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Title: Be Good to Yourself. A Book of Short Stories.
Author: McClung, Nellie Letitia (1873-1951)
Date of first publication: 1930
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Toronto: Thomas Allen, 1930
Date first posted: 24 October 2010
Date last updated: 24 October 2010
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #643

This ebook was produced by: Al Haines




BE GOOD TO YOURSELF


A BOOK OF SHORT STORIES


BY

NELLIE L. McCLUNG




THOMAS ALLEN, Publisher

TORONTO   CANADA




COPYRIGHT, CANADA, 1930

BY

NELLIE L. McCLUNG




PRINTED IN CANADA

T. H. BEST PRINTING CO., LIMITED

TORONTO, ONT.




Other Books by

NELLIE L. McCLUNG


  Sowing Seeds in Danny
  The Second Chance
  Purple Springs
  Painted Fires
  When Christmas Crossed the Peace
  The Black Creek Stopping House
  All We like Sheep
  In Times Like These
  The Next of Kin




CONTENTS


  Let Us Be Good to Ourselves
  We Are Saved by Our Limitations
  As In a Looking Glass
  Jane Brown
  The General
  Lost Years
  A Holiday at Home
  Security
  Are We a Gloomy People?
  The Ways of Women
  We Are All the Same
  How it Feels to be a Defeated Candidate
  Untimely Tears
  Too Late for Her
  Young Enough to Know Better
  Poll 47
  Thirty Years
  The Psychologist
  The Rainbow
  The Woman Who Missed Her Own Party
  Cats
  The Life of the Party
  You Never Know When it Will End
  Keeping Friends With the Family
  Frosted Grapes
  My Religion
  Good Mileage
  Higher Education
  What We Don't Use, We Lose
  Every Woman is Not a House-keeper
  When in Doubt, Please Yourself
  Wise Women Know Their Own Value
  They are Not All Married
  The Country School
  Behold the Pioneers
  The Roarin' Game
  Magic
  Adam's Fall
  Confirmation




BE GOOD TO YOURSELF




LET US BE GOOD TO OURSELVES

Most of us are not.  We remember and tell of every slip we have made.
If we forget to mail a letter, keep an appointment, deliver a message,
we spread the news, giving all our friends the impression that we are
not reliable, forgetting that the world takes us at our own valuation.

We have stayed out late at parties, because we hadn't the nerve to
break away, and then have been so tired the next morning we had not
time for the bath and careful dressing which would have fortified us
for the day's happenings, but instead had to dash out for the 8:20 car
with the sense of guilt that comes with soiled cuffs and an unwashed
skin.

We are so busy and concerned with our own and other people's affairs we
have not time to choose our food wisely, and so we eat what is handiest
and acquire indigestion and gloom and a sense of impending disaster.
We know that whipped cream does not agree with us, but when we go out
to a luncheon and it is there on the salad, satiny-white and billowy,
we eat it, because we do not want to appear rude.  We haven't time to
walk, to read, to relax, nor to take the hair treatments we know we
should have.  There are so many parties and bridges, sometimes we feel
we can't face another one, but we do--poor, over-worked slaves that we
are!

We haven't even the grace to let ourselves forget the unpleasant
happenings of life.  When someone slights us, we feel so badly over it
we simply have to tell someone, and so write a full account of it to
our friends, thereby engraving the whole matter on the tables of our
memory; and then we grieve over it, and stupidly say we wish we could
forget it!  When we lie awake at night, we torment ourselves by
picturing how wretched we will feel the next day, instead of turning on
the light and pleasantly reading the story we had intended to read the
day before.

We are clever people, efficient and high-powered, but in our zeal to
get things done we are forgetting the simple art of living.

Let us make a resolve--that we will begin to-day to relax, and loiter,
and potter around, and be lazy if we feel like it once in a while, and
take time to meditate, and watch the sun go down behind the hill.

Let us be good to ourselves.




WE ARE SAVED BY OUR LIMITATIONS

A box is a box because it has ends.

A house is a house because it has walls; a garden must have a fence.

When I was a little girl going to school, there broke out in our
neighborhood at one time an epidemic of crocheting, and all the girls
except me were doing miles of chains and doubles and singles, and
talked mysteriously of star stitches and seed stitches and mitred
corners.  There was one edging they were doing that did appeal to
me--it looked so easy and quick and was really beautiful with its
clover leaves lying fore and aft.  So I asked one of the girls to show
me.  Then I found out that I had slow-moving fingers.  I could never
make the steel hook glint and glimmer as the others could, nor could I
crook my little finger in that professional curve which seemed to go
with this art.  I therefore found myself left out of the mystic
sisterhood who fell to work at each recess and even snitched a few
precious minutes under cover of a desk, during school hours.

To save my pride I had to take up a position of indifference.  I
claimed that I did not want "edging" on my underwear, but I remember
how sad and forsaken I felt when other little girls were praised for
their industry, and admiring relatives told of the "sets" they had
made.  I had to do something to make up for my lack, and so I plunged
into fractions and spelling, and learned to recite all the poems in the
Third Reader, and when on Friday afternoons I followed Lucy Grey right
out to the middle of the plank, or with appropriate gestures stood
beside the Boy on the burning deck, whence all but he had fled, I knew
that in that brief bright hour I had the edge on the hand-workers.  I
was being saved by my limitations, though I did not know it.

I wonder if women will ever show as much sense as men in the way they
use their time.  No man tries to do everything.  He recognizes his
limitations and abides by them.  No man tries to make his own clothes
and hats or pyjamas, nor does he undertake to keep his office clean,
nor write his own letters, nor make Christmas presents.  Having chosen
a business or profession he attends to that and lets some one else do
all these things for him.

But women, even business women, do so many things.  They mend and cook
and put down jams and pickles and make over their clothes, and tire
their eyes making dresser scarves for people who are not greatly in
need of dresser scarves, and hurry through their work to get away to
the demonstration of clay modelling so that they may learn to make
various little do-dads for their friends who already have more do-dads
than they know what to do with.  It is all a hang-over from the days
when women's time was not worth anything.  We still have the feeling
that we must do everything we can do.

I know.  I am speaking out of a full and troubled heart.  I too am
cursed with the desire to do things I would be wise to leave alone.
Right at this moment the urge is on me to make a rug like the one I saw
last week at the Canadian Handicrafts Festival--the prettiest thing,
hooked on canvas and made of old underwear brightly dyed, and done in
splotches edged with black.  There will be many hours of labor on it.
Cutting the rags is a mussy job.  The rug when done will not be very
well done and will be worth four dollars and forty-nine cents.  But I
am in the throes of the idea.  Everyone has her weaknesses.  Mats are
mine.

We have the vote.  Every profession is open to us.  We have been
declared to be persons.  There is much real work to be done.  But we
have not yet learned to value our time.  Let us be thankful there are
many things we simply cannot do.  Nature has mercifully removed some
temptations from us.  We are saved by our limitations.




AS IN A LOOKING GLASS

It is not given to everyone to look into the crystal of life and see
ten years ahead.  But the privilege came to me one day not long ago,
and I got a glimpse of myself--a fleeting, terrifying glimpse.

I was on a street car, hurrying to a meeting, where I was going to
introduce the speaker.  I had been delayed at the last minute by one of
those discursive telephone correspondents who speak in paragraphs.

Now, of course, no one can really hurry on a street car.  But I was
trying to push that car, with both feet, and exerting what Mr. Gandhi
calls "soul force" to drive it along.  At every corner people stood
waiting to get on--women with baby-carriages; late comers half a block
away, running and waving.  I begrudged the time the conductor waited
for them.

A woman came on the car and sat near me, and even in my perturbed state
I noticed her.  She had such a familiar look, I almost spoke to her.

She began to talk to a woman across the aisle.  I think the woman asked
her how she was getting on, or maybe she did not need to be asked.  I
couldn't help hearing; not that I tried--I like to listen-in on
street-car conversations.

"I am doing it all as usual," she said in a voice that carried all over
the car.  "I have found out if you want a thing done, you had better do
it yourself--the longer I live, the less I bother with people.  Yes, I
believe in co-operation--if one person does it..."

I drew nearer, pretending I wanted to get out of the draft.

She used her hands when she talked.  "I didn't want to take it for
another year, but what could I do?  There was no one else who had been
in it from the beginning, and I have put too much into it to let it
fall down now.  I know it's too much for me.  My blood pressure has
gone up twenty points in the last month--and there you are!

"The younger women won't be bothered.  They are too busy amusing
themselves.  They may promise to do something, but when the day comes,
they phone that Charley is coming home, or going away, or has broken
his leg, or had his tonsils out, or his mother has died, or come to
visit them, or something.  And after listening for ten minutes, you
find out they are not going to do it.  So I save time by not asking
them!"

I watched her, fascinated.  Her hair, gray and rather stringy, was
carelessly rolled in a knot under her hat, and one strand had come out,
giving her that pathetic and distraught look which only a lock of
misguided gray hair can give.  Brown, black, or red hair can escape
from its moorings and carry a certain careless charm.  But gray hair
has to be in its place, or its owner goes at once into the depressed
class.

Her clothes were good, well made, and of becoming style, but they were
hurriedly put on.  I am sure she was answering the phone when she put
on her scarf.  Her hands, plump and marked with brown spots, had a
smear of ink on the right second finger.  Her gloves hung carelessly
from her pocket; one stocking had a twist; even her glasses were
smeared.

"I have been so tied up with this Festival," she said, "I have hardly
had time to comb my hair, much less say my prayers.  My family are all
cross with me.  But next year I will be out of it all, and I am going
to catch up on all the things I have been missing."

Then it was that I recognized her!

Myself!  Ten years hence!  Myself, a little older, a little stouter.
Amplified!--unless the signs were changed.

And in that blinding moment, a resolve came to me.  The signs would be
changed.

I leaned back in the seat.  I stopped pushing the car.  I put on my
gloves, carefully rubbing out every wrinkle.  I pulled my scarf down
neatly, and using the window for a mirror adjusted my hat and pulled
down enough hair to soften my face.  All at once it came to me that if
I were five minutes late it would not matter greatly.  A new
orientation of values had come to me.

The next day I had my hair cut.  I bought new clothes.  I joined a Golf
Club.  And these physical renovations were merely indicative.  That
revealing glimpse down the years reconstructed my mental attitude.

I can idle along now, with the cheerful abandon of a window-washer who
works by the hour, with meals provided!




JANE BROWN

  I don't know what I'll do," he said,
    And a large tear splashed on his sunburnt hand;
  "Here's the Spring upon us, and my wife dead!
  And look at the Summer's work I've planned:
  I've got new land--there'll be men to feed,
  And hired girls are an extravagant breed;
  They smash your dishes and waste your stuff
  And never think they are getting enough,
    And they always boil the tea!
  My Jane always seemed so full of grit
  It wasn't a bit like her to quit--
  At least without saying a word to me."

    "Then she wasn't ailing?" the minister said--
  He came out when he heard Mrs. Brown was dead,
  To try to comfort the one bereft:--
    "Oh!  She grumbled a little as women will
  But she never cost me a doctor's bill.
  Ain't this an awful way to be left?
    She was a dandy, was my Jane,
    Strong as a horse--and never complained;
    I'll never get her like again:
  Many a time when I went to bed
  I'd hear her up thumping out loaves of bread;
  When I came down in the morning light
  There was a tableful, brown and light,
  I tell you what--'twas a splendid sight!"

    "I suppose you often told her so"--the minister said--
    "Well--I don't know--I never was one to make a show,
  But although I never said so straight,
  I guess she knew I liked her gait."

    "I suppose she had help," the minister said,
  As he looked at the toilworn hands of the dead;
  "For the house is big, and the children small,
  One pair of hands could not do it all."

    "Oh--we tried one girl for days and days,
  But I could not stand her shiftless ways.
  Jane was patient and thought she'd learn,
  But that girl would break more than she could earn.
  Of course we always had old Miss Frame
  Out here for a week when the children came,
  And I tell you it galled me to pay for a week
  A dollar a day to that old freak."

    "I suppose you often told your wife
  That she was the joy and delight of your life;
  That home wasn't home without her face
  And how much you missed her from her place."

    "Well--I don't know as I ever said so straight--
  But I told her the house was in an awful state!
  I said I was tired of cold boiled tea
  And Miss Frame could not quit too soon for me:
  I told her my mother never lay in bed
  Three days in her life,--'till she lay there dead--
  At least I've often heard that told--
  She died when I was three days old."

    "A splendid helpmate to you was given,--
  You have children, too?"
          "Yes, six or seven--
  The youngest one is not real strong--
  We never knew just what was wrong--
  See, here are the kids--" and in two short rows
  Six children sat in their Sunday clothes,
  While kindfaced women everywhere
  Bestowed upon them unwonted care;
  But the old, sad wonder was in their eyes
  Which only comes--when a mother dies.
  The youngest one with the withered hand,
  So young, no one thought he could understand,
  But he gathered up that air of gloom
  And his voice rang out in the quiet room,
  And if ever a baby voiced despair,
  That little one cried--"It is not fair!"

  "Come out for a while," the farmer said,
  "That kid's sharp voice goes through my head."

    Outside 'twas a day of dazzling sun
  That warns old Winter his days are done:
  Cattle roamed through the oaten stacks
  Enjoying the sunshine on their backs;
  White pigs did long tunnelling stunts,
  Filling the air with contented grunts;
  A young colt frolicked beside the mare
  Who nosed it about with motherly care
  As she lazily yawned in the soft Spring air.

    "You've a lot of machines," the minister said,
  As he looked around at the rakes and drills
  That had overflowed from the big red shed;
  "You've paid some big machinery bills."
  Machines were there, blue, green, and red,
  And a threshing machine with a canvas head,
  While broken ones lay old and sere
  As if they had lain there many a year.

  "We have to have them," the farmer said,
  "No matter what we have to pay,
  For the season's short--and it's up to us
  To make the best of every day;
  These things can neither be borrowed nor lent,
  And it's foolish to try to save a cent.
  You have to use your judgment though,
  Folks try to do you every day,
  And it's not more than a month ago
  Since a fellow came all thro' this way--
  And he surely was a smooth-tongued gink--
  And he tried to sell me a kitchen sink.
  Jane would have taken it on the jump,
  For she always did want a kitchen pump;
  But I showed her it would bring no return
  And fifty dollars is a lot to burn."

  Then the neighbors came, and they laid her away,
  And they blamed the Lord in the same old way;
  And they wondered how if God is good
  He could take a mother from her brood;
  But looking down on that poor, tired face,
  The minister knew what had taken place;
  The Great Physician from the skies
  Had looked down with His kindly eyes
  And ordered the treatment He thought best,
    "_For Jane Brown I order change and rest_!"
  Then He did as the country doctors do,
  Not only wrote, but filled it too.
  And the minister blushed as he read the word,
  "Inasmuch as it hath pleased the Lord."
  And all the way home the graybird's song
  Piped out, "It's wrong--it's wrong--it's wrong!"

    Mrs. Brown passed out on St. Patrick's Day,
  Mr. Brown dried his eyes about the end of May;
  He painted his buckboard and looked abroad,
  And decided he'd try Bud Thompson's Maud.
  For Maud was willing, and big and strong,
  And he thought they'd be able to get along.

    So he went to Maud and stated his case,
  And he said he thought she'd a lovely face;
  He always had liked her quick, smart ways,
  And he believed he'd marry her some of these days;
  How would she like to be his wife?
  But Maud replied--"Not on your life--
  Of endless toil I know I'd tire
  And for an early grave I have no desire;
  You've made a success of working land,
  So at housework why not try your hand?
  When you have worked a month or two
  You'll know the truth your poor wife knew;
  Your work has been done by four-horse team,
  By man and tool and gasoline;
  Your yard looks like a machinery shower
  But your house was run on woman power;
  And one day of course, that power gave out!
  And that is how it comes about
  That you must fill that woman's place,
  And you think I have a lovely face!
  But I am wise--and so decline,
  You're very kind--but not for mine!"

  John Brown drove slowly down the lane
  And wished he had not lost poor Jane.




THE GENERAL

Loretta Jane.  That was her name.  She looks it too--a dark, angular,
solemn-faced woman with a gloomy eye--and she sighed deeply when I
showed her through the house.

"Eight rooms and a bath," she said wearily, "and I suppose no room for
a garden."

I confessed there was not.  Instinctively, I felt that she did not
approve of us.

She decided that she would try us for a month, however, and began to
work next day.  I saw at once that she knew her business, but there was
a detached air of indifference about her that impressed me unfavorably.
Her mind was evidently far away, and I could see that she merely
tolerated us.

Before the end of the month, scarlet fever broke out, and the two
children took it.  When I went into the kitchen to tell her the
children were sick, I fully expected that she would give me notice, for
if she did not like us when we were all well, it was not to be expected
that we would stand any chance when fifty percent. of us were sick.

"Loretta Jane," I began politely, "I am afraid the two children have
taken scarlet fever--they have some of the symptoms, and I am keeping
them in bed; they are very healthy children and it is not likely--"

She interrupted me there.

"Do you know what to do for them?  Are you any good around sick people?
Have you given them physic?  Are they running a temperature?"

She was on her way upstairs as she fired these questions at me, and the
answers did not interest her at all, for she was in the children's room
herself making her own observations by the time I caught up to her.

"We will separate them," she said quietly.  "Fred will go in the spare
room."

I obeyed her without a word--she had a way with her.  "There is nothing
to fear," she assured me, "when the cases are taken in time."

From the day the children took sick, Loretta Jane became a new
person--a friendly, pleasant, cheerful, happy woman who took charge of
all of us.  She washed, cooked, swept, and dusted.  More than that she
sang at her work, and in her spare time told stories to the sick
children.  Everyone of us fell in love with her and wondered why we
ever thought her dull and uninteresting.

After the children were better, she cleaned and fumigated every room in
the house, and her happiness seemed to increase as she progressed from
room to room.

About that time I began to brag about her to my friends, and filled
more than one of them with envy when I told them she had cleaned the
silver before breakfast.  I did not tell them that she had sniffed a
few times when I brought out some badly tarnished pieces, and muttered
something about fine old silver being wasted on some people.  At least
it sounded like that.  I did not catch her exact words, but I knew I
was being reproved!

When the house-cleaning was all done and the children were able to be
out again, I noticed to my dismay that Loretta Jane's enthusiasm for us
began to flag.  We ceased to interest her and her old gloomy manner
returned.  I suggested that she have two afternoons off instead of one,
but this was received with scorn.

I decided hastily to give a dinner before she had time to leave me, for
I felt sure she would give me notice any day.  With the extra work of
getting ready for the dinner her cheerfulness returned, and when the
night came I had every reason to be proud of her excellent cooking and
perfect service.  Evidently she lived on great occasions.

After the dinner she drooped again, and found life flat and stale.  She
grew petulant with the children, and disposed to argue on matters of
religion with me.  Then I decided to give a dance for my niece.  When I
told Loretta Jane about it, she roused herself like an old fire horse
when he hears the gong.  And the dance was a great success!

That was last week.  Now I am worried to know what to do!  I can't
afford to entertain all the time.  The children are not at all likely
to be sick.  The house is clean.  The preserving season is a long way
off!  Loretta Jane, with her thirst for excitement, begins to wear on
me; for I am a quiet woman and I long for rest.

I know what would perk her up!

If I should die tonight--or even break a leg--or sprain an ankle--or
get called away to attend the bedside of a dying relative!  But I am
not prepared to do any of these things--and I am worried!  I know now
why girls like Loretta Jane are called "Generals."

I know she is going to leave me.  I feel it coming.  We are too
hopelessly healthy and normal.  Our steadygoing commonplaceness is
smothering her!  She will leave us--unless some misfortune overtakes us.

I wonder if she has not a few prototypes in life, though not so clearly
defined--the people who are kind to their sick friends, but neglect
their well friends; who will step in only when trouble comes; who can
bear great sorrows well, but go down under the little irritating
things; who will write a cheque to cover the big obligations of life,
but have no small change for everyday use.




LOST YEARS

I know where my lost years have gone, and the manner of their going.

They have been talked away by myself and other people whose
conversational efforts I have inspired.

I have a fatal gift for starting monologues.  If there is a vein of
idle oral ore anywhere in my vicinity, I will be as sure as fate to tap
it with some innocent word.

This morning I began to telephone the women of our club to see how many
of them would entertain a delegate for the convention next week.  The
first woman said she had not been well and could not bear to have a
stranger in the house she was so nervous, and then I, unhappy woman
that I was, instead of letting it go at that, asked her what was the
matter.  It was none of my business.  I had only one concern this
morning, delegates, but the foolish words were uttered!  I had asked
her what was the matter!  She told me.  She kept back nothing.  She
began in the middle of her story and worked both ways.  I could feel
that she had reached for a cushion and settled down for a pleasant
morning.  One foot went asleep, and I began to wonder if a receiver
could really grow to a person's cheekbone, and all the time my
conscience pounded it into me that I had asked for it.  Delegates,
homeless and accusing, walked the aisles of my imagination and still
the recital went on.

I cannot even take in the day's supply of ice from a perfectly new
ice-man without opening up a conversational viaduct, over which goes
heavy cargoes of domestic and social happenings.  And barbers forsake
their honorable calling altogether to stand before me waving their
scissors in an effort to solve once and for all the immigration problem
of Canada.  And once when I told one of them to get on with his work,
he was so anxious to get it all said he did not notice what he was
doing until he ran out of hair.  And I had to wear my hat for a month.

And I must confess that some of the talking I have done myself!

Often I go to meetings hoping to learn something, and slipping into a
back seat I am prepared to listen and absorb the words of wisdom that
fall from the speaker's lips.  Just about the time I have found out
what it is all about and am beginning to be glad I came I hear the
chairman say, "I see we have Mrs. McClung with us this evening, and no
doubt she would like to bring us a message."

"Would like to," do you get that?

I wonder what there is in my face which makes people think that I am
always holding up my hand for permission to speak?

And so it is that down the pleasant but windy ways of chatter my
time--too much of it has gone.




