
+air, dark against the sky, the turkeys were roosting uneasily, as if
+disturbed by premonitions of approaching Thanksgiving. Rover pattered
+along by my side on the crisp grass and my brother clung to my hand.</p>
+
+<p>How bright and warm it was in the kitchen with mother putting things to
+rights while father and my uncles leaned their chairs against the wall
+and talked of the west and of moving. "I can't get away till after New
+Year's," father said. "But I'm going. I'll never put in another crop on
+these hills."</p>
+
+<p>With speechless content I listened to Uncle William's stories of bears
+and Indians, and other episodes of frontier life, until at last we were
+ordered to bed and the glorious day was done.</p>
+
+<p>Oh, those blessed days, those entrancing nights! How fine they were
+then, and how mellow they are now, for the slow-paced years have dropped
+nearly fifty other golden mists upon that far-off valley. From this
+distance I cannot understand how my father brought himself to leave that
+lovely farm and those good and noble friends.</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br /><a name="VI" id="VI"></a>
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+
+<h2>David and His Violin</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>Most of the events of our last autumn in Green's Coulee have slipped
+into the fathomless gulf, but the experiences of Thanksgiving day, which
+followed closely on our threshing day, are in my treasure house. Like a
+canvas by Rembrandt only one side of the figures therein is defined, the
+other side melts away into shadow&mdash;a luminous shadow, through which
+faint light pulses, luring my wistful gaze on and on, back into the
+vanished world where the springs of my life lie hidden.</p>
+
+<p>It is a raw November evening. Frank and Harriet and I are riding into a
+strange land in a clattering farm wagon. Father and mother are seated
+before us on the spring seat. The ground is frozen and the floor of the
+carriage pounds and jars. We cling to the iron-lined sides of the box to
+soften the blows. It is growing dark. Before us (in a similar vehicle)
+my Uncle David is leading the way. I catch momentary glimpses of him
+outlined against the pale yellow sky. He stands erect, holding the reins
+of his swiftly-moving horses in his powerful left hand. Occasionally he
+shouts back to my father, whose chin is buried in a thick buffalo-skin
+coat. Mother is only a vague mass, a figure wrapped in shawls. The wind
+is keen, the world gray and cheerless.</p>
+
+<p>My sister is close beside me in the straw. Frank is asleep. I am on my
+knees looking ahead. Suddenly with rush of wind and clatter of hoofs, we
+enter the gloom of a forest and the road begins to climb. I see the
+hills <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span>on the right. I catch the sound of wheels on a bridge. I am cold.
+I snuggle down under the robes and the gurgle of ice-bound water is
+fused with my dreams.</p>
+
+<p>I am roused at last by Uncle David's pleasant voice, "Wake up, boys, and
+pay y'r lodging!" I look out and perceive him standing beside the wheel.
+I see a house and I hear the sound of Deborah's voice from the
+warmly-lighted open door.</p>
+
+<p>I climb down, heavy with cold and sleep. As I stand there my uncle
+reaches up his arms to take my mother down. Not knowing that she has a
+rheumatic elbow, he squeezes her playfully. She gives a sharp scream,
+and his team starts away on a swift run around the curve of the road
+toward the gate. Dropping my mother, he dashes across the yard to
+intercept the runaways. We all stand in silence, watching the flying
+horses and the wonderful race he is making toward the gate. He runs with
+magnificent action, his head thrown high. As the team dashes through the
+gate his outflung left hand catches the end-board of the wagon,&mdash;he
+leaps into the box, and so passes from our sight.</p>
+
+<p>We go into the cottage. It is a small building with four rooms and a
+kitchen on the ground floor, but in the sitting room we come upon an
+open fireplace,&mdash;the first I had ever seen, and in the light of it sits
+Grandfather McClintock, the glory of the flaming logs gilding the edges
+of his cloud of bushy white hair. He does not rise to greet us, but
+smiles and calls out, "Come in! Come in! Draw a cheer. Sit ye down."</p>
+
+<p>A clamor of welcome fills the place. Harriet and I are put to warm
+before the blaze. Grandad takes Frank upon his knee and the cutting wind
+of the gray outside world is forgotten.</p>
+
+<p>This house in which the McClintocks were living at this time, belonged
+to a rented farm. Grandad had <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>sold the original homestead on the
+LaCrosse River, and David who had lately married a charming young
+Canadian girl, was the head of the family. Deborah, it seems, was also
+living with him and Frank was there&mdash;as a visitor probably.</p>
+
+<p>The room in which we sat was small and bare but to me it was very
+beautiful, because of the fire, and by reason of the merry voices which
+filled my ears with music. Aunt Rebecca brought to us a handful of
+crackers and told us that we were to have oyster soup for supper. This
+gave us great pleasure even in anticipation, for oysters were a
+delicious treat in those days.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Dick," Grandad began, "so ye're plannin' to go west, air ye?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, as soon as I get all my grain and hogs marketed I'm going to pull
+out for my new farm over in Iowa."</p>
+
+<p>"Ye'd better stick to the old coulee," warned my grandfather, a touch of
+sadness in his voice. "Ye'll find none better."</p>
+
+<p>My father was disposed to resent this. "That's all very well for the few
+who have the level land in the middle of the valley," he retorted, "but
+how about those of us who are crowded against the hills? You should see
+the farm I have in Winnesheik!! Not a hill on it big enough for a boy to
+coast on. It's right on the edge of Looking Glass Prairie, and I have a
+spring of water, and a fine grove of trees just where I want them, not
+where they have to be grubbed out."</p>
+
+<p>"But ye belong here," repeated Grandfather. "You were married here, your
+children were born here. Ye'll find no such friends in the west as you
+have here in Neshonoc. And Belle will miss the family."</p>
+
+<p>My father laughed. "Oh, you'll all come along. Dave has the fever
+already. Even William is likely to catch it."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span>Old Hugh sighed deeply. "I hope ye're wrong," he said. "I'd like to
+spend me last days here with me sons and daughters around me, sich as
+are left to me," here his voice became sterner. "It's the curse of our
+country,&mdash;this constant moving, moving. I'd have been better off had I
+stayed in Ohio, though this valley seemed very beautiful to me the first
+time I saw it."</p>
+
+<p>At this point David came in, and everybody shouted, "Did you stop them?"
+referring of course to the runaway team.</p>
+
+<p>"I did," he replied with a smile. "But how about the oysters. I'm holler
+as a beech log."</p>
+
+<p>The fragrance of the soup thoroughly awakened even little Frank, and
+when we drew around the table, each face shone with the light of peace
+and plenty, and all our elders tried to forget that this was the last
+Thanksgiving festival which the McClintocks and Garlands would be able
+to enjoy in the old valley. How good those oysters were! They made up
+the entire meal,&mdash;excepting mince pie which came as a closing sweet.</p>
+
+<p>Slowly, one by one, the men drew back and returned to the sitting room,
+leaving the women to wash up the dishes and put the kitchen to rights.
+David seized the opportunity to ask my father to tell once again of the
+trip he had made, of the lands he had seen, and the farm he had
+purchased, for his young heart was also fired with desire of
+exploration. The level lands toward the sunset allured him. In his
+visions the wild meadows were filled with game, and the free lands
+needed only to be tickled with a hoe to laugh into harvest.</p>
+
+<p>He said, "As soon as Dad and Frank are settled on a farm here, I'm going
+west also. I'm as tired of climbing these hills as you are. I want a
+place of my own&mdash;and besides, from all you say of that wheat country out
+there, a threshing machine would pay wonderfully well."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span>As the women came in, my father called out, "Come, Belle, sing 'O'er the
+Hills in Legions Boys!'&mdash;Dave get out your fiddle&mdash;and tune us all up."</p>
+
+<p>David tuned up his fiddle and while he twanged on the strings mother
+lifted her voice in our fine old marching song.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Cheer up, brothers, as we go,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O'er the mountains, westward ho&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">and we all joined in the jubilant chorus&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Then o'er the hills in legions, boys,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fair freedom's star<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Points to the sunset regions, boys,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ha, ha, ha-ha!&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>My father's face shone with the light of the explorer, the pioneer. The
+words of this song appealed to him as the finest poetry. It meant all
+that was fine and hopeful and buoyant in American life, to him&mdash;but on
+my mother's sweet face a wistful expression deepened and in her fine
+eyes a reflective shadow lay. To her this song meant not so much the
+acquisition of a new home as the loss of all her friends and relatives.
+She sang it submissively, not exultantly, and I think the other women
+were of the same mood though their faces were less expressive to me. To
+all of the pioneer wives of the past that song had meant deprivation,
+suffering, loneliness, heart-ache.</p>
+
+<p>From this they passed to other of my father's favorite songs, and it is
+highly significant to note that even in this choice of songs he
+generally had his way. He was the dominating force. "Sing 'Nellie
+Wildwood,'" he said, and they sang it.&mdash;This power of getting his will
+respected was due partly to his military training but <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span>more to a
+distinctive trait in him. He was a man of power, of decision, a natural
+commander of men.</p>
+
+<p>They sang "Minnie Minturn" to his request, and the refrain,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I have heard the angels warning,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I have seen the golden shore&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">meant much to me. So did the line,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But I only hear the drummers<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As the armies march away.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Aunt Deb was also a soul of decision. She called out, "No more of these
+sad tones," and struck up "The Year of Jubilo," and we all shouted till
+the walls shook with the exultant words:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Ol' massa run&mdash;ha-ha!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">De darkies stay,&mdash;ho-ho!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It must be now is the kingdom a-comin'<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In the year of Jubilo.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>At this point the fire suggested an old English ballad which I loved,
+and so I piped up, "Mother, sing, 'Pile the Wood on Higher!'" and she
+complied with pleasure, for this was a song of home, of the unbroken
+fireside circle.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Oh, the winds howl mad outdoors<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The snow clouds hurry past,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The giant trees sway to and fro<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Beneath the sweeping blast.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">and we children joined in the chorus:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Then we'll gather round the fire<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And we'll pile the wood on higher,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Let the song and jest go round;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">What care we for the storm,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">When the fireside is so warm,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And pleasure here is found?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span>Never before did this song mean so much to me as at this moment when the
+winds were actually howling outdoors, and Uncle Frank was in very truth
+piling the logs higher. It seemed as though my stuffed bosom could not
+receive anything deeper and finer, but it did, for father was saying,
+"Well, Dave, now for some <i>tunes</i>."</p>
+
+<p>This was the best part of David to me. He could make any room mystical
+with the magic of his bow. True, his pieces were mainly venerable dance
+tunes, cotillions, hornpipes,&mdash;melodies which had passed from fiddler to
+fiddler until they had become veritable folk-songs,&mdash;pieces like "Money
+Musk," "Honest John," "Haste to the Wedding," and many others whose
+names I have forgotten, but with a gift of putting into even the
+simplest song an emotion which subdued us and silenced us, he played on,
+absorbed and intent. From these familiar pieces he passed to others for
+which he had no names, melodies strangely sweet and sad, full of longing
+cries, voicing something which I dimly felt but could not understand.</p>
+
+<p>At the moment he was the somber Scotch Highlander, the true Celt, and as
+he bent above his instrument his black eyes glowing, his fine head
+drooping low, my heart bowed down in worship of his skill. He was my
+hero, the handsomest, most romantic figure in all my world.</p>
+
+<p>He played, "Maggie, Air Ye Sleepin," and the wind outside went to my
+soul. Voices wailed to me out of the illimitable hill-land forests,
+voices that pleaded:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Oh, let me in, for loud the linn<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Goes roarin' o'er the moorland craggy.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He appeared to forget us, even his young wife. His eyes looked away into
+gray storms. Vague longing ached in his throat. Life was a struggle,
+love a torment.</p>
+
+<p>He stopped abruptly, and put the violin into its box, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span>fumbling with the
+catch to hide his emotion and my father broke the tense silence with a
+prosaic word. "Well, well! Look here, it's time you youngsters were
+asleep. Beckie, where are you going to put these children?"</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Rebecca, a trim little woman with brown eyes, looked at us
+reflectively, "Well, now, I don't know. I guess we'll have to make a bed
+for them on the floor."</p>
+
+<p>This was done, and for the first time in my life, I slept before an open
+fire. As I snuggled into my blankets with my face turned to the blaze,
+the darkness of the night and the denizens of the pineland wilderness to
+the north had no terrors for me.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>I was awakened in the early light by Uncle David building the fire, and
+then came my father's call, and the hurly burly of jovial greeting from
+old and young. The tumult lasted till breakfast was called, and
+everybody who could find place sat around the table and attacked the
+venison and potatoes which formed the meal. I do not remember our
+leave-taking or the ride homeward. I bring to mind only the desolate
+cold of our own kitchen into which we tramped late in the afternoon,
+sitting in our wraps until the fire began to roar within its iron cage.</p>
+
+<p>Oh, winds of the winter night! Oh, firelight and the shine of tender
+eyes! How far away you seem tonight!</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">So faint and far,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Each dear face shineth as a star.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Oh, you by the western sea, and you of the south beyond the reach of
+Christmas snow, do not your hearts hunger, like mine tonight for that
+Thanksgiving Day among the trees? For the glance of eyes undimmed of
+tears, for the hair untouched with gray?</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span>It all lies in the unchanging realm of the past&mdash;this land of my
+childhood. Its charm, its strange dominion cannot return save in the
+poet's reminiscent dream. No money, no railway train can take us back to
+it. It did not in truth exist&mdash;it was a magical world, born of the
+vibrant union of youth and firelight, of music and the voice of moaning
+winds&mdash;a union which can never come again to you or me, father, uncle,
+brother, till the coulee meadows bloom again unscarred of spade or
+plow.</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br /><a name="VII" id="VII"></a>
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+<h2>Winnesheik "Woods and Prairie Lands"</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>Our last winter in the Coulee was given over to preparations for our
+removal but it made very little impression on my mind which was deeply
+engaged on my school work. As it was out of the question for us to
+attend the village school the elders arranged for a neighborhood school
+at the home of John Roche, who had an unusually large living room. John
+is but a shadowy figure in this chronicle but his daughter Indiana, whom
+we called "Ingie," stands out as the big girl of my class.</p>
+
+<p>Books were scarce in this house as well as in our own. I remember piles
+of newspapers but no bound volumes other than the Bible and certain
+small Sunday school books. All the homes of the valley were equally
+barren. My sister and I jointly possessed a very limp and soiled cloth
+edition of "Mother Goose." Our stories all came to us by way of the
+conversation of our elders. No one but grandmother Garland ever
+deliberately told us a tale&mdash;except the hired girls, and their romances
+were of such dark and gruesome texture that we often went to bed
+shivering with fear of the dark.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly, unexpectedly, miraculously, I came into possession of two
+books, one called <i>Beauty and The Beast</i>, and the other <i>Aladdin and His
+Wonderful Lamp</i>. These volumes mark a distinct epoch in my life. The
+grace of the lovely Lady as she stood above the cringing <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span>Beast gave me
+my first clear notion of feminine dignity and charm. On the magic Flying
+Carpet I rose into the wide air of Oriental romance. I attended the
+building of towered cities and the laying of gorgeous feasts. I carried
+in my hand the shell from which, at the word of command, the cool clear
+water gushed. My feet were shod with winged boots, and on my head was
+the Cap of Invisibility. My body was captive in our snowbound little
+cabin but my mind ranged the golden palaces of Persia&mdash;so much I know.
+Where the wonder-working romances came from I cannot now tell but I
+think they were Christmas presents, for Christmas came this year with
+unusual splendor.</p>
+
+<p>The sale of the farm had put into my father's hands a considerable sum
+of money and I assume that some small part of this went to make our
+holiday glorious. In one of my stockings was a noble red and blue tin
+horse with a flowing mane and tail, and in the other was a monkey who
+could be made to climb a stick. Harriet had a new china doll and Frank a
+horn and china dog, and all the corners of our stockings were stuffed
+with nuts and candies. I hope mother got something beside the potatoes
+and onions which I remember seeing her pull out and unwrap with
+delightful humor&mdash;an old and rather pathetic joke but new to us.</p>
+
+<p>The snow fell deep in January and I have many glorious pictures of the
+whirling flakes outlined against the darkly wooded hills across the
+marsh. Father was busy with his team drawing off wheat and hogs and hay,
+and often came into the house at night, white with the storms through
+which he had passed. My trips to school were often interrupted by the
+cold, and the path which my sister and I trod was along the
+ever-deepening furrows made by the bob-sleighs of the farmers. Often
+when we met a team or were overtaken by one, we were forced <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span>out of the
+road into the drifts, and I can feel to this moment, the wedge of snow
+which caught in the tops of my tall boots and slowly melted into my gray
+socks.</p>
+
+<p>We were not afraid of the drifts, however. On the contrary mother had to
+fight to keep us from wallowing beyond our depth. I had now a sled which
+was my inseparable companion. I could not feed the hens or bring in a
+pan of chips without taking it with me. My heart swelled with pride and
+joy whenever I regarded it, and yet it was but a sober-colored thing, a
+frame of hickory built by the village blacksmith in exchange for a cord
+of wood&mdash;delivered. I took it to school one day, but Ed Roche abused it,
+took it up and threw it into the deep snow among the weeds.&mdash;Had I been
+large enough, I would have killed that boy with pleasure, but being
+small and fat and numb with cold I merely rescued my treasure as quickly
+as I could and hurried home to pour my indignant story into my mother's
+sympathetic ears.</p>
+
+<p>I seldom spoke of my defeats to my father for he had once said, "Fight
+your own battles, my son. If I hear of your being licked by a boy of
+anything like your own size, I'll give you another when you get home."
+He didn't believe in molly-coddling, you will perceive. His was a stern
+school, the school of self-reliance and resolution.</p>
+
+<p>Neighbors came in now and again to talk of our migration, and yet in
+spite of all that, in spite of our song, in spite of my father's
+preparation I had no definite premonition of coming change, and when the
+day of departure actually dawned, I was as surprised, as unprepared as
+though it had all happened without the slightest warning.</p>
+
+<p>So long as the kettle sang on the hearth and the clock ticked on its
+shelf, the idea of "moving" was pleasantly diverting, but when one raw
+winter day I saw the faithful <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span>clock stuffed with rags and laid on its
+back in a box, and the chairs and dishes being loaded into a big sleigh,
+I began to experience something very disturbing and very uncomfortable.
+"O'er the hills in legions, boys," did not sound so inspiring to me
+then. "The woods and prairie lands" of Iowa became of less account to me
+than the little cabin in which I had lived all my short life.</p>
+
+<p>Harriet and I wandered around, whining and shivering, our own misery
+augmented by the worried look on mother's face. It was February, and she
+very properly resented leaving her home for a long, cold ride into an
+unknown world, but as a dutiful wife she worked hard and silently in
+packing away her treasures, and clothing her children for the journey.</p>
+
+<p>At last the great sleigh-load of bedding and furniture stood ready at
+the door, the stove, still warm with cheerful service, was lifted in,
+and the time for saying good-bye to our coulee home had come.</p>
+
+<p>"Forward march!" shouted father and led the way with the big bob-sled,
+followed by cousin Jim and our little herd of kine, while mother and the
+children brought up the rear in a "pung" drawn by old Josh, a flea-bit
+gray.&mdash;It is probable that at the moment the master himself was slightly
+regretful.</p>
+
+<p>A couple of hours' march brought us to LaCrosse, the great city whose
+wonders I had longed to confront. It stood on the bank of a wide river
+and had all the value of a sea-port to me for in summertime great
+hoarsely bellowing steamboats came and went from its quay, and all about
+it rose high wooded hills. Halting there, we overlooked a wide expanse
+of snow-covered ice in the midst of which a dark, swift, threatening
+current of open water ran. Across this chasm stretching from one
+ice-field to another lay a flexible narrow bridge over <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span>which my father
+led the way toward hills of the western shore. There was something
+especially terrifying in the boiling heave of that black flood, and I
+shivered with terror as I passed it, having vividly in my mind certain
+grim stories of men whose teams had broken through and been swept
+beneath the ice never to reappear.</p>
+
+<p>It was a long ride to my mother, for she too was in terror of the ice,
+but at last the Minnesota bank was reached, La Crescent was passed, and
+our guide entering a narrow valley began to climb the snowy hills. All
+that was familiar was put behind; all that was strange and dark, all
+that was wonderful and unknown, spread out before us, and as we crawled
+along that slippery, slanting road, it seemed that we were entering on a
+new and marvellous world.</p>
+
+<p>We lodged that night in Hokah, a little town in a deep valley. The
+tavern stood near a river which flowed over its dam with resounding roar
+and to its sound I slept. Next day at noon we reached Caledonia, a town
+high on the snowy prairie. Caledonia! For years that word was a poem in
+my ear, part of a marvellous and epic march. Actually it consisted of a
+few frame houses and a grocery store. But no matter. Its name shall ring
+like a peal of bells in this book.</p>
+
+<p>It grew colder as we rose, and that night, the night of the second day,
+we reached Hesper and entered a long stretch of woods, and at last
+turned in towards a friendly light shining from a low house beneath a
+splendid oak.</p>
+
+<p>As we drew near my father raised a signal shout, "Hallo-o-o the House!"
+and a man in a long gray coat came out. "Is that thee, friend Richard?"
+he called, and my father replied, "Yea, neighbor Barley, here we are!"</p>
+
+<p>I do not know how this stranger whose manner of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span>speech was so peculiar,
+came to be there, but he was and in answer to my question, father
+replied, "Barley is a Quaker," an answer which explained nothing at that
+time. Being too sleepy to pursue the matter, or to remark upon anything
+connected with the exterior, I dumbly followed Harriet into the kitchen
+which was still in possession of good Mrs. Barley.</p>
+
+<p>Having filled our stomachs with warm food mother put us to bed, and when
+we awoke late the next day the Barleys were gone, our own stove was in
+its place, and our faithful clock was ticking calmly on the shelf. So
+far as we knew, mother was again at home and entirely content.</p>
+
+<p>This farm, which was situated two miles west of the village of Hesper,
+immediately won our love. It was a glorious place for boys. Broad-armed
+white oaks stood about the yard, and to the east and north a deep forest
+invited to exploration. The house was of logs and for that reason was
+much more attractive to us than to our mother. It was, I suspect, both
+dark and cold. I know the roof was poor, for one morning I awoke to find
+a miniature peak of snow on the floor at my bedside. It was only a rude
+little frontier cabin, but it was perfectly satisfactory to me.</p>
+
+<p>Harriet and I learned much in the way of woodcraft during the months
+which followed. Night by night the rabbits, in countless numbers printed
+their tell-tale records in the snow, and quail and partridges nested
+beneath the down-drooping branches of the red oaks. Squirrels ran from
+tree to tree and we were soon able to distinguish and name most of the
+tracks made by the birds and small animals, and we took a never-failing
+delight in this study of the wild. In most of my excursions my sister
+was my companion. My brother was too small.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>All my memories of this farm are of the fiber of poetry. The silence of
+the snowy aisles of the forest, the whirring flight of partridges, the
+impudent bark of squirrels, the quavering voices of owls and coons, the
+music of the winds in the high trees,&mdash;all these impressions unite in my
+mind like parts of a woodland symphony. I soon learned to distinguish
+the raccoon's mournful call from the quavering cry of the owl, and I
+joined the hired man in hunting rabbits from under the piles of brush in
+the clearing. Once or twice some ferocious, larger animal, possibly a
+panther, hungrily yowled in the impenetrable thickets to the north, but
+this only lent a still more enthralling interest to the forest.</p>
+
+<p>To the east, an hour's walk through the timber, stood the village, built
+and named by the "Friends" who had a meeting house not far away, and
+though I saw much of them, I never attended their services.</p>
+
+<p>Our closest neighbor was a gruff loud-voiced old Norwegian and from his
+children (our playmates) we learned many curious facts. All Norwegians,
+it appeared, ate from wooden plates or wooden bowls. Their food was soup
+which they called "bean swaagen" and they were all yellow haired and
+blue-eyed.</p>
+
+<p>Harriet and I and one Lars Peterson gave a great deal of time to an
+attempt to train a yoke of yearling calves to draw our handsled. I call
+it an attempt, for we hardly got beyond a struggle to overcome the
+stubborn resentment of the stupid beasts, who very naturally objected to
+being forced into service before their time. Harriet was ten, I was not
+quite nine, and Lars was only twelve, hence we spent long hours in
+yoking and unyoking our unruly span. I believe we did actually haul
+several loads of firewood to the kitchen door, but at last Buck and Brin
+"turned the yoke" and broke it, and that ended our teaming.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span>The man from whom we acquired our farm had in some way domesticated a
+flock of wild geese, and though they must have been a part of the
+farm-yard during the winter, they made no deep impression on my mind
+till in the spring when as the migratory instinct stirred in their blood
+they all rose on the surface of the water in a little pool near the barn
+and with beating wings lifted their voices in brazen clamor calling to
+their fellows driving by high overhead. At times their cries halted the
+flocks in their arrowy flight and brought them down to mix
+indistinguishably with the captive birds.</p>
+
+<p>The wings of these had been clipped but as the weeks went on their
+pinions grew again and one morning when I went out to see what had
+happened to them, I found the pool empty and silent. We all missed their
+fine voices and yet we could not blame them for a reassertion of their
+freeborn nature. They had gone back to their summer camping grounds on
+the lakes of the far north.</p>
+
+<p>Early in April my father hired a couple of raw Norwegians to assist in
+clearing the land, and although neither of these immigrants could speak
+a word of English, I was greatly interested in them. They slept in the
+granary but this did not prevent them from communicating to our
+house-maid a virulent case of smallpox. Several days passed before my
+mother realized what ailed the girl. The discovery must have horrified
+her, for she had been through an epidemic of this dread disease in
+Wisconsin, and knew its danger.</p>
+
+<p>It was a fearsome plague in those days, much more fatal than now, and my
+mother with three unvaccinated children, a helpless handmaid to be
+nursed, was in despair when father developed the disease and took to his
+bed. Surely it must have seemed to her as though the Lord had visited
+upon her more punishment than belonged to her, for to add the final
+touch, in the midst of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span>all her other afflictions she was expecting the
+birth of another child.</p>
+
+<p>I do not know what we would have done had not a noble woman of the
+neighborhood volunteered to come in and help us. She was not a friend,
+hardly an acquaintance, and yet she served us like an angel of mercy.
+Whether she still lives or not I cannot say, but I wish to acknowledge
+here the splendid heroism which brought Mary Briggs, a stranger, into
+our stricken home at a time when all our other neighbors beat their
+horses into a mad gallop whenever forced to pass our gate.</p>
+
+<p>Young as I was I realized something of the burden which had fallen upon
+my mother, and when one night I was awakened from deep sleep by hearing
+her calling out in pain, begging piteously for help, I shuddered in my
+bed, realizing with childish, intuitive knowledge that she was passing
+through a cruel convulsion which could not be softened or put aside. I
+went to sleep again at last, and when I woke, I had a little sister.</p>
+
+<p>Harriet and I having been vaccinated, escaped with what was called the
+"verylide" but father was ill for several weeks. Fortunately he was
+spared, as we all were, the "pitting" which usually follows this dreaded
+disease, and in a week or two we children had forgotten all about it.
+Spring was upon us and the world was waiting to be explored.</p>
+
+<p>One of the noblest features of this farm was a large spring which boiled
+forth from the limestone rock about eighty rods north of the house, and
+this was a wonder-spot to us. There was something magical in this
+never-failing fountain, and we loved to play beside its waters. One of
+our delightful tasks was riding the horses to water at this spring, and
+I took many lessons in horsemanship on these trips.</p>
+
+<p>As the seeding time came on, enormous flocks of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span>pigeons, in clouds
+which almost filled the sky, made it necessary for some one to sentinel
+the new-sown grain, and although I was but nine years of age, my father
+put a double-barrelled shotgun into my hands, and sent me out to defend
+the fields.</p>
+
+<p>This commission filled me with the spirit of the soldier. Proudly
+walking my rounds I menaced the flocks as they circled warily over my
+head, taking shot at them now and again as they came near enough,
+feeling as duty bound and as martial as any Roman sentry standing guard
+over a city. Up to this time I had not been allowed to carry arms,
+although I had been the companion of Den Green and Ellis Usher on their
+hunting expeditions in the coulee&mdash;now with entire discretion over my
+weapon, I loaded it, capped it and fired it, marching with sedate and
+manly tread, while little Frank at my heels, served as subordinate in
+his turn.</p>
+
+<p>The pigeons passed after a few days, but my warlike duties continued,
+for the ground-squirrels, called "gophers" by the settlers, were almost
+as destructive of the seed corn as the pigeons had been of the wheat.
+Day after day I patrolled the edge of the field listening to the saucy
+whistle of the striped little rascals, tracking them to their burrows
+and shooting them as they lifted their heads above the ground. I had
+moments of being sorry for them, but the sight of one digging up the
+seed, silenced my complaining conscience and I continued to slay.</p>
+
+<p>The school-house of this district stood out upon the prairie to the west
+a mile distant, and during May we trudged our way over a pleasant road,
+each carrying a small tin pail filled with luncheon. Here I came in
+contact with the Norwegian boys from the colony to the north, and a
+bitter feud arose (or existed) between the "Yankees," as they called us,
+and "the Norskies," as <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span>we called them. Often when we met on the road,
+showers of sticks and stones filled the air, and our hearts burned with
+the heat of savage conflict. War usually broke out at the moment of
+parting. Often after a fairly amicable half-mile together we suddenly
+split into hostile ranks, and warred with true tribal frenzy as long as
+we could find a stone or a clod to serve as missile. I had no personal
+animosity in this, I was merely a Pict willing to destroy my Angle
+enemies.</p>
+
+<p>As I look back upon my life on that woodland farm, it all seems very
+colorful and sweet. I am re-living days when the warm sun, falling on
+radiant slopes of grass, lit the meadow phlox and tall tiger lilies into
+flaming torches of color. I think of blackberry thickets and odorous
+grapevines and cherry trees and the delicious nuts which grew in
+profusion throughout the forest to the north. This forest which seemed
+endless and was of enchanted solemnity served as our wilderness. We
+explored it at every opportunity. We loved every day for the color it
+brought, each season for the wealth of its experience, and we welcomed
+the thought of spending all our years in this beautiful home where the
+wood and the prairie of our song did actually meet and mingle.</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br /><a name="VIII" id="VIII"></a>
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+
+<h2>We Move Again</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>One day there came into our home a strange man who spoke in a fashion
+new to me. He was a middle-aged rather formal individual, dressed in a
+rough gray suit, and father alluded to him privately as "that English
+duke." I didn't know exactly what he meant by this, but our visitor's
+talk gave me a vague notion of "the old country."</p>
+
+<p>"My home," he said, "is near Manchester. I have come to try farming in
+the American wilderness."</p>
+
+<p>He was kindly, and did his best to be democratic, but we children stood
+away from him, wondering what he was doing in our house. My mother
+disliked him from the start for as he took his seat at our dinner table,
+he drew from his pocket a case in which he carried a silver fork and
+spoon and a silver-handled knife. Our cutlery was not good enough for
+him!</p>
+
+<p>Every family that we knew at that time used three-tined steel forks and
+my mother naturally resented the implied criticism of her table ware. I
+heard her say to my father, "If our ways don't suit your English friend
+he'd better go somewhere else for his meals."</p>
+
+<p>This fastidious pioneer also carried a revolver, for he believed that
+having penetrated far into a dangerous country, he was in danger, and I
+am not at all sure but that he was right, for the Minnesota woods at
+this time were filled with horse-thieves and counterfeiters, and it was
+known that many of these landhunting <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span>Englishmen carried large sums of
+gold on their persons.</p>
+
+<p>We resented our guest still more when we found that he was trying to buy
+our lovely farm and that father was already half-persuaded. We loved
+this farm. We loved the log house, and the oaks which sheltered it, and
+we especially valued the glorious spring and the plum trees which stood
+near it, but father was still dreaming of the free lands of the farther
+west, and early in March he sold to the Englishman and moved us all to a
+rented place some six miles directly west, in the township of Burr Oak.</p>
+
+<p>This was but a temporary lodging, a kind of camping place, for no sooner
+were his fields seeded than he set forth once again with a covered
+wagon, eager to explore the open country to the north and west of us.
+The wood and prairie land of Winnesheik County did not satisfy him,
+although it seemed to me then, as it does now, the fulfillment of his
+vision, the realization of our song.</p>
+
+<p>For several weeks he travelled through southern Minnesota and northern
+Iowa, always in search of the perfect farm, and when he returned, just
+before harvest, he was able to report that he had purchased a quarter
+section of "the best land in Mitchell County" and that after harvest we
+would all move again.</p>
+
+<p>If my mother resented this third removal she made no comment which I can
+now recall. I suspect that she went rather willingly this time, for her
+brother David wrote that he had also located in Mitchell County, not two
+miles from the place my father had decided upon for our future home, and
+Samantha, her younger sister, had settled in Minnesota. The circle in
+Neshonoc seemed about to break up. A mighty spreading and shifting was
+going on all over the west, and no doubt my mother accepted her part in
+it without especial protest.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span>Our life in Burr Oak township that summer was joyous for us children. It
+seems to have been almost all sunshine and play. As I reflect upon it I
+relive many delightful excursions into the northern woods. It appears
+that Harriet and I were in continual harvest of nuts and berries. Our
+walks to school were explorations and we spent nearly every Saturday and
+Sunday in minute study of the country-side, devouring everything which
+was remotely edible. We gorged upon May-apples until we were ill, and
+munched black cherries until we were dizzy with their fumes. We
+clambered high trees to collect baskets of wild grapes which our mother
+could not use, and we garnered nuts with the insatiable greed of
+squirrels. We ate oak-shoots, fern-roots, leaves, bark,
+seed-balls,&mdash;everything!&mdash;not because we were hungry but because we
+loved to experiment, and we came home, only when hungry or worn out or
+in awe of the darkness.</p>
+
+<p>It was a delightful season, full of the most satisfying companionship
+and yet of the names of my playmates I can seize upon only two&mdash;the
+others have faded from the tablets of my memory. I remember Ned who
+permitted me to hold his plow, and Perry who taught me how to tame the
+half-wild colts that filled his father's pasture. Together we spent long
+days lassoing&mdash;or rather snaring&mdash;the feet of these horses and subduing
+them to the halter. We had many fierce struggles but came out of them
+all without a serious injury.</p>
+
+<p>Late in August my father again loaded our household goods into wagons,
+and with our small herd of cattle following, set out toward the west,
+bound once again to overtake the actual line of the middle border.</p>
+
+<p>This journey has an unforgettable epic charm as I look back upon it.
+Each mile took us farther and farther into the unsettled prairie until
+in the afternoon of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span>second day, we came to a meadow so wide that
+its western rim touched the sky without revealing a sign of man's
+habitation other than the road in which we travelled.</p>
+
+<p>The plain was covered with grass tall as ripe wheat and when my father
+stopped his team and came back to us and said, "Well, children, here we
+are on The Big Prairie," we looked about us with awe, so endless seemed
+this spread of wild oats and waving blue-joint.</p>
+
+<p>Far away dim clumps of trees showed, but no chimney was in sight, and no
+living thing moved save our own cattle and the hawks lazily wheeling in
+the air. My heart filled with awe as well as wonder. The majesty of this
+primeval world exalted me. I felt for the first time the poetry of the
+unplowed spaces. It seemed that the "herds of deer and buffalo" of our
+song might, at any moment, present themselves,&mdash;but they did not, and my
+father took no account even of the marsh fowl.</p>
+
+<p>"Forward march!" he shouted, and on we went.</p>
+
+<p>Hour after hour he pushed into the west, the heads of his tired horses
+hanging ever lower, and on my mother's face the shadow deepened, but her
+chieftain's voice cheerily urging his team lost nothing of its clarion
+resolution. He was in his element. He loved this shelterless sweep of
+prairie. This westward march entranced him, I think he would have gladly
+kept on until the snowy wall of the Rocky Mountains met his eyes, for he
+was a natural explorer.</p>
+
+<p>Sunset came at last, but still he drove steadily on through the sparse
+settlements. Just at nightfall we came to a beautiful little stream, and
+stopped to let the horses drink. I heard its rippling, reassuring song
+on the pebbles. Thereafter all is dim and vague to me until my mother
+called out sharply, "Wake up, children! Here we are!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span>Struggling to my feet I looked about me. Nothing could be seen but the
+dim form of a small house.&mdash;On every side the land melted into
+blackness, silent and without boundary.</p>
+
+<p>Driving into the yard, father hastily unloaded one of the wagons and
+taking mother and Harriet and Jessie drove away to spend the night with
+Uncle David who had preceded us, as I now learned, and was living on a
+farm not far away. My brother and I were left to camp as best we could
+with the hired man.</p>
+
+<p>Spreading a rude bed on the floor, he told us to "hop in" and in ten
+minutes we were all fast asleep.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The sound of a clattering poker awakened me next morning and when I
+opened my sleepy eyes and looked out a new world displayed itself before
+me.</p>
+
+<p>The cabin faced a level plain with no tree in sight. A mile away to the
+west stood a low stone house and immediately in front of us opened a
+half-section of unfenced sod. To the north, as far as I could see, the
+land billowed like a russet ocean, with scarcely a roof to fleck its
+lonely spread.&mdash;I cannot say that I liked or disliked it. I merely
+marvelled at it, and while I wandered about the yard, the hired man
+scorched some cornmeal mush in a skillet and this with some butter and
+gingerbread, made up my first breakfast in Mitchell County.</p>
+
+<p>An hour or two later father and mother and the girls returned and the
+work of setting up the stove and getting the furniture in place began.
+In a very short time the experienced clock was voicing its contentment
+on a new shelf, and the kettle was singing busily on its familiar stove.
+Once more and for the sixth time since her marriage, Belle Garland
+adjusted herself to a pioneer environment, comforted no doubt by the
+knowledge that David and Deborah were near and that her father was
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span>coming soon. No doubt she also congratulated herself on the fact that
+she had not been carried beyond the Missouri River&mdash;and that her house
+was not "surrounded by Indians who murder by night."</p>
+
+<p>A few hours later, while my brother and I were on the roof of the house
+with intent to peer "over the edge of the prairie" something grandly
+significant happened. Upon a low hill to the west a herd of horses
+suddenly appeared running swiftly, led by a beautiful sorrel pony with
+shining white mane. On they came, like a platoon of cavalry rushing down
+across the open sod which lay before our door. The leader moved with
+lofty and graceful action, easily out-stretching all his fellows.
+Forward they swept, their long tails floating in the wind like
+banners,&mdash;on in a great curve as if scenting danger in the smoke of our
+fire. The thunder of their feet filled me with delight. Surely, next to
+a herd of buffalo this squadron of wild horses was the most satisfactory
+evidence of the wilderness into which we had been thrust.</p>
+
+<p>Riding as if to intercept the leader, a solitary herder now appeared,
+mounted upon a horse which very evidently was the mate of the leader. He
+rode magnificently, and under him the lithe mare strove resolutely to
+overtake and head off the leader.&mdash;All to no purpose! The halterless
+steeds of the prairie snorted derisively at their former companion,
+bridled and saddled, and carrying the weight of a master. Swiftly they
+thundered across the sod, dropped into a ravine, and disappeared in a
+cloud of dust.</p>
+
+<p>Silently we watched the rider turn and ride slowly homeward. The plain
+had become our new domain, the horseman our ideal.</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br /><a name="IX" id="IX"></a>
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+
+<h2>Our First Winter on the Prairie</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>For a few days my brother and I had little to do other than to keep the
+cattle from straying, and we used our leisure in becoming acquainted
+with the region round about.</p>
+
+<p>It burned deep into our memories, this wide, sunny, windy country. The
+sky so big, and the horizon line so low and so far away, made this new
+world of the plain more majestic than the world of the Coulee.&mdash;The
+grasses and many of the flowers were also new to us. On the uplands the
+herbage was short and dry and the plants stiff and woody, but in the
+swales the wild oat shook its quivers of barbed and twisted arrows, and
+the crow's foot, tall and sere, bowed softly under the feet of the wind,
+while everywhere, in the lowlands as well as on the ridges, the
+bleaching white antlers of by-gone herbivora lay scattered, testifying
+to "the herds of deer and buffalo" which once fed there. We were just a
+few years too late to see them.</p>
+
+<p>To the south the sections were nearly all settled upon, for in that
+direction lay the county town, but to the north and on into Minnesota
+rolled the unplowed sod, the feeding ground of the cattle, the home of
+foxes and wolves, and to the west, just beyond the highest ridges, we
+loved to think the bison might still be seen.</p>
+
+<p>The cabin on this rented farm was a mere shanty, a shell of pine boards,
+which needed re-enforcing to make it habitable and one day my father
+said, "Well, Hamlin, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span>I guess you'll have to run the plow-team this
+fall. I must help neighbor Button wall up the house and I can't afford
+to hire another man."</p>
+
+<p>This seemed a fine commission for a lad of ten, and I drove my horses
+into the field that first morning with a manly pride which added an inch
+to my stature. I took my initial "round" at a "land" which stretched
+from one side of the quarter section to the other, in confident mood. I
+was grown up!</p>
+
+<p>But alas! my sense of elation did not last long. To guide a team for a
+few minutes as an experiment was one thing&mdash;to plow all day like a hired
+hand was another. It was not a chore, it was a job. It meant moving to
+and fro hour after hour, day after day, with no one to talk to but the
+horses. It meant trudging eight or nine miles in the forenoon and as
+many more in the afternoon, with less than an hour off at noon. It meant
+dragging the heavy implement around the corners, and it meant also many
+ship-wrecks, for the thick, wet stubble matted with wild buckwheat often
+rolled up between the coulter and the standard and threw the share
+completely out of the ground, making it necessary for me to halt the
+team and jerk the heavy plow backward for a new start.</p>
+
+<p>Although strong and active I was rather short, even for a ten-year-old,
+and to reach the plow handles I was obliged to lift my hands above my
+shoulders; and so with the guiding lines crossed over my back and my
+worn straw hat bobbing just above the cross-brace I must have made a
+comical figure. At any rate nothing like it had been seen in the
+neighborhood and the people on the road to town looking across the
+field, laughed and called to me, and neighbor Button said to my father
+in my hearing, "That chap's too young to run a plow," a judgment which
+pleased and flattered me greatly.</p>
+
+<p>Harriet cheered me by running out occasionally to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span>meet me as I turned
+the nearest corner, and sometimes Frank consented to go all the way
+around, chatting breathlessly as he trotted along behind. At other times
+he was prevailed upon to bring to me a cookie and a glass of milk, a
+deed which helped to shorten the forenoon. And yet, notwithstanding all
+these ameliorations, plowing became tedious.</p>
+
+<p>The flies were savage, especially in the middle of the day, and the
+horses, tortured by their lances, drove badly, twisting and turning in
+their despairing rage. Their tails were continually getting over the
+lines, and in stopping to kick their tormentors from their bellies they
+often got astride the traces, and in other ways made trouble for me.
+Only in the early morning or when the sun sank low at night were they
+able to move quietly along their ways.</p>
+
+<p>The soil was the kind my father had been seeking, a smooth dark sandy
+loam, which made it possible for a lad to do the work of a man. Often
+the share would go the entire "round" without striking a root or a
+pebble as big as a walnut, the steel running steadily with a crisp
+craunching ripping sound which I rather liked to hear. In truth work
+would have been quite tolerable had it not been so long drawn out. Ten
+hours of it even on a fine day made about twice too many for a boy.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile I cheered myself in every imaginable way. I whistled. I sang.
+I studied the clouds. I gnawed the beautiful red skin from the seed
+vessels which hung upon the wild rose bushes, and I counted the prairie
+chickens as they began to come together in winter flocks running through
+the stubble in search of food. I stopped now and again to examine the
+lizards unhoused by the share, tormenting them to make them sweat their
+milky drops (they were curiously repulsive to me), and I measured the
+little granaries of wheat which the mice <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span>and gophers had deposited deep
+under the ground, storehouses which the plow had violated. My eyes dwelt
+enviously upon the sailing hawk, and on the passing of ducks. The
+occasional shadowy figure of a prairie wolf made me wish for Uncle David
+and his rifle.</p>
+
+<p>On certain days nothing could cheer me. When the bitter wind blew from
+the north, and the sky was filled with wild geese racing southward, with
+swiftly-hurrying clouds, winter seemed about to spring upon me. The
+horses' tails streamed in the wind. Flurries of snow covered me with
+clinging flakes, and the mud "gummed" my boots and trouser legs,
+clogging my steps. At such times I suffered from cold and
+loneliness&mdash;all sense of being a man evaporated. I was just a little
+boy, longing for the leisure of boyhood.</p>
+
+<p>Day after day, through the month of October and deep into November, I
+followed that team, turning over two acres of stubble each day. I would
+not believe this without proof, but it is true! At last it grew so cold
+that in the early morning everything was white with frost and I was
+obliged to put one hand in my pocket to keep it warm, while holding the
+plow with the other, but I didn't mind this so much, for it hinted at
+the close of autumn. I've no doubt facing the wind in this way was
+excellent discipline, but I didn't think it necessary then and my heart
+was sometimes bitter and rebellious.</p>
+
+<p>The soldier did not intend to be severe. As he had always been an early
+riser and a busy toiler it seemed perfectly natural and good discipline,
+that his sons should also plow and husk corn at ten years of age. He
+often told of beginning life as a "bound boy" at nine, and these stories
+helped me to perform my own tasks without whining. I feared to voice my
+weakness.</p>
+
+<p>At last there came a morning when by striking my heel upon the ground I
+convinced my boss that the soil <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span>was frozen too deep for the mold-board
+to break. "All right," he said, "you may lay off this forenoon."</p>
+
+<p>Oh, those beautiful hours of respite! With time to play or read I
+usually read, devouring anything I could lay my hands upon. Newspapers,
+whether old or new, or pasted on the wall or piled up in the
+attic,&mdash;anything in print was wonderful to me. One enthralling book,
+borrowed from Neighbor Button, was <i>The Female Spy</i>, a Tale of the
+Rebellion. Another treasure was a story called <i>Cast Ashore</i>, but this
+volume unfortunately was badly torn and fifty pages were missing so that
+I never knew, and do not know to this day, how those indomitable
+shipwrecked seamen reached their English homes. I dimly recall that one
+man carried a pet monkey on his back and that they all lived on
+"Bustards."</p>
+
+<p>Finally the day came when the ground rang like iron under the feet of
+the horses, and a bitter wind, raw and gusty, swept out of the
+northwest, bearing gray veils of sleet. Winter had come! Work in the
+furrow had ended. The plow was brought in, cleaned and greased to
+prevent its rusting, and while the horses munched their hay in
+well-earned holiday, father and I helped farmer Button husk the last of
+his corn.</p>
+
+<p>Osman Button, a quaint and interesting man of middle age, was a native
+of York State and retained many of the traditions of his old home
+strangely blent with a store of vivid memories of Colorado, Utah and
+California, for he had been one of the gold-seekers of the early
+fifties. He loved to spin yarns of "When I was in gold camps," and he
+spun them well. He was short and bent and spoke in a low voice with a
+curious nervous sniff, but his diction was notably precise and clear. He
+was a man of judgment, and a citizen of weight and influence. From O.
+Button I got my first definite notion of Bret Harte's country, and of
+the long journey <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span>which they of the ox team had made in search of
+Eldorado.</p>
+
+<p>His family "mostly boys and girls" was large, yet they all lived in a
+low limestone house which he had built (he said) to serve as a granary
+till he should find time to erect a suitable dwelling. In order to make
+the point dramatic, I will say that he was still living in the "granary"
+when last I called on him thirty years later!</p>
+
+<p>A warm friendship sprang up between him and my father, and he was often
+at our house but his gaunt and silent wife seldom accompanied him. She
+was kindly and hospitable, but a great sufferer. She never laughed, and
+seldom smiled, and so remains a pathetic figure in all my memories of
+the household.</p>
+
+<p>The younger Button children, Eva and Cyrus, became our companions in
+certain of our activities, but as they were both very sedate and slow of
+motion, they seldom joined us in our livelier sports. They were both
+much older than their years. Cyrus at this time was almost as venerable
+as his father, although his years were, I suppose, about seventeen.
+Albert and Lavinia, we heard, were much given to dancing and parties.</p>
+
+<p>One night as we were all seated around the kerosene lamp my father said,
+"Well, Belle, I suppose we'll have to take these young ones down to town
+and fit 'em out for school." These words so calmly uttered filled our
+minds with visions of new boots, new caps and new books, and though we
+went obediently to bed we hardly slept, so excited were we, and at
+breakfast next morning not one of us could think of food. All our
+desires converged upon the wondrous expedition&mdash;our first visit to town.</p>
+
+<p>Our only carriage was still the lumber wagon but it had now two spring
+seats, one for father, mother and Jessie, and one for Harriet, Frank and
+myself. No <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span>one else had anything better, hence we had no sense of being
+poorly outfitted. We drove away across the frosty prairie toward
+Osage&mdash;moderately comfortable and perfectly happy.</p>
+
+<p>Osage was only a little town, a village of perhaps twelve hundred
+inhabitants, but to me as we drove down its Main Street, it was almost
+as impressive as LaCrosse had been. Frank clung close to father, and
+mother led Jessie, leaving Harriet and me to stumble over nail-kegs and
+dodge whiffle trees what time our eyes absorbed jars of pink and white
+candy, and sought out boots and buckskin mittens. Whenever Harriet spoke
+she whispered, and we pointed at each shining object with cautious
+care.&mdash;Oh! the marvellous exotic smells! Odors of salt codfish and
+spices, calico and kerosene, apples and ginger-snaps mingle in my mind
+as I write.</p>
+
+<p>Each of us soon carried a candy marble in his or her cheek (as a
+chipmunk carries a nut) and Frank and I stood like sturdy hitching posts
+whilst the storekeeper with heavy hands screwed cotton-plush caps upon
+our heads,&mdash;but the most exciting moment, the crowning joy of the day,
+came with the buying of our new boots.&mdash;If only father had not insisted
+on our taking those which were a size too large for us!</p>
+
+<p>They were real boots. No one but a Congressman wore "gaiters" in those
+days. War fashions still dominated the shoe-shops, and high-topped
+cavalry boots were all but universal. They were kept in boxes under the
+counter or ranged in rows on a shelf and were of all weights and degrees
+of fineness. The ones I selected had red tops with a golden moon in the
+center but my brother's taste ran to blue tops decorated with a golden
+flag. Oh! that deliciously oily <i>new</i> smell! My heart glowed every time
+I looked at mine. I was especially pleased because they did <i>not</i> have
+copper toes. Copper <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span>toes belonged to little boys. A youth who had
+plowed seventy acres of land could not reasonably be expected to dress
+like a child.&mdash;How smooth and delightfully stiff they felt on my feet.</p>
+
+<p>Then came our new books, a McGuffey reader, a Mitchell geography, a
+Ray's arithmetic, and a slate. The books had a delightful new smell
+also, and there was singular charm in the smooth surface of the unmarked
+slates. I was eager to carve my name in the frame. At last with our
+treasures under the seat (so near that we could feel them), with our
+slates and books in our laps we jolted home, dreaming of school and
+snow. To wade in the drifts with our fine high-topped boots was now our
+desire.</p>
+
+<p>It is strange but I cannot recall how my mother looked on this trip.
+Even my father's image is faint and vague (I remember only his keen
+eagle-gray terrifying eyes), but I can see every acre of that rented
+farm. I can tell you exactly how the house looked. It was an unpainted
+square cottage and stood bare on the sod at the edge of Dry Run ravine.
+It had a small lean-to on the eastern side and a sitting room and
+bedroom below. Overhead was a low unplastered chamber in which we
+children slept. As it grew too cold to use the summer kitchen we cooked,
+ate and lived in the square room which occupied the entire front of the
+two story upright, and which was, I suppose, sixteen feet square. As our
+attic was warmed only by the stove-pipe, we older children of a frosty
+morning made extremely simple and hurried toilets. On very cold days we
+hurried down stairs to dress beside the kitchen fire.</p>
+
+<p>Our furniture was of the rudest sort. I cannot recall a single piece in
+our house or in our neighbors' houses that had either beauty or
+distinction. It was all cheap and worn, for this was the middle border,
+and nearly all <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span>our neighbors had moved as we had done in covered
+wagons. Farms were new, houses were mere shanties, and money was scarce.
+"War times" and "war prices" were only just beginning to change. Our
+clothing was all cheap and ill fitting. The women and children wore
+home-made "cotton flannel" underclothing for the most part, and the men
+wore rough, ready-made suits over which they drew brown denim blouses or
+overalls to keep them clean.</p>
+
+<p>Father owned a fine buffalo overcoat (so much of his song's promise was
+redeemed) and we possessed two buffalo robes for use in our winter
+sleigh, but mother had only a sad coat and a woolen shawl. How she kept
+warm I cannot now understand&mdash;I think she stayed at home on cold days.</p>
+
+<p>All of the boys wore long trousers, and even my eight year old brother
+looked like a miniature man with his full-length overalls, high-topped
+boots and real suspenders. As for me I carried a bandanna in my hip
+pocket and walked with determined masculine stride.</p>
+
+<p>My mother, like all her brothers and sisters, was musical and played the
+violin&mdash;or fiddle, as we called it,&mdash;and I have many dear remembrances
+of her playing. <i>Napoleon's March</i>, <i>Money Musk</i>, <i>The Devil's Dream</i>
+and half-a-dozen other simple tunes made up her repertoire. It was very
+crude music of course but it added to the love and admiration in which
+her children always held her. Also in some way we had fallen heir to a
+Prince melodeon&mdash;one that had belonged to the McClintocks, but only my
+sister played on that.</p>
+
+<p>Once at a dance in neighbor Button's house, mother took the "dare" of
+the fiddler and with shy smile played <i>The Fisher's Hornpipe</i> or some
+other simple melody and was mightily cheered at the close of it, a brief
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span>performance which she refused to repeat. Afterward she and my father
+danced and this seemed a very wonderful performance, for to us they were
+"old"&mdash;far past such frolicking, although he was but forty and she
+thirty-one!</p>
+
+<p>At this dance I heard, for the first time, the local professional
+fiddler, old Daddy Fairbanks, as quaint a character as ever entered
+fiction, for he was not only butcher and horse doctor but a renowned
+musician as well. Tall, gaunt and sandy, with enormous nose and sparse
+projecting teeth, he was to me the most enthralling figure at this dance
+and his queer "Calls" and his "York State" accent filled us all with
+delight. "<i>Ally</i> man left," "Chassay <i>by</i> your pardners," "Dozy-do"
+were some of the phrases he used as he played <i>Honest John</i> and
+<i>Haste to the Wedding</i>. At times he sang his calls in high nasal chant,
+"<i>First</i> lady lead to the <i>right</i>, deedle, deedle dum-dum&mdash;
+<i>gent</i> foller after&mdash;dally-deedle-do-do&mdash;<i>three</i> hands round"&mdash;and
+everybody laughed with frank enjoyment of his words and action.</p>
+
+<p>It was a joy to watch him "start the set." With fiddle under his chin he
+took his seat in a big chair on the kitchen table in order to command
+the floor. "Farm on, farm on!" he called disgustedly. "Lively now!" and
+then, when all the couples were in position, with one mighty No. 14 boot
+uplifted, with bow laid to strings he snarled, "Already&mdash;<span class="smcap">GELANG</span>!" and with
+a thundering crash his foot came down, "Honors <span class="smcap">TEW</span> your pardners&mdash;right and
+left <span class="smcap">FOUR</span>!" And the dance was on!</p>
+
+<p>I suspect his fiddlin' was not even "middlin'," but he beat time fairly
+well and kept the dancers somewhere near to rhythm, and so when his
+ragged old cap went round he often got a handful of quarters for his
+toil. He always ate two suppers, one at the beginning of the party and
+another at the end. He had a high respect <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span>for the skill of my Uncle
+David and was grateful to him and other better musicians for their
+non-interference with his professional engagements.</p>
+
+<p>The school-house which was to be the center of our social life stood on
+the bare prairie about a mile to the southwest and like thousands of
+other similar buildings in the west, had not a leaf to shade it in
+summer nor a branch to break the winds of savage winter. "There's been a
+good deal of talk about setting out a wind-break," neighbor Button
+explained to us, "but nothing has as yet been done." It was merely a
+square pine box painted a glaring white on the outside and a desolate
+drab within; at least drab was the original color, but the benches were
+mainly so greasy and hacked that original intentions were obscured. It
+had two doors on the eastern end and three windows on each side.</p>
+
+<p>A long square stove (standing on slender legs in a puddle of bricks), a
+wooden chair, and a rude table in one corner, for the use of the
+teacher, completed the movable furniture. The walls were roughly
+plastered and the windows had no curtains.</p>
+
+<p>It was a barren temple of the arts even to the residents of Dry Run, and
+Harriet and I, stealing across the prairie one Sunday morning to look
+in, came away vaguely depressed. We were fond of school and never missed
+a day if we could help it, but this neighborhood center seemed small and
+bleak and poor.</p>
+
+<p>With what fear, what excitement we approached the door on that first
+day, I can only faintly indicate. All the scholars were strange to me
+except Albert and Cyrus Button, and I was prepared for rough treatment.
+However, the experience was not so harsh as I had feared. True, Rangely
+Field did throw me down and wash my face in snow, and Jack Sweet tripped
+me up once or twice, but I bore these indignities with such grace and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span>could command, and soon made a place for myself among the boys.</p>
+
+<p>Burton Babcock was my seat-mate, and at once became my chum. You will
+hear much of him in this chronicle. He was two years older than I and
+though pale and slim was unusually swift and strong for his age. He was
+a silent lad, curiously timid in his classes and not at ease with his
+teachers.</p>
+
+<p>I cannot recover much of that first winter of school. It was not an
+experience to remember for its charm. Not one line of grace, not one
+touch of color relieved the room's bare walls or softened its harsh
+windows. Perhaps this very barrenness gave to the poetry in our readers
+an appeal that seems magical, certainly it threw over the faces of
+Frances Babcock and Mary Abbie Gammons a lovelier halo.&mdash;They were "the
+big girls" of the school, that is to say, they were seventeen or
+eighteen years old,&mdash;and Frances was the special terror of the teacher,
+a pale and studious pigeon-toed young man who was preparing for college.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of the cold, the boys played open air games all winter. "Dog
+and Deer," "Dare Gool" and "Fox and Geese" were our favorite diversions,
+and the wonder is that we did not all die of pneumonia, for we battled
+so furiously during each recess that we often came in wet with
+perspiration and coughing so hard that for several minutes recitations
+were quite impossible.&mdash;But we were a hardy lot and none of us seemed
+the worse for our colds.</p>
+
+<p>There was not much chivalry in the school&mdash;quite the contrary, for it
+was dominated by two or three big rough boys and the rest of us took our
+tone from them. To protect a girl, to shield her from remark or
+indignity required a good deal of bravery and few of us were strong
+enough to do it. Girls were foolish, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>ridiculous creatures, set apart to
+be laughed at or preyed upon at will. To shame them was a great
+joke.&mdash;How far I shared in these barbarities I cannot say but that I did
+share in them I know, for I had very little to do with my sister Harriet
+after crossing the school-house yard. She kept to her tribe as I to
+mine.</p>
+
+<p>This winter was made memorable also by a "revival" which came over the
+district with sudden fury. It began late in the winter&mdash;fortunately, for
+it ended all dancing and merry-making for the time. It silenced Daddy
+Fairbanks' fiddle and subdued my mother's glorious voice to a wail. A
+cloud of puritanical gloom settled upon almost every household. Youth
+and love became furtive and hypocritic.</p>
+
+<p>The evangelist, one of the old-fashioned shouting, hysterical,
+ungrammatical, gasping sort, took charge of the services, and in his
+exhortations phrases descriptive of lakes of burning brimstone and ages
+of endless torment abounded. Some of the figures of speech and violent
+gestures of the man still linger in my mind, but I will not set them
+down on paper. They are too dreadful to perpetuate. At times he roared
+with such power that he could have been heard for half a mile.</p>
+
+<p>And yet we went, night by night, mother, father, Jessie, all of us. It
+was our theater. Some of the roughest characters in the neighborhood
+rose and professed repentance, for a season, even old Barton, the
+profanest man in the township, experienced a "change of heart."</p>
+
+<p>We all enjoyed the singing, and joined most lustily in the tunes. Even
+little Jessie learned to sing <i>Heavenly Wings</i>, <i>There is a Fountain
+filled with Blood</i>, and <i>Old Hundred</i>.</p>
+
+<p>As I peer back into that crowded little schoolroom, smothering hot and
+reeking with lamp smoke, and recall the half-lit, familiar faces of the
+congregation, it all has <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span>the quality of a vision, something experienced
+in another world. The preacher, leaping, sweating, roaring till the
+windows rattle, the mothers with sleeping babes in their arms, the
+sweet, strained faces of the girls, the immobile wondering men, are
+spectral shadows, figures encountered in the phantasmagoria of
+disordered sleep.</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br /><a name="X" id="X"></a>
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CHAPTER X</h2>
+
+<h2>The Homestead on the Knoll</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>Spring came to us that year with such sudden beauty, such sweet
+significance after our long and depressing winter, that it seemed a
+release from prison, and when at the close of a warm day in March we
+heard, pulsing down through the golden haze of sunset, the mellow <i>boom,
+boom, boom</i> of the prairie cock our hearts quickened, for this, we were
+told, was the certain sign of spring.</p>
+
+<p>Day by day the call of this gay herald of spring was taken up by others
+until at last the whole horizon was ringing with a sunrise symphony of
+exultant song. "<i>Boom, boom, boom!</i>" called the roosters; "<i>cutta,
+cutta, wha-whoop-squaw, squawk!</i>" answered the hens as they fluttered
+and danced on the ridges&mdash;and mingled with their jocund hymn we heard at
+last the slender, wistful piping of the prairie lark.</p>
+
+<p>With the coming of spring my duties as a teamster returned. My father
+put me in charge of a harrow, and with old Doll and Queen&mdash;quiet and
+faithful span&mdash;I drove upon the field which I had plowed the previous
+October, there to plod to and fro behind my drag, while in the sky above
+my head and around me on the mellowing soil the life of the season,
+thickened.</p>
+
+<p>Aided by my team I was able to study at close range the prairie roosters
+as they assembled for their parade. They had regular "stamping grounds"
+on certain ridges, Where the soil was beaten smooth by the pressure of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span>their restless feet. I often passed within a few yards of them.&mdash;I can
+see them now, the cocks leaping and strutting, with trailing wings and
+down-thrust heads, displaying their bulbous orange-colored neck
+ornaments while the hens flutter and squawk in silly delight. All the
+charm and mystery of that prairie world comes back to me, and I ache
+with an illogical desire to recover it and hold it, and preserve it in
+some form for my children.&mdash;It seems an injustice that they should miss
+it, and yet it is probable that they are getting an equal joy of life,
+an equal exaltation from the opening flowers of the single lilac bush in
+our city back-yard or from an occasional visit to the lake in Central
+Park.</p>
+
+<p>Dragging is even more wearisome than plowing, in some respects, for you
+have no handles to assist you and your heels sinking deep into the soft
+loam bring such unwonted strain upon the tendons of your legs that you
+can scarcely limp home to supper, and it seems that you cannot possibly
+go on another day,&mdash;but you do&mdash;at least I did.</p>
+
+<p>There was something relentless as the weather in the way my soldier
+father ruled his sons, and yet he was neither hard-hearted nor
+unsympathetic. The fact is easily explained. His own boyhood had been
+task-filled and he saw nothing unnatural in the regular employment of
+his children. Having had little play-time himself, he considered that we
+were having a very comfortable boyhood. Furthermore the country was new
+and labor scarce. Every hand and foot must count under such conditions.</p>
+
+<p>There are certain ameliorations to child-labor on a farm. Air and
+sunshine and food are plentiful. I never lacked for meat or clothing,
+and mingled with my records of toil are exquisite memories of the joy I
+took in following the changes in the landscape, in the notes <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>of birds,
+and in the play of small animals on the sunny soil.</p>
+
+<p>There were no pigeons on the prairie but enormous flocks of ducks came
+sweeping northward, alighting at sunset to feed in the fields of
+stubble. They came in countless myriads and often when they settled to
+earth they covered acres of meadow like some prodigious cataract from
+the sky. When alarmed they rose with a sound like the rumbling of
+thunder.</p>
+
+<p>At times the lines of their cloud-like flocks were so unending that
+those in the front rank were lost in the northern sky, while those in
+the rear were but dim bands beneath the southern sun.&mdash;I tried many
+times to shoot some of them, but never succeeded, so wary were they.
+Brant and geese in formal flocks followed and to watch these noble birds
+pushing their arrowy lines straight into the north always gave me
+special joy. On fine days they flew high&mdash;so high they were but faint
+lines against the shining clouds.</p>
+
+<p>I learned to imitate their cries, and often caused the leaders to turn,
+to waver in their course as I uttered my resounding call.</p>
+
+<p>The sand-hill crane came last of all, loitering north in lonely easeful
+flight. Often of a warm day, I heard his sovereign cry falling from the
+azure dome, so high, so far his form could not be seen, so close to the
+sun that my eyes could not detect his solitary, majestic circling sweep.
+He came after the geese. He was the herald of summer. His brazen,
+reverberating call will forever remain associated in my mind with
+mellow, pulsating earth, springing grass and cloudless glorious May-time
+skies.</p>
+
+<p>As my team moved to and fro over the field, ground sparrows rose in
+countless thousands, flinging themselves against the sky like grains of
+wheat from out a sower's <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span>hand, and their chatter fell upon me like the
+voices of fairy sprites, invisible and multitudinous. Long swift narrow
+flocks of a bird we called "the prairie-pigeon" swooped over the swells
+on sounding wing, winding so close to the ground, they seemed at times
+like slender air-borne serpents,&mdash;and always the brown lark whistled as
+if to cheer my lonely task.</p>
+
+<p>Back and forth across the wide field I drove, while the sun crawled
+slowly up the sky. It was tedious work and I was always hungry by nine,
+and famished at ten. Thereafter the sun appeared to stand still. My
+chest caved in and my knees trembled with weakness, but when at last the
+white flag fluttering from a chamber window summoned to the mid-day
+meal, I started with strength miraculously renewed and called,
+"<i>Dinner!</i>" to the hired hand. Unhitching my team, with eager haste I
+climbed upon old Queen, and rode at ease toward the barn.</p>
+
+<p>Oh, it was good to enter the kitchen, odorous with fresh biscuit and hot
+coffee! We all ate like dragons, devouring potatoes and salt pork
+without end, till mother mildly remarked, "Boys, boys! Don't 'founder'
+yourselves!"</p>
+
+<p>From such a meal I withdrew torpid as a gorged snake, but luckily I had
+half an hour in which to get my courage back,&mdash;and besides, there was
+always the stirring power of father's clarion call. His energy appeared
+superhuman to me. I was in awe of him. He kept track of everything,
+seemed hardly to sleep and never complained of weariness. Long before
+the nooning was up, (or so it seemed to me) he began to shout: "Time's
+up, boys. Grab a root!"</p>
+
+<p>And so, lame, stiff and sore, with the sinews of my legs shortened, so
+that my knees were bent like an old man's, I hobbled away to the barn
+and took charge of my team. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span>Once in the field, I felt better. A subtle
+change, a mellower charm came over the afternoon earth. The ground was
+warmer, the sky more genial, the wind more amiable, and before I had
+finished my second "round" my joints were moderately pliable and my
+sinews relaxed.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless the temptation to sit on the corner of the harrow and dream
+the moments away was very great, and sometimes as I laid my tired body
+down on the tawny, sunlit grass at the edge of the field, and gazed up
+at the beautiful clouds sailing by, I wished for leisure to explore
+their purple valleys.&mdash;The wind whispered in the tall weeds, and sighed
+in the hazel bushes. The dried blades touching one another in the
+passing winds, spoke to me, and the gophers, glad of escape from their
+dark, underground prisons, chirped a cheery greeting. Such respites were
+strangely sweet.</p>
+
+<p>So day by day, as I walked my monotonous round upon the ever mellowing
+soil, the prairie spring unrolled its beauties before me. I saw the last
+goose pass on to the north, and watched the green grass creeping up the
+sunny slopes. I answered the splendid challenge of the loitering crane,
+and studied the ground sparrow building her grassy nest. The prairie
+hens began to seek seclusion in the swales, and the pocket gopher,
+busily mining the sod, threw up his purple-brown mounds of cool fresh
+earth. Larks, blue-birds and king-birds followed the robins, and at last
+the full tide of May covered the world with luscious green.</p>
+
+<p>Harriet and Frank returned to school but I was too valuable to be
+spared. The unbroken land of our new farm demanded the plow and no
+sooner was the planting on our rented place finished than my father
+began the work of fencing and breaking the sod of the homestead which
+lay a mile to the south, glowing like a garden under the summer sun. One
+day late in May my uncle David <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span>(who had taken a farm not far away),
+drove over with four horses hitched to a big breaking plow and together
+with my father set to work overturning the primeval sward whereon we
+were to be "lords of the soil."</p>
+
+<p>I confess that as I saw the tender plants and shining flowers bow
+beneath the remorseless beam, civilization seemed a sad business, and
+yet there was something epic, something large-gestured and splendid in
+the "breaking" season. Smooth, glossy, almost unwrinkled the thick
+ribbon of jet-black sod rose upon the share and rolled away from the
+mold-board's glistening curve to tuck itself upside down into the furrow
+behind the horse's heels, and the picture which my uncle made, gave me
+pleasure in spite of the sad changes he was making.</p>
+
+<p>The land was not all clear prairie and every ounce of David's great
+strength was required to guide that eighteen-inch plow as it went
+ripping and snarling through the matted roots of the hazel thickets, and
+sometimes my father came and sat on the beam in order to hold the
+coulter to its work, while the giant driver braced himself to the shock
+and the four horses strained desperately at their traces. These contests
+had the quality of a wrestling match but the men always won. My own job
+was to rake and burn the brush which my father mowed with a heavy
+scythe.&mdash;Later we dug postholes and built fences but each day was spent
+on the new land.</p>
+
+<p>Around us, on the swells, gray gophers whistled, and the nesting plover
+quaveringly called. Blackbirds clucked in the furrow and squat badgers
+watched with jealous eye the plow's inexorable progress toward their
+dens. The weather was perfect June. Fleecy clouds sailed like snowy
+galleons from west to east, the wind <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span>was strong but kind, and we worked
+in a glow of satisfied ownership.</p>
+
+<p>Many rattlesnakes ("massasaugas" Mr. Button called them), inhabited the
+moist spots and father and I killed several as we cleared the ground.
+Prairie wolves lurked in the groves and swales, but as foot by foot and
+rod by rod, the steady steel rolled the grass and the hazel brush under,
+all of these wild things died or hurried away, never to return. Some
+part of this tragedy I was able even then to understand and regret.</p>
+
+<p>At last the wide "quarter section" lay upturned, black to the sun and
+the garden that had bloomed and fruited for millions of years, waiting
+for man, lay torn and ravaged. The tender plants, the sweet flowers, the
+fragrant fruits, the busy insects, all the swarming lives which had been
+native here for untold centuries were utterly destroyed. It was sad and
+yet it was not all loss, even to my thinking, for I realized that over
+this desolation the green wheat would wave and the corn silks shed their
+pollen. It was not precisely the romantic valley of our song, but it was
+a rich and promiseful plot and my father seemed entirely content.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, on a little rise of ground near the road, neighbor Gammons
+and John Bowers were building our next home. It did not in the least
+resemble the foundation of an everlasting family seat, but it deeply
+excited us all. It was of pine and had the usual three rooms below and a
+long garret above and as it stood on a plain, bare to the winds, my
+father took the precaution of lining it with brick to hold it down. It
+was as good as most of the dwellings round about us but it stood naked
+on the sod, devoid of grace as a dry goods box. Its walls were rough
+plaster, its floor of white pine, its furniture poor, scanty and worn.
+There was a little picture on the face of the clock, a chromo on the
+wall, and a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span>printed portrait of General Grant&mdash;nothing more. It was
+home by reason of my mother's brave and cheery presence, and the prattle
+of Jessie's clear voice filled it with music. Dear child,&mdash;with her it
+was always spring!</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br /><a name="XI" id="XI"></a>
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+
+<h2>School Life</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>Our new house was completed during July but we did not move into it till
+in September. There was much to be done in way of building sheds,
+granaries and corn-cribs and in this work father was both carpenter and
+stone-mason. An amusing incident comes to my mind in connection with the
+digging of our well.</p>
+
+<p>Uncle David and I were "tending mason," and father was down in the well
+laying or trying to lay the curbing. It was a tedious and difficult job
+and he was about to give it up in despair when one of our neighbors, a
+quaint old Englishman named Barker, came driving along. He was one of
+these men who take a minute inquisitive interest in the affairs of
+others; therefore he pulled his team to a halt and came in.</p>
+
+<p>Peering into the well he drawled out, "Hello, Garland. W'at ye doin'
+down there?"</p>
+
+<p>"Tryin' to lay a curb," replied my father lifting a gloomy face, "and I
+guess it's too complicated for me."</p>
+
+<p>"Nothin' easier," retorted the old man with a wink at my uncle, "jest
+putt two a-top o' one and one a-toppo two&mdash;and the big eend out,"&mdash;and
+with a broad grin on his red face he went back to his team and drove
+away.</p>
+
+<p>My father afterwards said, "I saw the whole process in a flash of light.
+He had given me all the rule I needed. I laid the rest of that wall
+without a particle of trouble."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span>Many times after this Barker stopped to offer advice but he never quite
+equalled the startling success of his rule for masonry.</p>
+
+<p>The events of this harvest, even the process of moving into the new
+house, are obscured in my mind by the clouds of smoke which rose from
+calamitous fires all over the west. It was an unprecedentedly dry season
+so that not merely the prairie, but many weedy cornfields burned. I had
+a good deal of time to meditate upon this for I was again the plow-boy.
+Every day I drove away from the rented farm to the new land where I was
+cross-cutting the breaking, and the thickening haze through which the
+sun shone with a hellish red glare, produced in me a growing uneasiness
+which became terror when the news came to us that Chicago was on fire.
+It seemed to me then that the earth was about to go up in a flaming
+cloud just as my grandad had so often prophesied.</p>
+
+<p>This general sense of impending disaster was made keenly personal by the
+destruction of uncle David's stable with all his horses. This building
+like most of the barns of the region was not only roofed with straw but
+banked with straw, and it burned so swiftly that David was trapped in a
+stall while trying to save one of his teams. He saved himself by
+burrowing like a gigantic mole through the side of the shed, and so,
+hatless, covered with dust and chaff, emerged as if from a fiery burial
+after he had been given up for dead.</p>
+
+<p>This incident combined with others so filled my childish mind that I
+lived in apprehension of similar disaster. I feared the hot wind which
+roared up from the south, and I never entered our own stable in the
+middle of the day without a sense of danger. Then came the rains&mdash;the
+blessed rains&mdash;and put an end to my fears.</p>
+
+<p>In a week we had forgotten all the "conflagrations" <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span>except that in
+Chicago. There was something grandiose and unforgettable in the tales
+which told of the madly fleeing crowds in the narrow streets. These
+accounts pushed back the walls of my universe till its far edge included
+the ruined metropolis whose rebuilding was of the highest importance to
+us, for it was not only the source of all our supplies, but the great
+central market to which we sent our corn and hogs and wheat.</p>
+
+<p>My world was splendidly romantic. It was bounded on the west by <span class="smcap">The
+Plains</span> with their Indians and buffalo; on the north by <span class="smcap">The
+Great Woods</span>, filled with thieves and counterfeiters; on the south
+by <span class="smcap">Osage and Chicago</span>; and on the east by <span class="smcap">Hesper</span>, <span class="smcap">Onalaska</span> and <span class="smcap">Boston</span>. A
+luminous trail ran from Dry Run Prairie to Neshonoc&mdash;all else was "chaos
+and black night."</p>
+
+<p>For seventy days I walked behind my plow on the new farm while my father
+finished the harvest on the rented farm and moved to the house on the
+knoll. It was lonely work for a boy of eleven but there were frequent
+breaks in the monotony and I did not greatly suffer. I disliked
+cross-cutting for the reason that the unrotted sods would often pile up
+in front of the coulter and make me a great deal of trouble. There is a
+certain pathos in the sight of that small boy tugging and kicking at the
+stubborn turf in the effort to free his plow. Such misfortunes loom
+large in a lad's horizon.</p>
+
+<p>One of the interludes, and a lovely one, was given over to gathering the
+hay from one of the wild meadows to the north of us. Another was the
+threshing from the shock on the rented farm. This was the first time we
+had seen this done and it interested us keenly. A great many teams were
+necessary and the crew of men was correspondingly large. Uncle David was
+again the thresher with a fine new separator, and I would have enjoyed
+the season with almost perfect contentment <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span>had it not been for the fact
+that I was detailed to hold sacks for Daddy Fairbanks who was the
+measurer.</p>
+
+<p>Our first winter had been without much wind but our second taught us the
+meaning of the word "blizzard" which we had just begun to hear about.
+The winds of Wisconsin were "gentle zephyrs" compared to the blasts
+which now swept down over the plain to hammer upon our desolate little
+cabin and pile the drifts around our sheds and granaries, and even my
+pioneer father was forced to admit that the hills of Green's Coulee had
+their uses after all.</p>
+
+<p>One such storm which leaped upon us at the close of a warm and beautiful
+day in February lasted for two days and three nights, making life on the
+open prairie impossible even to the strongest man. The thermometer fell
+to thirty degrees below zero and the snow-laden air moving at a rate of
+eighty miles an hour pressed upon the walls of our house with giant
+power. The sky of noon was darkened, so that we moved in a pallid
+half-light, and the windows thick with frost shut us in as if with gray
+shrouds.</p>
+
+<p>Hour after hour those winds and snows in furious battle, howled and
+roared and whistled around our frail shelter, slashing at the windows
+and piping on the chimney, till it seemed as if the Lord Sun had been
+wholly blotted out and that the world would never again be warm. Twice
+each day my father made a desperate sally toward the stable to feed the
+imprisoned cows and horses or to replenish our fuel&mdash;for the remainder
+of the long pallid day he sat beside the fire with gloomy face. Even his
+indomitable spirit was awed by the fury of that storm.</p>
+
+<p>So long and so continuously did those immitigable winds howl in our ears
+that their tumult persisted, in imagination, when on the third morning,
+we thawed <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span>holes in the thickened rime of the window panes and looked
+forth on a world silent as a marble sea and flaming with sunlight. My
+own relief was mingled with surprise&mdash;surprise to find the landscape so
+unchanged.</p>
+
+<p>True, the yard was piled high with drifts and the barns were almost lost
+to view but the far fields and the dark lines of Burr Oak Grove remained
+unchanged.</p>
+
+<p>We met our school-mates that day, like survivors of shipwreck, and for
+many days we listened to gruesome stories of disaster, tales of stages
+frozen deep in snow with all their passengers sitting in their seats,
+and of herders with their silent flocks around them, lying stark as
+granite among the hazel bushes in which they had sought shelter. It was
+long before we shook off the awe with which this tempest filled our
+hearts.</p>
+
+<p>The school-house which stood at the corner of our new farm was less than
+half a mile away, and yet on many of the winter days which followed, we
+found it quite far enough. Hattie was now thirteen, Frank nine and I a
+little past eleven but nothing, except a blizzard such as I have
+described, could keep us away from school. Facing the cutting wind,
+wallowing through the drifts, battling like small intrepid animals, we
+often arrived at the door moaning with pain yet unsubdued, our ears
+frosted, our toes numb in our boots, to meet others in similar case
+around the roaring hot stove.</p>
+
+<p>Often after we reached the school-house another form of suffering
+overtook us in the "thawing out" process. Our fingers and toes, swollen
+with blood, ached and itched, and our ears burned. Nearly all of us
+carried sloughing ears and scaling noses. Some of the pupils came two
+miles against these winds.</p>
+
+<p>The natural result of all this exposure was of course, chilblains! Every
+foot in the school was more or less touched with this disease to which
+our elders alluded <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span>as if it were an amusing trifle, but to us it was no
+joke.</p>
+
+<p>After getting thoroughly warmed up, along about the middle of the
+forenoon, there came into our feet a most intense itching and burning
+and aching, a sensation so acute that keeping still was impossible, and
+all over the room an uneasy shuffling and drumming arose as we pounded
+our throbbing heels against the floor or scraped our itching toes
+against the edge of our benches. The teacher understood and was kind
+enough to overlook this disorder.</p>
+
+<p>The wonder is that any of us lived through that winter, for at recess,
+no matter what the weather might be we flung ourselves out of doors to
+play "fox and geese" or "dare goal," until, damp with perspiration, we
+responded to the teacher's bell, and came pouring back into the entry
+ways to lay aside our wraps for another hour's study.</p>
+
+<p>Our readers were almost the only counterchecks to the current of
+vulgarity and baseness which ran through the talk of the older boys, and
+I wish to acknowledge my deep obligation to Professor McGuffey, whoever
+he may have been, for the dignity and literary grace of his selections.
+From the pages of his readers I learned to know and love the poems of
+Scott, Byron, Southey, Wordsworth and a long line of the English
+masters. I got my first taste of Shakespeare from the selected scenes
+which I read in these books.</p>
+
+<p>With terror as well as delight I rose to read <i>Lochiel's Warning</i>, <i>The
+Battle of Waterloo</i> or <i>The Roman Captive</i>. Marco Bozzaris and William
+Tell were alike glorious to me. I soon knew not only my own reader, the
+fourth, but all the selections in the fifth and sixth as well. I could
+follow almost word for word the recitations of the older pupils and at
+such times I forgot my squat little body and my mop of hair, and became
+imaginatively a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span>page in the train of Ivanhoe, or a bowman in the army
+of Richard the Lion Heart battling the Saracen in the Holy Land.</p>
+
+<p>With a high ideal of the way in which these grand selections should be
+read, I was scared almost voiceless when it came my turn to read them
+before the class. "<span class="smcap">Strike for your Altars and your Fires. Strike for
+the Green Graves of your Sires&mdash;God and your Native Land</span>," always
+reduced me to a trembling breathlessness. The sight of the emphatic
+print was a call to the best that was in me and yet I could not meet the
+test. Excess of desire to do it just right often brought a ludicrous
+gasp and I often fell back into my seat in disgrace, the titter of the
+girls adding to my pain.</p>
+
+<p>Then there was the famous passage, "Did ye not hear it?" and the
+careless answer, "No, it was but the wind or the car rattling o'er the
+stony street."&mdash;I knew exactly how those opposing emotions should be
+expressed but to do it after I rose to my feet was impossible. Burton
+was even more terrified than I. Stricken blind as well as dumb he
+usually ended by helplessly staring at the words which, I conceive, had
+suddenly become a blur to him.</p>
+
+<p>No matter, we were taught to feel the force of these poems and to
+reverence the genius that produced them, and that was worth while.
+Falstaff and Prince Hal, Henry and his wooing of Kate, Wolsey and his
+downfall, Shylock and his pound of flesh all became a part of our
+thinking and helped us to measure the large figures of our own
+literature, for Whittier, Bryant and Longfellow also had place in these
+volumes. It is probable that Professor McGuffey, being a Southern man,
+did not value New England writers as highly as my grandmother did,
+nevertheless <i>Thanatopsis</i> was there and <i>The Village Blacksmith</i>, and
+extracts from <i>The Deer <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span>Slayer</i> and <i>The Pilot</i> gave us a notion that
+in Cooper we had a novelist of weight and importance, one to put beside
+Scott and Dickens.</p>
+
+<p>A by-product of my acquaintance with one of the older boys was a stack
+of copies of the <i>New York Weekly</i>, a paper filled with stories of noble
+life in England and hair-breadth escapes on the plain, a shrewd mixture,
+designed to meet the needs of the entire membership of a prairie
+household. The pleasure I took in these tales should fill me with shame,
+but it doesn't&mdash;I rejoice in the memory of it.</p>
+
+<p>I soon began, also, to purchase and trade "Beadle's Dime Novels" and, to
+tell the truth, I took an exquisite delight in <i>Old Sleuth</i> and <i>Jack
+Harkaway</i>. My taste was catholic. I ranged from <i>Lady Gwendolin</i> to
+<i>Buckskin Bill</i> and so far as I can now distinguish one was quite as
+enthralling as the other. It is impossible for any print to be as
+magical to any boy these days as those weeklies were to me in 1871.</p>
+
+<p>One day a singular test was made of us all. Through some agency now lost
+to me my father was brought to subscribe for <i>The Hearth and Home</i> or
+some such paper for the farmer, and in this I read my first chronicle of
+everyday life.</p>
+
+<p>In the midst of my dreams of lords and ladies, queens and dukes, I found
+myself deeply concerned with backwoods farming, spelling schools,
+protracted meetings and the like familiar homely scenes. This serial
+(which involved my sister and myself in many a spat as to who should
+read it first) was <i>The Hoosier Schoolmaster</i>, by Edward Eggleston, and
+a perfectly successful attempt to interest western readers in a story of
+the middle border.</p>
+
+<p>To us "Mandy" and "Bud Means," "Ralph Hartsook," the teacher, "Little
+Shocky" and sweet patient "Hannah," were as real as Cyrus Button and
+Daddy <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span>Fairbanks. We could hardly wait for the next number of the paper,
+so concerned were we about "Hannah" and "Ralph." We quoted old lady
+Means and we made bets on "Bud" in his fight with the villainous drover.
+I hardly knew where Indiana was in those days, but Eggleston's
+characters were near neighbors.</p>
+
+<p>The illustrations were dreadful, even in my eyes, but the artist
+contrived to give a slight virginal charm to Hannah and a certain
+childish sweetness to Shocky, so that we accepted the more than mortal
+ugliness of old man Means and his daughter Mirandy (who simpered over
+her book at us as she did at Ralph), as a just interpretation of their
+worthlessness.</p>
+
+<p>This book is a milestone in my literary progress as it is in the
+development of distinctive western fiction, and years afterward I was
+glad to say so to the aged author who lived a long and honored life as a
+teacher and writer of fiction.</p>
+
+<p>It was always too hot or too cold in our schoolroom and on certain days
+when a savage wind beat and clamored at the loose windows, the girls,
+humped and shivering, sat upon their feet to keep them warm, and the
+younger children with shawls over their shoulders sought permission to
+gather close about the stove.</p>
+
+<p>Our dinner pails (stored in the entry way) were often frozen solid and
+it was necessary to thaw out our mince pie as well as our bread and
+butter by putting it on the stove. I recall, vividly, gnawing, dog-like,
+at the mollified outside of a doughnut while still its frosty heart made
+my teeth ache.</p>
+
+<p>Happily all days were not like this. There were afternoons when the sun
+streamed warmly into the room, when long icicles formed on the eaves,
+adding a touch of grace to the desolate building, moments when the
+jingling bells of passing wood-sleighs expressed the natural cheer and
+buoyancy of our youthful hearts.</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br /><a name="XII" id="XII"></a>
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+
+<h2>Chores and Almanacs</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>Our farm-yard would have been uninhabitable during this winter had it
+not been for the long ricks of straw which we had piled up as a shield
+against the prairie winds. Our horse-barn, roofed with hay and banked
+with chaff, formed the west wall of the cowpen, and a long low shed gave
+shelter to the north.</p>
+
+<p>In this triangular space, in the lee of shed and straw-rick, the cattle
+passed a dolorous winter. Mostly they burrowed in the chaff, or stood
+about humped and shivering&mdash;only on sunny days did their arching backs
+subside. Naturally each animal grew a thick coat of long hair, and
+succeeded in coming through to grass again, but the cows of some of our
+neighbors were less fortunate. Some of them got so weak that they had to
+be "tailed" up as it was called. This meant that they were dying of
+hunger and the sight of them crawling about filled me with indignant
+wrath. I could not understand how a man, otherwise kind, could let his
+stock suffer for lack of hay when wild grass was plentiful.</p>
+
+<p>One of my duties, and one that I dreaded, was pumping water for our
+herd. This was no light job, especially on a stinging windy morning, for
+the cows, having only dry fodder, required an enormous amount of liquid,
+and as they could only drink while the water was fresh from the well,
+some one must work the handle till the last calf had absorbed his
+fill&mdash;and this had to be done when <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span>the thermometer was thirty below,
+just the same as at any other time.</p>
+
+<p>And this brings up an almost forgotten phase of bovine psychology. The
+order in which the cows drank as well as that in which they entered the
+stable was carefully determined and rigidly observed. There was always
+one old dowager who took precedence, all the others gave way before her.
+Then came the second in rank who feared the leader but insisted on
+ruling all the others, and so on down to the heifer. This order, once
+established, was seldom broken (at least by the females of the herd, the
+males were more unstable) even when the leader grew old and almost
+helpless.</p>
+
+<p>We took advantage of this loyalty when putting them into the barn. The
+stall furthest from the door belonged to "old Spot," the second to
+"Daisy" and so on, hence all I had to do was to open the door and let
+them in&mdash;for if any rash young thing got out of her proper place she was
+set right, very quickly, by her superiors.</p>
+
+<p>Some farms had ponds or streams to which their flocks were driven for
+water but this to me was a melancholy winter function, and sometimes as
+I joined Burt or Cyrus in driving the poor humped and shivering beasts
+down over the snowy plain to a hole chopped in the ice, and watched them
+lay their aching teeth to the frigid draught, trying a dozen times to
+temper their mouths to the chill I suffered with them. As they streamed
+along homeward, heavy with their sloshing load, they seemed the
+personification of a desolate and abused race.</p>
+
+<p>Winter mornings were a time of trial for us all. It required stern
+military command to get us out of bed before daylight, in a chamber
+warmed only by the stove-pipe, to draw on icy socks and frosty boots and
+go to the milking of cows and the currying of horses. Other boys did not
+rise by candle-light but I did, not because <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span>I was eager to make a
+record but for the very good reason that my commander believed in early
+rising. I groaned and whined but I rose&mdash;and always I found mother in
+the kitchen before me, putting the kettle on.</p>
+
+<p>It ought not to surprise the reader when I say that my morning toilet
+was hasty&mdash;something less than "a lick and a promise." I couldn't (or
+didn't) stop to wash my face or comb my hair; such refinements seem
+useless in an attic bedchamber at five in the morning of a December
+day&mdash;I put them off till breakfast time. Getting up at five <span class="smcap">A.
+M.</span> even in June was a hardship, in winter it was a punishment.</p>
+
+<p>Our discomforts had their compensations! As we came back to the house at
+six, the kitchen was always cheery with the smell of browning flapjacks,
+sizzling sausages and steaming coffee, and mother had plenty of hot
+water on the stove so that in "half a jiffy," with shining faces and
+sleek hair we sat down to a noble feast. By this time also the eastern
+sky was gorgeous with light, and two misty "sun dogs" dimly loomed,
+watching at the gate of the new day.</p>
+
+<p>Now that I think of it, father was the one who took the brunt of our
+"revellee." He always built the fire in the kitchen stove before calling
+the family. Mother, silent, sleepy, came second. Sometimes she was just
+combing her hair as I passed through the kitchen, at other times she
+would be at the biscuit dough or stirring the pancake batter&mdash;but she
+was always there!</p>
+
+<p>"What did you gain by this disagreeable habit of early rising?"&mdash;This is
+a question I have often asked myself since. Was it only a useless
+obsession on the part of my pioneer dad? Why couldn't we have slept till
+six, or even seven? Why rise before the sun?</p>
+
+<p>I cannot answer this, I only know such was our habit <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span>summer and winter,
+and that most of our neighbors conformed to the same rigorous tradition.
+None of us got rich, and as I look back on the situation, I cannot
+recall that those "sluggards" who rose an hour or two later were any
+poorer than we. I am inclined to think it was all a convention of the
+border, a custom which might very well have been broken by us all.</p>
+
+<p>My mother would have found these winter days very long had it not been
+for baby Jessie, for father was busily hauling wood from the Cedar River
+some six or seven miles away, and the almost incessant, mournful piping
+of the wind in the chimney was dispiriting. Occasionally Mrs. Button,
+Mrs. Gammons or some other of the neighbors would drop in for a visit,
+but generally mother and Jessie were alone till Harriet and Frank and I
+came home from school at half-past four.</p>
+
+<p>Our evenings were more cheerful. My sister Hattie was able to play a few
+simple tunes on the melodeon and Cyrus and Eva or Mary Abbie and John
+occasionally came in to sing. In this my mother often took part. In
+church her clear soprano rose above all the others like the voice of
+some serene great bird. Of this gift my father often expressed his open
+admiration.</p>
+
+<p>There was very little dancing during our second winter but Fred Jewett
+started a singing school which brought the young folks together once a
+week. We boys amused ourselves with "Dare Gool" and "Dog and Deer." Cold
+had little terror for us, provided the air was still. Often we played
+"Hi Spy" around the barn with the thermometer twenty below zero, and not
+infrequently we took long walks to visit Burton and other of our boy
+friends or to borrow something to read. I was always on the trail of a
+book.</p>
+
+<p>Harriet joined me in my search for stories and nothing <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span>in the
+neighborhood homes escaped us. Anything in print received our most
+respectful consideration. Jane Porter's <i>Scottish Chiefs</i> brought to us
+both anguish and delight. <i>Tempest and Sunshine</i> was another discovery.
+I cannot tell to whom I was indebted for <i>Ivanhoe</i> but I read and
+re-read it with the most intense pleasure. At the same time or near it I
+borrowed a huge bundle of <i>The New York Saturday Night</i> and <i>The New
+York Ledger</i> and from them I derived an almost equal enjoyment. "Old
+Sleuth" and "Buckskin Bill" were as admirable in their way as "Cedric
+the Saxon."</p>
+
+<p>At this time <i>Godey's Ladies Book</i> and <i>Peterson's Magazine</i> were the
+only high-class periodicals known to us. <i>The Toledo Blade</i> and <i>The New
+York Tribune</i> were still my father's political advisers and Horace
+Greeley and "Petroleum V. Nasby" were equally corporeal in my mind.</p>
+
+<p>Almanacs figured largely in my reading at this time, and were a source
+of frequent quotation by my father. They were nothing but small,
+badly-printed, patent medicine pamphlets, each with a loop of string at
+the corner so that they might be hung on a nail behind the stove, and of
+a crude green or yellow or blue. Each of them made much of a
+calm-featured man who seemed unaware of the fact that his internal
+organs were opened to the light of day. Lines radiated from his middle
+to the signs of the zodiac. I never knew what all this meant, but it
+gave me a sense of something esoteric and remote. Just what "Aries" and
+"Pisces" had to do with healing or the weather is still a mystery.</p>
+
+<p>These advertising bulletins could be seen in heaps on the counter at the
+drug store especially in the spring months when "Healey's Bitters" and
+"Allen's Cherry Pectoral" were most needed to "purify the blood." They
+were given out freely, but the price of the marvellous <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span>mixtures they
+celebrated was always one dollar a bottle, and many a broad coin went
+for a "bitter" which should have gone to buy a new dress for an
+overworked wife.</p>
+
+<p>These little books contained, also, concise aphorisms and weighty words
+of advice like "After dinner rest awhile; after supper run a mile," and
+"Be vigilant, be truthful and your life will never be ruthful." "Take
+care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves" (which
+needed a little translating to us) probably came down a long line of
+English copy books. No doubt they were all stolen from <i>Poor Richard</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Incidentally they called attention to the aches and pains of humankind,
+and each page presented the face, signature and address of some far-off
+person who had been miraculously relieved by the particular "balsam" or
+"bitter" which that pamphlet presented. Hollow-cheeked folk were shown
+"before taking," and the same individuals plump and hearty "after
+taking," followed by very realistic accounts of the diseases from which
+they had been relieved gave encouragement to others suffering from the
+same "complaints."</p>
+
+<p>Generally the almanac which presented the claims of a "pectoral" also
+had a "salve" that was "sovereign for burns" and some of them humanely
+took into account the ills of farm animals and presented a cure for bots
+or a liniment for spavins. I spent a great deal of time with these
+publications and to them a large part of my education is due.</p>
+
+<p>It is impossible that printed matter of any kind should possess for any
+child of today the enchantment which came to me, from a grimy,
+half-dismembered copy of Scott or Cooper. <i>The Life of P. T. Barnum</i>,
+Franklin's <i>Autobiography</i> we owned and they were also wellsprings of
+joy to me. Sometimes I hold with the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span>Lacedemonians that "hunger is the
+best sauce" for the mind as well as for the palate. Certainly we made
+the most of all that came our way.</p>
+
+<p>Naturally the school-house continued to be the center of our interest by
+day and the scene of our occasional neighborhood recreation by night. In
+its small way it was our Forum as well as our Academy and my memories of
+it are mostly pleasant.</p>
+
+<p>Early one bright winter day Charles Babcock and Albert Button, two of
+our big boys, suddenly appeared at the school-house door with their best
+teams hitched to great bob-sleds, and amid much shouting and laughter,
+the entire school (including the teacher) piled in on the straw which
+softened the bottom of the box, and away we raced with jangling bells,
+along the bright winter roads with intent to "surprise" the Burr Oak
+teacher and his flock.</p>
+
+<p>I particularly enjoyed this expedition for the Burr Oak School was
+larger than ours and stood on the edge of a forest and was protected by
+noble trees. A deep ravine near it furnished a mild form of coasting.
+The schoolroom had fine new desks with iron legs and the teacher's desk
+occupied a deep recess at the front. Altogether it possessed something
+of the dignity of a church. To go there was almost like going to town,
+for at the corners where the three roads met, four or five houses stood
+and in one of these was a postoffice.</p>
+
+<p>That day is memorable to me for the reason that I first saw Bettie and
+Hattie and Agnes, the prettiest girls in the township. Hattie and Bettie
+were both fair-haired and blue-eyed but Agnes was dark with great
+velvety black eyes. Neither of them was over sixteen, but they had all
+taken on the airs of young ladies and looked with amused contempt on
+lads of my age. Nevertheless, I had the right to admire them in secret
+for they added the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span>final touch of poetry to this visit to "the Grove
+School House."</p>
+
+<p>Often, thereafter, on a clear night when the thermometer stood twenty
+below zero, Burton and I would trot away toward the Grove to join in
+some meeting or to coast with the boys on the banks of the creek. I feel
+again the iron clutch of my frozen boots. The tippet around my neck is
+solid ice before my lips. My ears sting. Low-hung, blazing, the stars
+light the sky, and over the diamond-dusted snow-crust the moonbeams
+splinter.</p>
+
+<p>Though sensing the glory of such nights as these I was careful about
+referring to it. Restraint in such matters was the rule. If you said,
+"It is a fine day," or "The night is as clear as a bell," you had gone
+quite as far as the proprieties permitted. Love was also a forbidden
+word. You might say, "I love pie," but to say "I love Bettie," was
+mawkish if not actually improper.</p>
+
+<p>Caresses or terms of endearment even between parents and their children
+were very seldom used. People who said "Daddy dear," or "Jim dear," were
+under suspicion. "They fight like cats and dogs when no one else is
+around" was the universal comment on a family whose members were very
+free of their terms of affection. We were a Spartan lot. We did not
+believe in letting our wives and children know that they were an
+important part of our contentment.</p>
+
+<p>Social changes were in progress. We held no more quilting bees or
+barn-raisings. Women visited less than in Wisconsin. The work on the new
+farms was never ending, and all teams were in constant use during week
+days. The young people got together on one excuse or another, but their
+elders met only at public meetings.</p>
+
+<p>Singing, even among the young people was almost <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span>entirely confined to
+hymn-tunes. The new Moody and Sankey Song Book was in every home. <i>Tell
+Me the Old Old Story</i> did not refer to courtship but to salvation, and
+<i>Hold the Fort for I am Coming</i> was no longer a signal from Sherman, but
+a Message from Jesus. We often spent a joyous evening singing <i>O, Bear
+Me Away on Your Snowy Wings</i>, although we had no real desire to be taken
+"to our immortal home." Father no longer asked for <i>Minnie Minturn</i> and
+<i>Nellie Wildwood</i>,&mdash;but his love for Smith's <i>Grand March</i> persisted and
+my sister Harriet was often called upon to play it for him while he
+explained its meaning. The war was passing into the mellow, reminiscent
+haze of memory and he loved the splendid pictures which this descriptive
+piece of martial music recalled to mind. So far as we then knew his
+pursuit of the Sunset was at an end.</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br /><a name="XIII" id="XIII"></a>
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CHAPTER XIII</h2>
+
+<h2>Boy Life on the Prairie</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>The snows fell deep in February and when at last the warm March winds
+began to blow, lakes developed with magical swiftness in the fields, and
+streams filled every swale, transforming the landscape into something
+unexpected and enchanting. At night these waters froze, bringing fields
+of ice almost to our door. We forgot all our other interests in the joy
+of the games which we played thereon at every respite from school, or
+from the wood-pile, for splitting firewood was our first spring task.</p>
+
+<p>From time to time as the weather permitted, father had been cutting and
+hauling maple and hickory logs from the forests of the Cedar River, and
+these logs must now be made into stove-wood and piled for summer use.
+Even before the school term ended we began to take a hand at this work,
+after four o'clock and on Saturdays. While the hired man and father ran
+the cross-cut saw, whose pleasant song had much of the seed-time
+suggestion which vibrated in the <i>caw-caw</i> of the hens as they burrowed
+in the dust of the chip-yard, I split the easy blocks and my brother
+helped to pile the finished product.</p>
+
+<p>The place where the wood-pile lay was slightly higher than the barnyard
+and was the first dry ground to appear in the almost universal slush and
+mud. Delightful memories are associated with this sunny spot and with a
+pond which appeared as if by some conjury, on the very field where I had
+husked the down-row so painfully <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span>in November. From the wood-pile I was
+often permitted to go skating and Burton was my constant companion in
+these excursions. However, my joy in his companionship was not unmixed
+with bitterness, for I deeply envied him the skates which he wore. They
+were trimmed with brass and their runners came up over his toes in
+beautiful curves and ended in brass acorns which transfigured their
+wearer. To own a pair of such skates seemed to me the summit of all
+earthly glory.</p>
+
+<p>My own wooden "contraptions" went on with straps and I could not make
+the runners stay in the middle of my soles where they belonged, hence my
+ankles not only tipped in awkwardly but the stiff outer edges of my boot
+counters dug holes in my skin so that my outing was a kind of torture
+after all. Nevertheless, I persisted and, while Burton circled and
+swooped like a hawk, I sprawled with flapping arms in a mist of ignoble
+rage. That I learned to skate fairly well even under these disadvantages
+argues a high degree of enthusiasm.</p>
+
+<p>Father was always willing to release us from labor at times when the ice
+was fine, and at night we were free to explore the whole country round
+about, finding new places for our games. Sometimes the girls joined us,
+and we built fires on the edges of the swales and played "gool" and a
+kind of "shinny" till hunger drove us home.</p>
+
+<p>We held to this sport to the last&mdash;till the ice with prodigious booming
+and cracking fell away in the swales and broke through the icy drifts
+(which lay like dams along the fences) and vanished, leaving the
+corn-rows littered with huge blocks of ice. Often we came in from the
+pond, wet to the middle, our boots completely soaked with water. They
+often grew hard as iron during the night, and we experienced the
+greatest trouble in getting <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span>them on again. Greasing them with hot
+tallow was a regular morning job.</p>
+
+<p>Then came the fanning mill. The seed grain had to be fanned up, and that
+was a dark and dusty "trick" which we did not like anything near as well
+as we did skating or even piling wood. The hired man turned the mill, I
+dipped the wheat into the hopper, Franklin held sacks and father scooped
+the grain in. I don't suppose we gave up many hours to this work, but it
+seems to me that we spent weeks at it. Probably we took spells at the
+mill in the midst of the work on the chip pile.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, above our heads the wild ducks again pursued their northward
+flight, and the far honking of the geese fell to our ears from the
+solemn deeps of the windless night. On the first dry warm ridges the
+prairie cocks began to boom, and then at last came the day when father's
+imperious voice rang high in familiar command. "Out with the drags,
+boys! We start seeding tomorrow."</p>
+
+<p>Again we went forth on the land, this time to wrestle with the tough,
+unrotted sod of the new breaking, while all around us the larks and
+plover called and the gray badgers stared with disapproving bitterness
+from their ravaged hills.</p>
+
+<p>Maledictions on that tough northwest forty! How many times I harrowed
+and cross-harrowed it I cannot say, but I well remember the maddening
+persistency with which the masses of hazel roots clogged the teeth of
+the drag, making it necessary for me to raise the corner of it&mdash;a
+million times a day! This had to be done while the team was in motion,
+and you can see I did not lack for exercise. It was necessary also to
+"lap-half" and this requirement made careful driving needful for father
+could not be fooled. He saw every "balk."</p>
+
+<p>As the ground dried off the dust arose from under <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span>the teeth of the
+harrow and flew so thickly that my face was not only coated with it but
+tears of rebellious rage stained my cheeks with comic lines. At such
+times it seemed unprofitable to be the twelve-year-old son of a western
+farmer.</p>
+
+<p>One day, just as the early sown wheat was beginning to throw a tinge of
+green over the brown earth, a tremendous wind arose from the southwest
+and blew with such devastating fury that the soil, caught up from the
+field, formed a cloud, hundreds of feet high,&mdash;a cloud which darkened
+the sky, turning noon into dusk and sending us all to shelter. All the
+forenoon this blizzard of loam raged, filling the house with dust,
+almost smothering the cattle in the stable. Work was impossible, even
+for the men. The growing grain, its roots exposed to the air, withered
+and died. Many of the smaller plants were carried bodily away.</p>
+
+<p>As the day wore on father fell into dumb, despairing rage. His rigid
+face and smoldering eyes, his grim lips, terrified us all. It seemed to
+him (as to us), that the entire farm was about to take flight and the
+bitterest part of the tragic circumstance lay in the reflection that our
+loss (which was much greater than any of our neighbors) was due to the
+extra care with which we had pulverized the ground.</p>
+
+<p>"If only I hadn't gone over it that last time," I heard him groan in
+reference to the "smooch" with which I had crushed all the lumps making
+every acre friable as a garden. "Look at Woodring's!"</p>
+
+<p>Sure enough. The cloud was thinner over on Woodring's side of the line
+fence. His rough clods were hardly touched. My father's bitter revolt,
+his impotent fury appalled me, for it seemed to me (as to him), that
+nature was, at the moment, an enemy. More than seventy acres of this
+land had to be resown.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span>Most authors in writing of "the merry merry farmer" leave out
+experiences like this&mdash;they omit the mud and the dust and the grime,
+they forget the army worm, the flies, the heat, as well as the smells
+and drudgery of the barns. Milking the cows is spoken of in the
+traditional fashion as a lovely pastoral recreation, when as a matter of
+fact it is a tedious job. We all hated it. We saw no poetry in it. We
+hated it in summer when the mosquitoes bit and the cows slashed us with
+their tails, and we hated it still more in the winter time when they
+stood in crowded malodorous stalls.</p>
+
+<p>In summer when the flies were particularly savage we had a way of
+jamming our heads into the cows' flanks to prevent them from kicking
+into the pail, and sometimes we tied their tails to their legs so that
+they could not lash our ears. Humboldt Bunn tied a heifer's tail to his
+boot straps once&mdash;and regretted it almost instantly.&mdash;No, no, it won't
+do to talk to me of "the sweet breath of kine." I know them too
+well&mdash;and calves are not "the lovely, fawn-like creatures" they are
+supposed to be. To the boy who is teaching them to drink out of a pail
+they are nasty brutes&mdash;quite unlike fawns. They have a way of filling
+their nostrils with milk and blowing it all over their nurse. They are
+greedy, noisy, ill-smelling and stupid. They look well when running with
+their mothers in the pasture, but as soon as they are weaned they lose
+all their charm&mdash;for me.</p>
+
+<p>Attendance on swine was less humiliating for the reason that we could
+keep them at arm's length, but we didn't enjoy that. We liked teaming
+and pitching hay and harvesting and making fence, and we did not greatly
+resent plowing or husking corn but we did hate the smell, the filth of
+the cow-yard. Even hostling had its "outs," especially in spring when
+the horses were shedding their hair. I never fully enjoyed the taste of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span>equine dandruff, and the eternal smell of manure irked me, especially
+at the table.</p>
+
+<p>Clearing out from behind the animals was one of our never ending jobs,
+and hauling the compost out on the fields was one of the tasks which, as
+my father grimly said, "We always put off till it rains so hard we can't
+work out doors." This was no joke to us, for not only did we work out
+doors, we worked while standing ankle deep in the slime of the yard,
+getting full benefit of the drizzle. Our new land did not need the
+fertilizer, but we were forced to haul it away or move the barn. Some
+folks moved the barn. But then my father was an idealist.</p>
+
+<p>Life was not all currying or muck-raking for Burt or for me. Herding the
+cows came in to relieve the monotony of farm-work. Wide tracts of
+unbroken sod still lay open to the north and west, and these were the
+common grazing grounds for the community. Every farmer kept from
+twenty-five to a hundred head of cattle and half as many colts, and no
+sooner did the green begin to show on the fire-blackened sod in April
+than the winter-worn beasts left the straw-piles under whose lee they
+had fed during the cold months, and crawled out to nip the first tender
+spears of grass in the sheltered swales. They were still "free
+commoners" in the eyes of the law.</p>
+
+<p>The colts were a fuzzy, ungraceful lot at this season. Even the best of
+them had big bellies and carried dirty and tangled manes, but as the
+grazing improved, as the warmth and plenty of May filled their veins
+with new blood, they sloughed off their mangy coats and lifted their
+wide-blown nostrils to the western wind in exultant return to freedom.
+Many of them had never felt the weight of a man's hand, and even those
+that had wintered in and around the barn-yard soon lost all trace of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span>domesticity. It was not unusual to find that the wildest and wariest of
+all the leaders bore a collar mark or some other ineffaceable badge of
+previous servitude.</p>
+
+<p>They were for the most part Morgan grades or "Canuck," with a strain of
+broncho to give them fire. It was curious, it was glorious to see how
+deeply-buried instincts broke out in these halterless herds. In a few
+days, after many trials of speed and power the bands of all the region
+united into one drove, and a leader, the swiftest and most tireless of
+them all, appeared from the ranks and led them at will.</p>
+
+<p>Often without apparent cause, merely for the joy of it, they left their
+feeding grounds to wheel and charge and race for hours over the swells,
+across the creeks and through the hazel thickets. Sometimes their
+movements arose from the stinging of gadflies, sometimes from a battle
+between two jealous leaders, sometimes from the passing of a wolf&mdash;often
+from no cause at all other than that of abounding vitality.</p>
+
+<p>In much the same fashion, but less rapidly, the cattle went forth upon
+the plain and as each herd not only contained the growing steers, but
+the family cows, it became the duty of one boy from each farm to mount a
+horse at five o'clock every afternoon and "hunt the cattle," a task
+seldom shirked. My brother and I took turn and turn about at this
+delightful task, and soon learned to ride like Comanches. In fact we
+lived in the saddle, when freed from duty in the field. Burton often met
+us on the feeding grounds, and at such times the prairie seemed an
+excellent place for boys. As we galloped along together it was easy to
+imagine ourselves Wild Bill and Buckskin Joe in pursuit of Indians or
+buffalo.</p>
+
+<p>We became, by force of unconscious observation, deeply learned in the
+language and the psychology of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span>kine as well as colts. We watched the
+big bull-necked stags as they challenged one another, pawing the dust or
+kneeling to tear the sod with their horns. We possessed perfect
+understanding of their battle signs. Their boastful, defiant cries were
+as intelligible to us as those of men. Every note, every motion had a
+perfectly definite meaning. The foolish, inquisitive young heifers, the
+staid self-absorbed dowagers wearing their bells with dignity, the
+frisky two-year-olds and the lithe-bodied wide-horned, truculent
+three-year-olds all came in for interpretation.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes a lone steer ranging the sod came suddenly upon a trace of
+blood. Like a hound he paused, snuffling the earth. Then with wide mouth
+and outthrust, curling tongue, uttered voice. Wild as the tiger's
+food-sick cry, his warning roar burst forth, ending in a strange, upward
+explosive whine. Instantly every head in the herd was lifted, even the
+old cows heavy with milk stood as if suddenly renewing their youth,
+alert and watchful.</p>
+
+<p>Again it came, that prehistoric bawling cry, and with one mind the herd
+began to center, rushing with menacing swiftness, like warriors
+answering their chieftain's call for aid. With awkward lope or jolting
+trot, snorting with fury they hastened to the rescue, only to meet in
+blind bewildered mass, swirling to and fro in search of an imaginary
+cause of some ancestral danger.</p>
+
+<p>At such moments we were glad of our swift ponies. From our saddles we
+could study these outbreaks of atavistic rage with serene enjoyment.</p>
+
+<p>In herding the cattle we came to know all the open country round about
+and found it very beautiful. On the uplands a short, light-green,
+hairlike grass grew, intermixed with various resinous weeds, while in
+the lowland feeding grounds luxuriant patches of blue-joint, wild oats,
+and other tall forage plants waved in the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span>wind. Along the streams and
+in the "sloos" cat-tails and tiger-lilies nodded above thick mats of
+wide-bladed marsh grass. Almost without realizing it, I came to know the
+character of every weed, every flower, every living thing big enough to
+be seen from the back of a horse.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing could be more generous, more joyous, than these natural meadows
+in summer. The flash and ripple and glimmer of the tall sunflowers, the
+myriad voices of gleeful bobolinks, the chirp and gurgle of red-winged
+blackbirds swaying on the willows, the meadow-larks piping from grassy
+bogs, the peep of the prairie chick and the wailing call of plover on
+the flowery green slopes of the uplands made it all an ecstatic world to
+me. It was a wide world with a big, big sky which gave alluring hint of
+the still more glorious unknown wilderness beyond.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes of a Sunday afternoon, Harriet and I wandered away to the
+meadows along Dry Run, gathering bouquets of pinks, sweet-williams,
+tiger-lilies and lady slippers, thus attaining a vague perception of
+another and sweeter side of life. The sun flamed across the splendid
+serial waves of the grasses and the perfumes of a hundred spicy plants
+rose in the shimmering mid-day air. At such times the mere joy of living
+filled our young hearts with wordless satisfaction.</p>
+
+<p>Nor were the upland ridges less interesting, for huge antlers lying
+bleached and bare in countless numbers on the slopes told of the herds
+of elk and bison that had once fed in these splendid savannahs, living
+and dying in the days when the tall Sioux were the only hunters.</p>
+
+<p>The gray hermit, the badger, still clung to his deep den on the rocky
+unplowed ridges, and on sunny April days the mother fox lay out with her
+young, on southward-sloping swells. Often we met the prairie wolf or
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span>startled him from his sleep in hazel copse, finding in him the spirit
+of the wilderness. To us it seemed that just over the next long swell
+toward the sunset the shaggy brown bulls still fed in myriads, and in
+our hearts was a longing to ride away into the "sunset regions" of our
+song.</p>
+
+<p>All the boys I knew talked of Colorado, never of New England. We dreamed
+of the plains, of the Black Hills, discussing cattle raising and mining
+and hunting. "We'll have our rifles ready, boys, ha, ha, ha-ha!" was
+still our favorite chorus, "Newbrasky" and Wyoming our far-off
+wonderlands, Buffalo Bill our hero.</p>
+
+<p>David, my hunter uncle who lived near us, still retained his long
+old-fashioned, muzzle-loading rifle, and one day offered it to me, but
+as I could not hold it at arm's length, I sorrowfully returned it. We
+owned a shotgun, however, and this I used with all the confidence of a
+man. I was able to kill a few ducks with it and I also hunted gophers
+during May when the sprouting corn was in most danger. Later I became
+quite expert in catching chickens on the wing.</p>
+
+<p>On a long ridge to the north and west, the soil, too wet and cold to
+cultivate easily, remained unplowed for several years and scattered over
+these clay lands stood small groves of popple trees which we called
+"tow-heads." They were usually only two or three hundred feet in
+diameter, but they stood out like islands in the waving seas of grasses.
+Against these dark-green masses, breakers of blue-joint radiantly
+rolled.&mdash;To the east some four miles ran the Little Cedar River, and
+plum trees and crab-apples and haws bloomed along its banks. In June
+immense crops of strawberries offered from many meadows. Their delicious
+odor rose to us as we rode our way, tempting us to dismount and gather
+and eat.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span>Over these uplands, through these thickets of hazel brush, and around
+these coverts of popple, Burton and I careered, hunting the cows,
+chasing rabbits, killing rattlesnakes, watching the battles of bulls,
+racing the half-wild colts and pursuing the prowling wolves. It was an
+alluring life, and Harriet, who rode with us occasionally, seemed to
+enjoy it quite as much as any boy. She could ride almost as well as
+Burton, and we were all expert horse-tamers.</p>
+
+<p>We all rode like cavalrymen,&mdash;that is to say, while holding the reins in
+our left hands we guided our horses by the pressure of the strap across
+the neck, rather than by pulling at the bit. Our ponies were never
+allowed to trot. We taught them a peculiar gait which we called "the
+lope," which was an easy canter in front and a trot behind (a very good
+gait for long distances), and we drilled them to keep this pace steadily
+and to fall at command into a swift walk without any jolting intervening
+trot.&mdash;We learned to ride like circus performers standing on our
+saddles, and practised other of the tricks we had seen, and through it
+all my mother remained unalarmed. To her a boy on a horse was as natural
+as a babe in the cradle. The chances we took of getting killed were so
+numerous that she could not afford to worry.</p>
+
+<p>Burton continued to be my almost inseparable companion at school and
+whenever we could get together, and while to others he seemed only a
+shy, dull boy, to me he was something more. His strength and skill were
+remarkable and his self-command amazing. Although a lad of instant,
+white-hot, dangerous temper, he suddenly, at fifteen years of age, took
+himself in hand in a fashion miraculous to me. He decided (I never knew
+just why or how)&mdash;that he would never again use an obscene or profane
+word. He kept his vow. I knew him for over thirty years and I never
+heard him raise his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span>voice in anger or utter a word a woman would have
+shrunk from,&mdash;and yet he became one of the most fearless and indomitable
+mountaineers I ever knew.</p>
+
+<p>This change in him profoundly influenced me and though I said nothing
+about it, I resolved to do as well. I never quite succeeded, although I
+discouraged as well as I could the stories which some of the men and
+boys were so fond of telling, but alas! when the old cow kicked over my
+pail of milk, I fell from grace and told her just what I thought of her
+in phrases that Burton would have repressed. Still, I manfully tried to
+follow his good trail.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Corn-planting, which followed wheat-seeding, was done by hand, for a
+year or two, and this was a joyous task.&mdash;We "changed works" with
+neighbor Button, and in return Cyrus and Eva came to help us. Harriet
+and Eva and I worked side by side, "dropping" the corn, while Cyrus and
+the hired man followed with the hoes to cover it. Little Frank skittered
+about, planting with desultory action such pumpkin seeds as he did not
+eat. The presence of our young friends gave the job something of the
+nature of a party and we were sorry when it was over.</p>
+
+<p>After the planting a fortnight of less strenuous labor came on, a period
+which had almost the character of a holiday. The wheat needed no
+cultivation and the corn was not high enough to plow. This was a time
+for building fence and fixing up things generally. This, too, was the
+season of the circus. Each year one came along from the east, trailing
+clouds of glorified dust and filling our minds with the color of
+romance.</p>
+
+<p>From the time the "advance man" flung his highly colored posters over
+the fence till the coming of the glorious day we thought of little else.
+It was India and Arabia and the jungle to us. History and the magic <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span>and
+pomp of chivalry mingled in the parade of the morning, and the crowds,
+the clanging band, the haughty and alien beauty of the women, the gold
+embroidered housings, the stark majesty of the acrobats subdued us into
+silent worship.</p>
+
+<p>I here pay tribute to the men who brought these marvels to my eyes. To
+rob me of my memories of the circus would leave me as poor as those to
+whom life was a drab and hopeless round of toil. It was our brief season
+of imaginative life. In one day&mdash;in a part of one day&mdash;we gained a
+thousand new conceptions of the world and of human nature. It was an
+embodiment of all that was skillful and beautiful in manly action. It
+was a compendium of biologic research but more important still, it
+brought to our ears the latest band pieces and taught us the most
+popular songs. It furnished us with jokes. It relieved our dullness. It
+gave us something to talk about.</p>
+
+<p>We always went home wearied with excitement, and dusty and fretful&mdash;but
+content. We had seen it. We had grasped as much of it as anybody and
+could remember it as well as the best. Next day as we resumed work in
+the field the memory of its splendors went with us like a golden cloud.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Most of the duties of the farmer's life require the lapse of years to
+seem beautiful in my eyes, but haying was a season of well-defined
+charm. In Iowa, summer was at its most exuberant stage of vitality
+during the last days of June, and it was not strange that the faculties
+of even the toiling hay-maker, dulled and deadened with never ending
+drudgery, caught something of the superabundant glow and throb of
+nature's life.</p>
+
+<p>As I write I am back in that marvellous time.&mdash;The cornfield, dark-green
+and sweetly cool, is beginning to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span>ripple in the wind with multitudinous
+stir of shining, swirling leaf. Waves of dusk and green and gold, circle
+across the ripening barley, and long leaves upthrust, at intervals, like
+spears. The trees are in heaviest foliage, insect life is at its height,
+and the shimmering air is filled with buzzing, dancing forms, and the
+clover is gay with the sheen of innumerable gauzy wings.</p>
+
+<p>The west wind comes to me laden with ecstatic voices. The bobolinks sail
+and tinkle in the sensuous hush, now sinking, now rising, their
+exquisite notes filling the air as with the sound of fairy bells. The
+king-bird, alert, aggressive, cries out sharply as he launches from the
+top of a poplar tree upon some buzzing insect, and the plover makes the
+prairie sad with his wailing call. Vast purple-and-white clouds move
+like stately ships before the breeze, dark with rain, which they drop
+momentarily in trailing garments upon the earth, and so pass in majesty
+amidst a roll of thunder.</p>
+
+<p>The grasshoppers move in clouds with snap and buzz, and out of the
+luxurious stagnant marshes comes the ever-thickening chorus of the
+toads, while above them the kildees and the snipe shuttle to and fro in
+sounding flight. The blackbirds on the cat-tails sway and swing,
+uttering through lifted throats their liquid gurgle, mad with delight of
+the sun and the season&mdash;and over all, and laving all, moves the slow
+wind, heavy with the breath of the far-off blooms of other lands, a wind
+which covers the sunset plain with a golden entrancing haze.</p>
+
+<p>At such times it seemed to me that we had reached the "sunset region" of
+our song, and that we were indeed "lords of the soil."</p>
+
+<p>I am not so sure that haying brought to our mothers anything like this
+rapture, for the men added to our crew made the duties of the kitchens
+just that much heavier. I doubt if the women&mdash;any of them&mdash;got out into
+the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span>fields or meadows long enough to enjoy the birds and the breezes.
+Even on Sunday as they rode away to church, they were too tired and too
+worried to re-act to the beauties of the landscape.</p>
+
+<p>I now began to dimly perceive that my mother was not well. Although
+large and seemingly strong, her increasing weight made her long days of
+housework a torture. She grew very tired and her sweet face was often
+knotted with physical pain.</p>
+
+<p>She still made most of our garments as well as her own. She tailored
+father's shirts and underclothing, sewed carpet rags, pieced quilts and
+made butter for market,&mdash;and yet, in the midst of it all, found time to
+put covers on our baseball, and to do up all our burns and bruises.
+Being a farmer's wife in those days, meant laboring outside any
+regulation of the hours of toil. I recall hearing one of the tired
+house-wives say, "Seems like I never get a day off, not even on Sunday,"
+a protest which my mother thoroughly understood and sympathized with,
+notwithstanding its seeming inhospitality.</p>
+
+<p>No history of this time would be complete without a reference to the
+doctor. We were a vigorous and on the whole a healthy tribe but
+accidents sometimes happened and "Go for the doctor!" was the first
+command when the band-cutter slashed the hand of the thresher or one of
+the children fell from the hay-rick.</p>
+
+<p>One night as I lay buried in deep sleep close to the garret eaves I
+heard my mother call me&mdash;and something in her voice pierced me, roused
+me. A poignant note of alarm was in it.</p>
+
+<p>"Hamlin," she called, "get up&mdash;at once. You must go for the doctor. Your
+father is very sick. <i>Hurry!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>I sprang from my bed, dizzy with sleep, yet understanding her appeal. "I
+hear you, I'm coming," I called down to her as I started to dress.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span>"Call Hattie. I need her too."</p>
+
+<p>The rain was pattering on the roof, and as I dressed I had a disturbing
+vision of the long cold ride which lay before me. I hoped the case was
+not so bad as mother thought. With limbs still numb and weak I stumbled
+down the stairs to the sitting room where a faint light shone.</p>
+
+<p>Mother met me with white, strained face. "Your father is suffering
+terribly. Go for the doctor at once."</p>
+
+<p>I could hear the sufferer groan even as I moved about the kitchen,
+putting on my coat and lighting the lantern. It was about one o'clock of
+the morning, and the wind was cold as I picked my way through the mud to
+the barn. The thought of the long miles to town made me shiver but as
+the son of a soldier I could not falter in my duty.</p>
+
+<p>In their warm stalls the horses were resting in dreamful doze. Dan and
+Dick, the big plow team, stood near the door. Jule and Dolly came next.
+Wild Frank, a fleet but treacherous Morgan, stood fifth and for a moment
+I considered taking him. He was strong and of wonderful staying powers
+but so savage and unreliable that I dared not risk an accident. I passed
+on to bay Kittie whose bright eyes seemed to inquire, "What is the
+matter?"</p>
+
+<p>Flinging the blanket over her and smoothing it carefully, I tossed the
+light saddle to her back and cinched it tight, so tight that she
+grunted. "I can't take any chances of a spill," I explained to her, and
+she accepted the bit willingly. She was always ready for action and
+fully dependable.</p>
+
+<p>Blowing out my lantern I hung it on a peg, led Kit from her stall out
+into the night, and swung to the saddle. She made off with a spattering
+rush through the yard, out into the road. It was dark as pitch but I was
+fully awake <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span>now. The dash of the rain in my face had cleared my brain
+but I trusted to the keener senses of the mare to find the road which
+showed only in the strips of water which filled the wagon tracks.</p>
+
+<p>We made way slowly for a few minutes until my eyes expanded to take in
+the faint lines of light along the lane. The road at last became a river
+of ink running between faint gray banks of sward, and my heart rose in
+confidence. I took on dignity. I was a courier riding through the night
+to save a city, a messenger on whose courage and skill thousands of
+lives depended.</p>
+
+<p>"Get out o' this!" I shouted to Kit, and she leaped away like a wolf, at
+a tearing gallop.</p>
+
+<p>She knew her rider. We had herded the cattle many days on the prairie,
+and in races with the wild colts I had tested her speed. Snorting with
+vigor at every leap she seemed to say, "My heart is brave, my limbs are
+strong. Call on me."</p>
+
+<p>Out of the darkness John Martin's Carlo barked. A half-mile had passed.
+Old Marsh's fox hound clamored next. Two miles were gone. From here the
+road ran diagonally across the prairie, a velvet-black band on the dim
+sod. The ground was firmer but there were swales full of water. Through
+these Kittie dashed with unhesitating confidence, the water flying from
+her drumming hooves. Once she went to her knees and almost unseated me,
+but I regained my saddle and shouted, "Go on, Kit."</p>
+
+<p>The fourth mile was in the mud, but the fifth brought us to the village
+turnpike and the mare was as glad of it as I. Her breath was labored
+now. She snorted no more in exultation and confident strength. She began
+to wonder&mdash;to doubt, and I, who knew her ways as well as I knew those of
+a human being, realized that she was beginning to flag. The mud had
+begun to tell on her.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span>It hurt me to urge her on, but the memory of my mother's agonized face
+and the sound of my father's groan of pain steeled my heart. I set lash
+to her side and so kept her to her highest speed.</p>
+
+<p>At last a gleam of light! Someone in the village was awake. I passed
+another lighted window. Then the green and red lamps of the drug store
+cheered me with their promise of aid, for the doctor lived next door.
+There too a dim ray shone.</p>
+
+<p>Slipping from my weary horse I tied her to the rail and hurried up the
+walk toward the doctor's bell. I remembered just where the knob rested.
+Twice I pulled sharply, strongly, putting into it some part of the
+anxiety and impatience I felt. I could hear its imperative jingle as it
+died away in the silent house.</p>
+
+<p>At last the door opened and the doctor, a big blonde handsome man in a
+long night gown, confronted me with impassive face. "What is it, my
+boy?" he asked kindly.</p>
+
+<p>As I told him he looked down at my water-soaked form and wild-eyed
+countenance with gentle patience. Then he peered out over my head into
+the dismal night. He was a man of resolution but he hesitated for a
+moment. "Your father is suffering sharply, is he?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir. I could hear him groan.&mdash;Please hurry."</p>
+
+<p>He mused a moment. "He is a soldier. He would not complain of a little
+thing&mdash;I will come."</p>
+
+<p>Turning in relief, I ran down the walk and climbed upon my shivering
+mare. She wheeled sharply, eager to be off on her homeward way. Her
+spirit was not broken, but she was content to take a slower pace. She
+seemed to know that our errand was accomplished and that the warm
+shelter of the stall was to be her reward.</p>
+
+<p>Holding her down to a slow trot I turned often to see if I could detect
+the lights of the doctor's buggy which was a familiar sight on our road.
+I had heard that he kept <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span>one of his teams harnessed ready for calls
+like this, and I confidently expected him to overtake me. "It's a
+terrible night to go out, but he said he would come," I repeated as I
+rode.</p>
+
+<p>At last the lights of a carriage, crazily rocking, came into view and
+pulling Kit to a walk I twisted in my saddle, ready to shout with
+admiration of the speed of his team. "He's driving the 'Clay-Banks,'" I
+called in great excitement.</p>
+
+<p>The Clay-Banks were famous throughout the county as the doctor's
+swiftest and wildest team, a span of bronchos whose savage spirits no
+journey could entirely subdue, a team he did not spare, a team that
+scorned petting and pity, bony, sinewy, big-headed. They never walked
+and had little care of mud or snow.</p>
+
+<p>They came rushing now with splashing feet and foaming, half-open jaws,
+the big doctor, calm, iron-handed, masterful, sitting in the swaying top
+of his light buggy, his feet against the dash board, keeping his furious
+span in hand as easily as if they were a pair of Shetland ponies. The
+nigh horse was running, the off horse pacing, and the splatter of their
+feet, the slash of the wheels and the roaring of their heavy breathing,
+made my boyish heart leap. I could hardly repress a yell of delight.</p>
+
+<p>As I drew aside to let him pass the doctor called out with mellow cheer,
+"Take your time, boy, take your time!"</p>
+
+<p>Before I could even think of an answer, he was gone and I was alone with
+Kit and the night.</p>
+
+<p>My anxiety vanished with him. I had done all that could humanly be done,
+I had fetched the doctor. Whatever happened I was guiltless. I knew also
+that in a few minutes a sweet relief would come to my tortured mother,
+and with full faith and loving confidence in the man of science, I
+jogged along homeward, wet to the bone but triumphant.</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br /><a name="XIV" id="XIV"></a>
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+
+<h2>Wheat and the Harvest</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>The early seventies were years of swift change on the Middle Border. Day
+by day the settlement thickened. Section by section the prairie was
+blackened by the plow. Month by month the sweet wild meadows were fenced
+and pastured and so at last the colts and cows all came into captivity,
+and our horseback riding ceased, cut short as if by some imperial
+decree. Lanes of barbed wire replaced the winding wagon trails, our
+saddles gathered dust in the grain-sheds, and groves of Lombardy poplar
+and European larch replaced the tow-heads of aspen and hazel through
+which we had pursued the wolf and fox.</p>
+
+<p>I will not say that this produced in me any keen sense of sorrow at the
+time, for though I missed our horse-herds and the charm of the open
+spaces, I turned to tamer sports with the resilient adaptability of
+youth. If I could not ride I could at least play baseball, and the
+swimming hole in the Little Cedar remained untouched. The coming in of
+numerous Eastern settlers brought added charm to neighborhood life.
+Picnics, conventions, Fourth of July celebrations&mdash;all intensified our
+interest, and in their increasing drama we were compensated, in some
+degree at least, for the delights which were passing with the prairie.</p>
+
+<p>Our school-house did not change&mdash;except for the worse. No one thought of
+adding a tree or a vine to its ugly yard. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span>Sun-smit, bare as a nose it
+stood at the cross-roads, receiving us through its drab door-way as it
+had done from the first. Its benches, hideously hacked and thick with
+grime, were as hard and uncomfortable as when I first saw them, and the
+windows remained unshaded and unwashed. Most of the farm-houses in the
+region remained equally unadorned, but Deacon Gammons had added an "ell"
+and established a "parlor," and Anson Burtch had painted his barn. The
+plain began to take on a comfortable look, for some of the trees of the
+wind-breaks had risen above the roofs, and growing maples softened the
+effect of the bleak expanse.</p>
+
+<p>My mother, like most of her neighbors, still cooked and served meals in
+our one living room during the winter but moved into a "summer kitchen"
+in April. This change always gave us a sense of luxury&mdash;which is
+pathetic, if you look at it that way. Our front room became suddenly and
+happily a parlor, and was so treated. Mother at once got down the rag
+carpet and gave orders for us to shake out and bring in some clean straw
+to put under it, and when we had tacked it down and re-arranged the
+furniture, it was no longer a place for muddy boots and shirt-sleeved
+shiftlessness, it had an air of being in perpetual Sabbath leisure.</p>
+
+<p>The Garlands were not so poor as all this would seem to imply, for we
+were now farming over three hundred acres of land and caring for a herd
+of cattle and many swine. It merely meant that my father did not feel
+the need of a "best room" and mother and Harriet were not yet able to
+change his mind. Harriet wanted an organ like Mary Abby Gammons, mother
+longed for a real "in-grain" carpet and we all clamored for a spring
+wagon. We got the wagon first.</p>
+
+<p>That bleak little house is clearly defined in my mind at this moment.
+The low lean-to kitchen, the rag-carpeted <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span>sitting room with its two
+chromos of <i>Wide Awake</i> and <i>Fast Asleep</i>&mdash;its steel engraving of
+General Grant, and its tiny melodeon in the corner&mdash;all these come back
+to me. There are very few books or magazines in the scene, but there are
+piles of newspapers, for my father was an omnivorous reader of all
+things political. It was not a hovel, it was a pioneer cabin persisting
+into a settled community, that was all.</p>
+
+<p>During these years the whole middle border was menaced by bands of
+horse-thieves operating under a secret well-organized system. Horses
+disappeared night by night and were never recovered, till at last the
+farmers, in despair of the local authorities, organized a Horse Thief
+Protective Association which undertook to pursue and punish the robbers
+and to pay for such animals as were not returned. Our county had an
+association of this sort and shortly after we opened our new farm my
+father became a member. My first knowledge of this fact came when he
+nailed on our barn-door the white cloth poster which proclaimed in bold
+black letters a warning and a threat signed by "the Committee."&mdash;I was
+always a little in doubt as to whether the horse-thieves or ourselves
+were to be protected, for the notice was fair warning to them as well as
+an assurance to us. Anyhow very few horses were stolen from barns thus
+protected.</p>
+
+<p>The campaign against the thieves gave rise to many stirring stories
+which lost nothing in my father's telling of them. Jim McCarty was agent
+for our association and its effectiveness was largely due to his swift
+and fearless action. We all had a pleasant sense of the mystery of the
+night riding which went on during this period and no man could pass with
+a led horse without being under suspicion of being either a thief or a
+deputy. Then, too, the thieves were supposed to have in every community
+a spy who gave information as to the best horses, and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span>informed the gang
+as to the membership of the Protective Society.</p>
+
+<p>One of our neighbors fell under suspicion at this time and never got
+clear of it. I hope we did him no injustice in this for never after
+could I bring myself to enter his house, and he was clearly ostracized
+by all the neighbors.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>As I look back over my life on that Iowa farm the song of the reaper
+fills large place in my mind. We were all worshippers of wheat in those
+days. The men thought and talked of little else between seeding and
+harvest, and you will not wonder at this if you have known and bowed
+down before such abundance as we then enjoyed.</p>
+
+<p>Deep as the breast of a man, wide as the sea, heavy-headed,
+supple-stocked, many-voiced, full of multitudinous, secret, whispered
+colloquies,&mdash;a meeting place of winds and of sunlight,&mdash;our fields ran
+to the world's end.</p>
+
+<p>We trembled when the storm lay hard upon the wheat, we exulted as the
+lilac shadows of noon-day drifted over it! We went out into it at noon
+when all was still&mdash;so still we could hear the pulse of the transforming
+sap as it crept from cool root to swaying plume. We stood before it at
+evening when the setting sun flooded it with crimson, the bearded heads
+lazily swirling under the wings of the wind, the mousing hawk dipping
+into its green deeps like the eagle into the sea, and our hearts
+expanded with the beauty and the mystery of it,&mdash;and back of all this
+was the knowledge that its abundance meant a new carriage, an addition
+to the house or a new suit of clothes.</p>
+
+<p>Haying was over, and day by day we boys watched with deepening interest
+while the hot sun transformed the juices of the soil into those stately
+stalks. I loved to go out into the fairy forest of it, and lying there,
+silent in its swaying deeps, hear the wild chickens peep and the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span>wind
+sing its subtle song over our heads. Day by day I studied the barley as
+it turned yellow, first at the root and then at the neck (while the
+middle joints, rank and sappy, retained their blue-green sheen), until
+at last the lower leaves began to wither and the stems to stiffen in
+order to uphold the daily increasing weight of the milky berries, and
+then almost in an hour&mdash;lo! the edge of the field became a banded ribbon
+of green and yellow, languidly waving in and out with every rush of the
+breeze.</p>
+
+<p>Now we got out the reaper, put the sickles in order, and father laid in
+a store of provisions. Extra hands were hired, and at last, early on a
+hot July morning, the boss mounted to his seat on the self-rake
+"McCormick" and drove into the field. Frank rode the lead horse, four
+stalwart hands and myself took "stations" behind the reaper and the
+battle was on!</p>
+
+<p>Reaping generally came about the 20th of July, the hottest and dryest
+part of the summer, and was the most pressing work of the year. It
+demanded early rising for the men, and it meant an all day broiling over
+the kitchen stove for the women. Stern, incessant toil went on inside
+and out from dawn till sunset, no matter how the thermometer sizzled. On
+many days the mercury mounted to ninety-five in the shade, but with wide
+fields all yellowing at the same moment, no one thought of laying off. A
+storm might sweep it flat, or if neglected too long, it might "crinkle."</p>
+
+<p>Our reaper in 1874 was a new model of the McCormick self-rake,&mdash;the
+Marsh Harvester was not yet in general use. The Woods Dropper, the
+Seymour and Morgan hand-rake "contraptions" seemed a long way in the
+past. True the McCormick required four horses to drag it but it was
+effective. It was hard to believe that anything more cunning would ever
+come to claim the farmer's money. Weird tales of a machine on which two
+men <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span>rode and bound twelve acres of wheat in ten hours came to us, but
+we did not potently believe these reports&mdash;on the contrary we accepted
+the self-rake as quite the final word in harvesting machinery and
+cheerily bent to the binding of sheaves with their own straw in the good
+old time-honored way.</p>
+
+<p>No task save that of "cradling" surpassed in severity "binding on a
+station." It was a full-grown man's job, but every boy was ambitious to
+try his hand, and when at fourteen years of age I was promoted from
+"bundle boy" to be one of the five hands to bind after the reaper, I
+went to my corner with joy and confidence. For two years I had been
+serving as binder on the corners, (to keep the grain out of the way of
+the horses) and I knew my job.</p>
+
+<p>I was short and broad-shouldered with large strong hands admirably
+adapted for this work, and for the first two hours, easily held my own
+with the rest of the crew, but as the morning wore on and the sun grew
+hotter, my enthusiasm waned. A painful void developed in my chest. My
+breakfast had been ample, but no mere stomachful of food could carry a
+growing boy through five hours of desperate toil. Along about a quarter
+to ten, I began to scan the field with anxious eye, longing to see
+Harriet and the promised luncheon basket.</p>
+
+<p>Just when it seemed that I could endure the strain no longer she came
+bearing a jug of cool milk, some cheese and some deliciously fresh
+fried-cakes. With keen joy I set a couple of tall sheaves together like
+a tent and flung myself down flat on my back in their shadow to devour
+my lunch.</p>
+
+<p>Tired as I was, my dim eyes apprehended something of the splendor of the
+shining clouds which rolled like storms of snow through the deep-blue
+spaces of sky and so, resting silently as a clod I could hear the chirp
+of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span>crickets, the buzzing wings of flies and the faint, fairylike
+tread of smaller unseen insects hurrying their way just beneath my ear
+in the stubble. Strange green worms, grasshoppers and shining beetles
+crept over me as I dozed.</p>
+
+<p>This delicious, dreamful respite was broken by the far-off approaching
+purr of the sickle, flicked by the faint snap of the driver's whip, and
+out of the low rustle of the everstirring lilliputian forest came the
+wailing cry of a baby wild chicken lost from its mother&mdash;a falling,
+thrilling, piteous little pipe.</p>
+
+<p>Such momentary communion with nature seemed all the sweeter for the work
+which had preceded it, as well as that which was to follow it. It took
+resolution to rise and go back to my work, but I did it, sustained by a
+kind of soldierly pride.</p>
+
+<p>At noon we hurried to the house, surrounded the kitchen table and fell
+upon our boiled beef and potatoes with such ferocity that in fifteen
+minutes our meal was over. There was no ceremony and very little talking
+till the hid wolf was appeased. Then came a heavenly half-hour of rest
+on the cool grass in the shade of the trees, a siesta as luxurious as
+that of a Spanish monarch&mdash;but alas!&mdash;this "nooning," as we called it,
+was always cut short by father's word of sharp command, "Roll out,
+boys!" and again the big white jugs were filled at the well, the horses,
+lazy with food, led the way back to the field, and the stern contest
+began again.</p>
+
+<p>All nature at this hour seemed to invite to repose rather than to labor,
+and as the heat increased I longed with wordless fervor for the green
+woods of the Cedar River. At times the gentle wind hardly moved the
+bended heads of the barley, and the hawks hung in the air like trout
+sleeping in deep pools. The sunlight was a golden, silent, scorching
+cataract&mdash;yet each of us must strain <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span>his tired muscles and bend his
+aching back to the harvest.</p>
+
+<p>Supper came at five, another delicious interval&mdash;and then at six we all
+went out again for another hour or two in the cool of the
+sunset.&mdash;However, the pace was more leisurely now for the end of the day
+was near. I always enjoyed this period, for the shadows lengthening
+across the stubble, and the fiery sun, veiled by the gray clouds of the
+west, had wondrous charm. The air began to moisten and grow cool. The
+voices of the men pulsed powerfully and cheerfully across the narrowing
+field of unreaped grain, the prairie hens led forth their broods to
+feed, and at last, father's long-drawn and musical cry, "Turn <span class="smcap">OUT</span>! All
+hands <span class="smcap">TURN OUT</span>!" rang with restful significance through the dusk. Then,
+slowly, with low-hung heads the freed horses moved toward the barn,
+walking with lagging steps like weary warriors going into camp.</p>
+
+<p>In all the toil of the harvest field, the water jug filled a large
+place. It was a source of anxiety as well as comfort. To keep it cool,
+to keep it well filled was a part of my job. No man passed it at the
+"home corner" of the field. It is a delightful part of my recollections
+of the harvest.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">O cool gray jug that touched the lips<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In kiss that softly closed and clung,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No Spanish wine the tippler sips,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No port the poet's praise has sung&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Such pure, untainted sweetness yields<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As cool gray jug in harvest fields.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I see it now!&mdash;a clover leaf<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Out-spread upon its sweating side!&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As from the sheltering sheaf<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I pluck and swing it high, the wide<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Field glows with noon-day heat,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The winds are tangled in the wheat.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The swarming crickets blithely cheep,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span>
+<span class="i0">Across the stir of waving grain<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I see the burnished reaper creep&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The lunch-boy comes, and once again<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The jug its crystal coolness yields&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O cool gray jug in harvest fields!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>My father did not believe in serving strong liquor to his men, and
+seldom treated them to even beer. While not a teetotaler he was strongly
+opposed to all that intemperance represented. He furnished the best of
+food, and tea and coffee, but no liquor, and the men respected him for
+it.</p>
+
+<p>The reaping on our farm that year lasted about four weeks. Barley came
+first, wheat followed, the oats came last of all. No sooner was the
+final swath cut than the barley was ready to be put under cover, and
+"stacking," a new and less exacting phase of the harvest, began.</p>
+
+<p>This job required less men than reaping, hence a part of our hands were
+paid off, only the more responsible ones were retained. The rush, the
+strain of the reaping gave place to a leisurely, steady, day-by-day
+garnering of the thoroughly seasoned shocks into great conical piles,
+four in a place in the midst of the stubble, which was already growing
+green with swiftly-springing weeds.</p>
+
+<p>A full crew consisted of a stacker, a boy to pass bundles, two drivers
+for the heavy wagon-racks, and a pitcher in the field who lifted the
+sheaves from the shock with a three-tined fork and threw them to the man
+on the load.</p>
+
+<p>At the age of ten I had been taught to "handle bundles" on the stack,
+but now at fourteen I took my father's place as stacker, whilst he
+passed the sheaves and told me how to lay them. This exalted me at the
+same time that it increased my responsibility. It made a man of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span>me&mdash;not
+only in my own estimation, but in the eyes of my boy companions to whom
+I discoursed loftily on the value of "bulges" and the advantages of the
+stack over the rick.</p>
+
+<p>No sooner was the stacking ended than the dreaded task of plowing began
+for Burton and John and me. Every morning while our fathers and the
+hired men shouldered their forks and went away to help some neighbor
+thrash&mdash;("changing works") we drove our teams into the field, there to
+plod round and round in solitary course. Here I acquired the feeling
+which I afterward put into verse&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">A lonely task it is to plow!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All day the black and shining soil<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rolls like a ribbon from the mold-board's<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Glistening curve. All day the horses toil,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Battling with savage flies, and strain<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Their creaking single-trees. All day<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The crickets peer from wind-blown stacks of grain.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Franklin's job was almost as lonely. He was set to herd the cattle on
+the harvested stubble and keep them out of the corn field. A little
+later, in October, when I was called to take my place as corn-husker, he
+was promoted to the plow. Our only respite during the months of October
+and November was the occasional cold rain which permitted us to read or
+play cards in the kitchen.</p>
+
+<p>Cards! I never look at a certain type of playing card without
+experiencing a return of the wonder and the guilty joy with which I
+bought of Metellus Kirby my first "deck," and slipped it into my pocket.
+There was an alluring oriental imaginative quality in the drawing on the
+face cards. They brought to me vague hints of mad monarchs, desperate
+stakes, and huge sudden <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span>rewards. All that I had heard or read of
+Mississippi gamblers came back to make those gaudy bits of pasteboard
+marvellous.</p>
+
+<p>My father did not play cards, hence, although I had no reason to think
+he would forbid them to me, I took a fearsome joy in assuming his bitter
+opposition. For a time my brother and I played in secret, and then one
+day, one cold bleak day as we were seated on the floor of the granary
+playing on an upturned half-bushel measure, shivering with the chill,
+our fingers numb and blue, the door opened and father looked in.</p>
+
+<p>We waited, while his round, eagle-gray eyes took in the situation and it
+seemed a long, terrifying interval, then at last he mildly said, "I
+guess you'd better go in and play by the stove. This isn't very
+comfortable."</p>
+
+<p>Stunned by this unexpected concession, I gathered up the cards, and as I
+took my way to the house, I thought deeply. The meaning of that quiet
+voice, that friendly invitation was not lost on me. The soldier rose to
+grand heights by that single act, and when I showed the cards to mother
+and told her that father had consented to our playing, she looked grave
+but made no objection to our use of the kitchen table. As a matter of
+fact they both soon after joined our game. "If you are going to play,"
+they said, "we'd rather you played right here with us." Thereafter rainy
+days were less dreary, and the evenings shorter.</p>
+
+<p>Everybody played Authors at this time also, and to this day I cannot
+entirely rid myself of the estimations which our pack of cards fixed in
+my mind. <i>Prue and I</i> and <i>The Blithedale Romance</i> were on an equal
+footing, so far as our game went, and Howells, Bret Harte and Dickens
+were all of far-off romantic horizon. Writers were singular, exalted
+beings found only in the East&mdash;in splendid cities. They were not folks,
+they were <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span>demigods, men and women living aloof and looking down
+benignantly on toiling common creatures like us.</p>
+
+<p>It never entered my mind that anyone I knew could ever by any chance
+meet an author, or even hear one lecture&mdash;although it was said that they
+did sometimes come west on altruistic educational journeys and that they
+sometimes reached our county town.</p>
+
+<p>I am told&mdash;I do not know that it is true&mdash;that I am one of the names on
+a present-day deck of Author cards. If so, I wish I could call in that
+small plow-boy of 1874 and let him play a game with this particular
+pack!</p>
+
+<p>The crops on our farms in those first years were enormous and prices
+were good, and yet the homes of the neighborhood were slow in taking on
+grace or comfort. I don't know why this was so, unless it was that the
+men were continually buying more land and more machinery. Our own
+stables were still straw-roofed sheds, but the trees which we had
+planted had grown swiftly into a grove, and a garden, tended at odd
+moments by all hands, brought small fruits and vegetables in season.
+Although a constantly improving collection of farm machinery lightened
+the burdens of the husbandman, the drudgery of the house-wife's
+dish-washing and cooking did not correspondingly lessen. I fear it
+increased, for with the widening of the fields came the doubling of the
+harvest hands, and my mother continued to do most of the housework
+herself&mdash;cooking, sewing, washing, churning, and nursing the sick from
+time to time. No one in trouble ever sent for Isabelle Garland in vain,
+and I have many recollections of neighbors riding up in the night and
+calling for her with agitated voices.</p>
+
+<p>Of course I did not realize, and I am sure my father did not realize,
+the heavy burden, the endless grind of her toil. Harriet helped, of
+course, and Frank and I churned <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span>and carried wood and brought water; but
+even with such aid, the round of mother's duties must have been as
+relentless as a tread-mill. Even on Sunday, when we were free for a part
+of the day, she was required to furnish forth three meals, and to help
+Frank and Jessie dress for church.&mdash;She sang less and less, and the
+songs we loved were seldom referred to.&mdash;If I could only go back for one
+little hour and take her in my arms, and tell her how much I owe her for
+those grinding days!</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile we were all growing away from our life in the old Wisconsin
+Coulee. We heard from William but seldom, and David, who had bought a
+farm of his own some ten miles to the south of us, came over to see us
+only at long intervals. He still owned his long-barrelled rifle but it
+hung unused on a peg in the kitchen. Swiftly the world of the hunter was
+receding, never to return. Prairie chickens, rabbits, ducks, and other
+small game still abounded but they did not call for the bullet, and
+turkey shoots were events of the receding past. Almost in a year the
+ideals of the country-side changed. David was in truth a survival of a
+more heroic age, a time which he loved to lament with my father who was
+almost as great a lover of the wilderness as he. None of us sang "O'er
+the hills in legions, boys." Our share in the conquest of the west
+seemed complete.</p>
+
+<p>Threshing time, which was becoming each year less of a "bee" and more of
+a job (many of the men were mere hired hands), was made distinctive by
+David who came over from Orchard with his machine&mdash;the last time as it
+turned out&mdash;and stayed to the end. As I cut bands beside him in the dust
+and thunder of the cylinder I regained something of my boyish worship of
+his strength and skill. The tireless easy swing of his great frame was
+wonderful to me and when, in my weariness, I failed to slash a band he
+smiled and tore the sheaf apart&mdash;thus <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span>deepening my love for him. I
+looked up at him at such times as a sailor regards his captain on the
+bridge. His handsome immobile bearded face, his air of command, his
+large gestures as he rolled the broad sheaves into the howling maw of
+the machine made of him a chieftain.&mdash;The touch of melancholy which even
+then had begun to develop, added to his manly charm.</p>
+
+<p>One day in late September as I was plowing in the field at the back of
+the farm, I encountered a particularly troublesome thicket of weeds and
+vines in the stubble, and decided to burn the way before the coulter. We
+had been doing this ever since the frost had killed the vegetation but
+always on lands after they had been safeguarded by strips of plowing. On
+this particular land no fire had been set for the reason that four large
+stacks of wheat still stood waiting the thresher. In my irritation and
+self-confidence I decided to clear away the matted stubble on the same
+strip though at some distance from the stacks. This seemed safe enough
+at the time for the wind was blowing gently from the opposite direction.</p>
+
+<p>It was a lovely golden day and as I stood watching the friendly flame
+clearing the ground for me, I was filled with satisfaction. Suddenly I
+observed that the line of red was moving steadily against the wind and
+<i>toward</i> the stacks. My satisfaction changed to alarm. The matted weeds
+furnished a thick bed of fuel, and against the progress of the flame I
+had nothing to offer. I could only hope that the thinning stubble would
+permit me to trample it out. I tore at the ground in desperation, hoping
+to make a bare spot which the flame could not leap. I trampled the fire
+with my bare feet. I beat at it with my hat. I screamed for help.&mdash;Too
+late I thought of my team and the plow with which I might have drawn a
+furrow around the stacks. The flame <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span>touched the high-piled sheaves. It
+ran lightly, beautifully up the sides&mdash;and as I stood watching it, I
+thought, "It is all a dream. It can't be true."</p>
+
+<p>But it was. In less than twenty minutes the towering piles had melted
+into four glowing heaps of ashes. Four hundred dollars had gone up in
+that blaze.</p>
+
+<p>Slowly, painfully I hobbled to the plow and drove my team to the house.
+Although badly burned, my mental suffering was so much greater that I
+felt only part of it.&mdash;Leaving the horses at the well I hobbled into the
+house to my mother. She, I knew, would sympathize with me and shield me
+from the just wrath of my father who was away, but was due to return in
+an hour or two.</p>
+
+<p>Mother received me in silence, bandaged my feet and put me to bed where
+I lay in shame and terror.</p>
+
+<p>At last I heard father come in. He questioned, mother's voice replied.
+He remained ominously silent. She went on quietly but with an eloquence
+unusual in her. What she said to him I never knew, but when he came up
+the stairs and stood looking down at me his anger had cooled. He merely
+asked me how I felt, uncovered my burned feet, examined them, put the
+sheet back, and went away, without a word either of reproof or
+consolation.</p>
+
+<p>None of us except little Jessie, ever alluded to this tragic matter
+again; she was accustomed to tell my story as she remembered it,&mdash;"an
+'nen the moon changed&mdash;the fire ran up the stacks and burned 'em all
+down&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>When I think of the myriads of opportunities for committing mistakes of
+this sort, I wonder that we had so few accidents. The truth is our
+captain taught us to think before we acted at all times, and we had
+little of the heedlessness which less experienced children often show.
+We were in effect small soldiers and carried some of the
+responsibilities of soldiers into all that we did.</p>
+
+<p>While still I was hobbling about, suffering from my <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span>wounds my uncles
+William and Frank McClintock drove over from Neshonoc bringing with them
+a cloud of strangely-moving revived memories of the hills and woods of
+our old Wisconsin home. I was peculiarly delighted by this visit, for
+while the story of my folly was told, it was not dwelt upon. They soon
+forgot me and fell naturally into discussion of ancient neighbors and
+far-away events.</p>
+
+<p>To me it was like peering back into a dim, dawn-lit world wherein all
+forms were distorted or wondrously aggrandized. William, big,
+black-bearded and smiling, had lost little of his romantic appeal.
+Frank, still the wag, was able to turn hand-springs and somersaults
+almost as well as ever, and the talk which followed formed an absorbing
+review of early days in Wisconsin.</p>
+
+<p>It brought up and defined many of the events of our life in the coulee,
+pictures which were becoming a little vague, a little blurred. Al Randal
+and Ed Green, who were already almost mythical, were spoken of as living
+creatures and thus the far was brought near. Comparisons between the old
+and the new methods of seeding and harvest also gave me a sense of
+change, a perception which troubled me a little, especially as a wistful
+note had crept into the voices of these giants of the middle border.
+They all loved the wilderness too well not to be a little saddened by
+the clearing away of bosky coverts and the drying up of rippling
+streams.</p>
+
+<p>We sent for Uncle David who came over on Sunday to spend a night with
+his brothers and in the argument which followed, I began to sense in him
+a spirit of restlessness, a growing discontent which covered his
+handsome face with a deepening shadow. He disliked being tied down to
+the dull life of the farm, and his horse-power threshing machine no
+longer paid him enough to compensate for the loss of time and care on
+the other phases of his industry. His voice was still glorious and he
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span>played the violin when strongly urged, though with a sense of
+dissatisfaction.</p>
+
+<p>He and mother and Aunt Deborah sang <i>Nellie Wildwood</i> and <i>Lily Dale</i>
+and <i>Minnie Minturn</i> just as they used to do in the coulee, and I forgot
+my disgrace and the pain of my blistered feet in the rapture of that
+exquisite hour of blended melody and memory. The world they represented
+was passing and though I did not fully realize this, I sensed in some
+degree the transitory nature of this reunion. In truth it never came
+again. Never again did these three brothers meet, and when they said
+good-bye to us next morning, I wondered why it was, we must be so widely
+separated from those we loved the best.</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br /><a name="XV" id="XV"></a>
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CHAPTER XV</h2>
+
+<h2>Harriet Goes Away</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>Girls on the Border came to womanhood early. At fifteen my sister
+Harriet considered herself a young lady and began to go out to dances
+with Cyrus and Albert and Frances. She was small, moody and silent, and
+as all her interests became feminine I lost that sense of comradeship
+with which we used to ride after the cattle and I turned back to my
+brother who was growing into a hollow-chested lanky lad&mdash;and in our
+little sister Jessie we took increasing interest. She was a joyous
+child, always singing like a canary. <span class="smcap">She</span> was never a "trial."</p>
+
+<p>Though delicate and fair and pretty, she manifested a singular
+indifference to the usual games of girls. Contemptuous of dolls, she
+never played house so far as I know. She took no interest in sewing, or
+cooking, but had a whole yard full of "horses," that is to say, sticks
+of varying sizes and shapes. Each pole had its name and its "stall" and
+she endlessly repeated the chores of leading them to water and feeding
+them hay. She loved to go with me to the field and was never so happy as
+when riding on old Jule.&mdash;Dear little sister, I fear I neglected you at
+times, turning away from your sweet face and pleading smile to lose
+myself in some worthless book. I am comforted to remember that I did
+sometimes lift you to the back of a real horse and permit you to ride "a
+round," chattering like a sparrow as we plodded back and forth across
+the field.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span>Frank cared little for books but he could take a hand at games although
+he was not strong. Burton who at sixteen was almost as tall as his
+father was the last to surrender his saddle to the ash-bin. He often
+rode his high-headed horse past our house on his way to town, and I
+especially recall one day, when as Frank and I were walking to town (one
+fourth of July) Burt came galloping along with five dollars in his
+pocket.&mdash;We could not see the five dollars but we did get the full force
+and dignity of his cavalier approach, and his word was sufficient proof
+of the cash he had to spend. As he rode on we, in crushed humility,
+resumed our silent plodding in the dust of his horse's hooves.</p>
+
+<p>His round of labor, like my own, was well established. In spring he
+drove team and drag. In haying he served as stacker. In harvest he bound
+his station. In stacking he pitched bundles. After stacking he plowed or
+went out "changing works" and ended the season's work by husking corn&mdash;a
+job that increased in severity from year to year, as the fields grew
+larger. In '74 it lasted well into November. Beginning in the warm and
+golden September we kept at it (off and on) until sleety rains coated
+the ears with ice and the wet soil loaded our boots with huge balls of
+clay and grass&mdash;till the snow came whirling by on the wings of the north
+wind and the last flock of belated geese went sprawling sidewise down
+the ragged sky. Grim business this! At times our wet gloves froze on our
+hands.</p>
+
+<p>How primitive all our notions were! Few of the boys owned overcoats and
+the same suit served each of us for summer and winter alike. In lieu of
+ulsters most of us wore long, gay-colored woolen scarfs wound about our
+heads and necks&mdash;scarfs which our mothers, sisters or sweethearts had
+knitted for us. Our footwear continued to be boots of the tall cavalry
+model with pointed toes <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span>and high heels. Our collars were either
+home-made ginghams or "boughten" ones of paper at fifteen cents per box.
+Some men went so far as to wear "dickies," that is to say, false shirt
+fronts made of paper, but this was considered a silly cheat. No one in
+our neighborhood ever saw a tailor-made suit, and nothing that we wore
+fitted,&mdash;our clothes merely enclosed us.</p>
+
+<p>Harriet, like the other women, made her own dresses, assisted by my
+mother, and her best gowns in summer were white muslin tied at the waist
+with ribbons. All the girls dressed in this simple fashion, but as I
+write, recalling the glowing cheeks and shining eyes of Hattie and Agnes
+and Bess, I feel again the thrill of admiration which ran through my
+blood as they came down the aisle at church, or when at dancing parties
+they balanced or "sashayed" in <i>Honest John</i> or <i>Money Musk</i>.&mdash;To me
+they were perfectly clothed and divinely fair.</p>
+
+<p>The contrast between the McClintocks, my hunter uncles, and Addison
+Garland, my father's brother who came to visit us at about this time was
+strikingly significant even to me. Tall, thoughtful, humorous and of
+frail and bloodless body, "A. Garland" as he signed himself, was of the
+Yankee merchant type. A general store in Wisconsin was slowly making him
+a citizen of substance and his quiet comment brought to me an entirely
+new conception of the middle west and its future. He was a philosopher.
+He peered into the years that were to come and paid little heed to the
+passing glories of the plain. He predicted astounding inventions and
+great cities, and advised my father to go into dairying and diversified
+crops. "This is a natural butter country," said he.</p>
+
+<p>He was an invalid, and it was through him that we first learned of
+graham flour. During his stay (and for some time after) we suffered an
+infliction of sticky "gems" <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span>and dark soggy bread. We all resented this
+displacement of our usual salt-rising loaf and delicious saleratus
+biscuits but we ate the hot gems, liberally splashed with butter, just
+as we would have eaten dog-biscuit or hardtack had it been put before
+us.</p>
+
+<p>One of the sayings of my uncle will fix his character in the mind of the
+reader. One day, apropos of some public event which displeased him, he
+said, "Men can be infinitely more foolish in their collective capacity
+than on their own individual account." His quiet utterance of these
+words and especially the phrase "collective capacity" made a deep
+impression on me. The underlying truth of the saying came to me only
+later in my life.</p>
+
+<p>He was full of "<i>citrus-belt</i>" enthusiasm and told us that he was about
+to sell out and move to Santa Barbara. He did not urge my father to
+accompany him, and if he had, it would have made no difference. A
+winterless climate and the raising of fruit did not appeal to my
+Commander. He loved the prairie and the raising of wheat and cattle, and
+gave little heed to anything else, but to me Addison's talk of "the
+citrus belt" had the value of a romance, and the occasional Spanish
+phrases which he used afforded me an indefinable delight. It was
+unthinkable that I should ever see an <i>arroyo</i> but I permitted myself to
+dream of it while he talked.</p>
+
+<p>I think he must have encouraged my sister in her growing desire for an
+education, for in the autumn after his visit she entered the Cedar
+Valley Seminary at Osage and her going produced in me a desire to
+accompany her. I said nothing of it at the time, for my father gave but
+reluctant consent to Harriet's plan. A district school education seemed
+to him ample for any farmer's needs.</p>
+
+<p>Many of our social affairs were now connected with "the Grange." During
+these years on the new farm while we were busied with breaking and
+fencing and raising <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span>wheat, there had been growing up among the farmers
+of the west a social organization officially known as The Patrons of
+Husbandry. The places of meeting were called "Granges" and very
+naturally the members were at once called "Grangers."</p>
+
+<p>My father was an early and enthusiastic member of the order, and during
+the early seventies its meetings became very important dates on our
+calendar. In winter "oyster suppers," with debates, songs and essays,
+drew us all to the Burr Oak Grove school-house, and each spring, on the
+twelfth of June, the Grange Picnic was a grand "turn-out." It was almost
+as well attended as the circus.</p>
+
+<p>We all looked forward to it for weeks and every young man who owned a
+top-buggy got it out and washed and polished it for the use of his best
+girl, and those who were not so fortunate as to own "a rig" paid high
+tribute to the livery stable of the nearest town. Others, less able or
+less extravagant, doubled teams with a comrade and built a "bowery
+wagon" out of a wagon-box, and with hampers heaped with food rode away
+in state, drawn by a four or six-horse team. It seemed a splendid and
+daring thing to do, and some day I hoped to drive a six-horse bowery
+wagon myself.</p>
+
+<p>The central place of meeting was usually in some grove along the Big
+Cedar to the west and south of us, and early on the appointed day the
+various lodges of our region came together one by one at convenient
+places, each one moving in procession and led by great banners on which
+the women had blazoned the motto of their home lodge. Some of the
+columns had bands and came preceded by far faint strains of music, with
+marshals in red sashes galloping to and fro in fine assumption of
+military command.</p>
+
+<p>It was grand, it was inspiring&mdash;to us, to see those long <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span>lines of
+carriages winding down the lanes, joining one to another at the cross
+roads till at last all the granges from the northern end of the county
+were united in one mighty column advancing on the picnic ground, where
+orators awaited our approach with calm dignity and high resolve. Nothing
+more picturesque, more delightful, more helpful has ever risen out of
+American rural life. Each of these assemblies was a most grateful relief
+from the sordid loneliness of the farm.</p>
+
+<p>Our winter amusements were also in process of change. We held no more
+singing schools&mdash;the "Lyceum" had taken its place. Revival meetings were
+given up, although few of the church folk classed them among the
+amusements. The County Fair on the contrary was becoming each year more
+important as farming diversified. It was even more glorious than the
+Grange Picnic, was indeed second only to the fourth of July, and we
+looked forward to it all through the autumn.</p>
+
+<p>It came late in September and always lasted three days. We all went on
+the second day, (which was considered the best day) and mother, by
+cooking all the afternoon before our outing, provided us a dinner of
+cold chicken and cake and pie which we ate while sitting on the grass
+beside our wagon just off the racetrack while the horses munched hay and
+oats from the box. All around us other families were grouped, picnicking
+in the same fashion, and a cordial interchange of jellies and pies made
+the meal a delightful function. However, we boys never lingered over
+it,&mdash;we were afraid of missing something of the program.</p>
+
+<p>Our interest in the races was especially keen, for one of the citizens
+of our town owned a fine little trotting horse called "Huckleberry"
+whose honest friendly striving made him a general favorite. Our survey
+of fat sheep, broad-backed bulls and shining colts was a duty, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span>but to
+cheer Huckleberry at the home stretch was a privilege.</p>
+
+<p>To us from the farm the crowds were the most absorbing show of all. We
+met our chums and their sisters with a curious sense of strangeness, of
+discovery. Our playmates seemed alien somehow&mdash;especially the girls in
+their best dresses walking about two and two, impersonal and haughty of
+glance.</p>
+
+<p>Cyrus and Walter were there in their top-buggies with Harriet and Bettie
+but they seemed to be having a dull time, for while they sat holding
+their horses we were dodging about in freedom&mdash;now at the contest of
+draft horses, now at the sledge-hammer throwing, now at the candy-booth.
