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+Project Gutenberg's Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, by Stephen Leacock
+
+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: Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
+
+Author: Stephen Leacock
+
+Posting Date: February 25, 2009 [EBook #3533]
+Release Date: November, 2002
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SUNSHINE SKETCHES OF A LITTLE TOWN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Gardner Buchanan and The Distributed Proofreaders Team
+
+
+
+
+
+SUNSHINE SKETCHES OF A LITTLE TOWN
+
+By Stephen Leacock, 1869-1944
+
+
+          Preface
+
+     I    The Hostelry of Mr. Smith
+     II   The Speculations of Jefferson Thorpe
+     III  The Marine Excursion of the Knights of Pythias
+     IV   The Ministrations of the Rev. Mr. Drone
+     V    The Whirlwind Campaign in Mariposa
+     VI   The Beacon on the Hill
+     VII  The Extraordinary Entanglement of Mr. Pupkin
+     VIII The Fore-ordained Attachment of Zena Pepperleigh and Peter Pupkin
+     IX   The Mariposa Bank Mystery
+     X    The Great Election in Missinaba County
+     XI   The Candidacy of Mr. Smith
+     XII  L'Envoi. The Train to Mariposa
+
+
+
+
+
+Preface
+
+I know no way in which a writer may more fittingly introduce his work to
+the public than by giving a brief account of who and what he is. By this
+means some of the blame for what he has done is very properly shifted to
+the extenuating circumstances of his life.
+
+I was born at Swanmoor, Hants, England, on December 30, 1869. I am not
+aware that there was any particular conjunction of the planets at the
+time, but should think it extremely likely. My parents migrated to
+Canada in 1876, and I decided to go with them. My father took up a farm
+near Lake Simcoe, in Ontario. This was during the hard times of Canadian
+farming, and my father was just able by great diligence to pay the hired
+men and, in years of plenty, to raise enough grain to have seed for the
+next year's crop without buying any. By this process my brothers and
+I were inevitably driven off the land, and have become professors,
+business men, and engineers, instead of being able to grow up as farm
+labourers. Yet I saw enough of farming to speak exuberantly in political
+addresses of the joy of early rising and the deep sleep, both of body
+and intellect, that is induced by honest manual toil.
+
+I was educated at Upper Canada College, Toronto, of which I was head
+boy in 1887. From there I went to the University of Toronto, where
+I graduated in 1891. At the University I spent my entire time in the
+acquisition of languages, living, dead, and half-dead, and knew nothing
+of the outside world. In this diligent pursuit of words I spent about
+sixteen hours of each day. Very soon after graduation I had forgotten
+the languages, and found myself intellectually bankrupt. In other words
+I was what is called a distinguished graduate, and, as such, I took
+to school teaching as the only trade I could find that need neither
+experience nor intellect. I spent my time from 1891 to 1899 on the staff
+of Upper Canada College, an experience which has left me with a profound
+sympathy for the many gifted and brilliant men who are compelled to
+spend their lives in the most dreary, the most thankless, and the worst
+paid profession in the world. I have noted that of my pupils, those who
+seemed the laziest and the least enamoured of books are now rising
+to eminence at the bar, in business, and in public life; the really
+promising boys who took all the prizes are now able with difficulty to
+earn the wages of a clerk in a summer hotel or a deck hand on a canal
+boat.
+
+In 1899 I gave up school teaching in disgust, borrowing enough money
+to live upon for a few months, and went to the University of Chicago
+to study economics and political science. I was soon appointed to a
+Fellowship in political economy, and by means of this and some temporary
+employment by McGill University, I survived until I took the degree of
+Doctor of Philosophy in 1903. The meaning of this degree is that the
+recipient of instruction is examined for the last time in his life, and
+is pronounced completely full. After this, no new ideas can be imparted
+to him.
+
+From this time, and since my marriage, which had occurred at this
+period, I have belonged to the staff of McGill University, first as
+lecturer in Political Science, and later as head of the department of
+Economics and Political Science. As this position is one of the prizes
+of my profession, I am able to regard myself as singularly fortunate.
+The emolument is so high as to place me distinctly above the policemen,
+postmen, street-car conductors, and other salaried officials of the
+neighbourhood, while I am able to mix with the poorer of the business
+men of the city on terms of something like equality. In point of
+leisure, I enjoy more in the four corners of a single year than a
+business man knows in his whole life. I thus have what the business man
+can never enjoy, an ability to think, and, what is still better, to stop
+thinking altogether for months at a time.
+
+I have written a number of things in connection with my college life--a
+book on Political Science, and many essays, magazine articles, and so
+on. I belong to the Political Science Association of America, to the
+Royal Colonial Institute, and to the Church of England. These things,
+surely, are a proof of respectability. I have had some small connection
+with politics and public life. A few years ago I went all round the
+British Empire delivering addresses on Imperial organization. When I
+state that these lectures were followed almost immediately by the Union
+of South Africa, the Banana Riots in Trinidad, and the Turco-Italian
+war, I think the reader can form some idea of their importance. In
+Canada I belong to the Conservative party, but as yet I have failed
+entirely in Canadian politics, never having received a contract to build
+a bridge, or make a wharf, nor to construct even the smallest section
+of the Transcontinental Railway. This, however, is a form of national
+ingratitude to which one becomes accustomed in this Dominion.
+
+Apart from my college work, I have written two books, one called
+"Literary Lapses" and the other "Nonsense Novels." Each of these is
+published by John Lane (London and New York), and either of them can be
+obtained, absurd though it sounds, for the mere sum of three shillings
+and sixpence. Any reader of this preface, for example, ridiculous though
+it appears, could walk into a bookstore and buy both of these books for
+seven shillings. Yet these works are of so humorous a character that for
+many years it was found impossible to print them. The compositors fell
+back from their task suffocated with laughter and gasping for air.
+Nothing but the intervention of the linotype machine--or rather, of the
+kind of men who operate it--made it possible to print these books. Even
+now people have to be very careful in circulating them, and the books
+should never be put into the hands of persons not in robust health.
+
+Many of my friends are under the impression that I write these humorous
+nothings in idle moments when the wearied brain is unable to perform the
+serious labours of the economist. My own experience is exactly the other
+way. The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and
+figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific
+treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry
+into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write
+something out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an
+arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few
+and far between. Personally, I would sooner have written "Alice in
+Wonderland" than the whole Encyclopaedia Britannica.
+
+In regard to the present work I must disclaim at once all intentions of
+trying to do anything so ridiculously easy as writing about a real place
+and real people. Mariposa is not a real town. On the contrary, it is
+about seventy or eighty of them. You may find them all the way from Lake
+Superior to the sea, with the same square streets and the same maple
+trees and the same churches and hotels, and everywhere the sunshine of
+the land of hope.
+
+Similarly, the Reverend Mr. Drone is not one person but about eight or
+ten. To make him I clapped the gaiters of one ecclesiastic round the
+legs of another, added the sermons of a third and the character of a
+fourth, and so let him start on his way in the book to pick up such
+individual attributes as he might find for himself. Mullins and Bagshaw
+and Judge Pepperleigh and the rest are, it is true, personal friends
+of mine. But I have known them in such a variety of forms, with such
+alternations of tall and short, dark and fair, that, individually,
+I should have much ado to know them. Mr. Pupkin is found whenever a
+Canadian bank opens a branch in a county town and needs a teller. As for
+Mr. Smith, with his two hundred and eighty pounds, his hoarse voice,
+his loud check suit, his diamonds, the roughness of his address and
+the goodness of his heart,--all of this is known by everybody to be a
+necessary and universal adjunct of the hotel business.
+
+The inspiration of the book,--a land of hope and sunshine where little
+towns spread their square streets and their trim maple trees beside
+placid lakes almost within echo of the primeval forest,--is large
+enough. If it fails in its portrayal of the scenes and the country that
+it depicts the fault lies rather with an art that is deficient than in
+an affection that is wanting.
+
+Stephen Leacock. McGill University, June, 1912.
+
+
+
+
+ONE. The Hostelry of Mr. Smith
+
+I don't know whether you know Mariposa. If not, it is of no consequence,
+for if you know Canada at all, you are probably well acquainted with a
+dozen towns just like it.
+
+There it lies in the sunlight, sloping up from the little lake that
+spreads out at the foot of the hillside on which the town is built.
+There is a wharf beside the lake, and lying alongside of it a steamer
+that is tied to the wharf with two ropes of about the same size as they
+use on the Lusitania. The steamer goes nowhere in particular, for the
+lake is landlocked and there is no navigation for the Mariposa Belle
+except to "run trips" on the first of July and the Queen's Birthday, and
+to take excursions of the Knights of Pythias and the Sons of Temperance
+to and from the Local Option Townships.
+
+In point of geography the lake is called Lake Wissanotti and the river
+running out of it the Ossawippi, just as the main street of Mariposa is
+called Missinaba Street and the county Missinaba County. But these
+names do not really matter. Nobody uses them. People simply speak of the
+"lake" and the "river" and the "main street," much in the same way
+as they always call the Continental Hotel, "Pete Robinson's" and the
+Pharmaceutical Hall, "Eliot's Drug Store." But I suppose this is just
+the same in every one else's town as in mine, so I need lay no stress on
+it.
+
+The town, I say, has one broad street that runs up from the lake,
+commonly called the Main Street. There is no doubt about its width. When
+Mariposa was laid out there was none of that shortsightedness which is
+seen in the cramped dimensions of Wall Street and Piccadilly. Missinaba
+Street is so wide that if you were to roll Jeff Thorpe's barber shop
+over on its face it wouldn't reach half way across. Up and down the Main
+Street are telegraph poles of cedar of colossal thickness, standing at a
+variety of angles and carrying rather more wires than are commonly seen
+at a transatlantic cable station.
+
+On the Main Street itself are a number of buildings of extraordinary
+importance,--Smith's Hotel and the Continental and the Mariposa House,
+and the two banks (the Commercial and the Exchange), to say nothing of
+McCarthy's Block (erected in 1878), and Glover's Hardware Store with the
+Oddfellows' Hall above it. Then on the "cross" street that intersects
+Missinaba Street at the main corner there is the Post Office and the
+Fire Hall and the Young Men's Christian Association and the office of
+the Mariposa Newspacket,--in fact, to the eye of discernment a perfect
+jostle of public institutions comparable only to Threadneedle Street or
+Lower Broadway. On all the side streets there are maple trees and
+broad sidewalks, trim gardens with upright calla lilies, houses with
+verandahs, which are here and there being replaced by residences with
+piazzas.
+
+To the careless eye the scene on the Main Street of a summer afternoon
+is one of deep and unbroken peace. The empty street sleeps in the
+sunshine. There is a horse and buggy tied to the hitching post in front
+of Glover's hardware store. There is, usually and commonly, the burly
+figure of Mr. Smith, proprietor of Smith's Hotel, standing in his
+chequered waistcoat on the steps of his hostelry, and perhaps, further
+up the street, Lawyer Macartney going for his afternoon mail, or the
+Rev. Mr. Drone, the Rural Dean of the Church of England Church, going
+home to get his fishing rod after a mothers' auxiliary meeting.
+
+But this quiet is mere appearance. In reality, and to those who know it,
+the place is a perfect hive of activity. Why, at Netley's butcher shop
+(established in 1882) there are no less than four men working on the
+sausage machines in the basement; at the Newspacket office there are
+as many more job-printing; there is a long distance telephone with
+four distracting girls on high stools wearing steel caps and talking
+incessantly; in the offices in McCarthy's block are dentists and lawyers
+with their coats off, ready to work at any moment; and from the big
+planing factory down beside the lake where the railroad siding is, you
+may hear all through the hours of the summer afternoon the long-drawn
+music of the running saw.
+
+Busy--well, I should think so! Ask any of its inhabitants if Mariposa
+isn't a busy, hustling, thriving town. Ask Mullins, the manager of the
+Exchange Bank, who comes hustling over to his office from the Mariposa
+House every day at 10.30 and has scarcely time all morning to go out and
+take a drink with the manager of the Commercial; or ask--well, for
+the matter of that, ask any of them if they ever knew a more rushing
+go-a-head town than Mariposa.
+
+Of course if you come to the place fresh from New York, you are
+deceived. Your standard of vision is all astray, You do think the place
+is quiet. You do imagine that Mr. Smith is asleep merely because he
+closes his eyes as he stands. But live in Mariposa for six months or a
+year and then you will begin to understand it better; the buildings get
+higher and higher; the Mariposa House grows more and more luxurious;
+McCarthy's block towers to the sky; the 'buses roar and hum to the
+station; the trains shriek; the traffic multiplies; the people move
+faster and faster; a dense crowd swirls to and fro in the post-office
+and the five and ten cent store--and amusements! well, now! lacrosse,
+baseball, excursions, dances, the Fireman's Ball every winter and the
+Catholic picnic every summer; and music--the town band in the park every
+Wednesday evening, and the Oddfellows' brass band on the street every
+other Friday; the Mariposa Quartette, the Salvation Army--why, after a
+few months' residence you begin to realize that the place is a mere mad
+round of gaiety.
+
+In point of population, if one must come down to figures, the Canadian
+census puts the numbers every time at something round five thousand. But
+it is very generally understood in Mariposa that the census is largely
+the outcome of malicious jealousy. It is usual that after the census the
+editor of the Mariposa Newspacket makes a careful reestimate (based
+on the data of relative non-payment of subscriptions), and brings the
+population up to 6,000. After that the Mariposa Times-Herald makes
+an estimate that runs the figures up to 6,500. Then Mr. Gingham,
+the undertaker, who collects the vital statistics for the provincial
+government, makes an estimate from the number of what he calls the
+"demised" as compared with the less interesting persons who are still
+alive, and brings the population to 7,000. After that somebody else
+works it out that it's 7,500; then the man behind the bar of the
+Mariposa House offers to bet the whole room that there are 9,000 people
+in Mariposa. That settles it, and the population is well on the way to
+10,000, when down swoops the federal census taker on his next round and
+the town has to begin all over again.
+
+Still, it is a thriving town and there is no doubt of it. Even the
+transcontinental railways, as any townsman will tell you, run through
+Mariposa. It is true that the trains mostly go through at night and
+don't stop. But in the wakeful silence of the summer night you may hear
+the long whistle of the through train for the west as it tears through
+Mariposa, rattling over the switches and past the semaphores and
+ending in a long, sullen roar as it takes the trestle bridge over the
+Ossawippi. Or, better still, on a winter evening about eight o'clock you
+will see the long row of the Pullmans and diners of the night express
+going north to the mining country, the windows flashing with brilliant
+light, and within them a vista of cut glass and snow-white table linen,
+smiling negroes and millionaires with napkins at their chins whirling
+past in the driving snowstorm.
+
+I can tell you the people of Mariposa are proud of the trains, even if
+they don't stop! The joy of being on the main line lifts the Mariposa
+people above the level of their neighbours in such places as Tecumseh
+and Nichols Corners into the cosmopolitan atmosphere of through traffic
+and the larger life. Of course, they have their own train, too--the
+Mariposa Local, made up right there in the station yard, and running
+south to the city a hundred miles away. That, of course, is a real
+train, with a box stove on end in the passenger car, fed with cordwood
+upside down, and with seventeen flat cars of pine lumber set between the
+passenger car and the locomotive so as to give the train its full impact
+when shunting.
+
+Outside of Mariposa there are farms that begin well but get thinner and
+meaner as you go on, and end sooner or later in bush and swamp and the
+rock of the north country. And beyond that again, as the background of
+it all, though it's far away, you are somehow aware of the great pine
+woods of the lumber country reaching endlessly into the north.
+
+Not that the little town is always gay or always bright in the sunshine.
+There never was such a place for changing its character with the season.
+Dark enough and dull it seems of a winter night, the wooden sidewalks
+creaking with the frost, and the lights burning dim behind the shop
+windows. In olden times the lights were coal oil lamps; now, of course,
+they are, or are supposed to be, electricity, brought from the power
+house on the lower Ossawippi nineteen miles away. But, somehow, though
+it starts off as electricity from the Ossawippi rapids, by the time it
+gets to Mariposa and filters into the little bulbs behind the frosty
+windows of the shops, it has turned into coal oil again, as yellow and
+bleared as ever.
+
+After the winter, the snow melts and the ice goes out of the lake, the
+sun shines high and the shanty-men come down from the lumber woods and
+lie round drunk on the sidewalk outside of Smith's Hotel--and that's
+spring time. Mariposa is then a fierce, dangerous lumber town,
+calculated to terrorize the soul of a newcomer who does not
+understand that this also is only an appearance and that presently the
+rough-looking shanty-men will change their clothes and turn back again
+into farmers.
+
+Then the sun shines warmer and the maple trees come out and Lawyer
+Macartney puts on his tennis trousers, and that's summer time. The
+little town changes to a sort of summer resort. There are visitors up
+from the city. Every one of the seven cottages along the lake is full.
+The Mariposa Belle churns the waters of the Wissanotti into foam as she
+sails out from the wharf, in a cloud of flags, the band playing and the
+daughters and sisters of the Knights of Pythias dancing gaily on the
+deck.
+
+That changes too. The days shorten. The visitors disappear. The golden
+rod beside the meadow droops and withers on its stem. The maples blaze
+in glory and die. The evening closes dark and chill, and in the gloom
+of the main corner of Mariposa the Salvation Army around a naphtha lamp
+lift up the confession of their sins--and that is autumn. Thus the year
+runs its round, moving and changing in Mariposa, much as it does in
+other places.
+
+If, then, you feel that you know the town well enough to be admitted
+into the inner life and movement of it, walk down this June afternoon
+half way down the Main Street--or, if you like, half way up from the
+wharf--to where Mr. Smith is standing at the door of his hostelry. You
+will feel as you draw near that it is no ordinary man that you approach.
+It is not alone the huge bulk of Mr. Smith (two hundred and eighty
+pounds as tested on Netley's scales). It is not merely his costume,
+though the chequered waistcoat of dark blue with a flowered pattern
+forms, with his shepherd's plaid trousers, his grey spats and
+patent-leather boots, a colour scheme of no mean order. Nor is it
+merely Mr. Smith's finely mottled face. The face, no doubt, is a notable
+one,--solemn, inexpressible, unreadable, the face of the heaven-born
+hotel keeper. It is more than that. It is the strange dominating
+personality of the man that somehow holds you captive. I know nothing in
+history to compare with the position of Mr. Smith among those who drink
+over his bar, except, though in a lesser degree, the relation of the
+Emperor Napoleon to the Imperial Guard.
+
+When you meet Mr. Smith first you think he looks like an over-dressed
+pirate. Then you begin to think him a character. You wonder at his
+enormous bulk. Then the utter hopelessness of knowing what Smith is
+thinking by merely looking at his features gets on your mind and makes
+the Mona Lisa seem an open book and the ordinary human countenance as
+superficial as a puddle in the sunlight. After you have had a drink
+in Mr. Smith's bar, and he has called you by your Christian name, you
+realize that you are dealing with one of the greatest minds in the hotel
+business.
+
+Take, for instance, the big sign that sticks out into the street above
+Mr. Smith's head as he stands. What is on it? "JOS. SMITH, PROP."
+Nothing more, and yet the thing was a flash of genius. Other men who had
+had the hotel before Mr. Smith had called it by such feeble names as
+the Royal Hotel and the Queen's and the Alexandria. Every one of them
+failed. When Mr. Smith took over the hotel he simply put up the sign
+with "JOS. SMITH, PROP.," and then stood underneath in the sunshine as
+a living proof that a man who weighs nearly three hundred pounds is the
+natural king of the hotel business.
+
+But on this particular afternoon, in spite of the sunshine and deep
+peace, there was something as near to profound concern and anxiety as
+the features of Mr. Smith were ever known to express.
+
+The moment was indeed an anxious one. Mr. Smith was awaiting a telegram
+from his legal adviser who had that day journeyed to the county town
+to represent the proprietor's interest before the assembled License
+Commissioners. If you know anything of the hotel business at all,
+you will understand that as beside the decisions of the License
+Commissioners of Missinaba County, the opinions of the Lords of the
+Privy Council are mere trifles.
+
+The matter in question was very grave. The Mariposa Court had just
+fined Mr. Smith for the second time for selling liquors after hours. The
+Commissioners, therefore, were entitled to cancel the license.
+
+Mr. Smith knew his fault and acknowledged it. He had broken the law. How
+he had come to do so, it passed his imagination to recall. Crime always
+seems impossible in retrospect. By what sheer madness of the moment
+could he have shut up the bar on the night in question, and shut Judge
+Pepperleigh, the district judge in Missinaba County, outside of it? The
+more so inasmuch as the closing up of the bar under the rigid license
+law of the province was a matter that the proprietor never trusted to
+any hands but his own. Punctually every night at 11 o'clock Mr. Smith
+strolled from the desk of the "rotunda" to the door of the bar. If it
+seemed properly full of people and all was bright and cheerful, then
+he closed it. If not, he kept it open a few minutes longer till he had
+enough people inside to warrant closing. But never, never unless he was
+assured that Pepperleigh, the judge of the court, and Macartney, the
+prosecuting attorney, were both safely in the bar, or the bar parlour,
+did the proprietor venture to close up. Yet on this fatal night
+Pepperleigh and Macartney had been shut out--actually left on the street
+without a drink, and compelled to hammer and beat at the street door of
+the bar to gain admittance.
+
+This was the kind of thing not to be tolerated. Either a hotel must be
+run decently or quit. An information was laid next day and Mr. Smith
+convicted in four minutes,--his lawyers practically refusing to plead.
+The Mariposa court, when the presiding judge was cold sober, and it
+had the force of public opinion behind it, was a terrible engine of
+retributive justice.
+
+So no wonder that Mr. Smith awaited with anxiety the message of his
+legal adviser.
+
+He looked alternately up the street and down it again, hauled out his
+watch from the depths of his embroidered pocket, and examined the hour
+hand and the minute hand and the second hand with frowning scrutiny.
+
+Then wearily, and as one mindful that a hotel man is ever the servant of
+the public, he turned back into the hotel.
+
+"Billy," he said to the desk clerk, "if a wire comes bring it into the
+bar parlour."
+
+The voice of Mr. Smith is of a deep guttural such as Plancon or Edouard
+de Reske might have obtained had they had the advantages of the hotel
+business. And with that, Mr. Smith, as was his custom in off moments,
+joined his guests in the back room. His appearance, to the untrained
+eye, was merely that of an extremely stout hotelkeeper walking from the
+rotunda to the back bar. In reality, Mr. Smith was on the eve of one of
+the most brilliant and daring strokes ever effected in the history of
+licensed liquor. When I say that it was out of the agitation of this
+situation that Smith's Ladies' and Gent's Cafe originated, anybody who
+knows Mariposa will understand the magnitude of the moment.
+
+Mr. Smith, then, moved slowly from the doorway of the hotel through the
+"rotunda," or more simply the front room with the desk and the cigar
+case in it, and so to the bar and thence to the little room or back bar
+behind it. In this room, as I have said, the brightest minds of Mariposa
+might commonly be found in the quieter part of a summer afternoon.
+
+To-day there was a group of four who looked up as Mr. Smith entered,
+somewhat sympathetically, and evidently aware of the perplexities of the
+moment.
+
+Henry Mullins and George Duff, the two bank managers, were both present.
+Mullins is a rather short, rather round, smooth-shaven man of less than
+forty, wearing one of those round banking suits of pepper and salt, with
+a round banking hat of hard straw, and with the kind of gold tie-pin and
+heavy watch-chain and seals necessary to inspire confidence in matters
+of foreign exchange. Duff is just as round and just as short, and
+equally smoothly shaven, while his seals and straw hat are calculated to
+prove that the Commercial is just as sound a bank as the Exchange. From
+the technical point of view of the banking business, neither of them had
+any objection to being in Smith's Hotel or to taking a drink as long
+as the other was present. This, of course, was one of the cardinal
+principles of Mariposa banking.
+
+Then there was Mr. Diston, the high school teacher, commonly known as
+the "one who drank." None of the other teachers ever entered a hotel
+unless accompanied by a lady or protected by a child. But as Mr.
+Diston was known to drink beer on occasions and to go in and out of the
+Mariposa House and Smith's Hotel, he was looked upon as a man whose life
+was a mere wreck. Whenever the School Board raised the salaries of the
+other teachers, fifty or sixty dollars per annum at one lift, it was
+well understood that public morality wouldn't permit of an increase for
+Mr. Diston.
+
+Still more noticeable, perhaps, was the quiet, sallow looking man
+dressed in black, with black gloves and with black silk hat heavily
+craped and placed hollow-side-up on a chair. This was Mr. Golgotha
+Gingham, the undertaker of Mariposa, and his dress was due to the fact
+that he had just come from what he called an "interment." Mr. Gingham
+had the true spirit of his profession, and such words as "funeral"
+or "coffin" or "hearse" never passed his lips. He spoke always of
+"interments," of "caskets," and "coaches," using terms that were
+calculated rather to bring out the majesty and sublimity of death than
+to parade its horrors.
+
+To be present at the hotel was in accord with Mr. Gingham's general
+conception of his business. No man had ever grasped the true principles
+of undertaking more thoroughly than Mr. Gingham. I have often heard him
+explain that to associate with the living, uninteresting though they
+appear, is the only way to secure the custom of the dead.
+
+"Get to know people really well while they are alive," said Mr. Gingham;
+"be friends with them, close friends and then when they die you don't
+need to worry. You'll get the order every time."
+
+So, naturally, as the moment was one of sympathy, it was Mr. Gingham who
+spoke first.
+
+"What'll you do, Josh," he said, "if the Commissioners go against you?"
+
+"Boys," said Mr. Smith, "I don't rightly know. If I have to quit, the
+next move is to the city. But I don't reckon that I will have to quit.
+I've got an idee that I think's good every time."
+
+"Could you run a hotel in the city?" asked Mullins.
+
+"I could," said Mr. Smith. "I'll tell you. There's big things doin'
+in the hotel business right now, big chances if you go into it right.
+Hotels in the city is branching out. Why, you take the dining-room
+side of it," continued Mr. Smith, looking round at the group, "there's
+thousands in it. The old plan's all gone. Folks won't eat now in an
+ordinary dining-room with a high ceiling and windows. You have to get
+'em down underground in a room with no windows and lots of sawdust round
+and waiters that can't speak English. I seen them places last time I was
+in the city. They call 'em Rats' Coolers. And for light meals they want
+a Caff, a real French Caff, and for folks that come in late another
+place that they call a Girl Room that don't shut up at all. If I go to
+the city that's the kind of place I mean to run. What's yours, Gol? It's
+on the house?"
+
+And it was just at the moment when Mr. Smith said this that Billy, the
+desk-clerk, entered the room with the telegram in his hand.
+
+But stop--it is impossible for you to understand the anxiety with which
+Mr. Smith and his associates awaited the news from the Commissioners,
+without first realizing the astounding progress of Mr. Smith in the
+three past years, and the pinnacle of public eminence to which he had
+attained.
+
+Mr. Smith had come down from the lumber country of the Spanish River,
+where the divide is toward the Hudson Bay,--"back north" as they called
+it in Mariposa.
+
+He had been, it was said, a cook in the lumber shanties. To this day Mr.
+Smith can fry an egg on both sides with a lightness of touch that is the
+despair of his own "help."
+
+After that, he had run a river driver's boarding-house.
+
+After that, he had taken a food contract for a gang of railroad navvies
+on the transcontinental.
+
+After that, of course, the whole world was open to him.
+
+He came down to Mariposa and bought out the "inside" of what had been
+the Royal Hotel.
+
+Those who are educated understand that by the "inside" of a hotel is
+meant everything except the four outer walls of it--the fittings, the
+furniture, the bar, Billy the desk-clerk, the three dining-room girls,
+and above all the license granted by King Edward VII., and ratified
+further by King George, for the sale of intoxicating liquors.
+
+Till then the Royal had been a mere nothing. As "Smith's Hotel" it broke
+into a blaze of effulgence.
+
+From the first, Mr. Smith, as a proprietor, was a wild, rapturous
+success.
+
+He had all the qualifications.
+
+He weighed two hundred and eighty pounds.
+
+He could haul two drunken men out of the bar each by the scruff of the
+neck without the faintest anger or excitement.
+
+He carried money enough in his trousers pockets to start a bank, and
+spent it on anything, bet it on anything, and gave it away in handfuls.
+
+He was never drunk, and, as a point of chivalry to his customers, never
+quite sober. Anybody was free of the hotel who cared to come in. Anybody
+who didn't like it could go out. Drinks of all kinds cost five cents,
+or six for a quarter. Meals and beds were practically free. Any persons
+foolish enough to go to the desk and pay for them, Mr. Smith charged
+according to the expression of their faces.
+
+At first the loafers and the shanty men settled down on the place in a
+shower. But that was not the "trade" that Mr. Smith wanted. He knew
+how to get rid of them. An army of charwomen, turned into the hotel,
+scrubbed it from top to bottom. A vacuum cleaner, the first seen in
+Mariposa, hissed and screamed in the corridors. Forty brass beds were
+imported from the city, not, of course, for the guests to sleep in, but
+to keep them out. A bar-tender with a starched coat and wicker sleeves
+was put behind the bar.
+
+The loafers were put out of business. The place had become too "high
+toned" for them.
+
+To get the high class trade, Mr. Smith set himself to dress the part.
+He wore wide cut coats of filmy serge, light as gossamer; chequered
+waistcoats with a pattern for every day in the week; fedora hats light
+as autumn leaves; four-in-hand ties of saffron and myrtle green with a
+diamond pin the size of a hazel nut. On his fingers there were as many
+gems as would grace a native prince of India; across his waistcoat lay
+a gold watch-chain in huge square links and in his pocket a gold watch
+that weighed a pound and a half and marked minutes, seconds and quarter
+seconds. Just to look at Josh Smith's watch brought at least ten men to
+the bar every evening.
+
+Every morning Mr. Smith was shaved by Jefferson Thorpe, across the way.
+All that art could do, all that Florida water could effect, was lavished
+on his person.
+
+Mr. Smith became a local character. Mariposa was at his feet. All the
+reputable business-men drank at Mr. Smith's bar, and in the little
+parlour behind it you might find at any time a group of the brightest
+intellects in the town.
+
+Not but what there was opposition at first. The clergy, for example,
+who accepted the Mariposa House and the Continental as a necessary and
+useful evil, looked askance at the blazing lights and the surging crowd
+of Mr. Smith's saloon. They preached against him. When the Rev. Dean
+Drone led off with a sermon on the text "Lord be merciful even unto this
+publican Matthew Six," it was generally understood as an invitation to
+strike Mr. Smith dead. In the same way the sermon at the Presbyterian
+church the week after was on the text "Lo what now doeth Abiram in the
+land of Melchisideck Kings Eight and Nine?" and it was perfectly plain
+that what was meant was, "Lo, what is Josh Smith doing in Mariposa?"
+
+But this opposition had been countered by a wide and sagacious
+philanthropy. I think Mr. Smith first got the idea of that on the night
+when the steam merry-go-round came to Mariposa. Just below the hostelry,
+on an empty lot, it whirled and whistled, steaming forth its tunes on
+the summer evening while the children crowded round it in hundreds. Down
+the street strolled Mr. Smith, wearing a soft fedora to indicate that it
+was evening.
+
+"What d'you charge for a ride, boss?" said Mr. Smith.
+
+"Two for a nickel," said the man.
+
+"Take that," said Mr. Smith, handing out a ten-dollar bill from a roll
+of money, "and ride the little folks free all evening."
+
+That night the merry-go-round whirled madly till after midnight,
+freighted to capacity with Mariposa children, while up in Smith's Hotel,
+parents, friends and admirers, as the news spread, were standing four
+deep along the bar. They sold forty dollars' worth of lager alone that
+night, and Mr. Smith learned, if he had not already suspected it, the
+blessedness of giving.
+
+The uses of philanthropy went further. Mr. Smith subscribed to
+everything, joined everything, gave to everything. He became an
+Oddfellow, a Forester, A Knight of Pythias and a Workman. He gave a
+hundred dollars to the Mariposa Hospital and a hundred dollars to the
+Young Men's Christian Association.
+
+He subscribed to the Ball Club, the Lacrosse Club, the Curling Club,
+to anything, in fact, and especially to all those things which needed
+premises to meet in and grew thirsty in their discussions.
+
+As a consequence the Oddfellows held their annual banquet at Smith's
+Hotel and the Oyster Supper of the Knights of Pythias was celebrated in
+Mr. Smith's dining-room.
+
+Even more effective, perhaps, were Mr. Smith's secret benefactions,
+the kind of giving done by stealth of which not a soul in town knew
+anything, often, for a week after it was done. It was in this way that
+Mr. Smith put the new font in Dean Drone's church, and handed over a
+hundred dollars to Judge Pepperleigh for the unrestrained use of the
+Conservative party.
+
+So it came about that, little by little, the antagonism had died down.
+Smith's Hotel became an accepted institution in Mariposa. Even the
+temperance people were proud of Mr. Smith as a sort of character who
+added distinction to the town. There were moments, in the earlier quiet
+of the morning, when Dean Drone would go so far as to step in to the
+"rotunda" and collect a subscription. As for the Salvation Army, they
+ran in and out all the time unreproved.
+
+On only one point difficulty still remained. That was the closing of
+the bar. Mr. Smith could never bring his mind to it,--not as a matter of
+profit, but as a point of honour. It was too much for him to feel that
+Judge Pepperleigh might be out on the sidewalk thirsty at midnight, that
+the night hands of the Times-Herald on Wednesday might be compelled
+to go home dry. On this point Mr. Smith's moral code was simplicity
+itself,--do what is right and take the consequences. So the bar stayed
+open.
+
+Every town, I suppose, has its meaner spirits. In every genial
+bosom some snake is warmed,--or, as Mr. Smith put it to Golgotha
+Gingham--"there are some fellers even in this town skunks enough to
+inform."
+
+At first the Mariposa court quashed all indictments. The presiding
+judge, with his spectacles on and a pile of books in front of him,
+threatened the informer with the penitentiary. The whole bar of Mariposa
+was with Mr. Smith. But by sheer iteration the informations had proved
+successful. Judge Pepperleigh learned that Mr. Smith had subscribed a
+hundred dollars for the Liberal party and at once fined him for keeping
+open after hours. That made one conviction. On the top of this had come
+the untoward incident just mentioned and that made two. Beyond that
+was the deluge. This then was the exact situation when Billy, the desk
+clerk, entered the back bar with the telegram in his hand.
+
+"Here's your wire, sir," he said.
+
+"What does it say?" said Mr. Smith.
+
+He always dealt with written documents with a fine air of detachment. I
+don't suppose there were ten people in Mariposa who knew that Mr. Smith
+couldn't read.
+
+Billy opened the message and read, "Commissioners give you three months
+to close down."
+
+"Let me read it," said Mr. Smith, "that's right, three months to close
+down."
+
+There was dead silence when the message was read. Everybody waited for
+Mr. Smith to speak. Mr. Gingham instinctively assumed the professional
+air of hopeless melancholy.
+
+As it was afterwards recorded, Mr. Smith stood and "studied" with the
+tray in his hand for at least four minutes. Then he spoke.
+
+"Boys," he said, "I'll be darned if I close down till I'm ready to close
+down. I've got an idee. You wait and I'll show you."
+
+And beyond that, not another word did Mr. Smith say on the subject.
+
+But within forty-eight hours the whole town knew that something was
+doing. The hotel swarmed with carpenters, bricklayers and painters.
+There was an architect up from the city with a bundle of blue prints
+in his hand. There was an engineer taking the street level with a
+theodolite, and a gang of navvies with shovels digging like fury as if
+to dig out the back foundations of the hotel.
+
+"That'll fool 'em," said Mr. Smith.
+
+Half the town was gathered round the hotel crazy with excitement. But
+not a word would the proprietor say. Great dray loads of square timber,
+and two-by-eight pine joists kept arriving from the planing mill. There
+was a pile of matched spruce sixteen feet high lying by the sidewalk.