A HOLIDAY AT HOME

The Weavers have just come back from Bermuda.  The Browns are sailing
next week for Europe and will see the Passion Play.  One branch of our
family is leaving tomorrow to drive to the Coast, with every
contraption they have seen or heard of on their car, including a
meat-roaster on the engine, guaranteed to do a roast in forty miles.
Everywhere I go, people are discussing road maps, steamship sailings,
travellers' tweeds, hotel reservations.  And I, destined to spend the
two months at home, can only contribute to the chorus: "Won't that be
lovely!"

I want to go.  I want to hear and see the little red-bird in Bermuda
whose song is "Don't Worry!" repeated five times, no more and no less.
I want to feel the New Testament simplicity of the little Bavarian
town.  I want to cook a meal at Macleod Meadows.

We went today to another Trousseau Tea--Mrs. Burns, (No, she is not
getting married; she is going to New York.)  There I met two other
women who are going to be at home all summer, and all in a flash the
idea came to us, and we began to hold our own with the out-going tide.

Mrs. Brophy struck the first blow in our defence when she said it was
every woman's patriotic duty to know her own city before she travelled
about.  Mrs. Evans followed this with a neat quotation about "digging
more deeply in our own backyard."

I did not enjoy the backyard reference, knowing what I did about my
own, but I endorsed the sentiment.  My backyard has weeds in it:
chickweed, lamb's quarters, twitch grass--all the old favorites.  I had
a man do some weeding for me one day since I was left in charge, and he
cleaned out one corner, taking everything ahead of him--cariganas,
scarlet runners, and all--and although the weeds have returned the
cariganas and scarlet runners seem to be considerably put out about it.
But I played up to Mrs. Brophy's lead and said the summers were so
lovely here, I could not bear to leave.

We spoke of the joy of being able to have our dresses hanging tidily on
their own hangers in their own clothes closets, instead of being
squeezed in a valise; we said how we disliked packing and unpacking,
and remembering to put in those rolls of tissue paper in the folds of
the dresses, where they never do any good anyway; and catching trains,
and studying time tables.

We did not wish to discourage our hostess now that she had her tickets
and reservations, but we feared New York might be very hot in July, and
no doubt she would sometimes really envy us back here, enjoying the
delightfully cool and crisp nights.

We spoke of the evils of the tipping system, and roughly estimated what
we were going to save by not exposing ourselves to it.  And then the
irresistible shops in New York, planned and designed to make weak women
spend!  We pictured the return of our friend in September, with two
buffalo nickels, two one-cent American stamps, theatre checks, and a
New York car ticket in her purse, three valises full of wrinkled
clothes, with probably a trace of face powder spilled on them;
hollow-eyed from lack of sleep; ten pounds heavier from lack of
exercise; a blurred memory of flying landscapes sliding past the car
windows; her head light from constant motion ... while we three would
be slim from our temperate diet and regular exercises, the bloom of
youth on our cheeks, the light of knowledge in our eyes.

For we had decided as we talked to be very intellectual, too, and
agreed right there to go one day to our Museum and view the Dinosaurs
and fossils of the Bad Lands, and acquaint ourselves with the historic
documents we would find there.  We could learn about Sir George
Simpson, and why he crossed the Pass, and David Thompson, and know the
truth of how our city got its name, the coyote its plaintive voice, and
the dandelion its dauntless spirit.

And when our hearts crave beauty, we will take the elevator to the
eleventh floor of the big hotel and have tea on the roof, looking away
to the westward where the mountains stand all blue and silver and
snow-crested.  And we will think kindly and tenderly of poor Mrs.
Burns, traversing the sunburnt pavements of New York, with a blister on
her heel, and an ingrowing toe-nail.

And then, too, we will one day take the Ford and tie a few valises
wrapped in gunny sacks on the running board, and drive boldly into the
gate of the Sunshine Auto Camp, disregarding the gently-worded sign
that local people must not crowd in, and fetch up beside one of the
Community stoves, and there cook ourselves a meal, getting the local
color and atmosphere and feel of camp life, and catching its neighborly
spirit by borrowing a lemon squeezer from one neighbor, and the hot
frying pan from another.

And another day we will cross the ocean by taking the Blue car to Third
street east, and have a chop-suey dinner at Lovey's.  A holiday at home
has possibilities.




SECURITY

  Until to-day
  I have embroidered many a dull grey hour
  With shining bead and flashing crimson flower;
  I've changed the drab of life to gold and blue
  Thinking of all the glorious things I'll do
  When fortune comes my way!
  Until to-day
  I loved to dream of days when I shall roam
  Away from this old town I call my home;
  Away from Friday sweeping and the clink
  Of dirty dishes in a tea-stained sink:
  I loved to dream of steamers plowing through
  Tumultuous seas, white gulls against the blue;
  Of oriental silks with crumpling sound,
  With golden peacocks on a crimson ground,
  Of temple bells: and flights of flashing birds,
  And lots of things I cannot tell with words.

  To-day
  I set my dreams and dreaming all away:
  I said farewell to every plunging wave,
  I did not keep a thing: I could not save
  One yard of silk; I let the peacocks go;
  For in a flash I saw the future's map
  And knew that life--for me--was
  This
      or
          That
  You know, of course, how keen we are on oil,
  And fortunes have been made.  Old Mrs. Doyle
  Is off to Europe now on A. P. Con.
  To-day it seemed I could hold back no more,
  Here was sure fortune knocking at my door.
  I sought the bank--and drew my little store:
  I took the money crisp and new and green
  And felt myself as happy as a queen;
  Here in my hand I held the magic keys
  Which might admit me to the Seven Seas--
  The stiff new bills were like so many wings
  To bear me to the palaces of kings;
  My ears were full of sounds like drums afar--
  Sweet, vibrant words like jade and samovar!

  I found my way into the Oil Exchange
  And there I found, nor did I think it strange
  To see my neighbor; I've often heard her say
  Where things are free, she cannot stay away.
  "You've come to buy," she cried, "I knew you would!
  I wish you luck--they say Macleod is good:
  Oh don't I wish that I could take a fling!
  If I could leave, I'd go and teach a year,
  I know that I could save five hundred clear,
  And that would make a fortune....  Hear me rave!
  I get these spells ... Alas!  Alas! for me
  There's nothing but a cold eternity
  Of minding grandma.  Say, she's eighty-three
  And good for twenty more I do believe!
  I'm in for life, I tell you--no reprieve.

  Isn't old age the bunk?--I'll say it is.
  And now what gets my goat is--Dan and Liz
  Should take their turn, but do you think they will?
  Oh no, they leave it all for Jim and Lill.
  They send a little money now and then
  And think, no doubt, that they have done a heap;
  I wish they had to stand and hear her weep
  And cry that no one cares for her at all.

  "A dozen times a night I have to go...
  It's months since I have had a full night's sleep:
  And here's a thing that surely gets me wrong,
  Mother had plenty once, but it's all gone.
  Young Fred, the clever son, the Financier,
  Who goes with Et, his stylish wife, each year
  On buying trips to Europe--they were sure
  They could take mother's modest little pile
  And double it in no time.  Fred, it seems, could not endure
  To think of money lying in a vault where father left it
  Earning five per cent.; when he, brave soul, could place it
  Where it would just hump itself and swell...
  It maddens me to think of it ... oh, well
  That's that ...  We never hear a word from them at all

  Except we see some item in the press
  When Ettie entertains, and once when she
  Was going to the Coast to represent
  Her Chapter at the gathering of her Club;
  Mother had set her heart on seeing her,
  For she is Freddie's wife--the favorite boy.
  I wrote to her, inviting her to stay
  Coming or going, but she passed us by.
  She DID phone from the station, and she sent
  A post card telling us the peaks were high
  Or waters blue or something bright like that...
  To think she would not come and she so near,
  Has caused the poor old lady many a tear.
  But here am I unloading all my woe
  On you--Forgive me, won't you?  I must go.
  I hope you'll make a million."

  This afternoon, I bought a bond,
  A dull gray thing it is, at five per cent.
  And in the Bank I found that I could rent
  A dull gray box; 'Safety Deposit' is its name in full,
  And in its cold embrace I laid my Bond,
  Patting its head, with grateful hands and fond,
  And twice a year I'll journey to this shrine
  And clip the coupons; gloating, "These are mine,"
  Adding to them whatever I can save,
  And laying all together in the grave,
  Speaking them soft and fair--"Good Bonds, to you
  I trust the future--you will see me through,
  Emancipating Bonds!  You will set free
  Me from my kindred and my kin from me!
  O unforgetting Bonds!  I know you will
  Keep me from bothering my Jim and Lill."

  I'll miss my dreams;--I know I'll never go
  Where silver birds and purple peacocks grow,
      But still!
          There is
  A strengthening of heart and soul
  Thinking of Dan and Liz
  Who might have had to send the little dole!
  I know that whistling trains my soul may fret;
  In days to come my pallid soul may grow
  As weak as water, wishing I could go:
  But when I feel the sting of old regret
  I'll concentrate a little while
      On Fred and Et!




ARE WE A GLOOMY PEOPLE?

I like Lectures.

It is very pleasant to sit in a comfortable room and let your mind
drift along with the speaker, and yet be able to leave him without
apology or offence at any mental cross-road if a daisied meadow beckons
or a meadow-lark calls.

I did this one afternoon not long ago.  The lecturer, a very sedate
young man, was talking about Canadian literature.  He was rather
pessimistic about it, and said we had not any real literature in
Canada.  I looked back at the mountains, which I could see from the
window, and did not care whether we had or not.  I knew we had
something.

Then he said we were a gloomy people.  We were so concerned about the
material things of life that we had no time to play.  Facing the stern
conditions of existence, we had grown hard and unimaginative--

It was about there that I left him.  I began to think about a summer's
day, a languorous day in early August on the prairie when a blue gray
haze veiled the hills and the grain stood motionless in the fields,
green gold in the ripening sun.  It was a day which made you hold your
breath and pray that to-morrow might be as to-day and all the
to-morrows until the grain was safely cut.  I saw again the little
white-washed house and the flagged walk which ran between the
nasturtium beds, and the blue delphiniums standing against the fence,
and the sun-flowers turning their yellow faces with the sun.

There was a cloud in the west, a thick, dark gray plank-like cloud with
an ominous edging of white and caverns of blue, in which lightning
played, flashing in and out as if a door had been opened and shut.  But
not a sound, not a whisper, and on the trees not a leaf stirring.  In
the fields the sun still shone, but its brightness began to fade and
sicken.

At four o'clock the storm broke.  When it was over the grain lay broken
and beaten into the ground.  The leaves were stripped from the trees.
The flowers were simply gone as if they had never been, and the garden
was a litter off broken stalks, and then the sun, warm and brilliant,
came out as if nothing had happened.  A few straggling hens, draggled
and bewildered, stepped out into the yard and cautiously picked at the
hailstones that whitened the grass.

Then it was that the mother of the family, whose year's work had gone
in the fateful twenty minutes, took command and sent the children out
to gather hailstones.

"We'll make ice cream," she said cheerfully.  "We may not taste it
again for a year, for all the cream will have to be sold now.  But
to-day we have plenty.  We may as well get something out of the storm.
Cheer up now, children, and see who can find the biggest one and hurry
before they melt.

"We'll call Jim's folks to come over.  Aunt Minnie will be feeling
pretty low.  She was going to have a trip home, poor girl.  Hail is not
as bad as drought though, for there will still be cattle feed, and it's
wonderful the way the straw will grow up.  Beat up a cake, Lillie.
There is plenty of bread.  George, you phone while I set the freezer.
I'm glad you thought to gather in so many of those flowers, Lillie.
They do look nice.  We can put them in the cellar every night and they
will keep a long time.  It is a lucky thing that none of our windows
broke."

I went on pleasantly thinking of this woman.  But I came back in time
to hear the vote of thanks and the meeting closed happily with coffee
and asparagus rolls.

On my way out I met one of the oldest women in the club.  I asked her
if she thought we were a gloomy people.  "You should know," I said to
her.  "You have been here since before the railway, haven't you?"

"Yes," she laughed.  "I came about the same time as the mountains.  If
we had been gloomy we would have died.  We have lived on hope and
optimism and the sure knowledge that next year would be a good one, and
it usually was.  We are always expecting something here, something
pleasant and thrilling.  With us it is the Day Before Christmas all the
time.  With that poor boy it is the Day After."




THE WAYS OF WOMEN

I had forgotten the smell of the Montfort house, but when Martha opened
the door, it came back to me unchanged.  That faintly acrid odor which
betokens age and long occupation by the same people.  I thought I could
detect the odor of old silk dresses, with yellowed tissue paper in
their folds; old pieces of embroidery put away in pasteboard boxes,
whose labels bore the names of men long dead; the spicy smell of heavy
Christmas bakings; the medicines and disinfectants of many recovered
sicknesses; the flowers of weddings and funerals.

The twenty years had not changed Martha greatly, for having never been
young, there was little the years could do to her.  She was a tall
woman with thick glasses and thin hair; yet with a certain dignity and
charm of manner, which made her a favorite with all of us.

She was generally spoken of in her youth as "Poor Martha," because of
her family cares--the four clamorous young brothers and two sisters,
one or more of whom were always with her.  I remembered having seen her
without an encumbrance only on the occasions when she was wildly
searching for a strayed one.

And poor Martha was destined to a lifetime of slavery, for when the
boys grew up and the two girls were married and the day of freedom was
about to dawn, her mother had a stroke and dramatically resigned
herself to a life of invalidism.  So once again Martha found herself
sold down the river.

She received me gladly, and led the way to her mother's room, where
enthroned in a four-poster mahogany bed, regal in her purple gown and
lace cap, the old lady was waiting for me.

"I knew you had come," she said, holding out a shapely soft hand.  "My
friends are very kind to me since I was laid aside.  Martha, we will
have tea now.

"Yes, we are very comfortable, Martha and I, in the old house.  It is a
big house for two lone women, and Martha had some notion of having it
altered, so another family might have the upstairs, but I stood firm
against that.  I could not endure strangers in my house, tramping over
my head when I was trying to sleep.  And besides, what would my sons
say if they knew their mother was renting part of her house?  Martha
seems to be strangely deficient in pride.  I mean proper pride of birth
and station....

"And I have been quite grieved with her over this matter of her sewing
for strangers.  I am sure her brothers would forbid her, if they knew
it, but she begged me not to tell them, and I decided to humor her.
She pleaded with me that she could not sit idle, and of course she only
sews for our own circle of friends.  Even so, it is very hard on me;
what with telephoning and people coming, it becomes quite irritating.
I can only stand so much.

"Martha grows a little difficult as she gets older," went on the old
lady, with a heavy sigh.  "She wants to join a sort of literary club
here."

I ventured the opinion that no doubt she would enjoy it.  I remembered
Martha's love of literature, and her prowess in reciting every word of
Canto Five of the Lady of The Lake.

Mrs. Montfort shook her head.

"It is a very mixed affair.  Anyone can belong.  One of the teachers
here started it, rather a common sort of person, who came here without
invitation and discussed the matter with Martha in the hall....  It was
through this woman she met this Evans person ... I suppose you have
heard about the trouble I have had with him?"

I had heard that Joe Evans, who had made a fortune in Alberta oil, had
come back to the old town, and proposed to Martha, and had been
scornfully rejected, not by Martha, but by her mother.

I dared the old lady's wrath by saying a word of commendation for Joe.

"He is an utterly impossible person," she said scathingly.  "His father
was a pedlar.  You remember him, do you not?  And with all the cheek of
that type, he came here to my bedside and argued with me.  He said,
'You won't live forever, Mrs. Montfort, and Martha will find it
lonesome, if she has no one of her own.'

"I said, 'She has her brothers, sir, and two married sisters ...  But
all this is unpleasant.  I did not intend to mention it.  I want to
tell you about my sons.  They are doing wonderfully well.  Charles is a
barrister in New York.  He is married, and has a charming wife.
Sometimes we get a newspaper clipping where their names are mentioned.
Such a gay life they seem to have!  He says it takes all he earns.  The
dear lad always loved to have good things, and yet with it all he is so
generous!  Every Mother's Day he sends me the most beautiful wire!"

Martha had brought in the tea-tray and had swung the table over the
bed, so her mother could pour the tea.

"Martha, do get that wire Charles sent.  It was so beautiful!  He
wanted us to visit them last winter.  But of course that was
impossible.  I wrote back that I thought Martha and I were best at
home."

I looked at Martha, and thought I saw a flicker of something in her
quiet face.

"You are surely a lucky woman to have Martha with you," I said.  "She
is the sort of daughter we read of."

"Martha is a good girl," said her mother.  "I have no complaints.  She
is just like her father, quiet and reserved.  She never could make
friends like the other girls and boys ...  Allen is president of some
great club in Toronto.  I forget its name.  Anyway, he went to the
Coast last year, to their Convention, and the train--they had their
own--stayed an hour here, and he spent it all with me.

"There were speeches in the park, but he said, 'No.  I will spend the
time with Mother.'  I have wonderful sons.  Such a comfort they are to
me!  And when Allen went home, he sent me a beautiful book of views of
the Convention, and it had several pictures where I could find him ...
Did you get the wire, Martha?  Maybe I have it here ... I had it
yesterday.  Yes, here it is in the book I was reading.  See, it is a
Mother's Day wire and written.  I like it so much better than a typed
one."

I took it from her and read aloud the tender words of affection.

"Charles never forgets," she said with a break in her voice.  Martha
hurriedly left the room.

Looking again at the wire, I noticed it had no number.

"Sometimes I think Martha is a little jealous of the boys," said her
mother in a low voice.

I came away, marvelling anew at the ways of women.




WE ARE ALL THE SAME

It was Sunday evening, at the Penguin.  In the big square front room,
the men were letting the time go by unchallenged.  There was no good
reason for trying to hold it.  A radio in one corner raised the
question of "Who was Cain's Wife?" which was, no doubt, a vital matter
to Cain in his day, but drew scant attention from the Penguin
listeners.  They let it pass with the patient lethargy which comes from
being out of work, when life itself resolves into one great problem.
And for the moment that one was not pressing.  They all had shelter;
they had eaten; there was nothing to say.

Outside the rain poured drearily, and the wind as it swept across the
railway tracks drew a shudder from the loose window frames.

The men regarded the rain with a sort of joyless satisfaction.  As long
as it rained they were safe.  Mrs. Bruce, who sat behind the desk going
over her day-book, would turn no one out in the rain, hard woman though
she was; and the rain obligingly continued to stroke the windows with
its streaming fingers.

Mrs. Bruce looked up when I rang the bell on the counter, and motioned
for me to come into the small enclosure called the office.  From her
high stool she had a view of the whole premises: the big room; the
kitchen beyond, and the cubicles at the right, where stood the "beds"
referred to in the big sign outside.

It was in regard to the beds that I had called, having sent a couple of
needy pilgrims here a week ago for lodging.  Mrs. Bruce gave me the
reckoning and told me, too, something of the vicissitudes of her life.

"I've been here for ten years," she said, "and if I could collect
what's coming to me, I'd do well.  But you can't take the breeks off a
Highlandman.  I've been counting up my losses to-night.  It's a bad
night, and I might as well know the worst."

Just then the front door opened and an old man came in, in a gust of
wind.  He closed the door behind him smartly, and took off his
streaming rain coat and hung it on a holder behind the door, carefully
adjusting the shoulders.  He was a tall, spare old man, with a closely
cropped beard, red nose, but an unmistakable air.

"A night of rain," said he, musically intoning the words.  "A night of
wind and rain!"

There was a murmur of assent from the men.

"A night to make one grateful for a roof over one's head; a roof and,"
here he turned and bowed gracefully though somewhat stiffly to Mrs.
Bruce, "a gracious landlady."

He moved toward the stairs.  "I have dined, thank you," he said to Mrs.
Bruce, though she had not spoken.  "Later I will come down for a cup of
tea--if I may."

He went up the narrow stairs.

"He's an auld buddy who came in with the unemployed last winter," Mrs.
Bruce explained in a low tone.  "A nice auld buddy, and such a
gentleman!  He was an actor and dancing master at home, but--"

Mrs. Bruce drank from an imaginary bottle, and sighed significantly.

"He's been here nearly a year now ...  Our ways are rough by his, but
he makes no complaint ...  And the way he teaches my Evelyn--she's
seventeen now and works in the laundry.  He won't let us say 'Evelyn'
like we did--he says it's 'Eevelyn', like that ...  And he won't let
her chew gum or roll her stockin's, or sing the Bum song, or use a
slang word.  And the way he gets her to eat her vittles would do your
heart good.  There's none of this talkin' with your mouth full, or
reachin's out for stuff.  He has his meals with us mostly, and my word,
but we do catch it...

"My two boys--they're men now; Evelyn is the youngest--they have been
out of work, too, all winter, and been eatin' here.  They are at me to
get him out, but I tell them I have fed people all my life, who did not
pay me, nor even thank me.  And he does more than thank me--he tries to
help me.

"One night, when a big cowboy I had kept a week came in roarin' drunk,
I told him to get out.  If he had money to buy booze he had money to
pay me.  And he flew in a rage and swore at me.  Mr. Bimber stood up
for me, I can tell you--I never heard anything like it.  He towered
above the cowboy and, says he: 'Would you bite the hand that has fed
you?' with his voice sweepin' this room like a trumpet.  'Would you
dare to be rude to this elect lady, to whom we all owe so much?'

"It made me feel all queer and solemn to hear anyone stand up for me
like that ... I am a hard woman, I know.  Runnin' a roomin' house is no
job for a soft woman--but I guess maybe I am a little soft that way,
for I do like a word of praise and a little notice took of me.

"And if I go out, he sits here in his velvet coat, and answers the
phone like the King of England.  And one night, not so long ago, a wet,
cold night worse than this, he had the kettle on, and made a cup of tea
for me, when I came in.

"I ain't been used to much; my man was a good, hard worker, but he was
no hand for the like of that.  Maybe it's because I never had much done
for me that it goes over so big.  I sure do like to be took a little
notice of, and I don't deny it."

I told her we were all the same.  We all like to be "took notice of."
It is a trait not confined to women who keep boarding houses.  It is
not even confined to one sex!