+We were comical figures, with our long trousers, thick gray coats and
+faded hats, but we didn't know it and were happy.</p>
+
+<p>One day as Burton and I were wandering about on the fair grounds we came
+upon a patent medicine cart from which a faker, a handsome fellow with
+long black hair and an immense white hat, was addressing the crowd while
+a young and beautiful girl with a guitar in her lap sat in weary
+relaxation at his feet. A third member of the "troupe," a short and very
+plump man of commonplace type, was handing out bottles. It was "Doctor"
+Lightner, vending his "Magic Oil."</p>
+
+<p>At first I perceived only the doctor whose splendid gray suit and
+spotless linen made the men in the crowd rustic and graceless, but as I
+studied the woman I began to read into her face a sadness, a weariness,
+which appealed to my imagination. Who was she? Why was she there? I had
+never seen a girl with such an expression. She saw no one, was
+interested in nothing before her&mdash;and when her master, or husband, spoke
+to her in a low voice, she raised her guitar and joined in the song
+which he had started, all with the same air of weary disgust. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span>Her
+voice, a childishly sweet soprano, mingled with the robust baritone of
+the doctor and the shouting tenor of the fat man, like a thread of
+silver in a skein of brass.</p>
+
+<p>I forgot my dusty clothes, my rough shoes,&mdash;I forgot that I was a boy.
+Absorbed and dreaming I listened to these strange new songs and studied
+the singular faces of these alien songsters. Even the shouting tenor had
+a far-away gleam in the yellow light of his cat-like eyes. The leader's
+skill, the woman's grace and the perfect blending of their voices made
+an ineffaceable impression on my sensitive, farm-bred brain.</p>
+
+<p>The songs which they sang were not in themselves of a character to
+warrant this ecstasy in me. One of them ran as follows:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">O Mary had a little lamb,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Its fleece was black as jet,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In the little old log cabin in the lane;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And everywhere that Mary went,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The lamb went too, you bet.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In the little old log cabin in the lane.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">In the little old log cabin O!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The little old log cabin O!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The little old log cabin in the lane,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">They're hangin' men and women now<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">For singing songs like this<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In the little old log cabin in the lane.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Nevertheless I listened without a smile. It was art to me. It gave me
+something I had never known. The large, white, graceful hand of the
+doctor sweeping the strings, the clear ringing shout of the tenor and
+the chiming, bird-like voice of the girl lent to the absurd words of
+this ballad a singular dignity. They made all other persons and events
+of the day of no account.</p>
+
+<p>In the intervals between the songs the doctor talked of catarrh and its
+cure, and offered his medicines for <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span>sale, and in this dull part of the
+program the tenor assisted, but the girl, sinking back in her seat,
+resumed her impersonal and weary air.</p>
+
+<p>That was forty years ago, and I can still sing those songs and imitate
+the whoop of the shouting tenor, but I have never been able to put that
+woman into verse or fiction although I have tried. In a story called
+<i>Love or the Law</i> I once made a laborious attempt to account for her,
+but I did not succeed, and the manuscript remains in the bottom of my
+desk.</p>
+
+<p>No doubt the doctor has gone to his long account and the girl is a gray
+old woman of sixty-five but in this book they shall be forever young,
+forever beautiful, noble with the grace of art. The medicine they
+peddled was of doubtful service, but the songs they sang, the story they
+suggested were of priceless value to us who came from the monotony of
+the farm, and went back to it like bees laden with the pollen of new
+intoxicating blooms.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Sorrowfully we left Huckleberry's unfinished race, reluctantly we
+climbed into the farm wagon, sticky with candy, dusty, tired, some of us
+suffering with sick-headache, and rolled away homeward to milk the cows,
+feed the pigs and bed down the horses.</p>
+
+<p>As I look at a tintype of myself taken at about this time, I can hardly
+detect the physical relationship between that mop-headed, long-lipped
+lad, and the gray-haired man of today. But the coat, the tie, the little
+stick-pin on the lapel of my coat all unite to bring back to me with
+painful stir, the curious debates, the boyish delights, the dawning
+desires which led me to these material expressions of manly pride. There
+is a kind of pathos too, in the memory of the keen pleasure I took in
+that absurd ornament&mdash;and yet my joy was genuine, my satisfaction
+complete.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span>Harriet came home from school each Friday night but we saw little of
+her, for she was always engaged for dances or socials by the neighbors'
+sons, and had only a young lady's interest in her cub brothers. I
+resented this and was openly hostile to her admirers. She seldom rode
+with us to spelling schools or "soshybles." There was always some youth
+with a cutter, or some noisy group in a big bob-sleigh to carry her
+away, and on Monday morning father drove her back to the county town
+with growing pride in her improving manners.</p>
+
+<p>Her course at the Seminary was cut short in early spring by a cough
+which came from a long ride in the keen wind. She was very ill with a
+wasting fever, yet for a time refused to go to bed. She could not resign
+herself to the loss of her school-life.</p>
+
+<p>The lack of room in our house is brought painfully to my mind as I
+recall that she lay for a week or two in a corner of our living room
+with all the noise and bustle of the family going on around her. Her own
+attic chamber was unwarmed (like those of all her girl friends), and so
+she was forced to lie near the kitchen stove.</p>
+
+<p>She grew rapidly worse all through the opening days of April and as we
+were necessarily out in the fields at work, and mother was busied with
+her household affairs, the lonely sufferer was glad to have her bed in
+the living room&mdash;and there she lay, her bright eyes following mother at
+her work, growing whiter and whiter until one beautiful, tragic morning
+in early May, my father called me in to say good-bye to her.</p>
+
+<p>She was very weak, but her mind was perfectly clear, and as she kissed
+me farewell with a soft word about being a good boy, I turned away
+blinded with tears and fled to the barnyard, there to hide like a
+wounded animal, appalled by the weight of despair and sorrow which <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span>her
+transfigured face had suddenly thrust upon me. All about me the young
+cattle called, the spring sun shone and the gay fowls sang, but they
+could not mitigate my grief, my dismay, my sense of loss. My sister was
+passing from me&mdash;that was the agonizing fact which benumbed me. She who
+had been my playmate, my comrade, was about to vanish into air and
+earth!</p>
+
+<p>This was my first close contact with death, and it filled me with awe.
+Human life suddenly seemed fleeting and of a part with the impermanency
+and change of the westward moving Border Line.&mdash;Like the wild flowers
+she had gathered, Harriet was now a fragrant memory. Her dust mingled
+with the soil of the little burial ground just beyond the village
+bounds.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>My mother's heart was long in recovering from the pain of this loss, but
+at last Jessie's sweet face, which had in it the light of the sky and
+the color of a flower, won back her smiles. The child's acceptance of
+the funeral as a mere incident of her busy little life, in some way
+enabled us all to take up and carry forward the routine of our shadowed
+home.</p>
+
+<p>Those years on the plain, from '71 to '75, held much that was alluring,
+much that was splendid. I did not live an exceptional life in any way.
+My duties and my pleasures were those of the boys around me. In all
+essentials my life was typical of the time and place. My father was
+counted a good and successful farmer. Our neighbors all lived in the
+same restricted fashion as ourselves, in barren little houses of wood or
+stone, owning few books, reading only weekly papers. It was a pure
+democracy wherein my father was a leader and my mother beloved by all
+who knew her. If anybody looked down upon us we didn't know it, and in
+all the social affairs of the township we fully shared.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span>Nature was our compensation. As I look back upon it, I perceive
+transcendent sunsets, and a mighty sweep of golden grain beneath a sea
+of crimson clouds. The light and song and motion of the prairie return
+to me. I hear again the shrill, myriad-voiced choir of leaping insects
+whose wings flash fire amid the glorified stubble. The wind wanders by,
+lifting my torn hat-rim. The locusts rise in clouds before my weary
+feet. The prairie hen soars out of the unreaped barley and drops into
+the sheltering deeps of the tangled oats, green as emerald. The lone
+quail pipes in the hazel thicket, and far up the road the cow-bell's
+steady clang tells of the homecoming herd.</p>
+
+<p>Even in our hours of toil, and through the sultry skies, the sacred
+light of beauty broke; worn and grimed as we were, we still could fall
+a-dream before the marvel of a golden earth beneath a crimson sky.</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br /><a name="XVI" id="XVI"></a>
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CHAPTER XVI</h2>
+
+<h2>We Move to Town</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>One day, soon after the death of my sister Harriet, my father came home
+from a meeting of the Grange with a message which shook our home with
+the force of an earth-quake. The officers of the order had asked him to
+become the official grain-buyer for the county, and he had agreed to do
+it. "I am to take charge of the new elevator which is just being
+completed in Osage," he said.</p>
+
+<p>The effect of this announcement was far-reaching. First of all it put an
+end not merely to our further pioneering but, (as the plan developed)
+promised to translate us from the farm to a new and shining world, a
+town world where circuses, baseball games and county fairs were events
+of almost daily occurrence. It awed while it delighted us for we felt
+vaguely our father's perturbation.</p>
+
+<p>For the first time since leaving Boston, some thirty years before, Dick
+Garland began to dream of making a living at something less backbreaking
+than tilling the soil. It was to him a most abrupt and startling
+departure from the fixed plan of his life, and I dimly understood even
+then that he came to this decision only after long and troubled
+reflection. Mother as usual sat in silence. If she showed exultation, I
+do not recall the fashion of it.</p>
+
+<p>Father assumed his new duties in June and during all that summer and
+autumn, drove away immediately after breakfast each morning, to the
+elevator some six <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span>miles away, leaving me in full charge of the farm and
+its tools. All his orders to the hired men were executed through me. On
+me fell the supervision of their action, always with an eye to his
+general oversight. I never forgot that fact. He possessed the eye of an
+eagle. His uncanny powers of observation kept me terrified. He could
+detect at a glance the slightest blunder or wrong doing in my day's
+activities. Every afternoon, about sunset he came whirling into the
+yard, his team flecked with foam, his big gray eyes flashing from side
+to side, and if any tool was out of place or broken, he discovered it at
+once, and his reproof was never a cause of laughter to me or my brother.</p>
+
+<p>As harvest came on he took command in the field, for most of the harvest
+help that year were rough, hardy wanderers from the south, nomads who
+had followed the line of ripening wheat from Missouri northward, and
+were not the most profitable companions for boys of fifteen. They
+reached our neighborhood in July, arriving like a flight of alien
+unclean birds, and vanished into the north in September as mysteriously
+as they had appeared. A few of them had been soldiers, others were the
+errant sons of the poor farmers and rough mechanics of older States,
+migrating for the adventure of it. One of them gave his name as "Harry
+Lee," others were known by such names as "Big Ed" or "Shorty." Some
+carried valises, others had nothing but small bundles containing a clean
+shirt and a few socks.</p>
+
+<p>They all had the most appalling yet darkly romantic conception of women.
+A "girl" was the most desired thing in the world, a prize to be worked
+for, sought for and enjoyed without remorse. She had no soul. The maid
+who yielded to temptation deserved no pity, no consideration, no aid.
+Her sufferings were amusing, her diseases a joke, her future of no
+account. From these <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span>men Burton and I acquired a desolating fund of
+information concerning South Clark Street in Chicago, and the river
+front in St. Louis. Their talk did not allure, it mostly shocked and
+horrified us. We had not known that such cruelty, such baseness was in
+the world and it stood away in such violent opposition to the teaching
+of our fathers and uncles that it did not corrupt us. That man, the
+stronger animal, owed chivalry and care to woman, had been deeply
+grounded in our concept of life, and we shrank from these vile stories
+as from something disloyal to our mothers and sisters.</p>
+
+<p>To those who think of the farm as a sweetly ideal place in which to
+bring up a boy, all this may be disturbing&mdash;but the truth is, low-minded
+men are low-minded everywhere, and farm hands are often creatures with
+enormous appetites and small remorse, men on whom the beauty of nature
+has very little effect.</p>
+
+<p>To most of our harvest hands that year Saturday night meant a visit to
+town and a drunken spree, and they did not hesitate to say so in the
+presence of Burton and myself. Some of them did not hesitate to say
+anything in our presence. After a hard week's work we all felt that a
+trip to town was only a fair reward.</p>
+
+<p>Saturday night in town! How it all comes back to me! I am a timid
+visitor in the little frontier village. It is sunset. A whiskey-crazed
+farmhand is walking bare footed up and down the middle of the road
+defying the world.&mdash;From a corner of the street I watch with tense
+interest another lithe, pock-marked bully menacing with cat-like action,
+a cowering young farmer in a long linen coat. The crowd jeers at him for
+his cowardice&mdash;a burst of shouting is heard. A trampling follows and
+forth from the door of a saloon bulges a throng of drunken, steaming,
+reeling, cursing ruffians followed by brave Jim McCarty, the city
+marshal, with an offender under <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span>each hand.&mdash;The scene changes to the
+middle of the street. I am one of a throng surrounding a smooth-handed
+faker who is selling prize boxes of soap and giving away dollars.&mdash;"Now,
+gentlemen," he says, "if you will hand me a dollar I will give you a
+sample package of soap to examine, afterwards if you don't want the
+soap, return it to me, and I'll return your dollar." He repeats this
+several times, returning the dollars faithfully, then slightly varies
+his invitation by saying, "so that I can return your dollars."</p>
+
+<p>No one appears to observe this significant change, and as he has
+hitherto returned the dollars precisely according to promise, he now
+proceeds to his harvest. Having all his boxes out he abruptly closes the
+lid of his box and calmly remarks, "I said, 'so that I <i>can</i> return your
+dollars,' I didn't say I would.&mdash;Gentlemen, I have the dollars and <i>you</i>
+have the experience." He drops into his seat and takes up the reins to
+drive away. A tall man who has been standing silently beside the wheel
+of the carriage, snatches the whip from its socket, and lashes the
+swindler across the face. Red streaks appear on his cheek.&mdash;The crowd
+surges forward. Up from behind leaps a furious little Scotchman who
+snatches off his right boot and beats the stranger over the head with
+such fury that he falls from his carriage to the ground.&mdash;I rejoice in
+his punishment, and admire the tall man who led the assault.&mdash;The
+marshal comes, the man is led away, and the crowd smilingly scatters.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>We are on the way home. Only two of my crew are with me. The others are
+roaring from one drinking place to another, having a "good time." The
+air is soothingly clean and sweet after the tumult and the reek of the
+town. Appalled, yet fascinated, I listen to the oft repeated tales of
+just how Jim McCarty sprang into the saloon and cleaned out the brawling
+mob. I <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span>feel very young, very defenceless, and very sleepy as I
+listen.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>On Sunday, Burton usually came to visit me or I went over to his house
+and together we rode or walked to service at the Grove school-house. He
+was now the owner of a razor, and I was secretly planning to buy one.
+The question of dress had begun to trouble us both acutely. Our best
+suits were not only made from woolen cloth, they were of blizzard
+weight, and as on week days (in summer) our entire outfit consisted of a
+straw hat, a hickory shirt and a pair of brown denim overalls you may
+imagine what tortures we endured when fully encased in our "Sunday
+best," with starched shirts and paper collars.</p>
+
+<p>No one, so far as I knew, at that time possessed an extra, light-weight
+suit for hot-weather wear, although a long, yellow, linen robe called a
+"duster" was in fashion among the smart dressers. John Gammons, who was
+somewhat of a dandy in matters of toilet, was among the first of my
+circle to purchase one of these very ultra garments, and Burton soon
+followed his lead, and then my own discontent began. I, too, desired a
+duster.</p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately my father did not see me as I saw myself. To him I was
+still a boy and subject to his will in matters of dress as in other
+affairs, and the notion that I needed a linen coat was absurd. "If you
+are too warm, take your coat off," he said, and I not only went without
+the duster, but suffered the shame of appearing in a flat-crown black
+hat while Burton and all the other fellows were wearing light brown
+ones, of a conical shape.</p>
+
+<p>I was furious. After a period of bitter brooding I rebelled, and took
+the matter up with the Commander-in-Chief. I argued, "As I am not only
+doing a man's work on a boy's pay but actually superintending the stock
+and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span>tools, I am entitled to certain individual rights in the choice of
+a hat."</p>
+
+<p>The soldier listened in silence but his glance was stern. When I had
+ended he said, "You'll wear the hat I provide."</p>
+
+<p>For the first time in my life I defied him. "I will not," I said. "And
+you can't make me."</p>
+
+<p>He seized me by the arm and for a moment we faced each other in silent
+clash of wills. I was desperate now. "Don't you strike me," I warned.
+"You can't do that any more."</p>
+
+<p>His face changed. His eyes softened. He perceived in my attitude
+something new, something unconquerable. He dropped my arm and turned
+away. After a silent struggle with himself he took two dollars from his
+pocket and extended them to me. "Get your own hat," he said, and walked
+away.</p>
+
+<p>This victory forms the most important event of my fifteenth year. Indeed
+the chief's recession gave me a greater shock than any punishment could
+have done. Having forced him to admit the claims of my growing
+personality as well as the value of my services, I retired in a panic.
+The fact that he, the inexorable old soldier, had surrendered to my
+furious demands awed me, making me very careful not to go too fast or
+too far in my assumption of the privileges of manhood.</p>
+
+<p>Another of the milestones on my road to manhood was my first employment
+of the town barber. Up to this time my hair had been trimmed by mother
+or mangled by one of the hired men,&mdash;whereas both John and Burton
+enjoyed regular hair-cuts and came to Sunday school with the backs of
+their necks neatly shaved. I wanted to look like that, and so at last,
+shortly after my victory concerning the hat, I plucked up courage to ask
+my father for a quarter and got it! With my money <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span>tightly clutched in
+my hand I timidly entered the Tonsorial Parlor of Ed Mills and took my
+seat in his marvellous chair&mdash;thus touching another high point on the
+road to self-respecting manhood. My pleasure, however, was mixed with
+ignoble childish terror, for not only did the barber seem determined to
+force upon me a shampoo (which was ten cents extra), but I was in
+unremitting fear lest I should lose my quarter, the only one I
+possessed, and find myself accused as a swindler.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless I came safely away, a neater, older and graver person,
+walking with a manlier stride, and when I confronted my classmates at
+the Grove school-house on Sunday, I gave evidence of an accession of
+self-confidence. The fact that my back hair was now in fashionable order
+was of greatest comfort to me. If only my trousers had not continued
+their distressing habit of climbing up my boot-tops I would have been
+almost at ease but every time I rose from my seat it became necessary to
+make each instep smooth the leg of the other pantaloon, and even then
+they kept their shameful wrinkles, and a knowledge of my exposed ankles
+humbled me.</p>
+
+<p>Burton, although better dressed than I, was quite as confused and
+wordless in the presence of girls, but John Gammons was not only
+confident, he was irritatingly facile. Furthermore, as son of the
+director of the Sunday school he had almost too much distinction. I
+bitterly resented his linen collars, his neat suit and his smiling
+assurance, for while we professed to despise everything connected with
+church, we were keenly aware of the bright eyes of Bettie and noted that
+they rested often on John's curly head. He could sing, too, and
+sometimes, with sublime audacity, held the hymn book with her.</p>
+
+<p>The sweetness of those girlish faces held us captive through many a long
+sermon, but there were times when <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span>not even their beauty availed. Three
+or four of us occasionally slipped away into the glorious forest to pick
+berries or nuts, or to loaf in the odorous shade of the elms along the
+creek. The cool aisles of the oaks seemed more sweetly sanctifying
+(after a week of sun-smit soil on the open plain) than the crowded
+little church with its droning preacher, and there was something
+mystical in the melody of the little brook and in the flecking of light
+and shade across the silent woodland path.</p>
+
+<p>To drink of the little ice-cold spring beneath the maple tree in
+Frazer's pasture was almost as delight-giving as the plate of ice-cream
+which we sometimes permitted ourselves to buy in the village on
+Saturday, and often we wandered on and on, till the sinking sun warned
+us of duties at home and sent us hurrying to the open.</p>
+
+<p>It was always hard to go back to the farm after one of these days of
+leisure&mdash;back to greasy overalls and milk-bespattered boots, back to the
+society of fly-bedevilled cows and steaming, salty horses, back to the
+curry-comb and swill bucket,&mdash;but it was particularly hard during this
+our last summer on the prairie. But we did it with a feeling that we
+were nearing the end of it. "Next year we'll be living in town!" I said
+to the boys exultantly. "No more cow-milking for me!"</p>
+
+<p>I never rebelled at hard, clean work, like haying or harvest, but the
+slavery of being nurse to calves and scrub-boy to horses cankered my
+spirits more and more, and the thought of living in town filled me with
+an incredulous anticipatory delight. A life of leisure, of intellectual
+activity seemed about to open up to me, and I met my chums in a
+restrained exaltation which must have been trying to their souls. "I'm
+sorry to leave you," I jeered, "but so it goes. Some are chosen, others
+are left. Some rise to glory, others remain plodders&mdash;" such <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span>was my airy
+attitude. I wonder that they did not roll me in the dust.</p>
+
+<p>Though my own joy and that of my brother was keen and outspoken, I have
+no recollection that my mother uttered a single word of pleasure. She
+must have been as deeply excited, and as pleased as we, for it meant
+more to her than to us, it meant escape from the drudgery of the farm,
+from the pain of early rising, and yet I cannot be sure of her feeling.
+So far as she knew this move was final. Her life as a farmer's wife was
+about to end after twenty years of early rising and never ending labor,
+and I think she must have palpitated with joy of her approaching freedom
+from it all.</p>
+
+<p>As we were not to move till the following March, and as winter came on
+we went to school as usual in the bleak little shack at the corner of
+our farm and took part in all the neighborhood festivals. I have
+beautiful memories of trotting away across the plain to spelling schools
+and "Lyceums" through the sparkling winter nights with Franklin by my
+side, while the low-hung sky blazed with stars, and great white owls
+went flapping silently away before us.&mdash;I am riding in a long sleigh to
+the north beneath a wondrous moon to witness a performance of <i>Lord
+Dundreary</i> at the Barker school-house.&mdash;I am a neglected onlooker at a
+Christmas tree at Burr Oak. I am spelled down at the Shehan school&mdash;and
+through all these scenes runs a belief that I am leaving the district
+never to return to it, a conviction which lends to every experience a
+peculiar poignancy of appeal.</p>
+
+<p>Though but a shaggy colt in those days, I acknowledged a keen longing to
+join in the parties and dances of the grown-up boys and girls. I was not
+content to be merely the unnoticed cub in the corner. A place in the
+family bob-sled no longer satisfied me, and when at the "sociable" I
+stood in the corner with tousled hair and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span>clumsy ill-fitting garments I
+was in my desire, a confident, graceful squire of dames.</p>
+
+<p>The dancing was a revelation to me of the beauty and grace latent in the
+awkward girls and hulking men of the farms. It amazed and delighted me
+to see how gloriously Madeleine White swayed and tip-toed through the
+figures of the "Cotillion," and the sweet aloofness of Agnes Farwell's
+face filled me with worship. I envied Edwin Blackler his supple grace,
+his fine sense of rhythm, and especially the calm audacity of his manner
+with his partners. Bill, Joe, all the great lunking farm hands seemed
+somehow uplifted, carried out of their everyday selves, ennobled by some
+deep-seated emotion, and I was eager for a chance to show that I, too,
+could balance and bow and pay court to women, but&mdash;alas, I never did, I
+kept to my corner even though Stelle Gilbert came to drag me out.</p>
+
+<p>Occasionally a half-dozen of these audacious young people would turn a
+church social or donation party into a dance, much to the scandal of the
+deacons. I recall one such performance which ended most dramatically. It
+was a "shower" for the minister whose salary was too small to be even an
+honorarium, and the place of meeting was at the Durrells', two
+well-to-do farmers, brothers who lived on opposite sides of the road
+just south of the Grove school-house.</p>
+
+<p>Mother put up a basket of food, father cast a quarter of beef into the
+back-part of the sleigh, and we were off early of a cold winter night in
+order to be on hand for the supper. My brother and I were mere
+passengers on the straw behind, along with the slab of beef, but we gave
+no outward sign of discontent. It was a clear, keen, marvellous
+twilight, with the stars coming out over the woodlands to the east. On
+every road the sound of bells and the voices of happy young <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span>people came
+to our ears. Occasionally some fellow with a fast horse and a gay cutter
+came slashing up behind us and called out "Clear the track!" Father gave
+the road, and the youth and his best girl went whirling by with a gay
+word of thanks. Watch-dogs guarding the Davis farm-house, barked in
+savage warning as we passed and mother said, "Everybody's gone. I hope
+we won't be late."</p>
+
+<p>We were, indeed, a little behind the others for when we stumbled into
+the Ellis Durrell house we found a crowd of merry folks clustered about
+the kitchen stove. Mrs. Ellis flattered me by saying, "The young people
+are expecting you over at Joe's." Here she laughed, "I'm afraid they are
+going to dance."</p>
+
+<p>As soon as I was sufficiently thawed out I went across the road to the
+other house which gave forth the sound of singing and the rhythmic tread
+of dancing feet. It was filled to overflowing with the youth of the
+neighborhood, and Agnes Farwell, Joe's niece, the queenliest of them
+all, was leading the dance, her dark face aglow, her deep brown eyes
+alight.</p>
+
+<p>The dance was "The Weevilly Wheat" and Ed Blackler was her partner.
+Against the wall stood Marsh Belford, a tall, crude, fierce young savage
+with eyes fixed on Agnes. He was one of her suitors and mad with
+jealousy of Blackler to whom she was said to be engaged. He was a
+singular youth, at once bashful and baleful. He could not dance, and for
+that reason keenly resented Ed's supple grace and easy manners with the
+girls.</p>
+
+<p>Crossing to where Burton stood, I heard Belford say as he replied to
+some remark by his companions, "I'll roll him one o' these days." He
+laughed in a constrained way, and that his mood was dangerous was
+evident. In deep excitement Burton and I awaited the outcome.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span>The dancing was of the harmless "donation" sort. As musical instruments
+were forbidden, the rhythm was furnished by a song in which we all
+joined with clapping hands.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Come hither, my love, and trip together<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In the morning early,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Give to you the parting hand<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Although I love you dearly.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I won't have none of your weevilly wheat<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I won't have none of your barley,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I'll have some flour<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In half an hour<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To bake a cake for Charley.&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Oh, Charley, he is a fine young man,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Charley he is a dandy,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Charley he is a fine young man<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For he buys the girls some candy.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The figures were like those in the old time "Money Musk" and as Agnes
+bowed and swung and gave hands down the line I thought her the loveliest
+creature in the world, and so did Marsh, only that which gladdened me,
+maddened him. I acknowledged Edwin's superior claim,&mdash;Marsh did not.</p>
+
+<p>Burton, who understood the situation, drew me aside and said, "Marsh has
+been drinking. There's going to be war."</p>
+
+<p>As soon as the song ceased and the dancers paused, Marsh, white with
+resolution, went up to Agnes, and said something to her. She smiled, but
+shook her head and turned away. Marsh came back to where his brother Joe
+was standing and his face was tense with fury. "I'll make her wish she
+hadn't," he muttered.</p>
+
+<p>Edwin, as floor manager, now called out a new "set" and as the dancers
+began to "form on," Joe Belford hunched his brother. "Go after him now,"
+he said. With deadly slowness of action, Marsh sauntered up to Blackler
+and said something in a low voice.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span>"You're a liar!" retorted Edwin sharply.</p>
+
+<p>Belford struck out with a swing of his open hand, and a moment later
+they were rolling on the floor in a deadly grapple. The girls screamed
+and fled, but the boys formed a joyous ring around the contestants and
+cheered them on to keener strife while Joe Belford, tearing off his
+coat, stood above his brother, warning others to keep out of it. "This
+is to be a fair fight," he said. "The best man wins!"</p>
+
+<p>He was a redoubtable warrior and the ring widened. No one thought of
+interfering, in fact we were all delighted by this sudden outbreak of
+the heroic spirit.</p>
+
+<p>Ed threw off his antagonist and rose, bleeding but undaunted. "You
+devil," he said, "I'll smash your face."</p>
+
+<p>Marsh again struck him a staggering blow, and they were facing each
+other in watchful fury as Agnes forced her way through the crowd and,
+laying her hand on Belford's arm, calmly said, "Marsh Belford, what are
+you doing?"</p>
+
+<p>Her dignity, her beauty, her air of command, awed the bully and silenced
+every voice in the room. She was our hostess and as such assumed the
+right to enforce decorum. Fixing her glance upon Joe whom she recognized
+as the chief disturber, she said, "You'd better go home. This is no
+place for either you or Marsh."</p>
+
+<p>Sobered, shamed, the Belfords fell back and slipped out while Agnes
+turned to Edwin and wiped the blood from his face with self-contained
+tenderness.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>This date may be taken as fairly ending my boyhood, for I was rapidly
+taking on the manners of men. True, I did not smoke or chew tobacco and
+I was not greatly given to profanity, but I was able to shoulder a two
+bushel sack of wheat and could hold my own with most of the harvesters.
+Although short and heavy, I was deft <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span>with my hands, as one or two of
+the neighborhood bullies had reason to know and in many ways I was
+counted a man.</p>
+
+<p>I read during this year nearly one hundred dime novels, little
+paper-bound volumes filled with stories of Indians and wild horsemen and
+dukes and duchesses and men in iron masks, and sewing girls who turned
+out to be daughters of nobility, and marvellous detectives who bore
+charmed lives and always trapped the villains at the end of the story&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Of all these tales, those of the border naturally had most allurement.
+There was the <i>Quaker Sleuth</i>, for instance, and <i>Mad Matt the Trailer</i>,
+and <i>Buckskin Joe</i> who rode disdainfully alone (like Lochinvar),
+rescuing maidens from treacherous Apaches, cutting long rows of death
+notches on the stock of his carbine. One of these narratives contained a
+phantom troop of skeleton horsemen, a grisly squadron, which came like
+an icy wind out of the darkness, striking terror to the hearts of the
+renegades and savages, only to vanish with clatter of bones, and click
+of hoofs.</p>
+
+<p>In addition to these delight-giving volumes, I traded stock with other
+boys of the neighborhood. From Jack Sheet I derived a bundle of
+<i>Saturday Nights</i> in exchange for my <i>New York Weeklys</i> and from one of
+our harvest hands, a near-sighted old German, I borrowed some
+twenty-five or thirty numbers of <i>The Sea Side Library</i>. These also cost
+a dime when new, but you could return them and get a nickel in credit
+for another,&mdash;provided your own was in good condition.</p>
+
+<p>It is a question whether the reading of all this exciting fiction had an
+ill effect on my mind or not. Apparently it had very little effect of
+any sort other than to make the borderland a great deal more exciting
+than the farm, and yet so far as I can discover, I had no keen desire to
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span>go West and fight Indians and I showed no disposition to rob or murder
+in the manner of my heroes. I devoured <i>Jack Harkaway</i> and <i>The Quaker
+Sleuth</i> precisely as I played ball&mdash;to pass the time and because I
+enjoyed the game.</p>
+
+<p>Deacon Garland was highly indignant with my father for permitting such
+reading, and argued against it furiously, but no one paid much attention
+to his protests&mdash;especially after we caught the old gentleman sitting
+with a very lurid example of "The Damnable Lies" open in his hand. "I
+was only looking into it to see how bad it was," he explained.</p>
+
+<p>Father was so tickled at the old man's downfall that he said, "Stick to
+it till you find how it turns out."</p>
+
+<p>Grandsire, we all perceived, was human after all. I think we liked him
+rather better after this sign of weakness.</p>
+
+<p>It would not be fair to say that we read nothing else but these
+easy-going tales. As a matter of fact, I read everything within reach,
+even the copy of <i>Paradise Lost</i> which my mother presented to me on my
+fifteenth birthday. Milton I admit was hard work, but I got considerable
+joy out of his cursing passages. The battle scenes also interested me
+and I went about spouting the extraordinary harangues of Satan with such
+vigor that my team one day took fright of me, and ran away with the
+plow, leaving an erratic furrow to be explained. However, my father was
+glad to see me taking on the voice of the orator.</p>
+
+<p>The five years of life on this farm had brought swift changes into my
+world. Nearly all the open land had been fenced and plowed, and all the
+cattle and horses had been brought into pasture, and around most of the
+buildings, groves of maples were beginning to make the homesteads a
+little less barren and ugly. And yet <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span>with all these growing signs of
+prosperity I realized that something sweet and splendid was dying out of
+the prairie. The whistling pigeons, the wailing plover, the migrating
+ducks and geese, the soaring cranes, the shadowy wolves, the wary foxes,
+all the untamed things were passing, vanishing with the blue-joint
+grass, the dainty wild rose and the tiger-lily's flaming torch.
+Settlement was complete.</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br /><a name="XVII" id="XVII"></a>
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CHAPTER XVII</h2>
+
+<h2>A Taste of Village Life</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>The change from farm to village life, though delightful, was not so
+complete as we had anticipated, for we not only carried with us several
+cows and a span of horses, but the house which we had rented stood at
+the edge of town and possessed a large plot; therefore we not only
+continued to milk cows and curry horses, but set to work at once
+planting potatoes and other vegetables almost as if still upon the farm.
+The soil had been poorly cultivated for several years, and the weeds
+sprang up like dragons' teeth. Work, it seemed, was not to be escaped
+even in the city.</p>
+
+<p>Though a little resentful of this labor and somewhat disappointed in our
+dwelling, we were vastly excited by certain phases of our new
+surroundings. To be within a few minutes' walk of the postoffice, and to
+be able to go to the store at any moment, were conditions quite as
+satisfactory as we had any right to expect. Also we slept later, for my
+father was less disposed to get us out of bed at dawn and this in itself
+was an enormous gain, especially to my mother.</p>
+
+<p>Osage, a small town, hardly more than a village, was situated on the
+edge of a belt of hardwood timber through which the Cedar River ran, and
+was quite commonplace to most people but to me it was both mysterious
+and dangerous, for it was the home of an alien tribe, hostile and
+pitiless&mdash;"The Town Boys."</p>
+
+<p>Up to this time I had both hated and feared them, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span>knowing that they
+hated and despised me, and now, suddenly I was thrust among them and put
+on my own defenses. For a few weeks I felt like a young rooster in a
+strange barn-yard,&mdash;knowing that I would be called upon to prove my
+quality. In fact it took but a week or two to establish my place in the
+tribe for one of the leaders of the gang was Mitchell Scott, a powerful
+lad of about my own age, and to his friendship I owe a large part of my
+freedom from persecution.</p>
+
+<p>Uncle David came to see us several times during the spring and his talk
+was all about "going west." He was restless under the conditions of his
+life on a farm. I don't know why this was so, but a growing bitterness
+clouded his voice. Once I heard him say, "I don't know what use I am in
+the world. I am a failure." This was the first note of doubt, of
+discouragement that I had heard from any member of my family and it made
+a deep impression on me. Disillusionment had begun.</p>
+
+<p>During the early part of the summer my brother and I worked in the
+garden with frequent days off for fishing, swimming and berrying, and we
+were entirely content with life. No doubts assailed us. We swam in the
+pond at Rice's Mill and we cast our hooks in the sunny ripples below it.
+We saw the circus come to town and go into camp on a vacant lot, and we
+attended every movement of it with a delicious sense of leisure. We
+could go at night with no long ride to take after it was over.&mdash;The
+fourth of July came to seek us this year and we had but to step across
+the way to see a ball-game. We were at last in the center of our world.</p>
+
+<p>In June my father called me to help in the elevator and this turned out
+to be a most informing experience. "The Street," as it was called, was
+merely a wagon road which ran along in front of a row of wheat
+ware-houses <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span>of various shapes and sizes, from which the buyers emerged
+to meet the farmers as they drove into town. Two or three or more of the
+men would clamber upon the load, open the sacks, sample the grain and
+bid for it. If one man wanted the load badly, or if he chanced to be in
+a bad temper, the farmer was the gainer. Hence very few of them, even
+the members of the Grange, were content to drive up to my father's
+elevator and take the honest market price. They were all hoping to get a
+little more than the market price.</p>
+
+<p>This vexed and embittered my father who often spoke of it to me. "It
+only shows," he said, "how hard it will be to work out any reform among
+the farmers. They will never stand together. These other buyers will
+force me off the market and then there will be no one here to represent
+the farmers' interest."</p>
+
+<p>These merchants interested me greatly. Humorous, self-contained,
+remorseless in trade, they were most delightful companions when off
+duty. They liked my father in his private capacity, but as a factor of
+the Grange he was an enemy. Their kind was new to me and I loved to
+linger about and listen to their banter when there was nothing else to
+do.</p>
+
+<p>One of them by reason of his tailor-made suit and a large ring on his
+little finger, was especially attractive to me. He was a handsome man of
+a sinister type, and I regarded his expressionless face as that of a
+gambler. I didn't know that he was a poker player but it amused me to
+think so. Another buyer was a choleric Cornishman whom the other men
+sometimes goaded into paying five or six cents more than the market
+admitted, by shrewdly playing on his hot temper. A third was a tall
+gaunt old man of New England type, obstinate, honest, but of sanguine
+temperament. He was always on the bull side of the market and a loud
+debater.&mdash;The fourth, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span>a quiet little man of smooth address, acted as
+peacemaker.</p>
+
+<p>Among these men my father moved as an equal, notwithstanding the fact of
+his country training and prejudices, and it was through the man Morley
+that we got our first outlook upon the bleak world of Agnosticism, for
+during the summer a series of lectures by Robert Ingersoll was reported
+in one of the Chicago papers and the West rang with the controversy.</p>
+
+<p>On Monday as soon as the paper came to town it was the habit of the
+grain-buyers to gather at their little central office, and while Morley,
+the man with the seal ring, read the lecture aloud, the others listened
+and commented on the heresies. Not all were sympathizers with the great
+iconoclast, and the arguments which followed were often heated and
+sometimes fiercely personal.</p>
+
+<p>After they had quite finished with the paper, I sometimes secured it for
+myself, and hurrying back to my office in the elevator pored over it
+with intense zeal. Undoubtedly my father as well as I was profoundly
+influenced by "The Mistakes of Moses." The faith in which we had been
+reared had already grown dim, and under the light of Ingersoll's
+remorseless humor most of our superstitions vanished. I do not think my
+father's essential Christianity was in any degree diminished, he merely
+lost his respect for certain outworn traditions and empty creeds.</p>
+
+<p>My work consisted in receiving the grain and keeping the elevator going
+and as I weighed the sacks, made out checks for the payment and kept the
+books&mdash;in all ways taking a man's place,&mdash;I lost all sense of being a
+boy.</p>
+
+<p>The motive power of our hoisting machinery was a blind horse, a handsome
+fellow weighing some fifteen hundred pounds, and it was not long before
+he filled a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span>large space in my thoughts. There was something appealing
+in his sightless eyes, and I never watched him (as he patiently went his
+rounds in the dusty shed) without pity. He had a habit of kicking the
+wall with his right hind foot at a certain precise point as he circled,
+and a deep hollow in the sill attested his accuracy. He seemed to do
+this purposely&mdash;to keep count, as I imagined, of his dreary circling
+through sunless days.</p>
+
+<p>A part of my duty was to watch the fanning mill (in the high cupola) in
+order that the sieves should not clog. Three flights of stairs led to
+the mill and these had to be mounted many times each day. I always ran
+up the steps when the mill required my attention, but in coming down I
+usually swung from beam to beam, dropping from footway to footway like a
+monkey from a tall tree. My mother in seeing me do this called out in
+terror, but I assured her that there was not the slightest danger&mdash;and
+this was true, for I was both sure-footed and sure-handed in those days.</p>
+
+<p>This was a golden summer for us all. My mother found time to read. My
+father enjoyed companionship with the leading citizens of the town,
+while Franklin, as first assistant in a candy store, professed himself
+to be entirely content. My own holidays were spent in fishing or in
+roving the woods with Mitchell and George, but on Sundays the entire
+family dressed for church as for a solemn social function, fully alive
+to the dignity of Banker Brush, and the grandeur of Congressman Deering
+who came to service regularly&mdash;but on foot, so intense was the spirit of
+democracy among us.</p>
+
+<p>Theoretically there were no social distinctions in Osage, but after all
+a large house and a two seated carriage counted, and my mother's
+visitors were never from the few pretentious homes of the town but from
+the farms. However, I do not think she worried over her <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span>social position
+and I know she welcomed callers from Dry Run and Burr Oak with cordial
+hospitality. She was never envious or bitter.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of my busy life, I read more than ever before, and everything I
+saw or heard made a deep and lasting record on my mind. I recall with a
+sense of gratitude a sermon by the preacher in the Methodist Church
+which profoundly educated me. It was the first time I had ever heard the
+power of art and the value of its mission to man insisted upon. What was
+right and what was wrong had been pointed out to me, but things of
+beauty were seldom mentioned.</p>
+
+<p>With most eloquent gestures, with a face glowing with enthusiasm, the
+young orator enumerated the beautiful phases of nature. He painted the
+starry sky, the sunset clouds, and the purple hills in words of
+prismatic hue and his rapturous eloquence held us rigid. "We have been
+taught," he said in effect, "that beauty is a snare of the evil one;
+that it is a lure to destroy, but I assert that God desires loveliness
+and hates ugliness. He loves the shimmering of dawn, the silver light on
+the lake and the purple and snow of every summer cloud. He honors bright
+colors, for has he not set the rainbow in the heavens and made water to
+reflect the moon? He prefers joy and pleasure to hate and despair. He is
+not a God of pain, of darkness and ugliness, he is a God of beauty, of
+delight, of consolation."</p>
+
+<p>In some such strain he continued, and as his voice rose in fervent chant
+and his words throbbed with poetry, the sunlight falling through the
+window-pane gave out a more intense radiance, and over the faces of the
+girls, a more entrancing color fell. He opened my eyes to a new world,
+the world of art.</p>
+
+<p>I recognized in this man not only a moving orator but a scholar and I
+went out from that little church vaguely <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span>resolved to be a student also,
+a student of the beautiful. My father was almost equally moved and we
+all went again and again to hear our young evangel speak but never again
+did he touch my heart. That one discourse was his contribution to my
+education and I am grateful to him for it. In after life I had the
+pleasure of telling him how much he had suggested to me in that sermon.</p>
+
+<p>There was much to allure a farmer boy in the decorum of well-dressed men
+and the grace of daintily clad women as well as in the music and the dim
+interior of the church (which seemed to me of great dignity and charm)
+and I usually went both morning and evening to watch the regal daughters
+of the county aristocracy go up the aisle. I even joined a Sunday school
+class because charming Miss Culver was the teacher. Outwardly a stocky,
+ungraceful youth, I was inwardly a bold squire of romance, needing only
+a steed and a shield to fight for my lady love. No one could be more
+essentially romantic than I was at this time&mdash;but fortunately no one
+knew it!</p>
+
+<p>Mingling as I did with young people who had been students at the
+Seminary, I naturally developed a new ambition. I decided to enter for
+the autumn term, and to that end gained from my father a leave of
+absence during August and hired myself out to bind grain in the harvest
+field. I demanded full wages and when one blazing hot day I rode on a
+shining new Marsh harvester into a field of wheat just south of the Fair
+Ground, I felt myself a man, and entering upon a course which put me
+nearer the clothing and the education I desired.</p>
+
+<p>Binding on a harvester was desperately hard work for a sixteen-year-old
+boy for it called for endurance of heat and hunger as well as for
+unusual celerity and precision of action. But as I considered myself
+full-grown physically, I could not allow myself a word of complaint. I
+kept my place beside my partner hour after hour, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span>taking care of my half
+of ten acres of grain each day. My fingers, raw and bleeding with the
+briars and smarting with the rust on the grain, were a torture but I
+persisted to the end of harvest. In this way I earned enough money to
+buy myself a Sunday suit, some new boots and the necessary books for the
+seminary term which began in September.</p>
+
+<p>Up to this time I had never owned an overcoat nor a suit that fitted me.
+My shirts had always been made by my mother and had no real cuffs. I now
+purchased two boxes of paper cuffs and a real necktie. My intense
+satisfaction in these garments made mother smile with pleasure and
+understanding humor.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of my store suit and my high-heeled calf-skin boots I felt very
+humble as I left our lowly roof that first day and started for the
+chapel. To me the brick building standing in the center of its ample
+yard was as imposing as I imagine the Harper Memorial Library must be to
+the youngster of today as he enters the University of Chicago.</p>
+
+<p>To enter the chapel meant running the gauntlet of a hundred citified
+young men and women, fairly entitled to laugh at a clod-jumper like
+myself, and I would have balked completely had not David Pointer, a
+neighbor's son, volunteered to lead the way. Gratefully I accepted his
+offer, and so passed for the first time into the little hall which came
+to mean so much to me in after years.</p>
+
+<p>It was a large room swarming with merry young people and the Corinthian
+columns painted on the walls, the pipe organ, the stately professors on
+the platform, the self-confident choir, were all of such majesty that I
+was reduced to hare-like humility. What right had I to share in this
+splendor? Sliding hurriedly into a seat I took refuge in the obscurity
+which my youth and short stature guaranteed to me.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span>Soon Professor Bush, the principal of the school, gentle, blue-eyed,
+white-haired, with a sweet and mellow voice, rose to greet the old
+pupils and welcome the new ones, and his manner so won my confidence
+that at the close of the service I went to him and told him who I was.
+Fortunately he remembered my sister Harriet, and politely said, "I am
+glad to see you, Hamlin," and from that moment I considered him a
+friend, and an almost infallible guide.</p>
+
+<p>The school was in truth a very primitive institution, hardly more than a
+high school, but it served its purpose. It gave farmers' boys like
+myself the opportunity of meeting those who were older, finer, more
+learned than they, and every day was to me like turning a fresh and
+delightful page in a story book, not merely because it brought new
+friends, new experiences, but because it symbolized freedom from the hay
+fork and the hoe. Learning was easy for me. In all but mathematics I
+kept among the highest of my class without much effort, but it was in
+the "Friday Exercises" that I earliest distinguished myself.</p>
+
+<p>It was the custom at the close of every week's work to bring a section
+of the pupils upon the platform as essayists or orators, and these
+"exercises" formed the most interesting and the most passionately
+dreaded feature of the entire school. No pupil who took part in it ever
+forgot his first appearance. It was at once a pillory and a burning. It
+called for self-possession, memory, grace of gesture and a voice!</p>
+
+<p>My case is typical. For three or four days before my first ordeal, I
+could not eat. A mysterious uneasiness developed in my solar plexus, a
+pain which never left me&mdash;except possibly in the morning before I had
+time to think. Day by day I drilled and drilled and drilled, out in the
+fields at the edge of the town or at home when <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span>mother was away, in the
+barn while milking&mdash;at every opportunity I went through my selection
+with most impassioned voice and lofty gestures, sustained by the legends
+of Webster and Demosthenes, resolved upon a blazing victory. I did
+everything but mumble a smooth pebble&mdash;realizing that most of the boys
+in my section were going through precisely the same struggle. Each of us
+knew exactly how the others felt, and yet I cannot say that we displayed
+acute sympathy one with another; on the contrary, those in the free
+section considered the antics of the suffering section a very amusing
+spectacle and we were continually being "joshed" about our lack of
+appetite.</p>
+
+<p>The test was, in truth, rigorous. To ask a bashful boy or shy girl fresh
+from the kitchen to walk out upon a platform and face that crowd of
+mocking students was a kind of torture. No desk was permitted. Each
+victim stood bleakly exposed to the pitiless gaze of three hundred eyes,
+and as most of us were poorly dressed, in coats that never fitted and
+trousers that climbed our boot-tops, we suffered the miseries of the
+damned. The girls wore gowns which they themselves had made, and were,
+of course, equally self-conscious. The knowledge that their sleeves did
+not fit was of more concern to them than the thought of breaking
+down&mdash;but the fear of forgetting their lines also contributed to their
+dread and terror.</p>
+
+<p>While the names which preceded mine were called off that first
+afternoon, I grew colder and colder till at last I shook with a nervous
+chill, and when, in his smooth, pleasant tenor, Prof. Bush called out
+"Hamlin Garland" I rose in my seat with a spring like Jack from his box.
+My limbs were numb, so numb that I could scarcely feel the floor beneath
+my feet and the windows were only faint gray glares of light. My head
+oscillated like a toy <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span>balloon, seemed indeed to be floating in the air,
+and my heart was pounding like a drum.</p>
+
+<p>However, I had pondered upon this scene so long and had figured my
+course so exactly that I made all the turns with moderate degree of
+grace and succeeded finally in facing my audience without falling up the
+steps (as several others had done) and so looked down upon my fellows
+like Tennyson's eagle on the sea. In that instant a singular calm fell
+over me, I became strangely master of myself. From somewhere above me a
+new and amazing power fell upon me and in that instant I perceived on
+the faces of my classmates a certain expression of surprise and serious
+respect. My subconscious oratorical self had taken charge.</p>
+
+<p>I do not at present recall what my recitation was, but it was probably
+<i>Catiline's Defense</i> or some other of the turgid declamatory pieces of
+classic literature with which all our readers were filled. It was
+bombastic stuff, but my blind, boyish belief in it gave it dignity. As I
+went on my voice cleared. The window sashes regained their outlines. I
+saw every form before me, and the look of surprise and pleasure on the
+smiling face of my principal exalted me.</p>
+
+<p>Closing amid hearty applause, I stepped down with a feeling that I had
+won a place among the orators of the school, a belief which did no harm
+to others and gave me a good deal of satisfaction. As I had neither
+money nor clothes, and was not of figure to win admiration, why should I
+not express the pride I felt in my power to move an audience? Besides I
+was only sixteen!</p>
+
+<p>The principal spoke to me afterwards, both praising and criticising my
+method. The praise I accepted, the criticism I naturally resented. I
+realized some of my faults of course, but I was not ready to have even
+Prof. Bush tell me of them. I hated "elocution" drill in class, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span>I
+relied on "inspiration." I believed that orators were born, not made.</p>
+
+<p>There was one other speaker in my section, a little girl, considerably
+younger than myself, who had the mysterious power of the born actress,
+and I recognized this quality in her at once. I perceived that she spoke
+from a deep-seated, emotional, Celtic impulse. Hardly more than a child
+in years, she was easily the most dramatic reader in the school. She
+too, loved tragic prose and passionate, sorrowful verse and to hear her
+recite,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">One of them dead in the East by the sea<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And one of them dead in the West by the sea,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">was to be shaken by inexplicable emotion. Her face grew pale as silver
+as she went on and her eyes darkened with the anguish of the poet
+mother.</p>
+
+<p>Most of the students were the sons and daughters of farmers round about
+the county, but a few were from the village homes in western Iowa and
+southern Minnesota. Two or three boys wore real tailor-made suits, and
+the easy flow of their trouser legs and the set of their linen collars
+rendered me at once envious and discontented. "Some day," I said to
+myself, "I too, will have a suit that will not gape at the neck and
+crawl at the ankle," but I did not rise to the height of expecting a
+ring and watch.</p>
+
+<p>Shoes were just coming into fashion and one young man wore pointed "box
+toes" which filled all the rest of us with despair. John Cutler also
+wore collars of linen&mdash;real linen&mdash;which had to be laundered, but few of
+us dared fix our hopes as high as that. John also owned three neckties,
+and wore broad cuffs with engraved gold buttons, and on Fridays waved
+these splendors before our eyes with a malicious satisfaction which
+aroused our hatred. Of such complexion are the tragedies and triumphs of
+youth!</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span>How I envied Arthur Peters his calm and haughty bearing! Most of us
+entered chapel like rabbits sneaking down a turnip patch, but Arthur and
+John and Walter loitered in with the easy and assured manner of Senators
+or Generals&mdash;so much depends upon leather and prunella. Gradually I lost
+my terror of this ordeal, but I took care to keep behind some friendly
+bulk like young Blakeslee, who stood six feet two in his gaiters.</p>
+
+<p>With all these anxieties I loved the school and could hardly be wrested
+from it even for a day. I bent to my books with eagerness, I joined a
+debating society, and I took a hand at all the games. The days went by
+on golden, noiseless, ball-bearing axles&mdash;and almost before I realized
+it, winter was upon the land. But oh! the luxury of that winter, with no
+snow drifts to climb, no corn-stalks to gather and no long walk to
+school. It was sweet to wake each morning in the shelter of our little
+house and know that another day of delightful schooling was ours. Our
+hands softened and lightened. Our walk became each day less of a
+"galumping plod." The companionship of bright and interesting young
+people, and the study of well-dressed men and women in attendance upon
+lectures and socials was a part of our instruction and had their
+refining effect upon us, graceless colts though we were.</p>
+
+<p>Sometime during this winter Wendell Phillips came to town and lectured
+on <i>The Lost Arts</i>. My father took us all to see and hear this orator
+hero of his boyhood days in Boston.</p>
+
+<p>I confess to a disappointment in the event. A tall old gentleman with
+handsome clean-cut features, rose from behind the pulpit in the
+Congregational Church, and read from a manuscript&mdash;read quietly,
+colloquially, like a teacher addressing a group of students, with
+scarcely a gesture and without raising his voice. Only once <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span>toward the
+end of the hour did he thrill us, and then only for a moment.</p>
+
+<p>Father was a little saddened. He shook his head gravely. "He isn't the
+orator he was in the good old anti-slavery days," he explained and
+passed again into a glowing account of the famous "slave speech" in
+Faneuil Hall when the pro-slavery men all but mobbed the speaker.</p>
+
+<p>Per contra, I liked, (and the boys all liked) a certain peripatetic
+temperance lecturer named Beale, for <i>he</i> was an orator, one of those
+who rise on an impassioned chant, soaring above the snows of Chimborazo,
+mingling the purple and gold of sunset with the saffron and silver of
+the dawn. None of us could tell just what these gorgeous passages meant,
+but they were beautiful while they lasted, and sadly corrupted our
+oratorical style. It took some of us twenty years to recover from the
+fascination of this man's absurd and high falutin' elocutionary
+sing-song.</p>
+
+<p>I forgot the farm, I forgot the valley of my birth, I lived wholly and
+with joy in the present. Song, poetry, history mingled with the sports
+which made our life so unceasingly interesting. There was a certain
+girl, the daughter of the shoe merchant, who (temporarily) displaced the
+image of Agnes in the niche of my shrine, and to roll the platter for
+her at a "sociable" was a very high honor indeed, and there was another,
+a glorious contralto singer, much older than I&mdash;but there&mdash;I must not
+claim to have even attracted her eyes, and my meetings with Millie were
+so few and so public that I cannot claim to have ever conversed with
+her. They were all boyish adorations.</p>
+
+<p>Much as I enjoyed this winter, greatly as it instructed me, I cannot now
+recover from its luminous dark more than here and there an incident, a
+poem, a song. It was <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span>all delightful, that I know, so filled with joyous
+hours that I retain but a mingled impression of satisfaction and
+regret&mdash;satisfaction with life as I found it, regret at its inevitable
+ending&mdash;for my father, irritated by the failure of his renter, announced
+that he had decided to put us all back upon the farm.</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br /><a name="XVIII" id="XVIII"></a>
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CHAPTER XVIII</h2>
+
+<h2>Back to the Farm</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>Judging from the entries in a small diary of this date, I was neither an
+introspective youth nor one given to precocious literary subtleties.</p>
+
+<p>On March 27th, 1877, I made this entry; "Today we move back upon the
+farm."</p>
+
+<p>This is all of it! No more, no less. Not a word to indicate whether I
+regretted the decision or welcomed it, and from subsequent equally bald
+notes, I derive the information that my father retained his position as
+grain buyer, and that he drove back and forth daily over the five miles
+which lay between the farm and the elevator. There is no mention of my
+mother, no hint as to how she felt, although the return to the
+loneliness and drudgery of the farm must have been as grievous to her as
+to her sons.</p>
+
+<p>Our muscles were soft and our heads filled with new ambitions but there
+was no alternative. It was "back to the field," or "out into the cold,
+cold world," so forth we went upon the soil in the old familiar way,
+there to plod to and fro endlessly behind the seeder and the harrow. It
+was harder than ever to follow a team for ten hours over the soft
+ground, and early rising was more difficult than it had ever been
+before, but I discovered some compensations which helped me bear these
+discomforts. I saw more of the beauty of the landscape and I now had an
+aspiration to occupy my mind.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span>My memories of the Seminary, the echoes of the songs we had heard, gave
+the morning chorus of the prairie chickens a richer meaning than before.
+The west wind, laden with the delicious smell of uncovered earth, the
+tender blue of the sky, the cheerful chirping of the ground sparrows,
+the jocund whistling of the gophers, the winding flight of the prairie
+pigeons&mdash;all these sights and sounds of spring swept back upon me,
+bringing something sweeter and more significant than before. I had
+gained in perception and also in the power to assimilate what I
+perceived.</p>
+
+<p>This year in town had other far-reaching effects. It tended to warp us
+from our father's designs. It placed the rigorous, filthy drudgery of
+the farm-yard in sharp contrast with the carefree companionable
+existence led by my friends in the village, and we longed to be of their
+condition. We had gained our first set of comparative ideas, and with
+them an unrest which was to carry us very far away.</p>
+
+<p>True, neither Burton nor I had actually shared the splendors of
+Congressman Deering's house but we had obtained revelatory glimpses of
+its well-kept lawn, and through the open windows we had watched the
+waving of its lace curtains. We had observed also how well Avery Brush's
+frock coat fitted and we comprehended something of the elegant leisure
+which the sons and daughters of Wm. Petty's general store enjoyed.</p>
+
+<p>Over against these comforts, these luxurious conditions, we now set our
+ugly little farmhouse, with its rag carpets, its battered furniture, its
+barren attic, and its hard, rude beds.&mdash;All that we possessed seemed
+very cheap and deplorably commonplace.</p>
+
+<p>My brother, who had passed a vivid and wonderful year riding race
+horses, clerking in an ice cream parlor, with frequent holidays of
+swimming and baseball, also <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span>went groaning and grumbling to the fields.
+He too resented the curry-comb and the dung fork. We both loathed the
+smell of manure and hated the greasy clothing which our tasks made
+necessary. Secretly we vowed that when we were twenty-one we would leave
+the farm, never to return to it. However, as the ground dried off, and
+the grass grew green in the door-yard some part of this bitterness, this
+resentment, faded away, and we made no further complaint.</p>
+
+<p>My responsibilities were now those of a man. I was nearly full grown,
+quick and powerful of hand, and vain of my strength, which was, in fact,
+unusual and of decided advantage to me. Nothing ever really tired me
+out. I could perform any of my duties with ease, and none of the men
+under me ever presumed to question my authority. As harvest came on I
+took my place on our new Marsh harvester, and bound my half of over one
+hundred acres of heavy grain.</p>
+
+<p>The crop that year was enormous. At times, as I looked out over the
+billowing acres of wheat which must not only be reaped and bound and
+shocked and stacked but also threshed, before there was the slightest
+chance of my returning to the Seminary, my face grew long and my heart
+heavy.</p>
+
+<p>Burton shared this feeling, for he, too, had become profoundly
+interested in the Seminary and was eager to return, eager to renew the
+friendships he had gained. We both wished to walk once more beneath the
+maple trees in clean well-fitting garments, and above all we hungered to
+escape the curry-comb and the cow.</p>
+
+<p>Both of us retained our membership in the Adelphian Debating Society,
+and occasionally drove to town after the day's work to take part in the
+Monday meetings. Having decided, definitely, to be an orator, I now went
+about with a copy of Shakespeare in my pocket and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span>ranted the immortal
+soliloquies of <i>Hamlet</i> and <i>Richard</i> as I held the plow, feeling
+certain that I was following in the footprints of Lincoln and
+Demosthenes.</p>
+
+<p>Sundays brought a special sweet relief that summer, a note of finer
+poetry into all our lives, for often after a bath behind the barn we put
+on clean shirts and drove away to Osage to meet George and Mitchell, or
+went to church to see some of the girls we had admired at the Seminary.
+On other Sabbaths we returned to our places at the Burr Oak
+school-house, enjoying as we used to do, a few hours' forgetfulness of
+the farm.</p>
+
+<p>My father, I am glad to say, never insisted upon any religious
+observance on the part of his sons, and never interfered with any
+reasonable pleasure even on Sunday. If he made objection to our trips it
+was usually on behalf of the cattle. "Go where you please," he often
+said, "only get back in time to do the milking." Sometimes he would ask,
+"Don't you think the horses ought to have a rest as well as yourselves?"
+He was a stern man but a just man, and I am especially grateful to him
+for his non-interference with my religious affairs.</p>
+
+<p>All that summer and all the fall I worked like a hired man, assuming in
+addition the responsibilities of being boss. I bound grain until my arms
+were raw with briars and in stacking-time I wallowed round and round
+upon my knees, building great ricks of grain, taking obvious pride in
+the skill which this task required until my trousers, reinforced at the
+knees, bagged ungracefully and my hands, swollen with the act of
+grappling the heavy bundles as they were thrown to me, grew horny and
+brown and clumsy, so that I quite despaired of ever being able to write
+another letter. I was very glad not to have my Seminary friends see me
+in this unlovely condition.</p>
+
+<p>However, I took a well-defined pride in stacking, for <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span>it was a test of
+skill. It was clean work. Even now, as I ride a country lane, and see
+men at work handling oats or hay, I recall the pleasurable sides of work
+on the farm and long to return to it.</p>
+
+<p>The radiant sky of August and September on the prairie was a never
+failing source of delight to me. Nature seemed resting, opulent,
+self-satisfied and honorable. Every phase of the landscape indicated a
+task fulfilled. There were still and pulseless days when slaty-blue
+clouds piled up in the west and came drifting eastward with thunderous
+accompaniment, to break the oppressive heat and leave the earth cool and
+fresh from having passed. There were misty, windy days when the
+sounding, southern breeze swept the yellow stubble like a scythe; when
+the sky, without a cloud, was whitened by an overspreading haze; when
+the crickets sang sleepily as if in dream of eternal summer; and the
+grasshoppers clicked and buzzed from stalk to stalk in pure delight of
+sunshine and the harvest.</p>
+
+<p>Another humbler source of pleasure in stacking was the watermelon which,
+having been picked in the early morning and hidden under the edge of the
+stack, remained deliciously cool till mid-forenoon, when at a signal,
+the men all gathered in the shadow of the rick, and leisurely ate their
+fill of juicy "mountain sweets." Then there was the five o'clock supper,
+with its milk and doughnuts and pie which sent us back to our
+task&mdash;replete, content, ready for another hour of toil.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, there were unpleasant days later in the month, noons when the
+skies were filled with ragged, swiftly moving clouds, and the winds blew
+the sheaves inside out and slashed against my face the flying grain as
+well as the leaping crickets. Such days gave prophecy of the passing of
+summer and the coming of fall. But <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span>there was a mitigating charm even in
+these conditions, for they were all welcome promises of an early return
+to school.</p>
+
+<p>Crickets during stacking time were innumerable and voracious as rust or
+fire. They ate our coats or hats if we left them beside the stack. They
+gnawed the fork handles and devoured any straps that were left lying
+about, but their multitudinous song was a beautiful inwrought part of
+the symphony.</p>
+
+<p>That year the threshing was done in the fields with a traction engine.
+My uncle David came no more to help us harvest. He had almost passed out
+of our life, and I have no recollection of him till several years later.
+Much of the charm, the poetry of the old-time threshing vanished with
+the passing of horse power and the coming of the nomadic hired hand.
+There was less and less of the "changing works" which used to bring the
+young men of the farms together. The grain was no longer stacked round
+the stable. Most of it we threshed in the field and the straw after
+being spread out upon the stubble was burned. Some farmers threshed
+directly from the shock, and the new "Vibrator" took the place of the
+old Buffalo Pitts Separator with its ringing bell-metal pinions. Wheeled
+plows were common and self-binding harvesters were coming in.</p>
+
+<p>Although my laconic little diary does not show it, I was fiercely
+resolved upon returning to the Seminary. My father was not very
+sympathetic. In his eyes I already had a very good equipment for the
+battle of life, but mother, with a woman's ready understanding, divined
+that I had not merely set my heart on graduating at the Seminary, but
+that I was secretly dreaming of another and far more romantic career
+than that of being a farmer. Although a woman of slender schooling
+herself, she responded helpfully to every effort which <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span>her sons made to
+raise themselves above the commonplace level of neighborhood life.</p>
+
+<p>All through the early fall whenever Burton and I met the other boys of a
+Sunday our talk was sure to fall upon the Seminary, and Burton stoutly
+declared that he, too, was going to begin in September. As a matter of
+fact the autumn term opened while we were still hard at work around a
+threshing machine with no definite hope of release till the plowing and
+corn-husking were over. Our fathers did not seem to realize that the men
+of the future (even the farmers of the future) must have a considerable
+amount of learning and experience, and so October went by and November
+was well started before parole was granted and we were free to return to
+our books.</p>
+
+<p>With what sense of liberty, of exultation, we took our way down the road
+on that gorgeous autumn morning! No more dust, no more grime, no more
+mud, no more cow milking, no more horse currying! For five months we
+were to live the lives of scholars, of boarders.&mdash;Yes, through some
+mysterious channel our parents had been brought to the point of engaging
+lodgings for us in the home of a townsman named Leete. For two dollars a
+week it was arranged that we could eat and sleep from Monday night to
+Friday noon, but we were not expected to remain for supper on Friday;
+and Sunday supper, was of course, extra. I thought this a great deal of
+money then, but I cannot understand at this distance how our landlady
+was able to provide, for that sum, the raw material of her kitchen, to
+say nothing of bed linen and soap.</p>
+
+<p>The house, which stood on the edge of the town, was small and without
+upstairs heat, but it seemed luxurious to me, and the family straightway
+absorbed my interest. Leete, the nominal head of the establishment, was
+a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span>short, gray, lame and rather inefficient man of changeable temper who
+teamed about the streets with a span of roans almost as dour and
+crippled as himself. His wife, who did nearly all the housework for five
+boarders as well as for the members of her own family, was a soul of
+heroic pride and most indomitable energy. She was a tall, dark, thin
+woman who had once been handsome. Poor creature&mdash;how incessantly she
+toiled, and how much she endured!</p>
+
+<p>She had three graceful and alluring daughters,&mdash;Ella, nineteen, Cora,
+sixteen, and Martha, a quiet little mouse of about ten years of age.
+Ella was a girl of unusual attainment, a teacher, self-contained and
+womanly, with whom we all, promptly, fell in love. Cora, a moody,
+dark-eyed, passionate girl who sometimes glowed with friendly smiles and
+sometimes glowered in anger, was less adored. Neither of them considered
+Burton or myself worthy of serious notice. On the contrary, we were
+necessary nuisances.</p>
+
+<p>To me Ella was a queen, a kindly queen, ever ready to help me out with
+my algebra. Everything she did seemed to me instinct with womanly grace.
+No doubt she read the worship in my eyes, but her attitude was that of
+an older sister. Cora, being nearer my own age, awed me not at all. On
+the contrary, we were more inclined to battle than to coo. Her coolness
+toward me, I soon discovered, was sustained by her growing interest in a
+young man from Cerro Gordo County.</p>
+
+<p>We were a happy, noisy gang, and undoubtedly gave poor Mrs. Leete a
+great deal of trouble. There was Boggs (who had lost part of one ear in
+some fracas with Jack Frost) who paced up and down his room declining
+Latin verbs with painful pertinacity, and Burton who loved a jest but
+never made one, and Joe Pritchard, who was interested mainly in politics
+and oratory, and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span>finally that criminally well-dressed young book agent
+(with whom we had very little in common) and myself. In cold weather we
+all herded in the dining room to keep from freezing, and our weekly
+scrub took place after we got home to our own warm kitchens and the
+family wash-tubs.</p>
+
+<p>Life was a pure joy to Burton as to me. Each day was a poem, each night
+a dreamless sleep! Each morning at half past eight we went to the
+Seminary and at four o'clock left it with regret. I should like to say
+that we studied hard every night, burning a great deal of kerosene oil,
+but I cannot do so.&mdash;We had a good time. The learning, (so far as I can
+recall) was incidental.</p>
+
+<p>It happened that my closest friends, aside from Burton, were pupils of
+the public school and for that reason I kept my membership in the
+Adelphian Society which met every Monday evening. My activities there, I
+find, made up a large part of my life during this second winter. I not
+only debated furiously, disputing weighty political questions, thus
+advancing the forensic side of my education, but later in the winter I
+helped to organize a dramatic company which gave a play for the benefit
+of the Club Library.</p>
+
+<p>Just why I should have been chosen "stage director" of our "troupe," I
+cannot say, but something in my ability to declaim <i>Regulus</i> probably
+led to this high responsibility. At any rate, I not only played the
+leading juvenile, I settled points of action and costume without the
+slightest hesitation. Cora was my <i>ingenue</i> opposite, it fell out, and
+so we played at love-making, while meeting coldly at the family dining
+table.</p>
+
+<p>Our engagement in the town hall extended through two March evenings and
+was largely patronized. It would seem that I was a dominant figure on
+both occasions, for I declaimed a "piece" on the opening night, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span>one of
+those resounding orations (addressed to the Carthaginians), which we all
+loved, and which permitted of thunderous, rolling periods and passionate
+gestures. If my recollection is not distorted, I was masterful that
+night&mdash;at least, Joe Pritchard agreed that I was "the best part of the
+show." Joe was my friend, and I hold him in especial affection for his
+hearty praise of my effort.</p>
+
+<p>On this same night I also appeared in a little sketch representing the
+death of a veteran of the Revolutionary War, in which the dying man
+beholds in a vision his beloved Leader. Walter Blakeslee was the
+"Washington" and I, with heavily powdered hair, was the veteran. On the
+second night I played the juvenile lover in a drama called <i>His
+Brother's Keeper</i>. Cora as "Shellie," my sweetheart, was very lovely in
+pink mosquito netting, and for the first time I regretted her interest
+in the book agent from Cerro Gordo. Strange to say I had no fear at all
+as I looked out over the audience which packed the town hall to the
+ceiling. Father and mother were there with Frank and Jessie, all quite
+dazed (as I imagined) by my transcendent position behind the foot
+lights.</p>
+
+<p>It may have been this very night that Willard Eaton, the county
+attorney, spoke to my father saying, "Richard, whenever that boy of
+yours finishes school and wants to begin to study law, you send him
+right to me," which was, of course, a very great compliment, for the
+county attorney belonged to the best known and most influential firm of
+lawyers in the town. At the moment his offer would have seemed very dull
+and commonplace to me. I would have refused it.</p>
+
+<p>Our success that night was so great that it appeared a pity not to
+permit other towns to witness our performance, hence we boldly organized
+a "tour." We booked a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span>circuit which included St. Ansgar and Mitchell,
+two villages, one four, the other ten miles to the north. Audacious as
+this may seem, it was deliberately decided upon, and one pleasant day
+Mitchell and George and I loaded all our scenery into a wagon and drove
+away across the prairie to our first "stand" very much as Moli&egrave;re did in
+his youth, leaving the ladies to follow (in the grandeur of hired
+buggies) later in the day.</p>
+
+<p>That night we played with "artistic success"&mdash;that is to say, we lost
+some eighteen dollars, which so depressed the management that it
+abandoned the tour, and the entire organization returned to Osage in
+diminished glory. This cut short my career as an actor. I never again
+took part in a theatrical performance.</p>
+
+<p>Not long after this disaster, "Shellie," as I now called Cora, entered
+upon some mysterious and romantic drama of her own. The travelling man
+vanished, and soon after she too disappeared. Where she went, what she
+did, no one seemed to know, and none of us quite dared to ask. I never
+saw her again but last year, after nearly forty years of wandering, I
+was told that she is married and living in luxurious ease near London.
+Through what deep valleys she has travelled to reach this height, with
+what loss or gain, I cannot say, but I shall always remember her as she
+was that night in St. Ansgar, in her pink-mosquito-bar dress, her eyes
+shining with excitement, her voice vibrant with girlish gladness.</p>
+
+<p>Our second winter at the Seminary passed all too quickly, and when the
+prairie chickens began to boom from the ridges our hearts sank within
+us. For the first time the grouse's cheery dance was unwelcome for it
+meant the closing of our books, the loss of our pleasant companions, the
+surrender of our leisure, and a return to the mud of the fields.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span>It was especially hard to say good-bye to Ella and Maud, for though they
+were in no sense sweethearts they were very pleasant companions. There
+were others whom it was a pleasure to meet in the halls and to emulate
+in the class-rooms, and when early in April, we went home to enter upon
+the familiar round of seeding, corn-planting, corn plowing, harvesting,
+stacking and threshing, we had only the promise of an occasional trip to
+town to cheer us.</p>
+
+<p>It would seem that our interest in the girls of Burr Oak had diminished,
+for we were less regular in our attendance upon services in the little
+school-house, and whenever we could gain consent to use a horse, we
+hitched up and drove away to town. These trips have golden,
+unforgettable charm, and indicate the glamor which approaching manhood
+was flinging over my world.</p>
+
+<p>My father's world was less jocund, was indeed filled with increasing
+anxiety, for just before harvest time a new and formidable enemy of the
+wheat appeared in the shape of a minute, ill-smelling insect called the
+chinch bug. It already bore an evil reputation with us for it was
+reported to have eaten out the crops of southern Wisconsin and northern
+Illinois, and, indeed, before barley cutting was well under way the
+county was overrun with laborers from the south who were anxious to get
+work in order to recoup them for the loss of their own harvest. These
+fugitives brought incredible tales of the ravages of the enemy and
+prophesied our destruction but, as a matter of fact, only certain dry
+ridges proclaimed the presence of the insect during this year.</p>
+
+<p>The crop was rather poor for other reasons, and Mr. Babcock, like my
+father, objected to paying board bills. His attitude was so unpromising
+that Burton and I cast about to see how we could lessen the expense of
+upkeep during our winter term of school.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span>Together we decided to hire a room and board ourselves (as many of the
+other fellows did) and so cut our expenses to a mere trifle. It was
+difficult, even in those days, to live cheaper than two dollars per
+week, but we convinced our people that we could do it, and so at last
+wrung from our mothers a reluctant consent to our trying it. We got away
+in October, only two weeks behind our fellows.</p>
+
+<p>I well remember the lovely afternoon on which we unloaded our scanty
+furniture into the two little rooms which we had hired for the term. It
+was still glorious autumn weather, and we were young and released from
+slavery. We had a table, three chairs, a little strip of carpet, and a
+melodeon, which belonged to Burton's sister, and when we had spread our
+carpet and put up our curtains we took seats, and cocking our feet upon
+the window sill surveyed our surroundings with such satisfaction as only
+autocrats of the earth may compass. We were absolute masters of our
+time&mdash;that was our chiefest joy. We could rise when we pleased and go to
+bed when we pleased. There were no stables to clean, no pigs to feed,
+nothing marred our days. We could study or sing or dance at will. We
+could even wrestle at times with none to molest or make us afraid.</p>
+
+<p>My photograph shows the new suit which I had bought on my own
+responsibility this time, but no camera could possibly catch the glow of
+inward satisfaction which warmed my heart. It was a brown cassimere,
+coat, trousers and vest all alike,&mdash;and the trousers fitted me!
+Furthermore as I bought it without my father's help, my selection was
+made for esthetic reasons without regard to durability or warmth. It was
+mine&mdash;in the fullest sense&mdash;and when I next entered chapel I felt not
+merely draped, but defended. I walked to my seat with confident
+security, a well-dressed person. I had a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span>"boughten" shirt also, two
+boxes of paper cuffs, and two new ties, a black one for every day and a
+white one for Sunday.</p>
+
+<p>I don't know that any of the girls perceived my new suit, but I hoped
+one or two of them did. The boys were quite outspoken in their approval
+of it.</p>
+
+<p>I had given up boots, also, for most of the townsmen wore shoes, thus
+marking the decline of the military spirit. I never again owned a pair
+of those man-killing top-boots&mdash;which were not only hard to get on and
+off but pinched my toes, and interrupted the flow of my trouser-legs.
+Thus one great era fades into another. The Jack-boot period was over,
+the shoe, commonplace and comfortable, had won.</p>
+
+<p>Our housekeeping was very simple. Each of us brought from home on Monday
+morning a huge bag of doughnuts together with several loaves of bread,
+and (with a milkman near at hand) our cooking remained rudimentary. We
+did occasionally fry a steak and boil some potatoes, and I have a dim
+memory of several disastrous attempts to make flapjacks out of flour and
+sweet milk. However we never suffered from hunger as some of the other
+fellows actually did.</p>
+
+<p>Pretty Ethel Beebe comes into the record of this winter, like a quaint
+illustration to an old-fashioned story, for she lived near us and went
+to school along the same sidewalk. Burton was always saying, "Some day I
+am going to brace up and ask Ethel to let me carry her books, and I'm
+going to walk beside her right down Main Street." But he never did.
+Ultimately I attained to that incredible boldness, but Burton only
+followed along behind.</p>
+
+<p>Ethel was a slender, smiling, brown-eyed girl with a keen appreciation
+of the ridiculous, and I have no doubt she catalogued all our
+peculiarities, for she always seemed <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span>to be laughing at us, and I think
+it must have been her smiles that prevented any romantic attachment. We
+walked and talked without any deeper interest than good comradeship.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Babcock was famous for her pies and cakes, and Burton always
+brought some delicious samples of her skill. As regularly as the clock,
+on every Tuesday evening he said, in precisely the same tone, "Well,
+now, we'll have to eat these pies right away or they'll spoil," and as I
+made no objection, we had pie for luncheon, pie and cake for supper, and
+cake and pie for breakfast until all these "goodies" which were intended
+to serve as dessert through the week were consumed. By Thursday morning
+we were usually down to dry bread and butter.</p>
+
+<p>We simplified our housework in other ways in order that we might have
+time to study and Burton wasted a good deal of time at the fiddle,
+sawing away till I was obliged to fall upon him and roll him on the
+floor to silence him.</p>
+
+<p>I still have our ledger which gives an itemized account of the cost of
+this experiment in self board, and its footings are incredibly small.
+Less than fifty cents a day for both of us! Of course our mothers,
+sisters and aunts were continually joking us about our housekeeping, and
+once or twice Mrs. Babcock called upon us unexpectedly and found the
+room "a sight." But we did not mind her very much. We only feared the
+bright eyes of Ethel and Maude and Carrie. Fortunately they could not
+properly call upon us, even if they had wished to do so, and we were
+safe. It is probable, moreover, that they fully understood our methods,
+for they often slyly hinted at hasty dish-washing and primitive cookery.
+All of this only amused us, so long as they did not actually discover
+the dirt and disorder of which our mothers complained.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span>Our school library at that time was pitifully small and ludicrously
+prescriptive, but its shelves held a few of the fine old classics,
+Scott, Dickens and Thackeray&mdash;the kind of books which can always be had
+in sets at very low prices&mdash;and in nosing about among these I fell, one
+day, upon two small red volumes called <i>Mosses from an Old Manse</i>. Of
+course I had read of the author, for these books were listed in my
+<i>History of American Literature</i>, but I had never, up to this moment,
+dared to open one of them. I was a discoverer.</p>
+
+<p>I turned a page or two, and instantly my mental horizon widened. When I
+had finished the <i>Artist of the Beautiful</i>, the great Puritan romancer
+had laid his spell upon me everlastingly. Even as I walked homeward to
+my lunch, I read. I ate with the book beside my plate. I neglected my
+classes that afternoon, and as soon as I had absorbed this volume I
+secured the other and devoted myself to it with almost equal intensity.
+The stately diction, the rich and glowing imagery, the mystical
+radiance, and the aloofness of the author's personality all united to
+create in me a worshipful admiration which made all other interests pale
+and faint. It was my first profound literary passion and I was dazzled
+by the glory of it.</p>
+
+<p>It would be a pleasant task to say that this book determined my
+career&mdash;it would form a delightful literary assumption, but I cannot
+claim it. As a realist I must remain faithful to fact. I did not then
+and there vow to be a romantic novelist like Hawthorne. On the contrary,
+I realized that this great poet (to me he was a poet) like Edgar Allan
+Poe, was a soul that dwelt apart from ordinary mortals.</p>
+
+<p>To me he was a magician, a weaver of magic spells, a dreamer whose
+visions comprehended the half-lights, the borderlands, of the human
+soul. I loved the roll of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span>his words in <i>The March of Time</i> and the
+quaint phrasing of the <i>Rill from the Town Pump</i>; <i>Rappacini's Daughter</i>
+whose breath poisoned the insects in the air, uplifted me. <i>Drowne and
+His Wooden Image</i>, the <i>Great Stone Face</i>&mdash;each story had its special
+appeal. For days I walked amid enchanted mist, my partner&mdash;(even the
+maidens I most admired), became less appealing, less necessary to me.
+Eager to know more of this necromancer I searched the town for others of
+his books, but found only <i>American Notes</i> and <i>the Scarlet Letter</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Gradually I returned to something like my normal interests in baseball
+and my classmates, but never again did I fall to the low level of <i>Jack
+Harkaway</i>. I now possessed a literary touchstone with which I tested the
+quality of other books and other minds, and my intellectual arrogance, I
+fear, sometimes made me an unpleasant companion. The fact that Ethel did
+not "like" Hawthorne, sank her to a lower level in my estimation.</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br /><a name="XIX" id="XIX"></a>
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CHAPTER XIX</h2>
+
+<h2>End of School Days</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>Though my years at the Seminary were the happiest of my life they are
+among the most difficult for me to recover and present to my readers.
+During half the year I worked on the farm fiercely, unsparing of myself,
+in order that I might have an uninterrupted season of study in the
+village. Each term was very like another so far as its broad program
+went but innumerable, minute but very important progressions carried me
+toward manhood, events which can hardly be stated to an outsider.</p>
+
+<p>Burton remained my room-mate and in all our vicissitudes we had no vital
+disagreements but his unconquerable shyness kept him from making a good
+impression on his teachers and this annoyed me&mdash;it made him seem stupid
+when he was not. Once, as chairman of a committee it became his duty to
+introduce a certain lecturer who was to speak on "Elihu Burritt," and by
+some curious twist in my chum's mind this name became "Lu-hi Burritt"
+and he so stated it in his introductory remarks. This amused the
+lecturer and raised a titter in the audience. Burton bled in silence
+over this mishap for he was at heart deeply ambitious to be a public
+speaker. He never alluded to that speech even to me without writhing in
+retrospective shame.</p>
+
+<p>Another incident will illustrate his painfully shy character. One of our
+summer vacations was made notable by the visit of an exceedingly pretty
+girl to the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span>home of one of Burton's aunts who lived on the road to the
+Grove, and my chum's excitement over the presence of this alien bird of
+paradise was very amusing to me as well as to his brother Charles who
+was inclined, as an older brother, to "take it out" of Burt.</p>
+
+<p>I listened to my chum's account of his cousin's beauty with something
+more than fraternal interest. She came, it appeared, from Dubuque and
+had the true cosmopolitan's air of tolerance. Our small community amused
+her. Her hats and gowns (for it soon developed that she had at least
+two), were the envy of all the girls, and the admiration of the boys. No
+disengaged or slightly obligated beau of the district neglected to hitch
+his horse at Mrs. Knapp's gate.</p>
+
+<p>Burton's opportunity seemed better than that of any other youth, for he
+could visit his aunt as often as he wished without arousing comment,
+whereas for me, a call would have been equivalent to an offer of
+marriage. My only chance of seeing the radiant stranger was at church.
+Needless to say we all made it a point to attend every service during
+her stay.</p>
+
+<p>One Sunday afternoon as I was riding over to the Grove, I met Burton
+plodding homeward along the grassy lane, walking with hanging head and
+sagging shoulders. He looked like a man in deep and discouraged thought,
+and when he glanced up at me, with a familiar defensive smile twisting
+his long lips, I knew something had gone wrong.</p>
+
+<p>"Hello," I said. "Where have you been?"</p>
+
+<p>"Over to Aunt Sallie's," he said.</p>
+
+<p>His long, linen duster was sagging at the sides, and peering down at his
+pockets I perceived a couple of quarts of lovely Siberian crab-apples.
+"Where did you get all that fruit?" I demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"At home."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span>"What are you going to do with it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Take it back again."</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean by such a performance?"</p>
+
+<p>With the swift flush and silent laugh which always marked his
+confessions of weakness, or failure, he replied, "I went over to see
+Nettie. I intended to give her these apples," he indicated the fruit by
+a touch on each pocket, "but when I got there I found old Bill Watson,
+dressed to kill and large as life, sitting in the parlor. I was so
+afraid of his finding out what I had in my pockets that I didn't go in.
+I came away leaving him in possession."</p>
+
+<p>Of course I laughed&mdash;but there was an element of pathos in it after all.
+Poor Burt! He always failed to get his share of the good things in this
+world.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>We continued to board ourselves,&mdash;now here, now there, and always to the
+effect of being starved out by Friday night, but we kept well and active
+even on doughnuts and pie, and were grateful of any camping place in
+town.</p>
+
+<p>Once Burton left a soup-bone to simmer on the stove while we went away
+to morning recitations, and when we reached home, smoke was leaking from
+every keyhole. The room was solid with the remains of our bone. It took
+six months to get the horrid smell of charred beef out of our wardrobe.
+The girls all sniffed and wondered as we came near.</p>
+
+<p>On Fridays we went home and during the winter months very generally
+attended the Lyceum which met in the Burr Oak school-house. We often
+debated, and on one occasion I attained to the honor of being called
+upon to preside over the session. Another memorable evening is that in
+which I read with what seemed to me distinguished success Joaquin
+Miller's magnificent new poem, <i>Kit Carson's Ride</i> and in the splendid
+roar <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span>and trample of its lines discovered a new and powerful American
+poet. His spirit appealed to me. He was at once American and western. I
+read every line of his verse which the newspapers or magazines brought
+to me, and was profoundly influenced by its epic quality.</p>
+
+<p>And so, term by term, in growing joy and strength, in expanding
+knowledge of life, we hurried toward the end of our four years' course
+at this modest little school, finding in it all the essential elements
+of an education, for we caught at every chance quotation from the
+scientists, every fleeting literary allusion in the magazines,
+attaining, at last, a dim knowledge of what was going on in the great
+outside world of letters and discovery. Of course there were elections
+and tariff reforms and other comparatively unimportant matters taking
+place in the state but they made only the most transient impression on
+our minds.</p>
+
+<p>During the last winter of our stay at the Seminary, my associate in
+housekeeping was one Adelbert Jones, the son of a well-to-do farmer who
+lived directly east of town. "Del," as we called him, always alluded to
+himself as "Ferguson." He was tall, with a very large blond face
+inclined to freckle and his first care of a morning was to scrutinize
+himself most anxiously to see whether the troublesome brown flecks were
+increasing or diminishing in number. Often upon reaching the open air he
+would sniff the east wind and say lugubriously, "This is the kind of day
+that brings out the freckles on your Uncle Ferg."</p>
+
+<p>He was one of the best dressed men in the school, and especially finicky
+about his collars and ties,&mdash;was, indeed, one of the earliest to
+purchase linen. He also parted his yellow hair in the middle (which was
+a very noticeable thing in those days) and was always talking of taking
+a girl to a social or to prayer meeting. But, like Burton, he <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span>never
+did. So far as I knew he never "went double," and most of the girls
+looked upon him as more or less of a rustic, notwithstanding his fine
+figure and careful dress.</p>
+
+<p>As for me I did once hire a horse and carriage of a friend and took
+Alice for a drive! More than thirty-five years have passed since that
+adventure and yet I can see every turn in that road! I can hear the
+crackle of my starched shirt and the creak of my suspender buckles as I
+write.</p>
+
+<p>Alice, being quite as bashful as myself, kept our conversation to the
+high plane of Hawthorne and Poe and Schiller with an occasional tired
+droop to the weather, hence I infer that she was as much relieved as I
+when we reached her boarding house some two hours later. It was my first
+and only attempt at this, the most common of all ways of entertaining
+one's best girl.</p>
+
+<p>The youth who furnished the carriage betrayed me, and the outcry of my
+friends so intimidated me that I dared not look Alice in the face. My
+only comfort was that no one but ourselves could possibly know what an
+erratic conversationalist I had been. However, she did not seem to lay
+it up against me. I think she was as much astonished as I and I am
+persuaded that she valued the compliment of my extravagant gallantry.</p>
+
+<p>It is only fair to say that I had risen by this time to the dignity of
+"boughten shirts," linen collars and "Congress gaiters," and my suit
+purchased for graduating purposes was of black diagonal with a long
+tail, a garment which fitted me reasonably well. It was hot, of course,
+and nearly parboiled me of a summer evening, but I bore my suffering
+like the hero that I was, in order that I might make a presentable
+figure in the eyes of my classmates. I longed for a white vest but did
+not attain to that splendor.</p>
+
+<p>Life remained very simple and very democratic in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span>our little town.
+Although the county seat, it was slow in taking on city ways. I don't
+believe a real bath-tub distinguished the place (I never heard of one)
+but its sidewalks kept our feet out of the mud (even in March or April),
+and this was a marvellous fact to us. One or two fine lawns and flower
+gardens had come in, and year by year the maples had grown until they
+now made a pleasant shade in June, and in October glorified the plank
+walks. To us it was beautiful.</p>
+
+<p>As county town, Osage published two papers and was, in addition, the
+home of two Judges, a state Senator and a Congressman. A new opera house
+was built in '79 and an occasional "actor troupe" presented military
+plays like <i>Our Boys</i> or farces like <i>Solon Shingle</i>. The brass band and
+the baseball team were the best in the district, and were loyally upheld
+by us all.</p>
+
+<p>With all these attractions do you wonder that whenever Ed and Bill and
+Joe had a day of leisure they got out their buggies, washed them till
+they glistened like new, and called for their best girls on the way to
+town?</p>
+
+<p>Circuses, Fourth of Julys, County Fairs, all took place in Osage, and to
+own a "covered rig" and to take your sweetheart to the show were the
+highest forms of affluence and joy&mdash;unless you were actually able to
+live in town, as Burton and I now did for five days in each week, in
+which case you saw everything that was free and denied yourself
+everything but the circus. Nobody went so far in economy as that.</p>
+
+<p>As a conscientious historian I have gone carefully into the records of
+this last year, in the hope of finding something that would indicate a
+feeling on the part of the citizens that Dick Garland's boy was in some
+ways a remarkable youth, but (I regret to say) I cannot lay hands on a
+single item. It appears that I was just one of a hundred healthy,
+hearty, noisy students&mdash;but no, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span>wait! There is one incident which has
+slight significance. One day during my final term of school, as I stood
+in the postoffice waiting for the mail to be distributed, I picked up
+from the counter a book called <i>The Undiscovered Country</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"What is this about?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>The clerk looked up at me with an expression of disgust. "I bought it
+for a book of travel," said he, "but it is only a novel. Want it? I'll
+sell it cheap."</p>
+
+<p>Having no money to waste in that way, I declined, but as I had the
+volume in my hands, with a few minutes to spare, I began to read. It did
+not take me long to discover in this author a grace and precision of
+style which aroused both my admiration and my resentment. My resentment
+was vague, I could not have given a reason for it, but as a matter of
+fact, the English of this new author made some of my literary heroes
+seem either crude or stilted. I was just young enough and conservative
+enough to be irritated and repelled by the modernity of William Dean
+Howells.</p>
+
+<p>I put the book down and turned away, apparently uninfluenced by it.
+Indeed, I remained, if anything, more loyal to the grand manner of
+Hawthorne, but my love of realism was growing. I recall a rebuke from my
+teacher in rhetoric, condemning, in my essay on Mark Twain, an over
+praise of <i>Roughing It</i>. It is evident, therefore that I was even then a
+lover of the modern when taken off my guard.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile I had definitely decided not to be a lawyer, and it happened
+in this way. One Sunday morning as I was walking toward school, I met a
+young man named Lohr, a law student several years older than myself, who
+turned and walked with me for a few blocks.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Garland," said he, "what are you going to do after you graduate
+this June?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span>"I don't know," I frankly replied. "I have a chance to go into a law
+office."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't do it," protested he with sudden and inexplicable bitterness.
+"Whatever you do, don't become a lawyer's hack."</p>
+
+<p>His tone and the words, "lawyer's hack" had a powerful effect upon my
+mind. The warning entered my ears and stayed there. I decided against
+the law, as I had already decided against the farm.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Yes, these were the sweetest days of my life for I was carefree and
+glowing with the happiness which streams from perfect health and
+unquestioning faith. If any shadow drifted across this sunny year it
+fell from a haunting sense of the impermanency of my leisure. Neither
+Burton nor I had an ache or a pain. We had no fear and cherished no
+sorrow, and we were both comparatively free from the lover's almost
+intolerable longing. Our loves were hardly more than admirations.</p>
+
+<p>As I project myself back into those days I re-experience the keen joy I
+took in the downpour of vivid sunlight, in the colorful clouds of
+evening, and in the song of the west wind harping amid the maple leaves.
+The earth was new, the moonlight magical, the dawns miraculous. I shiver
+with the boy's solemn awe in the presence of beauty. The little
+recitation rooms, dusty with floating chalk, are wide halls of romance
+and the voices of my girl classmates (even though their words are
+algebraic formulas), ring sweet as bells across the years.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>During the years '79 and '80, while Burton and I had been living our
+carefree jocund life at the Seminary, a series of crop failures had
+profoundly affected the county, producing a feeling of unrest and
+bitterness in the farmers which was to have a far-reaching effect on <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span>my
+fortunes as well as upon those of my fellows. For two years the crop had
+been almost wholly destroyed by chinch bugs.</p>
+
+<p>The harvest of '80 had been a season of disgust and disappointment to us
+for not only had the pestiferous mites devoured the grain, they had
+filled our stables, granaries, and even our kitchens with their
+ill-smelling crawling bodies&mdash;and now they were coming again in added
+billions. By the middle of June they swarmed at the roots of the
+wheat&mdash;innumerable as the sands of the sea. They sapped the growing
+stalks till the leaves turned yellow. It was as if the field had been
+scorched, even the edges of the corn showed signs of blight. It was
+evident that the crop was lost unless some great change took place in
+the weather, and many men began to offer their land for sale.</p>
+
+<p>Naturally the business of grain-buying had suffered with the decline of
+grain-growing, and my father, profoundly discouraged by the outlook,
+sold his share in the elevator and turned his face toward the free lands
+of the farther west. He became again the pioneer.</p>
+
+<p>DAKOTA was the magic word. The "Jim River Valley" was now the "land of
+delight," where "herds of deer and buffalo" still "furnished the cheer."
+Once more the spirit of the explorer flamed up in the soldier's heart.
+Once more the sunset allured. Once more my mother sang the marching song
+of the McClintocks,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">O'er the hills in legions, boys,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Fair freedom's star<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Points to the sunset regions, boys,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Ha, ha, ha-ha!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and sometime, in May I think it was, father again set out&mdash;this time by
+train, to explore the Land of The Dakotas which had but recently been
+wrested from the control of Sitting Bull.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span>He was gone only two weeks, but on his return announced with triumphant
+smile that he had taken up a homestead in Ordway, Brown County, Dakota.
+His face was again alight with the hope of the borderman, and he had
+much to say of the region he had explored.</p>
+
+<p>As graduation day came on, Burton and I became very serious. The
+question of our future pressed upon us. What were we to do when our
+schooling ended? Neither of us had any hope of going to college, and
+neither of us had any intention of going to Dakota, although I had taken
+"Going West" as the theme of my oration. We were also greatly worried
+about these essays. Burton fell off in appetite and grew silent and
+abstracted. Each of us gave much time to declaiming our speeches, and
+the question of dress troubled us. Should we wear white ties and white
+vests, or white ties and black vests?</p>
+
+<p>The evening fell on a dark and rainy night, but the Garlands came down
+in their best attire and so did the Babcocks, the Gilchrists and many
+other of our neighbors. Burton was hoping that his people would not
+come, he especially dreaded the humorous gaze of his brother Charles who
+took a much less serious view of Burton's powers as an orator than
+Burton considered just. Other interested parents and friends filled the
+New Opera House to the doors, producing in us a sense of awe for this
+was the first time the "Exercises" had taken place outside the chapel.</p>
+
+<p>Never again shall I feel the same exultation, the same pleasure mingled
+with bitter sadness, the same perception of the irrevocable passing of
+beautiful things, and the equally inexorable coming on of care and
+trouble, as filled my heart that night. Whether any of the other members
+of my class vibrated with similar emotion or not I cannot say, but I do
+recall that some of the girls <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span>annoyed me by their excessive attentions
+to unimportant ribbons, flounces, and laces. "How do I look?" seemed
+their principal concern. Only Alice expressed anything of the prophetic
+sadness which mingled with her exultation.</p>
+
+<p>The name of my theme, (which was made public for the first time in the
+little programme) is worthy of a moment's emphasis. <i>Going West</i> had
+been suggested, of course by the emigration fever, then at its height,
+and upon it I had lavished a great deal of anxious care. As an oration
+it was all very excited and very florid, but it had some stirring ideas
+in it and coming in the midst of the profound political discourses of my
+fellows and the formal essays of the girls, it seemed much more singular
+and revolutionary, both in form and in substance, than it really was.</p>
+
+<p>As I waited my turn, I experienced that sense of nausea, that numbness
+which always preceded my platform trials, but as my name was called I
+contrived to reach the proper place behind the footlights, and to bow to
+the audience. My opening paragraph perplexed my fellows, and naturally,
+for it was exceedingly florid, filled with phrases like "the lure of the
+sunset," "the westward urge of men," and was neither prose nor verse.
+Nevertheless I detected a slight current of sympathy coming up to me,
+and in the midst of the vast expanse of faces, I began to detect here
+and there a friendly smile. Mother and father were near but their faces
+were very serious.</p>
+
+<p>After a few moments the blood began to circulate through my limbs and I
+was able to move about a little on the stage. My courage came back, but
+alas!&mdash;just in proportion as I attained confidence my emotional chant
+mounted too high! Since the writing was extremely ornate, my manner
+should have been studiedly cold and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span>simple. This I knew perfectly well,
+but I could not check the perfervid rush of my song. I ranted
+deplorably, and though I closed amid fairly generous applause, no
+flowers were handed up to me. The only praise I received came from
+Charles Lohr, the man who had warned me against becoming a lawyer's
+hack. He, meeting me in the wings of the stage as I came off, remarked
+with ironic significance, "Well, that was an original piece of
+business!"</p>
+
+<p>This delighted me exceedingly, for I had written with special deliberate
+intent to go outside the conventional grind of graduating orations.
+Feeling dimly, but sincerely, the epic march of the American pioneer I
+had tried to express it in an address which was in fact a sloppy poem. I
+should not like to have that manuscript printed precisely as it came
+from my pen, and a phonographic record of my voice would serve admirably
+as an instrument of blackmail. However, I thought at the time that I had
+done moderately well, and my mother's shy smile confirmed me in the
+belief.</p>
+
+<p>Burton was white with stage-fright as he stepped from the wings but he
+got through very well, better than I, for he attempted no oratorical
+flights.</p>
+
+<p>Now came the usual hurried and painful farewells of classmates. With
+fervid hand-clasp we separated, some of us never again to meet. Our
+beloved principal (who was even then shadowed by the illness which
+brought about his death) clung to us as if he hated to see us go, and
+some of us could not utter a word as we took his hand in parting. What I
+said to Alice and Maud and Ethel I do not know, but I do recall that I
+had an uncomfortable lump in my throat while saying it.</p>
+
+<p>As a truthful historian, I must add that Burton and I, immediately after
+this highly emotional close of our school career, were both called upon
+to climb into the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span>family carriage and drive away into the black night,
+back to the farm,&mdash;an experience which seemed to us at the time a sad
+anticlimax. When we entered our ugly attic rooms and tumbled wearily
+into our hard beds, we retained very little of our momentary sense of
+victory. Our carefree school life was ended. Our stern education in life
+had begun.</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br /><a name="XX" id="XX"></a>
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CHAPTER XX</h2>
+
+<h2>The Land of the Dakotas</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>The movement of settlers toward Dakota had now become an exodus, a
+stampede. Hardly anything else was talked about as neighbors met one
+another on the road or at the Burr Oak school-house on Sundays. Every
+man who could sell out had gone west or was going. In vain did the
+county papers and Farmer's Institute lecturers advise cattle raising and
+plead for diversified tillage, predicting wealth for those who held on;
+farmer after farmer joined the march to Kansas, Nebraska, and Dakota.
+"We are wheat raisers," they said, "and we intend to keep in the wheat
+belt."</p>
+
+<p>Our own family group was breaking up. My uncle David of pioneer spirit
+had already gone to the far Missouri Valley. Rachel had moved to
+Georgia, and Grandad McClintock was with his daughters, Samantha and
+Deborah, in western Minnesota. My mother, thus widely separated from her
+kin, resigned herself once more to the thought of founding a new home.
+Once more she sang, "O'er the hills in legions, boys," with such spirit
+as she could command, her clear voice a little touched with the
+huskiness of regret.</p>
+
+<p>I confess I sympathized in some degree with my father's new design.
+There was something large and fine in the business of wheat-growing, and
+to have a plague of insects arise just as our harvesting machinery was
+reaching such perfection that we could handle our entire crop without
+hired help, was a tragic, abominable <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span>injustice. I could not blame him
+for his resentment and dismay.</p>
+
+<p>My personal plans were now confused and wavering. I had no intention of
+joining this westward march; on the contrary, I was looking toward
+employment as a teacher, therefore my last weeks at the Seminary were
+shadowed by a cloud of uncertainty and vague alarm. It seemed a time of
+change, and immense, far-reaching, portentous readjustment. Our
+homestead was sold, my world was broken up. "What am I to do?" was my
+question.</p>
+
+<p>Father had settled upon Ordway, Brown County, South Dakota, as his
+future home, and immediately after my graduation, he and my brother set
+forth into the new country to prepare the way for the family's removal,
+leaving me to go ahead with the harvest alone. It fell out, therefore,
+that immediately after my flowery oration on <i>Going West</i> I found myself
+more of a slave to the cattle than ever before in my life.</p>
+
+<p>Help was scarce; I could not secure even so much as a boy to aid in
+milking the cows; I was obliged to work double time in order to set up
+the sheaves of barley which were in danger of mouldering on the wet
+ground. I worked with a kind of bitter, desperate pleasure, saying,
+"This is the last time I shall ever lift a bundle of this accursed
+stuff."</p>
+
+<p>And then, to make the situation worse, in raising some heavy machinery
+connected with the self-binder, I strained my side so seriously that I
+was unable to walk. This brought the harvesting to a stand, and made my
+father's return necessary. For several weeks I hobbled about, bent like
+a gnome, and so helped to reap what the chinch bugs had left, while my
+mother prepared to "follow the sunset" with her "Boss."</p>
+
+<p>September first was the day set for saying good-bye <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span>to Dry Run, and it
+so happened that her wedding anniversary fell close upon the same date
+and our neighbors, having quietly passed the word around, came together
+one Sunday afternoon to combine a farewell dinner with a Silver Wedding
+"surprise party."</p>
+
+<p>Mother saw nothing strange in the coming of the first two carriages, the
+Buttons often came driving in that way,&mdash;but when the Babcocks, the
+Coles, and the Gilchrists clattered in with smiling faces, we all stood
+in the yard transfixed with amazement. "What's the meaning of all this?"
+asked my father.</p>
+
+<p>No one explained. The women calmly clambered down from their vehicles,
+bearing baskets and bottles and knobby parcels, and began instant and
+concerted bustle of preparation. The men tied their horses to the fence
+and hunted up saw-horses and planks, and soon a long table was spread
+beneath the trees on the lawn. One by one other teams came whirling into
+the yard. The assembly resembled a "vandoo" as Asa Walker said. "It's
+worse than that," laughed Mrs. Turner. "It's a silver wedding and a
+'send off' combined."</p>
+
+<p>They would not let either the "bride" or the "groom" do a thing, and
+with smiling resignation my mother folded her hands and sank into a
+chair. "All right," she said. "I am perfectly willing to sit by and see
+you do the work. I won't have another chance right away." And there was
+something sad in her voice. She could not forget that this was the
+beginning of a new pioneering adventure.</p>
+
+<p>The shadows were long on the grass when at the close of the supper old
+John Gammons rose to make a speech and present the silver tea set. His
+voice was tremulous with emotion as he spoke of the loss which the
+neighborhood was about to suffer, and tears were in many eyes when
+father made reply. The old soldier's voice failed <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span>him several times
+during his utterance of the few short sentences he was able to frame,
+and at last he was obliged to take his seat, and blow his nose very hard
+on his big bandanna handkerchief to conceal his emotion.</p>
+
+<p>It was a very touching and beautiful moment to me, for as I looked
+around upon that little group of men and women, rough-handed, bent and
+worn with toil, silent and shadowed with the sorrow of parting, I
+realized as never before the high place my parents had won in the
+estimation of their neighbors. It affected me still more deeply to see
+my father stammer and flush with uncontrollable emotion. I had thought
+the event deeply important before, but I now perceived that our going
+was all of a piece with the West's elemental restlessness. I could not
+express what I felt then, and I can recover but little of it now, but
+the pain which filled my throat comes back to me mixed with a singular
+longing to relive it.</p>
+
+<p>There, on a low mound in the midst of the prairie, in the shadow of the
+house we had built, beneath the slender trees we had planted, we were
+bidding farewell to one cycle of emigration and entering upon another.
+The border line had moved on, and my indomitable Dad was moving with it.
+I shivered with dread of the irrevocable decision thus forced upon me. I
+heard a clanging as of great gates behind me and the field of the future
+was wide and wan.</p>
+
+<p>From this spot we had seen the wild prairies disappear. On every hand
+wheat and corn and clover had taken the place of the wild oat, the
+hazelbush and the rose. Our house, a commonplace frame cabin, took on
+grace. Here Hattie had died. Our yard was ugly, but there Jessie's small
+feet had worn a slender path. Each of our lives was knit into these
+hedges and rooted in these fields and yet, notwithstanding all this, in
+response to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span>some powerful yearning call, my father was about to set out
+for the fifth time into the still more remote and untrodden west. Small
+wonder that my mother sat with bowed head and tear-blinded eyes, while
+these good and faithful friends crowded around her to say good-bye.</p>
+
+<p>She had no enemies and no hatreds. Her rich singing voice, her smiling
+face, her ready sympathy with those who suffered, had endeared her to
+every home into which she had gone, even as a momentary visitor. No
+woman in childbirth, no afflicted family within a radius of five miles
+had ever called for her in vain. Death knew her well, for she had closed
+the eyes of youth and age, and yet she remained the same laughing,
+bounteous, whole-souled mother of men that she had been in the valley of
+the Neshonoc. Nothing could permanently cloud her face or embitter the
+sunny sweetness of her creed.</p>
+
+<p>One by one the women put their worn, ungraceful arms about her, kissed
+her with trembling lips, and went away in silent grief. The scene became
+too painful for me at last, and I fled away from it&mdash;out into the
+fields, bitterly asking, "Why should this suffering be? Why should
+mother be wrenched from all her dearest friends and forced to move away
+to a strange land?"</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>I did not see the actual packing up and moving of the household goods,
+for I had determined to set forth in advance and independently, eager to
+be my own master, and at the moment I did not feel in the least like
+pioneering.</p>
+
+<p>Some two years before, when the failure of our crop had made the matter
+of my continuing at school an issue between my father and myself, I had
+said, "If you will send me to school until I graduate, I will ask
+nothing further of you," and these words I now took <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span>a stern pleasure in
+upholding. Without a dollar of my own, I announced my intention to fare
+forth into the world on the strength of my two hands, but my father, who
+was in reality a most affectionate parent, offered me thirty dollars to
+pay my carfare.</p>
+
+<p>This I accepted, feeling that I had abundantly earned this money, and
+after a sad parting with my mother and my little sister, set out one
+September morning for Osage. At the moment I was oppressed with the
+thought that this was the fork in the trail, that my family and I had
+started on differing roads. I had become a man. With all the ways of the
+world before me I suffered from a feeling of doubt. The open gate
+allured me, but the homely scenes I was leaving suddenly put forth a
+latent magic.</p>
+
+<p>I knew every foot of this farm. I had traversed it scores of times in
+every direction, following the plow, the harrow, or the seeder. With a
+great lumber wagon at my side I had husked corn from every acre of it,
+and now I was leaving it with no intention of returning. My action, like
+that of my father, was final. As I looked back up the lane at the tall
+Lombardy poplar trees bent like sabres in the warm western wind, the
+landscape I was leaving seemed suddenly very beautiful, and the old home
+very peaceful and very desirable. Nevertheless I went on.</p>
+
+<p>Try as I may, I cannot bring back out of the darkness of that night any
+memory of how I spent the time. I must have called upon some of my
+classmates, but I cannot lay hold upon a single word or look or phrase
+from any of them. Deeply as I felt my distinction in thus riding forth
+into the world, all the tender incidents of farewell are lost to me.
+Perhaps my boyish self-absorption prevented me from recording outside
+impressions, for the idea of travelling, of crossing the State <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span>line,
+profoundly engaged me. Up to this time, notwithstanding all my dreams of
+conquest in far countries, I had never ridden in a railway coach! Can
+you wonder therefore that I trembled with joyous excitement as I paced
+the platform next morning waiting for the chariot of my romance? The
+fact that it was a decayed little coach at the end of a "mixed
+accommodation train" on a stub road did not matter. I was ecstatic.</p>
+
+<p>However, I was well dressed, and my inexperience appeared only in a
+certain tense watchfulness. I closely observed what went on around me
+and was careful to do nothing which could be misconstrued as ignorance.
+Thrilling with excitement, feeling the mighty significance of my
+departure, I entered quietly and took my seat, while the train roared on
+through Mitchell and St. Ansgar, the little towns in which I had played
+my part as an actor,&mdash;on into distant climes and marvellous cities. My
+emotion was all very boyish, but very natural as I look back upon it.</p>
+
+<p>The town in which I spent my first night abroad should have been called
+Thebes or Athens or Palmyra; but it was not. On the contrary, it was
+named Ramsey, after an old pioneer, and no one but a youth of fervid
+imagination at the close of his first day of adventure in the world
+would have found it worth a second glance. To me it was both beautiful
+and inspiring, for the reason that it was new territory and because it
+was the home of Alice, my most brilliant school mate, and while I had in
+mind some notion of a conference with the county superintendent of
+schools, my real reason for stopping off was a desire to see this girl
+whom I greatly admired.</p>
+
+<p>I smile as I recall the feeling of pride with which I stepped into the
+'bus and started for the Grand Central Hotel. And yet, after all, values
+are relative. That boy had something which I have lost. I would give
+much <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span>of my present knowledge of the world for the keen savor of life
+which filled my nostrils at that time.</p>
+
+<p>The sound of a violin is mingled with my memories of Ramsey, and the
+talk of a group of rough men around the bar-room stove is full of savage
+charm. A tall, pale man, with long hair and big black eyes, one who
+impressed me as being a man of refinement and culture, reduced by drink
+to poverty and to rebellious bitterness of soul, stands out in powerful
+relief&mdash;a tragic and moving figure.</p>
+
+<p>Here, too, I heard my first splendid singer. A patent medicine cart was
+in the street and one of its troupe, a basso, sang <i>Rocked in the Cradle
+of the Deep</i> with such art that I listened with delight. His lion-like
+pose, his mighty voice, his studied phrasing, revealed to me higher
+qualities of musical art than I had hitherto known.</p>
+
+<p>From this singer, I went directly to Alice's home. I must have appeared
+singularly exalted as I faced her. The entire family was in the sitting
+room as I entered&mdash;but after a few kindly inquiries concerning my people
+and some general remarks they each and all slipped away, leaving me
+alone with the girl&mdash;in the good old-fashioned American way.</p>
+
+<p>It would seem that in this farewell call I was permitting myself an
+exaggeration of what had been to Alice only a pleasant association, for
+she greeted me composedly and waited for me to justify my presence.</p>
+
+<p>After a few moments of explanation, I suggested that we go out and hear
+the singing of the "troupe." To this she consented, and rose
+quietly&mdash;she never did anything hurriedly or with girlish alertness&mdash;and
+put on her hat. Although so young, she had the dignity of a woman, and
+her face, pale as a silver moon, was calm and sweet, only her big gray
+eyes expressed the maiden <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span>mystery. She read my adoration and was a
+little afraid of it.</p>
+
+<p>As we walked, I spoke of the good days at "the Sem," of our classmates,
+and their future, and this led me to the announcement of my own plans.
+"I shall teach," I said. "I hope to be able to work into a professorship
+in literature some day.&mdash;What do you intend to do?"</p>
+
+<p>"I shall go on with my studies for a while," she replied. "I may go to
+some eastern college for a few years."</p>
+
+<p>"You must not become too learned," I urged. "You'll forget me."</p>
+
+<p>She did not protest this as a coquette might have done. On the contrary,
+she remained silent, and I was aware that while she liked and respected
+me, she was not profoundly moved by this farewell call. Nevertheless I
+hoped, and in that hope I repeated, "You will write to me, won't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course!" she replied, and again I experienced a chilling perception
+that her words arose from friendliness rather than from tenderness, but
+I was glad of even this restrained promise, and I added, "I shall write
+often, for I shall be lonely&mdash;for a while."</p>
+
+<p>As I walked on, the girl's soft warm arm in mine, a feeling of
+uncertainty, of disquiet, took possession of me. "Success" seemed a long
+way off and the road to it long and hard. However, I said nothing
+further concerning my doubts.</p>
+
+<p>The street that night had all the enchantment of Granada to me. The
+girl's voice rippled with a music like that of the fountain Lindarazza,
+and when I caught glimpses of her sweet, serious face beneath her
+hat-rim, I dreaded our parting. The nearer to her gate we drew the more
+tremulous my voice became, and the more uncertain my step.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span>At last on the door-step she turned and said, "Won't you come in again?"</p>
+
+<p>In her tone was friendly dismissal, but I would not have it so. "You
+will write to me, won't you?" I pleaded with choking utterance.</p>
+
+<p>She was moved (by pity perhaps).</p>
+
+<p>"Why, yes, with pleasure," she answered. "Good-bye, I hope you'll
+succeed. I'm sure you will."</p>
+
+<p>She extended her hand and I, recalling the instructions of my most
+romantic fiction, raised it to my lips. "Good-bye!" I huskily said, and
+turned away.</p>
+
+<p>My next night was spent in Faribault. Here I touched storied ground, for
+near this town Edward Eggleston had laid the scene of his novel, <i>The
+Mystery of Metropolisville</i> and my imagination responded to the magic
+which lay in the influence of the man of letters. I wrote to Alice a
+long and impassioned account of my sensations as I stood beside the
+Cannonball River.</p>
+
+<p>My search for a school proving futile, I pushed on to the town of
+Farmington, where the Dakota branch of the Milwaukee railroad crossed my
+line of march. Here I felt to its full the compelling power of the swift
+stream of immigration surging to the west. The little village had
+doubled in size almost in a day. It was a junction point, a place of
+transfer, and its thin-walled unpainted pine hotels were packed with
+men, women and children laden with bags and bundles (all bound for the
+west) and the joyous excitement of these adventurers compelled me to
+change my plan. I decided to try some of the newer counties in western
+Minnesota. Romance was still in the West for me.</p>
+
+<p>I slept that night on the floor in company with four or five young Iowa
+farmers, and the smell of clean white shavings, the wailing of tired
+children, the excited muttering of fathers, the plaintive voices of
+mothers, came <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span>through the partitions at intervals, producing in my mind
+an effect which will never pass away. It seemed to me at the moment as
+if all America were in process of change, all hurrying to overtake the
+vanishing line of the middle border, and the women at least were
+secretly or openly doubtful of the outcome. Woman is not by nature an
+explorer. She is the home-lover.</p>
+
+<p>Early the next morning I bought a ticket for Aberdeen, and entered the
+train crammed with movers who had found the "prairie schooner" all too
+slow. The epoch of the canvas-covered wagon had passed. The era of the
+locomotive, the day of the chartered car, had arrived. Free land was
+receding at railroad speed, the borderline could be overtaken only by
+steam, and every man was in haste to arrive.</p>
+
+<p>All that day we rumbled and rattled into a strange country, feeding our
+little engine with logs of wood, which we stopped occasionally to secure
+from long ricks which lined the banks of the river. At Chaska, at
+Granite Falls, I stepped off, but did not succeed in finding employment.
+It is probable that being filled with the desire of exploration I only
+half-heartedly sought for work; at any rate, on the third day, I found
+myself far out upon the unbroken plain where only the hairlike buffalo
+grass grew&mdash;beyond trees, beyond the plow, but not beyond settlement,
+for here at the end of my third day's ride at Millbank, I found a hamlet
+six months old, and the flock of shining yellow pine shanties strewn
+upon the sod, gave me an illogical delight, but then I was
+twenty-one&mdash;and it was sunset in the Land of the Dakotas!</p>
+
+<p>All around me that night the talk was all of land, land! Nearly every
+man I met was bound for the "Jim River valley," and each voice was
+aquiver with hope, each eye alight with anticipation of certain
+success. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span>Even the women had begun to catch something of this
+enthusiasm, for the night was very beautiful and the next day promised
+fair.</p>
+
+<p>Again I slept on a cot in a room of rough pine, slept dreamlessly, and
+was out early enough to witness the coming of dawn,&mdash;a wonderful moment
+that sunrise was to me. Again, as eleven years before, I felt myself a
+part of the new world, a world fresh from the hand of God. To the east
+nothing could be seen but a vague expanse of yellow plain, misty purple
+in its hollows, but to the west rose a long low wall of hills, the
+Eastern Coteaux, up which a red line of prairie fire was slowly
+creeping.</p>
+
+<p>It was middle September. The air, magnificently crisp and clear, filled
+me with desire of exploration, with vague resolution to do and dare. The
+sound of horses and mules calling for their feed, the clatter of hammers
+and the rasping of saws gave evidence of eager builders, of alert
+adventurers, and I was hotly impatient to get forward.</p>
+
+<p>At eight o'clock the engine drew out, pulling after it a dozen box-cars
+laden with stock and household goods, and on the roof of a freight
+caboose, together with several other young Jasons, I rode, bound for the
+valley of the James.</p>
+
+<p>It was a marvellous adventure. All the morning we rattled and rumbled
+along, our engine snorting with effort, struggling with a load almost
+too great for its strength. By noon we were up amid the rounded grassy
+hills of the Sisseton Reservation where only the coyote ranged and the
+Sioux made residence.</p>
+
+<p>Here we caught our first glimpse of the James River valley, which seemed
+to us at the moment as illimitable as the ocean and as level as a floor,
+and then pitching and tossing over the rough track, with our cars
+leaping <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span>and twisting like a herd of frightened buffaloes, we charged
+down the western slope, down into a level land of ripened grass, where
+blackbirds chattered in the willows, and prairie chickens called from
+the tall rushes which grew beside the sluggish streams.</p>
+
+<p>Aberdeen was the end of the line, and when we came into it that night it
+seemed a near neighbor to Sitting Bull and the bison. And so, indeed, it
+was, for a buffalo bull had been hunted across its site less than a year
+before.</p>
+
+<p>It was twelve miles from here to where my father had set his stakes for
+his new home, hence I must have stayed all night in some small hotel,
+but that experience has also faded from my mind. I remember only my walk
+across the dead-level plain next day. For the first time I set foot upon
+a landscape without a tree to break its sere expanse&mdash;and I was at once
+intensely interested in a long flock of gulls, apparently rolling along
+the sod, busily gathering their morning meal of frosted locusts. The
+ones left behind kept flying over the ones in front so that a ceaseless
+change of leadership took place.</p>
+
+<p>There was beauty in this plain, delicate beauty and a weird charm,
+despite its lack of undulation. Its lonely unplowed sweep gave me the
+satisfying sensation of being at last among the men who held the
+outposts,&mdash;sentinels for the marching millions who were approaching from
+the east. For two hours I walked, seeing Aberdeen fade to a series of
+wavering, grotesque notches on the southern horizon line, while to the
+north an equally irregular and insubstantial line of shadows gradually
+took on weight and color until it became the village in which my father
+was at this very moment busy in founding his new home.</p>
+
+<p>My experienced eyes saw the deep, rich soil, and my youthful imagination
+looking into the future, supplied <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span>the trees and vines and flowers which
+were to make this land a garden.</p>
+
+<p>I was converted. I had no doubts. It seemed at the moment that my father
+had acted wisely in leaving his Iowa farm in order to claim his share of
+Uncle Sam's rapidly-lessening unclaimed land.</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br /><a name="XXI" id="XXI"></a>
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CHAPTER XXI</h2>
+
+<h2>The Grasshopper and the Ant</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>Without a doubt this trip, so illogical and so recklessly extravagant,
+was due entirely to a boy's thirst for adventure. Color it as I may, the
+fact of my truancy remains. I longed to explore. The valley of the James
+allured me, and though my ticket and my meals along the route had used
+up my last dollar, I felt amply repaid as I trod this new earth and
+confronted this new sky&mdash;for both earth and sky were to my perception
+subtly different from those of Iowa and Minnesota.</p>
+
+<p>The endless stretches of short, dry grass, the gorgeous colors of the
+dawn, the marvellous, shifting, phantom lakes and headlands, the violet
+sunset afterglow,&mdash;all were widely different from our old home, and the
+far, bare hills were delightfully suggestive of the horseman, the Indian
+and the buffalo. The village itself was hardly more than a summer camp,
+and yet its hearty, boastful citizens talked almost deliriously of
+"corner lots" and "boulevards," and their chantings were timed to the
+sound of hammers. The spirit of the builder seized me and so with my
+return ticket in my pocket, I joined the carpenters at work on my
+father's claim some two miles from the village with intent to earn money
+for further exploration.</p>
+
+<p>Grandfather Garland had also taken a claim (although he heartily
+disliked the country) and in order to provide for both families a double
+house was being built across the line between the two farms. I helped
+shingle the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span>roof, and being twenty-one now, and my own master, I
+accepted wages from my father without a qualm. I earned every cent of my
+two dollars per day, I assure you, but I carefully omitted all reference
+to shingling, in my letters to my classmates.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of a fortnight with my pay in my pocket I started eastward on
+a trip which I fully intended to make very long and profoundly
+educational. That I was green, very green, I knew but all that could be
+changed by travel.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of my second day's journey, I reached Hastings, a small town
+on the Mississippi river, and from there decided to go by water to
+Redwing some thirty miles below. All my life I had longed to ride on a
+Mississippi steamboat, and now, as I waited on the wharf at the very
+instant of the fulfillment of my desire, I expanded with anticipatory
+satisfaction.</p>
+
+<p>The arrival of the <i>War Eagle</i> from St. Paul carried a fine foreign
+significance, and I ascended its gang-plank with the air of a traveller
+embarking at Cairo for Assouan. Once aboard the vessel I mingled,
+aloofly, with the passengers, absorbed in study of the river winding
+down among its wooded hills.</p>
+
+<p>This ecstasy lasted during the entire trip&mdash;indeed it almost took on
+poetic form as the vessel approached the landing at Redwing, for at this
+point the legendary appeal made itself felt. This lovely valley had once
+been the home of a chieftain, and his body, together with that of his
+favorite warhorse, was buried on the summit of a hill which overlooks
+the river, "in order" (so runs the legend) "that the chief might see the
+first faint glow of the resurrection morn and ride to meet it."</p>
+
+<p>In truth Redwing was a quiet, excessively practical little town, quite
+commonplace to every other passenger, except myself. My excited
+imagination <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span>translated it into something very distinctive and far-off
+and shining.</p>
+
+<p>I took lodgings that night at a very exclusive boarding house at six
+dollars per week, reckless of the effect on my very slender purse. For a
+few days I permitted myself to wander and to dream. I have disturbing
+recollections of writing my friends from this little town, letters
+wherein I rhapsodized on the beauty of the scenery in terms which I
+would not now use in describing the Grand Canyon, or in picturing the
+peaks of Wyoming. After all I was right. A landscape is precisely as
+great as the impression it makes upon the perceiving mind. I was a
+traveller at last!&mdash;that seemed to be my chiefest joy and I extracted
+from each day all the ecstasy it contained.</p>
+
+<p>My avowed object was to obtain a school and I did not entirely neglect
+my plans but application to the county superintendent came to nothing. I
+fear I was half-hearted in my campaign.</p>
+
+<p>At last, at the beginning of the week and at the end of my money, I
+bought passage to Wabasha and from there took train to a small town
+where some of my mother's cousins lived. I had been in correspondence
+with one of them, a Mrs. Harris, and I landed at her door (after a
+glorious ride up through the hills, amid the most gorgeous autumn
+colors) with just three cents in my pocket&mdash;a poverty which you may be
+sure I did not publish to my relations who treated me with high respect
+and manifested keen interest in all my plans.</p>
+
+<p>As nothing offered in the township round about the Harris home, I
+started one Saturday morning to walk to a little cross-roads village
+some twenty miles away, in which I was told a teacher was required. My
+cousins, not knowing that I was penniless, supposed, of course, that I
+would go by train, and I was too proud to tell them the truth. It was
+very muddy, and when I reached the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span>home of the committeeman his mid-day
+meal was over, and his wife did not ask if I had dined&mdash;although she was
+quick to tell me that the teacher had just been hired.</p>
+
+<p>Without a cent in my pocket, I could not ask for food&mdash;therefore, I
+turned back weary, hungry and disheartened. To make matters worse a cold
+rain was falling and the eighteen or twenty miles between me and the
+Harris farm looked long.</p>
+
+<p>I think it must have been at this moment that I began, for the first
+time, to take a really serious view of my plan "to see the world." It
+became evident with startling abruptness, that a man might be both
+hungry and cold in the midst of abundance. I recalled the fable of the
+grasshopper who, having wasted the summer hours in singing, was
+mendicant to the ant. My weeks of careless gayety were over. The money I
+had spent in travel looked like a noble fortune to me at this hour.</p>
+
+<p>The road was deep in mud, and as night drew on the rain thickened. At
+last I said, "I will go into some farm-house and ask the privilege of a
+bed." This was apparently a simple thing to do and yet I found it
+exceedingly hard to carry out. To say bluntly, "Sir, I have no money, I
+am tired and hungry," seemed a baldly disgraceful way of beginning. On
+the other hand to plead relationship with Will Harris involved a
+relative, and besides they might not know my cousin, or they might think
+my statement false.</p>
+
+<p>Arguing in this way I passed house after house while the water dripped
+from my hat and the mud clogged my feet. Though chilled and hungry to
+the point of weakness, my suffering was mainly mental. A sudden
+realization of the natural antagonism of the well-to-do toward the tramp
+appalled me. Once, as I turned in toward the bright light of a kitchen
+window, the roar of a watch dog stopped me before I had fairly passed
+the gate. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span>I turned back with a savage word, hot with resentment at a
+house-owner who would keep a beast like that. At another cottage I was
+repulsed by an old woman who sharply said, "We don't feed tramps."</p>
+
+<p>I now had the precise feeling of the penniless outcast. With morbidly
+active imagination I conceived of myself as a being forever set apart
+from home and friends, condemned to wander the night alone. I worked on
+this idea till I achieved a bitter, furtive and ferocious manner.</p>
+
+<p>However, I knocked at another door and upon meeting the eyes of the
+woman at the threshold, began with formal politeness to explain, "I am a
+teacher, I have been to look for a school, and I am on my way back to
+Byron, where I have relatives. Can you keep me all night?"</p>
+
+<p>The woman listened in silence and at length replied with ungracious
+curtness, "I guess so. Come in."</p>
+
+<p>She gave me a seat by the fire, and when her husband returned from the
+barn, I explained the situation to him. He was only moderately cordial.
+"Make yourself at home. I'll be in as soon as I have finished my
+milking," he said and left me beside the kitchen fire.</p>
+
+<p>The woman of the house, silent, suspicious (it seemed to me) began to
+spread the table for supper while I, sitting beside the stove, began to
+suffer with the knowledge that I had, in a certain sense, deceived them.
+I was fairly well dressed and my voice and manner, as well as the fact
+that I was seeking a school, had given them, no doubt, the impression
+that I was able to pay for my entertainment, and the more I thought of
+this the more uneasy I became. To eat of their food without making an
+explanation was impossible but the longer I waited the more difficult
+the explanation grew.</p>
+
+<p>Suffering keenly, absurdly, I sat with hanging head going over and over
+the problem, trying to formulate an easy way of letting them know my
+predicament. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span>There was but one way of escape&mdash;and I took it. As the
+woman stepped out of the room for a moment, I rose, seized my hat and
+rushed out into the rain and darkness like a fugitive.</p>
+
+<p>I have often wondered what those people thought when they found me gone.
+Perhaps I am the great mystery of their lives, an unexplained visitant
+from "the night's Plutonian shore."</p>
+
+<p>I plodded on for another mile or two in the darkness, which was now so
+intense I could scarcely keep the road. Only by the feel of the mud
+under my feet could I follow the pike. Like Jean Valjean, I possessed a
+tempest in my brain. I experienced my first touch of despair.</p>
+
+<p>Although I had never had more than thirty dollars at any one time, I had
+never been without money. Distinctions had not counted largely in the
+pioneer world to which I belonged. I was proud of my family. I came of
+good stock, and knew it and felt it, but now here I was, wet as a sponge
+and without shelter simply because I had not in my pocket a small piece
+of silver with which to buy a bed.</p>
+
+<p>I walked on until this dark surge of rebellious rage had spent its force
+and reason weakly resumed her throne. I said, "What nonsense! Here I am
+only a few miles from relatives. All the farmers on this road must know
+the Harris family. If I tell them who I am, they will certainly feel
+that I have the claim of a neighbor upon them."&mdash;But these deductions,
+admirable as they were, did not lighten my sky or make begging easier.</p>
+
+<p>After walking two miles further I found it almost impossible to proceed.
+It was black night and I did not know where I stood. The wind had risen
+and the rain was falling in slant cataracts. As I looked about me and
+caught the gleam from the windows of a small farmhouse, my stubborn
+pride gave way. Stumbling up the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span>path I rapped on the door. It was
+opened by a middle-aged farmer in his stocking feet, smoking a pipe.
+Having finished his supper he was taking his ease beside the fire, and
+fortunately for me, was in genial mood.</p>
+
+<p>"Come in," he said heartily. "'Tis a wet night."</p>
+
+<p>I began, "I am a cousin of William Harris of Byron&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You don't say! Well, what are you doing on the road a night like this?
+Come in!"</p>
+
+<p>I stepped inside and finished my explanation there.</p>
+
+<p>This good man and his wife will forever remain the most hospitable
+figures in my memory. They set me close beside the stove insisting that
+I put my feet in the oven to dry, talking meanwhile of my cousins and
+the crops, and complaining of the incessant rainstorms which were
+succeeding one another almost without intermission, making this one of
+the wettest and most dismal autumns the country had ever seen. Never in
+all my life has a roof seemed more heavenly, or hosts more sweet and
+gracious.</p>
+
+<p>After breakfast next morning I shook hands with the farmer saying: "I
+shall send you the money for my entertainment the first time my cousin
+comes to town," and under the clamor of his hospitable protestations
+against payment, set off up the road.</p>
+
+<p>The sun came out warm and beautiful and all about me on every farm the
+teamsters were getting into the fields. The mud began to dry up and with
+the growing cheer of the morning my heart expanded and the experience of
+the night before became as unreal as a dream and yet it had happened,
+and it had taught me a needed lesson. Hereafter I take no narrow
+chances, I vowed to myself.</p>
+
+<p>Upon arrival at my cousin's home I called him aside and said, "Will, you
+have work to do and I have need of wages,&mdash;I am going to strip off this
+'boiled shirt' and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span>white collar, and I am going to work for you just
+the same as any other hand, and I shall expect the full pay of the best
+man on your place."</p>
+
+<p>He protested, "I don't like to see you do this. Don't give up your
+plans. I'll hitch up and we'll start out and keep going till we find you
+a school."</p>
+
+<p>"No," I said, "not till I earn a few dollars to put in my pocket. I've
+played the grasshopper for a few weeks&mdash;from this time on I'm the busy
+ant."</p>
+
+<p>So it was settled, and the grasshopper went forth into the fields and
+toiled as hard as any slave. I plowed, threshed, and husked corn, and
+when at last December came, I had acquired money enough to carry me on
+my way. I decided to visit Onalaska and the old coulee where my father's
+sister and two of the McClintocks were still living. With swift return
+of confidence, I said good-bye to my friends in Zumbrota and took the
+train. It seemed very wonderful that after a space of thirteen years I
+should be returning to the scenes of my childhood, a full-grown man and
+paying my own way. I expanded with joy of the prospect.</p>
+
+<p>Onalaska, the reader may remember, was the town in which I had gone to
+school when a child, and in my return to it I felt somewhat like the man
+in the song, <i>Twenty Years Ago</i>&mdash;indeed I sang, "I've wandered through
+the village, Tom, I've sat beneath the tree" for my uncle that first
+night. There was the river, filled as of old with logs, and the clamor
+of the saws still rose from the sawdust islands. Bleakly white the
+little church, in which we used to sit in our Sunday best, remained
+unchanged but the old school-house was not merely altered, it was gone!
+In its place stood a commonplace building of brick. The boys with whom I
+used to play "Mumblety Peg" were men, and some of them had developed
+into worthless loafers, lounging about the doors of the saloons, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span>and
+although we looked at one another with eyes of sly recognition, we did
+not speak.</p>
+
+<p>Eagerly I visited the old coulee, but the magic was gone from the hills,
+the glamour from the meadows. The Widow Green no longer lived at the
+turn of the road, and only the Randals remained. The marsh was drained,
+the big trees cleared away. The valley was smaller, less mysterious,
+less poetic than my remembrances of it, but it had charm nevertheless,
+and I responded to the beauty of its guarding bluffs and the deep-blue
+shadows which streamed across its sunset fields.</p>
+
+<p>Uncle William drove down and took me home with him, over the long hill,
+back to the little farm where he was living much the same as I
+remembered him. One of his sons was dead, the other had shared in the
+rush for land, and was at this time owner of a homestead in western
+Minnesota. Grandfather McClintock, still able to walk about, was
+spending the autumn with William and we had a great deal of talk
+concerning the changes which had come to the country and especially to
+our family group. "Ye scatter like the leaves of autumn," he said
+sadly&mdash;then added, "Perhaps in the Final Day the trumpet of the Lord
+will bring us all together again."</p>
+
+<p>We sang some of his old Adventist hymns together and then he asked me
+what I was planning to do. "I haven't any definite plans," I answered,
+"except to travel. I want to travel. I want to see the world."</p>
+
+<p>"To see the world!" he exclaimed. "As for me I wait for it to pass away.
+I watch daily for the coming of the Chariot."</p>
+
+<p>This gray old crag of a man interested me as deeply as ever and yet, in
+a sense, he was an alien. He was not of my time&mdash;scarcely of my country.
+He was a survival <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span>of the days when the only book was the Bible, when
+the newspaper was a luxury. Migration had been his lifelong adventure
+and now he was waiting for the last great remove. His thought now was of
+"the region of the Amaranth," his new land "the other side of Jordan."</p>
+
+<p>He engaged my respect but I was never quite at ease with him. His
+valuations were too intensely religious; he could not understand my
+ambitions. His mind filled with singular prejudices,&mdash;notions which came
+down from the Colonial age, was impervious to new ideas. His character
+had lost something of its mellow charm&mdash;but it had gained in dramatic
+significance. Like my uncles he had ceased to be a part of my childish
+world.</p>
+
+<p>I went away with a sense of sadness, of loss as though a fine picture on
+the walls of memory had been dimmed or displaced. I perceived that I had
+idealized him as I had idealized all the figures and scenes of my
+boyhood&mdash;"but no matter, they were beautiful to me then and beautiful
+they shall remain," was the vague resolution with which I dismissed
+criticism.</p>
+
+<p>The whole region had become by contrast with Dakota, a "settled"
+community. The line of the middle border had moved on some three hundred
+miles to the west. The Dunlaps, McIldowneys, Dudleys and Elwells were
+the stay-at-homes. Having had their thrust at the job of pioneering
+before the war they were now content on their fat soil. To me they all
+seemed remote. Their very names had poetic value, for they brought up in
+my mind shadowy pictures of the Coulee country as it existed to my
+boyish memories.</p>
+
+<p>I spent nearly two months in Onalaska, living with my Aunt Susan, a
+woman of the loveliest character. Richard Bailey, her husband, one of
+the kindliest of men, soon found employment for me, and so, for a time,
+I was happy and secure.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span>However, this was but a pause by the roadside. I was not satisfied. It
+was a show of weakness to settle down on one's relations. I wanted to
+make my way among strangers. I scorned to lean upon my aunt and uncle,
+though they were abundantly able to keep me. It was mid-winter, nothing
+offered and so I turned (as so many young men similarly placed have
+done), toward a very common yet difficult job. I attempted to take
+subscriptions for a book.</p>
+
+<p>After a few days' experience in a neighboring town I decided that
+whatever else I might be fitted for in this world, I was not intended
+for a book agent. Surrendering my prospectus to the firm, I took my way
+down to Madison, the capital of the state, a city which seemed at this
+time very remote, and very important in my world. Only when travelling
+did I have the feeling of living up to the expectations of Alice and
+Burton who put into their letters to me, an envy which was very sweet.
+To them I was a bold adventurer!</p>
+
+<p>Alas for me! In the shining capital of my state I felt again the world's
+rough hand. First of all I tried The State House. This was before the
+general use of typewriters and I had been told that copyists were in
+demand. I soon discovered that four men and two girls were clamoring for
+every job. Nobody needed me. I met with blunt refusals and at last
+turned to other fields.</p>
+
+<p>Every morning I went among the merchants seeking an opportunity to clerk
+or keep books, and at last obtained a place at six dollars per week in
+the office of an agricultural implement firm. I was put to work in the
+accounting department, as general slavey, under the immediate
+supervision of a youth who had just graduated from my position and who
+considered me his legitimate victim. He was only seventeen and not
+handsome, and I despised him with instant bitterness. Under his
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span>direction I swept out the office, made copies of letters, got the mail,
+stamped envelopes and performed other duties of a manual routine kind,
+to which I would have made no objection, had it not been for the
+gloating joy with which that chinless cockerel ordered me about. I had
+never been under that kind of discipline, and to have a pin-headed gamin
+order me to clean spittoons was more than I could stomach.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of the week I went to the proprietor, and said, "If you have
+nothing better for me to do than sweep the floor and run errands, I
+think I'll quit."</p>
+
+<p>With some surprise my boss studied me. At last he said: "Very well, sir,
+you can go, and from all accounts I don't think we'll miss you much,"
+which was perfectly true. I was an absolute failure so far as any
+routine work of that kind was concerned.</p>
+
+<p>So here again I was thrown upon a cruel world with only six dollars
+between myself and the wolf. Again I fell back upon my physical powers.
+I made the round of all the factories seeking manual labor. I went out
+on the Catfish, where, through great sheds erected for the manufacture
+of farm machinery, I passed from superintendent to foreman, from foreman
+to boss,&mdash;eager to wheel sand, paint woodwork, shovel coal&mdash;anything at
+all to keep from sending home for money&mdash;for, mind you, my father or my
+uncle would have helped me out had I written to them, but I could not do
+that. So long as I was able to keep a roof over my head, I remained
+silent. I was in the world and I intended to keep going without asking a
+cent from anyone. Besides, the grandiloquent plans for travel and
+success which I had so confidently outlined to Burton must be carried
+out.</p>
+
+<p>I should have been perfectly secure had it been summertime, for I knew
+the farmer's life and all that pertained to it, but it was winter. How
+to get a living in a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span>strange town was my problem. It was a bright,
+clear, intensely cold February, and I was not very warmly dressed&mdash;hence
+I kept moving.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile I had become acquainted with a young clergyman in one of the
+churches, and had showed to him certain letters and papers to prove that
+I was not a tramp, and no doubt his word kept my boarding mistress from
+turning me into the street.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Eaton was a man of books. His library contained many volumes of
+standard value and we met as equals over the pages of Scott and Dickens.
+I actually forced him to listen to a lecture which I had been writing
+during the winter and so wrought upon him that he agreed to arrange a
+date for me in a neighboring country church.&mdash;Thereafter while I glowed
+with absurd dreams of winning money and renown by delivering that
+lecture in the churches and school-houses of the state, I continued to
+seek for work, any work that would bring me food and shelter.</p>
+
+<p>One bitter day in my desperate need I went down upon the lake to watch
+the men cutting ice. The wind was keen, the sky gray and filled with
+glittering minute flecks of frost, and my clothing (mainly cotton)
+seemed hardly thicker than gossamer, and yet I looked upon those working
+men with a distinct feeling of envy. Had I secured "a job" I should have
+been pulling a saw up and down through the ice, at the same time that I
+dreamed of touring the west as a lecturer&mdash;of such absurd contradictions
+are the visions of youth.</p>
+
+<p>I don't know exactly what I would have done had not my brother happened
+along on his way to a school near Chicago. To him I confessed my
+perplexity. He paid my board bill (which was not very large) and in
+return I talked him into a scheme which promised great things for us
+both&mdash;I contracted to lecture under his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span>management! He was delighted at
+the opportunity of advancing me, and we were both happy.</p>
+
+<p>Our first engagement was at Cyene, a church which really belonged to
+Eaton's circuit, and according to my remembrance the lecture was a
+moderate success. After paying all expenses we had a little money for
+carfare, and Franklin was profoundly impressed. It really seemed to us
+both that I had at last entered upon my career. It was the kind of
+service I had been preparing for during all my years at school&mdash;but
+alas! our next date was a disaster. We attempted to do that which an
+older and fully established lecturer would not have ventured. We tried
+to secure an audience with only two days' advance work, and of course we
+failed.</p>
+
+<p>I called a halt. I could not experiment on the small fund which my
+father had given Frank for his business education.</p>
+
+<p>However, I borrowed a few dollars of him and bought a ticket to Rock
+River, a town near Chicago. I longed to enter the great western
+metropolis, but dared not do so&mdash;yet. I felt safe only when in sight of
+a plowed field.</p>
+
+<p>At a junction seventy miles out of the city, we separated, he to attend
+a school, and I to continue my education in the grim realities of life.</p>
+
+<p>From office to office in Rock River I sullenly plodded, willing to work
+for fifty cents a day, until at last I secured a clerkship in a small
+stationery jobbing house which a couple of school teachers had strangely
+started, but on Saturday of the second week the proprietor called me to
+him and said kindly, but firmly, "Garland, I'm afraid you are too
+literary and too musical for this job. You have a fine baritone voice
+and your ability to vary the text set before you to copy, is remarkable,
+and yet I think we must part."</p>
+
+<p>The reasons for this ironical statement were (to my <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span>mind) ignoble;
+first of all he resented my musical ability, secondly, my literary skill
+shamed him, for as he had put before me a badly composed circular
+letter, telling me to copy it one hundred times, I quite naturally
+improved the English.&mdash;However, I admitted the charge of
+insubordination, and we parted quite amicably.</p>
+
+<p>It was still winter, and I was utterly without promise of employment. In
+this extremity, I went to the Y. M. C. A. (which had for one of its aims
+the assistance of young men out of work) and confided my homelessness to
+the secretary, a capital young fellow who knew enough about men to
+recognize that I was not a "bum." He offered me the position of
+night-watch and gave me a room and cot at the back of his office. These
+were dark hours!</p>
+
+<p>During the day I continued to pace the streets. Occasionally some little
+job like raking up a yard would present itself, and so I was able to buy
+a few rolls, and sometimes I indulged in milk and meat. I lived along
+from noon to noon in presentable condition, but I was always hungry. For
+four days I subsisted on five cents worth of buns.</p>
+
+<p>Having left my home for the purpose of securing experience in the world,
+I had this satisfaction&mdash;I was getting it! Very sweet and far away
+seemed all that beautiful life with Alice and Burton and Hattie at the
+Seminary, something to dream over, to regret, to versify, something
+which the future (at this moment) seemed utterly incapable of
+reproducing. I still corresponded with several of my classmates, but was
+careful to conceal the struggle that I was undergoing. I told them only
+of my travels and my reading.</p>
+
+<p>As the ironical jobber remarked, I had a good voice, and upon being
+invited to accompany the Band of Hope which went to sing and pray in the
+County Jail, I con<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span>sented, at least I took part in the singing. In this
+way I partly paid the debt I owed the Association, and secured some
+vivid impressions of prison life which came into use at a later time. My
+three associates in this work were a tinner, a clothing salesman and a
+cabinet maker. More and more I longed for the spring, for with it I knew
+would come seeding, building and a chance for me.</p>
+
+<p>At last in the midst of a grateful job of raking up yards and planting
+shrubs, I heard the rat-tat-tat of a hammer, and resolved upon a bold
+plan. I decided to become a carpenter, justifying myself by reference to
+my apprenticeship to my grandfather. One fine April morning I started
+out towards the suburbs, and at every house in process of construction
+approached the boss and asked for a job. Almost at once I found
+encouragement. "Yes, but where are your tools?"</p>
+
+<p>In order to buy the tools I must work, work at anything. Therefore, at
+the next place I asked if there was any rough labor required around the
+house. The foreman replied: "Yes, there is some grading to be done."
+Accordingly I set to work with a wheelbarrow, grading the bank around
+the almost completed building. This was hard work, the crudest form of
+manual labor, but I grappled with it desperately, knowing that the pay
+(a dollar and a half a day) would soon buy a kit of tools.</p>
+
+<p>Oh, that terrible first day! The heavy shovel blistered my hands and
+lamed my wrists. The lifting of the heavily laden wheelbarrow strained
+my back and shoulders. Half-starved and weak, quite unfitted for
+sustained effort of this kind, I struggled on, and at the end of an
+interminable afternoon staggered home to my cot. The next morning came
+soon,&mdash;too soon. I was not merely lame, I was lacerated. My muscles
+seemed to have been torn asunder, but I toiled (or made a show of
+toiling) all the second day. On the warrant of my wages I <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span>borrowed
+twenty-five cents of a friend and with this bought a meat dinner which
+helped me through another afternoon.</p>
+
+<p>The third day was less painful and by the end of the week, I was able to
+do anything required of me. Upon receiving my pay I went immediately to
+the hardware store and bought a set of tools and a carpenter's apron,
+and early on Monday morning sallied forth in the <i>opposite direction</i> as
+a carpenter seeking a job. I soon came to a big frame house in course of
+construction. "Do you need another hand?" I asked. "Yes," replied the
+boss. "Take hold, right here, with this man."</p>
+
+<p>"This man" turned out to be a Swede, a good-natured fellow, who made no
+comment on my deficiencies. We sawed and hammered together in very
+friendly fashion for a week, and I made rapid gains in strength and
+skill and took keen pleasure in my work. The days seemed short and life
+promising and as I was now getting two dollars per day, I moved out of
+my charity bed and took a room in a decayed mansion in the midst of a
+big lawn. My bearing became confident and easy. Money had straightened
+my back.</p>
+
+<p>The spring advanced rapidly while I was engaged on this work and as my
+crew occasionally took contracts in the country I have vivid pictures of
+the green and pleasant farm lands, of social farmers at barn-raisings,
+and of tables filled with fatness. I am walking again in my stocking
+feet, high on the "purline plate," beetle in hand, driving home the
+oaken "pins." I am shingling on the broad roof of a suburban house from
+which I can see the sunny slopes of a meadow and sheep feeding therein.
+I am mending a screen door for a farmer's wife while she confides to me
+the tragedy of her life&mdash;and always I have the foolish boyish notion
+that I am out in the world and seeing life.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span>Into the midst of this busy peaceful season of manual labor came my
+first deeply romantic admiration. Edwin Booth was announced as "the
+opening attraction of the New Opera House" and I fairly trembled with
+anticipatory delight, for to me the word <i>Booth</i> meant all that was
+splendid and tragic and glorious in the drama. I was afraid that
+something might prevent me from hearing him.</p>
+
+<p>At last the night came and so great was the throng, so strong the
+pressure on the doors that the lock gave way and I, with my dollar
+clutched tightly in my hand, was borne into the hall and half-way up the
+stairs without touching foot to the floor, and when at last, safe in my
+balcony seat I waited for the curtain to rise, I had a distinct
+realization that a shining milestone was about to be established in my
+youthful trail.</p>
+
+<p>My father had told me of the elder Booth, and of Edwin's beautiful
+Prince of Denmark I had heard many stories, therefore I waited with awe
+as well as eagerness, and when the curtain, rising upon the court scene,
+discovered the pale, handsome face and graceful form of the noble Dane,
+and the sound of his voice,&mdash;that magic velvet voice&mdash;floated to my ear
+with the words, "Seems, madame, I know not seems," neither time nor
+space nor matter existed for me&mdash;I was in an ecstasy of attention.</p>
+
+<p>I had read much of Shakespeare. I could recite many pages of the
+tragedies and historical plays, and I had been assured by my teachers
+that <i>Hamlet</i> was the greatest of all dramas, but Edwin Booth in one
+hour taught me more of its wonders, more of the beauty of the English
+language than all my instructors and all my books. He did more, he
+aroused in me a secret ambition to read as he read, to make the dead
+lines of print glow with color and throb with music. There was something
+magical in his interpretation of the drama's printed <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span>page. With voice
+and face and hand he restored for duller minds the visions of the poet,
+making Hamlet's sorrows as vital as our own.</p>
+
+<p>From this performance, which filled me with vague ambitions and a
+glorious melancholy, I returned to my association with a tinker, a
+tailor, and a tinner, whose careless and stupid comments on the play
+both pained and angered me. I went to my work next day in such absorbed
+silence as only love is supposed to give.</p>
+
+<p>I re-read my <i>Hamlet</i> now with the light of Booth's face in my eyes and
+the music of his glorious voice in my ear. As I nailed and sawed at pine
+lumber, I murmured inaudibly the lofty lines of the play, in the hope of
+fixing forever in my mind the cadences of the great tragedian's
+matchless voice.</p>
+
+<p>Great days! Growing days! Lonely days! Days of dream and development,
+needing only the girl to be perfect&mdash;but I had no one but Alice to whom
+I could voice my new enthusiasm and she was not only out of the reach of
+my voice, but serenely indifferent to my rhapsodic letters concerning
+<i>Hamlet</i> and the genius of Edwin Booth.</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br /><a name="XXII" id="XXII"></a>
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CHAPTER XXII</h2>
+
+<h2>We Discover New England</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>Edwin Booth's performance of <i>Hamlet</i> had another effect. It brought to
+my mind the many stories of Boston which my father had so often related
+to his children. I recalled his enthusiastic accounts of the elder Booth
+and Edwin Forrest, and especially his descriptions of the wonderful
+scenic effects in <i>Old Put</i> and <i>The Gold Seekers</i>, wherein actors rode
+down mimic stone steps or debarked from theatrical ships which sailed
+into pictured wharves, and one day in the midst of my lathing and
+sawing, I evolved a daring plan&mdash;I decided to visit Boston and explore
+New England.</p>
+
+<p>With all his feeling for the East my father had never revisited it. This
+was a matter of pride with him. "I never take the back trail," he said,
+and yet at times, as he dwelt on the old home in the state of Maine a
+wistful note had crept into his voice, and so now in writing to him, I
+told him that I intended to seek out his boyhood haunts in order that I
+might tell him all about the friends and relations who still lived
+there.</p>
+
+<p>Without in any formal way intending it the old borderman had endowed
+both his sons with a large sense of the power and historic significance
+of Massachusetts. He had contrived to make us feel some part of his
+idolatry of Wendell Phillips, for his memory of the great days of <i>The
+Liberator</i> were keen and worshipful. From him I derived a belief that
+there were giants in those days and the thought of walking the streets
+where Garrison was <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span>mobbed and standing in the hall which Webster had
+hallowed with his voice gave me a profound anticipatory stir of delight.</p>
+
+<p>As first assistant to a quaint and dirty old carpenter, I was now
+earning two dollars per day, and saving it. There was no occasion in
+those days for anyone to give me instructions concerning the care of
+money. I knew how every dollar came and I was equally careful to know
+where every nickel went. Travel cost three cents per mile, and the
+number of cities to be visited depended upon the number of dimes I
+should save.</p>
+
+<p>With my plan of campaign mapped out to include a stop at Niagara Falls
+and fourth of July on Boston Common I wrote to my brother at Valparaiso,
+Indiana, inviting him to join me in my adventure. "If we run out of
+money and of course we shall, for I have only about thirty dollars,
+we'll flee to the country. One of my friends here says we can easily
+find work in the meadows near Concord."</p>
+
+<p>The audacity of my design appealed to my brother's imagination. "I'm
+your huckleberry!" he replied. "School ends the last week in June. I'll
+meet you at the Atlantic House in Chicago on the first. Have about
+twenty dollars myself."</p>
+
+<p>At last the day came for my start. With all my pay in my pocket and my
+trunk checked I took the train for Chicago. I shall never forget the
+feeling of dismay with which, an hour later, I perceived from the car
+window a huge smoke-cloud which embraced the whole eastern horizon, for
+this, I was told was the soaring banner of the great and gloomy inland
+metropolis, whose dens of vice and houses of greed had been so often
+reported to me by wandering hired men. It was in truth only a huge
+flimsy country town in those days, but to me it was august as well as
+terrible.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span>Up to this moment Rockford was the largest town I had ever seen, and the
+mere thought of a million people stunned my imagination. "How can so
+many people find a living in one place?" Naturally I believed most of
+them to be robbers. "If the city is miles across, how am I to get from
+the railway station to my hotel without being assaulted?" Had it not
+been for the fear of ridicule, I think I should have turned back at the
+next stop. The shining lands beyond seemed hardly worth a struggle
+against the dragon's brood with which the dreadful city was a-swarm.
+Nevertheless I kept my seat and was carried swiftly on.</p>
+
+<p>Soon the straggling farm-houses thickened into groups, the villages
+merged into suburban towns, and the train began to clatter through sooty
+freight yards filled with box cars and switching engines; at last, after
+crawling through tangled, thickening webs of steel, it plunged into a
+huge, dark and noisy shed and came to a halt and a few moments later I
+faced the hackmen of Chicago, as verdant a youth as these experienced
+pirates had ever made common cause against.</p>
+
+<p>I knew of them (by report), and was prepared for trouble, but their
+clanging cries, their cynical eyes, their clutching insolent hands were
+more terrifying than anything I had imagined. Their faces expressed
+something remorseless, inhuman and mocking. Their grins were like those
+of wolves.</p>
+
+<p>In my hand I carried an imitation leather valise, and as I passed, each
+of the drivers made a snatch at it, almost tearing it from my hands, but
+being strong as well as desperate, I cleared myself of them, and so,
+following the crowd, not daring to look to right or left, reached the
+street and crossed the bridge with a sigh of relief. So much was
+accomplished.</p>
+
+<p>Without knowing where I should go, I wandered on, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span>shifting my bag from
+hand to hand, till my mind recovered its balance. My bewilderment, my
+depth of distrust, was augmented by the roar and tumult of the crowd. I
+was like some wild animal with exceedingly sensitive ears. The waves of
+sound smothered me.</p>
+
+<p>At last, timidly approaching a policeman, I asked the way to the
+Atlantic Hotel.</p>
+
+<p>"Keep straight down the street five blocks and turn to the left," he
+said, and his kind voice filled me with a glow of gratitude.</p>
+
+<p>With ears benumbed and brain distraught, I threaded the rush, the clamor
+of Clark street and entered the door of the hotel, with such relief as a
+sailor must feel upon suddenly reaching safe harbor after having been
+buffeted on a wild and gloomy sea by a heavy northeast gale.</p>
+
+<p>It was an inconspicuous hotel of the "Farmer's Home" type, but I
+approached the desk with meek reluctance and explained, "I am expecting
+to meet my brother here. I'd like permission to set my bag down and
+wait."</p>
+
+<p>With bland impersonal courtesy the clerk replied, "Make yourself at
+home."</p>
+
+<p>Gratefully sinking into a chair by the window, I fell into study of the
+people streaming by, and a chilling sense of helplessness fell upon me.
+I realized my ignorance, my feebleness. As a minute bubble in this
+torrent of human life, with no friend in whom I could put trust, and
+with only a handful of silver between myself and the gray wolf, I lost
+confidence. The Boston trip seemed a foolish tempting of Providence and
+yet, scared as I was, I had no real intention of giving it up.</p>
+
+<p>My brother's first words as he entered the door, were gayly derisive.
+"Oh, see the whiskers!" he cried and his calm acceptance of my plan
+restored my own courage.</p>
+
+<p>Together we planned our itinerary. We were to see Niagara Falls, of
+course, but to spend the fourth of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span>July on Boston Common, was our true
+objective. "When our money is used up," I said, "we'll strike out into
+the country."</p>
+
+<p>To all this my brother agreed. Neither of us had the slightest fear of
+hunger in the country. It was the city that gave us pause.</p>
+
+<p>All the afternoon and evening we wandered about the streets (being very
+careful not to go too far from our hotel), counting the stories of the
+tall buildings, and absorbing the drama of the pavement. Returning now
+and again to our sanctuary in the hotel lobby we ruminated and rested
+our weary feet.</p>
+
+<p>Everything interested us. The business section so sordid to others was
+grandly terrifying to us. The self-absorption of the men, the calm
+glances of the women humbled our simple souls. Nothing was commonplace,
+nothing was ugly to us.</p>
+
+<p>We slept that night in a room at the extreme top of the hotel. It
+couldn't have been a first class accommodation, for the frame of the bed
+fell in the moment we got into it, but we made no complaint&mdash;we would
+not have had the clerk know of our mishap for twice our bill. We merely
+spread the mattress on the floor and slept till morning.</p>
+
+<p>Having secured our transportation we were eager to be off, but as our
+tickets were second class, and good only on certain trains, we waited.
+We did not even think of a sleeping car. We had never known anyone rich
+enough to occupy one. Grant and Edwin Booth probably did, and senators
+were ceremonially obliged to do so, but ordinary folks never looked
+forward to such luxury. Neither of us would have known what to do with a
+berth if it had been presented to us, and the thought of spending two
+dollars for a night's sleep made the cold chills run over us. We knew of
+no easier way to earn <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span>two dollars than to save them, therefore we rode
+in the smoker.</p>
+
+<p>Late that night as we were sitting stoically in our places, a brakeman
+came along and having sized us up for the innocents we were,
+good-naturedly said, "Boys, if you'll get up I'll fix your seats so's
+you can lie down and catch a little sleep."</p>
+
+<p>Silently, gratefully we watched him while he took up the cushions and
+turned them lengthwise, thus making a couch. To be sure, it was a very
+short and very hard bed but with the health and strength of nineteen and
+twenty-two, we curled up and slept the remainder of the night like
+soldiers resting on their guns. Pain, we understood, was an unavoidable
+accompaniment of travel.</p>
+
+<p>When morning dawned the train was running through Canada, and excitedly
+calling upon Franklin to rouse, I peered from the window, expecting to
+see a land entirely different from Wisconsin and Illinois. We were both
+somewhat disappointed to find nothing distinctive in either the land or
+its inhabitants. However, it was a foreign soil and we had seen it. So
+much of our exploration was accomplished.</p>
+
+<p>It was three o'clock in the afternoon when we came in sight of the
+suspension bridge and Niagara Falls. I suppose it would be impossible
+for anyone now to feel the same profound interest in any natural
+phenomenon whatsoever. We believed that we were approaching the most
+stupendous natural wonder in all the world, and we could scarcely credit
+the marvel of our good fortune.</p>
+
+<p>All our lives we had heard of this colossal cataract. Our school readers
+contained stately poems and philosophical dissertations concerning it.
+Gough, the great orator, had pointed out the likeness of its resistless
+torrent to the habit of using spirituous liquors. The <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span>newspapers still
+printed descriptions of its splendor and no foreigner (so we understood)
+ever came to these shores without visiting and bowing humbly before the
+voice of its waters.&mdash;And to think that we, poor prairie boys, were soon
+to stand upon the illustrious brink of that dread chasm and listen to
+its mighty song was wonderful, incredible, benumbing!</p>
+
+<p>Alighting at the squalid little station on the American side, we went to
+the cheapest hotel our keen eyes could discover, and leaving our
+valises, we struck out immediately toward the towering white column of
+mist which could be seen rising like a ghostly banner behind the trees.
+We were like those who first discover a continent.</p>
+
+<p>As we crept nearer, the shuddering roar deepened, and our awe, our
+admiration, our patriotism deepened with it, and when at last we leaned
+against the rail and looked across the tossing spread of river swiftly
+sweeping to its fall, we held our breaths in wonder. It met our
+expectations.</p>
+
+<p>Of course we went below and spent two of our hard-earned dollars in
+order to be taken behind the falls. We were smothered with spray and
+forced to cling frenziedly to the hands of our guide, but it was a part
+of our duty, and we did it. No one could rob us of the glory of having
+adventured so far.</p>
+
+<p>That night we resumed our seats in the smoking car, and pushed on toward
+Boston in patiently-endured discomfort. Early the following morning we
+crossed the Hudson, and as the Berkshire hills began to loom against the
+dawn, I asked the brakeman, with much emotion, "Have we reached the
+Massachusetts line?" "We have," he said, and by pressing my nose against
+the glass and shading my face with my hands I was able to note the
+passing landscape.</p>
+
+<p>Little could be seen other than a tumbled, stormy <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span>sky with wooded
+heights dimly outlined against it, but I had all the emotions of a
+pilgrim entering upon some storied oriental vale. Massachusetts to me
+meant Whittier and Hawthorne and Wendell Phillips and Daniel Webster. It
+was the cradle of our liberty, the home of literature, the province of
+art&mdash;and it contained Boston!</p>
+
+<p>As the sun rose, both of us sat with eyes fixed upon the scenery,
+observant of every feature. It was all so strange, yet familiar! Barns
+with long, sloping roofs stood with their backs against the hillsides,
+precisely as in the illustrations to Hawthorne's stories, and Whittier's
+poems. The farm-houses, old and weather-beaten and guarded by giant
+elms, looked as if they might have sheltered Emerson and Lowell. The
+little villages with narrow streets lined with queer brick-walled houses
+(their sides to the gutter) reminded us of the pictures in Ben
+Franklin's <i>Autobiography</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Everything was old, delightfully old. Nothing was new.&mdash;Most of the
+people we saw were old. The men working in the fields were bent and
+gray, scarcely a child appeared, though elderly women abounded. (This
+was thirty-five years ago, before the Canadians and Italians had begun
+to swarm). Everywhere we detected signs of the historical, the
+traditional, the Yankee. The names of the stations rang in our ears like
+bells, <i>Lexington</i>, <i>Concord</i>, <i>Cambridge</i>, <i>Charlestown</i>, and&mdash;at last
+<i>Boston</i>!</p>
+
+<p>What a strange, new world this ancient city was to us, as we issued from
+the old Hoosac Tunnel station! The intersection of every street was a
+bit of history. The houses standing sidewise to the gutter, the narrow,
+ledge-like pavements, the awkward two-wheeled drays and carts, the men
+selling lobsters on the corner, the newsboys with their "papahs," the
+faces of the women <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span>so thin and pale, the men, neat, dapper, small, many
+of them walking with finicky precision as though treading on
+eggs,&mdash;everything had a Yankee tang, a special quality, and then, the
+noise! We had thought Chicago noisy, and so it was, but here the clamor
+was high-keyed, deafening for the reason that the rain-washed streets
+were paved with cobble stones over which enormous carts bumped and
+clattered with resounding riot.</p>
+
+<p>Bewildered,&mdash;with eyes and ears alert, we toiled up Haymarket Square
+shoulder to shoulder, seeking the Common. Of course we carried our
+hand-bags&mdash;(the railway had no parcel rooms in those days, or if it had
+we didn't know it) clinging to them like ants to their eggs and so
+slowly explored Tremont Street. Cornhill entranced us with its amazing
+curve. We passed the Granary Burying Ground and King's Chapel with awe,
+and so came to rest at last on the upper end of the Common! We had
+reached the goal of our long pilgrimage.</p>
+
+<p>To tell the truth, we were a little disappointed in our first view of
+it. It was much smaller than we had imagined it to be and the pond was
+<span class="smcap">ONLY</span> a pond, but the trees were all that father had declared
+them to be. We had known broad prairies and splendid primitive
+woodlands&mdash;but these elms dated back to the days of Washington, and were
+to be reverenced along with the State House and Bunker Hill.</p>
+
+<p>We spent considerable time there on that friendly bench, resting in the
+shadows of the elms, and while sitting there, we ate our lunch, and
+watched the traffic of Tremont Street, in perfect content till I
+remembered that the night was coming on, and that we had no place to
+sleep.</p>
+
+<p>Approaching a policeman I inquired the way to a boarding house.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span>The officer who chanced to be a good-natured Irishman, with a courtesy
+almost oppressive, minutely pointed the way to a house on Essex Street.