+
+Then the excavation deepened and the dirt flew, and the beams went up
+and the joists across, and all the day from dawn till dusk the hammers
+of the carpenters clattered away, working overtime at time and a half.
+
+"It don't matter what it costs," said Mr. Smith; "get it done."
+
+Rapidly the structure took form. It extended down the side street,
+joining the hotel at a right angle. Spacious and graceful it looked as
+it reared its uprights into the air.
+
+Already you could see the place where the row of windows was to come, a
+veritable palace of glass, it must be, so wide and commodious were they.
+Below it, you could see the basement shaping itself, with a low ceiling
+like a vault and big beams running across, dressed, smoothed, and ready
+for staining. Already in the street there were seven crates of red and
+white awning.
+
+And even then nobody knew what it was, and it was not till the
+seventeenth day that Mr. Smith, in the privacy of the back bar, broke
+the silence and explained.
+
+"I tell you, boys," he says, "it's a caff--like what they have in the
+city--a ladies' and gent's caff, and that underneath (what's yours, Mr.
+Mullins?) is a Rats' Cooler. And when I get her started, I'll hire a
+French Chief to do the cooking, and for the winter I will put in a 'girl
+room,' like what they have in the city hotels. And I'd like to see who's
+going to close her up then."
+
+Within two more weeks the plan was in operation. Not only was the caff
+built but the very hotel was transformed. Awnings had broken out in a
+red and white cloud upon its face, its every window carried a box of
+hanging plants, and above in glory floated the Union Jack. The very
+stationery was changed. The place was now Smith's Summer Pavilion. It
+was advertised in the city as Smith's Tourists' Emporium, and Smith's
+Northern Health Resort. Mr. Smith got the editor of the Times-Herald to
+write up a circular all about ozone and the Mariposa pine woods, with
+illustrations of the maskinonge (piscis mariposis) of Lake Wissanotti.
+
+The Saturday after that circular hit the city in July, there were men
+with fishing rods and landing nets pouring in on every train, almost
+too fast to register. And if, in the face of that, a few little drops of
+whiskey were sold over the bar, who thought of it?
+
+But the caff! that, of course, was the crowning glory of the thing, that
+and the Rats' Cooler below.
+
+Light and cool, with swinging windows open to the air, tables with
+marble tops, palms, waiters in white coats--it was the standing marvel
+of Mariposa. Not a soul in the town except Mr. Smith, who knew it by
+instinct, ever guessed that waiters and palms and marble tables can be
+rented over the long distance telephone.
+
+Mr. Smith was as good as his word. He got a French Chief with an
+aristocratic saturnine countenance, and a moustache and imperial that
+recalled the late Napoleon III. No one knew where Mr. Smith got him.
+Some people in the town said he was a French marquis. Others said he was
+a count and explained the difference.
+
+No one in Mariposa had ever seen anything like the caff. All down the
+side of it were the grill fires, with great pewter dish covers that went
+up and down on a chain, and you could walk along the row and actually
+pick out your own cutlet and then see the French marquis throw it on
+to the broiling iron; you could watch a buckwheat pancake whirled
+into existence under your eyes and see fowls' legs devilled, peppered,
+grilled, and tormented till they lost all semblance of the original
+Mariposa chicken.
+
+Mr. Smith, of course, was in his glory.
+
+"What have you got to-day, Alf?" he would say, as he strolled over to
+the marquis. The name of the Chief was, I believe Alphonse, but "Alf"
+was near enough for Mr. Smith.
+
+The marquis would extend to the proprietor the menu, "Voila, m'sieu, la
+carte du jour."
+
+Mr. Smith, by the way, encouraged the use of the French language in
+the caff. He viewed it, of course, solely in its relation to the hotel
+business, and, I think, regarded it as a recent invention.
+
+"It's comin' in all the time in the city," he said, "and y'aint expected
+to understand it."
+
+Mr. Smith would take the carte between his finger and thumb and stare
+at it. It was all covered with such devices as Potage la Mariposa--Filet
+Mignon a la proprietaire--Cotellete a la Smith, and so on.
+
+But the greatest thing about the caff were the prices. Therein lay, as
+everybody saw at once, the hopeless simplicity of Mr. Smith.
+
+The prices stood fast at 25 cents a meal. You could come in and eat all
+they had in the caff for a quarter.
+
+"No, sir," Mr. Smith said stoutly, "I ain't going to try to raise no
+prices on the public. The hotel's always been a quarter and the caff's a
+quarter."
+
+Full? Full of people?
+
+Well, I should think so! From the time the caff opened at 11 till it
+closed at 8.30, you could hardly find a table. Tourists, visitors,
+travellers, and half the people of Mariposa crowded at the little
+tables; crockery rattling, glasses tinkling on trays, corks popping, the
+waiters in their white coats flying to and fro, Alphonse whirling the
+cutlets and pancakes into the air, and in and through it all, Mr.
+Smith, in a white flannel suit and a broad crimson sash about his waist.
+Crowded and gay from morning to night, and even noisy in its hilarity.
+
+Noisy, yes; but if you wanted deep quiet and cool, if you wanted to step
+from the glare of a Canadian August to the deep shadow of an enchanted
+glade,--walk down below into the Rats' Cooler. There you had it; dark
+old beams (who could believe they were put there a month ago?), great
+casks set on end with legends such as Amontillado Fino done in gilt on
+a black ground, tall steins filled with German beer soft as moss, and a
+German waiter noiseless as moving foam. He who entered the Rats'
+Cooler at three of a summer afternoon was buried there for the day. Mr.
+Golgotha Gingham spent anything from four to seven hours there of every
+day. In his mind the place had all the quiet charm of an interment, with
+none of its sorrows.
+
+But at night, when Mr. Smith and Billy, the desk clerk, opened up the
+cash register and figured out the combined losses of the caff and the
+Rats' Cooler, Mr. Smith would say:
+
+"Billy, just wait till I get the license renood, and I'll close up this
+damn caff so tight they'll never know what hit her. What did that lamb
+cost? Fifty cents a pound, was it? I figure it, Billy, that every one of
+them hogs eats about a dollar's worth a grub for every twenty-five cents
+they pay on it. As for Alf--by gosh, I'm through with him."
+
+But that, of course, was only a confidential matter as between Mr. Smith
+and Billy.
+
+I don't know at what precise period it was that the idea of a petition
+to the License Commissioners first got about the town. No one seemed to
+know just who suggested it. But certain it was that public opinion
+began to swing strongly towards the support of Mr. Smith. I think it was
+perhaps on the day after the big fish dinner that Alphonse cooked for
+the Mariposa Canoe Club (at twenty cents a head) that the feeling began
+to find open expression. People said it was a shame that a man like Josh
+Smith should be run out of Mariposa by three license commissioners. Who
+were the license commissioners, anyway? Why, look at the license system
+they had in Sweden; yes, and in Finland and in South America. Or, for
+the matter of that, look at the French and Italians, who drink all day
+and all night. Aren't they all right? Aren't they a musical people? Take
+Napoleon, and Victor Hugo; drunk half the time, and yet look what they
+did.
+
+I quote these arguments not for their own sake, but merely to indicate
+the changing temper of public opinion in Mariposa. Men would sit in the
+caff at lunch perhaps for an hour and a half and talk about the license
+question in general, and then go down into the Rats' Cooler and talk
+about it for two hours more.
+
+It was amazing the way the light broke in in the case of particular
+individuals, often the most unlikely, and quelled their opposition.
+
+Take, for example, the editor of the Newspacket. I suppose there wasn't
+a greater temperance advocate in town. Yet Alphonse queered him with an
+Omelette a la License in one meal.
+
+Or take Pepperleigh himself, the judge of the Mariposa court. He was
+put to the bad with a game pie,--pate normand aux fines herbes--the
+real thing, as good as a trip to Paris in itself. After eating it,
+Pepperleigh had the common sense to realize that it was sheer madness to
+destroy a hotel that could cook a thing like that.
+
+In the same way, the secretary of the School Board was silenced with a
+stuffed duck a la Ossawippi.
+
+Three members of the town council were converted with a Dindon farci a
+la Josh Smith.
+
+And then, finally, Mr. Diston persuaded Dean Drone to come, and as soon
+as Mr. Smith and Alphonse saw him they landed him with a fried flounder
+that even the apostles would have appreciated.
+
+After that, every one knew that the license question was practically
+settled. The petition was all over the town. It was printed in duplicate
+at the Newspacket and you could see it lying on the counter of every
+shop in Mariposa. Some of the people signed it twenty or thirty times.
+
+It was the right kind of document too. It began--"Whereas in the bounty
+of providence the earth putteth forth her luscious fruits and her
+vineyards for the delight and enjoyment of mankind--" It made you
+thirsty just to read it. Any man who read that petition over was wild to
+get to the Rats' Cooler.
+
+When it was all signed up they had nearly three thousand names on it.
+
+Then Nivens, the lawyer, and Mr. Gingham (as a provincial official) took
+it down to the county town, and by three o'clock that afternoon the
+news had gone out from the long distance telephone office that Smith's
+license was renewed for three years.
+
+Rejoicings! Well, I should think so! Everybody was down wanting to
+shake hands with Mr. Smith. They told him that he had done more to boom
+Mariposa than any ten men in town. Some of them said he ought to run
+for the town council, and others wanted to make him the Conservative
+candidate for the next Dominion election. The caff was a mere babel
+of voices, and even the Rats' Cooler was almost floated away from its
+moorings.
+
+And in the middle of it all, Mr. Smith found time to say to Billy,
+the desk clerk: "Take the cash registers out of the caff and the Rats'
+Cooler and start counting up the books."
+
+And Billy said: "Will I write the letters for the palms and the tables
+and the stuff to go back?"
+
+And Mr. Smith said: "Get 'em written right away."
+
+So all evening the laughter and the chatter and the congratulations went
+on, and it wasn't till long after midnight that Mr. Smith was able to
+join Billy in the private room behind the "rotunda." Even when he did,
+there was a quiet and a dignity about his manner that had never been
+there before. I think it must have been the new halo of the Conservative
+candidacy that already radiated from his brow. It was, I imagine, at
+this very moment that Mr. Smith first realised that the hotel business
+formed the natural and proper threshold of the national legislature.
+
+"Here's the account of the cash registers," said Billy.
+
+"Let me see it," said Mr. Smith. And he studied the figures without a
+word.
+
+"And here's the letters about the palms, and here's Alphonse up to
+yesterday--"
+
+And then an amazing thing happened.
+
+"Billy," said Mr. Smith, "tear'em up. I ain't going to do it. It ain't
+right and I won't do it. They got me the license for to keep the caff
+and I'm going to keep the caff. I don't need to close her. The bar's
+good for anything from forty to a hundred a day now, with the Rats'
+Cooler going good, and that caff will stay right here."
+
+And stay it did.
+
+There it stands, mind you, to this day. You've only to step round the
+corner of Smith's Hotel on the side street and read the sign: LADIES'
+AND GENT'S CAFE, just as large and as imposing as ever.
+
+Mr. Smith said that he'd keep the caff, and when he saida thing he meant
+it!
+
+Of course there were changes, small changes.
+
+I don't say, mind you, that the fillet de beef that you get there now is
+perhaps quite up to the level of the filet de boeufs aux champignons of
+the days of glory.
+
+No doubt the lamb chops in Smith's Caff are often very much the same,
+nowadays, as the lamb chops of the Mariposa House or the Continental.
+
+Of course, things like Omelette aux Trufles practically died out when
+Alphonse went. And, naturally, the leaving of Alphonse was inevitable.
+No one knew just when he went, or why. But one morning he was gone. Mr.
+Smith said that "Alf had to go back to his folks in the old country."
+
+So, too, when Alf left, the use of the French language, as such, fell
+off tremendously in the caff. Even now they use it to some extent. You
+can still get fillet de beef, and saucisson au juice, but Billy the desk
+clerk has considerable trouble with the spelling.
+
+The Rats' Cooler, of course, closed down, or rather Mr. Smith closed it
+for repairs, and there is every likelihood that it will hardly open for
+three years. But the caff is there. They don't use the grills, because
+there's no need to, with the hotel kitchen so handy.
+
+The "girl room," I may say, was never opened. Mr. Smith promised it, it
+is true, for the winter, and still talks of it. But somehow there's been
+a sort of feeling against it. Every one in town admits that every big
+hotel in the city has a "girl room" and that it must be all right.
+Still, there's a certain--well, you know how sensitive opinion is in a
+place like Mariposa.
+
+
+
+
+TWO. The Speculations of Jefferson Thorpe
+
+It was not until the mining boom, at the time when everybody went simply
+crazy over the Cobalt and Porcupine mines of the new silver country near
+the Hudson Bay, that Jefferson Thorpe reached what you might call public
+importance in Mariposa.
+
+Of course everybody knew Jeff and his little barber shop that stood just
+across the street from Smith's Hotel. Everybody knew him and everybody
+got shaved there. From early morning, when the commercial travellers off
+the 6.30 express got shaved into the resemblance of human beings, there
+were always people going in and out of the barber shop.
+
+Mullins, the manager of the Exchange Bank, took his morning shave from
+Jeff as a form of resuscitation, with enough wet towels laid on his face
+to stew him and with Jeff moving about in the steam, razor in hand, as
+grave as an operating surgeon.
+
+Then, as I think I said, Mr. Smith came in every morning and there was
+a tremendous outpouring of Florida water and rums, essences and revivers
+and renovators, regardless of expense. What with Jeff's white coat and
+Mr. Smith's flowered waistcoat and the red geranium in the window and
+the Florida water and the double extract of hyacinth, the little shop
+seemed multi-coloured and luxurious enough for the annex of a Sultan's
+harem.
+
+But what I mean is that, till the mining boom, Jefferson Thorpe never
+occupied a position of real prominence in Mariposa. You couldn't, for
+example, have compared him with a man like Golgotha Gingham, who,
+as undertaker, stood in a direct relation to life and death, or to
+Trelawney, the postmaster, who drew money from the Federal Government of
+Canada, and was regarded as virtually a member of the Dominion Cabinet.
+
+Everybody knew Jeff and liked him, but the odd thing was that till he
+made money nobody took any stock in his ideas at all. It was only after
+he made the "clean up" that they came to see what a splendid fellow
+he was. "Level-headed" I think was the term; indeed in the speech of
+Mariposa, the highest form of endowment was to have the head set on
+horizontally as with a theodolite.
+
+As I say, it was when Jeff made money that they saw how gifted he was,
+and when he lost it,--but still, there's no need to go into that. I
+believe it's something the same in other places too.
+
+The barber shop, you will remember, stands across the street from
+Smith's Hotel, and stares at it face to face.
+
+It is one of those wooden structures--I don't know whether you know
+them--with a false front that sticks up above its real height and gives
+it an air at once rectangular and imposing. It is a form of architecture
+much used in Mariposa and understood to be in keeping with the
+pretentious and artificial character of modern business. There is a red,
+white and blue post in front of the shop and the shop itself has a large
+square window out of proportion to its little flat face.
+
+Painted on the panes of the window is the remains of a legend that once
+spelt BARBER SHOP, executed with the flourishes that prevailed in the
+golden age of sign painting in Mariposa. Through the window you can see
+the geraniums in the window shelf and behind them Jeff Thorpe with his
+little black scull cap on and his spectacles drooped upon his nose as he
+bends forward in the absorption of shaving.
+
+As you open the door, it sets in violent agitation a coiled spring up
+above and a bell that almost rings. Inside, there are two shaving chairs
+of the heavier, or electrocution pattern, with mirrors in front of them
+and pigeon holes with individual shaving mugs. There must be ever so
+many of them, fifteen or sixteen. It is the current supposition of each
+of Jeff's customers that everyone else but himself uses a separate mug.
+One corner of the shop is partitioned off and bears the sign: HOT AND
+COLD BATHS, 50 CENTS. There has been no bath inside the partition for
+twenty years--only old newspapers and a mop. Still, it lends distinction
+somehow, just as do the faded cardboard signs that hang against the
+mirror with the legends: TURKISH SHAMPOO, 75 CENTS, and ROMAN MASSAGE,
+$1.00.
+
+They said commonly in Mariposa that Jeff made money out of the barber
+shop. He may have, and it may have been that that turned his mind to
+investment. But it's hard to see how he could. A shave cost five cents,
+and a hair-cut fifteen (or the two, if you liked, for a quarter), and
+at that it is hard to see how he could make money, even when he had both
+chairs going and shaved first in one and then in the other.
+
+You see, in Mariposa, shaving isn't the hurried, perfunctory thing that
+it is in the city. A shave is looked upon as a form of physical pleasure
+and lasts anywhere from twenty-five minutes to three-quarters of an
+hour.
+
+In the morning hours, perhaps, there was a semblance of haste about it,
+but in the long quiet of the afternoon, as Jeff leaned forward towards
+the customer, and talked to him in a soft confidential monotone, like a
+portrait painter, the razor would go slower and slower, and pause and
+stop, move and pause again, till the shave died away into the mere
+drowse of conversation.
+
+At such hours, the Mariposa barber shop would become a very Palace of
+Slumber, and as you waited your turn in one of the wooden arm-chairs
+beside the wall, what with the quiet of the hour, and the low drone of
+Jeff's conversation, the buzzing of the flies against the window pane
+and the measured tick of the clock above the mirror, your head sank
+dreaming on your breast, and the Mariposa Newspacket rustled unheeded on
+the floor. It makes one drowsy just to think of it!
+
+The conversation, of course, was the real charm of the place. You see,
+Jefferson's forte, or specialty, was information. He could tell you more
+things within the compass of a half-hour's shave than you get in days
+of laborious research in an encyclopaedia. Where he got it all, I
+don't know, but I am inclined to think it came more or less out of the
+newspapers.
+
+In the city, people never read the newspapers, not really, only little
+bits and scraps of them. But in Mariposa it's different. There they read
+the whole thing from cover to cover, and they build up on it, in
+the course of years, a range of acquirement that would put a college
+president to the blush. Anybody who has ever heard Henry Mullins and
+Peter Glover talk about the future of China will know just what I mean.
+
+And, of course, the peculiarity of Jeff's conversation was that he could
+suit it to his man every time. He had a kind of divination about it.
+There was a certain kind of man that Jeff would size up sideways as
+he stropped the razor, and in whose ear he would whisper: "I see where
+Saint Louis has took four straight games off Chicago,"--and so hold him
+fascinated to the end.
+
+In the same way he would say to Mr. Smith: "I see where it says that
+this 'Flying Squirl' run a dead heat for the King's Plate."
+
+To a humble intellect like mine he would explain in full the relations
+of the Keesar to the German Rich Dog.
+
+But first and foremost, Jeff's specialty in the way of conversation
+was finance and the money market, the huge fortunes that a man with the
+right kind of head could make.
+
+I've known Jefferson to pause in his shaving with the razor suspended
+in the air as long as five minutes while he described, with his eye
+half closed, exactly the kind of a head a man needed in order to make
+a "haul" or a "clean up." It was evidently simply a matter of the head,
+and as far as one could judge, Jeff's own was the very type required.
+I don't know just at what time or how Jefferson first began his
+speculative enterprises. It was probably in him from the start. There
+is no doubt that the very idea of such things as Traction Stock and
+Amalgamated Asbestos went to his head: and whenever he spoke of Mr.
+Carnegie and Mr. Rockefeller, the yearning tone of his voice made it as
+soft as lathered soap.
+
+I suppose the most rudimentary form of his speculation was the hens.
+That was years ago. He kept them out at the back of his house,--which
+itself stood up a grass plot behind and beyond the barber shop,--and in
+the old days Jeff would say, with a certain note of pride in his voice,
+that The Woman had sold as many as two dozen eggs in a day to the summer
+visitors.
+
+But what with reading about Amalgamated Asbestos and Consolidated Copper
+and all that, the hens began to seem pretty small business, and, in
+any case, the idea of two dozen eggs at a cent apiece almost makes one
+blush. I suppose a good many of us have felt just as Jeff did about our
+poor little earnings. Anyway, I remember Jeff telling me one day that
+he could take the whole lot of the hens and sell them off and crack
+the money into Chicago wheat on margin and turn it over in twenty-four
+hours. He did it too. Only somehow when it was turned over it came
+upside down on top of the hens.
+
+After that the hen house stood empty and The Woman had to throw away
+chicken feed every day, at a dead loss of perhaps a shave and a half.
+But it made no difference to Jeff, for his mind had floated away already
+on the possibilities of what he called "displacement" mining on the
+Yukon.
+
+So you can understand that when the mining boom struck Mariposa,
+Jefferson Thorpe was in it right from the very start. Why, no wonder; it
+seemed like the finger of Providence. Here was this great silver country
+spread out to north of us, where people had thought there was only a
+wilderness. And right at our very doors! You could see, as I saw, the
+night express going north every evening; for all one knew Rockefeller or
+Carnegie or anyone might be on it! Here was the wealth of Calcutta, as
+the Mariposa Newspacket put it, poured out at our very feet.
+
+So no wonder the town went wild! All day in the street you could
+hear men talking of veins, and smelters and dips and deposits and
+faults,--the town hummed with it like a geology class on examination
+day. And there were men about the hotels with mining outfits and
+theodolites and dunnage bags, and at Smith's bar they would hand chunks
+of rock up and down, some of which would run as high as ten drinks to
+the pound.
+
+The fever just caught the town and ran through it! Within a fortnight
+they put a partition down Robertson's Coal and Wood Office and opened
+the Mariposa Mining Exchange, and just about every man on the Main
+Street started buying scrip. Then presently young Fizzlechip, who had
+been teller in Mullins's Bank and that everybody had thought a worthless
+jackass before, came back from the Cobalt country with a fortune, and
+loafed round in the Mariposa House in English khaki and a horizontal
+hat, drunk all the time, and everybody holding him up as an example of
+what it was possible to do if you tried.
+
+They all went in. Jim Eliot mortgaged the inside of the drug store and
+jammed it into Twin Tamagami. Pete Glover at the hardware store bought
+Nippewa stock at thirteen cents and sold it to his brother at seventeen
+and bought it back in less than a week at nineteen. They didn't care!
+They took a chance. Judge Pepperleigh put the rest of his wife's money
+into Temiskaming Common, and Lawyer Macartney got the fever, too, and
+put every cent that his sister possessed into Tulip Preferred.
+
+And even when young Fizzlechip shot himself in the back room of the
+Mariposa House, Mr. Gingham buried him in a casket with silver handles
+and it was felt that there was a Monte Carlo touch about the whole
+thing.
+
+They all went in--or all except Mr. Smith. You see, Mr. Smith had come
+down from there, and he knew all about rocks and mining and canoes and
+the north country. He knew what it was to eat flour-baked dampers under
+the lee side of a canoe propped among the underbrush, and to drink the
+last drop of whiskey within fifty miles. Mr. Smith had mighty little use
+for the north. But what he did do, was to buy up enough early potatoes
+to send fifteen carload lots into Cobalt at a profit of five dollars a
+bag.
+
+Mr. Smith, I say, hung back. But Jeff Thorpe was in the mining boom
+right from the start. He bought in on the Nippewa mine even before the
+interim prospectus was out. He took a "block" of 100 shares of
+Abbitibbi Development at fourteen cents, and he and Johnson, the livery
+stablekeeper next door, formed a syndicate and got a thousand shares
+of Metagami Lake at 3 1/4 cents and then "unloaded" them on one of the
+sausage men at Netley's butcher shop at a clear cent per cent advance.
+
+Jeff would open the little drawer below the mirror in the barber
+shop and show you all kinds and sorts of Cobalt country mining
+certificates,--blue ones, pink ones, green ones, with outlandish and
+fascinating names on them that ran clear from the Mattawa to the Hudson
+Bay.
+
+And right from the start he was confident of winning. "There ain't no
+difficulty to it," he said, "there's lots of silver up there in that
+country and if you buy some here and some there you can't fail to come
+out somewhere. I don't say," he used to continue, with the scissors open
+and ready to cut, "that some of the greenhorns won't get bit. But if a
+feller knows the country and keeps his head level, he can't lose."
+
+Jefferson had looked at so many prospectuses and so many pictures of
+mines and pine trees and smelters, that I think he'd forgotten that he'd
+never been in the country. Anyway, what's two hundred miles!
+
+To an onlooker it certainly didn't seem so simple. I never knew the
+meanness, the trickery, of the mining business, the sheer obstinate
+determination of the bigger capitalists not to make money when they
+might, till I heard the accounts of Jeff's different mines. Take the
+case of Corona Jewel. There was a good mine, simply going to ruin for
+lack of common sense.
+
+"She ain't been developed," Jeff would say. "There's silver enough in
+her so you could dig it out with a shovel. She's full of it. But they
+won't get at her and work her."
+
+Then he'd take a look at the pink and blue certificates of the Corona
+Jewel and slam the drawer on them in disgust. Worse than that was
+the Silent Pine,--a clear case of stupid incompetence! Utter lack of
+engineering skill was all that was keeping the Silent Pine from making a
+fortune for its holders.
+
+"The only trouble with that mine," said Jeff, "is they won't go deep
+enough. They followed the vein down to where it kind o' thinned out and
+then they quit. If they'd just go right into her good, they'd get it
+again. She's down there all right."
+
+But perhaps the meanest case of all was the Northern Star. That always
+seemed to me, every time I heard of it, a straight case for the criminal
+law. The thing was so evidently a conspiracy.
+
+"I bought her," said Jeff, "at thirty-two, and she stayed right there
+tight, like she was stuck. Then a bunch of these fellers in the city
+started to drive her down and they got her pushed down to twenty-four,
+and I held on to her and they shoved her down to twenty-one. This
+morning they've got her down to sixteen, but I don't mean to let go. No,
+sir."
+
+In another fortnight they shoved her, the same unscrupulous crowd, down
+to nine cents, and Jefferson still held on. "They're working her down,"
+he admitted, "but I'm holding her."
+
+No conflict between vice and virtue was ever grimmer.
+
+"She's at six," said Jeff, "but I've got her. They can't squeeze me."
+
+A few days after that, the same criminal gang had her down further than
+ever.
+
+"They've got her down to three cents," said Jeff, "but I'm with her.
+Yes, sir, they think they can shove her clean off the market, but
+they can't do it. I've boughten in Johnson's shares, and the whole of
+Netley's, and I'll stay with her till she breaks."
+
+So they shoved and pushed and clawed her down--that unseen nefarious
+crowd in the city--and Jeff held on to her and they writhed and twisted
+at his grip, and then--
+
+And then--well, that's just the queer thing about the mining business.
+Why, sudden as a flash of lightning, it seemed, the news came over the
+wire to the Mariposa Newspacket, that they had struck a vein of silver
+in the Northern Star as thick as a sidewalk, and that the stock had
+jumped to seventeen dollars a share, and even at that you couldn't get
+it! And Jeff stood there flushed and half-staggered against the mirror
+of the little shop, with a bunch of mining scrip in his hand that was
+worth forty thousand dollars!
+
+Excitement! It was all over the town in a minutes. They ran off a news
+extra at the Mariposa Newspacket, and in less than no time there wasn't
+standing room in the barber shop, and over in Smith's Hotel they had
+three extra barkeepers working on the lager beer pumps.
+
+They were selling mining shares on the Main Street in Mariposa that
+afternoon and people were just clutching for them. Then at night there
+was a big oyster supper in Smith's caff, with speeches, and the Mariposa
+band outside.
+
+And the queer thing was that the very next afternoon was the funeral
+of young Fizzlechip, and Dean Drone had to change the whole text of
+his Sunday sermon at two days' notice for fear of offending public
+sentiment.
+
+But I think what Jeff liked best of it all was the sort of public
+recognition that it meant. He'd stand there in the shop, hardly
+bothering to shave, and explain to the men in the arm-chairs how he held
+her, and they shoved her, and he clung to her, and what he'd said to
+himself--a perfect Iliad--while he was clinging to her.
+
+The whole thing was in the city papers a few days after with a
+photograph of Jeff, taken specially at Ed Moore's studio (upstairs over
+Netley's). It showed Jeff sitting among palm trees, as all mining men
+do, with one hand on his knee, and a dog, one of those regular mining
+dogs, at his feet, and a look of piercing intelligence in his face that
+would easily account for forty thousand dollars.
+
+I say that the recognition meant a lot to Jeff for its own sake. But no
+doubt the fortune meant quite a bit to him too on account of Myra.
+
+Did I mention Myra, Jeff's daughter? Perhaps not. That's the
+trouble with the people in Mariposa; they're all so separate and so
+different--not a bit like the people in the cities--that unless you hear
+about them separately and one by one you can't for a moment understand
+what they're like.
+
+Myra had golden hair and a Greek face and would come bursting through
+the barber shop in a hat at least six inches wider than what they
+wear in Paris. As you saw her swinging up the street to the Telephone
+Exchange in a suit that was straight out of the Delineator and brown
+American boots, there was style written all over her,--the kind of
+thing that Mariposa recognised and did homage to. And to see her in the
+Exchange,--she was one of the four girls that I spoke of,--on her high
+stool with a steel cap on,--jabbing the connecting plugs in and out
+as if electricity cost nothing--well, all I mean is that you could
+understand why it was that the commercial travellers would stand round
+in the Exchange calling up all sorts of impossible villages, and
+waiting about so pleasant and genial!--it made one realize how naturally
+good-tempered men are. And then when Myra would go off duty and Miss
+Cleghorn, who was sallow, would come on, the commercial men would be off
+again like autumn leaves.
+
+It just shows the difference between people. There was Myra who treated
+lovers like dogs and would slap them across the face with a banana skin
+to show her utter independence. And there was Miss Cleghorn, who was
+sallow, and who bought a forty cent Ancient History to improve herself:
+and yet if she'd hit any man in Mariposa with a banana skin, he'd have
+had her arrested for assault.
+
+Mind you, I don't mean that Myra was merely flippant and worthless. Not
+at all. She was a girl with any amount of talent. You should have heard
+her recite "The Raven," at the Methodist Social! Simply genius! And when
+she acted Portia in the Trial Scene of the Merchant of Venice at the
+High School concert, everybody in Mariposa admitted that you couldn't
+have told it from the original.
+
+So, of course, as soon as Jeff made the fortune, Myra had her
+resignation in next morning and everybody knew that she was to go to
+a dramatic school for three months in the fall and become a leading
+actress.
+
+But, as I said, the public recognition counted a lot for Jeff. The
+moment you begin to get that sort of thing it comes in quickly enough.
+Brains, you know, are recognized right away. That was why, of course,
+within a week from this Jeff received the first big packet of stuff from
+the Cuban Land Development Company, with coloured pictures of Cuba,
+and fields of bananas, and haciendas and insurrectos with machetes and
+Heaven knows what. They heard of him, somehow,--it wasn't for a modest
+man like Jefferson to say how. After all, the capitalists of the world
+are just one and the same crowd. If you're in it, you're in it, that's
+all! Jeff realized why it is that of course men like Carnegie or
+Rockefeller and Morgan all know one another. They have to.
+
+For all I know, this Cuban stuff may have been sent from Morgan himself.
+Some of the people in Mariposa said yes, others said no. There was no
+certainty.
+
+Anyway, they were fair and straight, this Cuban crowd that wrote to
+Jeff. They offered him to come right in and be one of themselves. If a
+man's got the brains, you may as well recognize it straight away. Just
+as well write him to be a director now as wait and hesitate till he
+forces his way into it.
+
+Anyhow, they didn't hesitate, these Cuban people that wrote to Jeff from
+Cuba--or from a post-office box in New York--it's all the same thing,
+because Cuba being so near to New York the mail is all distributed from
+there. I suppose in some financial circles they might have been slower,
+wanted guarantees of some sort, and so on, but these Cubans, you
+know, have got a sort of Spanish warmth of heart that you don't see
+in business men in America, and that touches you. No, they asked no
+guarantee. Just send the money whether by express order or by bank draft
+or cheque, they left that entirely to oneself, as a matter between Cuban
+gentlemen.
+
+And they were quite frank about their enterprise--bananas and tobacco
+in the plantation district reclaimed from the insurrectos. You
+could see it all there in the pictures--tobacco plants and the
+insurrectos--everything. They made no rash promises, just admitted
+straight out that the enterprise might realise 400 per cent. or might
+conceivably make less. There was no hint of more.
+
+So within a month, everybody in Mariposa knew that Jeff Thorpe was "in
+Cuban lands" and would probably clean up half a million by New Year's.
+You couldn't have failed to know it. All round the little shop there
+were pictures of banana groves and the harbour of Habana, and Cubans in
+white suits and scarlet sashes, smoking cigarettes in the sun and too
+ignorant to know that you can make four hundred per cent. by planting a
+banana tree.
+
+I liked it about Jeff that he didn't stop shaving. He went on just
+the same. Even when Johnson, the livery stable man, came in with five
+hundred dollars and asked him to see if the Cuban Board of Directors
+would let him put it in, Jeff laid it in the drawer and then shaved him
+for five cents, in the same old way. Of course, he must have felt proud
+when, a few days later, he got a letter from the Cuban people, from New
+York, accepting the money straight off without a single question, and
+without knowing anything more of Johnson except that he was a friend of
+Jeff's. They wrote most handsomely. Any friends of Jeff's were friends
+of Cuba. All money they might send would be treated just as Jeff's would
+be treated.
+
+One reason, perhaps, why Jeff didn't give up shaving was because it
+allowed him to talk about Cuba. You see, everybody knew in Mariposa that
+Jeff Thorpe had sold out of Cobalts and had gone into Cuban Renovated
+Lands--and that spread round him a kind of halo of wealth and mystery
+and outlandishness--oh, something Spanish. Perhaps you've felt it about
+people that you know. Anyhow, they asked him about the climate, and
+yellow fever and what the negroes were like and all that sort of thing.
+
+"This Cubey, it appears is an island," Jeff would explain. Of
+course, everybody knows how easily islands lend themselves to making
+money,--"and for fruit, they say it comes up so fast you can't stop
+it." And then he would pass into details about the Hash-enders and the
+resurrectos and technical things like that till it was thought a wonder
+how he could know it. Still, it was realized that a man with money has
+got to know these things. Look at Morgan and Rockefeller and all the men
+that make a pile. They know just as much as Jeff did about the countries
+where they make it. It stands to reason.
+
+Did I say that Jeff shaved in the same old way? Not quite. There was
+something even dreamier about it now, and a sort of new element in the
+way Jeff fell out of his monotone into lapses of thought that I, for
+one, misunderstood. I thought that perhaps getting so much money,--well,
+you know the way it acts on people in the larger cities. It seemed
+to spoil one's idea of Jeff that copper and asbestos and banana lands
+should form the goal of his thought when, if he knew it, the little shop
+and the sunlight of Mariposa was so much better.
+
+In fact, I had perhaps borne him a grudge for what seemed to me his
+perpetual interest in the great capitalists. He always had some item out
+of the paper about them.
+
+"I see where this here Carnegie has give fifty thousand dollars for one
+of them observatories," he would say.
+
+And another day he would pause in the course of shaving, and almost
+whisper: "Did you ever _see_ this Rockefeller?"
+
+It was only by a sort of accident that I came to know that there was
+another side to Jefferson's speculation that no one in Mariposa ever
+knew, or will ever know now.
+
+I knew it because I went in to see Jeff in his house one night. The
+house,--I think I said it,--stood out behind the barber shop. You went
+out of the back door of the shop, and through a grass plot with petunias
+beside it, and the house stood at the end. You could see the light
+of the lamp behind the blind, and through the screen door as you came
+along. And it was here that Jefferson used to sit in the evenings when
+the shop got empty.
+
+There was a round table that The Woman used to lay for supper, and after
+supper there used to be a chequered cloth on it and a lamp with a shade.