HOW IT FEELS TO BE A DEFEATED CANDIDATE

From the angle of human interest defeat is more attractive than victory
inasmuch as it is a more common experience, and the average reader may
be described as a mind imbued with considerable fortitude, when
contemplating the sorrows and disappointments of some one else.

Successful candidates are not given much scope in their speeches.  They
run in a pretty even groove.  Borne down the street by the cheering
throng which halted before the _Herald_ building, with cries of
"Speech! speech!" the successful candidate, carried aloft on the
shoulders of his friends, addressed the surging sea of faces: "This is
the proudest moment of my life ... a man would be a dull clod who did
not thrill ...  It will be my daily task to represent ... this
far-flung Dominion ... your children's children ... till death us do
part!"

Not much to that!

But the story of how people receive the news of disaster admits of
great variety.  Do they rage, or weep?  Do they bluff it off with a
jest?  Or do they call high heaven to witness?  According to the latest
picture version, the great man comes home early on election day, and
there, in the seclusion of his own home, surrounded by a few trusted
friends, calm, dignified, unmoved, mouth tight-lipped, head unbowed,
face pale, but lighted by a valiant cheerfulness, he awaits the end!

And at a late hour, when all hope is dead, with the adverse majority
steadily mounting like a metre of a taxi-cab wedged in the traffic, and
wires of condolence beginning to arrive, carried thither by
gray-uniformed boys in stiff caps, growing suddenly tired of it all,
the great man bids his friends an affectionate good night, and goes
heavily up the broad stairs, the light from the upper newel post
falling full on his noble face, and showing the lines of care--and the
friends below disperse quietly, murmuring something about one of whom
the world was not worthy.

And so to bed!

We did not do it that way.

We all gathered in the committee rooms, which the night before had
echoed with our laughter, our foolish boasts, and idle words, and
before us on the wall a great blackboard bore the leering figures--that
lurched and staggered before our eyes, changed every few minutes by one
of the campaign managers.  We were all frantically cheerful, but it was
all about as merry as an empty bird-cage.  With sickly smiles
abounding, seen and unseen, we sang, "See him smiling," and "There's a
Long, Long Trail," and speeches were made, and everyone did their best,
but there is no denying the fact that there was an outcropping of gloom
in the exercises of the evening.  By ten o'clock we knew that one of
our number was elected, one was defeated, and I was hovering between
life and death.  We knew that the counting would take all night, and
some of the faithful ones were determined to see it through, but I was
ready to call it a day about eleven o'clock, and leaving my political
fate in the hands of the scrutineers, I came home, and slept until I
heard the clip-clap of the milkman's horses, and the clinking of
bottles on the back step, and through the open window I could see the
crystal dawn leading in another day.

Then I remembered the unfinished business of the night before, but
before consulting the telephone I looked out of the window for a while.
It was so dewy green, and pleasant, and peaceful, with the shadows of
the big trees making black lace medallions on the lawn.

The voice in the telephone was announcing the names of the elected
candidates.

No!  Mine was not among them.  There were five elected.  I stood sixth.
Just for a moment I had a queer detached sensation, a bewildered,
panicky feeling, and in that dizzy fragment of time, it came home to me
that for all my philosophy and cheerful talk, I had never really
believed I would be defeated--but now ... now ... the boat had actually
sailed--without me.

But just like David in his grief, the mood quickly passed.  Why should
I go mourning all my days?  My political hopes had died in the night!
What of it?  They were not the only hopes.

My family behaved admirably at breakfast, even the youngest one, who is
at the age when it is rather embarrassing to have a mother of any sort,
and particularly so to have one that goes out and gets herself defeated.

Thinking of the many women who would be disappointed, and men, too, was
the heaviest part of my regret.  I know how hard many of them had
worked.  I told myself over and over again that I did not mind ...  I
suppose it does not require much fortitude to accept a stone wall ...
Anyway, I made a fine show of cheerfulness.

But though I went about quite light-heartedly and gay, telling myself
and others how fine it felt to be free, and of how glad I was that I
could go back to my own work with a clear conscience, there must have
been some root of bitterness in me, for I was seized with a desire to
cook, and I wanted the kitchen all to myself.

No woman can be utterly cast down who has a nice, bright, blue and
white kitchen facing the west, with a good gas range, and blue and
white checked linoleum on the floor (even if it is beginning to wear on
the highways and market roads), a cook book, oilcloth covered and
dropsical with loose-leaf additions, and the few odd trifles needed to
carry out the suggestions.

I set off at once on a perfect debauch of cooking.  I grated cheese,
stoned dates, blanched almonds, whipped cream, set jelly--and let the
phone ring.

It could tear itself out by the roots for all I cared.  I was in
another world--the pleasant, land-locked, stormless haven of double
boilers, jelly moulds, flour sifters, and other honest friends who make
no promise they cannot carry through.  The old stone sugar crock, with
the cracked and handleless cup in it, seemed glad to see me, and even
the gem jars, with their typed labels, sitting in a prim row, welcomed
me back and asked no questions.  I patted their little flat heads, and
admitted that the years had been long; reminded them, too, that I had
seen a lot more wear and tear than they had.  I loved the feel of the
little white-handled knife with which I peeled apples for pies.  It lay
comfortably in my hand and gave me the right vibration.

I am ashamed to have to tell it.  But I got more comfort that day out
of my cooking orgy than I did from either my philosophy or religion.
But I can see now, when the smoke of battle has cleared away, that I
was the beneficiary of that great promise respecting the non-overflow
of the rivers of sorrow.  We often get blessings that we do not
recognize at all, much less acknowledge.  But God is not so insistent
about having His gifts acknowledged as we are!  So long as we get them!

No, there was no overflowing of sorrow.  I think I could not have
endured it if my biscuits had been heavy, or my date trifle tough, or
the pie crust burnt in the bottom.  Nothing failed me.  And no woman
can turn out an ovenful of flaky pies, crisply browned and spicily
odorous, and not find peace for her troubled soul!

You've heard of the poet's heart leaping up when he beheld a rainbow in
the sky!  The same cardiac condition prevails when your salad dressing
has that satiny texture, which is a cross between the skin of an egg
and whipped cream!

The next day I wanted to get out.  I craved free life, and fresh air;
open fields and open sky.  I wanted to look away to the mountains, blue
in the distance, with the ice-caps on their heads.  So I went to Earl
Grey golf course, and played all morning.  It was a morning of
sparkling sunshine, and I loved all the little blue bells and violets
that spangled the fairways.  The mountains stood by mistily blue, with
some snow in their crevices, cool and unconcerned.

The game was not entirely successful.  I was too conscious of the Elbow
Park houses below me; some of them vaguely resentful; some
overbearingly exultant; and others leering at me with their drawn
blinds, like half closed conservative eyes.  I tried to concentrate on
the many good friends I have there, but someway the wires were crossed,
the notes were jangled, and not a gleam of friendliness could I raise.

I got on better, and did some splendid driving by naming the balls, and
was able by that means to give to one or two of them a pretty powerful
poke.

I played each morning, and at the end of three days I saw that my
spiritual health was restored--I was able then to dispassionately
discuss the whole matter.

The confessional is psychologically sound, for whether it is a sin or a
sorrow, or both, it is well to drag it out into the sunshine and let
the healing winds blow over it.  Ingrowing grief it is that festers and
poisons.

So now I am able to bring down all the evidence.  I believe, like
Selina Peake's father, in "So Big," that every experience in life,
pleasant or unpleasant, is so much velvet, if we know how to take it.

I believe that the way to take trouble is to leave it!  I know there is
in all of us, when things go wrong, a tendency to stick and stall, and
explain, and amplify, and recall, and all that; and it is all worthless
and unprofitable.  There is no more devastating emotion than self-pity;
it withers and sears the heart, dries up the fountain of youth, and is
bad for the complexion!  This is no coroner's inquest, no post-mortem
on "How did it happen?"

I know how it happened that I was defeated.  Not enough people wanted
to have me elected!  So there is no mystery about it--nothing that
needs explanation.

But just why I thought I would be elected is a human interest story.  I
believe every candidate, who ran, believed in his own success.  Hope
springs eternal, and friends see to it that it does.  Prior to election
day, friends fairly bubble with enthusiasm.  They haven't a doubt or a
fear in the world!  They tell you the enemy concedes your election!
The bets are all on you!  I remember, though I did not think of it
until after the election, that when a certain man ran for mayor in
Edmonton some years ago, he had more names on his nomination papers
than votes on election day!

Then there were the departing friends who earnestly desired to do their
country one good turn before they left for their holidays.  They came
to see me.  The first one said: "My dear, you simply must let your name
go before the convention.  We need you in the House.  And after your
five years of experience!  You simply must not think of dropping out!
What chance?--Oh, my de-ar!  Everyone says you will head the polls.
The baker spoke to me about you this morning.  It seems his wife was in
your Bible class in Manitoba.  He's so sorry he's an American citizen,
and so neither of them can vote, but they'll work for you."

I was greatly touched by her enthusiasm.  I thought she must be a type
of many.  So she was.  I met them everywhere.  They sought me out, and
entreated me to step out and save my country, and then having nobly
performed their duty as citizens, one by one they sought the solace of
the cool, sweet far distant places, where birds voices call, and waters
idly lap the shore.

But they didn't forget me!  On election day, they sent me picture
postcards, and in fairness I must add that at least three of them came
back to vote for me.

Looking back on it now I see I went through the campaign with a sort of
courageous imbecility!  So many people told me I was sure to be
elected, I seemed to forget that I had deep-seated, relentless
antagonism from several sections of the community.  Naturally, my
opponents did not report to me, and I reasoned, apparently, from
insufficient data.  But, a few friends full of enthusiasm can create
quite an impression.  Mine appeared like an army with banners.  I
should have remembered that there was nothing remarkable, or
significant, about this.  Every one has some friends.  The blackboards
in front of the filling stations carried a wise word the other day.
They said:

"Even cotton stockings have their supporters!"

I might have known that the liquor interests do not forgive the people
who oppose them.  Temperance people will forget their friends and
cheerfully forgive their enemies at election time, but the liquor
people are more dependable.  Some of them spoke to me about my stand on
prohibition, and told me quite frankly that if I would put the soft
pedal on the liquor question they would vote for me.

And I didn't.  And they didn't!  And there are no hard feelings between
us.

One grand old exponent of the cup that cheers and inebriates told me,
with odorous conviction, that he was with me against the hard stuff,
but a glass of beer never hurt any one!  And then he told me sweetly
reminiscent tales of his dear old sainted grandfather and other godly
and rotund gentlemen of the old school who drank heavily and
regularly--and died in the hope of a glorious resurrection.

But far more bitter and unyielding was the opposition of the
conservative element (my own party is not entirely free from it), that
resents the invasion of women.  Public offices, particularly those that
carry emoluments, they believe to belong, by the ancient right of
possession, to men.  They are quite willing to let women work on
boards, or committees, or indeed anywhere if the work is done
gratuitously--but if there is a salary, they know at once that women
are not fitted by nature for that!  And God never intended them to be
exposed to the dangers and temptations incident to such a post!

The dangers and temptations incident to office-cleaning at night, which
is done by women, and the lonely homeward walk in the early morning
when there are no cars running, is not so bad, for the work is
sufficiently ill-paid to keep it quite womanly.

And the curious part of this is that women can be found who will
support this view.  Not many--and not thinking women, just a few who
bitterly resent having any woman go farther than they are ever likely
to go.

Another feature, which works against any woman who runs for public
office, is the subconscious antagonism of men who don't want to work
with women.  Men are subconsciously afraid of women!  Afraid they will
not play fair!  No individual man is to blame--it is a racial trait,
and will take a lot of working out.  Men will work their fingers to the
bone for women--but not with them.

And then, of course, opposing me were many wives!  No one should
criticize the wives!  And I won't!  I saw many of them on election day.
One told me quite sweetly--"I don't know anything about this, but
Charley is frightfully keen, and told me to give out these cards, and
say 'I hope you will vote our ticket'--It's all a beastly muddle to
me--and bores me to tears!"

I thought of Mrs. Pankhurst and her heroic followers going to jail, and
suffering the agonies of social ostracism, as well as physical cruelty,
to win for women like these the right to vote, and with a less worthy
emotion I thought of some of the efforts we had made here.  I was like
the young chap of five who denounced his one-year-old sister when she
displeased him, in these scathing words: "I am sorry I ever prayed for
you!"

Oh, well!

Life has compensation for all of us.  When one door shuts--another
opens.

Basil King told us once, that the day he met with the accident that
made it impossible to carry on his work as a clergyman, he bought a
typewriter.  I didn't need to buy one.  All mine needed was a new
ribbon.




UNTIMELY TEARS

The cool church, with its open door, offered a pleasant harbor from the
billows of heat.  I stepped inside thankfully, for my appointment with
the minister was still twenty minutes away.  I had come to persuade
him, if I could, to come and lecture to us in our small town.

People began to come in noiselessly and I noticed the altar was banked
with flowers and ferns and the organ was playing softly through the
gloom and when the lights were suddenly switched on I saw I was at a
wedding.  The groom and his attendant came out of the vestry and waited
before the altar.

And what a charming wedding it was!

Flowers and ferns; roses and trailing smilax; silver bells and
streamers; three bridesmaids in mauve, jade, and peach; a queenly bride
in shimmering white; a little flower-girl about the size of a spool of
thread carrying a basket of roses; "O Promise Me" before the ceremony;
"The Voice that breathed o'er Eden" afterwards; the responses audible
and clear; not a hitch; not one awkward or embarrassed moment;
everything proceeding with that studied smoothness which comes with
careful rehearsing.  The ring did not fall.  The glove rolled back.

It comforted me--that wedding--it was such a perfect performance.  It
comforted me by reminding me that, in spite of hot winds, and
dust-storms and short crops, Beauty still walked the highways of our
lives.

The last word was spoken.  The last prayer said.  Then in that brief
pause so packed with emotion something happened.  Something harsh and
horrible.  Upon that musical silence broke a cry!  And the sound of a
woman sobbing.

"O my poor boy!" she wailed; "my poor Freddie!"

There was a commotion around her and then she was led out still
sobbing.  My heart ached for the stricken group at the altar who stood
shocked and dumb.  Then the friends gathered around them and I saw no
more.  But I knew that the beautiful wedding so carefully planned and
so faultlessly carried out had been broken into a thousand fragments
and my heart was hot with indignation.

The minister told me about it afterwards.

"Yes," he said in answer to my question, "it was the groom's mother.
She is a fine woman too but she has no sense of fitness.  No one would
deny a woman a few tears on the occasion of her boy's marriage, but she
might have had them shed before she came, and she might well have
chosen a more secluded place than a crowded church.  There is the
attic, the basement, the garage or the kitchen sink, all available--and
her tears did not mean a thing--she likes the bride and well she might.
She is glad to have her boy married and settled.  She will see him
every day and she is not the clinging vine sort of woman at all ... It
was hard on the bride, and a cruel thing for her to do..."

  "To everything there is a season--
  There is a time to weep
  And a time to laugh,
  A time to break down
  And a time to build up."


I have often wondered about that mother-in-law.  I hope the bride did
not have to live with her.  I know exactly what she would be like.  She
is the sort of person who would be sure to want a hot bath on Monday
morning and would use up all the hot water.  She would suddenly be
seized with the ambition to re-pot the big fern just after the sunroom
had been cleaned.  She would press some one to stay for dinner when the
family were going to eat up the remains of the head-cheese and the
pot-roast.  She would gasoline her gloves and boil cabbage the day her
daughter-in-law was entertaining.  She would notice that her son's suit
needed pressing and comment on it at the moment he was dashing out of
the house to catch the car.  She would be sure to think of something
bright and interesting to say at that critical time when you are about
to hear the name of the new station on the radio.

We all know the type.  A good woman but with no sense of fitness.




TOO LATE FOR HER

There were about four hundred of them, well-dressed, alert, and capable
looking women.  They drive their own cars, play a good hand at bridge,
belong to study clubs, have breakfast in bed when they feel like it,
have ideas on art and politics and are not afraid to express them.

They were watching a demonstration given by a softly-spoken young
person in pale green, who had without haste or waste prepared a
five-course luncheon in our presence.  It was cooking in a pale green
stove enhanced with nickle trimmings.  A pale green refrigerator,
gleaming like a block of jade, had received the dessert, and in its
arctic recesses the cream was now chilling, the jelly was setting, and
the forty-two ice cubes were forming.  While these miracles were being
performed, the young person told us why biscuits were sometimes tough;
why cakes fell and why housewives failed and men left home.

It was a happy scene, modern and sophisticated, typical of the
emancipated women whose problems have been solved.  But I could not
keep my mind on the stage nor listen to the young person in green,
though I had the greatest admiration for her masterly handling of her
subject.  I was so busy thinking of another woman for whom all these
wonders had come too late.

I was back forty years in a prairie farm house, a new one, smelling of
lumber, making a call on a city girl who had come to our neighborhood,
a bride, six months before.  I had heard she was not very happy.  She
stood looking out of the window, drooping and sad and so thin I
wondered how she managed to keep her clothes on.

The noon dishes were still on the table; the fire was out and it was
getting close to supper time, and even I knew that this surely boded
ill for the housekeeper.

She began to talk to me.  "Look at that," she said to me, pointing out
of the window.

I looked and saw nothing.

"It is the wind," she said listlessly.  "See how it threshes the trees
and tears at the clothes on the line and whips up the straw in the yard
and all for no good.  Doing no good to anyone.  Over there," pointing
to the river bank, "there is water running away, barrels of it, running
away, but when I want water I have to carry it from the well and draw
it up with that horrible creaking, croaking windlass.  Millions of
gallons of water but none for me.

"And last night.  Did you hear it?" she asked dully.  "The thunder and
lightning, tearing and roaring and shaking the house.  Enough light to
light the house for a week but gone in a second and everything blacker
than before.  It burned our haystack, though.  Now look at that
fire--black out.  It will not burn for me.  Do you think I could borrow
a bit of lightning to light my fire?"

I had never heard talk like that before.  And I never saw anything so
tired and so hopeless.  Her eyes had a festering look which I have
never forgotten.

I put on the fire for her and helped her with the dishes.  But I was
glad to get away.  She was so queer and talked in broken sentences.

She stayed a year.  Then one day she was gone.  And the judgment of the
neighborhood went against her.  When a woman left her man in those
days, and a good hard-working fellow, too, there was only one
explanation.  She was a bad lot.

My heart was sore for her to-day when I saw the young woman in green,
drawing water from a tap and getting heat or power or cold as she
willed by turning a switch.  My heart was sore for Jim Sneddon's wife
and all other tired and defeated women whom electricity would have
saved.

And I wondered about these young women so well dressed, so happy and
assured.  I wondered if they know how great has been their deliverance.

Perhaps it is only those of us who have had to let the butter and cream
down into the well in a pail by a rope to keep cool; gather chips to
coax a moody and reluctant fire into action; chase clothes up and down
a washboard all day long; breathe into lamp chimneys and rub them with
newspapers to make them shine; make butter with a dash churn; make a
floor clean by elbow grease and iron clothes a la Mrs. Potts--

Perhaps we are the only women who can ever be sufficiently grateful for
the blessings of modern science.




YOUNG ENOUGH TO KNOW BETTER

The friendship between the two families had been such an ideal one that
when the quarrel came, it was the talk of our neighborhood.

For three years the Cadmans and Taylors had lived side by side.  They
had taken out the fence to make the two lawns into one.  Mrs. Cadman
and Mrs. Taylor shopped together, entertained together, used the same
clothes-pins on the same clothes-reel, borrowed patterns, co-operated
in the matter of preserving kettle, vacuum cleaner, and lawn-mower, and
went into conference at any hour of the day or night on such questions
as the relative merit of binding and picot edging, granitewear and
aluminum.

The men went into the city every morning on the 8:20 car, borrowed
magazines and library books, went to baseball matches, and killed each
other's vote on election day.  The two little girls, aged ten, went to
school together and exchanged sweaters, tams, bathing suits, and
collected stamps and street car transfers.

But now the friendship that had been built up by three years of
neighborliness lay shattered and dead, stabbed by a few fiery words.

The two little girls, swinging in the hammock (made by their mothers
out of barrel staves and rope) had disputed over whose turn it was to
be swung, and Angela Cadman, convinced that it was time for Ruth Taylor
to vacate, had hastened the process by upsetting the hammock, throwing
Ruth to the ground.  Ruth raised a loud cry of protest and fright,
slightly tinged with pain.  Mrs. Taylor came, Mrs. Cadman came, and a
conversation ensued, in which everyone took part.

When Mrs. Taylor, mother of Ruth, called Angela Cadman "an
ill-mannered, selfish, spoiled child," Mrs. Cadman replied haughtily
and retired with dignity.

But her heart was heavy when, an hour later, she saw Mrs. Taylor and
Ruth leaving the house, apparently going down town, and noticed that
Mrs. Taylor was not carrying the blue purse she had given her on her
birthday.

When Mr. Cadman came home, she told him about the quarrel, but Reg.
Cadman unfortunately took the offensive.

"I told you there would be a smash some day.  You two have been too
intimate.  You couldn't buy seed for the bird without asking her
advice, and I'll bet you let her away with all she said about Angela."

"Well, you needn't jump down my throat," Mrs. Cadman snapped back.
"You've said worse than that about Angela.  It's not so very long since
you whipped her for losing your golf balls and then found Glen Taylor
had borrowed them."

"Now what has that to do with it?  Say, you have the greatest memory
for mean things!"

"You're very inconsiderate," Mrs. Cadman cried, her voice shaking.
"You know I'm upset, for it's no fun to quarrel with one's best friend.
But no matter what happens, I am always wrong!"

"Oh, don't get so dramatic, Ethel.  You make me tired!  You and Rose
Taylor have nothing to worry about.  You don't know you are alive."

The home atmosphere became heated.  The next morning Reg. Cadman took
an earlier car.  He hoped to avoid travelling with his friend, Glen
Taylor, but curiously enough Glen Taylor had, for reasons of his own,
left home early too.  They met with restraint and discussed unimportant
matters.  At lunch time, instead of eating together at the Rosebud, as
usual, they each decided to go elsewhere, and met again with still
greater embarrassment.