+Think of it&mdash;Essex Street! It sounded like Shakespeare and Merrie
+England!</p>
+
+<p>Following his direction, we found ourselves in the door of a small house
+on a narrow alley at the left of the Common. The landlady, a kindly
+soul, took our measure at once and gave us a room just off her little
+parlor, and as we had not slept, normally, for three nights, we decided
+to go at once to bed. It was about five o'clock, one of the noisiest
+hours of a noisy street, but we fell almost instantly into the kind of
+slumber in which time and tumult do not count.</p>
+
+<p>When I awoke, startled and bewildered, the sounds of screaming children,
+roaring, jarring drays, and the clatter of falling iron filled the room.
+At first I imagined this to be the business of the morning, but as I
+looked out of the window I perceived that it was sunset! "Wake up!" I
+called to Franklin. "<i>It's the next day!</i>" "We've slept twenty-four
+hours!&mdash;What will the landlady think of us?"</p>
+
+<p>Frank did not reply. He was still very sleepy, but he dressed, and with
+valise in hand dazedly followed me into the sitting room. The woman of
+the house was serving supper to her little family. To her I said,
+"You've been very kind to let us sleep all this time. We were very
+tired."</p>
+
+<p>"All this time?" she exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't it the next day?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>Then she laughed, and her husband laughed, doubling himself into a knot
+of merriment. "Oh, but that's rich!" said he. "You've been asleep
+exactly an hour and a quarter," he added. "How long did you <i>think</i>
+you'd slept&mdash;two days?"</p>
+
+<p>Sheepishly confessing that I thought we had, I turned <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span>back to bed, and
+claimed ten hours more of delicious rest.</p>
+
+<p>All "the next day" we spent in seeing Bunker Hill, Faneuil Hall, the old
+North Church, King's Chapel, Longfellow's home, the Washington Elm, and
+the Navy Yard.&mdash;It was all glorious but a panic seized us as we found
+our money slipping away from us, and late in the afternoon we purchased
+tickets for Concord, and fled the roaring and turbulent capital.</p>
+
+<p>We had seen the best of it anyway. We had tasted the ocean and found it
+really salt, and listened to "the sailors with bearded lips" on the
+wharves where the ships rocked idly on the tide,&mdash;The tide! Yes, that
+most inexplicable wonder of all we had proved. We had watched it come in
+at the Charles River Bridge, mysterious as the winds. We knew it was so.</p>
+
+<p>Why Concord, do you ask? Well, because Hawthorne had lived there, and
+because the region was redolent of Emerson and Thoreau, and I am glad to
+record that upon reaching it of a perfect summer evening, we found the
+lovely old village all that it had been pictured by the poets. The wide
+and beautiful meadows, the stone walls, the slow stream, the bridge and
+the statue of the "Minute Man" guarding the famous battlefield, the gray
+old Manse where Hawthorne lived, the cemetery of Sleepy Hollow, the
+grave of Emerson&mdash;all these historic and charming places enriched and
+inspired us. This land, so mellowed, so harmonious, so significant,
+seemed hardly real. It was a vision.</p>
+
+<p>We rounded out our day by getting lodgings in the quaint old Wright's
+tavern which stood (and still stands) at the forks of the road, a
+building whose date painted on its chimney showed that it was nearly two
+hundred years old! I have since walked Carnarvan's famous walls, and sat
+in the circus at Nismes&mdash;but I have never <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span>had a deeper thrill of
+historic emotion than when I studied the beamed ceiling of that little
+dining room. Our pure joy in its age amused our landlord greatly.</p>
+
+<p>Being down to our last dollar, we struck out into the country next
+morning, for the purpose of finding work upon a farm but met with very
+little encouragement. Most of the fields were harvested and those that
+were not were well supplied with "hands." Once we entered a beautiful
+country place where the proprietor himself (a man of leisure, a type we
+had never before seen) interrogated us with quizzical humor, and at last
+sent us to his foreman with honest desire to make use of us. But the
+foreman had nothing to give, and so we went on.</p>
+
+<p>All day we loitered along beautiful wood roads, passing wonderful old
+homesteads gray and mossy, sheltered by trees that were almost human in
+the clasp of their protecting arms. We paused beside bright streams, and
+drank at mossy wells operated by rude and ancient sweeps, contrivances
+which we had seen only in pictures. It was all beautiful, but we got no
+work. The next day, having spent our last cent in railway tickets, we
+rode to Ayer Junction, where we left our trunks in care of the baggage
+man and resumed our tramping.</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br /><a name="XXIII" id="XXIII"></a>
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CHAPTER XXIII</h2>
+
+<h2>Coasting Down Mt. Washington</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>In spite of all our anxiety, we enjoyed this search for work. The
+farmers were all so comically inquisitive. A few of them took us for
+what we were, students out on a vacation. Others though kind enough,
+seemed lacking in hospitality, from the western point of view, and some
+were openly suspicious&mdash;but the roads, the roads! In the west
+thoroughfares ran on section lines and were defined by wire fences. Here
+they curved like Indian trails following bright streams, and the stone
+walls which bordered them were festooned with vines as in a garden.</p>
+
+<p>That night we lodged in the home of an old farmer, an octogenarian who
+had never in all his life been twenty miles from his farm. He had never
+seen Boston, or Portland, but he had been twice to Nashua, returning,
+however, in time for supper. He, as well as his wife (dear simple soul),
+looked upon us as next door to educated Indians and entertained us in a
+flutter of excited hospitality.</p>
+
+<p>We told them of Dakota, of the prairies, describing the wonderful farm
+machinery, and boasting of the marvellous crops our father had raised in
+Iowa, and the old people listened in delighted amaze.</p>
+
+<p>They put us to bed at last in a queer high-posted, corded bedstead and I
+had a feeling that we were taking part in a Colonial play. It was like
+living a story book. We stared at each other in a stupor of
+satisfaction. We <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span>had never hoped for such luck. To be thrust back
+abruptly into the very life of our forebears was magical, and the
+excitement and delight of it kept us whispering together long after we
+should have been asleep.</p>
+
+<p>This was thirty years ago, and those kindly old souls have long since
+returned to dust, but their big four-posted bed is doing service, no
+doubt, in the home of some rich collector. I have forgotten their names
+but they shall live here in my book as long as its print shall endure.</p>
+
+<p>They seemed sorry to have us go next morning, but as they had nothing
+for us to do, they could only say, "Good-bye, give our love to Jane, if
+you see her, she lives in Illinois." Illinois and Dakota were all the
+same to them!</p>
+
+<p>Again we started forth along the graceful, irregular, elm-shaded roads,
+which intersected the land in every direction, perfectly happy except
+when we remembered our empty pockets. We could not get accustomed to the
+trees and the beauty of the vineclad stone walls. The lanes made
+<i>pictures</i> all the time. So did the apple trees and the elms and the
+bending streams.</p>
+
+<p>About noon of this day we came to a farm of very considerable size and
+fairly level, on which the hay remained uncut. "Here's our chance," I
+said to my brother, and going in, boldly accosted the farmer, a youngish
+man with a bright and pleasant face. "Do you want some skilled help?" I
+called out.</p>
+
+<p>The farmer admitted that he did, but eyed us as if jokers. Evidently we
+did not look precisely like workmen to him, but I jolted him by saying,
+"We are Iowa schoolboys out for a vacation. We were raised on a farm,
+and know all about haying. If you'll give us a chance we'll make you
+think you don't know much about harvesting hay."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span>This amused him. "Come in," he said, "and after dinner we'll see about
+it."</p>
+
+<p>At dinner we laid ourselves out to impress our host. We told him of the
+mile-wide fields of the west, and enlarged upon the stoneless prairies
+of Dakota. We described the broadcast seeders they used in Minnesota and
+bragged of the amount of hay we could put up, and both of us professed a
+contempt for two-wheeled carts. In the end we reduced our prospective
+employer to humbleness. He consulted his wife a moment and then said,
+"All right, boys, you may take hold."</p>
+
+<p>We stayed with him two weeks and enjoyed every moment of our stay.</p>
+
+<p>"Our expedition is successful," I wrote to my parents.</p>
+
+<p>On Sundays we picked berries or went fishing or tumbled about the lawn.
+It was all very beautiful and delightfully secure, so that when the time
+came to part with our pleasant young boss and his bright and cheery
+wife, we were as sorry as they.</p>
+
+<p>"We must move on," I insisted. "There are other things to see."</p>
+
+<p>After a short stay in Portland we took the train for Bethel, eager to
+visit the town which our father had described so many times. We had
+resolved to climb the hills on which he had gathered berries and sit on
+the "Overset" from which he had gazed upon the landscape. We felt
+indeed, a certain keen regret that he could not be with us.</p>
+
+<p>At Locks Mills, we met his old playmates, Dennis and Abner Herrick, men
+bent of form and dim of eye, gnarled and knotted by their battle with
+the rocks and barren hillsides, and to them we, confident lads, with our
+tales of smooth and level plow-lands, must have seemed like denizens
+from some farmers' paradise,&mdash;or perhaps they thought us fictionists. I
+certainly put a powerful <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span>emphasis on the pleasant side of western life
+at that time.</p>
+
+<p>Dennis especially looked upon us with amazement, almost with awe. To
+think that we, unaided and alone, had wandered so far and dared so much,
+while he, in all his life, had not been able to visit Boston, was
+bewildering. This static condition of the population was a constant
+source of wonder to us. How could people stay all their lives in one
+place? Must be something the matter with them.&mdash;Their ox-teams and
+tipcarts amused us, their stony fields appalled us, their restricted,
+parsimonious lives saddened us, and so, not wishing to be a burden, we
+decided to cut our stay short.</p>
+
+<p>On the afternoon of our last day, Abner took us on a tramp over the
+country, pointing out the paths "where Dick and I played," tracing the
+lines of the old farm, which had long since been given over to pasture,
+and so to the trout brook and home. In return for our "keep" we sang
+that night, and told stories of the west, and our hosts seemed pleased
+with the exchange. Shouldering our faithful "grips" next morning, we
+started for the railway and took the train for Gorham.</p>
+
+<p>Each mile brought us nearer the climax of our trip. We of the plains had
+longed and dreamed of the peaks. To us the White Mountains were at once
+the crowning wonder and chief peril of our expedition. They were to be
+in a very real sense the test of our courage. The iron crest of Mount
+Washington allured us as a light-house lures sea-birds.</p>
+
+<p>Leaving Gorham on foot, and carrying our inseparable valises, we started
+westward along the road leading to the peaks, expecting to get lodging
+at some farm-house, but as we stood aside to let gay coaches pass laden
+with glittering women and haughty men, we began to feel abused.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span>We were indeed, quaint objects. Each of us wore a long yellow linen
+"duster" and each bore a valise on a stick, as an Irishman carries a
+bundle. We feared neither wind nor rain, but wealth and coaches
+oppressed us.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless we trudged cheerily along, drinking at the beautiful
+springs beside the road, plucking blackberries for refreshment, lifting
+our eyes often to the snow-flecked peaks to the west. At noon we stopped
+at a small cottage to get some milk, and there again met a pathetic
+lonely old couple. The woman was at least eighty, and very crusty with
+her visitors, till I began to pet the enormous maltese cat which came
+purring to our feet. "What a magnificent animal!" I said to Frank.</p>
+
+<p>This softened the old woman's heart. She not only gave us bread and milk
+but sat down to gossip with us while we ate. She, too, had relatives
+"out there, somewhere in Iowa" and would hardly let us go, so eager was
+she to know all about her people. "Surely you must have met them."</p>
+
+<p>As we neared the foot of the great peak we came upon hotels of all sizes
+but I had not the slightest notion of staying even at the smallest.
+Having walked twelve miles to the foot of the mountain we now decided to
+set out for the top, still carrying those precious bags upon our
+shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>What we expected to do after we got to the summit, I cannot say, for we
+knew nothing of conditions there and were too tired to imagine&mdash;we just
+kept climbing, sturdily, doggedly, breathing heavily, more with
+excitement than with labor, for it seemed that we were approaching the
+moon,&mdash;so bleak and high the roadway ran. I had miscalculated sadly. It
+had looked only a couple of hours' brisk walk from the hotel, but the
+way <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span>lengthened out toward the last in a most disheartening fashion.</p>
+
+<p>"Where will we stay?" queried Frank.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, we'll find a place somewhere," I answered, but I was far from being
+as confident as I sounded.</p>
+
+<p>We had been told that it cost five dollars for a night's lodging at the
+hotel, but I entertained some vague notion that other and cheaper places
+offered. Perhaps I thought that a little village on the summit presented
+boarding houses.</p>
+
+<p>"No matter, we're in for it now," I stoutly said. "We'll find a
+place&mdash;we've got to find a place."</p>
+
+<p>It grew cold as we rose, surprisingly, dishearteningly cold and we both
+realized that to sleep in the open would be to freeze. As the night
+fell, our clothing, wet with perspiration, became almost as clammy as
+sheet iron, and we shivered with weakness as well as with frost. The
+world became each moment more barren, more wind-swept and Frank was
+almost at his last gasp.</p>
+
+<p>It was long after dark, and we were both trembling with fatigue and
+hollow with hunger as we came opposite a big barn just at the top of the
+trail. The door of this shelter stood invitingly open, and creeping into
+an empty stall we went to sleep on the straw like a couple of homeless
+dogs. We did not for a moment think of going to the hotel which loomed
+like a palace a few rods further on.</p>
+
+<p>A couple of hours later I was awakened by the crunch of a boot upon my
+ankle, followed by an oath of surprise. The stage-driver, coming in from
+his last trip, was looking down upon me. I could not see his face, but I
+did note the bright eyes and pricking ears of a noble gray horse
+standing just behind his master and champing his bit with impatience.</p>
+
+<p>Sleepy, scared and bewildered, I presented my plea with such eloquence
+that the man put his team in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span>another stall and left us to our straw.
+"But you get out o' here before the boss sees you," said he, "or
+there'll be trouble."</p>
+
+<p>"We'll get out before daybreak," I replied heartily.</p>
+
+<p>When I next awoke it was dawn, and my body was so stiff I could hardly
+move. We had slept cold and our muscles resented it. However, we hurried
+from the barn. Once safely out of reach of the "boss" we began to leap
+and dance and shout to the sun as it rose out of the mist, for this was
+precisely what we had come two thousand miles to see&mdash;sunrise on Mount
+Washington! It chanced, gloriously, that the valleys were filled with a
+misty sea, breaking soundlessly at our feet and we forgot cold, hunger,
+poverty, in the wonder of being "above the clouds!"</p>
+
+<p>In course of time our stomachs moderated our transports over the view
+and I persuaded my brother (who was younger and more delicate in
+appearance) to approach the kitchen and purchase a handout. Frank being
+harshly persuaded by his own need, ventured forth and soon came back
+with several slices of bread and butter and part of a cold chicken,
+which made the day perfectly satisfactory, and in high spirits we
+started to descend the western slope of the mountain.</p>
+
+<p>Here we performed the incredible. Our muscles were so sore and weak that
+as we attempted to walk down the railway track, our knees refused to
+bear our weight, and while creeping over the ties, groaning and sighing
+with pain, a bright idea suddenly irradiated my mind. As I studied the
+iron groove which contained the cogs in the middle of the track, I
+perceived that its edges were raised a little above the level of the
+rails and covered with oil. It occurred to me that it might be possible
+to slide down this track on a plank&mdash;if only I had a plank!</p>
+
+<p>I looked to the right. A miracle! There in the ditch <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span>lay a plank of
+exactly the right dimensions. I seized it, I placed it cross-wise of the
+rails. "All aboard," I called. Frank obeyed. I took my place at the
+other end, and so with our valises between us, we began to slip slowly,
+smoothly, and with joyous ease down the shining track! Hoopla! We had
+taken wing!</p>
+
+<p>We had solved our problem. The experiment was successful. Laughing and
+shouting with exultation, we swept on. We had but to touch every other
+tie with our heels in order to control our speed, so we coasted,
+smoothly, genially.</p>
+
+<p>On we went, mile after mile, slipping down the valley into the vivid
+sunlight, our eyes on the glorious scenery about us, down, down like a
+swooping bird. Once we passed above some workmen, who looked up in
+open-mouthed amazement, and cursed us in voices which seemed far and
+faint and futile. A little later the superintendent of the water tank
+warningly shouted, "<i>Stop that! Get Off!</i>" but we only laughed at him
+and swept on, out over a high trestle, where none could follow.</p>
+
+<p>At times our heads grew dizzy with the flicker and glitter of the rocks
+beneath us and as we rounded dangerous curves of the track, or descended
+swift slides with almost uncontrollable rapidity, I had some doubts, but
+we kept our wits, remained upon the rails, and at last spun round the
+final bend and came to a halt upon a level stretch of track, just above
+the little station.</p>
+
+<p>There, kicking aside our faithful plank, we took up our valises and with
+trembling knees and a sense of triumph set off down the valley of the
+wild Amonoosuc.</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br /><a name="XXIV" id="XXIV"></a>
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CHAPTER XXIV</h2>
+
+<h2>Tramping, New York, Washington, and Chicago</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>For two days we followed the Amonoosuc (which is a lovely stream),
+tramping along exquisite winding roads, loitering by sunny ripples or
+dreaming in the shadow of magnificent elms. It was all very, very
+beautiful to us of the level lands of Iowa and Dakota. These brooks
+rushing over their rocky beds, these stately trees and these bleak
+mountain-tops looming behind us, all glowed with the high splendor, of
+which we had dreamed.</p>
+
+<p>At noon we called at a farm-house to get something to eat and at night
+we paid for lodging in a rude tavern beside the way, and so at last
+reached the railway and the Connecticut River. Here we gained our trunks
+(which had been sent round by express) and as the country seemed poor
+and the farms barren, we spent nearly all our money in riding down the
+railway fifty or sixty miles. At some small town (I forget the name), we
+again took to the winding roads, looking for a job.</p>
+
+<p>Jobs, it turned out, were exceedingly hard to get. The haying was over,
+the oats mainly in shock, and the people on the highway suspicious and
+inhospitable. As we plodded along, our dimes melting away, hunger came,
+at last, to be a grim reality. We looked less and less like college boys
+and more and more like tramps, and the householders began to treat us
+with hostile contempt.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span>No doubt these farmers, much beset with tramps, had reasonable excuse
+for their inhospitable ways, but to us it was all bitter and uncalled
+for. I knew that cities were filled with robbers, brigands, burglars and
+pirates, but I had held (up to this time), the belief that the country,
+though rude and barren of luxury was nevertheless a place of plenty
+where no man need suffer hunger.</p>
+
+<p>Frank, being younger and less hardy than I, became clean disheartened,
+and upon me fell the responsibility and burden of the campaign. I
+certainly was to blame for our predicament.</p>
+
+<p>We came finally to the point of calling at every house where any crops
+lay ungathered, desperately in hope of securing something to do. At last
+there came a time when we no longer had money for a bed, and were forced
+to sleep wherever we could find covert. One night we couched on the
+floor of an old school-house, the next we crawled into an oat-shock and
+covered ourselves with straw. Let those who have never slept out on the
+ground through an August night say that it is impossible that one should
+be cold! During all the early warm part of the night a family of skunks
+rustled about us, and toward morning we both woke because of the chill.</p>
+
+<p>On the third night we secured the blessed opportunity of nesting in a
+farmer's granary. All humor had gone out of our expedition. Each day the
+world grew blacker, and the men of the Connecticut Valley more cruel and
+relentless. We both came to understand (not to the full, but in a large
+measure) the bitter rebellion of the tramp. To plod on and on into the
+dusk, rejected of comfortable folk, to couch at last with pole-cats in a
+shock of grain is a liberal education in sociology.</p>
+
+<p>On the fourth day we came upon an old farmer who had a few acres of
+badly tangled oats which he wished gathered and bound. He was a large,
+loose-jointed, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span>good-natured sloven who looked at me with stinging,
+penetrating stare, while I explained that we were students on a vacation
+tramping and in need of money. He seemed not particularly interested
+till Frank said with tragic bitterness, "If we ever get back to Dakota
+we'll never even look this way again." This interested the man. He said,
+"Turn in and cut them oats," and we gladly buckled to our job.</p>
+
+<p>Our spirits rose with the instant resiliency of youth, but what a task
+that reaping proved to be! The grain, tangled and flattened close to the
+ground, had to be caught up in one hand and cut with the old-fashioned
+reaping-hook, the kind they used in Egypt five thousand years ago&mdash;a
+thin crescent of steel with a straight handle, and as we bowed ourselves
+to the ground to clutch and clip the grain, we nearly broke in two
+pieces. It was hot at mid-day and the sun fell upon our bended shoulders
+with amazing power, but we toiled on, glad of the opportunity to earn a
+dollar. "Every cent means escape from this sad country," I repeated.</p>
+
+<p>We stayed some days with this reticent gardener, sleeping in the attic
+above his kitchen like two scullions, uttering no complaint till we had
+earned seven dollars apiece; then we said, "Good luck," and bought
+tickets for Greenfield, Massachusetts. We chose this spot for the reason
+that a great railway alluringly crossed the river at that place. We
+seemed in better situation to get west from such a point.</p>
+
+<p>Greenfield was so like Rockford (the western town in which I had worked
+as a carpenter), that I at once purchased a few tools and within a few
+hours secured work shingling a house on the edge of the town, while my
+brother took a hand at harvesting worms from a field of tobacco near by.</p>
+
+<p>The builder, a tall man, bent and grizzled, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span>complimented me warmly at
+the close of my second day, and said, "You may consider yourself hired
+for as long as you please to stay. You're a rattler." No compliment
+since has given me more pleasure than this. A few days later he invited
+both of us to live at his home. We accepted and were at once established
+in most comfortable quarters.</p>
+
+<p>Tranquil days followed. The country was very attractive, and on Sundays
+we walked the neighboring lanes, or climbed the high hills, or visited
+the quaint and lonely farm-houses round about, feeling more akin each
+week to the life of the valley, but we had no intention of remaining
+beyond a certain time. Great rivers called and cities allured. New York
+was still to be explored and to return to the west before winter set in
+was our plan.</p>
+
+<p>At last the time came when we thought it safe to start toward Albany and
+with grateful words of thanks to the carpenter and his wife, we set
+forth upon our travels. Our courage was again at topmost gauge. My
+success with the saw had given me confidence. I was no longer afraid of
+towns, and in a glow of high resolution and with thirty dollars in my
+pocket, I planned to invade New York which was to me the wickedest and
+the most sorrowful as well as the most splendid city in the world.</p>
+
+<p>Doubtless the true story of how I entered Manhattan will endanger my
+social position, but as an unflinching realist, I must begin by
+acknowledging that I left the Hudson River boat carrying my own luggage.
+I shudder to think what we two boys must have looked like as we set off,
+side by side, prospecting for Union Square and the Bowery. Broadway, we
+knew, was the main street and Union Square the center of the island,
+therefore we turned north and paced along the pavement, still clamped to
+our everlasting bags.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span>Broadway was not then the deep canon that it is today. It was walled by
+low shops of red brick&mdash;in fact, the whole city seemed low as compared
+with the high buildings of Chicago, nevertheless I was keenly worried
+over the question of housing.</p>
+
+<p>Food was easy. We could purchase a doughnut and a cup of coffee almost
+anywhere, or we could eat a sandwich in the park, but the matter of a
+bed, the business of sleeping in a maelstrom like New York was something
+more than serious&mdash;it was dangerous. Frank, naturally of a more prodigal
+nature, was all for going to the Broadway Hotel. "It's only for one
+night," said he. He always was rather careless of the future!</p>
+
+<p>I reminded him that we still had Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington
+to "do" and every cent must be husbanded&mdash;so we moved along toward Union
+Square with the question of a hotel still undecided, our arms aching
+with fatigue. "If only we could get rid of these awful bags," moaned
+Frank.</p>
+
+<p>To us Broadway was a storm, a cyclone, an abnormal unholy congestion of
+human souls. The friction of feet on the pavement was like the hissing
+of waves on the beach. The passing of trucks jarred upon our ears like
+the sevenfold thunders of Patmos, but we kept on, shoulder to shoulder,
+watchful, alert, till we reached Union Square, where with sighs of deep
+relief we sank upon the benches along with the other "rubes" and
+"jay-hawkers" lolling in sweet repose with weary soles laxly turned to
+the kindly indiscriminating breeze.</p>
+
+<p>The evening was mild, the scene enthralling, and we would have been
+perfectly happy but for the deeply disturbing question of a bed.
+Franklin, resting upon my resourceful management, made no motion even
+when the sun sank just about where that Venetian fronted building now
+stands, but whilst the insolent, teeming populace <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span>in clattering carts
+and drays charged round our peaceful sylvan haven (each driver plying
+the lash with the fierce aspect of a Roman charioteer) I rose to a
+desperate mission.</p>
+
+<p>With a courage born of need I led the way straight toward the basement
+portal of a small brown hotel on Fourth Avenue, and was startled almost
+into flight to find myself in a bar-room. Not knowing precisely how to
+retreat, I faltered out, "Have you a bed for us?"</p>
+
+<p>It is probable that the landlord, a huge foreign-looking man understood
+our timidity&mdash;at any rate, he smiled beneath his black mustache and
+directed a clerk to show us a room.</p>
+
+<p>In charge of this man, a slim youth, with a very bad complexion, we
+climbed a narrow stairway (which grew geometrically shabbier as we rose)
+until, at last, we came into a room so near the roof that it could
+afford only half-windows&mdash;but as we were getting the chamber at
+half-price we could not complain.</p>
+
+<p>No sooner had the porter left us than we both stretched out on the bed,
+in such relief and ecstasy of returning confidence as only weary youth
+and honest poverty can know.&mdash;It was heavenly sweet, this sense of
+safety in the heart of a tempest of human passion but as we rested, our
+hunger to explore returned. "Time is passing. We shall probably never
+see New York again," I argued, "and besides our bags are now safely
+<i>cached</i>. Let's go out and see how the city looks by night."</p>
+
+<p>To this Franklin agreed, and forth we went into the Square, rejoicing in
+our freedom from those accursed bags.</p>
+
+<p>Here for the first time, I observed the electric light shadows, so
+clear-cut, so marvellous. The park was lighted by several sputtering,
+sizzling arc-lamps, and their rays striking down through the trees,
+flung upon the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span>pavement a wavering, exquisite tracery of sharply
+defined, purple-black leaves and branches. This was, indeed, an entirely
+new effect in our old world and to my mind its wonder surpassed nature.
+It was as if I had suddenly been translated to some realm of magic art.</p>
+
+<p>Where we dined I cannot say, probably we ate a doughnut at some lunch
+counter but I am glad to remember that we got as far as Madison
+Square&mdash;which was like discovering another and still more enchanting
+island of romance. To us the Fifth Avenue Hotel was a great and historic
+building, for in it Grant and Sherman and Lincoln and Greeley had often
+registered.</p>
+
+<p>Ah, what a night that was! I did not expend a dollar, not even a
+quarter, but I would give half of all I now own for the sensitive heart,
+the absorbent brain I then possessed. Each form, each shadow was a
+miracle. Romance and terror and delight peopled every dusky side street.</p>
+
+<p>Submerged in the wondrous, drenched with the spray of this measureless
+ocean of human life, we wandered on and on till overborne nature called
+a halt. It was ten o'clock and prudence as well as weariness advised
+retreat. Decisively, yet with a feeling that we would never again glow
+beneath the lights of this radiant city, I led the way back to our
+half-rate bed in the Union Square Hungarian hotel.</p>
+
+<p>It is worth recording that on reaching our room, we opened our small
+window and leaning out, gazed away over the park, what time the tumult
+and the thunder and the shouting died into a low, continuous roar. The
+poetry and the majesty of the city lost nothing of its power under the
+moon.</p>
+
+<p>Although I did not shake my fist over the town and vow to return and
+conquer it (as penniless writers in fiction generally do) I bowed down
+before its power. "It's <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span>too much for us," I told my brother. "Two
+millions of people&mdash;think of it&mdash;of course London is larger, but then
+London is so far off."</p>
+
+<p>Sleep for us both was but a moment's forgetfulness. At one moment it was
+night and at another it was morning. We were awakened by the voice of
+the pavement, that sound which Whitman calls "the loud, proud, restive
+bass of the streets," and again I leaned forth to listen to the
+widespread crescendo roar of the deepening traffic. The air being cool
+and clear, the pedestrians stepped out with brisker, braver movement,
+and we, too, rose eager to meet the day at the gate of the town.</p>
+
+<p>All day we tramped, absorbing everything that went on in the open.
+Having explored the park, viewed the obelisk and visited the zoo, we
+wandered up and down Broadway, mooning upon the life of the streets.
+Curbstone fights, police manoeuvres, shop-window comedies, building
+operations&mdash;everything we saw instructed us. We soaked ourselves in the
+turbulent rivers of the town with a feeling that we should never see
+them again.</p>
+
+<p>We had intended to stay two days but a tragic encounter with a
+restaurant bandit so embittered and alarmed us that we fled New York (as
+we supposed), forever. At one o'clock, being hungry, very hungry, we
+began to look for a cheap eating house, and somewhere in University
+Place we came upon a restaurant which looked humble enough to afford a
+twenty-five cent dinner (which was our limit of extravagance), and so,
+timidly, we ventured in.</p>
+
+<p>A foreign-looking waiter greeted us, and led us to one of a number of
+very small tables covered with linen which impressed even Frank's
+uncritical eyes with its mussiness. With a feeling of having
+inadvertently entered a den of thieves, I wished myself out of it but
+lacked the courage to rise and when the man returned and placed <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span>upon
+the table two glasses and a strange looking bottle with a metal stopper
+which had a kind of lever at the side, Frank said, "Hi! Good thing!&mdash;I'm
+thirsty." Quite against my judgment he fooled around with the lever till
+he succeeded in helping himself to some of the liquid with which the
+bottle was filled. It was soda water and he drank heartily, although I
+was sure it would be extra on the bill.</p>
+
+<p>The food came on slowly, by fits and starts, and the dishes were all so
+cold and queer of taste that even Frank complained. But we ate with a
+terrifying premonition of trouble. "This meal will cost us at least
+thirty-five cents each!" I said.</p>
+
+<p>"No matter, it's an experience," my spendthrift brother retorted.</p>
+
+<p>At last when the limp lettuce, the amazing cheese and the bitter coffee
+were all consumed, I asked the soiled, outlandish waiter the price.</p>
+
+<p>In reply he pencilled on a slip as though we were deaf, and finally laid
+the completed bill face down beside my plate. I turned it over and grew
+pale.</p>
+
+<p>It totalled <i>one dollar and twenty cents!</i></p>
+
+<p>I felt weak and cold as if I had been suddenly poisoned. I trembled,
+then grew hot with indignation. "Sixty cents apiece!" I gasped. "Didn't
+I warn you?"</p>
+
+<p>Frank was still in reckless mood. "Well, this is the only time we have
+to do it. They won't catch us here again."</p>
+
+<p>I paid the bill and hurried out, bitterly exclaiming, "No more New York
+for me. I will not stay in such a robbers' den another night."</p>
+
+<p>And I didn't. At sunset we crossed the ferry and took the train for New
+Brunswick, New Jersey. Why we selected this town I cannot say, but I
+think it must have been because it was half-way to Philadelphia&mdash;and
+that <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span>we were just about as scared of Philadelphia as we were resentful
+of New York.</p>
+
+<p>After a night battle with New Jersey mosquitoes and certain plantigrade
+bed-fellows native to cheap hotels, we passed on to Philadelphia and to
+Baltimore, and at sunset of the same day reached Washington, the storied
+capital of the nation.</p>
+
+<p>Everything we saw here was deeply significant, national, rousing our
+patriotism. We were at once and profoundly interested by the negro life
+which flowered here in the free air of the District as under an African
+sun; the newsboys, the bootblacks, the muledrivers, all amused us. We
+spent that first night in Washington in a little lodging house just at
+the corner of the Capitol grounds where beds were offered for
+twenty-five cents. It was a dreadful place, but we slept without waking.
+It took a large odor, a sharp lance to keep either of us awake in those
+days.</p>
+
+<p>Tramping busily all the next day, we climbed everything that could be
+climbed. We visited the Capitol, the war building, the Treasury and the
+White House grounds. We toiled through all the museums, working harder
+than we had ever worked upon the farm, till Frank cried out for mercy. I
+was inexorable. "Our money is getting low. We must be very saving of
+carfare," I insisted. "We must see all we can. We'll never be here
+again."</p>
+
+<p>Once more we slept (among the negroes in a bare little lodging house),
+and on the third day, brimming with impressions, boarded the Chicago
+express and began our glorious, our exultant return over the
+Alleghanies, toward the west.</p>
+
+<p>It was with a feeling of joy, of distinct relief that we set our faces
+toward the sunset. Every mile brought us nearer home. I knew the West. I
+knew the people, and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span>I had no fear of making a living beyond the
+Alleghanies. Every mile added courage and hope to our hearts, and
+increased the value of the splendid, if sometimes severe experiences
+through which we had passed. Frank was especially gay for he was
+definitely on his way home, back to Dakota.</p>
+
+<p>And when next day on the heights of the Alleghany mountains, the train
+dipped to the west, and swinging around a curve, disclosed to us the
+tumbled spread of mountain-land descending to the valley of the Ohio, we
+sang "O'er the hills in legions, boys" as our forefathers did of old. We
+were about to re-enter the land of the teeming furrow.</p>
+
+<p>Late that night as we were riding through the darkness in the smoking
+car, I rose and, placing in my brother's hands all the money I had, said
+good-bye, and at Mansfield, Ohio, swung off the train, leaving him to
+proceed on his homeward way alone.</p>
+
+<p>It was about one o'clock of an autumn night, sharp and clear, and I
+spent the remainder of the morning on a bench in the railway station,
+waiting for the dawn. I could not sleep, and so spent the time in
+pondering on my former experiences in seeking work. "Have I been wrong?"
+I asked myself. "Is the workman in America, as in the old world, coming
+to be a man despised?"</p>
+
+<p>Having been raised in the splendid patriotism, perhaps one might say
+flamboyant patriotism, of the West during and following our Civil War, I
+had been brought up to believe that labor was honorable, that idlers
+were to be despised, but now as I sat with bowed head, cold, hungry and
+penniless, knowing that I must go forth at daylight&mdash;seeking work, the
+world seemed a very hostile place to me. Of course I did not consider
+myself a workman in the ordinary hopeless sense. My need of a job was
+merely temporary, for it was my intention to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span>return to the Middle West
+in time to secure a position as teacher in some country school.
+Nevertheless a lively imagination gave me all the sensations of the
+homeless man.</p>
+
+<p>The sun rose warm and golden, and with a return of my courage I started
+forth, confident of my ability to make a place for myself. With a wisdom
+which I had not hitherto shown I first sought a home, and luckily, I say
+luckily because I never could account for it, I knocked at the door of a
+modest little boarding house, whose mistress, a small blonde lady,
+invited me in and gave me a room without a moment's hesitation. Her
+dinner&mdash;a delicious mid-day meal, so heartened me that before the end of
+the day, I had secured a place as one of a crew of carpenters. My
+spirits rose. I was secure.</p>
+
+<p>My evenings were spent in reading Abbott's <i>Life of Napoleon</i> which I
+found buried in an immense pile of old magazines. I had never before
+read a full history of the great Corsican, and this chronicle moved me
+almost as profoundly as Hugo's <i>Les Mis&eacute;rables</i> had done the year
+before.</p>
+
+<p>On Sundays I walked about the country under the splendid oaks and
+beeches which covered the ridges, dreaming of the West, and of the
+future which was very vague and not very cheerful in coloring. My plan
+so far as I had a plan, was not ambitious. I had decided to return to
+some small town in Illinois and secure employment as a teacher, but as I
+lingered on at my carpenter trade till October nothing was left for me
+but a country school, and when Orrin Carter, county superintendent of
+Grundy County, (he is Judge Carter now) informed me that a district
+school some miles out would pay fifty dollars a month for a teacher, I
+gladly accepted the offer.</p>
+
+<p>On the following afternoon I started forth a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span>passenger with Hank Ring
+on his way homeward in an empty corn wagon. The box had no seat,
+therefore he and I both rode standing during a drive of six miles. The
+wind was raw, and the ground, frozen hard as iron, made the ride a kind
+of torture, but our supper of buckwheat pancakes and pork sausages at
+Deacon Ring's was partial compensation. On the following Monday I
+started my school.</p>
+
+<p>The winter which followed appalled the oldest inhabitant. Snow fell
+almost daily, and the winds were razor-bladed. In order to save every
+dollar of my wages, I built my own fires in the school-house. This means
+that on every week-day morning, I was obliged to push out into the
+stinging dawn, walk a mile to the icy building, split kindling, start a
+flame in the rude stove, and have the room comfortable at half-past
+eight. The thermometer often went to a point twenty degrees below zero,
+and my ears were never quite free from peeling skin and fevered tissues.</p>
+
+<p>My pupils were boys and girls of all sizes and qualities, and while it
+would be too much to say that I made the best teacher of mathematics in
+the county, I think I helped them in their reading, writing, and
+spelling, which after all are more important than algebra. On Saturday I
+usually went to town, for I had in some way become acquainted with the
+principal of a little normal school which was being carried on in Morris
+by a young Quaker from Philadelphia. Prof. Forsythe soon recognized in
+me something more than the ordinary "elocutionist" and readily aided me
+in securing a class in oratory among his students.</p>
+
+<p>This work and Forsythe's comradeship helped me to bear the tedium of my
+work in the country. No Saturday was too stormy, and the roads were
+never too deep with snow to keep me from my weekly visit to Morris
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span>where I came in contact with people nearer to my ways of thinking and
+living.</p>
+
+<p>But after all this was but the final section of my eastern
+excursion&mdash;for as the spring winds set in, the call of "the sunset
+regions" again overcame my love of cities. The rush to Dakota in March
+was greater than ever before and a power stronger than my will drew me
+back to the line of the middle border which had moved on into the
+Missouri Valley, carrying my people with it. As the spring odors filled
+my nostrils, my wish to emigrate was like that of the birds. "Out there
+is my share of the government land&mdash;and, if I am to carry out my plan of
+fitting myself for a professorship," I argued&mdash;"these claims are worth
+securing. My rights to the public domain are as good as any other
+man's."</p>
+
+<p>My recollections of the James River Valley were all pleasant. My brother
+and father both wrote urging me to come and secure a claim, and so at
+last I replied, "I'll come as soon as my school is out," thus committing
+all my future to the hazard of the homestead.</p>
+
+<p>And so it came about that in the second spring after setting my face to
+the east I planned a return to the Border. I had had my glimpse of
+Boston, New York and Washington. I was twenty-three years of age, and
+eager to revisit the plain whereon my father with the faith of a
+pioneer, was again upturning the sod and building a fourth home. And
+yet, Son of the Middle Border&mdash;I had discovered that I was also a
+Grandson of New England.</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br /><a name="XXV" id="XXV"></a>
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CHAPTER XXV</h2>
+
+<h2>The Land of the Straddle-Bug</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>A night in Chicago (where I saw Salvini play Othello), a day in Neshonoc
+to visit my Uncle Richard, and I was again in the midst of a jocund rush
+of land-seekers.</p>
+
+<p>The movement which had begun three years before was now at its height.
+Thousands of cars, for lack of engines to move them, were lying idle on
+the switches all over the west. Trains swarming with immigrants from
+every country of the world were haltingly creeping out upon the level
+lands. Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, Scotchmen, Englishmen, and Russians
+all mingled in this flood of land-seekers rolling toward the sundown
+plain, where a fat-soiled valley had been set aside by good Uncle Sam
+for the enrichment of every man. Such elation, such hopefulness could
+not fail to involve an excitable youth like myself.</p>
+
+<p>My companion, Forsythe, dropped off at Milbank, but I kept on, on into
+the James Valley, arriving at Ordway on the evening of the second day&mdash;a
+clear cloudless evening in early April, with the sun going down red in
+the west, the prairie chickens calling from the knolls and hammers still
+sounding in the village, their tattoo denoting the urgent need of roofs
+to shelter the incoming throng.</p>
+
+<p>The street swarmed with boomers. All talk was of lots, of land. Hour by
+hour as the sun sank, prospectors returned to the hotel from their trips
+into the unclaimed territory, hungry and tired but jubilant, and as they
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span>assembled in my father's store after supper, their boastful talk of
+"claims secured" made me forget all my other ambitions. I was as eager
+to clutch my share of Uncle Sam's bounty as any of them. The world
+seemed beginning anew for me as well as for these aliens from the
+crowded eastern world. "I am ready to stake a claim," I said to my
+father.</p>
+
+<p>Early the very next day, with a party of four (among them Charles
+Babcock, a brother of Burton), I started for the unsurveyed country
+where, some thirty miles to the west, my father had already located a
+pre-emption claim and built a rough shed, the only shelter for miles
+around.</p>
+
+<p>"We'll camp there," said Charles.</p>
+
+<p>It was an inspiring ride! The plain freshly uncovered from the snow was
+swept by a keen wind which held in spite of that an acrid prophecy of
+sudden spring. Ducks and geese rose from every icy pond and resumed
+their flight into the mystic north, and as we advanced the world
+broadened before us. The treelessness of the wide swells, the crispness
+of the air and the feeling that to the westward lay the land of the
+Sioux, all combined to make our trip a kind of epic in miniature.
+Charles also seemed to feel the essential poetry of the expedition,
+although he said little except to remark, "I wish Burton were here."</p>
+
+<p>It was one o'clock before we reached the cabin and two before we
+finished luncheon. The afternoon was spent in wandering over the near-by
+obtainable claims and at sundown we all returned to the shed to camp.</p>
+
+<p>As dusk fell, and while the geese flew low gabbling confidentially, and
+the ducks whistled by overhead in swift unerring flight, Charles and I
+lay down on the hay beside the horses, feeling ourselves to be, in some
+way, partners with God in this new world. I went to sleep <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span>hearing the
+horses munching their grain in the neighboring stalls, entirely
+contented with my day and confident of the morrow. All questions were
+answered, all doubts stilled.</p>
+
+<p>We arose with the sun and having eaten our rude breakfast set forth,
+some six miles to the west, to mark the location of our claims with the
+"straddle-bugs."</p>
+
+<p>The straddle-bug, I should explain, was composed of three boards set
+together in tripod form and was used as a monument, a sign of occupancy.
+Its presence defended a claim against the next comer. Lumber being very
+scarce at the moment, the building of a shanty was impossible, and so
+for several weeks these signs took the place of "improvements" and were
+fully respected. No one could honorably jump these claims within thirty
+days and no one did.</p>
+
+<p>At last, when far beyond the last claimant, we turned and looked back
+upon a score of these glittering guidons of progress, banners of the
+army of settlement, I realized that I was a vedette in the van of
+civilization, and when I turned to the west where nothing was to be seen
+save the mysterious plain and a long low line of still more mysterious
+hills, I thrilled with joy at all I had won.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed a true invasion, this taking possession of the virgin sod, but
+as I considered, there was a haunting sadness in it, for these shining
+pine pennons represented the inexorable plow. They prophesied the death
+of all wild creatures and assured the devastation of the beautiful, the
+destruction of all the signs and seasons of the sod.</p>
+
+<p>Apparently none of my companions shared this feeling, for they all
+leaped from the wagon and planted their stakes, each upon his chosen
+quarter-section with whoops of joy, cries which sounded faint and far,
+like the futile voices of insects, diminished to shrillness by the
+echoless abysses of the unclouded sky.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span>As we had measured the distance from the township lines by counting the
+revolutions of our wagon-wheels, so now with pocket compass and a couple
+of laths, Charles and I laid out inner boundaries and claimed three
+quarter-sections, one for Frank and one each for ourselves. Level as a
+floor these acres were, and dotted with the bones of bison.</p>
+
+<p>We ate our dinner on the bare sod while all around us the birds of
+spring-time moved in myriads, and over the swells to the east other
+wagons laden with other land-seekers crept like wingless
+beetles&mdash;stragglers from the main skirmish line.</p>
+
+<p>Having erected our pine-board straddle-bugs with our names written
+thereon, we jubilantly started back toward the railway. Tired but
+peaceful, we reached Ordway at dark and Mrs. Wynn's supper of ham and
+eggs and potatoes completed our day most satisfactorily.</p>
+
+<p>My father, who had planned to establish a little store on his claim, now
+engaged me as his representative, his clerk, and I spent the next week
+in hauling lumber and in helping to build the shanty and ware-room on
+the section line. As soon as the place was habitable, my mother and
+sister Jessie came out to stay with me, for in order to hold his
+pre-emption my father was obliged to make it his "home."</p>
+
+<p>Before we were fairly settled, my mother was forced to feed and house a
+great many land-seekers who had no other place to stay. This brought
+upon her once again all the drudgery of a pioneer house-wife, and filled
+her with longing for the old home in Iowa. It must have seemed to her as
+if she were never again to find rest except beneath the sod.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing that I have ever been called upon to do caused me more worry
+than the act of charging those land-seekers for their meals and bunks,
+and yet it was <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span>perfectly right that they should pay. Our buildings had
+been established with great trouble and at considerable expense, and my
+father said, "We cannot afford to feed so many people without return,"
+and yet it seemed to me like taking an unfair advantage of poor and
+homeless men. It was with the greatest difficulty that I brought myself
+to charge them anything at all. Fortunately the prices had been fixed by
+my father.</p>
+
+<p>Night by night it became necessary to lift a lantern on a high pole in
+front of the shack, in order that those who were traversing the plain
+after dark might find their way, and often I was aroused from my bed by
+the arrival of a worn and bewildered party of pilgrims rescued from a
+sleepless couch upon the wet sod.</p>
+
+<p>For several weeks mother was burdened with these wayfarers, but at last
+they began to thin out. The skirmish line moved on, the ranks halted,
+and all about the Moggeson ranch hundreds of yellow shanties sparkled at
+dawn like flecks of gold on a carpet of green velvet. Before the end of
+May every claim was taken and "improved"&mdash;more or less.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile I had taken charge of the store and Frank was the stage
+driver. He was a very bad salesman, but I was worse&mdash;that must be
+confessed. If a man wanted to purchase an article and had the money to
+pay for it, we exchanged commodities right there, but as far as my
+selling anything&mdash;father used to say, "Hamlin couldn't sell gold dollars
+for ninety cents a piece," and he was right&mdash;entirely right.</p>
+
+<p>I found little to interest me in the people who came to the store for
+they were "just ordinary folk" from Illinois, and Iowa, and I had never
+been a youth who made acquaintances easily, so with nothing of the
+politician in me, I seldom inquired after the babies or gossiped with
+the old women about their health and housekeeping. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span>I regretted this
+attitude afterward. A closer relationship with the settlers would have
+furnished me with a greater variety of fictional characters, but at the
+time I had no suspicion that I was missing anything.</p>
+
+<p>As the land dried off and the breaking plow began its course, a most
+idyllic and significant period of life came on. The plain became very
+beautiful as the soil sent forth its grasses. On the shadowed sides of
+the ridges exquisite shades of pink and purple bloomed, while the most
+radiant yellow-green flamed from slopes on which the sunlight fell. The
+days of May and June succeeded one another in perfect harmony like the
+notes in a song, broken only once or twice by thunderstorms.</p>
+
+<p>An opalescent mist was in the air, and everywhere, on every swell, the
+settlers could be seen moving silently to and fro with their teams,
+while the women sang at their work about the small shanties, and in
+their new gardens. On every side was the most cheerful acceptance of
+hard work and monotonous fare. No one acknowledged the transient quality
+of this life, although it was only a novel sort of picnic on the
+prairie, soon to end.</p>
+
+<p>Many young people and several groups of girls (teachers from the east)
+were among those who had taken claims, and some of these made life
+pleasant for themselves and helpful to others by bringing to their
+cabins, books and magazines and pictures. The store was not only the
+social center of the township but the postoffice, and Frank, who carried
+the mail (and who was much more gallant than I) seemed to draw out all
+the school ma'ams of the neighborhood. The raising of a flag on a high
+pole before the door was the signal for the post which brought the women
+pouring in from every direction eager for news of the eastern world.</p>
+
+<p>In accordance with my plan to become a teacher, I determined to go to
+the bottom of the laws which govern <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span>literary development, and so with
+an unexpurgated volume of Taine, a set of Chambers' <i>Encyclop&aelig;dia of
+English Literature</i>, and a volume of Greene's <i>History of the English
+People</i>, I set to work to base myself profoundly in the principles which
+govern a nation's self-expression. I still believed that in order to
+properly teach an appreciation of poetry, a man should have the power of
+dramatic expression, that he should be able to read so as to make the
+printed page live in the ears of his pupils. In short I had decided to
+unite the orator and the critic.</p>
+
+<p>As a result, I spent more time over my desk than beside the counter. I
+did not absolutely refuse to wait on a purchaser but no sooner was his
+package tied up than I turned away to my work of digesting and
+transcribing in long hand Taine's monumental book.</p>
+
+<p>Day after day I bent to this task, pondering all the great Frenchman had
+to say of <i>race</i>, <i>environment</i>, and <i>momentum</i> and on the walls of the
+cabin I mapped out in chalk the various periods of English society as he
+had indicated them. These charts were the wonder and astonishment of my
+neighbors whenever they chanced to enter the living room, and they
+appeared especially interested in the names written on the ceiling over
+my bed. I had put my favorites there so that when I opened my eyes of a
+morning, I could not help absorbing a knowledge of their dates and
+works.</p>
+
+<p>However, on Saturday afternoon when the young men came in from their
+claims, I was not above pitching quoits or "putting the shot" with
+them&mdash;in truth I took a mild satisfaction in being able to set a big
+boulder some ten inches beyond my strongest competitor. Occasionally I
+practiced with the rifle but was not a crack shot. I could still pitch a
+ball as well as any of them and I served as pitcher in the games which
+the men occasionally organized.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span>As harvest came on, mother and sister returned to Ordway, and cooking
+became a part of my daily routine. Charles occasionally helped out and
+we both learned to make biscuits and even pies. Frank loyally declared
+my apple-pies to be as good as any man could make.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile an ominous change had crept over the plain. The winds were hot
+and dry and the grass, baked on the stem, had became as inflammable as
+hay. The birds were silent. The sky, absolutely cloudless, began to
+scare us with its light. The sun rose through the dusty air, sinister
+with flare of horizontal heat. The little gardens on the breaking
+withered, and many of the women began to complain bitterly of the
+loneliness, and lack of shade. The tiny cabins were like ovens at
+mid-day.</p>
+
+<p>Smiling faces were less frequent. Timid souls began to inquire, "Are all
+Dakota summers like this?" and those with greatest penetration reasoned,
+from the quality of the grass which was curly and fine as hair, that
+they had unwittingly settled upon an arid soil.</p>
+
+<p>And so, week by week the holiday spirit faded from the colony and men in
+feverish unrest uttered words of bitterness. Eyes ached with light and
+hearts sickened with loneliness. Defeat seemed facing every man.</p>
+
+<p>By the first of September many of those who were in greatest need of
+land were ready to abandon their advanced position on the border and
+fall back into the ranks behind. We were all nothing but squatters. The
+section lines had not been run and every pre-emptor looked and longed
+for the coming of the surveying crew, because once our filings were made
+we could all return to the east, at least for six months, or we could
+prove up and buy our land. In other words, the survey offered a chance
+to escape from the tedious monotony of the burning plain into which we
+had so confidently thrust ourselves.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span>But the surveyors failed to appear though they were reported from day to
+day to be at work in the next township and so, one by one, those of us
+who were too poor to buy ourselves food, dropped away. Hundreds of
+shanties were battened up and deserted. The young women returned to
+their schools, and men who had counted upon getting work to support
+their families during the summer, and who had failed to do so, abandoned
+their claims and went east where settlement had produced a crop. Our
+song of emigration seemed but bitter mockery now.</p>
+
+<p>Moved by the same desire to escape, I began writing to various small
+towns in Minnesota and Iowa in the hope of obtaining a school, but with
+little result. My letters written from the border line did not inspire
+confidence in the School Boards of "the East." Then winter came.</p>
+
+<p>Winter! No man knows what winter means until he has lived through one in
+a pine-board shanty on a Dakota plain with only buffalo bones for fuel.
+There were those who had settled upon this land, not as I had done with
+intent to prove up and sell, but with plans to make a home, and many of
+these, having toiled all the early spring in hope of a crop, now at the
+beginning of winter found themselves with little money and no coal. Many
+of them would have starved and frozen had it not been for the buffalo
+skeletons which lay scattered over the sod, and for which a sudden
+market developed. Upon the proceeds of this singular harvest they almost
+literally lived. Thus "the herds of deer and buffalo" did indeed
+strangely "furnish the cheer."</p>
+
+<p>As for Charles and myself, we also returned to Ordway and there spent a
+part of each month, brooding darkly over the problem of our future. I
+already perceived the futility of my return to the frontier. The
+mysterious <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span>urgings of a vague yet deep-seated longing to go east
+rendered me restless, sour and difficult. I saw nothing before me, and
+yet my hard experiences in Wisconsin and in New England made me hesitate
+about going far. Teaching a country school seemed the only thing I was
+fitted for, and there shone no promise of that.</p>
+
+<p>Furthermore, like other pre-emptors I was forced to hold my claim by
+visiting it once every thirty days, and these trips became each time
+more painful, more menacing. February and March were of pitiless
+severity. One blizzard followed another with ever-increasing fury. No
+sooner was the snow laid by a north wind than it took wing above a
+southern blast and returned upon us sifting to and fro until at last its
+crystals were as fine as flour, so triturated that it seemed to drive
+through an inch board. Often it filled the air for hundreds of feet
+above the earth like a mist, and lay in long ridges behind every bush or
+weed. Nothing lived on these desolate uplands but the white owl and the
+wolf.</p>
+
+<p>One cold, bright day I started for my claim accompanied by a young
+Englishman, a fair-faced delicate young clerk from London, and before we
+had covered half our journey the west wind met us with such fury that
+the little cockney would certainly have frozen had I not forced him out
+of the sleigh to run by its side.</p>
+
+<p>Poor little man! This was not the romantic home he had expected to gain
+when he left his office on the Strand.</p>
+
+<p>Luckily, his wretched shanty was some six miles nearer than mine or he
+would have died. Leaving him safe in his den, I pushed on toward my own
+claim, in the teeth of a terrific gale, the cold growing each moment
+more intense. "The sunset regions" at that moment did not provoke me to
+song.</p>
+
+<p>In order to reach my cabin before darkness fell, I urged my team
+desperately, and it was well that I did, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span>for I could scarcely see my
+horses during the last mile, and the wind was appalling even to me&mdash;an
+experienced plainsman. Arriving at the barn I was disheartened to find
+the doors heavily banked with snow, but I fell to in desperate haste,
+and soon shoveled a passageway.</p>
+
+<p>This warmed me, but in the delay one of my horses became so chilled that
+he could scarcely enter his stall. He refused to eat also, and this
+troubled me very much. However, I loaded him with blankets and fell to
+work rubbing his legs with wisps of hay, to start the circulation, and
+did not desist until the old fellow began nibbling his forage.</p>
+
+<p>By this time the wind was blowing seventy miles an hour, and black
+darkness was upon the land. With a rush I reached my shanty only to find
+that somebody had taken all my coal and nearly all my kindling, save a
+few pieces of pine. This was serious, but I kindled a fire with the
+blocks, a blaze which was especially grateful by reason of its quick
+response.</p>
+
+<p>Hardly was the stove in action, when a rap at the door startled me.
+"Come," I shouted. In answer to my call, a young man, a neighbor,
+entered, carrying a sack filled with coal. He explained with some
+embarrassment, that in his extremity during the preceding blizzard, he
+had borrowed from my store, and that (upon seeing my light) he had
+hurried to restore the fuel, enough, at any rate, to last out the night.
+His heroism appeased my wrath and I watched him setting out on his
+return journey with genuine anxiety.</p>
+
+<p>That night is still vivid in my memory. The frail shanty, cowering
+close, quivered in the wind like a frightened hare. The powdery snow
+appeared to drive directly through the solid boards, and each hour the
+mercury slowly sank. Drawing my bed close to the fire, I covered myself
+with a buffalo robe and so slept for an hour or two.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span>When I woke it was still dark and the wind, though terrifying, was
+intermittent in its attack. The timbers of the house creaked as the
+blast lay hard upon it, and now and again the faint fine crystals came
+sifting down upon my face,&mdash;driven beneath the shingles by the tempest.
+At last I lit my oil lamp and shivered in my robe till dawn. I felt none
+of the exultation of a "king in fairyland" nor that of a "lord of the
+soil."</p>
+
+<p>The morning came, bright with sun but with the thermometer forty degrees
+below zero. It was so cold that the horses refused to face the northwest
+wind. I could not hitch them to the sleigh until I had blanketed them
+both beneath their harness; even then they snorted and pawed in terror.
+At last, having succeeded in hooking the traces I sprang in and,
+wrapping the robe about me, pushed eastward with all speed, seeking food
+and fire.</p>
+
+<p>This may be taken as a turning point in my career, for this experience
+(followed by two others almost as severe) permanently chilled my
+enthusiasm for pioneering the plain. Never again did I sing "Sunset
+Regions" with the same exultant spirit. "O'er the hills in legions,
+boys," no longer meant sunlit savannahs, flower meadows and deer-filled
+glades. The mingled "wood and prairie land" of the song was gone and
+Uncle Sam's domain, bleak, semi-arid, and wind-swept, offered little
+charm to my imagination. From that little cabin on the ridge I turned my
+face toward settlement, eager to escape the terror and the loneliness of
+the treeless sod. I began to plan for other work in other airs.</p>
+
+<p>Furthermore, I resented the conditions under which my mother lived and
+worked. Our home was in a small building next to the shop, and had all
+the shortcomings of a cabin and none of its charm. It is true nearly all
+our friends lived in equal discomfort, but it seemed to me <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span>that mother
+had earned something better. Was it for this she had left her home in
+Iowa. Was she never to enjoy a roomy and comfortable dwelling?</p>
+
+<p>She did not complain and she seldom showed her sense of discomfort. I
+knew that she longed for the friends and neighbors she had left behind,
+and yet so far from being able to help her I was even then planning to
+leave her.</p>
+
+<p>In a sullen rage I endured the winter and when at last the sun began to
+ride the sky with fervor and the prairie cock announced the spring, hope
+of an abundant crop, the promise of a new railroad, the incoming of
+jocund settlers created in each of us a confidence which expressed
+itself in a return to the land. With that marvellous faith which marks
+the husbandmen, we went forth once more with the drill and the harrow,
+planting seed against another harvest.</p>
+
+<p>Sometime during these winter days, I chanced upon a book which effected
+a profound change in my outlook on the world and led to far-reaching
+complications in my life. This volume was the Lovell edition of
+<i>Progress and Poverty</i> which was at that time engaging the attention of
+the political economists of the world.</p>
+
+<p>Up to this moment I had never read any book or essay in which our land
+system had been questioned. I had been raised in the belief that this
+was the best of all nations in the best of all possible worlds, in the
+happiest of all ages. I believed (of course) that the wisdom of those
+who formulated our constitution was but little less than that of
+archangels, and that all contingencies of our progress in government had
+been provided for or anticipated in that inspired and deathless
+instrument.</p>
+
+<p>Now as I read this book, my mind following step by step the author's
+advance upon the citadel of privilege, I was forced to admit that his
+main thesis was right. Unrestricted individual ownership of the earth I
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span>acknowledged to be wrong and I caught some glimpse of the radiant
+plenty of George's ideal Commonwealth. The trumpet call of the closing
+pages filled me with a desire to battle for the right. Here was a theme
+for the great orator. Here was opportunity for the most devoted evangel.</p>
+
+<p>Raw as I was, inconspicuous as a grasshopper by the roadside, I still
+had something in me which responded to the call of "the prophet of San
+Francisco," and yet I had no definite intention of becoming a
+missionary. How could I?</p>
+
+<p>Penniless, dependent upon the labor of my hands for a livelihood,
+discontented yet unable to decide upon a plan of action, I came and went
+all through that long summer with laggard feet and sorrowful
+countenance.</p>
+
+<p>My brother Franklin having sold his claim had boldly advanced upon
+Chicago. His ability as a bookkeeper secured him against want, and his
+letters were confident and cheerful.</p>
+
+<p>At last in the hour when my perplexity was greatest&mdash;the decisive
+impetus came, brought by a chance visitor, a young clergyman from
+Portland, Maine, who arrived in the town to buy some farms for himself
+and a friend. Though a native of Madison Mr. Bashford had won a place in
+the east and had decided to put some part of his salary into Dakota's
+alluring soil. Upon hearing that we were also from Wisconsin he came to
+call and stayed to dinner, and being of a jovial and candid nature soon
+drew from me a fairly coherent statement of my desire to do something in
+the world.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of a long talk he said, "Why don't you come to Boston and
+take a special course at the University? I know the Professor of
+Literature, and I can also give you a letter to the principal of a
+school of Oratory."</p>
+
+<p>This offer threw me into such excitement that I was <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span>unable to properly
+thank my adviser, but I fell into depths of dejection as soon as he left
+town. "How can I go east? How can I carry out such a plan?" I asked
+myself with bitter emphasis.</p>
+
+<p>All I had in the world was a small trunk, a couple of dozen books, a
+valise and a few acres of barren unplowed land. My previous visit to
+Boston was just the sort to tempt me to return, but my experiences as a
+laborer in New England had lessened my confidence in its resources&mdash;and
+yet the thought of being able to cross the Common every day opened a
+dazzling vista. The very fact that Mr. Bashford had gone there from the
+west as a student, a poor student, made the prodigiously daring step
+seem possible to me. "If only I had a couple of hundred dollars," I said
+to my mother who listened to my delirious words in silence. She divined
+what was surging in my heart and feared it.</p>
+
+<p>Thereafter I walked the floor of my room or wandered the prairie roads
+in continual debate. "What is there for me to do out here?" I demanded.
+"I can farm on these windy dusty acres&mdash;that's all. I am a failure as a
+merchant and I am sick of the country."</p>
+
+<p>There were moments of a morning or at sunset when the plain was splendid
+as a tranquil sea, and in such moments I bowed down before its
+mysterious beauty&mdash;but for the most part it seemed an empty, desolate,
+mocking world. The harvest was again light and the earth shrunk and
+seamed for lack of moisture.</p>
+
+<p>A hint of winter in the autumn air made me remember the remorseless
+winds and the iron earth over which the snows swept as if across an icy
+polar sea. I shuddered as I thought of again fighting my way to that
+desolate little cabin in McPherson County. I recalled but dimly the
+exultation with which I had made my claim. Boston, by contrast, glowed
+with beauty, with <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span>romance, with history, with glory like the vision of
+some turreted town built in the eastern sky at sunset.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll do it," I said at last. "I'll sell my claim. I'll go east. I'll
+find some little hole to creep into. I'll study night and day and so fit
+myself for teaching, then I'll come back west to Illinois or Wisconsin.
+Never will I return to this bleak world."</p>
+
+<p>I offered my claim for sale and while I continued my daily labor on the
+farm, my mind was far-away amid the imagined splendors of the east.</p>
+
+<p>My father was puzzled and a good deal irritated by his son's dark moods.
+My failure to fit into the store was unaccountable and unreasonable. "To
+my thinking," said he, "you have all the school you need. You ought to
+find it easy to make a living in a new, progressive community like
+this."</p>
+
+<p>To him, a son who wanted to go east was temporarily demented. It was an
+absurd plan. "Why, it's against the drift of things. You can't make a
+living back east. Hang onto your land and you'll come out all right. The
+place for a young man is in the west."</p>
+
+<p>Bitter and rebellious of mood, uneasy and uncertain of purpose my talks
+with him resulted only in irritation and discord, but my mother, with an
+abiding faith in my powers, offered no objection. She could not advise,
+it was all so far above and beyond her, but she patted my hand and said,
+"Cheer up! I'm sure it will come out all right. I hate to have you go,
+but I guess Mr. Bashford is right. You need more schooling."</p>
+
+<p>I could see that she was saddened by the thought of the separation which
+was to follow&mdash;with a vague knowledge of the experience of all the
+mothers of pioneer sons she feared that the days of our close
+companionship were ended. The detachment was not for a few months, it
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span>was final. Her face was very wistful and her voice tremulous as she
+told me to go.</p>
+
+<p>"It is hard for me to leave you and sister," I replied, "but I must. I'm
+only rotting here. I'll come back&mdash;at least to visit you."</p>
+
+<p>In tremendous excitement I mortgaged my claim for two hundred dollars
+and with that in my hand, started for the land of Emerson, Longfellow,
+and Hawthorne, believing that I was in truth reversing all the laws of
+development, breasting the current of progress, stemming the tide of
+emigration. All about me other young men were streaming toward the
+sunset, pushing westward to escape the pressure of the earth-lords
+behind, whilst I alone and poor, was daring all the dangers, all the
+difficulties from which they were so eagerly escaping.</p>
+
+<p>There was in my heart an illogical exaltation as though I too were about
+to escape something&mdash;and yet when the actual moment of parting came, I
+embraced my sorrowing mother, and kissed my quaint little sister
+good-bye without feeling in the least heroic or self-confident. At the
+moment sadness weakened me, reducing me to boyish timidity.</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br /><a name="XXVI" id="XXVI"></a>
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CHAPTER XXVI</h2>
+
+<h2>On to Boston</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>With plenty of time to think, I thought, crouched low in my seat silent
+as an owl. True, I dozed off now and again but even when shortened by
+these periods of forgetfulness, the journey seemed interminable and when
+I reached the grimy old shed of a station which was the Chicago terminal
+of the Northwestern in those days, I was glad of a chance to taste
+outside air, no matter how smoky it reported itself to be.</p>
+
+<p>My brother, who was working in the office of a weekly farm journal, met
+me with an air of calm superiority. He had become a true Chicagoan.
+Under his confident leadership I soon found a boarding place and a
+measure of repose. I must have stayed with him for several days for I
+recall being hypnotized into ordering a twenty-dollar tailor-made suit
+from a South Clark street merchant&mdash;you know the kind. It was a "Prince
+Albert Soot"&mdash;my first made-to-order outfit, but the extravagance seemed
+justified in face of the known elegance of man's apparel in Boston.</p>
+
+<p>It took me thirty-six hours more to get to Boston, and as I was ill all
+the way (I again rode in the smoking car) a less triumphant Jason never
+entered the City of Light and Learning. The day was a true November day,
+dark and rainy and cold, and when I confronted my cloud-built city of
+domes and towers I was concerned only with a place to sleep&mdash;I had
+little desire of battle and no remembrance of the Golden Fleece.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span>Up from the Hoosac Station and over the slimy, greasy pavement I trod
+with humped back, carrying my heavy valise (it was the same
+imitation-leather concern with which I had toured the city two years
+before), while gay little street cars tinkled by, so close to my
+shoulder that I could have touched them with my hand.</p>
+
+<p>Again I found my way through Haymarket Square to Tremont street and so
+at last to the Common, which presented a cold and dismal face at this
+time. The glory of my dream had fled. The trees, bare and brown and
+dripping with rain, offered no shelter. The benches were sodden, the
+paths muddy, and the sky, lost in a desolate mist shut down over my head
+with oppressive weight. I crawled along the muddy walk feeling about as
+important as a belated beetle in a July thunderstorm. Half of me was
+ready to surrender and go home on the next train but the other half, the
+obstinate half, sullenly forged ahead, busy with the problem of a roof
+and bed.</p>
+
+<p>My experience in Rock River now stood me in good hand. Stopping a
+policeman I asked the way to the Young Men's Christian Association. The
+officer pointed out a small tower not far away, and down the Tremont
+street walk I plodded as wretched a youth as one would care to see.</p>
+
+<p>Humbled, apologetic, I climbed the stairway, approached the desk, and in
+a weak voice requested the address of a cheap lodging place.</p>
+
+<p>From the cards which the clerk carelessly handed to me I selected the
+nearest address, which chanced to be on Boylston Place, a short narrow
+street just beyond the Public Library. It was a deplorably wet and
+gloomy alley, but I ventured down its narrow walk and desperately
+knocked on the door of No. 12.</p>
+
+<p>A handsome elderly woman with snow-white hair met me at the threshold.
+She looked entirely <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span>respectable, and as she named a price which I could
+afford to pay I accepted her invitation to enter. The house swarmed with
+life. Somebody was strumming a banjo, a girl was singing, and as I
+mounted the stair to the first floor, a slim little maid of about
+fourteen met us. "This is my daughter Fay," said the landlady with
+manifest pride.</p>
+
+<p>Left to myself I sank into a chair with such relief as only the poor
+homeless country boy knows when at the end of a long tramp from the
+station, he lets slip his hand-bag and looks around upon a room for
+which he has paid. It was a plain little chamber, but it meant shelter
+and sleep and I was grateful. I went to bed early.</p>
+
+<p>I slept soundly and the world to which I awoke was new and resplendent.
+My headache was gone, and as I left the house in search of breakfast I
+found the sun shining.</p>
+
+<p>Just around the corner on Tremont street I discovered a little old man
+who from a sidewalk booth, sold delicious coffee in cups of two
+sizes,&mdash;one at three cents and a larger one at five cents. He also
+offered doughnuts at a penny each.</p>
+
+<p>Having breakfasted at an outlay of exactly eight cents I returned to my
+chamber, which was a hall-room, eight feet by ten, and faced the north.
+It was heated (theoretically) from a register in the floor, and there
+was just space enough for my trunk, a cot and a small table at the
+window but as it cost only six dollars per month I was content. I
+figured that I could live on five dollars per week which would enable me
+to stay till spring. I had about one hundred and thirty dollars in my
+purse.</p>
+
+<p>From this sunless nook, this narrow niche, I began my study of Boston,
+whose historic significance quite overpowered me. I was alone. Mr.
+Bashford, in Portland, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span>Maine, was the only person in all the east on
+whom I could call for aid or advice in case of sickness. My father wrote
+me that he had relatives living in the city but I did not know how to
+find them. No one could have been more absolutely alone than I during
+that first month. I made no acquaintances, I spoke to no one.</p>
+
+<p>A part of each day was spent in studying the historical monuments of the
+city, and the remaining time was given to reading at the Young Men's
+Union or in the Public Library, which stood next door to my lodging
+house.</p>
+
+<p>At night I made detailed studies of the habits of the cockroaches with
+which my room was peopled. There was something uncanny in the action of
+these beasts. They were new to me and apparently my like had never
+before been observed by them. They belonged to the shadow, to the cold
+and to the damp of the city, whereas I was fresh from the sunlight of
+the plain, and as I watched them peering out from behind my wash-basin,
+they appeared to marvel at me and to confer on my case with almost
+elfish intelligence.</p>
+
+<p>Tantalized by an occasional feeble and vacillating current of warm air
+from the register, I was forced at times to wear my overcoat as I read,
+and at night I spread it over my cot. I did not see the sun for a month.
+The wind was always filled with rain or sleet, and as the lights in
+Bates' Hall were almost always blazing, I could hardly tell when day
+left off and night began. It seemed as if I had been plunged into
+another and darker world, a world of storm, of gray clouds, of endless
+cold.</p>
+
+<p>Having resolved to keep all my expenses within five dollars per week, I
+laid down a scientific plan for cheap living. I first nosed out every
+low-priced eating place within ten minutes walk of my lodging and soon
+knew which of these "joints" were wholesome, and which were <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span>not. Just
+around the corner was a place where a filling dinner could be procured
+for fifteen cents, including pudding, and the little lunch counter on
+Tremont street supplied my breakfast. Not one nickel did I spend in
+carfare, and yet I saw almost every celebrated building in the city.
+However, I tenderly regarded my shoe soles each night, for the cost of
+tapping was enormous.</p>
+
+<p>My notion of studying at some school was never carried out. The Boston
+University classes did not attract me. The Harvard lectures were
+inaccessible, and my call upon the teacher of "Expression" to whom Mr.
+Bashford had given me a letter led to nothing. The professor was a
+nervous person and made the mistake of assuming that I was as timid as I
+was silent. His manner irritated me and the outburst of my resentment
+was astonishing to him. I was hungry at the moment and to be patronized
+was too much!</p>
+
+<p>This encounter plunged me into deep discouragement and I went back to my
+reading in the library with a despairing resolution to improve every
+moment, for my stay in the east could not last many weeks. At the rate
+my money was going May would see me bankrupt.</p>
+
+<p>I read both day and night, grappling with Darwin, Spencer, Fiske,
+Helmholtz, Haeckel,&mdash;all the mighty masters of evolution whose books I
+had not hitherto been able to open. For diversion I dived into early
+English poetry and weltered in that sea of song which marks the
+beginnings of every literature, conning the ballads of Ireland and
+Wales, the epics of Ireland, the early German and the songs of the
+troubadours, a course of reading which started me on a series of
+lectures to be written directly from a study of the authors themselves.
+This dimly took shape as a volume to be called <i>The Development of
+English Ideals</i>, a sufficiently ambitious project.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span>Among other proscribed books I read Whitman's <i>Leaves of Grass</i> and
+without doubt that volume changed the world for me as it did for many
+others. Its rhythmic chants, its wonderful music filled me with a keen
+sense of the mystery of the near at hand. I rose from that first reading
+with a sense of having been taken up into high places. The spiritual
+significance of America was let loose upon me.</p>
+
+<p>Herbert Spencer remained my philosopher and master. With eager haste I
+sought to compass the "Synthetic Philosophy." The universe took on order
+and harmony as, from my five cent breakfast, I went directly to the
+consideration of Spencer's theory of the evolution of music or painting
+or sculpture. It was thrilling, it was joyful to perceive that
+everything moved from the simple to the complex&mdash;how the bow-string
+became the harp, and the egg the chicken. My mental diaphragm creaked
+with the pressure of inrushing ideas. My brain young, sensitive to every
+touch, took hold of facts and theories like a phonographic cylinder, and
+while my body softened and my muscles wasted from disuse, I skittered
+from pole to pole of the intellectual universe like an impatient bat. I
+learned a little of everything and nothing very thoroughly. With so many
+peaks in sight, I had no time to spend on digging up the valley soil.</p>
+
+<p>My only exercise was an occasional slow walk. I could not afford to
+waste my food in physical effort, and besides I was thinly dressed and
+could not go out except when the sun shone. My overcoat was considerably
+more than half cotton and a poor shield against the bitter wind which
+drove straight from the arctic sea into my bones. Even when the weather
+was mild, the crossings were nearly always ankle deep in slush, and
+walking was anything but a pleasure, therefore it happened that for days
+I took no outing whatsoever. From my meals I <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span>returned to my table in
+the library and read until closing time, conserving in every way my
+thirty cents' worth of "food units."</p>
+
+<p>In this way I covered a wide literary and scientific territory. Humped
+over my fitful register I discussed the Nebular Hypothesis. My poets and
+scientists not merely told me of things I had never known, they
+confirmed me in certain conceptions which had come to me without effort
+in the past. I became an evolutionist in the fullest sense, accepting
+Spencer as the greatest living thinker. Fiske and Galton and Allen were
+merely assistants to the Master Mind whose generalizations included in
+their circles all modern discovery.</p>
+
+<p>It was a sad change when, leaving the brilliant reading room where my
+mind had been in contact with these masters of scientific world, I crept
+back to my minute den, there to sit humped and shivering (my overcoat
+thrown over my shoulders) confronting with scared resentment the sure
+wasting of my little store of dollars. In spite of all my care, the
+pennies departed from my pockets like grains of sand from an hour-glass
+and most disheartening of all I was making no apparent gain toward
+fitting myself for employment in the west.</p>
+
+<p>Furthermore, the greatness, the significance, the beauty of Boston was
+growing upon me. I felt the neighboring presence of its autocrats more
+definitely and powerfully each day. Their names filled the daily papers,
+their comings and goings were carefully noted. William Dean Howells,
+Oliver Wendell Holmes, John G. Whittier, Edwin Booth, James Russell
+Lowell, all these towering personalities seemed very near to me now, and
+their presence, even if I never saw their faces, was an inspiration to
+one who had definitely decided to compose essays and poems, and to write
+possibly a history of American Literature. Symphony concerts, the
+Lowell <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span>Institute Lectures, the <i>Atlantic Monthly</i>&mdash;(all the distinctive
+institutions of the Hub) had become very precious to me notwithstanding
+the fact that I had little actual share in them. Their nearness while
+making my poverty more bitter, aroused in me a vague ambition to
+succeed&mdash;in something. "I won't be beaten, I will not surrender," I
+said.</p>
+
+<p>Being neither a resident of the city nor a pupil of any school I could
+not take books from the library and this inhibition wore upon me till at
+last I determined to seek the aid of Edward Everett Hale who had long
+been a great and gracious figure in my mind. His name had been among the
+"Authors" of our rainy-day game on the farm. I had read his books, and I
+had heard him preach and as his "Lend-a-hand" helpfulness was
+proverbial, I resolved to call upon him at his study in the church, and
+ask his advice. I was not very definite as to what I expected him to do,
+probably I hoped for sympathy in some form.</p>
+
+<p>The old man received me with kindness, but with a look of weariness
+which I quickly understood. Accustomed to helping people he considered
+me just another "Case." With hesitation I explained my difficulty about
+taking out books.</p>
+
+<p>With a bluff roar he exclaimed, "Well, well! That is strange! Have you
+spoken to the Librarian about it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I have, Dr. Hale, but he told me there were twenty thousand young
+students in the city in precisely my condition. People not residents and
+with no one to vouch for them cannot take books home."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't like that," he said. "I will look into that. You shall be
+provided for. Present my card to Judge Chamberlain; I am one of the
+trustees, and he will see that you have all the books you want."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span>I thanked him and withdrew, feeling that I had gained a point. I
+presented the card to the librarian whose manner softened at once. As a
+prot&eacute;g&eacute; of Dr. Hale I was distinguished. "I will see what can be done
+for you," said Judge Chamberlain. Thereafter I was able to take books to
+my room, a habit which still further imperilled my health, for I read
+fourteen hours a day instead of ten.</p>
+
+<p>Naturally I grew white and weak. My Dakota tan and my corn-fed muscle
+melted away. The only part of me which flourished was my hair. I
+begrudged every quarter which went to the barbers and I was cold most of
+the time (except when I infested the library) and I was hungry <i>all</i> the
+time.</p>
+
+<p>I knew that I was physically on the down-grade, but what could I do?
+Nothing except to cut down my expenses. I was living on less than five
+dollars a week, but even at that the end of my <i>stay</i> in the city was
+not far off. Hence I walked gingerly and read fiercely.</p>
+
+<p>Bates' Hall was deliciously comfortable, and every day at nine o'clock I
+was at the door eager to enter. I spent most of my day at a desk in the
+big central reading room, but at night I haunted the Young Men's Union,
+thus adding myself to a dubious collection of half-demented, ill-clothed
+derelicts, who suffered the contempt of the attendants by reason of
+their filling all the chairs and monopolizing all the newspaper racks.
+We never conversed one with another and no one knew my name, but there
+came to be a certain diplomatic understanding amongst us somewhat as
+snakes, rabbits, hyenas, and turtles sometimes form "happy families."</p>
+
+<p>There was one old ruffian who always sniffled and snuffled like a fat
+hog as he read, monopolizing my favorite newspaper. Another member of
+the circle perused the same page of the same book day after day,
+laughing <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span>vacuously over its contents. Never by any mistake did he call
+for a different book, and I never saw him turn a leaf. No doubt I was
+counted as one of this group of irresponsibles.</p>
+
+<p>All this hurt me. I saw no humor in it then, for I was even at this time
+an intellectual aristocrat. I despised brainless folk. I hated these
+loafers. I loathed the clerk at the desk who dismissed me with a
+contemptuous smirk, and I resented the formal smile and impersonal
+politeness of Mr. Baldwin, the President. Of course I understood that
+the attendants knew nothing of my dreams and my ambitions, and that they
+were treating me quite as well as my looks warranted, but I blamed them
+just the same, furious at my own helplessness to demonstrate my claims
+for higher honors.</p>
+
+<p>During all this time the only woman I knew was my landlady, Mrs. Davis,
+and her daughter Fay. Once a week I curtly said, "Here is your rent,
+Mrs. Davis," and yet, several times she asked with concern, "How are you
+feeling?&mdash;You don't look well. Why don't you board with me? I can feed
+you quite as cheaply as you can board yourself."</p>
+
+<p>It is probable that she read slow starvation in my face, but I haughtily
+answered, "Thank you, I prefer to take my meals out." As a matter of
+fact, I dreaded contact with the other boarders.</p>
+
+<p>As a member of the Union a certain number of lectures were open to me
+and so night by night, in company with my fellow "nuts," I called for my
+ticket and took my place in line at the door, like a charity patient at
+a hospital. However, as I seldom occupied a seat to the exclusion of
+anyone else and as my presence usually helped to keep the speaker in
+countenance, I had no qualms.</p>
+
+<p>The Union audience was notoriously the worst audience in Boston, being
+in truth a group of intellectual <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span>mendicants waiting for oratorical
+hand-me-outs. If we didn't happen to like the sandwiches or the dry
+doughnuts given us, we threw them down and walked away.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless in this hall I heard nearly all the great preachers of the
+city, and though some of their cant phrases worried me, I was benefited
+by the literary allusions of others. Carpenter retained nothing of the
+old-fashioned theology, and Hale was always a delight&mdash;so was Minot
+Savage. Dr. Bartol, a quaint absorbing survival of the Concord School of
+Philosophy, came once, and I often went to his Sunday service. It was
+always joy to enter the old West Meeting House for it remained almost
+precisely as it was in Revolutionary days. Its pews, its curtains, its
+footstools, its pulpit, were all deliciously suggestive of the time when
+stately elms looked in at the window, and when the minister, tall,
+white-haired, black-cravatted arose in the high pulpit and began to read
+with curious, sing-song cadences a chant from <i>Job</i> I easily imagined
+myself listening to Ralph Waldo Emerson.</p>
+
+<p>His sermons held no cheap phrases and his sentences delighted me by
+their neat literary grace. Once in an address on Grant he said, "He was
+an atmospheric man. He developed from the war-cloud like a bolt of
+lightning."</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps Minot Savage pleased me best of all for he too was a disciple of
+Spencer, a logical, consistent, and fearless evolutionist. He often
+quoted from the poets in his sermon. Once he read Whitman's "Song of
+Myself" with such power, such sense of rhythm that his congregation
+broke into applause at the end. I heard also (at Tremont temple and
+elsewhere) men like George William Curtis, Henry Ward Beecher, and
+Frederick Douglass, but greatest of all in a certain sense was the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span>influence of Edwin Booth who taught me the greatness of Shakespeare and
+the glory of English speech.</p>
+
+<p>Poor as I was, I visited the old Museum night after night, paying
+thirty-five cents which admitted me to a standing place in the first
+balcony, and there on my feet and in complete absorption, I saw in
+wondrous procession <i>Hamlet</i>, <i>Lear</i>, <i>Othello</i>, <i>Petruchio</i>, <i>Sir Giles
+Overreach</i>, <i>Macbeth</i>, <i>Iago</i>, and <i>Richelieu</i> emerge from the shadow
+and re-enact their tragic lives before my eyes. These were my purple,
+splendid hours. From the light of this glorious mimic world I stumbled
+down the stairs out into the night, careless of wind or snow, my brain
+in a tumult of revolt, my soul surging with high resolves.</p>
+
+<p>The stimulation of these performances was very great. The art of this
+"Prince of Tragedy" was a powerful educational influence along the lines
+of oratory, poetry and the drama. He expressed to me the soul of English
+Literature. He exemplified the music of English speech. His acting was
+at once painting and sculpture and music and I became still more
+economical of food in order that I might the more often bask in the
+golden atmosphere of his world. I said, "I, too, will help to make the
+dead lines of the great poets speak to the living people of today," and
+with new fervor bent to the study of oratory as the handmaid of poetry.</p>
+
+<p>The boys who acted as ushers in the balcony came at length to know me,
+and sometimes when it happened that some unlucky suburbanite was forced
+to leave his seat near the railing, one of the lads would nod at me and
+allow me to slip down and take the empty place.</p>
+
+<p>In this way I got closer to the marvellous lines of the actor's face,
+and was enabled to read and record the subtler, fleeter shadows of his
+expression. I have never looked upon a face with such transcendent power
+of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span>externalizing and differentiating emotions, and I have never heard a
+voice of equal beauty and majesty.</p>
+
+<p>Booth taught millions of Americans the dignity, the power and the music
+of the English tongue. He set a high mark in grace and precision of
+gesture, and the mysterious force of his essentially tragic spirit made
+so deep an impression upon those who heard him that they confused him
+with the characters he portrayed. As for me&mdash;I could not sleep for hours
+after leaving the theater.</p>
+
+<p>Line by line I made mental note of the actor's gestures, accents, and
+cadences and afterward wrote them carefully down. As I closed my eyes
+for sleep I could hear that solemn chant "<i>Duncan is in his grave. After
+life's fitful fever he sleeps well.</i>" With horror and admiration I
+recalled him, when as <i>Sir Giles</i>, with palsied hand helpless by his
+side, his face distorted, he muttered as if to himself, "Some undone
+widow sits upon my sword," or when as <i>Petruchio</i> in making a playful
+snatch at Kate's hand with the blaze of a lion's anger in his eye his
+voice rang out, "Were it the paw of an angry bear, I'd smite it off&mdash;but
+as it's Kate's I kiss it."</p>
+
+<p>To the boy from the cabin on the Dakota plain these stage pictures were
+of almost incommunicable beauty and significance. They justified me in
+all my daring. They made any suffering past, present, or future, worth
+while, and the knowledge that these glories were evanescent and that I
+must soon return to the Dakota plain only deepened their power and added
+to the grandeur of every scene.</p>
+
+<p>Booth's home at this time was on Beacon Hill, and I used to walk
+reverently by just to see where the great man housed. Once, the door
+being open, I caught a momentary glimpse of a curiously ornate umbrella
+stand, and the soft glow of a distant lamp, and the vision greatly
+enriched me. This singularly endowed <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span>artist presented to me the radiant
+summit of human happiness and glory, and to see him walk in or out of
+his door was my silent hope, but alas, this felicity was denied me!</p>
+
+<p>Under the spell of these performers, I wrote a series of studies of the
+tragedian in his greatest r&ocirc;les. "Edwin Booth as Lear," "Edwin Booth as
+Hamlet," and so on, recording with minutest fidelity every gesture,
+every accent, till four of these impersonations were preserved on the
+page as if in amber. I re-read my Shakespeare in the light of Booth's
+eyes, in the sound of his magic voice, and when the season ended, the
+city grew dark, doubly dark for me. Thereafter I lived in the fading
+glory of that month.</p>
+
+<p>These were growing days! I had moments of tremendous expansion, hours
+when my mind went out over the earth like a freed eagle, but these
+flights were always succeeded by fits of depression as I realized my
+weakness and my poverty. Nevertheless I persisted in my studies.</p>
+
+<p>Under the influence of Spencer I traced a parallel development of the
+Arts and found a measure of scientific peace. Under the inspiration of
+Whitman I pondered the significance of democracy and caught some part of
+its spiritual import. With Henry George as guide, I discovered the main
+cause of poverty and suffering in the world, and so in my little room,
+living on forty cents a day, I was in a sense profoundly happy. So long
+as I had a dollar and a half with which to pay my rent and two dollars
+for the keepers of the various dives in which I secured my food, I was
+imaginatively the equal of Booth and brother to the kings of song.</p>
+
+<p>And yet one stern persistent fact remained, my money was passing and I
+was growing weaker and paler every day. The cockroaches no longer amused
+me. Coming as I did from a land where the sky made up half the world <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span>I
+resented being thus condemned to a nook from which I could see only a
+gray rag of mist hanging above a neighboring chimney.</p>
+
+<p>In the moments when I closely confronted my situation the glory of the
+western sky came back to me, and it must have been during one of these
+dreary storms that I began to write a poor faltering little story which
+told of the adventures of a cattleman in the city. No doubt it was the
+expression of the homesickness at my own heart but only one or two of
+the chapters ever took shape, for I was tortured by the feeling that no
+matter how great the intellectual advancement caused by hearing Edwin
+Booth in <i>Hamlet</i> might be, it would avail me nothing when confronted by
+the school committee of Blankville, Illinois.</p>
+
+<p>I had moments of being troubled and uneasy and at times experienced a
+feeling that was almost despair.</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br /><a name="XXVII" id="XXVII"></a>
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CHAPTER XXVII</h2>
+
+<h2>Enter a Friend</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>One night seeing that the principal of a well known School of Oratory
+was bulletined to lecture at the Young Men's Union upon "The Philosophy
+of Expression" I went to hear him, more by way of routine than with any
+expectation of being enlightened or even interested, but his very first
+words surprised and delighted me. His tone was positive, his phrases
+epigrammatic, and I applauded heartily. "Here is a man of thought," I
+said.</p>
+
+<p>At the close of the address I ventured to the platform and expressed to
+him my interest in what he had said. He was a large man with a broad and
+smiling face, framed in a brown beard. He appeared pleased with my
+compliments and asked if I were a resident of Boston. "No, I am a
+western man," I replied. "I am here to study and I was especially
+interested in your quotations from Darwin's book on <i>Expression in Man
+and Animals</i>."</p>
+
+<p>His eyes expressed surprise and after a few minutes' conversation, he
+gave me his card saying, "Come and see me tomorrow morning at my
+office."</p>
+
+<p>I went home pleasantly excited by this encounter. After months of
+unbroken solitude in the midst of throngs of strangers, this man's
+cordial invitation meant much to me.</p>
+
+<p>On the following morning, at the hour set, I called at the door of his
+office on the top floor of No. 7 Beacon <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span>Street, which was an
+old-fashioned one-story building without an elevator.</p>
+
+<p>Brown asked me where I came from, what my plans were, and I replied with
+eager confidence. Then we grew harmoniously enthusiastic over Herbert
+Spencer and Darwin and Mantegazza and I talked a stream. My long silence
+found vent. Words poured from me in a torrent but he listened smilingly,
+his big head cocked on one side, waiting patiently for me to blow off
+steam. Later, when given a chance, he showed me the manuscript of a book
+upon which he was at work and together we discussed its main thesis. He
+asked me my opinion of this passage and that&mdash;and I replied, not as a
+pupil but as an equal, and the author seemed pleased at my candor.</p>
+
+<p>Two hours passed swiftly in this way and as the interview was about to
+end he asked, "Where do you live?"</p>
+
+<p>I told him and explained that I was trying to fit myself for teaching
+and that I was living as cheaply as possible. "I haven't any money for
+tuition," I confessed.</p>
+
+<p>He mused a moment, then said, "If you wish to come into my school I
+shall be glad to have you do so. Never mind about tuition,&mdash;pay me when
+you can."</p>
+
+<p>This generous offer sent me away filled with gratitude and an illogical
+hope. Not only had I gained a friend, I had found an intellectual
+comrade, one who was far more widely read, at least in science, than I.
+I went to my ten-cent lunch with a feeling that a door had unexpectedly
+opened and that it led into broader, sunnier fields of toil.</p>
+
+<p>The school, which consisted of several plain offices and a large
+class-room, was attended by some seventy or eighty pupils, mostly girls
+from New England and Canada with a few from Indiana and Ohio. It was a
+simple little workshop but to me it was the most <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span>important institution
+in Boston. It gave me welcome, and as I came into it on Monday morning
+at nine o'clock and was introduced to the pretty teacher of Delsarte,
+Miss Maida Craigen, whose smiling lips and big Irish-gray eyes made her
+beloved of all her pupils, I felt that my lonely life in Boston was
+ended.</p>
+
+<p>The teachers met me with formal kindliness, finding in me only another
+crude lump to be moulded into form, and while I did not blame them for
+it, I instantly drew inside my shell and remained there&mdash;thus robbing
+myself of much that would have done me good. Some of the girls went out
+of their way to be nice to me, but I kept aloof, filled with a savage
+resentment of my poverty and my threadbare clothing.</p>
+
+<p>Before the week was over, Professor Brown asked me to assist in reading
+the proof-sheets of his new book and this I did, going over it with him
+line by line. His deference to my judgment was a sincere compliment to
+my reading and warmed my heart like some elixir. It was my first
+authoritative appreciation and when at the end of the third session he
+said, "I shall consider your criticism more than equal to the sum of
+your tuition," I began to faintly forecast the time when my brain would
+make me self-supporting.</p>
+
+<p>My days were now cheerful. My life had direction. For two hours each
+afternoon (when work in the school was over) I sat with Brown discussing
+the laws of dramatic art, and to make myself still more valuable in this
+work, I read every listed book or article upon expression, and
+translated several French authorities, transcribing them in longhand for
+his use.</p>
+
+<p>In this work the weeks went by and spring approached. In a certain sense
+I felt that I was gaining an education which would be of value to me but
+I was not earning one cent of money, and my out-go was more than five
+dollars <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span>per week, for I occasionally went to the theater, and I had
+also begun attendance at the Boston Symphony concerts in Music Hall.</p>
+
+<p>By paying twenty-five cents students were allowed to fill the gallery
+and to stand on the ground floor, and Friday afternoons generally found
+me leaning against the wall listening to Brahms and Wagner. At such
+times I often thought of my mother, and my uncle David and wished that
+they too might hear these wondrous harmonies. I tried to imagine what
+the effect of this tumult of sound would be, as it beat in upon their
+inherited deeply musical brain-cells!</p>
+
+<p>One by one I caught up the threads of certain other peculiar Boston
+interests, and by careful reading of the <i>Transcript</i> was enabled to
+vibrate in full harmony with the local hymn of gratitude. New York
+became a mere emporium, a town without a library, a city without a first
+class orchestra, the home of a few commercial painters and several
+journalistic poets! Chicago was a huge dirty town on the middle border.
+Washington a vulgar political camp&mdash;only Philadelphia was admitted to
+have the quality of a real city and her literary and artistic resources
+were pitiably slender and failing!</p>
+
+<p>But all the time that I was feasting on these insubstantial glories, my
+meat was being cut down and my coat hung ever more loosely over my ribs.
+Pale and languid I longed for spring, for sunshine, with all the passion
+of a prisoner, and when at last the grass began to show green in the
+sheltered places on the Common and the sparrows began to utter their
+love notes, I went often of an afternoon to a bench in lee of a clump of
+trees and there sprawled out like a debilitated fox, basking in the
+tepid rays of a diminished sun.</p>
+
+<p>For all his expressed admiration of my literary and scientific acumen,
+Brown did not see fit to invite me to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span>dinner, probably because of my
+rusty suit and frayed cuffs. I did not blame him. I was in truth a
+shabby figure, and the dark-brown beard which had come upon me added to
+the unhealthy pallor of my skin, so that Mrs. Brown, a rather smart and
+socially ambitious lady, must have regarded me as something of an
+anarchist, a person to avoid. She always smiled as we met, but her smile
+was defensive.</p>
+
+<p>However, a blessed break in the monotony of my fare came during April
+when my friend Bashford invited me to visit him in Portland. I accepted
+his invitation with na&iuml;ve precipitation and furbished up my wardrobe as
+best I could, feeling that even the wife of a clergyman might not
+welcome a visitor with fringed cuffs and celluloid collars.</p>
+
+<p>This was my first sea voyage and I greatly enjoyed the trip&mdash;after I got
+there!</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Bashford received me kindly, but (I imagined) with a trace of
+official hospitality in her greeting. It was plain that she (like Mrs.
+Brown) considered me a "Charity Patient." Well, no matter, Bashford and
+I got on smoothly.</p>
+
+<p>Their house was large and its grandeur was almost oppressive to me, but
+I spent nearly a week in it. As I was leaving, Bashford gave me a card
+to Dr. Cross, a former parishioner in Jamaica Plain, saying, "Call upon
+the Doctor as soon as you return. He'll be glad to hear of Dakota."</p>
+
+<p>My little den in Boylston Place was almost intolerable to me now. Spring
+sunshine, real sunshine flooded the land and my heart was full of
+longing for the country. Therefore&mdash;though I dreaded meeting another
+stranger,&mdash;I decided to risk a dime and make the trip to Jamaica Plains,
+to call upon Dr. Cross.</p>
+
+<p>This ride was a further revelation of the beauty of New <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span>England. For
+half an hour the little horse-car ran along winding lanes under great
+overarching elm trees, past apple-orchards in bursting bloom. On every
+hand luscious lawns spread, filled with crocuses and dandelions just
+beginning to spangle the green. The effect upon me was somewhat like
+that which would be produced in the mind of a convict who should
+suddenly find his prison doors opening into a June meadow. Standing with
+the driver on the front platform, I drank deep of the flower-scented
+air. I had never seen anything more beautiful.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Cross, a sweet and gentle man of about sixty years of age (not
+unlike in manner and habit Professor Bush, my principal at the Cedar
+Valley Seminary) received his seedy visitor with a kindly smile. I liked
+him and trusted him at once. He was tall and very thin, with dark eyes
+and a long gray beard. His face was absolutely without suspicion or
+guile. It was impossible to conceive of his doing an unkind or hasty
+act, and he afterward said that I had the pallor of a man who had been
+living in a cellar. "I was genuinely alarmed about you," he said.</p>
+
+<p>His small frame house was simple, but it stood in the midst of a clump
+of pear trees, and when I broke out in lyrical praise of the beauty of
+the grass and glory of the flowers, the doctor smiled and became even
+more distinctly friendly. It appeared that through Mr. Bashford he had
+purchased a farm in Dakota, and the fact that I knew all about it and
+all about wheat farming gave me distinction.</p>
+
+<p>He introduced me to his wife, a wholesome hearty soul who invited me to
+dinner. I stayed. It was my first chance at a real meal since my visit
+to Portland, and I left the house with a full stomach, as well as a full
+heart, feeling that the world was not quite so unfriendly after <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span>all.
+"Come again on Sunday," the doctor almost commanded. "We shall expect
+you."</p>
+
+<p>My money had now retired to the lower corner of my left-hand pocket and
+it was evident that unless I called upon my father for help I must go
+back to the West; and much as I loved to talk of the broad fields and
+pleasant streams of Dakota, I dreaded the approach of the hour when I
+must leave Boston, which was coming to mean more and more to me every
+day.</p>
+
+<p>In a blind vague way I felt that to leave Boston was to leave all hope
+of a literary career and yet I saw no way of earning money in the city.
+In the stress of my need I thought of an old friend, a carpenter in
+Greenfield. "I'm sure he will give me a job," I said.</p>
+
+<p>With this in mind I went into Professor Brown's office one morning and I
+said, "Well, Professor, I must leave you."</p>
+
+<p>"What's that? What's the matter?" queried the principal shrilly.</p>
+
+<p>"My money's gone. I've got to get out and earn more," I answered sadly.</p>
+
+<p>He eyed me gravely. "What are you going to do?" he inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"I am going back to shingling," I said with tragic accent.</p>
+
+<p>"Shingling!" the old man exclaimed, and then began to laugh, his big
+paunch shaking up and down with the force of his mirth. "Shingling!" he
+shouted finally. "Can <i>you</i> shingle?"</p>
+
+<p>"You bet I can," I replied with comical access of pride, "but I don't
+like to. That is to say I don't like to give up my work here in Boston
+just when I am beginning to feel at home."</p>
+
+<p>Brown continued to chuckle. To hear that a man who knew Mantegazza and
+Darwin and Whitman and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span>Browning could even <i>think</i> of shingling, was
+highly humorous, but as he studied my forlorn face he sensed the
+despairing quiver in my voice and his kind heart softened. He ceased to
+smile. "Oh, you mustn't do that," he said earnestly. "You mustn't
+surrender now. We'll fix up some way for you to earn your keep. Can't
+you borrow a little?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I could get a few dollars from home, but I don't feel justified in
+doing so,&mdash;times are hard out there and besides I see no way of repaying
+a loan."</p>
+
+<p>He pondered a moment, "Well, now I'll tell you what we'll do. I'll make
+you our Instructor in Literature for the summer term and I'll put your
+Booth lecture on the programme. That will give you a start, and perhaps
+something else will develop for the autumn."</p>
+
+<p>This noble offer so emboldened me that I sent west for twenty-five
+dollars to pay my board, and to have my suit dyed.&mdash;It was the very same
+suit I had bought of the Clark Street tailor, and the aniline purple had
+turned pink along the seams&mdash;or if not pink it was some other color
+equally noticeable in the raiment of a lecturer, and not to be endured.
+I also purchased a new pair of shoes and a necktie of the Windsor
+pattern. This cravat and my long Prince Albert frock, while not strictly
+in fashion, made me feel at least presentable.</p>
+
+<p>Another piece of good fortune came to me soon after. Dr. Cross again
+invited me to dine and after dinner as we were driving together along
+one of the country lanes, the good doctor said, "Mrs. Cross is going up
+into New Hampshire for the summer and I shall be alone in the house. Why
+don't you come and stay with me? You need the open air, and I need
+company."</p>
+
+<p>This generous offer nearly shipwrecked my dignity. Several moments
+passed before I could control my voice to thank him. At last I said,
+"That's very kind of you, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span>Doctor. I'll come if you will let me pay at
+least the cost of my board."</p>
+
+<p>The Doctor understood this feeling and asked, "How much are you paying
+now?"</p>
+
+<p>With slight evasion I replied, "Well, I try to keep within five dollars
+a week."</p>
+
+<p>He smiled. "I don't see how you do it, but I can give you an attic room
+and you can pay me at your convenience."</p>
+
+<p>This noble invitation translated me from my dark, cold, cramped den
+(with its night-guard of redoubtable cockroaches) into the light and air
+of a comfortable suburban home. It took me back to the sky and the birds
+and the grass&mdash;and Irish Mary, the cook, put red blood into my veins. In
+my sabbath walks along the beautiful country roads, I heard again the
+song of the cat-bird and the trill of the bobolink. For the first time
+in months I slept in freedom from hunger, in security of the morrow. Oh,
+good Hiram Cross, your golden crown should be studded with jewels, for
+your life was filled with kindnesses like this!</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, in preparation for the summer term I gladly helped stamp and
+mail Brown's circulars. The lecture "Edwin Booth as Iago" I carefully
+re-wrote&mdash;for Brown had placed it on his printed programme and had also
+announced me as "Instructor in Literature." I took care to send this
+circular to all my friends and relatives in the west.</p>
+
+<p>Decidedly that summer of Taine in a Dakota cabin was bearing fruit, and
+yet just in proportion as Brown came to believe in my ability so did he
+proceed to "hector" me. He never failed to ask of a morning, "Well, when
+are you going back to shingling?"</p>
+
+<p>The Summer School opened in July. It was well attended, and the
+membership being made up of teachers <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span>of English and Oratory from
+several states was very impressive to me. Professors of elocution and of
+literature from well-known colleges and universities gave dignity and
+distinction to every session.</p>
+
+<p>My class was very small and paid me very little but it brought me to
+know Mrs. Payne, a studious, kindly woman (a resident of Hyde Park), who
+for some reason which will forever remain obscure, considered me not
+merely a youth of promise, but a lecturer of value. Having heard from
+Brown how sadly I needed money&mdash;perhaps she even detected poverty in my
+dyed coat, she not only invited me to deliver an immediate course of
+lectures at her house in Hyde Park but proceeded to force tickets upon
+all her friends.</p>
+
+<p>The importance of this engagement will appear when the reader is
+informed that I was owing the Doctor for a month's board, and saw no way
+of paying it, and that my one suit was distressingly threadbare. There
+are other and more interesting ways of getting famous but alas! I rose
+only by inches and incredible effort. My reader must be patient with me.</p>
+
+<p>My subjects were ambitious enough, "The Art of Edwin Booth," was ready
+for delivery, but "Victor Hugo and his Prose Masterpieces," was only
+partly composed and "The Modern German Novel" and "The American Novel"
+were in notes merely, therefore with puckered brow and sturdy pen I set
+to work in my little attic room, and there I toiled day and night to put
+on paper the notions I had acquired concerning these grandiose subjects.</p>
+
+<p>In after years I was appalled at the audacity of that schedule, and I
+think I had the grace to be scared at the time, but I swung into it
+recklessly. Tickets had been taken by some of the best known men among
+the teachers, and I was assured by Mrs. Payne that we would have the
+most distinguished audience that ever graced <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span>Hyde Park. "Among your
+listeners will be the literary editors of several Boston papers, two
+celebrated painters, and several well-known professors of oratory," she
+said, and like Lieutenant Napoleon called upon to demonstrate his
+powers, I graved with large and ruthless fist, and approached my opening
+date with palpitating but determined heart.</p>
+
+<p>It was a tense moment for me as (while awaiting my introduction) I
+looked into the faces of the men and women seated in that crowded
+parlor. Just before the dais, shading his eyes with his hand, was a
+small man with a pale face and brown beard. This was Charles E. Hurd,
+literary editor of the <i>Transcript</i>. Near him sat Theodore Weld, as
+venerable in appearance as Socrates (with long white hair and rosy
+cheeks), well known as one of the anti-slavery guard, a close friend of
+Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison. Beside him was Professor
+Raymond of Princeton, the author of several books, while Churchill of
+Andover and half a dozen other representatives of great colleges loomed
+behind him. I faced them all with a gambler's composure but behind my
+mask I was jellied with fear.</p>
+
+<p>However, when I rose to speak, the tremor passed out of my limbs, the
+blood came back to my brain, and I began without stammering. This first
+paper, fortunately for us all, dealt with Edwin Booth, whom I revered.
+To my mind he not only expressed the highest reach of dramatic art in
+his day, he was the best living interpreter of Shakespeare, and no doubt
+it was the sincerity of my utterance which held my hearers, for they all
+listened intently while I analyzed the character of <i>Iago</i>, and
+disclosed what seemed to me to be the sources of the great tragedian's
+power, and when I finished they applauded with unmistakable approval,
+and Mrs. Payne glowed with a sense of proprietorship in her prot&eacute;g&eacute; who
+had seized <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span>the opportunity and made it his. I was absurd but
+triumphant.</p>
+
+<p>Many of the guests (kindly of spirit) came up to shake hands and
+congratulate me. Mr. Hurd gave me a close grip and said, "Come up to the
+<i>Transcript</i> office and see me." John J. Enneking, a big, awkward
+red-bearded painter, elbowed up and in his queer German way spoke in
+approval. Churchill, Raymond, both said, "You'll do," and Brown finally
+came along with a mocking smile on his big face, eyed me with an air of
+quizzical comradeship, nudged me slyly with his elbow as he went by, and
+said, "Going back to shingling, are you?"</p>
+
+<p>On the homeward drive, Dr. Cross said very solemnly, "You have no need
+to fear the future."</p>
+
+<p>It was a very small event in the history of Hyde Park, but it was a
+veritable bridge of Lodi for me. I never afterward felt lonely or
+disheartened in Boston. I had been tested both as teacher and orator and
+I must be pardoned for a sudden growth of boyish self-confidence.</p>
+
+<p>The three lectures which followed were not so successful as the first,
+but my audience remained. Indeed I think it would have increased night
+by night had the room permitted it, and Mrs. Payne was still perfectly
+sure that her prot&eacute;g&eacute; had in him all the elements of success, but I fear
+Prof. Church expressed the sad truth when he said in writing, "Your man
+Garland is a diamond in the rough!" Of course I must have appeared very
+seedy and uncouth to these people and I am filled with wonder at their
+kindness to me. My accent was western. My coat sleeves shone at the
+elbows, my trousers bagged at the knees. Considering the anarch I must
+have been, I marvel at their toleration. No western audience could have
+been more hospitable, more cordial.</p>
+
+<p>The ninety dollars which I gained from this series of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</a></span>lectures was, let
+me say, the less important part of my victory, and yet it was wondrous
+opportune. They enabled me to cancel my indebtedness to the Doctor, and
+still have a little something to keep me going until my classes began in
+October, and as my landlord did not actually evict me, I stayed on
+shamelessly, fattening visibly on the puddings and roasts which Mrs.
+Cross provided and dear old Mary cooked with joy. She was the true
+artist. She loved to see her work appreciated.</p>
+
+<p>My class in English literature that term numbered twenty and the money
+which this brought carried me through till the mid-winter vacation, and
+permitted another glorious season of Booth and the Symphony Orchestra.
+In the month of January I organized a class in American Literature, and
+so at last became self-supporting in the city of Boston! No one who has
+not been through it can realize the greatness of this victory.</p>
+
+<p>I permitted myself a few improvements in hose and linen. I bought a
+leather hand-bag with a shoulder strap, and every day joined the stream
+of clerks and students crossing the Common. I began to feel a
+proprietary interest in the Hub. My sleeping room (also my study),
+continued to be in the attic (a true attic with a sloping roof and one
+window) but the window faced the south, and in it I did all my reading
+and writing. It was hot on sunny days and dark on cloudy days, but it
+was a refuge.</p>
+
+<p>As a citizen with a known habitation I was permitted to carry away books
+from the library, and each morning from eight until half-past twelve I
+sat at my desk writing, tearing away at some lecture, or historical
+essay, and once in a while I composed a few lines of verse. Five
+afternoons in each week I went to my classes and to the library,
+returning at six o'clock to my dinner and to my reading. This was my
+routine, and I was happy in it. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</a></span>My letters to my people in the west
+were confident, more confident than I ofttimes felt.</p>
+
+<p>During my second summer Burton Babcock, who had decided to study for the
+Unitarian ministry, came east with intent to enter the Divinity School
+at Harvard. He was the same old Burton, painfully shy, thoughtful,
+quaintly abrupt in manner, and together we visited the authorities at
+Cambridge and presented his case as best we could.</p>
+
+<p>For some reason not clear to either of us, the school refused to aid and
+after a week's stay with me Burton, a little disheartened but not
+resentful, went to Meadville, Pennsylvania. Boston seemed very wonderful
+to him and I enjoyed his visit keenly. We talked inevitably of old
+friends and old days in the manner of middle-aged men, and he told me
+that John Gammons had entered the Methodist ministry and was stationed
+in Decorah, that Charles, my former partner in Dakota, had returned to
+the old home very ill with some obscure disease. Mitchell Morrison was a
+watch-maker and jeweler in Winona and Lee Moss had gone to Superior. The
+scattering process had begun. The diverging wind-currents of destiny had
+already parted our little group and every year would see its members
+farther apart. How remote it all seems to me now,&mdash;like something
+experienced on another planet!</p>
+
+<p>Each month saw me more and more the Bostonian by adoption. My teaching
+paid my board, leaving me free to study and to write. I never did any
+hack-work for the newspapers. Hawthorne's influence over me was still
+powerful, and in my first attempts at writing fiction I kept to the
+essay form and sought for a certain distinction in tone. In poetry,
+however, Bret Harte, Joaquin Miller, and Walt Whitman were more to my
+way of thinking than either Poe or Emerson. In brief I was sadly
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span>"mixed." Perhaps the enforced confinement of my city life gave all poems
+of the open air, of the prairies, their great and growing power over me
+for I had resolved to remain in Boston until such time as I could return
+to the West in the guise of a conqueror. Just what I was about to
+conquer and in what way I was to secure eminence was not very clear to
+me, but I was resolved none the less, and had no immediate intention of
+returning.</p>
+
+<p>In the summer of 1886 Brown held another Summer School and again I
+taught a class. Autumn brought a larger success. Mrs. Lee started a
+Browning Class in Chelsea, and another loyal pupil organized a
+Shakespeare class in Waltham. I enjoyed my trips to these classes very
+much and one of the first stories I ever wrote was suggested by some
+characters I saw in an old grocery store in Waltham. As I recall my
+method of teaching, it consisted chiefly of readings. My critical
+comment could not have been profound.</p>
+
+<p>I was earning now twelve dollars per week, part of this went for railway
+fare, but I still had a margin of profit. True I still wore reversible
+cuffs and carried my laundry bundles in order to secure the discount,
+but I dressed in better style and looked a little less like a starving
+Russian artist, and I was becoming an author!</p>
+
+<p>My entrance into print came about through my good friend, Mr. Hurd, the
+book reviewer of the <i>Transcript</i>. For him I began to write an
+occasional critical article or poem just to try my hand. One of my
+regular "beats" was up the three long flights of stairs which led to
+Hurd's little den above Washington Street, for there I felt myself a
+little more of the literary man, a little nearer the current of American
+fiction.</p>
+
+<p>Let me repeat my appreciation of the fact that I met with the quickest
+response and the most generous aid among the people of Boston. There was
+nothing cold <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span>or critical in their treatment of me. My success,
+admittedly, came from some sympathy in them rather than from any real
+deserving on my part. I cannot understand at this distance why those
+charming people should have consented to receive from me, opinions
+concerning anything whatsoever,&mdash;least of all notions of
+literature,&mdash;but they did, and they seemed delighted at "discovering"
+me. Perhaps they were surprised at finding so much intelligence in a man
+from the plains.</p>
+
+<p>It was well that I was earning my own living at last, for things were
+not going especially well at home. A couple of dry seasons had made a
+great change in the fortunes of my people. Frank, with his usual
+careless good nature as clerk in the store had given credit to almost
+every comer, and as the hard times came on, many of those indebted
+failed to pay, and father was forced to give up his business and go back
+to the farm which he understood and could manage without the aid of an
+accountant.</p>
+
+<p>"The Junior" as I called my brother, being footloose and discontented,
+wrote to say that he was planning to go farther west&mdash;to Montana, I
+think it was. His letter threw me into dismay. I acknowledged once again
+that my education had in a sense been bought at his expense. I recalled
+the many weeks when the little chap had plowed in my stead whilst I was
+enjoying the inspiration of Osage. It gave me distress to think of him
+separating himself from the family as David had done, and yet my own
+position was too insecure to warrant me promising much in his aid.
+Nevertheless, realizing that mother would suffer less if she knew her
+two sons were together, I wrote, saying, "If you have definitely decided
+on leaving home, don't go west. Come to Boston, and I will see if I
+cannot get you something to do."</p>
+
+<p>It ended in his coming to Boston, and my mother was <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[Pg 349]</a></span>profoundly
+relieved. Father gave no sign either of pleasure or regret. He set to
+work once more increasing his acreage, vigorous and unsubdued.</p>
+
+<p>Frank's coming added to my burden of responsibility and care, but
+increased my pleasure in the city, for I now had someone to show it to.
+He secured a position as an accountant in a railway office and though we
+seldom met during the week, on Sundays we roamed the parks, or took
+excursions down the bay, and in a short time he too became an
+enthusiastic Bostonian with no thought of returning to Dakota. Little
+Jessie was now the sole stay and comfort of our mother.</p>
+
+<p>As I look back now upon the busy, happy days of 1885 and 1886, I can
+grasp only a few salient experiences.... A terrific storm is on the sea.
+We are at Nantasket to study it. The enormous waves are charging in from
+the illimitable sky like an army of horses, only to fall and waste
+themselves in wrath upon the sand. I feel the stinging blast against my
+face.... I am riding on a train over the marshes on my way to my class
+in Chelsea. I look across the level bay and behold a soaring banner of
+sunshot mist, spun by a passing engine, rising, floating, vanishing in
+the air.... I am sitting in an old grocery shop in Waltham listening to
+the quaint aphorism of a group of loafers around the stove.... I am
+lecturing before a summer school in Pepperel, New Hampshire.... I am at
+the theater, I hear Salvini thunderously clamoring on the stage. I see
+Modjeska's beautiful hands. I thrill to Sarah Bernhardt's velvet somber
+voice....</p>
+
+<p>It is summer, Frank and I are walking the lovely lanes of Milton under
+gigantic elms, or lying on the grass of the park in West Roxbury,
+watching the wild birds come and go, hearing the sound of the
+scythestone in the meadow. Day by day, week by week, Boston, New
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[Pg 350]</a></span>England, comes to fuse that part of me which is eastern. I grow at last
+into thinking myself a fixture. Boston is the center of music, of art,
+of literature. My only wish now is to earn money enough to visit my
+people in the West.</p>
+
+<p>And yet, notwithstanding all this, neither of us ever really became a
+Bostonian. We never got beyond a feeling for the beauty, the
+picturesqueness and the charm of our surroundings. The East caused me to
+cry out in admiration, but it did not inspire me to write. It did not
+appeal to me as my material. It was rather as a story already told, a
+song already sung.</p>
+
+<p>When I walked a lane, or saw the sloping roof of a house set against a
+hillside I thought of Whittier or Hawthorne and was silent. The sea
+reminded me of Celia Thaxter or Lucy Larcom. The marshes brought up the
+<i>Wayside Inn</i> of Longfellow; all, all was of the past. New England, rich
+with its memories of great men and noble women, had no direct
+inspiration for me, a son of the West. It did not lay hold upon my
+creative imagination, neither did it inspire me to sing of its glory. I
+remained immutably of the Middle Border and strange to say, my desire to
+celebrate the West was growing.</p>
+
+<p>Each season dropped a thickening veil of mist between me and the scenes
+of my youth, adding a poetic glamour to every rememberable form and
+fact. Each spring when the smell of fresh, uncovered earth returned to
+fret my nostrils I thought of the wide fields of Iowa, of the level
+plains of Dakota, and a desire to hear once more the prairie chicken
+calling from the ridges filled my heart. In the autumn when the wind
+swept through the bare branches of the elm, I thought of the lonely days
+of plowing on the prairie, and the poetry and significance of those wild
+gray days came over me with such power that I instinctively seized my
+pen to write of them.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[Pg 351]</a></span>One day, a man shoveling coal in the alley below my window reminded me
+of that peculiar ringing <i>scrape</i> which the farm shovel used to make
+when (on the Iowa farm) at dusk I scooped my load of corn from the wagon
+box to the crib, and straightway I fell a-dreaming, and from dreaming I
+came to composition, and so it happened that my first writing of any
+significance was an article depicting an Iowa corn-husking scene.</p>
+
+<p>It was not merely a picture of the life my brother and I had lived,&mdash;it
+was an attempt to set forth a typical scene of the Middle Border. "The
+Farm Life of New England has been fully celebrated by means of
+innumerable stories and poems," I began, "its husking bees, its dances,
+its winter scenes are all on record; is it not time that we of the west
+should depict our own distinctive life? The middle border has its
+poetry, its beauty, if we can only see it."</p>
+
+<p>To emphasize these differences I called this first article "The Western
+Corn Husking," and put into it the grim report of the man who had "been
+there," an insistence on the painful as well as the pleasant truth, a
+quality which was discovered afterwards to be characteristic of my work.
+The bitter truth was strongly developed in this first article.</p>
+
+<p>Up to this time I had composed nothing except several more or less
+high-falutin' essays, a few poems and one or two stories somewhat in
+imitation of Hawthorne, but in this my first real shot at the
+delineation of prairie life, I had no models. Perhaps this clear field
+helped me to be true. It was not fiction, as I had no intention at that
+time of becoming a fictionist, but it was fact, for it included the mud
+and cold of the landscape as well as its bloom and charm.</p>
+
+<p>I sent "The Corn Husking" to the <i>New American Magazine</i>, and almost by
+return mail the editor, William <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[Pg 352]</a></span>Wyckoff, wrote an inspiring letter to
+the effect that the life I had described was familiar to him, and that
+it had never been treated in this way. "I shall be very glad to read
+anything you have written or may write, and I suggest that you follow up
+this article by others of the same nature."</p>
+
+<p>It was just the encouragement I needed. I fell to work at once upon
+other articles, taking up the seasons one by one. Wyckoff accepted them
+gladly, but paid for them slowly and meagerly&mdash;but I did not blame him
+for that. His magazine was even then struggling for life.</p>
+
+<p>It must have been about this time that I sold to <i>Harper's Weekly</i> a
+long poem of the prairie, for which I was paid the enormous sum of
+twenty-five dollars. With this, the first money I ever had received for
+magazine writing, I hastened to purchase some silk for my mother, and
+the <i>Memoirs of General Grant</i> for my father, with intent to suitably
+record and celebrate my entrance into literature. For the first time in
+her life, my mother was able to wear a silk dress, and she wrote, soon
+after, a proud and grateful letter saying things which blurred my eyes
+and put a lump into my throat. If only I could have laid the silk in her
+lap, and caught the light of her happy smile!</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br /><a name="XXVIII" id="XXVIII"></a>
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[Pg 353]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CHAPTER XXVIII</h2>
+
+<h2>A Visit to the West</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>At twenty-seven years of age, and after having been six years absent
+from Osage, the little town in which I went to school, I found myself
+able to revisit it. My earnings were still humiliatingly less than those
+of a hod-carrier, but by shameless economy I had saved a little over one
+hundred dollars and with this as a travelling fund, I set forth at the
+close of school, on a vacation tour which was planned to include the old
+home in the Coulee, the Iowa farm, and my father's house in Dakota. I
+took passage in a first class coach this time, but was still a long way
+from buying a berth in a sleeping car.</p>
+
+<p>To find myself actually on the train and speeding westward was deeply
+and pleasurably exciting, but I did not realize how keen my hunger for
+familiar things had grown, till the next day when I reached the level
+lands of Indiana. Every field of wheat, every broad hat, every honest
+treatment of the letter "r" gave me assurance that I was approaching my
+native place. The reapers at work in the fields filled my mind with
+visions of the past. The very weeds at the roadside had a magical appeal
+and yet, eager as I was to reach old friends, I found in Chicago a new
+friend whose sympathy was so stimulating, so helpful that I delayed my
+journey for two days in order that I might profit by his critical
+comment.</p>
+
+<p>This meeting came about in a literary way. Some months earlier, in May,
+to be exact, Hurd of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[Pg 354]</a></span><i>Transcript</i> had placed in my hands a novel
+called <i>Zury</i> and my review of it had drawn from its author, a western
+man, a letter of thanks and a cordial invitation to visit him as I
+passed through Chicago, on my way to my old home. This I had gladly
+accepted, and now with keen interest, I was on my way to his home.</p>
+
+<p>Joseph Kirkland was at this time nearly sixty years of age, a small,
+alert, dark-eyed man, a lawyer, who lived in what seemed to me at the
+time, plutocratic grandeur, but in spite of all this, and
+notwithstanding the difference in our ages, I liked him and we formed an
+immediate friendship. "Mrs. Kirkland and my daughters are in Michigan
+for the summer," he explained, "and I am camping in my study." I was
+rather glad of this arrangement for, having the house entirely to
+ourselves, we could discuss realism, Howells and the land-question with
+full vigor and all night if we felt like it.</p>
+
+<p>Kirkland had read some of my western sketches and in the midst of his
+praise of them suddenly asked, "Why don't you write fiction?"</p>
+
+<p>To this I replied, "I can't manage the dialogue."</p>
+
+<p>"Nonsense!" said he. "You're lazy, that's all. You use the narrative
+form because it's easier. Buckle to it&mdash;you can write stories as well as
+I can&mdash;but you must sweat!"</p>
+
+<p>This so surprised me that I was unable to make any denial of his charge.
+The fact is he was right. To compose a page of conversation, wherein
+each actor uses his own accent and speaks from his own point of view,
+was not easy. I had dodged the hard spots.</p>
+
+<p>The older man's bluntness and humor, and his almost wistful appreciation
+of my youth and capacity for being moved, troubled me, absorbed my mind
+even during our talk. Some of his words stuck like burrs, because they
+seemed so absurd. "When your name is known all over <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[Pg 355]</a></span>the West," he said
+in parting, "remember what I say. You can go far if you'll only work. I
+began too late. I can't emotionalize present day western life&mdash;you can,
+but you must bend to your desk like a man. You must grind!"</p>
+
+<p>I didn't feel in the least like a successful fictionist and being a
+household word seemed very remote,&mdash;but I went away resolved to "grind"
+if grinding would do any good.</p>
+
+<p>Once out of the city, I absorbed "atmosphere" like a sponge. It was with
+me no longer (as in New England) a question of warmed-over themes and
+appropriated characters. Whittier, Hawthorne, Holmes, had no connection
+with the rude life of these prairies. Each weedy field, each wire fence,
+the flat stretches of grass, the leaning Lombardy trees,&mdash;everything was
+significant rather than beautiful, familiar rather than picturesque.</p>
+
+<p>Something deep and resonant vibrated within my brain as I looked out
+upon this monotonous commonplace landscape. I realized for the first
+time that the east had surfeited me with picturesqueness. It appeared
+that I had been living for six years amidst painted, neatly arranged
+pasteboard scenery. Now suddenly I dropped to the level of nature
+unadorned, down to the ugly unkempt lanes I knew so well, back to the
+pungent realities of the streamless plain.</p>
+
+<p>Furthermore I acknowledged a certain responsibility for the conditions
+of the settlers. I felt related to them, an intolerant part of them.
+Once fairly out among the fields of northern Illinois everything became
+so homely, uttered itself so piercingly to me that nothing less than
+song could express my sense of joy, of power. This was my country&mdash;these
+my people.</p>
+
+<p>It was the third of July, a beautiful day with a radiant sky, darkened
+now and again with sudden showers. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[Pg 356]</a></span>Great clouds, trailing veils of
+rain, enveloped the engine as it roared straight into the west,&mdash;for an
+instant all was dark, then forth we burst into the brilliant sunshine
+careening over the green ridges as if drawn by runaway dragons with
+breath of flame.</p>
+
+<p>It was sundown when I crossed the Mississippi river (at Dubuque) and the
+scene which I looked out upon will forever remain a splendid page in my
+memory. The coaches lay under the western bluffs, but away to the south
+the valley ran, walled with royal purple, and directly across the flood,
+a beach of sand flamed under the sunset light as if it were a bed of
+pure untarnished gold. Behind this an island rose, covered with noble
+trees which suggested all the romance of the immemorial river. The
+redman's canoe, the explorer's batteau, the hunter's lodge, the
+emigrant's cabin, all stood related to that inspiring vista. For the
+first time in my life I longed to put this noble stream into verse.</p>
+
+<p>All that day I had studied the land, musing upon its distinctive
+qualities, and while I acknowledged the natural beauty of it, I revolted
+from the gracelessness of its human habitations. The lonely boxlike
+farm-houses on the ridges suddenly appeared to me like the dens of wild
+animals. The lack of color, of charm in the lives of the people
+anguished me. I wondered why I had never before perceived the futility
+of woman's life on a farm.</p>
+
+<p>I asked myself, "Why have these stern facts never been put into our
+literature as they have been used in Russia and in England? Why has this
+land no story-tellers like those who have made Massachusetts and New
+Hampshire illustrious?"</p>
+
+<p>These and many other speculations buzzed in my brain. Each moment was a
+revelation of new uglinesses as well as of remembered beauties.</p>
+
+<p>At four o'clock of a wet morning I arrived at Charles <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[Pg 357]</a></span>City, from which
+I was to take "the spur" for Osage. Stiffened and depressed by my
+night's ride, I stepped out upon the platform and watched the train as
+it passed on, leaving me, with two or three other silent and sleepy
+passengers, to wait until seven o'clock in the morning for the
+"accommodation train." I was still busy with my problem, but the salient
+angles of my interpretation were economic rather than literary.</p>
+
+<p>Walking to and fro upon the platform, I continued to ponder my
+situation. In a few hours I would be among my old friends and
+companions, to measure and be measured. Six years before I had left them
+to seek my fortune in the eastern world. I had promised
+little,&mdash;fortunately&mdash;and I was returning, without the pot of gold and
+with only a tinge of glory.</p>
+
+<p>Exteriorly I had nothing but a crop of sturdy whiskers to show for my
+years of exile but mentally I was much enriched. Twenty years of
+development lay between my thought at the moment and those of my simpler
+days. My study of Spencer, Whitman and other of the great leaders of the
+world, my years of absorbed reading in the library, my days of
+loneliness and hunger in the city had swept me into a far bleak land of
+philosophic doubt where even the most daring of my classmates would
+hesitate to follow me.</p>
+
+<p>A violent perception of the mysterious, the irrevocable march of human
+life swept over me and I shivered before a sudden realization of the
+ceaseless change and shift of western life and landscape. How few of
+those I knew were there to greet me! Walter and Charles were dead, Maud
+and Lena were both married, and Burton was preaching somewhere in the
+West.</p>
+
+<p>Six short years had made many changes in the little town and it was in
+thinking upon these changes that I reached a full realization of the
+fact that I was no longer <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[Pg 358]</a></span>a "promising boy" of the prairie but a man,
+with a notion of human life and duty and responsibility which was
+neither cheerful nor resigned. I was returning as from deep valleys,
+from the most alien climate.</p>
+
+<p>Looking at the sky above me, feeling the rush of the earth beneath my
+feet I saw how much I had dared and how little, how pitifully little I
+had won. Over me the ragged rainclouds swept, obscuring the stars and in
+their movement and in the feeling of the dawn lay something illimitable
+and prophetic. Such moments do not come to men often&mdash;but to me for an
+hour, life was painfully purposeless. "What does it all mean?" I asked
+myself.</p>
+
+<p>At last the train came, and as it rattled away to the north and I drew
+closer to the scenes of my boyhood, my memory quickened. The Cedar
+rippling over its limestone ledges, the gray old mill and the pond where
+I used to swim, the farm-houses with their weedy lawns, all seemed not
+only familiar but friendly, and when at last I reached the station (the
+same grimy little den from which I had started forth six years before),
+I rose from my seat with the air of a world-traveller and descended upon
+the warped and splintered platform, among my one time friends and
+neighbors, with quickened pulse and seeking eye.</p>
+
+<p>It was the fourth of July and a crowd was at the station, but though I
+recognized half the faces, not one of them lightened at sight of me. The
+'bus driver, the ragged old dray-man (scandalously profane), the common
+loafers shuffling about, chewing and spitting, seemed absolutely
+unchanged. One or two elderly citizens eyed me closely as I slung my
+little Boston valise with a long strap over my shoulder and started up
+the billowing board sidewalk toward the center of the town, but I gave
+out no word of recognition. Indeed I took a boyish pride in the
+disguising effect of my beard.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">[Pg 359]</a></span>How small and flat and leisurely the village seemed. The buildings which
+had once been so imposing in my eyes were now of very moderate elevation
+indeed, and the opera house was almost indistinguishable from the
+two-story structures which flanked it; but the trees had increased in
+dignity, and some of the lawns were lovely.</p>
+
+<p>With eyes singling out each familiar object I loitered along the walk.
+There stood the grimy wagon shop from which a hammer was ringing
+cheerily, like the chirp of a cricket,&mdash;just as aforetime. Orrin Blakey
+stood at the door of his lumber yard surveying me with curious eyes but
+I passed him in silence. I wished to spend an hour or two in going about
+in guise of a stranger. There was something instructive as well as
+deliciously exciting in thus seeing old acquaintances as from behind a
+mask. They were at once familiar and mysterious&mdash;mysterious with my new
+question, "Is this life worth living?"</p>
+
+<p>The Merchants' Hotel which once appeared so luxurious (within the reach
+only of great lecturers like Joseph Cook and Wendell Phillips) had
+declined to a shabby frame tavern, but entering the dining room I
+selected a seat near an open window, from which I could look out upon
+the streets and survey the throng of thickening sightseers as they moved
+up and down before me like the figures in a vitascope.</p>
+
+<p>I was waited upon by a slatternly girl and the breakfast she brought to
+me was so bad (after Mary's cooking) that I could only make a pretense
+of eating it, but I kept my seat, absorbed by the forms coming and
+going, almost within the reach of my hand. Among the first to pace
+slowly by was Lawyer Ricker, stately, solemn and bibulous as ever, his
+red beard flowing over a vest unbuttoned in the manner of the
+old-fashioned southern gentleman, his spotless linen and neat tie
+showing that his careful, faithful wife was still on guard.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[Pg 360]</a></span>Him I remembered for his astounding ability to recite poetry by the hour
+and also because of a florid speech which I once heard him make in the
+court room. For six mortal hours he spoke on a case involving the
+stealing of a horse-blanket worth about four dollars and a half. In the
+course of his argument he ranged with leisurely self-absorption, from
+ancient Egypt and the sacred Crocodile down through the dark ages,
+touching at Athens and Mount Olympus, reviewing Rome and the court of
+Charlemagne, winding up at four P. M. with an impassioned appeal to the
+jury to remember the power of environment upon his client. I could not
+remember how the suit came out, but I did recall the look of
+stupefaction which rested on the face of the accused as he found himself
+likened to Gurth the swine-herd and a peasant of Carcassone.</p>
+
+<p>Ricker seemed quite unchanged save for the few gray hairs which had come
+into his beard and, as he stood in conversation with one of the
+merchants of the town, his nasal voice, his formal speech and the
+grandiloquent gesture of his right hand brought back to me all the
+stories I had heard of his drinking and of his wife's heroic rescuing
+expeditions to neighboring saloons. A strange, unsatisfactory end to a
+man of great natural ability.</p>
+
+<p>Following him came a young girl leading a child of ten. I knew them at
+once. Ella McKee had been of the size of the little one, her sister,
+when I went away, and nothing gave me a keener realization of the years
+which had passed than the flowering of the child I had known into this
+charming maiden of eighteen. Her resemblance to her sister Flora was too
+marked to be mistaken, and the little one by her side had the same
+flashing eyes and radiant smile with which both of her grown up sisters
+were endowed. Their beauty fairly glorified the dingy street as they
+walked past my window.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[Pg 361]</a></span>Then an old farmer, bent and worn of frame, halted before me to talk
+with a merchant. This was David Babcock, Burton's father, one of our old
+time neighbors, a little more bent, a little thinner, a little
+grayer&mdash;that was all, and as I listened to his words I asked, "What
+purpose does a man serve by toiling like that for sixty years with no
+increase of leisure, with no growth in mental grace?"</p>
+
+<p>There was a wistful note in his voice which went straight to my heart.
+He said: "No, our wheat crop ain't a-going to amount to much this year.
+Of course we don't try to raise much grain&mdash;it's mostly stock, but I
+thought I'd try wheat again. I wisht we could get back to the good old
+days of wheat raising&mdash;it w'ant so confining as stock-raisin'." His good
+days were also in the past!</p>
+
+<p>As I walked the street I met several neighbors from Dry Run as well as
+acquaintances from the Grove. Nearly all, even the young men, looked
+worn and weather-beaten and some appeared both silent and sad. Laughter
+was curiously infrequent and I wondered whether in my days on the farm
+they had all been as rude of dress, as misshapen of form and as wistful
+of voice as they now seemed to me to be. "Have times changed? Has a
+spirit of unrest and complaining developed in the American farmer?"</p>
+
+<p>I perceived the town from the triple viewpoint of a former resident, a
+man from the city, and a reformer, and every minutest detail of dress,
+tone and gesture revealed new meaning to me. Fancher and Gammons were
+feebler certainly, and a little more querulous with age, and their faded
+beards and rough hands gave pathetic evidence of the hard wear of wind
+and toil. At the moment nothing glozed the essential tragic futility of
+their existence.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[Pg 362]</a></span>Then down the street came "The Ragamuffins," the little Fourth of July
+procession, which in the old days had seemed so funny, so exciting to
+me. I laughed no more. It filled me with bitterness to think that such a
+makeshift spectacle could amuse anyone. "How dull and eventless life
+must be to enable such a pitiful travesty to attract and hold the
+attention of girls like Ella and Flora," I thought as I saw them
+standing with their little sister to watch "the parade."</p>
+
+<p>From the window of a law office, Emma and Matilda Leete were leaning and
+I decided to make myself known to them. Emma, who had been one of my
+high admirations, had developed into a handsome and interesting woman
+with very little of the village in her dress or expression, and when I
+stepped up to her and asked, "Do you know me?" her calm gray eyes and
+smiling lips denoted humor. "Of course I know you&mdash;in spite of the
+beard. Come in and sit with us and tell all of us about yourself."</p>
+
+<p>As we talked, I found that they, at least, had kept in touch with the
+thought of the east, and Ella understood in some degree the dark mood
+which I voiced. She, too, occasionally doubted whether the life they
+were all living was worth while. "We make the best of it," she said,
+"but none of us are living up to our dreams."</p>
+
+<p>Her musical voice, thoughtful eyes and quick intelligence, re-asserted
+their charm, and I spent an hour or more in her company talking of old
+friends. It was not necessary to talk down to her. She was essentially
+urban in tone while other of the girls who had once impressed me with
+their beauty had taken on the airs of village matrons and did not
+interest me. If they retained aspirations they concealed the fact. Their
+husbands and children entirely occupied their minds.</p>
+
+<p>Returning to the street, I introduced myself to Uncle <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">[Pg 363]</a></span>Billy Fraser and
+Osmund Button and other Sun Prairie neighbors and when it became known
+that "Dick Garland's boy" was in town, many friends gathered about to
+shake my hand and inquire concerning "Belle" and "Dick."</p>
+
+<p>The hard, crooked fingers, which they laid in my palm completed the
+sorrowful impression which their faces had made upon me. A twinge of
+pain went through my heart as I looked into their dim eyes and studied
+their heavy knuckles. I thought of the hand of Edwin Booth, of the
+flower-like palm of Helena Modjeska, of the subtle touch of Inness, and
+I said, "Is it not time that the human hand ceased to be primarily a
+bludgeon for hammering a bare living out of the earth? Nature all
+bountiful, undiscriminating, would, under justice, make such toil
+unnecessary." My heart burned with indignation. With William Morris and
+Henry George I exclaimed, "Nature is not to blame. Man's laws are to
+blame,"&mdash;but of this I said nothing at the time&mdash;at least not to men
+like Babcock and Fraser.</p>
+
+<p>Next day I rode forth among the farms of Dry Run, retracing familiar
+lanes, standing under the spreading branches of the maple trees I had
+planted fifteen years before. I entered the low stone cabin wherein
+Neighbor Button had lived for twenty years (always intending sometime to
+build a house and make a granary of this), and at the table with the
+family and the hired men, I ate again of Ann's "riz" biscuit and sweet
+melon pickles. It was not a pleasant meal, on the contrary it was
+depressing to me. The days of the border were over, and yet Arvilla his
+wife was ill and aging, still living in pioneer discomfort toiling like
+a slave.</p>
+
+<p>At neighbor Gardner's home, I watched his bent complaining old wife
+housekeeping from dawn to dark, literally dying on her feet. William
+Knapp's home was <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">[Pg 364]</a></span>somewhat improved but the men still came to the table
+in their shirt sleeves smelling of sweat and stinking of the stable,
+just as they used to do, and Mrs. Knapp grown more gouty, more unwieldy
+than ever (she spent twelve or fourteen hours each day on her swollen
+and aching feet), moved with a waddling motion because, as she
+explained, "I can't limp&mdash;I'm just as lame in one laig as I am in
+t'other. But 'tain't no use to complain, I've just so much work to do
+and I might as well go ahead and do it."</p>
+
+<p>I slept that night in her "best room," yes, at last, after thirty years
+of pioneer life, she had a guest chamber and a new "bedroom soot." With
+open pride and joy she led Belle Garland's boy in to view this precious
+acquisition, pointing out the soap and towels, and carefully removing
+the counterpane! I understood her pride, for my mother had not yet
+acquired anything so luxurious as this. She was still on the border!</p>
+
+<p>Next day, I called upon Andrew Ainsley and while the women cooked in a
+red-hot kitchen, Andy stubbed about the barnyard in his bare feet,
+showing me his hogs and horses. Notwithstanding his town-visitor and the
+fact that it was Sunday, he came to dinner in a dirty, sweaty,
+collarless shirt, and I, sitting at his oil-cloth covered table, slipped
+back, deeper, ever deeper among the stern realities of the life from
+which I had emerged. I recalled that while my father had never allowed
+his sons or the hired men to come to the table unwashed or uncombed, we
+usually ate while clothed in our sweaty garments, glad to get food into
+our mouths in any decent fashion, while the smell of the horse and the
+cow mingled with the savor of the soup. There is no escape even on a
+modern "model farm" from the odor of the barn.</p>
+
+<p>Every house I visited had its individual message of sordid struggle and
+half-hidden despair. Agnes had <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">[Pg 365]</a></span>married and moved away to Dakota, and
+Bess had taken upon her girlish shoulders the burdens of wifehood and
+motherhood almost before her girlhood had reached its first period of
+bloom. In addition to the work of being cook and scrub-woman, she was
+now a mother and nurse. As I looked around upon her worn chairs, faded
+rag carpets, and sagging sofas,&mdash;the bare walls of her pitiful little
+house seemed a prison. I thought of her as she was in the days of her
+radiant girlhood and my throat filled with rebellious pain.</p>
+
+<p>All the gilding of farm life melted away. The hard and bitter realities
+came back upon me in a flood. Nature was as beautiful as ever. The
+soaring sky was filled with shining clouds, the tinkle of the bobolink's
+fairy bells rose from the meadow, a mystical sheen was on the odorous
+grass and waving grain, but no splendor of cloud, no grace of sunset
+could conceal the poverty of these people, on the contrary they brought
+out, with a more intolerable poignancy, the gracelessness of these
+homes, and the sordid quality of the mechanical daily routine of these
+lives.</p>
+
+<p>I perceived beautiful youth becoming bowed and bent. I saw lovely
+girlhood wasting away into thin and hopeless age. Some of the women I
+had known had withered into querulous and complaining spinsterhood, and
+I heard ambitious youth cursing the bondage of the farm. "Of such pain
+and futility are the lives of the average man and woman of both city and
+country composed," I acknowledged to myself with savage candor, "Why lie
+about it?"</p>
+
+<p>Some of my playmates opened their acrid hearts to me. My presence
+stimulated their discontent. I was one of them, one who having escaped
+had returned as from some far-off glorious land of achievement. My
+improved dress, my changed manner of speech, everything <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">[Pg 366]</a></span>I said, roused
+in them a kind of rebellious rage and gave them unwonted power of
+expression. Their mood was no doubt transitory, but it was as real as my
+own.</p>
+
+<p>Men who were growing bent in digging into the soil spoke to me of their
+desire to see something of the great eastern world before they died.
+Women whose eyes were faded and dim with tears, listened to me with
+almost breathless interest whilst I told them of the great cities I had
+seen, of wonderful buildings, of theaters, of the music of the sea.
+Young girls expressed to me their longing for a life which was better
+worth while, and lads, eager for adventure and excitement, confided to
+me their secret intention to leave the farm at the earliest moment. "I
+don't intend to wear out my life drudging on this old place," said
+Wesley Fancher with a bitter oath.</p>
+
+<p>In those few days, I perceived life without its glamor. I no longer
+looked upon these toiling women with the thoughtless eyes of youth. I
+saw no humor in the bent forms and graying hair of the men. I began to
+understand that my own mother had trod a similar slavish round with
+never a full day of leisure, with scarcely an hour of escape from the
+tugging hands of children, and the need of mending and washing clothes.
+I recalled her as she passed from the churn to the stove, from the stove
+to the bedchamber, and from the bedchamber back to the kitchen, day
+after day, year after year, rising at daylight or before, and going to
+her bed only after the evening dishes were washed and the stockings and
+clothing mended for the night.</p>
+
+<p>The essential tragedy and hopelessness of most human life under the
+conditions into which our society was swiftly hardening embittered me,
+called for expression, but even then I did not know that I had found my
+theme. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">[Pg 367]</a></span>I had no intention at the moment of putting it into fiction.</p>
+
+<p>The reader may interrupt at this point to declare that all life, even
+the life of the city is futile, if you look at it in that way, and I
+reply by saying that I still have moments when I look at it that way.
+What is it all about, anyhow, this life of ours? Certainly to be forever
+weary and worried, to be endlessly soiled with thankless labor and to
+grow old before one's time soured and disappointed, is not the whole
+destiny of man!</p>
+
+<p>Some of these things I said to Emma and Matilda but their optimism was
+too ingrained to yield to my gray mood. "We can't afford to grant too
+much," said Emma. "We are in it, you see."</p>
+
+<p>Leaving the village of Osage, with my mind still in a tumult of revolt,
+I took the train for the Northwest, eager to see my mother and my little
+sister, yet beginning to dread the changes which I must surely find in
+them. Not only were my senses exceedingly alert and impressionable, my
+eyes saw nothing but the loneliness and the lack of beauty in the
+landscape, and the farther west I went, the lonelier became the boxlike
+habitations of the plain. Here were the lands over which we had hurried
+in 1881, lured by the "Government Land" of the farther west. Here, now,
+a kind of pioneering behind the lines was going on. The free lands were
+gone and so, at last, the price demanded by these speculators must be
+paid.</p>
+
+<p>This wasteful method of pioneering, this desolate business of lonely
+settlement took on a new and tragic significance as I studied it.
+Instructed by my new philosophy I now perceived that these plowmen,
+these wives and daughters had been pushed out into these lonely ugly
+shacks by the force of landlordism behind. These plodding Swedes and
+Danes, these thrifty Germans, these hairy Russians had all fled from the
+feudalism of their <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">[Pg 368]</a></span>native lands and were here because they had no share
+in the soil from which they sprung, and because in the settled
+communities of the eastern states, the speculative demand for land had
+hindered them from acquiring even a leasing right to the surface of the
+earth.</p>
+
+<p>I clearly perceived that our Song of Emigration had been, in effect, the
+hymn of fugitives!</p>
+
+<p>And yet all this did not prevent me from acknowledging the beauty of the
+earth. On the contrary, social injustice intensified nature's
+prodigality. I said, "Yes, the landscape is beautiful, but how much of
+its beauty penetrates to the heart of the men who are in the midst of it
+and battling with it? How much of consolation does the worn and weary
+renter find in the beauty of cloud and tree or in the splendor of the
+sunset?&mdash;Grace of flower does not feed or clothe the body, and when the
+toiler is both badly clothed and badly fed, bird-song and leaf-shine
+cannot bring content." Like Millet, I asked, "Why should all of a man's
+waking hours be spent in an effort to feed and clothe his family? Is
+there not something wrong in our social scheme when the unremitting
+toiler remains poor?"</p>
+
+<p>With such thoughts filling my mind, I passed through this belt of recent
+settlement and came at last into the valley of the James. One by one the
+familiar flimsy little wooden towns were left behind (strung like beads
+upon a string), and at last the elevator at Ordway appeared on the edge
+of the horizon, a minute, wavering projection against the sky-line, and
+half an hour later we entered the village, a sparse collection of
+weather-beaten wooden houses, without shade of trees or grass of lawns,
+a desolate, drab little town.</p>
+
+<p>Father met me at the train, grayer of beard and hair, but looking hale
+and cheerful, and his voice, his peculiar expressions swept away all my
+city experience. In an <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">[Pg 369]</a></span>instant I was back precisely where I had been
+when I left the farm. He was Captain, I was a corporal in the rear
+ranks.</p>
+
+<p>And yet he was distinctly less harsh, less keen. He had mellowed. He had
+gained in sentiment, in philosophy, that was evident, and as we rode
+away toward the farm we fell into intimate, almost tender talk.</p>
+
+<p>I was glad to note that he had lost nothing either in dignity or
+manliness in my eyes. His speech though sometimes ungrammatical was
+vigorous and precise and his stories gave evidence of his native
+constructive skill. "Your mother is crazy to see you," he said, "but I
+have only this one-seated buggy, and she couldn't come down to meet
+you."</p>
+
+<p>When nearly a mile away I saw her standing outside the door of the house
+waiting for us, so eager that she could not remain seated, and as I
+sprang from the carriage she came hurrying out to meet me, uttering a
+curious little murmuring sound which touched me to the heart.</p>
+
+<p>The changes in her shocked me, filled me with a sense of guilt.
+Hesitation was in her speech. Her voice once so glowing and so jocund,
+was tremulous, and her brown hair, once so abundant, was thin and gray.
+I realized at once that in the three years of my absence she had topped
+the high altitude of her life and was now descending swiftly toward
+defenseless age, and in bitter sadness I entered the house to meet my
+sister Jessie who was almost a stranger to me.</p>
+
+<p>She had remained small and was quaintly stooped in neck and shoulders
+but retained something of her childish charm. To her I was quite alien,
+in no sense a brother. She was very reticent, but it did not take me
+long to discover that in her quiet fashion she commanded the camp. For
+all his military bluster, the old soldier <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">[Pg 370]</a></span>was entirely subject to her.
+She was never wilful concerning anything really important, but she
+assumed all the rights of an individual and being the only child left in
+the family, went about her affairs without remark or question, serene,
+sweet but determined.</p>
+
+<p>The furniture and pictures of the house were quite as humble as I had
+remembered them to be, but mother wore with pride the silk dress I had
+sent to her and was so happy to have me at home that she sat in silent
+content, while I told her of my life in Boston (boasting of my success
+of course, I had to do that to justify myself), and explaining that I
+must return, in time to resume my teaching in September.</p>
+
+<p>Harvest was just beginning, and I said, "Father, if you'll pay me full
+wages, I'll take a hand."</p>
+
+<p>This pleased him greatly, but he asked, "Do you think you can stand it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I can try," I responded. Next day I laid off my city clothes and took
+my place as of old on the stack.</p>
+
+<p>On the broad acres of the arid plains the header and not the binder was
+then in use for cutting the wheat, and as stacker I had to take care of
+the grain brought to me by the three header boxes.</p>
+
+<p>It was very hard work that first day. It seemed that I could not last
+out the afternoon, but I did, and when at night I went to the house for
+supper, I could hardly sit at the table with the men, so weary were my
+bones. I sought my bed early and rose next day so sore that movement was
+torture. This wore away at last and on the third day I had no difficulty
+in keeping up my end of the whiffletree.</p>
+
+<p>The part of labor that I hated was the dirt. Night after night as I came
+in covered with dust, too tired to bathe, almost too weary to change my
+shirt, I declared against any further harvesting. However, I generally
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">[Pg 371]</a></span>managed to slosh myself with cold water from the well, and so went to my
+bed with a measure of self-respect, but even the "spare room" was hot
+and small, and the conditions of my mother's life saddened me. It was so
+hot and drear for her!</p>
+
+<p>Every detail of the daily life of the farm now assumed literary
+significance in my mind. The quick callousing of my hands, the swelling
+of my muscles, the sweating of my scalp, all the unpleasant results of
+severe physical labor I noted down, but with no intention of exalting
+toil into a wholesome and regenerative thing as Tolstoi, an aristocrat,
+had attempted to do. Labor when so prolonged and severe as at this time
+my toil had to be, is warfare. I was not working as a visitor but as a
+hired hand, and doing my full day's work and more.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of the week I wrote to my friend Kirkland, enclosing some of
+my detailed notes and his reply set me thinking. "You're the first
+actual farmer in American fiction,&mdash;now tell the truth about it," he
+wrote.</p>
+
+<p>Thereafter I studied the glory of the sky and the splendor of the wheat
+with a deepening sense of the generosity of nature and monstrous
+injustice of social creeds. In the few moments of leisure which came to
+me as I lay in the shade of a grain-rick, I pencilled rough outlines of
+poems. My mind was in a condition of tantalizing productivity and I felt
+vaguely that I ought to be writing books instead of pitching grain.
+Conceptions for stories began to rise from the subconscious deeps of my
+thought like bubbles, noiseless and swift&mdash;and still I did not realize
+that I had entered upon a new career.</p>
+
+<p>At night or on Sunday I continued my conferences with father and mother.
+Together we went over the past, talking of old neighbors and from one of
+these conversations came the theme of my first story. It was a very
+simple tale (told by my mother) of an old woman, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">[Pg 372]</a></span>who made a trip back
+to her York state home after an absence in the West of nearly thirty
+years. I was able to remember some of the details of her experience and
+when my mother had finished speaking I said to her, "That is too good to
+lose. I'm going to write it out." Then to amuse her, I added, "Why,
+that's worth seventy-five dollars to me. I'll go halves with you."</p>
+
+<p>Smilingly she held out her hand. "Very well, you may give me my share
+now."</p>
+
+<p>"Wait till I write it," I replied, a little taken aback.</p>
+
+<p>Going to my room I set to work and wrote nearly two thousand words of
+the sketch. This I brought out later in the day and read to her with
+considerable excitement. I really felt that I had struck out a character
+which, while it did not conform to the actual woman in the case, was
+almost as vivid in my mind.</p>
+
+<p>Mother listened very quietly until I had finished, then remarked with
+sententious approval. "That's good. Go on." She had no doubt of my
+ability to go on&mdash;indefinitely!</p>
+
+<p>I explained to her that it wasn't so easy as all that, but that I could
+probably finish it in a day or two. (As a matter of fact, I completed
+the story in Boston but mother got her share of the "loot" just the
+same.)</p>
+
+<p>Soon afterward, while sitting in the door looking out over the fields, I
+pencilled the first draft of a little poem called <i>Color in the Wheat</i>
+which I also read to her.</p>
+
+<p>She received this in the same manner as before, from which it appeared
+that nothing I wrote could surprise her. Her belief in my powers was
+quite boundless. Father was inclined to ask, "What's the good of it?"</p>
+
+<p>Of course all of my visit was not entirely made up of hard labor in the
+field. There were Sundays when we could rest or entertain the neighbors,
+and sometimes a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">[Pg 373]</a></span>shower gave us a few hours' respite, but for the most
+part the weeks which I spent at home were weeks of stern service in the
+ranks of the toilers.</p>
+
+<p>There was a very good reason for my close application to the
+fork-handle. Father paid me an extra price as "boss stacker," and I
+could not afford to let a day pass without taking the fullest advantage
+of it. At the same time, I was careful not to convey to my pupils and
+friends from Boston the disgraceful fact that I was still dependent upon
+my skill with a pitch-fork to earn a living. I was not quite sure of
+their approval of the case.</p>
+
+<p>At last there came the time when I must set my face toward the east.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed a treachery to say good-bye to my aging parents, leaving them
+and my untrained sister to this barren, empty, laborious life on the
+plain, whilst I returned to the music, the drama, the inspiration, the
+glory of Boston. Opposite poles of the world could not be farther apart.
+Acute self-accusation took out of my return all of the exaltation and
+much of the pleasure which I had expected to experience as I dropped my
+harvester's fork and gloves and put on the garments of civilization once
+more.</p>
+
+<p>With heart sore with grief and rebellion at "the inexorable trend of
+things," I entered the car, and when from its window I looked back upon
+my grieving mother, my throat filled with a suffocating sense of guilt.
+I was deserting her, recreant to my blood!&mdash;That I was re-enacting the
+most characteristic of all American dramas in thus pursuing an ambitious
+career in a far-off city I most poignantly realized and yet&mdash;I went! It
+seemed to me at the time that my duty lay in the way of giving up all my
+selfish plans in order that I might comfort my mother in her growing
+infirmity, and counsel and defend my sister&mdash;but I did not. I went away
+borne <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">[Pg 374]</a></span>on a stream of purpose so strong that I seemed but a leak in its
+resistless flood.</p>
+
+<p>This feeling of bitterness, of rebellion, of dissatisfaction with
+myself, wore gradually away, and by the time I reached Chicago I had
+resolved to climb high. "I will carry mother and Jessie to comfort and
+to some small share, at least, in the world of art," was my resolve. In
+this way I sought to palliate my selfish plan.</p>
+
+<p>Obscurely forming in my mind were two great literary concepts&mdash;that
+truth was a higher quality than beauty, and that to spread the reign of
+justice should everywhere be the design and intent of the artist. The
+merely beautiful in art seemed petty, and success at the cost of the
+happiness of others a monstrous egotism.</p>
+
+<p>In the spirit of these ideals I returned to my small attic room in
+Jamaica Plain and set to work to put my new conceptions into some sort
+of literary form.</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br /><a name="XXIX" id="XXIX"></a>
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">[Pg 375]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CHAPTER XXIX</h2>
+
+<h2>I Join the Anti-Poverty Brigade</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>In the slow procession of my struggling fortunes this visit to the West
+seems important, for it was the beginning of my career as a fictionist.
+My talk with Kirkland and my perception of the sordid monotony of farm
+life had given me a new and very definite emotional relationship to my
+native state. I perceived now the tragic value of scenes which had
+hitherto appeared merely dull or petty. My eyes were opened to the
+enforced misery of the pioneer. As a reformer my blood was stirred to
+protest. As a writer I was beset with a desire to record in some form
+this newly-born conception of the border.</p>
+
+<p>No sooner did I reach my little desk in Jamaica Plain than I began to
+write, composing in the glow of a flaming conviction. With a delightful
+(and deceptive) sense of power, I graved with heavy hand, as if with pen
+of steel on brazen tablets, picture after picture of the plain. I had no
+doubts, no hesitations about the kind of effect I wished to produce. I
+perceived little that was poetic, little that was idyllic, and nothing
+that was humorous in the man, who, with hands like claws, was scratching
+a scanty living from the soil of a rented farm, while his wife walked
+her ceaseless round from tub to churn and from churn to tub. On the
+contrary, the life of such a family appealed to me as an almost
+unrelievedly tragic futility.</p>
+
+<p>In the few weeks between my return and the beginning <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">[Pg 376]</a></span>of my teaching, I
+wrote several short stories, and outlined a propagandist play. With very
+little thought as to whether such stories would sell rapidly or not at
+all I began to send them away, to the <i>Century</i>, to <i>Harper's</i>, and
+other first class magazines without permitting myself any deep
+disappointment when they came back&mdash;as they all did!</p>
+
+<p>However, having resolved upon being printed by the best periodicals I
+persisted. Notwithstanding rejection after rejection I maintained an
+elevated aim and continued to fire away.</p>
+
+<p>There was a certain arrogance in all this, I will admit, but there was
+also sound logic, for I was seeking the ablest editorial judgment and in
+this way I got it. My manuscripts were badly put together (I used cheap
+paper and could not afford a typist), hence I could not blame the
+readers who hurried my stories back at me. No doubt my illegible writing
+as well as the blunt, unrelenting truth of my pictures repelled them.
+One or two friendly souls wrote personal notes protesting against my
+"false interpretation of western life."</p>
+
+<p>The fact that I, a working farmer, was presenting for the first time in
+fiction the actualities of western country life did not impress them as
+favorably as I had expected it to do. My own pleasure in being true was
+not shared, it would seem, by others. "Give us charming love stories!"
+pleaded the editors.</p>
+
+<p>"No, we've had enough of lies," I replied. "Other writers are telling
+the truth about the city,&mdash;the artisan's narrow, grimy, dangerous job is
+being pictured, and it appears to me that the time has come to tell the
+truth about the barn-yard's daily grind. I have lived the life and I
+know that farming is not entirely made up of berrying, tossing the
+new-mown hay and singing <i>The Old Oaken Bucket</i> on the porch by
+moonlight.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">[Pg 377]</a></span>"The working farmer," I went on to argue, "has to live in February as
+well as June. He must pitch manure as well as clover. Milking as
+depicted on a blue china plate where a maid in a flounced petticoat is
+caressing a gentle Jersey cow in a field of daisies, is quite unlike
+sitting down to the steaming flank of a stinking brindle heifer in
+flytime. Pitching odorous timothy in a poem and actually putting it into
+a mow with the temperature at ninety-eight in the shade are widely
+separated in fact as they should be in fiction. For me," I concluded,
+"the grime and the mud and the sweat and the dust exist. They still form
+a large part of life on the farm, and I intend that they shall go into
+my stories in their proper proportions."</p>
+
+<p>Alas! Each day made me more and more the dissenter from accepted
+economic as well as literary conventions. I became less and less of the
+booming, indiscriminating patriot. Precisely as successful politicians,
+popular preachers and vast traders diminished in importance in my mind,
+so the significance of Whitman, and Tolstoi and George increased, for
+they all represented qualities which make for saner, happier and more
+equitable conditions in the future. Perhaps I despised idlers and
+time-savers unduly, but I was of an age to be extreme.</p>
+
+<p>During the autumn Henry George was announced to speak in Faneuil Hall,
+sacred ark of liberty, and with eager feet my brother and I hastened to
+the spot to hear this reformer whose fame already resounded throughout
+the English-speaking world. Beginning his campaign in California he had
+carried it to Ireland, where he had been twice imprisoned for speaking
+his mind, and now after having set Bernard Shaw and other English
+Fabians aflame with indignant protest, was about to run for mayor of New
+York City.</p>
+
+<p>I have an impression that the meeting was a noon-day <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378">[Pg 378]</a></span>meeting for men,
+at any rate the historical old hall, which had echoed to the voices of
+Garrison and Phillips and Webster was filled with an eager expectant
+throng. The sanded floor was packed with auditors standing shoulder to
+shoulder and the galleries were crowded with these who, like ourselves,
+had gone early in order to ensure seats. From our places in the front
+row we looked down upon an almost solid mosaic of derby hats, the
+majority of which were rusty by exposure to wind and rain.</p>
+
+<p>As I waited I recalled my father's stories of the stern passions of
+anti-slavery days. In this hall Wendell Phillips in the pride and power
+of his early manhood, had risen to reply to the cowardly apologies of
+entrenched conservatism, and here now another voice was about to be
+raised in behalf of those whom the law oppressed. My brother had also
+read <i>Progress and Poverty</i> and both of us felt that we were taking part
+in a distinctly historical event, the beginning of a new abolition
+movement.</p>
+
+<p>At last, a stir at the back of the platform announced the approach of
+the speaker. Three or four men suddenly appeared from some concealed
+door and entered upon the stage. One of them, a short man with a full
+red beard, we recognized at once,&mdash;"The prophet of San Francisco" as he
+was then called (in fine derision) was not a noticeable man till he
+removed his hat. Then the fine line of his face from the crown of his
+head to the tip of his chin printed itself ineffaceably upon our minds.
+The dome-like brow was that of one highly specialized on lines of logic
+and sympathy. There was also something in the tense poise of his body
+which foretold the orator.</p>
+
+<p>Impatiently the audience endured the speakers who prepared the way and
+then, finally, George stepped forward, but prolonged waves of cheering
+again and again <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379">[Pg 379]</a></span>prevented his beginning. Thereupon he started pacing to
+and fro along the edge of the platform, his big head thrown back, his
+small hands clenched as if in anticipation of coming battle. He no
+longer appeared small. His was the master mind of that assembly.</p>
+
+<p>His first words cut across the air with singular calmness. Coming after
+the applause, following the nervous movement of a moment before, his
+utterance was surprisingly cold, masterful, and direct. Action had
+condensed into speech. Heat was transformed into light.</p>
+
+<p>His words were orderly and well chosen. They had precision and grace as
+well as power. He spoke as other men write, with style and arrangement.