+And beside it Jeff would sit, with his spectacles on and the paper
+spread out, reading about Carnegie and Rockefeller. Near him, but away
+from the table, was The Woman doing needlework, and Myra, when she
+wasn't working in the Telephone Exchange, was there too with her elbows
+on the table reading Marie Corelli--only now, of course, after the
+fortune, she was reading the prospectuses of Dramatic Schools.
+
+So this night,--I don't know just what it was in the paper that caused
+it,--Jeff laid down what he was reading and started to talk about
+Carnegie.
+
+"This Carnegie, I bet you, would be worth," said Jeff, closing up his
+eyes in calculation, "as much as perhaps two million dollars, if you was
+to sell him up. And this Rockefeller and this Morgan, either of them, to
+sell them up clean, would be worth another couple of million--"
+
+I may say in parentheses that it was a favourite method in Mariposa if
+you wanted to get at the real worth of a man, to imagine him clean sold
+up, put up for auction, as it were. It was the only way to test him.
+
+"And now look at 'em," Jeff went on. "They make their money and what do
+they do with it? They give it away. And who do they give it to? Why, to
+those as don't want it, every time. They give it to these professors and
+to this research and that, and do the poor get any of it? Not a cent and
+never will."
+
+"I tell you, boys," continued Jeff (there were no boys present, but in
+Mariposa all really important speeches are addressed to an imaginary
+audience of boys)--"I tell you, if I was to make a million out of this
+Cubey, I'd give it straight to the poor, yes, sir--divide it up into a
+hundred lots of a thousand dollars each and give it to the people that
+hadn't nothing."
+
+So always after that I knew just what those bananas were being grown
+for.
+
+Indeed, after that, though Jefferson never spoke of his intentions
+directly, he said a number of things that seemed to bear on them. He
+asked me, for instance, one day, how many blind people it would take to
+fill one of these blind homes and how a feller could get ahold of them.
+And at another time he asked whether if a feller advertised for some of
+these incurables a feller could get enough of them to make a showing.
+I know for a fact that he got Nivens, the lawyer, to draw up a document
+that was to give an acre of banana land in Cuba to every idiot in
+Missinaba county.
+
+But still,--what's the use of talking of what Jeff meant to do? Nobody
+knows or cares about it now.
+
+The end of it was bound to come. Even in Mariposa some of the people
+must have thought so. Else how was it that Henry Mullins made such a
+fuss about selling a draft for forty thousand on New York? And why was
+it that Mr. Smith wouldn't pay Billy, the desk clerk, his back wages
+when he wanted to put it into Cuba?
+
+Oh yes; some of them must have seen it. And yet when it came it seemed
+so quiet,--ever so quiet,--not a bit like the Northern Star mine and
+the oyster supper and the Mariposa band. It is strange how quiet these
+things look, the other way round.
+
+You remember the Cuban Land frauds in New York and Porforio Gomez
+shooting the detective, and him and Maximo Morez getting clear away with
+two hundred thousand? No, of course you don't; why, even in the city
+papers it only filled an inch or two of type, and anyway the names were
+hard to remember. That was Jeff's money--part of it. Mullins got the
+telegram, from a broker or someone, and he showed it to Jeff just as he
+was going up the street with an estate agent to look at a big empty lot
+on the hill behind the town--the very place for these incurables.
+
+And Jeff went back to the shop so quiet--have you ever seen an animal
+that is stricken through, how quiet it seems to move?
+
+Well, that's how he walked.
+
+And since that, though it's quite a little while ago, the shop's open
+till eleven every night now, and Jeff is shaving away to pay back that
+five hundred that Johnson, the livery man, sent to the Cubans, and--
+
+Pathetic? tut! tut! You don't know Mariposa. Jeff has to work pretty
+late, but that's nothing--nothing at all, if you've worked hard all your
+lifetime. And Myra is back at the Telephone Exchange--they were glad
+enough to get her, and she says now that if there's one thing she hates,
+it's the stage, and she can't see how the actresses put up with it.
+
+Anyway, things are not so bad. You see it was just at this time that
+Mr. Smith's caff opened, and Mr. Smith came to Jeff's Woman and said he
+wanted seven dozen eggs a day, and wanted them handy, and so the hens
+are back, and more of them, and they exult so every morning over the
+eggs they lay that if you wanted to talk of Rockefeller in the barber
+shop you couldn't hear his name for the cackling.
+
+
+
+
+THREE. The Marine Excursions of the Knights of Pythias
+
+Half-past six on a July morning! The Mariposa Belle is at the wharf,
+decked in flags, with steam up ready to start.
+
+Excursion day!
+
+Half past six on a July morning, and Lake Wissanotti lying in the sun as
+calm as glass. The opal colours of the morning light are shot from the
+surface of the water.
+
+Out on the lake the last thin threads of the mist are clearing away like
+flecks of cotton wool.
+
+The long call of the loon echoes over the lake. The air is cool and
+fresh. There is in it all the new life of the land of the silent pine
+and the moving waters. Lake Wissanotti in the morning sunlight! Don't
+talk to me of the Italian lakes, or the Tyrol or the Swiss Alps. Take
+them away. Move them somewhere else. I don't want them.
+
+Excursion Day, at half past six of a summer morning! With the boat all
+decked in flags and all the people in Mariposa on the wharf, and the
+band in peaked caps with big cornets tied to their bodies ready to play
+at any minute! I say! Don't tell me about the Carnival of Venice and
+the Delhi Durbar. Don't! I wouldn't look at them. I'd shut my eyes! For
+light and colour give me every time an excursion out of Mariposa down
+the lake to the Indian's Island out of sight in the morning mist. Talk
+of your Papal Zouaves and your Buckingham Palace Guard! I want to see
+the Mariposa band in uniform and the Mariposa Knights of Pythias with
+their aprons and their insignia and their picnic baskets and their
+five-cent cigars!
+
+Half past six in the morning, and all the crowd on the wharf and the
+boat due to leave in half an hour. Notice it!--in half an hour. Already
+she's whistled twice (at six, and at six fifteen), and at any minute
+now, Christie Johnson will step into the pilot house and pull the string
+for the warning whistle that the boat will leave in half an hour.
+So keep ready. Don't think of running back to Smith's Hotel for the
+sandwiches. Don't be fool enough to try to go up to the Greek Store,
+next to Netley's, and buy fruit. You'll be left behind for sure if you
+do. Never mind the sandwiches and the fruit! Anyway, here comes Mr.
+Smith himself with a huge basket of provender that would feed a factory.
+There must be sandwiches in that. I think I can hear them clinking.
+And behind Mr. Smith is the German waiter from the caff with another
+basket--indubitably lager beer; and behind him, the bar-tender of the
+hotel, carrying nothing, as far as one can see. But of course if you
+know Mariposa you will understand that why he looks so nonchalant and
+empty-handed is because he has two bottles of rye whiskey under his
+linen duster. You know, I think, the peculiar walk of a man with two
+bottles of whiskey in the inside pockets of a linen coat. In Mariposa,
+you see, to bring beer to an excursion is quite in keeping with public
+opinion. But, whiskey,--well, one has to be a little careful.
+
+Do I say that Mr. Smith is here? Why, everybody's here. There's Hussell
+the editor of the Newspacket, wearing a blue ribbon on his coat, for
+the Mariposa Knights of Pythias are, by their constitution, dedicated to
+temperance; and there's Henry Mullins, the manager of the Exchange Bank,
+also a Knight of Pythias, with a small flask of Pogram's Special in his
+hip pocket as a sort of amendment to the constitution. And there's Dean
+Drone, the Chaplain of the Order, with a fishing-rod (you never saw
+such green bass as lie among the rocks at Indian's Island), and with
+a trolling line in case of maskinonge, and a landing net in case of
+pickerel, and with his eldest daughter, Lilian Drone, in case of young
+men. There never was such a fisherman as the Rev. Rupert Drone.
+
+
+Perhaps I ought to explain that when I speak of the excursion as being
+of the Knights of Pythias, the thing must not be understood in any
+narrow sense. In Mariposa practically everybody belongs to the Knights
+of Pythias just as they do to everything else. That's the great thing
+about the town and that's what makes it so different from the city.
+Everybody is in everything.
+
+You should see them on the seventeenth of March, for example, when
+everybody wears a green ribbon and they're all laughing and glad,--you
+know what the Celtic nature is,--and talking about Home Rule.
+
+On St. Andrew's Day every man in town wears a thistle and shakes hands
+with everybody else, and you see the fine old Scotch honesty beaming out
+of their eyes.
+
+And on St. George's Day!--well, there's no heartiness like the good old
+English spirit, after all; why shouldn't a man feel glad that he's an
+Englishman?
+
+Then on the Fourth of July there are stars and stripes flying over half
+the stores in town, and suddenly all the men are seen to smoke cigars,
+and to know all about Roosevelt and Bryan and the Philippine Islands.
+Then you learn for the first time that Jeff Thorpe's people came from
+Massachusetts and that his uncle fought at Bunker Hill (it must have
+been Bunker Hill,--anyway Jefferson will swear it was in Dakota all
+right enough); and you find that George Duff has a married sister in
+Rochester and that her husband is all right; in fact, George was down
+there as recently as eight years ago. Oh, it's the most American town
+imaginable is Mariposa,--on the fourth of July.
+
+But wait, just wait, if you feel anxious about the solidity of the
+British connection, till the twelfth of the month, when everybody is
+wearing an orange streamer in his coat and the Orangemen (every man in
+town) walk in the big procession. Allegiance! Well, perhaps you remember
+the address they gave to the Prince of Wales on the platform of the
+Mariposa station as he went through on his tour to the west. I think
+that pretty well settled that question. So you will easily understand
+that of course everybody belongs to the Knights of Pythias and the
+Masons and Oddfellows, just as they all belong to the Snow Shoe Club and
+the Girls' Friendly Society.
+
+And meanwhile the whistle of the steamer has blown again for a quarter
+to seven:--loud and long this time, for any one not here now is late
+for certain; unless he should happen to come down in the last fifteen
+minutes.
+
+What a crowd upon the wharf and how they pile on to the steamer! It's a
+wonder that the boat can hold them all. But that's just the marvellous
+thing about the Mariposa Belle.
+
+I don't know,--I have never known,--where the steamers like the Mariposa
+Belle come from. Whether they are built by Harland and Wolff of Belfast,
+or whether, on the other hand, they are not built by Harland and Wolff
+of Belfast, is more than one would like to say offhand.
+
+The Mariposa Belle always seems to me to have some of those strange
+properties that distinguish Mariposa itself. I mean, her size seems to
+vary so. If you see her there in the winter, frozen in the ice beside
+the wharf with a snowdrift against the windows of the pilot house, she
+looks a pathetic little thing the size of a butternut. But in the summer
+time, especially after you've been in Mariposa for a month or two, and
+have paddled alongside of her in a canoe, she gets larger and taller,
+and with a great sweep of black sides, till you see no difference
+between the Mariposa Belle and the Lusitania. Each one is a big steamer
+and that's all you can say.
+
+Nor do her measurements help you much. She draws about eighteen inches
+forward, and more than that,--at least half an inch more, astern, and
+when she's loaded down with an excursion crowd she draws a good two
+inches more. And above the water,--why, look at all the decks on her!
+There's the deck you walk on to, from the wharf, all shut in, with
+windows along it, and the after cabin with the long table, and above
+that the deck with all the chairs piled upon it, and the deck in front
+where the band stand round in a circle, and the pilot house is higher
+than that, and above the pilot house is the board with the gold name and
+the flag pole and the steel ropes and the flags; and fixed in somewhere
+on the different levels is the lunch counter where they sell the
+sandwiches, and the engine room, and down below the deck level, beneath
+the water line, is the place where the crew sleep. What with steps and
+stairs and passages and piles of cordwood for the engine,--oh no, I
+guess Harland and Wolff didn't build her. They couldn't have.
+
+Yet even with a huge boat like the Mariposa Belle, it would be
+impossible for her to carry all of the crowd that you see in the boat
+and on the wharf. In reality, the crowd is made up of two classes,--all
+of the people in Mariposa who are going on the excursion and all those
+who are not. Some come for the one reason and some for the other.
+
+The two tellers of the Exchange Bank are both there standing side by
+side. But one of them,--the one with the cameo pin and the long face
+like a horse,--is going, and the other,--with the other cameo pin and
+the face like another horse,--is not. In the same way, Hussell of the
+Newspacket is going, but his brother, beside him, isn't. Lilian Drone is
+going, but her sister can't; and so on all through the crowd.
+
+
+And to think that things should look like that on the morning of a
+steamboat accident.
+
+How strange life is!
+
+To think of all these people so eager and anxious to catch the steamer,
+and some of them running to catch it, and so fearful that they might
+miss it,--the morning of a steamboat accident. And the captain blowing
+his whistle, and warning them so severely that he would leave them
+behind,--leave them out of the accident! And everybody crowding so
+eagerly to be in the accident.
+
+Perhaps life is like that all through.
+
+Strangest of all to think, in a case like this, of the people who were
+left behind, or in some way or other prevented from going, and always
+afterwards told of how they had escaped being on board the Mariposa
+Belle that day!
+
+Some of the instances were certainly extraordinary. Nivens, the lawyer,
+escaped from being there merely by the fact that he was away in the
+city.
+
+Towers, the tailor, only escaped owing to the fact that, not intending
+to go on the excursion he had stayed in bed till eight o'clock and so
+had not gone. He narrated afterwards that waking up that morning
+at half-past five, he had thought of the excursion and for some
+unaccountable reason had felt glad that he was not going.
+
+
+The case of Yodel, the auctioneer, was even more inscrutable. He had
+been to the Oddfellows' excursion on the train the week before and to
+the Conservative picnic the week before that, and had decided not to
+go on this trip. In fact, he had not the least intention of going. He
+narrated afterwards how the night before someone had stopped him on the
+corner of Nippewa and Tecumseh Streets (he indicated the very spot) and
+asked: "Are you going to take in the excursion to-morrow?" and he had
+said, just as simply as he was talking when narrating it: "No." And ten
+minutes after that, at the corner of Dalhousie and Brock Streets (he
+offered to lead a party of verification to the precise place) somebody
+else had stopped him and asked: "Well, are you going on the steamer trip
+to-morrow?" Again he had answered: "No," apparently almost in the same
+tone as before.
+
+He said afterwards that when he heard the rumour of the accident
+it seemed like the finger of Providence, and fell on his knees in
+thankfulness.
+
+There was the similar case of Morison (I mean the one in Glover's
+hardware store that married one of the Thompsons). He said afterwards
+that he had read so much in the papers about accidents lately,--mining
+accidents, and aeroplanes and gasoline,--that he had grown nervous. The
+night before his wife had asked him at supper: "Are you going on the
+excursion?" He had answered: "No, I don't think I feel like it," and had
+added: "Perhaps your mother might like to go." And the next evening just
+at dusk, when the news ran through the town, he said the first thought
+that flashed through his head was: "Mrs. Thompson's on that boat."
+
+He told this right as I say it--without the least doubt or confusion. He
+never for a moment imagined she was on the Lusitania or the Olympic
+or any other boat. He knew she was on this one. He said you could have
+knocked him down where he stood. But no one had. Not even when he got
+halfway down,--on his knees, and it would have been easier still to
+knock him down or kick him. People do miss a lot of chances.
+
+Still, as I say, neither Yodel nor Morison nor anyone thought about
+there being an accident until just after sundown when they--
+
+Well, have you ever heard the long booming whistle of a steamboat two
+miles out on the lake in the dusk, and while you listen and count and
+wonder, seen the crimson rockets going up against the sky and then heard
+the fire bell ringing right there beside you in the town, and seen the
+people running to the town wharf?
+
+That's what the people of Mariposa saw and felt that summer evening as
+they watched the Mackinaw life-boat go plunging out into the lake
+with seven sweeps to a side and the foam clear to the gunwale with the
+lifting stroke of fourteen men!
+
+But, dear me, I am afraid that this is no way to tell a story. I suppose
+the true art would have been to have said nothing about the accident
+till it happened. But when you write about Mariposa, or hear of it, if
+you know the place, it's all so vivid and real that a thing like the
+contrast between the excursion crowd in the morning and the scene at
+night leaps into your mind and you must think of it.
+
+
+But never mind about the accident,--let us turn back again to the
+morning.
+
+The boat was due to leave at seven. There was no doubt about the
+hour,--not only seven, but seven sharp. The notice in the Newspacket
+said: "The boat will leave sharp at seven;" and the advertising posters
+on the telegraph poles on Missinaba Street that began "Ho, for Indian's
+Island!" ended up with the words: "Boat leaves at seven sharp." There
+was a big notice on the wharf that said: "Boat leaves sharp on time."
+
+So at seven, right on the hour, the whistle blew loud and long, and then
+at seven fifteen three short peremptory blasts, and at seven thirty one
+quick angry call,--just one,--and very soon after that they cast off
+the last of the ropes and the Mariposa Belle sailed off in her cloud of
+flags, and the band of the Knights of Pythias, timing it to a nicety,
+broke into the "Maple Leaf for Ever!"
+
+I suppose that all excursions when they start are much the same. Anyway,
+on the Mariposa Belle everybody went running up and down all over the
+boat with deck chairs and camp stools and baskets, and found places,
+splendid places to sit, and then got scared that there might be better
+ones and chased off again. People hunted for places out of the sun and
+when they got them swore that they weren't going to freeze to please
+anybody; and the people in the sun said that they hadn't paid fifty
+cents to be roasted. Others said that they hadn't paid fifty cents to
+get covered with cinders, and there were still others who hadn't paid
+fifty cents to get shaken to death with the propeller.
+
+Still, it was all right presently. The people seemed to get sorted out
+into the places on the boat where they belonged. The women, the older
+ones, all gravitated into the cabin on the lower deck and by getting
+round the table with needlework, and with all the windows shut, they
+soon had it, as they said themselves, just like being at home.
+
+All the young boys and the toughs and the men in the band got down on
+the lower deck forward, where the boat was dirtiest and where the anchor
+was and the coils of rope.
+
+And upstairs on the after deck there were Lilian Drone and Miss Lawson,
+the high school teacher, with a book of German poetry,--Gothey I think
+it was,--and the bank teller and the younger men.
+
+In the centre, standing beside the rail, were Dean Drone and Dr.
+Gallagher, looking through binocular glasses at the shore.
+
+Up in front on the little deck forward of the pilot house was a group
+of the older men, Mullins and Duff and Mr. Smith in a deck chair, and
+beside him Mr. Golgotha Gingham, the undertaker of Mariposa, on a stool.
+It was part of Mr. Gingham's principles to take in an outing of this
+sort, a business matter, more or less,--for you never know what may
+happen at these water parties. At any rate, he was there in a neat suit
+of black, not, of course, his heavier or professional suit, but a soft
+clinging effect as of burnt paper that combined gaiety and decorum to a
+nicety.
+
+
+"Yes," said Mr. Gingham, waving his black glove in a general way towards
+the shore, "I know the lake well, very well. I've been pretty much all
+over it in my time."
+
+"Canoeing?" asked somebody.
+
+"No," said Mr. Gingham, "not in a canoe." There seemed a peculiar and
+quiet meaning in his tone.
+
+"Sailing, I suppose," said somebody else.
+
+"No," said Mr. Gingham. "I don't understand it."
+
+"I never knowed that you went on to the water at all, Gol," said Mr.
+Smith, breaking in.
+
+"Ah, not now," explained Mr. Gingham; "it was years ago, the first
+summer I came to Mariposa. I was on the water practically all day.
+Nothing like it to give a man an appetite and keep him in shape."
+
+"Was you camping?" asked Mr. Smith.
+
+"We camped at night," assented the undertaker, "but we put in
+practically the whole day on the water. You see we were after a party
+that had come up here from the city on his vacation and gone out in a
+sailing canoe. We were dragging. We were up every morning at sunrise,
+lit a fire on the beach and cooked breakfast, and then we'd light our
+pipes and be off with the net for a whole day. It's a great life,"
+concluded Mr. Gingham wistfully.
+
+"Did you get him?" asked two or three together.
+
+There was a pause before Mr. Gingham answered.
+
+"We did," he said,--"down in the reeds past Horseshoe Point. But it was
+no use. He turned blue on me right away."
+
+After which Mr. Gingham fell into such a deep reverie that the boat had
+steamed another half mile down the lake before anybody broke the silence
+again.
+
+Talk of this sort,--and after all what more suitable for a day on the
+water?--beguiled the way.
+
+
+Down the lake, mile by mile over the calm water, steamed the Mariposa
+Belle. They passed Poplar Point where the high sand-banks are with all
+the swallows' nests in them, and Dean Drone and Dr. Gallagher looked at
+them alternately through the binocular glasses, and it was wonderful how
+plainly one could see the swallows and the banks and the shrubs,--just
+as plainly as with the naked eye.
+
+And a little further down they passed the Shingle Beach, and Dr.
+Gallagher, who knew Canadian history, said to Dean Drone that it
+was strange to think that Champlain had landed there with his French
+explorers three hundred years ago; and Dean Drone, who didn't know
+Canadian history, said it was stranger still to think that the hand of
+the Almighty had piled up the hills and rocks long before that; and
+Dr. Gallagher said it was wonderful how the French had found their way
+through such a pathless wilderness; and Dean Drone said that it was
+wonderful also to think that the Almighty had placed even the smallest
+shrub in its appointed place. Dr. Gallagher said it filled him with
+admiration. Dean Drone said it filled him with awe. Dr. Gallagher said
+he'd been full of it ever since he was a boy; and Dean Drone said so had
+he.
+
+Then a little further, as the Mariposa Belle steamed on down the lake,
+they passed the Old Indian Portage where the great grey rocks are; and
+Dr. Gallagher drew Dean Drone's attention to the place where the narrow
+canoe track wound up from the shore to the woods, and Dean Drone said he
+could see it perfectly well without the glasses.
+
+Dr. Gallagher said that it was just here that a party of five hundred
+French had made their way with all their baggage and accoutrements
+across the rocks of the divide and down to the Great Bay. And Dean Drone
+said that it reminded him of Xenophon leading his ten thousand Greeks
+over the hill passes of Armenia down to the sea. Dr. Gallagher said the
+he had often wished he could have seen and spoken to Champlain, and Dean
+Drone said how much he regretted to have never known Xenophon.
+
+And then after that they fell to talking of relics and traces of the
+past, and Dr. Gallagher said that if Dean Drone would come round to his
+house some night he would show him some Indian arrow heads that he had
+dug up in his garden. And Dean Drone said that if Dr. Gallagher would
+come round to the rectory any afternoon he would show him a map of
+Xerxes' invasion of Greece. Only he must come some time between the
+Infant Class and the Mothers' Auxiliary.
+
+So presently they both knew that they were blocked out of one another's
+houses for some time to come, and Dr. Gallagher walked forward and told
+Mr. Smith, who had never studied Greek, about Champlain crossing the
+rock divide.
+
+Mr. Smith turned his head and looked at the divide for half a second and
+then said he had crossed a worse one up north back of the Wahnipitae
+and that the flies were Hades,--and then went on playing freezeout poker
+with the two juniors in Duff's bank.
+
+So Dr. Gallagher realized that that's always the way when you try to
+tell people things, and that as far as gratitude and appreciation goes
+one might as well never read books or travel anywhere or do anything.
+
+In fact, it was at this very moment that he made up his mind to give the
+arrows to the Mariposa Mechanics' Institute,--they afterwards became, as
+you know, the Gallagher Collection. But, for the time being, the doctor
+was sick of them and wandered off round the boat and watched Henry
+Mullins showing George Duff how to make a John Collins without lemons,
+and finally went and sat down among the Mariposa band and wished that he
+hadn't come.
+
+So the boat steamed on and the sun rose higher and higher, and the
+freshness of the morning changed into the full glare of noon, and they
+went on to where the lake began to narrow in at its foot, just where
+the Indian's Island is, all grass and trees and with a log wharf running
+into the water: Below it the Lower Ossawippi runs out of the lake, and
+quite near are the rapids, and you can see down among the trees the red
+brick of the power house and hear the roar of the leaping water.
+
+The Indian's Island itself is all covered with trees and tangled vines,
+and the water about it is so still that it's all reflected double and
+looks the same either way up. Then when the steamer's whistle blows as
+it comes into the wharf, you hear it echo among the trees of the island,
+and reverberate back from the shores of the lake.
+
+The scene is all so quiet and still and unbroken, that Miss
+Cleghorn,--the sallow girl in the telephone exchange, that I spoke
+of--said she'd like to be buried there. But all the people were so busy
+getting their baskets and gathering up their things that no one had time
+to attend to it.
+
+I mustn't even try to describe the landing and the boat crunching
+against the wooden wharf and all the people running to the same side of
+the deck and Christie Johnson calling out to the crowd to keep to the
+starboard and nobody being able to find it. Everyone who has been on a
+Mariposa excursion knows all about that.
+
+Nor can I describe the day itself and the picnic under the trees. 'There
+were speeches afterwards, and Judge Pepperleigh gave such offence
+by bringing in Conservative politics that a man called Patriotus
+Canadiensis wrote and asked for some of the invaluable space of the
+Mariposa Times-Herald and exposed it.
+
+I should say that there were races too, on the grass on the open side
+of the island, graded mostly according to ages, races for boys under
+thirteen and girls over nineteen and all that sort of thing. Sports
+are generally conducted on that plan in Mariposa. It is realized that a
+woman of sixty has an unfair advantage over a mere child.
+
+Dean Drone managed the races and decided the ages and gave out the
+prizes; the Wesleyan minister helped, and he and the young student, who
+was relieving in the Presbyterian Church, held the string at the winning
+point.
+
+They had to get mostly clergymen for the races because all the men had
+wandered off, somehow, to where they were drinking lager beer out of two
+kegs stuck on pine logs among the trees.
+
+But if you've ever been on a Mariposa excursion you know all about these
+details anyway.
+
+So the day wore on and presently the sun came through the trees on a
+slant and the steamer whistle blew with a great puff of white steam and
+all the people came straggling down to the wharf and pretty soon the
+Mariposa Belle had floated out on to the lake again and headed for the
+town, twenty miles away.
+
+
+I suppose you have often noticed the contrast there is between an
+excursion on its way out in the morning and what it looks like on the
+way home.
+
+In the morning everybody is so restless and animated and moves to
+and fro all over the boat and asks questions. But coming home, as the
+afternoon gets later and the sun sinks beyond the hills, all the people
+seem to get so still and quiet and drowsy.
+
+So it was with the people on the Mariposa Belle. They sat there on the
+benches and the deck chairs in little clusters, and listened to the
+regular beat of the propeller and almost dozed off asleep as they sat.
+Then when the sun set and the dusk drew on, it grew almost dark on the
+deck and so still that you could hardly tell there was anyone on board.
+
+And if you had looked at the steamer from the shore or from one of
+the islands, you'd have seen the row of lights from the cabin windows
+shining on the water and the red glare of the burning hemlock from the
+funnel, and you'd have heard the soft thud of the propeller miles away
+over the lake.
+
+Now and then, too, you could have heard them singing on the
+steamer,--the voices of the girls and the men blended into unison
+by the distance, rising and falling in long-drawn melody:
+"O--Can-a-da--O--Can-a-da."
+
+You may talk as you will about the intoning choirs of your European
+cathedrals, but the sound of "O--Can-a-da," borne across the waters of a
+silent lake at evening is good enough for those of us who know Mariposa.
+
+I think that it was just as they were singing like this: "O--Can-a-da,"
+that word went round that the boat was sinking.
+
+If you have ever been in any sudden emergency on the water, you will
+understand the strange psychology of it,--the way in which what is
+happening seems to become known all in a moment without a word being
+said. The news is transmitted from one to the other by some mysterious
+process.
+
+At any rate, on the Mariposa Belle first one and then the other heard
+that the steamer was sinking. As far as I could ever learn the first
+of it was that George Duff, the bank manager, came very quietly to Dr.
+Gallagher and asked him if he thought that the boat was sinking. The
+doctor said no, that he had thought so earlier in the day but that he
+didn't now think that she was.
+
+After that Duff, according to his own account, had said to Macartney,
+the lawyer, that the boat was sinking, and Macartney said that he
+doubted it very much.
+
+Then somebody came to Judge Pepperleigh and woke him up and said that
+there was six inches of water in the steamer and that she was sinking.
+And Pepperleigh said it was perfect scandal and passed the news on to
+his wife and she said that they had no business to allow it and that if
+the steamer sank that was the last excursion she'd go on.
+
+So the news went all round the boat and everywhere the people gathered
+in groups and talked about it in the angry and excited way that people
+have when a steamer is sinking on one of the lakes like Lake Wissanotti.
+
+Dean Drone, of course, and some others were quieter about it, and said
+that one must make allowances and that naturally there were two sides to
+everything. But most of them wouldn't listen to reason at all. I think,
+perhaps, that some of them were frightened. You see the last time but
+one that the steamer had sunk, there had been a man drowned and it made
+them nervous.
+
+What? Hadn't I explained about the depth of Lake Wissanotti? I had
+taken it for granted that you knew; and in any case parts of it are deep
+enough, though I don't suppose in this stretch of it from the big reed
+beds up to within a mile of the town wharf, you could find six feet of
+water in it if you tried. Oh, pshaw! I was not talking about a steamer
+sinking in the ocean and carrying down its screaming crowds of people
+into the hideous depths of green water. Oh, dear me no! That kind of
+thing never happens on Lake Wissanotti.
+
+But what does happen is that the Mariposa Belle sinks every now and
+then, and sticks there on the bottom till they get things straightened
+up.
+
+On the lakes round Mariposa, if a person arrives late anywhere and
+explains that the steamer sank, everybody understands the situation.
+
+You see when Harland and Wolff built the Mariposa Belle, they left some
+cracks in between the timbers that you fill up with cotton waste every
+Sunday. If this is not attended to, the boat sinks. In fact, it is part
+of the law of the province that all the steamers like the Mariposa Belle
+must be properly corked,--I think that is the word,--every season. There
+are inspectors who visit all the hotels in the province to see that it
+is done.
+
+So you can imagine now that I've explained it a little straighter, the
+indignation of the people when they knew that the boat had come uncorked
+and that they might be stuck out there on a shoal or a mud-bank half the
+night.
+
+I don't say either that there wasn't any danger; anyway, it doesn't feel
+very safe when you realize that the boat is settling down with every
+hundred yards that she goes, and you look over the side and see only the
+black water in the gathering night.
+
+Safe! I'm not sure now that I come to think of it that it isn't worse
+than sinking in the Atlantic. After all, in the Atlantic there is
+wireless telegraphy, and a lot of trained sailors and stewards. But out
+on Lake Wissanotti,--far out, so that you can only just see the lights
+of the town away off to the south,--when the propeller comes to a
+stop,--and you can hear the hiss of steam as they start to rake out the
+engine fires to prevent an explosion,--and when you turn from the red
+glare that comes from the furnace doors as they open them, to the
+black dark that is gathering over the lake,--and there's a night wind
+beginning to run among the rushes,--and you see the men going forward
+to the roof of the pilot house to send up the rockets to rouse the town,
+safe? Safe yourself, if you like; as for me, let me once get back into
+Mariposa again, under the night shadow of the maple trees, and this
+shall be the last, last time I'll go on Lake Wissanotti.
+
+Safe! Oh yes! Isn't it strange how safe other people's adventures seem
+after they happen? But you'd have been scared, too, if you'd been there
+just before the steamer sank, and seen them bringing up all the women on
+to the top deck.
+
+I don't see how some of the people took it so calmly; how Mr. Smith, for
+instance, could have gone on smoking and telling how he'd had a steamer
+"sink on him" on Lake Nipissing and a still bigger one, a side-wheeler,
+sink on him in Lake Abbitibbi.
+
+Then, quite suddenly, with a quiver, down she went. You could feel the
+boat sink, sink,--down, down,--would it never get to the bottom? The
+water came flush up to the lower deck, and then,--thank heaven,--the
+sinking stopped and there was the Mariposa Belle safe and tight on a
+reed bank.
+
+Really, it made one positively laugh! It seemed so queer and, anyway,
+if a man has a sort of natural courage, danger makes him laugh. Danger!
+pshaw! fiddlesticks! everybody scouted the idea. Why, it is just the
+little things like this that give zest to a day on the water.
+
+Within half a minute they were all running round looking for sandwiches
+and cracking jokes and talking of making coffee over the remains of the
+engine fires.
+
+
+I don't need to tell at length how it all happened after that.
+
+I suppose the people on the Mariposa Belle would have had to settle down
+there all night or till help came from the town, but some of the men
+who had gone forward and were peering out into the dark said that it
+couldn't be more than a mile across the water to Miller's Point. You
+could almost see it over there to the left,--some of them, I think, said
+"off on the port bow," because you know when you get mixed up in these
+marine disasters, you soon catch the atmosphere of the thing.
+
+So pretty soon they had the davits swung out over the side and were
+lowering the old lifeboat from the top deck into the water.
+
+There were men leaning out over the rail of the Mariposa Belle with
+lanterns that threw the light as they let her down, and the glare fell
+on the water and the reeds. But when they got the boat lowered, it
+looked such a frail, clumsy thing as one saw it from the rail above,
+that the cry was raised: "Women and children first!" For what was the
+sense, if it should turn out that the boat wouldn't even hold women and
+children, of trying to jam a lot of heavy men into it?
+
+So they put in mostly women and children and the boat pushed out into
+the darkness so freighted down it would hardly float.
+
+In the bow of it was the Presbyterian student who was relieving the
+minister, and he called out that they were in the hands of Providence.
+But he was crouched and ready to spring out of them at the first moment.
+
+So the boat went and was lost in the darkness except for the lantern in
+the bow that you could see bobbing on the water. Then presently it came
+back and they sent another load, till pretty soon the decks began to
+thin out and everybody got impatient to be gone.
+
+It was about the time that the third boat-load put off that Mr. Smith
+took a bet with Mullins for twenty-five dollars, that he'd be home in
+Mariposa before the people in the boats had walked round the shore.
+
+No one knew just what he meant, but pretty soon they saw Mr. Smith
+disappear down below into the lowest part of the steamer with a mallet
+in one hand and a big bundle of marline in the other.
+
+They might have wondered more about it, but it was just at this time
+that they heard the shouts from the rescue boat--the big Mackinaw
+lifeboat--that had put out from the town with fourteen men at the sweeps
+when they saw the first rockets go up.
+
+I suppose there is always something inspiring about a rescue at sea, or
+on the water.
+
+After all, the bravery of the lifeboat man is the true
+bravery,--expended to save life, not to destroy it.
+
+Certainly they told for months after of how the rescue boat came out to
+the Mariposa Belle.
+
+I suppose that when they put her in the water the lifeboat touched it
+for the first time since the old Macdonald Government placed her on Lake
+Wissanotti.
+
+Anyway, the water poured in at every seam. But not for a moment,--even
+with two miles of water between them and the steamer,--did the rowers
+pause for that.
+
+By the time they were half-way there the water was almost up to the
+thwarts, but they drove her on. Panting and exhausted (for mind you, if
+you haven't been in a fool boat like that for years, rowing takes it out
+of you), the rowers stuck to their task. They threw the ballast over
+and chucked into the water the heavy cork jackets and lifebelts that
+encumbered their movements. There was no thought of turning back. They
+were nearer to the steamer than the shore.
+
+"Hang to it, boys," called the crowd from the steamer's deck, and hang
+they did.
+
+They were almost exhausted when they got them; men leaning from the
+steamer threw them ropes and one by one every man was hauled aboard just
+as the lifeboat sank under their feet.
+
+Saved! by Heaven, saved, by one of the smartest pieces of rescue work
+ever seen on the lake.
+
+There's no use describing it; you need to see rescue work of this kind
+by lifeboats to understand it.
+
+Nor were the lifeboat crew the only ones that distinguished themselves.
+
+Boat after boat and canoe after canoe had put out from Mariposa to the
+help of the steamer. They got them all.