Sitting alone, Reg. Cadman ate his combination salad, and rehearsed a
conversation he intended to hold with Glen Taylor in the near future.

"Do you mean to say that because your wife and my wife had a silly row
over the kids, you are trying to avoid me?  Don't you think you can let
your wife fight her own battles?  I certainly can ...  You know very
well your wife is quick-tempered.  You've said so ...  You don't need
to distress yourself ...  I am not forcing myself on you."

The next day the quarrel reached the second stage.  Presents were
returned with notes.

Mrs. Taylor wrote: "I should think we might have settled our quarrel
without involving our husbands, but evidently Reg. thinks he has to
snub Glen.  So let this be the end."  The blue purse, a sofa cushion,
and a picture, all neatly wrapped, came with this.

Mrs. Cadman assembled the cups and saucers, one hand-painted scarf, and
a copy of "Adventures In Friendship" and wrote: "I can only follow your
lead.  This quarrel is of your making, not mine."

A week went by, a thoroughly miserable week.  Invitations to teas were
received and refused.  The usual Saturday afternoon picnic was not even
mentioned, and now it was Saturday again, a bright day of blue sky and
white clouds, that invited all house-dwellers to come out and be glad.
But in the two small houses with the common lawn, two women were
shedding bitter tears.

In the offending hammock, Angela and Ruth sat and talked.  Their
friendship had not been disturbed, though in deference to their parents
they had walked apart until out of sight of their homes, as they went
to school.

"When I get married," said Ruth Taylor, "I'll live beside you, and I'll
have four children, and so will you.  One child is too much trouble.
And if one of your girls upsets one of my girls out of the hammock, and
she raises a howl, I won't even come out.  I'll say, 'Clementina'--that
will be her name--'will have to learn to take her bumps.'"

"Your little girl won't be a howler," said Angela generously.  "That
sort of thing always skips a generation.  And mine won't be rough like
me..."

"Oh, you're not rough, Angela.  At least, I don't care if you are!"

"The worst thing about grown-up people," Ruth went on after a pause,
"is that you can't tell them anything.  Their feelings get hurt so
easily!"

Angela swung the hammock.  "I am glad we have no feelings," she said.
"So when we quarrel, we can make it up in a minute.  I couldn't stay
mad for a week.  I'd be sure to forget."

Ethel Cadman's phone rang, and a voice came over the wire, a repentant
voice, limp and faded as a washed ribbon.

"Ethel, it's Rose.  I've been listening to Ruth and Angela.  They're
swinging in the hammock....  They have more sense than we have.  I'm
sorry, Ethel.  Can I come over?"




POLL 47

Poll 47 was in the basement of a school, a damp, cold place, smelling
mousily of cement, lime, and sewage, and reached by a dark and winding
passage.  But we, stout suffragettes that we were (stout-hearted, I
mean) did not mind this.  Was it not for the privilege of going to the
polls that we had been working all these years?  And two of us had been
appointed as scrutineers for Poll 47.  And, better still, was not our
own Mrs. Banks one of the candidates?

A north window drained in a little gray light, revealing the ballot
boxes on the table, the voters' lists, the booths in the corner
screened off by cotton frames behind which a citizen could be alone
with his conscience.

At exactly nine o'clock came the first voter, old Tom Benchley, the
town drunkard, whose wife supported him by doing the washing in many
homes.

Mr. Benchley regarded us with a disapproving and rheumy eye.

"Where are the scrutineers?" he asked sternly.  "Every poll should open
at nine."

"We are the scrutineers," we answered politely.  "And this poll opened
one minute ago."

"Are there no men to do this?" Mr. Benchley queried with reproof in
every syllable.  "This is no work for women."

"Women have done harder work than this," we said sweetly.  "It is a
cold and unpleasant place, we know, but our work is easier than doing
washing, and washings, as you may have heard, are often done in
basements too."

"I believe in women stayin' at home," he said pointedly.  "And I don't
see what good they can do in the Legislature either.  I'd like to see
my wife at this!"

"And no doubt she would find it a pleasant change, too," we agreed.
"For we can sit at our work, and that is much easier than bending over
a tub."

Mr. Benchley pondered that for a moment and then like a man who
suddenly remembers that time is passing, he said, impatiently, "Give me
my ballot and let me out of this."

We found his name on the voters' list, stroked it out, gave him a
ballot, and directed him to the seclusion of the polling booth.

"A bad beginning," said Mrs. Locke to me under her breath.  Mrs. Locke
is Scotch and superstitious.  "He'll not vote for Mrs. Banks.  You know
it was Mrs. Banks who got his wife to interdict him.  I suppose that's
why he's here so early--to get in a vote against her.  He can't hear
us--he's deaf.  I had my heart set on polling the first vote, and now
this old sinner has got in ahead of me.  'Who spills the foremost
foeman's life, his party conquers in the strife.'  Old Tom, as our
first vote--when we are trying to elect a woman--is a bad omen."

"Listen," I interrupted her.

A sound of a scratching pencil came to us from behind the screen, and a
great joy broke over us.

"He is writing," we signalled to each other across the table in wicked
glee.  "He is spoiling his ballot.  Hurrah!"

We banished all traces of mirth from our faces and were rigid and
business-like when he returned.  We showed him where to put his ballot
and noticed that he had begun to roll it and then folded it.  But we
let that pass without comment, for we were glad to know that we would
be able to identify his ballot.  We were curious to know just what he
had written.

Mrs. Locke's cheerfulness returned.

"We may win after all," she said, as she hunted up her own name on the
list.  "No wonder he is scornful of women, having been supported by one
for so many years, the lazy old villain!"

"And did you notice her name is not on the voters' list at all?  That
means the little shack is in his name.  She is paying for it, but he
owns it.  Poor little soul, she would have voted for Mrs. Banks quick
enough!  But he wouldn't.  Never mind, he has spoiled his ballot
anyway."

When the polls were closed that night and the ballot boxes opened, we
were watching eagerly for that rolled and folded ballot.  When we had
smoothed it out we found five words there, written in a large and
trembling alcoholic hand; five words that had not only spoiled his
ballot, but which seriously upset our opinion of him, so freely
expressed.  Thomas Benchley had written on his ballot: "I am for the
lady."

We looked at each other rather sheepishly.

We had been so sure!




THIRTY YEARS

It was her great hour of deliverance; waited for and planned for thirty
years, but somehow, in this dewy June morning, with the train whistling
for the water tank one mile away--the train that would carry her away
from her life of bondage--the glamor had gone out of it all.  The
shackles struck from her wrists had taken all her strength with them;
she told herself bitterly that she was like a stupid little canary,
who, finding the door of its cage open, has not the sense to come out.

But she was going.  Nothing could stop her now.  The radiance and
exaltation would come.  All her thoughts and hopes had been directed to
this great day when she could tell Joel Branson she was leaving him
forever.  She had served her sentence and was free.  Thirty years is a
long time, and a hard punishment, but a woman has to pay for her
matrimonial mistakes.  Well, she had paid.  In humiliation, and hard
labor, and a thousand little meannesses.  She had expiated her sin, if
sin it was for a girl of nineteen to marry the man she loved, blinding
her eyes to his faults.

She had intended to tell him she was leaving, just as soon as Mary's
letter came, telling her the suite was all ready for her.

Mary and Caroline, her two daughters, were both on the city teaching
staff now, and able to give her a home.  They knew what a life she had
led, and ever since they were little things had comforted her with
plans of their independence...  But some way she had not told
him--another proof that the years had weakened her.

She had merely said she wanted to go and see the girls, and to her
surprise he consented, and had carried her valise to the station.

"Give my love to the girls," he called through the window as the train
moved out.  Joel Branson was a proud man in his way, sensitive to
public opinion, and had always carefully timed his ragings.  It would
hurt his pride when it became known his wife had left him; walked out
without asking anything for her thirty years...

The girls had taken a suite overlooking the park, and from the window
of her room she could see beds of geraniums and white daisies.  Her
room was done in mauve and gray, with a light over her bed and a pile
of books on the table.  On her stand were creams, powders, and perfume.

She looked at it all through a blur of tears.  She, who had endured
everything with her head up, her eyes dry, was now a poor, broken,
trembling woman, unbelievably old and worn.  Had all this beauty and
peace and comfort come too late?

"And now, mother," said Mary, "you can attend all the lectures you
want.  There's one every night, I think, over there in the Library, and
you can go and come as you please, and we know just how much you have
to catch up.  So don't think you have to cook, or sew for us.  You've
done all that, and now, you must have your fling."

That night in the rose and mauve room, she slept fitfully.  The noises
of the city were strange and terrifying.  The street cars clanged,
train whistles blew, and once the fire-engine roared by, throwing her
into a panic of fear ...  At daybreak, she awakened with a scream, and
the girls came flying into her room.

"I had a bad dream," she said.  "I thought I saw your father lying on
the floor of the granary.  He had fallen through the trap ... I am
sorry I frightened you."

She lay looking at the sunlight rising on the wall of her room, going
over the events of the previous day.  Suddenly she sat up, tense with
fright as a horrible thought gripped her.

She had forgotten to fasten the trap door of the granary when she put
some of the things in the loft for safe keeping!  That, then, was the
meaning of her dream!  It was a warning!

She couldn't tell the girls.  She knew what they would say.  But she
must warn Joel.  If she could only phone him, but Joel would not have a
phone.  He said she would waste too much time, talking to her neighbors
...  She told herself there was not a chance in the world he would be
in the loft.  It was only in haying time that he might be there, and
the hay would not be ready for two weeks.  She would write him, but he
might not go to the post office ...  In her dream, she had heard him
call her name.

She got up and went to the window, determined to get control of
herself.  Joel would be glad if he knew she was suffering because of
him.  He had always begrudged her any pleasure.  And now, on her great
day, had come this blight.  Oh, why had she been so careless! she would
phone the Smiths to go over and tell him ...  No, that would not do.
It would be heard all over the party line.  It would be different if
she were going back.

There was only one thing to do.  Go back and fasten the trap.

It was daylight now, but too early for the girls.  She would read.  But
the words ran together meaninglessly.  She watched the milkman's white
wagons, and thought with a stab of loneliness of her two cows coming to
the bars...

That day, the girls would be gone until evening.  There was luncheon at
noon at the hotel.  She wouldn't need to tell them.  The train went at
nine and came back at four.

She walked from the station, and was glad to meet no one.  She knew she
had a distraught look.  Her heart was pounding in her ears.

The house stared at her strangely, and there did not seem to be a
living thing about the place.  She noticed with horror that the
upstairs door of the granary was open.

"Joel!  Joel!" she cried in agony.  "Oh, Joel!" She climbed up the
ladder, still calling.

Joel, sweeping the loft, turned to see his wife's face, white with
fear, at the door.

He dropped his broom, and came to her.

"Oh, Joel," she cried.  "I forgot to fasten the trap and I dreamed you
fell, and I came back to tell you ...  It might have happened...!"

"Why, Mary!" he said.  "You poor old girl!  I came through the trap,
and just opened the big door to get light.  There, there, Mary--it's
all right!  Nothing happened ... only say, maybe I'm not glad to get
you back!  This place is like a graveyard without you.  It's a year
since you left, Mary!"




THE PSYCHOLOGIST

I am fortunate in having a friend, who has studied psychology.  She can
talk about frustrations and inhibitions and Mendel's Laws, as casually
as you and I speak of brussells sprouts.  In the club, to which she
belongs, they read life histories at a glance; no old sin or old secret
is safe.

I was with her on the train one day and she decided to give me a
demonstration.

"Do you see that woman across the aisle, two seats down?" she asked me
in that low voice that betokens mystery.

The woman two seats down was easy to see.  She was a big woman, dressed
in a flowered silk dress, and at the moment was standing on the seat
disposing of several bulky parcels in the rack.

"What do you read of her history?"

I did the best I could, at short notice.

"She is a fine, motherly type," I said, "and has done shopping for the
neighborhood as well as her own numerous family.  She is too
good-natured to refuse.  She is bringing home samples of madras
muslins, appliques and wall papers, and has learned to make paper
candy-baskets and lampshades.  She is advanced enough to have bobbed
her hair, but she still wears a skirt.  She is not concerned about
diet, can cook a good meal, and eat it.  She has a light hand with
cakes, and at the Ladies' Aid Social prefers to look after the
dish-washing.  That's about all I can give in the first five minutes,"
I said.

Mrs. Evans regarded me with something like pity.

"You have not touched on any of the deeper things," she said.  "You
have made an entirely superficial reading."

"It's your turn now," I said.

"I will think out loud so you will follow my method," said she.  "Do
you notice anything peculiar about her umbrella for example?"

I didn't.  It looked like the $1.98 kind, which is set out in company
with one hundred others, on the first floor, when it rains, and which I
have bought and lost many times.

"It has a dog's head on the handle," said Mrs. Evans.  "She has a bowl
of gold fish in one of those parcels; a love of animals is thereby
revealed.  She is a woman, who keeps pets, and why does she keep pets?"

"Because she can't help herself, quite likely," I ventured.  "I had
seven cats once, because I couldn't give them away as fast as Clarissa
had them."

"Oh, don't you see a deeper reason?  This woman is starved--starved!"

"She bears it well."

"Her soul is thwarted, so she pours out her affection on animals.  She
seeks a substitute."

"I can give her two kittens and not stint myself," I said generously.

"She would be much happier, if she adopted a family," said Mrs. Evans.
"She cannot satisfy her heart with anything less."

"Let us speak to her about it, then.  What's the good knowing these
things if we keep it to ourselves?"

Just then the object of our solicitude came down the aisle.  In a few
moments she returned, and as she passed I caught her eye.

"I was just into the baggage car to see my pup," she said.  "I got a
ginger spitz while I was in the city."

Mrs. Evans beamed.  We all like collateral evidence.

"Sit down and tell us about him."  I made room for her.

"I am interested in dogs, too."

"I thought if I got a pup, he would not draw the enmity of the cats,"
she said.  "I have four cats, and there may be more when I get home,
but we hadn't a dog.  We have a parrot, too, who calls me every
morning.  Just as the clock strikes seven he begins 'Mother, Oh
mother!' and he does not stop until I shout at him that I am coming."

"He calls you 'Mother'?" Mrs. Evans said.  She was confident now.
"Isn't that sweet.  Did you teach him that?  I am sure you like to hear
him."

"Well, not always.  Sometimes when I am sleepy, I wish he were not
quite so regular in his hour of waking.  But it is fun to hear him call
the children.  He begins with the eldest boy who is in High School now,
and goes on down the list until he gets to the twins, and he calls them
together 'Jack and Jim, Jack and Jim'.  He calls in order of their
ages--the whole eight."

I did not look at Mrs. Evans.




THE RAINBOW

A picture hung on the kitchen wall, a picture of Niagara Falls, seen
through a rainbow; a colored picture, showing the glassy-green river
coming toward me, serene, swift, and unafraid, changing into foaming
white spray that leaped and billowed, now higher, now lower, obeying
some rhythm of its own.

This was before the time of moving pictures, but it was a moving
picture to me, and many a time when I stood before it, walloping a
churn full of cream with the old-fashioned dasher, I could hear the
thunder of that flood of water on the rocks below, and feel the cool
spray on my face.  I made up my mind then, I would see the Falls.

It was a sunny day when I saw it.  The air was full of spring odors,
with apple and plum trees bending under their load of pink snow; the
woods full of dog-violets and trilliums.  Young lambs teetered on their
too-long legs in the meadows, and the fresh air coming in the train
windows had a resinous tang that lowered the content of oranges,
perfume, and moth-balls which had come with us from the city.  The
poplar trees swung rosy garlands as we passed, as if in compliment to
the brides and grooms.  And we had many of them.

We reached the Falls in the late afternoon, and hurried over, as if we
feared it might be gone.  It was smaller than I had thought, but the
glassy-green water broke into spray, just as it should; and the _Maid
of the Mist_ rode at anchor on the river below.  I had a tight feeling
around my heart.  It was all so familiar, and yet so strange, like the
old home with strangers living in it.

Brides and grooms were everywhere, shrill with excitement, and they
were not looking at the Falls at all.  I had pictured them as standing
awed in the presence, transfixed and hushed.  They told other brides
and grooms incidents of their weddings, and how cleverly they fooled
the gang at the station, rescued their valises, shook off the rice,
caught the train at Sunnyside--

Two women sat in front of the Falls, crocheting as they discussed
another woman, the new daughter-in-law of one of them.  I soon
discovered they did not like her or her family--the whole connection,
it seemed.  They were all extravagant, two-faced, bad-tempered, and not
very honest, though both ladies declared they were not going to say one
word against them.

Their hands flew as their tongues clacked, and as they counted the
purls and single and double chains, their heads went up and down like
hens picking corn.

I stayed a little while and then came away, sorrowful.  Something had
deflowered my romance.

But I had lived with it too long to let it go like that.  I would not
give it up, and in the early morning I went back and had it all to
myself.

Then came an old man with a lunch pail; a night watchman going home.

"I like to come and see her," he said, "before I turn in.  She is so
sure of herself, and keeps on rolling.  Just as the Indians saw her a
thousand years ago.  Nothing stops her.  She's on her way.  People come
and go.  She rolls.  Sometimes I think I'd like to go with her.  But I
know life is like that.  Just rolls too, and I'm part of it.  Makes me
feel better when I watch her.  I see nothing matters .... much."

Just then the sun came over the tree tops behind us, and fell on the
glistening spray, and I saw the rainbow!




THE WOMAN WHO MISSED HER OWN PARTY

Any one who has picked wild strawberries will know how I felt when I
saw my hostess opening a jar of them for me that day, when I stopped at
the Eagle's Nest Service Station.  The wife of the man who ran the
Station had come down the path from her little house, and asked me to
come up and wait while the repairs were being made.  She spread a white
cloth over the oil-cloth covered table, and hospitably told me to "sit
in."

"Do you serve wild strawberries and home-made biscuits to all wayfarers
who have car-trouble?" I asked.

"No, not always; I really haven't loosened up on the strawberries since
I had a bit of a disappointment.  I have never told any one about it,
for it hurt me so.  I couldn't even tell Bert, for he had warned me
that it would turn out just as it did."

"Tell me," I said; "I am a deep well."

She hesitated a moment.

"It is about a year ago," she began; "a woman came here, with her car,
and I asked her to come in.  You see it is lonely here, so far off the
highway, and I am glad when women come.  I asked her to have a cup of
tea, and I had strawberries too, and fresh bread.  She said, like you,
that wild strawberries are a test of friendship ...  We had a wonderful
time.  She was easy to talk to, easy to listen to, and I think I told
her more about myself than I ever told any one.  When she was leaving
she asked me to come and see her in the city, giving me her card.  She
said, 'I have a big house, and two maids spoiling for something to do.
Write me a card and we'll have a visit.'  She seemed to mean it."

"Of course she meant it," I said heartily.

"Now wait," said the lady of Eagle's Nest, "I am not so sure.  I didn't
intend to go.  It did not seem reasonable that she should want me.  Of
what interest could I be to her?  I, who live on a mountain trail, the
wife of a service station man; I, who see only life through train
windows going by, longing to follow it, but longing in vain--a
sunburnt, calloused-handed woman, who knows no greater thrill than when
the conductor throws me a roll of magazines--over which I sit until
Number Four roars by reminding me that to-morrow morning has come.
Well, anyway she asked me--and I fell for it ... I wanted to go.  Bert
said it was just her politeness, and that rather hurt me too.  So one
day when the rains had closed in on us, and no one came on the trail, I
sent her a card and said I was coming in and would spend the afternoon
with her if she were at home.  I wrote the letter three times trying to
be very casual and offhand and travelled.  I tried to give the
impression I was just running down to the city to match a gold-fish--or
have my glasses straightened, or my hair marcelled, or a diamond set.
I didn't want it to sound like my biennial outing.  I brushed my
clothes and blackened my shoes, and washed my face in buttermilk to
remove one of the three coats of tan."

"Tan is good this year," I ventured.

"Well, maybe--but it didn't do me any good.  I found her house easily,
and was awed with its magnificence; marvelling too, at my own
assurance.  I walked in between the stone pillars, and made my way to
the front door.  Just then two cars swept in, and beautifully dressed
women--it seemed like a dozen--alighted, like butterflies glowing with
color, glittering bead bags, fluttering draperies, gold shoes.  I
veered off, and went around to the back door.  I was sure then she had
not received my letter.  She was evidently having a party.  I couldn't
break in on that.  But I might see her a moment.  I wanted to see her.

"At the back door, I knocked, and a tall woman came--a sort of
warden-on-the-wall type, and she disposed of me in a moment.

"I am sorry," she said in a clipped English voice; "Mrs. Garrick is
very busy--she is entertaining and can see no one.  Will you come
again?"

"It is of no importance," I said just as stiff as she, and came away.
I sat in the station feeling very small and sad until Number Four came
in, and got home at one in the morning.  My visit was over.  I had been
to town, as we say.

I interrupted her there.

"Was that a bright windy day in the spring about a year ago?" I asked.

"It was--I remember the way the ladies' dresses billowed."

I stood up in my excitement.

"Mrs. Garrick was expecting a woman from the country.  She had
hurriedly invited a few of us to meet her.  It was you.  She said she
met a charming woman at a service-station.  There were about ten of us
there to meet you--and you didn't come.  I remember it well."

She looked at me in a dazed way.  Then her face flooded with color.

"It was your party," I said.  "Oh, why didn't you come right in?  It
was your party."

She opened her mouth to speak, but no words came.  Then...

"Oh, did I miss my own party?  I, who would have loved it so!  Think of
it--I sat there in the station, ready to cry with disappointment, while
my own party was going on--and that dear woman!"

"Don't take it so hard," I said at last.  "You are not the only one.
There are many people who miss their own party, day after day, and
never discover their mistake."