+His address could have been printed word for word as it fell from his
+lips. This self-mastery, this graceful lucidity of utterance combined
+with a personal presence distinctive and dignified, reduced even his
+enemies to respectful silence. His altruism, his sincere pity and his
+hatred of injustice sent me away in the mood of a disciple.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile a few of his followers had organized an "Anti-Poverty Society"
+similar to those which had already sprung up in New York, and my brother
+and I used to go of a Sunday evening to the old Horticultural Hall on
+Tremont Street, contributing our presence and our dimes in aid of the
+meeting. Speakers were few and as the weeks went by the audiences grew
+smaller and smaller till one night Chairman Roche announced with sad
+intonation that the meetings could not go on. "You've all got tired of
+hearing us repeat ourselves and we have no new speaker, none at all for
+next week. I am afraid we'll have to quit."</p>
+
+<p>My brother turned to me&mdash;"Here's your 'call,'" he said. "Volunteer to
+speak for them."</p>
+
+<p>Recognizing my duty I rose just as the audience was leaving and sought
+the chairman. With a tremor of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380">[Pg 380]</a></span>excitement in my voice I said, "If you
+can use me as a speaker for next Sunday I will do my best for you."</p>
+
+<p>Roche glanced at me for an instant, and then without a word of question,
+shouted to the audience, "Wait a moment! We <i>have</i> a speaker for next
+Sunday." Then, bending down, he asked of me, "What is your name and
+occupation?"</p>
+
+<p>I told him, and again he lifted his voice, this time in triumphant
+shout, "Professor Hamlin Garland will speak for us next Sunday at eight
+o'clock. Come and bring all your friends."</p>
+
+<p>"You are in for it now," laughed my brother gleefully. "You'll be lined
+up with the anarchists sure!"</p>
+
+<p>That evening was in a very real sense a parting of the ways for me. To
+refuse this call was to go selfishly and comfortably along the lines of
+literary activity I had chosen. To accept was to enter the arena where
+problems of economic justice were being sternly fought out. I understood
+already something of the disadvantage which attached to being called a
+reformer, but my sense of duty and the influence of Herbert Spencer and
+Walt Whitman rose above my doubts. I decided to do my part.</p>
+
+<p>All the week I agonized over my address, and on Sunday spoke to a
+crowded house with a kind of partisan success. On Monday my good friend
+Chamberlin, <i>The Listener</i> of <i>The Transcript</i> filled his column with a
+long review of my heretical harangue.&mdash;With one leap I had reached the
+lime-light of conservative Boston's disapproval!</p>
+
+<p>Chamberlin, himself a "philosophical anarchist," was pleased with the
+individualistic note which ran through my harangue. The Single Taxers
+were of course, delighted for I admitted my discipleship to George, and
+my socialistic friends urged that the general effect of my <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">[Pg 381]</a></span>argument was
+on their side. Altogether, for a penniless student and struggling story
+writer, I created something of a sensation. All my speeches thereafter
+helped to dye me deeper than ever with the color of reform.</p>
+
+<p>However, in the midst of my Anti-Poverty Campaign, I did not entirely
+forget my fiction and my teaching. I was becoming more and more a
+companion of artists and poets, and my devotion to things literary
+deepened from day to day. A dreadful theorist in some ways, I was, after
+all, more concerned with literary than with social problems. Writing was
+my life, land reform one of my convictions.</p>
+
+<p>High in my attic room I bent above my manuscript with a fierce resolve.
+From eight o'clock in the morning until half past twelve, I dug and
+polished. In the afternoon, I met my classes. In the evening I revised
+what I had written and in case I did not go to the theater or to a
+lecture (I had no social engagements) I wrote until ten o'clock. For
+recreation I sometimes drove with Dr. Cross on his calls or walked the
+lanes and climbed the hills with my brother.</p>
+
+<p>In this way most of my stories of the west were written. Happy in my own
+work, I bitterly resented the laws which created millionaires at the
+expense of the poor.</p>
+
+<p>These were days of security and tranquillity, and good friends
+thickened. Each week I felt myself in less danger of being obliged to
+shingle, though I still had difficulty in clothing myself properly.</p>
+
+<p>Again I saw Booth play his wondrous round of parts and was able to
+complete my monograph which I called <i>The Art of Edwin Booth</i>. I even
+went so far as to send to the great actor the chapter on his <i>Macbeth</i>
+and received from him grateful acknowledgments, in a charming letter.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">[Pg 382]</a></span>A little later I had the great honor of meeting him for a moment and it
+happened in this way. The veteran reader, James E. Murdock, was giving a
+recital in a small hall on Park Street, and it was privately announced
+that Edwin Booth and Lawrence Barrett would be present. This was enough
+to justify me in giving up one of my precious dollars on the chance of
+seeing the great tragedian enter the room.</p>
+
+<p>He came in a little late, flushing, timid, apologetic! It seemed to me a
+very curious and wonderful thing that this man who had spoken to
+millions of people from behind the footlights should be timid as a maid
+when confronted by less than two hundred of his worshipful fellow
+citizens in a small hall. So gentle and kindly did he seem.</p>
+
+<p>My courage grew, and after the lecture I approached the spot where he
+stood, and Mr. Barrett introduced me to him as "the author of the
+lecture on <i>Macbeth</i>."&mdash;Never had I looked into such eyes&mdash;deep and dark
+and sad&mdash;and my tongue failed me miserably. I could not say a word.
+Booth smiled with kindly interest and murmured his thanks for my
+critique, and I went away, down across the Common in a glow of delight
+and admiration.</p>
+
+<p>In the midst of all my other duties I was preparing my brother Franklin
+for the stage. Yes, through some mischance, this son of the prairie had
+obtained the privilege of studying with a retired "leading lady" who
+still occasionally made tours of the "Kerosene Circuit" and who had
+agreed to take him out with her, provided he made sufficient progress to
+warrant it. It was to prepare him for this trip that I met him three
+nights in the week at his office (he was bookkeeper in a cutlery firm)
+and there rehearsed <i>East Lynne</i>, <i>Leah the Forsaken</i>, and <i>The Lady of
+Lyons</i>.</p>
+
+<p>From seven o'clock until nine I held the book whilst <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383">[Pg 383]</a></span>he pranced and
+shouted and gesticulated through his lines.</p>
+
+<p>At last, emboldened by his star's praise, he cut loose from his ledger
+and went out on a tour which was extremely diverting but not at all
+remunerative. The company ran on a reef and Frank sent for carfare which
+I cheerfully remitted, crediting it to his educational account.</p>
+
+<p>The most vital literary man in all America at this time was Wm. Dean
+Howells who was in the full tide of his powers and an issue. All through
+the early eighties, reading Boston was divided into two parts,&mdash;those
+who liked Howells and those who fought him, and the most fiercely
+debated question at the clubs was whether his heroines were true to life
+or whether they were caricatures. In many homes he was read aloud with
+keen enjoyment of his delicate humor, and his graceful, incisive
+English; in other circles he was condemned because of his "injustice to
+the finer sex."</p>
+
+<p>As for me, having begun my literary career (as the reader may recall) by
+assaulting this leader of the realistic school I had ended, naturally,
+by becoming his public advocate. How could I help it?</p>
+
+<p>It is true a large part of one of my lectures consisted of a gratuitous
+slam at "Mr. Howells and the so-called realists," but further reading
+and deeper thought along the lines indicated by Whitman, had changed my
+view. One of Walt's immortal invitations which had appealed to me with
+special power was this:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Stop this day and night with me<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And you shall possess the origin of all poems;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You shall no longer take things at second or third hand<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nor look through the eyes of the dead,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nor through my eyes either,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But through your own eyes....<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You shall listen to all sides,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And filter them from yourself.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_384" id="Page_384">[Pg 384]</a></span>Thus by a circuitous route I had arrived at a position where I found
+myself inevitably a supporter not only of Howells but of Henry James
+whose work assumed ever larger significance in my mind. I was ready to
+concede with the realist that the poet might go round the earth and come
+back to find the things nearest at hand the sweetest and best after all,
+but that certain injustices, certain cruel facts must not be blinked at,
+and so, while admiring the grace, the humor, the satire of Howells'
+books, I was saved from anything like imitation by the sterner and
+darker material in which I worked.</p>
+
+<p>My wall of prejudice against the author of <i>A Modern Instance</i> really
+began to sag when during the second year of my stay in Boston, I took up
+and finished <i>The Undiscovered Country</i> (which I had begun five or six
+years before), but it was <i>The Minister's Charge</i> which gave the final
+push to my defenses and fetched them tumbling about my ears in a cloud
+of dust. In fact, it was a review of this book, written for the
+<i>Transcript</i> which brought about a meeting with the great novelist.</p>
+
+<p>My friend Hurd liked the review and had it set up. The editor, Mr.
+Clement, upon reading it in proof said to Hurd, "This is an able review.
+Put it in as an editorial. Who is the writer of it?" Hurd told him about
+me and Clement was interested. "Send him to me," he said.</p>
+
+<p>On Saturday I was not only surprised and delighted by the sight of my
+article in large type at the head of the literary page, I was fluttered
+by the word which Mr. Clement had sent to me.</p>
+
+<p>Humbly as a minstrel might enter the court of his king, I went before
+the editor, and stood expectantly while he said: "That was an excellent
+article. I have sent it to Mr. Howells. You should know him and sometime
+I will give you a letter to him, but not now. Wait awhile. War is being
+made upon him just now, and if you were <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385">[Pg 385]</a></span>to meet him your criticism
+would have less weight. His enemies would say that you had come under
+his personal influence. Go ahead with the work you have in hand, and
+after you have put yourself on record concerning him and his books I
+will see that you meet him."</p>
+
+<p>Like a knight enlisted in a holy war I descended the long narrow
+stairway to the street, and went to my home without knowing what passed
+me.</p>
+
+<p>I ruminated for hours on Mr. Clement's praise. I read and re-read my
+"able article" till I knew it by heart and then I started in, seriously,
+to understand and estimate the school of fiction to which Mr. Howells
+belonged. I read every one of his books as soon as I could obtain them.
+I read James, too, and many of the European realists, but it must have
+been two years before I called upon Mr. Clement to redeem his promise.</p>
+
+<p>Deeply excited, with my note of introduction carefully stowed in my
+inside pocket, I took the train one summer afternoon bound for Lee's
+Hotel in Auburndale, where Mr. Howells was at this time living.</p>
+
+<p>I fervently hoped that the building would not be too magnificent for I
+felt very small and very poor on alighting at the station, and every rod
+of my advance sensibly decreased my self-esteem. Starting with faltering
+feet I came to the entrance of the grounds in a state of panic, and as I
+looked up the path toward the towering portico of the hotel, it seemed
+to me the palace of an emperor and my resolution entirely left me.
+Actually I walked up the street for some distance before I was able to
+secure sufficient grip on myself to return and enter.</p>
+
+<p>"It is entirely unwarranted and very presumptuous in me to be thus
+intruding on a great author's time," I admitted, but it was too late to
+retreat, and so I kept on. Entering the wide central hall I crept warily
+across its polished, hardwood floor to the desk where a highly <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386">[Pg 386]</a></span>ornate
+clerk presided. In a meek, husky voice I asked, "Is Mr. Howells in?"</p>
+
+<p>"He is, but he's at dinner," the despot on the other side of the counter
+coldly replied, and his tone implied that he didn't think the great
+author would relish being disturbed by an individual who didn't even
+know the proper time to call. However, I produced my letter of
+introduction and with some access of spirit requested His Highness to
+have it sent in.</p>
+
+<p>A colored porter soon returned, showed me to a reception room off the
+hall, and told me that Mr. Howells would be out in a few minutes. During
+these minutes I sat with eyes on the portieres and a frog in my throat.
+"How will he receive me? How will he look? What shall I say to him?" I
+asked myself, and behold I hadn't an idea left!</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly the curtains parted and a short man with a large head stood
+framed in the opening. His face was impassive but his glance was one of
+the most piercing I had ever encountered. In the single instant before
+he smiled he discovered my character and my thought as though his eyes
+had been the lenses of some singular and powerful x-ray instrument. It
+was the glance of a novelist.</p>
+
+<p>Of course all this took but a moment's time. Then his face softened,
+became winning and his glance was gracious. "I'm glad to see you," he
+said, and his tone was cordial. "Won't you be seated?"</p>
+
+<p>We took seats at the opposite ends of a long sofa, and Mr. Howells began
+at once to inquire concerning the work and the purposes of his visitor.
+He soon drew forth the story of my coming to Boston and developed my
+theory of literature, listening intently while I told him of my history
+of American Ideals and my attempt at fiction.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_387" id="Page_387">[Pg 387]</a></span>My conception of the local novel and of its great importance in American
+literature, especially interested the master who listened intently while
+I enlarged upon my reasons for believing that the local novel would
+continue to grow in power and insight. At the end I said, "In my
+judgment the men and women of the south, the west and the east, are
+working (without knowing it) in accordance with a great principle, which
+is this: American literature, in order to be great, must be national,
+and in order to be national, must deal with conditions peculiar to our
+own land and climate. Every genuinely American writer must deal with the
+life he knows best and for which he cares the most. Thus Joel Chandler
+Harris, George W. Cable, Joseph Kirkland, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary
+Wilkins, like Bret Harte, are but varying phases of the same movement, a
+movement which is to give us at last a really vital and original
+literature!"</p>
+
+<p>Once set going I fear I went on like the political orator who doesn't
+know how to sit down. I don't think I did quit. Howells stopped me with
+a compliment. "You're doing a fine and valuable work," he said, and I
+thought he meant it&mdash;and he did mean it. "Each of us has had some
+perception of this movement but no one has correlated it as you have
+done. I hope you will go on and finish and publish your essays."</p>
+
+<p>These words uttered, perhaps, out of momentary conviction brought the
+blood to my face and filled me with conscious satisfaction. Words of
+praise by this keen thinker were like golden medals. I had good reason
+to know how discriminating he was in his use of adjectives for he was
+even then the undisputed leader in the naturalistic school of fiction
+and to gain even a moment's interview with him would have been a rich
+reward for a youth who had only just escaped from spreading <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_388" id="Page_388">[Pg 388]</a></span>manure on
+an Iowa farm. Emboldened by his gracious manner, I went on. I confessed
+that I too was determined to do a little at recording by way of fiction
+the manners and customs of my native West. "I don't know that I can
+write a novel, but I intend to try," I added.</p>
+
+<p>He was kind enough then to say that he would like to see some of my
+stories of Iowa. "You have almost a clear field out there&mdash;no one but
+Howe seems to be tilling it."</p>
+
+<p>How long he talked or how long I talked, I do not know, but at last
+(probably in self-defense), he suggested that we take a walk. We
+strolled about the garden a few minutes and each moment my spirits rose,
+for he treated me, not merely as an aspiring student, but as a fellow
+author in whom he could freely confide. At last, in his gentle way, he
+turned me toward my train.</p>
+
+<p>It was then as we were walking slowly down the street, that he faced me
+with the trust of a comrade and asked, "What would you think of a story
+dealing with the effect of a dream on the life of a man?&mdash;I have in mind
+a tale to be called <i>The Shadow of a Dream</i>, or something like that,
+wherein a man is to be influenced in some decided way by the memory of a
+vision, a ghostly figure which is to pursue him and have some share in
+the final catastrophe, whatever it may turn out to be. What would you
+think of such a plot?"</p>
+
+<p>Filled with surprise at his trust and confidence, I managed to stammer a
+judgment. "It would depend entirely upon the treatment," I answered.
+"The theme is a little like Hawthorne, but I can understand how, under
+your hand, it would not be in the least like Hawthorne."</p>
+
+<p>His assent was instant. "You think it not quite like me? You are right.
+It does sound a little lurid. I may <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389">[Pg 389]</a></span>never write it, but if I do, you
+may be sure it will be treated in my own way and not in Hawthorne's
+way."</p>
+
+<p>Stubbornly I persisted. "There are plenty who can do the weird kind of
+thing, Mr. Howells, but there is only one man who can write books like
+<i>A Modern Instance</i> and <i>Silas Lapham</i>."</p>
+
+<p>All that the novelist said, as well as his manner of saying it was
+wonderfully enriching to me. To have such a man, one whose fame was even
+at this time international, desire an expression of my opinion as to the
+fitness of his chosen theme, was like feeling on my shoulder the touch
+of a kingly accolade.</p>
+
+<p>I went away, exalted. My apprenticeship seemed over! To America's chief
+literary man I was a fellow-writer, a critic, and with this recognition
+the current of my ambition shifted course. I began to hope that I, too,
+might some day become a social historian as well as a teacher of
+literature. The reformer was still present, but the literary man had
+been reinforced, and yet, even here, I had chosen the unpopular,
+unprofitable side!</p>
+
+<p>Thereafter the gentle courtesy, the tact, the exquisite, yet simple
+English of this man was my education. Every hour of his delicious humor,
+his wise advice, his ready sympathy sent me away in mingled exaltation
+and despair&mdash;despair of my own blunt and common diction, exaltation over
+his continued interest and friendship.</p>
+
+<p>How I must have bored that sweet and gracious soul! He could not escape
+me. If he moved to Belmont I pursued him. If he went to Nahant or
+Magnolia or Kittery I spent my money like water in order to follow him
+up and bother him about my work, or worry him into a public acceptance
+of the single tax, and yet every word he spoke, every letter he wrote
+was a benediction and an inspiration.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_390" id="Page_390">[Pg 390]</a></span>He was a constant revelation to me of the swift transitions of mood to
+which a Celtic man of letters is liable. His humor was like a low, sweet
+bubbling geyser spring. It rose with a chuckle close upon some very
+somber mood and broke into exquisite phrases which lingered in my mind
+for weeks. Side by side with every jest was a bitter sigh, for he, too,
+had been deeply moved by new social ideals, and we talked much of the
+growing contrasts of rich and poor, of the suffering and loneliness of
+the farmer, the despair of the proletariat, and though I could never
+quite get him to perceive the difference between his program and ours
+(he was always for some vague socialistic reform), he readily admitted
+that land monopoly was the chief cause of poverty, and the first
+injustice to be destroyed. "But you must go farther, much farther," he
+would sadly say.</p>
+
+<p>Of all of my literary friends at this time, Edgar Chamberlin of the
+<i>Transcript</i> was the most congenial. He, too, was from Wisconsin, and
+loved the woods and fields with passionate fervor. At his house I met
+many of the young writers of Boston&mdash;at least they were young
+then&mdash;Sylvester Baxter, Imogene Guiney, Minna Smith, Alice Brown, Mary
+E. Wilkins, and Bradford Torrey were often there. No events in my life
+except my occasional calls on Mr. Howells were more stimulating to me
+than my visits to the circle about Chamberlin's hearth&mdash;(he was the kind
+of man who could not live without an open fire) and Mrs. Chamberlin's
+boundlessly hospitable table was an equally appealing joy.</p>
+
+<p>How they regarded me at that time I cannot surely define&mdash;perhaps they
+tolerated me out of love for the West. But I here acknowledge my
+obligation to "The Listener." He taught me to recognize literary themes
+in the city, for he brought the same keen insight, the same tender
+sympathy to bear upon the crowds of the streets that he <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391">[Pg 391]</a></span>used in
+describing the songs of the thrush or the whir of the partridge.</p>
+
+<p>He was especially interested in the Italians who were just beginning to
+pour into The North End, displacing the Irish as workmen in the streets,
+and often in his column made gracious and charming references to them,
+softening without doubt the suspicion and dislike with which many
+citizens regarded them.</p>
+
+<p>Hurd, on the contrary, was a very bookish man. He sat amidst mountains
+of "books for review" and yet he was always ready to welcome the slender
+volume of the new poet. To him I owe much. From him I secured my first
+knowledge of James Whitcomb Riley, and it was Hurd who first called my
+attention to Kirkland's <i>Zury</i>. Through him I came to an enthusiasm for
+the study of Ibsen and Bjornsen, for he was widely read in the
+literature of the north.</p>
+
+<p>On the desk of this hard-working, ill-paid man of letters (who never
+failed to utter words of encouragement to me) I wish to lay a tardy
+wreath of grateful praise. He deserves the best of the world beyond, for
+he got little but hard work from this. He loved poetry of all kinds and
+enjoyed a wide correspondence with those "who could not choose but
+sing." His desk was crammed with letters from struggling youths whose
+names are familiar now, and in whom he took an almost paternal interest.</p>
+
+<p>One day as I was leaving Hurd's office he said, "By the way, Garland,
+you ought to know Jim Herne. He's doing much the same sort of work on
+the stage that you and Miss Wilkins are putting into the short story.
+Here are a couple of tickets to his play. Go and see it and come back
+and tell what you think of it."</p>
+
+<p>Herne's name was new to me but Hurd's commendation was enough to take me
+down to the obscure theater <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_392" id="Page_392">[Pg 392]</a></span>in the South End where <i>Drifting Apart</i> was
+playing. The play was advertised as "a story of the Gloucester
+fishermen" and Katharine Herne was the "Mary Miller" of the piece.
+Herne's part was that of a stalwart fisherman, married to a delicate
+young girl, and when the curtain went up on his first scene I was
+delighted with the setting. It was a veritable cottage interior&mdash;not an
+English cottage but an American working man's home. The worn chairs, the
+rag rugs, the sewing machine doing duty as a flowerstand, all were in
+keeping.</p>
+
+<p>The dialogue was homely, intimate, almost trivial and yet contained a
+sweet and touching quality. It was, indeed, of a piece with the work of
+Miss Jewett only more humorous, and the action of Katharine and James
+Herne was in key with the text. The business of "Jack's" shaving and
+getting ready to go down the street was most delightful in spirit and
+the act closed with a touch of true pathos.</p>
+
+<p>The second act, a "dream act" was not so good, but the play came back to
+realities in the last act and sent us all away in joyous mood. It was
+for me the beginning of the local color American drama, and before I
+went to sleep that night I wrote a letter to Herne telling him how
+significant I found his play and wishing him the success he deserved.</p>
+
+<p>Almost by return mail came his reply thanking me for my good wishes and
+expressing a desire to meet me. "We are almost always at home on Sunday
+and shall be very glad to see you whenever you can find time to come."</p>
+
+<p>A couple of weeks later&mdash;as soon as I thought it seemly&mdash;I went out to
+Ashmont to see them, for my interest was keen. I knew no one connected
+with the stage at this time and I was curious to know&mdash;I was almost
+frenziedly eager to know the kind of folk the Hernes were.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_393" id="Page_393">[Pg 393]</a></span>My first view of their house was a disappointment. It was quite like any
+other two-story suburban cottage. It had a small garden but it faced
+directly on the walk and was a most uninspiring color. But if the house
+disappointed me the home did not. Herne, who looked older than when on
+the stage, met me with a curiously impassive face but I felt his
+friendship through this mask. Katharine who was even more charming than
+"Mary Miller" wore no mask. She was radiantly cordial and we were
+friends at once. Both persisted in calling me "professor" although I
+explained that I had no right to any such title. In the end they
+compromised by calling me "the Dean," and "the Dean" I remained in all
+the happy years of our friendship.</p>
+
+<p>Not the least of the charms of this home was the companionship of
+Herne's three lovely little daughters Julie, Chrystal and Dorothy, who
+liked "the Dean"&mdash;I don't know why&mdash;and were always at the door to greet
+me when I came. No other household meant as much to me. No one
+understood more clearly than the Hernes the principles I stood for, and
+no one was more interested in my plans for uniting the scattered members
+of my family. Before I knew it I had told them all about my mother and
+her pitiful condition, and Katharine's expressive face clouded with
+sympathetic pain. "You'll work it out," she said, "I am sure of it," and
+her confident words were a comfort to me.</p>
+
+<p>They were true Celts, swift to laughter and quick with tears; they
+inspired me to bolder flights. They met me on every plane of my
+intellectual interests, and our discussions of Herbert Spencer, Henry
+George, and William Dean Howells often lasted deep into the night. In
+all matters concerning the American Drama we were in accord.</p>
+
+<p>Having found these rare and inspiring souls I was not <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_394" id="Page_394">[Pg 394]</a></span>content until I
+had introduced them to all my literary friends. I became their publicity
+agent without authority and without pay, for I felt the injustice of a
+situation where such artists could be shunted into a theater in The
+South End where no one ever saw them&mdash;at least no one of the world of
+art and letters. Their cause was my cause, their success my chief
+concern.</p>
+
+<p><i>Drifting Apart</i>, I soon discovered, was only the beginning of Herne's
+ambitious design to write plays which should be as true in their local
+color as Howells' stories. He was at this time working on two plays
+which were to bring lasting fame and a considerable fortune. One of
+these was a picture of New England coast life and the other was a study
+of factory life. One became <i>Shore Acres</i> and the other <i>Margaret
+Fleming</i>.</p>
+
+<p>From time to time as we met he read me these plays, scene by scene, as
+he wrote them, and when <i>Margaret Fleming</i> was finished I helped him put
+it on at Chickering Hall. My brother was in the cast and I served as
+"Man in Front" for six weeks&mdash;again without pay of course&mdash;and did my
+best to let Boston know what was going on there in that little
+theater&mdash;the first of all the "Little Theaters" in America. Then came
+the success of <i>Shore Acres</i> at the Boston Museum and my sense of
+satisfaction was complete.</p>
+
+<p>How all this puts me back into that other shining Boston! I am climbing
+again those three long flights of stairs to the <i>Transcript</i> office.
+Chamberlin extends a cordial hand, Clement nods as I pass his door. It
+is raining, and in the wet street the vivid reds, greens, and yellows of
+the horse-cars, splash the pavement with gaudy color. Round the tower of
+the Old South Church the doves are whirling.</p>
+
+<p>It is Saturday. I am striding across the Common to Park Square, hurrying
+to catch the 5:02 train. The <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_395" id="Page_395">[Pg 395]</a></span>trees of the Mall are shaking their heavy
+tears upon me. Drays thunder afar off. Bells tinkle.&mdash;How simple, quiet,
+almost village-like this city of my vision seems in contrast with the
+Boston of today with its diabolic subways, its roaring overhead trains,
+its electric cars and its streaming automobiles!</p>
+
+<p>Over and over again I have tried to re-discover that Boston, but it is
+gone, never to return. Herne is dead, Hurd is dead, Clement no longer
+edits the <i>Transcript</i>, Howells and Mary Wilkins live in New York.
+Louise Chandler Moulton lies deep in that grave of whose restful quiet
+she so often sang, and Edward Everett Hale, type of a New England that
+was old when I was young, has also passed into silence. His name like
+that of Higginson and Holmes is only a faint memory in the marble
+splendors of the New Public Library. The ravening years&mdash;how they
+destroy!</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br /><a name="XXX" id="XXX"></a>
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_396" id="Page_396">[Pg 396]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CHAPTER XXX</h2>
+
+<h2>My Mother is Stricken</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>In the summer of 1889, notwithstanding a widening opportunity for
+lectures in the East, I decided to make another trip to the West. In all
+my mother's letters I detected a tremulous undertone of sadness, of
+longing, and this filled me with unrest even in the midst of the
+personal security I had won. I could not forget the duty I owed to her
+who had toiled so uncomplainingly that I might be clothed and fed and
+educated, and so I wrote to her announcing the date of my arrival.</p>
+
+<p>My friend, Dr. Cross, eager to see The Short-Grass Country which was a
+far-off and romantic territory to him, arranged to go with me. It was in
+July, and very hot the day we started, but we were both quite disposed
+to make the most of every good thing and to ignore all discomforts. I'm
+not entirely certain, but I think I occupied a sleeping car berth on
+this trip; if I did so it was for the first time in my life. Anyhow, I
+must have treated myself to regular meals, for I cannot recall being ill
+on the train. This, in itself, was remarkable.</p>
+
+<p>Strange to say, most of the incidents of the journey between Boston and
+Wisconsin are blended like the faded figures on a strip of sun-smit
+cloth, nothing remains definitely distinguishable except the memory of
+our visit to my Uncle William's farm in Neshonoc, and the recollection
+of the pleasure we took in the vivid bands of wild flowers which spun,
+like twin ribbons of satin, from beneath the wheels of the rear coach as
+we rushed <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_397" id="Page_397">[Pg 397]</a></span>across the state. All else has vanished as though it had
+never been.</p>
+
+<p>These primitive blossoms along the railroad's right-of-way deeply
+delighted my friend, but to me they were more than flowers, they were
+cups of sorcery, torches of magic incense. Each nodding pink brought
+back to me the sights and sounds and smells of the glorious meadows of
+my boyhood's vanished world. Every weed had its mystic tale. The slopes
+of the hills, the cattle grouped under the trees, all wrought upon me
+like old half-forgotten poems.</p>
+
+<p>My uncle, big, shaggy, gentle and reticent, met us at the faded little
+station and drove us away toward the sun-topped "sleeping camel" whose
+lines and shadows were so lovely and so familiar. In an hour we were at
+the farm-house where quaint Aunt Maria made us welcome in true pioneer
+fashion, and cooked a mess of hot biscuit to go with the honey from the
+bees in the garden. They both seemed very remote, very primitive even to
+me, to my friend Cross they were exactly like characters in a story. He
+could only look and listen and smile from his seat in the corner.</p>
+
+<p>William, a skilled bee-man, described to us his methods of tracking wild
+swarms, and told us how he handled those in his hives. "I can scoop 'em
+up as if they were so many kernels of corn," he said. After supper as we
+all sat on the porch watching the sunset, he reverted to the brave days
+of fifty-five when deer and bear came down over the hills, when a rifle
+was almost as necessary as a hoe, and as he talked I revived in him the
+black-haired smiling young giant of my boyhood days, untouched of age or
+care.</p>
+
+<p>He was a poet, in his dreamy reticent way, for when next morning I
+called attention to the beauty of the view down the valley, his face
+took on a kind of wistful <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_398" id="Page_398">[Pg 398]</a></span>sweetness and a certain shyness as he
+answered with a visible effort to conceal his feeling&mdash;"I like it&mdash;No
+place better. I wish your father and mother had never left the valley."
+And in this wish I joined.</p>
+
+<p>On the third day we resumed our journey toward Dakota, and the Doctor,
+though outwardly undismayed by the long hard ride and the increasing
+barrenness of the level lands, sighed with relief when at last I pointed
+out against the level sky-line the wavering bulk of the grain elevator
+which alone marked the wind-swept deserted site of Ordway, the end of
+our journey. He was tired.</p>
+
+<p>Business, I soon learned, had not been going well on the border during
+the two years of my absence. None of the towns had improved. On the
+contrary, all had lost ground.</p>
+
+<p>Another dry year was upon the land and the settlers were deeply
+disheartened. The holiday spirit of eight years before had entirely
+vanished. In its place was a sullen rebellion against government and
+against God. The stress of misfortune had not only destroyed hope, it
+had brought out the evil side of many men. Dissensions had grown common.
+Two of my father's neighbors had gone insane over the failure of their
+crops. Several had slipped away "between two days" to escape their
+debts, and even little Jessie, who met us at the train, brave as a
+meadow lark, admitted that something gray had settled down over the
+plain.</p>
+
+<p>Graveyards, jails, asylums, all the accompaniments of civilization, were
+now quite firmly established. On the west lay the lands of the Sioux and
+beyond them the still more arid foot-hills. The westward movement of the
+Middle Border for the time seemed at an end.</p>
+
+<p>My father, Jessie told me, was now cultivating more than five hundred
+acres of land, and deeply worried, for <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_399" id="Page_399">[Pg 399]</a></span>his wheat was thin and light and
+the price less than sixty cents per bushel.</p>
+
+<p>It was nearly sunset as we approached the farm, and a gorgeous sky was
+overarching it, but the bare little house in which my people lived
+seemed a million miles distant from Boston. The trees which my father
+had planted, the flowers which my mother had so faithfully watered, had
+withered in the heat. The lawn was burned brown. No green thing was in
+sight, and no shade offered save that made by the little cabin. On every
+side stretched scanty yellowing fields of grain, and from every worn
+road, dust rose like smoke from crevices, giving upon deep-hidden
+subterranean fires. It was not a good time to bring a visitor to the
+homestead, but it was too late to retreat.</p>
+
+<p>Mother, grayer, older, much less vigorous than she had been two years
+before, met us, silently, shyly, and I bled, inwardly, every time I
+looked at her. A hesitation had come into her speech, and the indecision
+of her movements scared me, but she was too excited and too happy to
+admit of any illness. Her smile was as sweet as ever.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Cross quietly accepted the hot narrow bedroom which was the best we
+could offer him, and at supper took his place among the harvest help
+without any noticeable sign of repugnance. It was all so remote, so
+characteristic of the border that interest dominated disgust.</p>
+
+<p>He was much touched, as indeed was I, by the handful of wild roses which
+father brought in to decorate the little sitting-room. "There's nothing
+I like better," he said, "than a wild rose." The old trailer had
+noticeably softened. While retaining his clarion voice and much of his
+sleepless energy, he was plainly less imperious of manner, less harsh of
+speech.</p>
+
+<p>Jessie's case troubled me. As I watched her, studied her, I perceived
+that she possessed uncommon powers, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_400" id="Page_400">[Pg 400]</a></span>but that she must be taken out of
+this sterile environment. "She must be rescued at once or she will live
+and die the wife of some Dakota farmer," I said to mother.</p>
+
+<p>Again I was disturbed by the feeling that in some way my own career was
+disloyal, something built upon the privations of my sister as well as
+upon those of my mother. I began definitely to plan their rescue. "They
+must not spend the rest of their days on this barren farm," I said to
+Dr. Cross, and my self-accusation spurred me to sterner resolve.</p>
+
+<p>It was not a pleasant time for my good friend, but, as it turned out,
+there was a special providence in his being there, for a few days later,
+while Jessie and I were seated in the little sitting-room busily
+discussing plans for her schooling we heard a short, piercing cry,
+followed by low sobbing.</p>
+
+<p>Hurrying out into the yard, I saw my mother standing a few yards from
+the door, her sweet face distorted, the tears streaming down her cheeks.
+"What is it, mother?" I called out.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't lift my feet," she stammered, putting her arms about my neck.
+"I can't move!" and in her voice was such terror and despair that my
+blood chilled.</p>
+
+<p>It was true! She was helpless. From the waist downward all power of
+locomotion had departed. Her feet were like lead, drawn to the earth by
+some terrible magnetic power.</p>
+
+<p>In a frenzy of alarm, Jessie and I carried her into the house and laid
+her on her bed. My heart burned with bitter indignation. "This is the
+end," I said. "Here is the result of long years of ceaseless toil. She
+has gone as her mother went, in the midst of the battle."</p>
+
+<p>At the moment I cursed the laws of man, I cursed myself. I accused my
+father. Each moment my remorse and horror deepened, and yet I could do
+nothing, nothing <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_401" id="Page_401">[Pg 401]</a></span>but kneel beside the bed and hold her hand while
+Jessie ran to call the doctor. She returned soon to say she could not
+find him.</p>
+
+<p>Slowly the stricken one grew calmer and at last, hearing a wagon drive
+into the yard, I hurried out to tell my father what had happened. He
+read in my face something wrong. "What's the matter?" he asked as I drew
+near.</p>
+
+<p>"Mother is stricken," I said. "She cannot walk."</p>
+
+<p>He stared at me in silence, his gray eyes expanding like those of an
+eagle, then calmly, mechanically he got down and began to unhitch the
+team. He performed each habitual act with most minute care, till I,
+impatient of his silence, his seeming indifference, repeated, "Don't you
+understand? Mother has had a stroke! She is absolutely helpless."</p>
+
+<p>Then he asked, "Where is your friend Dr. Cross?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know, I thought he was with you."</p>
+
+<p>Even as I was calling for him, Dr. Cross came into the cabin, his arms
+laden with roses. He had been strolling about on the prairie.</p>
+
+<p>With his coming hope returned. Calmly yet skillfully he went to the aid
+of the sufferer, while father, Jessie and I sat in agonized suspense
+awaiting his report.</p>
+
+<p>At last he came back to us with gentle reassuring smile.</p>
+
+<p>"There is no immediate danger," he said, and the tone in which he spoke
+was even more comforting than his words. "As soon as she recovers from
+her terror she will not suffer"&mdash;then he added gravely, "A minute blood
+vessel has ruptured in her brain, and a small clot has formed there. If
+this is absorbed, as I think it will be, she will recover. Nothing can
+be done for her. No medicine can reach her. It is just a question of
+rest and quiet." Then to me he added something which stung <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_402" id="Page_402">[Pg 402]</a></span>like a
+poisoned dart. "She should have been relieved from severe household
+labor years ago."</p>
+
+<p>My heart filled with bitterness and rebellion, bitterness against the
+pioneering madness which had scattered our family, and rebellion toward
+my father who had kept my mother always on the border, working like a
+slave long after the time when she should have been taking her ease.
+Above all, I resented my own failure, my own inability to help in the
+case. Here was I, established in a distant city, with success just
+opening her doors to me, and yet still so much the struggler that my
+will to aid was futile for lack of means.</p>
+
+<p>Sleep was difficult that night, and for days thereafter my mind was rent
+with a continual and ineffectual attempt to reach a solution of my
+problem, which was indeed typical of ambitious young America everywhere.
+"Shall I give up my career at this point? How can I best serve my
+mother?" These were my questions and I could not answer either of them.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of a week the sufferer was able to sit up, and soon recovered
+a large part of her native cheerfulness although it was evident to me
+that she would never again be the woman of the ready hand. Her days of
+labor were over.</p>
+
+<p>Her magnificent voice was now weak and uncertain. Her speech painfully
+hesitant. She who had been so strong, so brave, was now both easily
+frightened and readily confused. She who had once walked with the grace
+and power of an athlete was now in terror of an up-rolled rug upon the
+floor. Every time I looked at her my throat ached with remorseful pain.
+Every plan I made included a vow to make her happy if I could. My
+success now meant only service to her. In no other way could I justify
+my career.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Cross though naturally eager to return to the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_403" id="Page_403">[Pg 403]</a></span>comfort of his own
+home stayed on until his patient had regained her poise. "The clot seems
+in process of being taken up," he said to me, one morning, "and I think
+it safe to leave her. But you had better stay on for a few weeks."</p>
+
+<p>"I shall stay until September, at least," I replied. "I will not go back
+at all if I am needed here."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't fail to return," he earnestly advised. "The field is just opening
+for you in Boston, and your earning capacity is greater there than it is
+here. Success is almost won. Your mother knows this and tells me that
+she will insist on your going on with your work."</p>
+
+<p>Heroic soul! She was always ready to sacrifice herself for others.</p>
+
+<p>The Doctor's parting words comforted me as I returned to the shadeless
+farmstead to share in the work of harvesting the grain which was already
+calling for the reaper, and could not wait either upon sickness or age.
+Again I filled the place of stacker while my father drove the four-horse
+header, and when at noon, covered with sweat and dust, I looked at
+myself, I had very little sense of being a "rising literary man."</p>
+
+<p>I got back once again to the solid realities of farm life, and the
+majesty of the colorful sunsets which ended many of our days could not
+conceal from me the starved lives and lonely days of my little sister
+and my aging mother.</p>
+
+<p>"Think of it!" I wrote to my brother. "After eight years of cultivation,
+father's farm possesses neither tree nor vine. Mother's head has no
+protection from the burning rays of the sun, except the shadow which the
+house casts on the dry, hard door-yard. Where are the 'woods and prairie
+lands' of our song? Is this the 'fairy land' in which we were all to
+'reign like kings'? <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_404" id="Page_404">[Pg 404]</a></span>Doesn't the whole migration of the Garlands and
+McClintocks seem a madness?"</p>
+
+<p>Thereafter when alone, my mother and I often talked of the good old days
+in Wisconsin, of David and Deborah and William and Frank. I told her of
+Aunt Loretta's peaceful life, of the green hills and trees.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I wish we had never left Green's Coulee!" she said.</p>
+
+<p>But this was as far as her complaint ever went, for father was still
+resolute and undismayed. "We'll try again," he declared. "Next year will
+surely bring a crop."</p>
+
+<p>In a couple of weeks our patient, though unable to lift her feet, was
+able to shuffle across the floor into the kitchen, and thereafter
+insisted on helping Jessie at her tasks. From a seat in a convenient
+corner she picked over berries, stirred cake dough, ground coffee and
+wiped dishes, almost as cheerfully as ever, but to me it was a pitiful
+picture of bravery, and I burned ceaselessly with desire to do something
+to repay her for this almost hopeless disaster.</p>
+
+<p>The worst of the whole situation lay in the fact that my earnings both
+as teacher and as story writer were as yet hardly more than enough to
+pay my own carefully estimated expenses, and I saw no way of immediately
+increasing my income. On the face of it, my plain duty was to remain on
+the farm, and yet I could not bring myself to sacrifice my Boston life.
+In spite of my pitiful gains thus far, I held a vital hope of
+soon,&mdash;very soon&mdash;being in condition to bring my mother and my sister
+east. I argued, selfishly of course, "It must be that Dr. Cross is
+right. My only chance of success lies in the east."</p>
+
+<p>Mother did her best to comfort me. "Don't worry about us," she said. "Go
+back to your work. I am <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_405" id="Page_405">[Pg 405]</a></span>gaining. I'll be all right in a little while."
+Her brave heart was still unsubdued.</p>
+
+<p>While I was still debating my problem, a letter came which greatly
+influenced me, absurdly influenced all of us. It contained an invitation
+from the Secretary of the Cedar Valley Agriculture Society to be "the
+Speaker of the Day" at the County Fair on the twenty-fifth of September.
+This honor not only flattered me, it greatly pleased my mother. It was
+the kind of honor she could fully understand. In imagination she saw her
+son standing up before a throng of old-time friends and neighbors
+introduced by Judge Daly and applauded by all the bankers and merchants
+of the town. "You must do it," she said, and her voice was decisive.</p>
+
+<p>Father, though less open in his expression, was equally delighted. "You
+can go round that way just as well as not," he said. "I'd like to visit
+the old town myself."</p>
+
+<p>This letter relieved the situation in the most unexpected way. We all
+became cheerful. I began to say, "Of course you are going to get well,"
+and I turned again to my plan of taking my sister back to the seminary.
+"We'll hire a woman to stay with you," I said, "and Jessie can run up
+during vacation, or you and father can go down and spend Christmas with
+old friends."</p>
+
+<p>Yes, I confess it, I was not only planning to leave my mother again&mdash;I
+was intriguing to take her only child away from her. There is no excuse
+for this, none whatever except the fact that I had her co-operation in
+the plan. She wanted her daughter to be educated quite as strongly as I
+could wish, and was willing to put up with a little more loneliness and
+toil if only her children were on the road to somewhere.</p>
+
+<p>Jessie was the obstructionist. She was both scared and resentful. She
+had no desire to go to school in Osage. She wanted to stay where she
+was. Mother needed <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_406" id="Page_406">[Pg 406]</a></span>her,&mdash;and besides she didn't have any decent clothes
+to wear.</p>
+
+<p>Ultimately I overcame all her scruples, and by promising her a visit to
+the great city of Minneapolis (with the privilege of returning if she
+didn't like the school) I finally got her to start with me. Poor, little
+scared sister, I only half realized the agony of mind through which you
+passed as we rode away into the Minnesota prairies!</p>
+
+<p>The farther she got from home the shabbier her gown seemed and the more
+impossible her coat and hat. At last, as we were leaving Minneapolis on
+our way to Osage she leaned her tired head against me and sobbed out a
+wild wish to go home.</p>
+
+<p>Her grief almost wrecked my own self-control but I soothed her as best I
+could by telling her that she would soon be among old friends and that
+she couldn't turn back now. "Go on and make a little visit anyway," I
+added. "It's only a few hours from Ordway and you can go home at any
+time."</p>
+
+<p>She grew more cheerful as we entered familiar scenes, and one of the
+girls she had known when a child took charge of her, leaving me free to
+play the part of distinguished citizen.</p>
+
+<p>The last day of the races was in action when I, with a certain amount of
+justifiable pride, rode through the gate (the old familiar sagging gate)
+seated beside the President of the Association. I wish I could believe
+that as "Speaker of the Day," I filled the sons of my neighbors with
+some small part of the awe with which the speakers of other days filled
+me, and if I assumed something of the polite condescension with which
+all public personages carry off such an entrance, I trust it will be
+forgiven me.</p>
+
+<p>The event, even to me, was more inspiring in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_407" id="Page_407">[Pg 407]</a></span>anticipation than in
+fulfillment, for when I rose to speak in the band-stand the wind was
+blowing hard, and other and less intellectual attractions were in full
+tide. My audience remained distressingly small&mdash;and calm. I have a dim
+recollection of howling into the face of the equatorical current certain
+disconnected sentences concerning my reform theory, and of seeing on the
+familiar faces of David Babcock, John Gammons and others of my bronzed
+and bent old neighbors a mild wonder as to what I was talking about.</p>
+
+<p>On the whole I considered it a defeat. In the evening I spoke in the
+Opera House appearing on the same platform whence, eight years before, I
+had delivered my impassioned graduating oration on "Going West." True, I
+had gone east but then, advice is for others, not for oneself. Lee Moss,
+one of my classmates, and in those Seminary days a rival orator, was in
+my audience, and so was Burton, wordless as ever, and a little sad, for
+his attempt at preaching had not been successful&mdash;his ineradicable
+shyness had been against him. Hattie was there looking thin and old, and
+Ella and Matilda with others of the girls I had known eight years
+before. Some were accompanied by their children.</p>
+
+<p>I suspect I aroused their wonder rather than their admiration. My
+radicalism was only an astonishment to them. However, a few of the men,
+the more progressive of them, came to me at the close of my talk and
+shook hands and said, "Go on! The country needs just such talks." One of
+these was Uncle Billy Frazer and his allegiance surprised me, for he had
+never shown radical tendencies before.</p>
+
+<p>Summing it all up on my way to Chicago I must admit that as a great man
+returning to his native village I had not been a success.</p>
+
+<p>After a few hours of talk with Kirkland I started east <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_408" id="Page_408">[Pg 408]</a></span>by way of
+Washington in order that I might stop at Camden and call upon old Walt
+Whitman whose work I had been lecturing about, and who had expressed a
+willingness to receive me.</p>
+
+<p>It was hot and dry in the drab little city in which he lived, and the
+street on which the house stood was as cheerless as an ash-barrel, even
+to one accustomed to poverty, like myself, and when I reached the door
+of his small, decaying wooden tenement, I was dismayed. It was all so
+unlike the home of a world-famous poet.</p>
+
+<p>It was indeed very like that in which a very destitute mechanic might be
+living, and as I mounted the steps to Walt's room on the second story my
+resentment increased. Not a line of beauty or distinction or grace
+rewarded my glance. It was all of the same unesthetic barrenness, and
+not overly clean at that.</p>
+
+<p>The old man, majestic as a stranded sea-God, was sitting in an arm
+chair, his broad Quaker hat on his head, waiting to receive me. He was
+spotlessly clean. His white hair, his light gray suit, his fine linen
+all gave the effect of exquisite neatness and wholesome living. His
+clear tenor voice, his quiet smile, his friendly hand-clasp charmed me
+and calmed me. He was so much gentler and sweeter than I had expected
+him to be.</p>
+
+<p>He sat beside a heap of half-read books, marked newspapers, clippings
+and letters, a welter of concerns which he refused to have removed by
+the broom of the caretaker, and now and again as he wished to show me
+something he rose and hobbled a step or two to fish a book or a letter
+out of the pile. He was quite lame but could move without a crutch. He
+talked mainly of his good friends in Boston and elsewhere, and alluded
+to his enemies without a particle of rancor. The lines on his noble face
+were as placid as those on the brow of an <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_409" id="Page_409">[Pg 409]</a></span>ox&mdash;not one showed petulance
+or discouragement. He was the optimist in every word.</p>
+
+<p>He spoke of one of my stories to which Traubel had called his attention,
+and reproved me gently for not "letting in the light."</p>
+
+<p>It was a memorable meeting for me and I went away back to my work in
+Boston with a feeling that I had seen one of the very greatest literary
+personalities of the century, a notion I have had no cause to change in
+the twenty-seven years which have intervened.</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br /><a name="XXXI" id="XXXI"></a>
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_410" id="Page_410">[Pg 410]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CHAPTER XXXI</h2>
+
+<h2>Main Travelled Roads</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>My second visit to the West confirmed me in all my sorrowful notions of
+life on the plain, and I resumed my writing in a mood of bitter
+resentment, with full intention of telling the truth about western farm
+life, irrespective of the land-boomer or the politicians. I do not
+defend this mood, I merely report it.</p>
+
+<p>In this spirit I finished a story which I called <i>A Prairie Heroine</i> (in
+order that no one should mistake my meaning, for it was the study of a
+crisis in the life of a despairing farmer's wife), and while even here,
+I did not tell the whole truth, I succeeded in suggesting to the
+sympathetic observer a tragic and hopeless common case.</p>
+
+<p>It was a tract, that must be admitted, and realizing this, knowing that
+it was entirely too grim to find a place in the pages of the <i>Century</i>
+or <i>Harper's</i> I decided to send it to the <i>Arena</i>, a new Boston review
+whose spirit, so I had been told, was frankly radical.</p>
+
+<p>A few days later I was amazed to receive from the editor a letter of
+acceptance enclosing a check, but a paragraph in the letter astonished
+me more than the check which was for one hundred dollars.</p>
+
+<p>"I herewith enclose a check," wrote the editor, "which I hope you will
+accept in payment of your story.... I note that you have cut out certain
+paragraphs of description with the fear, no doubt, that the editor would
+object to them. I hope you will restore the manuscript to its original
+form and return it. When I <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_411" id="Page_411">[Pg 411]</a></span>ask a man to write for me, I want him to
+utter his mind with perfect freedom. My magazine is not one that is
+afraid of strong opinions."</p>
+
+<p>This statement backed up by the writer's signature on a blue slip
+produced in me a moment of stupefaction. Entertaining no real hope of
+acceptance, I had sent the manuscript in accordance with my principle of
+trying every avenue, and to get such an answer&mdash;an immediate
+answer&mdash;with a check!</p>
+
+<p>As soon as I recovered the use of my head and hand, I replied in eager
+acknowledgment. I do not recall the precise words of my letter, but it
+brought about an early meeting between B. O. Flower, the editor, and
+myself.</p>
+
+<p>Flower's personality pleased me. Hardly more than a boy at this time, he
+met me with the friendliest smile, and in our talk we discovered many
+common lines of thought.</p>
+
+<p>"Your story," he said, "is the kind of fiction I need. If you have any
+more of that sort let me see it. My magazine is primarily for discussion
+but I want to include at least one story in each issue. I cannot match
+the prices of magazines like the <i>Century</i> of course, but I will do the
+best I can for you."</p>
+
+<p>It would be difficult to exaggerate the value of this meeting to me, for
+no matter what anyone may now say of the <i>Arena's</i> logic or literary
+style, its editor's life was nobly altruistic. I have never known a man
+who strove more single-heartedly for social progress, than B. O. Flower.
+He was the embodiment of unselfish public service, and his ready
+sympathy for every genuine reform made his editorial office a center of
+civic zeal. As champions of various causes we all met in his open lists.</p>
+
+<p>In the months which followed he accepted for his magazine several of my
+short stories and bought and printed <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_412" id="Page_412">[Pg 412]</a></span><i>Under the Wheel</i>, an entire play,
+not to mention an essay or two on <i>The New Declaration of Rights</i>. He
+named me among his "regular contributors," and became not merely my
+comforter and active supporter but my banker, for the regularity of his
+payments raised me to comparative security. I was able to write home the
+most encouraging reports of my progress.</p>
+
+<p>At about the same time (or a little later) the <i>Century</i> accepted a
+short story which I called <i>A Spring Romance</i>, and a three-part tale of
+Wisconsin. For these I received nearly five hundred dollars!
+Accompanying the note of acceptance was a personal letter from Richard
+Watson Gilder, so hearty in its words of appreciation that I was assured
+of another and more distinctive avenue of expression.</p>
+
+<p>It meant something to get into the <i>Century</i> in those days. The praise
+of its editor was equivalent to a diploma. I regarded Gilder as second
+only to Howells in all that had to do with the judgment of fiction.
+Flower's interests were ethical, Gilder's esthetic, and after all my
+ideals were essentially literary. My reform notions were subordinate to
+my desire to take honors as a novelist.</p>
+
+<p>I cannot be quite sure of the precise date of this good fortune, but I
+think it must have been in the winter of 1890 for I remember writing a
+lofty letter to my father, in which I said, "If you want any money, let
+me know."</p>
+
+<p>As it happened he had need of seed wheat, and it was with deep
+satisfaction that I repaid the money I had borrowed of him, together
+with three hundred dollars more and so faced the new year clear of debt.</p>
+
+<p>Like the miner who, having suddenly uncovered a hidden vein of gold,
+bends to his pick in a confident belief in his "find" so I humped above
+my desk without doubts, without hesitations. I had found my work in the
+world. If I had any thought of investment at this time, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_413" id="Page_413">[Pg 413]</a></span>which I am sure
+I had not, it was concerned with the west. I had no notion of settling
+permanently in the east.</p>
+
+<p>My success in entering both the <i>Century</i> and the <i>Arena</i> emboldened me
+to say to Dr. Cross, "I shall be glad to come down out of the attic and
+take a full-sized chamber at regular rates."</p>
+
+<p>Alas! he had no such room, and so after much perturbation, my brother
+and I hired a little apartment on Moreland street in Roxbury and moved
+into it joyously. With a few dollars in my pocket, I went so far as to
+buy a couple of pictures and a new book rack, the first property I had
+ever owned, and when, on that first night, with everything in place we
+looked around upon our "suite," we glowed with such exultant pride as
+only struggling youth can feel. After years of privation, I had, at
+last, secured a niche in the frowning escarpment of Boston's social
+palisade.</p>
+
+<p>Frank was twenty-seven, I was thirty, and had it not been for a haunting
+sense of our father's defeat and a growing fear of mother's decline, we
+would have been entirely content. "How can we share our good fortune
+with her and with sister Jessie?" was the question which troubled us
+most. Jessie's fate seemed especially dreary by contrast with our busy
+and colorful life.</p>
+
+<p>"We can't bring them here," I argued. "They would never be happy here.
+Father is a borderman. He would enjoy coming east on a visit, but to
+shut him up in Boston would be like caging an eagle. The case seems
+hopeless."</p>
+
+<p>The more we discussed it the more insoluble the problem became. The best
+we could do was to write often and to plan for frequent visits to them.</p>
+
+<p>One day, late in March, Flower, who had been using my stories in almost
+every issue of his magazine, said to me: "Why don't you put together
+some of your tales of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_414" id="Page_414">[Pg 414]</a></span>the west, and let us bring them out in book form?
+I believe they would have instant success."</p>
+
+<p>His words delighted me for I had not yet begun to hope for an appearance
+as the author of a book. Setting to work at once to prepare such a
+volume I put into it two unpublished novelettes called <i>Up the Cooley</i>
+and <i>The Branch Road</i>, for the very good reason that none of the
+magazines, not even <i>The Arena</i>, found them "available." This reduced
+the number of sketches to six so that the title page read:</p>
+
+<p class="cen">
+MAIN TRAVELLED ROADS<br />
+Six Mississippi Valley Stories<br />
+<span class="smcap">By Hamlin Garland</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>The phrase "main travelled road" is common in the west. Ask a man to
+direct you to a farmhouse and he will say, "Keep the main travelled road
+till you come to the second crossing and turn to the left." It seemed to
+me not only a picturesque title, significant of my native country, but
+one which permitted the use of a grimly sardonic foreword. This I
+supplied.</p>
+
+<p>"The main travelled road in the west (as everywhere) is hot and dusty in
+summer and desolate and drear with mud in fall and spring, and in winter
+the winds sweep the snows across it, but it does sometimes cross a rich
+meadow where the songs of the larks and blackbirds and bobolinks are
+tangled. Follow it far enough, it may lead past a bend in the river
+where the water laughs eternally over its shallows. Mainly it is long
+and weariful and has a dull little town at one end, and a home of toil
+at the other. Like the main travelled road of life it is traversed by
+many classes of people, but the poor and the weary predominate."</p>
+
+<p>This, my first book, was put together during a time of deep personal
+sorrow. My little sister died suddenly, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_415" id="Page_415">[Pg 415]</a></span>leaving my father and mother
+alone on the bleak plain, seventeen hundred miles from both their sons.
+Hopelessly crippled, my mother now mourned the loss of her "baby" and
+the soldier's keen eyes grew dim, for he loved this little daughter
+above anything else in the world. The flag of his sunset march was
+drooping on its staff. Nothing but poverty and a lonely old age seemed
+before him, and yet, in his letters to me, he gave out only the briefest
+hints of his despair.</p>
+
+<p>All this will explain, if the reader is interested to know, why the
+dedication of my little book was bitter with revolt: "To my father and
+mother, whose half-century of pilgrimage on the main travelled road of
+life has brought them only pain and weariness, these stories are
+dedicated by a son to whom every day brings a deepening sense of his
+parents' silent heroism." It will explain also why the comfortable, the
+conservative, those who farmed the farmer, resented my thin gray volume
+and its message of acrid accusation.</p>
+
+<p>It was published in 1891 and the outcry against it was instant and
+astonishing&mdash;to me. I had a foolish notion that the literary folk of the
+west would take a local pride in the color of my work, and to find
+myself execrated by nearly every critic as "a bird willing to foul his
+own nest" was an amazement. Editorials and criticisms poured into the
+office, all written to prove that my pictures of the middle border were
+utterly false.</p>
+
+<p>Statistics were employed to show that pianos and Brussels carpets
+adorned almost every Iowa farmhouse. Tilling the prairie soil was
+declared to be "the noblest vocation in the world, not in the least like
+the pictures this eastern author has drawn of it."</p>
+
+<p>True, corn was only eleven cents per bushel at that time, and the number
+of alien farm-renters was increasing. True, all the bright boys and
+girls were leaving the farm, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_416" id="Page_416">[Pg 416]</a></span>following the example of my critics, but
+these I was told were all signs of prosperity and not of decay. The
+American farmer was getting rich, and moving to town, only the renters
+and the hired man were uneasy and clamorous.</p>
+
+<p>My answer to all this criticism was a blunt statement of facts. "Butter
+is not always golden nor biscuits invariably light and flaky in my farm
+scenes, because they're not so in real life," I explained. "I grew up on
+a farm and I am determined once for all to put the essential ugliness of
+its life into print. I will not lie, even to be a patriot. A proper
+proportion of the sweat, flies, heat, dirt and drudgery of it all shall
+go in. I am a competent witness and I intend to tell the whole truth."</p>
+
+<p>But I didn't! Even my youthful zeal faltered in the midst of a
+revelation of the lives led by the women on the farms of the middle
+border. Before the tragic futility of their suffering, my pen refused to
+shed its ink. Over the hidden chamber of their maternal agonies I drew
+the veil.</p>
+
+<p>The old soldier had nothing to say but mother wrote to me, "It scares me
+to read some of your stories&mdash;they are so true. You might have said
+more," she added, "but I'm glad you didn't. Farmers' wives have enough
+to bear as it is."</p>
+
+<p>"My stories were not written for farmers' wives," I replied. "They were
+written to convict the selfish monopolistic liars of the towns."</p>
+
+<p>"I hope the liars read 'em," was her laconic retort.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, in spite of all the outcry against my book, words of
+encouragement came in from a few men and women who had lived out the
+precise experiences which I had put into print. "You have delineated my
+life," one man said. "Every detail of your description is true. The
+sound of the prairie chickens, the hum of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_417" id="Page_417">[Pg 417]</a></span>threshing machine, the
+work of seeding, corn husking, everything is familiar to me and new in
+literature."</p>
+
+<p>A woman wrote, "You are entirely right about the loneliness, the
+stagnation, the hardship. We are sick of lies. Give the world the
+truth."</p>
+
+<p>Another critic writing from the heart of a great university said, "I
+value your stories highly as literature, but I suspect that in the
+social war which is coming you and I will be at each other's throats."</p>
+
+<p>This controversy naturally carried me farther and farther from the
+traditional, the respectable. As a rebel in art I was prone to arouse
+hate. Every letter I wrote was a challenge, and one of my conservative
+friends frankly urged the folly of my course. "It is a mistake for you
+to be associated with cranks like Henry George and writers like
+Whitman," he said. "It is a mistake to be published by the <i>Arena</i>. Your
+book should have been brought out by one of the old established firms.
+If you will fling away your radical notions and consent to amuse the
+governing classes, you will succeed."</p>
+
+<p>Fling away my convictions! It were as easy to do that as to cast out my
+bones. I was not wearing my indignation as a cloak. My rebellious
+tendencies came from something deep down. They formed an element in my
+blood. My patriotism resented the failure of our government. Therefore
+such advice had very little influence upon me. The criticism that really
+touched and influenced me was that which said, "Don't preach,&mdash;exemplify.
+Don't let your stories degenerate into tracts." Howells said, "Be fine,
+be fine&mdash;but not too fine!" and Gilder warned me not to leave Beauty out
+of the picture.</p>
+
+<p>In the light of this friendly council I perceived my danger, and set
+about to avoid the fault of mixing my fiction with my polemics.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_418" id="Page_418">[Pg 418]</a></span>The editor of the <i>Arena</i> remained my most loyal supporter. He filled
+the editorial section of his magazine with praise of my fiction and
+loudly proclaimed my non-conformist character. No editor ever worked
+harder to give his author a national reputation and the book sold, not
+as books sell now, but moderately, steadily, and being more widely read
+than sold, went far. This proved of course, that my readers were poor
+and could not afford to pay a dollar for a book, at least they didn't,
+and I got very little royalty from the sale. If I had any illusions
+about that they were soon dispelled. On the paper bound book I got five
+cents, on the cloth bound, ten. The sale was mainly in the fifty-cent
+edition.</p>
+
+<p>It was not for me to criticise the methods by which my publisher was
+trying to make me known, and I do not at this moment regret Flower's
+insistence upon the reforming side of me,&mdash;but for the reason that he
+was essentially ethical rather than esthetic, some part of the literary
+significance of my work escaped him. It was from the praise of Howells,
+Matthews and Stedman, that I received my enlightenment. I began to
+perceive that in order to make my work carry its message, I must be
+careful to keep a certain balance between Significance and Beauty. The
+artist began to check the preacher.</p>
+
+<p>Howells gave the book large space in "The Study" in <i>Harper's</i> and what
+he said of it profoundly instructed me. Edward Everett Hale, Mary E.
+Wilkins, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Charles Dudley Warner, Edmund
+Clarence Stedman, and many others were most generous of applause. In
+truth I was welcomed into the circle of American realists with an
+instant and generous greeting which astonished, at the same time that it
+delighted me.</p>
+
+<p>I marvel at this appreciation as I look back upon it, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_419" id="Page_419">[Pg 419]</a></span>and surely in
+view of its reception, no one can blame me for considering my drab
+little volume a much more important contribution to American fiction
+than it really was.</p>
+
+<p>It was my first book, and so, perhaps, the reader will excuse me for
+being a good deal uplifted by the noise it made. Then too, it is only
+fair to call attention to the fact that aside from Edward Eggleston's
+<i>Hoosier Schoolmaster</i>, <i>Howe's Story of a Country Town</i>, and <i>Zury</i>, by
+Joseph Kirkland, I had the middle west almost entirely to myself. Not
+one of the group of western writers who have since won far greater fame,
+and twenty times more dollars than I, had at that time published a
+single volume. William Allen White, Albert Bigelow Payne, Stewart Edward
+White, Jack London, Emerson Hough, George Ade, Meredith Nicholson, Booth
+Tarkington, and Rex Beach were all to come. "Octave Thanet" was writing
+her stories of Arkansas life for <i>Scribners</i> but had published only one
+book.</p>
+
+<p>Among all my letters of encouragement of this time, not one, except
+perhaps that from Mr. Howells, meant more to me than a word which came
+from Walt Whitman, who hailed me as one of the literary pioneers of the
+west for whom he had been waiting. His judgment, so impersonal, so
+grandly phrased, gave me the feeling of having been "praised by
+posterity."</p>
+
+<p>In short, I was assured that my face was set in the right direction and
+that the future was mine, for I was not yet thirty-one years of age, and
+thirty-one is a most excellent period of life!</p>
+
+<p>And yet, by a singular fatality, at this moment came another sorrow, the
+death of Alice, my boyhood's adoration. I had known for years that she
+was not for me, but I loved to think of her as out there walking the
+lanes among the roses and the wheat as of old. My regard for <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_420" id="Page_420">[Pg 420]</a></span>her was no
+longer that of the lover desiring and hoping, and though I acknowledged
+defeat I had been too broadly engaged in my ambitious literary plans to
+permit her deflection to permanently cloud my life. She had been a
+radiant and charming figure in my prairie world, and when I read the
+letter telling of her passing, my mind was irradiated with the picture
+she had made when last she said good-bye to me. Her gentle friendship
+had been very helpful through all my years of struggle and now in the
+day of my security, her place was empty.</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br /><a name="XXXII" id="XXXII"></a>
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_421" id="Page_421">[Pg 421]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CHAPTER XXXII</h2>
+
+<h2>The Spirit of Revolt</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>During all this time while I had been living so busily and happily in
+Boston, writing stories, discussing Ibsen and arguing the cause of
+Impressionism, a portentous and widespread change of sentiment was
+taking place among the farmers of the Middle Border. The discouragement
+which I had discovered in old friends and neighbors in Dakota was
+finding collective expression. A vast and non-sectional union of the
+corn-growers, wheat-raisers, and cotton-growers had been effected and
+the old time politicians were uneasy.</p>
+
+<p>As ten cent corn and ten per cent interest were troubling Kansas so
+six-cent cotton was inflaming Georgia&mdash;and both were frankly sympathetic
+with Montana and Colorado whose miners were suffering from a drop in the
+price of silver. To express the meaning of this revolt a flying squadron
+of radical orators had been commissioned and were in the field. Mary
+Ellen Lease with Cassandra voice, and Jerry Simpson with shrewd humor
+were voicing the demands of the plainsman, while "Coin" Harvey as
+champion of the Free Silver theory had stirred the Mountaineer almost to
+a frenzy. It was an era of fervent meetings and fulminating resolutions.
+The Grange had been social, or at most commercially co-operative in its
+activities, but The Farmers' Alliance came as a revolt.</p>
+
+<p>The People's Party which was the natural outcome of this unrest involved
+my father. He wrote me that he had <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_422" id="Page_422">[Pg 422]</a></span>joined "the Populists," and was one
+of their County officers. I was not surprised at this action on his
+part, for I had known how high in honor he held General Weaver who was
+the chief advocate of a third party.</p>
+
+<p>Naturally Flower sympathized with this movement, and kept the pages of
+his magazine filled with impassioned defenses of it. One day, early in
+'91, as I was calling upon him in his office, he suddenly said,
+"Garland, why can't you write a serial story for us? One that shall deal
+with this revolt of the farmers? It's perfectly legitimate material for
+a novel, as picturesque in its way as <i>The Rise of the Vend&eacute;e</i>&mdash;Can't
+you make use of it?"</p>
+
+<p>To this I replied, with some excitement&mdash;"Why yes, I think I can. I have
+in my desk at this moment, several chapters of an unfinished story which
+uses the early phases of the Grange movement as a background. If it
+pleases you I can easily bring it down to date. It might be necessary
+for me to go into the field, and make some fresh studies, but I believe
+I can treat the two movements in the same story. Anyhow I should like to
+try."</p>
+
+<p>"Bring the manuscript in at once," replied Flower. "It may be just what
+we are looking for. If it is we will print it as a serial this summer,
+and bring it out in book form next winter."</p>
+
+<p>In high excitement I hurried home to dig up and re-read the fragment
+which I called at this time <i>Bradley Talcott</i>. It contained about thirty
+thousand words and its hero was a hired man on an Iowa farm. Of course I
+saw possibilities in this manuscript&mdash;I was in the mood to do that&mdash;and
+sent it in.</p>
+
+<p>Flower read it and reported almost by return mail.</p>
+
+<p>"We'll take it," he said. "And as soon as you can get away, I think that
+you'd better go out to Kansas and Nebraska and make the studies
+necessary to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_423" id="Page_423">[Pg 423]</a></span>complete the story. We'll pay all your expenses and pay
+you for the serial besides."</p>
+
+<p>The price agreed upon would seem very small in these days of millionaire
+authors, but to me the terms of Flower's commission were nobly generous.
+They set me free. They gave me wings!&mdash;For the first time in my life I
+was able to travel in comfort. I could not only eat in the dining car,
+and sleep in the sleeping car, but I could go to a hotel at the end of
+my journey with a delightful sense of freedom from worry about the
+bills. Do you wonder that when I left Boston a week or two later, I did
+so with elation&mdash;with a sense of conquest?</p>
+
+<p>Eager to explore&mdash;eager to know every state of the Union and especially
+eager to study the far plains and the Rocky Mountains, I started
+westward and kept going until I reached Colorado. My stay in the
+mountain country was short, but my glimpses of Ouray and Telluride
+started me on a long series of stories of "the high trails."</p>
+
+<p>On the way out as well as on the way back, I took part in meetings of
+rebellious farmers in bare-walled Kansas school-houses, and watched
+protesting processions of weather-worn Nebraska Populists as they filed
+through the shadeless cities of their sun-baked plain. I attended
+barbecues on drab and dusty fair grounds, meeting many of the best known
+leaders in the field.</p>
+
+<p>Everywhere I came in contact with the discontented. I saw only those
+whose lives seemed about to end in failure, and my grim notions of farm
+life were in no wise softened by these experiences.</p>
+
+<p>How far away all this seems in these days of three-dollar wheat and
+twenty-six cent cotton&mdash;these days of automobiles, tractor plows, and
+silos!</p>
+
+<p>As I kept no diary in those days, I am a little uncertain about dates
+and places&mdash;and no wonder, for I was doing <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_424" id="Page_424">[Pg 424]</a></span>something every moment (I
+travelled almost incessantly for nearly two years) but one event of that
+summer does stand clearly out&mdash;that of a meeting with my father at Omaha
+in July.</p>
+
+<p>It seems that some sort of convention was being held there and that my
+father was a delegate from Brown County, Dakota. At any rate I
+distinctly recall meeting him at the train and taking him to my hotel
+and introducing him to General Weaver. As a representative of the
+<i>Arena</i> I had come to know many of the most prominent men in the
+movement, and my father was deeply impressed with their recognition of
+me. For the first time in his life, he deferred to me. He not only let
+me take charge of him, he let me pay the bills.</p>
+
+<p>He said nothing to me of his pride in my position, but my good friends
+Robert and Elia Peattie told me that to them he expressed the keenest
+satisfaction. "I never thought Hamlin would make a success of writing,"
+he said, "although he was always given to books. I couldn't believe that
+he would ever earn a living that way, but it seems that he is doing it."
+My commission from Flower and the fact that the <i>Arena</i> was willing to
+pay my way about the country, were to him indubitable signs of
+prosperity. They could not be misinterpreted by his neighbors.</p>
+
+<p>Elia Peattie sat beside him at a meeting when I spoke, and she heard him
+say to an old soldier on the right, "I never knew just what that boy of
+mine was fitted for, but I guess he has struck his gait at last."</p>
+
+<p>It may seem illogical to the reader, but this deference on the part of
+the old soldier did not amuse me. On the contrary it hurt me. A little
+pang went through me every time he yielded his leadership. I hated to
+see him display the slightest evidence of age, of weakness. I would
+rather have had him storm than sigh. Part of his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_425" id="Page_425">[Pg 425]</a></span>irresolution, his
+timidity, was due, as I could see, to the unwonted noise, and to the
+crowds of excited men, but more of it came from the vague alarm of
+self-distrust which are signs of advancing years.</p>
+
+<p>For two days we went about together, attending all the sessions and
+meeting many of the delegates, but we found time to discuss the problems
+which confronted us both. "I am farming nearly a thousand acres this
+year," he said, "and I'm getting the work systematized so that I can
+raise wheat at sixty cents a bushel&mdash;if I can only get fifteen bushels
+to the acre. But there's no money in the country. We seem to be at the
+bottom of our resources. I never expected to see this country in such a
+state. I can't get money enough to pay my taxes. Look at my clothes! I
+haven't had a new suit in three years. Your mother is in the same fix. I
+wanted to bring her down, but she had no clothes to wear&mdash;and then,
+besides, it's hard for her to travel. The heat takes hold of her
+terribly."</p>
+
+<p>This statement of the Border's poverty and drought was the more moving
+to me for the reason that the old pioneer had always been so patriotic,
+so confident, so sanguine of his country's future. He had come a long
+way from the buoyant faith of '66, and the change in him was typical of
+the change in the West&mdash;in America&mdash;and it produced in me a sense of
+dismay, of rebellious bitterness. Why should our great new land fall
+into this slough of discouragement?</p>
+
+<p>My sympathy with the Alliance took on a personal tinge. My pride in my
+own "success" sank away. How pitiful it all seemed in the midst of the
+almost universal disappointment and suffering of the West! In the face
+of my mother's need my resources were pitifully inadequate.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't go up to see mother this time," I explained to my father, "but
+I am coming out again this fall to speak <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_426" id="Page_426">[Pg 426]</a></span>in the campaign and I shall
+surely run up and visit her then."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll arrange for you to speak in Aberdeen," he said. "I'm on the County
+Committee."</p>
+
+<p>All the way back to Boston, and during the weeks of my work on my novel,
+I pondered the significance of the spiritual change which had swept over
+the whole nation&mdash;but above all others the problem of my father's
+desperate attempt to retrieve his fortunes engaged my sympathy. "Unless
+he gets a crop this year," I reported to my brother&mdash;"he is going to
+need help. It fills me with horror to think of those old people spending
+another winter out there on the plain."</p>
+
+<p>My brother who was again engaged by Herne to play one of the leading
+parts in <i>Shore Acres</i> was beginning to see light ahead. His pay was not
+large but he was saving a little of it and was willing to use his
+savings to help me out in my plan of rescue. It was to be a rescue
+although we were careful never to put it in that form in our letters to
+the old pioneer.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Up to this month I had retained my position in the Boston School of
+Oratory, but I now notified Brown that I should teach no more in his
+school or any other school.</p>
+
+<p>His big shoulders began to shake and a chuckle preceded his irritating
+joke&mdash;"Going back to shingling?" he demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"No," I replied, "I'm not going to shingle any more&mdash;except for exercise
+after I get my homestead in the west&mdash;but I think&mdash;I'm not sure&mdash;I
+<i>think</i> I can make a living with my pen."</p>
+
+<p>He became serious at this and said, "I'm sorry to have you go&mdash;but you
+are entirely right. You have found your work and I give you my blessing
+on it. But you must always count yourself one of my teachers and come
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_427" id="Page_427">[Pg 427]</a></span>and speak for us whenever you can." This I promised to do and so we
+parted.</p>
+
+<p>Early in September I went west and having put myself in the hands of the
+State Central Committee of Iowa, entered the field, campaigning in the
+interests of the People's Party. For six weeks I travelled, speaking
+nearly every day&mdash;getting back to the farms of the west and harvesting a
+rich fund of experiences.</p>
+
+<p>It was delightful autumn weather, and in central Iowa the crops were
+fairly abundant. On every hand fields of corn covered the gentle hills
+like wide rugs of lavender velvet, and the odor of melons and ripening
+leaves filled the air. Nature's songs of cheer and abundance (uttered by
+innumerable insects) set forth the monstrous injustice of man's law by
+way of contrast. Why should children cry for food in our cities whilst
+fruits rotted on the vines and wheat had no value to the harvester?</p>
+
+<p>With other eager young reformers, I rode across the odorous prairie
+swells, journeying from one meeting place to another, feeling as my
+companions did that something grandly beneficial was about to be enacted
+into law. In this spirit I spoke at Populist picnics, standing beneath
+great oaks, surrounded by men and women, work-worn like my own father
+and mother, shadowed by the same cloud of dismay. I smothered in small
+halls situated over saloons and livery stables, travelling by
+freight-train at night in order to ride in triumph as "Orator of the
+Day" at some county fair, until at last I lost all sense of being the
+writer and recluse.</p>
+
+<p>As I went north my indignation burned brighter, for the discontent of
+the people had been sharpened by the drought which had again cut short
+the crop. At Millbank, Cyrus, one of my old Dry Run neighbors, met me.
+He was now a grave, stooping middle-aged man also in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_428" id="Page_428">[Pg 428]</a></span>the midst of
+disillusionment. "Going west" had been a mistake for him as for my
+father&mdash;"But here we are," he said, "and I see nothing for it but to
+stick to the job."</p>
+
+<p>Mother and father came to Aberdeen to hear me speak, and as I looked
+down on them from the platform of the opera house, I detected on their
+faces an expression which was not so much attention, as preoccupation.
+They were not listening to my words, they were thinking of my
+relationship to them, of the mystery involved in my being there on the
+platform surrounded by the men of the county whom they most respected.
+They could not take my theories seriously, but they did value and to the
+full, the honor which their neighbors paid me&mdash;their son! Their presence
+so affected me that I made, I fear, but an indifferent address.</p>
+
+<p>We did not have much time to talk over family affairs but it was good to
+see them even for a few moments and to know that mother was slowly
+regaining the use of her limbs.</p>
+
+<p>Another engagement made it necessary for me to take the night train for
+St. Paul and so they both went down to the station with me, and as the
+time came to part I went out to the little covered buggy (which was all
+the carriage my father owned) to start them off on their lonely
+twelve-mile trip back to the farm. "I don't know how it is all coming
+about, mother, but sometime, somewhere you and I are going to live
+together,&mdash;not here, back in Osage, or perhaps in Boston. It won't be
+long now."</p>
+
+<p>She smiled, but her voice was tremulous. "Don't worry about me. I'm all
+right again&mdash;at least I am better. I shall be happy if only you are
+successful."</p>
+
+<p>This meeting did me good. My mother's smile lessened my bitterness, and
+her joy in me, her faith in me, sent me away in renewed determination to
+rescue <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_429" id="Page_429">[Pg 429]</a></span>her from the destitution and loneliness of this arid land.</p>
+
+<p>My return to Boston in November discovered a startling change in my
+relationship to it. The shining city in which I had lived for seven
+years, and which had become so familiar to me (and so necessary to my
+progress), had begun to dwindle, to recede. The warm, broad, unkempt and
+tumultuous west, with its clamorous movement, its freedom from
+tradition, its vitality of political thought, re-asserted its power over
+me. New England again became remote. It was evident that I had not
+really taken root in Massachusetts after all. I perceived that Boston
+was merely the capital of New England while New York was fast coming to
+be the all-conquering capital of The Nation.</p>
+
+<p>My realization of this shift of values was sharpened by the announcement
+that Howells had definitely decided to move to the Metropolis, and that
+Herne had broken up his little home in Ashmont and was to make his
+future home on Convent Avenue in Harlem. The process of stripping Boston
+to build up Manhattan had begun.</p>
+
+<p>My brother who was still one of Herne's company of players in <i>Shore
+Acres</i>, had no home to break up, but he said, "I'm going to get some
+sort of headquarters in New York. If you'll come on we'll hire a little
+apartment up town and 'bach' it. I'm sick of theatrical boarding
+houses."</p>
+
+<p>With suddenly acquired conviction that New York was about to become the
+Literary Center of America, I replied, "Very well. Get your flat. I'd
+like to spend a winter in the old town anyway."</p>
+
+<p>My brother took a small furnished apartment on 105th Street, and
+together we camped above the tumult. It was only twelve-and-a-half feet
+wide and about <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_430" id="Page_430">[Pg 430]</a></span>forty-eight long, and its furnishings were ugly, frayed
+and meager, but its sitting room opened upon the sun, and there, of a
+morning, I continued to write in growing content. At about noon the
+actor commonly cooked a steak or a chop and boiled a pot of coffee, and
+after the dishes were washed, we both merrily descended upon Broadway by
+means of a Ninth Avenue elevated train. Sometimes we dined down town in
+reckless luxury at one of the French restaurants, "where the tip was but
+a nickel and the dinner thirty cents," but usually even our evening meal
+was eaten at home.</p>
+
+<p>Herne was playing an unlimited engagement at the Broadway theater and I
+spent a good deal of time behind the scenes with him. His house on
+Convent Avenue was a handsome mansion and on a Sunday, I often dined
+there, and when we all got going the walls resounded with argument. Jim
+was a great wag and a delightful story teller, but he was in deadly
+earnest as a reformer, and always ready to speak on The Single Tax. He
+took his art very seriously also, and was one of the best stage
+directors of his day. Some of his dramatic methods were so far in
+advance of his time that they puzzled or disgusted many of his patrons,
+but without doubt he profoundly influenced the art of the American
+stage. Men like William Gillette and Clyde Fitch quite frankly
+acknowledged their indebtedness to him.</p>
+
+<p>Jim and Katharine both had an exaggerated notion of my importance in the
+world of art and letters, and listened to me with a respect, a
+fellowship and an appreciation which increased my sense of
+responsibility and inspired me to greater effort as a novelist. Together
+we hammered out questions of art and economics, and planned new plays.
+Those were inspiring hours to us all and we still refer to them as "the
+good old Convent Avenue days!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_431" id="Page_431">[Pg 431]</a></span>New York City itself was incredibly simpler and quieter than it is now,
+but to me it was a veritable hell because of the appalling inequality
+which lay between the palaces of the landlords and the tenements of the
+proletariat. The monstrous injustice of permitting a few men to own the
+land on which millions toiled for the barest living tore at my heart
+strings then, as it does now, and the worst of it rested in the fact
+that the landless seemed willing to be robbed for the pleasure of those
+who could not even dissipate the wealth which rolled in upon them in
+waves of unearned rent.</p>
+
+<p>And yet, much as I felt this injustice and much as the city affected me,
+I could not put it into fiction. "It is not my material," I said. "My
+dominion is the West."</p>
+
+<p>Though at ease, I had no feeling of being at home in this tumult. I was
+only stopping in it in order to be near the Hernes, my brother, and
+Howells. The Georges, whom I had come to know very well, interested me
+greatly and often of an evening I went over to the East Side, to the
+unpretentious brick house in which The Prophet and his delightful family
+lived. Of course this home was doctrinaire, but then I liked that
+flavor, and so did the Hernes, although Katharine's keen sense of humor
+sometimes made us all seem rather like thorough-going cranks&mdash;which we
+were.</p>
+
+<p>In the midst of our growing security and expanding acquaintanceship, my
+brother and I often returned to the problem of our aging parents.</p>
+
+<p>My brother was all for bringing them east but to this I replied, "No,
+that is out of the question. The old pioneer would never be happy in a
+city."</p>
+
+<p>"We could buy a farm over in Jersey."</p>
+
+<p>"What would he do there? He would be among strangers and in strange
+conditions.&mdash;No, the only solution is to get him to go back either to
+Iowa or to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_432" id="Page_432">[Pg 432]</a></span>Wisconsin. He will find even that very hard to do for it
+will seem like failure but he must do it. For mother's sake I'd rather
+see him go back to the LaCrosse valley. It would be a pleasure to visit
+them there."</p>
+
+<p>"That is the thing to do," my brother agreed. "I'll never get out to
+Dakota again."</p>
+
+<p>The more I thought about this the lovelier it seemed. The hills, the
+farmhouses, the roads, the meadows all had delightful associations in my
+mind, as I knew they must have in my mother's mind and the idea of a
+regained homestead in the place of my birth began to engage my thought
+whenever I had leisure to ponder my problem and especially whenever I
+received a letter from my mother.</p>
+
+<p>There was a certain poetic justice in the return of my father and mother
+to the land from which they had been lured a quarter of a century
+before, and I was willing to make any sacrifice to bring it about. I
+take no credit for this, it was a purely selfish plan, for so long as
+they were alone out there on the plain my own life must continue to be
+troubled and uneasy.</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br /><a name="XXXIII" id="XXXIII"></a>
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_433" id="Page_433">[Pg 433]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CHAPTER XXXIII</h2>
+
+<h2>The End of the Sunset Trail</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>In February while attending a conference of reformers in St. Louis I
+received a letter from my mother which greatly disturbed me. "I wish I
+could see you," she wrote. "I am not very well this winter, I can't go
+out very often and I get very lonesome for my boys. If only you did not
+live so far away!"</p>
+
+<p>There was something in this letter which made all that I was doing in
+the convention of no account, and on the following evening I took the
+train for Columbia, the little village in which my parents were spending
+the winter, filled with remorseful forebodings. My pain and
+self-accusation would not let me rest. Something clutched my heart every
+time I thought of my crippled mother prisoned in a Dakota shanty and no
+express train was swift enough to satisfy my desire to reach her. The
+letter had been forwarded to me and I was afraid that she might be
+actually ill.</p>
+
+<p>That ride next day from Sioux City to Aberdeen was one of the gloomiest
+I had ever experienced. Not only was my conscience uneasy, it seemed
+that I was being hurled into a region of arctic storms. A terrific
+blizzard possessed the plain, and the engine appeared to fight its way
+like a brave animal. All day it labored forward while the coaches behind
+it swayed in the ever-increasing power of the tempest, their wheels
+emitting squeals of pain as they ground through the drifts, and I
+sitting in my overcoat with collar turned high above my ears, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_434" id="Page_434">[Pg 434]</a></span>my hands
+thrust deep in my pockets, sullenly counted the hours of my discomfort.
+The windows, furred deep with frost, let in but a pallid half-light,
+thus adding a mental dusk to the actual menace of the storm.</p>
+
+<p>After each station the brakemen re-entered as if blown in by the blast,
+and a vapor, white as a shower of flour, filled the door-way, behind
+them. Occasionally as I cleared a space for a peephole through the rimy
+panes, I caught momentary glimpses of a level, treeless earth, desolate
+as the polar ocean swept by ferocious elemental warfare.</p>
+
+<p>No life was to be seen save here and there a suffering steer or colt,
+humped under the lee of a straw-stack. The streets of the small wooden
+towns were deserted. No citizen was abroad, only the faint smoke of
+chimneys testified to the presence of life beneath the roof-trees.</p>
+
+<p>Occasionally a local passenger came in, puffing and whistling with loud
+explosions of excited comment over the storm which he seemed to treat as
+an agreeable diversion, but the conductor, who followed, threshing his
+hands and nursing his ears, swore in emphatic dislike of the country and
+climate, but even this controversy offered no relief to the through
+passengers who sat in frozen stoical silence. There was very little
+humor in a Dakota blizzard for them&mdash;or for me.</p>
+
+<p>At six o'clock that night I reached the desolate end of my journey. My
+father met me at the station and led the way to the low square bleak
+cottage which he had rented for the winter. Mother, still unable to lift
+her feet from the floor, opened the door to us, and reaching her, as I
+did, through that terrifying tempest, made her seem as lonely as a
+castaway on some gelid Greenland coast.</p>
+
+<p>Father was in unwonted depression. His crop had again failed to mature.
+With nearly a thousand acres of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_435" id="Page_435">[Pg 435]</a></span>wheat, he had harvested barely enough
+for the next year's seed. He was not entirely at the end of his faith,
+however; on the contrary, he was filled with desire of the farther west.
+"The irrigated country is the next field for development. I'm going to
+sell out here and try irrigation in Montana. I want to get where I can
+regulate the water for my crops."</p>
+
+<p>"You'll do nothing of the kind," I retorted. "You'll go no further west.
+I have a better plan than that."</p>
+
+<p>The wind roared on, all that night and all the next day, and during this
+time we did little but feed the stove and argue our widely separated
+plans. I told them of Franklin's success on the stage with Herne, and I
+described my own busy, though unremunerative life as a writer, and as I
+talked the world from which I came shone with increasing splendor.</p>
+
+<p>Little by little the story of the country's decay came out. The village
+of Ordway had been moved away, nothing remained but the grain elevator.
+Many of our old neighbors had gone "to the irrigation country" and more
+were planning to go as soon as they could sell their farms. Columbia was
+also in desolate decline. Its hotel stood empty, its windows broken, its
+doors sagging.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing could have been more depressing, more hopeless, and my throat
+burned with bitter rage every time my mother shuffled across the floor,
+and when she shyly sat beside me and took my hand in hers as if to hold
+me fast, my voice almost failed me. I began to plead "Father, let's get
+a home together, somewhere. Suppose we compromise on old Neshonoc where
+you were married and where I was born. Let's buy a house and lot there
+and put the deed in mother's name so that it can never be alienated, and
+make it the Garland Homestead. Come! Mother's brothers are there, your
+sister is there, all your old pioneer <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_436" id="Page_436">[Pg 436]</a></span>comrades are there. It's in a
+rich and sheltered valley and is filled with associations of your
+youth.&mdash;Haven't you had enough of pioneering? Why not go back and be
+sheltered by the hills and trees for the rest of your lives? If you'll
+join us in this plan, Frank and I will spend our summers with you and
+perhaps we can all eat our Thanksgiving dinners together in the good old
+New England custom and be happy."</p>
+
+<p>Mother yielded at once to the earnestness of my appeal. "I'm ready to go
+back," she said. "There's only one thing to keep me here, and that is
+Jessie's grave," (Poor little girl! It did seem a bleak place in which
+to leave her lying alone) but the old soldier was still too proud, too
+much the pioneer, to bring himself at once to a surrender of his hopes.
+He shook his head and said, "I can't do it, Hamlin. I've got to fight it
+out right here or farther west."</p>
+
+<p>To this I darkly responded, "If you go farther west you go alone.
+Mother's pioneering is done. She is coming with me, back to comfort,
+back to a real home beside her brothers."</p>
+
+<p>As I grew calmer, we talked of the past, of the early days in Iowa, of
+the dimmer, yet still more beautiful valleys of Wisconsin, till mother
+sighed, and said, "I'd like to see the folks and the old coulee once
+more, but I never shall."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, you shall," I asserted.</p>
+
+<p>We spoke of David whose feet were still marching to the guidons of the
+sunset, of Burton far away on an Island in Puget Sound, and together we
+decided that placid old William, sitting among his bees in Gill's
+Coulee, was after all the wiser man. Of what avail this constant quest
+of gold, beneath the far horizon's rim?</p>
+
+<p>"Father," I bluntly said, "you've been chasing a will-o'-the-wisp. For
+fifty years you've been <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_437" id="Page_437">[Pg 437]</a></span>moving westward, and always you have gone from
+certainty to uncertainty, from a comfortable home to a shanty. For
+thirty years you've carried mother on a ceaseless journey&mdash;to what end?
+Here you are,&mdash;snowbound on a treeless plain with mother old and
+crippled. It's a hard thing to say but the time has come for a 'bout
+face. <i>You must take the back trail.</i> It will hurt, but it must be
+done."</p>
+
+<p>"I can't do it!" he exclaimed. "I've never 'backed water' in my life,
+and I won't do it now. I'm not beaten yet. We've had three bad years in
+succession&mdash;we'll surely have a crop next year. I won't surrender so
+long as I can run a team."</p>
+
+<p>"Then, let me tell you something else," I resumed. "I will never visit
+you on this accursed plain again. You can live here if you want to, but
+I'm going to take mother out of it. She shall not grow old and die in
+such surroundings as these. I won't have it&mdash;it isn't right."</p>
+
+<p>At last the stern old Captain gave in, at least to the point of saying,
+"Well, we'll see. I'll come down next summer, and we'll visit William
+and look the ground over.&mdash;But I won't consider going back to stay till
+I've had a crop. I won't go back to the old valley dead-broke. I can't
+stand being called a failure. If I have a crop and can sell out I'll
+talk with you."</p>
+
+<p>"Very well. I'm going to stop off at Salem on my way East and tell the
+folks that you are about to sell out and come back to the old valley."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>This victory over my pioneer father gave me such relief from my gnawing
+conscience that my whole sky lightened. The thought of establishing a
+family hearth at the point where my life began, had a fine appeal. All
+my schooling had been to migrate, to keep moving. "If your crop fails,
+go west and try a new soil. If disagreeable <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_438" id="Page_438">[Pg 438]</a></span>neighbors surround you,
+sell out and move,&mdash;always toward the open country. To remain quietly in
+your native place is a sign of weakness, of irresolution. Happiness
+dwells afar. Wealth and fame are to be found by journeying toward the
+sunset star!" Such had been the spirit, the message of all the songs and
+stories of my youth.</p>
+
+<p>Now suddenly I perceived the futility of our quest. I felt the value, I
+acknowledged the peace of the old, the settled. The valley of my birth
+even in the midst of winter had a quiet beauty. The bluffs were draped
+with purple and silver. Steel-blue shadows filled the hollows of the
+sunlit snow. The farmhouses all put forth a comfortable, settled, homey
+look. The farmers themselves, shaggy, fur-clad and well-fed, came into
+town driving fat horses whose bells uttered a song of plenty. On the
+plain we had feared the wind with a mortal terror, here the hills as
+well as the sheltering elms (which defended almost every roof) stood
+against the blast like friendly warders.</p>
+
+<p>The village life, though rude and slow-moving, was hearty and cheerful.
+As I went about the streets with my uncle William&mdash;gray-haired old
+pioneers whose names were startlingly familiar, called out, "Hello,
+Bill"&mdash;adding some homely jest precisely as they had been doing for
+forty years. As young men they had threshed or cradled or husked corn
+with my father, whom they still called by his first name. "So you are
+Dick's boy? How is Dick getting along?"</p>
+
+<p>"He has a big farm," I replied, "nearly a thousand acres, but he's going
+to sell out next year and come back here."</p>
+
+<p>They were all frankly pleased. "Is that so! Made his pile, I s'pose?"</p>
+
+<p>"Enough to live on, I guess," I answered evasively.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm glad to hear of it. I always liked Dick. We were <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_439" id="Page_439">[Pg 439]</a></span>in the woods
+together. I hated to see him leave the valley. How's Belle?"</p>
+
+<p>This question always brought the shadow back to my face. "Not very
+well,&mdash;but we hope she'll be better when she gets back here among her
+own folks."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, we'll all be glad to see them both," was the hearty reply.</p>
+
+<p>In this hope, with this plan in mind, I took my way back to New York,
+well pleased with my plan.</p>
+
+<p>After nearly a third of a century of migration, the Garlands were about
+to double on their trail, and their decision was deeply significant. It
+meant that a certain phase of American pioneering had ended, that "the
+woods and prairie lands" having all been taken up, nothing remained but
+the semi-arid valleys of the Rocky Mountains. "Irrigation" was a new
+word and a vague word in the ears of my father's generation, and had
+little of the charm which lay in the "flowery savannahs" of the
+Mississippi valley. In the years between 1865 and 1892 the nation had
+swiftly passed through the buoyant era of free land settlement, and now
+the day of reckoning had come.</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br /><a name="XXXIV" id="XXXIV"></a>
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_440" id="Page_440">[Pg 440]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CHAPTER XXXIV</h2>
+
+<h2>We Go to California</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>The idea of a homestead now became an obsession with me. As a
+proletariat I knew the power of the landlord and the value of land. My
+love of the wilderness was increasing year by year, but all desire to
+plow the wild land was gone. My desire for a home did not involve a
+lonely cabin in a far-off valley, on the contrary I wanted roads and
+bridges and neighbors. My hope now was to possess a minute isle of
+safety in the midst of the streaming currents of western life&mdash;a little
+solid ground in my native valley on which the surviving members of my
+family could catch and cling.</p>
+
+<p>All about me as I travelled, I now perceived the mournful side of
+American "enterprise." Sons were deserting their work-worn fathers,
+daughters were forgetting their tired mothers. Families were everywhere
+breaking up. Ambitious young men and unsuccessful old men were in
+restless motion, spreading, swarming, dragging their reluctant women and
+their helpless and wondering children into unfamiliar hardships&mdash;At
+times I visioned the Middle Border as a colony of ants&mdash;which was an
+injustice to the ants, for ants have a reason for their apparently
+futile and aimless striving.</p>
+
+<p>My brother and I discussed my notion in detail as we sat in our
+six-by-nine dining room, high in our Harlem flat. "The house must be in
+a village. It must be New England in type and stand beneath tall elm
+trees," I said. "It must be broad-based and low&mdash;you know the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_441" id="Page_441">[Pg 441]</a></span>kind, we
+saw dozens of them on our tramp-trip down the Connecticut Valley and
+we'll have a big garden and a tennis court. We'll need a barn, too, for
+father will want to keep a driving team. Mother shall have a girl to do
+the housework so that we can visit her often,"&mdash;and so on and on!</p>
+
+<p>Things were not coming our way very fast but they were coming, and it
+really looked as though my dream might become a reality. My brother was
+drawing a small but regular salary as a member of Herne's company, my
+stories were selling moderately well and as neither of us was given to
+drink or cards, whatever we earned we saved. To some minds our lives
+seemed stupidly regular, but we were happy in our quiet way.</p>
+
+<p>It was in my brother's little flat on One Hundred and Fifth Street that
+Stephen Crane renewed a friendship which had begun a couple of years
+before, while I was lecturing in Avon, New Jersey. He was a slim, pale,
+hungry looking boy at this time and had just written <i>The Red Badge of
+Courage</i>, in fact he brought the first half of it in his pocket on his
+second visit, and I loaned him fifteen dollars to redeem the other half
+from the keep of a cruel typist.</p>
+
+<p>He came again and again to see me, always with a new roll of manuscript
+in his ulster. Now it was <i>The Men in the Storm</i>, now a bunch of <i>The
+Black Riders</i>, curious poems, which he afterwards dedicated to me, and
+while my brother browned a steak, Steve and I usually sat in council
+over his dark future.</p>
+
+<p>"You will laugh over these lean years," I said to him, but he found
+small comfort in that prospect.</p>
+
+<p>To him I was a man established, and I took an absurd pleasure in playing
+the part of Successful Author. It was all very comical&mdash;for my study was
+the ratty little parlor of a furnished flat for which we paid thirty
+dollars <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_442" id="Page_442">[Pg 442]</a></span>per month. Still to the man at the bottom of a pit the fellow
+on top, in the sunlight, is a king, and to Crane my brother and I were
+at least dukes.</p>
+
+<p>An expression used by Suderman in his preface to <i>Dame Care</i> had made a
+great impression on my mind and in discussing my future with the Hernes
+I quoted these lines and said, "I am resolved that <i>my</i> mother shall not
+'rise from the feast of life empty.' Think of it! She has never seen a
+real play in a real theater in all her life. She has never seen a
+painting or heard a piece of fine music. She knows nothing of the
+splendors of our civilization except what comes to her in the
+newspapers, while here am I in the midst of every intellectual delight.
+I take no credit for my desire to comfort her&mdash;it's just my way of
+having fun. It's a purely selfish enterprise on my part."</p>
+
+<p>Katharine who was familiar with the theory of Egoistic Altruism would
+not let my statement go uncontradicted. She tried to make a virtue of my
+devotion to my parents.</p>
+
+<p>"No," I insisted,&mdash;"if batting around town gave me more real pleasure I
+would do it. It don't, in fact I shall never be quite happy till I have
+shown mother <i>Shore Acres</i> and given her an opportunity to hear a
+symphony concert."</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, having no business adviser, I was doing honorable things in a
+foolish way. With no knowledge of how to publish my work I was bringing
+out a problem novel here, a realistic novelette there and a book of
+short stories in a third place, all to the effect of confusing my public
+and disgusting the book-seller. But then, no one in those days had any
+very clear notion of how to launch a young writer, and so (as I had
+entered the literary field by way of a side-gate) I was doing as well as
+could have been expected of me. My idea, it appears, was to get as many
+books into the same market at the same time as possible. As a matter of
+fact none of them paid me any <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_443" id="Page_443">[Pg 443]</a></span>royalty, my subsistence came from the
+sale of such short stories as I was able to lodge with <i>The Century</i>,
+and <i>Harper's</i>, <i>The Youth's Companion</i> and <i>The Arena</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The "Bacheller Syndicate" took a kindly interest in me, and I came to
+like the big, blonde, dreaming youth from The North Country who was the
+nominal head of the firm. Irving Bacheller, even at that time struck me
+as more of a poet than a business man, though I was always glad to get
+his check, for it brought the Garland Homestead just that much nearer.
+On the whole it was a prosperous and busy winter for both my brother and
+myself.</p>
+
+<p>Chicago was in the early stages of building a World's Fair, and as
+spring came on I spent a couple of weeks in the city putting <i>Prairie
+Folks</i> into shape for the printer. Kirkland introduced me to the Chicago
+Literary Club, and my publisher, Frances Schulte, took me to the Press
+Club and I began to understand and like the city.</p>
+
+<p>As May deepened I went on up to Wisconsin, full of my plan for a
+homestead, and the green and luscious slopes of the old valley gave me a
+new delight, a kind of proprietary delight. I began to think of it as
+home. It seemed not only a natural deed but a dutiful deed, this return
+to the land of my birth, it was the beginning of a more settled order of
+life.</p>
+
+<p>My aunt, Susan Bailey, who was living alone in the old house in Onalaska
+made me welcome, and showed grateful interest when I spoke to her of my
+ambition. "I'll be glad to help you pay for such a place," she said,
+"provided you will set aside a room in it for me. I am lonely now. Your
+father is all I have and I'd like to spend my old age with him. But
+don't buy a farm. Buy a house and lot here or in LaCrosse."</p>
+
+<p>"Mother wants to be in West Salem," I replied. "All our talk has been of
+West Salem, and if you can content <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_444" id="Page_444">[Pg 444]</a></span>yourself to live with us there, I
+shall be very glad of your co-operation. Father is still skittish. He
+will not come back till he can sell to advantage. However, the season
+has started well and I am hoping that he will at least come down with
+mother and talk the matter over with us."</p>
+
+<p>To my delight, almost to my surprise, mother came, alone. "Father will
+follow in a few days," she said&mdash;"if he can find someone to look after
+his stock and tools while he is gone."</p>
+
+<p>She was able to walk a little now and together we went about the
+village, and visited relatives and neighbors in the country. We ate
+"company dinners" of fried chicken and shortcake, and sat out on the
+grass beneath the shelter of noble trees during the heat of the day.
+There was something profoundly restful and satisfying in this
+atmosphere. No one seemed in a hurry and no one seemed to fear either
+the wind or the sun.</p>
+
+<p>The talk was largely of the past, of the fine free life of the "early
+days" and my mother's eyes often filled with happy tears as she met
+friends who remembered her as a girl. There was no doubt in her mind.
+"I'd like to live here," she said. "It's more like home than any other
+place. But I don't see how your father could stand it on a little piece
+of land. He likes his big fields."</p>
+
+<p>One night as we were sitting on William's porch, talking of war times
+and of Hugh and Jane and Walter, a sweet and solemn mood came over us.
+It seemed as if the spirits of the pioneers, the McClintocks and Dudleys
+had been called back and were all about us. It seemed to me (as to my
+mother) as if Luke or Leonard might at any moment emerge from the
+odorous June dusk and speak to us. We spoke of David, and my mother's
+love for him vibrated in her voice as she said, "I don't suppose I'll
+ever see him again. He's too poor and too <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_445" id="Page_445">[Pg 445]</a></span>proud to come back here, and
+I'm too old and lame and poor to visit him."</p>
+
+<p>This produced in me a sudden and most audacious change of plan. "I'm not
+so certain about that," I retorted. "Frank's company is going to play in
+California this winter, and I am arranging a lecture tour&mdash;I've just
+decided that you and father shall go along."</p>
+
+<p>The boldness of my plan startled her. "Oh, we can't do a crazy thing
+like that," she declared.</p>
+
+<p>"It's not so crazy. Father has been talking for years of a visit to his
+brother in Santa Barbara. Aunt Susan tells me she wants to spend one
+more winter in California, and so I see no reason in the world why you
+and father should not go. I'll pay for your tickets and Addison will be
+glad to house you. We're going!" I asserted firmly. "We'll put off
+buying our homestead till next year and make this the grandest trip of
+your life."</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Maria here put in a word, "You do just what Hamlin tells you to do.
+If he wants to spend his money giving you a good time, you let him."</p>
+
+<p>Mother smiled wistfully but incredulously. To her it all seemed as
+remote, as improbable as a trip to Egypt, but I continued to talk of it
+as settled and so did William and Maria.</p>
+
+<p>I wrote at once to my father outlining my trip and pleading strongly for
+his consent and co-operation. "All your life long you and mother have
+toiled with hardly a day off. Your travelling has been mainly in a
+covered wagon. You have seen nothing of cities for thirty years. Addison
+wants you to spend the winter with him, and mother wants to see David
+once more&mdash;why not go? Begin to plan right now and as soon as your crops
+are harvested, meet me at Omaha or Kansas City and we'll all go along
+together."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_446" id="Page_446">[Pg 446]</a></span>He replied with unexpected half-promise. "The crops look pretty well.
+Unless something very destructive turns up I shall have a few dollars to
+spend. I'd like to make that trip. I'd like to see Addison once more."</p>
+
+<p>I replied, "The more I think about it, the more wonderful it all seems.
+It will enable you to see the mountains, and the great plains. You can
+visit Los Angeles and San Francisco. You can see the ocean. Frank is to
+play for a month in Frisco, and we can all meet at Uncle David's for
+Christmas."</p>
+
+<p>The remainder of the summer was taken up with the preparations for this
+gorgeous excursion. Mother went back to help father through the harvest,
+whilst I returned to Boston and completed arrangements for my lecture
+tour which was to carry me as far north as Puget Sound.</p>
+
+<p>At last in November, when the grain was all safely marketed, the old
+people met me in Kansas City, and from there as if in a dream, started
+westward with me in such holiday spirits as mother's health permitted.
+Father was like a boy. Having cut loose from the farm&mdash;at least for the
+winter, he declared his intention to have a good time, "as good as the
+law allows," he added with a smile.</p>
+
+<p>Of course they both expected to suffer on the journey, that's what
+travel had always meant to them, but I surprised them. I not only took
+separate lower berths in the sleeping car, I insisted on regular meals
+at the eating houses along the way, and they were amazed to find travel
+almost comfortable. The cost of all this disturbed my mother a good deal
+till I explained to her that my own expenses were paid by the lecture
+committees and that she need not worry about the price of her fare.
+Perhaps I even boasted about a recent sale of a story! If I did I hope
+it will be forgiven me for I was <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_447" id="Page_447">[Pg 447]</a></span>determined that this should be the
+greatest event in her life.</p>
+
+<p>My father's interest in all that came to view was as keen as my own.
+During all his years of manhood he had longed to cross the plains and to
+see Pike's Peak, and now while his approach was not as he had dreamed
+it, he was actually on his way into Colorado. "By the great Horn
+Spoons," he exclaimed as we neared the foot hills, "I'd like to have
+been here before the railroad."</p>
+
+<p>Here spoke the born explorer. His eyes sparkled, his face flushed. The
+farther we got into the houseless cattle range, the better he liked it.
+"The best times I've ever had in my life," he remarked as we were
+looking away across the plain at the faint shapes of the Spanish Peaks,
+"was when I was cruising the prairie in a covered wagon."</p>
+
+<p>Then he told me once again of his long trip into Minnesota before the
+war, and of the cavalry lieutenant who rounded the settlers up and sent
+them back to St. Paul to escape the Sioux who were on the warpath. "I
+never saw such a country for game as Northern Minnesota was in those
+days. It swarmed with water-fowl and chicken and deer. If the soldiers
+hadn't driven me out I would have had a farm up there. I was just
+starting to break a garden when the troops came."</p>
+
+<p>It was all glorious to me as to them. The Spanish life of Las Vegas
+where we rested for a day, the Indians of Laguna, the lava beds and
+painted buttes of the desert, the beautiful slopes of the San Francisco
+Mountains, the herds of cattle, the careering cowboys, the mines and
+miners&mdash;all came in for study and comment. We resented the nights which
+shut us out from so much that was interesting. Then came the hot sand of
+the Colorado valley, the swift climb to the bleak heights of the coast
+range&mdash;and, at last, the swift descent to the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_448" id="Page_448">[Pg 448]</a></span>orange groves and singing
+birds of Riverside. A dozen times father cried out, "This alone is worth
+the cost of the trip."</p>
+
+<p>Mother was weary, how weary I did not know till we reached our room in
+the hotel. She did not complain but her face was more dejected than I
+had ever seen it, and I was greatly disturbed by it. Our grand excursion
+had come too late for her.</p>
+
+<p>A good night's sleep and a hearty breakfast restored her to something
+like her smiling self and when we took the train for Santa Barbara she
+betrayed more excitement than at any time on our trip. "Do we really
+<i>see</i> the ocean?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," I explained, "we run close along the shore. You'll see waves and
+ships and sharks&mdash;may be a whale or two."</p>
+
+<p>Father was even more excited. He spent most of his time on the platform
+or hanging from the window. "Well, I never really expected to see the
+Pacific," he said as we were nearing the end of our journey. "Now I'm
+determined to see Frisco and the Golden Gate."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course&mdash;that is a part of our itinerary. You can see Frisco when you
+come up to visit David."</p>
+
+<p>My uncle Addison who was living in a plain but roomy house, was
+genuinely glad to see us, and his wife made us welcome in the spirit of
+the Middle Border for she was one of the early settlers of Green County,
+Wisconsin. In an hour we were at home.</p>
+
+<p>Our host was, as I remembered him, a tall thin man of quiet dignity and
+notable power of expression. His words were well chosen and his manner
+urbane. "I want you people to settle right down here with me for the
+winter," he said. "In fact I shall try to persuade Richard to buy a
+place here."</p>
+
+<p>This brought out my own plan for a home in West <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_449" id="Page_449">[Pg 449]</a></span>Salem and he agreed
+with me that the old people should never again spend a winter in Dakota.</p>
+
+<p>There was no question in my mind about the hospitality of this home and
+so with a very comfortable, a delightful sense of peace, of
+satisfaction, of security, I set out on my way to San Francisco,
+Portland and Olympia, eager to see California&mdash;all of it. Its mountains,
+its cities and above all its poets had long called to me. It meant the
+<i>Argonauts</i> and <i>The Songs of the Sierras</i> to me, and one of my main
+objects of destination was Joaquin Miller's home in Oakland Heights.</p>
+
+<p>No one else, so far as I knew, was transmitting this Coast life into
+literature. Edwin Markham was an Oakland school teacher, Frank Norris, a
+college student, and Jack London a boy in short trousers. Miller
+dominated the coast landscape. The mountains, the streams, the pines
+were his. A dozen times as I passed some splendid peak I quoted his
+lines. "Sierras! Eternal tents of snow that flash o'er battlements of
+mountains."</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, in all my journeying, throughout all my other interests, I
+kept in mind our design for a reunion at my uncle David's home in San
+Jos&eacute;, and I wrote him to tell him when to expect us. Franklin, who was
+playing in San Francisco, arranged to meet me, and father and mother
+were to come up from Santa Barbara.</p>
+
+<p>It all fell out quite miraculously as we had planned it. On the 24th of
+December we all met at my uncle's door.</p>
+
+<p>This reunion, so American in its unexpectedness, deserves closer
+analysis. My brother had come from New York City. Father and mother were
+from central Dakota. My own home was still in Boston. David and his
+family had reached this little tenement by way of a long trail through
+Iowa, Dakota, Montana, Oregon and Northern California. We who had all
+started, from the same little Wisconsin Valley were here drawn together,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_450" id="Page_450">[Pg 450]</a></span>as if by the magic of a conjuror's wand, in a city strange to us all.
+Can any other country on earth surpass the United States in the ruthless
+broadcast dispersion of its families? Could any other land furnish a
+more incredible momentary re-assembling of scattered units?</p>
+
+<p>The reader of this tale will remember that David was my boyish hero, and
+as I had not seen him for fifteen years, I had looked forward, with
+disquieting question concerning our meeting. Alas! My fears were
+justified. There was more of pain than pleasure in the visit, for us
+all. Although my brother and I did our best to make it joyous, the
+conditions of the reunion were sorrowful, for David, who like my father,
+had been following the lure of the sunset all his life, was in deep
+discouragement.</p>
+
+<p>From his fruitful farm in Iowa he had sought the free soil of Dakota.
+From Dakota he had been lured to Montana. In the forests of Montana he
+had been robbed by his partner, reduced in a single day to the rank of a
+day laborer, and so in the attempt to retrieve his fortunes, had again
+moved westward&mdash;ever westward, and here now at last in San Jos&eacute;, at the
+end of his means and almost at the end of his courage, he was working at
+whatever he could find to do.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, he was still the borderer, still the man of the open.
+Something in his face and voice, something in his glance set him apart
+from the ordinary workman. He still carried with him something of the
+hunter, something which came from the broad spaces of the Middle Border,
+and though his bushy hair and beard were streaked with white, and his
+eyes sad and dim, I could still discern in him some part of the physical
+strength and beauty which had made his young manhood so glorious to
+me&mdash;and deeper yet, I perceived in him the dreamer, the Celtic minstrel,
+the poet.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_451" id="Page_451">[Pg 451]</a></span>His limbs, mighty as of old, were heavy, and his towering frame was
+beginning to stoop. His brave heart was beating slow. Fortune had been
+harshly inimical to him and his outlook on life was bitter. With all his
+tremendous physical power he had not been able to regain his former
+footing among men.</p>
+
+<p>In talking of his misfortunes, I asked him why he had not returned to
+Wisconsin after his loss in Montana, and he replied, as my father had
+done. "How could I do that? How could I sneak back with empty pockets?"</p>
+
+<p>Inevitably, almost at once, father spoke of the violin. "Have you got it
+yet?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," David replied. "But I seldom play on it now. In fact, I don't
+think there are any strings on it."</p>
+
+<p>I could tell from the tone of his voice that he had no will to play, but
+he dug the almost forgotten instrument out of a closet, strung it and
+tuned it, and that evening after dinner, when my father called out in
+familiar imperious fashion, "Come, come! now for a tune," David was
+prepared, reluctantly, to comply.</p>
+
+<p>"My hands are so stiff and clumsy now," he said by way of apology to me.</p>
+
+<p>It was a sad pleasure to me, as to him, this revival of youthful
+memories, and I would have spared him if I could, but my father insisted
+upon having all of the jocund dances and sweet old songs. Although a man
+of deep feeling in many ways, he could not understand the tragedy of my
+uncle's failing skill.</p>
+
+<p>But mother did! Her ear was too acute not to detect the difference in
+tone between his playing at this time and the power of expression he had
+once possessed, and in her shadowy corner she suffered sympathetically
+when beneath his work-worn fingers the strings cried out discordantly.
+The wrist, once so strong and sure, the hands so supple and swift were
+now hooks of horn and bronze. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_452" id="Page_452">[Pg 452]</a></span>The magic touch of youth had vanished,
+and yet as he went on, some little part of his wizardry came back.</p>
+
+<p>At father's request he played once more <i>Maggie, Air Ye Sleepin'</i>, and
+while the strings wailed beneath his bow I shivered as of old, stirred
+by the winds of the past "roaring o'er Moorland craggy." Deep in my
+brain the sob of the song sank, filling my inner vision with flitting
+shadows of vanished faces, brows untouched of care, and sweet kind eyes
+lit by the firelight of a secure abundant hearth. I was lying once more
+before the fire in David's little cabin in the deep Wisconsin valley and
+Grandfather McClintock, a dreaming giant, was drumming on his chair, his
+face flame-lit, his hair a halo of snow and gold.</p>
+
+<p>Tune after tune the old Borderman played, in answer to my father's
+insistent demands, until at last the pain of it all became unendurable
+and he ended abruptly. "I can't play any more.&mdash;I'll never play again,"
+he added harshly as he laid the violin away in its box like a child in
+its coffin.</p>
+
+<p>We sat in silence, for we all realized that never again would we hear
+those wistful, meaningful melodies. Wordless, with aching throats,
+resentful of the present, my mother and my aunt dreamed of the bright
+and beautiful Neshonoc days when they were young and David was young and
+all the west was a land of hope.</p>
+
+<p>My father now joined in urging David to go back to the middle border.
+"I'll put you on my farm," he said. "Or if you want to go back to
+Neshonoc, we'll help you do that. We are thinking of going back there
+ourselves."</p>
+
+<p>David sadly shook his grizzled head. "No, I can't do that," he repeated.
+"I haven't money enough to pay my carfare, and besides, Becky and the
+children would never consent to it."</p>
+
+<p>I understood. His proud heart rebelled at the thought <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_453" id="Page_453">[Pg 453]</a></span>of the pitying or
+contemptuous eyes of his stay-at home neighbors. He who had gone forth
+so triumphantly thirty years before could not endure the notion of going
+back on borrowed money. Better to die among strangers like a soldier.</p>
+
+<p>Father, stern old pioneer though he was, could not think of leaving his
+wife's brother here, working like a Chinaman. "Dave has acted the fool,"
+he privately said to me, "but we will help him. If you can spare a
+little, we'll lend him enough to buy one of these fruit farms he's
+talking about."</p>
+
+<p>To this I agreed. Together we loaned him enough to make the first
+payment on a small farm. He was deeply grateful for this and hope again
+sprang up in his heart. "You won't regret it," he said brokenly. "This
+will put me on my feet, and by and by perhaps we'll meet in the old
+valley."&mdash;But we never did. I never saw him again.</p>
+
+<p>I shall always insist that a true musician, a superb violinist was lost
+to the world in David McClintock&mdash;but as he was born on the border and
+always remained on the border, how could he find himself? His hungry
+heart, his need of change, his search for the pot of gold beyond the
+sunset, had carried him from one adventure to another and always farther
+and farther from the things he most deeply craved. He might have been a
+great singer, for he had a beautiful voice and a keen appreciation of
+the finer elements of song.</p>
+
+<p>It was hard for me to adjust myself to his sorrowful decline into old
+age. I thought of him as he appeared to me when riding his threshing
+machine up the coulee road. I recalled the long rifle with which he used
+to carry off the prizes at the turkey shoots, and especially I
+remembered him as he looked while playing the violin on that far off
+Thanksgiving night in Lewis Valley.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_454" id="Page_454">[Pg 454]</a></span>I left California with the feeling that his life was almost ended, and
+my heart was heavy with indignant pity for I must now remember him only
+as a broken and discouraged man. The David of my idolatry, the laughing
+giant of my boyhood world, could be found now, only in the mist which
+hung above the hills and valleys of Neshonoc.</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br /><a name="XXXV" id="XXXV"></a>
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_455" id="Page_455">[Pg 455]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CHAPTER XXXV</h2>
+
+<h2>The Homestead in the Valley</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>To my father the Golden Gate of San Francisco was grandly romantic. It
+was associated in his mind with Bret Harte and the Goldseekers of Forty
+Nine, as well as with Fremont and the Mexican War, hence one of his
+expressed desires for many years had been to stand on the hills above
+the bay and look out on the ocean. "I know Boston," he said, "and I want
+to know Frisco."</p>
+
+<p>My mother's interest in the city was more personal. She was eager to see
+her son Franklin play his part in a real play on a real stage. For that
+reward she was willing to undertake considerable extra fatigue and so to
+please her, to satisfy my father and to gratify myself, I accompanied
+them to San Francisco and for several days with a delightful sense of
+accomplishment, my brother and I led them about the town. We visited the
+Seal Rocks and climbed Nob Hill, explored Chinatown and walked through
+the Old Spanish Quarter, and as each of these pleasures was tasted my
+father said, "Well now, that's done!" precisely as if he were getting
+through a list of tedious duties.</p>
+
+<p>There was no hint of obligation, however, in the hours which they spent
+in seeing my brother's performance as one of the "Three Twins" in
+<i>Incog</i>. The piece was in truth very funny and Franklin hardly to be
+distinguished from his "Star," a fact which astonished and delighted my
+mother. She didn't know he could look so unlike himself. She laughed
+herself quite breathless over the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_456" id="Page_456">[Pg 456]</a></span>absurd situations of the farce but
+father was not so easily satisfied. "This foolery is all well enough,"
+said he, "but I'd rather see you and your friend Herne in <i>Shore
+Acres</i>."</p>
+
+<p>At last the day came when they both expressed a desire to return to
+Santa Barbara. "We've had about all we can stand this trip," they
+confessed, whereupon, leaving Franklin at his job, we started down the
+valley on our way to Addison Garland's home which had come to have
+something of the quality of home to us all.</p>
+
+<p>We were tired but triumphant. One by one the things we had promised
+ourselves to see we had seen. The Plains, the Mountains, the Desert, the
+Orange Groves, the Ocean, all had been added to the list of our
+achievements. We had visited David and watched Franklin play in his
+"troupe," and now with a sense of fullness, of victory, we were on our
+way back to a safe harbor among the fruits and flowers of Southern
+California.</p>
+
+<p>This was the pleasantest thought of all to me and in private I said to
+my uncle, "I hope you can keep these people till spring. They must not
+go back to Dakota now."</p>
+
+<p>"Give yourself no concern about that!" replied Addison. "I have a
+program laid out which will keep them busy until May. We're going out to
+Catalina and up into the Ojai valley and down to Los Angeles. We are to
+play for the rest of the winter like a couple of boys."</p>
+
+<p>With mind entirely at ease I left them on the rose-embowered porch of my
+uncle's home, and started east by way of Denver and Chicago, eager to
+resume work on a book which I had promised for the autumn.</p>
+
+<p>Chicago was now full in the spot-light of the National Stage. In spite
+of the business depression which still engulfed the west, the promoters
+of the Columbian Exposition were going steadily forward with their
+plans, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_457" id="Page_457">[Pg 457]</a></span>and when I arrived in the city about the middle of January, the
+bustle of preparation was at a very high point.</p>
+
+<p>The newly-acquired studios were swarming with eager and aspiring young
+artists, and I believed, (as many others believed) that the city was
+entering upon an era of swift and shining development. All the near-by
+states were stirred and heartened by this esthetic awakening of a
+metropolis which up to this time had given but little thought to the
+value of art in the life of a community. From being a huge, muddy windy
+market-place, it seemed about to take its place among the literary
+capitals of the world.</p>
+
+<p>Colonies of painters, sculptors, decorators and other art experts now
+colored its life in gratifying degree. Beauty was a work to advertise
+with, and writers like Harriet Monroe, Henry B. Fuller, George Ade,
+Peter Finley Dunne, and Eugene Field were at work celebrating, each in
+his kind, the changes in the thought and aspect of the town. Ambitious
+publishing houses were springing up and "dummies" of new magazines were
+being thumbed by reckless young editors. The talk was all of Art, and
+the Exposition. It did, indeed seem as if culture were about to hum.</p>
+
+<p>Naturally this flare of esthetic enthusiasm lit the tow of my
+imagination. I predicted a publishing center and a literary market-place
+second only to New York, a publishing center which by reason of its
+geographical position would be more progressive than Boston, and more
+American than Manhattan. "Here flames the spirit of youth. Here throbs
+the heart of America," I declared in <i>Crumbling Idols</i>, an essay which I
+was at this time writing for the <i>Forum</i>.</p>
+
+<p>In the heat of this conviction, I decided to give up my residence in
+Boston and establish headquarters in Chicago. I belonged here. My
+writing was of the Middle <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_458" id="Page_458">[Pg 458]</a></span>Border, and must continue to be so. Its
+spirit was mine. All of my immediate relations were dwellers in the
+west, and as I had also definitely set myself the task of depicting
+certain phases of mountain life, it was inevitable that I should
+ultimately bring my workshop to Chicago which was my natural pivot, the
+hinge on which my varied activities would revolve. And, finally, to live
+here would enable me to keep in closer personal touch with my father and
+mother in the Wisconsin homestead which I had fully determined to
+acquire.</p>
+
+<p>Following this decision, I returned to Boston, and at once announced my
+plan to Howells, Flower and other of my good friends who had meant so
+much to me in the past. Each was kind enough to express regret and all
+agreed that my scheme was logical. "It should bring you happiness and
+success," they added.</p>
+
+<p>Alas! The longer I stayed, the deeper I settled into my groove and the
+more difficult my removal became. It was not easy to surrender the busy
+and cheerful life I had been leading for nearly ten years. It was hard
+to say good-bye to the artists and writers and musicians with whom I had
+so long been associated. To leave the Common, the parks, the Library and
+the lovely walks and drives of Roxbury, was sorrowful business&mdash;but I
+did it! I packed my books ready for shipment and returned to Chicago in
+May just as the Exposition was about to open its doors.</p>
+
+<p>Like everyone else who saw it at this time I was amazed at the grandeur
+of "The White City," and impatiently anxious to have all my friends and
+relations share in my enjoyment of it. My father was back on the farm in
+Dakota and I wrote to him at once urging him to come down. "Frank will
+be here in June and we will take charge of you. Sell the cook stove if
+necessary and come. You <i>must</i> see this fair. On the way back I will go
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_459" id="Page_459">[Pg 459]</a></span>as far as West Salem and we'll buy that homestead I've been talking
+about."</p>
+
+<p>My brother whose season closed about the twenty-fifth of May, joined me
+in urging them not to miss the fair and a few days later we were both
+delighted and a little surprised to get a letter from mother telling us
+when to expect them. "I can't walk very well," she explained, "but I'm
+coming. I am so hungry to see my boys that I don't mind the long
+journey."</p>
+
+<p>Having secured rooms for them at a small hotel near the west gate of the
+exposition grounds, we were at the station to receive them as they came
+from the train surrounded by other tired and dusty pilgrims of the
+plains. Father was in high spirits and mother was looking very well
+considering the tiresome ride of nearly seven hundred miles. "Give us a
+chance to wash up and we'll be ready for anything," she said with brave
+intonation.</p>
+
+<p>We took her at her word. With merciless enthusiasm we hurried them to
+their hotel and as soon as they had bathed and eaten a hasty lunch, we
+started out with intent to astonish and delight them. Here was another
+table at "the feast of life" from which we did not intend they should
+rise unsatisfied. "This shall be the richest experience of their lives,"
+we said.</p>
+
+<p>With a wheeled chair to save mother from the fatigue of walking we
+started down the line and so rapidly did we pass from one stupendous
+vista to another that we saw in a few hours many of the inside exhibits
+and all of the finest exteriors&mdash;not to mention a glimpse of the
+polyglot amazements of the Midway.</p>
+
+<p>In pursuance of our plan to watch the lights come on, we ate our supper
+in one of the big restaurants on the grounds and at eight o'clock
+entered the Court of Honor. It chanced to be a moonlit night, and as
+lamps were lit and the waters of the lagoon began to reflect the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_460" id="Page_460">[Pg 460]</a></span>gleaming walls of the great palaces with their sculptured ornaments,
+and boats of quaint shape filled with singers came and went beneath the
+arching bridges, the wonder and the beauty of it all moved these
+dwellers of the level lands to tears of joy which was almost as poignant
+as pain. In addition to its grandeur the scene had for them the
+transitory quality of an autumn sunset, a splendor which they would
+never see again.</p>
+
+<p>Stunned by the majesty of the vision, my mother sat in her chair,
+visioning it all yet comprehending little of its meaning. Her life had
+been spent among homely small things, and these gorgeous scenes dazzled
+her, overwhelmed her, letting in upon her in one mighty flood a thousand
+stupefying suggestions of the art and history and poetry of the world.
+She was old and she was ill, and her brain ached with the weight of its
+new conceptions. Her face grew troubled and wistful, and her eyes as big
+and dark as those of a child.</p>
+
+<p>At last utterly overcome she leaned her head against my arm, closed her
+eyes and said, "Take me home. I can't stand any more of it."</p>
+
+<p>Sadly I took her away, back to her room, realizing that we had been too
+eager. We had oppressed her with the exotic, the magnificent. She was
+too old and too feeble to enjoy as we had hoped she would enjoy, the
+color and music and thronging streets of The Magic City.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of the third day father said, "Well, I've had enough." He
+too, began to long for the repose of the country, the solace of familiar
+scenes. In truth they were both surfeited with the alien, sick of the
+picturesque. Their ears suffered from the clamor of strange sounds as
+their eyes ached with the clash of unaccustomed color. My insistent
+haste, my desire to make up in a few hours for all their past
+deprivations seemed at the moment to have been a mistake.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_461" id="Page_461">[Pg 461]</a></span>Seeing this, knowing that all the splendors of the Orient could not
+compensate them for another sleepless night, I decided to cut their
+visit short and hurry them back to quietude. Early on the fourth morning
+we started for the LaCrosse Valley by way of Madison&mdash;they with a sense
+of relief, I with a feeling of disappointment. "The feast was too rich,
+too highly spiced for their simple tastes," I now admitted.</p>
+
+<p>However, a certain amount of comfort came to me as I observed that the
+farther they got from the Fair the keener their enjoyment of it
+became!&mdash;With bodies at ease and minds untroubled, they now relived in
+pleasant retrospect all the excitement and bustle of the crowds, all the
+bewildering sights and sounds of the Midway. Scenes which had worried as
+well as amazed them were now recalled with growing enthusiasm, as our
+train, filled with other returning sightseers of like condition, rushed
+steadily northward into the green abundance of the land they knew so
+well, and when at six o'clock of a lovely afternoon, they stepped down
+upon the platform of the weather-beaten little station at West Salem,
+both were restored to their serene and buoyant selves. The leafy
+village, so green, so muddy, so lush with grass, seemed the perfection
+of restful security. The chuckle of robins on the lawns, the songs of
+cat-birds in the plum trees and the whistle of larks in the pasture
+appealed to them as parts of a familiar sweet and homely hymn.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Just in the edge of the village, on a four-acre plot of rich level
+ground, stood an old two-story frame cottage on which I had fixed my
+interest. It was not beautiful, not in the least like the ideal New
+England homestead my brother and I had so long discussed, but it was
+sheltered on the south by three enormous maples and its gate fronted
+upon a double row of New England elms <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_462" id="Page_462">[Pg 462]</a></span>whose branches almost arched the
+wide street. Its gardens, rich in grape vines, asparagus beds, plums,
+raspberries and other fruiting shrubs, appealed with especial power to
+my mother who had lived so long on the sun-baked plains that the sight
+of green things growing was very precious in her eyes. Clumps of lilacs,
+syringa and snow-ball, and beds of old-fashioned flowers gave further
+evidence of the love and care which the former owners of the place had
+lavished upon it.</p>
+
+<p>As for myself, the desire to see my aging parents safely sheltered
+beneath the benignant branches of those sturdy trees would have made me
+content even with a log cabin. In imagination I perceived this angular
+cottage growing into something fine and sweet and&mdash;our own!</p>
+
+<p>There was charm also in the fact that its western windows looked out
+upon the wooded hills over which I had wandered as a boy, and whose
+sky-line had printed itself deep into the lowest stratum of my
+subconscious memory; and so it happened that on the following night, as
+we stood before the gate looking out upon that sunset wall of purple
+bluffs from beneath the double row of elms stretching like a peristyle
+to the west, my decision came.</p>
+
+<p>"This is my choice," I declared. "Right here we take root. This shall be
+the Garland Homestead." I turned to my father. "When can you move?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not till after my grain is threshed and marketed," he replied.</p>
+
+<p>"Very well, let's call it the first of November, and we'll all meet here
+for our Thanksgiving dinner."</p>
+
+<p>Thanksgiving with us, as with most New Englanders, had always been a
+date-mark, something to count upon and to count from, and no sooner were
+we in possession of a deed, than my mother and I began to plan for a
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_463" id="Page_463">[Pg 463]</a></span>dinner which should be at once a reunion of the Garlands and
+McClintocks, a homecoming and a housewarming. With this understanding I
+let them go back for a final harvest in Dakota.</p>
+
+<p>The purchase of this small lot and commonplace house may seem very
+unimportant to the reader but to me and to my father it was in very
+truth epoch-marking. To me it was the ending of one life and the
+beginning of another. To him it was decisive and not altogether joyous.
+To accept this as his home meant a surrender of his faith in the Golden
+West, a tacit admission that all his explorations of the open lands with
+whatsoever they had meant of opportunity, had ended in a sense of
+failure on a barren soil. It was not easy for him to enter into the
+spirit of our Thanksgiving plans although he had given his consent to
+them. He was still the tiller of broad acres, the speculator hoping for
+a boom.</p>
+
+<p>Early in October, as soon as I could displace the renter of the house, I
+started in rebuilding and redecorating it as if for the entrance of a
+bride. I widened the dining room, refitted the kitchen and ordered new
+rugs, curtains and furniture from Chicago. I engaged a cook and maid,
+and bought a horse so that on November first, the date of my mother's
+arrival, I was able to meet her at the station and drive her in a
+carriage of her own to an almost completely outfitted home.</p>
+
+<p>It was by no means what I intended it to be, but it seemed luxurious to
+her. Tears dimmed her eyes as she stepped across the threshold, but when
+I said, "Mother, hereafter my headquarters are to be in Chicago, and my
+home here with you," she put her arms around my neck and wept. Her
+wanderings were over, her heart at peace.</p>
+
+<p>My father arrived a couple of weeks later, and with his coming, mother
+sent out the invitations for our dinner. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_464" id="Page_464">[Pg 464]</a></span>So far as we could, we
+intended to bring together the scattered units of our family group.</p>
+
+<p>At last the great day came! My brother was unable to be present and
+there were other empty chairs, but the McClintocks were well
+represented. William, white-haired, gigantic, looking almost exactly
+like Grandad at the same age, came early, bringing his wife, his two
+sons, and his daughter-in-law. Frank and Lorette drove over from Lewis
+Valley, with both of their sons and a daughter-in-law. Samantha and Dan
+could not come, but Deborah and Susan were present and completed the
+family roll. Several of my father's old friends promised to come in
+after dinner.</p>
+
+<p>The table, reflecting the abundance of the valley in those peaceful
+times, was stretched to its full length and as we gathered about it
+William congratulated my father on getting back where cranberries and
+turkeys and fat squashes grew.</p>
+
+<p>My mother smiled at this jest, but my father, still loyal to Dakota, was
+quick to defend it. "I like it out there," he insisted. "I like wheat
+raising on a big scale. I don't know how I'm going to come down from
+operating a six-horse header to scraping with a hoe in a garden patch."</p>
+
+<p>Mother, wearing her black silk dress and lace collar, sat at one end of
+the table, while I, to relieve my father of the task of carving the
+twenty-pound turkey, sat opposite her. For the first time in my life I
+took position as head of the family and the significance of this fact
+did not escape the company. The pen had proved itself to be mightier
+than the plow. Going east had proved more profitable than going west!</p>
+
+<p>It was a noble dinner! As I regard it from the standpoint of today, with
+potatoes six dollars per bushel and turkeys forty cents per pound, it
+all seems part of a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_465" id="Page_465">[Pg 465]</a></span>kindlier world, a vanished world&mdash;as it is! There
+were squashes and turnips and cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie and mince
+pie, (made under mother's supervision) and coffee with real cream,&mdash;all
+the things which are so precious now, and the talk was in praise of the
+delicious food and the Exposition which was just closing, and reports of
+the crops which were abundant and safely garnered. The wars of the world
+were all behind us and the nation on its way back to prosperity&mdash;and we
+were unafraid.</p>
+
+<p>The gay talk lasted well through the meal, but as mother's pies came on,
+Aunt Maria regretfully remarked, "It's a pity Frank can't help eat this
+dinner."</p>
+
+<p>"I wish Dave and Mantie were here," put in Deborah.</p>
+
+<p>"And Rachel," added mother.</p>
+
+<p>This brought the note of sadness which is inevitable in such a
+gathering, and the shadow deepened as we gathered about the fire a
+little later. The dead claimed their places.</p>
+
+<p>Since leaving the valley thirty years before our group had suffered many
+losses. All my grandparents were gone. My sisters Harriet and Jessie and
+my uncle Richard had fallen on the march. David and Rebecca were
+stranded in the foot hills of the Cascade mountains. Rachel, a widow,
+was in Georgia. The pioneers of '48 were old and their bright world a
+memory.</p>
+
+<p>My father called on mother for some of the old songs. "You and Deb sing
+<i>Nellie Wildwood</i>," he urged, and to me it was a call to all the absent
+ones, an invitation to gather about us in order that the gaps in our
+hearth-fire's broken circle might be filled.</p>
+
+<p>Sweet and clear though in diminished volume, my mother's voice rose on
+the tender refrain:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Never more to part, Nellie Wildwood<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Never more to long for the spring.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin"><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_466" id="Page_466">[Pg 466]</a></span>and I thought of Hattie and Jessie and tried to believe that they too
+were sharing in the comfort and contentment of our fire.</p>
+
+<p>George, who resembled his uncle David, and had much of his skill with
+the fiddle bow, had brought his violin with him, but when father asked
+Frank to play <i>Maggie, air ye sleepin'</i>, he shook his head, saying,
+"That's Dave's tune," and his loyalty touched us all.</p>
+
+<p>Quick tears sprang to mother's eyes. She knew all too well that never
+again would she hear her best-beloved brother touch the strings or join
+his voice to hers.</p>
+
+<p>It was a moment of sorrow for us all but only for a moment, for Deborah
+struck up one of the lively "darky pieces" which my father loved so
+well, and with its jubilant patter young and old returned to smiling.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">It must be now in the Kingdom a-comin'<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In the year of Jubilo!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">we shouted, and so translated the words of the song into an expression
+of our own rejoicing present.</p>
+
+<p>Song after song followed, war chants which renewed my father's military
+youth, ballads which deepened the shadows in my mother's eyes, and then
+at last, at my request, she sang <i>The Rolling Stone</i>, and with a smile
+at father, we all joined the chorus.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">We'll stay on the farm and we'll suffer no loss<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For the stone that keeps rolling will gather no moss.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>My father was not entirely convinced, but I, surrounded by these farmer
+folk, hearing from their lips these quaint melodies, responded like some
+tensely-strung instrument, whose chords are being played upon by
+searching winds. I acknowledged myself at home and for all time. Beneath
+my feet lay the rugged country rock of my nativity. It pleased me to
+discover my mental <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_467" id="Page_467">[Pg 467]</a></span>characteristics striking so deep into this typically
+American soil.</p>
+
+<p>One by one our guests rose and went away, jocularly saying to my father,
+"Well, Dick, you've done the right thing at last. It's a comfort to have
+you so handy. We'll come to dinner often." To me they said, "We'll
+expect to see more of you, now that the old folks are here."</p>
+
+<p>"This is my home," I repeated.</p>
+
+<p>When we were alone I turned to mother in the spirit of the builder.
+"Give me another year and I'll make this a homestead worth talking
+about. My head is full of plans for its improvement."</p>
+
+<p>"It's good enough for me as it is," she protested.</p>
+
+<p>"No, it isn't," I retorted quickly. "Nothing that I can do is good
+enough for you, but I intend to make you entirely happy if I can."</p>
+
+<p>Here I make an end of this story, here at the close of an epoch of
+western settlement, here with my father and mother sitting beside me in
+the light of a tender Thanksgiving, in our new old home and facing a
+peaceful future. I was thirty-three years of age, and in a certain very
+real sense this plot of ground, this protecting roof may be taken as the
+symbols of my hard-earned first success as well as the defiant gages of
+other necessary battles which I must fight and win.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>As I was leaving next day for Chicago, I said, "Mother, what shall I
+bring you from the city?"</p>
+
+<p>With a shy smile she answered, "There is only one thing more you can
+bring me,&mdash;one thing more that I want."</p>
+
+<p>"What is that?"</p>
+
+<p>"A daughter. I need a daughter&mdash;and some grandchildren."</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<div class="tr">
+<p class="cen"><a name="TN" id="TN"></a>Transcriber's Note</p>
+<br />
+
+Some inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in
+the original document has been preserved.<br />
+<br />
+Typographical errors corrected in the text:<br />
+<br />
+Page&nbsp;&nbsp;  21&nbsp;  McEldowney changed to McIldowney<br />
+Page&nbsp;&nbsp;  61&nbsp;  Winneshiek changed to Winnesheik<br />
+Page&nbsp;&nbsp;  80&nbsp;  Winneshiek changed to Winnesheik<br />
+Page&nbsp;&nbsp;  80&nbsp;  Winnesheik changed to Winnesheik<br />
+Page 164&nbsp;  arroya changed to arroyo<br />
+Page 202&nbsp;  luminious changed to luminous<br />
+Page 250&nbsp;  Canon changed to Canyon<br />
+Page 259&nbsp;  missing word "he" inserted<br />
+Page 270&nbsp;  buffetted changed to buffeted<br />
+Page 294&nbsp;  maneuvres changed to manoeuvres<br />
+Page 309&nbsp;  these changed to those<br />
+Page 316&nbsp;  turretted changed to turreted<br />
+Page 328&nbsp;  Douglas changed to Douglass<br />
+Page 334&nbsp;  gratitud changed to gratitude<br />
+Page 362&nbsp;  "of" added between "all us"<br />
+Page 364&nbsp;  unwieldly changed to unwieldy<br />
+Page 376&nbsp;  Harpers changed to Harper's<br />
+Page 378&nbsp;  Proverty changed to Poverty<br />
+Page 383&nbsp;  gratuitious changed to gratuitous<br />
+Page 391&nbsp;  Kurd's changed to Hurd's<br />
+Page 393&nbsp;  discusssions changed to discussions<br />
+Page 410&nbsp;  Harpers changed to Harper's<br />
+Page 414&nbsp;  wearyful changed to weariful<br />
+Page 418&nbsp;  Harpers changed to Harper's<br />
+Page 418&nbsp;  other changed to others<br />
+Page 443&nbsp;  Harpers changed to Harper's<br />
+Page 448&nbsp;  that changed to than<br />
+</div>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER***</p>
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Son of the Middle Border, by Hamlin Garland
+
+
+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: A Son of the Middle Border
+
+
+Author: Hamlin Garland
+
+
+
+Release Date: May 13, 2009  [eBook #28791]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Lee Dawei, Barbara Kosker, and the Project Gutenberg
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustrations.
+      See 28791-h.htm or 28791-h.zip:
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28791/28791-h/28791-h.htm)
+      or
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28791/28791-h.zip)
+
+
+
+
+
+A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER
+
+by
+
+HAMLIN GARLAND
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Illustration]
+
+ January twenty-second.
+
+ Dear Mrs. LeCron:
+
+In the spring of 1898, after finishing my LIFE OF ULYSSES S. GRANT, I
+began to plan to go into the Klondike over the Telegraph Trail. One day
+in showing the maps of my route to William Dean Howells, I said, "I
+shall go in here and come out there," a trail of nearly twelve hundred
+miles through an almost unknown country. As I uttered this I suddenly
+realized that I was starting on a path holding many perils and that I
+might not come back.
+
+With this in mind, I began to dictate the story of my career up to that
+time. It was put in the third person but it was my story and the story
+of my people, the Garlands and the McClintocks. This manuscript, crude
+and hasty as it was, became the basis of A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER. It
+was the beginning of a four-volume autobiography which it has taken me
+fifteen years to write. As a typical mid-west settler I felt that the
+history of my family would be, in a sense, the chronicle of the era of
+settlement lying between 1840 and 1914. I designedly kept it intimate
+and personal, the joys and sorrows of a group of migrating families. Of
+the four books, Volume One, THE TRAIL MAKERS, is based upon my memory of
+the talk around a pioneer fireside. The other three volumes are as true
+as my own memory can make them.
+
+ Hamlin Garland
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER
+
+by
+
+HAMLIN GARLAND
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+Grosset & Dunlap Publishers
+by arrangement with
+The MacMillan Company
+
+Printed in the United States of America
+
+Copyright, 1914 And 1917
+by P. F. Collier & Son
+
+Copyright, 1917
+by Hamlin Garland
+
+Set up and electrotyped. Published August, 1917. Reprinted
+March, 1925, December, 1925. Reissued, January, 1927,
+February, 1928.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+ CHAPTER                                                  PAGE
+
+      I. HOME FROM THE WAR                                   1
+
+     II. THE MCCLINTOCKS                                    14
+
+    III. THE HOME IN THE COULEE                             27
+
+     IV. FATHER SELLS THE FARM                              42
+
+      V. THE LAST THRESHING IN THE COULEE                   50
+
+     VI. DAVID AND HIS VIOLIN                               59
+
+    VII. WINNESHEIK "WOODS AND PRAIRIE LANDS"               68
+
+   VIII. WE MOVE AGAIN                                      79
+
+     IX. OUR FIRST WINTER ON THE PRAIRIE                    85
+
+      X. THE HOMESTEAD ON THE KNOLL                         99
+
+     XI. SCHOOL LIFE                                       107
+
+    XII. CHORES AND ALMANACS                               116
+
+   XIII. BOY LIFE ON THE PRAIRIE                           125
+
+    XIV. WHEAT AND THE HARVEST                             144
+
+     XV. HARRIET GOES AWAY                                 161
+
+    XVI. WE MOVE TO TOWN                                   173
+
+   XVII. A TASTE OF VILLAGE LIFE                           189
+
+  XVIII. BACK TO THE FARM                                  204
+
+    XIX. END OF SCHOOL DAYS                                221
+
+     XX. THE LAND OF THE DAKOTAS                           234
+
+    XXI. THE GRASSHOPPER AND THE ANT                       248
+
+   XXII. WE DISCOVER NEW ENGLAND                           267
+
+  XXIII. COASTING DOWN MT. WASHINGTON                      279
+
+   XXIV. TRAMPING, NEW YORK, WASHINGTON, AND CHICAGO       287
+
+    XXV. THE LAND OF THE STRADDLE-BUG                      301
+
+   XXVI. ON TO BOSTON                                      318
+
+  XXVII. ENTER A FRIEND                                    333
+
+ XXVIII. A VISIT TO THE WEST                               353
+
+   XXIX. I JOIN THE ANTI-POVERTY BRIGADE                   375
+
+    XXX. MY MOTHER IS STRICKEN                             396
+
+   XXXI. MAIN TRAVELLED ROADS                              410
+
+  XXXII. THE SPIRIT OF REVOLT                              421
+
+ XXXIII. THE END OF THE SUNSET TRAIL                       433
+
+  XXXIV. WE GO TO CALIFORNIA                               440
+
+   XXXV. THE HOMESTEAD IN THE VALLEY                       455
+
+
+
+
+A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER [Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+A Son of the Middle Border
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+Home from the War
+
+
+All of this universe known to me in the year 1864 was bounded by the
+wooded hills of a little Wisconsin coulee, and its center was the
+cottage in which my mother was living alone--my father was in the war.
+As I project myself back into that mystical age, half lights cover most
+of the valley. The road before our doorstone begins and ends in vague
+obscurity--and Granma Green's house at the fork of the trail stands on
+the very edge of the world in a sinister region peopled with bears and
+other menacing creatures. Beyond this point all is darkness and terror.
+
+It is Sunday afternoon and my mother and her three children, Frank,
+Harriet and I (all in our best dresses) are visiting the Widow Green,
+our nearest neighbor, a plump, jolly woman whom we greatly love. The
+house swarms with stalwart men and buxom women and we are all sitting
+around the table heaped with the remains of a harvest feast. The women
+are "telling fortunes" by means of tea-grounds. Mrs. Green is the
+seeress. After shaking the cup with the grounds at the bottom, she turns
+it bottom side up in a saucer. Then whirling it three times to the right
+and three times to the left, she lifts it and silently studies the
+position of the leaves which cling to the sides of the cup, what time we
+all wait in breathless suspense for her first word.
+
+"A soldier is coming to you!" she says to my mother. "See," and she
+points into the cup. We all crowd near, and I perceive a leaf with a
+stem sticking up from its body like a bayonet over a man's shoulder. "He
+is almost home," the widow goes on. Then with sudden dramatic turn she
+waves her hand toward the road, "Heavens and earth!" she cries. "There's
+Richard now!"
+
+We all turn and look toward the road, and there, indeed, is a soldier
+with a musket on his back, wearily plodding his way up the low hill just
+north of the gate. He is too far away for mother to call, and besides I
+think she must have been a little uncertain, for he did not so much as
+turn his head toward the house. Trembling with excitement she hurries
+little Frank into his wagon and telling Hattie to bring me, sets off up
+the road as fast as she can draw the baby's cart. It all seems a dream
+to me and I move dumbly, almost stupidly like one in a mist....
+
+We did not overtake the soldier, that is evident, for my next vision is
+that of a blue-coated figure leaning upon the fence, studying with
+intent gaze our empty cottage. I cannot, even now, precisely divine why
+he stood thus, sadly contemplating his silent home,--but so it was. His
+knapsack lay at his feet, his musket was propped against a post on whose
+top a cat was dreaming, unmindful of the warrior and his folded hands.
+
+He did not hear us until we were close upon him, and even after he
+turned, my mother hesitated, so thin, so hollow-eyed, so changed was he.
+"Richard, is that you?" she quaveringly asked.
+
+His worn face lighted up. His arms rose. "Yes, Belle! Here I am," he
+answered.
+
+Nevertheless though he took my mother in his arms, I could not relate
+him to the father I had heard so much about. To me he was only a strange
+man with big eyes and care-worn face. I did not recognize in him
+anything I had ever known, but my sister, who was two years older than
+I, went to his bosom of her own motion. She knew him, whilst I submitted
+to his caresses rather for the reason that my mother urged me forward
+than because of any affection I felt for him. Frank, however, would not
+even permit a kiss. The gaunt and grizzled stranger terrified him.
+
+"Come here, my little man," my father said.--"_My little man!_" Across
+the space of half-a-century I can still hear the sad reproach in his
+voice. "Won't you come and see your poor old father when he comes home
+from the war?"
+
+"My little man!" How significant that phrase seems to me now! The war
+had in very truth come between this patriot and his sons. I had
+forgotten him--the baby had never known him.
+
+Frank crept beneath the rail fence and stood there, well out of reach,
+like a cautious kitten warily surveying an alien dog. At last the
+soldier stooped and drawing from his knapsack a big red apple, held it
+toward the staring babe, confidently calling, "Now, I guess he'll come
+to his poor old pap home from the war."
+
+The mother apologized. "He doesn't know you, Dick. How could he? He was
+only nine months old when you went away. He'll go to you by and by."
+
+The babe crept slowly toward the shining lure. My father caught him
+despite his kicking, and hugged him close. "Now I've got you," he
+exulted.
+
+Then we all went into the little front room and the soldier laid off his
+heavy army shoes. My mother brought a pillow to put under his head, and
+so at last he stretched out on the floor the better to rest his tired,
+aching bones, and there I joined him.
+
+"Oh, Belle!" he said, in tones of utter content. "This is what I've
+dreamed about a million times."
+
+Frank and I grew each moment more friendly and soon began to tumble over
+him while mother hastened to cook something for him to eat. He asked for
+"hot biscuits and honey and plenty of coffee."
+
+That was a mystic hour--and yet how little I can recover of it! The
+afternoon glides into evening while the soldier talks, and at last we
+all go out to the barn to watch mother milk the cow. I hear him ask
+about the crops, the neighbors.--The sunlight passes. Mother leads the
+way back to the house. My father follows carrying little Frank in his
+arms.
+
+He is a "strange man" no longer. Each moment his voice sinks deeper into
+my remembrance. He is my father--that I feel ringing through the dim
+halls of my consciousness. Harriet clings to his hand in perfect
+knowledge and confidence. We eat our bread and milk, the trundle-bed is
+pulled out, we children clamber in, and I go to sleep to the music of
+his resonant voice recounting the story of the battles he had seen, and
+the marches he had made.
+
+The emergence of an individual consciousness from the void is, after
+all, the most amazing fact of human life and I should like to spend much
+of this first chapter in groping about in the luminous shadow of my
+infant world because, deeply considered, childish impressions are the
+fundamentals upon which an author's fictional out-put is based; but to
+linger might weary my reader at the outset, although I count myself most
+fortunate in the fact that my boyhood was spent in the midst of a
+charming landscape and during a certain heroic era of western
+settlement.
+
+The men and women of that far time loom large in my thinking for they
+possessed not only the spirit of adventurers but the courage of
+warriors. Aside from the natural distortion of a boy's imagination I am
+quite sure that the pioneers of 1860 still retained something broad and
+fine in their action, something a boy might honorably imitate.
+
+The earliest dim scene in my memory is that of a soft warm evening. I am
+cradled in the lap of my sister Harriet who is sitting on the door-step
+beneath a low roof. It is mid-summer and at our feet lies a mat of
+dark-green grass from which a frog is croaking. The stars are out, and
+above the high hills to the east a mysterious glow is glorifying the
+sky. The cry of the small animal at last conveys to my sister's mind a
+notion of distress, and rising she peers closely along the path.
+Starting back with a cry of alarm, she calls and my mother hurries out.
+She, too, examines the ground, and at last points out to me a long
+striped snake with a poor, shrieking little tree-toad in its mouth. The
+horror of this scene fixes it in my mind. My mother beats the serpent
+with a stick. The mangled victim hastens away, and the curtain falls.
+
+I must have been about four years old at this time, although there is
+nothing to determine the precise date. Our house, a small frame cabin,
+stood on the eastern slope of a long ridge and faced across a valley
+which seemed very wide to me then, and in the middle of it lay a marsh
+filled with monsters, from which the Water People sang night by night.
+Beyond was a wooded mountain.
+
+This doorstone must have been a favorite evening seat for my sister, for
+I remember many other delicious gloamings. Bats whirl and squeak in the
+odorous dusk. Night hawks whiz and boom, and over the dark forest wall a
+prodigious moon miraculously rolls. Fire-flies dart through the grass,
+and in a lone tree just outside the fence, a whippoorwill sounds his
+plaintive note. Sweet, very sweet, and wonderful are all these!
+
+The marsh across the lane was a sinister menacing place even by day for
+there (so my sister Harriet warned me) serpents swarmed, eager to bite
+runaway boys. "And if you step in the mud between the tufts of grass,"
+she said, "you will surely sink out of sight."--At night this teeming
+bog became a place of dank and horrid mystery. Bears and wolves and
+wildcats were reported as ruling the dark woods just beyond--only the
+door yard and the road seemed safe for little men--and even there I
+wished my mother to be within immediate call.
+
+My father who had bought his farm "on time," just before the war, could
+not enlist among the first volunteers, though he was deeply moved to do
+so, till his land was paid for--but at last in 1863 on the very day that
+he made the last payment on the mortgage, he put his name down on the
+roll and went back to his wife, a soldier.
+
+I have heard my mother say that this was one of the darkest moments of
+her life and if you think about it you will understand the reason why.
+My sister was only five years old, I was three and Frank was a babe in
+the cradle. Broken hearted at the thought of the long separation, and
+scared by visions of battle my mother begged the soldier not to go; but
+he was of the stern stuff which makes patriots--and besides his name was
+already on the roll, therefore he went away to join Grant's army at
+Vicksburg. "What sacrifice! What folly!" said his pacifist
+neighbors--"to leave your wife and children for an idea, a mere
+sentiment; to put your life in peril for a striped silken rag." But he
+went. For thirteen dollars a month he marched and fought while his plow
+rusted in the shed and his cattle called to him from their stalls.
+
+My conscious memory holds nothing of my mother's agony of waiting,
+nothing of the dark days when the baby was ill and the doctor far
+away--but into my subconscious ear her voice sank, and the words
+_Grant_, _Lincoln_, _Sherman_, "_furlough_," "_mustered out_," ring like
+bells, deep-toned and vibrant. I shared dimly in every emotional
+utterance of the neighbors who came to call and a large part of what I
+am is due to the impressions of these deeply passionate and poetic
+years.
+
+Dim pictures come to me. I see my mother at the spinning wheel, I help
+her fill the candle molds. I hold in my hands the queer carding combs
+with their crinkly teeth, but my first definite connected recollection
+is the scene of my father's return at the close of the war.
+
+I was not quite five years old, and the events of that day are so
+commingled with later impressions,--experiences which came long
+after--that I cannot be quite sure which are true and which imagined,
+but the picture as a whole is very vivid and very complete.
+
+Thus it happened that my first impressions of life were martial, and my
+training military, for my father brought back from his two years'
+campaigning under Sherman and Thomas the temper and the habit of a
+soldier.
+
+He became naturally the dominant figure in my horizon, and his scheme of
+discipline impressed itself almost at once upon his children.
+
+I suspect that we had fallen into rather free and easy habits under
+mother's government, for she was too jolly, too tender-hearted, to
+engender fear in us even when she threatened us with a switch or a
+shingle. We soon learned, however, that the soldier's promise of
+punishment was swift and precise in its fulfillment. We seldom presumed
+a second time on his forgetfulness or tolerance. We knew he loved us,
+for he often took us to his knees of an evening and told us stories of
+marches and battles, or chanted war-songs for us, but the moments of his
+tenderness were few and his fondling did not prevent him from almost
+instant use of the rod if he thought either of us needed it.
+
+His own boyhood had been both hard and short. Born of farmer folk in
+Oxford County, Maine, his early life had been spent on the soil in and
+about Lock's Mills with small chance of schooling. Later, as a teamster,
+and finally as shipping clerk for Amos Lawrence, he had enjoyed three
+mightily improving years in Boston. He loved to tell of his life there,
+and it is indicative of his character to say that he dwelt with special
+joy and pride on the actors and orators he had heard. He could describe
+some of the great scenes and repeat a few of the heroic lines of
+Shakespeare, and the roll of his deep voice as he declaimed, "Now is the
+winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York,"
+thrilled us--filled us with desire of something far off and wonderful.
+But best of all we loved to hear him tell of "Logan at Peach Tree
+Creek," and "Kilpatrick on the Granny White Turnpike."
+
+He was a vivid and concise story-teller and his words brought to us
+(sometimes all too clearly), the tragic happenings of the battlefields
+of Atlanta and Nashville. To him Grant, Lincoln, Sherman and Sheridan
+were among the noblest men of the world, and he would not tolerate any
+criticism of them.
+
+Next to his stories of the war I think we loved best to have him
+picture "the pineries" of Wisconsin, for during his first years in the
+State he had been both lumberman and raftsman, and his memory held
+delightful tales of wolves and bears and Indians.
+
+He often imitated the howls and growls and actions of the wild animals
+with startling realism, and his river narratives were full of
+unforgettable phrases like "the Jinny Bull Falls," "Old Moosinee" and
+"running the rapids."
+
+He also told us how his father and mother came west by way of the Erie
+Canal, and in a steamer on the Great Lakes, of how they landed in
+Milwaukee with Susan, their twelve-year-old daughter, sick with the
+smallpox; of how a farmer from Monticello carried them in his big farm
+wagon over the long road to their future home in Green county and it was
+with deep emotion that he described the bitter reception they
+encountered in the village.
+
+It appears that some of the citizens in a panic of dread were all for
+driving the Garlands out of town--then up rose old Hugh McClintock, big
+and gray as a grizzly bear, and put himself between the leader of the
+mob and its victims, and said, "You shall not lay hands upon them. Shame
+on ye!" And such was the power of his mighty arm and such the menace of
+his flashing eyes that no one went further with the plan of casting the
+new comers into the wilderness.
+
+Old Hugh established them in a lonely cabin on the edge of the village,
+and thereafter took care of them, nursing grandfather with his own hands
+until he was well. "And that's the way the McClintocks and the Garlands
+first joined forces," my father often said in ending the tale. "But the
+name of the man who carried your Aunt Susan in his wagon from Milwaukee
+to Monticello I never knew."
+
+I cannot understand why that sick girl did not die on that long journey
+over the rough roads of Wisconsin, and what it all must have seemed to
+my gentle New England grandmother I grieve to think about. Beautiful as
+the land undoubtedly was, such an experience should have shaken her
+faith in western men and western hospitality. But apparently it did not,
+for I never heard her allude to this experience with bitterness.
+
+In addition to his military character, Dick Garland also carried with
+him the odor of the pine forest and exhibited the skill and training of
+a forester, for in those early days even at the time when I began to
+remember the neighborhood talk, nearly every young man who could get
+away from the farm or the village went north, in November, into the pine
+woods which covered the entire upper part of the State, and my father,
+who had been a raftsman and timber cruiser and pilot ever since his
+coming west, was deeply skilled with axe and steering oars. The
+lumberman's life at that time was rough but not vicious, for the men
+were nearly all of native American stock, and my father was none the
+worse for his winters in camp.
+
+His field of action as lumberman was for several years, in and around
+Big Bull Falls (as it was then called), near the present town of Wausau,
+and during that time he had charge of a crew of loggers in winter and in
+summer piloted rafts of lumber down to Dubuque and other points where
+saw mills were located. He was called at this time, "Yankee Dick, the
+Pilot."
+
+As a result of all these experiences in the woods, he was almost as much
+woodsman as soldier in his talk, and the heroic life he had led made him
+very wonderful in my eyes. According to his account (and I have no
+reason to doubt it) he had been exceedingly expert in running a raft and
+could ride a canoe like a Chippewa. I remember hearing him very
+forcefully remark, "God forgot to make the man I could not follow."
+
+He was deft with an axe, keen of perception, sure of hand and foot, and
+entirely capable of holding his own with any man of his weight. Amid
+much drinking he remained temperate, and strange to say never used
+tobacco in any form. While not a large man he was nearly six feet in
+height, deep-chested and sinewy, and of dauntless courage. The quality
+which defended him from attack was the spirit which flamed from his
+eagle-gray eyes. Terrifying eyes they were, at times, as I had many
+occasions to note.
+
+As he gathered us all around his knee at night before the fire, he loved
+to tell us of riding the whirlpools of Big Bull Falls, or of how he
+lived for weeks on a raft with the water up to his knees (sleeping at
+night in his wet working clothes), sustained by the blood of youth and
+the spirit of adventure. His endurance even after his return from the
+war, was marvellous, although he walked a little bent and with a
+peculiar measured swinging stride--the stride of Sherman's veterans.
+
+As I was born in the first smoke of the great conflict, so all of my
+early memories of Green's coulee are permeated with the haze of the
+passing war-cloud. My soldier dad taught me the manual of arms, and for
+a year Harriet and I carried broom-sticks, flourished lath sabers, and
+hammered on dishpans in imitation of officers and drummers. Canteens
+made excellent water-bottles for the men in the harvest fields, and the
+long blue overcoats which the soldiers brought back with them from the
+south lent many a vivid spot of color to that far-off landscape.
+
+All the children of our valley inhaled with every breath this mingled
+air of romance and sorrow, history and song, and through those epic days
+runs a deep-laid consciousness of maternal pain. My mother's side of
+those long months of waiting was never fully delineated, for she was
+natively reticent and shy of expression. But piece by piece in later
+years I drew from her the tale of her long vigil, and obtained some hint
+of the bitter anguish of her suspense after each great battle.
+
+It is very strange, but I cannot define her face as I peer back into
+those childish times, though I can feel her strong arms about me. She
+seemed large and quite middle-aged to me, although she was in fact a
+handsome girl of twenty-three. Only by reference to a rare daguerreotype
+of the time am I able to correct this childish impression.
+
+Our farm lay well up in what is called Green's coulee, in a little
+valley just over the road which runs along the LaCrosse river in western
+Wisconsin. It contained one hundred and sixty acres of land which
+crumpled against the wooded hills on the east and lay well upon a ridge
+to the west. Only two families lived above us, and over the height to
+the north was the land of the red people, and small bands of their
+hunters used occasionally to come trailing down across our meadow on
+their way to and from LaCrosse, which was their immemorial trading
+point.
+
+Sometimes they walked into our house, always without knocking--but then
+we understood their ways. No one knocks at the wigwam of a red neighbor,
+and we were not afraid of them, for they were friendly, and our mother
+often gave them bread and meat which they took (always without thanks)
+and ate with much relish while sitting beside our fire. All this seemed
+very curious to us, but as they were accustomed to share their food and
+lodging with one another so they accepted my mother's bounty in the same
+matter-of-fact fashion.
+
+Once two old fellows, while sitting by the fire, watched Frank and me
+bringing in wood for the kitchen stove, and smiled and muttered between
+themselves thereat. At last one of them patted my brother on the head
+and called out admiringly, "Small pappoose, heap work--good!" and we
+were very proud of the old man's praise.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+The McClintocks
+
+
+The members of my mother's family must have been often at our home
+during my father's military service in the south, but I have no mental
+pictures of them till after my father's homecoming in '65. Their names
+were familiar--were, indeed, like bits of old-fashioned song. "Richard"
+was a fine and tender word in my ear, but "David" and "Luke," "Deborah"
+and "Samantha," and especially "Hugh," suggested something alien as well
+as poetic.
+
+They all lived somewhere beyond the hills which walled our coulee on the
+east, in a place called Salem, and I was eager to visit them, for in
+that direction my universe died away in a luminous mist of unexplored
+distance. I had some notion of its near-by loveliness for I had once
+viewed it from the top of the tall bluff which stood like a warder at
+the gate of our valley, and when one bright morning my father said,
+"Belle, get ready, and we'll drive over to Grandad's," we all became
+greatly excited.
+
+In those days people did not "call," they went "visitin'." The women
+took their knitting and stayed all the afternoon and sometimes all
+night. No one owned a carriage. Each family journeyed in a heavy farm
+wagon with the father and mother riding high on the wooden spring seat
+while the children jounced up and down on the hay in the bottom of the
+box or clung desperately to the side-boards to keep from being jolted
+out. In such wise we started on our trip to the McClintocks'.
+
+The road ran to the south and east around the base of Sugar Loaf Bluff,
+thence across a lovely valley and over a high wooded ridge which was so
+steep that at times we rode above the tree tops. As father stopped the
+horses to let them rest, we children gazed about us with wondering eyes.
+Far behind us lay the LaCrosse valley through which a slender river ran,
+while before us towered wind-worn cliffs of stone. It was an exploring
+expedition for us.
+
+The top of the divide gave a grand view of wooded hills to the
+northeast, but father did not wait for us to enjoy that. He started the
+team on the perilous downward road without regard to our wishes, and so
+we bumped and clattered to the bottom, all joy of the scenery swallowed
+up in fear of being thrown from the wagon.
+
+The roar of a rapid, the gleam of a long curving stream, a sharp turn
+through a pair of bars, and we found ourselves approaching a low
+unpainted house which stood on a level bench overlooking a river and its
+meadows.