+
+Pupkin, the other bank teller, with a face like a horse, who hadn't gone
+on the excursion,--as soon as he knew that the boat was signalling for
+help and that Miss Lawson was sending up rockets,--rushed for a row
+boat, grabbed an oar (two would have hampered him), and paddled madly
+out into the lake. He struck right out into the dark with the crazy
+skiff almost sinking beneath his feet. But they got him. They rescued
+him. They watched him, almost dead with exhaustion, make his way to the
+steamer, where he was hauled up with ropes. Saved! Saved!!
+
+
+They might have gone on that way half the night, picking up the
+rescuers, only, at the very moment when the tenth load of people left
+for the shore,--just as suddenly and saucily as you please, up came the
+Mariposa Belle from the mud bottom and floated.
+
+FLOATED?
+
+Why, of course she did. If you take a hundred and fifty people off a
+steamer that has sunk, and if you get a man as shrewd as Mr. Smith
+to plug the timber seams with mallet and marline, and if you turn ten
+bandsmen of the Mariposa band on to your hand pump on the bow of the
+lower decks--float? why, what else can she do?
+
+Then, if you stuff in hemlock into the embers of the fire that you were
+raking out, till it hums and crackles under the boiler, it won't be
+long before you hear the propeller thud thudding at the stern again, and
+before the long roar of the steam whistle echoes over to the town.
+
+And so the Mariposa Belle, with all steam up again and with the long
+train of sparks careering from the funnel, is heading for the town.
+
+But no Christie Johnson at the wheel in the pilot house this time.
+
+"Smith! Get Smith!" is the cry.
+
+Can he take her in? Well, now! Ask a man who has had steamers sink on
+him in half the lakes from Temiscaming to the Bay, if he can take her
+in? Ask a man who has run a York boat down the rapids of the Moose when
+the ice is moving, if he can grip the steering wheel of the Mariposa
+Belle? So there she steams safe and sound to the town wharf!
+
+Look at the lights and the crowd! If only the federal census taker could
+count us now! Hear them calling and shouting back and forward from the
+deck to the shore! Listen! There is the rattle of the shore ropes as
+they get them ready, and there's the Mariposa band,--actually forming
+in a circle on the upper deck just as she docks, and the leader with his
+baton,--one--two--ready now,--
+
+"O CAN-A-DA!"
+
+
+
+
+FOUR. The Ministrations of the Rev. Mr. Drone
+
+The Church of England in Mariposa is on a side street, where the maple
+trees are thickest, a little up the hill from the heart of the town. The
+trees above the church and the grass plot that was once the cemetery,
+till they made the new one (the Necropolis, over the brow of the hill),
+fill out the whole corner. Down behind the church, with only the driving
+shed and a lane between, is the rectory. It is a little brick house with
+odd angles. There is a hedge and a little gate, and a weeping ash tree
+with red berries.
+
+At the side of the rectory, churchward, is a little grass lawn with low
+hedges and at the side of that two wild plum trees, that are practically
+always in white blossom. Underneath them is a rustic table and chairs,
+and it is here that you may see Rural Dean Drone, the incumbent of the
+Church of England Church, sitting, in the chequered light of the plum
+tress that is neither sun nor shadow. Generally you will find him
+reading, and when I tell you that at the end of the grass plot where the
+hedge is highest there is a yellow bee hive with seven bees that belong
+to Dean Drone, you will realize that it is only fitting that the Dean is
+reading in the Greek. For what better could a man be reading beneath the
+blossom of the plum trees, within the very sound of the bees, than the
+Pastorals of Theocritus? The light trash of modern romance might put
+a man to sleep in such a spot, but with such food for reflection as
+Theocritus, a man may safely close his eyes and muse on what he reads
+without fear of dropping into slumber.
+
+Some men, I suppose, terminate their education when they leave their
+college. Not so Dean Drone. I have often heard him say that if he
+couldn't take a book in the Greek out on the lawn in a spare half hour,
+he would feel lost. It's a certain activity of the brain that must be
+stilled somehow. The Dean, too, seemed to have a native feeling for the
+Greek language. I have often heard people who might sit with him on
+the lawn, ask him to translate some of it. But he always refused. One
+couldn't translate it, he said. It lost so much in the translation that
+it was better not to try. It was far wiser not to attempt it. If you
+undertook to translate it, there was something gone, something missing
+immediately. I believe that many classical scholars feel this way, and
+like to read the Greek just as it is, without the hazard of trying to
+put it into so poor a medium as English. So that when Dean Drone
+said that he simply couldn't translate it, I believe he was perfectly
+sincere.
+
+Sometimes, indeed, he would read it aloud. That was another matter.
+Whenever, for example, Dr. Gallagher--I mean, of course, old Dr.
+Gallagher, not the young doctor (who was always out in the country in
+the afternoon)--would come over and bring his latest Indian relics to
+show to the Dean, the latter always read to him a passage or two. As
+soon as the doctor laid his tomahawk on the table, the Dean would
+reach for his Theocritus. I remember that on the day when Dr. Gallagher
+brought over the Indian skull that they had dug out of the railway
+embankment, and placed it on the rustic table, the Dean read to him so
+long from Theocritus that the doctor, I truly believe, dozed off in his
+chair. The Dean had to wait and fold his hands with the book across his
+knee, and close his eyes till the doctor should wake up again. And the
+skull was on the table between them, and from above the plum blossoms
+fluttered down, till they made flakes on it as white as Dr. Gallagher's
+hair.
+
+I don't want you to suppose that the Rev. Mr. Drone spent the whole of
+his time under the trees. Not at all. In point of fact, the rector's
+life was one round of activity which lie himself might deplore but was
+powerless to prevent. He had hardly sat down beneath the trees of an
+afternoon after his mid-day meal when there was the Infant Class at
+three, and after that, with scarcely an hour between, the Mothers'
+Auxiliary at five, and the next morning the Book Club, and that evening
+the Bible Study Class, and the next morning the Early Workers' Guild at
+eleven-thirty. The whole week was like that, and if one found time to
+sit down for an hour or so to recuperate it was the most one could do.
+After all, if a busy man spends the little bit of leisure that he gets
+in advanced classical study, there is surely no harm in it. I suppose,
+take it all in all, there wasn't a busier man than the Rural Dean among
+the Anglican clergy of the diocese.
+
+If the Dean ever did snatch a half-day from his incessant work, he spent
+it in fishing. But not always that, for as likely as not, instead of
+taking a real holiday he would put in the whole afternoon amusing
+the children and the boys that he knew, by making kites and toys and
+clockwork steamboats for them.
+
+It was fortunate for the Dean that he had the strange interest and
+aptitude for mechanical advices which he possessed, or otherwise this
+kind of thing would have been too cruel an imposition. But the Rev.
+Mr. Drone had a curious liking for machinery. I think I never heard him
+preach a better sermon than the one on Aeroplanes (Lo, what now see you
+on high Jeremiah Two).
+
+So it was that he spent two whole days making a kite with Chinese wings
+for Teddy Moore, the photographer's son, and closed down the infant
+class for forty-eight hours so that Teddy Moore should not miss the
+pleasure of flying it, or rather seeing it flown. It is foolish to trust
+a Chinese kite to the hands of a young child.
+
+In the same way the Dean made a mechanical top for little Marjorie
+Trewlaney, the cripple, to see spun: it would have been unwise to allow
+the afflicted girl to spin it. There was no end to the things that Mr.
+Drone could make, and always for the children. Even when he was making
+the sand-clock for poor little Willie Yodel (who died, you know) the
+Dean went right on with it and gave it to another child with just the
+same pleasure. Death, you know, to the clergy is a different thing from
+what it is to us. The Dean and Mr. Gingham used often to speak of it as
+they walked through the long grass of the new cemetery, the Necropolis.
+And when your Sunday walk is to your wife's grave, as the Dean's was,
+perhaps it seems different to anybody.
+
+The Church of England Church, I said; stood close to the rectory, a
+tall, sweeping church, and inside a great reach of polished cedar beams
+that ran to the point of the roof. There used to stand on the same spot
+the little stone church that all the grown-up people in Mariposa still
+remember, a quaint little building in red and grey stone. About it was
+the old cemetery, but that was all smoothed out later into the grass
+plot round the new church, and the headstones laid out flat, and no new
+graves have been put there for ever so long. But the Mariposa children
+still walk round and read the headstones lying flat in the grass and
+look for the old ones,--because some of them are ever so old--forty or
+fifty years back.
+
+Nor are you to think from all this that the Dean was not a man with
+serious perplexities. You could easily convince yourself of the
+contrary. For if you watched the Rev. Mr. Drone as he sat reading in the
+Greek, you would notice that no very long period every passed without
+his taking up a sheet or two of paper that lay between the leaves of the
+Theocritus and that were covered close with figures.
+
+And these the Dean would lay upon the rustic table, and he would add
+them up forwards and backwards, going first up the column and then down
+it to see that nothing had been left out, and then down it again to see
+what it was that must have been left out.
+
+Mathematics, you will understand, were not the Dean's forte. They never
+were the forte of the men who had been trained at the little Anglican
+college with the clipped hedges and the cricket ground, where Rupert
+Drone had taken the gold medal in Greek fifty-two years ago. You will
+see the medal at any time lying there in its open box on the rectory
+table, in case of immediate need. Any of the Drone girls, Lilian, or
+Jocelyn, or Theodora, would show it to you. But, as I say, mathematics
+were not the rector's forte, and he blamed for it (in a Christian
+spirit, you will understand) the memory of his mathematical professor,
+and often he spoke with great bitterness. I have often heard him say
+that in his opinion the colleges ought to dismiss, of course in
+a Christian spirit, all the professors who are not, in the most
+reverential sense of the term, fit for their jobs.
+
+No doubt many of the clergy of the diocese had suffered more or less
+just as the Dean had from lack of mathematical training. But the Dean
+always felt that his own case was especially to be lamented. For you
+see, if a man is trying to make a model aeroplane--for a poor family in
+the lower part of the town--and he is brought to a stop by the need of
+reckoning the coefficient of torsion of cast-iron rods, it shows plainly
+enough that the colleges are not truly filling their divine mission.
+
+
+But the figures that I speak of were not those of the model aeroplane.
+These were far more serious. Night and day they had been with the rector
+now for the best part of ten years, and they grew, if anything, more
+intricate.
+
+If, for example, you try to reckon the debt of a church--a large church
+with a great sweep of polished cedar beams inside, for the special
+glorification of the All Powerful, and with imported tiles on the roof
+for the greater glory of Heaven and with stained-glass windows for the
+exaltation of the All Seeing--if, I say, you try to reckon up the debt
+on such a church and figure out its interest and its present worth, less
+a fixed annual payment, it makes a pretty complicated sum. Then if you
+try to add to this the annual cost of insurance, and deduct from it
+three-quarters of a stipend, year by year, and then suddenly remember
+that three-quarters is too much, because you have forgotten the
+boarding-school fees of the littlest of the Drones (including French, as
+an extra--she must have it, all the older girls did), you have got a sum
+that pretty well defies ordinary arithmetic. The provoking part of it
+was that the Dean knew perfectly well that with the help of logarithms
+he could have done the thing in a moment. But at the Anglican college
+they had stopped short at that very place in the book. They had simply
+explained that Logos was a word and Arithmos a number, which at the
+time, seemed amply sufficient.
+
+So the Dean was perpetually taking out his sheets of figures, and adding
+them upwards and downwards, and they never came the same. Very often
+Mr. Gingham, who was a warden, would come and sit beside the rector and
+ponder over the figures, and Mr. Drone would explain that with a book of
+logarithms you could work it out in a moment. You would simply open the
+book and run your finger up the columns (he illustrated exactly the way
+in which the finger was moved), and there you were. Mr. Gingham said
+that it was a caution, and that logarithms (I quote his exact phrase)
+must be a terror.
+
+Very often, too, Nivens, the lawyer, who was a sidesman, and Mullins,
+the manager of the Exchange Bank, who was the chairman of the vestry,
+would come and take a look, at the figures. But they never could make
+much of them, because the stipend part was not a matter that one could
+discuss.
+
+Mullins would notice the item for a hundred dollars due on fire
+insurance and would say; as a business man, that surely that couldn't
+be fire insurance, and the Dean would say surely not, and change it:
+and Mullins would say surely there couldn't be fifty dollars for taxes,
+because there weren't any taxes, and the Dean would admit that of course
+it couldn't be for the taxes. In fact, the truth is that the Dean's
+figures were badly mixed, and the fault lay indubitably with the
+mathematical professor of two generations back.
+
+It was always Mullins's intention some day to look into the finances of
+the church, the more so as his father had been with Dean Drone at the
+little Anglican college with the cricket ground. But he was a busy man.
+As he explained to the rector himself, the banking business nowadays
+is getting to be such that a banker can hardly call even his Sunday
+mornings his own. Certainly Henry Mullins could not. They belonged
+largely to Smith's Hotel, and during the fishing season they belonged
+away down the lake, so far away that practically no one, unless it was
+George Duff of the Commercial Bank, could see them.
+
+But to think that all this trouble had come through the building of the
+new church.
+
+That was the bitterness of it.
+
+For the twenty-five years that Rural Dean Drone had preached in the
+little stone church, it had been his one aim, as he often put it in his
+sermons, to rear a larger Ark in Gideon. His one hope had been to set up
+a greater Evidence, or, very simply stated, to kindle a Brighter Beacon.
+
+After twenty-five years of waiting, he had been able at last to kindle
+it. Everybody in Mariposa remembers the building of the church. First
+of all they had demolished the little stone church to make way for the
+newer Evidence. It seemed almost a sacrilege, as the Dean himself said,
+to lay hands on it. Indeed it was at first proposed to take the stone of
+it and build it into a Sunday School, as a lesser testimony. Then,
+when that provided impracticable, it was suggested that the stone be
+reverently fashioned into a wall that should stand as a token. And when
+even that could not be managed, the stone of the little church was
+laid reverently into a stone pile; afterwards it was devoutly sold to a
+building contractor, and, like so much else in life, was forgotten.
+
+But the building of the church, no one, I think, will forget. The
+Dean threw himself into the work. With his coat off and his white
+shirt-sleeves conspicuous among the gang that were working at the
+foundations, he set his hand to the shovel, himself guided the
+road-scraper, urging on the horses; cheering and encouraging the men,
+till they begged him to desist. He mingled with the stone-masons,
+advising, helping, and giving counsel, till they pleaded with him
+to rest. He was among the carpenters, sawing, hammering, enquiring,
+suggesting, till they besought him to lay off. And he was night and day
+with the architect's assistants, drawing, planning, revising, till the
+architect told him to cut it out.
+
+So great was his activity, that I doubt whether the new church would
+ever have been finished, had not the wardens and the vestry men insisted
+that Mr. Drone must take a holiday, and sent him on the Mackinaw trip up
+the lakes,--the only foreign travel of the Dean's life.
+
+
+So in due time the New Church was built and it towered above the maple
+trees of Mariposa like a beacon on a hill. It stood so high that from
+the open steeple of it, where the bells were, you could see all the
+town lying at its feet, and the farmsteads to the south of it, and the
+railway like a double pencil line, and Lake Wissanotti spread out like
+a map. You could see and appreciate things from the height of the new
+church,--such as the size and the growing wealth of Mariposa,--that you
+never could have seen from the little stone church at all.
+
+Presently the church was opened and the Dean preached his first sermon
+in it, and he called it a Greater Testimony, and he said that it was an
+earnest, or first fruit of endeavour, and that it was a token or pledge,
+and he named it also a covenant. He said, too, that it was an anchorage
+and a harbour and a lighthouse as well as being a city set upon a hill;
+and he ended by declaring it an Ark of Refuge and notified them that
+the Bible Class would meet in the basement of it on that and every other
+third Wednesday.
+
+In the opening months of preaching about it the Dean had called the
+church so often an earnest and a pledge and a guerdon and a tabernacle,
+that I think he used to forget that it wasn't paid for. It was only when
+the agent of the building society and a representative of the Hosanna
+Pipe and Steam Organ Co. (Limited), used to call for quarterly payments
+that he was suddenly reminded of the fact. Always after these men came
+round the Dean used to preach a special sermon on sin, in the course
+of which he would mention that the ancient Hebrews used to put unjust
+traders to death,--a thing of which he spoke with Christian serenity.
+
+I don't think that at first anybody troubled much about the debt on the
+church. Dean Drone's figures showed that it was only a matter of time
+before it would be extinguished; only a little effort was needed,
+a little girding up of the loins of the congregation and they could
+shoulder the whole debt and trample it under their feet. Let them but
+set their hands to the plough and they could soon guide it into the deep
+water. Then they might furl their sails and sit every man under his own
+olive tree.
+
+Meantime, while the congregation was waiting to gird up its loins, the
+interest on the debt was paid somehow, or, when it wasn't paid, was
+added to the principal.
+
+I don't know whether you have had any experience with Greater
+Testimonies and with Beacons set on Hills. If you have, you will realize
+how, at first gradually, and then rapidly, their position from year to
+year grows more distressing. What with the building loan and the organ
+instalment, and the fire insurance,--a cruel charge,--and the heat
+and light, the rector began to realize as he added up the figures that
+nothing but logarithms could solve them. Then the time came when not
+only the rector, but all the wardens knew and the sidesmen knew that the
+debt was more than the church could carry; then the choir knew and the
+congregation knew and at last everybody knew; and there were special
+collections at Easter and special days of giving, and special weeks of
+tribulation, and special arrangements with the Hosanna Pipe and Steam
+Organ Co. And it was noticed that when the Rural Dean announced a
+service of Lenten Sorrow,--aimed more especially at the business
+men,--the congregation had diminished by forty per cent.
+
+I suppose things are just the same elsewhere,--I mean the peculiar kind
+of discontent that crept into the Church of England congregation in
+Mariposa after the setting up of the Beacon. There were those who
+claimed that they had seen the error from the first, though they had
+kept quiet, as such people always do, from breadth of mind. There were
+those who had felt years before how it would end, but their lips were
+sealed from humility of spirit. What was worse was that there were
+others who grew dissatisfied with the whole conduct of the church.
+
+Yodel, the auctioneer, for example, narrated how he had been to the city
+and had gone into a service of the Roman Catholic church: I believe, to
+state it more fairly, he had "dropped in,"--the only recognized means
+of access to such a service. He claimed that the music that he had heard
+there was music, and that (outside of his profession) the chanting and
+intoning could not be touched.
+
+Ed Moore, the photographer, also related that he had listened to a
+sermon in the city, and that if anyone would guarantee him a sermon like
+that he would defy you to keep him away from church. Meanwhile, failing
+the guarantee, he stayed away.
+
+The very doctrines were impeached. Some of the congregation began to
+cast doubts on eternal punishment,--doubts so grave as to keep them
+absent from the Lenten Services of Sorrow. Indeed, Lawyer Macartney took
+up the whole question of the Athanasian Creed one afternoon with Joe
+Milligan, the dentist, and hardly left a clause of it intact.
+
+All this time, you will understand, Dean Drone kept on with his special
+services, and leaflets, calls, and appeals went out from the Ark of
+Gideon like rockets from a sinking ship. More and more with every month
+the debt of the church lay heavy on his mind. At times he forgot it. At
+other times he woke up in the night and thought about it. Sometimes
+as he went down the street from the lighted precincts of the Greater
+Testimony and passed the Salvation Army, praying around a naphtha lamp
+under the open sky, it smote him to the heart with a stab.
+
+But the congregation were wrong, I think, in imputing fault to the
+sermons of Dean Drone. There I do think they were wrong. I can speak
+from personal knowledge when I say that the rector's sermons were not
+only stimulating in matters of faith, but contained valuable material
+in regard to the Greek language, to modern machinery and to a variety
+of things that should have proved of the highest advantage to the
+congregation.
+
+There was, I say, the Greek language. The Dean always showed the
+greatest delicacy of feeling in regard to any translation in or out of
+it that he made from the pulpit. He was never willing to accept even the
+faintest shade of rendering different from that commonly given without
+being assured of the full concurrence of the congregation. Either the
+translation must be unanimous and without contradiction, or he could not
+pass it. He would pause in his sermon and would say: "The original Greek
+is 'Hoson,' but perhaps you will allow me to translate it as equivalent
+to 'Hoyon.'" And they did. So that if there was any fault to be found it
+was purely on the side of the congregation for not entering a protest at
+the time.
+
+It was the same way in regard to machinery. After all, what better
+illustrates the supreme purpose of the All Wise than such a thing as
+the dynamo or the reciprocating marine engine or the pictures in the
+Scientific American?
+
+Then, too, if a man has had the opportunity to travel and has seen the
+great lakes spread out by the hand of Providence from where one leaves
+the new dock at the Sound to where one arrives safe and thankful with
+one's dear fellow-passengers in the spirit at the concrete landing stage
+at Mackinaw--is not this fit and proper material for the construction
+of an analogy or illustration? Indeed, even apart from an analogy, is it
+not mighty interesting to narrate, anyway? In any case, why should the
+church-wardens have sent the rector on the Mackinaw trip, if they had
+not expected him to make some little return for it?
+
+I lay some stress on this point because the criticisms directed
+against the Mackinaw sermons always seemed so unfair. If the rector
+had described his experiences in the crude language of the ordinary
+newspaper, there might, I admit, have been something unfitting about it.
+But he was always careful to express himself in a way that showed,--or,
+listen, let me explain with an example.
+
+"It happened to be my lot some years ago," he would say, "to find myself
+a voyager, just as one is a voyager on the sea of life, on the broad
+expanse of water which has been spread out to the north-west of us by
+the hand of Providence, at a height of five hundred and eighty-one feet
+above the level of the sea,--I refer, I may say, to Lake Huron." Now,
+how different that is from saying: "I'll never forget the time I went on
+the Mackinaw trip." The whole thing has a different sound entirely. In
+the same way the Dean would go on:
+
+"I was voyaging on one of those magnificent leviathans of the water,--I
+refer to the boats of the Northern Navigation Company,--and was standing
+beside the forward rail talking with a dear brother in the faith who was
+journeying westward also--I may say he was a commercial traveller,--and
+beside us was a dear sister in the spirit seated in a deck chair, while
+near us were two other dear souls in grace engaged in Christian pastime
+on the deck,--I allude more particularly to the game of deck billiards."
+
+I leave it to any reasonable man whether, with that complete and
+fair-minded explanation of the environment, it was not perfectly proper
+to close down the analogy, as the rector did, with the simple words: "In
+fact, it was an extremely fine morning."
+
+Yet there were some people, even in Mariposa, that took exception
+and spent their Sunday dinner time in making out that they couldn't
+understand what Dean Drone was talking about, and asking one another
+if they knew. Once, as he passed out from the doors of the Greater
+Testimony, the rector heard some one say: "The Church would be all right
+if that old mugwump was out of the pulpit." It went to his heart like a
+barbed thorn, and stayed there.
+
+You know, perhaps, how a remark of that sort can stay and rankle,
+and make you wish you could hear it again to make sure of it, because
+perhaps you didn't hear it aright, and it was a mistake after all.
+Perhaps no one said it, anyway. You ought to have written it down at the
+time. I have seen the Dean take down the encyclopaedia in the rectory,
+and move his finger slowly down the pages of the letter M, looking for
+mugwump. But it wasn't there. I have known him, in his little study
+upstairs, turn over the pages of the "Animals of Palestine," looking for
+a mugwump. But there was none there. It must have been unknown in the
+greater days of Judea.
+
+
+So things went on from month to month, and from year to year, and the
+debt and the charges loomed like a dark and gathering cloud on the
+horizon. I don't mean to say that efforts were not made to face the
+difficulty and to fight it. They were. Time after time the workers of
+the congregation got together and thought out plans for the extinction
+of the debt. But somehow, after every trial, the debt grew larger
+with each year, and every system that could be devised turned out more
+hopeless than the last.
+
+They began, I think, with the "endless chain" of letters of appeal. You
+may remember the device, for it was all-popular in clerical circles some
+ten or fifteen years ago. You got a number of people to write each of
+them three letters asking for ten cents from three each of their friends
+and asking each of them to send on three similar letters. Three each
+from three each, and three each more from each! Do you observe the
+wonderful ingenuity of it? Nobody, I think, has forgotten how the
+Willing Workers of the Church of England Church of Mariposa sat down
+in the vestry room in the basement with a pile of stationery three
+feet high, sending out the letters. Some, I know, will never forget it.
+Certainly not Mr. Pupkin, the teller in the Exchange Bank, for it was
+here that he met Zena Pepperleigh, the judge's daughter, for the
+first time; and they worked so busily that they wrote out ever so many
+letters--eight or nine--in a single afternoon, and they discovered
+that their handwritings were awfully alike, which was one of the most
+extraordinary and amazing coincidences, you will admit, in the history
+of chirography.
+
+But the scheme failed--failed utterly. I don't know why. The letters
+went out and were copied broadcast and recopied, till you could see the
+Mariposa endless chain winding its way towards the Rocky Mountains.
+But they never got the ten cents. The Willing Workers wrote for it in
+thousands, but by some odd chance they never struck the person who had
+it.
+
+Then after that there came a regular winter of effort. First of all they
+had a bazaar that was got up by the Girls' Auxiliary and held in the
+basement of the church. All the girls wore special costumes that were
+brought up from the city, and they had booths, where there was every
+imaginable thing for sale--pincushion covers, and chair covers, and sofa
+covers, everything that you can think of. If the people had once started
+buying them, the debt would have been lifted in no time. Even as it was
+the bazaar only lost twenty dollars.
+
+After that, I think, was the magic lantern lecture that Dean Drone gave
+on "Italy and her Invaders." They got the lantern and the slides up from
+the city, and it was simply splendid. Some of the slides were perhaps
+a little confusing, but it was all there,--the pictures of the dense
+Italian jungle and the crocodiles and the naked invaders with their
+invading clubs. It was a pity that it was such a bad night, snowing
+hard, and a curling match on, or they would have made a lot of money
+out of the lecture. As it was the loss, apart from the breaking of the
+lantern, which was unavoidable, was quite trifling.
+
+
+I can hardly remember all the things that there were after that. I
+recollect that it was always Mullins who arranged about renting the hall
+and printing the tickets and all that sort of thing. His father, you
+remember, had been at the Anglican college with Dean Drone, and though
+the rector was thirty-seven years older than Mullins, he leaned upon
+him, in matters of business, as upon a staff; and though Mullins was
+thirty-seven years younger than the Dean, he leaned against him, in
+matters of doctrine, as against a rock.
+
+At one time they got the idea that what the public wanted was not
+anything instructive but something light and amusing. Mullins said
+that people loved to laugh. He said that if you get a lot of people all
+together and get them laughing you can do anything you like with them.
+Once they start to laugh they are lost. So they got Mr. Dreery, the
+English Literature teacher at the high school, to give an evening of
+readings from the Great Humorists from Chaucer to Adam Smith. They came
+mighty near to making a barrel of money out of that. If the people had
+once started laughing it would have been all over with them. As it was I
+heard a lot of them say that they simply wanted to scream with laughter:
+they said they just felt like bursting into peals of laughter all
+the time. Even when, in the more subtle parts, they didn't feel like
+bursting out laughing, they said they had all they could do to keep from
+smiling. They said they never had such a hard struggle in their lives
+not to smile.
+
+In fact the chairman said when he put the vote of thanks that he was
+sure if people had known what the lecture was to be like there would
+have been a much better "turn-out." But you see all that the people
+had to go on was just the announcement of the name of the lecturer,
+Mr. Dreery, and that he would lecture on English Humour All Seats
+Twenty-five Cents. As the chairman expressed it himself, if the people
+had had any idea, any idea at all, of what the lecture would be like
+they would have been there in hundreds. But how could they get an idea
+that it would be so amusing with practically nothing to go upon?
+
+
+After that attempt things seemed to go from bad to worse. Nearly
+everybody was disheartened about it. What would have happened to the
+debt, or whether they would have ever paid it off, is more than I
+can say, if it hadn't occurred that light broke in on Mullins in the
+strangest and most surprising way you can imagine. It happened that he
+went away for his bank holidays, and while he was away he happened to
+be present in one of the big cities and saw how they went at it there
+to raise money. He came home in such a state of excitement that he went
+straight up from the Mariposa station to the rectory, valise and all,
+and he burst in one April evening to where the Rural Dean was sitting
+with the three girls beside the lamp in the front room, and he cried
+out:
+
+"Mr. Drone, I've got it,--I've got a way that will clear the debt before
+you're a fortnight older. We'll have a Whirlwind Campaign in Mariposa!"
+
+But stay! The change from the depth of depression to the pinnacle of
+hope is too abrupt. I must pause and tell you in another chapter of the
+Whirlwind Campaign in Mariposa.
+
+
+
+
+FIVE. The Whirlwind Campaign in Mariposa
+
+It was Mullins, the banker, who told Mariposa all about the plan of a
+Whirlwind Campaign and explained how it was to be done. He'd happened to
+be in one of the big cities when they were raising money by a Whirlwind
+Campaign for one of the universities, and he saw it all.
+
+He said he would never forget the scene on the last day of it, when the
+announcement was made that the total of the money raised was even more
+than what was needed. It was a splendid sight,--the business men of the
+town all cheering and laughing and shaking hands, and the professors
+with the tears streaming down their faces, and the Deans of the
+Faculties, who had given money themselves, sobbing aloud.
+
+He said it was the most moving thing he ever saw.
+
+So, as I said, Henry Mullins, who had seen it, explained to the others
+how it was done. He said that first of all a few of the business men
+got together quietly,--very quietly, indeed the more quietly the
+better,--and talked things over. Perhaps one of them would dine,--just
+quietly,--with another one and discuss the situation. Then these two
+would invite a third man,--possibly even a fourth,--to have lunch with
+them and talk in a general way,--even talk of other things part of the
+time. And so on in this way things would be discussed and looked at
+in different lights and viewed from different angles and then when
+everything was ready they would go at things with a rush. A central
+committee would be formed and sub-committees, with captains of each
+group and recorders and secretaries, and on a stated day the Whirlwind
+Campaign would begin.
+
+Each day the crowd would all agree to meet at some stated place and
+each lunch together,--say at a restaurant or at a club or at some eating
+place. This would go on every day with the interest getting keener and
+keener, and everybody getting more and more excited, till presently the
+chairman would announce that the campaign had succeeded and there would
+be the kind of scene that Mullins had described.
+
+So that was the plan that they set in motion in Mariposa.
+
+
+I don't wish to say too much about the Whirlwind Campaign itself. I
+don't mean to say that it was a failure. On the contrary, in many ways
+it couldn't have been a greater success, and yet somehow it didn't seem
+to work out just as Henry Mullins had said it would. It may be that
+there are differences between Mariposa and the larger cities that one
+doesn't appreciate at first sight. Perhaps it would have been better to
+try some other plan.
+
+Yet they followed along the usual line of things closely enough. They
+began with the regular system of some of the business men getting
+together in a quiet way.
+
+First of all, for example, Henry Mullins came over quietly to Duff's
+rooms, over the Commercial Bank, with a bottle of rye whiskey, and
+they talked things over. And the night after that George Duff came over
+quietly to Mullins's rooms, over the Exchange Bank, with a bottle
+of Scotch whiskey. A few evenings after that Mullins and Duff went
+together, in a very unostentatious way, with perhaps a couple of bottles
+of rye, to Pete Glover's room over the hardware store. And then all
+three of them went up one night with Ed Moore, the photographer, to
+Judge Pepperleigh's house under pretence of having a game of poker. The
+very day after that, Mullins and Duff and Ed Moore, and Pete Glover and
+the judge got Will Harrison, the harness maker, to go out without any
+formality on the lake on the pretext of fishing. And the next night
+after that Duff and Mullins and Ed Moore and Pete Glover and Pepperleigh
+and Will Harrison got Alf Trelawney, the postmaster, to come over, just
+in a casual way, to the Mariposa House, after the night mail, and the
+next day Mullins and Duff and--
+
+But, pshaw! you see at once how the thing is worked. There's no need to
+follow that part of the Whirlwind Campaign further. But it just shows
+the power of organization.
+
+And all this time, mind you, they were talking things over, and looking
+at things first in one light and then in another light,--in fact, just
+doing as the big city men do when there's an important thing like this
+under way.
+
+So after things had been got pretty well into shape in this way, Duff
+asked Mullins one night, straight out, if he would be chairman of
+the Central Committee. He sprung it on him and Mullins had no time to
+refuse, but he put it to Duff straight whether he would be treasurer.
+And Duff had no time to refuse.
+
+
+That gave things a start, and within a week they had the whole
+organization on foot. There was the Grand Central Committee and six
+groups or sub-committees of twenty men each, and a captain for
+every group. They had it all arranged on the lines most likely to be
+effective.
+
+In one group there were all the bankers, Mullins and Duff and Pupkin
+(with the cameo pin), and about four others. They had their photographs
+taken at Ed Moore's studio, taken in a line with a background of
+icebergs--a winter scene--and a pretty penetrating crowd they looked, I
+can tell you. After all, you know, if you get a crowd of representative
+bank men together in any financial deal, you've got a pretty
+considerable leverage right away.
+
+In the second group were the lawyers, Nivens and Macartney and the
+rest--about as level-headed a lot as you'd see anywhere. Get the lawyers
+of a town with you on a thing like this and you'll find you've got a
+sort of brain power with you that you'd never get without them.
+
+Then there were the business men--there was a solid crowd for
+you,--Harrison, the harness maker, and Glover, the hardware man, and
+all that gang, not talkers, perhaps, but solid men who can tell you to
+a nicety how many cents there are in a dollar. It's all right to talk
+about education and that sort of thing, but if you want driving power
+and efficiency, get business men. They're seeing it every day in the
+city, and it's just the same in Mariposa. Why, in the big concerns
+in the city, if they found out a man was educated, they wouldn't have
+him,--wouldn't keep him there a minute. That's why the business men have
+to conceal it so much.
+
+Then in the other teams there were the doctors and the newspaper men and
+the professional men like Judge Pepperleigh and Yodel the auctioneer.
+
+
+It was all organized so that every team had its headquarters, two of
+them in each of the three hotels--one upstairs and one down. And it
+was arranged that there would be a big lunch every day, to be held in
+Smith's caff, round the corner of Smith's Northern Health Resort and
+Home of the Wissanotti Angler,--you know the place. The lunch was
+divided up into tables, with a captain for each table to see about
+things to drink, and of course all the tables were in competition with
+one another. In fact the competition was the very life of the whole
+thing.
+
+It's just wonderful how these things run when they're organized. Take
+the first luncheon, for example. There they all were, every man in his
+place, every captain at his post at the top of the table. It was hard,
+perhaps, for some of them to get there. They had very likely to be in
+their stores and banks and offices till the last minute and then make a
+dash for it. It was the cleanest piece of team work you ever saw.
+
+You have noticed already, I am sure, that a good many of the captains
+and committee men didn't belong to the Church of England Church. Glover,
+for instance, was a Presbyterian, till they ran the picket fence of
+the manse two feet on to his property, and after that he became a
+free-thinker. But in Mariposa, as I have said, everybody likes to be in
+everything and naturally a Whirlwind Campaign was a novelty. Anyway it
+would have been a poor business to keep a man out of the lunches merely
+on account of his religion. I trust that the day for that kind of
+religious bigotry is past.
+
+Of course the excitement was when Henry Mullins at the head of the table
+began reading out the telegrams and letters and messages. First of all
+there was a telegram of good wishes from the Anglican Lord Bishop of
+the Diocese to Henry Mullins and calling him Dear Brother in Grace the
+Mariposa telegraph office is a little unreliable and it read: "Dear
+Brother in grease," but that was good enough. The Bishop said that his
+most earnest wishes were with them.