CATS

(_No reference to Lady-friends, Political Opponents, Critics, or even
Editors_)

I mean real cats, the furry ones who lie before the fire or sit in
windows and brighten the world with their cosy pleasant ways.  I like
them because they are so composed and self-sufficient and entirely
right in their own eyes; so sure of themselves and the justice of their
cause that they never need to repent and are never sorry for anything
they have ever done; never want to tell you their troubles and never
have any desire to do better.  I like them but I have no illusions
about them.  I like best of all the common cats, the alley breed, who
think a family tree is the thing you run up when the airedale is in
pursuit!

About five years ago a little cat just came to us.  She walked in with
the calm assurance of a paid-in-advance roomer.  She was a
square-jawed, blunt little cat without one distinguishing feature
except her air of confidence.  She came in at the front door and walked
through to the kitchen and I gathered from her air of self-possession
that the Billeting Committee or the Employment Bureau or some other
authoritative body had given her our address and asked her to call; and
just for a moment I wondered if I had put in a requisition somewhere
for a cat.  To relieve the embarrassment of the moment, which, however,
was all on my side, I offered her a saucer of milk, which she accepted
graciously and without haste; and then came and sat on my knee and gave
me a careful scrutiny which ended in her jocosely biting my hand and I
knew then that all was settled and she considered that my application
had been accepted.

When the youngest member of my family came in and found us getting
acquainted, he took one look at my impromptu visitor and cried
out--quite offensively, we thought--"Wormwood Scrubs!"

Now I do not think that he intended to insinuate that my friendly
visitor had lately occupied a cell in this or any other punitive
institution, or that she seemed to be in any danger of so doing.  It
was rather his way of expressing surprise and, I fear, disapproval.

I have said she was a blunt little cat, a plain little cat of no
particular color; last year's stubble or ravelled binding twine would
perhaps best describe her complexion, but I could feel that she had a
personality.

Unfortunately the name "Wormwood Scrubs" persisted, shortened to the
"Worm" or "Scrubs," both offensive and damaging to her prospects; and
so I saw that, to save my ingratiating young friend from the unfair
burden of a mean name, I would have to give her one, so, looking at her
square jaw, and uncompromising profile, I could think of just one name
for her.  It was plain, business-like, tidy, descriptive, and not
inharmonious; and so I made the proclamation to
all-whom-it-might-concern, that the little cat should henceforth be
known by the name of "Annie Gray," and as Annie Gray she ran her little
race.  Annie had one of the qualifications of greatness.  She believed
in herself and she believed in her mission.  Her mission was mice.  I
did not know that we had a mouse in the house; but the first morning
after her arrival Annie produced a mouse, dead to be sure, but
unmistakably a mouse.  Her detractors declared that this mouse had been
brought by Annie and planted in the basement for the purpose of
convincing us that we needed a cat.  Indeed, the young cynic offered to
prove that Annie had used it before; but I closed the debate right
there and upheld Miss Gray in her enterprise and praised her industry.
The next morning Miss Gray had another mouse to show for the night's
gleaning; and she carried it in triumph to the door of the young
cynic's bedroom as if she would silence his clacking tongue once and
for all.

Her reputation then as a mouser was assured and invitations began to
come in from outside points; and Annie and I were both well pleased and
flattered.

Telephone conversations ensued: "Mrs. McClung, I hear you have a
wonderful cat and I wonder if you would let me have her for a few days;
I have so many mice."  (Paragraph of description followed--tracks every
morning; wax eaten off jelly jars; oatmeal ruined; pantry ginning to
smell.)  "I hear your cat is very clever ... I will take good care of
her..."

And so Annie began her career!  All went well for several weeks and
Miss Gray came and went in a covered basket to the homes of the rich
and the great; and, once, at the very zenith of her popularity, had a
taxi sent for her.  When she had a few days at home she sat and washed
herself with great care.  It was in one of these breathing spells that
we found her using the drip from an imperfectly closed tap for this
purpose; and that was added to Annie's well-established record for
intelligence.

I might have known better than to let her out on Friday the Thirteenth.
The invitation came from a friend of one of Annie's clients, a Mrs.
Belloe, of whom I had heard.  I knew she belonged to some strange
religious sect and believed in spirits; but I did not think that a
plain matter of mousing would be affected by doctrinal divergence.
Mrs. Belloe had one little girl, Alvaretto, aged seven, who had always
been allowed to express herself in positive ways.  It appears that,
when little Alvaretto expresses her individuality by cutting her
mother's best tablecloth with the scissors, she is not reproved in the
crude and thoughtless way that some of us have used with our innocent
offspring on like occasions.  No, indeed!  Little Alvaretto is told
about the culture of flax and the weaving of linen, and is shown
pictures of the processes involved; and then shown the severed threads
and told that they can never be the same again, never, never, never;
and is taught a pretty little song with appropriate motions; so it
happens that whenever little Alvaretto wants her mother's undivided
attention she hacks a piece of furniture or breaks a dish or drags a
sharp nail over the piano.

When Miss Gray was left standing at the top of the basement stairs
waiting for someone to open the door for her to descend to the good
hunting below, little Alvaretto approached her.  Alvaretto had not seen
a cat before and was naturally curious; so, following the plan which
had been so successful with other objects of interest, she reached for
that part of Miss Gray's anatomy which seemed best adapted to a quick
jerk, and was in turn surprised to find two sharp teeth in her own fat
little hand.  This sudden come-back caused Alvaretto to cry loudly, and
her mother, arriving in great alarm, forgot all her theories of
gentleness and beat her invited guest with the broom handle.

Annie was on the doorstep the next morning with as mad a look in her
face as I ever saw; and I knew all was not well even before I received
Mrs. Belloe's account of the affair, from which it appeared that my
Annie had made a brutal and unprovoked attack upon her innocent and
defenceless child.  This was in the morning and by night Mrs. Belloe
believed that the cat was mad, and I had to admit she did not look any
too well pleased when she came home.

After that the business of the A. Gray Mouse Exterminator Company fell
off considerably, for the story of the wounding of little Alvaretto
Belloe had spread; and it was in this penumbral period of Annie's life
that her deadly rival, Clarissa, appeared.

But I wish to make it clear that I did not part with Annie because she
put a tooth or two into the soft little hand of Alvaretto Belloe, for I
believe she was entirely taken by surprise, and acted under the impulse
of self-protection; but when a little friend of mine who had been very
ill came to see me the first day she was able to go out and brought to
me her favorite kitten, I could not boorishly refuse so gracious a
gift.  The kitten was round, fat, and furry, a smoky gray marked with
dreamy blue!  Exquisite white markings, large luminous eyes, and an
affectionate disposition.  I do not wish to dwell on Miss Gray's
behaviour at this time.  "One of us will die" gleamed in her yellow
eyes; and, knowing Annie as we did, we knew this was no idle threat.
And Clarissa had merely hung for one brief moment on her wagging tail.

Now it happened, fortunately, that a friend of ours who owns a
seed-house had sent out a call for cats, for mice were devouring his
stores, sacks and all.  The moment I heard that cats were wanted I
phoned to him offering Annie delivered carriage free with the good-will
of the former owner; and my offer was accepted then and there.  I took
her down that day and my last glimpse of the capable Miss Gray, as she
disappeared into the gloomy labyrinth of bags and bins, was of a small
sturdy, self-sufficient cat about the size and color of a quarter's
worth of rice, who asked for no favors and expected none.

Then for three months Clarissa reigned in perfect peace and amity; and
the whole family rejoiced over her.  She was so beautiful; so playful
and affectionate; the perfect pet.  Three months of comfort, and then
began a new phase of life for all of us.  At the end of that time a
family of four arrived; and no one was more surprised than Clarissa.
We kept them all and found homes for them, too; and felt that a good
piece of work had been done for this great new needy country.

In another four months she had five rather scrubby looking little
things.  There were mutterings of the advisability of drowning some of
them, but no one wanted to do it, of course, and when they opened their
round eyes no one could do it; so they grew in beauty side by side.
Again we sent out to find homes for them.  Clarissa was so sweet and
trusting and left it all to us, especially to me; and I felt that I
must not fail her.

With great difficulty I placed four and we kept the fifth.  We did not
need two cats; but what could we do?  The kitten was jet black and had
a glossy coat; and we believed there was a streak of Persian in it.  We
also believed--but more of this anon.

In an incredibly short time we saw that the blow was about to fall
again; and it found us somewhat panicky.  Some of the kittens that had
gone out in the first distribution had yielded an increase and the
owners had asked me quite pointedly if I would help to find homes for
them.

The housing question sat heavily on me, and I found myself appraising
all the people I met from this angle; would they or would they not take
a kitten?  When I was asked to speak for societies, I made it a
condition of acceptance that two kittens would have to be absorbed by
the society.  I conveyed the thought tactfully, of course, but that is
what it amounted to; and, during the season for meetings, I managed to
dispose of several.  At teas, and other places where women meet, I
cleverly worked the conversation around to the subject of pets for
children, and had touching tales to tell of the delinquent child who
never had a pet; buttressing my tales with statistics to prove my
contention; and, under the spell of these conversations, managed to
shove off a few more.

But I went through some very dark days.  Orders were cancelled, and
kittens were returned.  I am not sure that I did not get some back that
were not Clarissa's at all.  I grieve to have to say it but some of the
people whom I had trusted failed me utterly; and they were so sly about
it.  If I went out of town for a day, someone was sure to bring back a
kitten; and the reasons they gave lacked sincerity.

"The dear little pet seemed to miss its mother so."  "Mother brought me
a bird for my birthday." "We are thinking of moving into a suite."

Then there were the people who were clever enough to see me coming: "O
Mrs. McClung, we would love to have one of your very lovely kittens but
you know the people next door have an airedale and they are so hard on
cats; and I am so terribly attached to any pet that it would simply
kill me to lose my kitty if I had one..."

Meanwhile Clarissa went merrily on.  Our backyard swarmed with her
courtiers; and, many a time when I was awakened by their unholy uproar,
I thought wistfully of little Annie Gray, with her flat-heeled
homeliness, and cursed Clarissa's fatal beauty which seemed to be in a
fair way to ruin both of us, for I knew I was becoming a social
outcast.  People were afraid to be friendly with me for fear I would
talk them into taking a cat; and I could see I was being deliberately
left out of many of the pleasant gatherings.

Then followed a series of happenings which decided me on a certain
course of action.

I had borne a lot from Clarissa.  She had that meekness that can get
what it likes out of people; but I was not so well pleased with her
attitude toward the little cat we called the "Jeopard" (so named
because he was so often found in jeopardy).  The Jeopard had been given
away and, not liking his place, came back; at least, he got back as far
as the car line, where I found him standing between the rails calling
loudly for some good Christian to show him the way home.  The car was
coming, and the little thing's eyes were wild with terror when I got
him and carried him home in triumph; and, in my joy at rescuing him, I
declared that he could stay, no matter how many kittens came.  Clarissa
promptly disowned him and fought with him, though he had not been more
than a week away.  When we at last persuaded her that he was her own
kitten she fell on him, not with any show of affection but with the
fiery zeal of the good housekeeper, to lick his hair into shape; for
the Jeopard was part Persian and dated back to the time the big gray
Persian from across the street had broken his caste.  Clarissa did not
allow the poor Jeopard a moment of peace, but spent most of her time
trying to make his hair lie down; and, when she found it could not be
done, turned on him in a rage that was most unbecoming and
unreasonable, for after all it was not the Jeopard's fault that his
hair was long.  Clarissa's conduct in this matter did much to shake my
faith in her.

A blow fell on me from another quarter too.  The big kitten, the one we
kept from the second family, the glossy-haired jet black Angus of
languorous habits called in good faith "Angus," became the subject of
suspicion.  I hoped I was mistaken; but I have found in matters of this
kind one is never mistaken.  The worst is always true.  And it was six.
We called his name Angus still but we added "in error," and tried hard
to use the feminine pronoun.

When Clarissa again presented to an over-stocked and unfriendly world a
brood of seven I was desperate.  I knew that society at large, I mean
the section of society to which I had access, had reached the
saturation point.  I could no longer be the bridge between the catless
home and the homeless cat.  We could perhaps find some other place of
living for our family and leave the house to Clarissa and Angusinerror.
One other dark road lay ahead of me ... there was one way of escape
and, driven into a corner as I was, I would take it.

I do not know why I chose Sunday morning unless it was that, in the
lowness of my mind as I contemplated what I was about to do, a little
sin like Sabbath-breaking was nothing to me.  I remember how far away I
felt from the sober respectable life which was ebbing past the house,
as the well-dressed and orderly families took their way to church.  The
dewy morning air ... Spring's elusive odors ... the soft and inviting
cadences of the chimes calling good people to prayer ... the marching
white clouds above my head ... the stillness of the quiet streets ...
and I making my way to the back yard with a bottle of chloroform in one
hand, and a covered basket full of sleeping kittens in the other.

A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands in
sleep; and, as the kindly drug spread its covering wings around the
tiny travellers, I said to them, "Little cats, I'm sorry that you have
to be deported; but you know about the quota.  The quota is full and
more full; and anyway, you need not feel disappointed for this is not
much of a world for little cats.  There are airedales and slingshots
and bad little boys, and locked doors and horrible nights and hunger
and burning thirsts and frozen ears, and hard-hearted women; and, in
the good green country to which you are now setting sail, there will be
none of these things.  So be on your way, little cats, without regret.
You are not missing much!"

But, when I came into the house and met the bereaved mothers (whom I
thought I had shut securely in the coal cellar) who regarded me with
horror-stricken and anguished eyes, my fine philosophy fell away from
me.  Angusinerror went back to her one kitten, and as this was her
first venture in maternity she grew to believe that she had never
really had more than one; but Clarissa, who can count as well as any of
us up to seven, spared me nothing and came with me the first time I
went to the basement after that fatal Sunday morning and, grabbing her
one kitten, the one I had, in my clemency, spared to her, she flew with
it in her mouth to a high box in the store-room, and actually growled
at me.

It was three weeks before she really made up with me and then it was in
a cold, half-hearted way, and, when I tried a piece of paper on a
string in the doorway, she chased it for me but I could see she was
doing it to please me and not because she liked doing it.

There is a sadness of spirit about her now that is disquieting to me.
She sits looking out of the window listlessly; and does not even growl
when an airedale passes.  She still hunts for the missing kittens and
she stands in front of me quite often and plainly asks me to tell her
where they are; and she wants to know why they come so easily? and why
are they so sweet and lovely? and why is it so hard to give them up?
and when I cannot answer any of these questions I know she thinks I am
pretty dumb.

Mr. Kipling has written a song for all dumb beasts who are hard beset;
and I say it over for Clarissa, but she looks out of the window and I
am not sure that it registers:

  Children of the Camp are we,
  Serving each in his degree;
  Children of the yoke and goad,
  Pack and harness, pad and load.

  And the men that walk beside,
  Dusty, silent, heavy-eyed,
  Cannot tell why we or they
  March and suffer, day by day.


But to-day the world is a bright and joyous place, for the buds are
opening on the trees; and the tulips are sticking up their sharp little
green noses; the river is running clear of ice; and just now a flock of
wild geese have gone honking over the house; and so the old drama of
life goes on.




THE LIFE OF THE PARTY

Behind the evening paper, in the last seat of the car, Eric Brown sat
in premeditated isolation.

It had been a day of a thousand irritations and griefs, expected and
unexpected.  As Manager of an Insurance Company, he was the shock
absorber--a three-way buffer between the Company, the Agent, and the
Public.  To-day the shocks came in from all six directions.  There was
the irate agent whose territory had been invaded; the policy-holder who
claimed his brother-in-law had a better policy in another company; the
sentimental, tearful woman, who would not let her husband take a
policy--he might die; the sharp rebuke from the Company regarding the
agents' accounts which were mounting higher and higher; the notice to
vacate the premises in three months; a cashier's error that had to be
explained.

He was tired of explaining, coaxing, reasoning--tired of the sound of
his own voice.  Then at lunch time, when ordinarily he would have had
an hour of peace, he had gone to his Service Club and listened to a
wordy speech from a man who has an evil gift of saying undisputed
things with great conviction, a sort of foamy eloquence that smothers
the listener.

A thirty-minute ride on the street car, with its clanging bells and
people coming and going, was his first respite.  At least he did not
have to listen or answer.  Passing a market garden he looked enviously
at the workmen setting out cabbage plants in the brown earth.  It was
quiet there and the ground did not talk back.  He tried to forget the
unpleasant happenings of the afternoon, especially that last interview
when he had unfortunately lost his temper.  He wished now that he had
left his office an hour earlier.

"I'm getting to be a mean old grouch," he said.

His wife met him at the door.  "Oh, Eric, you're late.  Did you forget
this is the night we are going to the Armstrongs?  Mrs. Armstrong said
to tell you she is depending on you to be the critic.  All the men are
to make after-dinner speeches, and you are to criticize them and she
wants you to go right after them and be real funny and make all the
local hits.  She says she is depending on you to make the party go!"

Eric sat down in the nearest chair and stared at her stupidly.  "I
won't go," he said.  "I never said I would go.  I wouldn't go if I had
said so.  I'm sick of people's crazy chatter."

Erma's pretty face turned pale.  "Why, Eric, what is the matter?"

"I'm tired, that's all.  Isn't that enough?  Haven't I a right to be
tired?  I'm not a piece of machinery.  I have a big job and you should
help me.  You shouldn't drag me out like this.  You have no mercy on
me!"

"I thought you liked going out," she said without raising her voice.
"You were pleased when I told you about this invitation.  Even though
you are tired, it will do you good to meet people.  I was tired too,
but I took a rest at five o'clock.  You should have come home a bit
earlier, but I suppose you forgot."

"Well, I won't go.  Now get that.  You like this sort of thing and I
don't.  Don't get me into this kind of corner again."

"Oh, don't worry, Eric, people who break engagements at the last minute
are not long bothered with invitations.  Come on then and I will get
you something to eat.  I have the kettle boiling.  I thought we would
have a cup of tea before we went.  You can call Mrs. Armstrong and tell
her you are not going.  Just tell her the truth.  She'll understand.
Old Bill Armstrong never goes anywhere with her.  But have your supper
first.  I'll have time to dress."

"Will you go alone?" Eric asked, wondering.

"Oh, yes, I must go.  I can't leave my hostess with two empty places.
I know what it means and what a slap in the face it is to anyone to
turn down an invitation that has been accepted."

"Well, then, you can tell her, Erma, just what a terrible day I have
had.  I simply couldn't stand another session with people--voices bore
into my brain like corkscrews."

Erma was slicing the cold ham.  "Sorry, Eric, but you will have to make
your own excuses.  That's one thing I won't do.  My mother did the
excusing for the whole family, poor dear, and I always felt it was a
bit too thick.  You see, Eric, we've only been married six weeks, and
we haven't quite made our adjustments.  But we'll learn.  No!  You'll
have to square your own account."

After Eric had eaten a good meal of cold ham and potato salad, with a
piece of apple pie and cheese, he felt greatly refreshed.

"I could have left the office an hour earlier," he thought.  "I
certainly did no good by staying and I did accept Mrs. Armstrong's
invitation.  Erma has been decent about this too, for I know she is
disappointed.  Surely I'm not going to grow into a narrow-minded
money-grubber like old Bill Armstrong!"

Upstairs he could hear Erma stepping lightly as she dressed.  She came
down radiant in her dinner gown.  "Sorry you are not coming, Eric," she
said cheerfully.  "Mrs. Armstrong will be disappointed.  Have you
phoned?"

Eric jumped up hurriedly.  "I'm feeling better ...  What time is it,
Erma?  Are the studs in my shirt?"

"Yes.  I laid out all your things.  I'm still hoping."

"Well, I'll go," he said; "but, Erma, don't accept any more invitations
for me.  You know I don't enjoy this sort of thing."


Five hours later.

"You were wonderful, Eric," said Erma, the faithful and admiring wife.
"I never saw Mrs. Armstrong so pleased over anything.  That story you
told about the explosion and the man and his wife going out of the
house together for the first time in twenty years certainly made a hit.
How do you think of those things at the right moment?"

"I'm glad I was able to put the party on its feet," he said.  "We
certainly had a pleasant evening.  I don't know when I laughed so much.
But, Erma, another time don't give me anything to eat before we go to a
place like that."




YOU NEVER KNOW WHERE IT WILL END

David Evans, aged seven, did not need to listen to the argument between
his parents.  He had heard it all before.  His father was disappointed
in him because he would not fight Michael Pepper, and his mother was
making out as good a case for him as she could.

David wished to please them both but he did not like to fight.  He
wasn't afraid of being hurt, but he had seen Michael fighting Bill
Dawson and their faces were ugly.  He hated ugliness.

His parents' voices became louder.  His father said, "You are spoiling
him, Edith.  You are making a sissy of him."

"What is a sissy, Daddy?" David interrupted at this point.

"A sissy is a boy who lets others impose on him and cries instead of
fights," Dr Evans explained, as he drew David to his side.

"But David doesn't cry," Mrs. Evans interposed.

"When Michael Pepper takes away your cart, what do you do?"  Dr. Evans
ignored his wife and looked at David, who hung his head with a feeling
of guilt he could not understand.

"I come home and get my wagon, and then after supper I go back and get
my cart," he explained.

"There, Edith, you see," David's father said; "he lets this Pepper kid
take his things."

"He does, but he always gets them back, and he never comes to you or me
to help him."

"He knows better than to come to me," the Doctor growled.

David's eyes opened very wide.  "Wouldn't you help me Daddy?" he asked
wonderingly.

Dr. Evans' lips set firmly.  "I want to help you, David," he explained.
"I am trying to help you.  I want you to grow up to be a big fine
man--strong and unafraid.  Men have to fight sometimes."

"Do you fight, Daddy?"  David showed his wonder.  "Hit men--big
men--when they take your things?"

"Of course I have to fight," Dr. Evans floundered a bit.  "Life is a
fight."

"Do you mean with Mamma?" David insisted.

"No, I mean with the world."  The Doctor escaped to generalities.  "But
when Michael takes your cart I want you to get it--go right after it
and bring it home."

"He's bigger than me," David said; considering the proposition.

"Never mind.  Hit him, David.  I'll be proud of you if you even try."