+
+"There it is. That's Grandad's house," said mother, and peering over her
+shoulder I perceived a group of people standing about the open door, and
+heard their shouts of welcome.
+
+My father laughed. "Looks as if the whole McClintock clan was on
+parade," he said.
+
+It was Sunday and all my aunts and uncles were in holiday dress and a
+merry, hearty, handsome group they were. One of the men helped my mother
+out and another, a roguish young fellow with a pock-marked face,
+snatched me from the wagon and carried me under his arm to the threshold
+where a short, gray-haired smiling woman was standing. "Mother, here's
+another grandson for you," he said as he put me at her feet.
+
+She greeted me kindly and led me into the house, in which a huge old man
+with a shock of perfectly white hair was sitting with a Bible on his
+knee. He had a rugged face framed in a circle of gray beard and his
+glance was absent-minded and remote. "Father," said my grandmother,
+"Belle has come. Here is one of her boys."
+
+Closing his book on his glasses to mark the place of his reading he
+turned to greet my mother who entered at this moment. His way of speech
+was as strange as his look and for a few moments I studied him with
+childish intentness. His face was rough-hewn as a rock but it was
+kindly, and though he soon turned from his guests and resumed his
+reading no one seemed to resent it.
+
+Young as I was I vaguely understood his mood. He was glad to see us but
+he was absorbed in something else, something of more importance, at the
+moment, than the chatter of the family. My uncles who came in a few
+moments later drew my attention and the white-haired dreamer fades from
+this scene.
+
+The room swarmed with McClintocks. There was William, a black-bearded,
+genial, quick-stepping giant who seized me by the collar with one hand
+and lifted me off the floor as if I were a puppy just to see how much I
+weighed; and David, a tall young man with handsome dark eyes and a droop
+at the outer corner of his eyelids which gave him in repose a look of
+melancholy distinction. He called me and I went to him readily for I
+loved him at once. His voice pleased me and I could see that my mother
+loved him too.
+
+From his knee I became acquainted with the girls of the family. Rachel,
+a demure and sweet-faced young woman, and Samantha, the beauty of the
+family, won my instant admiration, but Deb, as everybody called her,
+repelled me by her teasing ways. They were all gay as larks and their
+hearty clamor, so far removed from the quiet gravity of my grandmother
+Garland's house, pleased me. I had an immediate sense of being perfectly
+at home.
+
+There was an especial reason why this meeting should have been, as it
+was, a joyous hour. It was, in fact, a family reunion after the war. The
+dark days of sixty-five were over. The Nation was at peace and its
+warriors mustered out. True, some of those who had gone "down South" had
+not returned. Luke and Walter and Hugh were sleeping in The Wilderness,
+but Frank and Richard were safely at home and father was once more the
+clarion-voiced and tireless young man he had been when he went away to
+fight. So they all rejoiced, with only a passing tender word for those
+whose bodies filled a soldier's nameless grave.
+
+There were some boys of about my own age, William's sons, and as they at
+once led me away down into the grove, I can say little of what went on
+in the house after that. It must have been still in the warm September
+weather for we climbed the slender leafy trees and swayed and swung on
+their tip-tops like bobolinks. Perhaps I did not go so very high after
+all but I had the feeling of being very close to the sky.
+
+The blast of a bugle called us to dinner and we all went scrambling up
+the bank and into the "front room" like a swarm of hungry shotes
+responding to the call of the feeder. Aunt Deb, however shooed us out
+into the kitchen. "You can't stay here," she said. "Mother'll feed you
+in the kitchen."
+
+Grandmother was waiting for us and our places were ready, so what did it
+matter? We had chicken and mashed potato and nice hot biscuit and
+honey--just as good as the grown people had and could eat all we wanted
+without our mothers to bother us. I am quite certain about the honey for
+I found a bee in one of the cells of my piece of comb, and when I pushed
+my plate away in dismay grandmother laughed and said, "That is only a
+little baby bee. You see this is wild honey. William got it out of a
+tree and didn't have time to pick all the bees out of it."
+
+At this point my memories of this day fuse and flow into another visit
+to the McClintock homestead which must have taken place the next year,
+for it is my final record of my grandmother. I do not recall a single
+word that she said, but she again waited on us in the kitchen, beaming
+upon us with love and understanding. I see her also smiling in the midst
+of the joyous tumult which her children and grandchildren always
+produced when they met. She seemed content to listen and to serve.
+
+She was the mother of seven sons, each a splendid type of sturdy
+manhood, and six daughters almost equally gifted in physical beauty.
+Four of the sons stood over six feet in height and were of unusual
+strength. All of them--men and women alike--were musicians by
+inheritance, and I never think of them without hearing the sound of
+singing or the voice of the violin. Each of them could play some
+instrument and some of them could play any instrument. David, as you
+shall learn, was the finest fiddler of them all. Grandad himself was
+able to play the violin but he no longer did so. "'Tis the Devil's
+instrument," he said, but I noticed that he always kept time to it.
+
+Grandmother had very little learning. She could read and write of
+course, and she made frequent pathetic attempts to open her Bible or
+glance at a newspaper--all to little purpose, for her days were filled
+from dawn to dark with household duties.
+
+I know little of her family history. Beyond the fact that she was born
+in Maryland and had been always on the border, I have little to record.
+She was in truth overshadowed by the picturesque figure of her husband
+who was of Scotch-Irish descent and a most singular and interesting
+character.
+
+He was a mystic as well as a minstrel. He was an "Adventist"--that is to
+say a believer in the Second Coming of Christ, and a constant student of
+the Bible, especially of those parts which predicted the heavens rolling
+together as a scroll, and the destruction of the earth. Notwithstanding
+his lack of education and his rude exterior, he was a man of marked
+dignity and sobriety of manner. Indeed he was both grave and remote in
+his intercourse with his neighbors.
+
+He was like Ezekiel, a dreamer of dreams. He loved the Old Testament,
+particularly those books which consisted of thunderous prophecies and
+passionate lamentations. The poetry of _Isaiah_, The visions of _The
+Apocalypse_, formed his emotional outlet, his escape into the world of
+imaginative literature. The songs he loved best were those which
+described chariots of flaming clouds, the sound of the resurrection
+trump--or the fields of amaranth blooming "on the other side of Jordan."
+
+As I close my eyes and peer back into my obscure childish world I can
+see him sitting in his straight-backed cane-bottomed chair, drumming on
+the rungs with his fingers, keeping time to some inaudible tune--or
+chanting with faintly-moving lips the wondrous words of _John_ or
+_Daniel_. He must have been at this time about seventy years of age, but
+he seemed to me as old as a snow-covered mountain.
+
+My belief is that Grandmother did not fully share her husband's faith in
+The Second Coming but upon her fell the larger share of the burden of
+entertainment when Grandad made "the travelling brother" welcome. His
+was an open house to all who came along the road, and the fervid
+chantings, the impassioned prayers of these meetings lent a singular air
+of unreality to the business of cooking or plowing in the fields.
+
+I think he loved his wife and children, and yet I never heard him speak
+an affectionate word to them. He was kind, he was just, but he was not
+tender. With eyes turned inward, with a mind filled with visions of
+angel messengers with trumpets at their lips announcing "The Day of
+Wrath," how could he concern himself with the ordinary affairs of human
+life?
+
+Too old to bind grain in the harvest field, he was occasionally
+intrusted with the task of driving the reaper or the mower--and
+generally forgot to oil the bearings. His absent-mindedness was a source
+of laughter among his sons and sons-in-law. I've heard Frank say: "Dad
+would stop in the midst of a swath to announce the end of the world." He
+seldom remembered to put on a hat even in the blazing sun of July and
+his daughters had to keep an eye on him to be sure he had his vest on
+right-side out.
+
+Grandmother was cheerful in the midst of her toil and discomfort, for
+what other mother had such a family of noble boys and handsome girls?
+They all loved her, that she knew, and she was perfectly willing to
+sacrifice her comfort to promote theirs. Occasionally Samantha or Rachel
+remonstrated with her for working so hard, but she only put their
+protests aside and sent them back to their callers, for when the
+McClintock girls were at home, the horses of their suitors tied before
+the gate would have mounted a small troop of cavalry.
+
+It was well that this pioneer wife was rich in children, for she had
+little else. I do not suppose she ever knew what it was to have a
+comfortable well-aired bedroom, even in childbirth. She was practical
+and a good manager, and she needed to be, for her husband was as weirdly
+unworldly as a farmer could be. He was indeed a sad husbandman. Only the
+splendid abundance of the soil and the manual skill of his sons, united
+to the good management of his wife, kept his family fed and clothed.
+"What is the use of laying up a store of goods against the early
+destruction of the world?" he argued.
+
+He was bitterly opposed to secret societies, for some reason which I
+never fully understood, and the only fury I ever knew him to express was
+directed against these "dens of iniquity."
+
+Nearly all his neighbors, like those in our coulee, were native American
+as their names indicated. The Dudleys, Elwells, and Griswolds came from
+Connecticut, the McIldowneys and McKinleys from New York and Ohio, the
+Baileys and Garlands from Maine. Buoyant, vital, confident, these sons
+of the border bent to the work of breaking sod and building fence quite
+in the spirit of sportsmen.
+
+They were always racing in those days, rejoicing in their abounding
+vigor. With them reaping was a game, husking corn a test of endurance
+and skill, threshing a "bee." It was a Dudley against a McClintock, a
+Gilfillan against a Garland, and my father's laughing descriptions of
+the barn-raisings, harvestings and railsplittings of the valley filled
+my mind with vivid pictures of manly deeds. Every phase of farm work was
+carried on by hand. Strength and skill counted high and I had good
+reason for my idolatry of David and William. With the hearts of woodsmen
+and fists of sailors they were precisely the type to appeal to the
+imagination of a boy. Hunters, athletes, skilled horsemen--everything
+they did was to me heroic.
+
+Frank, smallest of all these sons of Hugh, was not what an observer
+would call puny. He weighed nearly one hundred and eighty pounds and
+never met his match except in his brothers. William could outlift him,
+David could out-run him and outleap him, but he was more agile than
+either--was indeed a skilled acrobat.
+
+His muscles were prodigious. The calves of his legs would not go into
+his top boots, and I have heard my father say that once when the
+"tumbling" in the little country "show" seemed not to his liking, Frank
+sprang over the ropes into the arena and went around the ring in a
+series of professional flip-flaps, to the unrestrained delight of the
+spectators. I did not witness this performance, I am sorry to say, but I
+have seen him do somersaults and turn cart-wheels in the door-yard just
+from the pure joy of living. He could have been a professional
+acrobat--and he came near to being a professional ball-player.
+
+He was always smiling, but his temper was fickle. Anybody could get a
+fight out of Frank McClintock at any time, simply by expressing a desire
+for it. To call him a liar was equivalent to contracting a doctor's
+bill. He loved hunting, as did all his brothers, but was too excitable
+to be a highly successful shot--whereas William and David were veritable
+Leather-stockings in their mastery of the heavy, old-fashioned rifle.
+David was especially dreaded at the turkey shoots of the county.
+
+William was over six feet in height, weighed two hundred and forty
+pounds, and stood "straight as an Injun." He was one of the most
+formidable men of the valley--even at fifty as I first recollect him, he
+walked with a quick lift of his foot like that of a young Chippewa. To
+me he was a huge gentle black bear, but I firmly believed he could whip
+any man in the world--even Uncle David--if he wanted to. I never
+expected to see him fight, for I could not imagine anybody foolish
+enough to invite his wrath.
+
+Such a man did develop, but not until William was over sixty,
+gray-haired and ill, and even then it took two strong men to engage him
+fully, and when it was all over (the contest filled but a few seconds),
+one assailant could not be found, and the other had to call in a doctor
+to piece him together again.
+
+William did not have a mark--his troubles began when he went home to his
+quaint little old wife. In some strange way she divined that he had been
+fighting, and soon drew the story from him. "William McClintock," said
+she severely, "hain't you old enough to keep your temper and not go
+brawling around like that and at a school meeting too!"
+
+William hung his head. "Well, I dunno!--I suppose my dyspepsy has made
+me kind o' irritable," he said by way of apology.
+
+My father was the historian of most of these exploits on the part of his
+brothers-in-law, for he loved to exalt their physical prowess at the
+same time that he deplored their lack of enterprise and system. Certain
+of their traits he understood well. Others he was never able to
+comprehend, and I am not sure that they ever quite understood
+themselves.
+
+A deep vein of poetry, of sub-conscious celtic sadness, ran through them
+all. It was associated with their love of music and was wordless. Only
+hints of this endowment came out now and again, and to the day of his
+death my father continued to express perplexity, and a kind of
+irritation at the curious combination of bitterness and sweetness, sloth
+and tremendous energy, slovenliness and exaltation which made Hugh
+McClintock and his sons the jest and the admiration of those who knew
+them best.
+
+Undoubtedly to the Elwells and Dudleys, as to most of their definite,
+practical, orderly and successful New England neighbors, my uncles were
+merely a good-natured, easy-going lot of "fiddlers," but to me as I grew
+old enough to understand them, they became a group of potential poets,
+bards and dreamers, inarticulate and moody. They fell easily into somber
+silence. Even Frank, the most boisterous and outspoken of them all,
+could be thrown into sudden melancholy by a melody, a line of poetry or
+a beautiful landscape.
+
+The reason for this praise of their quality, if the reason needs to be
+stated, lies in my feeling of definite indebtedness to them. They
+furnished much of the charm and poetic suggestion of my childhood. Most
+of what I have in the way of feeling for music, for rhythm, I derive
+from my mother's side of the house, for it was almost entirely Celt in
+every characteristic. She herself was a wordless poet, a sensitive
+singer of sad romantic songs.
+
+Father was by nature an orator and a lover of the drama. So far as I am
+aware, he never read a poem if he could help it, and yet he responded
+instantly to music, and was instinctively courtly in manner. His mind
+was clear, positive and definite, and his utterances fluent. Orderly,
+resolute and thorough in all that he did, he despised William
+McClintock's easy-going habits of husbandry, and found David's lack of
+"push," of business enterprise, deeply irritating. And yet he loved them
+both and respected my mother for defending them.
+
+To me, in those days, the shortcomings of the McClintocks did not appear
+particularly heinous. All our neighbors were living in log houses and
+frame shanties built beside the brooks, or set close against the
+hillsides, and William's small unpainted dwelling seemed a natural
+feature of the landscape, but as the years passed and other and more
+enterprising settlers built big barns, and shining white houses, the
+gray and leaning stables, sagging gates and roofs of my uncle's farm,
+became a reproach even in my eyes, so that when I visited it for the
+last time just before our removal to Iowa, I, too, was a little ashamed
+of it. Its disorder did not diminish my regard for the owner, but I
+wished he would clean out the stable and prop up the wagon-shed.
+
+My grandmother's death came soon after our second visit to the
+homestead. I have no personal memory of the event, but I heard Uncle
+David describe it. The setting of the final scene in the drama was
+humble. The girls were washing clothes in the yard and the silent old
+mother was getting the mid-day meal. David, as he came in from the
+field, stopped for a moment with his sisters and in their talk Samantha
+said: "Mother isn't at all well today."
+
+David, looking toward the kitchen, said, "Isn't there some way to keep
+her from working?"
+
+"You know how she is," explained Deborah. "She's worked so long she
+don't know how to rest. We tried to get her to lie down for an hour but
+she wouldn't."
+
+David was troubled. "She'll have to stop sometime," he said, and then
+they passed to other things, hearing meanwhile the tread of their
+mother's busy feet.
+
+Suddenly she appeared at the door, a frightened look on her face.
+
+"Why, mother!--what is the matter?" asked her daughter.
+
+She pointed to her mouth and shook her head, to indicate that she could
+not speak. David leaped toward her, but she dropped before he could
+reach her.
+
+Lifting her in his strong arms he laid her on her bed and hastened for
+the doctor. All in vain! She sank into unconsciousness and died without
+a word of farewell.
+
+She fell like a soldier in the ranks. Having served uncomplainingly up
+to the very edge of her evening bivouac, she passed to her final sleep
+in silent dignity.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+The Home in the Coulee
+
+
+Our postoffice was in the village of Onalaska, situated at the mouth of
+the Black River, which came down out of the wide forest lands of the
+north. It was called a "boom town" for the reason that "booms" or yards
+for holding pine logs laced the quiet bayou and supplied several large
+mills with timber. Busy saws clamored from the islands and great rafts
+of planks and lath and shingles were made up and floated down into the
+Mississippi and on to southern markets.
+
+It was a rude, rough little camp filled with raftsmen, loggers,
+mill-hands and boomsmen. Saloons abounded and deeds of violence were
+common, but to me it was a poem. From its position on a high plateau it
+commanded a lovely southern expanse of shimmering water bounded by
+purple bluffs. The spires of LaCrosse rose from the smoky distance, and
+steamships' hoarsely giving voice suggested illimitable reaches of
+travel. Some day I hoped my father would take me to that shining
+market-place whereto he carried all our grain.
+
+In this village of Onalaska, lived my grandfather and grandmother
+Garland, and their daughter Susan, whose husband, Richard Bailey, a
+quiet, kind man, was held in deep affection by us all. Of course he
+could not quite measure up to the high standards of David and William,
+even though he kept a store and sold candy, for he could neither kill a
+bear, nor play the fiddle, nor shoot a gun--much less turn hand-springs
+or tame a wild horse, but we liked him notwithstanding his limitations
+and were always glad when he came to visit us.
+
+Even at this time I recognized the wide differences which separated the
+McClintocks from the Garlands. The fact that my father's people lived to
+the west and in a town helped to emphasize the divergence.
+
+All the McClintocks were farmers, but grandfather Garland was a
+carpenter by trade, and a leader in his church which was to him a club,
+a forum and a commercial exchange. He was a native of Maine and proud of
+the fact. His eyes were keen and gray, his teeth fine and white, and his
+expression stern. His speech was neat and nipping. As a workman he was
+exact and his tools were always in perfect order. In brief he was a
+Yankee, as concentrated a bit of New England as was ever transplanted to
+the border. Hopelessly "sot" in all his eastern ways, he remained the
+doubter, the critic, all his life.
+
+We always spoke of him with formal precision as Grandfather Garland,
+never as "Grandad" or "Granpap" as we did in alluding to Hugh
+McClintock, and his long prayers (pieces of elaborate oratory) wearied
+us, while those of Grandad, which had the extravagance, the lyrical
+abandon of poetry, profoundly pleased us. Grandfather's church was a
+small white building in the edge of the village, Grandad's place of
+worship was a vision, a cloud-built temple, a house not made with hands.
+
+The contrast between my grandmothers was equally wide. Harriet Garland
+was tall and thin, with a dark and serious face. She was an invalid, and
+confined to a chair, which stood in the corner of her room. On the walls
+within reach of her hand hung many small pockets, so ordered that she
+could obtain her sewing materials without rising. She was always at work
+when I called, but it was her habit to pause and discover in some one
+of her receptacles a piece of candy or a stick of "lickerish root"
+which she gave to me "as a reward for being a good boy."
+
+She was always making needle rolls and thimble boxes and no doubt her
+skill helped to keep the family fed and clothed.
+
+Notwithstanding all divergence in the characters of Grandmother Garland
+and Grandmother McClintock, we held them both in almost equal affection.
+Serene, patient, bookish, Grandmother Garland brought to us, as to her
+neighbors in this rude river port, some of the best qualities of
+intellectual Boston, and from her lips we acquired many of the precepts
+and proverbs of our Pilgrim forbears.
+
+Her influence upon us was distinctly literary. She gloried in New
+England traditions, and taught us to love the poems of Whittier and
+Longfellow. It was she who called us to her knee and told us sadly yet
+benignly of the death of Lincoln, expressing only pity for the misguided
+assassin. She was a constant advocate of charity, piety, and learning.
+Always poor, and for many years a cripple, I never heard her complain,
+and no one, I think, ever saw her face clouded with a frown.
+
+Our neighbors in Green's Coulee were all native American. The first and
+nearest, Al Randal and his wife and son, we saw often and on the whole
+liked, but the Whitwells who lived on the farm above us were a constant
+source of comedy to my father. Old Port, as he was called, was a
+mild-mannered man who would have made very little impression on the
+community, but for his wife, a large and rather unkempt person, who
+assumed such man-like freedom of speech that my father was never without
+an amusing story of her doings.
+
+She swore in vigorous pioneer fashion, and dominated her husband by
+force of lung power as well as by a certain painful candor. "Port,
+you're an old fool," she often said to him in our presence. It was her
+habit to apologize to her guests, as they took their seats at her
+abundant table, "Wal, now, folks, I'm sorry, but there ain't a blank
+thing in this house fit for a dawg to eat--" expecting of course to have
+everyone cry out, "Oh, Mrs. Whitwell, this is a splendid dinner!" which
+they generally did. But once my father took her completely aback by
+rising resignedly from the table--"Come, Belle," said he to my mother,
+"let's go home. I'm not going to eat food not fit for a dog."
+
+The rough old woman staggered under this blow, but quickly recovered.
+"Dick Garland, you blank fool. Sit down, or I'll fetch you a swipe with
+the broom."
+
+In spite of her profanity and ignorance she was a good neighbor and in
+time of trouble no one was readier to relieve any distress in the
+coulee. However, it was upon Mrs. Randal and the widow Green that my
+mother called for aid, and I do not think Mrs. Whitwell was ever quite
+welcome even at our quilting bees, for her loud voice silenced every
+other, and my mother did not enjoy her vulgar stories.--Yes, I can
+remember several quilting bees, and I recall molding candles, and that
+our "company light" was a large kerosene lamp, in the glass globe of
+which a strip of red flannel was coiled. Probably this was merely a
+device to lengthen out the wick, but it made a memorable spot of color
+in the room--just as the watch-spring gong in the clock gave off a sound
+of fairy music to my ear. I don't know why the ring of that coil had
+such a wondrous appeal, but I often climbed upon a chair to rake its
+spirals with a nail in order that I might float away on its "dying
+fall."
+
+Life was primitive in all the homes of the coulee. Money was hard to
+get. We always had plenty to eat, but little in the way of luxuries. We
+had few toys except those we fashioned for ourselves, and our garments
+were mostly home-made. I have heard my father say, "Belle could go to
+town with me, buy the calico for a dress and be wearing it for
+supper"--but I fear that even this did not happen very often. Her "dress
+up" gowns, according to certain precious old tintypes, indicate that
+clothing was for her only a sort of uniform,--and yet I will not say
+this made her unhappy. Her face was always smiling. She knit all our
+socks, made all our shirts and suits. She even carded and spun wool, in
+addition to her housekeeping, and found time to help on our kites and
+bows and arrows.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Month by month the universe in which I lived lightened and widened. In
+my visits to Onalaska, I discovered the great Mississippi River, and the
+Minnesota Bluffs. The light of knowledge grew stronger. I began to
+perceive forms and faces which had been hidden in the dusk of babyhood.
+I heard more and more of LaCrosse, and out of the mist filled lower
+valley the booming roar of steamboats suggested to me distant countries
+and the sea.
+
+My father believed in service. At seven years of age, I had regular
+duties. I brought firewood to the kitchen and broke nubbins for the
+calves and shelled corn for the chickens. I have a dim memory of helping
+him (and grandfather) split oak-blocks into rafting pins in the kitchen.
+This seems incredible to me now, and yet it must have been so. In summer
+Harriet and I drove the cows to pasture, and carried "switchel" to the
+men in the hay-fields by means of a jug hung in the middle of a long
+stick.
+
+Haying was a delightful season to us, for the scythes of the men
+occasionally tossed up clusters of beautiful strawberries, which we
+joyfully gathered. I remember with especial pleasure the delicious
+shortcakes which my mother made of the wild fruit which we picked in the
+warm odorous grass along the edge of the meadow.
+
+Harvest time also brought a pleasing excitement (something unwonted,
+something like entertaining visitors) which compensated for the extra
+work demanded of us. The neighbors usually came in to help and life was
+a feast.
+
+There was, however, an ever-present menace in our lives, the snake!
+During mid-summer months blue racers and rattlesnakes swarmed and the
+terror of them often chilled our childish hearts. Once Harriet and I,
+with little Frank in his cart, came suddenly upon a monster diamond-back
+rattler sleeping by the roadside. In our mad efforts to escape, the cart
+was overturned and the baby scattered in the dust almost within reach of
+the snake. As soon as she realized what had happened, Harriet ran back
+bravely, caught up the child and brought him safely away.
+
+Another day, as I was riding on the load of wheat-sheaves, one of the
+men, in pitching the grain to the wagon lifted a rattlesnake with his
+fork. I saw it writhing in the bottom of the sheaf, and screamed out, "A
+snake, a snake!" It fell across the man's arm but slid harmlessly to the
+ground, and he put a tine through it.
+
+As it chanced to be just dinner time he took it with him to the house
+and fastened it down near the door of a coop in which an old hen and her
+brood of chickens were confined. I don't know why he did this but it
+threw the mother hen into such paroxysms of fear that she dashed herself
+again and again upon the slats of her house. It appeared that she
+comprehended to the full the terrible power of the writhing monster.
+
+Perhaps it was this same year that one of the men discovered another
+enormous yellow-back in the barnyard, one of the largest ever seen on
+the farm--and killed it just as it was moving across an old barrel. I
+cannot now understand why it tried to cross the barrel, but I distinctly
+visualize the brown and yellow band it made as it lay for an instant
+just before the bludgeon fell upon it, crushing it and the barrel
+together. He was thicker than my leg and glistened in the sun with
+sinister splendor. As he hung limp over the fence, a warning to his
+fellows, it was hard for me to realize that death still lay in his
+square jaws and poisonous fangs.
+
+Innumerable garter-snakes infested the marsh, and black snakes inhabited
+the edges of the woodlands, but we were not so much afraid of them. We
+accepted them as unavoidable companions in the wild. They would run from
+us. Bears and wildcats we held in real terror, though they were
+considered denizens of the darkness and hence not likely to be met with
+if one kept to the daylight.
+
+The "hoop snake" was quite as authentic to us as the blue racer,
+although no one had actually seen one. Den Green's cousin's uncle had
+killed one in Michigan, and a man over the ridge had once been stung by
+one that came rolling down the hill with his tail in his mouth. But
+Den's cousin's uncle, when he saw the one coming toward him, had stepped
+aside quick as lightning, and the serpent's sharp fangs had buried
+themselves so deep in the bark of a tree, that he could not escape.
+
+Various other of the myths common to American boyhood, were held in
+perfect faith by Den and Ellis and Ed, myths which made every woodland
+path an ambush and every marshy spot a place of evil. Horsehairs would
+turn to snakes if left in the spring, and a serpent's tail would not die
+till sundown.
+
+Once on the high hillside, I started a stone rolling, which as it went
+plunging into a hazel thicket, thrust out a deer, whose flight seemed
+fairly miraculous to me. He appeared to drift along the hillside like a
+bunch of thistle-down, and I took a singular delight in watching him
+disappear.
+
+Once my little brother and I, belated in our search for the cows, were
+far away on the hills when night suddenly came upon us. I could not have
+been more than eight years old and Frank was five. This incident reveals
+the fearless use our father made of us. True, we were hardly a mile from
+the house, but there were many serpents on the hillsides and wildcats in
+the cliffs, and eight is pretty young for such a task.
+
+We were following the cows through the tall grass and bushes, in the
+dark, when father came to our rescue, and I do not recall being sent on
+a similar expedition thereafter. I think mother protested against the
+danger of it. Her notions of our training were less rigorous.
+
+I never hear a cow-bell of a certain timbre that I do not relive in some
+degree the terror and despair of that hour on the mountain, when it
+seemed that my world had suddenly slipped away from me.
+
+Winter succeeds summer abruptly in my memory. Behind our house rose a
+sharp ridge down which we used to coast. Over this hill, fierce winds
+blew the snow, and wonderful, diamonded drifts covered the yard, and
+sometimes father was obliged to dig deep trenches in order to reach the
+barn.
+
+On winter evenings he shelled corn by drawing the ears across a spade
+resting on a wash tub, and we children built houses of the cobs, while
+mother sewed carpet rags or knit our mittens. Quilting bees of an
+afternoon were still recognized social functions and the spread quilt on
+its frame made a gorgeous tent under which my brother and I camped on
+our way to "Colorado." Lath swords and tin-pan drums remained a part of
+our equipment for a year or two.
+
+One stormy winter day, Edwin Randal, riding home in a sleigh behind his
+uncle, saw me in the yard and, picking an apple from an open barrel
+beside which he was standing, threw it at me. It was a very large apple,
+and as it struck the drift it disappeared leaving a round deep hole.
+Delving there I recovered it, and as I brushed the rime from its scarlet
+skin it seemed the most beautiful thing in this world. From this vividly
+remembered delight, I deduce the fact that apples were not very
+plentiful in our home.
+
+My favorite place in winter time was directly under the kitchen stove.
+It was one of the old-fashioned high-stepping breed, with long hind legs
+and an arching belly, and as the oven was on top, the space beneath the
+arch offered a delightful den for a cat, a dog or small boy, and I was
+usually to be found there, lying on my stomach, spelling out the
+"continued" stories which came to us in the county paper, for I was born
+with a hunger for print.
+
+We had few books in our house. Aside from the Bible I remember only one
+other, a thick, black volume filled with gaudy pictures of cherries and
+plums, and portraits of ideally fat and prosperous sheep, pigs and cows.
+It must have been a _Farmer's Annual_ or State agricultural report, but
+it contained in the midst of its dry prose, occasional poems like "_I
+remember, I remember_," "_The Old Armchair_" and other pieces of a
+domestic or rural nature. I was especially moved by The Old Armchair,
+and although some of the words and expressions were beyond my
+comprehension, I fully understood the defiant tenderness of the lines:
+
+    I love it, I love it, and who shall dare
+    To chide me for loving the old armchair?
+
+I fear the horticultural side of this volume did not interest me, but
+this sweetly-sad poem tinged even the gaudy pictures of prodigious plums
+and shining apples with a literary glamor. The preposterously plump
+cattle probably affected me as only another form of romantic fiction.
+The volume also had a pleasant smell, not so fine an odor as the Bible,
+but so delectable that I loved to bury my nose in its opened pages. What
+caused this odor I cannot tell--perhaps it had been used to press
+flowers or sprigs of sweet fern.
+
+Harriet's devotion to literature, like my own, was a nuisance. If my
+mother wanted a pan of chips she had to wrench one of us from a book, or
+tear us from a paper. If she pasted up a section of _Harper's Weekly_
+behind the washstand in the kitchen, I immediately discovered a special
+interest in that number, and likely enough forgot to wash myself. When
+mother saw this (as of course she very soon did), she turned the paper
+upside down, and thereafter accused me, with some justice, of standing
+on my head in order to continue my tale. "In fact," she often said, "it
+is easier for me to do my errands myself than to get either of you young
+ones to move."
+
+The first school which we attended was held in a neighboring farm-house,
+and there is very little to tell concerning it, but at seven I began to
+go to the public school in Onalaska and memory becomes definite, for the
+wide river which came silently out of the unknown north, carrying
+endless millions of pine logs, and the clamor of saws in the island
+mills, and especially the men walking the rolling logs with pike-poles
+in their hands filled me with a wordless joy. To be one of these brave
+and graceful "drivers" seemed almost as great an honor as to be a
+Captain in the army. Some of the boys of my acquaintance were sons of
+these hardy boomsmen, and related wonderful stories of their fathers'
+exploits--stories which we gladly believed. We all intended to be
+rivermen when we grew up.
+
+The quiet water below the booms harbored enormous fish at that time, and
+some of the male citizens who were too lazy to work in the mills got an
+easy living by capturing cat-fish, and when in liquor joined the
+rivermen in their drunken frays. My father's tales of the exploits of
+some of these redoubtable villains filled my mind with mingled
+admiration and terror. No one used the pistol, however, and very few the
+knife. Physical strength counted. Foot and fist were the weapons which
+ended each contest and no one was actually slain in these meetings of
+rival crews.
+
+In the midst of this tumult, surrounded by this coarse, unthinking life,
+my Grandmother Garland's home stood, a serene small sanctuary of lofty
+womanhood, a temple of New England virtue. From her and from my great
+aunt Bridges who lived in St. Louis, I received my first literary
+instruction, a partial offset to the vulgar yet heroic influence of the
+raftsmen and mill hands.
+
+The school-house, a wooden two story building, occupied an unkempt lot
+some distance back from the river and near a group of high sand dunes
+which possessed a sinister allurement to me. They had a mysterious
+desert quality, a flavor as of camels and Arabs. Once you got over
+behind them it seemed as if you were in another world, a far-off arid
+land where no water ran and only sear, sharp-edged grasses grew. Some of
+these mounds were miniature peaks of clear sand, so steep and dry that
+you could slide all the way down from top to bottom, and do no harm to
+your Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes. On rainy days you could dig caves in
+their sides.
+
+But the mills and the log booms were after all much more dramatic and we
+never failed to hurry away to the river if we had half an hour to spare.
+The "drivers," so brave and skilled, so graceful, held us in breathless
+admiration as they leaped from one rolling log to another, or walked the
+narrow wooden bridges above the deep and silently sweeping waters. The
+piles of slabs, the mounds of sawdust, the intermittent, ferocious snarl
+of the saws, the slap of falling lumber, the never ending fires eating
+up the refuse--all these sights and sounds made a return to school
+difficult. Even the life around the threshing machine seemed a little
+tame in comparison with the life of the booms.
+
+We were much at the Greens', our second-door neighbors to the south, and
+the doings of the men-folks fill large space in my memory. Ed, the
+oldest of the boys, a man of twenty-three or four, was as prodigious in
+his way as my Uncle David. He was mighty with the axe. His deeds as a
+railsplitter rivaled those of Lincoln. The number of cords of wood he
+could split in a single day was beyond belief. It was either seven or
+eleven, I forget which--I am perfectly certain of the number of
+buckwheat pancakes he could eat for I kept count on several occasions.
+Once he ate nine the size of a dinner plate together with a suitable
+number of sausages--but what would you expect of a man who could whirl a
+six pound axe all day in a desperate attack on the forest, without once
+looking at the sun or pausing for breath?
+
+However, he fell short of my hero in other ways. He looked like a fat
+man and his fiddling was only middling, therefore, notwithstanding his
+prowess with the axe and the maul, he remained subordinate to David, and
+though they never came to a test of strength we were perfectly sure that
+David was the finer man. His supple grace and his unconquerable pride
+made him altogether admirable.
+
+Den, the youngest of the Greens, was a boy about three years my senior,
+and a most attractive lad. I met him some years ago in California, a
+successful doctor, and we talked of the days when I was his slave and
+humbly carried his powder horn and game bag. Ellis Usher, who lived in
+Sand Lake and often hunted with Den, is an editor in Milwaukee and one
+of the political leaders of his state. In those days he had a small
+opinion of me. No doubt I _was_ a nuisance.
+
+The road which led from our farm to the village school crossed a sandy
+ridge and often in June our path became so hot that it burned the soles
+of our feet. If we went out of the road there were sand-burrs and we
+lost a great deal of time picking needles from our toes. How we hated
+those sand-burrs!--However, on these sand barrens many luscious
+strawberries grew. They were not large, but they gave off a delicious
+odor, and it sometimes took us a long time to reach home.
+
+There was a recognized element of danger in this road. Wildcats were
+plentiful around the limestone cliffs, and bears had been seen under the
+oak trees. In fact a place on the hillside was often pointed out with
+awe as "the place where Al Randal killed the bear." Our way led past the
+village cemetery also, and there was to me something vaguely awesome in
+that silent bivouac of the dead.
+
+Among the other village boys in the school were two lads named
+Gallagher, one of whom, whose name was Matt, became my daily terror. He
+was two years older than I and had all of a city gamin's cunning and
+self-command. At every intermission he sidled close to me, walking round
+me, feeling my arms, and making much of my muscle. Sometimes he came
+behind and lifted me to see how heavy I was, or called attention to my
+strong hands and wrists, insisting with the most terrifying candor of
+conviction, "I'm sure you can lick me." We never quite came to combat,
+and finally he gave up this baiting for a still more exquisite method of
+torment.
+
+My sister and I possessed a dog named Rover, a meek little yellow,
+bow-legged cur of mongrel character, but with the frankest, gentlest and
+sweetest face, it seemed to us, in all the world. He was not allowed to
+accompany us to school and scarcely ever left the yard, but Matt
+Gallagher in some way discovered my deep affection for this pet and
+thereafter played upon my fears with a malevolence which knew no mercy.
+One day he said, "Me and brother Dan are going over to your place to get
+a calf that's in your pasture. We're going to get excused fifteen
+minutes early. We'll get there before you do and we'll fix that dog of
+yours!--There won't be nothin' left of him but a grease spot when we are
+done with him."
+
+These words, spoken probably in jest, instantly filled my heart with an
+agony of fear. I saw in imagination just how my little playmate would
+come running out to meet his cruel foes, his brown eyes beaming with
+love and trust,--I saw them hiding sharp stones behind their backs while
+snapping their left-hand fingers to lure him within reach, and then I
+saw them drive their murdering weapons at his head.
+
+I could think of nothing else. I could not study, I could only sit and
+stare out of the window with tears running down my cheeks, until at
+last, the teacher observing my distress, inquired, "What is the matter?"
+And I, not knowing how to enter upon so terrible a tale, whined out,
+"I'm sick, I want to go home."
+
+"You may go," said the teacher kindly.
+
+Snatching my cap from beneath the desk where I had concealed it at
+recess, I hurried out and away over the sand-lot on the shortest way
+home. No stopping now for burrs!--I ran like one pursued. I shall never
+forget as long as I live, the pain, the panic, the frenzy of that race
+against time. The hot sand burned my feet, my side ached, my mouth was
+dry, and yet I ran on and on and on, looking back from moment to moment,
+seeing pursuers in every moving object.
+
+At last I came in sight of home, and Rover frisked out to meet me just
+as I had expected him to do, his tail wagging, his gentle eyes smiling
+up at me. Gasping, unable to utter a word, I frantically dragged the dog
+into the house and shut the door.
+
+"What is the matter?" asked my mother.
+
+I could not at the moment explain even to her what had threatened me,
+but her calm sweet words at last gave my story vent. Out it came in
+torrential flow.
+
+"Why, you poor child!" she said. "They were only fooling--they wouldn't
+dare to hurt your dog!"
+
+This was probably true. Matt had spoken without any clear idea of the
+torture he was inflicting.
+
+It is often said, "How little is required to give a child joy," but
+men--and women too--sometimes forget how little it takes to give a child
+pain.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+Father Sells the Farm
+
+
+Green's Coulee was a delightful place for boys. It offered hunting and
+coasting and many other engrossing sports, but my father, as the seasons
+went by, became thoroughly dissatisfied with its disadvantages. More and
+more he resented the stumps and ridges which interrupted his plow. Much
+of his quarter-section remained unbroken. There were ditches to be dug
+in the marsh and young oaks to be uprooted from the forest, and he was
+obliged to toil with unremitting severity. There were times, of course,
+when field duties did not press, but never a day came when the necessity
+for twelve hours' labor did not exist.
+
+Furthermore, as he grubbed or reaped he remembered the glorious prairies
+he had crossed on his exploring trip into Minnesota before the war, and
+the oftener he thought of them the more bitterly he resented his
+up-tilted, horse-killing fields, and his complaining words sank so deep
+into the minds of his sons that for years thereafter they were unable to
+look upon any rise of ground as an object to be admired.
+
+It irked him beyond measure to force his reaper along a steep slope, and
+he loathed the irregular little patches running up the ravines behind
+the timbered knolls, and so at last like many another of his neighbors
+he began to look away to the west as a fairer field for conquest. He no
+more thought of going east than a liberated eagle dreams of returning to
+its narrow cage. He loved to talk of Boston, to boast of its splendor,
+but to live there, to earn his bread there, was unthinkable. Beneath the
+sunset lay the enchanted land of opportunity and his liberation came
+unexpectedly.
+
+Sometime in the spring of 1868, a merchant from LaCrosse, a plump man
+who brought us candy and was very cordial and condescending, began
+negotiations for our farm, and in the discussion of plans which
+followed, my conception of the universe expanded. I began to understand
+that "Minnesota" was not a bluff but a wide land of romance, a prairie,
+peopled with red men, which lay far beyond the big river. And then, one
+day, I heard my father read to my mother a paragraph from the county
+paper which ran like this, "It is reported that Richard Garland has sold
+his farm in Green's Coulee to our popular grocer, Mr. Speer. Mr. Speer
+intends to make of it a model dairy farm."
+
+This intention seemed somehow to reflect a ray of glory upon us, though
+I fear it did not solace my mother, as she contemplated the loss of home
+and kindred. She was not by nature an emigrant,--few women are. She was
+content with the pleasant slopes, the kindly neighbors of Green's
+Coulee. Furthermore, most of her brothers and sisters still lived just
+across the ridge in the valley of the Neshonoc, and the thought of
+leaving them for a wild and unknown region was not pleasant.
+
+To my father, on the contrary, change was alluring. Iowa was now the
+place of the rainbow, and the pot of gold. He was eager to push on
+toward it, confident of the outcome. His spirit was reflected in one of
+the songs which we children particularly enjoyed hearing our mother
+sing, a ballad which consisted of a dialogue between a husband and wife
+on this very subject of emigration. The words as well as its wailing
+melody still stir me deeply, for they lay hold of my sub-conscious
+memory--embodying admirably the debate which went on in our home as
+well as in the homes of other farmers in the valley,--only, alas! our
+mothers did not prevail.
+
+It begins with a statement of unrest on the part of the husband who
+confesses that he is about to give up his plow and his cart--
+
+    Away to Colorado a journey I'll go,
+    For to double my fortune as other men do,
+    _While here I must labor each day in the field
+    And the winter consumes all the summer doth yield_.
+
+To this the wife replies:
+
+    Dear husband, I've noticed with a sorrowful heart
+    That you long have neglected your plow and your cart,
+    Your horses, sheep, cattle at random do run,
+    And your new Sunday jacket goes every day on.
+    _Oh, stay on your farm and you'll suffer no loss,
+    For the stone that keeps rolling will gather no moss._
+
+But the husband insists:
+
+    Oh, wife, let us go; Oh, don't let us wait;
+    I long to be there, and I long to be great,
+    While you some fair lady and who knows but I
+    May be some rich governor long 'fore I die,
+    _Whilst here I must labor each day in the field,
+    And the winter consumes all the summer doth yield_.
+
+But wife shrewdly retorts:
+
+    Dear husband, remember those lands are so dear
+    They will cost you the labor of many a year.
+    Your horses, sheep, cattle will all be to buy,
+    You will hardly get settled before you must die.
+    Oh, stay on the farm,--etc.
+
+The husband then argues that as in that country the lands are all
+cleared to the plow, and horses and cattle not very dear, they would
+soon be rich. Indeed, "we will feast on fat venison one-half of the
+year." Thereupon the wife brings in her final argument:
+
+    Oh, husband, remember those lands of delight
+    Are surrounded by Indians who murder by night.
+    Your house will be plundered and burnt to the ground
+    While your wife and your children lie mangled around.
+
+This fetches the husband up with a round turn:
+
+    Oh, wife, you've convinced me, I'll argue no more,
+    I never once thought of your dying before.
+    I love my dear children although they are small
+    And you, my dear wife, I love greatest of all.
+
+        Refrain (both together)
+
+    We'll stay on the farm and we'll suffer no loss
+    For the stone that keeps rolling will gather no moss.
+
+This song was not an especial favorite of my father. Its minor strains
+and its expressions of womanly doubts and fears were antipathetic to his
+sanguine, buoyant, self-confident nature. He was inclined to ridicule
+the conclusions of its last verse and to say that the man was a
+molly-coddle--or whatever the word of contempt was in those days. As an
+antidote he usually called for "O'er the hills in legions, boys," which
+exactly expressed his love of exploration and adventure.
+
+This ballad which dates back to the conquest of the Allegheny mountains
+opens with a fine uplifting note,
+
+    Cheer up, brothers, as we go
+    O'er the mountains, westward ho,
+    Where herds of deer and buffalo
+    Furnish the fare.
+
+and the refrain is at once a bugle call and a vision:
+
+    Then o'er the hills in legions, boys,
+    Fair freedom's star
+    Points to the sunset regions, boys,
+    Ha, ha, ha-ha!
+
+and when my mother's clear voice rose on the notes of that exultant
+chorus, our hearts responded with a surge of emotion akin to that which
+sent the followers of Daniel Boone across the Blue Ridge, and lined the
+trails of Kentucky and Ohio with the canvas-covered wagons of the
+pioneers.
+
+A little farther on in the song came these words,
+
+    When we've wood and prairie land,
+    Won by our toil,
+    We'll reign like kings in fairy land,
+    Lords of the soil!
+
+which always produced in my mind the picture of a noble farm-house in a
+park-like valley, just as the line, "Well have our rifles ready, boys,"
+expressed the boldness and self-reliance of an armed horseman.
+
+The significance of this song in the lives of the McClintocks and the
+Garlands cannot be measured. It was the marching song of my
+Grandfather's generation and undoubtedly profoundly influenced my father
+and my uncles in all that they did. It suggested shining mountains, and
+grassy vales, swarming with bear and elk. It called to green savannahs
+and endless flowery glades. It voiced as no other song did, the pioneer
+impulse throbbing deep in my father's blood. That its words will not
+bear close inspection today takes little from its power. Unquestionably
+it was a directing force in the lives of at least three generations of
+my pioneering race. Its strains will be found running through this book
+from first to last, for its pictures continued to allure my father on
+and on toward "the sunset regions," and its splendid faith carried him
+through many a dark vale of discontent.
+
+Our home was a place of song, notwithstanding the severe toil which was
+demanded of every hand, for often of an evening, especially in winter
+time, father took his seat beside the fire, invited us to his knees, and
+called on mother to sing. These moods were very sweet to us and we
+usually insisted upon his singing for us. True, he hardly knew one tune
+from another, but he had a hearty resounding chant which delighted us,
+and one of the ballads which we especially like to hear him repeat was
+called _Down the Ohio_. Only one verse survives in my memory:
+
+    The river is up, the channel is deep,
+    The winds blow high and strong.
+    The flash of the oars, the stroke we keep,
+    As we row the old boat along,
+      Down the O-h-i-o.
+
+Mother, on the contrary, was gifted with a voice of great range and
+sweetness, and from her we always demanded _Nettie Wildwood_, _Lily
+Dale_, _Lorena_ or some of Root's stirring war songs. We loved her
+noble, musical tone, and yet we always enjoyed our father's tuneless
+roar. There was something dramatic and moving in each of his ballads. He
+made the words mean so much.
+
+It is a curious fact that nearly all of the ballads which the
+McClintocks and other of these powerful young sons of the border loved
+to sing were sad. _Nellie Wildwood_, _Minnie Minturn_, _Belle Mahone_,
+_Lily Dale_ were all concerned with dead or dying maidens or with
+mocking birds still singing o'er their graves. Weeping willows and
+funeral urns ornamented the cover of each mournful ballad. Not one
+smiling face peered forth from the pages of _The Home Diadem_.
+
+    Lonely like a withered tree,
+      What is all the world to me?
+    Light and life were all in thee,
+      Sweet Belle Mahone,
+
+wailed stalwart David and buxom Deborah, and ready tears moistened my
+tanned plump cheeks.
+
+Perhaps it was partly by way of contrast that the jocund song of
+_Freedom's Star_ always meant so much to me, but however it came about,
+I am perfectly certain that it was an immense subconscious force in the
+life of my father as it had been in the westward marching of the
+McClintocks. In my own thinking it became at once a vision and a lure.
+
+The only humorous songs which my uncles knew were negro ditties, like
+_Camp Town Racetrack_ and _Jordan am a Hard Road to Trabbel_ but in
+addition to the sad ballads I have quoted, they joined my mother in _The
+Pirate's Serenade_, _Erin's Green Shore_, _Bird of the Wilderness_, and
+the memory of their mellow voices creates a golden dusk between me and
+that far-off cottage.
+
+During the summer of my eighth year, I took a part in haying and
+harvest, and I have a painful recollection of raking hay after the
+wagons, for I wore no shoes and the stubble was very sharp. I used to
+slip my feet along close to the ground, thus bending the stubble away
+from me before throwing my weight on it, otherwise walking was painful.
+If I were sent across the field on an errand I always sought out the
+path left by the broad wheels of the mowing machine and walked therein
+with a most delicious sense of safety.
+
+It cannot be that I was required to work very hard or very steadily, but
+it seemed to me then, and afterward, as if I had been made one of the
+regular hands and that I toiled the whole day through. I rode old Josh
+for the hired man to plow corn, and also guided the lead horse on the
+old McCormick reaper, my short legs sticking out at right angles from my
+body, and I carried water to the field.
+
+It appears that the blackbirds were very thick that year and
+threatened, in August, to destroy the corn. They came in gleeful clouds,
+settling with multitudinous clamor upon the stalks so that it became the
+duty of Den Green to scare them away by shooting at them, and I was
+permitted to follow and pick up the dead birds and carry them as "game."
+
+There was joy and keen excitement in this warfare. Sometimes when Den
+fired into a flock, a dozen or more came fluttering down. At other times
+vast swarms rose at the sound of the gun with a rush of wings which
+sounded like a distant storm. Once Den let me fire the gun, and I took
+great pride in this until I came upon several of the shining little
+creatures bleeding, dying in the grass. Then my heart was troubled and I
+repented of my cruelty. Mrs. Green put the birds into potpies but my
+mother would not do so. "I don't believe in such game," she said. "It's
+bad enough to shoot the poor things without eating them."
+
+Once we came upon a huge mountain rattlesnake and Den killed it with a
+shot of his gun. How we escaped being bitten is a mystery, for we
+explored every path of the hills and meadows in our bare feet, our
+trousers rolled to the knee. We hunted plums and picked blackberries and
+hazelnuts with very little fear of snakes, and yet we must have always
+been on guard. We loved our valley, and while occasionally we yielded to
+the lure of "Freedom's star," we were really content with Green's Coulee
+and its surrounding hills.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+The Last Threshing in the Coulee
+
+
+Life on a Wisconsin farm, even for the women, had its compensations.
+There were times when the daily routine of lonely and monotonous
+housework gave place to an agreeable bustle, and human intercourse
+lightened the toil. In the midst of the slow progress of the fall's
+plowing, the gathering of the threshing crew was a most dramatic event
+to my mother, as to us, for it not only brought unwonted clamor, it
+fetched her brothers William and David and Frank, who owned and ran a
+threshing machine, and their coming gave the house an air of festivity
+which offset the burden of extra work which fell upon us all.
+
+In those days the grain, after being brought in and stacked around the
+barn, was allowed to remain until October or November when all the other
+work was finished.
+
+Of course some men got the machine earlier, for all could not thresh at
+the same time, and a good part of every man's fall activities consisted
+in "changing works" with his neighbors, thus laying up a stock of unpaid
+labor against the home job. Day after day, therefore, father or the
+hired man shouldered a fork and went to help thresh, and all through the
+autumn months, the ceaseless ringing hum and the _bow-ouw, ouw-woo,
+boo-oo-oom_ of the great balance wheels on the separator and the deep
+bass purr of its cylinder could be heard in every valley like the
+droning song of some sullen and gigantic autumnal insect.
+
+I recall with especial clearness the events of that last threshing in
+the coulee.--I was eight, my brother was six. For days we had looked
+forward to the coming of "the threshers," listening with the greatest
+eagerness to father's report of the crew. At last he said, "Well, Belle,
+get ready. The machine will be here tomorrow."
+
+All day we hung on the gate, gazing down the road, watching, waiting for
+the crew, and even after supper, we stood at the windows still hoping to
+hear the rattle of the ponderous separator.
+
+Father explained that the men usually worked all day at one farm and
+moved after dark, and we were just starting to "climb the wooden hill"
+when we heard a far-off faint halloo.
+
+"There they are," shouted father, catching up his old square tin lantern
+and hurriedly lighting the candle within it. "That's Frank's voice."
+
+The night air was sharp, and as we had taken off our boots we could only
+stand at the window and watch father as he piloted the teamsters through
+the gate. The light threw fantastic shadows here and there, now lighting
+up a face, now bringing out the separator which seemed a weary and
+sullen monster awaiting its den. The men's voices sounded loud in the
+still night, causing the roused turkeys in the oaks to peer about on
+their perches, uneasy silhouettes against the sky.
+
+We would gladly have stayed awake to greet our beloved uncles, but
+mother said, "You must go to sleep in order to be up early in the
+morning," and reluctantly we turned away.
+
+Lying thus in our cot under the sloping raftered roof we could hear the
+squawk of the hens, as father wrung their innocent necks, and the crash
+of the "sweeps" being unloaded sounded loud and clear and strange. We
+longed to be out there, but at last the dance of lights and shadows on
+the plastered wall died away, and we fell into childish dreamless sleep.
+
+We were awakened at dawn by the ringing beat of the iron mauls as Frank
+and David drove the stakes to hold the "power" to the ground. The rattle
+of trace chains, the clash of iron rods, the clang of steel bars,
+intermixed with the laughter of the men, came sharply through the frosty
+air, and the smell of sizzling sausage from the kitchen warned us that
+our busy mother was hurrying the breakfast forward. Knowing that it was
+time to get up, although it was not yet light, I had a sense of being
+awakened into a romantic new world, a world of heroic action.
+
+As we stumbled down the stairs, we found the lamp-lit kitchen empty of
+the men. They had finished their coffee and were out in the stack-yard
+oiling the machine and hitching the horses to the power. Shivering yet
+entranced by the beauty of the frosty dawn we crept out to stand and
+watch the play. The frost lay white on every surface, the frozen ground
+rang like iron under the steel-shod feet of the horses, and the breath
+of the men rose up in little white puffs of steam.
+
+Uncle David on the feeder's stand was impatiently awaiting the coming of
+the fifth team. The pitchers were climbing the stacks like blackbirds,
+and the straw-stackers were scuffling about the stable door.--Finally,
+just as the east began to bloom, and long streamers of red began to
+unroll along the vast gray dome of sky Uncle Frank, the driver, lifted
+his voice in a "Chippewa war-whoop."
+
+On a still morning like this his signal could be heard for miles. Long
+drawn and musical, it sped away over the fields, announcing to all the
+world that the McClintocks were ready for the day's race. Answers came
+back faintly from the frosty fields where dim figures of laggard hands
+could be seen hurrying over the plowed ground, the last team came
+clattering in and was hooked into its place, David called "All right!"
+and the cylinder began to hum.
+
+In those days the machine was either a "J. I. Case" or a "Buffalo
+Pitts," and was moved by five pairs of horses attached to a "power"
+staked to the ground, round which they travelled pulling at the ends of
+long levers or sweeps, and to me the force seemed tremendous. "Tumbling
+rods" with "knuckle joints" carried the motion to the cylinder, and the
+driver who stood upon a square platform above the huge, greasy
+cog-wheels (round which the horses moved) was a grand figure in my eyes.
+
+Driving, to us, looked like a pleasant job, but Uncle Frank thought it
+very tiresome, and I can now see that it was. To stand on that small
+platform all through the long hours of a cold November day, when the
+cutting wind roared down the valley sweeping the dust and leaves along
+the road, was work. Even I perceived that it was far pleasanter to sit
+on the south side of the stack and watch the horses go round.
+
+It was necessary that the "driver" should be a man of judgment, for the
+horses had to be kept at just the right speed, and to do this he must
+gauge the motion of the cylinder by the pitch of its deep bass song.
+
+The three men in command of the machine were set apart as "the
+threshers."--William and David alternately "fed" or "tended," that is,
+one of them "fed" the grain into the howling cylinder while the other,
+oil-can in hand, watched the sieves, felt of the pinions and so kept the
+machine in good order. The feeder's position was the high place to which
+all boys aspired, and on this day I stood in silent admiration of Uncle
+David's easy powerful attitudes as he caught each bundle in the crook
+of his arm and spread it out into a broad, smooth band of yellow straw
+on which the whirling teeth caught and tore with monstrous fury. He was
+the ideal man in my eyes, grander in some ways than my father, and to be
+able to stand where he stood was the highest honor in the world.
+
+It was all poetry for us and we wished every day were threshing day. The
+wind blew cold, the clouds went flying across the bright blue sky, and
+the straw glistened in the sun. With jarring snarl the circling zone of
+cogs dipped into the sturdy greasy wheels, and the single-trees and
+pulley-chains chirped clear and sweet as crickets. The dust flew, the
+whip cracked, and the men working swiftly to get the sheaves to the
+feeder or to take the straw away from the tail-end of the machine, were
+like warriors, urged to desperate action by battle cries. The stackers
+wallowing to their waists in the fluffy straw-pile seemed gnomes acting
+for our amusement.
+
+The straw-pile! What delight we had in that! What joy it was to go up to
+the top where the men were stationed, one behind the other, and to have
+them toss huge forkfuls of the light fragrant stalks upon us, laughing
+to see us emerge from our golden cover. We were especially impressed by
+the bravery of Ed Green who stood in the midst of the thick dust and
+flying chaff close to the tail of the stacker. His teeth shone like a
+negro's out of his dust-blackened face and his shirt was wet with sweat,
+but he motioned for "more straw" and David, accepting the challenge,
+signalled for more speed. Frank swung his lash and yelled at the
+straining horses, the sleepy growl of the cylinder rose to a howl and
+the wheat came pulsing out at the spout in such a stream that the
+carriers were forced to trot on their path to and from the granary in
+order to keep the grain from piling up around the measurer.--There was
+a kind of splendid rivalry in this backbreaking toil--for each sack
+weighed ninety pounds.
+
+We got tired of wallowing in the straw at last, and went down to help
+Rover catch the rats which were being uncovered by the pitchers as they
+reached the stack bottom.--The horses, with their straining,
+out-stretched necks, the loud and cheery shouts, the whistling of the
+driver, the roar and hum of the great wheel, the flourishing of the
+forks, the supple movement of brawny arms, the shouts of the men, all
+blended with the wild sound of the wind in the creaking branches of the
+oaks, forming a glorious poem in our unforgetting minds.
+
+At last the call for dinner sounded. The driver began to call, "Whoa
+there, boys! Steady, Tom," and to hold his long whip before the eyes of
+the more spirited of the teams in order to convince them that he really
+meant "stop." The pitchers stuck their forks upright in the stack and
+leaped to the ground. Randal, the band-cutter, drew from his wrist the
+looped string of his big knife, the stackers slid down from the
+straw-pile, and a race began among the teamsters to see whose span would
+be first unhitched and at the watering trough. What joyous rivalry it
+seemed to us!--
+
+Mother and Mrs. Randal, wife of our neighbor, who was "changing works,"
+stood ready to serve the food as soon as the men were seated.--The table
+had been lengthened to its utmost and pieced out with boards, and planks
+had been laid on stout wooden chairs at either side.
+
+The men came in with a rush, and took seats wherever they could find
+them, and their attack on the boiled potatoes and chicken should have
+been appalling to the women, but it was not. They enjoyed seeing them
+eat. Ed Green was prodigious. One cut at a big potato, followed by two
+stabbing motions, and it was gone.--Two bites laid a leg of chicken as
+bare as a slate pencil. To us standing in the corner waiting our turn,
+it seemed that every "smitch" of the dinner was in danger, for the
+others were not far behind Ed and Dan.
+
+At last even the gauntest of them filled up and left the room and we
+were free to sit at "the second table" and eat, while the men rested
+outside. David and William, however, generally had a belt to sew or a
+bent tooth to take out of the "concave." This seemed of grave dignity to
+us and we respected their self-sacrificing labor.
+
+Nooning was brief. As soon as the horses had finished their oats, the
+roar and hum of the machine began again and continued steadily all the
+afternoon, till by and by the sun grew big and red, the night began to
+fall, and the wind died out.
+
+This was the most impressive hour of a marvellous day. Through the
+falling dusk, the machine boomed steadily with a new sound, a solemn
+roar, rising at intervals to a rattling impatient yell as the cylinder
+ran momentarily empty. The men moved now in silence, looming dim and
+gigantic in the half-light. The straw-pile mountain high, the pitchers
+in the chaff, the feeder on his platform, and especially the driver on
+his power, seemed almost superhuman to my childish eyes. Gray dust
+covered the handsome face of David, changing it into something both sad
+and stern, but Frank's cheery voice rang out musically as he called to
+the weary horses, "Come on, Tom! Hup there, Dan!"
+
+The track in which they walked had been worn into two deep circles and
+they all moved mechanically round and round, like parts of a machine,
+dull-eyed and covered with sweat.
+
+At last William raised the welcome cry, "All done!"--the men threw down
+their forks. Uncle Frank began to call in a gentle, soothing voice,
+"_Whoa_, lads! _Steady_, boys! Whoa, there!"
+
+But the horses had been going so long and so steadily that they could
+not at once check their speed. They kept moving, though slowly, on and
+on till their owners slid from the stacks and seizing the ends of the
+sweeps, held them. Even then, after the power was still, the cylinder
+kept its hum, till David throwing a last sheaf into its open maw, choked
+it into silence.
+
+Now came the sound of dropping chains, the clang of iron rods, and the
+thud of hoofs as the horses walked with laggard gait and weary
+down-falling heads to the barn. The men, more subdued than at dinner,
+washed with greater care, and combed the chaff from their beards. The
+air was still and cool, and the sky a deep cloudless blue starred with
+faint fire.
+
+Supper though quiet was more dramatic than dinner had been. The table
+lighted with kerosene lamps, the clean white linen, the fragrant dishes,
+the women flying about with steaming platters, all seemed very cheery
+and very beautiful, and the men who came into the light and warmth of
+the kitchen with aching muscles and empty stomachs, seemed gentler and
+finer than at noon. They were nearly all from neighboring farms, and my
+mother treated even the few hired men like visitors, and the talk was
+all hearty and good tempered though a little subdued.
+
+One by one the men rose and slipped away, and father withdrew to milk
+the cows and bed down the horses, leaving the women and the youngsters
+to eat what was left and "do up the dishes."
+
+After we had eaten our fill Frank and I also went out to the barn (all
+wonderfully changed now to our minds by the great stack of straw), there
+to listen to David and father chatting as they rubbed their tired
+horses.--The lantern threw a dim red light on the harness and on the
+rumps of the cattle, but left mysterious shadows in the corners. I could
+hear the mice rustling in the straw of the roof, and from the farther
+end of the dimly-lighted shed came the regular _strim-stram_ of the
+streams of milk falling into the bottom of a tin pail as the hired hand
+milked the big roan cow.
+
+All this was very momentous to me as I sat on the oat box, shivering in
+the cold air, listening with all my ears, and when we finally went
+toward the house, the stars were big and sparkling. The frost had
+already begun to glisten on the fences and well-curb, and high in the
+air, dark against the sky, the turkeys were roosting uneasily, as if
+disturbed by premonitions of approaching Thanksgiving. Rover pattered
+along by my side on the crisp grass and my brother clung to my hand.
+
+How bright and warm it was in the kitchen with mother putting things to
+rights while father and my uncles leaned their chairs against the wall
+and talked of the west and of moving. "I can't get away till after New
+Year's," father said. "But I'm going. I'll never put in another crop on
+these hills."
+
+With speechless content I listened to Uncle William's stories of bears
+and Indians, and other episodes of frontier life, until at last we were
+ordered to bed and the glorious day was done.
+
+Oh, those blessed days, those entrancing nights! How fine they were
+then, and how mellow they are now, for the slow-paced years have dropped
+nearly fifty other golden mists upon that far-off valley. From this
+distance I cannot understand how my father brought himself to leave that
+lovely farm and those good and noble friends.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+David and His Violin
+
+
+Most of the events of our last autumn in Green's Coulee have slipped
+into the fathomless gulf, but the experiences of Thanksgiving day, which
+followed closely on our threshing day, are in my treasure house. Like a
+canvas by Rembrandt only one side of the figures therein is defined, the
+other side melts away into shadow--a luminous shadow, through which
+faint light pulses, luring my wistful gaze on and on, back into the
+vanished world where the springs of my life lie hidden.
+
+It is a raw November evening. Frank and Harriet and I are riding into a
+strange land in a clattering farm wagon. Father and mother are seated
+before us on the spring seat. The ground is frozen and the floor of the
+carriage pounds and jars. We cling to the iron-lined sides of the box to
+soften the blows. It is growing dark. Before us (in a similar vehicle)
+my Uncle David is leading the way. I catch momentary glimpses of him
+outlined against the pale yellow sky. He stands erect, holding the reins
+of his swiftly-moving horses in his powerful left hand. Occasionally he
+shouts back to my father, whose chin is buried in a thick buffalo-skin
+coat. Mother is only a vague mass, a figure wrapped in shawls. The wind
+is keen, the world gray and cheerless.
+
+My sister is close beside me in the straw. Frank is asleep. I am on my
+knees looking ahead. Suddenly with rush of wind and clatter of hoofs, we
+enter the gloom of a forest and the road begins to climb. I see the
+hills on the right. I catch the sound of wheels on a bridge. I am cold.
+I snuggle down under the robes and the gurgle of ice-bound water is
+fused with my dreams.
+
+I am roused at last by Uncle David's pleasant voice, "Wake up, boys, and
+pay y'r lodging!" I look out and perceive him standing beside the wheel.
+I see a house and I hear the sound of Deborah's voice from the
+warmly-lighted open door.
+
+I climb down, heavy with cold and sleep. As I stand there my uncle
+reaches up his arms to take my mother down. Not knowing that she has a
+rheumatic elbow, he squeezes her playfully. She gives a sharp scream,
+and his team starts away on a swift run around the curve of the road
+toward the gate. Dropping my mother, he dashes across the yard to
+intercept the runaways. We all stand in silence, watching the flying
+horses and the wonderful race he is making toward the gate. He runs with
+magnificent action, his head thrown high. As the team dashes through the
+gate his outflung left hand catches the end-board of the wagon,--he
+leaps into the box, and so passes from our sight.
+
+We go into the cottage. It is a small building with four rooms and a
+kitchen on the ground floor, but in the sitting room we come upon an
+open fireplace,--the first I had ever seen, and in the light of it sits
+Grandfather McClintock, the glory of the flaming logs gilding the edges
+of his cloud of bushy white hair. He does not rise to greet us, but
+smiles and calls out, "Come in! Come in! Draw a cheer. Sit ye down."
+
+A clamor of welcome fills the place. Harriet and I are put to warm
+before the blaze. Grandad takes Frank upon his knee and the cutting wind
+of the gray outside world is forgotten.
+
+This house in which the McClintocks were living at this time, belonged
+to a rented farm. Grandad had sold the original homestead on the
+LaCrosse River, and David who had lately married a charming young
+Canadian girl, was the head of the family. Deborah, it seems, was also
+living with him and Frank was there--as a visitor probably.
+
+The room in which we sat was small and bare but to me it was very
+beautiful, because of the fire, and by reason of the merry voices which
+filled my ears with music. Aunt Rebecca brought to us a handful of
+crackers and told us that we were to have oyster soup for supper. This
+gave us great pleasure even in anticipation, for oysters were a
+delicious treat in those days.
+
+"Well, Dick," Grandad began, "so ye're plannin' to go west, air ye?"
+
+"Yes, as soon as I get all my grain and hogs marketed I'm going to pull
+out for my new farm over in Iowa."
+
+"Ye'd better stick to the old coulee," warned my grandfather, a touch of
+sadness in his voice. "Ye'll find none better."
+
+My father was disposed to resent this. "That's all very well for the few
+who have the level land in the middle of the valley," he retorted, "but
+how about those of us who are crowded against the hills? You should see
+the farm I have in Winnesheik!! Not a hill on it big enough for a boy to
+coast on. It's right on the edge of Looking Glass Prairie, and I have a
+spring of water, and a fine grove of trees just where I want them, not
+where they have to be grubbed out."
+
+"But ye belong here," repeated Grandfather. "You were married here, your
+children were born here. Ye'll find no such friends in the west as you
+have here in Neshonoc. And Belle will miss the family."
+
+My father laughed. "Oh, you'll all come along. Dave has the fever
+already. Even William is likely to catch it."
+
+Old Hugh sighed deeply. "I hope ye're wrong," he said. "I'd like to
+spend me last days here with me sons and daughters around me, sich as
+are left to me," here his voice became sterner. "It's the curse of our
+country,--this constant moving, moving. I'd have been better off had I
+stayed in Ohio, though this valley seemed very beautiful to me the first
+time I saw it."
+
+At this point David came in, and everybody shouted, "Did you stop them?"
+referring of course to the runaway team.
+
+"I did," he replied with a smile. "But how about the oysters. I'm holler
+as a beech log."
+
+The fragrance of the soup thoroughly awakened even little Frank, and
+when we drew around the table, each face shone with the light of peace
+and plenty, and all our elders tried to forget that this was the last
+Thanksgiving festival which the McClintocks and Garlands would be able
+to enjoy in the old valley. How good those oysters were! They made up
+the entire meal,--excepting mince pie which came as a closing sweet.
+
+Slowly, one by one, the men drew back and returned to the sitting room,
+leaving the women to wash up the dishes and put the kitchen to rights.
+David seized the opportunity to ask my father to tell once again of the
+trip he had made, of the lands he had seen, and the farm he had
+purchased, for his young heart was also fired with desire of
+exploration. The level lands toward the sunset allured him. In his
+visions the wild meadows were filled with game, and the free lands
+needed only to be tickled with a hoe to laugh into harvest.
+
+He said, "As soon as Dad and Frank are settled on a farm here, I'm going
+west also. I'm as tired of climbing these hills as you are. I want a
+place of my own--and besides, from all you say of that wheat country out
+there, a threshing machine would pay wonderfully well."
+
+As the women came in, my father called out, "Come, Belle, sing 'O'er the
+Hills in Legions Boys!'--Dave get out your fiddle--and tune us all up."
+
+David tuned up his fiddle and while he twanged on the strings mother
+lifted her voice in our fine old marching song.
+
+    Cheer up, brothers, as we go,
+    O'er the mountains, westward ho--
+
+and we all joined in the jubilant chorus--
+
+    Then o'er the hills in legions, boys,
+    Fair freedom's star
+    Points to the sunset regions, boys,
+    Ha, ha, ha-ha!--
+
+My father's face shone with the light of the explorer, the pioneer. The
+words of this song appealed to him as the finest poetry. It meant all
+that was fine and hopeful and buoyant in American life, to him--but on
+my mother's sweet face a wistful expression deepened and in her fine
+eyes a reflective shadow lay. To her this song meant not so much the
+acquisition of a new home as the loss of all her friends and relatives.
+She sang it submissively, not exultantly, and I think the other women
+were of the same mood though their faces were less expressive to me. To
+all of the pioneer wives of the past that song had meant deprivation,
+suffering, loneliness, heart-ache.
+
+From this they passed to other of my father's favorite songs, and it is
+highly significant to note that even in this choice of songs he
+generally had his way. He was the dominating force. "Sing 'Nellie
+Wildwood,'" he said, and they sang it.--This power of getting his will
+respected was due partly to his military training but more to a
+distinctive trait in him. He was a man of power, of decision, a natural
+commander of men.
+
+They sang "Minnie Minturn" to his request, and the refrain,--
+
+    I have heard the angels warning,
+    I have seen the golden shore--
+
+meant much to me. So did the line,
+
+    But I only hear the drummers
+    As the armies march away.
+
+Aunt Deb was also a soul of decision. She called out, "No more of these
+sad tones," and struck up "The Year of Jubilo," and we all shouted till
+the walls shook with the exultant words:
+
+    Ol' massa run--ha-ha!
+    De darkies stay,--ho-ho!
+    It must be now is the kingdom a-comin'
+    In the year of Jubilo.
+
+At this point the fire suggested an old English ballad which I loved,
+and so I piped up, "Mother, sing, 'Pile the Wood on Higher!'" and she
+complied with pleasure, for this was a song of home, of the unbroken
+fireside circle.
+
+    Oh, the winds howl mad outdoors
+      The snow clouds hurry past,
+    The giant trees sway to and fro
+      Beneath the sweeping blast.
+
+and we children joined in the chorus:
+
+    Then we'll gather round the fire
+      And we'll pile the wood on higher,
+    Let the song and jest go round;
+      What care we for the storm,
+      When the fireside is so warm,
+      And pleasure here is found?
+
+Never before did this song mean so much to me as at this moment when the
+winds were actually howling outdoors, and Uncle Frank was in very truth
+piling the logs higher. It seemed as though my stuffed bosom could not
+receive anything deeper and finer, but it did, for father was saying,
+"Well, Dave, now for some _tunes_."
+
+This was the best part of David to me. He could make any room mystical
+with the magic of his bow. True, his pieces were mainly venerable dance
+tunes, cotillions, hornpipes,--melodies which had passed from fiddler to
+fiddler until they had become veritable folk-songs,--pieces like "Money
+Musk," "Honest John," "Haste to the Wedding," and many others whose
+names I have forgotten, but with a gift of putting into even the
+simplest song an emotion which subdued us and silenced us, he played on,
+absorbed and intent. From these familiar pieces he passed to others for
+which he had no names, melodies strangely sweet and sad, full of longing
+cries, voicing something which I dimly felt but could not understand.
+
+At the moment he was the somber Scotch Highlander, the true Celt, and as
+he bent above his instrument his black eyes glowing, his fine head
+drooping low, my heart bowed down in worship of his skill. He was my
+hero, the handsomest, most romantic figure in all my world.
+
+He played, "Maggie, Air Ye Sleepin," and the wind outside went to my
+soul. Voices wailed to me out of the illimitable hill-land forests,
+voices that pleaded:
+
+    Oh, let me in, for loud the linn
+    Goes roarin' o'er the moorland craggy.
+
+He appeared to forget us, even his young wife. His eyes looked away into
+gray storms. Vague longing ached in his throat. Life was a struggle,
+love a torment.
+
+He stopped abruptly, and put the violin into its box, fumbling with the
+catch to hide his emotion and my father broke the tense silence with a
+prosaic word. "Well, well! Look here, it's time you youngsters were
+asleep. Beckie, where are you going to put these children?"
+
+Aunt Rebecca, a trim little woman with brown eyes, looked at us
+reflectively, "Well, now, I don't know. I guess we'll have to make a bed
+for them on the floor."
+
+This was done, and for the first time in my life, I slept before an open
+fire. As I snuggled into my blankets with my face turned to the blaze,
+the darkness of the night and the denizens of the pineland wilderness to
+the north had no terrors for me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was awakened in the early light by Uncle David building the fire, and
+then came my father's call, and the hurly burly of jovial greeting from
+old and young. The tumult lasted till breakfast was called, and
+everybody who could find place sat around the table and attacked the
+venison and potatoes which formed the meal. I do not remember our
+leave-taking or the ride homeward. I bring to mind only the desolate
+cold of our own kitchen into which we tramped late in the afternoon,
+sitting in our wraps until the fire began to roar within its iron cage.
+
+Oh, winds of the winter night! Oh, firelight and the shine of tender
+eyes! How far away you seem tonight!
+
+    So faint and far,
+    Each dear face shineth as a star.
+
+Oh, you by the western sea, and you of the south beyond the reach of
+Christmas snow, do not your hearts hunger, like mine tonight for that
+Thanksgiving Day among the trees? For the glance of eyes undimmed of
+tears, for the hair untouched with gray?
+
+It all lies in the unchanging realm of the past--this land of my
+childhood. Its charm, its strange dominion cannot return save in the
+poet's reminiscent dream. No money, no railway train can take us back to
+it. It did not in truth exist--it was a magical world, born of the
+vibrant union of youth and firelight, of music and the voice of moaning
+winds--a union which can never come again to you or me, father, uncle,
+brother, till the coulee meadows bloom again unscarred of spade or
+plow.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+Winnesheik "Woods and Prairie Lands"
+
+
+Our last winter in the Coulee was given over to preparations for our
+removal but it made very little impression on my mind which was deeply
+engaged on my school work. As it was out of the question for us to
+attend the village school the elders arranged for a neighborhood school
+at the home of John Roche, who had an unusually large living room. John
+is but a shadowy figure in this chronicle but his daughter Indiana, whom
+we called "Ingie," stands out as the big girl of my class.
+
+Books were scarce in this house as well as in our own. I remember piles
+of newspapers but no bound volumes other than the Bible and certain
+small Sunday school books. All the homes of the valley were equally
+barren. My sister and I jointly possessed a very limp and soiled cloth
+edition of "Mother Goose." Our stories all came to us by way of the
+conversation of our elders. No one but grandmother Garland ever
+deliberately told us a tale--except the hired girls, and their romances
+were of such dark and gruesome texture that we often went to bed
+shivering with fear of the dark.
+
+Suddenly, unexpectedly, miraculously, I came into possession of two
+books, one called _Beauty and The Beast_, and the other _Aladdin and His
+Wonderful Lamp_. These volumes mark a distinct epoch in my life. The
+grace of the lovely Lady as she stood above the cringing Beast gave me
+my first clear notion of feminine dignity and charm. On the magic Flying
+Carpet I rose into the wide air of Oriental romance. I attended the
+building of towered cities and the laying of gorgeous feasts. I carried
+in my hand the shell from which, at the word of command, the cool clear
+water gushed. My feet were shod with winged boots, and on my head was
+the Cap of Invisibility. My body was captive in our snowbound little
+cabin but my mind ranged the golden palaces of Persia--so much I know.
+Where the wonder-working romances came from I cannot now tell but I
+think they were Christmas presents, for Christmas came this year with
+unusual splendor.
+
+The sale of the farm had put into my father's hands a considerable sum
+of money and I assume that some small part of this went to make our
+holiday glorious. In one of my stockings was a noble red and blue tin
+horse with a flowing mane and tail, and in the other was a monkey who
+could be made to climb a stick. Harriet had a new china doll and Frank a
+horn and china dog, and all the corners of our stockings were stuffed
+with nuts and candies. I hope mother got something beside the potatoes
+and onions which I remember seeing her pull out and unwrap with
+delightful humor--an old and rather pathetic joke but new to us.
+
+The snow fell deep in January and I have many glorious pictures of the
+whirling flakes outlined against the darkly wooded hills across the
+marsh. Father was busy with his team drawing off wheat and hogs and hay,
+and often came into the house at night, white with the storms through
+which he had passed. My trips to school were often interrupted by the
+cold, and the path which my sister and I trod was along the
+ever-deepening furrows made by the bob-sleighs of the farmers. Often
+when we met a team or were overtaken by one, we were forced out of the
+road into the drifts, and I can feel to this moment, the wedge of snow
+which caught in the tops of my tall boots and slowly melted into my gray
+socks.
+
+We were not afraid of the drifts, however. On the contrary mother had to
+fight to keep us from wallowing beyond our depth. I had now a sled which
+was my inseparable companion. I could not feed the hens or bring in a
+pan of chips without taking it with me. My heart swelled with pride and
+joy whenever I regarded it, and yet it was but a sober-colored thing, a
+frame of hickory built by the village blacksmith in exchange for a cord
+of wood--delivered. I took it to school one day, but Ed Roche abused it,
+took it up and threw it into the deep snow among the weeds.--Had I been
+large enough, I would have killed that boy with pleasure, but being
+small and fat and numb with cold I merely rescued my treasure as quickly
+as I could and hurried home to pour my indignant story into my mother's
+sympathetic ears.
+
+I seldom spoke of my defeats to my father for he had once said, "Fight
+your own battles, my son. If I hear of your being licked by a boy of
+anything like your own size, I'll give you another when you get home."
+He didn't believe in molly-coddling, you will perceive. His was a stern
+school, the school of self-reliance and resolution.
+
+Neighbors came in now and again to talk of our migration, and yet in
+spite of all that, in spite of our song, in spite of my father's
+preparation I had no definite premonition of coming change, and when the
+day of departure actually dawned, I was as surprised, as unprepared as
+though it had all happened without the slightest warning.
+
+So long as the kettle sang on the hearth and the clock ticked on its
+shelf, the idea of "moving" was pleasantly diverting, but when one raw
+winter day I saw the faithful clock stuffed with rags and laid on its
+back in a box, and the chairs and dishes being loaded into a big sleigh,
+I began to experience something very disturbing and very uncomfortable.
+"O'er the hills in legions, boys," did not sound so inspiring to me
+then. "The woods and prairie lands" of Iowa became of less account to me
+than the little cabin in which I had lived all my short life.
+
+Harriet and I wandered around, whining and shivering, our own misery
+augmented by the worried look on mother's face. It was February, and she
+very properly resented leaving her home for a long, cold ride into an
+unknown world, but as a dutiful wife she worked hard and silently in
+packing away her treasures, and clothing her children for the journey.
+
+At last the great sleigh-load of bedding and furniture stood ready at
+the door, the stove, still warm with cheerful service, was lifted in,
+and the time for saying good-bye to our coulee home had come.
+
+"Forward march!" shouted father and led the way with the big bob-sled,
+followed by cousin Jim and our little herd of kine, while mother and the
+children brought up the rear in a "pung" drawn by old Josh, a flea-bit
+gray.--It is probable that at the moment the master himself was slightly
+regretful.
+
+A couple of hours' march brought us to LaCrosse, the great city whose
+wonders I had longed to confront. It stood on the bank of a wide river
+and had all the value of a sea-port to me for in summertime great
+hoarsely bellowing steamboats came and went from its quay, and all about
+it rose high wooded hills. Halting there, we overlooked a wide expanse
+of snow-covered ice in the midst of which a dark, swift, threatening
+current of open water ran. Across this chasm stretching from one
+ice-field to another lay a flexible narrow bridge over which my father
+led the way toward hills of the western shore. There was something
+especially terrifying in the boiling heave of that black flood, and I
+shivered with terror as I passed it, having vividly in my mind certain
+grim stories of men whose teams had broken through and been swept
+beneath the ice never to reappear.
+
+It was a long ride to my mother, for she too was in terror of the ice,
+but at last the Minnesota bank was reached, La Crescent was passed, and
+our guide entering a narrow valley began to climb the snowy hills. All
+that was familiar was put behind; all that was strange and dark, all
+that was wonderful and unknown, spread out before us, and as we crawled
+along that slippery, slanting road, it seemed that we were entering on a
+new and marvellous world.
+
+We lodged that night in Hokah, a little town in a deep valley. The
+tavern stood near a river which flowed over its dam with resounding roar
+and to its sound I slept. Next day at noon we reached Caledonia, a town
+high on the snowy prairie. Caledonia! For years that word was a poem in
+my ear, part of a marvellous and epic march. Actually it consisted of a
+few frame houses and a grocery store. But no matter. Its name shall ring
+like a peal of bells in this book.
+
+It grew colder as we rose, and that night, the night of the second day,
+we reached Hesper and entered a long stretch of woods, and at last
+turned in towards a friendly light shining from a low house beneath a
+splendid oak.
+
+As we drew near my father raised a signal shout, "Hallo-o-o the House!"
+and a man in a long gray coat came out. "Is that thee, friend Richard?"
+he called, and my father replied, "Yea, neighbor Barley, here we are!"
+
+I do not know how this stranger whose manner of speech was so peculiar,
+came to be there, but he was and in answer to my question, father
+replied, "Barley is a Quaker," an answer which explained nothing at that
+time. Being too sleepy to pursue the matter, or to remark upon anything
+connected with the exterior, I dumbly followed Harriet into the kitchen
+which was still in possession of good Mrs. Barley.
+
+Having filled our stomachs with warm food mother put us to bed, and when
+we awoke late the next day the Barleys were gone, our own stove was in
+its place, and our faithful clock was ticking calmly on the shelf. So
+far as we knew, mother was again at home and entirely content.
+
+This farm, which was situated two miles west of the village of Hesper,
+immediately won our love. It was a glorious place for boys. Broad-armed
+white oaks stood about the yard, and to the east and north a deep forest
+invited to exploration. The house was of logs and for that reason was
+much more attractive to us than to our mother. It was, I suspect, both
+dark and cold. I know the roof was poor, for one morning I awoke to find
+a miniature peak of snow on the floor at my bedside. It was only a rude
+little frontier cabin, but it was perfectly satisfactory to me.
+
+Harriet and I learned much in the way of woodcraft during the months
+which followed. Night by night the rabbits, in countless numbers printed
+their tell-tale records in the snow, and quail and partridges nested
+beneath the down-drooping branches of the red oaks. Squirrels ran from
+tree to tree and we were soon able to distinguish and name most of the
+tracks made by the birds and small animals, and we took a never-failing
+delight in this study of the wild. In most of my excursions my sister
+was my companion. My brother was too small.
+
+All my memories of this farm are of the fiber of poetry. The silence of
+the snowy aisles of the forest, the whirring flight of partridges, the
+impudent bark of squirrels, the quavering voices of owls and coons, the
+music of the winds in the high trees,--all these impressions unite in my
+mind like parts of a woodland symphony. I soon learned to distinguish
+the raccoon's mournful call from the quavering cry of the owl, and I
+joined the hired man in hunting rabbits from under the piles of brush in
+the clearing. Once or twice some ferocious, larger animal, possibly a
+panther, hungrily yowled in the impenetrable thickets to the north, but
+this only lent a still more enthralling interest to the forest.
+
+To the east, an hour's walk through the timber, stood the village, built
+and named by the "Friends" who had a meeting house not far away, and
+though I saw much of them, I never attended their services.
+
+Our closest neighbor was a gruff loud-voiced old Norwegian and from his
+children (our playmates) we learned many curious facts. All Norwegians,
+it appeared, ate from wooden plates or wooden bowls. Their food was soup
+which they called "bean swaagen" and they were all yellow haired and
+blue-eyed.
+
+Harriet and I and one Lars Peterson gave a great deal of time to an
+attempt to train a yoke of yearling calves to draw our handsled. I call
+it an attempt, for we hardly got beyond a struggle to overcome the
+stubborn resentment of the stupid beasts, who very naturally objected to
+being forced into service before their time. Harriet was ten, I was not
+quite nine, and Lars was only twelve, hence we spent long hours in
+yoking and unyoking our unruly span. I believe we did actually haul
+several loads of firewood to the kitchen door, but at last Buck and Brin
+"turned the yoke" and broke it, and that ended our teaming.
+
+The man from whom we acquired our farm had in some way domesticated a
+flock of wild geese, and though they must have been a part of the
+farm-yard during the winter, they made no deep impression on my mind
+till in the spring when as the migratory instinct stirred in their blood
+they all rose on the surface of the water in a little pool near the barn
+and with beating wings lifted their voices in brazen clamor calling to
+their fellows driving by high overhead. At times their cries halted the
+flocks in their arrowy flight and brought them down to mix
+indistinguishably with the captive birds.
+
+The wings of these had been clipped but as the weeks went on their
+pinions grew again and one morning when I went out to see what had
+happened to them, I found the pool empty and silent. We all missed their
+fine voices and yet we could not blame them for a reassertion of their
+freeborn nature. They had gone back to their summer camping grounds on
+the lakes of the far north.
+
+Early in April my father hired a couple of raw Norwegians to assist in
+clearing the land, and although neither of these immigrants could speak
+a word of English, I was greatly interested in them. They slept in the
+granary but this did not prevent them from communicating to our
+house-maid a virulent case of smallpox. Several days passed before my
+mother realized what ailed the girl. The discovery must have horrified
+her, for she had been through an epidemic of this dread disease in
+Wisconsin, and knew its danger.
+
+It was a fearsome plague in those days, much more fatal than now, and my
+mother with three unvaccinated children, a helpless handmaid to be
+nursed, was in despair when father developed the disease and took to his
+bed. Surely it must have seemed to her as though the Lord had visited
+upon her more punishment than belonged to her, for to add the final
+touch, in the midst of all her other afflictions she was expecting the
+birth of another child.
+
+I do not know what we would have done had not a noble woman of the
+neighborhood volunteered to come in and help us. She was not a friend,
+hardly an acquaintance, and yet she served us like an angel of mercy.
+Whether she still lives or not I cannot say, but I wish to acknowledge
+here the splendid heroism which brought Mary Briggs, a stranger, into
+our stricken home at a time when all our other neighbors beat their
+horses into a mad gallop whenever forced to pass our gate.
+
+Young as I was I realized something of the burden which had fallen upon
+my mother, and when one night I was awakened from deep sleep by hearing
+her calling out in pain, begging piteously for help, I shuddered in my
+bed, realizing with childish, intuitive knowledge that she was passing
+through a cruel convulsion which could not be softened or put aside. I
+went to sleep again at last, and when I woke, I had a little sister.
+
+Harriet and I having been vaccinated, escaped with what was called the
+"verylide" but father was ill for several weeks. Fortunately he was
+spared, as we all were, the "pitting" which usually follows this dreaded
+disease, and in a week or two we children had forgotten all about it.
+Spring was upon us and the world was waiting to be explored.
+
+One of the noblest features of this farm was a large spring which boiled
+forth from the limestone rock about eighty rods north of the house, and
+this was a wonder-spot to us. There was something magical in this
+never-failing fountain, and we loved to play beside its waters. One of
+our delightful tasks was riding the horses to water at this spring, and
+I took many lessons in horsemanship on these trips.
+
+As the seeding time came on, enormous flocks of pigeons, in clouds
+which almost filled the sky, made it necessary for some one to sentinel
+the new-sown grain, and although I was but nine years of age, my father
+put a double-barrelled shotgun into my hands, and sent me out to defend
+the fields.
+
+This commission filled me with the spirit of the soldier. Proudly
+walking my rounds I menaced the flocks as they circled warily over my
+head, taking shot at them now and again as they came near enough,
+feeling as duty bound and as martial as any Roman sentry standing guard
+over a city. Up to this time I had not been allowed to carry arms,
+although I had been the companion of Den Green and Ellis Usher on their
+hunting expeditions in the coulee--now with entire discretion over my
+weapon, I loaded it, capped it and fired it, marching with sedate and
+manly tread, while little Frank at my heels, served as subordinate in
+his turn.
+
+The pigeons passed after a few days, but my warlike duties continued,
+for the ground-squirrels, called "gophers" by the settlers, were almost
+as destructive of the seed corn as the pigeons had been of the wheat.
+Day after day I patrolled the edge of the field listening to the saucy
+whistle of the striped little rascals, tracking them to their burrows
+and shooting them as they lifted their heads above the ground. I had
+moments of being sorry for them, but the sight of one digging up the
+seed, silenced my complaining conscience and I continued to slay.
+
+The school-house of this district stood out upon the prairie to the west
+a mile distant, and during May we trudged our way over a pleasant road,
+each carrying a small tin pail filled with luncheon. Here I came in
+contact with the Norwegian boys from the colony to the north, and a
+bitter feud arose (or existed) between the "Yankees," as they called us,
+and "the Norskies," as we called them. Often when we met on the road,
+showers of sticks and stones filled the air, and our hearts burned with
+the heat of savage conflict. War usually broke out at the moment of
+parting. Often after a fairly amicable half-mile together we suddenly
+split into hostile ranks, and warred with true tribal frenzy as long as
+we could find a stone or a clod to serve as missile. I had no personal
+animosity in this, I was merely a Pict willing to destroy my Angle
+enemies.
+
+As I look back upon my life on that woodland farm, it all seems very
+colorful and sweet. I am re-living days when the warm sun, falling on
+radiant slopes of grass, lit the meadow phlox and tall tiger lilies into
+flaming torches of color. I think of blackberry thickets and odorous
+grapevines and cherry trees and the delicious nuts which grew in
+profusion throughout the forest to the north. This forest which seemed
+endless and was of enchanted solemnity served as our wilderness. We
+explored it at every opportunity. We loved every day for the color it
+brought, each season for the wealth of its experience, and we welcomed
+the thought of spending all our years in this beautiful home where the
+wood and the prairie of our song did actually meet and mingle.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+We Move Again
+
+
+One day there came into our home a strange man who spoke in a fashion
+new to me. He was a middle-aged rather formal individual, dressed in a
+rough gray suit, and father alluded to him privately as "that English
+duke." I didn't know exactly what he meant by this, but our visitor's
+talk gave me a vague notion of "the old country."
+
+"My home," he said, "is near Manchester. I have come to try farming in
+the American wilderness."
+
+He was kindly, and did his best to be democratic, but we children stood
+away from him, wondering what he was doing in our house. My mother
+disliked him from the start for as he took his seat at our dinner table,
+he drew from his pocket a case in which he carried a silver fork and
+spoon and a silver-handled knife. Our cutlery was not good enough for
+him!
+
+Every family that we knew at that time used three-tined steel forks and
+my mother naturally resented the implied criticism of her table ware. I
+heard her say to my father, "If our ways don't suit your English friend
+he'd better go somewhere else for his meals."
+
+This fastidious pioneer also carried a revolver, for he believed that
+having penetrated far into a dangerous country, he was in danger, and I
+am not at all sure but that he was right, for the Minnesota woods at
+this time were filled with horse-thieves and counterfeiters, and it was
+known that many of these landhunting Englishmen carried large sums of
+gold on their persons.
+
+We resented our guest still more when we found that he was trying to buy
+our lovely farm and that father was already half-persuaded. We loved
+this farm. We loved the log house, and the oaks which sheltered it, and
+we especially valued the glorious spring and the plum trees which stood
+near it, but father was still dreaming of the free lands of the farther
+west, and early in March he sold to the Englishman and moved us all to a
+rented place some six miles directly west, in the township of Burr Oak.
+
+This was but a temporary lodging, a kind of camping place, for no sooner
+were his fields seeded than he set forth once again with a covered
+wagon, eager to explore the open country to the north and west of us.
+The wood and prairie land of Winnesheik County did not satisfy him,
+although it seemed to me then, as it does now, the fulfillment of his
+vision, the realization of our song.
+
+For several weeks he travelled through southern Minnesota and northern
+Iowa, always in search of the perfect farm, and when he returned, just
+before harvest, he was able to report that he had purchased a quarter
+section of "the best land in Mitchell County" and that after harvest we
+would all move again.
+
+If my mother resented this third removal she made no comment which I can
+now recall. I suspect that she went rather willingly this time, for her
+brother David wrote that he had also located in Mitchell County, not two
+miles from the place my father had decided upon for our future home, and
+Samantha, her younger sister, had settled in Minnesota. The circle in
+Neshonoc seemed about to break up. A mighty spreading and shifting was
+going on all over the west, and no doubt my mother accepted her part in
+it without especial protest.
+
+Our life in Burr Oak township that summer was joyous for us children. It
+seems to have been almost all sunshine and play. As I reflect upon it I
+relive many delightful excursions into the northern woods. It appears
+that Harriet and I were in continual harvest of nuts and berries. Our
+walks to school were explorations and we spent nearly every Saturday and
+Sunday in minute study of the country-side, devouring everything which
+was remotely edible. We gorged upon May-apples until we were ill, and
+munched black cherries until we were dizzy with their fumes. We
+clambered high trees to collect baskets of wild grapes which our mother
+could not use, and we garnered nuts with the insatiable greed of
+squirrels. We ate oak-shoots, fern-roots, leaves, bark,
+seed-balls,--everything!--not because we were hungry but because we
+loved to experiment, and we came home, only when hungry or worn out or
+in awe of the darkness.
+
+It was a delightful season, full of the most satisfying companionship
+and yet of the names of my playmates I can seize upon only two--the
+others have faded from the tablets of my memory. I remember Ned who
+permitted me to hold his plow, and Perry who taught me how to tame the
+half-wild colts that filled his father's pasture. Together we spent long
+days lassoing--or rather snaring--the feet of these horses and subduing
+them to the halter. We had many fierce struggles but came out of them
+all without a serious injury.
+
+Late in August my father again loaded our household goods into wagons,
+and with our small herd of cattle following, set out toward the west,
+bound once again to overtake the actual line of the middle border.
+
+This journey has an unforgettable epic charm as I look back upon it.
+Each mile took us farther and farther into the unsettled prairie until
+in the afternoon of the second day, we came to a meadow so wide that
+its western rim touched the sky without revealing a sign of man's
+habitation other than the road in which we travelled.
+
+The plain was covered with grass tall as ripe wheat and when my father
+stopped his team and came back to us and said, "Well, children, here we
+are on The Big Prairie," we looked about us with awe, so endless seemed
+this spread of wild oats and waving blue-joint.
+
+Far away dim clumps of trees showed, but no chimney was in sight, and no
+living thing moved save our own cattle and the hawks lazily wheeling in
+the air. My heart filled with awe as well as wonder. The majesty of this
+primeval world exalted me. I felt for the first time the poetry of the
+unplowed spaces. It seemed that the "herds of deer and buffalo" of our
+song might, at any moment, present themselves,--but they did not, and my
+father took no account even of the marsh fowl.
+
+"Forward march!" he shouted, and on we went.
+
+Hour after hour he pushed into the west, the heads of his tired horses
+hanging ever lower, and on my mother's face the shadow deepened, but her
+chieftain's voice cheerily urging his team lost nothing of its clarion
+resolution. He was in his element. He loved this shelterless sweep of
+prairie. This westward march entranced him, I think he would have gladly
+kept on until the snowy wall of the Rocky Mountains met his eyes, for he
+was a natural explorer.
+
+Sunset came at last, but still he drove steadily on through the sparse
+settlements. Just at nightfall we came to a beautiful little stream, and
+stopped to let the horses drink. I heard its rippling, reassuring song
+on the pebbles. Thereafter all is dim and vague to me until my mother
+called out sharply, "Wake up, children! Here we are!"
+
+Struggling to my feet I looked about me. Nothing could be seen but the
+dim form of a small house.--On every side the land melted into
+blackness, silent and without boundary.
+
+Driving into the yard, father hastily unloaded one of the wagons and
+taking mother and Harriet and Jessie drove away to spend the night with
+Uncle David who had preceded us, as I now learned, and was living on a
+farm not far away. My brother and I were left to camp as best we could
+with the hired man.
+
+Spreading a rude bed on the floor, he told us to "hop in" and in ten
+minutes we were all fast asleep.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The sound of a clattering poker awakened me next morning and when I
+opened my sleepy eyes and looked out a new world displayed itself before
+me.
+
+The cabin faced a level plain with no tree in sight. A mile away to the
+west stood a low stone house and immediately in front of us opened a
+half-section of unfenced sod. To the north, as far as I could see, the
+land billowed like a russet ocean, with scarcely a roof to fleck its
+lonely spread.--I cannot say that I liked or disliked it. I merely
+marvelled at it, and while I wandered about the yard, the hired man
+scorched some cornmeal mush in a skillet and this with some butter and
+gingerbread, made up my first breakfast in Mitchell County.
+
+An hour or two later father and mother and the girls returned and the
+work of setting up the stove and getting the furniture in place began.
+In a very short time the experienced clock was voicing its contentment
+on a new shelf, and the kettle was singing busily on its familiar stove.
+Once more and for the sixth time since her marriage, Belle Garland
+adjusted herself to a pioneer environment, comforted no doubt by the
+knowledge that David and Deborah were near and that her father was
+coming soon. No doubt she also congratulated herself on the fact that
+she had not been carried beyond the Missouri River--and that her house
+was not "surrounded by Indians who murder by night."
+
+A few hours later, while my brother and I were on the roof of the house
+with intent to peer "over the edge of the prairie" something grandly
+significant happened. Upon a low hill to the west a herd of horses
+suddenly appeared running swiftly, led by a beautiful sorrel pony with
+shining white mane. On they came, like a platoon of cavalry rushing down
+across the open sod which lay before our door. The leader moved with
+lofty and graceful action, easily out-stretching all his fellows.
+Forward they swept, their long tails floating in the wind like
+banners,--on in a great curve as if scenting danger in the smoke of our
+fire. The thunder of their feet filled me with delight. Surely, next to
+a herd of buffalo this squadron of wild horses was the most satisfactory
+evidence of the wilderness into which we had been thrust.
+
+Riding as if to intercept the leader, a solitary herder now appeared,
+mounted upon a horse which very evidently was the mate of the leader. He
+rode magnificently, and under him the lithe mare strove resolutely to
+overtake and head off the leader.--All to no purpose! The halterless
+steeds of the prairie snorted derisively at their former companion,
+bridled and saddled, and carrying the weight of a master. Swiftly they
+thundered across the sod, dropped into a ravine, and disappeared in a
+cloud of dust.
+
+Silently we watched the rider turn and ride slowly homeward. The plain
+had become our new domain, the horseman our ideal.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+Our First Winter on the Prairie
+
+
+For a few days my brother and I had little to do other than to keep the
+cattle from straying, and we used our leisure in becoming acquainted
+with the region round about.
+
+It burned deep into our memories, this wide, sunny, windy country. The
+sky so big, and the horizon line so low and so far away, made this new
+world of the plain more majestic than the world of the Coulee.--The
+grasses and many of the flowers were also new to us. On the uplands the
+herbage was short and dry and the plants stiff and woody, but in the
+swales the wild oat shook its quivers of barbed and twisted arrows, and
+the crow's foot, tall and sere, bowed softly under the feet of the wind,
+while everywhere, in the lowlands as well as on the ridges, the
+bleaching white antlers of by-gone herbivora lay scattered, testifying
+to "the herds of deer and buffalo" which once fed there. We were just a
+few years too late to see them.
+
+To the south the sections were nearly all settled upon, for in that
+direction lay the county town, but to the north and on into Minnesota
+rolled the unplowed sod, the feeding ground of the cattle, the home of
+foxes and wolves, and to the west, just beyond the highest ridges, we
+loved to think the bison might still be seen.
+
+The cabin on this rented farm was a mere shanty, a shell of pine boards,
+which needed re-enforcing to make it habitable and one day my father
+said, "Well, Hamlin, I guess you'll have to run the plow-team this
+fall. I must help neighbor Button wall up the house and I can't afford
+to hire another man."
+
+This seemed a fine commission for a lad of ten, and I drove my horses
+into the field that first morning with a manly pride which added an inch
+to my stature. I took my initial "round" at a "land" which stretched
+from one side of the quarter section to the other, in confident mood. I
+was grown up!
+
+But alas! my sense of elation did not last long. To guide a team for a
+few minutes as an experiment was one thing--to plow all day like a hired
+hand was another. It was not a chore, it was a job. It meant moving to
+and fro hour after hour, day after day, with no one to talk to but the
+horses. It meant trudging eight or nine miles in the forenoon and as
+many more in the afternoon, with less than an hour off at noon. It meant
+dragging the heavy implement around the corners, and it meant also many
+ship-wrecks, for the thick, wet stubble matted with wild buckwheat often
+rolled up between the coulter and the standard and threw the share
+completely out of the ground, making it necessary for me to halt the
+team and jerk the heavy plow backward for a new start.
+
+Although strong and active I was rather short, even for a ten-year-old,
+and to reach the plow handles I was obliged to lift my hands above my
+shoulders; and so with the guiding lines crossed over my back and my
+worn straw hat bobbing just above the cross-brace I must have made a
+comical figure. At any rate nothing like it had been seen in the
+neighborhood and the people on the road to town looking across the
+field, laughed and called to me, and neighbor Button said to my father
+in my hearing, "That chap's too young to run a plow," a judgment which
+pleased and flattered me greatly.
+
+Harriet cheered me by running out occasionally to meet me as I turned
+the nearest corner, and sometimes Frank consented to go all the way
+around, chatting breathlessly as he trotted along behind. At other times
+he was prevailed upon to bring to me a cookie and a glass of milk, a
+deed which helped to shorten the forenoon. And yet, notwithstanding all
+these ameliorations, plowing became tedious.
+
+The flies were savage, especially in the middle of the day, and the
+horses, tortured by their lances, drove badly, twisting and turning in
+their despairing rage. Their tails were continually getting over the
+lines, and in stopping to kick their tormentors from their bellies they
+often got astride the traces, and in other ways made trouble for me.
+Only in the early morning or when the sun sank low at night were they
+able to move quietly along their ways.
+
+The soil was the kind my father had been seeking, a smooth dark sandy
+loam, which made it possible for a lad to do the work of a man. Often
+the share would go the entire "round" without striking a root or a
+pebble as big as a walnut, the steel running steadily with a crisp
+craunching ripping sound which I rather liked to hear. In truth work
+would have been quite tolerable had it not been so long drawn out. Ten
+hours of it even on a fine day made about twice too many for a boy.
+
+Meanwhile I cheered myself in every imaginable way. I whistled. I sang.
+I studied the clouds. I gnawed the beautiful red skin from the seed
+vessels which hung upon the wild rose bushes, and I counted the prairie
+chickens as they began to come together in winter flocks running through
+the stubble in search of food. I stopped now and again to examine the
+lizards unhoused by the share, tormenting them to make them sweat their
+milky drops (they were curiously repulsive to me), and I measured the
+little granaries of wheat which the mice and gophers had deposited deep
+under the ground, storehouses which the plow had violated. My eyes dwelt
+enviously upon the sailing hawk, and on the passing of ducks. The
+occasional shadowy figure of a prairie wolf made me wish for Uncle David
+and his rifle.
+
+On certain days nothing could cheer me. When the bitter wind blew from
+the north, and the sky was filled with wild geese racing southward, with
+swiftly-hurrying clouds, winter seemed about to spring upon me. The
+horses' tails streamed in the wind. Flurries of snow covered me with
+clinging flakes, and the mud "gummed" my boots and trouser legs,
+clogging my steps. At such times I suffered from cold and
+loneliness--all sense of being a man evaporated. I was just a little
+boy, longing for the leisure of boyhood.
+
+Day after day, through the month of October and deep into November, I
+followed that team, turning over two acres of stubble each day. I would
+not believe this without proof, but it is true! At last it grew so cold
+that in the early morning everything was white with frost and I was
+obliged to put one hand in my pocket to keep it warm, while holding the
+plow with the other, but I didn't mind this so much, for it hinted at
+the close of autumn. I've no doubt facing the wind in this way was
+excellent discipline, but I didn't think it necessary then and my heart
+was sometimes bitter and rebellious.
+
+The soldier did not intend to be severe. As he had always been an early
+riser and a busy toiler it seemed perfectly natural and good discipline,
+that his sons should also plow and husk corn at ten years of age. He
+often told of beginning life as a "bound boy" at nine, and these stories
+helped me to perform my own tasks without whining. I feared to voice my
+weakness.
+
+At last there came a morning when by striking my heel upon the ground I
+convinced my boss that the soil was frozen too deep for the mold-board
+to break. "All right," he said, "you may lay off this forenoon."
+
+Oh, those beautiful hours of respite! With time to play or read I
+usually read, devouring anything I could lay my hands upon. Newspapers,
+whether old or new, or pasted on the wall or piled up in the
+attic,--anything in print was wonderful to me. One enthralling book,
+borrowed from Neighbor Button, was _The Female Spy_, a Tale of the
+Rebellion. Another treasure was a story called _Cast Ashore_, but this
+volume unfortunately was badly torn and fifty pages were missing so that
+I never knew, and do not know to this day, how those indomitable
+shipwrecked seamen reached their English homes. I dimly recall that one
+man carried a pet monkey on his back and that they all lived on
+"Bustards."
+
+Finally the day came when the ground rang like iron under the feet of
+the horses, and a bitter wind, raw and gusty, swept out of the
+northwest, bearing gray veils of sleet. Winter had come! Work in the
+furrow had ended. The plow was brought in, cleaned and greased to
+prevent its rusting, and while the horses munched their hay in
+well-earned holiday, father and I helped farmer Button husk the last of
+his corn.
+
+Osman Button, a quaint and interesting man of middle age, was a native
+of York State and retained many of the traditions of his old home
+strangely blent with a store of vivid memories of Colorado, Utah and
+California, for he had been one of the gold-seekers of the early
+fifties. He loved to spin yarns of "When I was in gold camps," and he
+spun them well. He was short and bent and spoke in a low voice with a
+curious nervous sniff, but his diction was notably precise and clear. He
+was a man of judgment, and a citizen of weight and influence. From O.
+Button I got my first definite notion of Bret Harte's country, and of
+the long journey which they of the ox team had made in search of
+Eldorado.
+
+His family "mostly boys and girls" was large, yet they all lived in a
+low limestone house which he had built (he said) to serve as a granary
+till he should find time to erect a suitable dwelling. In order to make
+the point dramatic, I will say that he was still living in the "granary"
+when last I called on him thirty years later!
+
+A warm friendship sprang up between him and my father, and he was often
+at our house but his gaunt and silent wife seldom accompanied him. She
+was kindly and hospitable, but a great sufferer. She never laughed, and
+seldom smiled, and so remains a pathetic figure in all my memories of
+the household.
+
+The younger Button children, Eva and Cyrus, became our companions in
+certain of our activities, but as they were both very sedate and slow of
+motion, they seldom joined us in our livelier sports. They were both
+much older than their years. Cyrus at this time was almost as venerable
+as his father, although his years were, I suppose, about seventeen.
+Albert and Lavinia, we heard, were much given to dancing and parties.
+
+One night as we were all seated around the kerosene lamp my father said,
+"Well, Belle, I suppose we'll have to take these young ones down to town
+and fit 'em out for school." These words so calmly uttered filled our
+minds with visions of new boots, new caps and new books, and though we
+went obediently to bed we hardly slept, so excited were we, and at
+breakfast next morning not one of us could think of food. All our
+desires converged upon the wondrous expedition--our first visit to town.
+
+Our only carriage was still the lumber wagon but it had now two spring
+seats, one for father, mother and Jessie, and one for Harriet, Frank and
+myself. No one else had anything better, hence we had no sense of being
+poorly outfitted. We drove away across the frosty prairie toward
+Osage--moderately comfortable and perfectly happy.
+
+Osage was only a little town, a village of perhaps twelve hundred
+inhabitants, but to me as we drove down its Main Street, it was almost
+as impressive as LaCrosse had been. Frank clung close to father, and
+mother led Jessie, leaving Harriet and me to stumble over nail-kegs and
+dodge whiffle trees what time our eyes absorbed jars of pink and white
+candy, and sought out boots and buckskin mittens. Whenever Harriet spoke
+she whispered, and we pointed at each shining object with cautious
+care.--Oh! the marvellous exotic smells! Odors of salt codfish and
+spices, calico and kerosene, apples and ginger-snaps mingle in my mind
+as I write.
+
+Each of us soon carried a candy marble in his or her cheek (as a
+chipmunk carries a nut) and Frank and I stood like sturdy hitching posts
+whilst the storekeeper with heavy hands screwed cotton-plush caps upon
+our heads,--but the most exciting moment, the crowning joy of the day,
+came with the buying of our new boots.--If only father had not insisted
+on our taking those which were a size too large for us!
+
+They were real boots. No one but a Congressman wore "gaiters" in those
+days. War fashions still dominated the shoe-shops, and high-topped
+cavalry boots were all but universal. They were kept in boxes under the
+counter or ranged in rows on a shelf and were of all weights and degrees
+of fineness. The ones I selected had red tops with a golden moon in the
+center but my brother's taste ran to blue tops decorated with a golden
+flag. Oh! that deliciously oily _new_ smell! My heart glowed every time
+I looked at mine. I was especially pleased because they did _not_ have
+copper toes. Copper toes belonged to little boys. A youth who had
+plowed seventy acres of land could not reasonably be expected to dress
+like a child.--How smooth and delightfully stiff they felt on my feet.
+
+Then came our new books, a McGuffey reader, a Mitchell geography, a
+Ray's arithmetic, and a slate. The books had a delightful new smell
+also, and there was singular charm in the smooth surface of the unmarked
+slates. I was eager to carve my name in the frame. At last with our
+treasures under the seat (so near that we could feel them), with our
+slates and books in our laps we jolted home, dreaming of school and
+snow. To wade in the drifts with our fine high-topped boots was now our
+desire.
+
+It is strange but I cannot recall how my mother looked on this trip.
+Even my father's image is faint and vague (I remember only his keen
+eagle-gray terrifying eyes), but I can see every acre of that rented
+farm. I can tell you exactly how the house looked. It was an unpainted
+square cottage and stood bare on the sod at the edge of Dry Run ravine.
+It had a small lean-to on the eastern side and a sitting room and
+bedroom below. Overhead was a low unplastered chamber in which we
+children slept. As it grew too cold to use the summer kitchen we cooked,
+ate and lived in the square room which occupied the entire front of the
+two story upright, and which was, I suppose, sixteen feet square. As our
+attic was warmed only by the stove-pipe, we older children of a frosty
+morning made extremely simple and hurried toilets. On very cold days we
+hurried down stairs to dress beside the kitchen fire.
+
+Our furniture was of the rudest sort. I cannot recall a single piece in
+our house or in our neighbors' houses that had either beauty or
+distinction. It was all cheap and worn, for this was the middle border,
+and nearly all our neighbors had moved as we had done in covered
+wagons. Farms were new, houses were mere shanties, and money was scarce.
+"War times" and "war prices" were only just beginning to change. Our
+clothing was all cheap and ill fitting. The women and children wore
+home-made "cotton flannel" underclothing for the most part, and the men
+wore rough, ready-made suits over which they drew brown denim blouses or
+overalls to keep them clean.
+
+Father owned a fine buffalo overcoat (so much of his song's promise was
+redeemed) and we possessed two buffalo robes for use in our winter
+sleigh, but mother had only a sad coat and a woolen shawl. How she kept
+warm I cannot now understand--I think she stayed at home on cold days.
+
+All of the boys wore long trousers, and even my eight year old brother
+looked like a miniature man with his full-length overalls, high-topped
+boots and real suspenders. As for me I carried a bandanna in my hip
+pocket and walked with determined masculine stride.
+
+My mother, like all her brothers and sisters, was musical and played the
+violin--or fiddle, as we called it,--and I have many dear remembrances
+of her playing. _Napoleon's March_, _Money Musk_, _The Devil's Dream_
+and half-a-dozen other simple tunes made up her repertoire. It was very
+crude music of course but it added to the love and admiration in which
+her children always held her. Also in some way we had fallen heir to a
+Prince melodeon--one that had belonged to the McClintocks, but only my
+sister played on that.
+
+Once at a dance in neighbor Button's house, mother took the "dare" of
+the fiddler and with shy smile played _The Fisher's Hornpipe_ or some
+other simple melody and was mightily cheered at the close of it, a brief
+performance which she refused to repeat. Afterward she and my father
+danced and this seemed a very wonderful performance, for to us they were
+"old"--far past such frolicking, although he was but forty and she
+thirty-one!
+
+At this dance I heard, for the first time, the local professional
+fiddler, old Daddy Fairbanks, as quaint a character as ever entered
+fiction, for he was not only butcher and horse doctor but a renowned
+musician as well. Tall, gaunt and sandy, with enormous nose and sparse
+projecting teeth, he was to me the most enthralling figure at this dance
+and his queer "Calls" and his "York State" accent filled us all with
+delight. "_Ally_ man left," "Chassay _by_ your pardners," "Dozy-do"
+were some of the phrases he used as he played _Honest John_ and
+_Haste to the Wedding_. At times he sang his calls in high nasal chant,
+"_First_ lady lead to the _right_, deedle, deedle dum-dum--
+_gent_ foller after--dally-deedle-do-do--_three_ hands round"--and
+everybody laughed with frank enjoyment of his words and action.
+
+It was a joy to watch him "start the set." With fiddle under his chin he
+took his seat in a big chair on the kitchen table in order to command
+the floor. "Farm on, farm on!" he called disgustedly. "Lively now!" and
+then, when all the couples were in position, with one mighty No. 14 boot
+uplifted, with bow laid to strings he snarled, "Already--GELANG!" and with
+a thundering crash his foot came down, "Honors TEW your pardners--right and
+left FOUR!" And the dance was on!
+
+I suspect his fiddlin' was not even "middlin'," but he beat time fairly
+well and kept the dancers somewhere near to rhythm, and so when his
+ragged old cap went round he often got a handful of quarters for his
+toil. He always ate two suppers, one at the beginning of the party and
+another at the end. He had a high respect for the skill of my Uncle
+David and was grateful to him and other better musicians for their
+non-interference with his professional engagements.
+
+The school-house which was to be the center of our social life stood on
+the bare prairie about a mile to the southwest and like thousands of
+other similar buildings in the west, had not a leaf to shade it in
+summer nor a branch to break the winds of savage winter. "There's been a
+good deal of talk about setting out a wind-break," neighbor Button
+explained to us, "but nothing has as yet been done." It was merely a
+square pine box painted a glaring white on the outside and a desolate
+drab within; at least drab was the original color, but the benches were
+mainly so greasy and hacked that original intentions were obscured. It
+had two doors on the eastern end and three windows on each side.
+
+A long square stove (standing on slender legs in a puddle of bricks), a
+wooden chair, and a rude table in one corner, for the use of the
+teacher, completed the movable furniture. The walls were roughly
+plastered and the windows had no curtains.
+
+It was a barren temple of the arts even to the residents of Dry Run, and
+Harriet and I, stealing across the prairie one Sunday morning to look
+in, came away vaguely depressed. We were fond of school and never missed
+a day if we could help it, but this neighborhood center seemed small and
+bleak and poor.
+
+With what fear, what excitement we approached the door on that first
+day, I can only faintly indicate. All the scholars were strange to me
+except Albert and Cyrus Button, and I was prepared for rough treatment.
+However, the experience was not so harsh as I had feared. True, Rangely
+Field did throw me down and wash my face in snow, and Jack Sweet tripped
+me up once or twice, but I bore these indignities with such grace and
+could command, and soon made a place for myself among the boys.
+
+Burton Babcock was my seat-mate, and at once became my chum. You will
+hear much of him in this chronicle. He was two years older than I and
+though pale and slim was unusually swift and strong for his age. He was
+a silent lad, curiously timid in his classes and not at ease with his
+teachers.
+
+I cannot recover much of that first winter of school. It was not an
+experience to remember for its charm. Not one line of grace, not one
+touch of color relieved the room's bare walls or softened its harsh
+windows. Perhaps this very barrenness gave to the poetry in our readers
+an appeal that seems magical, certainly it threw over the faces of
+Frances Babcock and Mary Abbie Gammons a lovelier halo.--They were "the
+big girls" of the school, that is to say, they were seventeen or
+eighteen years old,--and Frances was the special terror of the teacher,
+a pale and studious pigeon-toed young man who was preparing for college.
+
+In spite of the cold, the boys played open air games all winter. "Dog
+and Deer," "Dare Gool" and "Fox and Geese" were our favorite diversions,
+and the wonder is that we did not all die of pneumonia, for we battled
+so furiously during each recess that we often came in wet with
+perspiration and coughing so hard that for several minutes recitations
+were quite impossible.--But we were a hardy lot and none of us seemed
+the worse for our colds.
+
+There was not much chivalry in the school--quite the contrary, for it
+was dominated by two or three big rough boys and the rest of us took our
+tone from them. To protect a girl, to shield her from remark or
+indignity required a good deal of bravery and few of us were strong
+enough to do it. Girls were foolish, ridiculous creatures, set apart to
+be laughed at or preyed upon at will. To shame them was a great
+joke.--How far I shared in these barbarities I cannot say but that I did
+share in them I know, for I had very little to do with my sister Harriet
+after crossing the school-house yard. She kept to her tribe as I to
+mine.
+
+This winter was made memorable also by a "revival" which came over the
+district with sudden fury. It began late in the winter--fortunately, for
+it ended all dancing and merry-making for the time. It silenced Daddy
+Fairbanks' fiddle and subdued my mother's glorious voice to a wail. A
+cloud of puritanical gloom settled upon almost every household. Youth
+and love became furtive and hypocritic.
+
+The evangelist, one of the old-fashioned shouting, hysterical,
+ungrammatical, gasping sort, took charge of the services, and in his
+exhortations phrases descriptive of lakes of burning brimstone and ages
+of endless torment abounded. Some of the figures of speech and violent
+gestures of the man still linger in my mind, but I will not set them
+down on paper. They are too dreadful to perpetuate. At times he roared
+with such power that he could have been heard for half a mile.
+
+And yet we went, night by night, mother, father, Jessie, all of us. It
+was our theater. Some of the roughest characters in the neighborhood
+rose and professed repentance, for a season, even old Barton, the
+profanest man in the township, experienced a "change of heart."
+
+We all enjoyed the singing, and joined most lustily in the tunes. Even
+little Jessie learned to sing _Heavenly Wings_, _There is a Fountain
+filled with Blood_, and _Old Hundred_.
+
+As I peer back into that crowded little schoolroom, smothering hot and
+reeking with lamp smoke, and recall the half-lit, familiar faces of the
+congregation, it all has the quality of a vision, something experienced
+in another world. The preacher, leaping, sweating, roaring till the
+windows rattle, the mothers with sleeping babes in their arms, the
+sweet, strained faces of the girls, the immobile wondering men, are
+spectral shadows, figures encountered in the phantasmagoria of
+disordered sleep.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+The Homestead on the Knoll
+
+
+Spring came to us that year with such sudden beauty, such sweet
+significance after our long and depressing winter, that it seemed a
+release from prison, and when at the close of a warm day in March we
+heard, pulsing down through the golden haze of sunset, the mellow _boom,
+boom, boom_ of the prairie cock our hearts quickened, for this, we were
+told, was the certain sign of spring.
+
+Day by day the call of this gay herald of spring was taken up by others
+until at last the whole horizon was ringing with a sunrise symphony of
+exultant song. "_Boom, boom, boom!_" called the roosters; "_cutta,
+cutta, wha-whoop-squaw, squawk!_" answered the hens as they fluttered
+and danced on the ridges--and mingled with their jocund hymn we heard at
+last the slender, wistful piping of the prairie lark.
+
+With the coming of spring my duties as a teamster returned. My father
+put me in charge of a harrow, and with old Doll and Queen--quiet and
+faithful span--I drove upon the field which I had plowed the previous
+October, there to plod to and fro behind my drag, while in the sky above
+my head and around me on the mellowing soil the life of the season,
+thickened.
+
+Aided by my team I was able to study at close range the prairie roosters
+as they assembled for their parade. They had regular "stamping grounds"
+on certain ridges, Where the soil was beaten smooth by the pressure of
+their restless feet. I often passed within a few yards of them.--I can
+see them now, the cocks leaping and strutting, with trailing wings and
+down-thrust heads, displaying their bulbous orange-colored neck
+ornaments while the hens flutter and squawk in silly delight. All the
+charm and mystery of that prairie world comes back to me, and I ache
+with an illogical desire to recover it and hold it, and preserve it in
+some form for my children.--It seems an injustice that they should miss
+it, and yet it is probable that they are getting an equal joy of life,
+an equal exaltation from the opening flowers of the single lilac bush in
+our city back-yard or from an occasional visit to the lake in Central
+Park.
+
+Dragging is even more wearisome than plowing, in some respects, for you
+have no handles to assist you and your heels sinking deep into the soft
+loam bring such unwonted strain upon the tendons of your legs that you
+can scarcely limp home to supper, and it seems that you cannot possibly
+go on another day,--but you do--at least I did.
+
+There was something relentless as the weather in the way my soldier
+father ruled his sons, and yet he was neither hard-hearted nor
+unsympathetic. The fact is easily explained. His own boyhood had been
+task-filled and he saw nothing unnatural in the regular employment of
+his children. Having had little play-time himself, he considered that we
+were having a very comfortable boyhood. Furthermore the country was new
+and labor scarce. Every hand and foot must count under such conditions.
+
+There are certain ameliorations to child-labor on a farm. Air and
+sunshine and food are plentiful. I never lacked for meat or clothing,
+and mingled with my records of toil are exquisite memories of the joy I
+took in following the changes in the landscape, in the notes of birds,
+and in the play of small animals on the sunny soil.
+
+There were no pigeons on the prairie but enormous flocks of ducks came
+sweeping northward, alighting at sunset to feed in the fields of
+stubble. They came in countless myriads and often when they settled to
+earth they covered acres of meadow like some prodigious cataract from
+the sky. When alarmed they rose with a sound like the rumbling of
+thunder.
+
+At times the lines of their cloud-like flocks were so unending that
+those in the front rank were lost in the northern sky, while those in
+the rear were but dim bands beneath the southern sun.--I tried many
+times to shoot some of them, but never succeeded, so wary were they.
+Brant and geese in formal flocks followed and to watch these noble birds
+pushing their arrowy lines straight into the north always gave me
+special joy. On fine days they flew high--so high they were but faint
+lines against the shining clouds.
+
+I learned to imitate their cries, and often caused the leaders to turn,
+to waver in their course as I uttered my resounding call.
+
+The sand-hill crane came last of all, loitering north in lonely easeful
+flight. Often of a warm day, I heard his sovereign cry falling from the
+azure dome, so high, so far his form could not be seen, so close to the
+sun that my eyes could not detect his solitary, majestic circling sweep.
+He came after the geese. He was the herald of summer. His brazen,
+reverberating call will forever remain associated in my mind with
+mellow, pulsating earth, springing grass and cloudless glorious May-time
+skies.
+
+As my team moved to and fro over the field, ground sparrows rose in
+countless thousands, flinging themselves against the sky like grains of
+wheat from out a sower's hand, and their chatter fell upon me like the
+voices of fairy sprites, invisible and multitudinous. Long swift narrow
+flocks of a bird we called "the prairie-pigeon" swooped over the swells
+on sounding wing, winding so close to the ground, they seemed at times
+like slender air-borne serpents,--and always the brown lark whistled as
+if to cheer my lonely task.
+
+Back and forth across the wide field I drove, while the sun crawled
+slowly up the sky. It was tedious work and I was always hungry by nine,
+and famished at ten. Thereafter the sun appeared to stand still. My
+chest caved in and my knees trembled with weakness, but when at last the
+white flag fluttering from a chamber window summoned to the mid-day
+meal, I started with strength miraculously renewed and called,
+"_Dinner!_" to the hired hand. Unhitching my team, with eager haste I
+climbed upon old Queen, and rode at ease toward the barn.
+
+Oh, it was good to enter the kitchen, odorous with fresh biscuit and hot
+coffee! We all ate like dragons, devouring potatoes and salt pork
+without end, till mother mildly remarked, "Boys, boys! Don't 'founder'
+yourselves!"
+
+From such a meal I withdrew torpid as a gorged snake, but luckily I had
+half an hour in which to get my courage back,--and besides, there was
+always the stirring power of father's clarion call. His energy appeared
+superhuman to me. I was in awe of him. He kept track of everything,
+seemed hardly to sleep and never complained of weariness. Long before
+the nooning was up, (or so it seemed to me) he began to shout: "Time's
+up, boys. Grab a root!"
+
+And so, lame, stiff and sore, with the sinews of my legs shortened, so
+that my knees were bent like an old man's, I hobbled away to the barn
+and took charge of my team. Once in the field, I felt better. A subtle
+change, a mellower charm came over the afternoon earth. The ground was
+warmer, the sky more genial, the wind more amiable, and before I had
+finished my second "round" my joints were moderately pliable and my
+sinews relaxed.
+
+Nevertheless the temptation to sit on the corner of the harrow and dream
+the moments away was very great, and sometimes as I laid my tired body
+down on the tawny, sunlit grass at the edge of the field, and gazed up
+at the beautiful clouds sailing by, I wished for leisure to explore
+their purple valleys.--The wind whispered in the tall weeds, and sighed
+in the hazel bushes. The dried blades touching one another in the
+passing winds, spoke to me, and the gophers, glad of escape from their
+dark, underground prisons, chirped a cheery greeting. Such respites were
+strangely sweet.
+
+So day by day, as I walked my monotonous round upon the ever mellowing
+soil, the prairie spring unrolled its beauties before me. I saw the last
+goose pass on to the north, and watched the green grass creeping up the
+sunny slopes. I answered the splendid challenge of the loitering crane,
+and studied the ground sparrow building her grassy nest. The prairie
+hens began to seek seclusion in the swales, and the pocket gopher,
+busily mining the sod, threw up his purple-brown mounds of cool fresh
+earth. Larks, blue-birds and king-birds followed the robins, and at last
+the full tide of May covered the world with luscious green.
+
+Harriet and Frank returned to school but I was too valuable to be
+spared. The unbroken land of our new farm demanded the plow and no
+sooner was the planting on our rented place finished than my father
+began the work of fencing and breaking the sod of the homestead which
+lay a mile to the south, glowing like a garden under the summer sun. One
+day late in May my uncle David (who had taken a farm not far away),
+drove over with four horses hitched to a big breaking plow and together
+with my father set to work overturning the primeval sward whereon we
+were to be "lords of the soil."
+
+I confess that as I saw the tender plants and shining flowers bow
+beneath the remorseless beam, civilization seemed a sad business, and
+yet there was something epic, something large-gestured and splendid in
+the "breaking" season. Smooth, glossy, almost unwrinkled the thick
+ribbon of jet-black sod rose upon the share and rolled away from the
+mold-board's glistening curve to tuck itself upside down into the furrow
+behind the horse's heels, and the picture which my uncle made, gave me
+pleasure in spite of the sad changes he was making.
+
+The land was not all clear prairie and every ounce of David's great
+strength was required to guide that eighteen-inch plow as it went
+ripping and snarling through the matted roots of the hazel thickets, and
+sometimes my father came and sat on the beam in order to hold the
+coulter to its work, while the giant driver braced himself to the shock
+and the four horses strained desperately at their traces. These contests
+had the quality of a wrestling match but the men always won. My own job
+was to rake and burn the brush which my father mowed with a heavy
+scythe.--Later we dug postholes and built fences but each day was spent
+on the new land.
+
+Around us, on the swells, gray gophers whistled, and the nesting plover
+quaveringly called. Blackbirds clucked in the furrow and squat badgers
+watched with jealous eye the plow's inexorable progress toward their
+dens. The weather was perfect June. Fleecy clouds sailed like snowy
+galleons from west to east, the wind was strong but kind, and we worked
+in a glow of satisfied ownership.
+
+Many rattlesnakes ("massasaugas" Mr. Button called them), inhabited the
+moist spots and father and I killed several as we cleared the ground.
+Prairie wolves lurked in the groves and swales, but as foot by foot and
+rod by rod, the steady steel rolled the grass and the hazel brush under,
+all of these wild things died or hurried away, never to return. Some
+part of this tragedy I was able even then to understand and regret.
+
+At last the wide "quarter section" lay upturned, black to the sun and
+the garden that had bloomed and fruited for millions of years, waiting
+for man, lay torn and ravaged. The tender plants, the sweet flowers, the
+fragrant fruits, the busy insects, all the swarming lives which had been
+native here for untold centuries were utterly destroyed. It was sad and
+yet it was not all loss, even to my thinking, for I realized that over
+this desolation the green wheat would wave and the corn silks shed their
+pollen. It was not precisely the romantic valley of our song, but it was
+a rich and promiseful plot and my father seemed entirely content.
+
+Meanwhile, on a little rise of ground near the road, neighbor Gammons
+and John Bowers were building our next home. It did not in the least
+resemble the foundation of an everlasting family seat, but it deeply
+excited us all. It was of pine and had the usual three rooms below and a
+long garret above and as it stood on a plain, bare to the winds, my
+father took the precaution of lining it with brick to hold it down. It
+was as good as most of the dwellings round about us but it stood naked
+on the sod, devoid of grace as a dry goods box. Its walls were rough
+plaster, its floor of white pine, its furniture poor, scanty and worn.
+There was a little picture on the face of the clock, a chromo on the
+wall, and a printed portrait of General Grant--nothing more. It was
+home by reason of my mother's brave and cheery presence, and the prattle
+of Jessie's clear voice filled it with music. Dear child,--with her it
+was always spring!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+School Life
+
+
+Our new house was completed during July but we did not move into it till
+in September. There was much to be done in way of building sheds,
+granaries and corn-cribs and in this work father was both carpenter and
+stone-mason. An amusing incident comes to my mind in connection with the
+digging of our well.
+
+Uncle David and I were "tending mason," and father was down in the well
+laying or trying to lay the curbing. It was a tedious and difficult job
+and he was about to give it up in despair when one of our neighbors, a
+quaint old Englishman named Barker, came driving along. He was one of
+these men who take a minute inquisitive interest in the affairs of
+others; therefore he pulled his team to a halt and came in.
+
+Peering into the well he drawled out, "Hello, Garland. W'at ye doin'
+down there?"
+
+"Tryin' to lay a curb," replied my father lifting a gloomy face, "and I
+guess it's too complicated for me."
+
+"Nothin' easier," retorted the old man with a wink at my uncle, "jest
+putt two a-top o' one and one a-toppo two--and the big eend out,"--and
+with a broad grin on his red face he went back to his team and drove
+away.
+
+My father afterwards said, "I saw the whole process in a flash of light.
+He had given me all the rule I needed. I laid the rest of that wall
+without a particle of trouble."
+
+Many times after this Barker stopped to offer advice but he never quite
+equalled the startling success of his rule for masonry.
+
+The events of this harvest, even the process of moving into the new
+house, are obscured in my mind by the clouds of smoke which rose from
+calamitous fires all over the west. It was an unprecedentedly dry season
+so that not merely the prairie, but many weedy cornfields burned. I had
+a good deal of time to meditate upon this for I was again the plow-boy.
+Every day I drove away from the rented farm to the new land where I was
+cross-cutting the breaking, and the thickening haze through which the
+sun shone with a hellish red glare, produced in me a growing uneasiness
+which became terror when the news came to us that Chicago was on fire.
+It seemed to me then that the earth was about to go up in a flaming
+cloud just as my grandad had so often prophesied.
+
+This general sense of impending disaster was made keenly personal by the
+destruction of uncle David's stable with all his horses. This building
+like most of the barns of the region was not only roofed with straw but
+banked with straw, and it burned so swiftly that David was trapped in a
+stall while trying to save one of his teams. He saved himself by
+burrowing like a gigantic mole through the side of the shed, and so,
+hatless, covered with dust and chaff, emerged as if from a fiery burial
+after he had been given up for dead.
+
+This incident combined with others so filled my childish mind that I
+lived in apprehension of similar disaster. I feared the hot wind which
+roared up from the south, and I never entered our own stable in the
+middle of the day without a sense of danger. Then came the rains--the
+blessed rains--and put an end to my fears.
+
+In a week we had forgotten all the "conflagrations" except that in
+Chicago. There was something grandiose and unforgettable in the tales
+which told of the madly fleeing crowds in the narrow streets. These
+accounts pushed back the walls of my universe till its far edge included
+the ruined metropolis whose rebuilding was of the highest importance to
+us, for it was not only the source of all our supplies, but the great
+central market to which we sent our corn and hogs and wheat.
+
+My world was splendidly romantic. It was bounded on the west by THE
+PLAINS with their Indians and buffalo; on the north by THE GREAT WOODS,
+filled with thieves and counterfeiters; on the south by OSAGE AND CHICAGO;
+and on the east by HESPER, ONALASKA and BOSTON. A luminous trail ran from
+Dry Run Prairie to Neshonoc--all else was "chaos and black night."
+
+For seventy days I walked behind my plow on the new farm while my father
+finished the harvest on the rented farm and moved to the house on the
+knoll. It was lonely work for a boy of eleven but there were frequent
+breaks in the monotony and I did not greatly suffer. I disliked
+cross-cutting for the reason that the unrotted sods would often pile up
+in front of the coulter and make me a great deal of trouble. There is a
+certain pathos in the sight of that small boy tugging and kicking at the
+stubborn turf in the effort to free his plow. Such misfortunes loom
+large in a lad's horizon.
+
+One of the interludes, and a lovely one, was given over to gathering the
+hay from one of the wild meadows to the north of us. Another was the
+threshing from the shock on the rented farm. This was the first time we
+had seen this done and it interested us keenly. A great many teams were
+necessary and the crew of men was correspondingly large. Uncle David was
+again the thresher with a fine new separator, and I would have enjoyed
+the season with almost perfect contentment had it not been for the fact
+that I was detailed to hold sacks for Daddy Fairbanks who was the
+measurer.
+
+Our first winter had been without much wind but our second taught us the
+meaning of the word "blizzard" which we had just begun to hear about.
+The winds of Wisconsin were "gentle zephyrs" compared to the blasts
+which now swept down over the plain to hammer upon our desolate little
+cabin and pile the drifts around our sheds and granaries, and even my
+pioneer father was forced to admit that the hills of Green's Coulee had
+their uses after all.
+
+One such storm which leaped upon us at the close of a warm and beautiful
+day in February lasted for two days and three nights, making life on the
+open prairie impossible even to the strongest man. The thermometer fell
+to thirty degrees below zero and the snow-laden air moving at a rate of
+eighty miles an hour pressed upon the walls of our house with giant
+power. The sky of noon was darkened, so that we moved in a pallid
+half-light, and the windows thick with frost shut us in as if with gray
+shrouds.
+
+Hour after hour those winds and snows in furious battle, howled and
+roared and whistled around our frail shelter, slashing at the windows
+and piping on the chimney, till it seemed as if the Lord Sun had been
+wholly blotted out and that the world would never again be warm. Twice
+each day my father made a desperate sally toward the stable to feed the
+imprisoned cows and horses or to replenish our fuel--for the remainder
+of the long pallid day he sat beside the fire with gloomy face. Even his
+indomitable spirit was awed by the fury of that storm.
+
+So long and so continuously did those immitigable winds howl in our ears
+that their tumult persisted, in imagination, when on the third morning,
+we thawed holes in the thickened rime of the window panes and looked
+forth on a world silent as a marble sea and flaming with sunlight. My
+own relief was mingled with surprise--surprise to find the landscape so
+unchanged.
+
+True, the yard was piled high with drifts and the barns were almost lost
+to view but the far fields and the dark lines of Burr Oak Grove remained
+unchanged.
+
+We met our school-mates that day, like survivors of shipwreck, and for
+many days we listened to gruesome stories of disaster, tales of stages
+frozen deep in snow with all their passengers sitting in their seats,
+and of herders with their silent flocks around them, lying stark as
+granite among the hazel bushes in which they had sought shelter. It was
+long before we shook off the awe with which this tempest filled our
+hearts.
+
+The school-house which stood at the corner of our new farm was less than
+half a mile away, and yet on many of the winter days which followed, we
+found it quite far enough. Hattie was now thirteen, Frank nine and I a
+little past eleven but nothing, except a blizzard such as I have
+described, could keep us away from school. Facing the cutting wind,
+wallowing through the drifts, battling like small intrepid animals, we
+often arrived at the door moaning with pain yet unsubdued, our ears
+frosted, our toes numb in our boots, to meet others in similar case
+around the roaring hot stove.
+
+Often after we reached the school-house another form of suffering
+overtook us in the "thawing out" process. Our fingers and toes, swollen
+with blood, ached and itched, and our ears burned. Nearly all of us
+carried sloughing ears and scaling noses. Some of the pupils came two
+miles against these winds.
+
+The natural result of all this exposure was of course, chilblains! Every
+foot in the school was more or less touched with this disease to which
+our elders alluded as if it were an amusing trifle, but to us it was no
+joke.
+
+After getting thoroughly warmed up, along about the middle of the
+forenoon, there came into our feet a most intense itching and burning
+and aching, a sensation so acute that keeping still was impossible, and
+all over the room an uneasy shuffling and drumming arose as we pounded
+our throbbing heels against the floor or scraped our itching toes
+against the edge of our benches. The teacher understood and was kind
+enough to overlook this disorder.
+
+The wonder is that any of us lived through that winter, for at recess,
+no matter what the weather might be we flung ourselves out of doors to
+play "fox and geese" or "dare goal," until, damp with perspiration, we
+responded to the teacher's bell, and came pouring back into the entry
+ways to lay aside our wraps for another hour's study.
+
+Our readers were almost the only counterchecks to the current of
+vulgarity and baseness which ran through the talk of the older boys, and
+I wish to acknowledge my deep obligation to Professor McGuffey, whoever
+he may have been, for the dignity and literary grace of his selections.
+From the pages of his readers I learned to know and love the poems of
+Scott, Byron, Southey, Wordsworth and a long line of the English
+masters. I got my first taste of Shakespeare from the selected scenes
+which I read in these books.
+
+With terror as well as delight I rose to read _Lochiel's Warning_, _The
+Battle of Waterloo_ or _The Roman Captive_. Marco Bozzaris and William
+Tell were alike glorious to me. I soon knew not only my own reader, the
+fourth, but all the selections in the fifth and sixth as well. I could
+follow almost word for word the recitations of the older pupils and at
+such times I forgot my squat little body and my mop of hair, and became
+imaginatively a page in the train of Ivanhoe, or a bowman in the army
+of Richard the Lion Heart battling the Saracen in the Holy Land.
+
+With a high ideal of the way in which these grand selections should be
+read, I was scared almost voiceless when it came my turn to read them
+before the class. "STRIKE FOR YOUR ALTARS AND YOUR FIRES. STRIKE FOR
+THE GREEN GRAVES OF YOUR SIRES--GOD AND YOUR NATIVE LAND," always
+reduced me to a trembling breathlessness. The sight of the emphatic
+print was a call to the best that was in me and yet I could not meet the
+test. Excess of desire to do it just right often brought a ludicrous
+gasp and I often fell back into my seat in disgrace, the titter of the
+girls adding to my pain.
+
+Then there was the famous passage, "Did ye not hear it?" and the
+careless answer, "No, it was but the wind or the car rattling o'er the
+stony street."--I knew exactly how those opposing emotions should be
+expressed but to do it after I rose to my feet was impossible. Burton
+was even more terrified than I. Stricken blind as well as dumb he
+usually ended by helplessly staring at the words which, I conceive, had
+suddenly become a blur to him.
+
+No matter, we were taught to feel the force of these poems and to
+reverence the genius that produced them, and that was worth while.
+Falstaff and Prince Hal, Henry and his wooing of Kate, Wolsey and his
+downfall, Shylock and his pound of flesh all became a part of our
+thinking and helped us to measure the large figures of our own
+literature, for Whittier, Bryant and Longfellow also had place in these
+volumes. It is probable that Professor McGuffey, being a Southern man,
+did not value New England writers as highly as my grandmother did,
+nevertheless _Thanatopsis_ was there and _The Village Blacksmith_, and
+extracts from _The Deer Slayer_ and _The Pilot_ gave us a notion that
+in Cooper we had a novelist of weight and importance, one to put beside
+Scott and Dickens.
+
+A by-product of my acquaintance with one of the older boys was a stack
+of copies of the _New York Weekly_, a paper filled with stories of noble
+life in England and hair-breadth escapes on the plain, a shrewd mixture,
+designed to meet the needs of the entire membership of a prairie
+household. The pleasure I took in these tales should fill me with shame,
+but it doesn't--I rejoice in the memory of it.
+
+I soon began, also, to purchase and trade "Beadle's Dime Novels" and, to
+tell the truth, I took an exquisite delight in _Old Sleuth_ and _Jack
+Harkaway_. My taste was catholic. I ranged from _Lady Gwendolin_ to
+_Buckskin Bill_ and so far as I can now distinguish one was quite as
+enthralling as the other. It is impossible for any print to be as
+magical to any boy these days as those weeklies were to me in 1871.
+
+One day a singular test was made of us all. Through some agency now lost
+to me my father was brought to subscribe for _The Hearth and Home_ or
+some such paper for the farmer, and in this I read my first chronicle of
+everyday life.
+
+In the midst of my dreams of lords and ladies, queens and dukes, I found
+myself deeply concerned with backwoods farming, spelling schools,
+protracted meetings and the like familiar homely scenes. This serial
+(which involved my sister and myself in many a spat as to who should
+read it first) was _The Hoosier Schoolmaster_, by Edward Eggleston, and
+a perfectly successful attempt to interest western readers in a story of
+the middle border.
+
+To us "Mandy" and "Bud Means," "Ralph Hartsook," the teacher, "Little
+Shocky" and sweet patient "Hannah," were as real as Cyrus Button and
+Daddy Fairbanks. We could hardly wait for the next number of the paper,
+so concerned were we about "Hannah" and "Ralph." We quoted old lady
+Means and we made bets on "Bud" in his fight with the villainous drover.
+I hardly knew where Indiana was in those days, but Eggleston's
+characters were near neighbors.
+
+The illustrations were dreadful, even in my eyes, but the artist
+contrived to give a slight virginal charm to Hannah and a certain
+childish sweetness to Shocky, so that we accepted the more than mortal
+ugliness of old man Means and his daughter Mirandy (who simpered over
+her book at us as she did at Ralph), as a just interpretation of their
+worthlessness.
+
+This book is a milestone in my literary progress as it is in the
+development of distinctive western fiction, and years afterward I was
+glad to say so to the aged author who lived a long and honored life as a
+teacher and writer of fiction.
+
+It was always too hot or too cold in our schoolroom and on certain days
+when a savage wind beat and clamored at the loose windows, the girls,
+humped and shivering, sat upon their feet to keep them warm, and the
+younger children with shawls over their shoulders sought permission to
+gather close about the stove.
+
+Our dinner pails (stored in the entry way) were often frozen solid and
+it was necessary to thaw out our mince pie as well as our bread and
+butter by putting it on the stove. I recall, vividly, gnawing, dog-like,
+at the mollified outside of a doughnut while still its frosty heart made
+my teeth ache.
+
+Happily all days were not like this. There were afternoons when the sun
+streamed warmly into the room, when long icicles formed on the eaves,
+adding a touch of grace to the desolate building, moments when the
+jingling bells of passing wood-sleighs expressed the natural cheer and
+buoyancy of our youthful hearts.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+Chores and Almanacs
+
+
+Our farm-yard would have been uninhabitable during this winter had it
+not been for the long ricks of straw which we had piled up as a shield
+against the prairie winds. Our horse-barn, roofed with hay and banked
+with chaff, formed the west wall of the cowpen, and a long low shed gave
+shelter to the north.
+
+In this triangular space, in the lee of shed and straw-rick, the cattle
+passed a dolorous winter. Mostly they burrowed in the chaff, or stood
+about humped and shivering--only on sunny days did their arching backs
+subside. Naturally each animal grew a thick coat of long hair, and
+succeeded in coming through to grass again, but the cows of some of our
+neighbors were less fortunate. Some of them got so weak that they had to
+be "tailed" up as it was called. This meant that they were dying of
+hunger and the sight of them crawling about filled me with indignant
+wrath. I could not understand how a man, otherwise kind, could let his
+stock suffer for lack of hay when wild grass was plentiful.
+
+One of my duties, and one that I dreaded, was pumping water for our
+herd. This was no light job, especially on a stinging windy morning, for
+the cows, having only dry fodder, required an enormous amount of liquid,
+and as they could only drink while the water was fresh from the well,
+some one must work the handle till the last calf had absorbed his
+fill--and this had to be done when the thermometer was thirty below,
+just the same as at any other time.
+
+And this brings up an almost forgotten phase of bovine psychology. The
+order in which the cows drank as well as that in which they entered the
+stable was carefully determined and rigidly observed. There was always
+one old dowager who took precedence, all the others gave way before her.
+Then came the second in rank who feared the leader but insisted on
+ruling all the others, and so on down to the heifer. This order, once
+established, was seldom broken (at least by the females of the herd, the
+males were more unstable) even when the leader grew old and almost
+helpless.
+
+We took advantage of this loyalty when putting them into the barn. The
+stall furthest from the door belonged to "old Spot," the second to
+"Daisy" and so on, hence all I had to do was to open the door and let
+them in--for if any rash young thing got out of her proper place she was
+set right, very quickly, by her superiors.
+
+Some farms had ponds or streams to which their flocks were driven for
+water but this to me was a melancholy winter function, and sometimes as
+I joined Burt or Cyrus in driving the poor humped and shivering beasts
+down over the snowy plain to a hole chopped in the ice, and watched them
+lay their aching teeth to the frigid draught, trying a dozen times to
+temper their mouths to the chill I suffered with them. As they streamed
+along homeward, heavy with their sloshing load, they seemed the
+personification of a desolate and abused race.
+
+Winter mornings were a time of trial for us all. It required stern
+military command to get us out of bed before daylight, in a chamber
+warmed only by the stove-pipe, to draw on icy socks and frosty boots and
+go to the milking of cows and the currying of horses. Other boys did not
+rise by candle-light but I did, not because I was eager to make a
+record but for the very good reason that my commander believed in early
+rising. I groaned and whined but I rose--and always I found mother in
+the kitchen before me, putting the kettle on.
+
+It ought not to surprise the reader when I say that my morning toilet
+was hasty--something less than "a lick and a promise." I couldn't (or
+didn't) stop to wash my face or comb my hair; such refinements seem
+useless in an attic bedchamber at five in the morning of a December
+day--I put them off till breakfast time. Getting up at five A. M. even
+in June was a hardship, in winter it was a punishment.
+
+Our discomforts had their compensations! As we came back to the house at
+six, the kitchen was always cheery with the smell of browning flapjacks,
+sizzling sausages and steaming coffee, and mother had plenty of hot
+water on the stove so that in "half a jiffy," with shining faces and
+sleek hair we sat down to a noble feast. By this time also the eastern
+sky was gorgeous with light, and two misty "sun dogs" dimly loomed,
+watching at the gate of the new day.
+
+Now that I think of it, father was the one who took the brunt of our
+"revellee." He always built the fire in the kitchen stove before calling
+the family. Mother, silent, sleepy, came second. Sometimes she was just
+combing her hair as I passed through the kitchen, at other times she
+would be at the biscuit dough or stirring the pancake batter--but she
+was always there!
+
+"What did you gain by this disagreeable habit of early rising?"--This is
+a question I have often asked myself since. Was it only a useless
+obsession on the part of my pioneer dad? Why couldn't we have slept till
+six, or even seven? Why rise before the sun?
+
+I cannot answer this, I only know such was our habit summer and winter,
+and that most of our neighbors conformed to the same rigorous tradition.
+None of us got rich, and as I look back on the situation, I cannot
+recall that those "sluggards" who rose an hour or two later were any
+poorer than we. I am inclined to think it was all a convention of the
+border, a custom which might very well have been broken by us all.
+
+My mother would have found these winter days very long had it not been
+for baby Jessie, for father was busily hauling wood from the Cedar River
+some six or seven miles away, and the almost incessant, mournful piping
+of the wind in the chimney was dispiriting. Occasionally Mrs. Button,
+Mrs. Gammons or some other of the neighbors would drop in for a visit,
+but generally mother and Jessie were alone till Harriet and Frank and I
+came home from school at half-past four.
+
+Our evenings were more cheerful. My sister Hattie was able to play a few
+simple tunes on the melodeon and Cyrus and Eva or Mary Abbie and John
+occasionally came in to sing. In this my mother often took part. In
+church her clear soprano rose above all the others like the voice of
+some serene great bird. Of this gift my father often expressed his open
+admiration.
+
+There was very little dancing during our second winter but Fred Jewett
+started a singing school which brought the young folks together once a
+week. We boys amused ourselves with "Dare Gool" and "Dog and Deer." Cold
+had little terror for us, provided the air was still. Often we played
+"Hi Spy" around the barn with the thermometer twenty below zero, and not
+infrequently we took long walks to visit Burton and other of our boy
+friends or to borrow something to read. I was always on the trail of a
+book.
+
+Harriet joined me in my search for stories and nothing in the
+neighborhood homes escaped us. Anything in print received our most
+respectful consideration. Jane Porter's _Scottish Chiefs_ brought to us
+both anguish and delight. _Tempest and Sunshine_ was another discovery.
+I cannot tell to whom I was indebted for _Ivanhoe_ but I read and
+re-read it with the most intense pleasure. At the same time or near it I
+borrowed a huge bundle of _The New York Saturday Night_ and _The New
+York Ledger_ and from them I derived an almost equal enjoyment. "Old
+Sleuth" and "Buckskin Bill" were as admirable in their way as "Cedric
+the Saxon."
+
+At this time _Godey's Ladies Book_ and _Peterson's Magazine_ were the
+only high-class periodicals known to us. _The Toledo Blade_ and _The New
+York Tribune_ were still my father's political advisers and Horace
+Greeley and "Petroleum V. Nasby" were equally corporeal in my mind.
+
+Almanacs figured largely in my reading at this time, and were a source
+of frequent quotation by my father. They were nothing but small,
+badly-printed, patent medicine pamphlets, each with a loop of string at
+the corner so that they might be hung on a nail behind the stove, and of
+a crude green or yellow or blue. Each of them made much of a
+calm-featured man who seemed unaware of the fact that his internal
+organs were opened to the light of day. Lines radiated from his middle
+to the signs of the zodiac. I never knew what all this meant, but it
+gave me a sense of something esoteric and remote. Just what "Aries" and
+"Pisces" had to do with healing or the weather is still a mystery.
+
+These advertising bulletins could be seen in heaps on the counter at the
+drug store especially in the spring months when "Healey's Bitters" and
+"Allen's Cherry Pectoral" were most needed to "purify the blood." They
+were given out freely, but the price of the marvellous mixtures they
+celebrated was always one dollar a bottle, and many a broad coin went
+for a "bitter" which should have gone to buy a new dress for an
+overworked wife.
+
+These little books contained, also, concise aphorisms and weighty words
+of advice like "After dinner rest awhile; after supper run a mile," and
+"Be vigilant, be truthful and your life will never be ruthful." "Take
+care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves" (which
+needed a little translating to us) probably came down a long line of
+English copy books. No doubt they were all stolen from _Poor Richard_.
+
+Incidentally they called attention to the aches and pains of humankind,
+and each page presented the face, signature and address of some far-off
+person who had been miraculously relieved by the particular "balsam" or
+"bitter" which that pamphlet presented. Hollow-cheeked folk were shown
+"before taking," and the same individuals plump and hearty "after
+taking," followed by very realistic accounts of the diseases from which
+they had been relieved gave encouragement to others suffering from the
+same "complaints."
+
+Generally the almanac which presented the claims of a "pectoral" also
+had a "salve" that was "sovereign for burns" and some of them humanely
+took into account the ills of farm animals and presented a cure for bots
+or a liniment for spavins. I spent a great deal of time with these
+publications and to them a large part of my education is due.
+
+It is impossible that printed matter of any kind should possess for any
+child of today the enchantment which came to me, from a grimy,
+half-dismembered copy of Scott or Cooper. _The Life of P. T. Barnum_,
+Franklin's _Autobiography_ we owned and they were also wellsprings of
+joy to me. Sometimes I hold with the Lacedemonians that "hunger is the
+best sauce" for the mind as well as for the palate. Certainly we made
+the most of all that came our way.
+
+Naturally the school-house continued to be the center of our interest by
+day and the scene of our occasional neighborhood recreation by night. In
+its small way it was our Forum as well as our Academy and my memories of
+it are mostly pleasant.
+
+Early one bright winter day Charles Babcock and Albert Button, two of
+our big boys, suddenly appeared at the school-house door with their best
+teams hitched to great bob-sleds, and amid much shouting and laughter,
+the entire school (including the teacher) piled in on the straw which
+softened the bottom of the box, and away we raced with jangling bells,
+along the bright winter roads with intent to "surprise" the Burr Oak
+teacher and his flock.
+
+I particularly enjoyed this expedition for the Burr Oak School was
+larger than ours and stood on the edge of a forest and was protected by
+noble trees. A deep ravine near it furnished a mild form of coasting.
+The schoolroom had fine new desks with iron legs and the teacher's desk
+occupied a deep recess at the front. Altogether it possessed something
+of the dignity of a church. To go there was almost like going to town,
+for at the corners where the three roads met, four or five houses stood
+and in one of these was a postoffice.
+
+That day is memorable to me for the reason that I first saw Bettie and
+Hattie and Agnes, the prettiest girls in the township. Hattie and Bettie
+were both fair-haired and blue-eyed but Agnes was dark with great
+velvety black eyes. Neither of them was over sixteen, but they had all
+taken on the airs of young ladies and looked with amused contempt on
+lads of my age. Nevertheless, I had the right to admire them in secret
+for they added the final touch of poetry to this visit to "the Grove
+School House."
+
+Often, thereafter, on a clear night when the thermometer stood twenty
+below zero, Burton and I would trot away toward the Grove to join in
+some meeting or to coast with the boys on the banks of the creek. I feel
+again the iron clutch of my frozen boots. The tippet around my neck is
+solid ice before my lips. My ears sting. Low-hung, blazing, the stars
+light the sky, and over the diamond-dusted snow-crust the moonbeams
+splinter.
+
+Though sensing the glory of such nights as these I was careful about
+referring to it. Restraint in such matters was the rule. If you said,
+"It is a fine day," or "The night is as clear as a bell," you had gone
+quite as far as the proprieties permitted. Love was also a forbidden
+word. You might say, "I love pie," but to say "I love Bettie," was
+mawkish if not actually improper.
+
+Caresses or terms of endearment even between parents and their children
+were very seldom used. People who said "Daddy dear," or "Jim dear," were
+under suspicion. "They fight like cats and dogs when no one else is
+around" was the universal comment on a family whose members were very
+free of their terms of affection. We were a Spartan lot. We did not
+believe in letting our wives and children know that they were an
+important part of our contentment.
+
+Social changes were in progress. We held no more quilting bees or
+barn-raisings. Women visited less than in Wisconsin. The work on the new
+farms was never ending, and all teams were in constant use during week
+days. The young people got together on one excuse or another, but their
+elders met only at public meetings.
+
+Singing, even among the young people was almost entirely confined to
+hymn-tunes. The new Moody and Sankey Song Book was in every home. _Tell
+Me the Old Old Story_ did not refer to courtship but to salvation, and
+_Hold the Fort for I am Coming_ was no longer a signal from Sherman, but
+a Message from Jesus. We often spent a joyous evening singing _O, Bear
+Me Away on Your Snowy Wings_, although we had no real desire to be taken
+"to our immortal home." Father no longer asked for _Minnie Minturn_ and
+_Nellie Wildwood_,--but his love for Smith's _Grand March_ persisted and
+my sister Harriet was often called upon to play it for him while he
+explained its meaning. The war was passing into the mellow, reminiscent
+haze of memory and he loved the splendid pictures which this descriptive
+piece of martial music recalled to mind. So far as we then knew his
+pursuit of the Sunset was at an end.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+Boy Life on the Prairie
+
+
+The snows fell deep in February and when at last the warm March winds
+began to blow, lakes developed with magical swiftness in the fields, and
+streams filled every swale, transforming the landscape into something
+unexpected and enchanting. At night these waters froze, bringing fields
+of ice almost to our door. We forgot all our other interests in the joy
+of the games which we played thereon at every respite from school, or
+from the wood-pile, for splitting firewood was our first spring task.
+
+From time to time as the weather permitted, father had been cutting and
+hauling maple and hickory logs from the forests of the Cedar River, and
+these logs must now be made into stove-wood and piled for summer use.
+Even before the school term ended we began to take a hand at this work,
+after four o'clock and on Saturdays. While the hired man and father ran
+the cross-cut saw, whose pleasant song had much of the seed-time
+suggestion which vibrated in the _caw-caw_ of the hens as they burrowed
+in the dust of the chip-yard, I split the easy blocks and my brother
+helped to pile the finished product.
+
+The place where the wood-pile lay was slightly higher than the barnyard
+and was the first dry ground to appear in the almost universal slush and
+mud. Delightful memories are associated with this sunny spot and with a
+pond which appeared as if by some conjury, on the very field where I had
+husked the down-row so painfully in November. From the wood-pile I was
+often permitted to go skating and Burton was my constant companion in
+these excursions. However, my joy in his companionship was not unmixed
+with bitterness, for I deeply envied him the skates which he wore. They
+were trimmed with brass and their runners came up over his toes in
+beautiful curves and ended in brass acorns which transfigured their
+wearer. To own a pair of such skates seemed to me the summit of all
+earthly glory.
+
+My own wooden "contraptions" went on with straps and I could not make
+the runners stay in the middle of my soles where they belonged, hence my
+ankles not only tipped in awkwardly but the stiff outer edges of my boot
+counters dug holes in my skin so that my outing was a kind of torture
+after all. Nevertheless, I persisted and, while Burton circled and
+swooped like a hawk, I sprawled with flapping arms in a mist of ignoble
+rage. That I learned to skate fairly well even under these disadvantages
+argues a high degree of enthusiasm.
+
+Father was always willing to release us from labor at times when the ice
+was fine, and at night we were free to explore the whole country round
+about, finding new places for our games. Sometimes the girls joined us,
+and we built fires on the edges of the swales and played "gool" and a
+kind of "shinny" till hunger drove us home.
+
+We held to this sport to the last--till the ice with prodigious booming
+and cracking fell away in the swales and broke through the icy drifts
+(which lay like dams along the fences) and vanished, leaving the
+corn-rows littered with huge blocks of ice. Often we came in from the
+pond, wet to the middle, our boots completely soaked with water. They
+often grew hard as iron during the night, and we experienced the
+greatest trouble in getting them on again. Greasing them with hot
+tallow was a regular morning job.
+
+Then came the fanning mill. The seed grain had to be fanned up, and that
+was a dark and dusty "trick" which we did not like anything near as well
+as we did skating or even piling wood. The hired man turned the mill, I
+dipped the wheat into the hopper, Franklin held sacks and father scooped
+the grain in. I don't suppose we gave up many hours to this work, but it
+seems to me that we spent weeks at it. Probably we took spells at the
+mill in the midst of the work on the chip pile.
+
+Meanwhile, above our heads the wild ducks again pursued their northward
+flight, and the far honking of the geese fell to our ears from the
+solemn deeps of the windless night. On the first dry warm ridges the
+prairie cocks began to boom, and then at last came the day when father's
+imperious voice rang high in familiar command. "Out with the drags,
+boys! We start seeding tomorrow."
+
+Again we went forth on the land, this time to wrestle with the tough,
+unrotted sod of the new breaking, while all around us the larks and
+plover called and the gray badgers stared with disapproving bitterness
+from their ravaged hills.
+
+Maledictions on that tough northwest forty! How many times I harrowed
+and cross-harrowed it I cannot say, but I well remember the maddening
+persistency with which the masses of hazel roots clogged the teeth of
+the drag, making it necessary for me to raise the corner of it--a
+million times a day! This had to be done while the team was in motion,
+and you can see I did not lack for exercise. It was necessary also to
+"lap-half" and this requirement made careful driving needful for father
+could not be fooled. He saw every "balk."
+
+As the ground dried off the dust arose from under the teeth of the
+harrow and flew so thickly that my face was not only coated with it but
+tears of rebellious rage stained my cheeks with comic lines. At such
+times it seemed unprofitable to be the twelve-year-old son of a western
+farmer.
+
+One day, just as the early sown wheat was beginning to throw a tinge of
+green over the brown earth, a tremendous wind arose from the southwest
+and blew with such devastating fury that the soil, caught up from the
+field, formed a cloud, hundreds of feet high,--a cloud which darkened
+the sky, turning noon into dusk and sending us all to shelter. All the
+forenoon this blizzard of loam raged, filling the house with dust,
+almost smothering the cattle in the stable. Work was impossible, even
+for the men. The growing grain, its roots exposed to the air, withered
+and died. Many of the smaller plants were carried bodily away.
+
+As the day wore on father fell into dumb, despairing rage. His rigid
+face and smoldering eyes, his grim lips, terrified us all. It seemed to
+him (as to us), that the entire farm was about to take flight and the
+bitterest part of the tragic circumstance lay in the reflection that our
+loss (which was much greater than any of our neighbors) was due to the
+extra care with which we had pulverized the ground.
+
+"If only I hadn't gone over it that last time," I heard him groan in
+reference to the "smooch" with which I had crushed all the lumps making
+every acre friable as a garden. "Look at Woodring's!"
+
+Sure enough. The cloud was thinner over on Woodring's side of the line
+fence. His rough clods were hardly touched. My father's bitter revolt,
+his impotent fury appalled me, for it seemed to me (as to him), that
+nature was, at the moment, an enemy. More than seventy acres of this
+land had to be resown.
+
+Most authors in writing of "the merry merry farmer" leave out
+experiences like this--they omit the mud and the dust and the grime,
+they forget the army worm, the flies, the heat, as well as the smells
+and drudgery of the barns. Milking the cows is spoken of in the
+traditional fashion as a lovely pastoral recreation, when as a matter of
+fact it is a tedious job. We all hated it. We saw no poetry in it. We
+hated it in summer when the mosquitoes bit and the cows slashed us with
+their tails, and we hated it still more in the winter time when they
+stood in crowded malodorous stalls.
+
+In summer when the flies were particularly savage we had a way of
+jamming our heads into the cows' flanks to prevent them from kicking
+into the pail, and sometimes we tied their tails to their legs so that
+they could not lash our ears. Humboldt Bunn tied a heifer's tail to his
+boot straps once--and regretted it almost instantly.--No, no, it won't
+do to talk to me of "the sweet breath of kine." I know them too
+well--and calves are not "the lovely, fawn-like creatures" they are
+supposed to be. To the boy who is teaching them to drink out of a pail
+they are nasty brutes--quite unlike fawns. They have a way of filling
+their nostrils with milk and blowing it all over their nurse. They are
+greedy, noisy, ill-smelling and stupid. They look well when running with
+their mothers in the pasture, but as soon as they are weaned they lose
+all their charm--for me.
+
+Attendance on swine was less humiliating for the reason that we could
+keep them at arm's length, but we didn't enjoy that. We liked teaming
+and pitching hay and harvesting and making fence, and we did not greatly
+resent plowing or husking corn but we did hate the smell, the filth of
+the cow-yard. Even hostling had its "outs," especially in spring when
+the horses were shedding their hair. I never fully enjoyed the taste of
+equine dandruff, and the eternal smell of manure irked me, especially
+at the table.