+
+Then Mullins read a letter from the Mayor of Mariposa Pete Glover was
+mayor that year--stating that his keenest desires were with them: and
+then one from the Carriage Company saying that its heartiest good will
+was all theirs; and then one from the Meat Works saying that its nearest
+thoughts were next to them. Then he read one from himself, as head of
+the Exchange Bank, you understand, informing him that he had heard
+of his project and assuring him of his liveliest interest in what he
+proposed.
+
+At each of these telegrams and messages there was round after round of
+applause, so that you could hardly hear yourself speak or give an order.
+But that was nothing to when Mullins got up again, and beat on the
+table for silence and made one of those crackling speeches--just the way
+business men speak--the kind of speech that a college man simply can't
+make. I wish I could repeat it all. I remember that it began: "Now boys,
+you know what we're here for, gentlemen," and it went on just as good as
+that all through. When Mullins had done he took out a fountain pen
+and wrote out a cheque for a hundred dollars, conditional on the fund
+reaching fifty thousand. And there was a burst of cheers all over the
+room.
+
+Just the moment he had done it, up sprang George Duff,--you know the
+keen competition there is, as a straight matter of business, between the
+banks in Mariposa,--up sprang George Duff, I say, and wrote out a cheque
+for another hundred conditional on the fund reaching seventy thousand.
+You never heard such cheering in your life.
+
+And then when Netley walked up to the head of the table and laid down
+a cheque for a hundred dollars conditional on the fund reaching one
+hundred thousand the room was in an uproar. A hundred thousand dollars!
+Just think of it! The figures fairly stagger one. To think of a hundred
+thousand dollars raised in five minutes in a little place like Mariposa!
+
+And even that was nothing! In less than no time there was such a crowd
+round Mullins trying to borrow his pen all at once that his waistcoat
+was all stained with ink. Finally when they got order at last, and
+Mullins stood up and announced that the conditional fund had reached a
+quarter of a million, the whole place was a perfect babel of cheering.
+Oh, these Whirlwind Campaigns are wonderful things!
+
+
+I can tell you the Committee felt pretty proud that first day. There was
+Henry Mullins looking a little bit flushed and excited, with his white
+waistcoat and an American Beauty rose, and with ink marks all over him
+from the cheque signing; and he kept telling them that he'd known all
+along that all that was needed was to get the thing started and telling
+again about what he'd seen at the University Campaign and about the
+professors crying, and wondering if the high school teachers would come
+down for the last day of the meetings.
+
+Looking back on the Mariposa Whirlwind, I can never feel that it was
+a failure. After all, there is a sympathy and a brotherhood in
+these things when men work shoulder to shoulder. If you had seen the
+canvassers of the Committee going round the town that evening shoulder
+to shoulder from the Mariposa House to the Continental and up to
+Mullins's rooms and over to Duffs, shoulder to shoulder, you'd have
+understood it.
+
+I don't say that every lunch was quite such a success as the first. It's
+not always easy to get out of the store if you're a busy man, and a good
+many of the Whirlwind Committee found that they had just time to hurry
+down and snatch their lunch and get back again. Still, they came, and
+snatched it. As long as the lunches lasted, they came. Even if they had
+simply to rush it and grab something to eat and drink without time to
+talk to anybody, they came.
+
+No, no, it was not lack of enthusiasm that killed the Whirlwind Campaign
+in Mariposa. It must have been something else. I don't just know what
+it was but I think it had something to do with the financial, the
+book-keeping side of the thing.
+
+It may have been, too, that the organization was not quite correctly
+planned. You see, if practically everybody is on the committees, it is
+awfully hard to try to find men to canvass, and it is not allowable for
+the captains and the committee men to canvass one another, because their
+gifts are spontaneous. So the only thing that the different groups
+could do was to wait round in some likely place--say the bar parlour
+of Smith's Hotel--in the hope that somebody might come in who could be
+canvassed.
+
+You might ask why they didn't canvass Mr. Smith himself, but of course
+they had done that at the very start, as I should have said. Mr. Smith
+had given them two hundred dollars in cash conditional on the lunches
+being held in the caff of his hotel; and it's awfully hard to get a
+proper lunch I mean the kind to which a Bishop can express regret at not
+being there--under a dollar twenty-five. So Mr. Smith got back his own
+money, and the crowd began eating into the benefactions, and it got
+more and more complicated whether to hold another lunch in the hope of
+breaking even, or to stop the campaign.
+
+It was disappointing, yes. In spite of all the success and the sympathy,
+it was disappointing. I don't say it didn't do good. No doubt a lot of
+the men got to know one another better than ever they had before. I have
+myself heard Judge Pepperleigh say that after the campaign he knew
+all of Pete Glover that he wanted to. There was a lot of that kind of
+complete satiety. The real trouble about the Whirlwind Campaign was that
+they never clearly understood which of them were the whirlwind and who
+were to be the campaign.
+
+Some of them, I believe, took it pretty much to heart. I know that Henry
+Mullins did. You could see it. The first day he came down to the lunch,
+all dressed up with the American Beauty and the white waistcoat. The
+second day he only wore a pink carnation and a grey waistcoat. The third
+day he had on a dead daffodil and a cardigan undervest, and on the last
+day, when the high school teachers should have been there, he only wore
+his office suit and he hadn't even shaved. He looked beaten.
+
+It was that night that he went up to the rectory to tell the news to
+Dean Drone. It had been arranged, you know, that the rector should not
+attend the lunches, so as to let the whole thing come as a surprise;
+so that all he knew about it was just scraps of information about the
+crowds at the lunch and how they cheered and all that. Once, I believe,
+he caught sight of the Newspacket with a two-inch headline: A QUARTER
+OF A MILLION, but he wouldn't let himself read further because it would
+have spoilt the surprise.
+
+I saw Mullins, as I say, go up the street on his way to Dean Drone's.
+It was middle April and there was ragged snow on the streets, and the
+nights were dark still, and cold. I saw Mullins grit his teeth as he
+walked, and I know that he held in his coat pocket his own cheque for
+the hundred, with the condition taken off it, and he said that there
+were so many skunks in Mariposa that a man might as well be in the Head
+Office in the city.
+
+The Dean came out to the little gate in the dark,--you could see the
+lamplight behind him from the open door of the rectory,--and he shook
+hands with Mullins and they went in together.
+
+
+
+
+SIX. The Beacon on the Hill
+
+Mullins said afterward that it was ever so much easier than he thought
+it would have been. The Dean, he said, was so quiet. Of course if Mr.
+Drone had started to swear at Mullins, or tried to strike him, it would
+have been much harder. But as it was he was so quiet that part of the
+time he hardly seemed to follow what Mullins was saying. So Mullins
+was glad of that, because it proved that the Dean wasn't feeling
+disappointed as, in a way, he might have.
+
+Indeed, the only time when the rector seemed animated and excited in the
+whole interview was when Mullins said that the campaign had been ruined
+by a lot of confounded mugwumps. Straight away the Dean asked if those
+mugwumps had really prejudiced the outcome of the campaign. Mullins
+said there was no doubt of it, and the Dean enquired if the presence
+of mugwumps was fatal in matters of endeavour, and Mullins said that
+it was. Then the rector asked if even one mugwump was, in the Christian
+sense, deleterious. Mullins said that one mugwump would kill anything.
+After that the Dean hardly spoke at all.
+
+In fact, the rector presently said that he mustn't detain Mullins too
+long and that he had detained him too long already and that Mullins must
+be weary from his train journey and that in cases of extreme weariness
+nothing but a sound sleep was of any avail; he himself, unfortunately,
+would not be able to avail himself of the priceless boon of slumber
+until he had first retired to his study to write some letters; so that
+Mullins, who had a certain kind of social quickness of intuition, saw
+that it was time to leave, and went away.
+
+It was midnight as he went down the street, and a dark, still night.
+That can be stated positively because it came out in court afterwards.
+Mullins swore that it was a dark night; he admitted, under examination,
+that there may have been the stars, or at least some of the less
+important of them, though he had made no attempt, as brought out on
+cross-examination, to count them: there may have been, too, the electric
+lights, and Mullins was not willing to deny that it was quite possible
+that there was more or less moonlight. But that there was no light that
+night in the form of sunlight, Mullins was absolutely certain. All that,
+I say, came out in court.
+
+But meanwhile the rector had gone upstairs to his study and had seated
+himself in front of his table to write his letters. It was here always
+that he wrote his sermons. From the window of the room you looked
+through the bare white maple trees to the sweeping outline of the church
+shadowed against the night sky, and beyond that, though far off, was
+the new cemetery where the rector walked of a Sunday (I think I told you
+why): beyond that again, for the window faced the east, there lay, at no
+very great distance, the New Jerusalem. There were no better things that
+a man might look towards from his study window, nor anything that could
+serve as a better aid to writing.
+
+But this night the Dean's letters must have been difficult indeed to
+write. For he sat beside the table holding his pen and with his head
+bent upon his other hand, and though he sometimes put a line or two on
+the paper, for the most part he sat motionless. The fact is that Dean
+Drone was not trying to write letters, but only one letter. He was
+writing a letter of resignation. If you have not done that for forty
+years it is extremely difficult to get the words.
+
+So at least the Dean found it. First he wrote one set of words and then
+he sat and thought and wrote something else. But nothing seemed to suit.
+
+The real truth was that Dean Drone, perhaps more than he knew himself,
+had a fine taste for words and effects, and when you feel that a
+situation is entirely out of the common, you naturally try, if you have
+that instinct, to give it the right sort of expression.
+
+I believe that at the time when Rupert Drone had taken the medal
+in Greek over fifty years ago, it was only a twist of fate that had
+prevented him from becoming a great writer. There was a buried author in
+him just as there was a buried financier in Jefferson Thorpe. In fact,
+there were many people in Mariposa like that, and for all I know you may
+yourself have seen such elsewhere. For instance, I am certain that Billy
+Rawson, the telegraph operator at Mariposa, could easily have invented
+radium. In the same way one has only to read the advertisements of Mr.
+Gingham, the undertaker, to know that there is still in him a poet,
+who could have written on death far more attractive verses than the
+Thanatopsis of Cullen Bryant, and under a title less likely to offend
+the public and drive away custom. He has told me this himself.
+
+So the Dean tried first this and then that and nothing would seem to
+suit. First of all he wrote:
+
+"It is now forty years since I came among you, a youth full of life and
+hope and ardent in the work before me--" Then he paused, doubtful of the
+accuracy and clearness of the expression, read it over again and again
+in deep thought and then began again:
+
+"It is now forty years since I came among you, a broken and melancholy
+boy, without life or hope, desiring only to devote to the service of
+this parish such few years as might remain of an existence blighted
+before it had truly begun--" And then again the Dean stopped. He read
+what he had written; he frowned; he crossed it through with his pen.
+This was no way to write, this thin egotistical strain of complaint.
+Once more he started:
+
+"It is now forty years since I came among you, a man already tempered
+and trained, except possibly in mathematics--" And then again the rector
+paused and his mind drifted away to the memory of the Anglican professor
+that I spoke of, who had had so little sense of his higher mission as to
+omit the teaching of logarithms. And the rector mused so long that
+when he began again it seemed to him that it was simpler and better to
+discard the personal note altogether, and he wrote:
+
+"There are times, gentlemen, in the life of a parish, when it comes to
+an epoch which brings it to a moment when it reaches a point--"
+
+The Dean stuck fast again, but refusing this time to be beaten went
+resolutely on:
+
+"--reaches a point where the circumstances of the moment make the epoch
+such as to focus the life of the parish in that time."
+
+Then the Dean saw that he was beaten, and he knew that he not only
+couldn't manage the parish but couldn't say so in proper English, and of
+the two the last was the bitterer discovery.
+
+He raised his head, and looked for a moment through the window at the
+shadow of the church against the night, so outlined that you could
+almost fancy that the light of the New Jerusalem was beyond it. Then he
+wrote, and this time not to the world at large but only to Mullins:
+
+"My dear Harry, I want to resign my charge. Will you come over and help
+me?"
+
+
+When the Dean at last rose from writing that, I think it was far on in
+the night. As he rose he looked again through the window, looked once
+and then once more, and so stood with widening eyes, and his face set
+towards what he saw.
+
+What was that? That light in the sky there, eastward?--near or far he
+could not say. Was it already the dawn of the New Jerusalem brightening
+in the east, or was it--look--in the church itself,--what is that?--that
+dull red glow that shines behind the stained-glass windows, turning them
+to crimson? that fork of flame that breaks now from the casement and
+flashes upward, along the wood--and see--that sudden sheet of fire that
+springs the windows of the church with the roar of splintered glass and
+surges upward into the sky, till the dark night and the bare trees and
+sleeping street of Mariposa are all illumined with its glow!
+
+Fire! Fire! and the sudden sound of the bell now, breaking upon the
+night.
+
+So stood the Dean erect, with one hand pressed against the table for
+support, while the Mariposa fire bell struck out its warning to the
+sleeping town,--stood there while the street grew loud with the tumult
+of voices,--with the roaring gallop of the fire brigade,--with the harsh
+note of the gong--and over all other sounds, the great seething of the
+flames that tore their way into the beams and rafters of the pointed
+church and flared above it like a torch into the midnight sky.
+
+So stood the Dean, and as the church broke thus into a very beacon
+kindled upon a hill,--sank forward without a sign, his face against the
+table, stricken.
+
+
+You need to see a fire in a place such as Mariposa, a town still half of
+wood, to know what fire means. In the city it is all different. To
+the onlooker, at any rate, a fire is only a spectacle, nothing more.
+Everything is arranged, organized, certain. It is only once perhaps in a
+century that fire comes to a large city as it comes to the little wooden
+town like Mariposa as a great Terror of the Night.
+
+That, at any rate, is what it meant in Mariposa that night in April, the
+night the Church of England Church burnt down. Had the fire gained but
+a hundred feet, or less, it could have reached from the driving shed
+behind the church to the backs of the wooden shops of the Main Street,
+and once there not all the waters of Lake Wissanotti could stay the
+course of its destruction. It was for that hundred feet that they
+fought, the men of Mariposa, from the midnight call of the bell till the
+slow coming of the day. They fought the fire, not to save the church,
+for that was doomed from the first outbreak of the flames, but to stop
+the spread of it and save the town. They fought it at the windows,
+and at the blazing doors, and through the yawning furnace of the open
+belfry; fought it, with the Mariposa engine thumping and panting in the
+street, itself aglow with fire like a servant demon fighting its own
+kind, with tall ladders reaching to the very roof, and with hose that
+poured their streams of tossing water foaming into the flames.
+
+Most of all they fought to save the wooden driving shed behind the
+church from which the fire could leap into the heart of Mariposa. That
+was where the real fight was, for the life of the town. I wish you could
+have seen how they turned the hose against the shingles, ripping and
+tearing them from their places with the force of the driven water: how
+they mounted on the roof, axe in hand, and cut madly at the rafters
+to bring the building down, while the black clouds of smoke rolled in
+volumes about the men as they worked. You could see the fire horses
+harnessed with logging chains to the uprights of the shed to tear the
+building from its place.
+
+Most of all I wish you could have seen Mr. Smith, proprietor, as I think
+you know, of Smith's Hotel, there on the roof with a fireman's helmet
+on, cutting through the main beam of solid cedar, twelve by twelve, that
+held tight still when the rafters and the roof tree were down already,
+the shed on fire in a dozen places, and the other men driven from the
+work by the flaming sparks, and by the strangle of the smoke. Not so
+Mr. Smith! See him there as he plants himself firm at the angle of the
+beams, and with the full impact of his two hundred and eighty pounds
+drives his axe into the wood! I tell you it takes a man from the pine
+country of the north to handle an axe! Right, left, left, right, down
+it comes, with never a pause or stay, never missing by a fraction of
+an inch the line of the stroke! At it, Smith! Down with it! Till with
+a shout from the crowd the beam gapes asunder, and Mr. Smith is on the
+ground again, roaring his directions to the men and horses as they haul
+down the shed, in a voice that dominates the fire itself.
+
+Who made Mr. Smith the head and chief of the Mariposa fire brigade that
+night, I cannot say. I do not know even where he got the huge red helmet
+that he wore, nor had I ever heard till the night the church burnt down
+that Mr. Smith was a member of the fire brigade at all. But it's always
+that way. Your little narrow-chested men may plan and organize, but when
+there is something to be done, something real, then it's the man of size
+and weight that steps to the front every time. Look at Bismarck and
+Mr. Gladstone and President Taft and Mr. Smith,--the same thing in each
+case.
+
+I suppose it was perfectly natural that just as soon as Mr. Smith came
+on the scene he put on somebody's helmet and shouted his directions
+to the men and bossed the Mariposa fire brigade like Bismarck with the
+German parliament.
+
+The fire had broken out late, late at night, and they fought it till the
+day. The flame of it lit up the town and the bare grey maple trees, and
+you could see in the light of it the broad sheet of the frozen lake,
+snow covered still. It kindled such a beacon as it burned that from the
+other side of the lake the people on the night express from the north
+could see it twenty miles away. It lit up such a testimony of flame that
+Mariposa has never seen the like of it before or since. Then when the
+roof crashed in and the tall steeple tottered and fell, so swift a
+darkness seemed to come that the grey trees and the frozen lake vanished
+in a moment as if blotted out of existence.
+
+
+When the morning came the great church of Mariposa was nothing but a
+ragged group of walls with a sodden heap of bricks and blackened wood,
+still hissing here and there beneath the hose with the sullen anger of
+a conquered fire. Round the ruins of the fire walked the people of
+Mariposa next morning, and they pointed out where the wreck of the
+steeple had fallen, and where the bells of the church lay in a molten
+heap among the bricks, and they talked of the loss that it was and how
+many dollars it would take to rebuild the church, and whether it was
+insured and for how much. And there were at least fourteen people who
+had seen the fire first, and more than that who had given the first
+alarm, and ever so many who knew how fires of this sort could be
+prevented.
+
+Most noticeable of all you could see the sidesmen and the wardens and
+Mullins, the chairman of the vestry, talking in little groups about the
+fire. Later in the day there came from the city the insurance men and
+the fire appraisers, and they too walked about the ruins, and talked
+with the wardens and the vestry men. There was such a luxury of
+excitement in the town that day that it was just as good as a public
+holiday.
+
+But the strangest part of it was the unexpected sequel. I don't know
+through what error of the Dean's figures it happened, through what lack
+of mathematical training the thing turned out as it did. No doubt the
+memory of the mathematical professor was heavily to blame for it, but
+the solid fact is that the Church of England Church of Mariposa turned
+out to be insured for a hundred thousand, and there were the receipts
+and the vouchers, all signed and regular, just as they found them in a
+drawer of the rector's study. There was no doubt about it. The insurance
+people might protest as they liked. The straight, plain fact was that
+the church was insured for about twice the whole amount of the cost and
+the debt and the rector's salary and the boarding-school fees of the
+littlest of the Drones all put together.
+
+
+There was a Whirlwind Campaign for you! Talk of raising money,--that was
+something like! I wonder if the universities and the city institutions
+that go round trying to raise money by the slow and painful method
+called a Whirlwind Campaign, that takes perhaps all day to raise fifty
+thousand dollars, ever thought of anything so beautifully simple as
+this.
+
+The Greater Testimony that had lain so heavily on the congregation went
+flaming to its end, and burned up its debts and its obligations and
+enriched its worshippers by its destruction. Talk of a beacon on a hill!
+You can hardly beat that one.
+
+I wish you could have seen how the wardens and the sidesmen and Mullins,
+the chairman of the vestry, smiled and chuckled at the thought of it.
+Hadn't they said all along that all that was needed was a little faith
+and effort? And here it was, just as they said, and they'd been right
+after all.
+
+Protest from the insurance people? Legal proceedings to prevent payment?
+My dear sir! I see you know nothing about the Mariposa court, in spite
+of the fact that I have already said that it was one of the most
+precise instruments of British fair play ever established. Why, Judge
+Pepperleigh disposed of the case and dismissed the protest of the
+company in less than fifteen minutes! Just what the jurisdiction
+of Judge Pepperleigh's court is I don't know, but I do know that in
+upholding the rights of a Christian congregation--I am quoting here the
+text of the decision--against the intrigues of a set of infernal skunks
+that make too much money, anyway, the Mariposa court is without an
+equal. Pepperleigh even threatened the plaintiffs with the penitentiary,
+or worse.
+
+How the fire started no one ever knew. There was a queer story that went
+about to the effect that Mr. Smith and Mr. Gingham's assistant had been
+seen very late that night carrying an automobile can of kerosene up the
+street. But that was amply disproved by the proceedings of the court,
+and by the evidence of Mr. Smith himself. He took his dying oath,--not
+his ordinary one as used in the License cases, but his dying one,--that
+he had not carried a can of kerosene up the street, and that anyway it
+was the rottenest kind of kerosene he had ever seen and no more use than
+so much molasses. So that point was settled.
+
+Dean Drone? Did he get well again? Why, what makes you ask that? You
+mean, was his head at all affected after the stroke? No, it was not.
+Absolutely not. It was not affected in the least, though how anybody who
+knows him now in Mariposa could have the faintest idea that his mind was
+in any way impaired by the stroke is more than I can tell. The engaging
+of Mr. Uttermost, the curate, whom perhaps you have heard preach in the
+new church, had nothing whatever to do with Dean Drone's head. It was
+merely a case of the pressure of overwork. It was felt very generally
+by the wardens that, in these days of specialization, the rector was
+covering too wide a field, and that if he should abandon some of the
+lesser duties of his office, he might devote his energies more intently
+to the Infant Class. That was all. You may hear him there any afternoon,
+talking to them, if you will stand under the maple trees and listen
+through the open windows of the new Infant School.
+
+And, as for audiences, for intelligence, for attention--well, if I want
+to find listeners who can hear and understand about the great spaces
+of Lake Huron, let me tell of it, every time face to face with the blue
+eyes of the Infant Class, fresh from the infinity of spaces greater
+still. Talk of grown-up people all you like, but for listeners let me
+have the Infant Class with their pinafores and their Teddy Bears and
+their feet not even touching the floor, and Mr. Uttermost may preach to
+his heart's content of the newer forms of doubt revealed by the higher
+criticism.
+
+So you will understand that the Dean's mind is, if anything, even
+keener, and his head even clearer than before. And if you want proof of
+it, notice him there beneath the plum blossoms reading in the Greek:
+he has told me that he finds that he can read, with the greatest ease,
+works in the Greek that seemed difficult before. Because his head is so
+clear now.
+
+And sometimes,--when his head is very clear,--as he sits there reading
+beneath the plum blossoms he can hear them singing beyond, and his
+wife's voice.
+
+
+
+
+SEVEN. The Extraordinary Entanglement of Mr. Pupkin
+
+Judge Pepperleigh lived in a big house with hardwood floors and a wide
+piazza that looked over the lake from the top of Oneida Street.
+
+Every day about half-past five he used to come home from his office in
+the Mariposa Court House. On some days as he got near the house he would
+call out to his wife:
+
+"Almighty Moses, Martha! who left the sprinkler on the grass?"
+
+On other days he would call to her from quite a little distance off:
+"Hullo, mother! Got any supper for a hungry man?"
+
+And Mrs. Pepperleigh never knew which it would be. On the days when he
+swore at the sprinkler you could see his spectacles flash like dynamite.
+But on the days when he called: "Hullo, mother," they were simply
+irradiated with kindliness.
+
+Some days, I say, he would cry out with a perfect whine of indignation:
+"Suffering Caesar! has that infernal dog torn up those geraniums again?"
+And other days you would hear him singing out: "Hullo, Rover! Well,
+doggie, well, old fellow!"
+
+In the same way at breakfast, the judge, as he looked over the
+morning paper, would sometimes leap to his feet with a perfect howl of
+suffering, and cry: "Everlasting Moses! the Liberals have carried East
+Elgin." Or else he would lean back from the breakfast table with
+the most good-humoured laugh you ever heard and say: "Ha! ha! the
+Conservatives have carried South Norfolk."
+
+And yet he was perfectly logical, when you come to think of it. After
+all, what is more annoying to a sensitive, highly-strung man than an
+infernal sprinkler playing all over the place, and what more agreeable
+to a good-natured, even-tempered fellow than a well-prepared supper? Or,
+what is more likeable than one's good, old, affectionate dog bounding
+down the path from sheer delight at seeing you,--or more execrable than
+an infernal whelp that has torn up the geraniums and is too old to keep,
+anyway?
+
+As for politics, well, it all seemed reasonable enough. When the
+Conservatives got in anywhere, Pepperleigh laughed and enjoyed it,
+simply because it does one good to see a straight, fine, honest fight
+where the best man wins. When a Liberal got in, it made him mad, and he
+said so,--not, mind you, from any political bias, for his office forbid
+it,--but simply because one can't bear to see the country go absolutely
+to the devil.
+
+I suppose, too, it was partly the effect of sitting in court all day
+listening to cases. One gets what you might call the judicial temper of
+mind. Pepperleigh had it so strongly developed that I've seen him kick
+a hydrangea pot to pieces with his foot because the accursed thing
+wouldn't flower. He once threw the canary cage clear into the lilac
+bushes because the "blasted bird wouldn't stop singing." It was a
+straight case of judicial temper. Lots of judges have it, developed in
+just the same broad, all-round way as with Judge Pepperleigh.
+
+
+I think it must be passing sentences that does it. Anyway, Pepperleigh
+had the aptitude for passing sentences so highly perfected that he spent
+his whole time at it inside of court and out. I've heard him hand out
+sentences for the Sultan of Turkey and Mrs. Pankhurst and the Emperor of
+Germany that made one's blood run cold. He would sit there on the piazza
+of a summer evening reading the paper, with dynamite sparks flying from
+his spectacles as he sentenced the Czar of Russia to ten years in the
+salt mines--and made it fifteen a few minutes afterwards. Pepperleigh
+always read the foreign news--the news of things that he couldn't
+alter--as a form of wild and stimulating torment.
+
+So you can imagine that in some ways the judge's house was a pretty
+difficult house to go to. I mean you can see how awfully hard it must
+have been for Mr. Pupkin. I tell you it took some nerve to step up on
+that piazza and say, in a perfectly natural, off-hand way: "Oh, how
+do you do, judge? Is Miss Zena in? No, I won't stay, thanks; I think I
+ought to be going. I simply called." A man who can do that has got to
+have a pretty fair amount of savoir what do you call it, and he's got to
+be mighty well shaved and have his cameo pin put in his tie at a pretty
+undeniable angle before he can tackle it. Yes, and even then he may need
+to hang round behind the lilac bushes for half an hour first, and cool
+off. And he's apt to make pretty good time down Oneida Street on the way
+back.
+
+Still, that's what you call love, and if you've got it, and are well
+shaved, and your boots well blacked, you can do things that seem almost
+impossible. Yes, you can do anything, even if you do trip over the dog
+in getting off the piazza.
+
+Don't suppose for a moment that Judge Pepperleigh was an unapproachable
+or a harsh man always and to everybody. Even Mr. Pupkin had to admit
+that that couldn't be so. To know that, you had only to see Zena
+Pepperleigh put her arm round his neck and call him Daddy. She would do
+that even when there were two or three young men sitting on the edge of
+the piazza. You know, I think, the way they sit on the edge in Mariposa.
+It is meant to indicate what part of the family they have come to see.
+Thus when George Duff, the bank manager, came up to the Pepperleigh
+house, he always sat in a chair on the verandah and talked to the judge.
+But when Pupkin or Mallory Tompkins or any fellow like that came, he sat
+down in a sidelong fashion on the edge of the boards and then they knew
+exactly what he was there for. If he knew the house well, he leaned his
+back against the verandah post and smoked a cigarette. But that took
+nerve.
+
+But I am afraid that this is a digression, and, of course, you know all
+about it just as well as I do. All that I was trying to say was that I
+don't suppose that the judge had ever spoken a cross word to Zena in his
+life.--Oh, he threw her novel over the grape-vine, I don't deny that,
+but then why on earth should a girl read trash like the Errant Quest of
+the Palladin Pilgrim, and the Life of Sir Galahad, when the house was
+full of good reading like The Life of Sir John A. Macdonald, and Pioneer
+Days in Tecumseh Township?
+
+
+Still, what I mean is that the judge never spoke harshly to Zena, except
+perhaps under extreme provocation; and I am quite sure that he never,
+never had to Neil. But then what father ever would want to speak angrily
+to such a boy as Neil Pepperleigh? The judge took no credit himself for
+that; the finest grown boy in the whole county and so broad and big that
+they took him into the Missinaba Horse when he was only seventeen. And
+clever,--so clever that he didn't need to study; so clever that he used
+to come out at the foot of the class in mathematics at the Mariposa
+high school through sheer surplus of brain power. I've heard the judge
+explain it a dozen times. Why, Neil was so clever that he used to be
+able to play billiards at the Mariposa House all evening when the other
+boys had to stay at home and study.
+
+Such a powerful looking fellow, too! Everybody in Mariposa remembers
+how Neil Pepperleigh smashed in the face of Peter McGinnis, the Liberal
+organizer, at the big election--you recall it--when the old Macdonald
+Government went out. Judge Pepperleigh had to try him for it the next
+morning--his own son. They say there never was such a scene even in the
+Mariposa court. There was, I believe, something like it on a smaller
+scale in Roman history, but it wasn't half as dramatic. I remember Judge
+Pepperleigh leaning forward to pass the sentence,--for a judge is bound,
+you know, by his oath,--and how grave he looked and yet so proud and
+happy, like a man doing his duty and sustained by it, and he said:
+
+"My boy, you are innocent. You smashed in Peter McGinnis's face, but you
+did it without criminal intent. You put a face on him, by Jehoshaphat!
+that he won't lose for six months, but you did it without evil purpose
+or malign design. My boy, look up! Give me your hand! You leave this
+court without a stain upon your name."
+
+They said it was one of the most moving scenes ever enacted in the
+Mariposa Court.
+
+
+But the strangest thing is that if the judge had known what every one
+else in Mariposa knew, it would have broken his heart. If he could have
+seen Neil with the drunken flush on his face in the billiard room of the
+Mariposa House,--if he had known, as every one else did, that Neil was
+crazed with drink the night he struck the Liberal organizer when the old
+Macdonald Government went out,--if he could have known that even on that
+last day Neil was drunk when he rode with the Missinaba Horse to the
+station to join the Third Contingent for the war, and all the street of
+the little town was one great roar of people--
+
+But the judge never knew, and now he never will. For if you could find
+it in the meanness of your soul to tell him, it would serve no purpose
+now except to break his heart, and there would rise up to rebuke you the
+pictured vision of an untended grave somewhere in the great silences of
+South Africa.
+
+Did I say above, or seem to imply, that the judge sometimes spoke
+harshly to his wife? Or did you gather for a minute that her lot was
+one to lament over or feel sorry for? If so, it just shows that you know
+nothing about such things, and that marriage, at least as it exists
+in Mariposa, is a sealed book to you. You are as ignorant as Miss
+Spiffkins, the biology teacher at the high school, who always says
+how sorry she is for Mrs. Pepperleigh. You get that impression simply
+because the judge howled like an Algonquin Indian when he saw the
+sprinkler running on the lawn. But are you sure you know the other side
+of it? Are you quite sure when you talk like Miss Spiffkins does about
+the rights of it, that you are taking all things into account? You might
+have thought differently perhaps of the Pepperleighs, anyway, if you had
+been there that evening when the judge came home to his wife with one
+hand pressed to his temple and in the other the cablegram that said
+that Neil had been killed in action in South Africa. That night they
+sat together with her hand in his, just as they had sat together thirty
+years ago when he was a law student in the city.
+
+Go and tell Miss Spiffkins that! Hydrangeas,--canaries,--
+temper,--blazes! What does Miss Spiffkins know about it all?
+
+But in any case, if you tried to tell Judge Pepperleigh about Neil now
+he wouldn't believe it. He'd laugh it to scorn. That is Neil's
+picture, in uniform, hanging in the dining-room beside the Fathers of
+Confederation. That military-looking man in the picture beside him is
+General Kitchener, whom you may perhaps have heard of, for he was very
+highly spoken of in Neil's letters. All round the room, in fact, and
+still more in the judge's library upstairs, you will see pictures of
+South Africa and the departure of the Canadians (there are none of the
+return), and of Mounted Infantry and of Unmounted Cavalry and a lot of
+things that only soldiers and the fathers of soldiers know about.
+
+So you can realize that for a fellow who isn't military, and who wears
+nothing nearer to a uniform than a daffodil tennis blazer, the judge's
+house is a devil of a house to come to.
+
+I think you remember young Mr. Pupkin, do you not? I have referred to
+him several times already as the junior teller in the Exchange Bank. But
+if you know Mariposa at all you have often seen him. You have noticed
+him, I am sure, going for the bank mail in the morning in an office suit
+effect of clinging grey with a gold necktie pin shaped like a riding
+whip. You have seen him often enough going down to the lake front after
+supper, in tennis things, smoking a cigarette and with a paddle and a
+crimson canoe cushion under his arm. You have seen him entering Dean
+Drone's church in a top hat and a long frock coat nearly to his feet.
+You have seen him, perhaps, playing poker in Peter Glover's room
+over the hardware store and trying to look as if he didn't hold three
+aces,--in fact, giving absolutely no sign of it beyond the wild flush in
+his face and the fact that his hair stands on end.
+
+That kind of reticence is a thing you simply have to learn in banking.
+I mean, if you've got to be in a position where you know for a fact
+that the Mariposa Packing Company's account is overdrawn by sixty-four
+dollars, and yet daren't say anything about it, not even to the
+girls that you play tennis with,--I don't say, not a casual hint as a
+reference, but not really tell them, not, for instance, bring down the
+bank ledger to the tennis court and show them,--you learn a sort of
+reticence and self-control that people outside of banking circles never
+can attain.
+
+Why, I've known Pupkin at the Fireman's Ball lean against the wall in
+his dress suit and talk away to Jim Eliot, the druggist, without giving
+the faintest hint or indication that Eliot's note for twenty-seven
+dollars had been protested that very morning. Not a hint of it. I don't
+say he didn't mention it, in a sort of way, in the supper room, just to
+one or two, but I mean there was nothing in the way he leant up against
+the wall to suggest it.
+
+But, however, I don't mention that as either for or against Mr. Pupkin.
+That sort of thing is merely the A B C of banking, as he himself told
+me when explaining why it was that he hesitated to divulge the exact
+standing of the Mariposa Carriage Company. Of course, once you get past
+the A B C you can learn a lot that is mighty interesting.
+
+So I think that if you know Mariposa and understand even the rudiments
+of banking, you are perfectly acquainted with Mr. Pupkin. What? You
+remember him as being in love with Miss Lawson, the high school teacher?
+In love with HER? What a ridiculous idea. You mean merely because on the
+night when the Mariposa Belle sank with every soul on board, Pupkin put
+off from the town in a skiff to rescue Miss Lawson. Oh, but you're quite
+wrong. That wasn't LOVE. I've heard Pupkin explain it himself a dozen
+times. That sort of thing,--paddling out to a sinking steamer at night
+in a crazy skiff,--may indicate a sort of attraction, but not real love,
+not what Pupkin came to feel afterwards. Indeed, when he began to think
+of it, it wasn't even attraction, it was merely respect,--that's all
+it was. And anyway, that was long before, six or seven months back, and
+Pupkin admitted that at the time he was a mere boy.
+
+
+Mr. Pupkin, I must explain, lived with Mallory Tompkins in rooms over
+the Exchange Bank, on the very top floor, the third, with Mullins's own
+rooms below them. Extremely comfortable quarters they were, with two
+bedrooms and a sitting-room that was all fixed up with snowshoes and
+tennis rackets on the walls and dance programmes and canoe club badges
+and all that sort of thing.
+
+Mallory Tompkins was a young man with long legs and check trousers who
+worked on the Mariposa Times-Herald. That was what gave him his literary
+taste. He used to read Ibsen and that other Dutch author--Bumstone
+Bumstone, isn't it?--and you can judge that he was a mighty intellectual
+fellow. He was so intellectual that he was, as he himself admitted,
+a complete eggnostic. He and Pupkin used to have the most tremendous
+arguments about creation and evolution, and how if you study at a school
+of applied science you learn that there's no hell beyond the present
+life.