"I think David's plan is much wiser than yours," Mrs. Evans said with a
flash in her eyes.  "He uses his head instead of his fists, and when
you let your temper loose you never know what will happen."

But Dr. Evans frowned as he rose to go to his office, and called back
over his shoulder, "When that Pepper kid sees he's not afraid he'll
respect him."


It was three days later that young David Evans, aged seven, changed his
methods of getting his things from Michael Pepper.  Michael and Amy,
his little sister, had come over to see a bird house David was making
and to borrow David's cart.  As they were going away David asked
Michael to return the cart that day, but Michael told him he could come
for it if he wanted it.

Suddenly David realized that now was the time to make his father proud
of him.  He walked over to Michael and said calmly, "I'll have to hit
you, Michael, if you won't bring back my cart."  So far in David's
little mind there was no passion.  He was merely trying a new theory.

But before he could do anything Michael Pepper doubled his fists, and
hit him in the face, then another blow below the belt.

Amy Pepper began to cry.  She knew what would happen to David if the
boys fought.  "I'll bring the cart," she screamed; "I'll bring the
cart!"

But David didn't hear her.  Something was happening to him.  A rising
rage possessed him.  He was striking and kicking with all his strength.
He wanted to hurt--to kill.

Michael sprang on him.  They clinched and fell.  Michael's fingers
reached for his throat--pressed--hard--harder.

David's hand touched something heavy--closed over it--and with a mighty
effort he jerked free.  Then in a blind rage he threw the hammer with
which he had been working.


In the Doctor's office Amy Pepper lay with a purple bruise on her
forehead.  Her eyes were closed.  As Dr. Evans worked over her, David
stood with horror in his eyes asking, "Did I do it, Daddy?  Did I kill
Amy?"

His father did not answer until Amy opened her eyes.




KEEPING FRIENDS WITH THE FAMILY

Scientists tell us that our minds are like onions, with layers and
layers of consciousness wrapped and folded around each other; and who
am I to dispute them?  It's a pleasant fancy with which to beguile our
dull moments anyway, and very intriguing.  Everyone loves to unroll a
parcel that has manifold wrapping, which we strip off with rising
expectancy--happy if its diminishing bulk contains something better
than a raw potato at its heart.

Leaving the metaphysical aspect of it, we are on safer ground when we
say that the relations of life begin with the family.  We belong to
many groups in these complex days: classes, societies, lodges,
affiliations of all kinds--but the family is the abiding and
inescapable one.  We may resign from a Club, stay away from a class,
change our politics, but the family into which we are born will ever
remain our family.  From it much of our joy and sorrow will come.  It
is, therefore, a proper subject for serious thought.  What are we going
to do about it?

The family half a century ago and less was bound together by the
strongest ties of all.  They worked together.  They needed each other.
They couldn't raise the barn, or gather the crop, without all the
relations.  Family feuds had to be patched up at threshing time.  But
that's all over.  Steam and gas and different methods of work have
changed all of that.  The economic bonds have fallen off the family.
We are free from each other that way.  Mother used to make the girls'
dresses--now the girls watch the sales.

Instead of one enterprise in which every member of the family had a
stake, we have the spectacle now of the members of a family going their
several ways.  The father carries on his grocery business alone; the
son is an auto mechanic; the daughter, stenographer for an oil company.
Even the mother, whom tradition has prescribed to the confines of the
home, may be carrying on a nice little sales-on-commission business
after hours.  With all the devices for convenient cooking, all the
semi-prepared foods on the market, no able-bodied woman need spend all
her time and energy at home; the smallness of the modern family is also
a factor.

And yet in spite of this seeming independence, we are dependent on our
own people for our happiness, and always will be.

The first requisite in family life is a home, a common inheritance,
something which requires care, something on which love can be bestowed.
We love what we work for.  A house of our own is a common denominator
for the whole family.

And in a house there's work for every one, and that is the secret of
family loyalty--community of effort.  A house and a garden, wherein all
have duties and rights, and the pride of ownership, is the foundation
of family loyalties and friendships.  A family where everybody works is
usually a happy family, rejoicing in the common inheritance.  It is in
this regard that a farm offers the best conditions for family life,
that is, provided the human relations are harmonious.

Many books have been written on the theme of the stern, unyielding,
autocratic father, and the rebellious son who leaves home, slamming the
door behind him as he goes, while the pale, trembling mother weeps and
prays but is powerless to effect a reconciliation.  "You must obey your
father," is the formula her sorely tried heart clings to.  "You must
not talk back to your father!"  When, as near as the reader could
judge, the old man needed to be talked back to, if ever a man did.  But
such was the tradition.

Years pass.  And when the family fortunes are at low ebb, the proud old
despot confined to his chair with gout (we know now he was simply
poisoned with angry emotions), the poor mother worn thin and frail
trying to please him, and with her tender heart breaking for her
wayward boy; the pretty daughter, thin and pale now too, anaemic and
sad, for she had to be in every night at nine so that father could get
his rest, and never could she have any young people to foregather with
her, "father was so difficult...."

Into this sodden, gray, and stuffy family comes the Prodigal, browned
by many suns, gay, rollicking, robust, successful, and forgiving.  He
claps the old man affectionately on the back, showers presents on
everyone, kisses his weeping mother and sister; pays off the mortgage;
and a new life begins for the family.

To me the outstanding feature of this type of story is this:--the boy,
who rebelled and escaped from the discordant vibrations, succeeded.  He
grew strong; lived happily, and developed a vibrant personality.  The
daughter, who submitted to the tyrant's rule, became a poor drab
creature, the victim of halitosis.  And though the writers of these
tales had no thought of teaching such a heretical doctrine as this, it
stands out from the story like the policeman at the crossing pointing
an imperative white hand to the Far Country, and if the message of the
hand could become vocal this is what it would be:

"If the vibrations of home are full of discord and you are unable to
change them--it's down the road for you, my lad.  Beat it, boy or girl,
beat it!  For life is a one-way road.  Remember, you cannot double back
and live again the days that are lost, and remember, too, that no one,
not even a father or mother, has any license to darken the sun, or
distort the moon and stars that were given to shine upon and lighten
the path of youth.  If you have tried every way you can think of to get
along at home, and all have failed--try distance.  Distance is a
positive miracle worker in sweetening family relationships."

I am strong in the hope that the time is coming when parents will study
certain psychological laws that control the conduct of their children;
and it may be, in the providence of God, that the Church will lead the
way.  Instead of so much exhortation from the pulpit, we may have
classes in psychology where people may be shown how to overcome their
troubles, instead of being constantly implored to endure them!

In Fanny Hurst's new book "A President is Born," she describes a
middle-class American family in such vivid manner that the reader can
actually smell, in its fascinating pages, the spice-cake made for the
last birthday party, and the moth-balls that protected the old
gentleman's winter coat.  The Schuylers were a solid family in the
sense of standing together.  They fought with each other, shouted,
scolded, upbraided, swore at and by each other, praised, laughed at,
helped each other.  The story begins with a family gathering; where the
full force of the family assembled, and where the old gentleman, with
many chuckles kept up his sleeve, until the friction of delay and
suspense had set everyone on edge, the piece of news that shook the
family to its foundations.  These grown-up sons and daughters, with
children of their own, were going to have a young brother or sister, a
brother it proved to be, young David, destined to be a President of the
United States.

Then the author traces bit by bit the influences which beat upon this
square-faced, sturdy little American, following each stream to its
source, with the alchemy of her great art.

One function gets the place of honor in the story, and that is the
family conference.  When the bachelor brother, the studious Henry, was
offered the nomination to Congress, and refused it, the family gathered
to reason with him; when the golden-haired Claire and her cousin
Stephen had together strayed too far from virtue's path, the family sat
on their case, and decided after a stormy session on what could be
done, and every member, young and old, attended.  There was a feeble
attempt to send young David to bed, which he staunchly resisted, upheld
in that resistance by his old brother Henry who said, "Let the kid
stay--don't make him think that having a baby is a disgraceful thing!"

So David grew with the strength of his family behind him--and learned
all that they could teach him, thriving on the strong meat of the
family conferences, where every member of the family, himself included,
got a hearing.

And when disaster came to the family, every member stood bravely up to
it, and met the shock like a square of Gordon Highlanders, knitted
together, as they had been, by their sense of family unity.  In telling
the story of David Schuyler, Fanny Hurst has again demonstrated that
the strength of the wolf is the pack.

Family unity is nurtured by freedom of speech, and by the same token it
is shattered or rather choked to death by the iniquitous tradition,
under which we have suffered for generations, that parents must not be
talked back to by their children--that there is something God-like in
the act of begetting a child, which forever establishes the parents,
especially the father, in wisdom and honor.  Happily this remnant of
medieval superstition is passing away, and fathers and mothers have to
show cause, if they are going to receive reverence.  Who are we,--we
who have had the temerity to bring children into the world--that we are
not to be criticized or questioned?  Are we so perfect in conduct?  So
infallible in judgment?  So irreproachable in character?

I do not mean that parents should endure rudeness from their children.
Freedom of speech and rudeness are not even analogous.  It is the boy
and girl who dare not reply to their parents, who go out from their
presence in thin-lipped silence, yet with bitterness in their hearts,
ingrowing bitterness that cannot be expressed, and so swells and
festers.  If parents only knew the wells of bitterness they dig in the
hearts of their children by their high-handed and austere dealings,
they would welcome even rudeness in preference to that damning silence
in whose poisonous breath filial affection withers and dies.

There is a passage in the writings of the Prophet Nahum in which God
appeals to the Children of Israel to speak out.  He cries, "Testify
against me!  Wherein have I wearied you?"  That's the way to clear the
air!  Speak up.  Give me your side of it.  The meeting is now open for
discussion.

Common courtesy is a great factor in holding families together.  "No
matter what goes wrong," a girl said to me once, "we can always depend
on mother, her good manners never desert her.  I am proud to say that
my mother is the most courteous person I know."  And that is surely a
sweet and gracious tribute for a mother to receive from her daughter.

Words, bitter stinging words, and even idle, gossipy words, without
evil intention, disrupt more families than acts of disloyalty.  The
tongue is an unruly member, surely.  And most of us have kept our
friends largely because our idle words were not reported.

A woman, who had just moved into a new house, laughingly remarked to a
friend, that any one who had as many relatives as she had, simply had
to have a spare room.  The remark was twisted a little when re-told,
and by the time it had gone around the ramifications of the family, the
whole clan was up in arms.  The lady of the new house wondered why none
of them came to visit her--and it took years to wipe out the
ill-feeling.  All of which bears out the words of the psalmist
regarding the relation of strife and tale-bearers.

Family loyalties thrive, too, on pleasant surprises.  No one can
remember all the relatives' birthdays each year.  But once in a while
to spring a "three for five" birthday card which bears a blue and green
bird, from whose beak a purple streamer shouts in gold letters a "Happy
Birthday to Aunt Mary," helps a little, particularly if you manage to
have it arrive in Aunt Mary's mail on the very day.  Or to send to your
Cousin Jim a newspaper clipping which tells of the new
drought-resisting wheat, knowing that he, too, is carrying on an
experiment, is a friendly little bit of good will propaganda that
cements family friendship.  It is the small, unexpected courtesies of
life that feed the tender plants of friendship, and it is in neglect of
these that families so often fail.

There are proud and cynical souls who will flout all this, for to them
it is a sorry business to even try to keep friends with the family,
believing, as they profess to believe, that family ties are fetters to
be broken.

There are shallow thinkers who write and speak much heresy and nonsense
about the breaking up of a family group, and the desirability of each
person living his own life, unshackled by traditions of family.  Out of
the mists and miseries of the past has the family group been evolved,
and it will grow in strength and beauty as time goes on.

When the time comes, as it is surely coming, when no child comes into
life unwelcomed and unwanted; when systems of State clinics and State
hospitals spread their wholesome and healing gospel of good health for
all; when mothers have time to enjoy and know their children, and time
to study their growing minds; when the Church takes up the great
problems of teaching people how to live with as much earnestness as it
has tried to show them how to die, the family will be exalted and
glorified.

Even now, though we are far from the ideal, let us remember, with deep
affection and humble gratitude, that it is our own people who come to
our rescue in time of distress, while the genial acquaintance, the
winsome fellow club member, the pleasant political associate, pass by
on the other side, busy with their own concerns.  The rather
lightly-regarded relative is the one who is ready to become our
security at the bank.

It was not the vivacious friend you met on the train, and for whom you
gave a Luncheon-Bridge last winter, and who was, as the Society editor
put it, "the raison d'tre for many pleasant social events" after that,
who offered to mind the baby for you when you had to go to the
hospital.  No, it was your sister Maude, who has six of her own, but
gaily declared one more did not matter!  So it goes!

It is in the dark hours of trouble that the family shines--which
possibly was the thought in the mind of Solomon when he set down the
statement that a brother is born for adversity.




FROSTED GRAPES

I saw their battered caps going past the window and knew that the
unemployed were again about to stand on my doorstep.

The phone was ringing; the mail had just come in; the breakfast dishes
were in the sink; the flowers needed water.  A woman was coming to see
me about her matrimonial misadventures at ten o'clock; I was trying to
prepare a speech.  So I went to the back door determined to contribute
to the unemployment situation the smallest amount of time.

"We don't want anything ourselves, but we have a friend who is in a bad
way," said one of the men.  "He's in a box car on the track."

"And what is the matter?" I asked.

"He's gone a little queer in the head, lady, and we're afraid to tell
anyone for fear they'll shut him up, and he ain't a bit crazy; he had a
big disappointment, that's all, and he's young.  But he's no more crazy
than--you are!  If you could give us some coffee, and something kinda
nice--he's fond of maple syrup--just to get him to eat.  He hasn't
tasted anything since it happened, and that's two days ago."

I wondered what emotional crisis had risen above the level of misery of
his life.

While they were having a meal I got the story.  Jimmy had enlisted at
sixteen, lying about his age to get in.  His brother was killed beside
him at Vimy, but he came through without a scratch, and after the war
stayed in Eastern Canada.  But he was unsettled and shaken, and did one
thing after another, and when the hard times came had nothing saved.
His two friends had lost their jobs, too, and the three of them decided
to hike west.

"Jimmy wanted to get back to Glanville--he was sure he'd be jake if he
could just get back there.  He had met a swell lady there when he was
going through with his battalion in seventeen.  She was at the station
with a big crowd, to see the boys go through, and she took to Jimmy.  I
guess he was a swell kid too, with his red cheeks and curly hair; and
she said she wished he was hers, and kissed him as the train pulled out.

"Jimmy remembers everything about her.  She had a hat with grapes,
frosted over the purple, so natural you wanted to eat them.  She was
the mayor's wife, and showed Jimmy her house across the track, a big
white one with a red roof and lilacs all in bloom, and she said to him:
'Jimmy, I will not forget you, even if the war lasts a hundred years.'

"And the band was playing, and the school-children sang, and the ladies
gave the soldiers boxes of candy and cigarettes, and the candy was
something wonderful, with cherries in it.  Jimmy was so young he had
never smoked, and the lady who was giving out the cigarettes said:
'You're too young to smoke, but I'll give you two boxes of candy,' and
the mayor's wife said, 'Give him cigarettes, too.  If he's old enough
to fight, he's old enough to smoke,' and he did smoke when he got on
the train, and it made him sick.  He remembers everything, though
that's thirteen years ago.

"He was sure we'd be jake if we could just get to her town, and we were
nearly four weeks getting there, but we did get there at last, hungry,
wet, and ragged, and sure enough, there was the big white house with
the red roof and the lilacs all in bloom, facing the track just as
Jimmy said.  Jimmy was pretty near all in, but say, he was like a kid
the night before Christmas.

"Every window in the house was alight, and Jimmy declared she must have
known he was coming.  We couldn't go in, looking like we did, so we
crept round to the back, to the stable, and got in easy enough, and
found lots of hay to lie on, and that was the best bed we'd had for
weeks.

"Jimmy promised us pancakes and maple syrup for breakfast, and the
three of us were kind of lightheaded, what with being so tired, and
hungry, and happy too.  Sometimes I had thought the poor kid was
building too much on what she said, but that night, looking at the big
house shining with lights, and all the swell cars parked around, I
began to believe in it too, and seeing the people inside so
good-looking and well dressed, it seemed maybe there would be jobs for
us, and a new start...

"Jimmy fell asleep, telling us about the grapes on her hat.

"Then something happened.

"Someone was yelling at us.  But we were so tired and thick-headed, we
couldn't get it at all.  A light was shining in my face, and when I got
my eyes pulled open, I saw a policeman holding a lantern.

"'Get up, you bums,' he shouted.  'You can't sleep here.  This is
private property ...  Get up and get out of this, or I'll have to
arrest you.'

"I knew there was something I should say, but I couldn't think what it
was.

"At last Jimmy got roused, and he said: 'Say, officer, listen!  I know
the mayor's wife.  She's a friend of mine.  Just go and tell her Jimmy
Waldron is here.  Jimmy Waldron of the 66th--the boy she said she
wouldn't forget if the war lasted a hundred years.  Tell her that."

"The policeman kinda softened at that, and I could see he believed
Jimmy too, and he left us and went into the house.  The party was
breaking up, and there was lots of cars getting started, and lights
flashed in the stable door as the cars circled out.

"The policeman came back with something in his hand.

"Mrs. Tarrick says you can't sleep in the stable.  She's afraid you'll
smoke and set it on fire.  But she says to go down to the
Chinaman's--he'll still be open, and get a meal.  And here's a dollar
for you.  She's sorry, but she can't remember any Jimmy Waldron.  She
says maybe you're thinking of some one else.  She's a swell lady, the
mayor's wife, and sure has fed a lot of tramps!"

"The light of the lantern fell right on Jimmy's face, and I thought he
was going to faint, but he stood up and said, 'Thank you, officer, and
will you thank Mrs. Tarrick.  Tell her it was my mistake ...  I should
have known there is no Santa Claus.'

"And he laughed, a strangling sort of laugh that was worse than any cry
I ever heard ...  And he hasn't been just right ever since, lady.  He's
just queer."




MY RELIGION

Everyone is religious, I believe--incurably religious.  We cannot
escape it.  We must be interested in our destination as we travel
through life, facing the inevitable exit where the darkness will close
around us.  Our terrestrial tenure is so terribly insecure.  We are all
shipwrecked sailors on the deck of a listing vessel.  How can we dare
to say we are not interested?

Religion is an explanation, an emotion, and a code of ethics.

My first experience with death came when I was ten years old.  One of
our neighbors had died.  She was a pale, draggled woman, worn out by
hard work and child-bearing, and doing without the things her heart
craved.  She did not exactly die--she just quit!  What was the use of
going on?  There was nothing ahead of her.  So she dropped out of the
race, acknowledging defeat.  Nobody blamed her.  I had heard the whole
matter discussed, and I did not see how God could square Himself over
the way Mrs. Inglis had been treated.  My mother said she pitied the
minister who was coming to preach her funeral sermon.  It may have been
because he had to drive twelve miles in the cold, but I took it to mean
that she thought he had such a poor case.  My sister and I were allowed
to go to the funeral, because there was no one to leave at home with
us, and we were both anxious to go.  I was keen to hear the case for
the defense.

It was a bitterly cold day.  The minister's cheek was frozen inside of
his big storm-collar when he came stamping into the room.  But his
heart was not chilled, nor were his powers of description.  He drew a
picture of the heavenly country which I have never forgotten, and when
concluding he declared that God was able to do for us "exceedingly
abundantly more than we could ask or think."

Nothing could have been more satisfactory to me than that challenge.  I
made a resolve at that moment that I would do my best for the dead
woman.  She would have the right sort of heaven if asking and thinking
were all that was needed.  My sister, three years older than I, who
could do everything infinitely better than I could, was ready to do
some asking and thinking, too.  So we spent many happy hours arranging
the heavenly home of our neighbor.

We gave her a white horse to ride, a red plush saddle, and a
wine-colored habit.  The color scheme was not very good, but we had
never seen any kind of plush saddle other than a red one, and so had to
take it.  My sister wisely pointed out that when she was sitting on the
saddle the red plush wouldn't show anyway.  We gave her a rose garden
of her own, with boxhedges, drawing heavily for these on a seed-catalog
which had fallen into our hands.  The garden had a marble wall, on
which pink pigeons were perched in the golden sunshine.  We sent over
the remainder of her family (meaning no harm to our young neighbors),
and two buxom maids to care for them.  I did not know what "buxom"
meant, and I have a suspicion that my sister did not either, so I
refrained from questioning.  Then we put one whole evening on the
reception given her on arrival, drawing shamelessly from the pictures
of the ice-carnival in Montreal which came in the _Family Herald_.  We
even read from the Book of Revelation that part which says about "they
shall not thirst any more, nor hunger any more, and God shall wipe all
tears from their eyes."  Never did these healing words fall on more
trusting hearts.  Our faith was clear and plain.  God would make it up
to everyone who suffered here, and in that faith to this day I have
never wavered.

I know there is a place of rest and beauty, where starved souls will
expand and grow, and tired eyes brighten, and tired backs relax, and
everyone will find his or her heart's desire.

I have a few questions I will ask if happily I arrive at the heavenly
country.  No doubt there will be certain days set apart when even a
private member can interrogate the Government.  Especially do I want to
know how it is that a just God has allowed the sins of the fathers to
be visited on the children.  Even the virtues of the mothers, inherited
by the same law, do not balance the account.  I will ask about these
and other things, and in the meantime I am ready to believe that God is
in His heaven, and is not overlooking anything.

I had plenty of time to think when I was a little girl.  We lived two
hundred miles from a railroad.  We got our mail in the Spring.  My
appetite was not cloyed by chocolate bars, or whetted by ice cream
cones.  A new pair of moccasins, with the smell of willow smoke, was
exquisite rapture.


I came to know the spell and power of temptation when I was about
eleven.  I hated to go to bed, especially when some of the neighbors
had come in.  It seemed terrible to have to go away from the gay world
of laughter and lamplight downstairs and be swallowed up by the dismal
nothingness of the darkness under the rafters, where I slept; and I was
afraid of the dark, too, though I would not confess it.  But I had to
go.  My mother was Scotch, and knew her duty.  She despised the
feckless folk who let their little ones sit up.