+
+Clearing out from behind the animals was one of our never ending jobs,
+and hauling the compost out on the fields was one of the tasks which, as
+my father grimly said, "We always put off till it rains so hard we can't
+work out doors." This was no joke to us, for not only did we work out
+doors, we worked while standing ankle deep in the slime of the yard,
+getting full benefit of the drizzle. Our new land did not need the
+fertilizer, but we were forced to haul it away or move the barn. Some
+folks moved the barn. But then my father was an idealist.
+
+Life was not all currying or muck-raking for Burt or for me. Herding the
+cows came in to relieve the monotony of farm-work. Wide tracts of
+unbroken sod still lay open to the north and west, and these were the
+common grazing grounds for the community. Every farmer kept from
+twenty-five to a hundred head of cattle and half as many colts, and no
+sooner did the green begin to show on the fire-blackened sod in April
+than the winter-worn beasts left the straw-piles under whose lee they
+had fed during the cold months, and crawled out to nip the first tender
+spears of grass in the sheltered swales. They were still "free
+commoners" in the eyes of the law.
+
+The colts were a fuzzy, ungraceful lot at this season. Even the best of
+them had big bellies and carried dirty and tangled manes, but as the
+grazing improved, as the warmth and plenty of May filled their veins
+with new blood, they sloughed off their mangy coats and lifted their
+wide-blown nostrils to the western wind in exultant return to freedom.
+Many of them had never felt the weight of a man's hand, and even those
+that had wintered in and around the barn-yard soon lost all trace of
+domesticity. It was not unusual to find that the wildest and wariest of
+all the leaders bore a collar mark or some other ineffaceable badge of
+previous servitude.
+
+They were for the most part Morgan grades or "Canuck," with a strain of
+broncho to give them fire. It was curious, it was glorious to see how
+deeply-buried instincts broke out in these halterless herds. In a few
+days, after many trials of speed and power the bands of all the region
+united into one drove, and a leader, the swiftest and most tireless of
+them all, appeared from the ranks and led them at will.
+
+Often without apparent cause, merely for the joy of it, they left their
+feeding grounds to wheel and charge and race for hours over the swells,
+across the creeks and through the hazel thickets. Sometimes their
+movements arose from the stinging of gadflies, sometimes from a battle
+between two jealous leaders, sometimes from the passing of a wolf--often
+from no cause at all other than that of abounding vitality.
+
+In much the same fashion, but less rapidly, the cattle went forth upon
+the plain and as each herd not only contained the growing steers, but
+the family cows, it became the duty of one boy from each farm to mount a
+horse at five o'clock every afternoon and "hunt the cattle," a task
+seldom shirked. My brother and I took turn and turn about at this
+delightful task, and soon learned to ride like Comanches. In fact we
+lived in the saddle, when freed from duty in the field. Burton often met
+us on the feeding grounds, and at such times the prairie seemed an
+excellent place for boys. As we galloped along together it was easy to
+imagine ourselves Wild Bill and Buckskin Joe in pursuit of Indians or
+buffalo.
+
+We became, by force of unconscious observation, deeply learned in the
+language and the psychology of kine as well as colts. We watched the
+big bull-necked stags as they challenged one another, pawing the dust or
+kneeling to tear the sod with their horns. We possessed perfect
+understanding of their battle signs. Their boastful, defiant cries were
+as intelligible to us as those of men. Every note, every motion had a
+perfectly definite meaning. The foolish, inquisitive young heifers, the
+staid self-absorbed dowagers wearing their bells with dignity, the
+frisky two-year-olds and the lithe-bodied wide-horned, truculent
+three-year-olds all came in for interpretation.
+
+Sometimes a lone steer ranging the sod came suddenly upon a trace of
+blood. Like a hound he paused, snuffling the earth. Then with wide mouth
+and outthrust, curling tongue, uttered voice. Wild as the tiger's
+food-sick cry, his warning roar burst forth, ending in a strange, upward
+explosive whine. Instantly every head in the herd was lifted, even the
+old cows heavy with milk stood as if suddenly renewing their youth,
+alert and watchful.
+
+Again it came, that prehistoric bawling cry, and with one mind the herd
+began to center, rushing with menacing swiftness, like warriors
+answering their chieftain's call for aid. With awkward lope or jolting
+trot, snorting with fury they hastened to the rescue, only to meet in
+blind bewildered mass, swirling to and fro in search of an imaginary
+cause of some ancestral danger.
+
+At such moments we were glad of our swift ponies. From our saddles we
+could study these outbreaks of atavistic rage with serene enjoyment.
+
+In herding the cattle we came to know all the open country round about
+and found it very beautiful. On the uplands a short, light-green,
+hairlike grass grew, intermixed with various resinous weeds, while in
+the lowland feeding grounds luxuriant patches of blue-joint, wild oats,
+and other tall forage plants waved in the wind. Along the streams and
+in the "sloos" cat-tails and tiger-lilies nodded above thick mats of
+wide-bladed marsh grass. Almost without realizing it, I came to know the
+character of every weed, every flower, every living thing big enough to
+be seen from the back of a horse.
+
+Nothing could be more generous, more joyous, than these natural meadows
+in summer. The flash and ripple and glimmer of the tall sunflowers, the
+myriad voices of gleeful bobolinks, the chirp and gurgle of red-winged
+blackbirds swaying on the willows, the meadow-larks piping from grassy
+bogs, the peep of the prairie chick and the wailing call of plover on
+the flowery green slopes of the uplands made it all an ecstatic world to
+me. It was a wide world with a big, big sky which gave alluring hint of
+the still more glorious unknown wilderness beyond.
+
+Sometimes of a Sunday afternoon, Harriet and I wandered away to the
+meadows along Dry Run, gathering bouquets of pinks, sweet-williams,
+tiger-lilies and lady slippers, thus attaining a vague perception of
+another and sweeter side of life. The sun flamed across the splendid
+serial waves of the grasses and the perfumes of a hundred spicy plants
+rose in the shimmering mid-day air. At such times the mere joy of living
+filled our young hearts with wordless satisfaction.
+
+Nor were the upland ridges less interesting, for huge antlers lying
+bleached and bare in countless numbers on the slopes told of the herds
+of elk and bison that had once fed in these splendid savannahs, living
+and dying in the days when the tall Sioux were the only hunters.
+
+The gray hermit, the badger, still clung to his deep den on the rocky
+unplowed ridges, and on sunny April days the mother fox lay out with her
+young, on southward-sloping swells. Often we met the prairie wolf or
+startled him from his sleep in hazel copse, finding in him the spirit
+of the wilderness. To us it seemed that just over the next long swell
+toward the sunset the shaggy brown bulls still fed in myriads, and in
+our hearts was a longing to ride away into the "sunset regions" of our
+song.
+
+All the boys I knew talked of Colorado, never of New England. We dreamed
+of the plains, of the Black Hills, discussing cattle raising and mining
+and hunting. "We'll have our rifles ready, boys, ha, ha, ha-ha!" was
+still our favorite chorus, "Newbrasky" and Wyoming our far-off
+wonderlands, Buffalo Bill our hero.
+
+David, my hunter uncle who lived near us, still retained his long
+old-fashioned, muzzle-loading rifle, and one day offered it to me, but
+as I could not hold it at arm's length, I sorrowfully returned it. We
+owned a shotgun, however, and this I used with all the confidence of a
+man. I was able to kill a few ducks with it and I also hunted gophers
+during May when the sprouting corn was in most danger. Later I became
+quite expert in catching chickens on the wing.
+
+On a long ridge to the north and west, the soil, too wet and cold to
+cultivate easily, remained unplowed for several years and scattered over
+these clay lands stood small groves of popple trees which we called
+"tow-heads." They were usually only two or three hundred feet in
+diameter, but they stood out like islands in the waving seas of grasses.
+Against these dark-green masses, breakers of blue-joint radiantly
+rolled.--To the east some four miles ran the Little Cedar River, and
+plum trees and crab-apples and haws bloomed along its banks. In June
+immense crops of strawberries offered from many meadows. Their delicious
+odor rose to us as we rode our way, tempting us to dismount and gather
+and eat.
+
+Over these uplands, through these thickets of hazel brush, and around
+these coverts of popple, Burton and I careered, hunting the cows,
+chasing rabbits, killing rattlesnakes, watching the battles of bulls,
+racing the half-wild colts and pursuing the prowling wolves. It was an
+alluring life, and Harriet, who rode with us occasionally, seemed to
+enjoy it quite as much as any boy. She could ride almost as well as
+Burton, and we were all expert horse-tamers.
+
+We all rode like cavalrymen,--that is to say, while holding the reins in
+our left hands we guided our horses by the pressure of the strap across
+the neck, rather than by pulling at the bit. Our ponies were never
+allowed to trot. We taught them a peculiar gait which we called "the
+lope," which was an easy canter in front and a trot behind (a very good
+gait for long distances), and we drilled them to keep this pace steadily
+and to fall at command into a swift walk without any jolting intervening
+trot.--We learned to ride like circus performers standing on our
+saddles, and practised other of the tricks we had seen, and through it
+all my mother remained unalarmed. To her a boy on a horse was as natural
+as a babe in the cradle. The chances we took of getting killed were so
+numerous that she could not afford to worry.
+
+Burton continued to be my almost inseparable companion at school and
+whenever we could get together, and while to others he seemed only a
+shy, dull boy, to me he was something more. His strength and skill were
+remarkable and his self-command amazing. Although a lad of instant,
+white-hot, dangerous temper, he suddenly, at fifteen years of age, took
+himself in hand in a fashion miraculous to me. He decided (I never knew
+just why or how)--that he would never again use an obscene or profane
+word. He kept his vow. I knew him for over thirty years and I never
+heard him raise his voice in anger or utter a word a woman would have
+shrunk from,--and yet he became one of the most fearless and indomitable
+mountaineers I ever knew.
+
+This change in him profoundly influenced me and though I said nothing
+about it, I resolved to do as well. I never quite succeeded, although I
+discouraged as well as I could the stories which some of the men and
+boys were so fond of telling, but alas! when the old cow kicked over my
+pail of milk, I fell from grace and told her just what I thought of her
+in phrases that Burton would have repressed. Still, I manfully tried to
+follow his good trail.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Corn-planting, which followed wheat-seeding, was done by hand, for a
+year or two, and this was a joyous task.--We "changed works" with
+neighbor Button, and in return Cyrus and Eva came to help us. Harriet
+and Eva and I worked side by side, "dropping" the corn, while Cyrus and
+the hired man followed with the hoes to cover it. Little Frank skittered
+about, planting with desultory action such pumpkin seeds as he did not
+eat. The presence of our young friends gave the job something of the
+nature of a party and we were sorry when it was over.
+
+After the planting a fortnight of less strenuous labor came on, a period
+which had almost the character of a holiday. The wheat needed no
+cultivation and the corn was not high enough to plow. This was a time
+for building fence and fixing up things generally. This, too, was the
+season of the circus. Each year one came along from the east, trailing
+clouds of glorified dust and filling our minds with the color of
+romance.
+
+From the time the "advance man" flung his highly colored posters over
+the fence till the coming of the glorious day we thought of little else.
+It was India and Arabia and the jungle to us. History and the magic and
+pomp of chivalry mingled in the parade of the morning, and the crowds,
+the clanging band, the haughty and alien beauty of the women, the gold
+embroidered housings, the stark majesty of the acrobats subdued us into
+silent worship.
+
+I here pay tribute to the men who brought these marvels to my eyes. To
+rob me of my memories of the circus would leave me as poor as those to
+whom life was a drab and hopeless round of toil. It was our brief season
+of imaginative life. In one day--in a part of one day--we gained a
+thousand new conceptions of the world and of human nature. It was an
+embodiment of all that was skillful and beautiful in manly action. It
+was a compendium of biologic research but more important still, it
+brought to our ears the latest band pieces and taught us the most
+popular songs. It furnished us with jokes. It relieved our dullness. It
+gave us something to talk about.
+
+We always went home wearied with excitement, and dusty and fretful--but
+content. We had seen it. We had grasped as much of it as anybody and
+could remember it as well as the best. Next day as we resumed work in
+the field the memory of its splendors went with us like a golden cloud.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Most of the duties of the farmer's life require the lapse of years to
+seem beautiful in my eyes, but haying was a season of well-defined
+charm. In Iowa, summer was at its most exuberant stage of vitality
+during the last days of June, and it was not strange that the faculties
+of even the toiling hay-maker, dulled and deadened with never ending
+drudgery, caught something of the superabundant glow and throb of
+nature's life.
+
+As I write I am back in that marvellous time.--The cornfield, dark-green
+and sweetly cool, is beginning to ripple in the wind with multitudinous
+stir of shining, swirling leaf. Waves of dusk and green and gold, circle
+across the ripening barley, and long leaves upthrust, at intervals, like
+spears. The trees are in heaviest foliage, insect life is at its height,
+and the shimmering air is filled with buzzing, dancing forms, and the
+clover is gay with the sheen of innumerable gauzy wings.
+
+The west wind comes to me laden with ecstatic voices. The bobolinks sail
+and tinkle in the sensuous hush, now sinking, now rising, their
+exquisite notes filling the air as with the sound of fairy bells. The
+king-bird, alert, aggressive, cries out sharply as he launches from the
+top of a poplar tree upon some buzzing insect, and the plover makes the
+prairie sad with his wailing call. Vast purple-and-white clouds move
+like stately ships before the breeze, dark with rain, which they drop
+momentarily in trailing garments upon the earth, and so pass in majesty
+amidst a roll of thunder.
+
+The grasshoppers move in clouds with snap and buzz, and out of the
+luxurious stagnant marshes comes the ever-thickening chorus of the
+toads, while above them the kildees and the snipe shuttle to and fro in
+sounding flight. The blackbirds on the cat-tails sway and swing,
+uttering through lifted throats their liquid gurgle, mad with delight of
+the sun and the season--and over all, and laving all, moves the slow
+wind, heavy with the breath of the far-off blooms of other lands, a wind
+which covers the sunset plain with a golden entrancing haze.
+
+At such times it seemed to me that we had reached the "sunset region" of
+our song, and that we were indeed "lords of the soil."
+
+I am not so sure that haying brought to our mothers anything like this
+rapture, for the men added to our crew made the duties of the kitchens
+just that much heavier. I doubt if the women--any of them--got out into
+the fields or meadows long enough to enjoy the birds and the breezes.
+Even on Sunday as they rode away to church, they were too tired and too
+worried to re-act to the beauties of the landscape.
+
+I now began to dimly perceive that my mother was not well. Although
+large and seemingly strong, her increasing weight made her long days of
+housework a torture. She grew very tired and her sweet face was often
+knotted with physical pain.
+
+She still made most of our garments as well as her own. She tailored
+father's shirts and underclothing, sewed carpet rags, pieced quilts and
+made butter for market,--and yet, in the midst of it all, found time to
+put covers on our baseball, and to do up all our burns and bruises.
+Being a farmer's wife in those days, meant laboring outside any
+regulation of the hours of toil. I recall hearing one of the tired
+house-wives say, "Seems like I never get a day off, not even on Sunday,"
+a protest which my mother thoroughly understood and sympathized with,
+notwithstanding its seeming inhospitality.
+
+No history of this time would be complete without a reference to the
+doctor. We were a vigorous and on the whole a healthy tribe but
+accidents sometimes happened and "Go for the doctor!" was the first
+command when the band-cutter slashed the hand of the thresher or one of
+the children fell from the hay-rick.
+
+One night as I lay buried in deep sleep close to the garret eaves I
+heard my mother call me--and something in her voice pierced me, roused
+me. A poignant note of alarm was in it.
+
+"Hamlin," she called, "get up--at once. You must go for the doctor. Your
+father is very sick. _Hurry!_"
+
+I sprang from my bed, dizzy with sleep, yet understanding her appeal. "I
+hear you, I'm coming," I called down to her as I started to dress.
+
+"Call Hattie. I need her too."
+
+The rain was pattering on the roof, and as I dressed I had a disturbing
+vision of the long cold ride which lay before me. I hoped the case was
+not so bad as mother thought. With limbs still numb and weak I stumbled
+down the stairs to the sitting room where a faint light shone.
+
+Mother met me with white, strained face. "Your father is suffering
+terribly. Go for the doctor at once."
+
+I could hear the sufferer groan even as I moved about the kitchen,
+putting on my coat and lighting the lantern. It was about one o'clock of
+the morning, and the wind was cold as I picked my way through the mud to
+the barn. The thought of the long miles to town made me shiver but as
+the son of a soldier I could not falter in my duty.
+
+In their warm stalls the horses were resting in dreamful doze. Dan and
+Dick, the big plow team, stood near the door. Jule and Dolly came next.
+Wild Frank, a fleet but treacherous Morgan, stood fifth and for a moment
+I considered taking him. He was strong and of wonderful staying powers
+but so savage and unreliable that I dared not risk an accident. I passed
+on to bay Kittie whose bright eyes seemed to inquire, "What is the
+matter?"
+
+Flinging the blanket over her and smoothing it carefully, I tossed the
+light saddle to her back and cinched it tight, so tight that she
+grunted. "I can't take any chances of a spill," I explained to her, and
+she accepted the bit willingly. She was always ready for action and
+fully dependable.
+
+Blowing out my lantern I hung it on a peg, led Kit from her stall out
+into the night, and swung to the saddle. She made off with a spattering
+rush through the yard, out into the road. It was dark as pitch but I was
+fully awake now. The dash of the rain in my face had cleared my brain
+but I trusted to the keener senses of the mare to find the road which
+showed only in the strips of water which filled the wagon tracks.
+
+We made way slowly for a few minutes until my eyes expanded to take in
+the faint lines of light along the lane. The road at last became a river
+of ink running between faint gray banks of sward, and my heart rose in
+confidence. I took on dignity. I was a courier riding through the night
+to save a city, a messenger on whose courage and skill thousands of
+lives depended.
+
+"Get out o' this!" I shouted to Kit, and she leaped away like a wolf, at
+a tearing gallop.
+
+She knew her rider. We had herded the cattle many days on the prairie,
+and in races with the wild colts I had tested her speed. Snorting with
+vigor at every leap she seemed to say, "My heart is brave, my limbs are
+strong. Call on me."
+
+Out of the darkness John Martin's Carlo barked. A half-mile had passed.
+Old Marsh's fox hound clamored next. Two miles were gone. From here the
+road ran diagonally across the prairie, a velvet-black band on the dim
+sod. The ground was firmer but there were swales full of water. Through
+these Kittie dashed with unhesitating confidence, the water flying from
+her drumming hooves. Once she went to her knees and almost unseated me,
+but I regained my saddle and shouted, "Go on, Kit."
+
+The fourth mile was in the mud, but the fifth brought us to the village
+turnpike and the mare was as glad of it as I. Her breath was labored
+now. She snorted no more in exultation and confident strength. She began
+to wonder--to doubt, and I, who knew her ways as well as I knew those of
+a human being, realized that she was beginning to flag. The mud had
+begun to tell on her.
+
+It hurt me to urge her on, but the memory of my mother's agonized face
+and the sound of my father's groan of pain steeled my heart. I set lash
+to her side and so kept her to her highest speed.
+
+At last a gleam of light! Someone in the village was awake. I passed
+another lighted window. Then the green and red lamps of the drug store
+cheered me with their promise of aid, for the doctor lived next door.
+There too a dim ray shone.
+
+Slipping from my weary horse I tied her to the rail and hurried up the
+walk toward the doctor's bell. I remembered just where the knob rested.
+Twice I pulled sharply, strongly, putting into it some part of the
+anxiety and impatience I felt. I could hear its imperative jingle as it
+died away in the silent house.
+
+At last the door opened and the doctor, a big blonde handsome man in a
+long night gown, confronted me with impassive face. "What is it, my
+boy?" he asked kindly.
+
+As I told him he looked down at my water-soaked form and wild-eyed
+countenance with gentle patience. Then he peered out over my head into
+the dismal night. He was a man of resolution but he hesitated for a
+moment. "Your father is suffering sharply, is he?"
+
+"Yes, sir. I could hear him groan.--Please hurry."
+
+He mused a moment. "He is a soldier. He would not complain of a little
+thing--I will come."
+
+Turning in relief, I ran down the walk and climbed upon my shivering
+mare. She wheeled sharply, eager to be off on her homeward way. Her
+spirit was not broken, but she was content to take a slower pace. She
+seemed to know that our errand was accomplished and that the warm
+shelter of the stall was to be her reward.
+
+Holding her down to a slow trot I turned often to see if I could detect
+the lights of the doctor's buggy which was a familiar sight on our road.
+I had heard that he kept one of his teams harnessed ready for calls
+like this, and I confidently expected him to overtake me. "It's a
+terrible night to go out, but he said he would come," I repeated as I
+rode.
+
+At last the lights of a carriage, crazily rocking, came into view and
+pulling Kit to a walk I twisted in my saddle, ready to shout with
+admiration of the speed of his team. "He's driving the 'Clay-Banks,'" I
+called in great excitement.
+
+The Clay-Banks were famous throughout the county as the doctor's
+swiftest and wildest team, a span of bronchos whose savage spirits no
+journey could entirely subdue, a team he did not spare, a team that
+scorned petting and pity, bony, sinewy, big-headed. They never walked
+and had little care of mud or snow.
+
+They came rushing now with splashing feet and foaming, half-open jaws,
+the big doctor, calm, iron-handed, masterful, sitting in the swaying top
+of his light buggy, his feet against the dash board, keeping his furious
+span in hand as easily as if they were a pair of Shetland ponies. The
+nigh horse was running, the off horse pacing, and the splatter of their
+feet, the slash of the wheels and the roaring of their heavy breathing,
+made my boyish heart leap. I could hardly repress a yell of delight.
+
+As I drew aside to let him pass the doctor called out with mellow cheer,
+"Take your time, boy, take your time!"
+
+Before I could even think of an answer, he was gone and I was alone with
+Kit and the night.
+
+My anxiety vanished with him. I had done all that could humanly be done,
+I had fetched the doctor. Whatever happened I was guiltless. I knew also
+that in a few minutes a sweet relief would come to my tortured mother,
+and with full faith and loving confidence in the man of science, I
+jogged along homeward, wet to the bone but triumphant.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+Wheat and the Harvest
+
+
+The early seventies were years of swift change on the Middle Border. Day
+by day the settlement thickened. Section by section the prairie was
+blackened by the plow. Month by month the sweet wild meadows were fenced
+and pastured and so at last the colts and cows all came into captivity,
+and our horseback riding ceased, cut short as if by some imperial
+decree. Lanes of barbed wire replaced the winding wagon trails, our
+saddles gathered dust in the grain-sheds, and groves of Lombardy poplar
+and European larch replaced the tow-heads of aspen and hazel through
+which we had pursued the wolf and fox.
+
+I will not say that this produced in me any keen sense of sorrow at the
+time, for though I missed our horse-herds and the charm of the open
+spaces, I turned to tamer sports with the resilient adaptability of
+youth. If I could not ride I could at least play baseball, and the
+swimming hole in the Little Cedar remained untouched. The coming in of
+numerous Eastern settlers brought added charm to neighborhood life.
+Picnics, conventions, Fourth of July celebrations--all intensified our
+interest, and in their increasing drama we were compensated, in some
+degree at least, for the delights which were passing with the prairie.
+
+Our school-house did not change--except for the worse. No one thought of
+adding a tree or a vine to its ugly yard. Sun-smit, bare as a nose it
+stood at the cross-roads, receiving us through its drab door-way as it
+had done from the first. Its benches, hideously hacked and thick with
+grime, were as hard and uncomfortable as when I first saw them, and the
+windows remained unshaded and unwashed. Most of the farm-houses in the
+region remained equally unadorned, but Deacon Gammons had added an "ell"
+and established a "parlor," and Anson Burtch had painted his barn. The
+plain began to take on a comfortable look, for some of the trees of the
+wind-breaks had risen above the roofs, and growing maples softened the
+effect of the bleak expanse.
+
+My mother, like most of her neighbors, still cooked and served meals in
+our one living room during the winter but moved into a "summer kitchen"
+in April. This change always gave us a sense of luxury--which is
+pathetic, if you look at it that way. Our front room became suddenly and
+happily a parlor, and was so treated. Mother at once got down the rag
+carpet and gave orders for us to shake out and bring in some clean straw
+to put under it, and when we had tacked it down and re-arranged the
+furniture, it was no longer a place for muddy boots and shirt-sleeved
+shiftlessness, it had an air of being in perpetual Sabbath leisure.
+
+The Garlands were not so poor as all this would seem to imply, for we
+were now farming over three hundred acres of land and caring for a herd
+of cattle and many swine. It merely meant that my father did not feel
+the need of a "best room" and mother and Harriet were not yet able to
+change his mind. Harriet wanted an organ like Mary Abby Gammons, mother
+longed for a real "in-grain" carpet and we all clamored for a spring
+wagon. We got the wagon first.
+
+That bleak little house is clearly defined in my mind at this moment.
+The low lean-to kitchen, the rag-carpeted sitting room with its two
+chromos of _Wide Awake_ and _Fast Asleep_--its steel engraving of
+General Grant, and its tiny melodeon in the corner--all these come back
+to me. There are very few books or magazines in the scene, but there are
+piles of newspapers, for my father was an omnivorous reader of all
+things political. It was not a hovel, it was a pioneer cabin persisting
+into a settled community, that was all.
+
+During these years the whole middle border was menaced by bands of
+horse-thieves operating under a secret well-organized system. Horses
+disappeared night by night and were never recovered, till at last the
+farmers, in despair of the local authorities, organized a Horse Thief
+Protective Association which undertook to pursue and punish the robbers
+and to pay for such animals as were not returned. Our county had an
+association of this sort and shortly after we opened our new farm my
+father became a member. My first knowledge of this fact came when he
+nailed on our barn-door the white cloth poster which proclaimed in bold
+black letters a warning and a threat signed by "the Committee."--I was
+always a little in doubt as to whether the horse-thieves or ourselves
+were to be protected, for the notice was fair warning to them as well as
+an assurance to us. Anyhow very few horses were stolen from barns thus
+protected.
+
+The campaign against the thieves gave rise to many stirring stories
+which lost nothing in my father's telling of them. Jim McCarty was agent
+for our association and its effectiveness was largely due to his swift
+and fearless action. We all had a pleasant sense of the mystery of the
+night riding which went on during this period and no man could pass with
+a led horse without being under suspicion of being either a thief or a
+deputy. Then, too, the thieves were supposed to have in every community
+a spy who gave information as to the best horses, and informed the gang
+as to the membership of the Protective Society.
+
+One of our neighbors fell under suspicion at this time and never got
+clear of it. I hope we did him no injustice in this for never after
+could I bring myself to enter his house, and he was clearly ostracized
+by all the neighbors.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As I look back over my life on that Iowa farm the song of the reaper
+fills large place in my mind. We were all worshippers of wheat in those
+days. The men thought and talked of little else between seeding and
+harvest, and you will not wonder at this if you have known and bowed
+down before such abundance as we then enjoyed.
+
+Deep as the breast of a man, wide as the sea, heavy-headed,
+supple-stocked, many-voiced, full of multitudinous, secret, whispered
+colloquies,--a meeting place of winds and of sunlight,--our fields ran
+to the world's end.
+
+We trembled when the storm lay hard upon the wheat, we exulted as the
+lilac shadows of noon-day drifted over it! We went out into it at noon
+when all was still--so still we could hear the pulse of the transforming
+sap as it crept from cool root to swaying plume. We stood before it at
+evening when the setting sun flooded it with crimson, the bearded heads
+lazily swirling under the wings of the wind, the mousing hawk dipping
+into its green deeps like the eagle into the sea, and our hearts
+expanded with the beauty and the mystery of it,--and back of all this
+was the knowledge that its abundance meant a new carriage, an addition
+to the house or a new suit of clothes.
+
+Haying was over, and day by day we boys watched with deepening interest
+while the hot sun transformed the juices of the soil into those stately
+stalks. I loved to go out into the fairy forest of it, and lying there,
+silent in its swaying deeps, hear the wild chickens peep and the wind
+sing its subtle song over our heads. Day by day I studied the barley as
+it turned yellow, first at the root and then at the neck (while the
+middle joints, rank and sappy, retained their blue-green sheen), until
+at last the lower leaves began to wither and the stems to stiffen in
+order to uphold the daily increasing weight of the milky berries, and
+then almost in an hour--lo! the edge of the field became a banded ribbon
+of green and yellow, languidly waving in and out with every rush of the
+breeze.
+
+Now we got out the reaper, put the sickles in order, and father laid in
+a store of provisions. Extra hands were hired, and at last, early on a
+hot July morning, the boss mounted to his seat on the self-rake
+"McCormick" and drove into the field. Frank rode the lead horse, four
+stalwart hands and myself took "stations" behind the reaper and the
+battle was on!
+
+Reaping generally came about the 20th of July, the hottest and dryest
+part of the summer, and was the most pressing work of the year. It
+demanded early rising for the men, and it meant an all day broiling over
+the kitchen stove for the women. Stern, incessant toil went on inside
+and out from dawn till sunset, no matter how the thermometer sizzled. On
+many days the mercury mounted to ninety-five in the shade, but with wide
+fields all yellowing at the same moment, no one thought of laying off. A
+storm might sweep it flat, or if neglected too long, it might "crinkle."
+
+Our reaper in 1874 was a new model of the McCormick self-rake,--the
+Marsh Harvester was not yet in general use. The Woods Dropper, the
+Seymour and Morgan hand-rake "contraptions" seemed a long way in the
+past. True the McCormick required four horses to drag it but it was
+effective. It was hard to believe that anything more cunning would ever
+come to claim the farmer's money. Weird tales of a machine on which two
+men rode and bound twelve acres of wheat in ten hours came to us, but
+we did not potently believe these reports--on the contrary we accepted
+the self-rake as quite the final word in harvesting machinery and
+cheerily bent to the binding of sheaves with their own straw in the good
+old time-honored way.
+
+No task save that of "cradling" surpassed in severity "binding on a
+station." It was a full-grown man's job, but every boy was ambitious to
+try his hand, and when at fourteen years of age I was promoted from
+"bundle boy" to be one of the five hands to bind after the reaper, I
+went to my corner with joy and confidence. For two years I had been
+serving as binder on the corners, (to keep the grain out of the way of
+the horses) and I knew my job.
+
+I was short and broad-shouldered with large strong hands admirably
+adapted for this work, and for the first two hours, easily held my own
+with the rest of the crew, but as the morning wore on and the sun grew
+hotter, my enthusiasm waned. A painful void developed in my chest. My
+breakfast had been ample, but no mere stomachful of food could carry a
+growing boy through five hours of desperate toil. Along about a quarter
+to ten, I began to scan the field with anxious eye, longing to see
+Harriet and the promised luncheon basket.
+
+Just when it seemed that I could endure the strain no longer she came
+bearing a jug of cool milk, some cheese and some deliciously fresh
+fried-cakes. With keen joy I set a couple of tall sheaves together like
+a tent and flung myself down flat on my back in their shadow to devour
+my lunch.
+
+Tired as I was, my dim eyes apprehended something of the splendor of the
+shining clouds which rolled like storms of snow through the deep-blue
+spaces of sky and so, resting silently as a clod I could hear the chirp
+of the crickets, the buzzing wings of flies and the faint, fairylike
+tread of smaller unseen insects hurrying their way just beneath my ear
+in the stubble. Strange green worms, grasshoppers and shining beetles
+crept over me as I dozed.
+
+This delicious, dreamful respite was broken by the far-off approaching
+purr of the sickle, flicked by the faint snap of the driver's whip, and
+out of the low rustle of the everstirring lilliputian forest came the
+wailing cry of a baby wild chicken lost from its mother--a falling,
+thrilling, piteous little pipe.
+
+Such momentary communion with nature seemed all the sweeter for the work
+which had preceded it, as well as that which was to follow it. It took
+resolution to rise and go back to my work, but I did it, sustained by a
+kind of soldierly pride.
+
+At noon we hurried to the house, surrounded the kitchen table and fell
+upon our boiled beef and potatoes with such ferocity that in fifteen
+minutes our meal was over. There was no ceremony and very little talking
+till the hid wolf was appeased. Then came a heavenly half-hour of rest
+on the cool grass in the shade of the trees, a siesta as luxurious as
+that of a Spanish monarch--but alas!--this "nooning," as we called it,
+was always cut short by father's word of sharp command, "Roll out,
+boys!" and again the big white jugs were filled at the well, the horses,
+lazy with food, led the way back to the field, and the stern contest
+began again.
+
+All nature at this hour seemed to invite to repose rather than to labor,
+and as the heat increased I longed with wordless fervor for the green
+woods of the Cedar River. At times the gentle wind hardly moved the
+bended heads of the barley, and the hawks hung in the air like trout
+sleeping in deep pools. The sunlight was a golden, silent, scorching
+cataract--yet each of us must strain his tired muscles and bend his
+aching back to the harvest.
+
+Supper came at five, another delicious interval--and then at six we all
+went out again for another hour or two in the cool of the
+sunset.--However, the pace was more leisurely now for the end of the day
+was near. I always enjoyed this period, for the shadows lengthening
+across the stubble, and the fiery sun, veiled by the gray clouds of the
+west, had wondrous charm. The air began to moisten and grow cool. The
+voices of the men pulsed powerfully and cheerfully across the narrowing
+field of unreaped grain, the prairie hens led forth their broods to
+feed, and at last, father's long-drawn and musical cry, "Turn OUT! All
+hands TURN OUT!" rang with restful significance through the dusk. Then,
+slowly, with low-hung heads the freed horses moved toward the barn,
+walking with lagging steps like weary warriors going into camp.
+
+In all the toil of the harvest field, the water jug filled a large
+place. It was a source of anxiety as well as comfort. To keep it cool,
+to keep it well filled was a part of my job. No man passed it at the
+"home corner" of the field. It is a delightful part of my recollections
+of the harvest.
+
+    O cool gray jug that touched the lips
+    In kiss that softly closed and clung,
+    No Spanish wine the tippler sips,
+    No port the poet's praise has sung--
+    Such pure, untainted sweetness yields
+    As cool gray jug in harvest fields.
+
+    I see it now!--a clover leaf
+    Out-spread upon its sweating side!--
+    As from the sheltering sheaf
+    I pluck and swing it high, the wide
+    Field glows with noon-day heat,
+    The winds are tangled in the wheat.
+
+    The swarming crickets blithely cheep,
+    Across the stir of waving grain
+    I see the burnished reaper creep--
+    The lunch-boy comes, and once again
+    The jug its crystal coolness yields--
+    O cool gray jug in harvest fields!
+
+My father did not believe in serving strong liquor to his men, and
+seldom treated them to even beer. While not a teetotaler he was strongly
+opposed to all that intemperance represented. He furnished the best of
+food, and tea and coffee, but no liquor, and the men respected him for
+it.
+
+The reaping on our farm that year lasted about four weeks. Barley came
+first, wheat followed, the oats came last of all. No sooner was the
+final swath cut than the barley was ready to be put under cover, and
+"stacking," a new and less exacting phase of the harvest, began.
+
+This job required less men than reaping, hence a part of our hands were
+paid off, only the more responsible ones were retained. The rush, the
+strain of the reaping gave place to a leisurely, steady, day-by-day
+garnering of the thoroughly seasoned shocks into great conical piles,
+four in a place in the midst of the stubble, which was already growing
+green with swiftly-springing weeds.
+
+A full crew consisted of a stacker, a boy to pass bundles, two drivers
+for the heavy wagon-racks, and a pitcher in the field who lifted the
+sheaves from the shock with a three-tined fork and threw them to the man
+on the load.
+
+At the age of ten I had been taught to "handle bundles" on the stack,
+but now at fourteen I took my father's place as stacker, whilst he
+passed the sheaves and told me how to lay them. This exalted me at the
+same time that it increased my responsibility. It made a man of me--not
+only in my own estimation, but in the eyes of my boy companions to whom
+I discoursed loftily on the value of "bulges" and the advantages of the
+stack over the rick.
+
+No sooner was the stacking ended than the dreaded task of plowing began
+for Burton and John and me. Every morning while our fathers and the
+hired men shouldered their forks and went away to help some neighbor
+thrash--("changing works") we drove our teams into the field, there to
+plod round and round in solitary course. Here I acquired the feeling
+which I afterward put into verse--
+
+    A lonely task it is to plow!
+    All day the black and shining soil
+    Rolls like a ribbon from the mold-board's
+    Glistening curve. All day the horses toil,
+    Battling with savage flies, and strain
+    Their creaking single-trees. All day
+    The crickets peer from wind-blown stacks of grain.
+
+Franklin's job was almost as lonely. He was set to herd the cattle on
+the harvested stubble and keep them out of the corn field. A little
+later, in October, when I was called to take my place as corn-husker, he
+was promoted to the plow. Our only respite during the months of October
+and November was the occasional cold rain which permitted us to read or
+play cards in the kitchen.
+
+Cards! I never look at a certain type of playing card without
+experiencing a return of the wonder and the guilty joy with which I
+bought of Metellus Kirby my first "deck," and slipped it into my pocket.
+There was an alluring oriental imaginative quality in the drawing on the
+face cards. They brought to me vague hints of mad monarchs, desperate
+stakes, and huge sudden rewards. All that I had heard or read of
+Mississippi gamblers came back to make those gaudy bits of pasteboard
+marvellous.
+
+My father did not play cards, hence, although I had no reason to think
+he would forbid them to me, I took a fearsome joy in assuming his bitter
+opposition. For a time my brother and I played in secret, and then one
+day, one cold bleak day as we were seated on the floor of the granary
+playing on an upturned half-bushel measure, shivering with the chill,
+our fingers numb and blue, the door opened and father looked in.
+
+We waited, while his round, eagle-gray eyes took in the situation and it
+seemed a long, terrifying interval, then at last he mildly said, "I
+guess you'd better go in and play by the stove. This isn't very
+comfortable."
+
+Stunned by this unexpected concession, I gathered up the cards, and as I
+took my way to the house, I thought deeply. The meaning of that quiet
+voice, that friendly invitation was not lost on me. The soldier rose to
+grand heights by that single act, and when I showed the cards to mother
+and told her that father had consented to our playing, she looked grave
+but made no objection to our use of the kitchen table. As a matter of
+fact they both soon after joined our game. "If you are going to play,"
+they said, "we'd rather you played right here with us." Thereafter rainy
+days were less dreary, and the evenings shorter.
+
+Everybody played Authors at this time also, and to this day I cannot
+entirely rid myself of the estimations which our pack of cards fixed in
+my mind. _Prue and I_ and _The Blithedale Romance_ were on an equal
+footing, so far as our game went, and Howells, Bret Harte and Dickens
+were all of far-off romantic horizon. Writers were singular, exalted
+beings found only in the East--in splendid cities. They were not folks,
+they were demigods, men and women living aloof and looking down
+benignantly on toiling common creatures like us.
+
+It never entered my mind that anyone I knew could ever by any chance
+meet an author, or even hear one lecture--although it was said that they
+did sometimes come west on altruistic educational journeys and that they
+sometimes reached our county town.
+
+I am told--I do not know that it is true--that I am one of the names on
+a present-day deck of Author cards. If so, I wish I could call in that
+small plow-boy of 1874 and let him play a game with this particular
+pack!
+
+The crops on our farms in those first years were enormous and prices
+were good, and yet the homes of the neighborhood were slow in taking on
+grace or comfort. I don't know why this was so, unless it was that the
+men were continually buying more land and more machinery. Our own
+stables were still straw-roofed sheds, but the trees which we had
+planted had grown swiftly into a grove, and a garden, tended at odd
+moments by all hands, brought small fruits and vegetables in season.
+Although a constantly improving collection of farm machinery lightened
+the burdens of the husbandman, the drudgery of the house-wife's
+dish-washing and cooking did not correspondingly lessen. I fear it
+increased, for with the widening of the fields came the doubling of the
+harvest hands, and my mother continued to do most of the housework
+herself--cooking, sewing, washing, churning, and nursing the sick from
+time to time. No one in trouble ever sent for Isabelle Garland in vain,
+and I have many recollections of neighbors riding up in the night and
+calling for her with agitated voices.
+
+Of course I did not realize, and I am sure my father did not realize,
+the heavy burden, the endless grind of her toil. Harriet helped, of
+course, and Frank and I churned and carried wood and brought water; but
+even with such aid, the round of mother's duties must have been as
+relentless as a tread-mill. Even on Sunday, when we were free for a part
+of the day, she was required to furnish forth three meals, and to help
+Frank and Jessie dress for church.--She sang less and less, and the
+songs we loved were seldom referred to.--If I could only go back for one
+little hour and take her in my arms, and tell her how much I owe her for
+those grinding days!
+
+Meanwhile we were all growing away from our life in the old Wisconsin
+Coulee. We heard from William but seldom, and David, who had bought a
+farm of his own some ten miles to the south of us, came over to see us
+only at long intervals. He still owned his long-barrelled rifle but it
+hung unused on a peg in the kitchen. Swiftly the world of the hunter was
+receding, never to return. Prairie chickens, rabbits, ducks, and other
+small game still abounded but they did not call for the bullet, and
+turkey shoots were events of the receding past. Almost in a year the
+ideals of the country-side changed. David was in truth a survival of a
+more heroic age, a time which he loved to lament with my father who was
+almost as great a lover of the wilderness as he. None of us sang "O'er
+the hills in legions, boys." Our share in the conquest of the west
+seemed complete.
+
+Threshing time, which was becoming each year less of a "bee" and more of
+a job (many of the men were mere hired hands), was made distinctive by
+David who came over from Orchard with his machine--the last time as it
+turned out--and stayed to the end. As I cut bands beside him in the dust
+and thunder of the cylinder I regained something of my boyish worship of
+his strength and skill. The tireless easy swing of his great frame was
+wonderful to me and when, in my weariness, I failed to slash a band he
+smiled and tore the sheaf apart--thus deepening my love for him. I
+looked up at him at such times as a sailor regards his captain on the
+bridge. His handsome immobile bearded face, his air of command, his
+large gestures as he rolled the broad sheaves into the howling maw of
+the machine made of him a chieftain.--The touch of melancholy which even
+then had begun to develop, added to his manly charm.
+
+One day in late September as I was plowing in the field at the back of
+the farm, I encountered a particularly troublesome thicket of weeds and
+vines in the stubble, and decided to burn the way before the coulter. We
+had been doing this ever since the frost had killed the vegetation but
+always on lands after they had been safeguarded by strips of plowing. On
+this particular land no fire had been set for the reason that four large
+stacks of wheat still stood waiting the thresher. In my irritation and
+self-confidence I decided to clear away the matted stubble on the same
+strip though at some distance from the stacks. This seemed safe enough
+at the time for the wind was blowing gently from the opposite direction.
+
+It was a lovely golden day and as I stood watching the friendly flame
+clearing the ground for me, I was filled with satisfaction. Suddenly I
+observed that the line of red was moving steadily against the wind and
+_toward_ the stacks. My satisfaction changed to alarm. The matted weeds
+furnished a thick bed of fuel, and against the progress of the flame I
+had nothing to offer. I could only hope that the thinning stubble would
+permit me to trample it out. I tore at the ground in desperation, hoping
+to make a bare spot which the flame could not leap. I trampled the fire
+with my bare feet. I beat at it with my hat. I screamed for help.--Too
+late I thought of my team and the plow with which I might have drawn a
+furrow around the stacks. The flame touched the high-piled sheaves. It
+ran lightly, beautifully up the sides--and as I stood watching it, I
+thought, "It is all a dream. It can't be true."
+
+But it was. In less than twenty minutes the towering piles had melted
+into four glowing heaps of ashes. Four hundred dollars had gone up in
+that blaze.
+
+Slowly, painfully I hobbled to the plow and drove my team to the house.
+Although badly burned, my mental suffering was so much greater that I
+felt only part of it.--Leaving the horses at the well I hobbled into the
+house to my mother. She, I knew, would sympathize with me and shield me
+from the just wrath of my father who was away, but was due to return in
+an hour or two.
+
+Mother received me in silence, bandaged my feet and put me to bed where
+I lay in shame and terror.
+
+At last I heard father come in. He questioned, mother's voice replied.
+He remained ominously silent. She went on quietly but with an eloquence
+unusual in her. What she said to him I never knew, but when he came up
+the stairs and stood looking down at me his anger had cooled. He merely
+asked me how I felt, uncovered my burned feet, examined them, put the
+sheet back, and went away, without a word either of reproof or
+consolation.
+
+None of us except little Jessie, ever alluded to this tragic matter
+again; she was accustomed to tell my story as she remembered it,--"an
+'nen the moon changed--the fire ran up the stacks and burned 'em all
+down--"
+
+When I think of the myriads of opportunities for committing mistakes of
+this sort, I wonder that we had so few accidents. The truth is our
+captain taught us to think before we acted at all times, and we had
+little of the heedlessness which less experienced children often show.
+We were in effect small soldiers and carried some of the
+responsibilities of soldiers into all that we did.
+
+While still I was hobbling about, suffering from my wounds my uncles
+William and Frank McClintock drove over from Neshonoc bringing with them
+a cloud of strangely-moving revived memories of the hills and woods of
+our old Wisconsin home. I was peculiarly delighted by this visit, for
+while the story of my folly was told, it was not dwelt upon. They soon
+forgot me and fell naturally into discussion of ancient neighbors and
+far-away events.
+
+To me it was like peering back into a dim, dawn-lit world wherein all
+forms were distorted or wondrously aggrandized. William, big,
+black-bearded and smiling, had lost little of his romantic appeal.
+Frank, still the wag, was able to turn hand-springs and somersaults
+almost as well as ever, and the talk which followed formed an absorbing
+review of early days in Wisconsin.
+
+It brought up and defined many of the events of our life in the coulee,
+pictures which were becoming a little vague, a little blurred. Al Randal
+and Ed Green, who were already almost mythical, were spoken of as living
+creatures and thus the far was brought near. Comparisons between the old
+and the new methods of seeding and harvest also gave me a sense of
+change, a perception which troubled me a little, especially as a wistful
+note had crept into the voices of these giants of the middle border.
+They all loved the wilderness too well not to be a little saddened by
+the clearing away of bosky coverts and the drying up of rippling
+streams.
+
+We sent for Uncle David who came over on Sunday to spend a night with
+his brothers and in the argument which followed, I began to sense in him
+a spirit of restlessness, a growing discontent which covered his
+handsome face with a deepening shadow. He disliked being tied down to
+the dull life of the farm, and his horse-power threshing machine no
+longer paid him enough to compensate for the loss of time and care on
+the other phases of his industry. His voice was still glorious and he
+played the violin when strongly urged, though with a sense of
+dissatisfaction.
+
+He and mother and Aunt Deborah sang _Nellie Wildwood_ and _Lily Dale_
+and _Minnie Minturn_ just as they used to do in the coulee, and I forgot
+my disgrace and the pain of my blistered feet in the rapture of that
+exquisite hour of blended melody and memory. The world they represented
+was passing and though I did not fully realize this, I sensed in some
+degree the transitory nature of this reunion. In truth it never came
+again. Never again did these three brothers meet, and when they said
+good-bye to us next morning, I wondered why it was, we must be so widely
+separated from those we loved the best.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+Harriet Goes Away
+
+
+Girls on the Border came to womanhood early. At fifteen my sister
+Harriet considered herself a young lady and began to go out to dances
+with Cyrus and Albert and Frances. She was small, moody and silent, and
+as all her interests became feminine I lost that sense of comradeship
+with which we used to ride after the cattle and I turned back to my
+brother who was growing into a hollow-chested lanky lad--and in our
+little sister Jessie we took increasing interest. She was a joyous
+child, always singing like a canary. SHE was never a "trial."
+
+Though delicate and fair and pretty, she manifested a singular
+indifference to the usual games of girls. Contemptuous of dolls, she
+never played house so far as I know. She took no interest in sewing, or
+cooking, but had a whole yard full of "horses," that is to say, sticks
+of varying sizes and shapes. Each pole had its name and its "stall" and
+she endlessly repeated the chores of leading them to water and feeding
+them hay. She loved to go with me to the field and was never so happy as
+when riding on old Jule.--Dear little sister, I fear I neglected you at
+times, turning away from your sweet face and pleading smile to lose
+myself in some worthless book. I am comforted to remember that I did
+sometimes lift you to the back of a real horse and permit you to ride "a
+round," chattering like a sparrow as we plodded back and forth across
+the field.
+
+Frank cared little for books but he could take a hand at games although
+he was not strong. Burton who at sixteen was almost as tall as his
+father was the last to surrender his saddle to the ash-bin. He often
+rode his high-headed horse past our house on his way to town, and I
+especially recall one day, when as Frank and I were walking to town (one
+fourth of July) Burt came galloping along with five dollars in his
+pocket.--We could not see the five dollars but we did get the full force
+and dignity of his cavalier approach, and his word was sufficient proof
+of the cash he had to spend. As he rode on we, in crushed humility,
+resumed our silent plodding in the dust of his horse's hooves.
+
+His round of labor, like my own, was well established. In spring he
+drove team and drag. In haying he served as stacker. In harvest he bound
+his station. In stacking he pitched bundles. After stacking he plowed or
+went out "changing works" and ended the season's work by husking corn--a
+job that increased in severity from year to year, as the fields grew
+larger. In '74 it lasted well into November. Beginning in the warm and
+golden September we kept at it (off and on) until sleety rains coated
+the ears with ice and the wet soil loaded our boots with huge balls of
+clay and grass--till the snow came whirling by on the wings of the north
+wind and the last flock of belated geese went sprawling sidewise down
+the ragged sky. Grim business this! At times our wet gloves froze on our
+hands.
+
+How primitive all our notions were! Few of the boys owned overcoats and
+the same suit served each of us for summer and winter alike. In lieu of
+ulsters most of us wore long, gay-colored woolen scarfs wound about our
+heads and necks--scarfs which our mothers, sisters or sweethearts had
+knitted for us. Our footwear continued to be boots of the tall cavalry
+model with pointed toes and high heels. Our collars were either
+home-made ginghams or "boughten" ones of paper at fifteen cents per box.
+Some men went so far as to wear "dickies," that is to say, false shirt
+fronts made of paper, but this was considered a silly cheat. No one in
+our neighborhood ever saw a tailor-made suit, and nothing that we wore
+fitted,--our clothes merely enclosed us.
+
+Harriet, like the other women, made her own dresses, assisted by my
+mother, and her best gowns in summer were white muslin tied at the waist
+with ribbons. All the girls dressed in this simple fashion, but as I
+write, recalling the glowing cheeks and shining eyes of Hattie and Agnes
+and Bess, I feel again the thrill of admiration which ran through my
+blood as they came down the aisle at church, or when at dancing parties
+they balanced or "sashayed" in _Honest John_ or _Money Musk_.--To me
+they were perfectly clothed and divinely fair.
+
+The contrast between the McClintocks, my hunter uncles, and Addison
+Garland, my father's brother who came to visit us at about this time was
+strikingly significant even to me. Tall, thoughtful, humorous and of
+frail and bloodless body, "A. Garland" as he signed himself, was of the
+Yankee merchant type. A general store in Wisconsin was slowly making him
+a citizen of substance and his quiet comment brought to me an entirely
+new conception of the middle west and its future. He was a philosopher.
+He peered into the years that were to come and paid little heed to the
+passing glories of the plain. He predicted astounding inventions and
+great cities, and advised my father to go into dairying and diversified
+crops. "This is a natural butter country," said he.
+
+He was an invalid, and it was through him that we first learned of
+graham flour. During his stay (and for some time after) we suffered an
+infliction of sticky "gems" and dark soggy bread. We all resented this
+displacement of our usual salt-rising loaf and delicious saleratus
+biscuits but we ate the hot gems, liberally splashed with butter, just
+as we would have eaten dog-biscuit or hardtack had it been put before
+us.
+
+One of the sayings of my uncle will fix his character in the mind of the
+reader. One day, apropos of some public event which displeased him, he
+said, "Men can be infinitely more foolish in their collective capacity
+than on their own individual account." His quiet utterance of these
+words and especially the phrase "collective capacity" made a deep
+impression on me. The underlying truth of the saying came to me only
+later in my life.
+
+He was full of "_citrus-belt_" enthusiasm and told us that he was about
+to sell out and move to Santa Barbara. He did not urge my father to
+accompany him, and if he had, it would have made no difference. A
+winterless climate and the raising of fruit did not appeal to my
+Commander. He loved the prairie and the raising of wheat and cattle, and
+gave little heed to anything else, but to me Addison's talk of "the
+citrus belt" had the value of a romance, and the occasional Spanish
+phrases which he used afforded me an indefinable delight. It was
+unthinkable that I should ever see an _arroyo_ but I permitted myself to
+dream of it while he talked.
+
+I think he must have encouraged my sister in her growing desire for an
+education, for in the autumn after his visit she entered the Cedar
+Valley Seminary at Osage and her going produced in me a desire to
+accompany her. I said nothing of it at the time, for my father gave but
+reluctant consent to Harriet's plan. A district school education seemed
+to him ample for any farmer's needs.
+
+Many of our social affairs were now connected with "the Grange." During
+these years on the new farm while we were busied with breaking and
+fencing and raising wheat, there had been growing up among the farmers
+of the west a social organization officially known as The Patrons of
+Husbandry. The places of meeting were called "Granges" and very
+naturally the members were at once called "Grangers."
+
+My father was an early and enthusiastic member of the order, and during
+the early seventies its meetings became very important dates on our
+calendar. In winter "oyster suppers," with debates, songs and essays,
+drew us all to the Burr Oak Grove school-house, and each spring, on the
+twelfth of June, the Grange Picnic was a grand "turn-out." It was almost
+as well attended as the circus.
+
+We all looked forward to it for weeks and every young man who owned a
+top-buggy got it out and washed and polished it for the use of his best
+girl, and those who were not so fortunate as to own "a rig" paid high
+tribute to the livery stable of the nearest town. Others, less able or
+less extravagant, doubled teams with a comrade and built a "bowery
+wagon" out of a wagon-box, and with hampers heaped with food rode away
+in state, drawn by a four or six-horse team. It seemed a splendid and
+daring thing to do, and some day I hoped to drive a six-horse bowery
+wagon myself.
+
+The central place of meeting was usually in some grove along the Big
+Cedar to the west and south of us, and early on the appointed day the
+various lodges of our region came together one by one at convenient
+places, each one moving in procession and led by great banners on which
+the women had blazoned the motto of their home lodge. Some of the
+columns had bands and came preceded by far faint strains of music, with
+marshals in red sashes galloping to and fro in fine assumption of
+military command.
+
+It was grand, it was inspiring--to us, to see those long lines of
+carriages winding down the lanes, joining one to another at the cross
+roads till at last all the granges from the northern end of the county
+were united in one mighty column advancing on the picnic ground, where
+orators awaited our approach with calm dignity and high resolve. Nothing
+more picturesque, more delightful, more helpful has ever risen out of
+American rural life. Each of these assemblies was a most grateful relief
+from the sordid loneliness of the farm.
+
+Our winter amusements were also in process of change. We held no more
+singing schools--the "Lyceum" had taken its place. Revival meetings were
+given up, although few of the church folk classed them among the
+amusements. The County Fair on the contrary was becoming each year more
+important as farming diversified. It was even more glorious than the
+Grange Picnic, was indeed second only to the fourth of July, and we
+looked forward to it all through the autumn.
+
+It came late in September and always lasted three days. We all went on
+the second day, (which was considered the best day) and mother, by
+cooking all the afternoon before our outing, provided us a dinner of
+cold chicken and cake and pie which we ate while sitting on the grass
+beside our wagon just off the racetrack while the horses munched hay and
+oats from the box. All around us other families were grouped, picnicking
+in the same fashion, and a cordial interchange of jellies and pies made
+the meal a delightful function. However, we boys never lingered over
+it,--we were afraid of missing something of the program.
+
+Our interest in the races was especially keen, for one of the citizens
+of our town owned a fine little trotting horse called "Huckleberry"
+whose honest friendly striving made him a general favorite. Our survey
+of fat sheep, broad-backed bulls and shining colts was a duty, but to
+cheer Huckleberry at the home stretch was a privilege.
+
+To us from the farm the crowds were the most absorbing show of all. We
+met our chums and their sisters with a curious sense of strangeness, of
+discovery. Our playmates seemed alien somehow--especially the girls in
+their best dresses walking about two and two, impersonal and haughty of
+glance.
+
+Cyrus and Walter were there in their top-buggies with Harriet and Bettie
+but they seemed to be having a dull time, for while they sat holding
+their horses we were dodging about in freedom--now at the contest of
+draft horses, now at the sledge-hammer throwing, now at the candy-booth.
+We were comical figures, with our long trousers, thick gray coats and
+faded hats, but we didn't know it and were happy.
+
+One day as Burton and I were wandering about on the fair grounds we came
+upon a patent medicine cart from which a faker, a handsome fellow with
+long black hair and an immense white hat, was addressing the crowd while
+a young and beautiful girl with a guitar in her lap sat in weary
+relaxation at his feet. A third member of the "troupe," a short and very
+plump man of commonplace type, was handing out bottles. It was "Doctor"
+Lightner, vending his "Magic Oil."
+
+At first I perceived only the doctor whose splendid gray suit and
+spotless linen made the men in the crowd rustic and graceless, but as I
+studied the woman I began to read into her face a sadness, a weariness,
+which appealed to my imagination. Who was she? Why was she there? I had
+never seen a girl with such an expression. She saw no one, was
+interested in nothing before her--and when her master, or husband, spoke
+to her in a low voice, she raised her guitar and joined in the song
+which he had started, all with the same air of weary disgust. Her
+voice, a childishly sweet soprano, mingled with the robust baritone of
+the doctor and the shouting tenor of the fat man, like a thread of
+silver in a skein of brass.
+
+I forgot my dusty clothes, my rough shoes,--I forgot that I was a boy.
+Absorbed and dreaming I listened to these strange new songs and studied
+the singular faces of these alien songsters. Even the shouting tenor had
+a far-away gleam in the yellow light of his cat-like eyes. The leader's
+skill, the woman's grace and the perfect blending of their voices made
+an ineffaceable impression on my sensitive, farm-bred brain.
+
+The songs which they sang were not in themselves of a character to
+warrant this ecstasy in me. One of them ran as follows:
+
+        O Mary had a little lamb,
+        Its fleece was black as jet,
+    In the little old log cabin in the lane;
+        And everywhere that Mary went,
+        The lamb went too, you bet.
+    In the little old log cabin in the lane.
+
+        In the little old log cabin O!
+        The little old log cabin O!
+    The little old log cabin in the lane,
+        They're hangin' men and women now
+        For singing songs like this
+    In the little old log cabin in the lane.
+
+Nevertheless I listened without a smile. It was art to me. It gave me
+something I had never known. The large, white, graceful hand of the
+doctor sweeping the strings, the clear ringing shout of the tenor and
+the chiming, bird-like voice of the girl lent to the absurd words of
+this ballad a singular dignity. They made all other persons and events
+of the day of no account.
+
+In the intervals between the songs the doctor talked of catarrh and its
+cure, and offered his medicines for sale, and in this dull part of the
+program the tenor assisted, but the girl, sinking back in her seat,
+resumed her impersonal and weary air.
+
+That was forty years ago, and I can still sing those songs and imitate
+the whoop of the shouting tenor, but I have never been able to put that
+woman into verse or fiction although I have tried. In a story called
+_Love or the Law_ I once made a laborious attempt to account for her,
+but I did not succeed, and the manuscript remains in the bottom of my
+desk.
+
+No doubt the doctor has gone to his long account and the girl is a gray
+old woman of sixty-five but in this book they shall be forever young,
+forever beautiful, noble with the grace of art. The medicine they
+peddled was of doubtful service, but the songs they sang, the story they
+suggested were of priceless value to us who came from the monotony of
+the farm, and went back to it like bees laden with the pollen of new
+intoxicating blooms.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Sorrowfully we left Huckleberry's unfinished race, reluctantly we
+climbed into the farm wagon, sticky with candy, dusty, tired, some of us
+suffering with sick-headache, and rolled away homeward to milk the cows,
+feed the pigs and bed down the horses.
+
+As I look at a tintype of myself taken at about this time, I can hardly
+detect the physical relationship between that mop-headed, long-lipped
+lad, and the gray-haired man of today. But the coat, the tie, the little
+stick-pin on the lapel of my coat all unite to bring back to me with
+painful stir, the curious debates, the boyish delights, the dawning
+desires which led me to these material expressions of manly pride. There
+is a kind of pathos too, in the memory of the keen pleasure I took in
+that absurd ornament--and yet my joy was genuine, my satisfaction
+complete.
+
+Harriet came home from school each Friday night but we saw little of
+her, for she was always engaged for dances or socials by the neighbors'
+sons, and had only a young lady's interest in her cub brothers. I
+resented this and was openly hostile to her admirers. She seldom rode
+with us to spelling schools or "soshybles." There was always some youth
+with a cutter, or some noisy group in a big bob-sleigh to carry her
+away, and on Monday morning father drove her back to the county town
+with growing pride in her improving manners.
+
+Her course at the Seminary was cut short in early spring by a cough
+which came from a long ride in the keen wind. She was very ill with a
+wasting fever, yet for a time refused to go to bed. She could not resign
+herself to the loss of her school-life.
+
+The lack of room in our house is brought painfully to my mind as I
+recall that she lay for a week or two in a corner of our living room
+with all the noise and bustle of the family going on around her. Her own
+attic chamber was unwarmed (like those of all her girl friends), and so
+she was forced to lie near the kitchen stove.
+
+She grew rapidly worse all through the opening days of April and as we
+were necessarily out in the fields at work, and mother was busied with
+her household affairs, the lonely sufferer was glad to have her bed in
+the living room--and there she lay, her bright eyes following mother at
+her work, growing whiter and whiter until one beautiful, tragic morning
+in early May, my father called me in to say good-bye to her.
+
+She was very weak, but her mind was perfectly clear, and as she kissed
+me farewell with a soft word about being a good boy, I turned away
+blinded with tears and fled to the barnyard, there to hide like a
+wounded animal, appalled by the weight of despair and sorrow which her
+transfigured face had suddenly thrust upon me. All about me the young
+cattle called, the spring sun shone and the gay fowls sang, but they
+could not mitigate my grief, my dismay, my sense of loss. My sister was
+passing from me--that was the agonizing fact which benumbed me. She who
+had been my playmate, my comrade, was about to vanish into air and
+earth!
+
+This was my first close contact with death, and it filled me with awe.
+Human life suddenly seemed fleeting and of a part with the impermanency
+and change of the westward moving Border Line.--Like the wild flowers
+she had gathered, Harriet was now a fragrant memory. Her dust mingled
+with the soil of the little burial ground just beyond the village
+bounds.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My mother's heart was long in recovering from the pain of this loss, but
+at last Jessie's sweet face, which had in it the light of the sky and
+the color of a flower, won back her smiles. The child's acceptance of
+the funeral as a mere incident of her busy little life, in some way
+enabled us all to take up and carry forward the routine of our shadowed
+home.
+
+Those years on the plain, from '71 to '75, held much that was alluring,
+much that was splendid. I did not live an exceptional life in any way.
+My duties and my pleasures were those of the boys around me. In all
+essentials my life was typical of the time and place. My father was
+counted a good and successful farmer. Our neighbors all lived in the
+same restricted fashion as ourselves, in barren little houses of wood or
+stone, owning few books, reading only weekly papers. It was a pure
+democracy wherein my father was a leader and my mother beloved by all
+who knew her. If anybody looked down upon us we didn't know it, and in
+all the social affairs of the township we fully shared.
+
+Nature was our compensation. As I look back upon it, I perceive
+transcendent sunsets, and a mighty sweep of golden grain beneath a sea
+of crimson clouds. The light and song and motion of the prairie return
+to me. I hear again the shrill, myriad-voiced choir of leaping insects
+whose wings flash fire amid the glorified stubble. The wind wanders by,
+lifting my torn hat-rim. The locusts rise in clouds before my weary
+feet. The prairie hen soars out of the unreaped barley and drops into
+the sheltering deeps of the tangled oats, green as emerald. The lone
+quail pipes in the hazel thicket, and far up the road the cow-bell's
+steady clang tells of the homecoming herd.
+
+Even in our hours of toil, and through the sultry skies, the sacred
+light of beauty broke; worn and grimed as we were, we still could fall
+a-dream before the marvel of a golden earth beneath a crimson sky.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+We Move to Town
+
+
+One day, soon after the death of my sister Harriet, my father came home
+from a meeting of the Grange with a message which shook our home with
+the force of an earth-quake. The officers of the order had asked him to
+become the official grain-buyer for the county, and he had agreed to do
+it. "I am to take charge of the new elevator which is just being
+completed in Osage," he said.
+
+The effect of this announcement was far-reaching. First of all it put an
+end not merely to our further pioneering but, (as the plan developed)
+promised to translate us from the farm to a new and shining world, a
+town world where circuses, baseball games and county fairs were events
+of almost daily occurrence. It awed while it delighted us for we felt
+vaguely our father's perturbation.
+
+For the first time since leaving Boston, some thirty years before, Dick
+Garland began to dream of making a living at something less backbreaking
+than tilling the soil. It was to him a most abrupt and startling
+departure from the fixed plan of his life, and I dimly understood even
+then that he came to this decision only after long and troubled
+reflection. Mother as usual sat in silence. If she showed exultation, I
+do not recall the fashion of it.
+
+Father assumed his new duties in June and during all that summer and
+autumn, drove away immediately after breakfast each morning, to the
+elevator some six miles away, leaving me in full charge of the farm and
+its tools. All his orders to the hired men were executed through me. On
+me fell the supervision of their action, always with an eye to his
+general oversight. I never forgot that fact. He possessed the eye of an
+eagle. His uncanny powers of observation kept me terrified. He could
+detect at a glance the slightest blunder or wrong doing in my day's
+activities. Every afternoon, about sunset he came whirling into the
+yard, his team flecked with foam, his big gray eyes flashing from side
+to side, and if any tool was out of place or broken, he discovered it at
+once, and his reproof was never a cause of laughter to me or my brother.
+
+As harvest came on he took command in the field, for most of the harvest
+help that year were rough, hardy wanderers from the south, nomads who
+had followed the line of ripening wheat from Missouri northward, and
+were not the most profitable companions for boys of fifteen. They
+reached our neighborhood in July, arriving like a flight of alien
+unclean birds, and vanished into the north in September as mysteriously
+as they had appeared. A few of them had been soldiers, others were the
+errant sons of the poor farmers and rough mechanics of older States,
+migrating for the adventure of it. One of them gave his name as "Harry
+Lee," others were known by such names as "Big Ed" or "Shorty." Some
+carried valises, others had nothing but small bundles containing a clean
+shirt and a few socks.
+
+They all had the most appalling yet darkly romantic conception of women.
+A "girl" was the most desired thing in the world, a prize to be worked
+for, sought for and enjoyed without remorse. She had no soul. The maid
+who yielded to temptation deserved no pity, no consideration, no aid.
+Her sufferings were amusing, her diseases a joke, her future of no
+account. From these men Burton and I acquired a desolating fund of
+information concerning South Clark Street in Chicago, and the river
+front in St. Louis. Their talk did not allure, it mostly shocked and
+horrified us. We had not known that such cruelty, such baseness was in
+the world and it stood away in such violent opposition to the teaching
+of our fathers and uncles that it did not corrupt us. That man, the
+stronger animal, owed chivalry and care to woman, had been deeply
+grounded in our concept of life, and we shrank from these vile stories
+as from something disloyal to our mothers and sisters.
+
+To those who think of the farm as a sweetly ideal place in which to
+bring up a boy, all this may be disturbing--but the truth is, low-minded
+men are low-minded everywhere, and farm hands are often creatures with
+enormous appetites and small remorse, men on whom the beauty of nature
+has very little effect.
+
+To most of our harvest hands that year Saturday night meant a visit to
+town and a drunken spree, and they did not hesitate to say so in the
+presence of Burton and myself. Some of them did not hesitate to say
+anything in our presence. After a hard week's work we all felt that a
+trip to town was only a fair reward.
+
+Saturday night in town! How it all comes back to me! I am a timid
+visitor in the little frontier village. It is sunset. A whiskey-crazed
+farmhand is walking bare footed up and down the middle of the road
+defying the world.--From a corner of the street I watch with tense
+interest another lithe, pock-marked bully menacing with cat-like action,
+a cowering young farmer in a long linen coat. The crowd jeers at him for
+his cowardice--a burst of shouting is heard. A trampling follows and
+forth from the door of a saloon bulges a throng of drunken, steaming,
+reeling, cursing ruffians followed by brave Jim McCarty, the city
+marshal, with an offender under each hand.--The scene changes to the
+middle of the street. I am one of a throng surrounding a smooth-handed
+faker who is selling prize boxes of soap and giving away dollars.--"Now,
+gentlemen," he says, "if you will hand me a dollar I will give you a
+sample package of soap to examine, afterwards if you don't want the
+soap, return it to me, and I'll return your dollar." He repeats this
+several times, returning the dollars faithfully, then slightly varies
+his invitation by saying, "so that I can return your dollars."
+
+No one appears to observe this significant change, and as he has
+hitherto returned the dollars precisely according to promise, he now
+proceeds to his harvest. Having all his boxes out he abruptly closes the
+lid of his box and calmly remarks, "I said, 'so that I _can_ return your
+dollars,' I didn't say I would.--Gentlemen, I have the dollars and _you_
+have the experience." He drops into his seat and takes up the reins to
+drive away. A tall man who has been standing silently beside the wheel
+of the carriage, snatches the whip from its socket, and lashes the
+swindler across the face. Red streaks appear on his cheek.--The crowd
+surges forward. Up from behind leaps a furious little Scotchman who
+snatches off his right boot and beats the stranger over the head with
+such fury that he falls from his carriage to the ground.--I rejoice in
+his punishment, and admire the tall man who led the assault.--The
+marshal comes, the man is led away, and the crowd smilingly scatters.--
+
+We are on the way home. Only two of my crew are with me. The others are
+roaring from one drinking place to another, having a "good time." The
+air is soothingly clean and sweet after the tumult and the reek of the
+town. Appalled, yet fascinated, I listen to the oft repeated tales of
+just how Jim McCarty sprang into the saloon and cleaned out the brawling
+mob. I feel very young, very defenceless, and very sleepy as I
+listen.--
+
+On Sunday, Burton usually came to visit me or I went over to his house
+and together we rode or walked to service at the Grove school-house. He
+was now the owner of a razor, and I was secretly planning to buy one.
+The question of dress had begun to trouble us both acutely. Our best
+suits were not only made from woolen cloth, they were of blizzard
+weight, and as on week days (in summer) our entire outfit consisted of a
+straw hat, a hickory shirt and a pair of brown denim overalls you may
+imagine what tortures we endured when fully encased in our "Sunday
+best," with starched shirts and paper collars.
+
+No one, so far as I knew, at that time possessed an extra, light-weight
+suit for hot-weather wear, although a long, yellow, linen robe called a
+"duster" was in fashion among the smart dressers. John Gammons, who was
+somewhat of a dandy in matters of toilet, was among the first of my
+circle to purchase one of these very ultra garments, and Burton soon
+followed his lead, and then my own discontent began. I, too, desired a
+duster.
+
+Unfortunately my father did not see me as I saw myself. To him I was
+still a boy and subject to his will in matters of dress as in other
+affairs, and the notion that I needed a linen coat was absurd. "If you
+are too warm, take your coat off," he said, and I not only went without
+the duster, but suffered the shame of appearing in a flat-crown black
+hat while Burton and all the other fellows were wearing light brown
+ones, of a conical shape.
+
+I was furious. After a period of bitter brooding I rebelled, and took
+the matter up with the Commander-in-Chief. I argued, "As I am not only
+doing a man's work on a boy's pay but actually superintending the stock
+and tools, I am entitled to certain individual rights in the choice of
+a hat."
+
+The soldier listened in silence but his glance was stern. When I had
+ended he said, "You'll wear the hat I provide."
+
+For the first time in my life I defied him. "I will not," I said. "And
+you can't make me."
+
+He seized me by the arm and for a moment we faced each other in silent
+clash of wills. I was desperate now. "Don't you strike me," I warned.
+"You can't do that any more."
+
+His face changed. His eyes softened. He perceived in my attitude
+something new, something unconquerable. He dropped my arm and turned
+away. After a silent struggle with himself he took two dollars from his
+pocket and extended them to me. "Get your own hat," he said, and walked
+away.
+
+This victory forms the most important event of my fifteenth year. Indeed
+the chief's recession gave me a greater shock than any punishment could
+have done. Having forced him to admit the claims of my growing
+personality as well as the value of my services, I retired in a panic.
+The fact that he, the inexorable old soldier, had surrendered to my
+furious demands awed me, making me very careful not to go too fast or
+too far in my assumption of the privileges of manhood.
+
+Another of the milestones on my road to manhood was my first employment
+of the town barber. Up to this time my hair had been trimmed by mother
+or mangled by one of the hired men,--whereas both John and Burton
+enjoyed regular hair-cuts and came to Sunday school with the backs of
+their necks neatly shaved. I wanted to look like that, and so at last,
+shortly after my victory concerning the hat, I plucked up courage to ask
+my father for a quarter and got it! With my money tightly clutched in
+my hand I timidly entered the Tonsorial Parlor of Ed Mills and took my
+seat in his marvellous chair--thus touching another high point on the
+road to self-respecting manhood. My pleasure, however, was mixed with
+ignoble childish terror, for not only did the barber seem determined to
+force upon me a shampoo (which was ten cents extra), but I was in
+unremitting fear lest I should lose my quarter, the only one I
+possessed, and find myself accused as a swindler.
+
+Nevertheless I came safely away, a neater, older and graver person,
+walking with a manlier stride, and when I confronted my classmates at
+the Grove school-house on Sunday, I gave evidence of an accession of
+self-confidence. The fact that my back hair was now in fashionable order
+was of greatest comfort to me. If only my trousers had not continued
+their distressing habit of climbing up my boot-tops I would have been
+almost at ease but every time I rose from my seat it became necessary to
+make each instep smooth the leg of the other pantaloon, and even then
+they kept their shameful wrinkles, and a knowledge of my exposed ankles
+humbled me.
+
+Burton, although better dressed than I, was quite as confused and
+wordless in the presence of girls, but John Gammons was not only
+confident, he was irritatingly facile. Furthermore, as son of the
+director of the Sunday school he had almost too much distinction. I
+bitterly resented his linen collars, his neat suit and his smiling
+assurance, for while we professed to despise everything connected with
+church, we were keenly aware of the bright eyes of Bettie and noted that
+they rested often on John's curly head. He could sing, too, and
+sometimes, with sublime audacity, held the hymn book with her.
+
+The sweetness of those girlish faces held us captive through many a long
+sermon, but there were times when not even their beauty availed. Three
+or four of us occasionally slipped away into the glorious forest to pick
+berries or nuts, or to loaf in the odorous shade of the elms along the
+creek. The cool aisles of the oaks seemed more sweetly sanctifying
+(after a week of sun-smit soil on the open plain) than the crowded
+little church with its droning preacher, and there was something
+mystical in the melody of the little brook and in the flecking of light
+and shade across the silent woodland path.
+
+To drink of the little ice-cold spring beneath the maple tree in
+Frazer's pasture was almost as delight-giving as the plate of ice-cream
+which we sometimes permitted ourselves to buy in the village on
+Saturday, and often we wandered on and on, till the sinking sun warned
+us of duties at home and sent us hurrying to the open.
+
+It was always hard to go back to the farm after one of these days of
+leisure--back to greasy overalls and milk-bespattered boots, back to the
+society of fly-bedevilled cows and steaming, salty horses, back to the
+curry-comb and swill bucket,--but it was particularly hard during this
+our last summer on the prairie. But we did it with a feeling that we
+were nearing the end of it. "Next year we'll be living in town!" I said
+to the boys exultantly. "No more cow-milking for me!"
+
+I never rebelled at hard, clean work, like haying or harvest, but the
+slavery of being nurse to calves and scrub-boy to horses cankered my
+spirits more and more, and the thought of living in town filled me with
+an incredulous anticipatory delight. A life of leisure, of intellectual
+activity seemed about to open up to me, and I met my chums in a
+restrained exaltation which must have been trying to their souls. "I'm
+sorry to leave you," I jeered, "but so it goes. Some are chosen, others
+are left. Some rise to glory, others remain plodders--" such was my airy
+attitude. I wonder that they did not roll me in the dust.
+
+Though my own joy and that of my brother was keen and outspoken, I have
+no recollection that my mother uttered a single word of pleasure. She
+must have been as deeply excited, and as pleased as we, for it meant
+more to her than to us, it meant escape from the drudgery of the farm,
+from the pain of early rising, and yet I cannot be sure of her feeling.
+So far as she knew this move was final. Her life as a farmer's wife was
+about to end after twenty years of early rising and never ending labor,
+and I think she must have palpitated with joy of her approaching freedom
+from it all.
+
+As we were not to move till the following March, and as winter came on
+we went to school as usual in the bleak little shack at the corner of
+our farm and took part in all the neighborhood festivals. I have
+beautiful memories of trotting away across the plain to spelling schools
+and "Lyceums" through the sparkling winter nights with Franklin by my
+side, while the low-hung sky blazed with stars, and great white owls
+went flapping silently away before us.--I am riding in a long sleigh to
+the north beneath a wondrous moon to witness a performance of _Lord
+Dundreary_ at the Barker school-house.--I am a neglected onlooker at a
+Christmas tree at Burr Oak. I am spelled down at the Shehan school--and
+through all these scenes runs a belief that I am leaving the district
+never to return to it, a conviction which lends to every experience a
+peculiar poignancy of appeal.
+
+Though but a shaggy colt in those days, I acknowledged a keen longing to
+join in the parties and dances of the grown-up boys and girls. I was not
+content to be merely the unnoticed cub in the corner. A place in the
+family bob-sled no longer satisfied me, and when at the "sociable" I
+stood in the corner with tousled hair and clumsy ill-fitting garments I
+was in my desire, a confident, graceful squire of dames.
+
+The dancing was a revelation to me of the beauty and grace latent in the
+awkward girls and hulking men of the farms. It amazed and delighted me
+to see how gloriously Madeleine White swayed and tip-toed through the
+figures of the "Cotillion," and the sweet aloofness of Agnes Farwell's
+face filled me with worship. I envied Edwin Blackler his supple grace,
+his fine sense of rhythm, and especially the calm audacity of his manner
+with his partners. Bill, Joe, all the great lunking farm hands seemed
+somehow uplifted, carried out of their everyday selves, ennobled by some
+deep-seated emotion, and I was eager for a chance to show that I, too,
+could balance and bow and pay court to women, but--alas, I never did, I
+kept to my corner even though Stelle Gilbert came to drag me out.
+
+Occasionally a half-dozen of these audacious young people would turn a
+church social or donation party into a dance, much to the scandal of the
+deacons. I recall one such performance which ended most dramatically. It
+was a "shower" for the minister whose salary was too small to be even an
+honorarium, and the place of meeting was at the Durrells', two
+well-to-do farmers, brothers who lived on opposite sides of the road
+just south of the Grove school-house.
+
+Mother put up a basket of food, father cast a quarter of beef into the
+back-part of the sleigh, and we were off early of a cold winter night in
+order to be on hand for the supper. My brother and I were mere
+passengers on the straw behind, along with the slab of beef, but we gave
+no outward sign of discontent. It was a clear, keen, marvellous
+twilight, with the stars coming out over the woodlands to the east. On
+every road the sound of bells and the voices of happy young people came
+to our ears. Occasionally some fellow with a fast horse and a gay cutter
+came slashing up behind us and called out "Clear the track!" Father gave
+the road, and the youth and his best girl went whirling by with a gay
+word of thanks. Watch-dogs guarding the Davis farm-house, barked in
+savage warning as we passed and mother said, "Everybody's gone. I hope
+we won't be late."
+
+We were, indeed, a little behind the others for when we stumbled into
+the Ellis Durrell house we found a crowd of merry folks clustered about
+the kitchen stove. Mrs. Ellis flattered me by saying, "The young people
+are expecting you over at Joe's." Here she laughed, "I'm afraid they are
+going to dance."
+
+As soon as I was sufficiently thawed out I went across the road to the
+other house which gave forth the sound of singing and the rhythmic tread
+of dancing feet. It was filled to overflowing with the youth of the
+neighborhood, and Agnes Farwell, Joe's niece, the queenliest of them
+all, was leading the dance, her dark face aglow, her deep brown eyes
+alight.
+
+The dance was "The Weevilly Wheat" and Ed Blackler was her partner.
+Against the wall stood Marsh Belford, a tall, crude, fierce young savage
+with eyes fixed on Agnes. He was one of her suitors and mad with
+jealousy of Blackler to whom she was said to be engaged. He was a
+singular youth, at once bashful and baleful. He could not dance, and for
+that reason keenly resented Ed's supple grace and easy manners with the
+girls.
+
+Crossing to where Burton stood, I heard Belford say as he replied to
+some remark by his companions, "I'll roll him one o' these days." He
+laughed in a constrained way, and that his mood was dangerous was
+evident. In deep excitement Burton and I awaited the outcome.
+
+The dancing was of the harmless "donation" sort. As musical instruments
+were forbidden, the rhythm was furnished by a song in which we all
+joined with clapping hands.
+
+    Come hither, my love, and trip together
+    In the morning early,
+    Give to you the parting hand
+    Although I love you dearly.
+    I won't have none of your weevilly wheat
+    I won't have none of your barley,
+    I'll have some flour
+    In half an hour
+    To bake a cake for Charley.--
+    Oh, Charley, he is a fine young man,
+    Charley he is a dandy,
+    Charley he is a fine young man
+    For he buys the girls some candy.
+
+The figures were like those in the old time "Money Musk" and as Agnes
+bowed and swung and gave hands down the line I thought her the loveliest
+creature in the world, and so did Marsh, only that which gladdened me,
+maddened him. I acknowledged Edwin's superior claim,--Marsh did not.
+
+Burton, who understood the situation, drew me aside and said, "Marsh has
+been drinking. There's going to be war."
+
+As soon as the song ceased and the dancers paused, Marsh, white with
+resolution, went up to Agnes, and said something to her. She smiled, but
+shook her head and turned away. Marsh came back to where his brother Joe
+was standing and his face was tense with fury. "I'll make her wish she
+hadn't," he muttered.
+
+Edwin, as floor manager, now called out a new "set" and as the dancers
+began to "form on," Joe Belford hunched his brother. "Go after him now,"
+he said. With deadly slowness of action, Marsh sauntered up to Blackler
+and said something in a low voice.
+
+"You're a liar!" retorted Edwin sharply.
+
+Belford struck out with a swing of his open hand, and a moment later
+they were rolling on the floor in a deadly grapple. The girls screamed
+and fled, but the boys formed a joyous ring around the contestants and
+cheered them on to keener strife while Joe Belford, tearing off his
+coat, stood above his brother, warning others to keep out of it. "This
+is to be a fair fight," he said. "The best man wins!"
+
+He was a redoubtable warrior and the ring widened. No one thought of
+interfering, in fact we were all delighted by this sudden outbreak of
+the heroic spirit.
+
+Ed threw off his antagonist and rose, bleeding but undaunted. "You
+devil," he said, "I'll smash your face."
+
+Marsh again struck him a staggering blow, and they were facing each
+other in watchful fury as Agnes forced her way through the crowd and,
+laying her hand on Belford's arm, calmly said, "Marsh Belford, what are
+you doing?"
+
+Her dignity, her beauty, her air of command, awed the bully and silenced
+every voice in the room. She was our hostess and as such assumed the
+right to enforce decorum. Fixing her glance upon Joe whom she recognized
+as the chief disturber, she said, "You'd better go home. This is no
+place for either you or Marsh."
+
+Sobered, shamed, the Belfords fell back and slipped out while Agnes
+turned to Edwin and wiped the blood from his face with self-contained
+tenderness.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This date may be taken as fairly ending my boyhood, for I was rapidly
+taking on the manners of men. True, I did not smoke or chew tobacco and
+I was not greatly given to profanity, but I was able to shoulder a two
+bushel sack of wheat and could hold my own with most of the harvesters.
+Although short and heavy, I was deft with my hands, as one or two of
+the neighborhood bullies had reason to know and in many ways I was
+counted a man.
+
+I read during this year nearly one hundred dime novels, little
+paper-bound volumes filled with stories of Indians and wild horsemen and
+dukes and duchesses and men in iron masks, and sewing girls who turned
+out to be daughters of nobility, and marvellous detectives who bore
+charmed lives and always trapped the villains at the end of the story--
+
+Of all these tales, those of the border naturally had most allurement.
+There was the _Quaker Sleuth_, for instance, and _Mad Matt the Trailer_,
+and _Buckskin Joe_ who rode disdainfully alone (like Lochinvar),
+rescuing maidens from treacherous Apaches, cutting long rows of death
+notches on the stock of his carbine. One of these narratives contained a
+phantom troop of skeleton horsemen, a grisly squadron, which came like
+an icy wind out of the darkness, striking terror to the hearts of the
+renegades and savages, only to vanish with clatter of bones, and click
+of hoofs.
+
+In addition to these delight-giving volumes, I traded stock with other
+boys of the neighborhood. From Jack Sheet I derived a bundle of
+_Saturday Nights_ in exchange for my _New York Weeklys_ and from one of
+our harvest hands, a near-sighted old German, I borrowed some
+twenty-five or thirty numbers of _The Sea Side Library_. These also cost
+a dime when new, but you could return them and get a nickel in credit
+for another,--provided your own was in good condition.
+
+It is a question whether the reading of all this exciting fiction had an
+ill effect on my mind or not. Apparently it had very little effect of
+any sort other than to make the borderland a great deal more exciting
+than the farm, and yet so far as I can discover, I had no keen desire to
+go West and fight Indians and I showed no disposition to rob or murder
+in the manner of my heroes. I devoured _Jack Harkaway_ and _The Quaker
+Sleuth_ precisely as I played ball--to pass the time and because I
+enjoyed the game.
+
+Deacon Garland was highly indignant with my father for permitting such
+reading, and argued against it furiously, but no one paid much attention
+to his protests--especially after we caught the old gentleman sitting
+with a very lurid example of "The Damnable Lies" open in his hand. "I
+was only looking into it to see how bad it was," he explained.
+
+Father was so tickled at the old man's downfall that he said, "Stick to
+it till you find how it turns out."
+
+Grandsire, we all perceived, was human after all. I think we liked him
+rather better after this sign of weakness.
+
+It would not be fair to say that we read nothing else but these
+easy-going tales. As a matter of fact, I read everything within reach,
+even the copy of _Paradise Lost_ which my mother presented to me on my
+fifteenth birthday. Milton I admit was hard work, but I got considerable
+joy out of his cursing passages. The battle scenes also interested me
+and I went about spouting the extraordinary harangues of Satan with such
+vigor that my team one day took fright of me, and ran away with the
+plow, leaving an erratic furrow to be explained. However, my father was
+glad to see me taking on the voice of the orator.
+
+The five years of life on this farm had brought swift changes into my
+world. Nearly all the open land had been fenced and plowed, and all the
+cattle and horses had been brought into pasture, and around most of the
+buildings, groves of maples were beginning to make the homesteads a
+little less barren and ugly. And yet with all these growing signs of
+prosperity I realized that something sweet and splendid was dying out of
+the prairie. The whistling pigeons, the wailing plover, the migrating
+ducks and geese, the soaring cranes, the shadowy wolves, the wary foxes,
+all the untamed things were passing, vanishing with the blue-joint
+grass, the dainty wild rose and the tiger-lily's flaming torch.
+Settlement was complete.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+A Taste of Village Life
+
+
+The change from farm to village life, though delightful, was not so
+complete as we had anticipated, for we not only carried with us several
+cows and a span of horses, but the house which we had rented stood at
+the edge of town and possessed a large plot; therefore we not only
+continued to milk cows and curry horses, but set to work at once
+planting potatoes and other vegetables almost as if still upon the farm.
+The soil had been poorly cultivated for several years, and the weeds
+sprang up like dragons' teeth. Work, it seemed, was not to be escaped
+even in the city.
+
+Though a little resentful of this labor and somewhat disappointed in our
+dwelling, we were vastly excited by certain phases of our new
+surroundings. To be within a few minutes' walk of the postoffice, and to
+be able to go to the store at any moment, were conditions quite as
+satisfactory as we had any right to expect. Also we slept later, for my
+father was less disposed to get us out of bed at dawn and this in itself
+was an enormous gain, especially to my mother.
+
+Osage, a small town, hardly more than a village, was situated on the
+edge of a belt of hardwood timber through which the Cedar River ran, and
+was quite commonplace to most people but to me it was both mysterious
+and dangerous, for it was the home of an alien tribe, hostile and
+pitiless--"The Town Boys."
+
+Up to this time I had both hated and feared them, knowing that they
+hated and despised me, and now, suddenly I was thrust among them and put
+on my own defenses. For a few weeks I felt like a young rooster in a
+strange barn-yard,--knowing that I would be called upon to prove my
+quality. In fact it took but a week or two to establish my place in the
+tribe for one of the leaders of the gang was Mitchell Scott, a powerful
+lad of about my own age, and to his friendship I owe a large part of my
+freedom from persecution.
+
+Uncle David came to see us several times during the spring and his talk
+was all about "going west." He was restless under the conditions of his
+life on a farm. I don't know why this was so, but a growing bitterness
+clouded his voice. Once I heard him say, "I don't know what use I am in
+the world. I am a failure." This was the first note of doubt, of
+discouragement that I had heard from any member of my family and it made
+a deep impression on me. Disillusionment had begun.
+
+During the early part of the summer my brother and I worked in the
+garden with frequent days off for fishing, swimming and berrying, and we
+were entirely content with life. No doubts assailed us. We swam in the
+pond at Rice's Mill and we cast our hooks in the sunny ripples below it.
+We saw the circus come to town and go into camp on a vacant lot, and we
+attended every movement of it with a delicious sense of leisure. We
+could go at night with no long ride to take after it was over.--The
+fourth of July came to seek us this year and we had but to step across
+the way to see a ball-game. We were at last in the center of our world.
+
+In June my father called me to help in the elevator and this turned out
+to be a most informing experience. "The Street," as it was called, was
+merely a wagon road which ran along in front of a row of wheat
+ware-houses of various shapes and sizes, from which the buyers emerged
+to meet the farmers as they drove into town. Two or three or more of the
+men would clamber upon the load, open the sacks, sample the grain and
+bid for it. If one man wanted the load badly, or if he chanced to be in
+a bad temper, the farmer was the gainer. Hence very few of them, even
+the members of the Grange, were content to drive up to my father's
+elevator and take the honest market price. They were all hoping to get a
+little more than the market price.
+
+This vexed and embittered my father who often spoke of it to me. "It
+only shows," he said, "how hard it will be to work out any reform among
+the farmers. They will never stand together. These other buyers will
+force me off the market and then there will be no one here to represent
+the farmers' interest."
+
+These merchants interested me greatly. Humorous, self-contained,
+remorseless in trade, they were most delightful companions when off
+duty. They liked my father in his private capacity, but as a factor of
+the Grange he was an enemy. Their kind was new to me and I loved to
+linger about and listen to their banter when there was nothing else to
+do.
+
+One of them by reason of his tailor-made suit and a large ring on his
+little finger, was especially attractive to me. He was a handsome man of
+a sinister type, and I regarded his expressionless face as that of a
+gambler. I didn't know that he was a poker player but it amused me to
+think so. Another buyer was a choleric Cornishman whom the other men
+sometimes goaded into paying five or six cents more than the market
+admitted, by shrewdly playing on his hot temper. A third was a tall
+gaunt old man of New England type, obstinate, honest, but of sanguine
+temperament. He was always on the bull side of the market and a loud
+debater.--The fourth, a quiet little man of smooth address, acted as
+peacemaker.
+
+Among these men my father moved as an equal, notwithstanding the fact of
+his country training and prejudices, and it was through the man Morley
+that we got our first outlook upon the bleak world of Agnosticism, for
+during the summer a series of lectures by Robert Ingersoll was reported
+in one of the Chicago papers and the West rang with the controversy.
+
+On Monday as soon as the paper came to town it was the habit of the
+grain-buyers to gather at their little central office, and while Morley,
+the man with the seal ring, read the lecture aloud, the others listened
+and commented on the heresies. Not all were sympathizers with the great
+iconoclast, and the arguments which followed were often heated and
+sometimes fiercely personal.
+
+After they had quite finished with the paper, I sometimes secured it for
+myself, and hurrying back to my office in the elevator pored over it
+with intense zeal. Undoubtedly my father as well as I was profoundly
+influenced by "The Mistakes of Moses." The faith in which we had been
+reared had already grown dim, and under the light of Ingersoll's
+remorseless humor most of our superstitions vanished. I do not think my
+father's essential Christianity was in any degree diminished, he merely
+lost his respect for certain outworn traditions and empty creeds.
+
+My work consisted in receiving the grain and keeping the elevator going
+and as I weighed the sacks, made out checks for the payment and kept the
+books--in all ways taking a man's place,--I lost all sense of being a
+boy.
+
+The motive power of our hoisting machinery was a blind horse, a handsome
+fellow weighing some fifteen hundred pounds, and it was not long before
+he filled a large space in my thoughts. There was something appealing
+in his sightless eyes, and I never watched him (as he patiently went his
+rounds in the dusty shed) without pity. He had a habit of kicking the
+wall with his right hind foot at a certain precise point as he circled,
+and a deep hollow in the sill attested his accuracy. He seemed to do
+this purposely--to keep count, as I imagined, of his dreary circling
+through sunless days.
+
+A part of my duty was to watch the fanning mill (in the high cupola) in
+order that the sieves should not clog. Three flights of stairs led to
+the mill and these had to be mounted many times each day. I always ran
+up the steps when the mill required my attention, but in coming down I
+usually swung from beam to beam, dropping from footway to footway like a
+monkey from a tall tree. My mother in seeing me do this called out in
+terror, but I assured her that there was not the slightest danger--and
+this was true, for I was both sure-footed and sure-handed in those days.
+
+This was a golden summer for us all. My mother found time to read. My
+father enjoyed companionship with the leading citizens of the town,
+while Franklin, as first assistant in a candy store, professed himself
+to be entirely content. My own holidays were spent in fishing or in
+roving the woods with Mitchell and George, but on Sundays the entire
+family dressed for church as for a solemn social function, fully alive
+to the dignity of Banker Brush, and the grandeur of Congressman Deering
+who came to service regularly--but on foot, so intense was the spirit of
+democracy among us.
+
+Theoretically there were no social distinctions in Osage, but after all
+a large house and a two seated carriage counted, and my mother's
+visitors were never from the few pretentious homes of the town but from
+the farms. However, I do not think she worried over her social position
+and I know she welcomed callers from Dry Run and Burr Oak with cordial
+hospitality. She was never envious or bitter.
+
+In spite of my busy life, I read more than ever before, and everything I
+saw or heard made a deep and lasting record on my mind. I recall with a
+sense of gratitude a sermon by the preacher in the Methodist Church
+which profoundly educated me. It was the first time I had ever heard the
+power of art and the value of its mission to man insisted upon. What was
+right and what was wrong had been pointed out to me, but things of
+beauty were seldom mentioned.
+
+With most eloquent gestures, with a face glowing with enthusiasm, the
+young orator enumerated the beautiful phases of nature. He painted the
+starry sky, the sunset clouds, and the purple hills in words of
+prismatic hue and his rapturous eloquence held us rigid. "We have been
+taught," he said in effect, "that beauty is a snare of the evil one;
+that it is a lure to destroy, but I assert that God desires loveliness
+and hates ugliness. He loves the shimmering of dawn, the silver light on
+the lake and the purple and snow of every summer cloud. He honors bright
+colors, for has he not set the rainbow in the heavens and made water to
+reflect the moon? He prefers joy and pleasure to hate and despair. He is
+not a God of pain, of darkness and ugliness, he is a God of beauty, of
+delight, of consolation."
+
+In some such strain he continued, and as his voice rose in fervent chant
+and his words throbbed with poetry, the sunlight falling through the
+window-pane gave out a more intense radiance, and over the faces of the
+girls, a more entrancing color fell. He opened my eyes to a new world,
+the world of art.
+
+I recognized in this man not only a moving orator but a scholar and I
+went out from that little church vaguely resolved to be a student also,
+a student of the beautiful. My father was almost equally moved and we
+all went again and again to hear our young evangel speak but never again
+did he touch my heart. That one discourse was his contribution to my
+education and I am grateful to him for it. In after life I had the
+pleasure of telling him how much he had suggested to me in that sermon.
+
+There was much to allure a farmer boy in the decorum of well-dressed men
+and the grace of daintily clad women as well as in the music and the dim
+interior of the church (which seemed to me of great dignity and charm)
+and I usually went both morning and evening to watch the regal daughters
+of the county aristocracy go up the aisle. I even joined a Sunday school
+class because charming Miss Culver was the teacher. Outwardly a stocky,
+ungraceful youth, I was inwardly a bold squire of romance, needing only
+a steed and a shield to fight for my lady love. No one could be more
+essentially romantic than I was at this time--but fortunately no one
+knew it!
+
+Mingling as I did with young people who had been students at the
+Seminary, I naturally developed a new ambition. I decided to enter for
+the autumn term, and to that end gained from my father a leave of
+absence during August and hired myself out to bind grain in the harvest
+field. I demanded full wages and when one blazing hot day I rode on a
+shining new Marsh harvester into a field of wheat just south of the Fair
+Ground, I felt myself a man, and entering upon a course which put me
+nearer the clothing and the education I desired.
+
+Binding on a harvester was desperately hard work for a sixteen-year-old
+boy for it called for endurance of heat and hunger as well as for
+unusual celerity and precision of action. But as I considered myself
+full-grown physically, I could not allow myself a word of complaint. I
+kept my place beside my partner hour after hour, taking care of my half
+of ten acres of grain each day. My fingers, raw and bleeding with the
+briars and smarting with the rust on the grain, were a torture but I
+persisted to the end of harvest. In this way I earned enough money to
+buy myself a Sunday suit, some new boots and the necessary books for the
+seminary term which began in September.
+
+Up to this time I had never owned an overcoat nor a suit that fitted me.
+My shirts had always been made by my mother and had no real cuffs. I now
+purchased two boxes of paper cuffs and a real necktie. My intense
+satisfaction in these garments made mother smile with pleasure and
+understanding humor.
+
+In spite of my store suit and my high-heeled calf-skin boots I felt very
+humble as I left our lowly roof that first day and started for the
+chapel. To me the brick building standing in the center of its ample
+yard was as imposing as I imagine the Harper Memorial Library must be to
+the youngster of today as he enters the University of Chicago.
+
+To enter the chapel meant running the gauntlet of a hundred citified
+young men and women, fairly entitled to laugh at a clod-jumper like
+myself, and I would have balked completely had not David Pointer, a
+neighbor's son, volunteered to lead the way. Gratefully I accepted his
+offer, and so passed for the first time into the little hall which came
+to mean so much to me in after years.
+
+It was a large room swarming with merry young people and the Corinthian
+columns painted on the walls, the pipe organ, the stately professors on
+the platform, the self-confident choir, were all of such majesty that I
+was reduced to hare-like humility. What right had I to share in this
+splendor? Sliding hurriedly into a seat I took refuge in the obscurity
+which my youth and short stature guaranteed to me.
+
+Soon Professor Bush, the principal of the school, gentle, blue-eyed,
+white-haired, with a sweet and mellow voice, rose to greet the old
+pupils and welcome the new ones, and his manner so won my confidence
+that at the close of the service I went to him and told him who I was.
+Fortunately he remembered my sister Harriet, and politely said, "I am
+glad to see you, Hamlin," and from that moment I considered him a
+friend, and an almost infallible guide.
+
+The school was in truth a very primitive institution, hardly more than a
+high school, but it served its purpose. It gave farmers' boys like
+myself the opportunity of meeting those who were older, finer, more
+learned than they, and every day was to me like turning a fresh and
+delightful page in a story book, not merely because it brought new
+friends, new experiences, but because it symbolized freedom from the hay
+fork and the hoe. Learning was easy for me. In all but mathematics I
+kept among the highest of my class without much effort, but it was in
+the "Friday Exercises" that I earliest distinguished myself.
+
+It was the custom at the close of every week's work to bring a section
+of the pupils upon the platform as essayists or orators, and these
+"exercises" formed the most interesting and the most passionately
+dreaded feature of the entire school. No pupil who took part in it ever
+forgot his first appearance. It was at once a pillory and a burning. It
+called for self-possession, memory, grace of gesture and a voice!
+
+My case is typical. For three or four days before my first ordeal, I
+could not eat. A mysterious uneasiness developed in my solar plexus, a
+pain which never left me--except possibly in the morning before I had
+time to think. Day by day I drilled and drilled and drilled, out in the
+fields at the edge of the town or at home when mother was away, in the
+barn while milking--at every opportunity I went through my selection
+with most impassioned voice and lofty gestures, sustained by the legends
+of Webster and Demosthenes, resolved upon a blazing victory. I did
+everything but mumble a smooth pebble--realizing that most of the boys
+in my section were going through precisely the same struggle. Each of us
+knew exactly how the others felt, and yet I cannot say that we displayed
+acute sympathy one with another; on the contrary, those in the free
+section considered the antics of the suffering section a very amusing
+spectacle and we were continually being "joshed" about our lack of
+appetite.
+
+The test was, in truth, rigorous. To ask a bashful boy or shy girl fresh
+from the kitchen to walk out upon a platform and face that crowd of
+mocking students was a kind of torture. No desk was permitted. Each
+victim stood bleakly exposed to the pitiless gaze of three hundred eyes,
+and as most of us were poorly dressed, in coats that never fitted and
+trousers that climbed our boot-tops, we suffered the miseries of the
+damned. The girls wore gowns which they themselves had made, and were,
+of course, equally self-conscious. The knowledge that their sleeves did
+not fit was of more concern to them than the thought of breaking
+down--but the fear of forgetting their lines also contributed to their
+dread and terror.
+
+While the names which preceded mine were called off that first
+afternoon, I grew colder and colder till at last I shook with a nervous
+chill, and when, in his smooth, pleasant tenor, Prof. Bush called out
+"Hamlin Garland" I rose in my seat with a spring like Jack from his box.
+My limbs were numb, so numb that I could scarcely feel the floor beneath
+my feet and the windows were only faint gray glares of light. My head
+oscillated like a toy balloon, seemed indeed to be floating in the air,
+and my heart was pounding like a drum.
+
+However, I had pondered upon this scene so long and had figured my
+course so exactly that I made all the turns with moderate degree of
+grace and succeeded finally in facing my audience without falling up the
+steps (as several others had done) and so looked down upon my fellows
+like Tennyson's eagle on the sea. In that instant a singular calm fell
+over me, I became strangely master of myself. From somewhere above me a
+new and amazing power fell upon me and in that instant I perceived on
+the faces of my classmates a certain expression of surprise and serious
+respect. My subconscious oratorical self had taken charge.
+
+I do not at present recall what my recitation was, but it was probably
+_Catiline's Defense_ or some other of the turgid declamatory pieces of
+classic literature with which all our readers were filled. It was
+bombastic stuff, but my blind, boyish belief in it gave it dignity. As I
+went on my voice cleared. The window sashes regained their outlines. I
+saw every form before me, and the look of surprise and pleasure on the
+smiling face of my principal exalted me.
+
+Closing amid hearty applause, I stepped down with a feeling that I had
+won a place among the orators of the school, a belief which did no harm
+to others and gave me a good deal of satisfaction. As I had neither
+money nor clothes, and was not of figure to win admiration, why should I
+not express the pride I felt in my power to move an audience? Besides I
+was only sixteen!
+
+The principal spoke to me afterwards, both praising and criticising my
+method. The praise I accepted, the criticism I naturally resented. I
+realized some of my faults of course, but I was not ready to have even
+Prof. Bush tell me of them. I hated "elocution" drill in class, I
+relied on "inspiration." I believed that orators were born, not made.
+
+There was one other speaker in my section, a little girl, considerably
+younger than myself, who had the mysterious power of the born actress,
+and I recognized this quality in her at once. I perceived that she spoke
+from a deep-seated, emotional, Celtic impulse. Hardly more than a child
+in years, she was easily the most dramatic reader in the school. She
+too, loved tragic prose and passionate, sorrowful verse and to hear her
+recite,
+
+    One of them dead in the East by the sea
+    And one of them dead in the West by the sea,
+
+was to be shaken by inexplicable emotion. Her face grew pale as silver
+as she went on and her eyes darkened with the anguish of the poet
+mother.
+
+Most of the students were the sons and daughters of farmers round about
+the county, but a few were from the village homes in western Iowa and
+southern Minnesota. Two or three boys wore real tailor-made suits, and
+the easy flow of their trouser legs and the set of their linen collars
+rendered me at once envious and discontented. "Some day," I said to
+myself, "I too, will have a suit that will not gape at the neck and
+crawl at the ankle," but I did not rise to the height of expecting a
+ring and watch.
+
+Shoes were just coming into fashion and one young man wore pointed "box
+toes" which filled all the rest of us with despair. John Cutler also
+wore collars of linen--real linen--which had to be laundered, but few of
+us dared fix our hopes as high as that. John also owned three neckties,
+and wore broad cuffs with engraved gold buttons, and on Fridays waved
+these splendors before our eyes with a malicious satisfaction which
+aroused our hatred. Of such complexion are the tragedies and triumphs of
+youth!
+
+How I envied Arthur Peters his calm and haughty bearing! Most of us
+entered chapel like rabbits sneaking down a turnip patch, but Arthur and
+John and Walter loitered in with the easy and assured manner of Senators
+or Generals--so much depends upon leather and prunella. Gradually I lost
+my terror of this ordeal, but I took care to keep behind some friendly
+bulk like young Blakeslee, who stood six feet two in his gaiters.
+
+With all these anxieties I loved the school and could hardly be wrested
+from it even for a day. I bent to my books with eagerness, I joined a
+debating society, and I took a hand at all the games. The days went by
+on golden, noiseless, ball-bearing axles--and almost before I realized
+it, winter was upon the land. But oh! the luxury of that winter, with no
+snow drifts to climb, no corn-stalks to gather and no long walk to
+school. It was sweet to wake each morning in the shelter of our little
+house and know that another day of delightful schooling was ours. Our
+hands softened and lightened. Our walk became each day less of a
+"galumping plod." The companionship of bright and interesting young
+people, and the study of well-dressed men and women in attendance upon
+lectures and socials was a part of our instruction and had their
+refining effect upon us, graceless colts though we were.
+
+Sometime during this winter Wendell Phillips came to town and lectured
+on _The Lost Arts_. My father took us all to see and hear this orator
+hero of his boyhood days in Boston.
+
+I confess to a disappointment in the event. A tall old gentleman with
+handsome clean-cut features, rose from behind the pulpit in the
+Congregational Church, and read from a manuscript--read quietly,
+colloquially, like a teacher addressing a group of students, with
+scarcely a gesture and without raising his voice. Only once toward the
+end of the hour did he thrill us, and then only for a moment.
+
+Father was a little saddened. He shook his head gravely. "He isn't the
+orator he was in the good old anti-slavery days," he explained and
+passed again into a glowing account of the famous "slave speech" in
+Faneuil Hall when the pro-slavery men all but mobbed the speaker.
+
+Per contra, I liked, (and the boys all liked) a certain peripatetic
+temperance lecturer named Beale, for _he_ was an orator, one of those
+who rise on an impassioned chant, soaring above the snows of Chimborazo,
+mingling the purple and gold of sunset with the saffron and silver of
+the dawn. None of us could tell just what these gorgeous passages meant,
+but they were beautiful while they lasted, and sadly corrupted our
+oratorical style. It took some of us twenty years to recover from the
+fascination of this man's absurd and high falutin' elocutionary
+sing-song.
+
+I forgot the farm, I forgot the valley of my birth, I lived wholly and
+with joy in the present. Song, poetry, history mingled with the sports
+which made our life so unceasingly interesting. There was a certain
+girl, the daughter of the shoe merchant, who (temporarily) displaced the
+image of Agnes in the niche of my shrine, and to roll the platter for
+her at a "sociable" was a very high honor indeed, and there was another,
+a glorious contralto singer, much older than I--but there--I must not
+claim to have even attracted her eyes, and my meetings with Millie were
+so few and so public that I cannot claim to have ever conversed with
+her. They were all boyish adorations.
+
+Much as I enjoyed this winter, greatly as it instructed me, I cannot now
+recover from its luminous dark more than here and there an incident, a
+poem, a song. It was all delightful, that I know, so filled with joyous
+hours that I retain but a mingled impression of satisfaction and
+regret--satisfaction with life as I found it, regret at its inevitable
+ending--for my father, irritated by the failure of his renter, announced
+that he had decided to put us all back upon the farm.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+Back to the Farm
+
+
+Judging from the entries in a small diary of this date, I was neither an
+introspective youth nor one given to precocious literary subtleties.
+
+On March 27th, 1877, I made this entry; "Today we move back upon the
+farm."
+
+This is all of it! No more, no less. Not a word to indicate whether I
+regretted the decision or welcomed it, and from subsequent equally bald
+notes, I derive the information that my father retained his position as
+grain buyer, and that he drove back and forth daily over the five miles
+which lay between the farm and the elevator. There is no mention of my
+mother, no hint as to how she felt, although the return to the
+loneliness and drudgery of the farm must have been as grievous to her as
+to her sons.
+
+Our muscles were soft and our heads filled with new ambitions but there
+was no alternative. It was "back to the field," or "out into the cold,
+cold world," so forth we went upon the soil in the old familiar way,
+there to plod to and fro endlessly behind the seeder and the harrow. It
+was harder than ever to follow a team for ten hours over the soft
+ground, and early rising was more difficult than it had ever been
+before, but I discovered some compensations which helped me bear these
+discomforts. I saw more of the beauty of the landscape and I now had an
+aspiration to occupy my mind.
+
+My memories of the Seminary, the echoes of the songs we had heard, gave
+the morning chorus of the prairie chickens a richer meaning than before.
+The west wind, laden with the delicious smell of uncovered earth, the
+tender blue of the sky, the cheerful chirping of the ground sparrows,
+the jocund whistling of the gophers, the winding flight of the prairie
+pigeons--all these sights and sounds of spring swept back upon me,
+bringing something sweeter and more significant than before. I had
+gained in perception and also in the power to assimilate what I
+perceived.
+
+This year in town had other far-reaching effects. It tended to warp us
+from our father's designs. It placed the rigorous, filthy drudgery of
+the farm-yard in sharp contrast with the carefree companionable
+existence led by my friends in the village, and we longed to be of their
+condition. We had gained our first set of comparative ideas, and with
+them an unrest which was to carry us very far away.
+
+True, neither Burton nor I had actually shared the splendors of
+Congressman Deering's house but we had obtained revelatory glimpses of
+its well-kept lawn, and through the open windows we had watched the
+waving of its lace curtains. We had observed also how well Avery Brush's
+frock coat fitted and we comprehended something of the elegant leisure
+which the sons and daughters of Wm. Petty's general store enjoyed.
+
+Over against these comforts, these luxurious conditions, we now set our
+ugly little farmhouse, with its rag carpets, its battered furniture, its
+barren attic, and its hard, rude beds.--All that we possessed seemed
+very cheap and deplorably commonplace.
+
+My brother, who had passed a vivid and wonderful year riding race
+horses, clerking in an ice cream parlor, with frequent holidays of
+swimming and baseball, also went groaning and grumbling to the fields.
+He too resented the curry-comb and the dung fork. We both loathed the
+smell of manure and hated the greasy clothing which our tasks made
+necessary. Secretly we vowed that when we were twenty-one we would leave
+the farm, never to return to it. However, as the ground dried off, and
+the grass grew green in the door-yard some part of this bitterness, this
+resentment, faded away, and we made no further complaint.
+
+My responsibilities were now those of a man. I was nearly full grown,
+quick and powerful of hand, and vain of my strength, which was, in fact,
+unusual and of decided advantage to me. Nothing ever really tired me
+out. I could perform any of my duties with ease, and none of the men
+under me ever presumed to question my authority. As harvest came on I
+took my place on our new Marsh harvester, and bound my half of over one
+hundred acres of heavy grain.
+
+The crop that year was enormous. At times, as I looked out over the
+billowing acres of wheat which must not only be reaped and bound and
+shocked and stacked but also threshed, before there was the slightest
+chance of my returning to the Seminary, my face grew long and my heart
+heavy.
+
+Burton shared this feeling, for he, too, had become profoundly
+interested in the Seminary and was eager to return, eager to renew the
+friendships he had gained. We both wished to walk once more beneath the
+maple trees in clean well-fitting garments, and above all we hungered to
+escape the curry-comb and the cow.
+
+Both of us retained our membership in the Adelphian Debating Society,
+and occasionally drove to town after the day's work to take part in the
+Monday meetings. Having decided, definitely, to be an orator, I now went
+about with a copy of Shakespeare in my pocket and ranted the immortal
+soliloquies of _Hamlet_ and _Richard_ as I held the plow, feeling
+certain that I was following in the footprints of Lincoln and
+Demosthenes.
+
+Sundays brought a special sweet relief that summer, a note of finer
+poetry into all our lives, for often after a bath behind the barn we put
+on clean shirts and drove away to Osage to meet George and Mitchell, or
+went to church to see some of the girls we had admired at the Seminary.
+On other Sabbaths we returned to our places at the Burr Oak
+school-house, enjoying as we used to do, a few hours' forgetfulness of
+the farm.
+
+My father, I am glad to say, never insisted upon any religious
+observance on the part of his sons, and never interfered with any
+reasonable pleasure even on Sunday. If he made objection to our trips it
+was usually on behalf of the cattle. "Go where you please," he often
+said, "only get back in time to do the milking." Sometimes he would ask,
+"Don't you think the horses ought to have a rest as well as yourselves?"
+He was a stern man but a just man, and I am especially grateful to him
+for his non-interference with my religious affairs.
+
+All that summer and all the fall I worked like a hired man, assuming in
+addition the responsibilities of being boss. I bound grain until my arms
+were raw with briars and in stacking-time I wallowed round and round
+upon my knees, building great ricks of grain, taking obvious pride in
+the skill which this task required until my trousers, reinforced at the
+knees, bagged ungracefully and my hands, swollen with the act of
+grappling the heavy bundles as they were thrown to me, grew horny and
+brown and clumsy, so that I quite despaired of ever being able to write
+another letter. I was very glad not to have my Seminary friends see me
+in this unlovely condition.
+
+However, I took a well-defined pride in stacking, for it was a test of
+skill. It was clean work. Even now, as I ride a country lane, and see
+men at work handling oats or hay, I recall the pleasurable sides of work
+on the farm and long to return to it.
+
+The radiant sky of August and September on the prairie was a never
+failing source of delight to me. Nature seemed resting, opulent,
+self-satisfied and honorable. Every phase of the landscape indicated a
+task fulfilled. There were still and pulseless days when slaty-blue
+clouds piled up in the west and came drifting eastward with thunderous
+accompaniment, to break the oppressive heat and leave the earth cool and
+fresh from having passed. There were misty, windy days when the
+sounding, southern breeze swept the yellow stubble like a scythe; when
+the sky, without a cloud, was whitened by an overspreading haze; when
+the crickets sang sleepily as if in dream of eternal summer; and the
+grasshoppers clicked and buzzed from stalk to stalk in pure delight of
+sunshine and the harvest.
+
+Another humbler source of pleasure in stacking was the watermelon which,
+having been picked in the early morning and hidden under the edge of the
+stack, remained deliciously cool till mid-forenoon, when at a signal,
+the men all gathered in the shadow of the rick, and leisurely ate their
+fill of juicy "mountain sweets." Then there was the five o'clock supper,
+with its milk and doughnuts and pie which sent us back to our
+task--replete, content, ready for another hour of toil.
+
+Of course, there were unpleasant days later in the month, noons when the
+skies were filled with ragged, swiftly moving clouds, and the winds blew
+the sheaves inside out and slashed against my face the flying grain as
+well as the leaping crickets. Such days gave prophecy of the passing of
+summer and the coming of fall. But there was a mitigating charm even in
+these conditions, for they were all welcome promises of an early return
+to school.
+
+Crickets during stacking time were innumerable and voracious as rust or
+fire. They ate our coats or hats if we left them beside the stack. They
+gnawed the fork handles and devoured any straps that were left lying
+about, but their multitudinous song was a beautiful inwrought part of
+the symphony.
+
+That year the threshing was done in the fields with a traction engine.
+My uncle David came no more to help us harvest. He had almost passed out
+of our life, and I have no recollection of him till several years later.
+Much of the charm, the poetry of the old-time threshing vanished with
+the passing of horse power and the coming of the nomadic hired hand.
+There was less and less of the "changing works" which used to bring the
+young men of the farms together. The grain was no longer stacked round
+the stable. Most of it we threshed in the field and the straw after
+being spread out upon the stubble was burned. Some farmers threshed
+directly from the shock, and the new "Vibrator" took the place of the
+old Buffalo Pitts Separator with its ringing bell-metal pinions. Wheeled
+plows were common and self-binding harvesters were coming in.
+
+Although my laconic little diary does not show it, I was fiercely
+resolved upon returning to the Seminary. My father was not very
+sympathetic. In his eyes I already had a very good equipment for the
+battle of life, but mother, with a woman's ready understanding, divined
+that I had not merely set my heart on graduating at the Seminary, but
+that I was secretly dreaming of another and far more romantic career
+than that of being a farmer. Although a woman of slender schooling
+herself, she responded helpfully to every effort which her sons made to
+raise themselves above the commonplace level of neighborhood life.
+
+All through the early fall whenever Burton and I met the other boys of a
+Sunday our talk was sure to fall upon the Seminary, and Burton stoutly
+declared that he, too, was going to begin in September. As a matter of
+fact the autumn term opened while we were still hard at work around a
+threshing machine with no definite hope of release till the plowing and
+corn-husking were over. Our fathers did not seem to realize that the men
+of the future (even the farmers of the future) must have a considerable
+amount of learning and experience, and so October went by and November
+was well started before parole was granted and we were free to return to
+our books.
+
+With what sense of liberty, of exultation, we took our way down the road
+on that gorgeous autumn morning! No more dust, no more grime, no more
+mud, no more cow milking, no more horse currying! For five months we
+were to live the lives of scholars, of boarders.--Yes, through some
+mysterious channel our parents had been brought to the point of engaging
+lodgings for us in the home of a townsman named Leete. For two dollars a
+week it was arranged that we could eat and sleep from Monday night to
+Friday noon, but we were not expected to remain for supper on Friday;
+and Sunday supper, was of course, extra. I thought this a great deal of
+money then, but I cannot understand at this distance how our landlady
+was able to provide, for that sum, the raw material of her kitchen, to
+say nothing of bed linen and soap.
+
+The house, which stood on the edge of the town, was small and without
+upstairs heat, but it seemed luxurious to me, and the family straightway
+absorbed my interest. Leete, the nominal head of the establishment, was
+a short, gray, lame and rather inefficient man of changeable temper who
+teamed about the streets with a span of roans almost as dour and
+crippled as himself. His wife, who did nearly all the housework for five
+boarders as well as for the members of her own family, was a soul of
+heroic pride and most indomitable energy. She was a tall, dark, thin
+woman who had once been handsome. Poor creature--how incessantly she
+toiled, and how much she endured!
+
+She had three graceful and alluring daughters,--Ella, nineteen, Cora,
+sixteen, and Martha, a quiet little mouse of about ten years of age.
+Ella was a girl of unusual attainment, a teacher, self-contained and
+womanly, with whom we all, promptly, fell in love. Cora, a moody,
+dark-eyed, passionate girl who sometimes glowed with friendly smiles and
+sometimes glowered in anger, was less adored. Neither of them considered
+Burton or myself worthy of serious notice. On the contrary, we were
+necessary nuisances.
+
+To me Ella was a queen, a kindly queen, ever ready to help me out with
+my algebra. Everything she did seemed to me instinct with womanly grace.
+No doubt she read the worship in my eyes, but her attitude was that of
+an older sister. Cora, being nearer my own age, awed me not at all. On
+the contrary, we were more inclined to battle than to coo. Her coolness
+toward me, I soon discovered, was sustained by her growing interest in a
+young man from Cerro Gordo County.
+
+We were a happy, noisy gang, and undoubtedly gave poor Mrs. Leete a
+great deal of trouble. There was Boggs (who had lost part of one ear in
+some fracas with Jack Frost) who paced up and down his room declining
+Latin verbs with painful pertinacity, and Burton who loved a jest but
+never made one, and Joe Pritchard, who was interested mainly in politics
+and oratory, and finally that criminally well-dressed young book agent
+(with whom we had very little in common) and myself. In cold weather we
+all herded in the dining room to keep from freezing, and our weekly
+scrub took place after we got home to our own warm kitchens and the
+family wash-tubs.
+
+Life was a pure joy to Burton as to me. Each day was a poem, each night
+a dreamless sleep! Each morning at half past eight we went to the
+Seminary and at four o'clock left it with regret. I should like to say
+that we studied hard every night, burning a great deal of kerosene oil,
+but I cannot do so.--We had a good time. The learning, (so far as I can
+recall) was incidental.
+
+It happened that my closest friends, aside from Burton, were pupils of
+the public school and for that reason I kept my membership in the
+Adelphian Society which met every Monday evening. My activities there, I
+find, made up a large part of my life during this second winter. I not
+only debated furiously, disputing weighty political questions, thus
+advancing the forensic side of my education, but later in the winter I
+helped to organize a dramatic company which gave a play for the benefit
+of the Club Library.
+
+Just why I should have been chosen "stage director" of our "troupe," I
+cannot say, but something in my ability to declaim _Regulus_ probably
+led to this high responsibility. At any rate, I not only played the
+leading juvenile, I settled points of action and costume without the
+slightest hesitation. Cora was my _ingenue_ opposite, it fell out, and
+so we played at love-making, while meeting coldly at the family dining
+table.
+
+Our engagement in the town hall extended through two March evenings and
+was largely patronized. It would seem that I was a dominant figure on
+both occasions, for I declaimed a "piece" on the opening night, one of
+those resounding orations (addressed to the Carthaginians), which we all
+loved, and which permitted of thunderous, rolling periods and passionate
+gestures. If my recollection is not distorted, I was masterful that
+night--at least, Joe Pritchard agreed that I was "the best part of the
+show." Joe was my friend, and I hold him in especial affection for his
+hearty praise of my effort.
+
+On this same night I also appeared in a little sketch representing the
+death of a veteran of the Revolutionary War, in which the dying man
+beholds in a vision his beloved Leader. Walter Blakeslee was the
+"Washington" and I, with heavily powdered hair, was the veteran. On the
+second night I played the juvenile lover in a drama called _His
+Brother's Keeper_. Cora as "Shellie," my sweetheart, was very lovely in
+pink mosquito netting, and for the first time I regretted her interest
+in the book agent from Cerro Gordo. Strange to say I had no fear at all
+as I looked out over the audience which packed the town hall to the
+ceiling. Father and mother were there with Frank and Jessie, all quite
+dazed (as I imagined) by my transcendent position behind the foot
+lights.
+
+It may have been this very night that Willard Eaton, the county
+attorney, spoke to my father saying, "Richard, whenever that boy of
+yours finishes school and wants to begin to study law, you send him
+right to me," which was, of course, a very great compliment, for the
+county attorney belonged to the best known and most influential firm of
+lawyers in the town. At the moment his offer would have seemed very dull
+and commonplace to me. I would have refused it.
+
+Our success that night was so great that it appeared a pity not to
+permit other towns to witness our performance, hence we boldly organized
+a "tour." We booked a circuit which included St. Ansgar and Mitchell,
+two villages, one four, the other ten miles to the north. Audacious as
+this may seem, it was deliberately decided upon, and one pleasant day
+Mitchell and George and I loaded all our scenery into a wagon and drove
+away across the prairie to our first "stand" very much as Moliere did in
+his youth, leaving the ladies to follow (in the grandeur of hired
+buggies) later in the day.
+
+That night we played with "artistic success"--that is to say, we lost
+some eighteen dollars, which so depressed the management that it
+abandoned the tour, and the entire organization returned to Osage in
+diminished glory. This cut short my career as an actor. I never again
+took part in a theatrical performance.
+
+Not long after this disaster, "Shellie," as I now called Cora, entered
+upon some mysterious and romantic drama of her own. The travelling man
+vanished, and soon after she too disappeared. Where she went, what she
+did, no one seemed to know, and none of us quite dared to ask. I never
+saw her again but last year, after nearly forty years of wandering, I
+was told that she is married and living in luxurious ease near London.
+Through what deep valleys she has travelled to reach this height, with
+what loss or gain, I cannot say, but I shall always remember her as she
+was that night in St. Ansgar, in her pink-mosquito-bar dress, her eyes
+shining with excitement, her voice vibrant with girlish gladness.
+
+Our second winter at the Seminary passed all too quickly, and when the
+prairie chickens began to boom from the ridges our hearts sank within
+us. For the first time the grouse's cheery dance was unwelcome for it
+meant the closing of our books, the loss of our pleasant companions, the
+surrender of our leisure, and a return to the mud of the fields.
+
+It was especially hard to say good-bye to Ella and Maud, for though they
+were in no sense sweethearts they were very pleasant companions. There
+were others whom it was a pleasure to meet in the halls and to emulate
+in the class-rooms, and when early in April, we went home to enter upon
+the familiar round of seeding, corn-planting, corn plowing, harvesting,
+stacking and threshing, we had only the promise of an occasional trip to
+town to cheer us.
+
+It would seem that our interest in the girls of Burr Oak had diminished,
+for we were less regular in our attendance upon services in the little
+school-house, and whenever we could gain consent to use a horse, we
+hitched up and drove away to town. These trips have golden,
+unforgettable charm, and indicate the glamor which approaching manhood
+was flinging over my world.
+
+My father's world was less jocund, was indeed filled with increasing
+anxiety, for just before harvest time a new and formidable enemy of the
+wheat appeared in the shape of a minute, ill-smelling insect called the
+chinch bug. It already bore an evil reputation with us for it was
+reported to have eaten out the crops of southern Wisconsin and northern
+Illinois, and, indeed, before barley cutting was well under way the
+county was overrun with laborers from the south who were anxious to get
+work in order to recoup them for the loss of their own harvest. These
+fugitives brought incredible tales of the ravages of the enemy and
+prophesied our destruction but, as a matter of fact, only certain dry
+ridges proclaimed the presence of the insect during this year.
+
+The crop was rather poor for other reasons, and Mr. Babcock, like my
+father, objected to paying board bills. His attitude was so unpromising
+that Burton and I cast about to see how we could lessen the expense of
+upkeep during our winter term of school.
+
+Together we decided to hire a room and board ourselves (as many of the
+other fellows did) and so cut our expenses to a mere trifle. It was
+difficult, even in those days, to live cheaper than two dollars per
+week, but we convinced our people that we could do it, and so at last
+wrung from our mothers a reluctant consent to our trying it. We got away
+in October, only two weeks behind our fellows.
+
+I well remember the lovely afternoon on which we unloaded our scanty
+furniture into the two little rooms which we had hired for the term. It
+was still glorious autumn weather, and we were young and released from
+slavery. We had a table, three chairs, a little strip of carpet, and a
+melodeon, which belonged to Burton's sister, and when we had spread our
+carpet and put up our curtains we took seats, and cocking our feet upon
+the window sill surveyed our surroundings with such satisfaction as only
+autocrats of the earth may compass. We were absolute masters of our
+time--that was our chiefest joy. We could rise when we pleased and go to
+bed when we pleased. There were no stables to clean, no pigs to feed,
+nothing marred our days. We could study or sing or dance at will. We
+could even wrestle at times with none to molest or make us afraid.
+
+My photograph shows the new suit which I had bought on my own
+responsibility this time, but no camera could possibly catch the glow of
+inward satisfaction which warmed my heart. It was a brown cassimere,
+coat, trousers and vest all alike,--and the trousers fitted me!
+Furthermore as I bought it without my father's help, my selection was
+made for esthetic reasons without regard to durability or warmth. It was
+mine--in the fullest sense--and when I next entered chapel I felt not
+merely draped, but defended. I walked to my seat with confident
+security, a well-dressed person. I had a "boughten" shirt also, two
+boxes of paper cuffs, and two new ties, a black one for every day and a
+white one for Sunday.
+
+I don't know that any of the girls perceived my new suit, but I hoped
+one or two of them did. The boys were quite outspoken in their approval
+of it.
+
+I had given up boots, also, for most of the townsmen wore shoes, thus
+marking the decline of the military spirit. I never again owned a pair
+of those man-killing top-boots--which were not only hard to get on and
+off but pinched my toes, and interrupted the flow of my trouser-legs.
+Thus one great era fades into another. The Jack-boot period was over,
+the shoe, commonplace and comfortable, had won.
+
+Our housekeeping was very simple. Each of us brought from home on Monday
+morning a huge bag of doughnuts together with several loaves of bread,
+and (with a milkman near at hand) our cooking remained rudimentary. We
+did occasionally fry a steak and boil some potatoes, and I have a dim
+memory of several disastrous attempts to make flapjacks out of flour and
+sweet milk. However we never suffered from hunger as some of the other
+fellows actually did.
+
+Pretty Ethel Beebe comes into the record of this winter, like a quaint
+illustration to an old-fashioned story, for she lived near us and went
+to school along the same sidewalk. Burton was always saying, "Some day I
+am going to brace up and ask Ethel to let me carry her books, and I'm
+going to walk beside her right down Main Street." But he never did.
+Ultimately I attained to that incredible boldness, but Burton only
+followed along behind.
+
+Ethel was a slender, smiling, brown-eyed girl with a keen appreciation
+of the ridiculous, and I have no doubt she catalogued all our
+peculiarities, for she always seemed to be laughing at us, and I think
+it must have been her smiles that prevented any romantic attachment. We
+walked and talked without any deeper interest than good comradeship.
+
+Mrs. Babcock was famous for her pies and cakes, and Burton always
+brought some delicious samples of her skill. As regularly as the clock,
+on every Tuesday evening he said, in precisely the same tone, "Well,
+now, we'll have to eat these pies right away or they'll spoil," and as I
+made no objection, we had pie for luncheon, pie and cake for supper, and
+cake and pie for breakfast until all these "goodies" which were intended
+to serve as dessert through the week were consumed. By Thursday morning
+we were usually down to dry bread and butter.
+
+We simplified our housework in other ways in order that we might have
+time to study and Burton wasted a good deal of time at the fiddle,
+sawing away till I was obliged to fall upon him and roll him on the
+floor to silence him.
+
+I still have our ledger which gives an itemized account of the cost of
+this experiment in self board, and its footings are incredibly small.
+Less than fifty cents a day for both of us! Of course our mothers,
+sisters and aunts were continually joking us about our housekeeping, and
+once or twice Mrs. Babcock called upon us unexpectedly and found the
+room "a sight." But we did not mind her very much. We only feared the
+bright eyes of Ethel and Maude and Carrie. Fortunately they could not
+properly call upon us, even if they had wished to do so, and we were
+safe. It is probable, moreover, that they fully understood our methods,
+for they often slyly hinted at hasty dish-washing and primitive cookery.
+All of this only amused us, so long as they did not actually discover
+the dirt and disorder of which our mothers complained.
+
+Our school library at that time was pitifully small and ludicrously
+prescriptive, but its shelves held a few of the fine old classics,
+Scott, Dickens and Thackeray--the kind of books which can always be had
+in sets at very low prices--and in nosing about among these I fell, one
+day, upon two small red volumes called _Mosses from an Old Manse_. Of
+course I had read of the author, for these books were listed in my
+_History of American Literature_, but I had never, up to this moment,
+dared to open one of them. I was a discoverer.
+
+I turned a page or two, and instantly my mental horizon widened. When I
+had finished the _Artist of the Beautiful_, the great Puritan romancer
+had laid his spell upon me everlastingly. Even as I walked homeward to
+my lunch, I read. I ate with the book beside my plate. I neglected my
+classes that afternoon, and as soon as I had absorbed this volume I
+secured the other and devoted myself to it with almost equal intensity.
+The stately diction, the rich and glowing imagery, the mystical
+radiance, and the aloofness of the author's personality all united to
+create in me a worshipful admiration which made all other interests pale
+and faint. It was my first profound literary passion and I was dazzled
+by the glory of it.
+
+It would be a pleasant task to say that this book determined my
+career--it would form a delightful literary assumption, but I cannot
+claim it. As a realist I must remain faithful to fact. I did not then
+and there vow to be a romantic novelist like Hawthorne. On the contrary,
+I realized that this great poet (to me he was a poet) like Edgar Allan
+Poe, was a soul that dwelt apart from ordinary mortals.
+
+To me he was a magician, a weaver of magic spells, a dreamer whose
+visions comprehended the half-lights, the borderlands, of the human
+soul. I loved the roll of his words in _The March of Time_ and the
+quaint phrasing of the _Rill from the Town Pump_; _Rappacini's Daughter_
+whose breath poisoned the insects in the air, uplifted me. _Drowne and
+His Wooden Image_, the _Great Stone Face_--each story had its special
+appeal. For days I walked amid enchanted mist, my partner--(even the
+maidens I most admired), became less appealing, less necessary to me.
+Eager to know more of this necromancer I searched the town for others of
+his books, but found only _American Notes_ and _the Scarlet Letter_.
+
+Gradually I returned to something like my normal interests in baseball
+and my classmates, but never again did I fall to the low level of _Jack
+Harkaway_. I now possessed a literary touchstone with which I tested the
+quality of other books and other minds, and my intellectual arrogance, I
+fear, sometimes made me an unpleasant companion. The fact that Ethel did
+not "like" Hawthorne, sank her to a lower level in my estimation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+End of School Days
+
+
+Though my years at the Seminary were the happiest of my life they are
+among the most difficult for me to recover and present to my readers.
+During half the year I worked on the farm fiercely, unsparing of myself,
+in order that I might have an uninterrupted season of study in the
+village. Each term was very like another so far as its broad program
+went but innumerable, minute but very important progressions carried me
+toward manhood, events which can hardly be stated to an outsider.
+
+Burton remained my room-mate and in all our vicissitudes we had no vital
+disagreements but his unconquerable shyness kept him from making a good
+impression on his teachers and this annoyed me--it made him seem stupid
+when he was not. Once, as chairman of a committee it became his duty to
+introduce a certain lecturer who was to speak on "Elihu Burritt," and by
+some curious twist in my chum's mind this name became "Lu-hi Burritt"
+and he so stated it in his introductory remarks. This amused the
+lecturer and raised a titter in the audience. Burton bled in silence
+over this mishap for he was at heart deeply ambitious to be a public
+speaker. He never alluded to that speech even to me without writhing in
+retrospective shame.
+
+Another incident will illustrate his painfully shy character. One of our
+summer vacations was made notable by the visit of an exceedingly pretty
+girl to the home of one of Burton's aunts who lived on the road to the
+Grove, and my chum's excitement over the presence of this alien bird of
+paradise was very amusing to me as well as to his brother Charles who
+was inclined, as an older brother, to "take it out" of Burt.
+
+I listened to my chum's account of his cousin's beauty with something
+more than fraternal interest. She came, it appeared, from Dubuque and
+had the true cosmopolitan's air of tolerance. Our small community amused
+her. Her hats and gowns (for it soon developed that she had at least
+two), were the envy of all the girls, and the admiration of the boys. No
+disengaged or slightly obligated beau of the district neglected to hitch
+his horse at Mrs. Knapp's gate.
+
+Burton's opportunity seemed better than that of any other youth, for he
+could visit his aunt as often as he wished without arousing comment,
+whereas for me, a call would have been equivalent to an offer of
+marriage. My only chance of seeing the radiant stranger was at church.
+Needless to say we all made it a point to attend every service during
+her stay.
+
+One Sunday afternoon as I was riding over to the Grove, I met Burton
+plodding homeward along the grassy lane, walking with hanging head and
+sagging shoulders. He looked like a man in deep and discouraged thought,
+and when he glanced up at me, with a familiar defensive smile twisting
+his long lips, I knew something had gone wrong.
+
+"Hello," I said. "Where have you been?"
+
+"Over to Aunt Sallie's," he said.
+
+His long, linen duster was sagging at the sides, and peering down at his
+pockets I perceived a couple of quarts of lovely Siberian crab-apples.
+"Where did you get all that fruit?" I demanded.
+
+"At home."
+
+"What are you going to do with it?"
+
+"Take it back again."
+
+"What do you mean by such a performance?"
+
+With the swift flush and silent laugh which always marked his
+confessions of weakness, or failure, he replied, "I went over to see
+Nettie. I intended to give her these apples," he indicated the fruit by
+a touch on each pocket, "but when I got there I found old Bill Watson,
+dressed to kill and large as life, sitting in the parlor. I was so
+afraid of his finding out what I had in my pockets that I didn't go in.
+I came away leaving him in possession."
+
+Of course I laughed--but there was an element of pathos in it after all.
+Poor Burt! He always failed to get his share of the good things in this
+world.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We continued to board ourselves,--now here, now there, and always to the
+effect of being starved out by Friday night, but we kept well and active
+even on doughnuts and pie, and were grateful of any camping place in
+town.
+
+Once Burton left a soup-bone to simmer on the stove while we went away
+to morning recitations, and when we reached home, smoke was leaking from
+every keyhole. The room was solid with the remains of our bone. It took
+six months to get the horrid smell of charred beef out of our wardrobe.
+The girls all sniffed and wondered as we came near.
+
+On Fridays we went home and during the winter months very generally
+attended the Lyceum which met in the Burr Oak school-house. We often
+debated, and on one occasion I attained to the honor of being called
+upon to preside over the session. Another memorable evening is that in
+which I read with what seemed to me distinguished success Joaquin
+Miller's magnificent new poem, _Kit Carson's Ride_ and in the splendid
+roar and trample of its lines discovered a new and powerful American
+poet. His spirit appealed to me. He was at once American and western. I
+read every line of his verse which the newspapers or magazines brought
+to me, and was profoundly influenced by its epic quality.
+
+And so, term by term, in growing joy and strength, in expanding
+knowledge of life, we hurried toward the end of our four years' course
+at this modest little school, finding in it all the essential elements
+of an education, for we caught at every chance quotation from the
+scientists, every fleeting literary allusion in the magazines,
+attaining, at last, a dim knowledge of what was going on in the great
+outside world of letters and discovery. Of course there were elections
+and tariff reforms and other comparatively unimportant matters taking
+place in the state but they made only the most transient impression on
+our minds.
+
+During the last winter of our stay at the Seminary, my associate in
+housekeeping was one Adelbert Jones, the son of a well-to-do farmer who
+lived directly east of town. "Del," as we called him, always alluded to
+himself as "Ferguson." He was tall, with a very large blond face
+inclined to freckle and his first care of a morning was to scrutinize
+himself most anxiously to see whether the troublesome brown flecks were
+increasing or diminishing in number. Often upon reaching the open air he
+would sniff the east wind and say lugubriously, "This is the kind of day
+that brings out the freckles on your Uncle Ferg."
+
+He was one of the best dressed men in the school, and especially finicky
+about his collars and ties,--was, indeed, one of the earliest to
+purchase linen. He also parted his yellow hair in the middle (which was
+a very noticeable thing in those days) and was always talking of taking
+a girl to a social or to prayer meeting. But, like Burton, he never
+did. So far as I knew he never "went double," and most of the girls
+looked upon him as more or less of a rustic, notwithstanding his fine
+figure and careful dress.
+
+As for me I did once hire a horse and carriage of a friend and took
+Alice for a drive! More than thirty-five years have passed since that
+adventure and yet I can see every turn in that road! I can hear the
+crackle of my starched shirt and the creak of my suspender buckles as I
+write.
+
+Alice, being quite as bashful as myself, kept our conversation to the
+high plane of Hawthorne and Poe and Schiller with an occasional tired
+droop to the weather, hence I infer that she was as much relieved as I
+when we reached her boarding house some two hours later. It was my first
+and only attempt at this, the most common of all ways of entertaining
+one's best girl.
+
+The youth who furnished the carriage betrayed me, and the outcry of my
+friends so intimidated me that I dared not look Alice in the face. My
+only comfort was that no one but ourselves could possibly know what an
+erratic conversationalist I had been. However, she did not seem to lay
+it up against me. I think she was as much astonished as I and I am
+persuaded that she valued the compliment of my extravagant gallantry.
+
+It is only fair to say that I had risen by this time to the dignity of
+"boughten shirts," linen collars and "Congress gaiters," and my suit
+purchased for graduating purposes was of black diagonal with a long
+tail, a garment which fitted me reasonably well. It was hot, of course,
+and nearly parboiled me of a summer evening, but I bore my suffering
+like the hero that I was, in order that I might make a presentable
+figure in the eyes of my classmates. I longed for a white vest but did
+not attain to that splendor.
+
+Life remained very simple and very democratic in our little town.
+Although the county seat, it was slow in taking on city ways. I don't
+believe a real bath-tub distinguished the place (I never heard of one)
+but its sidewalks kept our feet out of the mud (even in March or April),
+and this was a marvellous fact to us. One or two fine lawns and flower
+gardens had come in, and year by year the maples had grown until they
+now made a pleasant shade in June, and in October glorified the plank
+walks. To us it was beautiful.
+
+As county town, Osage published two papers and was, in addition, the
+home of two Judges, a state Senator and a Congressman. A new opera house
+was built in '79 and an occasional "actor troupe" presented military
+plays like _Our Boys_ or farces like _Solon Shingle_. The brass band and
+the baseball team were the best in the district, and were loyally upheld
+by us all.
+
+With all these attractions do you wonder that whenever Ed and Bill and
+Joe had a day of leisure they got out their buggies, washed them till
+they glistened like new, and called for their best girls on the way to
+town?
+
+Circuses, Fourth of Julys, County Fairs, all took place in Osage, and to
+own a "covered rig" and to take your sweetheart to the show were the
+highest forms of affluence and joy--unless you were actually able to
+live in town, as Burton and I now did for five days in each week, in
+which case you saw everything that was free and denied yourself
+everything but the circus. Nobody went so far in economy as that.
+
+As a conscientious historian I have gone carefully into the records of
+this last year, in the hope of finding something that would indicate a
+feeling on the part of the citizens that Dick Garland's boy was in some
+ways a remarkable youth, but (I regret to say) I cannot lay hands on a
+single item. It appears that I was just one of a hundred healthy,
+hearty, noisy students--but no, wait! There is one incident which has
+slight significance. One day during my final term of school, as I stood
+in the postoffice waiting for the mail to be distributed, I picked up
+from the counter a book called _The Undiscovered Country_.
+
+"What is this about?" I asked.
+
+The clerk looked up at me with an expression of disgust. "I bought it
+for a book of travel," said he, "but it is only a novel. Want it? I'll
+sell it cheap."
+
+Having no money to waste in that way, I declined, but as I had the
+volume in my hands, with a few minutes to spare, I began to read. It did
+not take me long to discover in this author a grace and precision of
+style which aroused both my admiration and my resentment. My resentment
+was vague, I could not have given a reason for it, but as a matter of
+fact, the English of this new author made some of my literary heroes
+seem either crude or stilted. I was just young enough and conservative
+enough to be irritated and repelled by the modernity of William Dean
+Howells.
+
+I put the book down and turned away, apparently uninfluenced by it.
+Indeed, I remained, if anything, more loyal to the grand manner of
+Hawthorne, but my love of realism was growing. I recall a rebuke from my
+teacher in rhetoric, condemning, in my essay on Mark Twain, an over
+praise of _Roughing It_. It is evident, therefore that I was even then a
+lover of the modern when taken off my guard.
+
+Meanwhile I had definitely decided not to be a lawyer, and it happened
+in this way. One Sunday morning as I was walking toward school, I met a
+young man named Lohr, a law student several years older than myself, who
+turned and walked with me for a few blocks.
+
+"Well, Garland," said he, "what are you going to do after you graduate
+this June?"
+
+"I don't know," I frankly replied. "I have a chance to go into a law
+office."
+
+"Don't do it," protested he with sudden and inexplicable bitterness.
+"Whatever you do, don't become a lawyer's hack."
+
+His tone and the words, "lawyer's hack" had a powerful effect upon my
+mind. The warning entered my ears and stayed there. I decided against
+the law, as I had already decided against the farm.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Yes, these were the sweetest days of my life for I was carefree and
+glowing with the happiness which streams from perfect health and
+unquestioning faith. If any shadow drifted across this sunny year it
+fell from a haunting sense of the impermanency of my leisure. Neither
+Burton nor I had an ache or a pain. We had no fear and cherished no
+sorrow, and we were both comparatively free from the lover's almost
+intolerable longing. Our loves were hardly more than admirations.
+
+As I project myself back into those days I re-experience the keen joy I
+took in the downpour of vivid sunlight, in the colorful clouds of
+evening, and in the song of the west wind harping amid the maple leaves.
+The earth was new, the moonlight magical, the dawns miraculous. I shiver
+with the boy's solemn awe in the presence of beauty. The little
+recitation rooms, dusty with floating chalk, are wide halls of romance
+and the voices of my girl classmates (even though their words are
+algebraic formulas), ring sweet as bells across the years.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+During the years '79 and '80, while Burton and I had been living our
+carefree jocund life at the Seminary, a series of crop failures had
+profoundly affected the county, producing a feeling of unrest and
+bitterness in the farmers which was to have a far-reaching effect on my
+fortunes as well as upon those of my fellows. For two years the crop had
+been almost wholly destroyed by chinch bugs.
+
+The harvest of '80 had been a season of disgust and disappointment to us
+for not only had the pestiferous mites devoured the grain, they had
+filled our stables, granaries, and even our kitchens with their
+ill-smelling crawling bodies--and now they were coming again in added
+billions. By the middle of June they swarmed at the roots of the
+wheat--innumerable as the sands of the sea. They sapped the growing
+stalks till the leaves turned yellow. It was as if the field had been
+scorched, even the edges of the corn showed signs of blight. It was
+evident that the crop was lost unless some great change took place in
+the weather, and many men began to offer their land for sale.
+
+Naturally the business of grain-buying had suffered with the decline of
+grain-growing, and my father, profoundly discouraged by the outlook,
+sold his share in the elevator and turned his face toward the free lands
+of the farther west. He became again the pioneer.
+
+DAKOTA was the magic word. The "Jim River Valley" was now the "land of
+delight," where "herds of deer and buffalo" still "furnished the cheer."
+Once more the spirit of the explorer flamed up in the soldier's heart.
+Once more the sunset allured. Once more my mother sang the marching song
+of the McClintocks,
+
+    O'er the hills in legions, boys,
+      Fair freedom's star
+    Points to the sunset regions, boys,
+      Ha, ha, ha-ha!
+
+and sometime, in May I think it was, father again set out--this time by
+train, to explore the Land of The Dakotas which had but recently been
+wrested from the control of Sitting Bull.
+
+He was gone only two weeks, but on his return announced with triumphant
+smile that he had taken up a homestead in Ordway, Brown County, Dakota.
+His face was again alight with the hope of the borderman, and he had
+much to say of the region he had explored.
+
+As graduation day came on, Burton and I became very serious. The
+question of our future pressed upon us. What were we to do when our
+schooling ended? Neither of us had any hope of going to college, and
+neither of us had any intention of going to Dakota, although I had taken
+"Going West" as the theme of my oration. We were also greatly worried
+about these essays. Burton fell off in appetite and grew silent and
+abstracted. Each of us gave much time to declaiming our speeches, and
+the question of dress troubled us. Should we wear white ties and white
+vests, or white ties and black vests?
+
+The evening fell on a dark and rainy night, but the Garlands came down
+in their best attire and so did the Babcocks, the Gilchrists and many
+other of our neighbors. Burton was hoping that his people would not
+come, he especially dreaded the humorous gaze of his brother Charles who
+took a much less serious view of Burton's powers as an orator than
+Burton considered just. Other interested parents and friends filled the
+New Opera House to the doors, producing in us a sense of awe for this
+was the first time the "Exercises" had taken place outside the chapel.
+
+Never again shall I feel the same exultation, the same pleasure mingled
+with bitter sadness, the same perception of the irrevocable passing of
+beautiful things, and the equally inexorable coming on of care and
+trouble, as filled my heart that night. Whether any of the other members
+of my class vibrated with similar emotion or not I cannot say, but I do
+recall that some of the girls annoyed me by their excessive attentions
+to unimportant ribbons, flounces, and laces. "How do I look?" seemed
+their principal concern. Only Alice expressed anything of the prophetic
+sadness which mingled with her exultation.
+
+The name of my theme, (which was made public for the first time in the
+little programme) is worthy of a moment's emphasis. _Going West_ had
+been suggested, of course by the emigration fever, then at its height,
+and upon it I had lavished a great deal of anxious care. As an oration
+it was all very excited and very florid, but it had some stirring ideas
+in it and coming in the midst of the profound political discourses of my
+fellows and the formal essays of the girls, it seemed much more singular
+and revolutionary, both in form and in substance, than it really was.
+
+As I waited my turn, I experienced that sense of nausea, that numbness
+which always preceded my platform trials, but as my name was called I
+contrived to reach the proper place behind the footlights, and to bow to
+the audience. My opening paragraph perplexed my fellows, and naturally,
+for it was exceedingly florid, filled with phrases like "the lure of the
+sunset," "the westward urge of men," and was neither prose nor verse.
+Nevertheless I detected a slight current of sympathy coming up to me,
+and in the midst of the vast expanse of faces, I began to detect here
+and there a friendly smile. Mother and father were near but their faces
+were very serious.
+
+After a few moments the blood began to circulate through my limbs and I
+was able to move about a little on the stage. My courage came back, but
+alas!--just in proportion as I attained confidence my emotional chant
+mounted too high! Since the writing was extremely ornate, my manner
+should have been studiedly cold and simple. This I knew perfectly well,
+but I could not check the perfervid rush of my song. I ranted
+deplorably, and though I closed amid fairly generous applause, no
+flowers were handed up to me. The only praise I received came from
+Charles Lohr, the man who had warned me against becoming a lawyer's
+hack. He, meeting me in the wings of the stage as I came off, remarked
+with ironic significance, "Well, that was an original piece of
+business!"
+
+This delighted me exceedingly, for I had written with special deliberate
+intent to go outside the conventional grind of graduating orations.
+Feeling dimly, but sincerely, the epic march of the American pioneer I
+had tried to express it in an address which was in fact a sloppy poem. I
+should not like to have that manuscript printed precisely as it came
+from my pen, and a phonographic record of my voice would serve admirably
+as an instrument of blackmail. However, I thought at the time that I had
+done moderately well, and my mother's shy smile confirmed me in the
+belief.
+
+Burton was white with stage-fright as he stepped from the wings but he
+got through very well, better than I, for he attempted no oratorical
+flights.
+
+Now came the usual hurried and painful farewells of classmates. With
+fervid hand-clasp we separated, some of us never again to meet. Our
+beloved principal (who was even then shadowed by the illness which
+brought about his death) clung to us as if he hated to see us go, and
+some of us could not utter a word as we took his hand in parting. What I
+said to Alice and Maud and Ethel I do not know, but I do recall that I
+had an uncomfortable lump in my throat while saying it.
+
+As a truthful historian, I must add that Burton and I, immediately after
+this highly emotional close of our school career, were both called upon
+to climb into the family carriage and drive away into the black night,
+back to the farm,--an experience which seemed to us at the time a sad
+anticlimax. When we entered our ugly attic rooms and tumbled wearily
+into our hard beds, we retained very little of our momentary sense of
+victory. Our carefree school life was ended. Our stern education in life
+had begun.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+The Land of the Dakotas
+
+
+The movement of settlers toward Dakota had now become an exodus, a
+stampede. Hardly anything else was talked about as neighbors met one
+another on the road or at the Burr Oak school-house on Sundays. Every
+man who could sell out had gone west or was going. In vain did the
+county papers and Farmer's Institute lecturers advise cattle raising and
+plead for diversified tillage, predicting wealth for those who held on;
+farmer after farmer joined the march to Kansas, Nebraska, and Dakota.
+"We are wheat raisers," they said, "and we intend to keep in the wheat
+belt."
+
+Our own family group was breaking up. My uncle David of pioneer spirit
+had already gone to the far Missouri Valley. Rachel had moved to
+Georgia, and Grandad McClintock was with his daughters, Samantha and
+Deborah, in western Minnesota. My mother, thus widely separated from her
+kin, resigned herself once more to the thought of founding a new home.
+Once more she sang, "O'er the hills in legions, boys," with such spirit
+as she could command, her clear voice a little touched with the
+huskiness of regret.
+
+I confess I sympathized in some degree with my father's new design.
+There was something large and fine in the business of wheat-growing, and
+to have a plague of insects arise just as our harvesting machinery was
+reaching such perfection that we could handle our entire crop without
+hired help, was a tragic, abominable injustice. I could not blame him
+for his resentment and dismay.
+
+My personal plans were now confused and wavering. I had no intention of
+joining this westward march; on the contrary, I was looking toward
+employment as a teacher, therefore my last weeks at the Seminary were
+shadowed by a cloud of uncertainty and vague alarm. It seemed a time of
+change, and immense, far-reaching, portentous readjustment. Our
+homestead was sold, my world was broken up. "What am I to do?" was my
+question.
+
+Father had settled upon Ordway, Brown County, South Dakota, as his
+future home, and immediately after my graduation, he and my brother set
+forth into the new country to prepare the way for the family's removal,
+leaving me to go ahead with the harvest alone. It fell out, therefore,
+that immediately after my flowery oration on _Going West_ I found myself
+more of a slave to the cattle than ever before in my life.
+
+Help was scarce; I could not secure even so much as a boy to aid in
+milking the cows; I was obliged to work double time in order to set up
+the sheaves of barley which were in danger of mouldering on the wet
+ground. I worked with a kind of bitter, desperate pleasure, saying,
+"This is the last time I shall ever lift a bundle of this accursed
+stuff."
+
+And then, to make the situation worse, in raising some heavy machinery
+connected with the self-binder, I strained my side so seriously that I
+was unable to walk. This brought the harvesting to a stand, and made my
+father's return necessary. For several weeks I hobbled about, bent like
+a gnome, and so helped to reap what the chinch bugs had left, while my
+mother prepared to "follow the sunset" with her "Boss."
+
+September first was the day set for saying good-bye to Dry Run, and it
+so happened that her wedding anniversary fell close upon the same date
+and our neighbors, having quietly passed the word around, came together
+one Sunday afternoon to combine a farewell dinner with a Silver Wedding
+"surprise party."
+
+Mother saw nothing strange in the coming of the first two carriages, the
+Buttons often came driving in that way,--but when the Babcocks, the
+Coles, and the Gilchrists clattered in with smiling faces, we all stood
+in the yard transfixed with amazement. "What's the meaning of all this?"
+asked my father.
+
+No one explained. The women calmly clambered down from their vehicles,
+bearing baskets and bottles and knobby parcels, and began instant and
+concerted bustle of preparation. The men tied their horses to the fence
+and hunted up saw-horses and planks, and soon a long table was spread
+beneath the trees on the lawn. One by one other teams came whirling into
+the yard. The assembly resembled a "vandoo" as Asa Walker said. "It's
+worse than that," laughed Mrs. Turner. "It's a silver wedding and a
+'send off' combined."
+
+They would not let either the "bride" or the "groom" do a thing, and
+with smiling resignation my mother folded her hands and sank into a
+chair. "All right," she said. "I am perfectly willing to sit by and see
+you do the work. I won't have another chance right away." And there was
+something sad in her voice. She could not forget that this was the
+beginning of a new pioneering adventure.
+
+The shadows were long on the grass when at the close of the supper old
+John Gammons rose to make a speech and present the silver tea set. His
+voice was tremulous with emotion as he spoke of the loss which the
+neighborhood was about to suffer, and tears were in many eyes when
+father made reply. The old soldier's voice failed him several times
+during his utterance of the few short sentences he was able to frame,
+and at last he was obliged to take his seat, and blow his nose very hard
+on his big bandanna handkerchief to conceal his emotion.
+
+It was a very touching and beautiful moment to me, for as I looked
+around upon that little group of men and women, rough-handed, bent and
+worn with toil, silent and shadowed with the sorrow of parting, I
+realized as never before the high place my parents had won in the
+estimation of their neighbors. It affected me still more deeply to see
+my father stammer and flush with uncontrollable emotion. I had thought
+the event deeply important before, but I now perceived that our going
+was all of a piece with the West's elemental restlessness. I could not
+express what I felt then, and I can recover but little of it now, but
+the pain which filled my throat comes back to me mixed with a singular
+longing to relive it.
+
+There, on a low mound in the midst of the prairie, in the shadow of the
+house we had built, beneath the slender trees we had planted, we were
+bidding farewell to one cycle of emigration and entering upon another.
+The border line had moved on, and my indomitable Dad was moving with it.
+I shivered with dread of the irrevocable decision thus forced upon me. I
+heard a clanging as of great gates behind me and the field of the future
+was wide and wan.
+
+From this spot we had seen the wild prairies disappear. On every hand
+wheat and corn and clover had taken the place of the wild oat, the
+hazelbush and the rose. Our house, a commonplace frame cabin, took on
+grace. Here Hattie had died. Our yard was ugly, but there Jessie's small
+feet had worn a slender path. Each of our lives was knit into these
+hedges and rooted in these fields and yet, notwithstanding all this, in
+response to some powerful yearning call, my father was about to set out
+for the fifth time into the still more remote and untrodden west. Small
+wonder that my mother sat with bowed head and tear-blinded eyes, while
+these good and faithful friends crowded around her to say good-bye.
+
+She had no enemies and no hatreds. Her rich singing voice, her smiling
+face, her ready sympathy with those who suffered, had endeared her to
+every home into which she had gone, even as a momentary visitor. No
+woman in childbirth, no afflicted family within a radius of five miles
+had ever called for her in vain. Death knew her well, for she had closed
+the eyes of youth and age, and yet she remained the same laughing,
+bounteous, whole-souled mother of men that she had been in the valley of
+the Neshonoc. Nothing could permanently cloud her face or embitter the
+sunny sweetness of her creed.
+
+One by one the women put their worn, ungraceful arms about her, kissed
+her with trembling lips, and went away in silent grief. The scene became
+too painful for me at last, and I fled away from it--out into the
+fields, bitterly asking, "Why should this suffering be? Why should
+mother be wrenched from all her dearest friends and forced to move away
+to a strange land?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I did not see the actual packing up and moving of the household goods,
+for I had determined to set forth in advance and independently, eager to
+be my own master, and at the moment I did not feel in the least like
+pioneering.
+
+Some two years before, when the failure of our crop had made the matter
+of my continuing at school an issue between my father and myself, I had
+said, "If you will send me to school until I graduate, I will ask
+nothing further of you," and these words I now took a stern pleasure in
+upholding. Without a dollar of my own, I announced my intention to fare
+forth into the world on the strength of my two hands, but my father, who
+was in reality a most affectionate parent, offered me thirty dollars to
+pay my carfare.
+
+This I accepted, feeling that I had abundantly earned this money, and
+after a sad parting with my mother and my little sister, set out one
+September morning for Osage. At the moment I was oppressed with the
+thought that this was the fork in the trail, that my family and I had
+started on differing roads. I had become a man. With all the ways of the
+world before me I suffered from a feeling of doubt. The open gate
+allured me, but the homely scenes I was leaving suddenly put forth a
+latent magic.
+
+I knew every foot of this farm. I had traversed it scores of times in
+every direction, following the plow, the harrow, or the seeder. With a
+great lumber wagon at my side I had husked corn from every acre of it,
+and now I was leaving it with no intention of returning. My action, like
+that of my father, was final. As I looked back up the lane at the tall
+Lombardy poplar trees bent like sabres in the warm western wind, the
+landscape I was leaving seemed suddenly very beautiful, and the old home
+very peaceful and very desirable. Nevertheless I went on.
+
+Try as I may, I cannot bring back out of the darkness of that night any
+memory of how I spent the time. I must have called upon some of my
+classmates, but I cannot lay hold upon a single word or look or phrase
+from any of them. Deeply as I felt my distinction in thus riding forth
+into the world, all the tender incidents of farewell are lost to me.
+Perhaps my boyish self-absorption prevented me from recording outside
+impressions, for the idea of travelling, of crossing the State line,
+profoundly engaged me. Up to this time, notwithstanding all my dreams of
+conquest in far countries, I had never ridden in a railway coach! Can
+you wonder therefore that I trembled with joyous excitement as I paced
+the platform next morning waiting for the chariot of my romance? The
+fact that it was a decayed little coach at the end of a "mixed
+accommodation train" on a stub road did not matter. I was ecstatic.
+
+However, I was well dressed, and my inexperience appeared only in a
+certain tense watchfulness. I closely observed what went on around me
+and was careful to do nothing which could be misconstrued as ignorance.
+Thrilling with excitement, feeling the mighty significance of my
+departure, I entered quietly and took my seat, while the train roared on
+through Mitchell and St. Ansgar, the little towns in which I had played
+my part as an actor,--on into distant climes and marvellous cities. My
+emotion was all very boyish, but very natural as I look back upon it.
+
+The town in which I spent my first night abroad should have been called
+Thebes or Athens or Palmyra; but it was not. On the contrary, it was
+named Ramsey, after an old pioneer, and no one but a youth of fervid
+imagination at the close of his first day of adventure in the world
+would have found it worth a second glance. To me it was both beautiful
+and inspiring, for the reason that it was new territory and because it
+was the home of Alice, my most brilliant school mate, and while I had in
+mind some notion of a conference with the county superintendent of
+schools, my real reason for stopping off was a desire to see this girl
+whom I greatly admired.
+
+I smile as I recall the feeling of pride with which I stepped into the
+'bus and started for the Grand Central Hotel. And yet, after all, values
+are relative. That boy had something which I have lost. I would give
+much of my present knowledge of the world for the keen savor of life
+which filled my nostrils at that time.
+
+The sound of a violin is mingled with my memories of Ramsey, and the
+talk of a group of rough men around the bar-room stove is full of savage
+charm. A tall, pale man, with long hair and big black eyes, one who
+impressed me as being a man of refinement and culture, reduced by drink
+to poverty and to rebellious bitterness of soul, stands out in powerful
+relief--a tragic and moving figure.
+
+Here, too, I heard my first splendid singer. A patent medicine cart was
+in the street and one of its troupe, a basso, sang _Rocked in the Cradle
+of the Deep_ with such art that I listened with delight. His lion-like
+pose, his mighty voice, his studied phrasing, revealed to me higher
+qualities of musical art than I had hitherto known.
+
+From this singer, I went directly to Alice's home. I must have appeared
+singularly exalted as I faced her. The entire family was in the sitting
+room as I entered--but after a few kindly inquiries concerning my people
+and some general remarks they each and all slipped away, leaving me
+alone with the girl--in the good old-fashioned American way.
+
+It would seem that in this farewell call I was permitting myself an
+exaggeration of what had been to Alice only a pleasant association, for
+she greeted me composedly and waited for me to justify my presence.
+
+After a few moments of explanation, I suggested that we go out and hear
+the singing of the "troupe." To this she consented, and rose
+quietly--she never did anything hurriedly or with girlish alertness--and
+put on her hat. Although so young, she had the dignity of a woman, and
+her face, pale as a silver moon, was calm and sweet, only her big gray
+eyes expressed the maiden mystery. She read my adoration and was a
+little afraid of it.
+
+As we walked, I spoke of the good days at "the Sem," of our classmates,
+and their future, and this led me to the announcement of my own plans.
+"I shall teach," I said. "I hope to be able to work into a professorship
+in literature some day.--What do you intend to do?"
+
+"I shall go on with my studies for a while," she replied. "I may go to
+some eastern college for a few years."
+
+"You must not become too learned," I urged. "You'll forget me."
+
+She did not protest this as a coquette might have done. On the contrary,
+she remained silent, and I was aware that while she liked and respected
+me, she was not profoundly moved by this farewell call. Nevertheless I
+hoped, and in that hope I repeated, "You will write to me, won't you?"
+
+"Of course!" she replied, and again I experienced a chilling perception
+that her words arose from friendliness rather than from tenderness, but
+I was glad of even this restrained promise, and I added, "I shall write
+often, for I shall be lonely--for a while."
+
+As I walked on, the girl's soft warm arm in mine, a feeling of
+uncertainty, of disquiet, took possession of me. "Success" seemed a long
+way off and the road to it long and hard. However, I said nothing
+further concerning my doubts.
+
+The street that night had all the enchantment of Granada to me. The
+girl's voice rippled with a music like that of the fountain Lindarazza,
+and when I caught glimpses of her sweet, serious face beneath her
+hat-rim, I dreaded our parting. The nearer to her gate we drew the more
+tremulous my voice became, and the more uncertain my step.