+
+Mallory Tompkins used to prove absolutely that the miracles were only
+electricity, and Pupkin used to admit that it was an awfully good
+argument, but claimed that he had heard it awfully well answered in a
+sermon, though unfortunately he had forgotten how.
+
+Tompkins used to show that the flood was contrary to geology, and Pupkin
+would acknowledge that the point was an excellent one, but that he had
+read a book,--the title of which he ought to have written down,--which
+explained geology away altogether.
+
+Mallory Tompkins generally got the best of the merely logical side of
+the arguments, but Pupkin--who was a tremendous Christian--was much
+stronger in the things he had forgotten. So the discussions often lasted
+till far into the night, and Mr. Pupkin would fall asleep and dream of a
+splendid argument, which would have settled the whole controversy, only
+unfortunately he couldn't recall it in the morning.
+
+Of course, Pupkin would never have thought of considering himself on an
+intellectual par with Mallory Tompkins. That would have been ridiculous.
+Mallory Tompkins had read all sorts of things and had half a mind to
+write a novel himself--either that or a play. All he needed, he said,
+was to have a chance to get away somewhere by himself and think. Every
+time he went away to the city Pupkin expected that he might return with
+the novel all finished; but though he often came back with his eyes red
+from thinking, the novel as yet remained incomplete.
+
+Meantime, Mallory Tompkins, as I say, was a mighty intellectual fellow.
+You could see that from the books on the bamboo bookshelves in the
+sitting-room. There was, for instance, the "Encyclopaedia Metropolitana"
+in forty volumes, that he bought on the instalment plan for two dollars
+a month. Then when they took that away, there was the "History of
+Civilization," in fifty volumes at fifty cents a week for fifty years.
+Tompkins had read in it half-way through the Stone Age before they
+took it from him. After that there was the "Lives of the Painters," one
+volume at a time--a splendid thing in which you could read all about
+Aahrens, and Aachenthal, and Aax and men of that class.
+
+After all, there's nothing like educating oneself. Mallory Tompkins knew
+about the opening period of all sorts of things, and in regard to people
+whose names began with "A" you couldn't stick him.
+
+I don't mean that he and Mr. Pupkin lived a mere routine of studious
+evenings. That would be untrue. Quite often their time was spent in much
+less commendable ways than that, and there were poker parties in their
+sitting-room that didn't break up till nearly midnight. Card-playing,
+after all, is a slow business, unless you put money on it, and, besides,
+if you are in a bank and are handling money all day, gambling has a
+fascination.
+
+I've seen Pupkin and Mallory Tompkins and Joe Milligan, the dentist, and
+Mitchell the ticket agent, and the other "boys" sitting round the table
+with matches enough piled up in front of them to stock a factory. Ten
+matches counted for one chip and ten chips made a cent--so you see they
+weren't merely playing for the fun of the thing. Of course it's a
+hollow pleasure. You realize that when you wake up at night parched with
+thirst, ten thousand matches to the bad. But banking is a wild life and
+everybody knows it.
+
+Sometimes Pupkin would swear off and keep away from the cursed thing for
+weeks, and then perhaps he'd see by sheer accident a pile of matches on
+the table, or a match lying on the floor and it would start the craze in
+him. I am using his own words--a "craze"--that's what he called it when
+he told Miss Lawson all about it, and she promised to cure him of it.
+She would have, too. Only, as I say, Pupkin found that what he had
+mistaken for attraction was only respect. And there's no use worrying a
+woman that you respect about your crazes.
+
+
+It was from Mallory Tompkins that Pupkin learned all about the Mariposa
+people, because Pupkin came from away off--somewhere down in the
+Maritime Provinces--and didn't know a soul. Mallory Tompkins used to
+tell him about Judge Pepperleigh, and what a wonderfully clever man he
+was and how he would have been in the Supreme Court for certain if the
+Conservative Government had stayed in another fifteen or twenty years
+instead of coming to a premature end. He used to talk so much about the
+Pepperleighs, that Pupkin was sick of the very name. But just as soon as
+he had seen Zena Pepperleigh he couldn't hear enough of them. He would
+have talked with Tompkins for hours about the judge's dog Rover. And as
+for Zena, if he could have brought her name over his lips, he would have
+talked of her forever.
+
+He first saw her--by one of the strangest coincidences in the world--on
+the Main Street of Mariposa. If he hadn't happened to be going up the
+street and she to be coming down it, the thing wouldn't have happened.
+Afterwards they both admitted that it was one of the most peculiar
+coincidences they ever heard of. Pupkin owned that he had had the
+strangest feeling that morning as if something were going to happen--a
+feeling not at all to be classed with the one of which he had once
+spoken to Miss Lawson, and which was, at the most, a mere anticipation
+of respect.
+
+But, as I say, Pupkin met Zena Pepperleigh on the 26th of June, at
+twenty-five minutes to eleven. And at once the whole world changed. The
+past was all blotted out. Even in the new forty volume edition of
+the "Instalment Record of Humanity" that Mallory Tompkins had just
+received--Pupkin wouldn't have bothered with it.
+
+She--that word henceforth meant Zena--had just come back from
+her boarding-school, and of all times of year coming back from a
+boarding-school and for wearing a white shirt waist and a crimson
+tie and for carrying a tennis racket on the stricken street of a
+town--commend me to the month of June in Mariposa.
+
+And, for Pupkin, straight away the whole town was irradiated with
+sunshine, and there was such a singing of the birds, and such a dancing
+of the rippled waters of the lake, and such a kindliness in the faces
+of all the people, that only those who have lived in Mariposa, and been
+young there, can know at all what he felt.
+
+The simple fact is that just the moment he saw Zena Pepperleigh, Mr.
+Pupkin was clean, plumb, straight, flat, absolutely in love with her.
+
+Which fact is so important that it would be folly not to close the
+chapter and think about it.
+
+
+
+
+EIGHT. The Fore-ordained Attachment of Zena Pepperleigh and Peter Pupkin
+
+Zena Pepperleigh used to sit reading novels on the piazza of the judge's
+house, half hidden by the Virginia creepers. At times the book would
+fall upon her lap and there was such a look of unstilled yearning in her
+violet eyes that it did not entirely disappear even when she picked up
+the apple that lay beside her and took another bite out of it.
+
+With hands clasped she would sit there dreaming all the beautiful
+day-dreams of girlhood. When you saw that faraway look in her eyes,
+it meant that she was dreaming that a plumed and armoured knight was
+rescuing her from the embattled keep of a castle beside the Danube. At
+other times she was being borne away by an Algerian corsair over the
+blue waters of the Mediterranean and was reaching out her arms towards
+France to say farewell to it.
+
+Sometimes when you noticed a sweet look of resignation that seemed
+to rest upon her features, it meant that Lord Ronald de Chevereux was
+kneeling at her feet, and that she was telling him to rise, that her
+humbler birth must ever be a bar to their happiness, and Lord Ronald was
+getting into an awful state about it, as English peers do at the least
+suggestion of anything of the sort.
+
+Or, if it wasn't that, then her lover had just returned to her side,
+tall and soldierly and sunburned, after fighting for ten years in the
+Soudan for her sake, and had come back to ask her for her answer and
+to tell her that for ten years her face had been with him even in
+the watches of the night. He was asking her for a sign, any kind of
+sign,--ten years in the Soudan entitles them to a sign,--and Zena was
+plucking a white rose, just one, from her hair, when she would hear her
+father's step on the piazza and make a grab for the Pioneers of Tecumseh
+Township, and start reading it like mad.
+
+She was always, as I say, being rescued and being borne away, and being
+parted, and reaching out her arms to France and to Spain, and
+saying good-bye forever to Valladolid or the old grey towers of
+Hohenbranntwein.
+
+And I don't mean that she was in the least exceptional or romantic,
+because all the girls in Mariposa were just like that. An Algerian
+corsair could have come into the town and had a dozen of them for the
+asking, and as for a wounded English officer,--well, perhaps it's better
+not to talk about it outside or the little town would become a regular
+military hospital.
+
+Because, mind you, the Mariposa girls are all right. You've only to look
+at them to realize that. You see, you can get in Mariposa a print dress
+of pale blue or pale pink for a dollar twenty that looks infinitely
+better than anything you ever see in the city,--especially if you can
+wear with it a broad straw hat and a background of maple trees and the
+green grass of a tennis court. And if you remember, too, that these are
+cultivated girls who have all been to the Mariposa high school and can
+do decimal fractions, you will understand that an Algerian corsair would
+sharpen his scimitar at the very sight of them.
+
+Don't think either that they are all dying to get married; because they
+are not. I don't say they wouldn't take an errant knight, or a buccaneer
+or a Hungarian refugee, but for the ordinary marriages of ordinary
+people they feel nothing but a pitying disdain. So it is that each one
+of them in due time marries an enchanted prince and goes to live in one
+of the little enchanted houses in the lower part of the town.
+
+I don't know whether you know it, but you can rent an enchanted house
+in Mariposa for eight dollars a month, and some of the most completely
+enchanted are the cheapest. As for the enchanted princes, they find
+them in the strangest places, where you never expected to see them,
+working--under a spell, you understand,--in drug-stores and printing
+offices, and even selling things in shops. But to be able to find them
+you have first to read ever so many novels about Sir Galahad and the
+Errant Quest and that sort of thing.
+
+
+Naturally then Zena Pepperleigh, as she sat on the piazza, dreamed
+of bandits and of wounded officers and of Lord Ronalds riding on
+foam-flecked chargers. But that she ever dreamed of a junior bank
+teller in a daffodil blazer riding past on a bicycle, is pretty hard to
+imagine. So, when Mr. Pupkin came tearing past up the slope of Oneida
+Street at a speed that proved that he wasn't riding there merely to
+pass the house, I don't suppose that Zena Pepperleigh was aware of his
+existence.
+
+That may be a slight exaggeration. She knew, perhaps, that he was
+the new junior teller in the Exchange Bank and that he came from the
+Maritime Provinces, and that nobody knew who his people were, and that
+he had never been in a canoe in his life till he came to Mariposa, and
+that he sat four pews back in Dean Drone's church, and that his salary
+was eight hundred dollars. Beyond that, she didn't know a thing about
+him. She presumed, however, that the reason why he went past so fast was
+because he didn't dare to go slow.
+
+This, of course, was perfectly correct. Ever since the day when Mr.
+Pupkin met Zena in the Main Street he used to come past the house on his
+bicycle just after bank hours. He would have gone past twenty times a
+day but he was afraid to. As he came up Oneida Street, he used to pedal
+faster and faster,--he never meant to, but he couldn't help it,--till he
+went past the piazza where Zena was sitting at an awful speed with his
+little yellow blazer flying in the wind. In a second he had disappeared
+in a buzz and a cloud of dust, and the momentum of it carried him clear
+out into the country for miles and miles before he ever dared to pause
+or look back.
+
+Then Mr. Pupkin would ride in a huge circuit about the country, trying
+to think he was looking at the crops, and sooner or later his bicycle
+would be turned towards the town again and headed for Oneida Street, and
+would get going quicker and quicker and quicker, till the pedals whirled
+round with a buzz and he came past the judge's house again, like a
+bullet out of a gun. He rode fifteen miles to pass the house twice, and
+even then it took all the nerve that he had.
+
+The people on Oneida Street thought that Mr. Pupkin was crazy, but Zena
+Pepperleigh knew that he was not. Already, you see, there was a sort
+of dim parallel between the passing of the bicycle and the last ride of
+Tancred the Inconsolable along the banks of the Danube.
+
+I have already mentioned, I think, how Mr. Pupkin and Zena Pepperleigh
+first came to know one another. Like everything else about them, it was
+a sheer matter of coincidence, quite inexplicable unless you understand
+that these things are fore-ordained.
+
+That, of course, is the way with fore-ordained affairs and that's where
+they differ from ordinary love.
+
+
+I won't even try to describe how Mr. Pupkin felt when he first spoke
+with Zena and sat beside her as they copied out the "endless chain"
+letter asking for ten cents. They wrote out, as I said, no less than
+eight of the letters between them, and they found out that their
+handwritings were so alike that you could hardly tell them apart, except
+that Pupkin's letters were round and Zena's letters were pointed and
+Pupkin wrote straight up and down and Zena wrote on a slant. Beyond that
+the writing was so alike that it was the strangest coincidence in the
+world. Of course when they made figures it was different and Pupkin
+explained to Zena that in the bank you have to be able to make a seven
+so that it doesn't look like a nine.
+
+So, as I say, they wrote the letters all afternoon and when it was over
+they walked up Oneida Street together, ever so slowly. When they got
+near the house, Zena asked Pupkin to come in to tea, with such an easy
+off-hand way that you couldn't have told that she was half an hour late
+and was taking awful chances on the judge. Pupkin hadn't had time to say
+yes before the judge appeared at the door, just as they were stepping up
+on to the piazza, and he had a table napkin in his hand and the dynamite
+sparks were flying from his spectacles as he called out:
+
+"Great heaven! Zena, why in everlasting blazes can't you get in to tea
+at a Christian hour?"
+
+Zena gave one look of appeal to Pupkin, and Pupkin looked one glance of
+comprehension, and turned and fled down Oneida Street. And if the scene
+wasn't quite as dramatic as the renunciation of Tancred the Troubadour,
+it at least had something of the same elements in it.
+
+Pupkin walked home to his supper at the Mariposa House on air, and that
+evening there was a gentle distance in his manner towards Sadie, the
+dining-room girl, that I suppose no bank clerk in Mariposa ever showed
+before. It was like Sir Galahad talking with the tire-women of Queen
+Guinevere and receiving huckleberry pie at their hands.
+
+After that Mr. Pupkin and Zena Pepperleigh constantly met together.
+They played tennis as partners on the grass court behind Dr. Gallagher's
+house,--the Mariposa Tennis Club rent it, you remember, for fifty
+cents a month,--and Pupkin used to perform perfect prodigies of valour,
+leaping in the air to serve with his little body hooked like a letter
+S. Sometimes, too, they went out on Lake Wissanotti in the evening in
+Pupkin's canoe, with Zena sitting in the bow and Pupkin paddling in the
+stern and they went out ever so far and it was after dark and the stars
+were shining before they came home. Zena would look at the stars and
+say how infinitely far away they seemed, and Pupkin would realize that a
+girl with a mind like that couldn't have any use for a fool such as
+him. Zena used to ask him to point out the Pleiades and Jupiter and Ursa
+minor, and Pupkin showed her exactly where they were. That impressed
+them both tremendously, because Pupkin didn't know that Zena remembered
+the names out of the astronomy book at her boarding-school, and Zena
+didn't know that Pupkin simply took a chance on where the stars were.
+
+And ever so many times they talked so intimately that Pupkin came mighty
+near telling her about his home in the Maritime Provinces and about his
+father and mother, and then kicked himself that he hadn't the manliness
+to speak straight out about it and take the consequences.
+
+Please don't imagine from any of this that the course of Mr. Pupkin's
+love ran smooth. On the contrary, Pupkin himself felt that it was
+absolutely hopeless from the start.
+
+There were, it might be admitted, certain things that seemed to indicate
+progress.
+
+In the course of the months of June and July and August, he had taken
+Zena out in his canoe thirty-one times. Allowing an average of two miles
+for each evening, Pupkin had paddled Zena sixty-two miles, or more than
+a hundred thousand yards. That surely was something.
+
+He had played tennis with her on sixteen afternoons. Three times he had
+left his tennis racket up at the judge's house in Zena's charge, and
+once he had, with her full consent, left his bicycle there all night.
+This must count for something. No girl could trifle with a man to the
+extent of having his bicycle leaning against the verandah post all night
+and mean nothing by it.
+
+More than that--he had been to tea at the judge's house fourteen times,
+and seven times he had been asked by Lilian Drone to the rectory when
+Zena was coming, and five times by Nora Gallagher to tea at the doctor's
+house because Zena was there.
+
+Altogether he had eaten so many meals where Zena was that his meal
+ticket at the Mariposa lasted nearly double its proper time, and
+the face of Sadie, the dining-room girl, had grown to wear a look of
+melancholy resignation; sadder than romance.
+
+Still more than that, Pupkin had bought for Zena, reckoning it
+altogether, about two buckets of ice cream and perhaps half a bushel of
+chocolate. Not that Pupkin grudged the expense of it. On the contrary,
+over and above the ice cream and the chocolate he had bought her a white
+waistcoat and a walking stick with a gold top, a lot of new neckties and
+a pair of patent leather boots--that is, they were all bought on account
+of her, which is the same thing.
+
+Add to all this that Pupkin and Zena had been to the Church of England
+Church nearly every Sunday evening for two months, and one evening they
+had even gone to the Presbyterian Church "for fun," which, if you know
+Mariposa, you will realize to be a wild sort of escapade that ought to
+speak volumes.
+
+
+Yet in spite of this, Pupkin felt that the thing was hopeless: which
+only illustrates the dreadful ups and downs, the wild alternations of
+hope and despair that characterise an exceptional affair of this sort.
+
+Yes, it was hopeless.
+
+Every time that Pupkin watched Zena praying in church, he knew that she
+was too good for him. Every time that he came to call for her and found
+her reading Browning and Omar Khayyam he knew that she was too clever
+for him. And every time that he saw her at all he realized that she was
+too beautiful for him.
+
+You see, Pupkin knew that he wasn't a hero. When Zena would clasp her
+hands and talk rapturously about crusaders and soldiers and firemen and
+heroes generally, Pupkin knew just where he came in. Not in it, that was
+all. If a war could have broken out in Mariposa, or the judge's house
+been invaded by the Germans, he might have had a chance, but as it
+was--hopeless.
+
+Then there was Zena's father. Heaven knows Pupkin tried hard to please
+the judge. He agreed with every theory that Judge Pepperleigh advanced,
+and that took a pretty pliable intellect in itself. They denounced
+female suffrage one day and they favoured it the next. One day the judge
+would claim that the labour movement was eating out the heart of the
+country, and the next day he would hold that the hope of the world lay
+in the organization of the toiling masses. Pupkin shifted his opinions
+like the glass in a kaleidoscope. Indeed, the only things on which he
+was allowed to maintain a steadfast conviction were the purity of the
+Conservative party of Canada and the awful wickedness of the recall of
+judges.
+
+But with all that the judge was hardly civil to Pupkin. He hadn't asked
+him to the house till Zena brought him there, though, as a rule, all the
+bank clerks in Mariposa treated Judge Pepperleigh's premises as their
+own. He used to sit and sneer at Pupkin after he had gone till Zena
+would throw down the Pioneers of Tecumseh Township in a temper and
+flounce off the piazza to her room. After which the judge's manner would
+change instantly and he would relight his corn cob pipe and sit and
+positively beam with contentment. In all of which there was something so
+mysterious as to prove that Mr. Pupkin's chances were hopeless.
+
+Nor was that all of it. Pupkin's salary was eight hundred dollars a year
+and the Exchange Bank limit for marriage was a thousand.
+
+I suppose you are aware of the grinding capitalistic tyranny of the
+banks in Mariposa whereby marriage is put beyond the reach of ever so
+many mature and experienced men of nineteen and twenty and twenty-one,
+who are compelled to go on eating on a meal ticket at the Mariposa House
+and living over the bank to suit the whim of a group of capitalists.
+
+Whenever Pupkin thought of this two hundred dollars he understood all
+that it meant by social unrest. In fact, he interpreted all forms of
+social discontent in terms of it. Russian Anarchism, German Socialism,
+the Labour Movement, Henry George, Lloyd George,--he understood the
+whole lot of them by thinking of his two hundred dollars.
+
+When I tell you that at this period Mr. Pupkin read Memoirs of the
+Great Revolutionists and even thought of blowing up Henry Mullins with
+dynamite, you can appreciate his state of mind.
+
+
+But not even by all these hindrances and obstacles to his love for Zena
+Pepperleigh would Peter Pupkin have been driven to commit suicide (oh,
+yes; he committed it three times, as I'm going to tell you), had it not
+been for another thing that he knew stood once and for all and in cold
+reality between him and Zena.
+
+He felt it in a sort of way, as soon as he knew her. Each time that he
+tried to talk to her about his home and his father and mother and found
+that something held him back, he realized more and more the kind of
+thing that stood between them. Most of all did he realize it, with a
+sudden sickness of heart, when he got word that his father and mother
+wanted to come to Mariposa to see him and he had all he could do to head
+them off from it.
+
+Why? Why stop them? The reason was, simple enough, that Pupkin was
+ashamed of them, bitterly ashamed. The picture of his mother and father
+turning up in Mariposa and being seen by his friends there and going up
+to the Pepperleigh's house made him feel faint with shame.
+
+No, I don't say it wasn't wrong. It only shows what difference of
+fortune, the difference of being rich and being poor, means in this
+world. You perhaps have been so lucky that you cannot appreciate what
+it means to feel shame at the station of your own father and mother. You
+think it doesn't matter, that honesty and kindliness of heart are all
+that counts. That only shows that you have never known some of the
+bitterest feelings of people less fortunate than yourself.
+
+So it was with Mr. Pupkin. When he thought of his father and mother
+turning up in Mariposa, his face reddened with unworthy shame.
+
+He could just picture the scene! He could see them getting out of their
+Limousine touring car, with the chauffeur holding open the door for
+them, and his father asking for a suite of rooms,--just think of it, a
+suite of rooms!--at the Mariposa House.
+
+The very thought of it turned him ill.
+
+What! You have mistaken my meaning? Ashamed of them because they were
+poor? Good heavens, no, but because they were rich! And not rich in the
+sense in which they use the term in Mariposa, where a rich person merely
+means a man who has money enough to build a house with a piazza and to
+have everything he wants; but rich in the other sense,--motor cars, Ritz
+hotels, steam yachts, summer islands and all that sort of thing.
+
+Why, Pupkin's father,--what's the use of trying to conceal it any
+longer?--was the senior partner in the law firm of Pupkin, Pupkin and
+Pupkin. If you know the Maritime Provinces at all, you've heard of the
+Pupkins. The name is a household word from Chedabucto to Chidabecto.
+And, for the matter of that, the law firm and the fact that Pupkin
+senior had been an Attorney General was the least part of it. Attorney
+General! Why, there's no money in that! It's no better than the Senate.
+No, no, Pupkin senior, like so many lawyers, was practically a promoter,
+and he blew companies like bubbles, and when he wasn't in the Maritime
+Provinces he was in Boston and New York raising money and floating
+loans, and when they had no money left in New York he floated it in
+London: and when he had it, he floated on top of it big rafts of lumber
+on the Miramichi and codfish on the Grand Banks and lesser fish in the
+Fundy Bay. You've heard perhaps of the Tidal Transportation Company, and
+Fundy Fisheries Corporation, and the Paspebiac Pulp and Paper Unlimited?
+Well, all of those were Pupkin senior under other names. So just imagine
+him in Mariposa! Wouldn't he be utterly foolish there? Just imagine him
+meeting Jim Eliot and treating him like a druggist merely because he
+ran a drug store! or speaking to Jefferson Thorpe as if he were a barber
+simply because he shaved for money! Why, a man like that could ruin
+young Pupkin in Mariposa in half a day, and Pupkin knew it.
+
+That wouldn't matter so much, but think of the Pepperleighs and Zena!
+Everything would be over with them at once. Pupkin knew just what the
+judge thought of riches and luxuries. How often had he heard the
+judge pass sentences of life imprisonment on Pierpont Morgan and
+Mr. Rockefeller. How often had Pupkin heard him say that any man who
+received more than three thousand dollars a year (that was the judicial
+salary in the Missinaba district) was a mere robber, unfit to shake
+the hand of an honest man. Bitter! I should think he was! He was not so
+bitter, perhaps, as Mr. Muddleson, the principal of the Mariposa high
+school, who said that any man who received more than fifteen hundred
+dollars was a public enemy. He was certainly not so bitter as Trelawney,
+the post-master, who said that any man who got from society more
+than thirteen hundred dollars (apart from a legitimate increase in
+recognition of a successful election) was a danger to society. Still,
+he was bitter. They all were in Mariposa. Pupkin could just imagine how
+they would despise his father!
+
+And Zena! That was the worst of all. How often had, Pupkin heard her
+say that she simply hated diamonds wouldn't wear them, despised them,
+wouldn't give a thank you for a whole tiara of them! As for motor cars
+and steam yachts,--well, it was pretty plain that that sort of thing had
+no chance with Zena Pepperleigh. Why, she had told Pupkin one night in
+the canoe that she would only marry a man who was poor and had his way
+to make and would hew down difficulties for her sake. And when Pupkin
+couldn't answer the argument she was quite cross and silent all the way
+home.
+
+
+What was Peter Pupkin doing, then, at eight hundred dollars in a bank in
+Mariposa? If you ask that, it means that you know nothing of the life
+of the Maritime Provinces and the sturdy temper of the people. I suppose
+there are no people in the world who hate luxury and extravagance and
+that sort of thing quite as much as the Maritime Province people, and,
+of them, no one hated luxury more than Pupkin senior.
+
+Don't mistake the man. He wore a long sealskin coat in winter, yes; but
+mark you, not as a matter of luxury, but merely as a question of his
+lungs. He smoked, I admit it, a thirty-five cent cigar, not because he
+preferred it, but merely through a delicacy of the thorax that made it
+imperative. He drank champagne at lunch, I concede the point, not in
+the least from the enjoyment of it, but simply on account of a peculiar
+affection of the tongue and lips that positively dictated it. His own
+longing--and his wife shared it--was for the simple, simple life--an
+island somewhere, with birds and trees. They had bought three or four
+islands--one in the St. Lawrence, and two in the Gulf, and one off the
+coast of Maine--looking for this sort of thing. Pupkin senior often said
+that he wanted to have some place that would remind him of the little
+old farm up the Aroostook where he was brought up. He often bought
+little old farms, just to try them, but they always turned out to be so
+near a city that he cut them into real estate lots, without even having
+had time to look at them.
+
+But--and this is where the emphasis lay--in the matter of luxury for his
+only son, Peter, Pupkin senior was a Maritime Province man right to the
+core, with all the hardihood of the United Empire Loyalists ingrained in
+him. No luxury for that boy! No, sir! From his childhood, Pupkin senior
+had undertaken, at the least sign of luxury, to "tan it out of him,"
+after the fashion still in vogue in the provinces. Then he sent him to
+an old-fashioned school to get it "thumped out of him," and after that
+he had put him for a year on a Nova Scotia schooner to get it "knocked
+out of him." If, after all that, young Pupkin, even when he came to
+Mariposa, wore cameo pins and daffodil blazers, and broke out into
+ribbed silk saffron ties on pay day, it only shows that the old Adam
+still needs further tanning even in the Maritime Provinces.
+
+Young Pupkin, of course, was to have gone into law. That was his
+father's cherished dream and would have made the firm Pupkin, Pupkin,
+Pupkin, and Pupkin, as it ought to have been. But young Peter was kept
+out of the law by the fool system of examinations devised since his
+father's time. Hence there was nothing for it but to sling him into a
+bank; "sling him" was, I think, the expression. So his father decided
+that if Pupkin was to be slung, he should be slung good and far--clean
+into Canada (you know the way they use that word in the Maritime
+Provinces). And to sling Pupkin he called in the services of an old
+friend, a man after his own heart, just as violent as himself, who used
+to be at the law school in the city with Pupkin senior thirty years ago.
+So this friend, who happened to live in Mariposa, and who was a violent
+man, said at once: "Edward, by Jehoshaphat! send the boy up here."
+
+So that is how Pupkin came to Mariposa. And if, when he got there, his
+father's friend gave no sign, and treated the boy with roughness and
+incivility, that may have been, for all I know, a continuation of the
+"tanning" process of the Maritime people.
+
+Did I mention that the Pepperleigh family, generations ago, had taken up
+land near the Aroostook, and that it was from there the judge's father
+came to Tecumseh township? Perhaps not, but it doesn't matter.
+
+But surely after such reminiscences as these the awful things that are
+impending over Mr. Pupkin must be kept for another chapter.
+
+
+
+
+NINE. The Mariposa Bank Mystery
+
+Suicide is a thing that ought not to be committed without very careful
+thought. It often involves serious consequences, and in some cases
+brings pain to others than oneself.
+
+I don't say that there is no justification for it. There often is.
+Anybody who has listened to certain kinds of music, or read certain
+kinds of poetry, or heard certain kinds of performances upon the
+concertina, will admit that there are some lives which ought not to be
+continued, and that even suicide has its brighter aspects.
+
+But to commit suicide on grounds of love is at the best a very dubious
+experiment. I know that in this I am expressing an opinion contrary
+to that of most true lovers who embrace suicide on the slightest
+provocation as the only honourable termination of an existence that
+never ought to have begun.
+
+I quite admit that there is a glamour and a sensation about the thing
+which has its charm, and that there is nothing like it for causing a
+girl to realize the value of the heart that she has broken and which
+breathed forgiveness upon her at the very moment when it held in its
+hand the half-pint of prussic acid that was to terminate its beating for
+ever.
+
+But apart from the general merits of the question, I suppose there are
+few people, outside of lovers, who know what it is to commit suicide
+four times in five weeks.
+
+Yet this was what happened to Mr. Pupkin, of the Exchange Bank of
+Mariposa.
+
+Ever since he had known Zena Pepperleigh he had realized that his love
+for her was hopeless. She was too beautiful for him and too good for
+him; her father hated him and her mother despised him; his salary was
+too small and his own people were too rich.
+
+If you add to all that that he came up to the judge's house one night
+and found a poet reciting verses to Zena, you will understand the
+suicide at once. It was one of those regular poets with a solemn jackass
+face, and lank parted hair and eyes like puddles of molasses. I don't
+know how he came there--up from the city, probably--but there he was
+on the Pepperleighs' verandah that August evening. He was reciting
+poetry--either Tennyson's or Shelley's, or his own, you couldn't
+tell--and about him sat Zena with her hands clasped and Nora Gallagher
+looking at the sky and Jocelyn Drone gazing into infinity, and a little
+tubby woman looking at the poet with her head falling over sideways--in
+fact, there was a whole group of them.
+
+
+I don't know what it is about poets that draws women to them in this
+way. But everybody knows that a poet has only to sit and saw the air
+with his hands and recite verses in a deep stupid voice, and all the
+women are crazy over him. Men despise him and would kick him off the
+verandah if they dared, but the women simply rave over him.
+
+So Pupkin sat there in the gloom and listened to this poet reciting
+Browning and he realized that everybody understood it but him. He could
+see Zena with her eyes fixed on the poet as if she were hanging on to
+every syllable (she was; she needed to), and he stood it just about
+fifteen minutes and then slid off the side of the verandah and
+disappeared without even saying good-night.
+
+He walked straight down Oneida Street and along the Main Street just as
+hard as he could go. There was only one purpose in his mind,--suicide.
+He was heading straight for Jim Eliot's drug store on the main corner
+and his idea was to buy a drink of chloroform and drink it and die right
+there on the spot.
+
+As Pupkin walked down the street, the whole thing was so vivid in his
+mind that he could picture it to the remotest detail. He could even see
+it all in type, in big headings in the newspapers of the following day:
+
+APPALLING SUICIDE. PETER PUPKIN POISONED.
+
+He perhaps hoped that the thing might lead to some kind of public
+enquiry and that the question of Browning's poetry and whether it is
+altogether fair to allow of its general circulation would be fully
+ventilated in the newspapers.
+
+Thinking of that, Pupkin came to the main corner.
+
+On a warm August evening the drug store of Mariposa, as you know, is all
+a blaze of lights. You can hear the hissing of the soda-water fountain
+half a block away, and inside the store there are ever so many
+people--boys and girls and old people too--all drinking sarsaparilla and
+chocolate sundaes and lemon sours and foaming drinks that you take out
+of long straws. There is such a laughing and a talking as you never
+heard, and the girls are all in white and pink and cambridge blue, and
+the soda fountain is of white marble with silver taps, and it hisses
+and sputters, and Jim Eliot and his assistant wear white coats with red
+geraniums in them, and it's just as gay as gay.
+
+The foyer of the opera in Paris may be a fine sight, but I doubt if it
+can compare with the inside of Eliot's drug store in Mariposa--for real
+gaiety and joy of living.
+
+This night the store was especially crowded because it was a Saturday
+and that meant early closing for all the hotels, except, of course,
+Smith's. So as the hotels were shut, the people were all in the drug
+store, drinking like fishes. It just shows the folly of Local Option and
+the Temperance Movement and all that. Why, if you shut the hotels you
+simply drive the people to the soda fountains and there's more drinking
+than ever, and not only of the men, too, but the girls and young boys
+and children. I've seen little things of eight and nine that had to
+be lifted up on the high stools at Eliot's drug store, drinking great
+goblets of lemon soda, enough to burst them--brought there by their own
+fathers, and why? Simply because the hotel bars were shut.
+
+What's the use of thinking you can stop people drinking merely by
+cutting off whiskey and brandy? The only effect is to drive them to
+taking lemon sour and sarsaparilla and cherry pectoral and caroka
+cordial and things they wouldn't have touched before. So in the long run
+they drink more than ever. The point is that you can't prevent people
+having a good time, no matter how hard you try. If they can't have it
+with lager beer and brandy, they'll have it with plain soda and lemon
+pop, and so the whole gloomy scheme of the temperance people breaks
+down, anyway.
+
+But I was only saying that Eliot's drug store in Mariposa on a Saturday
+night is the gayest and brightest spot in the world.
+
+And just imagine what a fool of a place to commit suicide in!
+
+Just imagine going up to the soda-water fountain and asking for five
+cents' worth of chloroform and soda! Well, you simply can't, that's all.
+
+That's the way Pupkin found it. You see, as soon as he came in, somebody
+called out: "Hello, Pete!" and one or two others called: "Hullo, Pup!"
+and some said: "How goes it?" and others: "How are you toughing it?"
+and so on, because you see they had all been drinking more or less and
+naturally they felt jolly and glad-hearted.
+
+So the upshot of it was that instead of taking chloroform, Pupkin
+stepped up to the counter of the fountain and he had a bromo-seltzer
+with cherry soda, and after that he had one of those aerated seltzers,
+and then a couple of lemon seltzers and a bromo-phizzer.
+
+I don't know if you know the mental effect of a bromo-seltzer.
+
+But it's a hard thing to commit suicide on.
+
+You can't.
+
+You feel so buoyant.
+
+Anyway, what with the phizzing of the seltzer and the lights and the
+girls, Pupkin began to feel so fine that he didn't care a cuss for all
+the Browning in the world, and as for the poet--oh, to blazes with him!
+What's poetry, anyway?--only rhymes.
+
+So, would you believe it, in about ten minutes Peter Pupkin was off
+again and heading straight for the Pepperleighs' house, poet or no poet,
+and, what was more to the point, he carried with him three great bricks
+of Eliot's ice cream--in green, pink and brown layers. He struck the
+verandah just at the moment when Browning was getting too stale
+and dreary for words. His brain was all sizzling and jolly with the
+bromo-seltzer, and when he fetched out the ice cream bricks and Zena
+ran to get plates and spoons to eat it with, and Pupkin went with her
+to help fetch them and they picked out the spoons together, they were so
+laughing and happy that it was just a marvel. Girls, you know, need no
+bromo-seltzer. They're full of it all the time.
+
+And as for the poet--well, can you imagine how Pupkin felt when Zena
+told him that the poet was married, and that the tubby little woman with
+her head on sideways was his wife?
+
+So they had the ice cream, and the poet ate it in bucketsful. Poets
+always do. They need it. And after it the poet recited some stanzas of
+his own and Pupkin saw that he had misjudged the man, because it was
+dandy poetry, the very best. That night Pupkin walked home on air and
+there was no thought of chloroform, and it turned out that he hadn't
+committed suicide, but like all lovers he had commuted it.