One night I got a reprieve for one half-hour.  It went by like the
twinkle of a star.  I had promised to go without a word.  I went, but
at the top of the stairs I turned to look back ...  It was surely no
harm to watch for a minute.  They were dancing a square dance.  I knew
every movement.  I could "call off," too.  I only intended to stay
until I saw them dance the breakdown: "All join hands and circle to the
left."

When I awakened my mother was putting me to bed and explaining a few
things to me.  Everyone knew what I had done; it's a wonder I hadn't
fallen downstairs; that's what came of letting me have the extra
half-hour; a little girl like me at this hour--asleep in her clothes!

It sounded to me like the Judgment Day, and I had been found dead in my
sins!  I knew I had no defence, but it taught me something.  Like
Adelaide Proctor, since then "I know the poison and the sting of things
too sweet."

It was when I was nine that I learned to pray.  Of course, I always
said my prayers.  But I really prayed for the first time when my eldest
sister was very ill with pneumonia.  With no doctor nearer than Portage
la Prairie, and only the simplest homely remedies, the case looked
pretty hopeless, but over the snow, on snowshoes, came the minister,
Rev. Thomas Hall, a devoted man of God long since gone to his reward.
I remember the way he prayed beside Elizabeth's bed.  I loved him for
the way he put it up to God, wondering all the time how he knew what a
wonderful girl she was, and how much we needed her and loved her.  She
lay with her shining brown hair spread out on the pillow, fighting for
breath, while we knelt, awed and fearful.  I remember I had my eyes
shut tight, but I could see her face as plainly as if my eyes had been
open.  When the minister was done and I looked at my mother I knew
something had happened.  The fear had gone from her face.  It seemed to
me, too, that the responsibility had been lifted from us.  A big,
strong shoulder had been placed under our burden, and I understood from
that moment that God hears prayers and sends help.  It is when people
cannot pray that they break.

I am dwelling on the happenings of childhood, because I believe we form
our characters then.  There is so little to be done for grownup people.
We can comfort them in sorrow, entertain them when they are dull,
confirm them in what they already believe, but it is hard to change
their way of thinking.

I am not daring to minimize the work of grace, which can change any
heart, but, speaking humanly, I say we can do but little for the adult.

And because I know that children are so susceptible to influence, so
ready to respond to all that is heroic and noble, yet so easily
beguiled by the worship of false gods, I tremble when I think of the
evil influences which beat upon the young life of to-day.


I have never been much of a theologian.  Doctrinal discussions have a
mouldy taste and are dusty to the palate.  I believe we all know enough
to live by.  It is not so much spiritual food we need as spiritual
exercise.  But I love the Bible for its stately music and the beauty of
its diction, and the words of Christ have the power to set all the
bells in my heart ringing.  I long to know the mind of the Lord.  I
would like to know just what was in His mind when He cut short Peter's
protestations of love by saying, "Feed My Lambs."  That was a slogan
for all of us to take from His lips.  He tells us in these three words
how to show our love.  It is not, "Chant my praises," "Defend my
theories," "Kill my enemies."  No, no--but a greater, better, lovelier
task: "Feed my lambs."

Of course, we cannot get away from the militant side of religion.

How very glad I would be to exercise my religion in a peaceable,
blameless, mellow way; to sing hymns, read my Bible, teach dainty
little dimpled darlings in Sunday school, carry jellies to the sick,
entertain strangers, and let it go at that.  Then I would have the joy
of hearing people say, "She is a very sweet woman."

But here is the trouble.  God demands our love, not just our
amiability.  Amiability never embarrasses any one, but love may, and
often does kill.  If ye say we love God, we must love the children of
men--for they are the children of God.  And if we love humanity we must
hate humanity's enemies.  The gardener who loves flowers must destroy
the weeds.  Toleration when applied to weeds, germs, dirt, mad dogs,
and racial poisons ceases to be a Christian virtue.  It becomes
indifference and cowardice.

There are people who call themselves broadminded, but they mean by that
they do not care what happens.  They confuse broadmindedness with
indifference.

I believe in being broadminded in respect to other people's opinions,
particularly their religious beliefs, remembering that no one has a
corner on light or grace.  God reveals Himself in many ways.  Religion
is a bridge, and as such must have two qualifications: it must carry
our weight, and it must endure in the tide of great waters.  If it has
these two qualifications, it is a good bridge, irrespective of size,
color, or shape.  It is a deadly sin, I believe, to lay our axe to the
arch of another man's bridge.

And so it is that religion is an explanation, and an emotion, and a
code of ethics.  It tells us something of how we come to be here, and
where we are going.  It is a code of ethics, inasmuch as it holds us to
a certain standard of conduct.  We cannot short-change the baker, or
poison the neighbor's dog, with any degree of comfort.  And it is an
emotion, inasmuch as we find our hearts strangely warmed when we see
the woods ablaze with autumn or hear the church bells ringing, because
we know that God loves us, and has not left us comfortless.

My religion has taught me that life is a joyous adventure.  I wouldn't
have missed it for anything!




GOOD MILEAGE

The old lady pushed the baby carriage into the shade of the Library,
and sitting down on one of the green benches, closed her eyes and gave
herself over to the ecstacy of the first quiet moment of the day.

"Thank God," she said reverently, "he's asleep at last."

It was very still, cool, and green in the park; only a few girls passed
on their way home from work, and their footfalls were muffled by the
cinder path.  The old lady's thoughts were tinged with bitterness.

"What a life!" she said to herself.  "After working forty years, doing
big things, raising six children, and giving them all a good start,
here I am pushing a baby carriage; a nurse maid at my time of life.
And how amused Mary and Dick are at the idea of 'mother wanting a car
of her own.'  They think I am too old, and I am not yet sixty-five.
I've driven horses all my life.  Mary thinks I am quite satisfied to
mind the baby.  I hear her telling her friends, 'Mother is simply crazy
about the baby,' and that is partly correct.  I am crazy sure enough to
go on this way."

Her meditations were interrupted by something striking the bench on
which she sat.  It was an old tire rolled by a small boy of about six
years, who shouted at her to look out.

The old lady waved her arms to enjoin silence, thinking of the occupant
of the baby-carriage beside her and his light slumbers.  Then the
hoop-roller's guardian appeared.  He pointed an indignant cane at the
young offender.

"Come here, Ernest."  His voice was a tired one, frayed with irritation.

"Are you a nurse-maid too?" asked the old lady.

"Worse than that.  I understand even a nurse-maid has some authority,
and gets her Thursdays.  Will you meet my grandson, Ernest Raymond?  He
did not mean to frighten you, but he does many things he does not mean
to do.  He is really a nice child--at a distance, and in small doses."

The old lady smiled in her friendly way.

"I won't think much of him if he wakens my grandson, and it is not hard
to do."

The old man sat on the opposite bench and wiped the top of his head
with a white silk handkerchief.

"I hope that won't happen," he said seriously.  "They do waken easily.
I know Ernest has a young sister who is a nighthawk and hoot-owl.
There is no reason in her.  I can't stand children any more--I am
ashamed to say it, but it is true."

The old lady looked at him understandingly.

"Don't I know it," she said.  "And do your people think they are giving
you quite a treat, when you take this young cyclone to the park? and do
they tell people that he is the greatest interest in your life?"

"Something to that effect.  'He keeps grandfather young,' I believe is
the exact wording.  They are all very good to me, you know."

"So are mine, only they boss me too much.  Do you have to drink a lot
of water, and eat spinach, and walk a mile every day?"

"How do you know all that?" the old man asked regarding her with
surprise.

"They are all the same.  And do they think you are too old to go to a
political meeting? and if you ever fell down stairs, are they always
telling you to be careful? and when they have visitors, do you feel
rather out of everything and in the way? and do the visitors take it
for granted that you are deaf, and shout at you?--and are you afraid to
tell them you would like to drive the car, for you know what they would
say?"

The old man came over and sat down beside her.

"Are you a mind-reader?" he asked.

"Oh, no," she laughed, "I am just an old lady who refuses to sit in a
corner and knit.  I am still young though my joints are stiff.  I want
to go on living, and knowing things, and young people cannot understand
that.  They think life is over for me, and I think my good times should
be just beginning, for I have enough to live on of my own, and I
haven't family cares, at least I shouldn't have any.  But I seem to
lack the courage to break away.  I am tired of being a visitor in
another woman's house.  I want to shell peas on my own verandah, and
have some one coming for dinner, who will eat six of my lemon cookies."


I got the rest of the story from the mourners, the two bereaved
daughters.  "Wasn't it terrible?  It seems they met in the Park, when
they took the children out, and made it up, and they took turns minding
the children and going to the garage to get lessons in driving a car
... and they left us notes saying they did not want to argue with us,
but were quite old enough to know their own minds, and said by the time
we got the note they would be well on their way to Banff, and they were
going to be married there.  Now they have sent us cards from the Coast,
all about how well the car is running, and how many miles they get to
the gallon.  Isn't it awful?"




HIGHER EDUCATION

  It has always been a bitter thought to me
  That my boy Tom has had to go to work
  Instead of going on to school, as most boys do.
  He took the burden when his father died.
  Poor little soul!  I see him yet;--
  Just how he stood, so little and so white
  And such a man!--he said:
  "We'll manage, mother; don't you cry or fret--
  The Lord will help us someway to provide,"
  And so He has.
          The twins were only four
  And Tom was eight.  A better boy
  No mother ever had...
  The hardest thing
  I find in being poor, is this--
  The days of youth are all so quickly sped
  And Tom's have gone in weariness and toil
  While other boys have played.  I cannot say
  That I am reconciled--
          I'm not.
          I sometimes dream
  That some one comes to me, and says, "I've watched
  That boy of yours; I've seen him at his work,
  So cheerful, willing,--he should have a chance--
  That lad will make his mark.
  And if it's just a matter of finance
  Why that can be arranged..."
  And then I wake
  And watch the street lamp flickering outside
  And wish and wish his father had not died.

  Tom went into the mines; a call-boy there
  He worked at night; each time I saw him go
  Out in the dark, calling goodbye to me,
  So brave and smiling,--I could have cried
  My heart out.--I could see
  His childhood passing.

  My neighbor's boy is just the age of Tom
  And he is just through High School now, and has gone
  Away to University, to study law.
  He's all they've got, and they are proud to do
  Their best for him, and he's a nice boy too.
  The day he went Tom did not seem to mind
  But I'll admit 'twas hard for me to be resigned.

  To-day she called me on the phone to see
  If I could come and help her,
          And I went
  Glad of a chance to earn an honest cent
  And she pays well; and always makes me feel
  She's glad to have me ... Well, it seems
  The students had a riot in the Hall--
  The Arts and Meds she said, and in the brawl
  They scuffed each other's clothes.  'Twas all
  In fun, she said, and no one was to blame--
  It seems they have to do it to preserve the fame
  Of higher learning.  Dick sent his clothes home
  For her to clean.  We pronounced the suit
  A total wreck.  She said she'd send
  Another one, and I said it was well
  She could, and it was then she told me ...
  It seems her heart is very sore
  About a lot of things.  Dick is no more
  The boy who went away.
          He only writes them now
  When he is out of funds.  And when he did come home
  Found fault with everything, and said
  Our little town gave him the blues.
  And not a word had he to tell
  Of Socrates or Hannibal
  Or things like that; smoked all the time;
  Lay late abed; stayed out one night
  And half the day, and came home bleary-eyed--
  And this the boy on whom their
  Hopes and pride have all been set.
  She said she sometimes wishes that
  He had never learned to read or write.
  If this is what has come of it ...
          I couldn't find
  A word to say to comfort her.
          A thing like this
  Cuts deep;
  I didn't tell her my good news at all.
  I did not speak of Tom, but she will hear
  He has had another raise; that's two this year--
  He gets a hundred now.
          He goes two nights a week
  To night school, and he won
  The Road Race in the Y.,--
          We're doing fine
  We got the house fresh done, with kalsomine
  And paint; I've got three places regular to clean,
  And always can, by hurrying, get home in time
  To cook the meals.  The twins
  Are both in High School going strong ...
          I hope it is not wrong
  To feel so happy!




WHAT WE DON'T USE, WE LOSE

No one can ignore the strange complex which is laying hold on people to
do something, however worthless, that is out of the ordinary.  We are
disposed to explain it all, particularly the tree-sitting, by saying
the people are publicity-mad--or just plain crazy.  We may laugh at the
woman, who finding that she could not coax or bribe her young son to
come down from his tree, shinned up one herself, crying out, "I cannot
be outdone by my own son," still we are a little bit disturbed over
this strange outbreak, for we know there is something back of it.

It isn't a lack of music, or art, or beauty that drives people to do
these absurd things.  Beauty and art and music were never so easily
attainable as they are now.  Music floats down every village street;
pictures come in with every mail delivery; with chain-broadcasts, air
mail, movies, and talkies, entertainment is easier to obtain than ever
before.

But entertainment is not enough.  Everyone craves a sense of glory, of
achievement.  We want to endure and overcome, to try a tilt with
fortune, like the two boys who drove their car across the continent in
reverse.  And the pitiful thing about it is that in our modern society,
or our understanding of humanity, we do not seem able to make provision
for this impelling force; at least we have not been able to take up all
of it, so the unused part runs out in absurdity--like the gas from
Turner Valley which is burned before your eyes.

We were talking about this last night as we sat around the fire; and we
were disposed to lay the blame on our easy ways of living.  In the days
when boys and girls had to weed the onions, and hunt up the cows, and
keep the wood-box full, and walk two miles to school, they were not
bothering the neighborhood by tree-sitting.  The struggle for existence
has kept many a person, young and old, in a normal state of mind.

From that we talked about the people who settled Canada, and how their
heroism had full play.  Then it was we got the story of the evening.

"Heroism is sometimes forced on people too," said one of the men.  "I
mean we find ourselves doing brave things that we never intended to do;
and having begun there is nothing to do but go on ...  When I was ten,
my people moved from Oxbow to Gilbert Plains, making the journey in the
Fall, with covered wagons, and all the usual settlers' effects, cattle,
horses, everything.  About half way there, we reached the burnt
country, over which the prairie fire had swept, and the feet of the
cattle began to get sore; the patches of grass were scarce too, and we
had to let them graze wherever there was grass.  So it became evident
that the wagons must go on, for the winter was likely to set in any
day, and some one would have to stay behind with the cattle, and bring
them on at their own pace.  And my brother and I were the unanimous
choice.  I was ten and he was nine, and we had an Indian pony and a tin
cup.  That was our equipment.  I think we were quite pleased at
first--I suppose that bears out what you were saying about the sense of
adventure--to be trusted with forty-five head of cattle ...  With our
tin cup we milked the bell cow, and that was our food supply ...
Shingles were driven in the cross roads to guide us, by our people who
had gone ahead, and to find those shingles, particularly after we got
into the Riding Mountains, became one of the problems of our young
lives.  That and to keep warm, and to urge on the tired young calves
that just dropped in their tracks from weariness after they had walked
a few miles."

"Had you blankets to sleep in?  November nights are cold," we said.

"We had the pony's blanket, just a saddle blanket, and no overcoats,
but we managed some way.  I remember that some nights we were too cold
to sleep, and the first night we got into the Riding Mountains we were
too frightened to sleep.  The wolves came down the mountains and howled
all night, and we had no matches to start a fire ...  We may have been
full of adventure the first day we were left behind, while the sun
shone warm and bright, but when that dark November night, cold and
piercing, came down on us without mercy, and the wolves seemed to be
all around, we crept as far under the bell cow as we could, and held
each other in an agony of fear.  The old cow was warm, and friendly and
let us stay ... and the night ended somehow.  We were two weeks on the
road; and slept only two nights in a house.  And had two real meals
which I will never forget.  We knew there were people named Shields
living in the mountains, but when we saw the house, in the early dawn,
we were too shy to go to the door.  But fortunately for us, Mrs.
Shields saw us, and brought us in, and fed us, gave us some clean
clothes and let us sleep in a bed.

"And Mrs. Field on the other side of the mountains when we reached her
house did the same.  The rule of the road was to feed anyone who was
hungry, give them shelter, clean socks, and kind words, and these two
women did that ...  In the mountains we stopped at an old cabin, and
found there a man sick, and alone.  We carried water for him in our tin
cup and built up his fire, and sent help to him, too, when we met a man
driving a wagon.  We heard afterwards it was typhoid fever he had, but
he recovered and we did not get the disease either.

"And one day we found our people--and delivered the forty-five head of
cattle, not one missing, the pony, the pony's blanket, and the tin cup
...  And the next day the big storm broke and the winter set in; but we
had won our race."

We sat awhile in silence, thinking of the two frightened little boys,
with only a friendly cow for food and shelter, in that black night in
November.

"Do you think you could do that?" someone asked the fifteen-year old
whose brown eyes were shining.

Before he could answer, the man who told the story said,

"He could--if he had to ...  We were no braver than other boys ...  We
just had to go on."




EVERY WOMAN IS NOT A HOUSE-KEEPER

Mrs. Frost, watching her two children and their teacher making their
way under the big umbrella down the muddy road toward the school,
turned back from the window with a sigh of despair.

"It is all wrong!" she said bitterly.

The fire was out; burnt toast littered the damper; dirty dishes were on
the table.  She had spilled a cup of coffee in her haste on the
tablecloth, and the gloom from outside had settled in the corners of
the kitchen with a dishwater grayness that made her shudder.  How she
hated it all!

"I am the world's worst housekeeper," she said sadly.  "Things pile up
on me so, and I see so many other things I want to do, and could do.  I
wish I had more time to help Bessie and Sam with their lessons; they
are missing the joy of learning, Aunt Ruth is so prim, and regular, and
mechanical in her teaching."

At noon, in spite of all her hard work, the luncheon did not go right.
The tomato soup curdled as she served it, and she remembered then she
had not put in the soda.  Little Bessie, seeing her mother's
embarrassment, did her best to say something cheerful.

"I like it curdled," she declared stoutly.  "It tastes like something
that would be very good for you."

"I just can't cook; and that's that!" said Mrs. Frost.  "No one works
harder.  I walk twenty miles a day, I am sure.  Dick, you are a
cheerful martyr, but a martyr all the same ....  My mind wanders to
other things--happier things--and something burns, or boils over.  I
never get a break.  Anything that can go wrong, does go wrong ...  I
often wonder if any one really likes housework, or do they merely
endure it?  What about you, Aunt Ruth?"

"I like it," said Miss Everton, "and I'll tell you what we'll do, Eva.
We will give ourselves a break.  I am tired of teaching.  I never did
like it, but it was about all I could do.  You go back to school and
teach for me to-day, and I'll clean up the house and get dinner ready.
I have a miserable cold and headache and will be glad to stay in and
work around at my ease in this nice, quiet house."

Dearmont School had a surprise that afternoon, when Mrs. Frost, in a
burnt orange smock that brightened the whole room, came in.

"We'll build a fire first," she said.  "It is such a raw day, we will
enjoy the glow of it too.  We can leave the door open.  Every one loves
a fire on a gray day like this."

"Please, teacher," spoke up Mattie White, "we wanted to put on a fire
this morning, but Miss Everton said we better not begin fires too
early."

But two of the boys had the wood and paper in the stove, and soon the
cheerful crackle rang out, and the children gathered around to enjoy
its warmth.  Mrs. Frost began to tell them about the first people who
lived on earth, who had no houses but only caves.  Their greatest
comfort was the fire, around which they gathered at night, telling each
other stories of the chase.  Wolves might be howling outside or enemies
lurking in the hills, but the fire was their friend.  It cooked their
food, warmed them, and kept the wolves away too.

Mattie White, Miss Everton's favorite pupil, feeling her
responsibility, ventured to remind the new teacher that there was
serious work to be done.

"Please, teacher, we take reading right after noon.  We are at page 49."

Someone kicked Mattie White softly on the shin.  Couldn't she leave
well enough alone?

Mrs. Frost took her chair and, sitting near the stove, said cheerfully:

"I think there's room for all of you, if you sit on the floor in front
of the fire, and now the door can be opened so we can see the coals."

She knew the floor was clean, Aunt Ruth would see to that.

"And we won't take the reading lesson on page 49.  It does not suit us
to-day, for it is called 'The Golden Window,' and ours are not golden
to-day.  We will take the 'Melancholy Days.'  I will read it for you.
I am sure it was a day just like this when Bryant wrote it.  He had a
cold in his head; and his hands were chapped, and he was feeling very
sad.  Now listen.  If you want to go and look out of the window, go,
and see how well this describes what you see."

She read the first verse.

"Please, teacher," said Mattie, "we always take the hard words first,
and pick out the nouns before we begin to read."

Mrs. Frost smiled back at Mattie.

"We aren't going to bother about the words.  We are just going to have
a good time to-day."

Mattie's troubled face grew more cloudy.  She knew what happened to
people who tried to have a good time in school.

"Now let us see how we would describe a day like this."

"The cows are all humped up like this," said one boy.

"They stand with their heads away from the rain and shake the rain out
of their ears like this," said another.

"Mrs. Macdonald's clothes are on the line, all wet, and the baby's
things too, and maybe he's needing them," said a motherly little girl,
eldest of four.

"There's leaves in piles in the corner of the fence, just like he
said," said Effie Jones from the window.

Mrs. Frost handed Effie the book.

"Read that line," she said.  Effie took a minute to find it.

"Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the withered leaves lie dead," she
read.

The biggest boy came over and looked at the book in Effie's hand.  Then
got his own; and went over it.

"Our crows are on the straw-stacks instead of wood-tops," he said, "but
that's all right, isn't it?"

"Read that line," said Mrs. Frost.

"And from the wood-top calls the crow, through all the gloomy day."

"Now we can read the whole verse."  Every hand went up.

"Grade II should be at their number work," said Mattie.  "It's on the
board."

"O, let them listen," said Mrs. Frost.  "They like this just as well as
we do."

Grade II extended a disrespectful, but triumphant tongue in the
direction of Mattie, and the reading went on.