+
+At last on the door-step she turned and said, "Won't you come in again?"
+
+In her tone was friendly dismissal, but I would not have it so. "You
+will write to me, won't you?" I pleaded with choking utterance.
+
+She was moved (by pity perhaps).
+
+"Why, yes, with pleasure," she answered. "Good-bye, I hope you'll
+succeed. I'm sure you will."
+
+She extended her hand and I, recalling the instructions of my most
+romantic fiction, raised it to my lips. "Good-bye!" I huskily said, and
+turned away.
+
+My next night was spent in Faribault. Here I touched storied ground, for
+near this town Edward Eggleston had laid the scene of his novel, _The
+Mystery of Metropolisville_ and my imagination responded to the magic
+which lay in the influence of the man of letters. I wrote to Alice a
+long and impassioned account of my sensations as I stood beside the
+Cannonball River.
+
+My search for a school proving futile, I pushed on to the town of
+Farmington, where the Dakota branch of the Milwaukee railroad crossed my
+line of march. Here I felt to its full the compelling power of the swift
+stream of immigration surging to the west. The little village had
+doubled in size almost in a day. It was a junction point, a place of
+transfer, and its thin-walled unpainted pine hotels were packed with
+men, women and children laden with bags and bundles (all bound for the
+west) and the joyous excitement of these adventurers compelled me to
+change my plan. I decided to try some of the newer counties in western
+Minnesota. Romance was still in the West for me.
+
+I slept that night on the floor in company with four or five young Iowa
+farmers, and the smell of clean white shavings, the wailing of tired
+children, the excited muttering of fathers, the plaintive voices of
+mothers, came through the partitions at intervals, producing in my mind
+an effect which will never pass away. It seemed to me at the moment as
+if all America were in process of change, all hurrying to overtake the
+vanishing line of the middle border, and the women at least were
+secretly or openly doubtful of the outcome. Woman is not by nature an
+explorer. She is the home-lover.
+
+Early the next morning I bought a ticket for Aberdeen, and entered the
+train crammed with movers who had found the "prairie schooner" all too
+slow. The epoch of the canvas-covered wagon had passed. The era of the
+locomotive, the day of the chartered car, had arrived. Free land was
+receding at railroad speed, the borderline could be overtaken only by
+steam, and every man was in haste to arrive.
+
+All that day we rumbled and rattled into a strange country, feeding our
+little engine with logs of wood, which we stopped occasionally to secure
+from long ricks which lined the banks of the river. At Chaska, at
+Granite Falls, I stepped off, but did not succeed in finding employment.
+It is probable that being filled with the desire of exploration I only
+half-heartedly sought for work; at any rate, on the third day, I found
+myself far out upon the unbroken plain where only the hairlike buffalo
+grass grew--beyond trees, beyond the plow, but not beyond settlement,
+for here at the end of my third day's ride at Millbank, I found a hamlet
+six months old, and the flock of shining yellow pine shanties strewn
+upon the sod, gave me an illogical delight, but then I was
+twenty-one--and it was sunset in the Land of the Dakotas!
+
+All around me that night the talk was all of land, land! Nearly every
+man I met was bound for the "Jim River valley," and each voice was
+aquiver with hope, each eye alight with anticipation of certain
+success. Even the women had begun to catch something of this
+enthusiasm, for the night was very beautiful and the next day promised
+fair.
+
+Again I slept on a cot in a room of rough pine, slept dreamlessly, and
+was out early enough to witness the coming of dawn,--a wonderful moment
+that sunrise was to me. Again, as eleven years before, I felt myself a
+part of the new world, a world fresh from the hand of God. To the east
+nothing could be seen but a vague expanse of yellow plain, misty purple
+in its hollows, but to the west rose a long low wall of hills, the
+Eastern Coteaux, up which a red line of prairie fire was slowly
+creeping.
+
+It was middle September. The air, magnificently crisp and clear, filled
+me with desire of exploration, with vague resolution to do and dare. The
+sound of horses and mules calling for their feed, the clatter of hammers
+and the rasping of saws gave evidence of eager builders, of alert
+adventurers, and I was hotly impatient to get forward.
+
+At eight o'clock the engine drew out, pulling after it a dozen box-cars
+laden with stock and household goods, and on the roof of a freight
+caboose, together with several other young Jasons, I rode, bound for the
+valley of the James.
+
+It was a marvellous adventure. All the morning we rattled and rumbled
+along, our engine snorting with effort, struggling with a load almost
+too great for its strength. By noon we were up amid the rounded grassy
+hills of the Sisseton Reservation where only the coyote ranged and the
+Sioux made residence.
+
+Here we caught our first glimpse of the James River valley, which seemed
+to us at the moment as illimitable as the ocean and as level as a floor,
+and then pitching and tossing over the rough track, with our cars
+leaping and twisting like a herd of frightened buffaloes, we charged
+down the western slope, down into a level land of ripened grass, where
+blackbirds chattered in the willows, and prairie chickens called from
+the tall rushes which grew beside the sluggish streams.
+
+Aberdeen was the end of the line, and when we came into it that night it
+seemed a near neighbor to Sitting Bull and the bison. And so, indeed, it
+was, for a buffalo bull had been hunted across its site less than a year
+before.
+
+It was twelve miles from here to where my father had set his stakes for
+his new home, hence I must have stayed all night in some small hotel,
+but that experience has also faded from my mind. I remember only my walk
+across the dead-level plain next day. For the first time I set foot upon
+a landscape without a tree to break its sere expanse--and I was at once
+intensely interested in a long flock of gulls, apparently rolling along
+the sod, busily gathering their morning meal of frosted locusts. The
+ones left behind kept flying over the ones in front so that a ceaseless
+change of leadership took place.
+
+There was beauty in this plain, delicate beauty and a weird charm,
+despite its lack of undulation. Its lonely unplowed sweep gave me the
+satisfying sensation of being at last among the men who held the
+outposts,--sentinels for the marching millions who were approaching from
+the east. For two hours I walked, seeing Aberdeen fade to a series of
+wavering, grotesque notches on the southern horizon line, while to the
+north an equally irregular and insubstantial line of shadows gradually
+took on weight and color until it became the village in which my father
+was at this very moment busy in founding his new home.
+
+My experienced eyes saw the deep, rich soil, and my youthful imagination
+looking into the future, supplied the trees and vines and flowers which
+were to make this land a garden.
+
+I was converted. I had no doubts. It seemed at the moment that my father
+had acted wisely in leaving his Iowa farm in order to claim his share of
+Uncle Sam's rapidly-lessening unclaimed land.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+The Grasshopper and the Ant
+
+
+Without a doubt this trip, so illogical and so recklessly extravagant,
+was due entirely to a boy's thirst for adventure. Color it as I may, the
+fact of my truancy remains. I longed to explore. The valley of the James
+allured me, and though my ticket and my meals along the route had used
+up my last dollar, I felt amply repaid as I trod this new earth and
+confronted this new sky--for both earth and sky were to my perception
+subtly different from those of Iowa and Minnesota.
+
+The endless stretches of short, dry grass, the gorgeous colors of the
+dawn, the marvellous, shifting, phantom lakes and headlands, the violet
+sunset afterglow,--all were widely different from our old home, and the
+far, bare hills were delightfully suggestive of the horseman, the Indian
+and the buffalo. The village itself was hardly more than a summer camp,
+and yet its hearty, boastful citizens talked almost deliriously of
+"corner lots" and "boulevards," and their chantings were timed to the
+sound of hammers. The spirit of the builder seized me and so with my
+return ticket in my pocket, I joined the carpenters at work on my
+father's claim some two miles from the village with intent to earn money
+for further exploration.
+
+Grandfather Garland had also taken a claim (although he heartily
+disliked the country) and in order to provide for both families a double
+house was being built across the line between the two farms. I helped
+shingle the roof, and being twenty-one now, and my own master, I
+accepted wages from my father without a qualm. I earned every cent of my
+two dollars per day, I assure you, but I carefully omitted all reference
+to shingling, in my letters to my classmates.
+
+At the end of a fortnight with my pay in my pocket I started eastward on
+a trip which I fully intended to make very long and profoundly
+educational. That I was green, very green, I knew but all that could be
+changed by travel.
+
+At the end of my second day's journey, I reached Hastings, a small town
+on the Mississippi river, and from there decided to go by water to
+Redwing some thirty miles below. All my life I had longed to ride on a
+Mississippi steamboat, and now, as I waited on the wharf at the very
+instant of the fulfillment of my desire, I expanded with anticipatory
+satisfaction.
+
+The arrival of the _War Eagle_ from St. Paul carried a fine foreign
+significance, and I ascended its gang-plank with the air of a traveller
+embarking at Cairo for Assouan. Once aboard the vessel I mingled,
+aloofly, with the passengers, absorbed in study of the river winding
+down among its wooded hills.
+
+This ecstasy lasted during the entire trip--indeed it almost took on
+poetic form as the vessel approached the landing at Redwing, for at this
+point the legendary appeal made itself felt. This lovely valley had once
+been the home of a chieftain, and his body, together with that of his
+favorite warhorse, was buried on the summit of a hill which overlooks
+the river, "in order" (so runs the legend) "that the chief might see the
+first faint glow of the resurrection morn and ride to meet it."
+
+In truth Redwing was a quiet, excessively practical little town, quite
+commonplace to every other passenger, except myself. My excited
+imagination translated it into something very distinctive and far-off
+and shining.
+
+I took lodgings that night at a very exclusive boarding house at six
+dollars per week, reckless of the effect on my very slender purse. For a
+few days I permitted myself to wander and to dream. I have disturbing
+recollections of writing my friends from this little town, letters
+wherein I rhapsodized on the beauty of the scenery in terms which I
+would not now use in describing the Grand Canyon, or in picturing the
+peaks of Wyoming. After all I was right. A landscape is precisely as
+great as the impression it makes upon the perceiving mind. I was a
+traveller at last!--that seemed to be my chiefest joy and I extracted
+from each day all the ecstasy it contained.
+
+My avowed object was to obtain a school and I did not entirely neglect
+my plans but application to the county superintendent came to nothing. I
+fear I was half-hearted in my campaign.
+
+At last, at the beginning of the week and at the end of my money, I
+bought passage to Wabasha and from there took train to a small town
+where some of my mother's cousins lived. I had been in correspondence
+with one of them, a Mrs. Harris, and I landed at her door (after a
+glorious ride up through the hills, amid the most gorgeous autumn
+colors) with just three cents in my pocket--a poverty which you may be
+sure I did not publish to my relations who treated me with high respect
+and manifested keen interest in all my plans.
+
+As nothing offered in the township round about the Harris home, I
+started one Saturday morning to walk to a little cross-roads village
+some twenty miles away, in which I was told a teacher was required. My
+cousins, not knowing that I was penniless, supposed, of course, that I
+would go by train, and I was too proud to tell them the truth. It was
+very muddy, and when I reached the home of the committeeman his mid-day
+meal was over, and his wife did not ask if I had dined--although she was
+quick to tell me that the teacher had just been hired.
+
+Without a cent in my pocket, I could not ask for food--therefore, I
+turned back weary, hungry and disheartened. To make matters worse a cold
+rain was falling and the eighteen or twenty miles between me and the
+Harris farm looked long.
+
+I think it must have been at this moment that I began, for the first
+time, to take a really serious view of my plan "to see the world." It
+became evident with startling abruptness, that a man might be both
+hungry and cold in the midst of abundance. I recalled the fable of the
+grasshopper who, having wasted the summer hours in singing, was
+mendicant to the ant. My weeks of careless gayety were over. The money I
+had spent in travel looked like a noble fortune to me at this hour.
+
+The road was deep in mud, and as night drew on the rain thickened. At
+last I said, "I will go into some farm-house and ask the privilege of a
+bed." This was apparently a simple thing to do and yet I found it
+exceedingly hard to carry out. To say bluntly, "Sir, I have no money, I
+am tired and hungry," seemed a baldly disgraceful way of beginning. On
+the other hand to plead relationship with Will Harris involved a
+relative, and besides they might not know my cousin, or they might think
+my statement false.
+
+Arguing in this way I passed house after house while the water dripped
+from my hat and the mud clogged my feet. Though chilled and hungry to
+the point of weakness, my suffering was mainly mental. A sudden
+realization of the natural antagonism of the well-to-do toward the tramp
+appalled me. Once, as I turned in toward the bright light of a kitchen
+window, the roar of a watch dog stopped me before I had fairly passed
+the gate. I turned back with a savage word, hot with resentment at a
+house-owner who would keep a beast like that. At another cottage I was
+repulsed by an old woman who sharply said, "We don't feed tramps."
+
+I now had the precise feeling of the penniless outcast. With morbidly
+active imagination I conceived of myself as a being forever set apart
+from home and friends, condemned to wander the night alone. I worked on
+this idea till I achieved a bitter, furtive and ferocious manner.
+
+However, I knocked at another door and upon meeting the eyes of the
+woman at the threshold, began with formal politeness to explain, "I am a
+teacher, I have been to look for a school, and I am on my way back to
+Byron, where I have relatives. Can you keep me all night?"
+
+The woman listened in silence and at length replied with ungracious
+curtness, "I guess so. Come in."
+
+She gave me a seat by the fire, and when her husband returned from the
+barn, I explained the situation to him. He was only moderately cordial.
+"Make yourself at home. I'll be in as soon as I have finished my
+milking," he said and left me beside the kitchen fire.
+
+The woman of the house, silent, suspicious (it seemed to me) began to
+spread the table for supper while I, sitting beside the stove, began to
+suffer with the knowledge that I had, in a certain sense, deceived them.
+I was fairly well dressed and my voice and manner, as well as the fact
+that I was seeking a school, had given them, no doubt, the impression
+that I was able to pay for my entertainment, and the more I thought of
+this the more uneasy I became. To eat of their food without making an
+explanation was impossible but the longer I waited the more difficult
+the explanation grew.
+
+Suffering keenly, absurdly, I sat with hanging head going over and over
+the problem, trying to formulate an easy way of letting them know my
+predicament. There was but one way of escape--and I took it. As the
+woman stepped out of the room for a moment, I rose, seized my hat and
+rushed out into the rain and darkness like a fugitive.
+
+I have often wondered what those people thought when they found me gone.
+Perhaps I am the great mystery of their lives, an unexplained visitant
+from "the night's Plutonian shore."
+
+I plodded on for another mile or two in the darkness, which was now so
+intense I could scarcely keep the road. Only by the feel of the mud
+under my feet could I follow the pike. Like Jean Valjean, I possessed a
+tempest in my brain. I experienced my first touch of despair.
+
+Although I had never had more than thirty dollars at any one time, I had
+never been without money. Distinctions had not counted largely in the
+pioneer world to which I belonged. I was proud of my family. I came of
+good stock, and knew it and felt it, but now here I was, wet as a sponge
+and without shelter simply because I had not in my pocket a small piece
+of silver with which to buy a bed.
+
+I walked on until this dark surge of rebellious rage had spent its force
+and reason weakly resumed her throne. I said, "What nonsense! Here I am
+only a few miles from relatives. All the farmers on this road must know
+the Harris family. If I tell them who I am, they will certainly feel
+that I have the claim of a neighbor upon them."--But these deductions,
+admirable as they were, did not lighten my sky or make begging easier.
+
+After walking two miles further I found it almost impossible to proceed.
+It was black night and I did not know where I stood. The wind had risen
+and the rain was falling in slant cataracts. As I looked about me and
+caught the gleam from the windows of a small farmhouse, my stubborn
+pride gave way. Stumbling up the path I rapped on the door. It was
+opened by a middle-aged farmer in his stocking feet, smoking a pipe.
+Having finished his supper he was taking his ease beside the fire, and
+fortunately for me, was in genial mood.
+
+"Come in," he said heartily. "'Tis a wet night."
+
+I began, "I am a cousin of William Harris of Byron--"
+
+"You don't say! Well, what are you doing on the road a night like this?
+Come in!"
+
+I stepped inside and finished my explanation there.
+
+This good man and his wife will forever remain the most hospitable
+figures in my memory. They set me close beside the stove insisting that
+I put my feet in the oven to dry, talking meanwhile of my cousins and
+the crops, and complaining of the incessant rainstorms which were
+succeeding one another almost without intermission, making this one of
+the wettest and most dismal autumns the country had ever seen. Never in
+all my life has a roof seemed more heavenly, or hosts more sweet and
+gracious.
+
+After breakfast next morning I shook hands with the farmer saying: "I
+shall send you the money for my entertainment the first time my cousin
+comes to town," and under the clamor of his hospitable protestations
+against payment, set off up the road.
+
+The sun came out warm and beautiful and all about me on every farm the
+teamsters were getting into the fields. The mud began to dry up and with
+the growing cheer of the morning my heart expanded and the experience of
+the night before became as unreal as a dream and yet it had happened,
+and it had taught me a needed lesson. Hereafter I take no narrow
+chances, I vowed to myself.
+
+Upon arrival at my cousin's home I called him aside and said, "Will, you
+have work to do and I have need of wages,--I am going to strip off this
+'boiled shirt' and white collar, and I am going to work for you just
+the same as any other hand, and I shall expect the full pay of the best
+man on your place."
+
+He protested, "I don't like to see you do this. Don't give up your
+plans. I'll hitch up and we'll start out and keep going till we find you
+a school."
+
+"No," I said, "not till I earn a few dollars to put in my pocket. I've
+played the grasshopper for a few weeks--from this time on I'm the busy
+ant."
+
+So it was settled, and the grasshopper went forth into the fields and
+toiled as hard as any slave. I plowed, threshed, and husked corn, and
+when at last December came, I had acquired money enough to carry me on
+my way. I decided to visit Onalaska and the old coulee where my father's
+sister and two of the McClintocks were still living. With swift return
+of confidence, I said good-bye to my friends in Zumbrota and took the
+train. It seemed very wonderful that after a space of thirteen years I
+should be returning to the scenes of my childhood, a full-grown man and
+paying my own way. I expanded with joy of the prospect.
+
+Onalaska, the reader may remember, was the town in which I had gone to
+school when a child, and in my return to it I felt somewhat like the man
+in the song, _Twenty Years Ago_--indeed I sang, "I've wandered through
+the village, Tom, I've sat beneath the tree" for my uncle that first
+night. There was the river, filled as of old with logs, and the clamor
+of the saws still rose from the sawdust islands. Bleakly white the
+little church, in which we used to sit in our Sunday best, remained
+unchanged but the old school-house was not merely altered, it was gone!
+In its place stood a commonplace building of brick. The boys with whom I
+used to play "Mumblety Peg" were men, and some of them had developed
+into worthless loafers, lounging about the doors of the saloons, and
+although we looked at one another with eyes of sly recognition, we did
+not speak.
+
+Eagerly I visited the old coulee, but the magic was gone from the hills,
+the glamour from the meadows. The Widow Green no longer lived at the
+turn of the road, and only the Randals remained. The marsh was drained,
+the big trees cleared away. The valley was smaller, less mysterious,
+less poetic than my remembrances of it, but it had charm nevertheless,
+and I responded to the beauty of its guarding bluffs and the deep-blue
+shadows which streamed across its sunset fields.
+
+Uncle William drove down and took me home with him, over the long hill,
+back to the little farm where he was living much the same as I
+remembered him. One of his sons was dead, the other had shared in the
+rush for land, and was at this time owner of a homestead in western
+Minnesota. Grandfather McClintock, still able to walk about, was
+spending the autumn with William and we had a great deal of talk
+concerning the changes which had come to the country and especially to
+our family group. "Ye scatter like the leaves of autumn," he said
+sadly--then added, "Perhaps in the Final Day the trumpet of the Lord
+will bring us all together again."
+
+We sang some of his old Adventist hymns together and then he asked me
+what I was planning to do. "I haven't any definite plans," I answered,
+"except to travel. I want to travel. I want to see the world."
+
+"To see the world!" he exclaimed. "As for me I wait for it to pass away.
+I watch daily for the coming of the Chariot."
+
+This gray old crag of a man interested me as deeply as ever and yet, in
+a sense, he was an alien. He was not of my time--scarcely of my country.
+He was a survival of the days when the only book was the Bible, when
+the newspaper was a luxury. Migration had been his lifelong adventure
+and now he was waiting for the last great remove. His thought now was of
+"the region of the Amaranth," his new land "the other side of Jordan."
+
+He engaged my respect but I was never quite at ease with him. His
+valuations were too intensely religious; he could not understand my
+ambitions. His mind filled with singular prejudices,--notions which came
+down from the Colonial age, was impervious to new ideas. His character
+had lost something of its mellow charm--but it had gained in dramatic
+significance. Like my uncles he had ceased to be a part of my childish
+world.
+
+I went away with a sense of sadness, of loss as though a fine picture on
+the walls of memory had been dimmed or displaced. I perceived that I had
+idealized him as I had idealized all the figures and scenes of my
+boyhood--"but no matter, they were beautiful to me then and beautiful
+they shall remain," was the vague resolution with which I dismissed
+criticism.
+
+The whole region had become by contrast with Dakota, a "settled"
+community. The line of the middle border had moved on some three hundred
+miles to the west. The Dunlaps, McIldowneys, Dudleys and Elwells were
+the stay-at-homes. Having had their thrust at the job of pioneering
+before the war they were now content on their fat soil. To me they all
+seemed remote. Their very names had poetic value, for they brought up in
+my mind shadowy pictures of the Coulee country as it existed to my
+boyish memories.
+
+I spent nearly two months in Onalaska, living with my Aunt Susan, a
+woman of the loveliest character. Richard Bailey, her husband, one of
+the kindliest of men, soon found employment for me, and so, for a time,
+I was happy and secure.
+
+However, this was but a pause by the roadside. I was not satisfied. It
+was a show of weakness to settle down on one's relations. I wanted to
+make my way among strangers. I scorned to lean upon my aunt and uncle,
+though they were abundantly able to keep me. It was mid-winter, nothing
+offered and so I turned (as so many young men similarly placed have
+done), toward a very common yet difficult job. I attempted to take
+subscriptions for a book.
+
+After a few days' experience in a neighboring town I decided that
+whatever else I might be fitted for in this world, I was not intended
+for a book agent. Surrendering my prospectus to the firm, I took my way
+down to Madison, the capital of the state, a city which seemed at this
+time very remote, and very important in my world. Only when travelling
+did I have the feeling of living up to the expectations of Alice and
+Burton who put into their letters to me, an envy which was very sweet.
+To them I was a bold adventurer!
+
+Alas for me! In the shining capital of my state I felt again the world's
+rough hand. First of all I tried The State House. This was before the
+general use of typewriters and I had been told that copyists were in
+demand. I soon discovered that four men and two girls were clamoring for
+every job. Nobody needed me. I met with blunt refusals and at last
+turned to other fields.
+
+Every morning I went among the merchants seeking an opportunity to clerk
+or keep books, and at last obtained a place at six dollars per week in
+the office of an agricultural implement firm. I was put to work in the
+accounting department, as general slavey, under the immediate
+supervision of a youth who had just graduated from my position and who
+considered me his legitimate victim. He was only seventeen and not
+handsome, and I despised him with instant bitterness. Under his
+direction I swept out the office, made copies of letters, got the mail,
+stamped envelopes and performed other duties of a manual routine kind,
+to which I would have made no objection, had it not been for the
+gloating joy with which that chinless cockerel ordered me about. I had
+never been under that kind of discipline, and to have a pin-headed gamin
+order me to clean spittoons was more than I could stomach.
+
+At the end of the week I went to the proprietor, and said, "If you have
+nothing better for me to do than sweep the floor and run errands, I
+think I'll quit."
+
+With some surprise my boss studied me. At last he said: "Very well, sir,
+you can go, and from all accounts I don't think we'll miss you much,"
+which was perfectly true. I was an absolute failure so far as any
+routine work of that kind was concerned.
+
+So here again I was thrown upon a cruel world with only six dollars
+between myself and the wolf. Again I fell back upon my physical powers.
+I made the round of all the factories seeking manual labor. I went out
+on the Catfish, where, through great sheds erected for the manufacture
+of farm machinery, I passed from superintendent to foreman, from foreman
+to boss,--eager to wheel sand, paint woodwork, shovel coal--anything at
+all to keep from sending home for money--for, mind you, my father or my
+uncle would have helped me out had I written to them, but I could not do
+that. So long as I was able to keep a roof over my head, I remained
+silent. I was in the world and I intended to keep going without asking a
+cent from anyone. Besides, the grandiloquent plans for travel and
+success which I had so confidently outlined to Burton must be carried
+out.
+
+I should have been perfectly secure had it been summertime, for I knew
+the farmer's life and all that pertained to it, but it was winter. How
+to get a living in a strange town was my problem. It was a bright,
+clear, intensely cold February, and I was not very warmly dressed--hence
+I kept moving.
+
+Meanwhile I had become acquainted with a young clergyman in one of the
+churches, and had showed to him certain letters and papers to prove that
+I was not a tramp, and no doubt his word kept my boarding mistress from
+turning me into the street.
+
+Mr. Eaton was a man of books. His library contained many volumes of
+standard value and we met as equals over the pages of Scott and Dickens.
+I actually forced him to listen to a lecture which I had been writing
+during the winter and so wrought upon him that he agreed to arrange a
+date for me in a neighboring country church.--Thereafter while I glowed
+with absurd dreams of winning money and renown by delivering that
+lecture in the churches and school-houses of the state, I continued to
+seek for work, any work that would bring me food and shelter.
+
+One bitter day in my desperate need I went down upon the lake to watch
+the men cutting ice. The wind was keen, the sky gray and filled with
+glittering minute flecks of frost, and my clothing (mainly cotton)
+seemed hardly thicker than gossamer, and yet I looked upon those working
+men with a distinct feeling of envy. Had I secured "a job" I should have
+been pulling a saw up and down through the ice, at the same time that I
+dreamed of touring the west as a lecturer--of such absurd contradictions
+are the visions of youth.
+
+I don't know exactly what I would have done had not my brother happened
+along on his way to a school near Chicago. To him I confessed my
+perplexity. He paid my board bill (which was not very large) and in
+return I talked him into a scheme which promised great things for us
+both--I contracted to lecture under his management! He was delighted at
+the opportunity of advancing me, and we were both happy.
+
+Our first engagement was at Cyene, a church which really belonged to
+Eaton's circuit, and according to my remembrance the lecture was a
+moderate success. After paying all expenses we had a little money for
+carfare, and Franklin was profoundly impressed. It really seemed to us
+both that I had at last entered upon my career. It was the kind of
+service I had been preparing for during all my years at school--but
+alas! our next date was a disaster. We attempted to do that which an
+older and fully established lecturer would not have ventured. We tried
+to secure an audience with only two days' advance work, and of course we
+failed.
+
+I called a halt. I could not experiment on the small fund which my
+father had given Frank for his business education.
+
+However, I borrowed a few dollars of him and bought a ticket to Rock
+River, a town near Chicago. I longed to enter the great western
+metropolis, but dared not do so--yet. I felt safe only when in sight of
+a plowed field.
+
+At a junction seventy miles out of the city, we separated, he to attend
+a school, and I to continue my education in the grim realities of life.
+
+From office to office in Rock River I sullenly plodded, willing to work
+for fifty cents a day, until at last I secured a clerkship in a small
+stationery jobbing house which a couple of school teachers had strangely
+started, but on Saturday of the second week the proprietor called me to
+him and said kindly, but firmly, "Garland, I'm afraid you are too
+literary and too musical for this job. You have a fine baritone voice
+and your ability to vary the text set before you to copy, is remarkable,
+and yet I think we must part."
+
+The reasons for this ironical statement were (to my mind) ignoble;
+first of all he resented my musical ability, secondly, my literary skill
+shamed him, for as he had put before me a badly composed circular
+letter, telling me to copy it one hundred times, I quite naturally
+improved the English.--However, I admitted the charge of
+insubordination, and we parted quite amicably.
+
+It was still winter, and I was utterly without promise of employment. In
+this extremity, I went to the Y. M. C. A. (which had for one of its aims
+the assistance of young men out of work) and confided my homelessness to
+the secretary, a capital young fellow who knew enough about men to
+recognize that I was not a "bum." He offered me the position of
+night-watch and gave me a room and cot at the back of his office. These
+were dark hours!
+
+During the day I continued to pace the streets. Occasionally some little
+job like raking up a yard would present itself, and so I was able to buy
+a few rolls, and sometimes I indulged in milk and meat. I lived along
+from noon to noon in presentable condition, but I was always hungry. For
+four days I subsisted on five cents worth of buns.
+
+Having left my home for the purpose of securing experience in the world,
+I had this satisfaction--I was getting it! Very sweet and far away
+seemed all that beautiful life with Alice and Burton and Hattie at the
+Seminary, something to dream over, to regret, to versify, something
+which the future (at this moment) seemed utterly incapable of
+reproducing. I still corresponded with several of my classmates, but was
+careful to conceal the struggle that I was undergoing. I told them only
+of my travels and my reading.
+
+As the ironical jobber remarked, I had a good voice, and upon being
+invited to accompany the Band of Hope which went to sing and pray in the
+County Jail, I consented, at least I took part in the singing. In this
+way I partly paid the debt I owed the Association, and secured some
+vivid impressions of prison life which came into use at a later time. My
+three associates in this work were a tinner, a clothing salesman and a
+cabinet maker. More and more I longed for the spring, for with it I knew
+would come seeding, building and a chance for me.
+
+At last in the midst of a grateful job of raking up yards and planting
+shrubs, I heard the rat-tat-tat of a hammer, and resolved upon a bold
+plan. I decided to become a carpenter, justifying myself by reference to
+my apprenticeship to my grandfather. One fine April morning I started
+out towards the suburbs, and at every house in process of construction
+approached the boss and asked for a job. Almost at once I found
+encouragement. "Yes, but where are your tools?"
+
+In order to buy the tools I must work, work at anything. Therefore, at
+the next place I asked if there was any rough labor required around the
+house. The foreman replied: "Yes, there is some grading to be done."
+Accordingly I set to work with a wheelbarrow, grading the bank around
+the almost completed building. This was hard work, the crudest form of
+manual labor, but I grappled with it desperately, knowing that the pay
+(a dollar and a half a day) would soon buy a kit of tools.
+
+Oh, that terrible first day! The heavy shovel blistered my hands and
+lamed my wrists. The lifting of the heavily laden wheelbarrow strained
+my back and shoulders. Half-starved and weak, quite unfitted for
+sustained effort of this kind, I struggled on, and at the end of an
+interminable afternoon staggered home to my cot. The next morning came
+soon,--too soon. I was not merely lame, I was lacerated. My muscles
+seemed to have been torn asunder, but I toiled (or made a show of
+toiling) all the second day. On the warrant of my wages I borrowed
+twenty-five cents of a friend and with this bought a meat dinner which
+helped me through another afternoon.
+
+The third day was less painful and by the end of the week, I was able to
+do anything required of me. Upon receiving my pay I went immediately to
+the hardware store and bought a set of tools and a carpenter's apron,
+and early on Monday morning sallied forth in the _opposite direction_ as
+a carpenter seeking a job. I soon came to a big frame house in course of
+construction. "Do you need another hand?" I asked. "Yes," replied the
+boss. "Take hold, right here, with this man."
+
+"This man" turned out to be a Swede, a good-natured fellow, who made no
+comment on my deficiencies. We sawed and hammered together in very
+friendly fashion for a week, and I made rapid gains in strength and
+skill and took keen pleasure in my work. The days seemed short and life
+promising and as I was now getting two dollars per day, I moved out of
+my charity bed and took a room in a decayed mansion in the midst of a
+big lawn. My bearing became confident and easy. Money had straightened
+my back.
+
+The spring advanced rapidly while I was engaged on this work and as my
+crew occasionally took contracts in the country I have vivid pictures of
+the green and pleasant farm lands, of social farmers at barn-raisings,
+and of tables filled with fatness. I am walking again in my stocking
+feet, high on the "purline plate," beetle in hand, driving home the
+oaken "pins." I am shingling on the broad roof of a suburban house from
+which I can see the sunny slopes of a meadow and sheep feeding therein.
+I am mending a screen door for a farmer's wife while she confides to me
+the tragedy of her life--and always I have the foolish boyish notion
+that I am out in the world and seeing life.
+
+Into the midst of this busy peaceful season of manual labor came my
+first deeply romantic admiration. Edwin Booth was announced as "the
+opening attraction of the New Opera House" and I fairly trembled with
+anticipatory delight, for to me the word _Booth_ meant all that was
+splendid and tragic and glorious in the drama. I was afraid that
+something might prevent me from hearing him.
+
+At last the night came and so great was the throng, so strong the
+pressure on the doors that the lock gave way and I, with my dollar
+clutched tightly in my hand, was borne into the hall and half-way up the
+stairs without touching foot to the floor, and when at last, safe in my
+balcony seat I waited for the curtain to rise, I had a distinct
+realization that a shining milestone was about to be established in my
+youthful trail.
+
+My father had told me of the elder Booth, and of Edwin's beautiful
+Prince of Denmark I had heard many stories, therefore I waited with awe
+as well as eagerness, and when the curtain, rising upon the court scene,
+discovered the pale, handsome face and graceful form of the noble Dane,
+and the sound of his voice,--that magic velvet voice--floated to my ear
+with the words, "Seems, madame, I know not seems," neither time nor
+space nor matter existed for me--I was in an ecstasy of attention.
+
+I had read much of Shakespeare. I could recite many pages of the
+tragedies and historical plays, and I had been assured by my teachers
+that _Hamlet_ was the greatest of all dramas, but Edwin Booth in one
+hour taught me more of its wonders, more of the beauty of the English
+language than all my instructors and all my books. He did more, he
+aroused in me a secret ambition to read as he read, to make the dead
+lines of print glow with color and throb with music. There was something
+magical in his interpretation of the drama's printed page. With voice
+and face and hand he restored for duller minds the visions of the poet,
+making Hamlet's sorrows as vital as our own.
+
+From this performance, which filled me with vague ambitions and a
+glorious melancholy, I returned to my association with a tinker, a
+tailor, and a tinner, whose careless and stupid comments on the play
+both pained and angered me. I went to my work next day in such absorbed
+silence as only love is supposed to give.
+
+I re-read my _Hamlet_ now with the light of Booth's face in my eyes and
+the music of his glorious voice in my ear. As I nailed and sawed at pine
+lumber, I murmured inaudibly the lofty lines of the play, in the hope of
+fixing forever in my mind the cadences of the great tragedian's
+matchless voice.
+
+Great days! Growing days! Lonely days! Days of dream and development,
+needing only the girl to be perfect--but I had no one but Alice to whom
+I could voice my new enthusiasm and she was not only out of the reach of
+my voice, but serenely indifferent to my rhapsodic letters concerning
+_Hamlet_ and the genius of Edwin Booth.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+We Discover New England
+
+
+Edwin Booth's performance of _Hamlet_ had another effect. It brought to
+my mind the many stories of Boston which my father had so often related
+to his children. I recalled his enthusiastic accounts of the elder Booth
+and Edwin Forrest, and especially his descriptions of the wonderful
+scenic effects in _Old Put_ and _The Gold Seekers_, wherein actors rode
+down mimic stone steps or debarked from theatrical ships which sailed
+into pictured wharves, and one day in the midst of my lathing and
+sawing, I evolved a daring plan--I decided to visit Boston and explore
+New England.
+
+With all his feeling for the East my father had never revisited it. This
+was a matter of pride with him. "I never take the back trail," he said,
+and yet at times, as he dwelt on the old home in the state of Maine a
+wistful note had crept into his voice, and so now in writing to him, I
+told him that I intended to seek out his boyhood haunts in order that I
+might tell him all about the friends and relations who still lived
+there.
+
+Without in any formal way intending it the old borderman had endowed
+both his sons with a large sense of the power and historic significance
+of Massachusetts. He had contrived to make us feel some part of his
+idolatry of Wendell Phillips, for his memory of the great days of _The
+Liberator_ were keen and worshipful. From him I derived a belief that
+there were giants in those days and the thought of walking the streets
+where Garrison was mobbed and standing in the hall which Webster had
+hallowed with his voice gave me a profound anticipatory stir of delight.
+
+As first assistant to a quaint and dirty old carpenter, I was now
+earning two dollars per day, and saving it. There was no occasion in
+those days for anyone to give me instructions concerning the care of
+money. I knew how every dollar came and I was equally careful to know
+where every nickel went. Travel cost three cents per mile, and the
+number of cities to be visited depended upon the number of dimes I
+should save.
+
+With my plan of campaign mapped out to include a stop at Niagara Falls
+and fourth of July on Boston Common I wrote to my brother at Valparaiso,
+Indiana, inviting him to join me in my adventure. "If we run out of
+money and of course we shall, for I have only about thirty dollars,
+we'll flee to the country. One of my friends here says we can easily
+find work in the meadows near Concord."
+
+The audacity of my design appealed to my brother's imagination. "I'm
+your huckleberry!" he replied. "School ends the last week in June. I'll
+meet you at the Atlantic House in Chicago on the first. Have about
+twenty dollars myself."
+
+At last the day came for my start. With all my pay in my pocket and my
+trunk checked I took the train for Chicago. I shall never forget the
+feeling of dismay with which, an hour later, I perceived from the car
+window a huge smoke-cloud which embraced the whole eastern horizon, for
+this, I was told was the soaring banner of the great and gloomy inland
+metropolis, whose dens of vice and houses of greed had been so often
+reported to me by wandering hired men. It was in truth only a huge
+flimsy country town in those days, but to me it was august as well as
+terrible.
+
+Up to this moment Rockford was the largest town I had ever seen, and the
+mere thought of a million people stunned my imagination. "How can so
+many people find a living in one place?" Naturally I believed most of
+them to be robbers. "If the city is miles across, how am I to get from
+the railway station to my hotel without being assaulted?" Had it not
+been for the fear of ridicule, I think I should have turned back at the
+next stop. The shining lands beyond seemed hardly worth a struggle
+against the dragon's brood with which the dreadful city was a-swarm.
+Nevertheless I kept my seat and was carried swiftly on.
+
+Soon the straggling farm-houses thickened into groups, the villages
+merged into suburban towns, and the train began to clatter through sooty
+freight yards filled with box cars and switching engines; at last, after
+crawling through tangled, thickening webs of steel, it plunged into a
+huge, dark and noisy shed and came to a halt and a few moments later I
+faced the hackmen of Chicago, as verdant a youth as these experienced
+pirates had ever made common cause against.
+
+I knew of them (by report), and was prepared for trouble, but their
+clanging cries, their cynical eyes, their clutching insolent hands were
+more terrifying than anything I had imagined. Their faces expressed
+something remorseless, inhuman and mocking. Their grins were like those
+of wolves.
+
+In my hand I carried an imitation leather valise, and as I passed, each
+of the drivers made a snatch at it, almost tearing it from my hands, but
+being strong as well as desperate, I cleared myself of them, and so,
+following the crowd, not daring to look to right or left, reached the
+street and crossed the bridge with a sigh of relief. So much was
+accomplished.
+
+Without knowing where I should go, I wandered on, shifting my bag from
+hand to hand, till my mind recovered its balance. My bewilderment, my
+depth of distrust, was augmented by the roar and tumult of the crowd. I
+was like some wild animal with exceedingly sensitive ears. The waves of
+sound smothered me.
+
+At last, timidly approaching a policeman, I asked the way to the
+Atlantic Hotel.
+
+"Keep straight down the street five blocks and turn to the left," he
+said, and his kind voice filled me with a glow of gratitude.
+
+With ears benumbed and brain distraught, I threaded the rush, the clamor
+of Clark street and entered the door of the hotel, with such relief as a
+sailor must feel upon suddenly reaching safe harbor after having been
+buffeted on a wild and gloomy sea by a heavy northeast gale.
+
+It was an inconspicuous hotel of the "Farmer's Home" type, but I
+approached the desk with meek reluctance and explained, "I am expecting
+to meet my brother here. I'd like permission to set my bag down and
+wait."
+
+With bland impersonal courtesy the clerk replied, "Make yourself at
+home."
+
+Gratefully sinking into a chair by the window, I fell into study of the
+people streaming by, and a chilling sense of helplessness fell upon me.
+I realized my ignorance, my feebleness. As a minute bubble in this
+torrent of human life, with no friend in whom I could put trust, and
+with only a handful of silver between myself and the gray wolf, I lost
+confidence. The Boston trip seemed a foolish tempting of Providence and
+yet, scared as I was, I had no real intention of giving it up.
+
+My brother's first words as he entered the door, were gayly derisive.
+"Oh, see the whiskers!" he cried and his calm acceptance of my plan
+restored my own courage.
+
+Together we planned our itinerary. We were to see Niagara Falls, of
+course, but to spend the fourth of July on Boston Common, was our true
+objective. "When our money is used up," I said, "we'll strike out into
+the country."
+
+To all this my brother agreed. Neither of us had the slightest fear of
+hunger in the country. It was the city that gave us pause.
+
+All the afternoon and evening we wandered about the streets (being very
+careful not to go too far from our hotel), counting the stories of the
+tall buildings, and absorbing the drama of the pavement. Returning now
+and again to our sanctuary in the hotel lobby we ruminated and rested
+our weary feet.
+
+Everything interested us. The business section so sordid to others was
+grandly terrifying to us. The self-absorption of the men, the calm
+glances of the women humbled our simple souls. Nothing was commonplace,
+nothing was ugly to us.
+
+We slept that night in a room at the extreme top of the hotel. It
+couldn't have been a first class accommodation, for the frame of the bed
+fell in the moment we got into it, but we made no complaint--we would
+not have had the clerk know of our mishap for twice our bill. We merely
+spread the mattress on the floor and slept till morning.
+
+Having secured our transportation we were eager to be off, but as our
+tickets were second class, and good only on certain trains, we waited.
+We did not even think of a sleeping car. We had never known anyone rich
+enough to occupy one. Grant and Edwin Booth probably did, and senators
+were ceremonially obliged to do so, but ordinary folks never looked
+forward to such luxury. Neither of us would have known what to do with a
+berth if it had been presented to us, and the thought of spending two
+dollars for a night's sleep made the cold chills run over us. We knew of
+no easier way to earn two dollars than to save them, therefore we rode
+in the smoker.
+
+Late that night as we were sitting stoically in our places, a brakeman
+came along and having sized us up for the innocents we were,
+good-naturedly said, "Boys, if you'll get up I'll fix your seats so's
+you can lie down and catch a little sleep."
+
+Silently, gratefully we watched him while he took up the cushions and
+turned them lengthwise, thus making a couch. To be sure, it was a very
+short and very hard bed but with the health and strength of nineteen and
+twenty-two, we curled up and slept the remainder of the night like
+soldiers resting on their guns. Pain, we understood, was an unavoidable
+accompaniment of travel.
+
+When morning dawned the train was running through Canada, and excitedly
+calling upon Franklin to rouse, I peered from the window, expecting to
+see a land entirely different from Wisconsin and Illinois. We were both
+somewhat disappointed to find nothing distinctive in either the land or
+its inhabitants. However, it was a foreign soil and we had seen it. So
+much of our exploration was accomplished.
+
+It was three o'clock in the afternoon when we came in sight of the
+suspension bridge and Niagara Falls. I suppose it would be impossible
+for anyone now to feel the same profound interest in any natural
+phenomenon whatsoever. We believed that we were approaching the most
+stupendous natural wonder in all the world, and we could scarcely credit
+the marvel of our good fortune.
+
+All our lives we had heard of this colossal cataract. Our school readers
+contained stately poems and philosophical dissertations concerning it.
+Gough, the great orator, had pointed out the likeness of its resistless
+torrent to the habit of using spirituous liquors. The newspapers still
+printed descriptions of its splendor and no foreigner (so we understood)
+ever came to these shores without visiting and bowing humbly before the
+voice of its waters.--And to think that we, poor prairie boys, were soon
+to stand upon the illustrious brink of that dread chasm and listen to
+its mighty song was wonderful, incredible, benumbing!
+
+Alighting at the squalid little station on the American side, we went to
+the cheapest hotel our keen eyes could discover, and leaving our
+valises, we struck out immediately toward the towering white column of
+mist which could be seen rising like a ghostly banner behind the trees.
+We were like those who first discover a continent.
+
+As we crept nearer, the shuddering roar deepened, and our awe, our
+admiration, our patriotism deepened with it, and when at last we leaned
+against the rail and looked across the tossing spread of river swiftly
+sweeping to its fall, we held our breaths in wonder. It met our
+expectations.
+
+Of course we went below and spent two of our hard-earned dollars in
+order to be taken behind the falls. We were smothered with spray and
+forced to cling frenziedly to the hands of our guide, but it was a part
+of our duty, and we did it. No one could rob us of the glory of having
+adventured so far.
+
+That night we resumed our seats in the smoking car, and pushed on toward
+Boston in patiently-endured discomfort. Early the following morning we
+crossed the Hudson, and as the Berkshire hills began to loom against the
+dawn, I asked the brakeman, with much emotion, "Have we reached the
+Massachusetts line?" "We have," he said, and by pressing my nose against
+the glass and shading my face with my hands I was able to note the
+passing landscape.
+
+Little could be seen other than a tumbled, stormy sky with wooded
+heights dimly outlined against it, but I had all the emotions of a
+pilgrim entering upon some storied oriental vale. Massachusetts to me
+meant Whittier and Hawthorne and Wendell Phillips and Daniel Webster. It
+was the cradle of our liberty, the home of literature, the province of
+art--and it contained Boston!
+
+As the sun rose, both of us sat with eyes fixed upon the scenery,
+observant of every feature. It was all so strange, yet familiar! Barns
+with long, sloping roofs stood with their backs against the hillsides,
+precisely as in the illustrations to Hawthorne's stories, and Whittier's
+poems. The farm-houses, old and weather-beaten and guarded by giant
+elms, looked as if they might have sheltered Emerson and Lowell. The
+little villages with narrow streets lined with queer brick-walled houses
+(their sides to the gutter) reminded us of the pictures in Ben
+Franklin's _Autobiography_.
+
+Everything was old, delightfully old. Nothing was new.--Most of the
+people we saw were old. The men working in the fields were bent and
+gray, scarcely a child appeared, though elderly women abounded. (This
+was thirty-five years ago, before the Canadians and Italians had begun
+to swarm). Everywhere we detected signs of the historical, the
+traditional, the Yankee. The names of the stations rang in our ears like
+bells, _Lexington_, _Concord_, _Cambridge_, _Charlestown_, and--at last
+_Boston_!
+
+What a strange, new world this ancient city was to us, as we issued from
+the old Hoosac Tunnel station! The intersection of every street was a
+bit of history. The houses standing sidewise to the gutter, the narrow,
+ledge-like pavements, the awkward two-wheeled drays and carts, the men
+selling lobsters on the corner, the newsboys with their "papahs," the
+faces of the women so thin and pale, the men, neat, dapper, small, many
+of them walking with finicky precision as though treading on
+eggs,--everything had a Yankee tang, a special quality, and then, the
+noise! We had thought Chicago noisy, and so it was, but here the clamor
+was high-keyed, deafening for the reason that the rain-washed streets
+were paved with cobble stones over which enormous carts bumped and
+clattered with resounding riot.
+
+Bewildered,--with eyes and ears alert, we toiled up Haymarket Square
+shoulder to shoulder, seeking the Common. Of course we carried our
+hand-bags--(the railway had no parcel rooms in those days, or if it had
+we didn't know it) clinging to them like ants to their eggs and so
+slowly explored Tremont Street. Cornhill entranced us with its amazing
+curve. We passed the Granary Burying Ground and King's Chapel with awe,
+and so came to rest at last on the upper end of the Common! We had
+reached the goal of our long pilgrimage.
+
+To tell the truth, we were a little disappointed in our first view of
+it. It was much smaller than we had imagined it to be and the pond was
+ONLY a pond, but the trees were all that father had declared them to be.
+We had known broad prairies and splendid primitive woodlands--but these
+elms dated back to the days of Washington, and were to be reverenced
+along with the State House and Bunker Hill.
+
+We spent considerable time there on that friendly bench, resting in the
+shadows of the elms, and while sitting there, we ate our lunch, and
+watched the traffic of Tremont Street, in perfect content till I
+remembered that the night was coming on, and that we had no place to
+sleep.
+
+Approaching a policeman I inquired the way to a boarding house.
+
+The officer who chanced to be a good-natured Irishman, with a courtesy
+almost oppressive, minutely pointed the way to a house on Essex Street.
+Think of it--Essex Street! It sounded like Shakespeare and Merrie
+England!
+
+Following his direction, we found ourselves in the door of a small house
+on a narrow alley at the left of the Common. The landlady, a kindly
+soul, took our measure at once and gave us a room just off her little
+parlor, and as we had not slept, normally, for three nights, we decided
+to go at once to bed. It was about five o'clock, one of the noisiest
+hours of a noisy street, but we fell almost instantly into the kind of
+slumber in which time and tumult do not count.
+
+When I awoke, startled and bewildered, the sounds of screaming children,
+roaring, jarring drays, and the clatter of falling iron filled the room.
+At first I imagined this to be the business of the morning, but as I
+looked out of the window I perceived that it was sunset! "Wake up!" I
+called to Franklin. "_It's the next day!_" "We've slept twenty-four
+hours!--What will the landlady think of us?"
+
+Frank did not reply. He was still very sleepy, but he dressed, and with
+valise in hand dazedly followed me into the sitting room. The woman of
+the house was serving supper to her little family. To her I said,
+"You've been very kind to let us sleep all this time. We were very
+tired."
+
+"All this time?" she exclaimed.
+
+"Isn't it the next day?" I asked.
+
+Then she laughed, and her husband laughed, doubling himself into a knot
+of merriment. "Oh, but that's rich!" said he. "You've been asleep
+exactly an hour and a quarter," he added. "How long did you _think_
+you'd slept--two days?"
+
+Sheepishly confessing that I thought we had, I turned back to bed, and
+claimed ten hours more of delicious rest.
+
+All "the next day" we spent in seeing Bunker Hill, Faneuil Hall, the old
+North Church, King's Chapel, Longfellow's home, the Washington Elm, and
+the Navy Yard.--It was all glorious but a panic seized us as we found
+our money slipping away from us, and late in the afternoon we purchased
+tickets for Concord, and fled the roaring and turbulent capital.
+
+We had seen the best of it anyway. We had tasted the ocean and found it
+really salt, and listened to "the sailors with bearded lips" on the
+wharves where the ships rocked idly on the tide,--The tide! Yes, that
+most inexplicable wonder of all we had proved. We had watched it come in
+at the Charles River Bridge, mysterious as the winds. We knew it was so.
+
+Why Concord, do you ask? Well, because Hawthorne had lived there, and
+because the region was redolent of Emerson and Thoreau, and I am glad to
+record that upon reaching it of a perfect summer evening, we found the
+lovely old village all that it had been pictured by the poets. The wide
+and beautiful meadows, the stone walls, the slow stream, the bridge and
+the statue of the "Minute Man" guarding the famous battlefield, the gray
+old Manse where Hawthorne lived, the cemetery of Sleepy Hollow, the
+grave of Emerson--all these historic and charming places enriched and
+inspired us. This land, so mellowed, so harmonious, so significant,
+seemed hardly real. It was a vision.
+
+We rounded out our day by getting lodgings in the quaint old Wright's
+tavern which stood (and still stands) at the forks of the road, a
+building whose date painted on its chimney showed that it was nearly two
+hundred years old! I have since walked Carnarvan's famous walls, and sat
+in the circus at Nismes--but I have never had a deeper thrill of
+historic emotion than when I studied the beamed ceiling of that little
+dining room. Our pure joy in its age amused our landlord greatly.
+
+Being down to our last dollar, we struck out into the country next
+morning, for the purpose of finding work upon a farm but met with very
+little encouragement. Most of the fields were harvested and those that
+were not were well supplied with "hands." Once we entered a beautiful
+country place where the proprietor himself (a man of leisure, a type we
+had never before seen) interrogated us with quizzical humor, and at last
+sent us to his foreman with honest desire to make use of us. But the
+foreman had nothing to give, and so we went on.
+
+All day we loitered along beautiful wood roads, passing wonderful old
+homesteads gray and mossy, sheltered by trees that were almost human in
+the clasp of their protecting arms. We paused beside bright streams, and
+drank at mossy wells operated by rude and ancient sweeps, contrivances
+which we had seen only in pictures. It was all beautiful, but we got no
+work. The next day, having spent our last cent in railway tickets, we
+rode to Ayer Junction, where we left our trunks in care of the baggage
+man and resumed our tramping.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+Coasting Down Mt. Washington
+
+
+In spite of all our anxiety, we enjoyed this search for work. The
+farmers were all so comically inquisitive. A few of them took us for
+what we were, students out on a vacation. Others though kind enough,
+seemed lacking in hospitality, from the western point of view, and some
+were openly suspicious--but the roads, the roads! In the west
+thoroughfares ran on section lines and were defined by wire fences. Here
+they curved like Indian trails following bright streams, and the stone
+walls which bordered them were festooned with vines as in a garden.
+
+That night we lodged in the home of an old farmer, an octogenarian who
+had never in all his life been twenty miles from his farm. He had never
+seen Boston, or Portland, but he had been twice to Nashua, returning,
+however, in time for supper. He, as well as his wife (dear simple soul),
+looked upon us as next door to educated Indians and entertained us in a
+flutter of excited hospitality.
+
+We told them of Dakota, of the prairies, describing the wonderful farm
+machinery, and boasting of the marvellous crops our father had raised in
+Iowa, and the old people listened in delighted amaze.
+
+They put us to bed at last in a queer high-posted, corded bedstead and I
+had a feeling that we were taking part in a Colonial play. It was like
+living a story book. We stared at each other in a stupor of
+satisfaction. We had never hoped for such luck. To be thrust back
+abruptly into the very life of our forebears was magical, and the
+excitement and delight of it kept us whispering together long after we
+should have been asleep.
+
+This was thirty years ago, and those kindly old souls have long since
+returned to dust, but their big four-posted bed is doing service, no
+doubt, in the home of some rich collector. I have forgotten their names
+but they shall live here in my book as long as its print shall endure.
+
+They seemed sorry to have us go next morning, but as they had nothing
+for us to do, they could only say, "Good-bye, give our love to Jane, if
+you see her, she lives in Illinois." Illinois and Dakota were all the
+same to them!
+
+Again we started forth along the graceful, irregular, elm-shaded roads,
+which intersected the land in every direction, perfectly happy except
+when we remembered our empty pockets. We could not get accustomed to the
+trees and the beauty of the vineclad stone walls. The lanes made
+_pictures_ all the time. So did the apple trees and the elms and the
+bending streams.
+
+About noon of this day we came to a farm of very considerable size and
+fairly level, on which the hay remained uncut. "Here's our chance," I
+said to my brother, and going in, boldly accosted the farmer, a youngish
+man with a bright and pleasant face. "Do you want some skilled help?" I
+called out.
+
+The farmer admitted that he did, but eyed us as if jokers. Evidently we
+did not look precisely like workmen to him, but I jolted him by saying,
+"We are Iowa schoolboys out for a vacation. We were raised on a farm,
+and know all about haying. If you'll give us a chance we'll make you
+think you don't know much about harvesting hay."
+
+This amused him. "Come in," he said, "and after dinner we'll see about
+it."
+
+At dinner we laid ourselves out to impress our host. We told him of the
+mile-wide fields of the west, and enlarged upon the stoneless prairies
+of Dakota. We described the broadcast seeders they used in Minnesota and
+bragged of the amount of hay we could put up, and both of us professed a
+contempt for two-wheeled carts. In the end we reduced our prospective
+employer to humbleness. He consulted his wife a moment and then said,
+"All right, boys, you may take hold."
+
+We stayed with him two weeks and enjoyed every moment of our stay.
+
+"Our expedition is successful," I wrote to my parents.
+
+On Sundays we picked berries or went fishing or tumbled about the lawn.
+It was all very beautiful and delightfully secure, so that when the time
+came to part with our pleasant young boss and his bright and cheery
+wife, we were as sorry as they.
+
+"We must move on," I insisted. "There are other things to see."
+
+After a short stay in Portland we took the train for Bethel, eager to
+visit the town which our father had described so many times. We had
+resolved to climb the hills on which he had gathered berries and sit on
+the "Overset" from which he had gazed upon the landscape. We felt
+indeed, a certain keen regret that he could not be with us.
+
+At Locks Mills, we met his old playmates, Dennis and Abner Herrick, men
+bent of form and dim of eye, gnarled and knotted by their battle with
+the rocks and barren hillsides, and to them we, confident lads, with our
+tales of smooth and level plow-lands, must have seemed like denizens
+from some farmers' paradise,--or perhaps they thought us fictionists. I
+certainly put a powerful emphasis on the pleasant side of western life
+at that time.
+
+Dennis especially looked upon us with amazement, almost with awe. To
+think that we, unaided and alone, had wandered so far and dared so much,
+while he, in all his life, had not been able to visit Boston, was
+bewildering. This static condition of the population was a constant
+source of wonder to us. How could people stay all their lives in one
+place? Must be something the matter with them.--Their ox-teams and
+tipcarts amused us, their stony fields appalled us, their restricted,
+parsimonious lives saddened us, and so, not wishing to be a burden, we
+decided to cut our stay short.
+
+On the afternoon of our last day, Abner took us on a tramp over the
+country, pointing out the paths "where Dick and I played," tracing the
+lines of the old farm, which had long since been given over to pasture,
+and so to the trout brook and home. In return for our "keep" we sang
+that night, and told stories of the west, and our hosts seemed pleased
+with the exchange. Shouldering our faithful "grips" next morning, we
+started for the railway and took the train for Gorham.
+
+Each mile brought us nearer the climax of our trip. We of the plains had
+longed and dreamed of the peaks. To us the White Mountains were at once
+the crowning wonder and chief peril of our expedition. They were to be
+in a very real sense the test of our courage. The iron crest of Mount
+Washington allured us as a light-house lures sea-birds.
+
+Leaving Gorham on foot, and carrying our inseparable valises, we started
+westward along the road leading to the peaks, expecting to get lodging
+at some farm-house, but as we stood aside to let gay coaches pass laden
+with glittering women and haughty men, we began to feel abused.
+
+We were indeed, quaint objects. Each of us wore a long yellow linen
+"duster" and each bore a valise on a stick, as an Irishman carries a
+bundle. We feared neither wind nor rain, but wealth and coaches
+oppressed us.
+
+Nevertheless we trudged cheerily along, drinking at the beautiful
+springs beside the road, plucking blackberries for refreshment, lifting
+our eyes often to the snow-flecked peaks to the west. At noon we stopped
+at a small cottage to get some milk, and there again met a pathetic
+lonely old couple. The woman was at least eighty, and very crusty with
+her visitors, till I began to pet the enormous maltese cat which came
+purring to our feet. "What a magnificent animal!" I said to Frank.
+
+This softened the old woman's heart. She not only gave us bread and milk
+but sat down to gossip with us while we ate. She, too, had relatives
+"out there, somewhere in Iowa" and would hardly let us go, so eager was
+she to know all about her people. "Surely you must have met them."
+
+As we neared the foot of the great peak we came upon hotels of all sizes
+but I had not the slightest notion of staying even at the smallest.
+Having walked twelve miles to the foot of the mountain we now decided to
+set out for the top, still carrying those precious bags upon our
+shoulders.
+
+What we expected to do after we got to the summit, I cannot say, for we
+knew nothing of conditions there and were too tired to imagine--we just
+kept climbing, sturdily, doggedly, breathing heavily, more with
+excitement than with labor, for it seemed that we were approaching the
+moon,--so bleak and high the roadway ran. I had miscalculated sadly. It
+had looked only a couple of hours' brisk walk from the hotel, but the
+way lengthened out toward the last in a most disheartening fashion.
+
+"Where will we stay?" queried Frank.
+
+"Oh, we'll find a place somewhere," I answered, but I was far from being
+as confident as I sounded.
+
+We had been told that it cost five dollars for a night's lodging at the
+hotel, but I entertained some vague notion that other and cheaper places
+offered. Perhaps I thought that a little village on the summit presented
+boarding houses.
+
+"No matter, we're in for it now," I stoutly said. "We'll find a
+place--we've got to find a place."
+
+It grew cold as we rose, surprisingly, dishearteningly cold and we both
+realized that to sleep in the open would be to freeze. As the night
+fell, our clothing, wet with perspiration, became almost as clammy as
+sheet iron, and we shivered with weakness as well as with frost. The
+world became each moment more barren, more wind-swept and Frank was
+almost at his last gasp.
+
+It was long after dark, and we were both trembling with fatigue and
+hollow with hunger as we came opposite a big barn just at the top of the
+trail. The door of this shelter stood invitingly open, and creeping into
+an empty stall we went to sleep on the straw like a couple of homeless
+dogs. We did not for a moment think of going to the hotel which loomed
+like a palace a few rods further on.
+
+A couple of hours later I was awakened by the crunch of a boot upon my
+ankle, followed by an oath of surprise. The stage-driver, coming in from
+his last trip, was looking down upon me. I could not see his face, but I
+did note the bright eyes and pricking ears of a noble gray horse
+standing just behind his master and champing his bit with impatience.
+
+Sleepy, scared and bewildered, I presented my plea with such eloquence
+that the man put his team in another stall and left us to our straw.
+"But you get out o' here before the boss sees you," said he, "or
+there'll be trouble."
+
+"We'll get out before daybreak," I replied heartily.
+
+When I next awoke it was dawn, and my body was so stiff I could hardly
+move. We had slept cold and our muscles resented it. However, we hurried
+from the barn. Once safely out of reach of the "boss" we began to leap
+and dance and shout to the sun as it rose out of the mist, for this was
+precisely what we had come two thousand miles to see--sunrise on Mount
+Washington! It chanced, gloriously, that the valleys were filled with a
+misty sea, breaking soundlessly at our feet and we forgot cold, hunger,
+poverty, in the wonder of being "above the clouds!"
+
+In course of time our stomachs moderated our transports over the view
+and I persuaded my brother (who was younger and more delicate in
+appearance) to approach the kitchen and purchase a handout. Frank being
+harshly persuaded by his own need, ventured forth and soon came back
+with several slices of bread and butter and part of a cold chicken,
+which made the day perfectly satisfactory, and in high spirits we
+started to descend the western slope of the mountain.
+
+Here we performed the incredible. Our muscles were so sore and weak that
+as we attempted to walk down the railway track, our knees refused to
+bear our weight, and while creeping over the ties, groaning and sighing
+with pain, a bright idea suddenly irradiated my mind. As I studied the
+iron groove which contained the cogs in the middle of the track, I
+perceived that its edges were raised a little above the level of the
+rails and covered with oil. It occurred to me that it might be possible
+to slide down this track on a plank--if only I had a plank!
+
+I looked to the right. A miracle! There in the ditch lay a plank of
+exactly the right dimensions. I seized it, I placed it cross-wise of the
+rails. "All aboard," I called. Frank obeyed. I took my place at the
+other end, and so with our valises between us, we began to slip slowly,
+smoothly, and with joyous ease down the shining track! Hoopla! We had
+taken wing!
+
+We had solved our problem. The experiment was successful. Laughing and
+shouting with exultation, we swept on. We had but to touch every other
+tie with our heels in order to control our speed, so we coasted,
+smoothly, genially.
+
+On we went, mile after mile, slipping down the valley into the vivid
+sunlight, our eyes on the glorious scenery about us, down, down like a
+swooping bird. Once we passed above some workmen, who looked up in
+open-mouthed amazement, and cursed us in voices which seemed far and
+faint and futile. A little later the superintendent of the water tank
+warningly shouted, "_Stop that! Get Off!_" but we only laughed at him
+and swept on, out over a high trestle, where none could follow.
+
+At times our heads grew dizzy with the flicker and glitter of the rocks
+beneath us and as we rounded dangerous curves of the track, or descended
+swift slides with almost uncontrollable rapidity, I had some doubts, but
+we kept our wits, remained upon the rails, and at last spun round the
+final bend and came to a halt upon a level stretch of track, just above
+the little station.
+
+There, kicking aside our faithful plank, we took up our valises and with
+trembling knees and a sense of triumph set off down the valley of the
+wild Amonoosuc.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+Tramping, New York, Washington, and Chicago
+
+
+For two days we followed the Amonoosuc (which is a lovely stream),
+tramping along exquisite winding roads, loitering by sunny ripples or
+dreaming in the shadow of magnificent elms. It was all very, very
+beautiful to us of the level lands of Iowa and Dakota. These brooks
+rushing over their rocky beds, these stately trees and these bleak
+mountain-tops looming behind us, all glowed with the high splendor, of
+which we had dreamed.
+
+At noon we called at a farm-house to get something to eat and at night
+we paid for lodging in a rude tavern beside the way, and so at last
+reached the railway and the Connecticut River. Here we gained our trunks
+(which had been sent round by express) and as the country seemed poor
+and the farms barren, we spent nearly all our money in riding down the
+railway fifty or sixty miles. At some small town (I forget the name), we
+again took to the winding roads, looking for a job.
+
+Jobs, it turned out, were exceedingly hard to get. The haying was over,
+the oats mainly in shock, and the people on the highway suspicious and
+inhospitable. As we plodded along, our dimes melting away, hunger came,
+at last, to be a grim reality. We looked less and less like college boys
+and more and more like tramps, and the householders began to treat us
+with hostile contempt.
+
+No doubt these farmers, much beset with tramps, had reasonable excuse
+for their inhospitable ways, but to us it was all bitter and uncalled
+for. I knew that cities were filled with robbers, brigands, burglars and
+pirates, but I had held (up to this time), the belief that the country,
+though rude and barren of luxury was nevertheless a place of plenty
+where no man need suffer hunger.
+
+Frank, being younger and less hardy than I, became clean disheartened,
+and upon me fell the responsibility and burden of the campaign. I
+certainly was to blame for our predicament.
+
+We came finally to the point of calling at every house where any crops
+lay ungathered, desperately in hope of securing something to do. At last
+there came a time when we no longer had money for a bed, and were forced
+to sleep wherever we could find covert. One night we couched on the
+floor of an old school-house, the next we crawled into an oat-shock and
+covered ourselves with straw. Let those who have never slept out on the
+ground through an August night say that it is impossible that one should
+be cold! During all the early warm part of the night a family of skunks
+rustled about us, and toward morning we both woke because of the chill.
+
+On the third night we secured the blessed opportunity of nesting in a
+farmer's granary. All humor had gone out of our expedition. Each day the
+world grew blacker, and the men of the Connecticut Valley more cruel and
+relentless. We both came to understand (not to the full, but in a large
+measure) the bitter rebellion of the tramp. To plod on and on into the
+dusk, rejected of comfortable folk, to couch at last with pole-cats in a
+shock of grain is a liberal education in sociology.
+
+On the fourth day we came upon an old farmer who had a few acres of
+badly tangled oats which he wished gathered and bound. He was a large,
+loose-jointed, good-natured sloven who looked at me with stinging,
+penetrating stare, while I explained that we were students on a vacation
+tramping and in need of money. He seemed not particularly interested
+till Frank said with tragic bitterness, "If we ever get back to Dakota
+we'll never even look this way again." This interested the man. He said,
+"Turn in and cut them oats," and we gladly buckled to our job.
+
+Our spirits rose with the instant resiliency of youth, but what a task
+that reaping proved to be! The grain, tangled and flattened close to the
+ground, had to be caught up in one hand and cut with the old-fashioned
+reaping-hook, the kind they used in Egypt five thousand years ago--a
+thin crescent of steel with a straight handle, and as we bowed ourselves
+to the ground to clutch and clip the grain, we nearly broke in two
+pieces. It was hot at mid-day and the sun fell upon our bended shoulders
+with amazing power, but we toiled on, glad of the opportunity to earn a
+dollar. "Every cent means escape from this sad country," I repeated.
+
+We stayed some days with this reticent gardener, sleeping in the attic
+above his kitchen like two scullions, uttering no complaint till we had
+earned seven dollars apiece; then we said, "Good luck," and bought
+tickets for Greenfield, Massachusetts. We chose this spot for the reason
+that a great railway alluringly crossed the river at that place. We
+seemed in better situation to get west from such a point.
+
+Greenfield was so like Rockford (the western town in which I had worked
+as a carpenter), that I at once purchased a few tools and within a few
+hours secured work shingling a house on the edge of the town, while my
+brother took a hand at harvesting worms from a field of tobacco near by.
+
+The builder, a tall man, bent and grizzled, complimented me warmly at
+the close of my second day, and said, "You may consider yourself hired
+for as long as you please to stay. You're a rattler." No compliment
+since has given me more pleasure than this. A few days later he invited
+both of us to live at his home. We accepted and were at once established
+in most comfortable quarters.
+
+Tranquil days followed. The country was very attractive, and on Sundays
+we walked the neighboring lanes, or climbed the high hills, or visited
+the quaint and lonely farm-houses round about, feeling more akin each
+week to the life of the valley, but we had no intention of remaining
+beyond a certain time. Great rivers called and cities allured. New York
+was still to be explored and to return to the west before winter set in
+was our plan.
+
+At last the time came when we thought it safe to start toward Albany and
+with grateful words of thanks to the carpenter and his wife, we set
+forth upon our travels. Our courage was again at topmost gauge. My
+success with the saw had given me confidence. I was no longer afraid of
+towns, and in a glow of high resolution and with thirty dollars in my
+pocket, I planned to invade New York which was to me the wickedest and
+the most sorrowful as well as the most splendid city in the world.
+
+Doubtless the true story of how I entered Manhattan will endanger my
+social position, but as an unflinching realist, I must begin by
+acknowledging that I left the Hudson River boat carrying my own luggage.
+I shudder to think what we two boys must have looked like as we set off,
+side by side, prospecting for Union Square and the Bowery. Broadway, we
+knew, was the main street and Union Square the center of the island,
+therefore we turned north and paced along the pavement, still clamped to
+our everlasting bags.
+
+Broadway was not then the deep canon that it is today. It was walled by
+low shops of red brick--in fact, the whole city seemed low as compared
+with the high buildings of Chicago, nevertheless I was keenly worried
+over the question of housing.
+
+Food was easy. We could purchase a doughnut and a cup of coffee almost
+anywhere, or we could eat a sandwich in the park, but the matter of a
+bed, the business of sleeping in a maelstrom like New York was something
+more than serious--it was dangerous. Frank, naturally of a more prodigal
+nature, was all for going to the Broadway Hotel. "It's only for one
+night," said he. He always was rather careless of the future!
+
+I reminded him that we still had Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington
+to "do" and every cent must be husbanded--so we moved along toward Union
+Square with the question of a hotel still undecided, our arms aching
+with fatigue. "If only we could get rid of these awful bags," moaned
+Frank.
+
+To us Broadway was a storm, a cyclone, an abnormal unholy congestion of
+human souls. The friction of feet on the pavement was like the hissing
+of waves on the beach. The passing of trucks jarred upon our ears like
+the sevenfold thunders of Patmos, but we kept on, shoulder to shoulder,
+watchful, alert, till we reached Union Square, where with sighs of deep
+relief we sank upon the benches along with the other "rubes" and
+"jay-hawkers" lolling in sweet repose with weary soles laxly turned to
+the kindly indiscriminating breeze.
+
+The evening was mild, the scene enthralling, and we would have been
+perfectly happy but for the deeply disturbing question of a bed.
+Franklin, resting upon my resourceful management, made no motion even
+when the sun sank just about where that Venetian fronted building now
+stands, but whilst the insolent, teeming populace in clattering carts
+and drays charged round our peaceful sylvan haven (each driver plying
+the lash with the fierce aspect of a Roman charioteer) I rose to a
+desperate mission.
+
+With a courage born of need I led the way straight toward the basement
+portal of a small brown hotel on Fourth Avenue, and was startled almost
+into flight to find myself in a bar-room. Not knowing precisely how to
+retreat, I faltered out, "Have you a bed for us?"
+
+It is probable that the landlord, a huge foreign-looking man understood
+our timidity--at any rate, he smiled beneath his black mustache and
+directed a clerk to show us a room.
+
+In charge of this man, a slim youth, with a very bad complexion, we
+climbed a narrow stairway (which grew geometrically shabbier as we rose)
+until, at last, we came into a room so near the roof that it could
+afford only half-windows--but as we were getting the chamber at
+half-price we could not complain.
+
+No sooner had the porter left us than we both stretched out on the bed,
+in such relief and ecstasy of returning confidence as only weary youth
+and honest poverty can know.--It was heavenly sweet, this sense of
+safety in the heart of a tempest of human passion but as we rested, our
+hunger to explore returned. "Time is passing. We shall probably never
+see New York again," I argued, "and besides our bags are now safely
+_cached_. Let's go out and see how the city looks by night."
+
+To this Franklin agreed, and forth we went into the Square, rejoicing in
+our freedom from those accursed bags.
+
+Here for the first time, I observed the electric light shadows, so
+clear-cut, so marvellous. The park was lighted by several sputtering,
+sizzling arc-lamps, and their rays striking down through the trees,
+flung upon the pavement a wavering, exquisite tracery of sharply
+defined, purple-black leaves and branches. This was, indeed, an entirely
+new effect in our old world and to my mind its wonder surpassed nature.
+It was as if I had suddenly been translated to some realm of magic art.
+
+Where we dined I cannot say, probably we ate a doughnut at some lunch
+counter but I am glad to remember that we got as far as Madison
+Square--which was like discovering another and still more enchanting
+island of romance. To us the Fifth Avenue Hotel was a great and historic
+building, for in it Grant and Sherman and Lincoln and Greeley had often
+registered.
+
+Ah, what a night that was! I did not expend a dollar, not even a
+quarter, but I would give half of all I now own for the sensitive heart,
+the absorbent brain I then possessed. Each form, each shadow was a
+miracle. Romance and terror and delight peopled every dusky side street.
+
+Submerged in the wondrous, drenched with the spray of this measureless
+ocean of human life, we wandered on and on till overborne nature called
+a halt. It was ten o'clock and prudence as well as weariness advised
+retreat. Decisively, yet with a feeling that we would never again glow
+beneath the lights of this radiant city, I led the way back to our
+half-rate bed in the Union Square Hungarian hotel.
+
+It is worth recording that on reaching our room, we opened our small
+window and leaning out, gazed away over the park, what time the tumult
+and the thunder and the shouting died into a low, continuous roar. The
+poetry and the majesty of the city lost nothing of its power under the
+moon.
+
+Although I did not shake my fist over the town and vow to return and
+conquer it (as penniless writers in fiction generally do) I bowed down
+before its power. "It's too much for us," I told my brother. "Two
+millions of people--think of it--of course London is larger, but then
+London is so far off."
+
+Sleep for us both was but a moment's forgetfulness. At one moment it was
+night and at another it was morning. We were awakened by the voice of
+the pavement, that sound which Whitman calls "the loud, proud, restive
+bass of the streets," and again I leaned forth to listen to the
+widespread crescendo roar of the deepening traffic. The air being cool
+and clear, the pedestrians stepped out with brisker, braver movement,
+and we, too, rose eager to meet the day at the gate of the town.
+
+All day we tramped, absorbing everything that went on in the open.
+Having explored the park, viewed the obelisk and visited the zoo, we
+wandered up and down Broadway, mooning upon the life of the streets.
+Curbstone fights, police manoeuvres, shop-window comedies, building
+operations--everything we saw instructed us. We soaked ourselves in the
+turbulent rivers of the town with a feeling that we should never see
+them again.
+
+We had intended to stay two days but a tragic encounter with a
+restaurant bandit so embittered and alarmed us that we fled New York (as
+we supposed), forever. At one o'clock, being hungry, very hungry, we
+began to look for a cheap eating house, and somewhere in University
+Place we came upon a restaurant which looked humble enough to afford a
+twenty-five cent dinner (which was our limit of extravagance), and so,
+timidly, we ventured in.
+
+A foreign-looking waiter greeted us, and led us to one of a number of
+very small tables covered with linen which impressed even Frank's
+uncritical eyes with its mussiness. With a feeling of having
+inadvertently entered a den of thieves, I wished myself out of it but
+lacked the courage to rise and when the man returned and placed upon
+the table two glasses and a strange looking bottle with a metal stopper
+which had a kind of lever at the side, Frank said, "Hi! Good thing!--I'm
+thirsty." Quite against my judgment he fooled around with the lever till
+he succeeded in helping himself to some of the liquid with which the
+bottle was filled. It was soda water and he drank heartily, although I
+was sure it would be extra on the bill.
+
+The food came on slowly, by fits and starts, and the dishes were all so
+cold and queer of taste that even Frank complained. But we ate with a
+terrifying premonition of trouble. "This meal will cost us at least
+thirty-five cents each!" I said.
+
+"No matter, it's an experience," my spendthrift brother retorted.
+
+At last when the limp lettuce, the amazing cheese and the bitter coffee
+were all consumed, I asked the soiled, outlandish waiter the price.
+
+In reply he pencilled on a slip as though we were deaf, and finally laid
+the completed bill face down beside my plate. I turned it over and grew
+pale.
+
+It totalled _one dollar and twenty cents_!
+
+I felt weak and cold as if I had been suddenly poisoned. I trembled,
+then grew hot with indignation. "Sixty cents apiece!" I gasped. "Didn't
+I warn you?"
+
+Frank was still in reckless mood. "Well, this is the only time we have
+to do it. They won't catch us here again."
+
+I paid the bill and hurried out, bitterly exclaiming, "No more New York
+for me. I will not stay in such a robbers' den another night."
+
+And I didn't. At sunset we crossed the ferry and took the train for New
+Brunswick, New Jersey. Why we selected this town I cannot say, but I
+think it must have been because it was half-way to Philadelphia--and
+that we were just about as scared of Philadelphia as we were resentful
+of New York.
+
+After a night battle with New Jersey mosquitoes and certain plantigrade
+bed-fellows native to cheap hotels, we passed on to Philadelphia and to
+Baltimore, and at sunset of the same day reached Washington, the storied
+capital of the nation.
+
+Everything we saw here was deeply significant, national, rousing our
+patriotism. We were at once and profoundly interested by the negro life
+which flowered here in the free air of the District as under an African
+sun; the newsboys, the bootblacks, the muledrivers, all amused us. We
+spent that first night in Washington in a little lodging house just at
+the corner of the Capitol grounds where beds were offered for
+twenty-five cents. It was a dreadful place, but we slept without waking.
+It took a large odor, a sharp lance to keep either of us awake in those
+days.
+
+Tramping busily all the next day, we climbed everything that could be
+climbed. We visited the Capitol, the war building, the Treasury and the
+White House grounds. We toiled through all the museums, working harder
+than we had ever worked upon the farm, till Frank cried out for mercy. I
+was inexorable. "Our money is getting low. We must be very saving of
+carfare," I insisted. "We must see all we can. We'll never be here
+again."
+
+Once more we slept (among the negroes in a bare little lodging house),
+and on the third day, brimming with impressions, boarded the Chicago
+express and began our glorious, our exultant return over the
+Alleghanies, toward the west.
+
+It was with a feeling of joy, of distinct relief that we set our faces
+toward the sunset. Every mile brought us nearer home. I knew the West. I
+knew the people, and I had no fear of making a living beyond the
+Alleghanies. Every mile added courage and hope to our hearts, and
+increased the value of the splendid, if sometimes severe experiences
+through which we had passed. Frank was especially gay for he was
+definitely on his way home, back to Dakota.
+
+And when next day on the heights of the Alleghany mountains, the train
+dipped to the west, and swinging around a curve, disclosed to us the
+tumbled spread of mountain-land descending to the valley of the Ohio, we
+sang "O'er the hills in legions, boys" as our forefathers did of old. We
+were about to re-enter the land of the teeming furrow.
+
+Late that night as we were riding through the darkness in the smoking
+car, I rose and, placing in my brother's hands all the money I had, said
+good-bye, and at Mansfield, Ohio, swung off the train, leaving him to
+proceed on his homeward way alone.
+
+It was about one o'clock of an autumn night, sharp and clear, and I
+spent the remainder of the morning on a bench in the railway station,
+waiting for the dawn. I could not sleep, and so spent the time in
+pondering on my former experiences in seeking work. "Have I been wrong?"
+I asked myself. "Is the workman in America, as in the old world, coming
+to be a man despised?"
+
+Having been raised in the splendid patriotism, perhaps one might say
+flamboyant patriotism, of the West during and following our Civil War, I
+had been brought up to believe that labor was honorable, that idlers
+were to be despised, but now as I sat with bowed head, cold, hungry and
+penniless, knowing that I must go forth at daylight--seeking work, the
+world seemed a very hostile place to me. Of course I did not consider
+myself a workman in the ordinary hopeless sense. My need of a job was
+merely temporary, for it was my intention to return to the Middle West
+in time to secure a position as teacher in some country school.
+Nevertheless a lively imagination gave me all the sensations of the
+homeless man.
+
+The sun rose warm and golden, and with a return of my courage I started
+forth, confident of my ability to make a place for myself. With a wisdom
+which I had not hitherto shown I first sought a home, and luckily, I say
+luckily because I never could account for it, I knocked at the door of a
+modest little boarding house, whose mistress, a small blonde lady,
+invited me in and gave me a room without a moment's hesitation. Her
+dinner--a delicious mid-day meal, so heartened me that before the end of
+the day, I had secured a place as one of a crew of carpenters. My
+spirits rose. I was secure.
+
+My evenings were spent in reading Abbott's _Life of Napoleon_ which I
+found buried in an immense pile of old magazines. I had never before
+read a full history of the great Corsican, and this chronicle moved me
+almost as profoundly as Hugo's _Les Miserables_ had done the year
+before.
+
+On Sundays I walked about the country under the splendid oaks and
+beeches which covered the ridges, dreaming of the West, and of the
+future which was very vague and not very cheerful in coloring. My plan
+so far as I had a plan, was not ambitious. I had decided to return to
+some small town in Illinois and secure employment as a teacher, but as I
+lingered on at my carpenter trade till October nothing was left for me
+but a country school, and when Orrin Carter, county superintendent of
+Grundy County, (he is Judge Carter now) informed me that a district
+school some miles out would pay fifty dollars a month for a teacher, I
+gladly accepted the offer.
+
+On the following afternoon I started forth a passenger with Hank Ring
+on his way homeward in an empty corn wagon. The box had no seat,
+therefore he and I both rode standing during a drive of six miles. The
+wind was raw, and the ground, frozen hard as iron, made the ride a kind
+of torture, but our supper of buckwheat pancakes and pork sausages at
+Deacon Ring's was partial compensation. On the following Monday I
+started my school.
+
+The winter which followed appalled the oldest inhabitant. Snow fell
+almost daily, and the winds were razor-bladed. In order to save every
+dollar of my wages, I built my own fires in the school-house. This means
+that on every week-day morning, I was obliged to push out into the
+stinging dawn, walk a mile to the icy building, split kindling, start a
+flame in the rude stove, and have the room comfortable at half-past
+eight. The thermometer often went to a point twenty degrees below zero,
+and my ears were never quite free from peeling skin and fevered tissues.
+
+My pupils were boys and girls of all sizes and qualities, and while it
+would be too much to say that I made the best teacher of mathematics in
+the county, I think I helped them in their reading, writing, and
+spelling, which after all are more important than algebra. On Saturday I
+usually went to town, for I had in some way become acquainted with the
+principal of a little normal school which was being carried on in Morris
+by a young Quaker from Philadelphia. Prof. Forsythe soon recognized in
+me something more than the ordinary "elocutionist" and readily aided me
+in securing a class in oratory among his students.
+
+This work and Forsythe's comradeship helped me to bear the tedium of my
+work in the country. No Saturday was too stormy, and the roads were
+never too deep with snow to keep me from my weekly visit to Morris
+where I came in contact with people nearer to my ways of thinking and
+living.
+
+But after all this was but the final section of my eastern
+excursion--for as the spring winds set in, the call of "the sunset
+regions" again overcame my love of cities. The rush to Dakota in March
+was greater than ever before and a power stronger than my will drew me
+back to the line of the middle border which had moved on into the
+Missouri Valley, carrying my people with it. As the spring odors filled
+my nostrils, my wish to emigrate was like that of the birds. "Out there
+is my share of the government land--and, if I am to carry out my plan of
+fitting myself for a professorship," I argued--"these claims are worth
+securing. My rights to the public domain are as good as any other
+man's."
+
+My recollections of the James River Valley were all pleasant. My brother
+and father both wrote urging me to come and secure a claim, and so at
+last I replied, "I'll come as soon as my school is out," thus committing
+all my future to the hazard of the homestead.
+
+And so it came about that in the second spring after setting my face to
+the east I planned a return to the Border. I had had my glimpse of
+Boston, New York and Washington. I was twenty-three years of age, and
+eager to revisit the plain whereon my father with the faith of a
+pioneer, was again upturning the sod and building a fourth home. And
+yet, Son of the Middle Border--I had discovered that I was also a
+Grandson of New England.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+The Land of the Straddle-Bug
+
+
+A night in Chicago (where I saw Salvini play Othello), a day in Neshonoc
+to visit my Uncle Richard, and I was again in the midst of a jocund rush
+of land-seekers.
+
+The movement which had begun three years before was now at its height.
+Thousands of cars, for lack of engines to move them, were lying idle on
+the switches all over the west. Trains swarming with immigrants from
+every country of the world were haltingly creeping out upon the level
+lands. Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, Scotchmen, Englishmen, and Russians
+all mingled in this flood of land-seekers rolling toward the sundown
+plain, where a fat-soiled valley had been set aside by good Uncle Sam
+for the enrichment of every man. Such elation, such hopefulness could
+not fail to involve an excitable youth like myself.
+
+My companion, Forsythe, dropped off at Milbank, but I kept on, on into
+the James Valley, arriving at Ordway on the evening of the second day--a
+clear cloudless evening in early April, with the sun going down red in
+the west, the prairie chickens calling from the knolls and hammers still
+sounding in the village, their tattoo denoting the urgent need of roofs
+to shelter the incoming throng.
+
+The street swarmed with boomers. All talk was of lots, of land. Hour by
+hour as the sun sank, prospectors returned to the hotel from their trips
+into the unclaimed territory, hungry and tired but jubilant, and as they
+assembled in my father's store after supper, their boastful talk of
+"claims secured" made me forget all my other ambitions. I was as eager
+to clutch my share of Uncle Sam's bounty as any of them. The world
+seemed beginning anew for me as well as for these aliens from the
+crowded eastern world. "I am ready to stake a claim," I said to my
+father.
+
+Early the very next day, with a party of four (among them Charles
+Babcock, a brother of Burton), I started for the unsurveyed country
+where, some thirty miles to the west, my father had already located a
+pre-emption claim and built a rough shed, the only shelter for miles
+around.
+
+"We'll camp there," said Charles.
+
+It was an inspiring ride! The plain freshly uncovered from the snow was
+swept by a keen wind which held in spite of that an acrid prophecy of
+sudden spring. Ducks and geese rose from every icy pond and resumed
+their flight into the mystic north, and as we advanced the world
+broadened before us. The treelessness of the wide swells, the crispness
+of the air and the feeling that to the westward lay the land of the
+Sioux, all combined to make our trip a kind of epic in miniature.
+Charles also seemed to feel the essential poetry of the expedition,
+although he said little except to remark, "I wish Burton were here."
+
+It was one o'clock before we reached the cabin and two before we
+finished luncheon. The afternoon was spent in wandering over the near-by
+obtainable claims and at sundown we all returned to the shed to camp.
+
+As dusk fell, and while the geese flew low gabbling confidentially, and
+the ducks whistled by overhead in swift unerring flight, Charles and I
+lay down on the hay beside the horses, feeling ourselves to be, in some
+way, partners with God in this new world. I went to sleep hearing the
+horses munching their grain in the neighboring stalls, entirely
+contented with my day and confident of the morrow. All questions were
+answered, all doubts stilled.
+
+We arose with the sun and having eaten our rude breakfast set forth,
+some six miles to the west, to mark the location of our claims with the
+"straddle-bugs."
+
+The straddle-bug, I should explain, was composed of three boards set
+together in tripod form and was used as a monument, a sign of occupancy.
+Its presence defended a claim against the next comer. Lumber being very
+scarce at the moment, the building of a shanty was impossible, and so
+for several weeks these signs took the place of "improvements" and were
+fully respected. No one could honorably jump these claims within thirty
+days and no one did.
+
+At last, when far beyond the last claimant, we turned and looked back
+upon a score of these glittering guidons of progress, banners of the
+army of settlement, I realized that I was a vedette in the van of
+civilization, and when I turned to the west where nothing was to be seen
+save the mysterious plain and a long low line of still more mysterious
+hills, I thrilled with joy at all I had won.
+
+It seemed a true invasion, this taking possession of the virgin sod, but
+as I considered, there was a haunting sadness in it, for these shining
+pine pennons represented the inexorable plow. They prophesied the death
+of all wild creatures and assured the devastation of the beautiful, the
+destruction of all the signs and seasons of the sod.
+
+Apparently none of my companions shared this feeling, for they all
+leaped from the wagon and planted their stakes, each upon his chosen
+quarter-section with whoops of joy, cries which sounded faint and far,
+like the futile voices of insects, diminished to shrillness by the
+echoless abysses of the unclouded sky.
+
+As we had measured the distance from the township lines by counting the
+revolutions of our wagon-wheels, so now with pocket compass and a couple
+of laths, Charles and I laid out inner boundaries and claimed three
+quarter-sections, one for Frank and one each for ourselves. Level as a
+floor these acres were, and dotted with the bones of bison.
+
+We ate our dinner on the bare sod while all around us the birds of
+spring-time moved in myriads, and over the swells to the east other
+wagons laden with other land-seekers crept like wingless
+beetles--stragglers from the main skirmish line.
+
+Having erected our pine-board straddle-bugs with our names written
+thereon, we jubilantly started back toward the railway. Tired but
+peaceful, we reached Ordway at dark and Mrs. Wynn's supper of ham and
+eggs and potatoes completed our day most satisfactorily.
+
+My father, who had planned to establish a little store on his claim, now
+engaged me as his representative, his clerk, and I spent the next week
+in hauling lumber and in helping to build the shanty and ware-room on
+the section line. As soon as the place was habitable, my mother and
+sister Jessie came out to stay with me, for in order to hold his
+pre-emption my father was obliged to make it his "home."
+
+Before we were fairly settled, my mother was forced to feed and house a
+great many land-seekers who had no other place to stay. This brought
+upon her once again all the drudgery of a pioneer house-wife, and filled
+her with longing for the old home in Iowa. It must have seemed to her as
+if she were never again to find rest except beneath the sod.
+
+Nothing that I have ever been called upon to do caused me more worry
+than the act of charging those land-seekers for their meals and bunks,
+and yet it was perfectly right that they should pay. Our buildings had
+been established with great trouble and at considerable expense, and my
+father said, "We cannot afford to feed so many people without return,"
+and yet it seemed to me like taking an unfair advantage of poor and
+homeless men. It was with the greatest difficulty that I brought myself
+to charge them anything at all. Fortunately the prices had been fixed by
+my father.
+
+Night by night it became necessary to lift a lantern on a high pole in
+front of the shack, in order that those who were traversing the plain
+after dark might find their way, and often I was aroused from my bed by
+the arrival of a worn and bewildered party of pilgrims rescued from a
+sleepless couch upon the wet sod.
+
+For several weeks mother was burdened with these wayfarers, but at last
+they began to thin out. The skirmish line moved on, the ranks halted,
+and all about the Moggeson ranch hundreds of yellow shanties sparkled at
+dawn like flecks of gold on a carpet of green velvet. Before the end of
+May every claim was taken and "improved"--more or less.
+
+Meanwhile I had taken charge of the store and Frank was the stage
+driver. He was a very bad salesman, but I was worse--that must be
+confessed. If a man wanted to purchase an article and had the money to
+pay for it, we exchanged commodities right there, but as far as my
+selling anything--father used to say, "Hamlin couldn't sell gold dollars
+for ninety cents a piece," and he was right--entirely right.
+
+I found little to interest me in the people who came to the store for
+they were "just ordinary folk" from Illinois, and Iowa, and I had never
+been a youth who made acquaintances easily, so with nothing of the
+politician in me, I seldom inquired after the babies or gossiped with
+the old women about their health and housekeeping. I regretted this
+attitude afterward. A closer relationship with the settlers would have
+furnished me with a greater variety of fictional characters, but at the
+time I had no suspicion that I was missing anything.
+
+As the land dried off and the breaking plow began its course, a most
+idyllic and significant period of life came on. The plain became very
+beautiful as the soil sent forth its grasses. On the shadowed sides of
+the ridges exquisite shades of pink and purple bloomed, while the most
+radiant yellow-green flamed from slopes on which the sunlight fell. The
+days of May and June succeeded one another in perfect harmony like the
+notes in a song, broken only once or twice by thunderstorms.
+
+An opalescent mist was in the air, and everywhere, on every swell, the
+settlers could be seen moving silently to and fro with their teams,
+while the women sang at their work about the small shanties, and in
+their new gardens. On every side was the most cheerful acceptance of
+hard work and monotonous fare. No one acknowledged the transient quality
+of this life, although it was only a novel sort of picnic on the
+prairie, soon to end.
+
+Many young people and several groups of girls (teachers from the east)
+were among those who had taken claims, and some of these made life
+pleasant for themselves and helpful to others by bringing to their
+cabins, books and magazines and pictures. The store was not only the
+social center of the township but the postoffice, and Frank, who carried
+the mail (and who was much more gallant than I) seemed to draw out all
+the school ma'ams of the neighborhood. The raising of a flag on a high
+pole before the door was the signal for the post which brought the women
+pouring in from every direction eager for news of the eastern world.
+
+In accordance with my plan to become a teacher, I determined to go to
+the bottom of the laws which govern literary development, and so with
+an unexpurgated volume of Taine, a set of Chambers' _Encyclopaedia of
+English Literature_, and a volume of Greene's _History of the English
+People_, I set to work to base myself profoundly in the principles which
+govern a nation's self-expression. I still believed that in order to
+properly teach an appreciation of poetry, a man should have the power of
+dramatic expression, that he should be able to read so as to make the
+printed page live in the ears of his pupils. In short I had decided to
+unite the orator and the critic.
+
+As a result, I spent more time over my desk than beside the counter. I
+did not absolutely refuse to wait on a purchaser but no sooner was his
+package tied up than I turned away to my work of digesting and
+transcribing in long hand Taine's monumental book.
+
+Day after day I bent to this task, pondering all the great Frenchman had
+to say of _race_, _environment_, and _momentum_ and on the walls of the
+cabin I mapped out in chalk the various periods of English society as he
+had indicated them. These charts were the wonder and astonishment of my
+neighbors whenever they chanced to enter the living room, and they
+appeared especially interested in the names written on the ceiling over
+my bed. I had put my favorites there so that when I opened my eyes of a
+morning, I could not help absorbing a knowledge of their dates and
+works.
+
+However, on Saturday afternoon when the young men came in from their
+claims, I was not above pitching quoits or "putting the shot" with
+them--in truth I took a mild satisfaction in being able to set a big
+boulder some ten inches beyond my strongest competitor. Occasionally I
+practiced with the rifle but was not a crack shot. I could still pitch a
+ball as well as any of them and I served as pitcher in the games which
+the men occasionally organized.
+
+As harvest came on, mother and sister returned to Ordway, and cooking
+became a part of my daily routine. Charles occasionally helped out and
+we both learned to make biscuits and even pies. Frank loyally declared
+my apple-pies to be as good as any man could make.
+
+Meanwhile an ominous change had crept over the plain. The winds were hot
+and dry and the grass, baked on the stem, had became as inflammable as
+hay. The birds were silent. The sky, absolutely cloudless, began to
+scare us with its light. The sun rose through the dusty air, sinister
+with flare of horizontal heat. The little gardens on the breaking
+withered, and many of the women began to complain bitterly of the
+loneliness, and lack of shade. The tiny cabins were like ovens at
+mid-day.
+
+Smiling faces were less frequent. Timid souls began to inquire, "Are all
+Dakota summers like this?" and those with greatest penetration reasoned,
+from the quality of the grass which was curly and fine as hair, that
+they had unwittingly settled upon an arid soil.
+
+And so, week by week the holiday spirit faded from the colony and men in
+feverish unrest uttered words of bitterness. Eyes ached with light and
+hearts sickened with loneliness. Defeat seemed facing every man.
+
+By the first of September many of those who were in greatest need of
+land were ready to abandon their advanced position on the border and
+fall back into the ranks behind. We were all nothing but squatters. The
+section lines had not been run and every pre-emptor looked and longed
+for the coming of the surveying crew, because once our filings were made
+we could all return to the east, at least for six months, or we could
+prove up and buy our land. In other words, the survey offered a chance
+to escape from the tedious monotony of the burning plain into which we
+had so confidently thrust ourselves.
+
+But the surveyors failed to appear though they were reported from day to
+day to be at work in the next township and so, one by one, those of us
+who were too poor to buy ourselves food, dropped away. Hundreds of
+shanties were battened up and deserted. The young women returned to
+their schools, and men who had counted upon getting work to support
+their families during the summer, and who had failed to do so, abandoned
+their claims and went east where settlement had produced a crop. Our
+song of emigration seemed but bitter mockery now.
+
+Moved by the same desire to escape, I began writing to various small
+towns in Minnesota and Iowa in the hope of obtaining a school, but with
+little result. My letters written from the border line did not inspire
+confidence in the School Boards of "the East." Then winter came.
+
+Winter! No man knows what winter means until he has lived through one in
+a pine-board shanty on a Dakota plain with only buffalo bones for fuel.
+There were those who had settled upon this land, not as I had done with
+intent to prove up and sell, but with plans to make a home, and many of
+these, having toiled all the early spring in hope of a crop, now at the
+beginning of winter found themselves with little money and no coal. Many
+of them would have starved and frozen had it not been for the buffalo
+skeletons which lay scattered over the sod, and for which a sudden
+market developed. Upon the proceeds of this singular harvest they almost
+literally lived. Thus "the herds of deer and buffalo" did indeed
+strangely "furnish the cheer."
+
+As for Charles and myself, we also returned to Ordway and there spent a
+part of each month, brooding darkly over the problem of our future. I
+already perceived the futility of my return to the frontier. The
+mysterious urgings of a vague yet deep-seated longing to go east
+rendered me restless, sour and difficult. I saw nothing before me, and
+yet my hard experiences in Wisconsin and in New England made me hesitate
+about going far. Teaching a country school seemed the only thing I was
+fitted for, and there shone no promise of that.
+
+Furthermore, like other pre-emptors I was forced to hold my claim by
+visiting it once every thirty days, and these trips became each time
+more painful, more menacing. February and March were of pitiless
+severity. One blizzard followed another with ever-increasing fury. No
+sooner was the snow laid by a north wind than it took wing above a
+southern blast and returned upon us sifting to and fro until at last its
+crystals were as fine as flour, so triturated that it seemed to drive
+through an inch board. Often it filled the air for hundreds of feet
+above the earth like a mist, and lay in long ridges behind every bush or
+weed. Nothing lived on these desolate uplands but the white owl and the
+wolf.
+
+One cold, bright day I started for my claim accompanied by a young
+Englishman, a fair-faced delicate young clerk from London, and before we
+had covered half our journey the west wind met us with such fury that
+the little cockney would certainly have frozen had I not forced him out
+of the sleigh to run by its side.
+
+Poor little man! This was not the romantic home he had expected to gain
+when he left his office on the Strand.
+
+Luckily, his wretched shanty was some six miles nearer than mine or he
+would have died. Leaving him safe in his den, I pushed on toward my own
+claim, in the teeth of a terrific gale, the cold growing each moment
+more intense. "The sunset regions" at that moment did not provoke me to
+song.
+
+In order to reach my cabin before darkness fell, I urged my team
+desperately, and it was well that I did, for I could scarcely see my
+horses during the last mile, and the wind was appalling even to me--an
+experienced plainsman. Arriving at the barn I was disheartened to find
+the doors heavily banked with snow, but I fell to in desperate haste,
+and soon shoveled a passageway.
+
+This warmed me, but in the delay one of my horses became so chilled that
+he could scarcely enter his stall. He refused to eat also, and this
+troubled me very much. However, I loaded him with blankets and fell to
+work rubbing his legs with wisps of hay, to start the circulation, and
+did not desist until the old fellow began nibbling his forage.
+
+By this time the wind was blowing seventy miles an hour, and black
+darkness was upon the land. With a rush I reached my shanty only to find
+that somebody had taken all my coal and nearly all my kindling, save a
+few pieces of pine. This was serious, but I kindled a fire with the
+blocks, a blaze which was especially grateful by reason of its quick
+response.
+
+Hardly was the stove in action, when a rap at the door startled me.
+"Come," I shouted. In answer to my call, a young man, a neighbor,
+entered, carrying a sack filled with coal. He explained with some
+embarrassment, that in his extremity during the preceding blizzard, he
+had borrowed from my store, and that (upon seeing my light) he had
+hurried to restore the fuel, enough, at any rate, to last out the night.
+His heroism appeased my wrath and I watched him setting out on his
+return journey with genuine anxiety.
+
+That night is still vivid in my memory. The frail shanty, cowering
+close, quivered in the wind like a frightened hare. The powdery snow
+appeared to drive directly through the solid boards, and each hour the
+mercury slowly sank. Drawing my bed close to the fire, I covered myself
+with a buffalo robe and so slept for an hour or two.
+
+When I woke it was still dark and the wind, though terrifying, was
+intermittent in its attack. The timbers of the house creaked as the
+blast lay hard upon it, and now and again the faint fine crystals came
+sifting down upon my face,--driven beneath the shingles by the tempest.
+At last I lit my oil lamp and shivered in my robe till dawn. I felt none
+of the exultation of a "king in fairyland" nor that of a "lord of the
+soil."
+
+The morning came, bright with sun but with the thermometer forty degrees
+below zero. It was so cold that the horses refused to face the northwest
+wind. I could not hitch them to the sleigh until I had blanketed them
+both beneath their harness; even then they snorted and pawed in terror.
+At last, having succeeded in hooking the traces I sprang in and,
+wrapping the robe about me, pushed eastward with all speed, seeking food
+and fire.
+
+This may be taken as a turning point in my career, for this experience
+(followed by two others almost as severe) permanently chilled my
+enthusiasm for pioneering the plain. Never again did I sing "Sunset
+Regions" with the same exultant spirit. "O'er the hills in legions,
+boys," no longer meant sunlit savannahs, flower meadows and deer-filled
+glades. The mingled "wood and prairie land" of the song was gone and
+Uncle Sam's domain, bleak, semi-arid, and wind-swept, offered little
+charm to my imagination. From that little cabin on the ridge I turned my
+face toward settlement, eager to escape the terror and the loneliness of
+the treeless sod. I began to plan for other work in other airs.
+
+Furthermore, I resented the conditions under which my mother lived and
+worked. Our home was in a small building next to the shop, and had all
+the shortcomings of a cabin and none of its charm. It is true nearly all
+our friends lived in equal discomfort, but it seemed to me that mother
+had earned something better. Was it for this she had left her home in
+Iowa. Was she never to enjoy a roomy and comfortable dwelling?
+
+She did not complain and she seldom showed her sense of discomfort. I
+knew that she longed for the friends and neighbors she had left behind,
+and yet so far from being able to help her I was even then planning to
+leave her.
+
+In a sullen rage I endured the winter and when at last the sun began to
+ride the sky with fervor and the prairie cock announced the spring, hope
+of an abundant crop, the promise of a new railroad, the incoming of
+jocund settlers created in each of us a confidence which expressed
+itself in a return to the land. With that marvellous faith which marks
+the husbandmen, we went forth once more with the drill and the harrow,
+planting seed against another harvest.
+
+Sometime during these winter days, I chanced upon a book which effected
+a profound change in my outlook on the world and led to far-reaching
+complications in my life. This volume was the Lovell edition of
+_Progress and Poverty_ which was at that time engaging the attention of
+the political economists of the world.
+
+Up to this moment I had never read any book or essay in which our land
+system had been questioned. I had been raised in the belief that this
+was the best of all nations in the best of all possible worlds, in the
+happiest of all ages. I believed (of course) that the wisdom of those
+who formulated our constitution was but little less than that of
+archangels, and that all contingencies of our progress in government had
+been provided for or anticipated in that inspired and deathless
+instrument.
+
+Now as I read this book, my mind following step by step the author's
+advance upon the citadel of privilege, I was forced to admit that his
+main thesis was right. Unrestricted individual ownership of the earth I
+acknowledged to be wrong and I caught some glimpse of the radiant
+plenty of George's ideal Commonwealth. The trumpet call of the closing
+pages filled me with a desire to battle for the right. Here was a theme
+for the great orator. Here was opportunity for the most devoted evangel.
+
+Raw as I was, inconspicuous as a grasshopper by the roadside, I still
+had something in me which responded to the call of "the prophet of San
+Francisco," and yet I had no definite intention of becoming a
+missionary. How could I?
+
+Penniless, dependent upon the labor of my hands for a livelihood,
+discontented yet unable to decide upon a plan of action, I came and went
+all through that long summer with laggard feet and sorrowful
+countenance.
+
+My brother Franklin having sold his claim had boldly advanced upon
+Chicago. His ability as a bookkeeper secured him against want, and his
+letters were confident and cheerful.
+
+At last in the hour when my perplexity was greatest--the decisive
+impetus came, brought by a chance visitor, a young clergyman from
+Portland, Maine, who arrived in the town to buy some farms for himself
+and a friend. Though a native of Madison Mr. Bashford had won a place in
+the east and had decided to put some part of his salary into Dakota's
+alluring soil. Upon hearing that we were also from Wisconsin he came to
+call and stayed to dinner, and being of a jovial and candid nature soon
+drew from me a fairly coherent statement of my desire to do something in
+the world.
+
+At the end of a long talk he said, "Why don't you come to Boston and
+take a special course at the University? I know the Professor of
+Literature, and I can also give you a letter to the principal of a
+school of Oratory."
+
+This offer threw me into such excitement that I was unable to properly
+thank my adviser, but I fell into depths of dejection as soon as he left
+town. "How can I go east? How can I carry out such a plan?" I asked
+myself with bitter emphasis.
+
+All I had in the world was a small trunk, a couple of dozen books, a
+valise and a few acres of barren unplowed land. My previous visit to
+Boston was just the sort to tempt me to return, but my experiences as a
+laborer in New England had lessened my confidence in its resources--and
+yet the thought of being able to cross the Common every day opened a
+dazzling vista. The very fact that Mr. Bashford had gone there from the
+west as a student, a poor student, made the prodigiously daring step
+seem possible to me. "If only I had a couple of hundred dollars," I said
+to my mother who listened to my delirious words in silence. She divined
+what was surging in my heart and feared it.
+
+Thereafter I walked the floor of my room or wandered the prairie roads
+in continual debate. "What is there for me to do out here?" I demanded.
+"I can farm on these windy dusty acres--that's all. I am a failure as a
+merchant and I am sick of the country."
+
+There were moments of a morning or at sunset when the plain was splendid
+as a tranquil sea, and in such moments I bowed down before its
+mysterious beauty--but for the most part it seemed an empty, desolate,
+mocking world. The harvest was again light and the earth shrunk and
+seamed for lack of moisture.
+
+A hint of winter in the autumn air made me remember the remorseless
+winds and the iron earth over which the snows swept as if across an icy
+polar sea. I shuddered as I thought of again fighting my way to that
+desolate little cabin in McPherson County. I recalled but dimly the
+exultation with which I had made my claim. Boston, by contrast, glowed
+with beauty, with romance, with history, with glory like the vision of
+some turreted town built in the eastern sky at sunset.
+
+"I'll do it," I said at last. "I'll sell my claim. I'll go east. I'll
+find some little hole to creep into. I'll study night and day and so fit
+myself for teaching, then I'll come back west to Illinois or Wisconsin.
+Never will I return to this bleak world."
+
+I offered my claim for sale and while I continued my daily labor on the
+farm, my mind was far-away amid the imagined splendors of the east.
+
+My father was puzzled and a good deal irritated by his son's dark moods.
+My failure to fit into the store was unaccountable and unreasonable. "To
+my thinking," said he, "you have all the school you need. You ought to
+find it easy to make a living in a new, progressive community like
+this."
+
+To him, a son who wanted to go east was temporarily demented. It was an
+absurd plan. "Why, it's against the drift of things. You can't make a
+living back east. Hang onto your land and you'll come out all right. The
+place for a young man is in the west."
+
+Bitter and rebellious of mood, uneasy and uncertain of purpose my talks
+with him resulted only in irritation and discord, but my mother, with an
+abiding faith in my powers, offered no objection. She could not advise,
+it was all so far above and beyond her, but she patted my hand and said,
+"Cheer up! I'm sure it will come out all right. I hate to have you go,
+but I guess Mr. Bashford is right. You need more schooling."
+
+I could see that she was saddened by the thought of the separation which
+was to follow--with a vague knowledge of the experience of all the
+mothers of pioneer sons she feared that the days of our close
+companionship were ended. The detachment was not for a few months, it
+was final. Her face was very wistful and her voice tremulous as she
+told me to go.
+
+"It is hard for me to leave you and sister," I replied, "but I must. I'm
+only rotting here. I'll come back--at least to visit you."
+
+In tremendous excitement I mortgaged my claim for two hundred dollars
+and with that in my hand, started for the land of Emerson, Longfellow,
+and Hawthorne, believing that I was in truth reversing all the laws of
+development, breasting the current of progress, stemming the tide of
+emigration. All about me other young men were streaming toward the
+sunset, pushing westward to escape the pressure of the earth-lords
+behind, whilst I alone and poor, was daring all the dangers, all the
+difficulties from which they were so eagerly escaping.
+
+There was in my heart an illogical exaltation as though I too were about
+to escape something--and yet when the actual moment of parting came, I
+embraced my sorrowing mother, and kissed my quaint little sister
+good-bye without feeling in the least heroic or self-confident. At the
+moment sadness weakened me, reducing me to boyish timidity.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+On to Boston
+
+
+With plenty of time to think, I thought, crouched low in my seat silent
+as an owl. True, I dozed off now and again but even when shortened by
+these periods of forgetfulness, the journey seemed interminable and when
+I reached the grimy old shed of a station which was the Chicago terminal
+of the Northwestern in those days, I was glad of a chance to taste
+outside air, no matter how smoky it reported itself to be.
+
+My brother, who was working in the office of a weekly farm journal, met
+me with an air of calm superiority. He had become a true Chicagoan.
+Under his confident leadership I soon found a boarding place and a
+measure of repose. I must have stayed with him for several days for I
+recall being hypnotized into ordering a twenty-dollar tailor-made suit
+from a South Clark street merchant--you know the kind. It was a "Prince
+Albert Soot"--my first made-to-order outfit, but the extravagance seemed
+justified in face of the known elegance of man's apparel in Boston.
+
+It took me thirty-six hours more to get to Boston, and as I was ill all
+the way (I again rode in the smoking car) a less triumphant Jason never
+entered the City of Light and Learning. The day was a true November day,
+dark and rainy and cold, and when I confronted my cloud-built city of
+domes and towers I was concerned only with a place to sleep--I had
+little desire of battle and no remembrance of the Golden Fleece.
+
+Up from the Hoosac Station and over the slimy, greasy pavement I trod
+with humped back, carrying my heavy valise (it was the same
+imitation-leather concern with which I had toured the city two years
+before), while gay little street cars tinkled by, so close to my
+shoulder that I could have touched them with my hand.
+
+Again I found my way through Haymarket Square to Tremont street and so
+at last to the Common, which presented a cold and dismal face at this
+time. The glory of my dream had fled. The trees, bare and brown and
+dripping with rain, offered no shelter. The benches were sodden, the
+paths muddy, and the sky, lost in a desolate mist shut down over my head
+with oppressive weight. I crawled along the muddy walk feeling about as
+important as a belated beetle in a July thunderstorm. Half of me was
+ready to surrender and go home on the next train but the other half, the
+obstinate half, sullenly forged ahead, busy with the problem of a roof
+and bed.
+
+My experience in Rock River now stood me in good hand. Stopping a
+policeman I asked the way to the Young Men's Christian Association. The
+officer pointed out a small tower not far away, and down the Tremont
+street walk I plodded as wretched a youth as one would care to see.
+
+Humbled, apologetic, I climbed the stairway, approached the desk, and in
+a weak voice requested the address of a cheap lodging place.
+
+From the cards which the clerk carelessly handed to me I selected the
+nearest address, which chanced to be on Boylston Place, a short narrow
+street just beyond the Public Library. It was a deplorably wet and
+gloomy alley, but I ventured down its narrow walk and desperately
+knocked on the door of No. 12.
+
+A handsome elderly woman with snow-white hair met me at the threshold.
+She looked entirely respectable, and as she named a price which I could
+afford to pay I accepted her invitation to enter. The house swarmed with
+life. Somebody was strumming a banjo, a girl was singing, and as I
+mounted the stair to the first floor, a slim little maid of about
+fourteen met us. "This is my daughter Fay," said the landlady with
+manifest pride.
+
+Left to myself I sank into a chair with such relief as only the poor
+homeless country boy knows when at the end of a long tramp from the
+station, he lets slip his hand-bag and looks around upon a room for
+which he has paid. It was a plain little chamber, but it meant shelter
+and sleep and I was grateful. I went to bed early.
+
+I slept soundly and the world to which I awoke was new and resplendent.
+My headache was gone, and as I left the house in search of breakfast I
+found the sun shining.
+
+Just around the corner on Tremont street I discovered a little old man
+who from a sidewalk booth, sold delicious coffee in cups of two
+sizes,--one at three cents and a larger one at five cents. He also
+offered doughnuts at a penny each.
+
+Having breakfasted at an outlay of exactly eight cents I returned to my
+chamber, which was a hall-room, eight feet by ten, and faced the north.
+It was heated (theoretically) from a register in the floor, and there
+was just space enough for my trunk, a cot and a small table at the
+window but as it cost only six dollars per month I was content. I
+figured that I could live on five dollars per week which would enable me
+to stay till spring. I had about one hundred and thirty dollars in my
+purse.
+
+From this sunless nook, this narrow niche, I began my study of Boston,
+whose historic significance quite overpowered me. I was alone. Mr.
+Bashford, in Portland, Maine, was the only person in all the east on
+whom I could call for aid or advice in case of sickness. My father wrote
+me that he had relatives living in the city but I did not know how to
+find them. No one could have been more absolutely alone than I during
+that first month. I made no acquaintances, I spoke to no one.
+
+A part of each day was spent in studying the historical monuments of the
+city, and the remaining time was given to reading at the Young Men's
+Union or in the Public Library, which stood next door to my lodging
+house.
+
+At night I made detailed studies of the habits of the cockroaches with
+which my room was peopled. There was something uncanny in the action of
+these beasts. They were new to me and apparently my like had never
+before been observed by them. They belonged to the shadow, to the cold
+and to the damp of the city, whereas I was fresh from the sunlight of
+the plain, and as I watched them peering out from behind my wash-basin,
+they appeared to marvel at me and to confer on my case with almost
+elfish intelligence.
+
+Tantalized by an occasional feeble and vacillating current of warm air
+from the register, I was forced at times to wear my overcoat as I read,
+and at night I spread it over my cot. I did not see the sun for a month.
+The wind was always filled with rain or sleet, and as the lights in
+Bates' Hall were almost always blazing, I could hardly tell when day
+left off and night began. It seemed as if I had been plunged into
+another and darker world, a world of storm, of gray clouds, of endless
+cold.
+
+Having resolved to keep all my expenses within five dollars per week, I
+laid down a scientific plan for cheap living. I first nosed out every
+low-priced eating place within ten minutes walk of my lodging and soon
+knew which of these "joints" were wholesome, and which were not. Just
+around the corner was a place where a filling dinner could be procured
+for fifteen cents, including pudding, and the little lunch counter on
+Tremont street supplied my breakfast. Not one nickel did I spend in
+carfare, and yet I saw almost every celebrated building in the city.
+However, I tenderly regarded my shoe soles each night, for the cost of
+tapping was enormous.
+
+My notion of studying at some school was never carried out. The Boston
+University classes did not attract me. The Harvard lectures were
+inaccessible, and my call upon the teacher of "Expression" to whom Mr.
+Bashford had given me a letter led to nothing. The professor was a
+nervous person and made the mistake of assuming that I was as timid as I
+was silent. His manner irritated me and the outburst of my resentment
+was astonishing to him. I was hungry at the moment and to be patronized
+was too much!
+
+This encounter plunged me into deep discouragement and I went back to my
+reading in the library with a despairing resolution to improve every
+moment, for my stay in the east could not last many weeks. At the rate
+my money was going May would see me bankrupt.
+
+I read both day and night, grappling with Darwin, Spencer, Fiske,
+Helmholtz, Haeckel,--all the mighty masters of evolution whose books I
+had not hitherto been able to open. For diversion I dived into early
+English poetry and weltered in that sea of song which marks the
+beginnings of every literature, conning the ballads of Ireland and
+Wales, the epics of Ireland, the early German and the songs of the
+troubadours, a course of reading which started me on a series of
+lectures to be written directly from a study of the authors themselves.
+This dimly took shape as a volume to be called _The Development of
+English Ideals_, a sufficiently ambitious project.
+
+Among other proscribed books I read Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_ and
+without doubt that volume changed the world for me as it did for many
+others. Its rhythmic chants, its wonderful music filled me with a keen
+sense of the mystery of the near at hand. I rose from that first reading
+with a sense of having been taken up into high places. The spiritual
+significance of America was let loose upon me.
+
+Herbert Spencer remained my philosopher and master. With eager haste I
+sought to compass the "Synthetic Philosophy." The universe took on order
+and harmony as, from my five cent breakfast, I went directly to the
+consideration of Spencer's theory of the evolution of music or painting
+or sculpture. It was thrilling, it was joyful to perceive that
+everything moved from the simple to the complex--how the bow-string
+became the harp, and the egg the chicken. My mental diaphragm creaked
+with the pressure of inrushing ideas. My brain young, sensitive to every
+touch, took hold of facts and theories like a phonographic cylinder, and
+while my body softened and my muscles wasted from disuse, I skittered
+from pole to pole of the intellectual universe like an impatient bat. I
+learned a little of everything and nothing very thoroughly. With so many
+peaks in sight, I had no time to spend on digging up the valley soil.
+
+My only exercise was an occasional slow walk. I could not afford to
+waste my food in physical effort, and besides I was thinly dressed and
+could not go out except when the sun shone. My overcoat was considerably
+more than half cotton and a poor shield against the bitter wind which
+drove straight from the arctic sea into my bones. Even when the weather
+was mild, the crossings were nearly always ankle deep in slush, and
+walking was anything but a pleasure, therefore it happened that for days
+I took no outing whatsoever. From my meals I returned to my table in
+the library and read until closing time, conserving in every way my
+thirty cents' worth of "food units."
+
+In this way I covered a wide literary and scientific territory. Humped
+over my fitful register I discussed the Nebular Hypothesis. My poets and
+scientists not merely told me of things I had never known, they
+confirmed me in certain conceptions which had come to me without effort
+in the past. I became an evolutionist in the fullest sense, accepting
+Spencer as the greatest living thinker. Fiske and Galton and Allen were
+merely assistants to the Master Mind whose generalizations included in
+their circles all modern discovery.
+
+It was a sad change when, leaving the brilliant reading room where my
+mind had been in contact with these masters of scientific world, I crept
+back to my minute den, there to sit humped and shivering (my overcoat
+thrown over my shoulders) confronting with scared resentment the sure
+wasting of my little store of dollars. In spite of all my care, the
+pennies departed from my pockets like grains of sand from an hour-glass
+and most disheartening of all I was making no apparent gain toward
+fitting myself for employment in the west.
+
+Furthermore, the greatness, the significance, the beauty of Boston was
+growing upon me. I felt the neighboring presence of its autocrats more
+definitely and powerfully each day. Their names filled the daily papers,
+their comings and goings were carefully noted. William Dean Howells,
+Oliver Wendell Holmes, John G. Whittier, Edwin Booth, James Russell
+Lowell, all these towering personalities seemed very near to me now, and
+their presence, even if I never saw their faces, was an inspiration to
+one who had definitely decided to compose essays and poems, and to write
+possibly a history of American Literature. Symphony concerts, the
+Lowell Institute Lectures, the _Atlantic Monthly_--(all the distinctive
+institutions of the Hub) had become very precious to me notwithstanding
+the fact that I had little actual share in them. Their nearness while
+making my poverty more bitter, aroused in me a vague ambition to
+succeed--in something. "I won't be beaten, I will not surrender," I
+said.
+
+Being neither a resident of the city nor a pupil of any school I could
+not take books from the library and this inhibition wore upon me till at
+last I determined to seek the aid of Edward Everett Hale who had long
+been a great and gracious figure in my mind. His name had been among the
+"Authors" of our rainy-day game on the farm. I had read his books, and I
+had heard him preach and as his "Lend-a-hand" helpfulness was
+proverbial, I resolved to call upon him at his study in the church, and
+ask his advice. I was not very definite as to what I expected him to do,
+probably I hoped for sympathy in some form.
+
+The old man received me with kindness, but with a look of weariness
+which I quickly understood. Accustomed to helping people he considered
+me just another "Case." With hesitation I explained my difficulty about
+taking out books.
+
+With a bluff roar he exclaimed, "Well, well! That is strange! Have you
+spoken to the Librarian about it?"
+
+"I have, Dr. Hale, but he told me there were twenty thousand young
+students in the city in precisely my condition. People not residents and
+with no one to vouch for them cannot take books home."
+
+"I don't like that," he said. "I will look into that. You shall be
+provided for. Present my card to Judge Chamberlain; I am one of the
+trustees, and he will see that you have all the books you want."
+
+I thanked him and withdrew, feeling that I had gained a point. I
+presented the card to the librarian whose manner softened at once. As a
+protege of Dr. Hale I was distinguished. "I will see what can be done
+for you," said Judge Chamberlain. Thereafter I was able to take books to
+my room, a habit which still further imperilled my health, for I read
+fourteen hours a day instead of ten.
+
+Naturally I grew white and weak. My Dakota tan and my corn-fed muscle
+melted away. The only part of me which flourished was my hair. I
+begrudged every quarter which went to the barbers and I was cold most of
+the time (except when I infested the library) and I was hungry _all_ the
+time.
+
+I knew that I was physically on the down-grade, but what could I do?
+Nothing except to cut down my expenses. I was living on less than five
+dollars a week, but even at that the end of my _stay_ in the city was
+not far off. Hence I walked gingerly and read fiercely.
+
+Bates' Hall was deliciously comfortable, and every day at nine o'clock I
+was at the door eager to enter. I spent most of my day at a desk in the
+big central reading room, but at night I haunted the Young Men's Union,
+thus adding myself to a dubious collection of half-demented, ill-clothed
+derelicts, who suffered the contempt of the attendants by reason of
+their filling all the chairs and monopolizing all the newspaper racks.
+We never conversed one with another and no one knew my name, but there
+came to be a certain diplomatic understanding amongst us somewhat as
+snakes, rabbits, hyenas, and turtles sometimes form "happy families."
+
+There was one old ruffian who always sniffled and snuffled like a fat
+hog as he read, monopolizing my favorite newspaper. Another member of
+the circle perused the same page of the same book day after day,
+laughing vacuously over its contents. Never by any mistake did he call
+for a different book, and I never saw him turn a leaf. No doubt I was
+counted as one of this group of irresponsibles.
+
+All this hurt me. I saw no humor in it then, for I was even at this time
+an intellectual aristocrat. I despised brainless folk. I hated these
+loafers. I loathed the clerk at the desk who dismissed me with a
+contemptuous smirk, and I resented the formal smile and impersonal
+politeness of Mr. Baldwin, the President. Of course I understood that
+the attendants knew nothing of my dreams and my ambitions, and that they
+were treating me quite as well as my looks warranted, but I blamed them
+just the same, furious at my own helplessness to demonstrate my claims
+for higher honors.
+
+During all this time the only woman I knew was my landlady, Mrs. Davis,
+and her daughter Fay. Once a week I curtly said, "Here is your rent,
+Mrs. Davis," and yet, several times she asked with concern, "How are you
+feeling?--You don't look well. Why don't you board with me? I can feed
+you quite as cheaply as you can board yourself."
+
+It is probable that she read slow starvation in my face, but I haughtily
+answered, "Thank you, I prefer to take my meals out." As a matter of
+fact, I dreaded contact with the other boarders.
+
+As a member of the Union a certain number of lectures were open to me
+and so night by night, in company with my fellow "nuts," I called for my
+ticket and took my place in line at the door, like a charity patient at
+a hospital. However, as I seldom occupied a seat to the exclusion of
+anyone else and as my presence usually helped to keep the speaker in
+countenance, I had no qualms.
+
+The Union audience was notoriously the worst audience in Boston, being
+in truth a group of intellectual mendicants waiting for oratorical
+hand-me-outs. If we didn't happen to like the sandwiches or the dry
+doughnuts given us, we threw them down and walked away.
+
+Nevertheless in this hall I heard nearly all the great preachers of the
+city, and though some of their cant phrases worried me, I was benefited
+by the literary allusions of others. Carpenter retained nothing of the
+old-fashioned theology, and Hale was always a delight--so was Minot
+Savage. Dr. Bartol, a quaint absorbing survival of the Concord School of
+Philosophy, came once, and I often went to his Sunday service. It was
+always joy to enter the old West Meeting House for it remained almost
+precisely as it was in Revolutionary days. Its pews, its curtains, its
+footstools, its pulpit, were all deliciously suggestive of the time when
+stately elms looked in at the window, and when the minister, tall,
+white-haired, black-cravatted arose in the high pulpit and began to read
+with curious, sing-song cadences a chant from _Job_ I easily imagined
+myself listening to Ralph Waldo Emerson.
+
+His sermons held no cheap phrases and his sentences delighted me by
+their neat literary grace. Once in an address on Grant he said, "He was
+an atmospheric man. He developed from the war-cloud like a bolt of
+lightning."
+
+Perhaps Minot Savage pleased me best of all for he too was a disciple of
+Spencer, a logical, consistent, and fearless evolutionist. He often
+quoted from the poets in his sermon. Once he read Whitman's "Song of
+Myself" with such power, such sense of rhythm that his congregation
+broke into applause at the end. I heard also (at Tremont temple and
+elsewhere) men like George William Curtis, Henry Ward Beecher, and
+Frederick Douglass, but greatest of all in a certain sense was the
+influence of Edwin Booth who taught me the greatness of Shakespeare and
+the glory of English speech.
+
+Poor as I was, I visited the old Museum night after night, paying
+thirty-five cents which admitted me to a standing place in the first
+balcony, and there on my feet and in complete absorption, I saw in
+wondrous procession _Hamlet_, _Lear_, _Othello_, _Petruchio_, _Sir Giles
+Overreach_, _Macbeth_, _Iago_, and _Richelieu_ emerge from the shadow
+and re-enact their tragic lives before my eyes. These were my purple,
+splendid hours. From the light of this glorious mimic world I stumbled
+down the stairs out into the night, careless of wind or snow, my brain
+in a tumult of revolt, my soul surging with high resolves.
+
+The stimulation of these performances was very great. The art of this
+"Prince of Tragedy" was a powerful educational influence along the lines
+of oratory, poetry and the drama. He expressed to me the soul of English
+Literature. He exemplified the music of English speech. His acting was
+at once painting and sculpture and music and I became still more
+economical of food in order that I might the more often bask in the
+golden atmosphere of his world. I said, "I, too, will help to make the
+dead lines of the great poets speak to the living people of today," and
+with new fervor bent to the study of oratory as the handmaid of poetry.
+
+The boys who acted as ushers in the balcony came at length to know me,
+and sometimes when it happened that some unlucky suburbanite was forced
+to leave his seat near the railing, one of the lads would nod at me and
+allow me to slip down and take the empty place.
+
+In this way I got closer to the marvellous lines of the actor's face,
+and was enabled to read and record the subtler, fleeter shadows of his
+expression. I have never looked upon a face with such transcendent power
+of externalizing and differentiating emotions, and I have never heard a
+voice of equal beauty and majesty.
+
+Booth taught millions of Americans the dignity, the power and the music
+of the English tongue. He set a high mark in grace and precision of
+gesture, and the mysterious force of his essentially tragic spirit made
+so deep an impression upon those who heard him that they confused him
+with the characters he portrayed. As for me--I could not sleep for hours
+after leaving the theater.
+
+Line by line I made mental note of the actor's gestures, accents, and
+cadences and afterward wrote them carefully down. As I closed my eyes
+for sleep I could hear that solemn chant "_Duncan is in his grave. After
+life's fitful fever he sleeps well._" With horror and admiration I
+recalled him, when as _Sir Giles_, with palsied hand helpless by his
+side, his face distorted, he muttered as if to himself, "Some undone
+widow sits upon my sword," or when as _Petruchio_ in making a playful
+snatch at Kate's hand with the blaze of a lion's anger in his eye his
+voice rang out, "Were it the paw of an angry bear, I'd smite it off--but
+as it's Kate's I kiss it."
+
+To the boy from the cabin on the Dakota plain these stage pictures were
+of almost incommunicable beauty and significance. They justified me in
+all my daring. They made any suffering past, present, or future, worth
+while, and the knowledge that these glories were evanescent and that I
+must soon return to the Dakota plain only deepened their power and added
+to the grandeur of every scene.
+
+Booth's home at this time was on Beacon Hill, and I used to walk
+reverently by just to see where the great man housed. Once, the door
+being open, I caught a momentary glimpse of a curiously ornate umbrella
+stand, and the soft glow of a distant lamp, and the vision greatly
+enriched me. This singularly endowed artist presented to me the radiant
+summit of human happiness and glory, and to see him walk in or out of
+his door was my silent hope, but alas, this felicity was denied me!
+
+Under the spell of these performers, I wrote a series of studies of the
+tragedian in his greatest roles. "Edwin Booth as Lear," "Edwin Booth as
+Hamlet," and so on, recording with minutest fidelity every gesture,
+every accent, till four of these impersonations were preserved on the
+page as if in amber. I re-read my Shakespeare in the light of Booth's
+eyes, in the sound of his magic voice, and when the season ended, the
+city grew dark, doubly dark for me. Thereafter I lived in the fading
+glory of that month.
+
+These were growing days! I had moments of tremendous expansion, hours
+when my mind went out over the earth like a freed eagle, but these
+flights were always succeeded by fits of depression as I realized my
+weakness and my poverty. Nevertheless I persisted in my studies.
+
+Under the influence of Spencer I traced a parallel development of the
+Arts and found a measure of scientific peace. Under the inspiration of
+Whitman I pondered the significance of democracy and caught some part of
+its spiritual import. With Henry George as guide, I discovered the main
+cause of poverty and suffering in the world, and so in my little room,
+living on forty cents a day, I was in a sense profoundly happy. So long
+as I had a dollar and a half with which to pay my rent and two dollars
+for the keepers of the various dives in which I secured my food, I was
+imaginatively the equal of Booth and brother to the kings of song.
+
+And yet one stern persistent fact remained, my money was passing and I
+was growing weaker and paler every day. The cockroaches no longer amused
+me. Coming as I did from a land where the sky made up half the world I
+resented being thus condemned to a nook from which I could see only a
+gray rag of mist hanging above a neighboring chimney.
+
+In the moments when I closely confronted my situation the glory of the
+western sky came back to me, and it must have been during one of these
+dreary storms that I began to write a poor faltering little story which
+told of the adventures of a cattleman in the city. No doubt it was the
+expression of the homesickness at my own heart but only one or two of
+the chapters ever took shape, for I was tortured by the feeling that no
+matter how great the intellectual advancement caused by hearing Edwin
+Booth in _Hamlet_ might be, it would avail me nothing when confronted by
+the school committee of Blankville, Illinois.
+
+I had moments of being troubled and uneasy and at times experienced a
+feeling that was almost despair.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+Enter a Friend
+
+
+One night seeing that the principal of a well known School of Oratory
+was bulletined to lecture at the Young Men's Union upon "The Philosophy
+of Expression" I went to hear him, more by way of routine than with any
+expectation of being enlightened or even interested, but his very first
+words surprised and delighted me. His tone was positive, his phrases
+epigrammatic, and I applauded heartily. "Here is a man of thought," I
+said.
+
+At the close of the address I ventured to the platform and expressed to
+him my interest in what he had said. He was a large man with a broad and
+smiling face, framed in a brown beard. He appeared pleased with my
+compliments and asked if I were a resident of Boston. "No, I am a
+western man," I replied. "I am here to study and I was especially
+interested in your quotations from Darwin's book on _Expression in Man
+and Animals_."
+
+His eyes expressed surprise and after a few minutes' conversation, he
+gave me his card saying, "Come and see me tomorrow morning at my
+office."
+
+I went home pleasantly excited by this encounter. After months of
+unbroken solitude in the midst of throngs of strangers, this man's
+cordial invitation meant much to me.
+
+On the following morning, at the hour set, I called at the door of his
+office on the top floor of No. 7 Beacon Street, which was an
+old-fashioned one-story building without an elevator.
+
+Brown asked me where I came from, what my plans were, and I replied with
+eager confidence. Then we grew harmoniously enthusiastic over Herbert
+Spencer and Darwin and Mantegazza and I talked a stream. My long silence
+found vent. Words poured from me in a torrent but he listened smilingly,
+his big head cocked on one side, waiting patiently for me to blow off
+steam. Later, when given a chance, he showed me the manuscript of a book
+upon which he was at work and together we discussed its main thesis. He
+asked me my opinion of this passage and that--and I replied, not as a
+pupil but as an equal, and the author seemed pleased at my candor.
+
+Two hours passed swiftly in this way and as the interview was about to
+end he asked, "Where do you live?"
+
+I told him and explained that I was trying to fit myself for teaching
+and that I was living as cheaply as possible. "I haven't any money for
+tuition," I confessed.
+
+He mused a moment, then said, "If you wish to come into my school I
+shall be glad to have you do so. Never mind about tuition,--pay me when
+you can."
+
+This generous offer sent me away filled with gratitude and an illogical
+hope. Not only had I gained a friend, I had found an intellectual
+comrade, one who was far more widely read, at least in science, than I.
+I went to my ten-cent lunch with a feeling that a door had unexpectedly
+opened and that it led into broader, sunnier fields of toil.
+
+The school, which consisted of several plain offices and a large
+class-room, was attended by some seventy or eighty pupils, mostly girls
+from New England and Canada with a few from Indiana and Ohio. It was a
+simple little workshop but to me it was the most important institution
+in Boston. It gave me welcome, and as I came into it on Monday morning
+at nine o'clock and was introduced to the pretty teacher of Delsarte,
+Miss Maida Craigen, whose smiling lips and big Irish-gray eyes made her
+beloved of all her pupils, I felt that my lonely life in Boston was
+ended.
+
+The teachers met me with formal kindliness, finding in me only another
+crude lump to be moulded into form, and while I did not blame them for
+it, I instantly drew inside my shell and remained there--thus robbing
+myself of much that would have done me good. Some of the girls went out
+of their way to be nice to me, but I kept aloof, filled with a savage
+resentment of my poverty and my threadbare clothing.
+
+Before the week was over, Professor Brown asked me to assist in reading
+the proof-sheets of his new book and this I did, going over it with him
+line by line. His deference to my judgment was a sincere compliment to
+my reading and warmed my heart like some elixir. It was my first
+authoritative appreciation and when at the end of the third session he
+said, "I shall consider your criticism more than equal to the sum of
+your tuition," I began to faintly forecast the time when my brain would
+make me self-supporting.
+
+My days were now cheerful. My life had direction. For two hours each
+afternoon (when work in the school was over) I sat with Brown discussing
+the laws of dramatic art, and to make myself still more valuable in this
+work, I read every listed book or article upon expression, and
+translated several French authorities, transcribing them in longhand for
+his use.
+
+In this work the weeks went by and spring approached. In a certain sense
+I felt that I was gaining an education which would be of value to me but
+I was not earning one cent of money, and my out-go was more than five
+dollars per week, for I occasionally went to the theater, and I had
+also begun attendance at the Boston Symphony concerts in Music Hall.
+
+By paying twenty-five cents students were allowed to fill the gallery
+and to stand on the ground floor, and Friday afternoons generally found
+me leaning against the wall listening to Brahms and Wagner. At such
+times I often thought of my mother, and my uncle David and wished that
+they too might hear these wondrous harmonies. I tried to imagine what
+the effect of this tumult of sound would be, as it beat in upon their
+inherited deeply musical brain-cells!
+
+One by one I caught up the threads of certain other peculiar Boston
+interests, and by careful reading of the _Transcript_ was enabled to
+vibrate in full harmony with the local hymn of gratitude. New York
+became a mere emporium, a town without a library, a city without a first
+class orchestra, the home of a few commercial painters and several
+journalistic poets! Chicago was a huge dirty town on the middle border.
+Washington a vulgar political camp--only Philadelphia was admitted to
+have the quality of a real city and her literary and artistic resources
+were pitiably slender and failing!
+
+But all the time that I was feasting on these insubstantial glories, my
+meat was being cut down and my coat hung ever more loosely over my ribs.
+Pale and languid I longed for spring, for sunshine, with all the passion
+of a prisoner, and when at last the grass began to show green in the
+sheltered places on the Common and the sparrows began to utter their
+love notes, I went often of an afternoon to a bench in lee of a clump of
+trees and there sprawled out like a debilitated fox, basking in the
+tepid rays of a diminished sun.
+
+For all his expressed admiration of my literary and scientific acumen,
+Brown did not see fit to invite me to dinner, probably because of my
+rusty suit and frayed cuffs. I did not blame him. I was in truth a
+shabby figure, and the dark-brown beard which had come upon me added to
+the unhealthy pallor of my skin, so that Mrs. Brown, a rather smart and
+socially ambitious lady, must have regarded me as something of an
+anarchist, a person to avoid. She always smiled as we met, but her smile
+was defensive.
+
+However, a blessed break in the monotony of my fare came during April
+when my friend Bashford invited me to visit him in Portland. I accepted
+his invitation with naive precipitation and furbished up my wardrobe as
+best I could, feeling that even the wife of a clergyman might not
+welcome a visitor with fringed cuffs and celluloid collars.
+
+This was my first sea voyage and I greatly enjoyed the trip--after I got
+there!
+
+Mrs. Bashford received me kindly, but (I imagined) with a trace of
+official hospitality in her greeting. It was plain that she (like Mrs.
+Brown) considered me a "Charity Patient." Well, no matter, Bashford and
+I got on smoothly.
+
+Their house was large and its grandeur was almost oppressive to me, but
+I spent nearly a week in it. As I was leaving, Bashford gave me a card
+to Dr. Cross, a former parishioner in Jamaica Plain, saying, "Call upon
+the Doctor as soon as you return. He'll be glad to hear of Dakota."
+
+My little den in Boylston Place was almost intolerable to me now. Spring
+sunshine, real sunshine flooded the land and my heart was full of
+longing for the country. Therefore--though I dreaded meeting another
+stranger,--I decided to risk a dime and make the trip to Jamaica Plains,
+to call upon Dr. Cross.
+
+This ride was a further revelation of the beauty of New England. For
+half an hour the little horse-car ran along winding lanes under great
+overarching elm trees, past apple-orchards in bursting bloom. On every
+hand luscious lawns spread, filled with crocuses and dandelions just
+beginning to spangle the green. The effect upon me was somewhat like
+that which would be produced in the mind of a convict who should
+suddenly find his prison doors opening into a June meadow. Standing with
+the driver on the front platform, I drank deep of the flower-scented
+air. I had never seen anything more beautiful.
+
+Dr. Cross, a sweet and gentle man of about sixty years of age (not
+unlike in manner and habit Professor Bush, my principal at the Cedar
+Valley Seminary) received his seedy visitor with a kindly smile. I liked
+him and trusted him at once. He was tall and very thin, with dark eyes
+and a long gray beard. His face was absolutely without suspicion or
+guile. It was impossible to conceive of his doing an unkind or hasty
+act, and he afterward said that I had the pallor of a man who had been
+living in a cellar. "I was genuinely alarmed about you," he said.
+
+His small frame house was simple, but it stood in the midst of a clump
+of pear trees, and when I broke out in lyrical praise of the beauty of
+the grass and glory of the flowers, the doctor smiled and became even
+more distinctly friendly. It appeared that through Mr. Bashford he had
+purchased a farm in Dakota, and the fact that I knew all about it and
+all about wheat farming gave me distinction.
+
+He introduced me to his wife, a wholesome hearty soul who invited me to
+dinner. I stayed. It was my first chance at a real meal since my visit
+to Portland, and I left the house with a full stomach, as well as a full
+heart, feeling that the world was not quite so unfriendly after all.
+"Come again on Sunday," the doctor almost commanded. "We shall expect
+you."
+
+My money had now retired to the lower corner of my left-hand pocket and
+it was evident that unless I called upon my father for help I must go
+back to the West; and much as I loved to talk of the broad fields and
+pleasant streams of Dakota, I dreaded the approach of the hour when I
+must leave Boston, which was coming to mean more and more to me every
+day.
+
+In a blind vague way I felt that to leave Boston was to leave all hope
+of a literary career and yet I saw no way of earning money in the city.
+In the stress of my need I thought of an old friend, a carpenter in
+Greenfield. "I'm sure he will give me a job," I said.
+
+With this in mind I went into Professor Brown's office one morning and I
+said, "Well, Professor, I must leave you."
+
+"What's that? What's the matter?" queried the principal shrilly.
+
+"My money's gone. I've got to get out and earn more," I answered sadly.
+
+He eyed me gravely. "What are you going to do?" he inquired.
+
+"I am going back to shingling," I said with tragic accent.
+
+"Shingling!" the old man exclaimed, and then began to laugh, his big
+paunch shaking up and down with the force of his mirth. "Shingling!" he
+shouted finally. "Can _you_ shingle?"
+
+"You bet I can," I replied with comical access of pride, "but I don't
+like to. That is to say I don't like to give up my work here in Boston
+just when I am beginning to feel at home."
+
+Brown continued to chuckle. To hear that a man who knew Mantegazza and
+Darwin and Whitman and Browning could even _think_ of shingling, was
+highly humorous, but as he studied my forlorn face he sensed the
+despairing quiver in my voice and his kind heart softened. He ceased to
+smile. "Oh, you mustn't do that," he said earnestly. "You mustn't
+surrender now. We'll fix up some way for you to earn your keep. Can't
+you borrow a little?"
+
+"Yes, I could get a few dollars from home, but I don't feel justified in
+doing so,--times are hard out there and besides I see no way of repaying
+a loan."
+
+He pondered a moment, "Well, now I'll tell you what we'll do. I'll make
+you our Instructor in Literature for the summer term and I'll put your
+Booth lecture on the programme. That will give you a start, and perhaps
+something else will develop for the autumn."
+
+This noble offer so emboldened me that I sent west for twenty-five
+dollars to pay my board, and to have my suit dyed.--It was the very same
+suit I had bought of the Clark Street tailor, and the aniline purple had
+turned pink along the seams--or if not pink it was some other color
+equally noticeable in the raiment of a lecturer, and not to be endured.
+I also purchased a new pair of shoes and a necktie of the Windsor
+pattern. This cravat and my long Prince Albert frock, while not strictly
+in fashion, made me feel at least presentable.
+
+Another piece of good fortune came to me soon after. Dr. Cross again
+invited me to dine and after dinner as we were driving together along
+one of the country lanes, the good doctor said, "Mrs. Cross is going up
+into New Hampshire for the summer and I shall be alone in the house. Why
+don't you come and stay with me? You need the open air, and I need
+company."
+
+This generous offer nearly shipwrecked my dignity. Several moments
+passed before I could control my voice to thank him. At last I said,
+"That's very kind of you, Doctor. I'll come if you will let me pay at
+least the cost of my board."
+
+The Doctor understood this feeling and asked, "How much are you paying
+now?"
+
+With slight evasion I replied, "Well, I try to keep within five dollars
+a week."
+
+He smiled. "I don't see how you do it, but I can give you an attic room
+and you can pay me at your convenience."
+
+This noble invitation translated me from my dark, cold, cramped den
+(with its night-guard of redoubtable cockroaches) into the light and air
+of a comfortable suburban home. It took me back to the sky and the birds
+and the grass--and Irish Mary, the cook, put red blood into my veins. In
+my sabbath walks along the beautiful country roads, I heard again the
+song of the cat-bird and the trill of the bobolink. For the first time
+in months I slept in freedom from hunger, in security of the morrow. Oh,
+good Hiram Cross, your golden crown should be studded with jewels, for
+your life was filled with kindnesses like this!
+
+Meanwhile, in preparation for the summer term I gladly helped stamp and
+mail Brown's circulars. The lecture "Edwin Booth as Iago" I carefully
+re-wrote--for Brown had placed it on his printed programme and had also
+announced me as "Instructor in Literature." I took care to send this
+circular to all my friends and relatives in the west.
+
+Decidedly that summer of Taine in a Dakota cabin was bearing fruit, and
+yet just in proportion as Brown came to believe in my ability so did he
+proceed to "hector" me. He never failed to ask of a morning, "Well, when
+are you going back to shingling?"
+
+The Summer School opened in July. It was well attended, and the
+membership being made up of teachers of English and Oratory from
+several states was very impressive to me. Professors of elocution and of
+literature from well-known colleges and universities gave dignity and
+distinction to every session.
+
+My class was very small and paid me very little but it brought me to
+know Mrs. Payne, a studious, kindly woman (a resident of Hyde Park), who
+for some reason which will forever remain obscure, considered me not
+merely a youth of promise, but a lecturer of value. Having heard from
+Brown how sadly I needed money--perhaps she even detected poverty in my
+dyed coat, she not only invited me to deliver an immediate course of
+lectures at her house in Hyde Park but proceeded to force tickets upon
+all her friends.
+
+The importance of this engagement will appear when the reader is
+informed that I was owing the Doctor for a month's board, and saw no way
+of paying it, and that my one suit was distressingly threadbare. There
+are other and more interesting ways of getting famous but alas! I rose
+only by inches and incredible effort. My reader must be patient with me.
+
+My subjects were ambitious enough, "The Art of Edwin Booth," was ready
+for delivery, but "Victor Hugo and his Prose Masterpieces," was only
+partly composed and "The Modern German Novel" and "The American Novel"
+were in notes merely, therefore with puckered brow and sturdy pen I set
+to work in my little attic room, and there I toiled day and night to put
+on paper the notions I had acquired concerning these grandiose subjects.
+
+In after years I was appalled at the audacity of that schedule, and I
+think I had the grace to be scared at the time, but I swung into it
+recklessly. Tickets had been taken by some of the best known men among
+the teachers, and I was assured by Mrs. Payne that we would have the
+most distinguished audience that ever graced Hyde Park. "Among your
+listeners will be the literary editors of several Boston papers, two
+celebrated painters, and several well-known professors of oratory," she
+said, and like Lieutenant Napoleon called upon to demonstrate his
+powers, I graved with large and ruthless fist, and approached my opening
+date with palpitating but determined heart.
+
+It was a tense moment for me as (while awaiting my introduction) I
+looked into the faces of the men and women seated in that crowded
+parlor. Just before the dais, shading his eyes with his hand, was a
+small man with a pale face and brown beard. This was Charles E. Hurd,
+literary editor of the _Transcript_. Near him sat Theodore Weld, as
+venerable in appearance as Socrates (with long white hair and rosy
+cheeks), well known as one of the anti-slavery guard, a close friend of
+Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison. Beside him was Professor
+Raymond of Princeton, the author of several books, while Churchill of
+Andover and half a dozen other representatives of great colleges loomed
+behind him. I faced them all with a gambler's composure but behind my
+mask I was jellied with fear.
+
+However, when I rose to speak, the tremor passed out of my limbs, the
+blood came back to my brain, and I began without stammering. This first
+paper, fortunately for us all, dealt with Edwin Booth, whom I revered.
+To my mind he not only expressed the highest reach of dramatic art in
+his day, he was the best living interpreter of Shakespeare, and no doubt
+it was the sincerity of my utterance which held my hearers, for they all
+listened intently while I analyzed the character of _Iago_, and
+disclosed what seemed to me to be the sources of the great tragedian's
+power, and when I finished they applauded with unmistakable approval,
+and Mrs. Payne glowed with a sense of proprietorship in her protege who
+had seized the opportunity and made it his. I was absurd but
+triumphant.
+
+Many of the guests (kindly of spirit) came up to shake hands and
+congratulate me. Mr. Hurd gave me a close grip and said, "Come up to the
+_Transcript_ office and see me." John J. Enneking, a big, awkward
+red-bearded painter, elbowed up and in his queer German way spoke in
+approval. Churchill, Raymond, both said, "You'll do," and Brown finally
+came along with a mocking smile on his big face, eyed me with an air of
+quizzical comradeship, nudged me slyly with his elbow as he went by, and
+said, "Going back to shingling, are you?"
+
+On the homeward drive, Dr. Cross said very solemnly, "You have no need
+to fear the future."
+
+It was a very small event in the history of Hyde Park, but it was a
+veritable bridge of Lodi for me. I never afterward felt lonely or
+disheartened in Boston. I had been tested both as teacher and orator and
+I must be pardoned for a sudden growth of boyish self-confidence.
+
+The three lectures which followed were not so successful as the first,
+but my audience remained. Indeed I think it would have increased night
+by night had the room permitted it, and Mrs. Payne was still perfectly
+sure that her protege had in him all the elements of success, but I fear
+Prof. Church expressed the sad truth when he said in writing, "Your man
+Garland is a diamond in the rough!" Of course I must have appeared very
+seedy and uncouth to these people and I am filled with wonder at their
+kindness to me. My accent was western. My coat sleeves shone at the
+elbows, my trousers bagged at the knees. Considering the anarch I must
+have been, I marvel at their toleration. No western audience could have
+been more hospitable, more cordial.
+
+The ninety dollars which I gained from this series of lectures was, let
+me say, the less important part of my victory, and yet it was wondrous
+opportune. They enabled me to cancel my indebtedness to the Doctor, and
+still have a little something to keep me going until my classes began in
+October, and as my landlord did not actually evict me, I stayed on
+shamelessly, fattening visibly on the puddings and roasts which Mrs.
+Cross provided and dear old Mary cooked with joy. She was the true
+artist. She loved to see her work appreciated.
+
+My class in English literature that term numbered twenty and the money
+which this brought carried me through till the mid-winter vacation, and
+permitted another glorious season of Booth and the Symphony Orchestra.
+In the month of January I organized a class in American Literature, and
+so at last became self-supporting in the city of Boston! No one who has
+not been through it can realize the greatness of this victory.
+
+I permitted myself a few improvements in hose and linen. I bought a
+leather hand-bag with a shoulder strap, and every day joined the stream
+of clerks and students crossing the Common. I began to feel a
+proprietary interest in the Hub. My sleeping room (also my study),
+continued to be in the attic (a true attic with a sloping roof and one
+window) but the window faced the south, and in it I did all my reading
+and writing. It was hot on sunny days and dark on cloudy days, but it
+was a refuge.
+
+As a citizen with a known habitation I was permitted to carry away books
+from the library, and each morning from eight until half-past twelve I
+sat at my desk writing, tearing away at some lecture, or historical
+essay, and once in a while I composed a few lines of verse. Five
+afternoons in each week I went to my classes and to the library,
+returning at six o'clock to my dinner and to my reading. This was my
+routine, and I was happy in it. My letters to my people in the west
+were confident, more confident than I ofttimes felt.
+
+During my second summer Burton Babcock, who had decided to study for the
+Unitarian ministry, came east with intent to enter the Divinity School
+at Harvard. He was the same old Burton, painfully shy, thoughtful,
+quaintly abrupt in manner, and together we visited the authorities at
+Cambridge and presented his case as best we could.
+
+For some reason not clear to either of us, the school refused to aid and
+after a week's stay with me Burton, a little disheartened but not
+resentful, went to Meadville, Pennsylvania. Boston seemed very wonderful
+to him and I enjoyed his visit keenly. We talked inevitably of old
+friends and old days in the manner of middle-aged men, and he told me
+that John Gammons had entered the Methodist ministry and was stationed
+in Decorah, that Charles, my former partner in Dakota, had returned to
+the old home very ill with some obscure disease. Mitchell Morrison was a
+watch-maker and jeweler in Winona and Lee Moss had gone to Superior. The
+scattering process had begun. The diverging wind-currents of destiny had
+already parted our little group and every year would see its members
+farther apart. How remote it all seems to me now,--like something
+experienced on another planet!
+
+Each month saw me more and more the Bostonian by adoption. My teaching
+paid my board, leaving me free to study and to write. I never did any
+hack-work for the newspapers. Hawthorne's influence over me was still
+powerful, and in my first attempts at writing fiction I kept to the
+essay form and sought for a certain distinction in tone. In poetry,
+however, Bret Harte, Joaquin Miller, and Walt Whitman were more to my
+way of thinking than either Poe or Emerson. In brief I was sadly
+"mixed." Perhaps the enforced confinement of my city life gave all poems
+of the open air, of the prairies, their great and growing power over me
+for I had resolved to remain in Boston until such time as I could return
+to the West in the guise of a conqueror. Just what I was about to
+conquer and in what way I was to secure eminence was not very clear to
+me, but I was resolved none the less, and had no immediate intention of
+returning.
+
+In the summer of 1886 Brown held another Summer School and again I
+taught a class. Autumn brought a larger success. Mrs. Lee started a
+Browning Class in Chelsea, and another loyal pupil organized a
+Shakespeare class in Waltham. I enjoyed my trips to these classes very
+much and one of the first stories I ever wrote was suggested by some
+characters I saw in an old grocery store in Waltham. As I recall my
+method of teaching, it consisted chiefly of readings. My critical
+comment could not have been profound.
+
+I was earning now twelve dollars per week, part of this went for railway
+fare, but I still had a margin of profit. True I still wore reversible
+cuffs and carried my laundry bundles in order to secure the discount,
+but I dressed in better style and looked a little less like a starving
+Russian artist, and I was becoming an author!
+
+My entrance into print came about through my good friend, Mr. Hurd, the
+book reviewer of the _Transcript_. For him I began to write an
+occasional critical article or poem just to try my hand. One of my
+regular "beats" was up the three long flights of stairs which led to
+Hurd's little den above Washington Street, for there I felt myself a
+little more of the literary man, a little nearer the current of American
+fiction.
+
+Let me repeat my appreciation of the fact that I met with the quickest
+response and the most generous aid among the people of Boston. There was
+nothing cold or critical in their treatment of me. My success,
+admittedly, came from some sympathy in them rather than from any real
+deserving on my part. I cannot understand at this distance why those
+charming people should have consented to receive from me, opinions
+concerning anything whatsoever,--least of all notions of
+literature,--but they did, and they seemed delighted at "discovering"
+me. Perhaps they were surprised at finding so much intelligence in a man
+from the plains.
+
+It was well that I was earning my own living at last, for things were
+not going especially well at home. A couple of dry seasons had made a
+great change in the fortunes of my people. Frank, with his usual
+careless good nature as clerk in the store had given credit to almost
+every comer, and as the hard times came on, many of those indebted
+failed to pay, and father was forced to give up his business and go back
+to the farm which he understood and could manage without the aid of an
+accountant.
+
+"The Junior" as I called my brother, being footloose and discontented,
+wrote to say that he was planning to go farther west--to Montana, I
+think it was. His letter threw me into dismay. I acknowledged once again
+that my education had in a sense been bought at his expense. I recalled
+the many weeks when the little chap had plowed in my stead whilst I was
+enjoying the inspiration of Osage. It gave me distress to think of him
+separating himself from the family as David had done, and yet my own
+position was too insecure to warrant me promising much in his aid.
+Nevertheless, realizing that mother would suffer less if she knew her
+two sons were together, I wrote, saying, "If you have definitely decided
+on leaving home, don't go west. Come to Boston, and I will see if I
+cannot get you something to do."
+
+It ended in his coming to Boston, and my mother was profoundly
+relieved. Father gave no sign either of pleasure or regret. He set to
+work once more increasing his acreage, vigorous and unsubdued.
+
+Frank's coming added to my burden of responsibility and care, but
+increased my pleasure in the city, for I now had someone to show it to.
+He secured a position as an accountant in a railway office and though we
+seldom met during the week, on Sundays we roamed the parks, or took
+excursions down the bay, and in a short time he too became an
+enthusiastic Bostonian with no thought of returning to Dakota. Little
+Jessie was now the sole stay and comfort of our mother.
+
+As I look back now upon the busy, happy days of 1885 and 1886, I can
+grasp only a few salient experiences.... A terrific storm is on the sea.
+We are at Nantasket to study it. The enormous waves are charging in from
+the illimitable sky like an army of horses, only to fall and waste
+themselves in wrath upon the sand. I feel the stinging blast against my
+face.... I am riding on a train over the marshes on my way to my class
+in Chelsea. I look across the level bay and behold a soaring banner of
+sunshot mist, spun by a passing engine, rising, floating, vanishing in
+the air.... I am sitting in an old grocery shop in Waltham listening to
+the quaint aphorism of a group of loafers around the stove.... I am
+lecturing before a summer school in Pepperel, New Hampshire.... I am at
+the theater, I hear Salvini thunderously clamoring on the stage. I see
+Modjeska's beautiful hands. I thrill to Sarah Bernhardt's velvet somber
+voice....
+
+It is summer, Frank and I are walking the lovely lanes of Milton under
+gigantic elms, or lying on the grass of the park in West Roxbury,
+watching the wild birds come and go, hearing the sound of the
+scythestone in the meadow. Day by day, week by week, Boston, New
+England, comes to fuse that part of me which is eastern. I grow at last
+into thinking myself a fixture. Boston is the center of music, of art,
+of literature. My only wish now is to earn money enough to visit my
+people in the West.
+
+And yet, notwithstanding all this, neither of us ever really became a
+Bostonian. We never got beyond a feeling for the beauty, the
+picturesqueness and the charm of our surroundings. The East caused me to
+cry out in admiration, but it did not inspire me to write. It did not
+appeal to me as my material. It was rather as a story already told, a
+song already sung.
+
+When I walked a lane, or saw the sloping roof of a house set against a
+hillside I thought of Whittier or Hawthorne and was silent. The sea
+reminded me of Celia Thaxter or Lucy Larcom. The marshes brought up the
+_Wayside Inn_ of Longfellow; all, all was of the past. New England, rich
+with its memories of great men and noble women, had no direct
+inspiration for me, a son of the West. It did not lay hold upon my
+creative imagination, neither did it inspire me to sing of its glory. I
+remained immutably of the Middle Border and strange to say, my desire to
+celebrate the West was growing.
+
+Each season dropped a thickening veil of mist between me and the scenes
+of my youth, adding a poetic glamour to every rememberable form and
+fact. Each spring when the smell of fresh, uncovered earth returned to
+fret my nostrils I thought of the wide fields of Iowa, of the level
+plains of Dakota, and a desire to hear once more the prairie chicken
+calling from the ridges filled my heart. In the autumn when the wind
+swept through the bare branches of the elm, I thought of the lonely days
+of plowing on the prairie, and the poetry and significance of those wild
+gray days came over me with such power that I instinctively seized my
+pen to write of them.
+
+One day, a man shoveling coal in the alley below my window reminded me
+of that peculiar ringing _scrape_ which the farm shovel used to make
+when (on the Iowa farm) at dusk I scooped my load of corn from the wagon
+box to the crib, and straightway I fell a-dreaming, and from dreaming I
+came to composition, and so it happened that my first writing of any
+significance was an article depicting an Iowa corn-husking scene.
+
+It was not merely a picture of the life my brother and I had lived,--it
+was an attempt to set forth a typical scene of the Middle Border. "The
+Farm Life of New England has been fully celebrated by means of
+innumerable stories and poems," I began, "its husking bees, its dances,
+its winter scenes are all on record; is it not time that we of the west
+should depict our own distinctive life? The middle border has its
+poetry, its beauty, if we can only see it."
+
+To emphasize these differences I called this first article "The Western
+Corn Husking," and put into it the grim report of the man who had "been
+there," an insistence on the painful as well as the pleasant truth, a
+quality which was discovered afterwards to be characteristic of my work.
+The bitter truth was strongly developed in this first article.
+
+Up to this time I had composed nothing except several more or less
+high-falutin' essays, a few poems and one or two stories somewhat in
+imitation of Hawthorne, but in this my first real shot at the
+delineation of prairie life, I had no models. Perhaps this clear field
+helped me to be true. It was not fiction, as I had no intention at that
+time of becoming a fictionist, but it was fact, for it included the mud
+and cold of the landscape as well as its bloom and charm.
+
+I sent "The Corn Husking" to the _New American Magazine_, and almost by
+return mail the editor, William Wyckoff, wrote an inspiring letter to
+the effect that the life I had described was familiar to him, and that
+it had never been treated in this way. "I shall be very glad to read
+anything you have written or may write, and I suggest that you follow up
+this article by others of the same nature."
+
+It was just the encouragement I needed. I fell to work at once upon
+other articles, taking up the seasons one by one. Wyckoff accepted them
+gladly, but paid for them slowly and meagerly--but I did not blame him
+for that. His magazine was even then struggling for life.
+
+It must have been about this time that I sold to _Harper's Weekly_ a
+long poem of the prairie, for which I was paid the enormous sum of
+twenty-five dollars. With this, the first money I ever had received for
+magazine writing, I hastened to purchase some silk for my mother, and
+the _Memoirs of General Grant_ for my father, with intent to suitably
+record and celebrate my entrance into literature. For the first time in
+her life, my mother was able to wear a silk dress, and she wrote, soon
+after, a proud and grateful letter saying things which blurred my eyes
+and put a lump into my throat. If only I could have laid the silk in her
+lap, and caught the light of her happy smile!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+A Visit to the West
+
+
+At twenty-seven years of age, and after having been six years absent
+from Osage, the little town in which I went to school, I found myself
+able to revisit it. My earnings were still humiliatingly less than those
+of a hod-carrier, but by shameless economy I had saved a little over one
+hundred dollars and with this as a travelling fund, I set forth at the
+close of school, on a vacation tour which was planned to include the old
+home in the Coulee, the Iowa farm, and my father's house in Dakota. I
+took passage in a first class coach this time, but was still a long way
+from buying a berth in a sleeping car.
+
+To find myself actually on the train and speeding westward was deeply
+and pleasurably exciting, but I did not realize how keen my hunger for
+familiar things had grown, till the next day when I reached the level
+lands of Indiana. Every field of wheat, every broad hat, every honest
+treatment of the letter "r" gave me assurance that I was approaching my
+native place. The reapers at work in the fields filled my mind with
+visions of the past. The very weeds at the roadside had a magical appeal
+and yet, eager as I was to reach old friends, I found in Chicago a new
+friend whose sympathy was so stimulating, so helpful that I delayed my
+journey for two days in order that I might profit by his critical
+comment.
+
+This meeting came about in a literary way. Some months earlier, in May,
+to be exact, Hurd of the _Transcript_ had placed in my hands a novel
+called _Zury_ and my review of it had drawn from its author, a western
+man, a letter of thanks and a cordial invitation to visit him as I
+passed through Chicago, on my way to my old home. This I had gladly
+accepted, and now with keen interest, I was on my way to his home.
+
+Joseph Kirkland was at this time nearly sixty years of age, a small,
+alert, dark-eyed man, a lawyer, who lived in what seemed to me at the
+time, plutocratic grandeur, but in spite of all this, and
+notwithstanding the difference in our ages, I liked him and we formed an
+immediate friendship. "Mrs. Kirkland and my daughters are in Michigan
+for the summer," he explained, "and I am camping in my study." I was
+rather glad of this arrangement for, having the house entirely to
+ourselves, we could discuss realism, Howells and the land-question with
+full vigor and all night if we felt like it.
+
+Kirkland had read some of my western sketches and in the midst of his
+praise of them suddenly asked, "Why don't you write fiction?"
+
+To this I replied, "I can't manage the dialogue."
+
+"Nonsense!" said he. "You're lazy, that's all. You use the narrative
+form because it's easier. Buckle to it--you can write stories as well as
+I can--but you must sweat!"
+
+This so surprised me that I was unable to make any denial of his charge.
+The fact is he was right. To compose a page of conversation, wherein
+each actor uses his own accent and speaks from his own point of view,
+was not easy. I had dodged the hard spots.
+
+The older man's bluntness and humor, and his almost wistful appreciation
+of my youth and capacity for being moved, troubled me, absorbed my mind
+even during our talk. Some of his words stuck like burrs, because they
+seemed so absurd. "When your name is known all over the West," he said
+in parting, "remember what I say. You can go far if you'll only work. I
+began too late. I can't emotionalize present day western life--you can,
+but you must bend to your desk like a man. You must grind!"
+
+I didn't feel in the least like a successful fictionist and being a
+household word seemed very remote,--but I went away resolved to "grind"
+if grinding would do any good.