+
+
+I don't need to describe in full the later suicides of Mr. Pupkin,
+because they were all conducted on the same plan and rested on something
+the same reasons as above.
+
+Sometimes he would go down at night to the offices of the bank below
+his bedroom and bring up his bank revolver in order to make an end of
+himself with it. This, too, he could see headed up in the newspapers as:
+
+BRILLIANT BOY BANKER BLOWS OUT BRAINS.
+
+But blowing your brains out is a noisy, rackety performance, and Pupkin
+soon found that only special kinds of brains are suited for it. So he
+always sneaked back again later in the night and put the revolver in its
+place, deciding to drown himself instead. Yet every time that he walked
+down to the Trestle Bridge over the Ossawippi he found it was quite
+unsuitable for drowning--too high, and the water too swift and black,
+and the rushes too gruesome--in fact, not at all the kind of place for a
+drowning.
+
+Far better, he realized, to wait there on the railroad track and throw
+himself under the wheels of the express and be done with it. Yet, though
+Pupkin often waited in this way for the train, he was never able to pick
+out a pair of wheels that suited him. Anyhow, it's awfully hard to tell
+an express from a fast freight.
+
+I wouldn't mention these attempts at suicide if one of them hadn't
+finally culminated in making Peter Pupkin a hero and solving for him the
+whole perplexed entanglement of his love affair with Zena Pepperleigh.
+Incidentally it threw him into the very centre of one of the most
+impenetrable bank mysteries that ever baffled the ingenuity of some of
+the finest legal talent that ever adorned one of the most enterprising
+communities in the country.
+
+It happened one night, as I say, that Pupkin decided to go down into
+the office of the bank and get his revolver and see if it would blow his
+brains out. It was the night of the Firemen's Ball and Zena had danced
+four times with a visitor from the city, a man who was in the fourth
+year at the University and who knew everything. It was more than Peter
+Pupkin could bear. Mallory Tompkins was away that night, and when Pupkin
+came home he was all alone in the building, except for Gillis, the
+caretaker, who lived in the extension at the back.
+
+He sat in his room for hours brooding. Two or three times he picked up a
+book--he remembered afterwards distinctly that it was Kant's Critique
+of Pure Reason--and tried to read it, but it seemed meaningless and
+trivial. Then with a sudden access of resolution he started from his
+chair and made his way down the stairs and into the office room of the
+bank, meaning to get a revolver and kill himself on the spot and let
+them find his body lying on the floor.
+
+It was then far on in the night and the empty building of the bank was
+as still as death. Pupkin could hear the stairs creak under his feet,
+and as he went he thought he heard another sound like the opening or
+closing of a door. But it sounded not like the sharp ordinary noise of
+a closing door but with a dull muffled noise as if someone had shut
+the iron door of a safe in a room under the ground. For a moment Pupkin
+stood and listened with his heart thumping against his ribs. Then he
+kicked his slippers from his feet and without a sound stole into the
+office on the ground floor and took the revolver from his teller's desk.
+As he gripped it, he listened to the sounds on the back-stairway and in
+the vaults below.
+
+I should explain that in the Exchange Bank of Mariposa the offices are
+on the ground floor level with the street. Below this is another floor
+with low dark rooms paved with flagstones, with unused office desks and
+with piles of papers stored in boxes. On this floor are the vaults of
+the bank, and lying in them in the autumn--the grain season--there is
+anything from fifty to a hundred thousand dollars in currency tied in
+bundles. There is no other light down there than the dim reflection from
+the lights out on the street, that lies in patches on the stone floor.
+
+I think as Peter Pupkin stood, revolver in hand, in the office of
+the bank, he had forgotten all about the maudlin purpose of his first
+coming. He had forgotten for the moment all about heroes and love
+affairs, and his whole mind was focussed, sharp and alert, with the
+intensity of the night-time, on the sounds that he heard in the vault
+and on the back-stairway of the bank.
+
+Straight away, Pupkin knew what it meant as plainly as if it were
+written in print. He had forgotten, I say, about being a hero and he
+only knew that there was sixty thousand dollars in the vault of the bank
+below, and that he was paid eight hundred dollars a year to look after
+it.
+
+As Peter Pupkin stood there listening to the sounds in his stockinged
+feet, his faced showed grey as ashes in the light that fell through the
+window from the street. His heart beat like a hammer against his ribs.
+But behind its beatings was the blood of four generations of Loyalists,
+and the robber who would take that sixty thousand dollars from the
+Mariposa bank must take it over the dead body of Peter Pupkin, teller.
+
+
+Pupkin walked down the stairs to the lower room, the one below the
+ground with the bank vault in it, with as fine a step as any of his
+ancestors showed on parade. And if he had known it, as he came down the
+stairway in the front of the vault room, there was a man crouched in the
+shadow of the passage way by the stairs at the back. This man, too, held
+a revolver in his hand, and, criminal or not, his face was as resolute
+as Pupkin's own. As he heard the teller's step on the stair, he turned
+and waited in the shadow of the doorway without a sound.
+
+There is no need really to mention all these details. They are only
+of interest as showing how sometimes a bank teller in a corded smoking
+jacket and stockinged feet may be turned into such a hero as even the
+Mariposa girls might dream about.
+
+All of this must have happened at about three o'clock in the night.
+This much was established afterwards from the evidence of Gillis, the
+caretaker. When he first heard the sounds he had looked at his watch and
+noticed that it was half-past two; the watch he knew was three-quarters
+of an hour slow three days before and had been gaining since. The exact
+time at which Gillis heard footsteps in the bank and started downstairs,
+pistol in hand, became a nice point afterwards in the cross-examination.
+
+But one must not anticipate. Pupkin reached the iron door of the bank
+safe, and knelt in front of it, feeling in the dark to find the fracture
+of the lock. As he knelt, he heard a sound behind him, and swung round
+on his knees and saw the bank robber in the half light of the passage
+way and the glitter of a pistol in his hand. The rest was over in an
+instant. Pupkin heard a voice that was his own, but that sounded strange
+and hollow, call out: "Drop that, or I'll fire!" and then just as he
+raised his revolver, there came a blinding flash of light before his
+eyes, and Peter Pupkin, junior teller of the bank, fell forward on the
+floor and knew no more.
+
+
+At that point, of course, I ought to close down a chapter, or volume,
+or, at least, strike the reader over the head with a sandbag to force
+him to stop and think. In common fairness one ought to stop here and
+count a hundred or get up and walk round a block, or, at any rate,
+picture to oneself Peter Pupkin lying on the floor of the bank,
+motionless, his arms distended, the revolver still grasped in his hand.
+But I must go on.
+
+By half-past seven on the following morning it was known all over
+Mariposa that Peter Pupkin the junior teller of the Exchange had been
+shot dead by a bank robber in the vault of the building. It was known
+also that Gillis, the caretaker, had been shot and killed at the foot of
+the stairs, and that the robber had made off with fifty thousand dollars
+in currency; that he had left a trail of blood on the sidewalk and that
+the men were out tracking him with bloodhounds in the great swamps to
+the north of the town.
+
+This, I say, and it is important to note it, was what they knew at
+half-past seven. Of course as each hour went past they learned more
+and more. At eight o'clock it was known that Pupkin was not dead, but
+dangerously wounded in the lungs. At eight-thirty it was known that he
+was not shot in the lungs, but that the ball had traversed the pit of
+his stomach.
+
+At nine o'clock it was learned that the pit of Pupkin's stomach was all
+right, but that the bullet had struck his right ear and carried it away.
+Finally it was learned that his ear had not exactly been carried away,
+that is, not precisely removed by the bullet, but that it had grazed
+Pupkin's head in such a way that it had stunned him, and if it had been
+an inch or two more to the left it might have reached his brain. This,
+of course, was just as good as being killed from the point of view of
+public interest.
+
+Indeed, by nine o'clock Pupkin could be himself seen on the Main Street
+with a great bandage sideways on his head, pointing out the traces of
+the robber. Gillis, the caretaker, too, it was known by eight, had not
+been killed. He had been shot through the brain, but whether the injury
+was serious or not was only a matter of conjecture. In fact, by ten
+o'clock it was understood that the bullet from the robber's second shot
+had grazed the side of the caretaker's head, but as far as could be
+known his brain was just as before. I should add that the first report
+about the bloodstains and the swamp and the bloodhounds turned out to
+be inaccurate. The stains may have been blood, but as they led to the
+cellar way of Netley's store they may have also been molasses, though it
+was argued, to be sure, that the robber might well have poured molasses
+over the bloodstains from sheer cunning.
+
+It was remembered, too, that there were no bloodhounds in Mariposa,
+although, mind you, there are any amount of dogs there.
+
+So you see that by ten o'clock in the morning the whole affair was
+settling into the impenetrable mystery which it ever since remained.
+
+Not that there wasn't evidence enough. There was Pupkin's own story
+and Gillis's story, and the stories of all the people who had heard the
+shots and seen the robber (some said, the bunch of robbers) go running
+past (others said, walking past), in the night. Apparently the robber
+ran up and down half the streets of Mariposa before he vanished.
+
+But the stories of Pupkin and Gillis were plain enough. Pupkin related
+that he heard sounds in the bank and came downstairs just in time to
+see the robber crouching in the passage way, and that the robber was
+a large, hulking, villainous looking man, wearing a heavy coat. Gillis
+told exactly the same story, having heard the noises at the same
+time, except that he first described the robber as a small thin fellow
+(peculiarly villainous looking, however, even in the dark), wearing a
+short jacket; but on thinking it over, Gillis realized that he had been
+wrong about the size of the criminal, and that he was even bigger, if
+anything, than what Mr. Pupkin thought. Gillis had fired at the robber;
+just at the same moment had Mr. Pupkin.
+
+Beyond that, all was mystery, absolute and impenetrable.
+
+By eleven o'clock the detectives had come up from the city under orders
+from the head of the bank.
+
+
+I wish you could have seen the two detectives as they moved to and fro
+in Mariposa--fine looking, stern, impenetrable men that they were. They
+seemed to take in the whole town by instinct and so quietly. They found
+their way to Mr. Smith's Hotel just as quietly as if it wasn't design at
+all and stood there at the bar, picking up scraps of conversation--you
+know the way detectives do it. Occasionally they allowed one or two
+bystanders--confederates, perhaps,--to buy a drink for them, and you
+could see from the way they drank it that they were still listening for
+a clue. If there had been the faintest clue in Smith's Hotel or in the
+Mariposa House or in the Continental, those fellows would have been at
+it like a flash.
+
+To see them moving round the town that day--silent, massive,
+imperturbable--gave one a great idea of their strange, dangerous
+calling. They went about the town all day and yet in such a quiet
+peculiar way that you couldn't have realized that they were working at
+all. They ate their dinner together at Smith's cafe and took an hour and
+a half over it to throw people off the scent. Then when they got them
+off it, they sat and talked with Josh Smith in the back bar to keep them
+off. Mr. Smith seemed to take to them right away. They were men of his
+own size, or near it, and anyway hotel men and detectives have a
+general affinity and share in the same impenetrable silence and in their
+confidential knowledge of the weaknesses of the public.
+
+Mr. Smith, too, was of great use to the detectives. "Boys," he said, "I
+wouldn't ask too close as to what folks was out late at night: in this
+town it don't do."
+
+When those two great brains finally left for the city on the
+five-thirty, it was hard to realize that behind each grand, impassible
+face a perfect vortex of clues was seething.
+
+But if the detectives were heroes, what was Pupkin? Imagine him with
+his bandage on his head standing in front of the bank and talking of the
+midnight robbery with that peculiar false modesty that only heroes are
+entitled to use.
+
+I don't know whether you have ever been a hero, but for sheer
+exhilaration there is nothing like it. And for Mr. Pupkin, who had gone
+through life thinking himself no good, to be suddenly exalted into the
+class of Napoleon Bonaparte and John Maynard and the Charge of the Light
+Brigade--oh, it was wonderful. Because Pupkin was a brave man now and
+he knew it and acquired with it all the brave man's modesty. In fact,
+I believe he was heard to say that he had only done his duty, and that
+what he did was what any other man would have done: though when somebody
+else said: "That's so, when you come to think of it," Pupkin turned on
+him that quiet look of the wounded hero, bitterer than words.
+
+And if Pupkin had known that all of the afternoon papers in the city
+reported him dead, he would have felt more luxurious still.
+
+That afternoon the Mariposa court sat in enquiry,--technically it was
+summoned in inquest on the dead robber--though they hadn't found the
+body--and it was wonderful to see them lining up the witnesses and
+holding cross-examinations. There is something in the cross-examination
+of great criminal lawyers like Nivens, of Mariposa, and in the counter
+examinations of presiding judges like Pepperleigh that thrills you to
+the core with the astuteness of it.
+
+They had Henry Mullins, the manager, on the stand for an hour and a
+half, and the excitement was so breathless that you could have heard a
+pin drop. Nivens took him on first.
+
+"What is your name?" he said.
+
+"Henry August Mullins."
+
+"What position do you hold?"
+
+"I am manager of the Exchange Bank."
+
+"When were you born?"
+
+"December 30, 1869."
+
+After that, Nivens stood looking quietly at Mullins. You could feel that
+he was thinking pretty deeply before he shot the next question at him.
+
+"Where did you go to school?"
+
+Mullins answered straight off: "The high school down home," and Nivens
+thought again for a while and then asked:
+
+"How many boys were at the school?"
+
+"About sixty."
+
+"How many masters?"
+
+"About three."
+
+After that Nivens paused a long while and seemed to be digesting the
+evidence, but at last an idea seemed to strike him and he said:
+
+"I understand you were not on the bank premises last night. Where were
+you?"
+
+"Down the lake duck shooting."
+
+You should have seen the excitement in the court when Mullins said this.
+The judge leaned forward in his chair and broke in at once.
+
+"Did you get any, Harry?" he asked.
+
+"Yes," Mullins said, "about six."
+
+"Where did you get them? What? In the wild rice marsh past the river?
+You don't say so! Did you get them on the sit or how?"
+
+All of these questions were fired off at the witness from the court in a
+single breath. In fact, it was the knowledge that the first ducks of the
+season had been seen in the Ossawippi marsh that led to the termination
+of the proceedings before the afternoon was a quarter over. Mullins and
+George Duff and half the witnesses were off with shotguns as soon as the
+court was cleared.
+
+
+I may as well state at once that the full story of the robbery of the
+bank of Mariposa never came to the light. A number of arrests--mostly
+of vagrants and suspicious characters--were made, but the guilt of the
+robbery was never brought home to them. One man was arrested twenty
+miles away, at the other end of Missinaba county, who not only
+corresponded exactly with the description of the robber, but, in
+addition to this, had a wooden leg. Vagrants with one leg are always
+regarded with suspicion in places like Mariposa, and whenever a robbery
+or a murder happens they are arrested in batches.
+
+It was never even known just how much money was stolen from the bank.
+Some people said ten thousand dollars, others more. The bank, no doubt
+for business motives, claimed that the contents of the safe were intact
+and that the robber had been foiled in his design.
+
+But none of this matters to the exaltation of Mr. Pupkin. Good fortune,
+like bad, never comes in small instalments. On that wonderful day, every
+good thing happened to Peter Pupkin at once. The morning saw him a
+hero. At the sitting of the court, the judge publicly told him that his
+conduct was fit to rank among the annals of the pioneers of Tecumseh
+Township, and asked him to his house for supper. At five o'clock he
+received the telegram of promotion from the head office that raised
+his salary to a thousand dollars, and made him not only a hero but a
+marriageable man. At six o'clock he started up to the judge's house with
+his resolution nerved to the most momentous step of his life.
+
+His mind was made up.
+
+He would do a thing seldom if ever done in Mariposa. He would propose to
+Zena Pepperleigh. In Mariposa this kind of step, I say, is seldom taken.
+The course of love runs on and on through all its stages of tennis
+playing and dancing and sleigh riding, till by sheer notoriety of
+circumstance an understanding is reached. To propose straight out would
+be thought priggish and affected and is supposed to belong only to
+people in books.
+
+But Pupkin felt that what ordinary people dare not do, heroes are
+allowed to attempt. He would propose to Zena, and more than that, he
+would tell her in a straight, manly way that he was rich and take the
+consequences.
+
+And he did it.
+
+That night on the piazza, where the hammock hangs in the shadow of
+the Virginia creeper, he did it. By sheer good luck the judge had
+gone indoors to the library, and by a piece of rare good fortune Mrs.
+Pepperleigh had gone indoors to the sewing room, and by a happy trick
+of coincidence the servant was out and the dog was tied up--in fact,
+no such chain of circumstances was ever offered in favour of mortal man
+before.
+
+What Zena said--beyond saying yes--I do not know. I am sure that when
+Pupkin told her of the money, she bore up as bravely as so fine a girl
+as Zena would, and when he spoke of diamonds she said she would wear
+them for his sake.
+
+They were saying these things and other things--ever so many other
+things--when there was such a roar and a clatter up Oneida Street as
+you never heard, and there came bounding up to the house one of the most
+marvellous Limousine touring cars that ever drew up at the home of a
+judge on a modest salary of three thousand dollars. When it stopped
+there sprang from it an excited man in a long sealskin coat--worn not
+for the luxury of it at all but from the sheer chilliness of the autumn
+evening. And it was, as of course you know, Pupkin's father. He had seen
+the news of his son's death in the evening paper in the city. They drove
+the car through, so the chauffeur said, in two hours and a quarter, and
+behind them there was to follow a special trainload of detectives and
+emergency men, but Pupkin senior had cancelled all that by telegram half
+way up when he heard that Peter was still living.
+
+For a moment as his eye rested on young Pupkin you would almost have
+imagined, had you not known that he came from the Maritime Provinces,
+that there were tears in them and that he was about to hug his son to
+his heart. But if he didn't hug Peter to his heart, he certainly did
+within a few moments clasp Zena to it, in that fine fatherly way in
+which they clasp pretty girls in the Maritime Provinces. The strangest
+thing is that Pupkin senior seemed to understand the whole situation
+without any explanations at all.
+
+Judge Pepperleigh, I think, would have shaken both of Pupkin senior's
+arms off when he saw him; and when you heard them call one another
+"Ned" and "Phillip" it made you feel that they were boys again attending
+classes together at the old law school in the city.
+
+If Pupkin thought that his father wouldn't make a hit in Mariposa,
+it only showed his ignorance. Pupkin senior sat there on the judge's
+verandah smoking a corn cob pipe as if he had never heard of Havana
+cigars in his life. In the three days that he spent in Mariposa that
+autumn, he went in and out of Jeff Thorpe's barber shop and Eliot's drug
+store, shot black ducks in the marsh and played poker every evening at
+a hundred matches for a cent as if he had never lived any other life in
+all his days. They had to send him telegrams enough to fill a satchel to
+make him come away.
+
+So Pupkin and Zena in due course of time were married, and went to live
+in one of the enchanted houses on the hillside in the newer part of the
+town, where you may find them to this day.
+
+You may see Pupkin there at any time cutting enchanted grass on a little
+lawn in as gaudy a blazer as ever.
+
+But if you step up to speak to him or walk with him into the enchanted
+house, pray modulate your voice a little musical though it is--for there
+is said to be an enchanted baby on the premises whose sleep must not
+lightly be disturbed.
+
+
+
+
+TEN. The Great Election in Missinaba County
+
+Don't ask me what election it was, whether Dominion or Provincial or
+Imperial or Universal, for I scarcely know.
+
+It must, of course, have been going on in other parts of the country
+as well, but I saw it all from Missinaba County which, with the town of
+Mariposa, was, of course, the storm centre and focus point of the whole
+turmoil.
+
+I only know that it was a huge election and that on it turned issues of
+the most tremendous importance, such as whether or not Mariposa should
+become part of the United States, and whether the flag that had waved
+over the school house at Tecumseh Township for ten centuries should be
+trampled under the hoof of an alien invader, and whether Britons should
+be slaves, and whether Canadians should be Britons, and whether the
+farming class would prove themselves Canadians, and tremendous questions
+of that kind.
+
+And there was such a roar and a tumult to it, and such a waving of flags
+and beating of drums and flaring of torchlights that such parts of the
+election as may have been going on elsewhere than in Missinaba county
+must have been quite unimportant and didn't really matter.
+
+Now that it is all over, we can look back at it without heat or passion.
+We can see,--it's plain enough now,--that in the great election Canada
+saved the British Empire, and that Missinaba saved Canada and that
+the vote of the Third Concession of Tecumseh Township saved Missinaba
+County, and that those of us who carried the third concession,--well,
+there's no need to push it further. We prefer to be modest about it. If
+we still speak of it, it is only quietly and simply and not more than
+three or four times a day.
+
+But you can't understand the election at all, and the conventions and
+the campaigns and the nominations and the balloting, unless you first
+appreciate the peculiar complexion of politics in Mariposa.
+
+Let me begin at the beginning. Everybody in Mariposa is either a Liberal
+or a Conservative or else is both. Some of the people are or have
+been Liberals or Conservatives all their lives and are called
+dyed-in-the-wool Grits or old-time Tories and things of that sort. These
+people get from long training such a swift penetrating insight into
+national issues that they can decide the most complicated question in
+four seconds: in fact, just as soon as they grab the city papers out of
+the morning mail, they know the whole solution of any problem you can
+put to them. There are other people whose aim it is to be broad-minded
+and judicious and who vote Liberal or Conservative according to their
+judgment of the questions of the day. If their judgment of these
+questions tells them that there is something in it for them in voting
+Liberal, then they do so. But if not, they refuse to be the slaves of a
+party or the henchmen of any political leader. So that anybody looking
+for henches has got to keep away from them.
+
+But the one thing that nobody is allowed to do in Mariposa is to have
+no politics. Of course there are always some people whose circumstances
+compel them to say that they have no politics. But that is easily
+understood. Take the case of Trelawney, the postmaster. Long ago he was
+a letter carrier under the old Mackenzie Government, and later he was
+a letter sorter under the old Macdonald Government, and after that a
+letter stamper under the old Tupper Government, and so on. Trelawney
+always says that he has no politics, but the truth is that he has too
+many.
+
+So, too, with the clergy in Mariposa. They have no politics--absolutely
+none. Yet Dean Drone round election time always announces as his text
+such a verse as: "Lo! is there not one righteous man in Israel?" or:
+"What ho! is it not time for a change?" And that is a signal for all the
+Liberal business men to get up and leave their pews.
+
+Similarly over at the Presbyterian Church, the minister says that his
+sacred calling will not allow him to take part in politics and that
+his sacred calling prevents him from breathing even a word of harshness
+against his fellow man, but that when it comes to the elevation of the
+ungodly into high places in the commonwealth (this means, of course, the
+nomination of the Conservative candidate) then he's not going to allow
+his sacred calling to prevent him from saying just what he thinks of
+it. And by that time, having pretty well cleared the church of
+Conservatives, he proceeds to show from the scriptures that the ancient
+Hebrews were Liberals to a man, except those who were drowned in the
+flood or who perished, more or less deservedly, in the desert.
+
+There are, I say, some people who are allowed to claim to have no
+politics,--the office holders, and the clergy and the school teachers
+and the hotel keepers. But beyond them, anybody in Mariposa who says
+that he has no politics is looked upon as crooked, and people wonder
+what it is that he is "out after."
+
+In fact, the whole town and county is a hive of politics, and people
+who have only witnessed gatherings such as the House of Commons at
+Westminster and the Senate at Washington and never seen a Conservative
+Convention at Tecumseh Corners or a Liberal Rally at the Concession
+school house, don't know what politics means.
+
+So you may imagine the excitement in Mariposa when it became known that
+King George had dissolved the parliament of Canada and had sent out a
+writ or command for Missinaba County to elect for him some other person
+than John Henry Bagshaw because he no longer had confidence in him.
+
+The king, of course, is very well known, very favourably known, in
+Mariposa. Everybody remembers how he visited the town on his great tour
+in Canada, and stopped off at the Mariposa station. Although he was only
+a prince at the time, there was quite a big crowd down at the depot and
+everybody felt what a shame it was that the prince had no time to see
+more of Mariposa, because he would get such a false idea of it, seeing
+only the station and the lumber yards. Still, they all came to the
+station and all the Liberals and Conservatives mixed together perfectly
+freely and stood side by side without any distinction, so that the
+prince should not observe any party differences among them. And he
+didn't,--you could see that he didn't. They read him an address all
+about the tranquillity and loyalty of the Empire, and they purposely
+left out any reference to the trouble over the town wharf or the big row
+there had been about the location of the new post-office. There was a
+general decent feeling that it wouldn't be fair to disturb the prince
+with these things: later on, as king, he would, of course, _have_ to
+know all about them, but meanwhile it was better to leave him with the
+idea that his empire was tranquil.
+
+So they deliberately couched the address in terms that were just as
+reassuring as possible and the prince was simply delighted with it. I
+am certain that he slept pretty soundly after hearing that address. Why,
+you could see it taking effect even on his aides-de-camp and the people
+round him, so imagine how the prince must have felt!
+
+I think in Mariposa they understand kings perfectly. Every time that
+a king or a prince comes, they try to make him see the bright side of
+everything and let him think that they're all united. Judge Pepperleigh
+walked up and down arm in arm with Dr. Gallagher, the worst Grit in the
+town, just to make the prince feel fine.
+
+So when they got the news that the king had lost confidence in John
+Henry Bagshaw, the sitting member, they never questioned it a bit. Lost
+confidence? All right, they'd elect him another right away. They'd elect
+him half a dozen if he needed them. They don't mind; they'd elect the
+whole town man after man rather than have the king worried about it.
+
+In any case, all the Conservatives had been wondering for years how the
+king and the governor-general and men like that had tolerated such a man
+as Bagshaw so long.
+
+Missinaba County, I say, is a regular hive of politics, and not the
+miserable, crooked, money-ridden politics of the cities, but the
+straight, real old-fashioned thing that is an honour to the country
+side. Any man who would offer to take a bribe or sell his convictions
+for money, would be an object of scorn. I don't say they wouldn't take
+money,--they would, of course, why not?--but if they did they would
+take it in a straight fearless way and say nothing about it. They
+might,--it's only human,--accept a job or a contract from the
+government, but if they did, rest assured it would be in a broad
+national spirit and not for the sake of the work itself. No, sir. Not
+for a minute.
+
+Any man who wants to get the votes of the Missinaba farmers and the
+Mariposa business men has got to persuade them that he's the right man.
+If he can do that,--if he can persuade any one of them that he is the
+right man and that all the rest know it, then they'll vote for him.
+
+The division, I repeat, between the Liberals and the Conservatives,
+is intense. Yet you might live for a long while in the town, between
+elections, and never know it. It is only when you get to understand
+the people that you begin to see that there is a cross division running
+through them that nothing can ever remove. You gradually become aware of
+fine subtle distinctions that miss your observation at first. Outwardly,
+they are all friendly enough. For instance, Joe Milligan the dentist is
+a Conservative, and has been for six years, and yet he shares the same
+boat-house with young Dr. Gallagher, who is a Liberal, and they even
+bought a motor boat between them. Pete Glover and Alf McNichol were in
+partnership in the hardware and paint store, though they belonged on
+different sides.
+
+But just as soon as elections drew near, the differences in politics
+became perfectly apparent. Liberals and Conservatives drew away from one
+another. Joe Milligan used the motor boat one Saturday and Dr. Gallagher
+the next, and Pete Glover sold hardware on one side of the store and Alf
+McNichol sold paint on the other. You soon realized too that one of the
+newspapers was Conservative and the other was Liberal, and that there
+was a Liberal drug store and a Conservative drug store, and so on.
+Similarly round election time, the Mariposa House was the Liberal Hotel,
+and the Continental Conservative, though Mr. Smith's place, where they
+always put on a couple of extra bar tenders, was what you might call
+Independent-Liberal-Conservative, with a dash of Imperialism thrown in.
+Mr. Gingham, the undertaker, was, as a natural effect of his calling,
+an advanced Liberal, but at election time he always engaged a special
+assistant for embalming Conservative customers.
+
+So now, I think, you understand something of the general political
+surroundings of the great election in Missinaba County.
+
+John Henry Bagshaw was the sitting member, the Liberal member, for
+Missinaba County.
+
+The Liberals called him the old war horse, and the old battle-axe, and
+the old charger and the old champion and all sorts of things of that
+kind. The Conservatives called him the old jackass and the old army mule
+and the old booze fighter and the old grafter and the old scoundrel.
+
+John Henry Bagshaw was, I suppose, one of the greatest political forces
+in the world. He had flowing white hair crowned with a fedora hat, and a
+smooth statesmanlike face which it cost the country twenty-five cents a
+day to shave.
+
+Altogether the Dominion of Canada had spent over two thousand dollars in
+shaving that face during the twenty years that Bagshaw had represented
+Missinaba County. But the result had been well worth it.
+
+Bagshaw wore a long political overcoat that it cost the country twenty
+cents a day to brush, and boots that cost the Dominion fifteen cents
+every morning to shine.
+
+But it was money well spent.
+
+Bagshaw of Mariposa was one of the most representative men of the age,
+and it's no wonder that he had been returned for the county for five
+elections running, leaving the Conservatives nowhere. Just think how
+representative he was. He owned two hundred acres out on the Third
+Concession and kept two men working on it all the time to prove that he
+was a practical farmer. They sent in fat hogs to the Missinaba County
+Agricultural Exposition and the World's Fair every autumn, and Bagshaw
+himself stood beside the pig pens with the judges, and wore a pair of
+corduroy breeches and chewed a straw all afternoon. After that if any
+farmer thought that he was not properly represented in Parliament, it
+showed that he was an ass.
+
+Bagshaw owned a half share in the harness business and a quarter share
+in the tannery and that made him a business man. He paid for a pew in
+the Presbyterian Church and that represented religion in Parliament. He
+attended college for two sessions thirty years ago, and that represented
+education and kept him abreast with modern science, if not ahead of it.
+He kept a little account in one bank and a big account in the other, so
+that he was a rich man or a poor man at the same time.
+
+Add to that that John Henry Bagshaw was perhaps the finest orator in
+Mariposa. That, of course, is saying a great deal. There are speakers
+there, lots of them that can talk two or three hours at a stretch, but
+the old war horse could beat them all. They say that when John Henry
+Bagshaw got well started, say after a couple of hours of talk, he could
+speak as Pericles or Demosthenes or Cicero never could have spoken.
+
+You could tell Bagshaw a hundred yards off as a member of the House
+of Commons. He wore a pepper-and-salt suit to show that he came from a
+rural constituency, and he wore a broad gold watch-chain with dangling
+seals to show that he also represents a town. You could see from his
+quiet low collar and white tie that his electorate were a Godfearing,
+religious people, while the horseshoe pin that he wore showed that his
+electorate were not without sporting instincts and knew a horse from a
+jackass.
+
+Most of the time, John Henry Bagshaw had to be at Ottawa (though he
+preferred the quiet of his farm and always left it, as he said, with a
+sigh). If he was not in Ottawa, he was in Washington, and of course at
+any time they might need him in London, so that it was no wonder that he
+could only be in Mariposa about two months of the year.
+
+That is why everybody knew, when Bagshaw got off the afternoon train
+one day early in the spring, that there must be something very important
+coming and that the rumours about a new election must be perfectly true.
+
+Everything that he did showed this. He gave the baggage man twenty-five
+cents to take the check off his trunk, the 'bus driver fifty cents to
+drive him up to the Main Street, and he went into Callahan's tobacco
+store and bought two ten-cent cigars and took them across the street and
+gave them to Mallory Tompkins of the Times-Herald as a present from the
+Prime Minister.
+
+All that afternoon, Bagshaw went up and down the Main Street of
+Mariposa, and you could see, if you knew the signs of it, that there was
+politics in the air. He bought nails and putty and glass in the hardware
+store, and harness in the harness shop, and drugs in the drug store and
+toys in the toy shop, and all the things like that that are needed for a
+big campaign.
+
+Then when he had done all this he went over with McGinnis the Liberal
+organizer and Mallory Tompkins, the Times-Herald man, and Gingham
+(the great Independent-Liberal undertaker) to the back parlour in the
+Mariposa House.
+
+You could tell from the way John Henry Bagshaw closed the door before he
+sat down that he was in a pretty serious frame of mind.
+
+"Gentlemen," he said, "the election is a certainty. We're going to have
+a big fight on our hands and we've got to get ready for it."
+
+"Is it going to be on the tariff?" asked Tompkins.
+
+"Yes, gentlemen, I'm afraid it is. The whole thing is going to turn on
+the tariff question. I wish it were otherwise. I think it madness, but
+they're bent on it, and we got to fight it on that line. Why they can't
+fight it merely on the question of graft," continued the old war horse,
+rising from his seat and walking up and down, "Heaven only knows. I
+warned them. I appealed to them. I said, fight the thing on graft and we
+can win easy. Take this constituency,--why not have fought the thing out
+on whether I spent too much money on the town wharf or the post-office?
+What better issues could a man want? Let them claim that I am crooked
+and let me claim that I'm not. Surely that was good enough without
+dragging in the tariff. But now, gentlemen, tell me about things in the
+constituency. Is there any talk yet of who is to run?"
+
+Mallory Tompkins lighted up the second of his Prime Minister's cigars
+and then answered for the group:
+
+"Everybody says that Edward Drone is going to run."
+
+"Ah!" said the old war horse, and there was joy upon his face, "is he?
+At last! That's good, that's good--now what platform will he run on?"
+
+"Independent."
+
+"Excellent," said Mr. Bagshaw. "Independent, that's fine. On a programme
+of what?"
+
+"Just simple honesty and public morality."
+
+"Come now," said the member, "that's splendid: that will help
+enormously. Honesty and public morality! The very thing! If Drone runs
+and makes a good showing, we win for a certainty. Tompkins, you must
+lose no time over this. Can't you manage to get some articles in the
+other papers hinting that at the last election we bribed all the voters
+in the county, and that we gave out enough contracts to simply pervert
+the whole constituency. Imply that we poured the public money into this
+county in bucketsful and that we are bound to do it again. Let Drone
+have plenty of material of this sort and he'll draw off every honest
+unbiased vote in the Conservative party.
+
+"My only fear is," continued the old war horse, losing some of his
+animation, "that Drone won't run after all. He's said it so often
+before and never has. He hasn't got the money. But we must see to that.
+Gingham, you know his brother well; you must work it so that we pay
+Drone's deposit and his campaign expenses. But how like Drone it is to
+come out at this time!"
+
+It was indeed very like Edward Drone to attempt so misguided a thing as
+to come out an Independent candidate in Missinaba County on a platform
+of public honesty. It was just the sort of thing that anyone in Mariposa
+would expect from him.
+
+Edward Drone was the Rural Dean's younger brother,--young Mr. Drone,
+they used to call him, years ago, to distinguish him from the rector.
+He was a somewhat weaker copy of his elder brother, with a simple,
+inefficient face and kind blue eyes. Edward Drone was, and always had
+been, a failure. In training he had been, once upon a time, an engineer
+and built dams that broke and bridges that fell down and wharves that
+floated away in the spring floods. He had been a manufacturer and
+failed, had been a contractor and failed, and now lived a meagre life as
+a sort of surveyor or land expert on goodness knows what.
+
+In his political ideas Edward Drone was and, as everybody in Mariposa
+knew, always had been crazy. He used to come up to the autumn exercises
+at the high school and make speeches about the ancient Romans and Titus
+Manlius and Quintus Curtius at the same time when John Henry Bagshaw
+used to make a speech about the Maple Leaf and ask for an extra half
+holiday. Drone used to tell the boys about the lessons to be learned
+from the lives of the truly great, and Bagshaw used to talk to them
+about the lessons learned from the lives of the extremely rich. Drone
+used to say that his heart filled whenever he thought of the splendid
+patriotism of the ancient Romans, and Bagshaw said that whenever he
+looked out over this wide Dominion his heart overflowed.
+
+Even the youngest boy in the school could tell that Drone was foolish.
+Not even the school teachers would have voted for him.
+
+"What about the Conservatives?" asked Bagshaw presently; "is there any
+talk yet as to who they'll bring out?" Gingham and Mallory Tompkins
+looked at one another. They were almost afraid to speak.
+
+"Hadn't you heard?" said Gingham; "they've got their man already."
+
+"Who is it?" said Bagshaw quickly. "They're going to put up Josh Smith."
+
+"Great Heaven!" said Bagshaw, jumping to his feet; "Smith! the hotel
+keeper."
+
+"Yes, sir," said Mr. Gingham, "that's the man."
+
+Do you remember, in history, how Napoleon turned pale when he heard
+that the Duke of Wellington was to lead the allies in Belgium? Do you
+remember how when Themistocles heard that Aristogiton was to lead the
+Spartans, he jumped into the sea? Possibly you don't, but it may help
+you to form some idea of what John Henry Bagshaw felt when he heard that
+the Conservatives had selected Josh Smith, proprietor of Smith's Hotel.
+
+You remember Smith. You've seen him there on the steps of his
+hotel,--two hundred and eighty pounds in his stockinged feet. You've
+seen him selling liquor after hours through sheer public spirit, and you
+recall how he saved the lives of hundreds of people on the day when the
+steamer sank, and how he saved the town from being destroyed the night
+when the Church of England Church burnt down. You know that hotel of
+his, too, half way down the street, Smith's Northern Health Resort,
+though already they were beginning to call it Smith's British Arms.
+
+So you can imagine that Bagshaw came as near to turning pale as a man in
+federal politics can.
+
+"I never knew Smith was a Conservative," he said faintly; "he always
+subscribed to our fund."
+
+"He is now," said Mr. Gingham ominously; "he says the idea of this
+reciprocity business cuts him to the heart."
+
+"The infernal liar!" said Mr. Bagshaw.
+
+There was silence for a few moments. Then Bagshaw spoke again.
+
+"Will Smith have anything else in his platform besides the trade
+question?"
+
+"Yes," said Mr. Gingham gloomily, "he will."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"Temperance and total prohibition!"
+
+John Henry Bagshaw sank back in his chair as if struck with a club.
+There let me leave him for a chapter.
+
+
+
+
+ELEVEN. The Candidacy of Mr. Smith
+
+"Boys," said Mr. Smith to the two hostlers, stepping out on to the
+sidewalk in front of the hotel,--"hoist that there British Jack over the
+place and hoist her up good."
+
+Then he stood and watched the flag fluttering in the wind.
+
+"Billy," he said to the desk clerk, "get a couple more and put them up
+on the roof of the caff behind the hotel. Wire down to the city and get
+a quotation on a hundred of them. Take them signs 'American Drinks' out
+of the bar. Put up noo ones with 'British Beer at all Hours'; clear out
+the rye whiskey and order in Scotch and Irish, and then go up to the
+printing office and get me them placards."
+
+Then another thought struck Mr. Smith.
+
+"Say, Billy," he said, "wire to the city for fifty pictures of King
+George. Get 'em good, and get 'em coloured. It don't matter what they
+cost."
+
+"All right, sir," said Billy.
+
+"And Billy," called Mr. Smith, as still another thought struck him
+(indeed, the moment Mr. Smith went into politics you could see these
+thoughts strike him like waves), "get fifty pictures of his father, old
+King Albert."
+
+"All right, sir."
+
+"And say, I tell you, while you're at it, get some of the old queen,
+Victorina, if you can. Get 'em in mourning, with a harp and one of them
+lions and a three-pointed prong."
+
+It was on the morning after the Conservative Convention. Josh Smith had
+been chosen the candidate. And now the whole town was covered with flags
+and placards and there were bands in the streets every evening, and
+noise and music and excitement that went on from morning till night.
+
+Election times are exciting enough even in the city. But there the
+excitement dies down in business hours. In Mariposa there aren't any
+business hours and the excitement goes on _all_ the time.
+
+Mr. Smith had carried the Convention before him. There had been a feeble
+attempt to put up Nivens. But everybody knew that he was a lawyer and a
+college man and wouldn't have a chance by a man with a broader outlook
+like Josh Smith.
+
+So the result was that Smith was the candidate and there were placards
+out all over the town with SMITH AND BRITISH ALLEGIANCE in big letters,
+and people were wearing badges with Mr. Smith's face on one side and
+King George's on the other, and the fruit store next to the hotel had
+been cleaned out and turned into committee rooms with a gang of workers
+smoking cigars in it all day and half the night.
+
+There were other placards, too, with BAGSHAW AND LIBERTY, BAGSHAW AND
+PROSPERITY, VOTE FOR THE OLD MISSINABA STANDARD BEARER, and up town
+beside the Mariposa House there were the Bagshaw committee rooms with
+a huge white streamer across the street, and with a gang of Bagshaw
+workers smoking their heads off.
+
+But Mr. Smith had an estimate made which showed that nearly two cigars
+to one were smoked in his committee rooms as compared with the Liberals.
+It was the first time in five elections that the Conservative had been
+able to make such a showing as that.
+
+One might mention, too, that there were Drone placards out,--five or six
+of them,--little things about the size of a pocket handkerchief, with a
+statement that "Mr. Edward Drone solicits the votes of the electors of
+Missinaba County." But you would never notice them. And when Drone tried
+to put up a streamer across the Main Street with DRONE AND HONESTY the
+wind carried it away into the lake.
+
+The fight was really between Smith and Bagshaw, and everybody knew it
+from the start.
+
+I wish that I were able to narrate all the phases and the turns of the
+great contest from the opening of the campaign till the final polling
+day. But it would take volumes.
+
+First of all, of course, the trade question was hotly discussed in the
+two newspapers of Mariposa, and the Newspacket and the Times-Herald
+literally bristled with statistics. Then came interviews with the
+candidates and the expression of their convictions in regard to tariff
+questions.
+
+"Mr. Smith," said the reporter of the Mariposa Newspacket, "we'd like
+to get your views of the effect of the proposed reduction of the
+differential duties."
+
+"By gosh, Pete," said Mr. Smith, "you can search me. Have a cigar."
+
+"What do you think, Mr. Smith, would be the result of lowering the _ad
+valorem_ British preference and admitting American goods at a reciprocal
+rate?"
+
+"It's a corker, ain't it?" answered Mr. Smith. "What'll you take, lager
+or domestic?"
+
+And in that short dialogue Mr. Smith showed that he had instantaneously
+grasped the whole method of dealing with the press. The interview in the
+paper next day said that Mr. Smith, while unwilling to state positively
+that the principle of tariff discrimination was at variance with sound
+fiscal science, was firmly of opinion that any reciprocal interchange
+of tariff preferences with the United States must inevitably lead to a
+serious per capita reduction of the national industry.
+
+
+"Mr. Smith," said the chairman of a delegation of the manufacturers of
+Mariposa, "what do you propose to do in regard to the tariff if you're
+elected?"
+
+"Boys," answered Mr. Smith, "I'll put her up so darned high they won't
+never get her down again."
+
+
+"Mr. Smith," said the chairman of another delegation, "I'm an old free
+trader--"
+
+"Put it there," said Mr. Smith, "so'm I. There ain't nothing like it."
+
+
+"What do you think about imperial defence?" asked another questioner.
+
+"Which?" said Mr. Smith.
+
+"Imperial defence."
+
+"Of what?"
+
+"Of everything."
+
+"Who says it?" said Mr. Smith.
+
+"Everybody is talking of it."
+
+"What do the Conservative boys at Ottaway think about it?" answered Mr.
+Smith.
+
+"They're all for it."
+
+"Well, I'm fer it too," said Mr. Smith.
+
+
+These little conversations represented only the first stage, the
+argumentative stage of the great contest. It was during this period, for
+example, that the Mariposa Newspacket absolutely proved that the price
+of hogs in Mariposa was decimal six higher than the price of oranges in
+Southern California and that the average decennial import of eggs into
+Missinaba County had increased four decimal six eight two in the last
+fifteen years more than the import of lemons in New Orleans.
+
+Figures of this kind made the people think. Most certainly.
+
+After all this came the organizing stage and after that the big public
+meetings and the rallies. Perhaps you have never seen a county being
+"organized." It is a wonderful sight.
+
+First of all the Bagshaw men drove through crosswise in top buggies and
+then drove through it again lengthwise. Whenever they met a farmer they
+went in and ate a meal with him, and after the meal they took him out to
+the buggy and gave him a drink. After that the man's vote was absolutely
+solid until it was tampered with by feeding a Conservative.
+
+In fact, the only way to show a farmer that you are in earnest is to go
+in and eat a meal with him. If you won't eat it, he won't vote for you.
+That is the recognized political test.
+
+But, of course, just as soon as the Bagshaw men had begun to get the
+farming vote solidified, the Smith buggies came driving through in the
+other direction, eating meals and distributing cigars and turning all
+the farmers back into Conservatives.
+
+Here and there you might see Edward Drone, the Independent candidate,
+wandering round from farm to farm in the dust of the political buggies.
+To each of the farmers he explained that he pledged himself to give no
+bribes, to spend no money and to offer no jobs, and each one of them
+gripped him warmly by the hand and showed him the way to the next farm.
+
+After the organization of the county there came the period of the public
+meetings and the rallies and the joint debates between the candidates
+and their supporters.
+
+I suppose there was no place in the whole Dominion where the trade
+question--the Reciprocity question--was threshed out quite so thoroughly
+and in quite such a national patriotic spirit as in Mariposa. For a
+month, at least, people talked of nothing else. A man would stop another
+in the street and tell him that he had read last night that the average
+price of an egg in New York was decimal ought one more than the price of
+an egg in Mariposa, and the other man would stop the first one later in
+the day and tell him that the average price of a hog in Idaho was point
+six of a cent per pound less (or more,--he couldn't remember which for
+the moment) than the average price of beef in Mariposa.
+
+People lived on figures of this sort, and the man who could remember
+most of them stood out as a born leader.
+
+But of course it was at the public meetings that these things were most
+fully discussed. It would take volumes to do full justice to all the
+meetings that they held in Missinaba County. But here and there single
+speeches stood out as masterpieces of convincing oratory. Take, for
+example, the speech of John Henry Bagshaw at the Tecumseh Corners School
+House. The Mariposa Times-Herald said next day that that speech would go
+down in history, and so it will,--ever so far down.
+
+Anyone who has heard Bagshaw knows what an impressive speaker he is, and
+on this night when he spoke with the quiet dignity of a man old in years
+and anxious only to serve his country, he almost surpassed himself. Near
+the end of his speech somebody dropped a pin, and the noise it made in
+falling fairly rattled the windows.
+
+"I am an old man now, gentlemen," Bagshaw said, "and the time must soon
+come when I must not only leave politics, but must take my way towards
+that goal from which no traveller returns."
+
+There was a deep hush when Bagshaw said this. It was understood to imply
+that he thought of going to the United States.
+
+"Yes, gentlemen, I am an old man, and I wish, when my time comes to go,
+to depart leaving as little animosity behind me as possible. But before
+I _do_ go, I want it pretty clearly understood that there are more darn
+scoundrels in the Conservative party than ought to be tolerated in any
+decent community. I bear," he continued, "malice towards none and I wish
+to speak with gentleness to all, but what I will say is that how any
+set of rational responsible men could nominate such a skunk as the
+Conservative candidate passes the bounds of my comprehension. Gentlemen,
+in the present campaign there is no room for vindictive abuse. Let us
+rise to a higher level than that. They tell me that my opponent, Smith,
+is a common saloon keeper. Let it pass. They tell me that he has stood
+convicted of horse stealing, that he is a notable perjurer, that he is
+known as the blackest-hearted liar in Missinaba County. Let us not speak
+of it. Let no whisper of it pass our lips.
+
+"No, gentlemen," continued Bagshaw, pausing to take a drink of water,
+"let us rather consider this question on the high plane of national
+welfare. Let us not think of our own particular interests but let
+us consider the good of the country at large. And to do this, let me
+present to you some facts in regard to the price of barley in Tecumseh
+Township."
+
+Then, amid a deep stillness, Bagshaw read off the list of prices of
+sixteen kinds of grain in sixteen different places during sixteen years.
+
+"But let me turn," Bagshaw went on to another phase of the national
+subject, "and view for a moment the price of marsh hay in Missinaba
+County--"
+
+When Bagshaw sat down that night it was felt that a Liberal vote in
+Tecumseh Township was a foregone conclusion.
+
+But here they hadn't reckoned on the political genius of Mr. Smith.
+When he heard next day of the meeting, he summoned some of his leading
+speakers to him and he said:
+
+"Boys, they're beating us on them statissicks. Ourn ain't good enough."
+
+Then he turned to Nivens and he said:
+
+"What was them figures you had here the other night?"
+
+Nivens took out a paper and began reading.
+
+"Stop," said Mr. Smith, "what was that figure for bacon?"
+
+"Fourteen million dollars," said Nivens.
+
+"Not enough," said Mr. Smith, "make it twenty. They'll stand for it,
+them farmers."
+
+Nivens changed it.
+
+"And what was that for hay?"
+
+"Two dollars a ton."
+
+"Shove it up to four," said Mr. Smith: "And I tell you," he added, "if
+any of them farmers says the figures ain't correct, tell them to go to
+Washington and see for themselves; say that if any man wants the proof
+of your figures let him go over to England and ask,--tell him to go
+straight to London and see it all for himself in the books."
+
+
+After this, there was no more trouble over statistics. I must say though
+that it is a wonderfully convincing thing to hear trade figures of this
+kind properly handled. Perhaps the best man on this sort of thing in the
+campaign was Mullins, the banker. A man of his profession simply has to
+have figures of trade and population and money at his fingers' ends and
+the effect of it in public speaking is wonderful.
+
+No doubt you have listened to speakers of this kind, but I question
+whether you have ever heard anything more typical of the sort of effect
+that I allude to than Mullins's speech at the big rally at the Fourth
+Concession.
+
+Mullins himself, of course, knows the figures so well that he never
+bothers to write them into notes and the effect is very striking.
+
+"Now, gentlemen," he said very earnestly, "how many of you know just to
+what extent the exports of this country have increased in the last ten
+years? How many could tell what per cent. of increase there has been in
+one decade of our national importation?"--then Mullins paused and looked
+round. Not a man knew it.
+
+"I don't recall," he said, "exactly the precise amount myself,--not at
+this moment,--but it must be simply tremendous. Or take the question of
+population," Mullins went on, warming up again as a born statistician
+always does at the proximity of figures, "how many of you know, how many
+of you can state, what has been the decennial percentage increase in our
+leading cities--?"
+
+There he paused, and would you believe it, not a man could state it.
+
+"I don't recall the exact figures," said Mullins, "but I have them at
+home and they are positively colossal."
+
+But just in one phase of the public speaking, the candidacy of Mr. Smith
+received a serious set-back.
+
+It had been arranged that Mr. Smith should run on a platform of total
+prohibition. But they soon found that it was a mistake. They had
+imported a special speaker from the city, a grave man with a white tie,
+who put his whole heart into the work and would take nothing for it
+except his expenses and a sum of money for each speech. But beyond the
+money, I say, he would take nothing.
+
+He spoke one night at the Tecumseh Corners social hall at the same time
+when the Liberal meeting was going on at the Tecumseh Corners school
+house.
+
+"Gentlemen," he said, as he paused half way in his speech,--"while we
+are gathered here in earnest discussion, do you know what is happening
+over at the meeting place of our opponents? Do you know that seventeen
+bottles of rye whiskey were sent out from the town this afternoon
+to that innocent and unsuspecting school house? Seventeen bottles of
+whiskey hidden in between the blackboard and the wall, and every single
+man that attends that meeting,--mark my words, every single man,--will
+drink his fill of the abominable stuff at the expense of the Liberal
+candidate!"
+
+Just as soon as the speaker said this, you could see the Smith men at
+the meeting look at one another in injured surprise, and before the
+speech was half over the hall was practically emptied.
+
+After that the total prohibition plank was changed and the committee
+substituted a declaration in favour of such a form of restrictive
+license as should promote temperance while encouraging the manufacture
+of spirituous liquors, and by a severe regulation of the liquor traffic
+should place intoxicants only in the hands of those fitted to use them.
+
+
+Finally there came the great day itself, the Election Day that brought,
+as everybody knows, the crowning triumph of Mr. Smith's career. There is
+no need to speak of it at any length, because it has become a matter of
+history.
+
+In any case, everybody who has ever seen Mariposa knows just what
+election day is like. The shops, of course, are, as a matter of custom,
+all closed, and the bar rooms are all closed by law so that you have to
+go in by the back way. All the people are in their best clothes and at
+first they walk up and down the street in a solemn way just as they do
+on the twelfth of July and on St. Patrick's Day, before the fun begins.
+Everybody keeps looking in at the different polling places to see if
+anybody else has voted yet, because, of course, nobody cares to vote
+first for fear of being fooled after all and voting on the wrong side.
+
+Most of all did the supporters of Mr. Smith, acting under his
+instructions, hang back from the poll in the early hours. To Mr. Smith's
+mind, voting was to be conducted on the same plan as bear-shooting.
+
+"Hold back your votes, boys," he said, "and don't be too eager. Wait
+till she begins to warm up and then let 'em have it good and hard."
+
+In each of the polling places in Mariposa there is a returning officer
+and with him are two scrutineers, and the electors, I say, peep in and
+out like mice looking into a trap. But if once the scrutineers get a man
+well into the polling booth, they push him in behind a little curtain
+and make him vote. The voting, of course, is by secret ballot, so that
+no one except the scrutineers and the returning officer and the two or
+three people who may be round the poll can possibly tell how a man has
+voted.
+
+That's how it comes about that the first results are often so
+contradictory and conflicting. Sometimes the poll is badly arranged
+and the scrutineers are unable to see properly just how the ballots
+are being marked and they count up the Liberals and Conservatives in
+different ways. Often, too, a voter makes his mark so hurriedly and
+carelessly that they have to pick it out of the ballot box and look at
+it to see what it is.
+
+I suppose that may have been why it was that in Mariposa the results
+came out at first in such a conflicting way. Perhaps that was how it
+was that the first reports showed that Edward Drone the Independent
+candidate was certain to win. You should have seen how the excitement
+grew upon the streets when the news was circulated. In the big rallies
+and meetings of the Liberals and Conservatives, everybody had pretty
+well forgotten all about Drone, and when the news got round at about
+four o'clock that the Drone vote was carrying the poll, the people were
+simply astounded. Not that they were not pleased. On the contrary.
+They were delighted. Everybody came up to Drone and shook hands and
+congratulated him and told him that they had known all along that what
+the country wanted was a straight, honest, non-partisan representation.
+The Conservatives said openly that they were sick of party, utterly done
+with it, and the Liberals said that they hated it. Already three or four
+of them had taken Drone aside and explained that what was needed in the
+town was a straight, clean, non-partisan post-office, built on a piece
+of ground of a strictly non-partisan character, and constructed under
+contracts that were not tainted and smirched with party affiliation. Two
+or three men were willing to show to Drone just where a piece of ground
+of this character could be bought. They told him too that in the matter
+of the postmastership itself they had nothing against Trelawney, the
+present postmaster, in any personal sense, and would say nothing against
+him except merely that he was utterly and hopelessly unfit for his job
+and that if Drone believed, as he had said he did, in a purified civil
+service, he ought to begin by purifying Trelawney.
+
+Already Edward Drone was beginning to feel something of what it meant
+to hold office and there was creeping into his manner the quiet
+self-importance which is the first sign of conscious power.
+
+In fact, in that brief half-hour of office, Drone had a chance to
+see something of what it meant. Henry McGinnis came to him and asked
+straight out for a job as federal census-taker on the ground that he
+was hard up and had been crippled with rheumatism all winter. Nelson
+Williamson asked for the post of wharf master on the plea that he
+had been laid up with sciatica all winter and was absolutely fit for
+nothing. Erasmus Archer asked him if he could get his boy Pete into one
+of the departments at Ottawa, and made a strong case of it by explaining
+that he had tried his cussedest to get Pete a job anywhere else and it
+was simply impossible. Not that Pete wasn't a willing boy, but he was
+slow,--even his father admitted it,--slow as the devil, blast him, and
+with no head for figures and unfortunately he'd never had the schooling
+to bring him on. But if Drone could get him in at Ottawa, his father
+truly believed it would be the very place for him. Surely in the Indian
+Department or in the Astronomical Branch or in the New Canadian Navy
+there must be any amount of opening for a boy like this? And to all of
+these requests Drone found himself explaining that he would take the
+matter under his very earnest consideration and that they must remember
+that he had to consult his colleagues and not merely follow the dictates
+of his own wishes. In fact, if he had ever in his life had any envy of
+Cabinet Ministers, he lost it in this hour.
+
+But Drone's hour was short. Even before the poll had closed in Mariposa,
+the news came sweeping in, true or false, that Bagshaw was carrying
+the county. The second concession had gone for Bagshaw in a regular
+landslide, six votes to only two for Smith,--and all down the township
+line road (where the hay farms are) Bagshaw was said to be carrying all
+before him.
+
+Just as soon as that news went round the town, they launched the
+Mariposa band of the Knights of Pythias (every man in it is a Liberal)
+down the Main Street with big red banners in front of it with the motto
+BAGSHAW FOREVER in letters a foot high. Such rejoicing and enthusiasm
+began to set in as you never saw. Everybody crowded round Bagshaw on the
+steps of the Mariposa House and shook his hand and said they were proud
+to see the day and that the Liberal party was the glory of the Dominion
+and that as for this idea of non-partisan politics the very thought
+of it made them sick. Right away in the committee rooms they began
+to organize the demonstration for the evening with lantern slides and
+speeches and they arranged for a huge bouquet to be presented to Bagshaw
+on the platform by four little girls (all Liberals) all dressed in
+white.
+
+And it was just at this juncture, with one hour of voting left, that
+Mr. Smith emerged from his committee rooms and turned his voters on the
+town, much as the Duke of Wellington sent the whole line to the charge
+at Waterloo. From every committee room and sub-committee room they
+poured out in flocks with blue badges fluttering on their coats.
+
+"Get at it, boys," said Mr. Smith, "vote and keep on voting till they
+make you quit."
+
+Then he turned to his campaign assistant. "Billy," he said, "wire down
+to the city that I'm elected by an overwhelming majority and tell them
+to wire it right back. Send word by telephone to all the polling places
+in the county that the hull town has gone solid Conservative and tell
+them to send the same news back here. Get carpenters and tell them to
+run up a platform in front of the hotel; tell them to take the bar door
+clean off its hinges and be all ready the minute the poll quits."
+
+It was that last hour that did it. Just as soon as the big posters
+went up in the windows of the Mariposa Newspacket with the telegraphic
+despatch that Josh Smith was reported in the city to be elected, and was
+followed by the messages from all over the county, the voters hesitated
+no longer. They had waited, most of them, all through the day, not
+wanting to make any error in their vote, but when they saw the Smith men
+crowding into the polls and heard the news from the outside, they went
+solid in one great stampede, and by the time the poll was declared
+closed at five o'clock there was no shadow of doubt that the county was
+saved and that Josh Smith was elected for Missinaba.
+
+
+I wish you could have witnessed the scene in Mariposa that evening. It
+would have done your heart good,--such joy, such public rejoicing as you
+never saw. It turned out that there wasn't really a Liberal in the whole
+town and that there never had been. They were all Conservatives and had
+been for years and years. Men who had voted, with pain and sorrow in
+their hearts, for the Liberal party for twenty years, came out that
+evening and owned up straight that they were Conservatives. They
+said they could stand the strain no longer and simply had to confess.
+Whatever the sacrifice might mean, they were prepared to make it.
+
+Even Mr. Golgotha Gingham, the undertaker, came out and admitted that
+in working for John Henry Bagshaw he'd been going straight against his
+conscience. He said that right from the first he had had his misgivings.
+He said it had haunted him. Often at night when he would be working away
+quietly, one of these sudden misgivings would overcome him so that he
+could hardly go on with his embalming. Why, it appeared that on the very
+first day when reciprocity was proposed, he had come home and said to
+Mrs. Gingham that he thought it simply meant selling out the country.
+And the strange thing was that ever so many others had just the same
+misgivings. Trelawney admitted that he had said to Mrs. Trelawney that
+it was madness, and Jeff Thorpe, the barber, had, he admitted, gone home
+to his dinner, the first day reciprocity was talked of, and said to Mrs.
+Thorpe that it would simply kill business in the country and introduce
+a cheap, shoddy, American form of haircut that would render true loyalty
+impossible. To think that Mrs. Gingham and Mrs. Trelawney and Mrs.
+Thorpe had known all this for six months and kept quiet about it! Yet I
+think there were a good many Mrs. Ginghams in the country. It is merely
+another proof that no woman is fit for politics.
+
+
+The demonstration that night in Mariposa will never be forgotten. The
+excitement in the streets, the torchlights, the music of the band of
+the Knights of Pythias (an organization which is conservative in all but
+name), and above all the speeches and the patriotism.
+
+They had put up a big platform in front of the hotel, and on it were
+Mr. Smith and his chief workers, and behind them was a perfect forest of
+flags. They presented a huge bouquet of flowers to Mr. Smith, handed to
+him by four little girls in white,--the same four that I spoke of above,
+for it turned out that they were all Conservatives.
+
+Then there were the speeches. Judge Pepperleigh spoke and said that
+there was no need to dwell on the victory that they had achieved,
+because it was history; there was no occasion to speak of what part he
+himself had played, within the limits of his official position, because
+what he had done was henceforth a matter of history; and Nivens, the
+lawyer, said that he would only say just a few words, because anything
+that he might have done was now history; later generations, he said,
+might read it but it was not for him to speak of it, because it belonged
+now to the history of the country. And, after them, others spoke in the
+same strain and all refused absolutely to dwell on the subject (for more
+than half an hour) on the ground that anything that they might have done
+was better left for future generations to investigate. And no doubt this
+was very true, as to some things, anyway.
+
+Mr. Smith, of course, said nothing. He didn't have to,--not for four
+years,--and he knew it.
+
+
+
+
+TWELVE. L'Envoi. The Train to Mariposa
+
+It leaves the city every day about five o'clock in the evening, the
+train for Mariposa.
+
+Strange that you did not know of it, though you come from the little
+town--or did, long years ago.
+
+Odd that you never knew, in all these years, that the train was there
+every afternoon, puffing up steam in the city station, and that you
+might have boarded it any day and gone home. No, not "home,"--of course
+you couldn't call it "home" now; "home" means that big red sandstone
+house of yours in the costlier part of the city. "Home" means, in a way,
+this Mausoleum Club where you sometimes talk with me of the times that
+you had as a boy in Mariposa.
+
+But of course "home" would hardly be the word you would apply to the
+little town, unless perhaps, late at night, when you'd been sitting
+reading in a quiet corner somewhere such a book as the present one.
+
+Naturally you don't know of the Mariposa train now. Years ago, when you
+first came to the city as a boy with your way to make, you knew of it
+well enough, only too well. The price of a ticket counted in those days,
+and though you knew of the train you couldn't take it, but sometimes
+from sheer homesickness you used to wander down to the station on a
+Friday afternoon after your work, and watch the Mariposa people getting
+on the train and wish that you could go.
+
+Why, you knew that train at one time better, I suppose, than any other
+single thing in the city, and loved it too for the little town in the
+sunshine that it ran to.
+
+Do you remember how when you first began to make money you used to plan
+that just as soon as you were rich, really rich, you'd go back home
+again to the little town and build a great big house with a fine
+verandah,--no stint about it, the best that money could buy, planed
+lumber, every square foot of it, and a fine picket fence in front of it.
+
+It was to be one of the grandest and finest houses that thought
+could conceive; much finer, in true reality, than that vast palace of
+sandstone with the porte cochere and the sweeping conservatories that
+you afterwards built in the costlier part of the city.
+
+But if you have half forgotten Mariposa, and long since lost the way to
+it, you are only like the greater part of the men here in this Mausoleum
+Club in the city. Would you believe it that practically every one of
+them came from Mariposa once upon a time, and that there isn't one of
+them that doesn't sometimes dream in the dull quiet of the long evening
+here in the club, that some day he will go back and see the place.
+
+They all do. Only they're half ashamed to own it.
+
+Ask your neighbour there at the next table whether the partridge that
+they sometimes serve to you here can be compared for a moment to the
+birds that he and you, or he and some one else, used to shoot as boys in
+the spruce thickets along the lake. Ask him if he ever tasted duck that
+could for a moment be compared to the black ducks in the rice marsh
+along the Ossawippi. And as for fish, and fishing,--no, don't ask him
+about that, for if he ever starts telling you of the chub they used
+to catch below the mill dam and the green bass that used to lie in the
+water-shadow of the rocks beside the Indian's Island, not even the long
+dull evening in this club would be long enough for the telling of it.
+
+But no wonder they don't know about the five o'clock train for Mariposa.
+Very few people know about it. Hundreds of them know that there is a
+train that goes out at five o'clock, but they mistake it. Ever so many
+of them think it's just a suburban train. Lots of people that take it
+every day think it's only the train to the golf grounds, but the joke
+is that after it passes out of the city and the suburbs and the golf
+grounds, it turns itself little by little into the Mariposa train,
+thundering and pounding towards the north with hemlock sparks pouring
+out into the darkness from the funnel of it.
+
+Of course you can't tell it just at first. All those people that are
+crowding into it with golf clubs, and wearing knickerbockers and flat
+caps, would deceive anybody. That crowd of suburban people going home
+on commutation tickets and sometimes standing thick in the aisles, those
+are, of course, not Mariposa people. But look round a little bit and
+you'll find them easily enough. Here and there in the crowd those people
+with the clothes that are perfectly all right and yet look odd in some
+way, the women with the peculiar hats and the--what do you say?--last
+year's fashions? Ah yes, of course, that must be it.
+
+Anyway, those are the Mariposa people all right enough. That man with
+the two-dollar panama and the glaring spectacles is one of the greatest
+judges that ever adorned the bench of Missinaba County. That clerical
+gentleman with the wide black hat, who is explaining to the man with
+him the marvellous mechanism of the new air brake (one of the most
+conspicuous illustrations of the divine structure of the physical
+universe), surely you have seen him before. Mariposa people! Oh yes,
+there are any number of them on the train every day.
+
+But of course you hardly recognize them while the train is still passing
+through the suburbs and the golf district and the outlying parts of the
+city area. But wait a little, and you will see that when the city
+is well behind you, bit by bit the train changes its character. The
+electric locomotive that took you through the city tunnels is off now
+and the old wood engine is hitched on in its place. I suppose, very
+probably, you haven't seen one of these wood engines since you were a
+boy forty years ago,--the old engine with a wide top like a hat on its
+funnel, and with sparks enough to light up a suit for damages once in
+every mile.
+
+Do you see, too, that the trim little cars that came out of the city
+on the electric suburban express are being discarded now at the way
+stations, one by one, and in their place is the old familiar car with
+the stuff cushions in red plush (how gorgeous it once seemed!) and with
+a box stove set up in one end of it? The stove is burning furiously at
+its sticks this autumn evening, for the air sets in chill as you get
+clear away from the city and are rising up to the higher ground of the
+country of the pines and the lakes.
+
+Look from the window as you go. The city is far behind now and right and
+left of you there are trim farms with elms and maples near them and with
+tall windmills beside the barns that you can still see in the gathering
+dusk. There is a dull red light from the windows of the farmstead. It
+must be comfortable there after the roar and clatter of the city, and
+only think of the still quiet of it.
+
+As you sit back half dreaming in the car, you keep wondering why it is
+that you never came up before in all these years. Ever so many times you
+planned that just as soon as the rush and strain of business eased up a
+little, you would take the train and go back to the little town to see
+what it was like now, and if things had changed much since your day.
+But each time when your holidays came, somehow you changed your mind and
+went down to Naragansett or Nagahuckett or Nagasomething, and left over
+the visit to Mariposa for another time.
+
+It is almost night now. You can still see the trees and the fences and
+the farmsteads, but they are fading fast in the twilight. They have
+lengthened out the train by this time with a string of flat cars and
+freight cars between where we are sitting and the engine. But at every
+crossway we can hear the long muffled roar of the whistle, dying to a
+melancholy wail that echoes into the woods; the woods, I say, for the
+farms are thinning out and the track plunges here and there into great
+stretches of bush,--tall tamerack and red scrub willow and with a
+tangled undergrowth of bush that has defied for two generations all
+attempts to clear it into the form of fields.
+
+Why, look, that great space that seems to open out in the half-dark of
+the falling evening,--why, surely yes,--Lake Ossawippi, the big lake,
+as they used to call it, from which the river runs down to the smaller
+lake,--Lake Wissanotti,--where the town of Mariposa has lain waiting for
+you there for thirty years.
+
+This is Lake Ossawippi surely enough. You would know it anywhere by the
+broad, still, black water with hardly a ripple, and with the grip of the
+coming frost already on it. Such a great sheet of blackness it looks as
+the train thunders along the side, swinging the curve of the embankment
+at a breakneck speed as it rounds the corner of the lake.
+
+How fast the train goes this autumn night! You have travelled, I know
+you have; in the Empire State Express, and the New Limited and the
+Maritime Express that holds the record of six hundred whirling miles
+from Paris to Marseilles. But what are they to this, this mad career,
+this breakneck speed, this thundering roar of the Mariposa local driving
+hard to its home! Don't tell me that the speed is only twenty-five miles
+an hour. I don't care what it is. I tell you, and you can prove it for
+yourself if you will, that that train of mingled flat cars and coaches
+that goes tearing into the night, its engine whistle shrieking out its
+warning into the silent woods and echoing over the dull still lake, is
+the fastest train in the whole world.
+
+Yes, and the best too,--the most comfortable, the most reliable, the
+most luxurious and the speediest train that ever turned a wheel.
+
+And the most genial, the most sociable too. See how the passengers all
+turn and talk to one another now as they get nearer and nearer to the
+little town. That dull reserve that seemed to hold the passengers in
+the electric suburban has clean vanished and gone. They are
+talking,--listen,--of the harvest, and the late election, and of how
+the local member is mentioned for the cabinet and all the old familiar
+topics of the sort. Already the conductor has changed his glazed hat for
+an ordinary round Christie and you can hear the passengers calling him
+and the brakesman "Bill" and "Sam" as if they were all one family.
+
+What is it now--nine thirty? Ah, then we must be nearing the town,--this
+big bush that we are passing through, you remember it surely as the
+great swamp just this side of the bridge over the Ossawippi? There is
+the bridge itself, and the long roar of the train as it rushes sounding
+over the trestle work that rises above the marsh. Hear the clatter as we
+pass the semaphores and switch lights! We must be close in now!
+
+What? it feels nervous and strange to be coming here again after all
+these years? It must indeed. No, don't bother to look at the reflection
+of your face in the window-pane shadowed by the night outside. Nobody
+could tell you now after all these years. Your face has changed in these
+long years of money-getting in the city. Perhaps if you had come back
+now and again, just at odd times, it wouldn't have been so.
+
+There,--you hear it?--the long whistle of the locomotive, one, two,
+three! You feel the sharp slackening of the train as it swings round
+the curve of the last embankment that brings it to the Mariposa station.
+See, too, as we round the curve, the row of the flashing lights, the
+bright windows of the depot.
+
+How vivid and plain it all is. Just as it used to be thirty years ago.
+There is the string of the hotel 'buses, drawn up all ready for the
+train, and as the train rounds in and stops hissing and panting at the
+platform, you can hear above all other sounds the cry of the brakesmen
+and the porters:
+
+"MARIPOSA! MARIPOSA!"
+
+
+And as we listen, the cry grows fainter and fainter in our ears and
+we are sitting here again in the leather chairs of the Mausoleum Club,
+talking of the little Town in the Sunshine that once we knew.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, by 
+Stephen Leacock
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