+
+Once out of the city, I absorbed "atmosphere" like a sponge. It was with
+me no longer (as in New England) a question of warmed-over themes and
+appropriated characters. Whittier, Hawthorne, Holmes, had no connection
+with the rude life of these prairies. Each weedy field, each wire fence,
+the flat stretches of grass, the leaning Lombardy trees,--everything was
+significant rather than beautiful, familiar rather than picturesque.
+
+Something deep and resonant vibrated within my brain as I looked out
+upon this monotonous commonplace landscape. I realized for the first
+time that the east had surfeited me with picturesqueness. It appeared
+that I had been living for six years amidst painted, neatly arranged
+pasteboard scenery. Now suddenly I dropped to the level of nature
+unadorned, down to the ugly unkempt lanes I knew so well, back to the
+pungent realities of the streamless plain.
+
+Furthermore I acknowledged a certain responsibility for the conditions
+of the settlers. I felt related to them, an intolerant part of them.
+Once fairly out among the fields of northern Illinois everything became
+so homely, uttered itself so piercingly to me that nothing less than
+song could express my sense of joy, of power. This was my country--these
+my people.
+
+It was the third of July, a beautiful day with a radiant sky, darkened
+now and again with sudden showers. Great clouds, trailing veils of
+rain, enveloped the engine as it roared straight into the west,--for an
+instant all was dark, then forth we burst into the brilliant sunshine
+careening over the green ridges as if drawn by runaway dragons with
+breath of flame.
+
+It was sundown when I crossed the Mississippi river (at Dubuque) and the
+scene which I looked out upon will forever remain a splendid page in my
+memory. The coaches lay under the western bluffs, but away to the south
+the valley ran, walled with royal purple, and directly across the flood,
+a beach of sand flamed under the sunset light as if it were a bed of
+pure untarnished gold. Behind this an island rose, covered with noble
+trees which suggested all the romance of the immemorial river. The
+redman's canoe, the explorer's batteau, the hunter's lodge, the
+emigrant's cabin, all stood related to that inspiring vista. For the
+first time in my life I longed to put this noble stream into verse.
+
+All that day I had studied the land, musing upon its distinctive
+qualities, and while I acknowledged the natural beauty of it, I revolted
+from the gracelessness of its human habitations. The lonely boxlike
+farm-houses on the ridges suddenly appeared to me like the dens of wild
+animals. The lack of color, of charm in the lives of the people
+anguished me. I wondered why I had never before perceived the futility
+of woman's life on a farm.
+
+I asked myself, "Why have these stern facts never been put into our
+literature as they have been used in Russia and in England? Why has this
+land no story-tellers like those who have made Massachusetts and New
+Hampshire illustrious?"
+
+These and many other speculations buzzed in my brain. Each moment was a
+revelation of new uglinesses as well as of remembered beauties.
+
+At four o'clock of a wet morning I arrived at Charles City, from which
+I was to take "the spur" for Osage. Stiffened and depressed by my
+night's ride, I stepped out upon the platform and watched the train as
+it passed on, leaving me, with two or three other silent and sleepy
+passengers, to wait until seven o'clock in the morning for the
+"accommodation train." I was still busy with my problem, but the salient
+angles of my interpretation were economic rather than literary.
+
+Walking to and fro upon the platform, I continued to ponder my
+situation. In a few hours I would be among my old friends and
+companions, to measure and be measured. Six years before I had left them
+to seek my fortune in the eastern world. I had promised
+little,--fortunately--and I was returning, without the pot of gold and
+with only a tinge of glory.
+
+Exteriorly I had nothing but a crop of sturdy whiskers to show for my
+years of exile but mentally I was much enriched. Twenty years of
+development lay between my thought at the moment and those of my simpler
+days. My study of Spencer, Whitman and other of the great leaders of the
+world, my years of absorbed reading in the library, my days of
+loneliness and hunger in the city had swept me into a far bleak land of
+philosophic doubt where even the most daring of my classmates would
+hesitate to follow me.
+
+A violent perception of the mysterious, the irrevocable march of human
+life swept over me and I shivered before a sudden realization of the
+ceaseless change and shift of western life and landscape. How few of
+those I knew were there to greet me! Walter and Charles were dead, Maud
+and Lena were both married, and Burton was preaching somewhere in the
+West.
+
+Six short years had made many changes in the little town and it was in
+thinking upon these changes that I reached a full realization of the
+fact that I was no longer a "promising boy" of the prairie but a man,
+with a notion of human life and duty and responsibility which was
+neither cheerful nor resigned. I was returning as from deep valleys,
+from the most alien climate.
+
+Looking at the sky above me, feeling the rush of the earth beneath my
+feet I saw how much I had dared and how little, how pitifully little I
+had won. Over me the ragged rainclouds swept, obscuring the stars and in
+their movement and in the feeling of the dawn lay something illimitable
+and prophetic. Such moments do not come to men often--but to me for an
+hour, life was painfully purposeless. "What does it all mean?" I asked
+myself.
+
+At last the train came, and as it rattled away to the north and I drew
+closer to the scenes of my boyhood, my memory quickened. The Cedar
+rippling over its limestone ledges, the gray old mill and the pond where
+I used to swim, the farm-houses with their weedy lawns, all seemed not
+only familiar but friendly, and when at last I reached the station (the
+same grimy little den from which I had started forth six years before),
+I rose from my seat with the air of a world-traveller and descended upon
+the warped and splintered platform, among my one time friends and
+neighbors, with quickened pulse and seeking eye.
+
+It was the fourth of July and a crowd was at the station, but though I
+recognized half the faces, not one of them lightened at sight of me. The
+'bus driver, the ragged old dray-man (scandalously profane), the common
+loafers shuffling about, chewing and spitting, seemed absolutely
+unchanged. One or two elderly citizens eyed me closely as I slung my
+little Boston valise with a long strap over my shoulder and started up
+the billowing board sidewalk toward the center of the town, but I gave
+out no word of recognition. Indeed I took a boyish pride in the
+disguising effect of my beard.
+
+How small and flat and leisurely the village seemed. The buildings which
+had once been so imposing in my eyes were now of very moderate elevation
+indeed, and the opera house was almost indistinguishable from the
+two-story structures which flanked it; but the trees had increased in
+dignity, and some of the lawns were lovely.
+
+With eyes singling out each familiar object I loitered along the walk.
+There stood the grimy wagon shop from which a hammer was ringing
+cheerily, like the chirp of a cricket,--just as aforetime. Orrin Blakey
+stood at the door of his lumber yard surveying me with curious eyes but
+I passed him in silence. I wished to spend an hour or two in going about
+in guise of a stranger. There was something instructive as well as
+deliciously exciting in thus seeing old acquaintances as from behind a
+mask. They were at once familiar and mysterious--mysterious with my new
+question, "Is this life worth living?"
+
+The Merchants' Hotel which once appeared so luxurious (within the reach
+only of great lecturers like Joseph Cook and Wendell Phillips) had
+declined to a shabby frame tavern, but entering the dining room I
+selected a seat near an open window, from which I could look out upon
+the streets and survey the throng of thickening sightseers as they moved
+up and down before me like the figures in a vitascope.
+
+I was waited upon by a slatternly girl and the breakfast she brought to
+me was so bad (after Mary's cooking) that I could only make a pretense
+of eating it, but I kept my seat, absorbed by the forms coming and
+going, almost within the reach of my hand. Among the first to pace
+slowly by was Lawyer Ricker, stately, solemn and bibulous as ever, his
+red beard flowing over a vest unbuttoned in the manner of the
+old-fashioned southern gentleman, his spotless linen and neat tie
+showing that his careful, faithful wife was still on guard.
+
+Him I remembered for his astounding ability to recite poetry by the hour
+and also because of a florid speech which I once heard him make in the
+court room. For six mortal hours he spoke on a case involving the
+stealing of a horse-blanket worth about four dollars and a half. In the
+course of his argument he ranged with leisurely self-absorption, from
+ancient Egypt and the sacred Crocodile down through the dark ages,
+touching at Athens and Mount Olympus, reviewing Rome and the court of
+Charlemagne, winding up at four P. M. with an impassioned appeal to the
+jury to remember the power of environment upon his client. I could not
+remember how the suit came out, but I did recall the look of
+stupefaction which rested on the face of the accused as he found himself
+likened to Gurth the swine-herd and a peasant of Carcassone.
+
+Ricker seemed quite unchanged save for the few gray hairs which had come
+into his beard and, as he stood in conversation with one of the
+merchants of the town, his nasal voice, his formal speech and the
+grandiloquent gesture of his right hand brought back to me all the
+stories I had heard of his drinking and of his wife's heroic rescuing
+expeditions to neighboring saloons. A strange, unsatisfactory end to a
+man of great natural ability.
+
+Following him came a young girl leading a child of ten. I knew them at
+once. Ella McKee had been of the size of the little one, her sister,
+when I went away, and nothing gave me a keener realization of the years
+which had passed than the flowering of the child I had known into this
+charming maiden of eighteen. Her resemblance to her sister Flora was too
+marked to be mistaken, and the little one by her side had the same
+flashing eyes and radiant smile with which both of her grown up sisters
+were endowed. Their beauty fairly glorified the dingy street as they
+walked past my window.
+
+Then an old farmer, bent and worn of frame, halted before me to talk
+with a merchant. This was David Babcock, Burton's father, one of our old
+time neighbors, a little more bent, a little thinner, a little
+grayer--that was all, and as I listened to his words I asked, "What
+purpose does a man serve by toiling like that for sixty years with no
+increase of leisure, with no growth in mental grace?"
+
+There was a wistful note in his voice which went straight to my heart.
+He said: "No, our wheat crop ain't a-going to amount to much this year.
+Of course we don't try to raise much grain--it's mostly stock, but I
+thought I'd try wheat again. I wisht we could get back to the good old
+days of wheat raising--it w'ant so confining as stock-raisin'." His good
+days were also in the past!
+
+As I walked the street I met several neighbors from Dry Run as well as
+acquaintances from the Grove. Nearly all, even the young men, looked
+worn and weather-beaten and some appeared both silent and sad. Laughter
+was curiously infrequent and I wondered whether in my days on the farm
+they had all been as rude of dress, as misshapen of form and as wistful
+of voice as they now seemed to me to be. "Have times changed? Has a
+spirit of unrest and complaining developed in the American farmer?"
+
+I perceived the town from the triple viewpoint of a former resident, a
+man from the city, and a reformer, and every minutest detail of dress,
+tone and gesture revealed new meaning to me. Fancher and Gammons were
+feebler certainly, and a little more querulous with age, and their faded
+beards and rough hands gave pathetic evidence of the hard wear of wind
+and toil. At the moment nothing glozed the essential tragic futility of
+their existence.
+
+Then down the street came "The Ragamuffins," the little Fourth of July
+procession, which in the old days had seemed so funny, so exciting to
+me. I laughed no more. It filled me with bitterness to think that such a
+makeshift spectacle could amuse anyone. "How dull and eventless life
+must be to enable such a pitiful travesty to attract and hold the
+attention of girls like Ella and Flora," I thought as I saw them
+standing with their little sister to watch "the parade."
+
+From the window of a law office, Emma and Matilda Leete were leaning and
+I decided to make myself known to them. Emma, who had been one of my
+high admirations, had developed into a handsome and interesting woman
+with very little of the village in her dress or expression, and when I
+stepped up to her and asked, "Do you know me?" her calm gray eyes and
+smiling lips denoted humor. "Of course I know you--in spite of the
+beard. Come in and sit with us and tell all of us about yourself."
+
+As we talked, I found that they, at least, had kept in touch with the
+thought of the east, and Ella understood in some degree the dark mood
+which I voiced. She, too, occasionally doubted whether the life they
+were all living was worth while. "We make the best of it," she said,
+"but none of us are living up to our dreams."
+
+Her musical voice, thoughtful eyes and quick intelligence, re-asserted
+their charm, and I spent an hour or more in her company talking of old
+friends. It was not necessary to talk down to her. She was essentially
+urban in tone while other of the girls who had once impressed me with
+their beauty had taken on the airs of village matrons and did not
+interest me. If they retained aspirations they concealed the fact. Their
+husbands and children entirely occupied their minds.
+
+Returning to the street, I introduced myself to Uncle Billy Fraser and
+Osmund Button and other Sun Prairie neighbors and when it became known
+that "Dick Garland's boy" was in town, many friends gathered about to
+shake my hand and inquire concerning "Belle" and "Dick."
+
+The hard, crooked fingers, which they laid in my palm completed the
+sorrowful impression which their faces had made upon me. A twinge of
+pain went through my heart as I looked into their dim eyes and studied
+their heavy knuckles. I thought of the hand of Edwin Booth, of the
+flower-like palm of Helena Modjeska, of the subtle touch of Inness, and
+I said, "Is it not time that the human hand ceased to be primarily a
+bludgeon for hammering a bare living out of the earth? Nature all
+bountiful, undiscriminating, would, under justice, make such toil
+unnecessary." My heart burned with indignation. With William Morris and
+Henry George I exclaimed, "Nature is not to blame. Man's laws are to
+blame,"--but of this I said nothing at the time--at least not to men
+like Babcock and Fraser.
+
+Next day I rode forth among the farms of Dry Run, retracing familiar
+lanes, standing under the spreading branches of the maple trees I had
+planted fifteen years before. I entered the low stone cabin wherein
+Neighbor Button had lived for twenty years (always intending sometime to
+build a house and make a granary of this), and at the table with the
+family and the hired men, I ate again of Ann's "riz" biscuit and sweet
+melon pickles. It was not a pleasant meal, on the contrary it was
+depressing to me. The days of the border were over, and yet Arvilla his
+wife was ill and aging, still living in pioneer discomfort toiling like
+a slave.
+
+At neighbor Gardner's home, I watched his bent complaining old wife
+housekeeping from dawn to dark, literally dying on her feet. William
+Knapp's home was somewhat improved but the men still came to the table
+in their shirt sleeves smelling of sweat and stinking of the stable,
+just as they used to do, and Mrs. Knapp grown more gouty, more unwieldy
+than ever (she spent twelve or fourteen hours each day on her swollen
+and aching feet), moved with a waddling motion because, as she
+explained, "I can't limp--I'm just as lame in one laig as I am in
+t'other. But 'tain't no use to complain, I've just so much work to do
+and I might as well go ahead and do it."
+
+I slept that night in her "best room," yes, at last, after thirty years
+of pioneer life, she had a guest chamber and a new "bedroom soot." With
+open pride and joy she led Belle Garland's boy in to view this precious
+acquisition, pointing out the soap and towels, and carefully removing
+the counterpane! I understood her pride, for my mother had not yet
+acquired anything so luxurious as this. She was still on the border!
+
+Next day, I called upon Andrew Ainsley and while the women cooked in a
+red-hot kitchen, Andy stubbed about the barnyard in his bare feet,
+showing me his hogs and horses. Notwithstanding his town-visitor and the
+fact that it was Sunday, he came to dinner in a dirty, sweaty,
+collarless shirt, and I, sitting at his oil-cloth covered table, slipped
+back, deeper, ever deeper among the stern realities of the life from
+which I had emerged. I recalled that while my father had never allowed
+his sons or the hired men to come to the table unwashed or uncombed, we
+usually ate while clothed in our sweaty garments, glad to get food into
+our mouths in any decent fashion, while the smell of the horse and the
+cow mingled with the savor of the soup. There is no escape even on a
+modern "model farm" from the odor of the barn.
+
+Every house I visited had its individual message of sordid struggle and
+half-hidden despair. Agnes had married and moved away to Dakota, and
+Bess had taken upon her girlish shoulders the burdens of wifehood and
+motherhood almost before her girlhood had reached its first period of
+bloom. In addition to the work of being cook and scrub-woman, she was
+now a mother and nurse. As I looked around upon her worn chairs, faded
+rag carpets, and sagging sofas,--the bare walls of her pitiful little
+house seemed a prison. I thought of her as she was in the days of her
+radiant girlhood and my throat filled with rebellious pain.
+
+All the gilding of farm life melted away. The hard and bitter realities
+came back upon me in a flood. Nature was as beautiful as ever. The
+soaring sky was filled with shining clouds, the tinkle of the bobolink's
+fairy bells rose from the meadow, a mystical sheen was on the odorous
+grass and waving grain, but no splendor of cloud, no grace of sunset
+could conceal the poverty of these people, on the contrary they brought
+out, with a more intolerable poignancy, the gracelessness of these
+homes, and the sordid quality of the mechanical daily routine of these
+lives.
+
+I perceived beautiful youth becoming bowed and bent. I saw lovely
+girlhood wasting away into thin and hopeless age. Some of the women I
+had known had withered into querulous and complaining spinsterhood, and
+I heard ambitious youth cursing the bondage of the farm. "Of such pain
+and futility are the lives of the average man and woman of both city and
+country composed," I acknowledged to myself with savage candor, "Why lie
+about it?"
+
+Some of my playmates opened their acrid hearts to me. My presence
+stimulated their discontent. I was one of them, one who having escaped
+had returned as from some far-off glorious land of achievement. My
+improved dress, my changed manner of speech, everything I said, roused
+in them a kind of rebellious rage and gave them unwonted power of
+expression. Their mood was no doubt transitory, but it was as real as my
+own.
+
+Men who were growing bent in digging into the soil spoke to me of their
+desire to see something of the great eastern world before they died.
+Women whose eyes were faded and dim with tears, listened to me with
+almost breathless interest whilst I told them of the great cities I had
+seen, of wonderful buildings, of theaters, of the music of the sea.
+Young girls expressed to me their longing for a life which was better
+worth while, and lads, eager for adventure and excitement, confided to
+me their secret intention to leave the farm at the earliest moment. "I
+don't intend to wear out my life drudging on this old place," said
+Wesley Fancher with a bitter oath.
+
+In those few days, I perceived life without its glamor. I no longer
+looked upon these toiling women with the thoughtless eyes of youth. I
+saw no humor in the bent forms and graying hair of the men. I began to
+understand that my own mother had trod a similar slavish round with
+never a full day of leisure, with scarcely an hour of escape from the
+tugging hands of children, and the need of mending and washing clothes.
+I recalled her as she passed from the churn to the stove, from the stove
+to the bedchamber, and from the bedchamber back to the kitchen, day
+after day, year after year, rising at daylight or before, and going to
+her bed only after the evening dishes were washed and the stockings and
+clothing mended for the night.
+
+The essential tragedy and hopelessness of most human life under the
+conditions into which our society was swiftly hardening embittered me,
+called for expression, but even then I did not know that I had found my
+theme. I had no intention at the moment of putting it into fiction.
+
+The reader may interrupt at this point to declare that all life, even
+the life of the city is futile, if you look at it in that way, and I
+reply by saying that I still have moments when I look at it that way.
+What is it all about, anyhow, this life of ours? Certainly to be forever
+weary and worried, to be endlessly soiled with thankless labor and to
+grow old before one's time soured and disappointed, is not the whole
+destiny of man!
+
+Some of these things I said to Emma and Matilda but their optimism was
+too ingrained to yield to my gray mood. "We can't afford to grant too
+much," said Emma. "We are in it, you see."
+
+Leaving the village of Osage, with my mind still in a tumult of revolt,
+I took the train for the Northwest, eager to see my mother and my little
+sister, yet beginning to dread the changes which I must surely find in
+them. Not only were my senses exceedingly alert and impressionable, my
+eyes saw nothing but the loneliness and the lack of beauty in the
+landscape, and the farther west I went, the lonelier became the boxlike
+habitations of the plain. Here were the lands over which we had hurried
+in 1881, lured by the "Government Land" of the farther west. Here, now,
+a kind of pioneering behind the lines was going on. The free lands were
+gone and so, at last, the price demanded by these speculators must be
+paid.
+
+This wasteful method of pioneering, this desolate business of lonely
+settlement took on a new and tragic significance as I studied it.
+Instructed by my new philosophy I now perceived that these plowmen,
+these wives and daughters had been pushed out into these lonely ugly
+shacks by the force of landlordism behind. These plodding Swedes and
+Danes, these thrifty Germans, these hairy Russians had all fled from the
+feudalism of their native lands and were here because they had no share
+in the soil from which they sprung, and because in the settled
+communities of the eastern states, the speculative demand for land had
+hindered them from acquiring even a leasing right to the surface of the
+earth.
+
+I clearly perceived that our Song of Emigration had been, in effect, the
+hymn of fugitives!
+
+And yet all this did not prevent me from acknowledging the beauty of the
+earth. On the contrary, social injustice intensified nature's
+prodigality. I said, "Yes, the landscape is beautiful, but how much of
+its beauty penetrates to the heart of the men who are in the midst of it
+and battling with it? How much of consolation does the worn and weary
+renter find in the beauty of cloud and tree or in the splendor of the
+sunset?--Grace of flower does not feed or clothe the body, and when the
+toiler is both badly clothed and badly fed, bird-song and leaf-shine
+cannot bring content." Like Millet, I asked, "Why should all of a man's
+waking hours be spent in an effort to feed and clothe his family? Is
+there not something wrong in our social scheme when the unremitting
+toiler remains poor?"
+
+With such thoughts filling my mind, I passed through this belt of recent
+settlement and came at last into the valley of the James. One by one the
+familiar flimsy little wooden towns were left behind (strung like beads
+upon a string), and at last the elevator at Ordway appeared on the edge
+of the horizon, a minute, wavering projection against the sky-line, and
+half an hour later we entered the village, a sparse collection of
+weather-beaten wooden houses, without shade of trees or grass of lawns,
+a desolate, drab little town.
+
+Father met me at the train, grayer of beard and hair, but looking hale
+and cheerful, and his voice, his peculiar expressions swept away all my
+city experience. In an instant I was back precisely where I had been
+when I left the farm. He was Captain, I was a corporal in the rear
+ranks.
+
+And yet he was distinctly less harsh, less keen. He had mellowed. He had
+gained in sentiment, in philosophy, that was evident, and as we rode
+away toward the farm we fell into intimate, almost tender talk.
+
+I was glad to note that he had lost nothing either in dignity or
+manliness in my eyes. His speech though sometimes ungrammatical was
+vigorous and precise and his stories gave evidence of his native
+constructive skill. "Your mother is crazy to see you," he said, "but I
+have only this one-seated buggy, and she couldn't come down to meet
+you."
+
+When nearly a mile away I saw her standing outside the door of the house
+waiting for us, so eager that she could not remain seated, and as I
+sprang from the carriage she came hurrying out to meet me, uttering a
+curious little murmuring sound which touched me to the heart.
+
+The changes in her shocked me, filled me with a sense of guilt.
+Hesitation was in her speech. Her voice once so glowing and so jocund,
+was tremulous, and her brown hair, once so abundant, was thin and gray.
+I realized at once that in the three years of my absence she had topped
+the high altitude of her life and was now descending swiftly toward
+defenseless age, and in bitter sadness I entered the house to meet my
+sister Jessie who was almost a stranger to me.
+
+She had remained small and was quaintly stooped in neck and shoulders
+but retained something of her childish charm. To her I was quite alien,
+in no sense a brother. She was very reticent, but it did not take me
+long to discover that in her quiet fashion she commanded the camp. For
+all his military bluster, the old soldier was entirely subject to her.
+She was never wilful concerning anything really important, but she
+assumed all the rights of an individual and being the only child left in
+the family, went about her affairs without remark or question, serene,
+sweet but determined.
+
+The furniture and pictures of the house were quite as humble as I had
+remembered them to be, but mother wore with pride the silk dress I had
+sent to her and was so happy to have me at home that she sat in silent
+content, while I told her of my life in Boston (boasting of my success
+of course, I had to do that to justify myself), and explaining that I
+must return, in time to resume my teaching in September.
+
+Harvest was just beginning, and I said, "Father, if you'll pay me full
+wages, I'll take a hand."
+
+This pleased him greatly, but he asked, "Do you think you can stand it?"
+
+"I can try," I responded. Next day I laid off my city clothes and took
+my place as of old on the stack.
+
+On the broad acres of the arid plains the header and not the binder was
+then in use for cutting the wheat, and as stacker I had to take care of
+the grain brought to me by the three header boxes.
+
+It was very hard work that first day. It seemed that I could not last
+out the afternoon, but I did, and when at night I went to the house for
+supper, I could hardly sit at the table with the men, so weary were my
+bones. I sought my bed early and rose next day so sore that movement was
+torture. This wore away at last and on the third day I had no difficulty
+in keeping up my end of the whiffletree.
+
+The part of labor that I hated was the dirt. Night after night as I came
+in covered with dust, too tired to bathe, almost too weary to change my
+shirt, I declared against any further harvesting. However, I generally
+managed to slosh myself with cold water from the well, and so went to my
+bed with a measure of self-respect, but even the "spare room" was hot
+and small, and the conditions of my mother's life saddened me. It was so
+hot and drear for her!
+
+Every detail of the daily life of the farm now assumed literary
+significance in my mind. The quick callousing of my hands, the swelling
+of my muscles, the sweating of my scalp, all the unpleasant results of
+severe physical labor I noted down, but with no intention of exalting
+toil into a wholesome and regenerative thing as Tolstoi, an aristocrat,
+had attempted to do. Labor when so prolonged and severe as at this time
+my toil had to be, is warfare. I was not working as a visitor but as a
+hired hand, and doing my full day's work and more.
+
+At the end of the week I wrote to my friend Kirkland, enclosing some of
+my detailed notes and his reply set me thinking. "You're the first
+actual farmer in American fiction,--now tell the truth about it," he
+wrote.
+
+Thereafter I studied the glory of the sky and the splendor of the wheat
+with a deepening sense of the generosity of nature and monstrous
+injustice of social creeds. In the few moments of leisure which came to
+me as I lay in the shade of a grain-rick, I pencilled rough outlines of
+poems. My mind was in a condition of tantalizing productivity and I felt
+vaguely that I ought to be writing books instead of pitching grain.
+Conceptions for stories began to rise from the subconscious deeps of my
+thought like bubbles, noiseless and swift--and still I did not realize
+that I had entered upon a new career.
+
+At night or on Sunday I continued my conferences with father and mother.
+Together we went over the past, talking of old neighbors and from one of
+these conversations came the theme of my first story. It was a very
+simple tale (told by my mother) of an old woman, who made a trip back
+to her York state home after an absence in the West of nearly thirty
+years. I was able to remember some of the details of her experience and
+when my mother had finished speaking I said to her, "That is too good to
+lose. I'm going to write it out." Then to amuse her, I added, "Why,
+that's worth seventy-five dollars to me. I'll go halves with you."
+
+Smilingly she held out her hand. "Very well, you may give me my share
+now."
+
+"Wait till I write it," I replied, a little taken aback.
+
+Going to my room I set to work and wrote nearly two thousand words of
+the sketch. This I brought out later in the day and read to her with
+considerable excitement. I really felt that I had struck out a character
+which, while it did not conform to the actual woman in the case, was
+almost as vivid in my mind.
+
+Mother listened very quietly until I had finished, then remarked with
+sententious approval. "That's good. Go on." She had no doubt of my
+ability to go on--indefinitely!
+
+I explained to her that it wasn't so easy as all that, but that I could
+probably finish it in a day or two. (As a matter of fact, I completed
+the story in Boston but mother got her share of the "loot" just the
+same.)
+
+Soon afterward, while sitting in the door looking out over the fields, I
+pencilled the first draft of a little poem called _Color in the Wheat_
+which I also read to her.
+
+She received this in the same manner as before, from which it appeared
+that nothing I wrote could surprise her. Her belief in my powers was
+quite boundless. Father was inclined to ask, "What's the good of it?"
+
+Of course all of my visit was not entirely made up of hard labor in the
+field. There were Sundays when we could rest or entertain the neighbors,
+and sometimes a shower gave us a few hours' respite, but for the most
+part the weeks which I spent at home were weeks of stern service in the
+ranks of the toilers.
+
+There was a very good reason for my close application to the
+fork-handle. Father paid me an extra price as "boss stacker," and I
+could not afford to let a day pass without taking the fullest advantage
+of it. At the same time, I was careful not to convey to my pupils and
+friends from Boston the disgraceful fact that I was still dependent upon
+my skill with a pitch-fork to earn a living. I was not quite sure of
+their approval of the case.
+
+At last there came the time when I must set my face toward the east.
+
+It seemed a treachery to say good-bye to my aging parents, leaving them
+and my untrained sister to this barren, empty, laborious life on the
+plain, whilst I returned to the music, the drama, the inspiration, the
+glory of Boston. Opposite poles of the world could not be farther apart.
+Acute self-accusation took out of my return all of the exaltation and
+much of the pleasure which I had expected to experience as I dropped my
+harvester's fork and gloves and put on the garments of civilization once
+more.
+
+With heart sore with grief and rebellion at "the inexorable trend of
+things," I entered the car, and when from its window I looked back upon
+my grieving mother, my throat filled with a suffocating sense of guilt.
+I was deserting her, recreant to my blood!--That I was re-enacting the
+most characteristic of all American dramas in thus pursuing an ambitious
+career in a far-off city I most poignantly realized and yet--I went! It
+seemed to me at the time that my duty lay in the way of giving up all my
+selfish plans in order that I might comfort my mother in her growing
+infirmity, and counsel and defend my sister--but I did not. I went away
+borne on a stream of purpose so strong that I seemed but a leak in its
+resistless flood.
+
+This feeling of bitterness, of rebellion, of dissatisfaction with
+myself, wore gradually away, and by the time I reached Chicago I had
+resolved to climb high. "I will carry mother and Jessie to comfort and
+to some small share, at least, in the world of art," was my resolve. In
+this way I sought to palliate my selfish plan.
+
+Obscurely forming in my mind were two great literary concepts--that
+truth was a higher quality than beauty, and that to spread the reign of
+justice should everywhere be the design and intent of the artist. The
+merely beautiful in art seemed petty, and success at the cost of the
+happiness of others a monstrous egotism.
+
+In the spirit of these ideals I returned to my small attic room in
+Jamaica Plain and set to work to put my new conceptions into some sort
+of literary form.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+I Join the Anti-Poverty Brigade
+
+
+In the slow procession of my struggling fortunes this visit to the West
+seems important, for it was the beginning of my career as a fictionist.
+My talk with Kirkland and my perception of the sordid monotony of farm
+life had given me a new and very definite emotional relationship to my
+native state. I perceived now the tragic value of scenes which had
+hitherto appeared merely dull or petty. My eyes were opened to the
+enforced misery of the pioneer. As a reformer my blood was stirred to
+protest. As a writer I was beset with a desire to record in some form
+this newly-born conception of the border.
+
+No sooner did I reach my little desk in Jamaica Plain than I began to
+write, composing in the glow of a flaming conviction. With a delightful
+(and deceptive) sense of power, I graved with heavy hand, as if with pen
+of steel on brazen tablets, picture after picture of the plain. I had no
+doubts, no hesitations about the kind of effect I wished to produce. I
+perceived little that was poetic, little that was idyllic, and nothing
+that was humorous in the man, who, with hands like claws, was scratching
+a scanty living from the soil of a rented farm, while his wife walked
+her ceaseless round from tub to churn and from churn to tub. On the
+contrary, the life of such a family appealed to me as an almost
+unrelievedly tragic futility.
+
+In the few weeks between my return and the beginning of my teaching, I
+wrote several short stories, and outlined a propagandist play. With very
+little thought as to whether such stories would sell rapidly or not at
+all I began to send them away, to the _Century_, to _Harper's_, and
+other first class magazines without permitting myself any deep
+disappointment when they came back--as they all did!
+
+However, having resolved upon being printed by the best periodicals I
+persisted. Notwithstanding rejection after rejection I maintained an
+elevated aim and continued to fire away.
+
+There was a certain arrogance in all this, I will admit, but there was
+also sound logic, for I was seeking the ablest editorial judgment and in
+this way I got it. My manuscripts were badly put together (I used cheap
+paper and could not afford a typist), hence I could not blame the
+readers who hurried my stories back at me. No doubt my illegible writing
+as well as the blunt, unrelenting truth of my pictures repelled them.
+One or two friendly souls wrote personal notes protesting against my
+"false interpretation of western life."
+
+The fact that I, a working farmer, was presenting for the first time in
+fiction the actualities of western country life did not impress them as
+favorably as I had expected it to do. My own pleasure in being true was
+not shared, it would seem, by others. "Give us charming love stories!"
+pleaded the editors.
+
+"No, we've had enough of lies," I replied. "Other writers are telling
+the truth about the city,--the artisan's narrow, grimy, dangerous job is
+being pictured, and it appears to me that the time has come to tell the
+truth about the barn-yard's daily grind. I have lived the life and I
+know that farming is not entirely made up of berrying, tossing the
+new-mown hay and singing _The Old Oaken Bucket_ on the porch by
+moonlight.
+
+"The working farmer," I went on to argue, "has to live in February as
+well as June. He must pitch manure as well as clover. Milking as
+depicted on a blue china plate where a maid in a flounced petticoat is
+caressing a gentle Jersey cow in a field of daisies, is quite unlike
+sitting down to the steaming flank of a stinking brindle heifer in
+flytime. Pitching odorous timothy in a poem and actually putting it into
+a mow with the temperature at ninety-eight in the shade are widely
+separated in fact as they should be in fiction. For me," I concluded,
+"the grime and the mud and the sweat and the dust exist. They still form
+a large part of life on the farm, and I intend that they shall go into
+my stories in their proper proportions."
+
+Alas! Each day made me more and more the dissenter from accepted
+economic as well as literary conventions. I became less and less of the
+booming, indiscriminating patriot. Precisely as successful politicians,
+popular preachers and vast traders diminished in importance in my mind,
+so the significance of Whitman, and Tolstoi and George increased, for
+they all represented qualities which make for saner, happier and more
+equitable conditions in the future. Perhaps I despised idlers and
+time-savers unduly, but I was of an age to be extreme.
+
+During the autumn Henry George was announced to speak in Faneuil Hall,
+sacred ark of liberty, and with eager feet my brother and I hastened to
+the spot to hear this reformer whose fame already resounded throughout
+the English-speaking world. Beginning his campaign in California he had
+carried it to Ireland, where he had been twice imprisoned for speaking
+his mind, and now after having set Bernard Shaw and other English
+Fabians aflame with indignant protest, was about to run for mayor of New
+York City.
+
+I have an impression that the meeting was a noon-day meeting for men,
+at any rate the historical old hall, which had echoed to the voices of
+Garrison and Phillips and Webster was filled with an eager expectant
+throng. The sanded floor was packed with auditors standing shoulder to
+shoulder and the galleries were crowded with these who, like ourselves,
+had gone early in order to ensure seats. From our places in the front
+row we looked down upon an almost solid mosaic of derby hats, the
+majority of which were rusty by exposure to wind and rain.
+
+As I waited I recalled my father's stories of the stern passions of
+anti-slavery days. In this hall Wendell Phillips in the pride and power
+of his early manhood, had risen to reply to the cowardly apologies of
+entrenched conservatism, and here now another voice was about to be
+raised in behalf of those whom the law oppressed. My brother had also
+read _Progress and Poverty_ and both of us felt that we were taking part
+in a distinctly historical event, the beginning of a new abolition
+movement.
+
+At last, a stir at the back of the platform announced the approach of
+the speaker. Three or four men suddenly appeared from some concealed
+door and entered upon the stage. One of them, a short man with a full
+red beard, we recognized at once,--"The prophet of San Francisco" as he
+was then called (in fine derision) was not a noticeable man till he
+removed his hat. Then the fine line of his face from the crown of his
+head to the tip of his chin printed itself ineffaceably upon our minds.
+The dome-like brow was that of one highly specialized on lines of logic
+and sympathy. There was also something in the tense poise of his body
+which foretold the orator.
+
+Impatiently the audience endured the speakers who prepared the way and
+then, finally, George stepped forward, but prolonged waves of cheering
+again and again prevented his beginning. Thereupon he started pacing to
+and fro along the edge of the platform, his big head thrown back, his
+small hands clenched as if in anticipation of coming battle. He no
+longer appeared small. His was the master mind of that assembly.
+
+His first words cut across the air with singular calmness. Coming after
+the applause, following the nervous movement of a moment before, his
+utterance was surprisingly cold, masterful, and direct. Action had
+condensed into speech. Heat was transformed into light.
+
+His words were orderly and well chosen. They had precision and grace as
+well as power. He spoke as other men write, with style and arrangement.
+His address could have been printed word for word as it fell from his
+lips. This self-mastery, this graceful lucidity of utterance combined
+with a personal presence distinctive and dignified, reduced even his
+enemies to respectful silence. His altruism, his sincere pity and his
+hatred of injustice sent me away in the mood of a disciple.
+
+Meanwhile a few of his followers had organized an "Anti-Poverty Society"
+similar to those which had already sprung up in New York, and my brother
+and I used to go of a Sunday evening to the old Horticultural Hall on
+Tremont Street, contributing our presence and our dimes in aid of the
+meeting. Speakers were few and as the weeks went by the audiences grew
+smaller and smaller till one night Chairman Roche announced with sad
+intonation that the meetings could not go on. "You've all got tired of
+hearing us repeat ourselves and we have no new speaker, none at all for
+next week. I am afraid we'll have to quit."
+
+My brother turned to me--"Here's your 'call,'" he said. "Volunteer to
+speak for them."
+
+Recognizing my duty I rose just as the audience was leaving and sought
+the chairman. With a tremor of excitement in my voice I said, "If you
+can use me as a speaker for next Sunday I will do my best for you."
+
+Roche glanced at me for an instant, and then without a word of question,
+shouted to the audience, "Wait a moment! We _have_ a speaker for next
+Sunday." Then, bending down, he asked of me, "What is your name and
+occupation?"
+
+I told him, and again he lifted his voice, this time in triumphant
+shout, "Professor Hamlin Garland will speak for us next Sunday at eight
+o'clock. Come and bring all your friends."
+
+"You are in for it now," laughed my brother gleefully. "You'll be lined
+up with the anarchists sure!"
+
+That evening was in a very real sense a parting of the ways for me. To
+refuse this call was to go selfishly and comfortably along the lines of
+literary activity I had chosen. To accept was to enter the arena where
+problems of economic justice were being sternly fought out. I understood
+already something of the disadvantage which attached to being called a
+reformer, but my sense of duty and the influence of Herbert Spencer and
+Walt Whitman rose above my doubts. I decided to do my part.
+
+All the week I agonized over my address, and on Sunday spoke to a
+crowded house with a kind of partisan success. On Monday my good friend
+Chamberlin, _The Listener_ of _The Transcript_ filled his column with a
+long review of my heretical harangue.--With one leap I had reached the
+lime-light of conservative Boston's disapproval!
+
+Chamberlin, himself a "philosophical anarchist," was pleased with the
+individualistic note which ran through my harangue. The Single Taxers
+were of course, delighted for I admitted my discipleship to George, and
+my socialistic friends urged that the general effect of my argument was
+on their side. Altogether, for a penniless student and struggling story
+writer, I created something of a sensation. All my speeches thereafter
+helped to dye me deeper than ever with the color of reform.
+
+However, in the midst of my Anti-Poverty Campaign, I did not entirely
+forget my fiction and my teaching. I was becoming more and more a
+companion of artists and poets, and my devotion to things literary
+deepened from day to day. A dreadful theorist in some ways, I was, after
+all, more concerned with literary than with social problems. Writing was
+my life, land reform one of my convictions.
+
+High in my attic room I bent above my manuscript with a fierce resolve.
+From eight o'clock in the morning until half past twelve, I dug and
+polished. In the afternoon, I met my classes. In the evening I revised
+what I had written and in case I did not go to the theater or to a
+lecture (I had no social engagements) I wrote until ten o'clock. For
+recreation I sometimes drove with Dr. Cross on his calls or walked the
+lanes and climbed the hills with my brother.
+
+In this way most of my stories of the west were written. Happy in my own
+work, I bitterly resented the laws which created millionaires at the
+expense of the poor.
+
+These were days of security and tranquillity, and good friends
+thickened. Each week I felt myself in less danger of being obliged to
+shingle, though I still had difficulty in clothing myself properly.
+
+Again I saw Booth play his wondrous round of parts and was able to
+complete my monograph which I called _The Art of Edwin Booth_. I even
+went so far as to send to the great actor the chapter on his _Macbeth_
+and received from him grateful acknowledgments, in a charming letter.
+
+A little later I had the great honor of meeting him for a moment and it
+happened in this way. The veteran reader, James E. Murdock, was giving a
+recital in a small hall on Park Street, and it was privately announced
+that Edwin Booth and Lawrence Barrett would be present. This was enough
+to justify me in giving up one of my precious dollars on the chance of
+seeing the great tragedian enter the room.
+
+He came in a little late, flushing, timid, apologetic! It seemed to me a
+very curious and wonderful thing that this man who had spoken to
+millions of people from behind the footlights should be timid as a maid
+when confronted by less than two hundred of his worshipful fellow
+citizens in a small hall. So gentle and kindly did he seem.
+
+My courage grew, and after the lecture I approached the spot where he
+stood, and Mr. Barrett introduced me to him as "the author of the
+lecture on _Macbeth_."--Never had I looked into such eyes--deep and dark
+and sad--and my tongue failed me miserably. I could not say a word.
+Booth smiled with kindly interest and murmured his thanks for my
+critique, and I went away, down across the Common in a glow of delight
+and admiration.
+
+In the midst of all my other duties I was preparing my brother Franklin
+for the stage. Yes, through some mischance, this son of the prairie had
+obtained the privilege of studying with a retired "leading lady" who
+still occasionally made tours of the "Kerosene Circuit" and who had
+agreed to take him out with her, provided he made sufficient progress to
+warrant it. It was to prepare him for this trip that I met him three
+nights in the week at his office (he was bookkeeper in a cutlery firm)
+and there rehearsed _East Lynne_, _Leah the Forsaken_, and _The Lady of
+Lyons_.
+
+From seven o'clock until nine I held the book whilst he pranced and
+shouted and gesticulated through his lines.
+
+At last, emboldened by his star's praise, he cut loose from his ledger
+and went out on a tour which was extremely diverting but not at all
+remunerative. The company ran on a reef and Frank sent for carfare which
+I cheerfully remitted, crediting it to his educational account.
+
+The most vital literary man in all America at this time was Wm. Dean
+Howells who was in the full tide of his powers and an issue. All through
+the early eighties, reading Boston was divided into two parts,--those
+who liked Howells and those who fought him, and the most fiercely
+debated question at the clubs was whether his heroines were true to life
+or whether they were caricatures. In many homes he was read aloud with
+keen enjoyment of his delicate humor, and his graceful, incisive
+English; in other circles he was condemned because of his "injustice to
+the finer sex."
+
+As for me, having begun my literary career (as the reader may recall) by
+assaulting this leader of the realistic school I had ended, naturally,
+by becoming his public advocate. How could I help it?
+
+It is true a large part of one of my lectures consisted of a gratuitous
+slam at "Mr. Howells and the so-called realists," but further reading
+and deeper thought along the lines indicated by Whitman, had changed my
+view. One of Walt's immortal invitations which had appealed to me with
+special power was this:
+
+    Stop this day and night with me
+    And you shall possess the origin of all poems;
+    You shall no longer take things at second or third hand
+    Nor look through the eyes of the dead,
+    Nor through my eyes either,
+    But through your own eyes....
+    You shall listen to all sides,
+    And filter them from yourself.
+
+Thus by a circuitous route I had arrived at a position where I found
+myself inevitably a supporter not only of Howells but of Henry James
+whose work assumed ever larger significance in my mind. I was ready to
+concede with the realist that the poet might go round the earth and come
+back to find the things nearest at hand the sweetest and best after all,
+but that certain injustices, certain cruel facts must not be blinked at,
+and so, while admiring the grace, the humor, the satire of Howells'
+books, I was saved from anything like imitation by the sterner and
+darker material in which I worked.
+
+My wall of prejudice against the author of _A Modern Instance_ really
+began to sag when during the second year of my stay in Boston, I took up
+and finished _The Undiscovered Country_ (which I had begun five or six
+years before), but it was _The Minister's Charge_ which gave the final
+push to my defenses and fetched them tumbling about my ears in a cloud
+of dust. In fact, it was a review of this book, written for the
+_Transcript_ which brought about a meeting with the great novelist.
+
+My friend Hurd liked the review and had it set up. The editor, Mr.
+Clement, upon reading it in proof said to Hurd, "This is an able review.
+Put it in as an editorial. Who is the writer of it?" Hurd told him about
+me and Clement was interested. "Send him to me," he said.
+
+On Saturday I was not only surprised and delighted by the sight of my
+article in large type at the head of the literary page, I was fluttered
+by the word which Mr. Clement had sent to me.
+
+Humbly as a minstrel might enter the court of his king, I went before
+the editor, and stood expectantly while he said: "That was an excellent
+article. I have sent it to Mr. Howells. You should know him and sometime
+I will give you a letter to him, but not now. Wait awhile. War is being
+made upon him just now, and if you were to meet him your criticism
+would have less weight. His enemies would say that you had come under
+his personal influence. Go ahead with the work you have in hand, and
+after you have put yourself on record concerning him and his books I
+will see that you meet him."
+
+Like a knight enlisted in a holy war I descended the long narrow
+stairway to the street, and went to my home without knowing what passed
+me.
+
+I ruminated for hours on Mr. Clement's praise. I read and re-read my
+"able article" till I knew it by heart and then I started in, seriously,
+to understand and estimate the school of fiction to which Mr. Howells
+belonged. I read every one of his books as soon as I could obtain them.
+I read James, too, and many of the European realists, but it must have
+been two years before I called upon Mr. Clement to redeem his promise.
+
+Deeply excited, with my note of introduction carefully stowed in my
+inside pocket, I took the train one summer afternoon bound for Lee's
+Hotel in Auburndale, where Mr. Howells was at this time living.
+
+I fervently hoped that the building would not be too magnificent for I
+felt very small and very poor on alighting at the station, and every rod
+of my advance sensibly decreased my self-esteem. Starting with faltering
+feet I came to the entrance of the grounds in a state of panic, and as I
+looked up the path toward the towering portico of the hotel, it seemed
+to me the palace of an emperor and my resolution entirely left me.
+Actually I walked up the street for some distance before I was able to
+secure sufficient grip on myself to return and enter.
+
+"It is entirely unwarranted and very presumptuous in me to be thus
+intruding on a great author's time," I admitted, but it was too late to
+retreat, and so I kept on. Entering the wide central hall I crept warily
+across its polished, hardwood floor to the desk where a highly ornate
+clerk presided. In a meek, husky voice I asked, "Is Mr. Howells in?"
+
+"He is, but he's at dinner," the despot on the other side of the counter
+coldly replied, and his tone implied that he didn't think the great
+author would relish being disturbed by an individual who didn't even
+know the proper time to call. However, I produced my letter of
+introduction and with some access of spirit requested His Highness to
+have it sent in.
+
+A colored porter soon returned, showed me to a reception room off the
+hall, and told me that Mr. Howells would be out in a few minutes. During
+these minutes I sat with eyes on the portieres and a frog in my throat.
+"How will he receive me? How will he look? What shall I say to him?" I
+asked myself, and behold I hadn't an idea left!
+
+Suddenly the curtains parted and a short man with a large head stood
+framed in the opening. His face was impassive but his glance was one of
+the most piercing I had ever encountered. In the single instant before
+he smiled he discovered my character and my thought as though his eyes
+had been the lenses of some singular and powerful x-ray instrument. It
+was the glance of a novelist.
+
+Of course all this took but a moment's time. Then his face softened,
+became winning and his glance was gracious. "I'm glad to see you," he
+said, and his tone was cordial. "Won't you be seated?"
+
+We took seats at the opposite ends of a long sofa, and Mr. Howells began
+at once to inquire concerning the work and the purposes of his visitor.
+He soon drew forth the story of my coming to Boston and developed my
+theory of literature, listening intently while I told him of my history
+of American Ideals and my attempt at fiction.
+
+My conception of the local novel and of its great importance in American
+literature, especially interested the master who listened intently while
+I enlarged upon my reasons for believing that the local novel would
+continue to grow in power and insight. At the end I said, "In my
+judgment the men and women of the south, the west and the east, are
+working (without knowing it) in accordance with a great principle, which
+is this: American literature, in order to be great, must be national,
+and in order to be national, must deal with conditions peculiar to our
+own land and climate. Every genuinely American writer must deal with the
+life he knows best and for which he cares the most. Thus Joel Chandler
+Harris, George W. Cable, Joseph Kirkland, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary
+Wilkins, like Bret Harte, are but varying phases of the same movement, a
+movement which is to give us at last a really vital and original
+literature!"
+
+Once set going I fear I went on like the political orator who doesn't
+know how to sit down. I don't think I did quit. Howells stopped me with
+a compliment. "You're doing a fine and valuable work," he said, and I
+thought he meant it--and he did mean it. "Each of us has had some
+perception of this movement but no one has correlated it as you have
+done. I hope you will go on and finish and publish your essays."
+
+These words uttered, perhaps, out of momentary conviction brought the
+blood to my face and filled me with conscious satisfaction. Words of
+praise by this keen thinker were like golden medals. I had good reason
+to know how discriminating he was in his use of adjectives for he was
+even then the undisputed leader in the naturalistic school of fiction
+and to gain even a moment's interview with him would have been a rich
+reward for a youth who had only just escaped from spreading manure on
+an Iowa farm. Emboldened by his gracious manner, I went on. I confessed
+that I too was determined to do a little at recording by way of fiction
+the manners and customs of my native West. "I don't know that I can
+write a novel, but I intend to try," I added.
+
+He was kind enough then to say that he would like to see some of my
+stories of Iowa. "You have almost a clear field out there--no one but
+Howe seems to be tilling it."
+
+How long he talked or how long I talked, I do not know, but at last
+(probably in self-defense), he suggested that we take a walk. We
+strolled about the garden a few minutes and each moment my spirits rose,
+for he treated me, not merely as an aspiring student, but as a fellow
+author in whom he could freely confide. At last, in his gentle way, he
+turned me toward my train.
+
+It was then as we were walking slowly down the street, that he faced me
+with the trust of a comrade and asked, "What would you think of a story
+dealing with the effect of a dream on the life of a man?--I have in mind
+a tale to be called _The Shadow of a Dream_, or something like that,
+wherein a man is to be influenced in some decided way by the memory of a
+vision, a ghostly figure which is to pursue him and have some share in
+the final catastrophe, whatever it may turn out to be. What would you
+think of such a plot?"
+
+Filled with surprise at his trust and confidence, I managed to stammer a
+judgment. "It would depend entirely upon the treatment," I answered.
+"The theme is a little like Hawthorne, but I can understand how, under
+your hand, it would not be in the least like Hawthorne."
+
+His assent was instant. "You think it not quite like me? You are right.
+It does sound a little lurid. I may never write it, but if I do, you
+may be sure it will be treated in my own way and not in Hawthorne's
+way."
+
+Stubbornly I persisted. "There are plenty who can do the weird kind of
+thing, Mr. Howells, but there is only one man who can write books like
+_A Modern Instance_ and _Silas Lapham_."
+
+All that the novelist said, as well as his manner of saying it was
+wonderfully enriching to me. To have such a man, one whose fame was even
+at this time international, desire an expression of my opinion as to the
+fitness of his chosen theme, was like feeling on my shoulder the touch
+of a kingly accolade.
+
+I went away, exalted. My apprenticeship seemed over! To America's chief
+literary man I was a fellow-writer, a critic, and with this recognition
+the current of my ambition shifted course. I began to hope that I, too,
+might some day become a social historian as well as a teacher of
+literature. The reformer was still present, but the literary man had
+been reinforced, and yet, even here, I had chosen the unpopular,
+unprofitable side!
+
+Thereafter the gentle courtesy, the tact, the exquisite, yet simple
+English of this man was my education. Every hour of his delicious humor,
+his wise advice, his ready sympathy sent me away in mingled exaltation
+and despair--despair of my own blunt and common diction, exaltation over
+his continued interest and friendship.
+
+How I must have bored that sweet and gracious soul! He could not escape
+me. If he moved to Belmont I pursued him. If he went to Nahant or
+Magnolia or Kittery I spent my money like water in order to follow him
+up and bother him about my work, or worry him into a public acceptance
+of the single tax, and yet every word he spoke, every letter he wrote
+was a benediction and an inspiration.
+
+He was a constant revelation to me of the swift transitions of mood to
+which a Celtic man of letters is liable. His humor was like a low, sweet
+bubbling geyser spring. It rose with a chuckle close upon some very
+somber mood and broke into exquisite phrases which lingered in my mind
+for weeks. Side by side with every jest was a bitter sigh, for he, too,
+had been deeply moved by new social ideals, and we talked much of the
+growing contrasts of rich and poor, of the suffering and loneliness of
+the farmer, the despair of the proletariat, and though I could never
+quite get him to perceive the difference between his program and ours
+(he was always for some vague socialistic reform), he readily admitted
+that land monopoly was the chief cause of poverty, and the first
+injustice to be destroyed. "But you must go farther, much farther," he
+would sadly say.
+
+Of all of my literary friends at this time, Edgar Chamberlin of the
+_Transcript_ was the most congenial. He, too, was from Wisconsin, and
+loved the woods and fields with passionate fervor. At his house I met
+many of the young writers of Boston--at least they were young
+then--Sylvester Baxter, Imogene Guiney, Minna Smith, Alice Brown, Mary
+E. Wilkins, and Bradford Torrey were often there. No events in my life
+except my occasional calls on Mr. Howells were more stimulating to me
+than my visits to the circle about Chamberlin's hearth--(he was the kind
+of man who could not live without an open fire) and Mrs. Chamberlin's
+boundlessly hospitable table was an equally appealing joy.
+
+How they regarded me at that time I cannot surely define--perhaps they
+tolerated me out of love for the West. But I here acknowledge my
+obligation to "The Listener." He taught me to recognize literary themes
+in the city, for he brought the same keen insight, the same tender
+sympathy to bear upon the crowds of the streets that he used in
+describing the songs of the thrush or the whir of the partridge.
+
+He was especially interested in the Italians who were just beginning to
+pour into The North End, displacing the Irish as workmen in the streets,
+and often in his column made gracious and charming references to them,
+softening without doubt the suspicion and dislike with which many
+citizens regarded them.
+
+Hurd, on the contrary, was a very bookish man. He sat amidst mountains
+of "books for review" and yet he was always ready to welcome the slender
+volume of the new poet. To him I owe much. From him I secured my first
+knowledge of James Whitcomb Riley, and it was Hurd who first called my
+attention to Kirkland's _Zury_. Through him I came to an enthusiasm for
+the study of Ibsen and Bjornsen, for he was widely read in the
+literature of the north.
+
+On the desk of this hard-working, ill-paid man of letters (who never
+failed to utter words of encouragement to me) I wish to lay a tardy
+wreath of grateful praise. He deserves the best of the world beyond, for
+he got little but hard work from this. He loved poetry of all kinds and
+enjoyed a wide correspondence with those "who could not choose but
+sing." His desk was crammed with letters from struggling youths whose
+names are familiar now, and in whom he took an almost paternal interest.
+
+One day as I was leaving Hurd's office he said, "By the way, Garland,
+you ought to know Jim Herne. He's doing much the same sort of work on
+the stage that you and Miss Wilkins are putting into the short story.
+Here are a couple of tickets to his play. Go and see it and come back
+and tell what you think of it."
+
+Herne's name was new to me but Hurd's commendation was enough to take me
+down to the obscure theater in the South End where _Drifting Apart_ was
+playing. The play was advertised as "a story of the Gloucester
+fishermen" and Katharine Herne was the "Mary Miller" of the piece.
+Herne's part was that of a stalwart fisherman, married to a delicate
+young girl, and when the curtain went up on his first scene I was
+delighted with the setting. It was a veritable cottage interior--not an
+English cottage but an American working man's home. The worn chairs, the
+rag rugs, the sewing machine doing duty as a flowerstand, all were in
+keeping.
+
+The dialogue was homely, intimate, almost trivial and yet contained a
+sweet and touching quality. It was, indeed, of a piece with the work of
+Miss Jewett only more humorous, and the action of Katharine and James
+Herne was in key with the text. The business of "Jack's" shaving and
+getting ready to go down the street was most delightful in spirit and
+the act closed with a touch of true pathos.
+
+The second act, a "dream act" was not so good, but the play came back to
+realities in the last act and sent us all away in joyous mood. It was
+for me the beginning of the local color American drama, and before I
+went to sleep that night I wrote a letter to Herne telling him how
+significant I found his play and wishing him the success he deserved.
+
+Almost by return mail came his reply thanking me for my good wishes and
+expressing a desire to meet me. "We are almost always at home on Sunday
+and shall be very glad to see you whenever you can find time to come."
+
+A couple of weeks later--as soon as I thought it seemly--I went out to
+Ashmont to see them, for my interest was keen. I knew no one connected
+with the stage at this time and I was curious to know--I was almost
+frenziedly eager to know the kind of folk the Hernes were.
+
+My first view of their house was a disappointment. It was quite like any
+other two-story suburban cottage. It had a small garden but it faced
+directly on the walk and was a most uninspiring color. But if the house
+disappointed me the home did not. Herne, who looked older than when on
+the stage, met me with a curiously impassive face but I felt his
+friendship through this mask. Katharine who was even more charming than
+"Mary Miller" wore no mask. She was radiantly cordial and we were
+friends at once. Both persisted in calling me "professor" although I
+explained that I had no right to any such title. In the end they
+compromised by calling me "the Dean," and "the Dean" I remained in all
+the happy years of our friendship.
+
+Not the least of the charms of this home was the companionship of
+Herne's three lovely little daughters Julie, Chrystal and Dorothy, who
+liked "the Dean"--I don't know why--and were always at the door to greet
+me when I came. No other household meant as much to me. No one
+understood more clearly than the Hernes the principles I stood for, and
+no one was more interested in my plans for uniting the scattered members
+of my family. Before I knew it I had told them all about my mother and
+her pitiful condition, and Katharine's expressive face clouded with
+sympathetic pain. "You'll work it out," she said, "I am sure of it," and
+her confident words were a comfort to me.
+
+They were true Celts, swift to laughter and quick with tears; they
+inspired me to bolder flights. They met me on every plane of my
+intellectual interests, and our discussions of Herbert Spencer, Henry
+George, and William Dean Howells often lasted deep into the night. In
+all matters concerning the American Drama we were in accord.
+
+Having found these rare and inspiring souls I was not content until I
+had introduced them to all my literary friends. I became their publicity
+agent without authority and without pay, for I felt the injustice of a
+situation where such artists could be shunted into a theater in The
+South End where no one ever saw them--at least no one of the world of
+art and letters. Their cause was my cause, their success my chief
+concern.
+
+_Drifting Apart_, I soon discovered, was only the beginning of Herne's
+ambitious design to write plays which should be as true in their local
+color as Howells' stories. He was at this time working on two plays
+which were to bring lasting fame and a considerable fortune. One of
+these was a picture of New England coast life and the other was a study
+of factory life. One became _Shore Acres_ and the other _Margaret
+Fleming_.
+
+From time to time as we met he read me these plays, scene by scene, as
+he wrote them, and when _Margaret Fleming_ was finished I helped him put
+it on at Chickering Hall. My brother was in the cast and I served as
+"Man in Front" for six weeks--again without pay of course--and did my
+best to let Boston know what was going on there in that little
+theater--the first of all the "Little Theaters" in America. Then came
+the success of _Shore Acres_ at the Boston Museum and my sense of
+satisfaction was complete.
+
+How all this puts me back into that other shining Boston! I am climbing
+again those three long flights of stairs to the _Transcript_ office.
+Chamberlin extends a cordial hand, Clement nods as I pass his door. It
+is raining, and in the wet street the vivid reds, greens, and yellows of
+the horse-cars, splash the pavement with gaudy color. Round the tower of
+the Old South Church the doves are whirling.
+
+It is Saturday. I am striding across the Common to Park Square, hurrying
+to catch the 5:02 train. The trees of the Mall are shaking their heavy
+tears upon me. Drays thunder afar off. Bells tinkle.--How simple, quiet,
+almost village-like this city of my vision seems in contrast with the
+Boston of today with its diabolic subways, its roaring overhead trains,
+its electric cars and its streaming automobiles!
+
+Over and over again I have tried to re-discover that Boston, but it is
+gone, never to return. Herne is dead, Hurd is dead, Clement no longer
+edits the _Transcript_, Howells and Mary Wilkins live in New York.
+Louise Chandler Moulton lies deep in that grave of whose restful quiet
+she so often sang, and Edward Everett Hale, type of a New England that
+was old when I was young, has also passed into silence. His name like
+that of Higginson and Holmes is only a faint memory in the marble
+splendors of the New Public Library. The ravening years--how they
+destroy!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+My Mother is Stricken
+
+
+In the summer of 1889, notwithstanding a widening opportunity for
+lectures in the East, I decided to make another trip to the West. In all
+my mother's letters I detected a tremulous undertone of sadness, of
+longing, and this filled me with unrest even in the midst of the
+personal security I had won. I could not forget the duty I owed to her
+who had toiled so uncomplainingly that I might be clothed and fed and
+educated, and so I wrote to her announcing the date of my arrival.
+
+My friend, Dr. Cross, eager to see The Short-Grass Country which was a
+far-off and romantic territory to him, arranged to go with me. It was in
+July, and very hot the day we started, but we were both quite disposed
+to make the most of every good thing and to ignore all discomforts. I'm
+not entirely certain, but I think I occupied a sleeping car berth on
+this trip; if I did so it was for the first time in my life. Anyhow, I
+must have treated myself to regular meals, for I cannot recall being ill
+on the train. This, in itself, was remarkable.
+
+Strange to say, most of the incidents of the journey between Boston and
+Wisconsin are blended like the faded figures on a strip of sun-smit
+cloth, nothing remains definitely distinguishable except the memory of
+our visit to my Uncle William's farm in Neshonoc, and the recollection
+of the pleasure we took in the vivid bands of wild flowers which spun,
+like twin ribbons of satin, from beneath the wheels of the rear coach as
+we rushed across the state. All else has vanished as though it had
+never been.
+
+These primitive blossoms along the railroad's right-of-way deeply
+delighted my friend, but to me they were more than flowers, they were
+cups of sorcery, torches of magic incense. Each nodding pink brought
+back to me the sights and sounds and smells of the glorious meadows of
+my boyhood's vanished world. Every weed had its mystic tale. The slopes
+of the hills, the cattle grouped under the trees, all wrought upon me
+like old half-forgotten poems.
+
+My uncle, big, shaggy, gentle and reticent, met us at the faded little
+station and drove us away toward the sun-topped "sleeping camel" whose
+lines and shadows were so lovely and so familiar. In an hour we were at
+the farm-house where quaint Aunt Maria made us welcome in true pioneer
+fashion, and cooked a mess of hot biscuit to go with the honey from the
+bees in the garden. They both seemed very remote, very primitive even to
+me, to my friend Cross they were exactly like characters in a story. He
+could only look and listen and smile from his seat in the corner.
+
+William, a skilled bee-man, described to us his methods of tracking wild
+swarms, and told us how he handled those in his hives. "I can scoop 'em
+up as if they were so many kernels of corn," he said. After supper as we
+all sat on the porch watching the sunset, he reverted to the brave days
+of fifty-five when deer and bear came down over the hills, when a rifle
+was almost as necessary as a hoe, and as he talked I revived in him the
+black-haired smiling young giant of my boyhood days, untouched of age or
+care.
+
+He was a poet, in his dreamy reticent way, for when next morning I
+called attention to the beauty of the view down the valley, his face
+took on a kind of wistful sweetness and a certain shyness as he
+answered with a visible effort to conceal his feeling--"I like it--No
+place better. I wish your father and mother had never left the valley."
+And in this wish I joined.
+
+On the third day we resumed our journey toward Dakota, and the Doctor,
+though outwardly undismayed by the long hard ride and the increasing
+barrenness of the level lands, sighed with relief when at last I pointed
+out against the level sky-line the wavering bulk of the grain elevator
+which alone marked the wind-swept deserted site of Ordway, the end of
+our journey. He was tired.
+
+Business, I soon learned, had not been going well on the border during
+the two years of my absence. None of the towns had improved. On the
+contrary, all had lost ground.
+
+Another dry year was upon the land and the settlers were deeply
+disheartened. The holiday spirit of eight years before had entirely
+vanished. In its place was a sullen rebellion against government and
+against God. The stress of misfortune had not only destroyed hope, it
+had brought out the evil side of many men. Dissensions had grown common.
+Two of my father's neighbors had gone insane over the failure of their
+crops. Several had slipped away "between two days" to escape their
+debts, and even little Jessie, who met us at the train, brave as a
+meadow lark, admitted that something gray had settled down over the
+plain.
+
+Graveyards, jails, asylums, all the accompaniments of civilization, were
+now quite firmly established. On the west lay the lands of the Sioux and
+beyond them the still more arid foot-hills. The westward movement of the
+Middle Border for the time seemed at an end.
+
+My father, Jessie told me, was now cultivating more than five hundred
+acres of land, and deeply worried, for his wheat was thin and light and
+the price less than sixty cents per bushel.
+
+It was nearly sunset as we approached the farm, and a gorgeous sky was
+overarching it, but the bare little house in which my people lived
+seemed a million miles distant from Boston. The trees which my father
+had planted, the flowers which my mother had so faithfully watered, had
+withered in the heat. The lawn was burned brown. No green thing was in
+sight, and no shade offered save that made by the little cabin. On every
+side stretched scanty yellowing fields of grain, and from every worn
+road, dust rose like smoke from crevices, giving upon deep-hidden
+subterranean fires. It was not a good time to bring a visitor to the
+homestead, but it was too late to retreat.
+
+Mother, grayer, older, much less vigorous than she had been two years
+before, met us, silently, shyly, and I bled, inwardly, every time I
+looked at her. A hesitation had come into her speech, and the indecision
+of her movements scared me, but she was too excited and too happy to
+admit of any illness. Her smile was as sweet as ever.
+
+Dr. Cross quietly accepted the hot narrow bedroom which was the best we
+could offer him, and at supper took his place among the harvest help
+without any noticeable sign of repugnance. It was all so remote, so
+characteristic of the border that interest dominated disgust.
+
+He was much touched, as indeed was I, by the handful of wild roses which
+father brought in to decorate the little sitting-room. "There's nothing
+I like better," he said, "than a wild rose." The old trailer had
+noticeably softened. While retaining his clarion voice and much of his
+sleepless energy, he was plainly less imperious of manner, less harsh of
+speech.
+
+Jessie's case troubled me. As I watched her, studied her, I perceived
+that she possessed uncommon powers, but that she must be taken out of
+this sterile environment. "She must be rescued at once or she will live
+and die the wife of some Dakota farmer," I said to mother.
+
+Again I was disturbed by the feeling that in some way my own career was
+disloyal, something built upon the privations of my sister as well as
+upon those of my mother. I began definitely to plan their rescue. "They
+must not spend the rest of their days on this barren farm," I said to
+Dr. Cross, and my self-accusation spurred me to sterner resolve.
+
+It was not a pleasant time for my good friend, but, as it turned out,
+there was a special providence in his being there, for a few days later,
+while Jessie and I were seated in the little sitting-room busily
+discussing plans for her schooling we heard a short, piercing cry,
+followed by low sobbing.
+
+Hurrying out into the yard, I saw my mother standing a few yards from
+the door, her sweet face distorted, the tears streaming down her cheeks.
+"What is it, mother?" I called out.
+
+"I can't lift my feet," she stammered, putting her arms about my neck.
+"I can't move!" and in her voice was such terror and despair that my
+blood chilled.
+
+It was true! She was helpless. From the waist downward all power of
+locomotion had departed. Her feet were like lead, drawn to the earth by
+some terrible magnetic power.
+
+In a frenzy of alarm, Jessie and I carried her into the house and laid
+her on her bed. My heart burned with bitter indignation. "This is the
+end," I said. "Here is the result of long years of ceaseless toil. She
+has gone as her mother went, in the midst of the battle."
+
+At the moment I cursed the laws of man, I cursed myself. I accused my
+father. Each moment my remorse and horror deepened, and yet I could do
+nothing, nothing but kneel beside the bed and hold her hand while
+Jessie ran to call the doctor. She returned soon to say she could not
+find him.
+
+Slowly the stricken one grew calmer and at last, hearing a wagon drive
+into the yard, I hurried out to tell my father what had happened. He
+read in my face something wrong. "What's the matter?" he asked as I drew
+near.
+
+"Mother is stricken," I said. "She cannot walk."
+
+He stared at me in silence, his gray eyes expanding like those of an
+eagle, then calmly, mechanically he got down and began to unhitch the
+team. He performed each habitual act with most minute care, till I,
+impatient of his silence, his seeming indifference, repeated, "Don't you
+understand? Mother has had a stroke! She is absolutely helpless."
+
+Then he asked, "Where is your friend Dr. Cross?"
+
+"I don't know, I thought he was with you."
+
+Even as I was calling for him, Dr. Cross came into the cabin, his arms
+laden with roses. He had been strolling about on the prairie.
+
+With his coming hope returned. Calmly yet skillfully he went to the aid
+of the sufferer, while father, Jessie and I sat in agonized suspense
+awaiting his report.
+
+At last he came back to us with gentle reassuring smile.
+
+"There is no immediate danger," he said, and the tone in which he spoke
+was even more comforting than his words. "As soon as she recovers from
+her terror she will not suffer"--then he added gravely, "A minute blood
+vessel has ruptured in her brain, and a small clot has formed there. If
+this is absorbed, as I think it will be, she will recover. Nothing can
+be done for her. No medicine can reach her. It is just a question of
+rest and quiet." Then to me he added something which stung like a
+poisoned dart. "She should have been relieved from severe household
+labor years ago."
+
+My heart filled with bitterness and rebellion, bitterness against the
+pioneering madness which had scattered our family, and rebellion toward
+my father who had kept my mother always on the border, working like a
+slave long after the time when she should have been taking her ease.
+Above all, I resented my own failure, my own inability to help in the
+case. Here was I, established in a distant city, with success just
+opening her doors to me, and yet still so much the struggler that my
+will to aid was futile for lack of means.
+
+Sleep was difficult that night, and for days thereafter my mind was rent
+with a continual and ineffectual attempt to reach a solution of my
+problem, which was indeed typical of ambitious young America everywhere.
+"Shall I give up my career at this point? How can I best serve my
+mother?" These were my questions and I could not answer either of them.
+
+At the end of a week the sufferer was able to sit up, and soon recovered
+a large part of her native cheerfulness although it was evident to me
+that she would never again be the woman of the ready hand. Her days of
+labor were over.
+
+Her magnificent voice was now weak and uncertain. Her speech painfully
+hesitant. She who had been so strong, so brave, was now both easily
+frightened and readily confused. She who had once walked with the grace
+and power of an athlete was now in terror of an up-rolled rug upon the
+floor. Every time I looked at her my throat ached with remorseful pain.
+Every plan I made included a vow to make her happy if I could. My
+success now meant only service to her. In no other way could I justify
+my career.
+
+Dr. Cross though naturally eager to return to the comfort of his own
+home stayed on until his patient had regained her poise. "The clot seems
+in process of being taken up," he said to me, one morning, "and I think
+it safe to leave her. But you had better stay on for a few weeks."
+
+"I shall stay until September, at least," I replied. "I will not go back
+at all if I am needed here."
+
+"Don't fail to return," he earnestly advised. "The field is just opening
+for you in Boston, and your earning capacity is greater there than it is
+here. Success is almost won. Your mother knows this and tells me that
+she will insist on your going on with your work."
+
+Heroic soul! She was always ready to sacrifice herself for others.
+
+The Doctor's parting words comforted me as I returned to the shadeless
+farmstead to share in the work of harvesting the grain which was already
+calling for the reaper, and could not wait either upon sickness or age.
+Again I filled the place of stacker while my father drove the four-horse
+header, and when at noon, covered with sweat and dust, I looked at
+myself, I had very little sense of being a "rising literary man."
+
+I got back once again to the solid realities of farm life, and the
+majesty of the colorful sunsets which ended many of our days could not
+conceal from me the starved lives and lonely days of my little sister
+and my aging mother.
+
+"Think of it!" I wrote to my brother. "After eight years of cultivation,
+father's farm possesses neither tree nor vine. Mother's head has no
+protection from the burning rays of the sun, except the shadow which the
+house casts on the dry, hard door-yard. Where are the 'woods and prairie
+lands' of our song? Is this the 'fairy land' in which we were all to
+'reign like kings'? Doesn't the whole migration of the Garlands and
+McClintocks seem a madness?"
+
+Thereafter when alone, my mother and I often talked of the good old days
+in Wisconsin, of David and Deborah and William and Frank. I told her of
+Aunt Loretta's peaceful life, of the green hills and trees.
+
+"Oh, I wish we had never left Green's Coulee!" she said.
+
+But this was as far as her complaint ever went, for father was still
+resolute and undismayed. "We'll try again," he declared. "Next year will
+surely bring a crop."
+
+In a couple of weeks our patient, though unable to lift her feet, was
+able to shuffle across the floor into the kitchen, and thereafter
+insisted on helping Jessie at her tasks. From a seat in a convenient
+corner she picked over berries, stirred cake dough, ground coffee and
+wiped dishes, almost as cheerfully as ever, but to me it was a pitiful
+picture of bravery, and I burned ceaselessly with desire to do something
+to repay her for this almost hopeless disaster.
+
+The worst of the whole situation lay in the fact that my earnings both
+as teacher and as story writer were as yet hardly more than enough to
+pay my own carefully estimated expenses, and I saw no way of immediately
+increasing my income. On the face of it, my plain duty was to remain on
+the farm, and yet I could not bring myself to sacrifice my Boston life.
+In spite of my pitiful gains thus far, I held a vital hope of
+soon,--very soon--being in condition to bring my mother and my sister
+east. I argued, selfishly of course, "It must be that Dr. Cross is
+right. My only chance of success lies in the east."
+
+Mother did her best to comfort me. "Don't worry about us," she said. "Go
+back to your work. I am gaining. I'll be all right in a little while."
+Her brave heart was still unsubdued.
+
+While I was still debating my problem, a letter came which greatly
+influenced me, absurdly influenced all of us. It contained an invitation
+from the Secretary of the Cedar Valley Agriculture Society to be "the
+Speaker of the Day" at the County Fair on the twenty-fifth of September.
+This honor not only flattered me, it greatly pleased my mother. It was
+the kind of honor she could fully understand. In imagination she saw her
+son standing up before a throng of old-time friends and neighbors
+introduced by Judge Daly and applauded by all the bankers and merchants
+of the town. "You must do it," she said, and her voice was decisive.
+
+Father, though less open in his expression, was equally delighted. "You
+can go round that way just as well as not," he said. "I'd like to visit
+the old town myself."
+
+This letter relieved the situation in the most unexpected way. We all
+became cheerful. I began to say, "Of course you are going to get well,"
+and I turned again to my plan of taking my sister back to the seminary.
+"We'll hire a woman to stay with you," I said, "and Jessie can run up
+during vacation, or you and father can go down and spend Christmas with
+old friends."
+
+Yes, I confess it, I was not only planning to leave my mother again--I
+was intriguing to take her only child away from her. There is no excuse
+for this, none whatever except the fact that I had her co-operation in
+the plan. She wanted her daughter to be educated quite as strongly as I
+could wish, and was willing to put up with a little more loneliness and
+toil if only her children were on the road to somewhere.
+
+Jessie was the obstructionist. She was both scared and resentful. She
+had no desire to go to school in Osage. She wanted to stay where she
+was. Mother needed her,--and besides she didn't have any decent clothes
+to wear.
+
+Ultimately I overcame all her scruples, and by promising her a visit to
+the great city of Minneapolis (with the privilege of returning if she
+didn't like the school) I finally got her to start with me. Poor, little
+scared sister, I only half realized the agony of mind through which you
+passed as we rode away into the Minnesota prairies!
+
+The farther she got from home the shabbier her gown seemed and the more
+impossible her coat and hat. At last, as we were leaving Minneapolis on
+our way to Osage she leaned her tired head against me and sobbed out a
+wild wish to go home.
+
+Her grief almost wrecked my own self-control but I soothed her as best I
+could by telling her that she would soon be among old friends and that
+she couldn't turn back now. "Go on and make a little visit anyway," I
+added. "It's only a few hours from Ordway and you can go home at any
+time."
+
+She grew more cheerful as we entered familiar scenes, and one of the
+girls she had known when a child took charge of her, leaving me free to
+play the part of distinguished citizen.
+
+The last day of the races was in action when I, with a certain amount of
+justifiable pride, rode through the gate (the old familiar sagging gate)
+seated beside the President of the Association. I wish I could believe
+that as "Speaker of the Day," I filled the sons of my neighbors with
+some small part of the awe with which the speakers of other days filled
+me, and if I assumed something of the polite condescension with which
+all public personages carry off such an entrance, I trust it will be
+forgiven me.
+
+The event, even to me, was more inspiring in anticipation than in
+fulfillment, for when I rose to speak in the band-stand the wind was
+blowing hard, and other and less intellectual attractions were in full
+tide. My audience remained distressingly small--and calm. I have a dim
+recollection of howling into the face of the equatorical current certain
+disconnected sentences concerning my reform theory, and of seeing on the
+familiar faces of David Babcock, John Gammons and others of my bronzed
+and bent old neighbors a mild wonder as to what I was talking about.
+
+On the whole I considered it a defeat. In the evening I spoke in the
+Opera House appearing on the same platform whence, eight years before, I
+had delivered my impassioned graduating oration on "Going West." True, I
+had gone east but then, advice is for others, not for oneself. Lee Moss,
+one of my classmates, and in those Seminary days a rival orator, was in
+my audience, and so was Burton, wordless as ever, and a little sad, for
+his attempt at preaching had not been successful--his ineradicable
+shyness had been against him. Hattie was there looking thin and old, and
+Ella and Matilda with others of the girls I had known eight years
+before. Some were accompanied by their children.
+
+I suspect I aroused their wonder rather than their admiration. My
+radicalism was only an astonishment to them. However, a few of the men,
+the more progressive of them, came to me at the close of my talk and
+shook hands and said, "Go on! The country needs just such talks." One of
+these was Uncle Billy Frazer and his allegiance surprised me, for he had
+never shown radical tendencies before.
+
+Summing it all up on my way to Chicago I must admit that as a great man
+returning to his native village I had not been a success.
+
+After a few hours of talk with Kirkland I started east by way of
+Washington in order that I might stop at Camden and call upon old Walt
+Whitman whose work I had been lecturing about, and who had expressed a
+willingness to receive me.
+
+It was hot and dry in the drab little city in which he lived, and the
+street on which the house stood was as cheerless as an ash-barrel, even
+to one accustomed to poverty, like myself, and when I reached the door
+of his small, decaying wooden tenement, I was dismayed. It was all so
+unlike the home of a world-famous poet.
+
+It was indeed very like that in which a very destitute mechanic might be
+living, and as I mounted the steps to Walt's room on the second story my
+resentment increased. Not a line of beauty or distinction or grace
+rewarded my glance. It was all of the same unesthetic barrenness, and
+not overly clean at that.
+
+The old man, majestic as a stranded sea-God, was sitting in an arm
+chair, his broad Quaker hat on his head, waiting to receive me. He was
+spotlessly clean. His white hair, his light gray suit, his fine linen
+all gave the effect of exquisite neatness and wholesome living. His
+clear tenor voice, his quiet smile, his friendly hand-clasp charmed me
+and calmed me. He was so much gentler and sweeter than I had expected
+him to be.
+
+He sat beside a heap of half-read books, marked newspapers, clippings
+and letters, a welter of concerns which he refused to have removed by
+the broom of the caretaker, and now and again as he wished to show me
+something he rose and hobbled a step or two to fish a book or a letter
+out of the pile. He was quite lame but could move without a crutch. He
+talked mainly of his good friends in Boston and elsewhere, and alluded
+to his enemies without a particle of rancor. The lines on his noble face
+were as placid as those on the brow of an ox--not one showed petulance
+or discouragement. He was the optimist in every word.
+
+He spoke of one of my stories to which Traubel had called his attention,
+and reproved me gently for not "letting in the light."
+
+It was a memorable meeting for me and I went away back to my work in
+Boston with a feeling that I had seen one of the very greatest literary
+personalities of the century, a notion I have had no cause to change in
+the twenty-seven years which have intervened.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+Main Travelled Roads
+
+
+My second visit to the West confirmed me in all my sorrowful notions of
+life on the plain, and I resumed my writing in a mood of bitter
+resentment, with full intention of telling the truth about western farm
+life, irrespective of the land-boomer or the politicians. I do not
+defend this mood, I merely report it.
+
+In this spirit I finished a story which I called _A Prairie Heroine_ (in
+order that no one should mistake my meaning, for it was the study of a
+crisis in the life of a despairing farmer's wife), and while even here,
+I did not tell the whole truth, I succeeded in suggesting to the
+sympathetic observer a tragic and hopeless common case.
+
+It was a tract, that must be admitted, and realizing this, knowing that
+it was entirely too grim to find a place in the pages of the _Century_
+or _Harper's_ I decided to send it to the _Arena_, a new Boston review
+whose spirit, so I had been told, was frankly radical.
+
+A few days later I was amazed to receive from the editor a letter of
+acceptance enclosing a check, but a paragraph in the letter astonished
+me more than the check which was for one hundred dollars.
+
+"I herewith enclose a check," wrote the editor, "which I hope you will
+accept in payment of your story.... I note that you have cut out certain
+paragraphs of description with the fear, no doubt, that the editor would
+object to them. I hope you will restore the manuscript to its original
+form and return it. When I ask a man to write for me, I want him to
+utter his mind with perfect freedom. My magazine is not one that is
+afraid of strong opinions."
+
+This statement backed up by the writer's signature on a blue slip
+produced in me a moment of stupefaction. Entertaining no real hope of
+acceptance, I had sent the manuscript in accordance with my principle of
+trying every avenue, and to get such an answer--an immediate
+answer--with a check!
+
+As soon as I recovered the use of my head and hand, I replied in eager
+acknowledgment. I do not recall the precise words of my letter, but it
+brought about an early meeting between B. O. Flower, the editor, and
+myself.
+
+Flower's personality pleased me. Hardly more than a boy at this time, he
+met me with the friendliest smile, and in our talk we discovered many
+common lines of thought.
+
+"Your story," he said, "is the kind of fiction I need. If you have any
+more of that sort let me see it. My magazine is primarily for discussion
+but I want to include at least one story in each issue. I cannot match
+the prices of magazines like the _Century_ of course, but I will do the
+best I can for you."
+
+It would be difficult to exaggerate the value of this meeting to me, for
+no matter what anyone may now say of the _Arena's_ logic or literary
+style, its editor's life was nobly altruistic. I have never known a man
+who strove more single-heartedly for social progress, than B. O. Flower.
+He was the embodiment of unselfish public service, and his ready
+sympathy for every genuine reform made his editorial office a center of
+civic zeal. As champions of various causes we all met in his open lists.
+
+In the months which followed he accepted for his magazine several of my
+short stories and bought and printed _Under the Wheel_, an entire play,
+not to mention an essay or two on _The New Declaration of Rights_. He
+named me among his "regular contributors," and became not merely my
+comforter and active supporter but my banker, for the regularity of his
+payments raised me to comparative security. I was able to write home the
+most encouraging reports of my progress.
+
+At about the same time (or a little later) the _Century_ accepted a
+short story which I called _A Spring Romance_, and a three-part tale of
+Wisconsin. For these I received nearly five hundred dollars!
+Accompanying the note of acceptance was a personal letter from Richard
+Watson Gilder, so hearty in its words of appreciation that I was assured
+of another and more distinctive avenue of expression.
+
+It meant something to get into the _Century_ in those days. The praise
+of its editor was equivalent to a diploma. I regarded Gilder as second
+only to Howells in all that had to do with the judgment of fiction.
+Flower's interests were ethical, Gilder's esthetic, and after all my
+ideals were essentially literary. My reform notions were subordinate to
+my desire to take honors as a novelist.
+
+I cannot be quite sure of the precise date of this good fortune, but I
+think it must have been in the winter of 1890 for I remember writing a
+lofty letter to my father, in which I said, "If you want any money, let
+me know."
+
+As it happened he had need of seed wheat, and it was with deep
+satisfaction that I repaid the money I had borrowed of him, together
+with three hundred dollars more and so faced the new year clear of debt.
+
+Like the miner who, having suddenly uncovered a hidden vein of gold,
+bends to his pick in a confident belief in his "find" so I humped above
+my desk without doubts, without hesitations. I had found my work in the
+world. If I had any thought of investment at this time, which I am sure
+I had not, it was concerned with the west. I had no notion of settling
+permanently in the east.
+
+My success in entering both the _Century_ and the _Arena_ emboldened me
+to say to Dr. Cross, "I shall be glad to come down out of the attic and
+take a full-sized chamber at regular rates."
+
+Alas! he had no such room, and so after much perturbation, my brother
+and I hired a little apartment on Moreland street in Roxbury and moved
+into it joyously. With a few dollars in my pocket, I went so far as to
+buy a couple of pictures and a new book rack, the first property I had
+ever owned, and when, on that first night, with everything in place we
+looked around upon our "suite," we glowed with such exultant pride as
+only struggling youth can feel. After years of privation, I had, at
+last, secured a niche in the frowning escarpment of Boston's social
+palisade.
+
+Frank was twenty-seven, I was thirty, and had it not been for a haunting
+sense of our father's defeat and a growing fear of mother's decline, we
+would have been entirely content. "How can we share our good fortune
+with her and with sister Jessie?" was the question which troubled us
+most. Jessie's fate seemed especially dreary by contrast with our busy
+and colorful life.
+
+"We can't bring them here," I argued. "They would never be happy here.
+Father is a borderman. He would enjoy coming east on a visit, but to
+shut him up in Boston would be like caging an eagle. The case seems
+hopeless."
+
+The more we discussed it the more insoluble the problem became. The best
+we could do was to write often and to plan for frequent visits to them.
+
+One day, late in March, Flower, who had been using my stories in almost
+every issue of his magazine, said to me: "Why don't you put together
+some of your tales of the west, and let us bring them out in book form?
+I believe they would have instant success."
+
+His words delighted me for I had not yet begun to hope for an appearance
+as the author of a book. Setting to work at once to prepare such a
+volume I put into it two unpublished novelettes called _Up the Cooley_
+and _The Branch Road_, for the very good reason that none of the
+magazines, not even _The Arena_, found them "available." This reduced
+the number of sketches to six so that the title page read:
+
+ MAIN TRAVELLED ROADS
+ Six Mississippi Valley Stories
+ BY HAMLIN GARLAND
+
+The phrase "main travelled road" is common in the west. Ask a man to
+direct you to a farmhouse and he will say, "Keep the main travelled road
+till you come to the second crossing and turn to the left." It seemed to
+me not only a picturesque title, significant of my native country, but
+one which permitted the use of a grimly sardonic foreword. This I
+supplied.
+
+"The main travelled road in the west (as everywhere) is hot and dusty in
+summer and desolate and drear with mud in fall and spring, and in winter
+the winds sweep the snows across it, but it does sometimes cross a rich
+meadow where the songs of the larks and blackbirds and bobolinks are
+tangled. Follow it far enough, it may lead past a bend in the river
+where the water laughs eternally over its shallows. Mainly it is long
+and weariful and has a dull little town at one end, and a home of toil
+at the other. Like the main travelled road of life it is traversed by
+many classes of people, but the poor and the weary predominate."
+
+This, my first book, was put together during a time of deep personal
+sorrow. My little sister died suddenly, leaving my father and mother
+alone on the bleak plain, seventeen hundred miles from both their sons.
+Hopelessly crippled, my mother now mourned the loss of her "baby" and
+the soldier's keen eyes grew dim, for he loved this little daughter
+above anything else in the world. The flag of his sunset march was
+drooping on its staff. Nothing but poverty and a lonely old age seemed
+before him, and yet, in his letters to me, he gave out only the briefest
+hints of his despair.
+
+All this will explain, if the reader is interested to know, why the
+dedication of my little book was bitter with revolt: "To my father and
+mother, whose half-century of pilgrimage on the main travelled road of
+life has brought them only pain and weariness, these stories are
+dedicated by a son to whom every day brings a deepening sense of his
+parents' silent heroism." It will explain also why the comfortable, the
+conservative, those who farmed the farmer, resented my thin gray volume
+and its message of acrid accusation.
+
+It was published in 1891 and the outcry against it was instant and
+astonishing--to me. I had a foolish notion that the literary folk of the
+west would take a local pride in the color of my work, and to find
+myself execrated by nearly every critic as "a bird willing to foul his
+own nest" was an amazement. Editorials and criticisms poured into the
+office, all written to prove that my pictures of the middle border were
+utterly false.
+
+Statistics were employed to show that pianos and Brussels carpets
+adorned almost every Iowa farmhouse. Tilling the prairie soil was
+declared to be "the noblest vocation in the world, not in the least like
+the pictures this eastern author has drawn of it."
+
+True, corn was only eleven cents per bushel at that time, and the number
+of alien farm-renters was increasing. True, all the bright boys and
+girls were leaving the farm, following the example of my critics, but
+these I was told were all signs of prosperity and not of decay. The
+American farmer was getting rich, and moving to town, only the renters
+and the hired man were uneasy and clamorous.
+
+My answer to all this criticism was a blunt statement of facts. "Butter
+is not always golden nor biscuits invariably light and flaky in my farm
+scenes, because they're not so in real life," I explained. "I grew up on
+a farm and I am determined once for all to put the essential ugliness of
+its life into print. I will not lie, even to be a patriot. A proper
+proportion of the sweat, flies, heat, dirt and drudgery of it all shall
+go in. I am a competent witness and I intend to tell the whole truth."
+
+But I didn't! Even my youthful zeal faltered in the midst of a
+revelation of the lives led by the women on the farms of the middle
+border. Before the tragic futility of their suffering, my pen refused to
+shed its ink. Over the hidden chamber of their maternal agonies I drew
+the veil.
+
+The old soldier had nothing to say but mother wrote to me, "It scares me
+to read some of your stories--they are so true. You might have said
+more," she added, "but I'm glad you didn't. Farmers' wives have enough
+to bear as it is."
+
+"My stories were not written for farmers' wives," I replied. "They were
+written to convict the selfish monopolistic liars of the towns."
+
+"I hope the liars read 'em," was her laconic retort.
+
+Nevertheless, in spite of all the outcry against my book, words of
+encouragement came in from a few men and women who had lived out the
+precise experiences which I had put into print. "You have delineated my
+life," one man said. "Every detail of your description is true. The
+sound of the prairie chickens, the hum of the threshing machine, the
+work of seeding, corn husking, everything is familiar to me and new in
+literature."
+
+A woman wrote, "You are entirely right about the loneliness, the
+stagnation, the hardship. We are sick of lies. Give the world the
+truth."
+
+Another critic writing from the heart of a great university said, "I
+value your stories highly as literature, but I suspect that in the
+social war which is coming you and I will be at each other's throats."
+
+This controversy naturally carried me farther and farther from the
+traditional, the respectable. As a rebel in art I was prone to arouse
+hate. Every letter I wrote was a challenge, and one of my conservative
+friends frankly urged the folly of my course. "It is a mistake for you
+to be associated with cranks like Henry George and writers like
+Whitman," he said. "It is a mistake to be published by the _Arena_. Your
+book should have been brought out by one of the old established firms.
+If you will fling away your radical notions and consent to amuse the
+governing classes, you will succeed."
+
+Fling away my convictions! It were as easy to do that as to cast out my
+bones. I was not wearing my indignation as a cloak. My rebellious
+tendencies came from something deep down. They formed an element in my
+blood. My patriotism resented the failure of our government. Therefore
+such advice had very little influence upon me. The criticism that really
+touched and influenced me was that which said, "Don't preach,--exemplify.
+Don't let your stories degenerate into tracts." Howells said, "Be fine,
+be fine--but not too fine!" and Gilder warned me not to leave Beauty out
+of the picture.
+
+In the light of this friendly council I perceived my danger, and set
+about to avoid the fault of mixing my fiction with my polemics.
+
+The editor of the _Arena_ remained my most loyal supporter. He filled
+the editorial section of his magazine with praise of my fiction and
+loudly proclaimed my non-conformist character. No editor ever worked
+harder to give his author a national reputation and the book sold, not
+as books sell now, but moderately, steadily, and being more widely read
+than sold, went far. This proved of course, that my readers were poor
+and could not afford to pay a dollar for a book, at least they didn't,
+and I got very little royalty from the sale. If I had any illusions
+about that they were soon dispelled. On the paper bound book I got five
+cents, on the cloth bound, ten. The sale was mainly in the fifty-cent
+edition.
+
+It was not for me to criticise the methods by which my publisher was
+trying to make me known, and I do not at this moment regret Flower's
+insistence upon the reforming side of me,--but for the reason that he
+was essentially ethical rather than esthetic, some part of the literary
+significance of my work escaped him. It was from the praise of Howells,
+Matthews and Stedman, that I received my enlightenment. I began to
+perceive that in order to make my work carry its message, I must be
+careful to keep a certain balance between Significance and Beauty. The
+artist began to check the preacher.
+
+Howells gave the book large space in "The Study" in _Harper's_ and what
+he said of it profoundly instructed me. Edward Everett Hale, Mary E.
+Wilkins, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Charles Dudley Warner, Edmund
+Clarence Stedman, and many others were most generous of applause. In
+truth I was welcomed into the circle of American realists with an
+instant and generous greeting which astonished, at the same time that it
+delighted me.
+
+I marvel at this appreciation as I look back upon it, and surely in
+view of its reception, no one can blame me for considering my drab
+little volume a much more important contribution to American fiction
+than it really was.
+
+It was my first book, and so, perhaps, the reader will excuse me for
+being a good deal uplifted by the noise it made. Then too, it is only
+fair to call attention to the fact that aside from Edward Eggleston's
+_Hoosier Schoolmaster_, _Howe's Story of a Country Town_, and _Zury_, by
+Joseph Kirkland, I had the middle west almost entirely to myself. Not
+one of the group of western writers who have since won far greater fame,
+and twenty times more dollars than I, had at that time published a
+single volume. William Allen White, Albert Bigelow Payne, Stewart Edward
+White, Jack London, Emerson Hough, George Ade, Meredith Nicholson, Booth
+Tarkington, and Rex Beach were all to come. "Octave Thanet" was writing
+her stories of Arkansas life for _Scribners_ but had published only one
+book.
+
+Among all my letters of encouragement of this time, not one, except
+perhaps that from Mr. Howells, meant more to me than a word which came
+from Walt Whitman, who hailed me as one of the literary pioneers of the
+west for whom he had been waiting. His judgment, so impersonal, so
+grandly phrased, gave me the feeling of having been "praised by
+posterity."
+
+In short, I was assured that my face was set in the right direction and
+that the future was mine, for I was not yet thirty-one years of age, and
+thirty-one is a most excellent period of life!
+
+And yet, by a singular fatality, at this moment came another sorrow, the
+death of Alice, my boyhood's adoration. I had known for years that she
+was not for me, but I loved to think of her as out there walking the
+lanes among the roses and the wheat as of old. My regard for her was no
+longer that of the lover desiring and hoping, and though I acknowledged
+defeat I had been too broadly engaged in my ambitious literary plans to
+permit her deflection to permanently cloud my life. She had been a
+radiant and charming figure in my prairie world, and when I read the
+letter telling of her passing, my mind was irradiated with the picture
+she had made when last she said good-bye to me. Her gentle friendship
+had been very helpful through all my years of struggle and now in the
+day of my security, her place was empty.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+The Spirit of Revolt
+
+
+During all this time while I had been living so busily and happily in
+Boston, writing stories, discussing Ibsen and arguing the cause of
+Impressionism, a portentous and widespread change of sentiment was
+taking place among the farmers of the Middle Border. The discouragement
+which I had discovered in old friends and neighbors in Dakota was
+finding collective expression. A vast and non-sectional union of the
+corn-growers, wheat-raisers, and cotton-growers had been effected and
+the old time politicians were uneasy.
+
+As ten cent corn and ten per cent interest were troubling Kansas so
+six-cent cotton was inflaming Georgia--and both were frankly sympathetic
+with Montana and Colorado whose miners were suffering from a drop in the
+price of silver. To express the meaning of this revolt a flying squadron
+of radical orators had been commissioned and were in the field. Mary
+Ellen Lease with Cassandra voice, and Jerry Simpson with shrewd humor
+were voicing the demands of the plainsman, while "Coin" Harvey as
+champion of the Free Silver theory had stirred the Mountaineer almost to
+a frenzy. It was an era of fervent meetings and fulminating resolutions.
+The Grange had been social, or at most commercially co-operative in its
+activities, but The Farmers' Alliance came as a revolt.
+
+The People's Party which was the natural outcome of this unrest involved
+my father. He wrote me that he had joined "the Populists," and was one
+of their County officers. I was not surprised at this action on his
+part, for I had known how high in honor he held General Weaver who was
+the chief advocate of a third party.
+
+Naturally Flower sympathized with this movement, and kept the pages of
+his magazine filled with impassioned defenses of it. One day, early in
+'91, as I was calling upon him in his office, he suddenly said,
+"Garland, why can't you write a serial story for us? One that shall deal
+with this revolt of the farmers? It's perfectly legitimate material for
+a novel, as picturesque in its way as _The Rise of the Vendee_--Can't
+you make use of it?"
+
+To this I replied, with some excitement--"Why yes, I think I can. I have
+in my desk at this moment, several chapters of an unfinished story which
+uses the early phases of the Grange movement as a background. If it
+pleases you I can easily bring it down to date. It might be necessary
+for me to go into the field, and make some fresh studies, but I believe
+I can treat the two movements in the same story. Anyhow I should like to
+try."
+
+"Bring the manuscript in at once," replied Flower. "It may be just what
+we are looking for. If it is we will print it as a serial this summer,
+and bring it out in book form next winter."
+
+In high excitement I hurried home to dig up and re-read the fragment
+which I called at this time _Bradley Talcott_. It contained about thirty
+thousand words and its hero was a hired man on an Iowa farm. Of course I
+saw possibilities in this manuscript--I was in the mood to do that--and
+sent it in.
+
+Flower read it and reported almost by return mail.
+
+"We'll take it," he said. "And as soon as you can get away, I think that
+you'd better go out to Kansas and Nebraska and make the studies
+necessary to complete the story. We'll pay all your expenses and pay
+you for the serial besides."
+
+The price agreed upon would seem very small in these days of millionaire
+authors, but to me the terms of Flower's commission were nobly generous.
+They set me free. They gave me wings!--For the first time in my life I
+was able to travel in comfort. I could not only eat in the dining car,
+and sleep in the sleeping car, but I could go to a hotel at the end of
+my journey with a delightful sense of freedom from worry about the
+bills. Do you wonder that when I left Boston a week or two later, I did
+so with elation--with a sense of conquest?
+
+Eager to explore--eager to know every state of the Union and especially
+eager to study the far plains and the Rocky Mountains, I started
+westward and kept going until I reached Colorado. My stay in the
+mountain country was short, but my glimpses of Ouray and Telluride
+started me on a long series of stories of "the high trails."
+
+On the way out as well as on the way back, I took part in meetings of
+rebellious farmers in bare-walled Kansas school-houses, and watched
+protesting processions of weather-worn Nebraska Populists as they filed
+through the shadeless cities of their sun-baked plain. I attended
+barbecues on drab and dusty fair grounds, meeting many of the best known
+leaders in the field.
+
+Everywhere I came in contact with the discontented. I saw only those
+whose lives seemed about to end in failure, and my grim notions of farm
+life were in no wise softened by these experiences.
+
+How far away all this seems in these days of three-dollar wheat and
+twenty-six cent cotton--these days of automobiles, tractor plows, and
+silos!
+
+As I kept no diary in those days, I am a little uncertain about dates
+and places--and no wonder, for I was doing something every moment (I
+travelled almost incessantly for nearly two years) but one event of that
+summer does stand clearly out--that of a meeting with my father at Omaha
+in July.
+
+It seems that some sort of convention was being held there and that my
+father was a delegate from Brown County, Dakota. At any rate I
+distinctly recall meeting him at the train and taking him to my hotel
+and introducing him to General Weaver. As a representative of the
+_Arena_ I had come to know many of the most prominent men in the
+movement, and my father was deeply impressed with their recognition of
+me. For the first time in his life, he deferred to me. He not only let
+me take charge of him, he let me pay the bills.
+
+He said nothing to me of his pride in my position, but my good friends
+Robert and Elia Peattie told me that to them he expressed the keenest
+satisfaction. "I never thought Hamlin would make a success of writing,"
+he said, "although he was always given to books. I couldn't believe that
+he would ever earn a living that way, but it seems that he is doing it."
+My commission from Flower and the fact that the _Arena_ was willing to
+pay my way about the country, were to him indubitable signs of
+prosperity. They could not be misinterpreted by his neighbors.
+
+Elia Peattie sat beside him at a meeting when I spoke, and she heard him
+say to an old soldier on the right, "I never knew just what that boy of
+mine was fitted for, but I guess he has struck his gait at last."
+
+It may seem illogical to the reader, but this deference on the part of
+the old soldier did not amuse me. On the contrary it hurt me. A little
+pang went through me every time he yielded his leadership. I hated to
+see him display the slightest evidence of age, of weakness. I would
+rather have had him storm than sigh. Part of his irresolution, his
+timidity, was due, as I could see, to the unwonted noise, and to the
+crowds of excited men, but more of it came from the vague alarm of
+self-distrust which are signs of advancing years.
+
+For two days we went about together, attending all the sessions and
+meeting many of the delegates, but we found time to discuss the problems
+which confronted us both. "I am farming nearly a thousand acres this
+year," he said, "and I'm getting the work systematized so that I can
+raise wheat at sixty cents a bushel--if I can only get fifteen bushels
+to the acre. But there's no money in the country. We seem to be at the
+bottom of our resources. I never expected to see this country in such a
+state. I can't get money enough to pay my taxes. Look at my clothes! I
+haven't had a new suit in three years. Your mother is in the same fix. I
+wanted to bring her down, but she had no clothes to wear--and then,
+besides, it's hard for her to travel. The heat takes hold of her
+terribly."
+
+This statement of the Border's poverty and drought was the more moving
+to me for the reason that the old pioneer had always been so patriotic,
+so confident, so sanguine of his country's future. He had come a long
+way from the buoyant faith of '66, and the change in him was typical of
+the change in the West--in America--and it produced in me a sense of
+dismay, of rebellious bitterness. Why should our great new land fall
+into this slough of discouragement?
+
+My sympathy with the Alliance took on a personal tinge. My pride in my
+own "success" sank away. How pitiful it all seemed in the midst of the
+almost universal disappointment and suffering of the West! In the face
+of my mother's need my resources were pitifully inadequate.
+
+"I can't go up to see mother this time," I explained to my father, "but
+I am coming out again this fall to speak in the campaign and I shall
+surely run up and visit her then."
+
+"I'll arrange for you to speak in Aberdeen," he said. "I'm on the County
+Committee."
+
+All the way back to Boston, and during the weeks of my work on my novel,
+I pondered the significance of the spiritual change which had swept over
+the whole nation--but above all others the problem of my father's
+desperate attempt to retrieve his fortunes engaged my sympathy. "Unless
+he gets a crop this year," I reported to my brother--"he is going to
+need help. It fills me with horror to think of those old people spending
+another winter out there on the plain."
+
+My brother who was again engaged by Herne to play one of the leading
+parts in _Shore Acres_ was beginning to see light ahead. His pay was not
+large but he was saving a little of it and was willing to use his
+savings to help me out in my plan of rescue. It was to be a rescue
+although we were careful never to put it in that form in our letters to
+the old pioneer.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Up to this month I had retained my position in the Boston School of
+Oratory, but I now notified Brown that I should teach no more in his
+school or any other school.
+
+His big shoulders began to shake and a chuckle preceded his irritating
+joke--"Going back to shingling?" he demanded.
+
+"No," I replied, "I'm not going to shingle any more--except for exercise
+after I get my homestead in the west--but I think--I'm not sure--I
+_think_ I can make a living with my pen."
+
+He became serious at this and said, "I'm sorry to have you go--but you
+are entirely right. You have found your work and I give you my blessing
+on it. But you must always count yourself one of my teachers and come
+and speak for us whenever you can." This I promised to do and so we
+parted.
+
+Early in September I went west and having put myself in the hands of the
+State Central Committee of Iowa, entered the field, campaigning in the
+interests of the People's Party. For six weeks I travelled, speaking
+nearly every day--getting back to the farms of the west and harvesting a
+rich fund of experiences.
+
+It was delightful autumn weather, and in central Iowa the crops were
+fairly abundant. On every hand fields of corn covered the gentle hills
+like wide rugs of lavender velvet, and the odor of melons and ripening
+leaves filled the air. Nature's songs of cheer and abundance (uttered by
+innumerable insects) set forth the monstrous injustice of man's law by
+way of contrast. Why should children cry for food in our cities whilst
+fruits rotted on the vines and wheat had no value to the harvester?
+
+With other eager young reformers, I rode across the odorous prairie
+swells, journeying from one meeting place to another, feeling as my
+companions did that something grandly beneficial was about to be enacted
+into law. In this spirit I spoke at Populist picnics, standing beneath
+great oaks, surrounded by men and women, work-worn like my own father
+and mother, shadowed by the same cloud of dismay. I smothered in small
+halls situated over saloons and livery stables, travelling by
+freight-train at night in order to ride in triumph as "Orator of the
+Day" at some county fair, until at last I lost all sense of being the
+writer and recluse.
+
+As I went north my indignation burned brighter, for the discontent of
+the people had been sharpened by the drought which had again cut short
+the crop. At Millbank, Cyrus, one of my old Dry Run neighbors, met me.
+He was now a grave, stooping middle-aged man also in the midst of
+disillusionment. "Going west" had been a mistake for him as for my
+father--"But here we are," he said, "and I see nothing for it but to
+stick to the job."
+
+Mother and father came to Aberdeen to hear me speak, and as I looked
+down on them from the platform of the opera house, I detected on their
+faces an expression which was not so much attention, as preoccupation.
+They were not listening to my words, they were thinking of my
+relationship to them, of the mystery involved in my being there on the
+platform surrounded by the men of the county whom they most respected.
+They could not take my theories seriously, but they did value and to the
+full, the honor which their neighbors paid me--their son! Their presence
+so affected me that I made, I fear, but an indifferent address.
+
+We did not have much time to talk over family affairs but it was good to
+see them even for a few moments and to know that mother was slowly
+regaining the use of her limbs.
+
+Another engagement made it necessary for me to take the night train for
+St. Paul and so they both went down to the station with me, and as the
+time came to part I went out to the little covered buggy (which was all
+the carriage my father owned) to start them off on their lonely
+twelve-mile trip back to the farm. "I don't know how it is all coming
+about, mother, but sometime, somewhere you and I are going to live
+together,--not here, back in Osage, or perhaps in Boston. It won't be
+long now."
+
+She smiled, but her voice was tremulous. "Don't worry about me. I'm all
+right again--at least I am better. I shall be happy if only you are
+successful."
+
+This meeting did me good. My mother's smile lessened my bitterness, and
+her joy in me, her faith in me, sent me away in renewed determination to
+rescue her from the destitution and loneliness of this arid land.
+
+My return to Boston in November discovered a startling change in my
+relationship to it. The shining city in which I had lived for seven
+years, and which had become so familiar to me (and so necessary to my
+progress), had begun to dwindle, to recede. The warm, broad, unkempt and
+tumultuous west, with its clamorous movement, its freedom from
+tradition, its vitality of political thought, re-asserted its power over
+me. New England again became remote. It was evident that I had not
+really taken root in Massachusetts after all. I perceived that Boston
+was merely the capital of New England while New York was fast coming to
+be the all-conquering capital of The Nation.
+
+My realization of this shift of values was sharpened by the announcement
+that Howells had definitely decided to move to the Metropolis, and that
+Herne had broken up his little home in Ashmont and was to make his
+future home on Convent Avenue in Harlem. The process of stripping Boston
+to build up Manhattan had begun.
+
+My brother who was still one of Herne's company of players in _Shore
+Acres_, had no home to break up, but he said, "I'm going to get some
+sort of headquarters in New York. If you'll come on we'll hire a little
+apartment up town and 'bach' it. I'm sick of theatrical boarding
+houses."
+
+With suddenly acquired conviction that New York was about to become the
+Literary Center of America, I replied, "Very well. Get your flat. I'd
+like to spend a winter in the old town anyway."
+
+My brother took a small furnished apartment on 105th Street, and
+together we camped above the tumult. It was only twelve-and-a-half feet
+wide and about forty-eight long, and its furnishings were ugly, frayed
+and meager, but its sitting room opened upon the sun, and there, of a
+morning, I continued to write in growing content. At about noon the
+actor commonly cooked a steak or a chop and boiled a pot of coffee, and
+after the dishes were washed, we both merrily descended upon Broadway by
+means of a Ninth Avenue elevated train. Sometimes we dined down town in
+reckless luxury at one of the French restaurants, "where the tip was but
+a nickel and the dinner thirty cents," but usually even our evening meal
+was eaten at home.
+
+Herne was playing an unlimited engagement at the Broadway theater and I
+spent a good deal of time behind the scenes with him. His house on
+Convent Avenue was a handsome mansion and on a Sunday, I often dined
+there, and when we all got going the walls resounded with argument. Jim
+was a great wag and a delightful story teller, but he was in deadly
+earnest as a reformer, and always ready to speak on The Single Tax. He
+took his art very seriously also, and was one of the best stage
+directors of his day. Some of his dramatic methods were so far in
+advance of his time that they puzzled or disgusted many of his patrons,
+but without doubt he profoundly influenced the art of the American
+stage. Men like William Gillette and Clyde Fitch quite frankly
+acknowledged their indebtedness to him.
+
+Jim and Katharine both had an exaggerated notion of my importance in the
+world of art and letters, and listened to me with a respect, a
+fellowship and an appreciation which increased my sense of
+responsibility and inspired me to greater effort as a novelist. Together
+we hammered out questions of art and economics, and planned new plays.
+Those were inspiring hours to us all and we still refer to them as "the
+good old Convent Avenue days!"
+
+New York City itself was incredibly simpler and quieter than it is now,
+but to me it was a veritable hell because of the appalling inequality
+which lay between the palaces of the landlords and the tenements of the
+proletariat. The monstrous injustice of permitting a few men to own the
+land on which millions toiled for the barest living tore at my heart
+strings then, as it does now, and the worst of it rested in the fact
+that the landless seemed willing to be robbed for the pleasure of those
+who could not even dissipate the wealth which rolled in upon them in
+waves of unearned rent.
+
+And yet, much as I felt this injustice and much as the city affected me,
+I could not put it into fiction. "It is not my material," I said. "My
+dominion is the West."
+
+Though at ease, I had no feeling of being at home in this tumult. I was
+only stopping in it in order to be near the Hernes, my brother, and
+Howells. The Georges, whom I had come to know very well, interested me
+greatly and often of an evening I went over to the East Side, to the
+unpretentious brick house in which The Prophet and his delightful family
+lived. Of course this home was doctrinaire, but then I liked that
+flavor, and so did the Hernes, although Katharine's keen sense of humor
+sometimes made us all seem rather like thorough-going cranks--which we
+were.
+
+In the midst of our growing security and expanding acquaintanceship, my
+brother and I often returned to the problem of our aging parents.
+
+My brother was all for bringing them east but to this I replied, "No,
+that is out of the question. The old pioneer would never be happy in a
+city."
+
+"We could buy a farm over in Jersey."
+
+"What would he do there? He would be among strangers and in strange
+conditions.--No, the only solution is to get him to go back either to
+Iowa or to Wisconsin. He will find even that very hard to do for it
+will seem like failure but he must do it. For mother's sake I'd rather
+see him go back to the LaCrosse valley. It would be a pleasure to visit
+them there."
+
+"That is the thing to do," my brother agreed. "I'll never get out to
+Dakota again."
+
+The more I thought about this the lovelier it seemed. The hills, the
+farmhouses, the roads, the meadows all had delightful associations in my
+mind, as I knew they must have in my mother's mind and the idea of a
+regained homestead in the place of my birth began to engage my thought
+whenever I had leisure to ponder my problem and especially whenever I
+received a letter from my mother.
+
+There was a certain poetic justice in the return of my father and mother
+to the land from which they had been lured a quarter of a century
+before, and I was willing to make any sacrifice to bring it about. I
+take no credit for this, it was a purely selfish plan, for so long as
+they were alone out there on the plain my own life must continue to be
+troubled and uneasy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+The End of the Sunset Trail
+
+
+In February while attending a conference of reformers in St. Louis I
+received a letter from my mother which greatly disturbed me. "I wish I
+could see you," she wrote. "I am not very well this winter, I can't go
+out very often and I get very lonesome for my boys. If only you did not
+live so far away!"
+
+There was something in this letter which made all that I was doing in
+the convention of no account, and on the following evening I took the
+train for Columbia, the little village in which my parents were spending
+the winter, filled with remorseful forebodings. My pain and
+self-accusation would not let me rest. Something clutched my heart every
+time I thought of my crippled mother prisoned in a Dakota shanty and no
+express train was swift enough to satisfy my desire to reach her. The
+letter had been forwarded to me and I was afraid that she might be
+actually ill.
+
+That ride next day from Sioux City to Aberdeen was one of the gloomiest
+I had ever experienced. Not only was my conscience uneasy, it seemed
+that I was being hurled into a region of arctic storms. A terrific
+blizzard possessed the plain, and the engine appeared to fight its way
+like a brave animal. All day it labored forward while the coaches behind
+it swayed in the ever-increasing power of the tempest, their wheels
+emitting squeals of pain as they ground through the drifts, and I
+sitting in my overcoat with collar turned high above my ears, my hands
+thrust deep in my pockets, sullenly counted the hours of my discomfort.
+The windows, furred deep with frost, let in but a pallid half-light,
+thus adding a mental dusk to the actual menace of the storm.
+
+After each station the brakemen re-entered as if blown in by the blast,
+and a vapor, white as a shower of flour, filled the door-way, behind
+them. Occasionally as I cleared a space for a peephole through the rimy
+panes, I caught momentary glimpses of a level, treeless earth, desolate
+as the polar ocean swept by ferocious elemental warfare.
+
+No life was to be seen save here and there a suffering steer or colt,
+humped under the lee of a straw-stack. The streets of the small wooden
+towns were deserted. No citizen was abroad, only the faint smoke of
+chimneys testified to the presence of life beneath the roof-trees.
+
+Occasionally a local passenger came in, puffing and whistling with loud
+explosions of excited comment over the storm which he seemed to treat as
+an agreeable diversion, but the conductor, who followed, threshing his
+hands and nursing his ears, swore in emphatic dislike of the country and
+climate, but even this controversy offered no relief to the through
+passengers who sat in frozen stoical silence. There was very little
+humor in a Dakota blizzard for them--or for me.
+
+At six o'clock that night I reached the desolate end of my journey. My
+father met me at the station and led the way to the low square bleak
+cottage which he had rented for the winter. Mother, still unable to lift
+her feet from the floor, opened the door to us, and reaching her, as I
+did, through that terrifying tempest, made her seem as lonely as a
+castaway on some gelid Greenland coast.
+
+Father was in unwonted depression. His crop had again failed to mature.
+With nearly a thousand acres of wheat, he had harvested barely enough
+for the next year's seed. He was not entirely at the end of his faith,
+however; on the contrary, he was filled with desire of the farther west.
+"The irrigated country is the next field for development. I'm going to
+sell out here and try irrigation in Montana. I want to get where I can
+regulate the water for my crops."
+
+"You'll do nothing of the kind," I retorted. "You'll go no further west.
+I have a better plan than that."
+
+The wind roared on, all that night and all the next day, and during this
+time we did little but feed the stove and argue our widely separated
+plans. I told them of Franklin's success on the stage with Herne, and I
+described my own busy, though unremunerative life as a writer, and as I
+talked the world from which I came shone with increasing splendor.
+
+Little by little the story of the country's decay came out. The village
+of Ordway had been moved away, nothing remained but the grain elevator.
+Many of our old neighbors had gone "to the irrigation country" and more
+were planning to go as soon as they could sell their farms. Columbia was
+also in desolate decline. Its hotel stood empty, its windows broken, its
+doors sagging.
+
+Nothing could have been more depressing, more hopeless, and my throat
+burned with bitter rage every time my mother shuffled across the floor,
+and when she shyly sat beside me and took my hand in hers as if to hold
+me fast, my voice almost failed me. I began to plead "Father, let's get
+a home together, somewhere. Suppose we compromise on old Neshonoc where
+you were married and where I was born. Let's buy a house and lot there
+and put the deed in mother's name so that it can never be alienated, and
+make it the Garland Homestead. Come! Mother's brothers are there, your
+sister is there, all your old pioneer comrades are there. It's in a
+rich and sheltered valley and is filled with associations of your
+youth.--Haven't you had enough of pioneering? Why not go back and be
+sheltered by the hills and trees for the rest of your lives? If you'll
+join us in this plan, Frank and I will spend our summers with you and
+perhaps we can all eat our Thanksgiving dinners together in the good old
+New England custom and be happy."
+
+Mother yielded at once to the earnestness of my appeal. "I'm ready to go
+back," she said. "There's only one thing to keep me here, and that is
+Jessie's grave," (Poor little girl! It did seem a bleak place in which
+to leave her lying alone) but the old soldier was still too proud, too
+much the pioneer, to bring himself at once to a surrender of his hopes.
+He shook his head and said, "I can't do it, Hamlin. I've got to fight it
+out right here or farther west."
+
+To this I darkly responded, "If you go farther west you go alone.
+Mother's pioneering is done. She is coming with me, back to comfort,
+back to a real home beside her brothers."
+
+As I grew calmer, we talked of the past, of the early days in Iowa, of
+the dimmer, yet still more beautiful valleys of Wisconsin, till mother
+sighed, and said, "I'd like to see the folks and the old coulee once
+more, but I never shall."
+
+"Yes, you shall," I asserted.
+
+We spoke of David whose feet were still marching to the guidons of the
+sunset, of Burton far away on an Island in Puget Sound, and together we
+decided that placid old William, sitting among his bees in Gill's
+Coulee, was after all the wiser man. Of what avail this constant quest
+of gold, beneath the far horizon's rim?
+
+"Father," I bluntly said, "you've been chasing a will-o'-the-wisp. For
+fifty years you've been moving westward, and always you have gone from
+certainty to uncertainty, from a comfortable home to a shanty. For
+thirty years you've carried mother on a ceaseless journey--to what end?
+Here you are,--snowbound on a treeless plain with mother old and
+crippled. It's a hard thing to say but the time has come for a 'bout
+face. _You must take the back trail._ It will hurt, but it must be
+done."
+
+"I can't do it!" he exclaimed. "I've never 'backed water' in my life,
+and I won't do it now. I'm not beaten yet. We've had three bad years in
+succession--we'll surely have a crop next year. I won't surrender so
+long as I can run a team."
+
+"Then, let me tell you something else," I resumed. "I will never visit
+you on this accursed plain again. You can live here if you want to, but
+I'm going to take mother out of it. She shall not grow old and die in
+such surroundings as these. I won't have it--it isn't right."
+
+At last the stern old Captain gave in, at least to the point of saying,
+"Well, we'll see. I'll come down next summer, and we'll visit William
+and look the ground over.--But I won't consider going back to stay till
+I've had a crop. I won't go back to the old valley dead-broke. I can't
+stand being called a failure. If I have a crop and can sell out I'll
+talk with you."
+
+"Very well. I'm going to stop off at Salem on my way East and tell the
+folks that you are about to sell out and come back to the old valley."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This victory over my pioneer father gave me such relief from my gnawing
+conscience that my whole sky lightened. The thought of establishing a
+family hearth at the point where my life began, had a fine appeal. All
+my schooling had been to migrate, to keep moving. "If your crop fails,
+go west and try a new soil. If disagreeable neighbors surround you,
+sell out and move,--always toward the open country. To remain quietly in
+your native place is a sign of weakness, of irresolution. Happiness
+dwells afar. Wealth and fame are to be found by journeying toward the
+sunset star!" Such had been the spirit, the message of all the songs and
+stories of my youth.
+
+Now suddenly I perceived the futility of our quest. I felt the value, I
+acknowledged the peace of the old, the settled. The valley of my birth
+even in the midst of winter had a quiet beauty. The bluffs were draped
+with purple and silver. Steel-blue shadows filled the hollows of the
+sunlit snow. The farmhouses all put forth a comfortable, settled, homey
+look. The farmers themselves, shaggy, fur-clad and well-fed, came into
+town driving fat horses whose bells uttered a song of plenty. On the
+plain we had feared the wind with a mortal terror, here the hills as
+well as the sheltering elms (which defended almost every roof) stood
+against the blast like friendly warders.
+
+The village life, though rude and slow-moving, was hearty and cheerful.
+As I went about the streets with my uncle William--gray-haired old
+pioneers whose names were startlingly familiar, called out, "Hello,
+Bill"--adding some homely jest precisely as they had been doing for
+forty years. As young men they had threshed or cradled or husked corn
+with my father, whom they still called by his first name. "So you are
+Dick's boy? How is Dick getting along?"
+
+"He has a big farm," I replied, "nearly a thousand acres, but he's going
+to sell out next year and come back here."
+
+They were all frankly pleased. "Is that so! Made his pile, I s'pose?"
+
+"Enough to live on, I guess," I answered evasively.
+
+"I'm glad to hear of it. I always liked Dick. We were in the woods
+together. I hated to see him leave the valley. How's Belle?"
+
+This question always brought the shadow back to my face. "Not very
+well,--but we hope she'll be better when she gets back here among her
+own folks."
+
+"Well, we'll all be glad to see them both," was the hearty reply.
+
+In this hope, with this plan in mind, I took my way back to New York,
+well pleased with my plan.
+
+After nearly a third of a century of migration, the Garlands were about
+to double on their trail, and their decision was deeply significant. It
+meant that a certain phase of American pioneering had ended, that "the
+woods and prairie lands" having all been taken up, nothing remained but
+the semi-arid valleys of the Rocky Mountains. "Irrigation" was a new
+word and a vague word in the ears of my father's generation, and had
+little of the charm which lay in the "flowery savannahs" of the
+Mississippi valley. In the years between 1865 and 1892 the nation had
+swiftly passed through the buoyant era of free land settlement, and now
+the day of reckoning had come.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+We Go to California
+
+
+The idea of a homestead now became an obsession with me. As a
+proletariat I knew the power of the landlord and the value of land. My
+love of the wilderness was increasing year by year, but all desire to
+plow the wild land was gone. My desire for a home did not involve a
+lonely cabin in a far-off valley, on the contrary I wanted roads and
+bridges and neighbors. My hope now was to possess a minute isle of
+safety in the midst of the streaming currents of western life--a little
+solid ground in my native valley on which the surviving members of my
+family could catch and cling.
+
+All about me as I travelled, I now perceived the mournful side of
+American "enterprise." Sons were deserting their work-worn fathers,
+daughters were forgetting their tired mothers. Families were everywhere
+breaking up. Ambitious young men and unsuccessful old men were in
+restless motion, spreading, swarming, dragging their reluctant women and
+their helpless and wondering children into unfamiliar hardships--At
+times I visioned the Middle Border as a colony of ants--which was an
+injustice to the ants, for ants have a reason for their apparently
+futile and aimless striving.
+
+My brother and I discussed my notion in detail as we sat in our
+six-by-nine dining room, high in our Harlem flat. "The house must be in
+a village. It must be New England in type and stand beneath tall elm
+trees," I said. "It must be broad-based and low--you know the kind, we
+saw dozens of them on our tramp-trip down the Connecticut Valley and
+we'll have a big garden and a tennis court. We'll need a barn, too, for
+father will want to keep a driving team. Mother shall have a girl to do
+the housework so that we can visit her often,"--and so on and on!
+
+Things were not coming our way very fast but they were coming, and it
+really looked as though my dream might become a reality. My brother was
+drawing a small but regular salary as a member of Herne's company, my
+stories were selling moderately well and as neither of us was given to
+drink or cards, whatever we earned we saved. To some minds our lives
+seemed stupidly regular, but we were happy in our quiet way.
+
+It was in my brother's little flat on One Hundred and Fifth Street that
+Stephen Crane renewed a friendship which had begun a couple of years
+before, while I was lecturing in Avon, New Jersey. He was a slim, pale,
+hungry looking boy at this time and had just written _The Red Badge of
+Courage_, in fact he brought the first half of it in his pocket on his
+second visit, and I loaned him fifteen dollars to redeem the other half
+from the keep of a cruel typist.
+
+He came again and again to see me, always with a new roll of manuscript
+in his ulster. Now it was _The Men in the Storm_, now a bunch of _The
+Black Riders_, curious poems, which he afterwards dedicated to me, and
+while my brother browned a steak, Steve and I usually sat in council
+over his dark future.
+
+"You will laugh over these lean years," I said to him, but he found
+small comfort in that prospect.
+
+To him I was a man established, and I took an absurd pleasure in playing
+the part of Successful Author. It was all very comical--for my study was
+the ratty little parlor of a furnished flat for which we paid thirty
+dollars per month. Still to the man at the bottom of a pit the fellow
+on top, in the sunlight, is a king, and to Crane my brother and I were
+at least dukes.
+
+An expression used by Suderman in his preface to _Dame Care_ had made a
+great impression on my mind and in discussing my future with the Hernes
+I quoted these lines and said, "I am resolved that _my_ mother shall not
+'rise from the feast of life empty.' Think of it! She has never seen a
+real play in a real theater in all her life. She has never seen a
+painting or heard a piece of fine music. She knows nothing of the
+splendors of our civilization except what comes to her in the
+newspapers, while here am I in the midst of every intellectual delight.
+I take no credit for my desire to comfort her--it's just my way of
+having fun. It's a purely selfish enterprise on my part."
+
+Katharine who was familiar with the theory of Egoistic Altruism would
+not let my statement go uncontradicted. She tried to make a virtue of my
+devotion to my parents.
+
+"No," I insisted,--"if batting around town gave me more real pleasure I
+would do it. It don't, in fact I shall never be quite happy till I have
+shown mother _Shore Acres_ and given her an opportunity to hear a
+symphony concert."
+
+Meanwhile, having no business adviser, I was doing honorable things in a
+foolish way. With no knowledge of how to publish my work I was bringing
+out a problem novel here, a realistic novelette there and a book of
+short stories in a third place, all to the effect of confusing my public
+and disgusting the book-seller. But then, no one in those days had any
+very clear notion of how to launch a young writer, and so (as I had
+entered the literary field by way of a side-gate) I was doing as well as
+could have been expected of me. My idea, it appears, was to get as many
+books into the same market at the same time as possible. As a matter of
+fact none of them paid me any royalty, my subsistence came from the
+sale of such short stories as I was able to lodge with _The Century_,
+and _Harper's_, _The Youth's Companion_ and _The Arena_.
+
+The "Bacheller Syndicate" took a kindly interest in me, and I came to
+like the big, blonde, dreaming youth from The North Country who was the
+nominal head of the firm. Irving Bacheller, even at that time struck me
+as more of a poet than a business man, though I was always glad to get
+his check, for it brought the Garland Homestead just that much nearer.
+On the whole it was a prosperous and busy winter for both my brother and
+myself.
+
+Chicago was in the early stages of building a World's Fair, and as
+spring came on I spent a couple of weeks in the city putting _Prairie
+Folks_ into shape for the printer. Kirkland introduced me to the Chicago
+Literary Club, and my publisher, Frances Schulte, took me to the Press
+Club and I began to understand and like the city.
+
+As May deepened I went on up to Wisconsin, full of my plan for a
+homestead, and the green and luscious slopes of the old valley gave me a
+new delight, a kind of proprietary delight. I began to think of it as
+home. It seemed not only a natural deed but a dutiful deed, this return
+to the land of my birth, it was the beginning of a more settled order of
+life.
+
+My aunt, Susan Bailey, who was living alone in the old house in Onalaska
+made me welcome, and showed grateful interest when I spoke to her of my
+ambition. "I'll be glad to help you pay for such a place," she said,
+"provided you will set aside a room in it for me. I am lonely now. Your
+father is all I have and I'd like to spend my old age with him. But
+don't buy a farm. Buy a house and lot here or in LaCrosse."
+
+"Mother wants to be in West Salem," I replied. "All our talk has been of
+West Salem, and if you can content yourself to live with us there, I
+shall be very glad of your co-operation. Father is still skittish. He
+will not come back till he can sell to advantage. However, the season
+has started well and I am hoping that he will at least come down with
+mother and talk the matter over with us."
+
+To my delight, almost to my surprise, mother came, alone. "Father will
+follow in a few days," she said--"if he can find someone to look after
+his stock and tools while he is gone."
+
+She was able to walk a little now and together we went about the
+village, and visited relatives and neighbors in the country. We ate
+"company dinners" of fried chicken and shortcake, and sat out on the
+grass beneath the shelter of noble trees during the heat of the day.
+There was something profoundly restful and satisfying in this
+atmosphere. No one seemed in a hurry and no one seemed to fear either
+the wind or the sun.
+
+The talk was largely of the past, of the fine free life of the "early
+days" and my mother's eyes often filled with happy tears as she met
+friends who remembered her as a girl. There was no doubt in her mind.
+"I'd like to live here," she said. "It's more like home than any other
+place. But I don't see how your father could stand it on a little piece
+of land. He likes his big fields."
+
+One night as we were sitting on William's porch, talking of war times
+and of Hugh and Jane and Walter, a sweet and solemn mood came over us.
+It seemed as if the spirits of the pioneers, the McClintocks and Dudleys
+had been called back and were all about us. It seemed to me (as to my
+mother) as if Luke or Leonard might at any moment emerge from the
+odorous June dusk and speak to us. We spoke of David, and my mother's
+love for him vibrated in her voice as she said, "I don't suppose I'll
+ever see him again. He's too poor and too proud to come back here, and
+I'm too old and lame and poor to visit him."
+
+This produced in me a sudden and most audacious change of plan. "I'm not
+so certain about that," I retorted. "Frank's company is going to play in
+California this winter, and I am arranging a lecture tour--I've just
+decided that you and father shall go along."
+
+The boldness of my plan startled her. "Oh, we can't do a crazy thing
+like that," she declared.
+
+"It's not so crazy. Father has been talking for years of a visit to his
+brother in Santa Barbara. Aunt Susan tells me she wants to spend one
+more winter in California, and so I see no reason in the world why you
+and father should not go. I'll pay for your tickets and Addison will be
+glad to house you. We're going!" I asserted firmly. "We'll put off
+buying our homestead till next year and make this the grandest trip of
+your life."
+
+Aunt Maria here put in a word, "You do just what Hamlin tells you to do.
+If he wants to spend his money giving you a good time, you let him."
+
+Mother smiled wistfully but incredulously. To her it all seemed as
+remote, as improbable as a trip to Egypt, but I continued to talk of it
+as settled and so did William and Maria.
+
+I wrote at once to my father outlining my trip and pleading strongly for
+his consent and co-operation. "All your life long you and mother have
+toiled with hardly a day off. Your travelling has been mainly in a
+covered wagon. You have seen nothing of cities for thirty years. Addison
+wants you to spend the winter with him, and mother wants to see David
+once more--why not go? Begin to plan right now and as soon as your crops
+are harvested, meet me at Omaha or Kansas City and we'll all go along
+together."
+
+He replied with unexpected half-promise. "The crops look pretty well.
+Unless something very destructive turns up I shall have a few dollars to
+spend. I'd like to make that trip. I'd like to see Addison once more."
+
+I replied, "The more I think about it, the more wonderful it all seems.
+It will enable you to see the mountains, and the great plains. You can
+visit Los Angeles and San Francisco. You can see the ocean. Frank is to
+play for a month in Frisco, and we can all meet at Uncle David's for
+Christmas."
+
+The remainder of the summer was taken up with the preparations for this
+gorgeous excursion. Mother went back to help father through the harvest,
+whilst I returned to Boston and completed arrangements for my lecture
+tour which was to carry me as far north as Puget Sound.
+
+At last in November, when the grain was all safely marketed, the old
+people met me in Kansas City, and from there as if in a dream, started
+westward with me in such holiday spirits as mother's health permitted.
+Father was like a boy. Having cut loose from the farm--at least for the
+winter, he declared his intention to have a good time, "as good as the
+law allows," he added with a smile.
+
+Of course they both expected to suffer on the journey, that's what
+travel had always meant to them, but I surprised them. I not only took
+separate lower berths in the sleeping car, I insisted on regular meals
+at the eating houses along the way, and they were amazed to find travel
+almost comfortable. The cost of all this disturbed my mother a good deal
+till I explained to her that my own expenses were paid by the lecture
+committees and that she need not worry about the price of her fare.
+Perhaps I even boasted about a recent sale of a story! If I did I hope
+it will be forgiven me for I was determined that this should be the
+greatest event in her life.
+
+My father's interest in all that came to view was as keen as my own.
+During all his years of manhood he had longed to cross the plains and to
+see Pike's Peak, and now while his approach was not as he had dreamed
+it, he was actually on his way into Colorado. "By the great Horn
+Spoons," he exclaimed as we neared the foot hills, "I'd like to have
+been here before the railroad."
+
+Here spoke the born explorer. His eyes sparkled, his face flushed. The
+farther we got into the houseless cattle range, the better he liked it.
+"The best times I've ever had in my life," he remarked as we were
+looking away across the plain at the faint shapes of the Spanish Peaks,
+"was when I was cruising the prairie in a covered wagon."
+
+Then he told me once again of his long trip into Minnesota before the
+war, and of the cavalry lieutenant who rounded the settlers up and sent
+them back to St. Paul to escape the Sioux who were on the warpath. "I
+never saw such a country for game as Northern Minnesota was in those
+days. It swarmed with water-fowl and chicken and deer. If the soldiers
+hadn't driven me out I would have had a farm up there. I was just
+starting to break a garden when the troops came."
+
+It was all glorious to me as to them. The Spanish life of Las Vegas
+where we rested for a day, the Indians of Laguna, the lava beds and
+painted buttes of the desert, the beautiful slopes of the San Francisco
+Mountains, the herds of cattle, the careering cowboys, the mines and
+miners--all came in for study and comment. We resented the nights which
+shut us out from so much that was interesting. Then came the hot sand of
+the Colorado valley, the swift climb to the bleak heights of the coast
+range--and, at last, the swift descent to the orange groves and singing
+birds of Riverside. A dozen times father cried out, "This alone is worth
+the cost of the trip."
+
+Mother was weary, how weary I did not know till we reached our room in
+the hotel. She did not complain but her face was more dejected than I
+had ever seen it, and I was greatly disturbed by it. Our grand excursion
+had come too late for her.
+
+A good night's sleep and a hearty breakfast restored her to something
+like her smiling self and when we took the train for Santa Barbara she
+betrayed more excitement than at any time on our trip. "Do we really
+_see_ the ocean?" she asked.
+
+"Yes," I explained, "we run close along the shore. You'll see waves and
+ships and sharks--may be a whale or two."
+
+Father was even more excited. He spent most of his time on the platform
+or hanging from the window. "Well, I never really expected to see the
+Pacific," he said as we were nearing the end of our journey. "Now I'm
+determined to see Frisco and the Golden Gate."
+
+"Of course--that is a part of our itinerary. You can see Frisco when you
+come up to visit David."
+
+My uncle Addison who was living in a plain but roomy house, was
+genuinely glad to see us, and his wife made us welcome in the spirit of
+the Middle Border for she was one of the early settlers of Green County,
+Wisconsin. In an hour we were at home.
+
+Our host was, as I remembered him, a tall thin man of quiet dignity and
+notable power of expression. His words were well chosen and his manner
+urbane. "I want you people to settle right down here with me for the
+winter," he said. "In fact I shall try to persuade Richard to buy a
+place here."
+
+This brought out my own plan for a home in West Salem and he agreed
+with me that the old people should never again spend a winter in Dakota.
+
+There was no question in my mind about the hospitality of this home and
+so with a very comfortable, a delightful sense of peace, of
+satisfaction, of security, I set out on my way to San Francisco,
+Portland and Olympia, eager to see California--all of it. Its mountains,
+its cities and above all its poets had long called to me. It meant the
+_Argonauts_ and _The Songs of the Sierras_ to me, and one of my main
+objects of destination was Joaquin Miller's home in Oakland Heights.
+
+No one else, so far as I knew, was transmitting this Coast life into
+literature. Edwin Markham was an Oakland school teacher, Frank Norris, a
+college student, and Jack London a boy in short trousers. Miller
+dominated the coast landscape. The mountains, the streams, the pines
+were his. A dozen times as I passed some splendid peak I quoted his
+lines. "Sierras! Eternal tents of snow that flash o'er battlements of
+mountains."
+
+Nevertheless, in all my journeying, throughout all my other interests, I
+kept in mind our design for a reunion at my uncle David's home in San
+Jose, and I wrote him to tell him when to expect us. Franklin, who was
+playing in San Francisco, arranged to meet me, and father and mother
+were to come up from Santa Barbara.
+
+It all fell out quite miraculously as we had planned it. On the 24th of
+December we all met at my uncle's door.
+
+This reunion, so American in its unexpectedness, deserves closer
+analysis. My brother had come from New York City. Father and mother were
+from central Dakota. My own home was still in Boston. David and his
+family had reached this little tenement by way of a long trail through
+Iowa, Dakota, Montana, Oregon and Northern California. We who had all
+started, from the same little Wisconsin Valley were here drawn together,
+as if by the magic of a conjuror's wand, in a city strange to us all.
+Can any other country on earth surpass the United States in the ruthless
+broadcast dispersion of its families? Could any other land furnish a
+more incredible momentary re-assembling of scattered units?
+
+The reader of this tale will remember that David was my boyish hero, and
+as I had not seen him for fifteen years, I had looked forward, with
+disquieting question concerning our meeting. Alas! My fears were
+justified. There was more of pain than pleasure in the visit, for us
+all. Although my brother and I did our best to make it joyous, the
+conditions of the reunion were sorrowful, for David, who like my father,
+had been following the lure of the sunset all his life, was in deep
+discouragement.
+
+From his fruitful farm in Iowa he had sought the free soil of Dakota.
+From Dakota he had been lured to Montana. In the forests of Montana he
+had been robbed by his partner, reduced in a single day to the rank of a
+day laborer, and so in the attempt to retrieve his fortunes, had again
+moved westward--ever westward, and here now at last in San Jose, at the
+end of his means and almost at the end of his courage, he was working at
+whatever he could find to do.
+
+Nevertheless, he was still the borderer, still the man of the open.
+Something in his face and voice, something in his glance set him apart
+from the ordinary workman. He still carried with him something of the
+hunter, something which came from the broad spaces of the Middle Border,
+and though his bushy hair and beard were streaked with white, and his
+eyes sad and dim, I could still discern in him some part of the physical
+strength and beauty which had made his young manhood so glorious to
+me--and deeper yet, I perceived in him the dreamer, the Celtic minstrel,
+the poet.
+
+His limbs, mighty as of old, were heavy, and his towering frame was
+beginning to stoop. His brave heart was beating slow. Fortune had been
+harshly inimical to him and his outlook on life was bitter. With all his
+tremendous physical power he had not been able to regain his former
+footing among men.
+
+In talking of his misfortunes, I asked him why he had not returned to
+Wisconsin after his loss in Montana, and he replied, as my father had
+done. "How could I do that? How could I sneak back with empty pockets?"
+
+Inevitably, almost at once, father spoke of the violin. "Have you got it
+yet?" he asked.
+
+"Yes," David replied. "But I seldom play on it now. In fact, I don't
+think there are any strings on it."
+
+I could tell from the tone of his voice that he had no will to play, but
+he dug the almost forgotten instrument out of a closet, strung it and
+tuned it, and that evening after dinner, when my father called out in
+familiar imperious fashion, "Come, come! now for a tune," David was
+prepared, reluctantly, to comply.
+
+"My hands are so stiff and clumsy now," he said by way of apology to me.
+
+It was a sad pleasure to me, as to him, this revival of youthful
+memories, and I would have spared him if I could, but my father insisted
+upon having all of the jocund dances and sweet old songs. Although a man
+of deep feeling in many ways, he could not understand the tragedy of my
+uncle's failing skill.
+
+But mother did! Her ear was too acute not to detect the difference in
+tone between his playing at this time and the power of expression he had
+once possessed, and in her shadowy corner she suffered sympathetically
+when beneath his work-worn fingers the strings cried out discordantly.
+The wrist, once so strong and sure, the hands so supple and swift were
+now hooks of horn and bronze. The magic touch of youth had vanished,
+and yet as he went on, some little part of his wizardry came back.
+
+At father's request he played once more _Maggie, Air Ye Sleepin'_, and
+while the strings wailed beneath his bow I shivered as of old, stirred
+by the winds of the past "roaring o'er Moorland craggy." Deep in my
+brain the sob of the song sank, filling my inner vision with flitting
+shadows of vanished faces, brows untouched of care, and sweet kind eyes
+lit by the firelight of a secure abundant hearth. I was lying once more
+before the fire in David's little cabin in the deep Wisconsin valley and
+Grandfather McClintock, a dreaming giant, was drumming on his chair, his
+face flame-lit, his hair a halo of snow and gold.
+
+Tune after tune the old Borderman played, in answer to my father's
+insistent demands, until at last the pain of it all became unendurable
+and he ended abruptly. "I can't play any more.--I'll never play again,"
+he added harshly as he laid the violin away in its box like a child in
+its coffin.
+
+We sat in silence, for we all realized that never again would we hear
+those wistful, meaningful melodies. Wordless, with aching throats,
+resentful of the present, my mother and my aunt dreamed of the bright
+and beautiful Neshonoc days when they were young and David was young and
+all the west was a land of hope.
+
+My father now joined in urging David to go back to the middle border.
+"I'll put you on my farm," he said. "Or if you want to go back to
+Neshonoc, we'll help you do that. We are thinking of going back there
+ourselves."
+
+David sadly shook his grizzled head. "No, I can't do that," he repeated.
+"I haven't money enough to pay my carfare, and besides, Becky and the
+children would never consent to it."
+
+I understood. His proud heart rebelled at the thought of the pitying or
+contemptuous eyes of his stay-at home neighbors. He who had gone forth
+so triumphantly thirty years before could not endure the notion of going
+back on borrowed money. Better to die among strangers like a soldier.
+
+Father, stern old pioneer though he was, could not think of leaving his
+wife's brother here, working like a Chinaman. "Dave has acted the fool,"
+he privately said to me, "but we will help him. If you can spare a
+little, we'll lend him enough to buy one of these fruit farms he's
+talking about."
+
+To this I agreed. Together we loaned him enough to make the first
+payment on a small farm. He was deeply grateful for this and hope again
+sprang up in his heart. "You won't regret it," he said brokenly. "This
+will put me on my feet, and by and by perhaps we'll meet in the old
+valley."--But we never did. I never saw him again.
+
+I shall always insist that a true musician, a superb violinist was lost
+to the world in David McClintock--but as he was born on the border and
+always remained on the border, how could he find himself? His hungry
+heart, his need of change, his search for the pot of gold beyond the
+sunset, had carried him from one adventure to another and always farther
+and farther from the things he most deeply craved. He might have been a
+great singer, for he had a beautiful voice and a keen appreciation of
+the finer elements of song.
+
+It was hard for me to adjust myself to his sorrowful decline into old
+age. I thought of him as he appeared to me when riding his threshing
+machine up the coulee road. I recalled the long rifle with which he used
+to carry off the prizes at the turkey shoots, and especially I
+remembered him as he looked while playing the violin on that far off
+Thanksgiving night in Lewis Valley.
+
+I left California with the feeling that his life was almost ended, and
+my heart was heavy with indignant pity for I must now remember him only
+as a broken and discouraged man. The David of my idolatry, the laughing
+giant of my boyhood world, could be found now, only in the mist which
+hung above the hills and valleys of Neshonoc.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV
+
+The Homestead in the Valley
+
+
+To my father the Golden Gate of San Francisco was grandly romantic. It
+was associated in his mind with Bret Harte and the Goldseekers of Forty
+Nine, as well as with Fremont and the Mexican War, hence one of his
+expressed desires for many years had been to stand on the hills above
+the bay and look out on the ocean. "I know Boston," he said, "and I want
+to know Frisco."
+
+My mother's interest in the city was more personal. She was eager to see
+her son Franklin play his part in a real play on a real stage. For that
+reward she was willing to undertake considerable extra fatigue and so to
+please her, to satisfy my father and to gratify myself, I accompanied
+them to San Francisco and for several days with a delightful sense of
+accomplishment, my brother and I led them about the town. We visited the
+Seal Rocks and climbed Nob Hill, explored Chinatown and walked through
+the Old Spanish Quarter, and as each of these pleasures was tasted my
+father said, "Well now, that's done!" precisely as if he were getting
+through a list of tedious duties.
+
+There was no hint of obligation, however, in the hours which they spent
+in seeing my brother's performance as one of the "Three Twins" in
+_Incog_. The piece was in truth very funny and Franklin hardly to be
+distinguished from his "Star," a fact which astonished and delighted my
+mother. She didn't know he could look so unlike himself. She laughed
+herself quite breathless over the absurd situations of the farce but
+father was not so easily satisfied. "This foolery is all well enough,"
+said he, "but I'd rather see you and your friend Herne in _Shore
+Acres_."
+
+At last the day came when they both expressed a desire to return to
+Santa Barbara. "We've had about all we can stand this trip," they
+confessed, whereupon, leaving Franklin at his job, we started down the
+valley on our way to Addison Garland's home which had come to have
+something of the quality of home to us all.
+
+We were tired but triumphant. One by one the things we had promised
+ourselves to see we had seen. The Plains, the Mountains, the Desert, the
+Orange Groves, the Ocean, all had been added to the list of our
+achievements. We had visited David and watched Franklin play in his
+"troupe," and now with a sense of fullness, of victory, we were on our
+way back to a safe harbor among the fruits and flowers of Southern
+California.
+
+This was the pleasantest thought of all to me and in private I said to
+my uncle, "I hope you can keep these people till spring. They must not
+go back to Dakota now."
+
+"Give yourself no concern about that!" replied Addison. "I have a
+program laid out which will keep them busy until May. We're going out to
+Catalina and up into the Ojai valley and down to Los Angeles. We are to
+play for the rest of the winter like a couple of boys."
+
+With mind entirely at ease I left them on the rose-embowered porch of my
+uncle's home, and started east by way of Denver and Chicago, eager to
+resume work on a book which I had promised for the autumn.
+
+Chicago was now full in the spot-light of the National Stage. In spite
+of the business depression which still engulfed the west, the promoters
+of the Columbian Exposition were going steadily forward with their
+plans, and when I arrived in the city about the middle of January, the
+bustle of preparation was at a very high point.
+
+The newly-acquired studios were swarming with eager and aspiring young
+artists, and I believed, (as many others believed) that the city was
+entering upon an era of swift and shining development. All the near-by
+states were stirred and heartened by this esthetic awakening of a
+metropolis which up to this time had given but little thought to the
+value of art in the life of a community. From being a huge, muddy windy
+market-place, it seemed about to take its place among the literary
+capitals of the world.
+
+Colonies of painters, sculptors, decorators and other art experts now
+colored its life in gratifying degree. Beauty was a work to advertise
+with, and writers like Harriet Monroe, Henry B. Fuller, George Ade,
+Peter Finley Dunne, and Eugene Field were at work celebrating, each in
+his kind, the changes in the thought and aspect of the town. Ambitious
+publishing houses were springing up and "dummies" of new magazines were
+being thumbed by reckless young editors. The talk was all of Art, and
+the Exposition. It did, indeed seem as if culture were about to hum.
+
+Naturally this flare of esthetic enthusiasm lit the tow of my
+imagination. I predicted a publishing center and a literary market-place
+second only to New York, a publishing center which by reason of its
+geographical position would be more progressive than Boston, and more
+American than Manhattan. "Here flames the spirit of youth. Here throbs
+the heart of America," I declared in _Crumbling Idols_, an essay which I
+was at this time writing for the _Forum_.
+
+In the heat of this conviction, I decided to give up my residence in
+Boston and establish headquarters in Chicago. I belonged here. My
+writing was of the Middle Border, and must continue to be so. Its
+spirit was mine. All of my immediate relations were dwellers in the
+west, and as I had also definitely set myself the task of depicting
+certain phases of mountain life, it was inevitable that I should
+ultimately bring my workshop to Chicago which was my natural pivot, the
+hinge on which my varied activities would revolve. And, finally, to live
+here would enable me to keep in closer personal touch with my father and
+mother in the Wisconsin homestead which I had fully determined to
+acquire.
+
+Following this decision, I returned to Boston, and at once announced my
+plan to Howells, Flower and other of my good friends who had meant so
+much to me in the past. Each was kind enough to express regret and all
+agreed that my scheme was logical. "It should bring you happiness and
+success," they added.
+
+Alas! The longer I stayed, the deeper I settled into my groove and the
+more difficult my removal became. It was not easy to surrender the busy
+and cheerful life I had been leading for nearly ten years. It was hard
+to say good-bye to the artists and writers and musicians with whom I had
+so long been associated. To leave the Common, the parks, the Library and
+the lovely walks and drives of Roxbury, was sorrowful business--but I
+did it! I packed my books ready for shipment and returned to Chicago in
+May just as the Exposition was about to open its doors.
+
+Like everyone else who saw it at this time I was amazed at the grandeur
+of "The White City," and impatiently anxious to have all my friends and
+relations share in my enjoyment of it. My father was back on the farm in
+Dakota and I wrote to him at once urging him to come down. "Frank will
+be here in June and we will take charge of you. Sell the cook stove if
+necessary and come. You _must_ see this fair. On the way back I will go
+as far as West Salem and we'll buy that homestead I've been talking
+about."
+
+My brother whose season closed about the twenty-fifth of May, joined me
+in urging them not to miss the fair and a few days later we were both
+delighted and a little surprised to get a letter from mother telling us
+when to expect them. "I can't walk very well," she explained, "but I'm
+coming. I am so hungry to see my boys that I don't mind the long
+journey."
+
+Having secured rooms for them at a small hotel near the west gate of the
+exposition grounds, we were at the station to receive them as they came
+from the train surrounded by other tired and dusty pilgrims of the
+plains. Father was in high spirits and mother was looking very well
+considering the tiresome ride of nearly seven hundred miles. "Give us a
+chance to wash up and we'll be ready for anything," she said with brave
+intonation.
+
+We took her at her word. With merciless enthusiasm we hurried them to
+their hotel and as soon as they had bathed and eaten a hasty lunch, we
+started out with intent to astonish and delight them. Here was another
+table at "the feast of life" from which we did not intend they should
+rise unsatisfied. "This shall be the richest experience of their lives,"
+we said.
+
+With a wheeled chair to save mother from the fatigue of walking we
+started down the line and so rapidly did we pass from one stupendous
+vista to another that we saw in a few hours many of the inside exhibits
+and all of the finest exteriors--not to mention a glimpse of the
+polyglot amazements of the Midway.
+
+In pursuance of our plan to watch the lights come on, we ate our supper
+in one of the big restaurants on the grounds and at eight o'clock
+entered the Court of Honor. It chanced to be a moonlit night, and as
+lamps were lit and the waters of the lagoon began to reflect the
+gleaming walls of the great palaces with their sculptured ornaments,
+and boats of quaint shape filled with singers came and went beneath the
+arching bridges, the wonder and the beauty of it all moved these
+dwellers of the level lands to tears of joy which was almost as poignant
+as pain. In addition to its grandeur the scene had for them the
+transitory quality of an autumn sunset, a splendor which they would
+never see again.
+
+Stunned by the majesty of the vision, my mother sat in her chair,
+visioning it all yet comprehending little of its meaning. Her life had
+been spent among homely small things, and these gorgeous scenes dazzled
+her, overwhelmed her, letting in upon her in one mighty flood a thousand
+stupefying suggestions of the art and history and poetry of the world.
+She was old and she was ill, and her brain ached with the weight of its
+new conceptions. Her face grew troubled and wistful, and her eyes as big
+and dark as those of a child.
+
+At last utterly overcome she leaned her head against my arm, closed her
+eyes and said, "Take me home. I can't stand any more of it."
+
+Sadly I took her away, back to her room, realizing that we had been too
+eager. We had oppressed her with the exotic, the magnificent. She was
+too old and too feeble to enjoy as we had hoped she would enjoy, the
+color and music and thronging streets of The Magic City.
+
+At the end of the third day father said, "Well, I've had enough." He
+too, began to long for the repose of the country, the solace of familiar
+scenes. In truth they were both surfeited with the alien, sick of the
+picturesque. Their ears suffered from the clamor of strange sounds as
+their eyes ached with the clash of unaccustomed color. My insistent
+haste, my desire to make up in a few hours for all their past
+deprivations seemed at the moment to have been a mistake.
+
+Seeing this, knowing that all the splendors of the Orient could not
+compensate them for another sleepless night, I decided to cut their
+visit short and hurry them back to quietude. Early on the fourth morning
+we started for the LaCrosse Valley by way of Madison--they with a sense
+of relief, I with a feeling of disappointment. "The feast was too rich,
+too highly spiced for their simple tastes," I now admitted.
+
+However, a certain amount of comfort came to me as I observed that the
+farther they got from the Fair the keener their enjoyment of it
+became!--With bodies at ease and minds untroubled, they now relived in
+pleasant retrospect all the excitement and bustle of the crowds, all the
+bewildering sights and sounds of the Midway. Scenes which had worried as
+well as amazed them were now recalled with growing enthusiasm, as our
+train, filled with other returning sightseers of like condition, rushed
+steadily northward into the green abundance of the land they knew so
+well, and when at six o'clock of a lovely afternoon, they stepped down
+upon the platform of the weather-beaten little station at West Salem,
+both were restored to their serene and buoyant selves. The leafy
+village, so green, so muddy, so lush with grass, seemed the perfection
+of restful security. The chuckle of robins on the lawns, the songs of
+cat-birds in the plum trees and the whistle of larks in the pasture
+appealed to them as parts of a familiar sweet and homely hymn.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Just in the edge of the village, on a four-acre plot of rich level
+ground, stood an old two-story frame cottage on which I had fixed my
+interest. It was not beautiful, not in the least like the ideal New
+England homestead my brother and I had so long discussed, but it was
+sheltered on the south by three enormous maples and its gate fronted
+upon a double row of New England elms whose branches almost arched the
+wide street. Its gardens, rich in grape vines, asparagus beds, plums,
+raspberries and other fruiting shrubs, appealed with especial power to
+my mother who had lived so long on the sun-baked plains that the sight
+of green things growing was very precious in her eyes. Clumps of lilacs,
+syringa and snow-ball, and beds of old-fashioned flowers gave further
+evidence of the love and care which the former owners of the place had
+lavished upon it.
+
+As for myself, the desire to see my aging parents safely sheltered
+beneath the benignant branches of those sturdy trees would have made me
+content even with a log cabin. In imagination I perceived this angular
+cottage growing into something fine and sweet and--our own!
+
+There was charm also in the fact that its western windows looked out
+upon the wooded hills over which I had wandered as a boy, and whose
+sky-line had printed itself deep into the lowest stratum of my
+subconscious memory; and so it happened that on the following night, as
+we stood before the gate looking out upon that sunset wall of purple
+bluffs from beneath the double row of elms stretching like a peristyle
+to the west, my decision came.
+
+"This is my choice," I declared. "Right here we take root. This shall be
+the Garland Homestead." I turned to my father. "When can you move?"
+
+"Not till after my grain is threshed and marketed," he replied.
+
+"Very well, let's call it the first of November, and we'll all meet here
+for our Thanksgiving dinner."
+
+Thanksgiving with us, as with most New Englanders, had always been a
+date-mark, something to count upon and to count from, and no sooner were
+we in possession of a deed, than my mother and I began to plan for a
+dinner which should be at once a reunion of the Garlands and
+McClintocks, a homecoming and a housewarming. With this understanding I
+let them go back for a final harvest in Dakota.
+
+The purchase of this small lot and commonplace house may seem very
+unimportant to the reader but to me and to my father it was in very
+truth epoch-marking. To me it was the ending of one life and the
+beginning of another. To him it was decisive and not altogether joyous.
+To accept this as his home meant a surrender of his faith in the Golden
+West, a tacit admission that all his explorations of the open lands with
+whatsoever they had meant of opportunity, had ended in a sense of
+failure on a barren soil. It was not easy for him to enter into the
+spirit of our Thanksgiving plans although he had given his consent to
+them. He was still the tiller of broad acres, the speculator hoping for
+a boom.
+
+Early in October, as soon as I could displace the renter of the house, I
+started in rebuilding and redecorating it as if for the entrance of a
+bride. I widened the dining room, refitted the kitchen and ordered new
+rugs, curtains and furniture from Chicago. I engaged a cook and maid,
+and bought a horse so that on November first, the date of my mother's
+arrival, I was able to meet her at the station and drive her in a
+carriage of her own to an almost completely outfitted home.
+
+It was by no means what I intended it to be, but it seemed luxurious to
+her. Tears dimmed her eyes as she stepped across the threshold, but when
+I said, "Mother, hereafter my headquarters are to be in Chicago, and my
+home here with you," she put her arms around my neck and wept. Her
+wanderings were over, her heart at peace.
+
+My father arrived a couple of weeks later, and with his coming, mother
+sent out the invitations for our dinner. So far as we could, we
+intended to bring together the scattered units of our family group.
+
+At last the great day came! My brother was unable to be present and
+there were other empty chairs, but the McClintocks were well
+represented. William, white-haired, gigantic, looking almost exactly
+like Grandad at the same age, came early, bringing his wife, his two
+sons, and his daughter-in-law. Frank and Lorette drove over from Lewis
+Valley, with both of their sons and a daughter-in-law. Samantha and Dan
+could not come, but Deborah and Susan were present and completed the
+family roll. Several of my father's old friends promised to come in
+after dinner.
+
+The table, reflecting the abundance of the valley in those peaceful
+times, was stretched to its full length and as we gathered about it
+William congratulated my father on getting back where cranberries and
+turkeys and fat squashes grew.
+
+My mother smiled at this jest, but my father, still loyal to Dakota, was
+quick to defend it. "I like it out there," he insisted. "I like wheat
+raising on a big scale. I don't know how I'm going to come down from
+operating a six-horse header to scraping with a hoe in a garden patch."
+
+Mother, wearing her black silk dress and lace collar, sat at one end of
+the table, while I, to relieve my father of the task of carving the
+twenty-pound turkey, sat opposite her. For the first time in my life I
+took position as head of the family and the significance of this fact
+did not escape the company. The pen had proved itself to be mightier
+than the plow. Going east had proved more profitable than going west!
+
+It was a noble dinner! As I regard it from the standpoint of today, with
+potatoes six dollars per bushel and turkeys forty cents per pound, it
+all seems part of a kindlier world, a vanished world--as it is! There
+were squashes and turnips and cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie and mince
+pie, (made under mother's supervision) and coffee with real cream,--all
+the things which are so precious now, and the talk was in praise of the
+delicious food and the Exposition which was just closing, and reports of
+the crops which were abundant and safely garnered. The wars of the world
+were all behind us and the nation on its way back to prosperity--and we
+were unafraid.
+
+The gay talk lasted well through the meal, but as mother's pies came on,
+Aunt Maria regretfully remarked, "It's a pity Frank can't help eat this
+dinner."
+
+"I wish Dave and Mantie were here," put in Deborah.
+
+"And Rachel," added mother.
+
+This brought the note of sadness which is inevitable in such a
+gathering, and the shadow deepened as we gathered about the fire a
+little later. The dead claimed their places.
+
+Since leaving the valley thirty years before our group had suffered many
+losses. All my grandparents were gone. My sisters Harriet and Jessie and
+my uncle Richard had fallen on the march. David and Rebecca were
+stranded in the foot hills of the Cascade mountains. Rachel, a widow,
+was in Georgia. The pioneers of '48 were old and their bright world a
+memory.
+
+My father called on mother for some of the old songs. "You and Deb sing
+_Nellie Wildwood_," he urged, and to me it was a call to all the absent
+ones, an invitation to gather about us in order that the gaps in our
+hearth-fire's broken circle might be filled.
+
+Sweet and clear though in diminished volume, my mother's voice rose on
+the tender refrain:
+
+    Never more to part, Nellie Wildwood
+    Never more to long for the spring.
+
+and I thought of Hattie and Jessie and tried to believe that they too
+were sharing in the comfort and contentment of our fire.
+
+George, who resembled his uncle David, and had much of his skill with
+the fiddle bow, had brought his violin with him, but when father asked
+Frank to play _Maggie, air ye sleepin'_, he shook his head, saying,
+"That's Dave's tune," and his loyalty touched us all.
+
+Quick tears sprang to mother's eyes. She knew all too well that never
+again would she hear her best-beloved brother touch the strings or join
+his voice to hers.
+
+It was a moment of sorrow for us all but only for a moment, for Deborah
+struck up one of the lively "darky pieces" which my father loved so
+well, and with its jubilant patter young and old returned to smiling.
+
+    It must be now in the Kingdom a-comin'
+    In the year of Jubilo!
+
+we shouted, and so translated the words of the song into an expression
+of our own rejoicing present.
+
+Song after song followed, war chants which renewed my father's military
+youth, ballads which deepened the shadows in my mother's eyes, and then
+at last, at my request, she sang _The Rolling Stone_, and with a smile
+at father, we all joined the chorus.
+
+    We'll stay on the farm and we'll suffer no loss
+    For the stone that keeps rolling will gather no moss.
+
+My father was not entirely convinced, but I, surrounded by these farmer
+folk, hearing from their lips these quaint melodies, responded like some
+tensely-strung instrument, whose chords are being played upon by
+searching winds. I acknowledged myself at home and for all time. Beneath
+my feet lay the rugged country rock of my nativity. It pleased me to
+discover my mental characteristics striking so deep into this typically
+American soil.
+
+One by one our guests rose and went away, jocularly saying to my father,
+"Well, Dick, you've done the right thing at last. It's a comfort to have
+you so handy. We'll come to dinner often." To me they said, "We'll
+expect to see more of you, now that the old folks are here."
+
+"This is my home," I repeated.
+
+When we were alone I turned to mother in the spirit of the builder.
+"Give me another year and I'll make this a homestead worth talking
+about. My head is full of plans for its improvement."
+
+"It's good enough for me as it is," she protested.
+
+"No, it isn't," I retorted quickly. "Nothing that I can do is good
+enough for you, but I intend to make you entirely happy if I can."
+
+Here I make an end of this story, here at the close of an epoch of
+western settlement, here with my father and mother sitting beside me in
+the light of a tender Thanksgiving, in our new old home and facing a
+peaceful future. I was thirty-three years of age, and in a certain very
+real sense this plot of ground, this protecting roof may be taken as the
+symbols of my hard-earned first success as well as the defiant gages of
+other necessary battles which I must fight and win.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As I was leaving next day for Chicago, I said, "Mother, what shall I
+bring you from the city?"
+
+With a shy smile she answered, "There is only one thing more you can
+bring me,--one thing more that I want."
+
+"What is that?"
+
+"A daughter. I need a daughter--and some grandchildren."
+
+
+
+
+    +-----------------------------------------------+
+    | Transcriber's Note:                           |
+    |                                               |
+    | Some inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in |
+    | the original document have been preserved.    |
+    |                                               |
+    | Typographical errors corrected in the text:   |
+    |                                               |
+    | Page  21  McEldowney changed to McIldowney    |
+    | Page  61  Winneshiek changed to Winnesheik    |
+    | Page  80  Winneshiek changed to Winnesheik    |
+    | Page  80  Winnesheik changed to Winnesheik    |
+    | Page 164  arroya changed to arroyo            |
+    | Page 202  luminious changed to luminous       |
+    | Page 250  Canon changed to Canyon             |
+    | Page 259  missing word "he" inserted          |
+    | Page 270  buffetted changed to buffeted       |
+    | Page 294  maneuvres changed to manoeuvres     |
+    | Page 309  these changed to those              |
+    | Page 316  turretted changed to turreted       |
+    | Page 328  Douglas changed to Douglass         |
+    | Page 334  gratitud changed to gratitude       |
+    | Page 362  "of" added between "all us"         |
+    | Page 364  unwieldly changed to unwieldy       |
+    | Page 376  Harpers changed to Harper's         |
+    | Page 378  Proverty changed to Poverty         |
+    | Page 383  gratuitious changed to gratuitous   |
+    | Page 391  Kurd's changed to Hurd's            |
+    | Page 393  discusssions changed to discussions |
+    | Page 410  Harpers changed to Harper's         |
+    | Page 414  wearyful changed to weariful        |
+    | Page 418  Harpers changed to Harper's         |
+    | Page 418  other changed to others             |
+    | Page 443  Harpers changed to Harper's         |
+    | Page 448  that changed to than                |
+    +-----------------------------------------------+
+
+
+
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