"I never knew there was anything nice about a rainy day," said the big
boy, "but, gee, it's swell, when you know how to look at it."


"My headache is all gone, and I had a lovely afternoon," said Miss
Everton, as the family sat down to a good hot meal.  The house was
clean and tidy, and every face at the table was a happy one.

"Why don't you teach us all the time, mother, and let Aunt Ruth keep
house?" asked Bessie.

"That would suit me," said Miss Everton; "I've been wanting to get a
position in some institution as matron, and to run your house for a few
months will be good practice for me.  And you can easily get a good
housekeeper, who will be glad of such a pleasant home, when I go."

"I'd love that," said Mrs. Frost; "what do you think, Dick?"

"Every lady to her liking," said her husband, as he helped himself to
another biscuit.

"So the melancholy day was not a melancholy day at all.  It was a
golden window," said young Sam, who was one of the Grade II who had
listened to Bryant's poem instead of doing his number work.




WHEN IN DOUBT, PLEASE YOURSELF

"I will give you a theme to write on," said a girl whom I will call
Sally Smith, but that is not her name.  "I know something which should
be said, and read at every family gathering; and if the advice were
followed, it would save much trouble."

"That sounds attractive," I said.  "Let us have it."

Sally Smith, who works in an insurance office, is the eldest of a
family, and she and I often meet at the Business Women's Club.

"My theme is this," said she, as we waited for the dessert.  We had
disposed of the lamb chops and green peas, with all the accessories.
"Families should be frank with each other, and speak their minds
freely."

"Well, aren't they, and don't they?" I asked in surprise.  One of my
family had told me that very morning that I should give my green hat to
the first rummage sale I heard of.

"No, they are too fearful of hurting some one's feelings ...  For
example, we have a summer cottage at one of the Lakes, and we have gone
there for years.  But none of us like it.  There's no fun in camping in
the same place year after year, especially when there are so many
places to go to.  But this old place is full of associations, mother
says.  There's the stump on which Bobbie, aged three, cut his hand,
when he was chopping bullrushes!  There's the pier Emily blew off one
windy day when mother told her she should not go out.  Well, anyway,
each year we have gone, thinking we were pleasing mother, and dad, and
now quite by accident we find out that mother rather dreads the two
summer months.  She finds the work hard without the conveniences of the
city, but thought she must go every year for our sakes.  Could you beat
that?  Every one being so agreeable that no one would tell the truth.

"But I got my lesson last week.  If I have ever erred on the side of
being too agreeable, I have had my punishment.  But here comes the
dessert.  I will not spoil an honest piece of apple-pie with ice-cream
on top by any such withering tale as this."

When the luncheon was over, and the last speech made, and the vote of
thanks and everything, Sally and I went out together, and found a
secluded corner, where there was no sign which said, "Do not sit on the
Furniture," and she told me the story.

"I did not take my holidays this year, except week-ends at the Lake,
but one nice little trip did come my way, and that was to drive my
brother's car to Lake Louise, one Saturday, and come back on the train
that night.  I love that road to the mountains of Lake Louise; it grows
more beautiful to me every time I have driven over it, and I was
greatly pleased at the thought.  Ed's car is a lovely little roadster,
just a new one.  And I wanted to go alone.  I love being alone ...
being the eldest of eight, I suppose ...  Then I began to think, and
that's where I made my mistake.  I should have taken my lovely trip in
humbleness and gratitude of heart.  But I began to think I should take
some one, and some one who does not get many pleasures, which brought
me to consider Mrs. Rawson.  She is mother's cousin, but not a bit like
mother.  But she lives in an apartment all alone, and no one bothers
much about her.  And, the more I thought of it, the more plainly did it
seem my duty, and I had quite a glow of virtue when we started out.

"The day was beautiful; golden sunshine and the mountains clear cut,
blue and white, coming out to meet us.  It was the sort of a day that
would take the meanness out of any one, you would think, but Mrs.
Rawson's mind seemed to be obsessed with the gory details of
operations.  I tried not to listen, and opened my heart to the green
and gold foliage of the hills; the blue and green flashes from the
river, as it hurried along beside the road; the tawny fields dotted
with stocks, but I couldn't escape it all, and so I got quite a barrage
of 'gas-pockets,' and 'proud flesh,' and the sad but altogether
undeserved fate of those who disobey the doctor's orders.

"When we approached the mountains, and the road ran in the cool green
shadows, I hoped she might fall silent in the presence of these
towering monsters.  And she did for a few blissful moments ...  But
about the Old Park Gate she revived and plunged into a detailed and
picturesque account of the domestic relations that prevail in the
apartment in which she lives, determined that I should know the bitter
truth about them all.

"When we went into the Chalet for lunch, that wonderful place where the
gold of the poppies outside reappears in the golden lights of the room,
we had a table in the window and could look right into the loveliest
spot the world holds, with its snowy glacier reflected in the placid
lake below.  It always takes my breath away.  But not so with Hattie
Rawson!

"She leaned over to me, and asked me to notice the man and woman at my
left.  I told her I saw nothing unusual about them.  I had seen five
thousand like them.  But in a voice that boomed across the room she
confided in me she knew them, and they had not paid their rent for two
months.

"She met someone she knew after lunch, and I got a good half hour to
watch the poppies nodding in the wind, and see the veils of clouds
drape themselves around the mountain tops.  But when I went over to
tell her we must be on our way to the station, I heard her say:

"'The drive is a bit tiresome ... I had to give up a very nice party to
come ... but I could not very well refuse my niece, (her mother is my
cousin you know).  I could see she was rather nervous about driving
alone.'

"So now," Sally concluded, "this is my slogan; it may sound a little
selfish but there's wisdom in it: 'When in doubt, please yourself.'
Then you are sure that one person is pleased."




WISE WOMEN KNOW THEIR OWN VALUE

When she awakened, the first yellow beam of sunshine was rippling on
the wall, and for a moment or two she lay thinking of little Paul
Dombey and the golden water that wavered and paled and faded in the
grim old house in Portland Place ...  But she knew it was not a time
for lingering.  This was another day, and she must be up and at it,
though Thursday was always her easiest day, with the washing and
ironing done.

She gave a general call to the family, the formal notice of motion, and
then went downstairs to get the day started.  She put on the coffee;
straightened the living room; removed apple-cores, candy papers, ginger
ale glasses; picked up the magazines, and sorted out the newspapers;
set fire to the accumulation in the fire-place; straightened the
curtains, and rugs; wiped the finger marks from the radio ... all the
time directing the traffic upstairs.  "Hurry, Billy!  Get in ahead of
Harold.  You know how long he stays ...  No, my time isn't fast.  Yes,
you must have a bath, Tom."

By nine o'clock, she had all her family fed and out, except Enid, who
was having her holidays and enjoying the luxury of a long sleep.  Just
as she began the dishes, the mail came in, and a card from the Library
stated that Billy's book was overdue, and if a messenger had to be sent
it would cost fifty cents.  A ten minute search revealed the book under
the cushions of the chesterfield.

Before she started the dishes, she took half an hour to read the
letters and the paper.  She read in the report of an address the number
of men who are out of employment in this country; read about a new
machine that will do the work of one hundred men; read, too, a bishop's
denunciation of childless homes.  She was reading the editorials when
the bell rang.  It was a college student, one of a family of thirteen
he told her proudly, soliciting subscriptions to pay his way through
college.  Before she got back to the table where she left the mail, a
little girl called to sell tickets for a garden party in aid of the
Children's Home.

She prepared the scalloped potatoes for lunch and washed the dishes,
answering the phone five times.  Then went upstairs to make the beds,
ignoring the phone, until the ring sounded that she and her husband had
agreed on.

"Say, Mary," he said, "Bob Brown and Ed Peters are in town.  I would
like to bring them for lunch ...  Is that all right?  Give them a beef
loaf ...  They are tired of hotel meals.  I know they will enjoy it,
and I've bragged to them about your rhubarb relish ...  Don't go to any
trouble, just something simple ...  Good girl!  I knew you would.  And,
Mary, we are going to play golf afterwards.  Lay out my things, will
you?  And that collar on my shirt is a little tight.  Can you let it
out?"

She left the beds then, and went to the kitchen.  When the good smell
of a baking beef loaf came upstairs, Enid, kimona clad, and drowsy,
came into the kitchen.

"Mother, I don't want to go back to-morrow.  I want to have some of the
girls in.  I wish you would phone the office.  You are the diplomat for
this family.  I won't have any more holidays for a year, and I've done
plenty overtime.  And, mother, make Harold pay me the money I loaned
him for his insurance.  I want to get that coat.  If you weren't so
stiff about instalment buying, I could have had it.  But I guess you
are right.  And, mother, Ethel's shower is going to be all homemade
things.  Could you get a set of coat holders done?  It's next
Wednesday; pink, mauve and green.  You're a dear.  My! that smells
good.  I'll be down for lunch!"

When the luncheon was over, and the golfers on their way, she swept the
dining room, washed the dishes; they seemed endless.  She wondered why
we have to use so many.  One phone call from the school nurse told her
Billy's teeth needed attention; so she made an appointment with a
dentist for Saturday morning.  Then she went to her desk and worked on
the notices for her society.  By this time she was glad of the chance
to sit down.  But there were flowers in the garden that should be
picked ...  She might get Billy to do them when he came home, if she
could remember ...  But he had to practise.  No, she would go.  It was
lovely to get out in the sunshine.

She picked the flowers, making them into little bouquets, sweet peas
and baby's breath; marigolds and bachelor's buttons with mignonette;
gladioli by themselves ...  Billy could deliver them for her to the
apartment.

She remembered then she had not been able to get her twenty minute
sleep after lunch, and she sat down, thinking she would read a few
minutes.  The sunshine was so bright, it had left her a little tired.
But a few minutes rest would be all she needed.

A new magazine had come in with the afternoon mail.  She opened it and
read the title of the first article.

"The Idle Woman--and the Vanishing Home!"

Then Harold phoned to ask her to send his best suit to the cleaners, he
must have it for Saturday night; and would she please look at his dress
shirt to see if it would do again.

Before she got back to the article, the Enumerator called at the front
door, and she gave him the information he wanted, regarding the people
who lived there and their occupations.  Robert Wilson, her husband,
salesmanager; Harold Wilson, bank clerk; Thomas Wilson, Normal student;
Enid Wilson, stenographer; William Wilson, public school student.

"And you," said the young man, "are Mrs. Wilson?"  He made a wavy line
in the column marked "Occupation" and volunteered the information,
"Some women do not like to have their occupation put down as
'Housekeeper' or 'Married Woman,' so I generally just leave it."  He
smiled at her brightly.  But she did not smile back.  She was thinking.

It was getting on toward evening, and her feet were tired, so just for
a few minutes she was disposed to resent the implication that she was a
person of no occupation.  But not for long.  She put the potatoes in
the oven for supper, and started one of Enid's coat hangers.

"There may be no word for it, but I know," she said, for Mary Wilson
was one of the wise women of the world who know the value of their
work.  She knew she was the string on which her whole family was
threaded: a cord of silk, smooth, strong, and enduring.




THEY ARE NOT ALL MARRIED

With two pretty sisters for a perpetual standard, Hilda Collins had no
illusions about her own beauty-content.  Her skin was swarthy; her
cheek bones high; her mouth large.  So at an early age she abandoned
all hope of marrying a millionaire, or a foreign prince, and as the
relentless years rolled on the list of exemptions grew longer, and
longer.

But she soon discovered that there are compensations in being homely.
She was a favorite bridesmaid at weddings; served at teas; fourth hand
at bridge and many a married woman's first choice when there was one
seat to be filled in the car.

When she began to teach, she found a fierce joy in bringing beauty
where none had been before, for her first school was in one of the most
desolate parts of the prairie misleadingly called Ferndell.  Being no
rival to anyone in the matrimonial market, she excited no jealousies
and could get everyone to work with her.

At the end of the second year, Ferndell school had a red roof, gleaming
white walls, frilled curtains, a flagged walk, a hedge of caragana,
small but hopeful, and flaming flower beds.  She had a dramatic club
among the young people; a reading circle for the women, and her school
activities were featured in one issue of the _Teachers' Magazine_.

After five years at Ferndell, she was called home to care for the
family of one of the pretty sisters, who had to go to a hospital for a
long period.  And after that, being the only unattached woman in a
large family connection, she was often called on, in times of domestic
stress.  For, as the prettiest sister said fretfully, "Hilda always had
the best of everything and the least she could do was to help one of
her family in trouble."  But when no one was having a baby, or an
operation, or a holiday, Hilda taught, and always made it a full-time
job.

I first met her during the war when there was a teacher-shortage.  She
sent a letter to the Department of Education, signifying her intention
of taking a school.  She said she would go anywhere; had no objections
to going into a foreign district; and could teach music.  She was quite
frank about her age, but softened the blow by saying she had never been
sick a day in her life.

I saw her again in the days of the drought following the war.  She was
growing older, darker, and thinner.  She wore a waterproof the color of
mouldy hay, a stiff black hat, pulled well down on her head, stout
boots, with square toes.  She came in to tell me she was willing to go
to some district where the crop had utterly failed.

"I have enough clothes to do me," she said.  "Clothes do not mean much
to me.  I can live for two years anyway, and that may see better times."

When I tried to thank her, she made light of it.

I had news of her from time to time from one of her nieces who spoke of
her as "poor Aunt Hilda."  Then one day I met the prettiest sister.
Her first question was in a tone of proud complaint.  "Have you heard
the latest about Hilda?"

I shook my head.

"She is going to England," she said with pride.  "She is going to
lecture about Canada with all her expenses paid and a good salary."
Then came the complaint.  "Some people get all the breaks."

"I'm glad.  She deserves it," I said heartily.  "And no one could do
such work better."

"Perhaps," the pretty sister agreed grudgingly.  "But she knows I am
not very strong, and I will miss her so.  She doesn't seem to care.
Women without children get so selfish!"

"Selfish!" I gasped.  "Hilda Collins is one of the mothers of the race.
She is one of the most unselfish women I ever knew."

But the pretty sister shook her head.  "I don't know what Hilda has
done more than the rest of us to deserve a chance like that.  But she's
so happy, she's like a bride--she's almost pretty."

This summer I saw Hilda.  Happiness has transformed her.  No one would
call her unattractive now.

"Hilda," I said, "be careful.  You'll be snapped up yet, with those red
earrings and that saucy little hat!"

Hilda laughed.

"No.  No danger; I am immune.  'Not wanted on the passage' like the big
boxes ...  I ceased to struggle earlier than most homely girls, and so
saved myself a lot of grief and heart-burnings.  And I have never been
unhappy over it.  I have had such joy in my work.  And the work is
absorbing.  I wish you could see some of the children in those families
of mine!"

I looked after her in admiration as she went quickly down the street,
and I was more than ever convinced that the Lord knows what He is doing
when He leaves some of the best women in the world unattached.




THE COUNTRY SCHOOL

  Weather beaten and gray it stands,
  Tiny dot on the harvest lands--
  Not very much to see!
  Porch at the end, where the gophers play;
  Smelling of crumbs, on a summer's day;
  Row of windows, two or three,
  Inside walls of smoky gray
  Hung with torn and crooked maps;
  A broken blind that taps and taps;
  Not an attractive spot, you say?
  No, but here in this lowly station
  Slowly is working an ancient law
  And a temple is rising, we call it a nation,
  Without the sound of hammer or saw!




BEHOLD THE PIONEERS!

I was on the Peace River train travelling into that land of brief,
bright summer, where, because of the long hours of sunshine the grain
ripens in ninety days from the time the seed is planted; that land of
rolling hills, rich pastures, and clear streams whose banks are
tapestried with a million flowers; land of velvet dusks, purple
distances, and heavenly stillness; where Nature is so prodigal with her
gifts that the people forget that the winters are long and cold, and
the market for their product is far away; a land that inspires a
passionate faith, that does not waver or even argue.  The Peace River
people know their country, and know, too, that some day, the world will
come knocking at their doors.

Looking at my fellow-passengers, I was speculating idly as to their
reasons for "going in."  I saw the typical close-shaven, weather-cured
Englishman who just naturally took the out-trail; the cheerful
commercial traveler ready to talk or listen, or play a game of cards,
or hold an argument with anyone, ready too to give up his "lower," or
hold a baby, or lend his paper, or carry a valise, or buy a meal for
anyone who needed it.  There were the man and his wife travelling to
the Peace River country because it was the thing to do, and determined
not to like it.  The district nurse going in, with compassion in her
eyes, healing in her hands, and her suit cases full of antiseptics and
ointments.

I was looking at a handsome young woman who sat across the aisle from
me, two round fat babies beside her on the seat.  They were quite as
broad as they were long, and reminded me of those weighted kewpie dolls
who cannot be slapped down.  They were dressed in one-piece blue
over-alls, and beamed with health like their mother, and like her, had
fine black eyes.

I began to talk to her, before the afternoon was over, and found she
was going ninety miles beyond Peace River Crossing to a valley I had
never heard of.

"Won't you be lonely?" I asked.  "Are you sure you will have any
neighbors?"

"I am sure I will not," she said with a flashing smile, "and I am glad
of it.  I am tired of people.  That's why I am going.  I want to get a
chance to do as I like.  All my life, I have had to consider other
people's opinions.  No, I won't be lonesome.  We are taking cows and
horses, dogs and cats, sheep and hens.  My husband is there now."

"Then," I said, "it is not like being alone."

She twisted her mouth expressively.  "He's rather a quiet sort of
chap," she said frankly, "and not much company.  But we'll manage ...
I soon found out, after I married him, that he wasn't what anyone would
call a bright companion.  I saw I had to do something for myself.  So I
got a few hens.  Hens are real sociable and chatty ...  Did you ever
hear them come bursting out of the henhouse on a bright winter morning,
each one telling her own story, and no one listening?  ...  I like
animals much better than people anyway.  You don't have to answer them
... and their feelings are not so easily hurt.  They never want to tell
you their troubles, and then warn you not to tell; and they won't pick
up some little thing you've said and twist it into something you never
thought of saying....  They won't say one thing to your face ... and
something else behind your back ... and they won't listen in on the
phone ... nor tell you how to raise your children or criticize your
housekeeping, or be mad at you for not inviting them to your party, and
they aren't always right--"

Her black eyes were snapping and her cheeks burning.

"I see," I said, "you have been living with your relatives or your
husband's relatives, or both."

"Both and plenty!" she said grimly, "I'll say I have!  The whole
neighborhood is related to either one of us.  But how did you know?"

"Your description was unmistakable," I said.  "Relatives have little
ways all their own, and yet remember if you needed help they would be
the first to give it."

"Yes, but I'd rather die than take it.  They would never forget it.
No, I think I did the right thing.  I decided to pull out.  They were
beginning to spoil my disposition.  I was in so many quarrels, and John
was growing like them.  So we just sold out and I got everything
squared away, for I told each family what I thought of them and why we
were going ... and we parted good friends.  I left no unfinished
business.  All I want is a good, clean chance in a new country.  Why
break your back picking sow thistle when there's millions of acres that
never saw a sow thistle?  And I mean that both ways, mostly
figuratively.  John will do what I tell him when I have him all to
myself.  We will raise our own help.  When we have six children we can
get a school.  We will have three hundred and twenty acres of our own,
and grazing rights from there to the horizon."

She looked at her watch.

"It is time to eat," she said, looking for the first time at the two
black-eyed ones who had listened to everything she said.  "Come, boys,
Track!"

She arose and stretched herself like a graceful young animal, and the
two round babies, going into reverse, wriggled off the seat and to my
utter astonishment followed her down the aisle.  The elder of the two
may have been three years old, but the wee one was no more than a year
and a half old, but he trotted after his brother undisturbed by the
swaying of the train.

I looked after them in admiration.

"There go the pioneers!" I thought.

Even as Abraham, having some trouble with Lot, spoke up and said, "Oh,
all right; have it your own way," and went out, not knowing whither, so
this woman was taking the unknown trail in the pursuit of happiness,
life, and liberty; and she, too, like Abraham, would found a colony in
some valley of the North.  She would meet hardship, loneliness,
discouragement, but her stout heart would be ready to meet what came,
having seen the vision and heard the heavenly voices that spoke of
freedom and space and independence.

And as the brilliant sunshine paled into the twilight of approaching
night and the settlers' houses grew scarcer and smaller and lonelier, I
wondered how many of these intrepid people were here because of a
family row!




THE ROARIN' GAME

Curling is a splendid sport for women.  Not only does it provide
healthful exercise, opportunities for self-control, and good
sportsmanship, but being primarily a man's sport, it makes for better
understanding between men and women.  A man can understand how his wife
may be late in getting home from a curling game much easier than if she
has been at a missionary meeting.




MAGIC

  She parks her baby with a friend,
    She piles her dishes in the sink,
  Pulls on her sweater, grabs her broom,
    And hurries over to the rink.
  She would have had her dishes done,
  But she was drawn to curl at one.

  She wins her game--and so is drawn
    To curl again at half-past three;
  This is a bear-cat of a game
    Against an ancient enemy.
  When she comes out, the lamps gleam high,
  Like stars against the dull, gray sky.

  Now by all things that we have learned
    Of husbands and their ways,
  This woman's man will angry be,
    And grievous trouble raise
  When he comes home, at close of day,
  And finds his dear wife--far away.

  He goes and brings his offspring home,
    He lights the kitchen fire,
  He sets the supper on to cook;
    No trace of slumbering ire;
  But knowing what we do of life
  We tremble for the erring wife!

  At half-past six her step is heard,
    Her voice is full of joy:
  "O Bill!--I didn't do a thing
    To Mrs. Pomeroy!
  I took her out with my last stone,
  And we were one up coming home."
  And as he stirred the baby's food
  He said, "I'm glad you lammed her good!"




ADAM'S FALL

  Man cannot live in idleness and grow,
  I wish he could.  I wish it might be so.
  I'm sure when Adam lived in Eden's bowers
  Wooed by the birds, and comforted by flowers,
  He wished it too, and liked the way of getting
  All that he wanted without toil or fretting.
  That was the life!  No worry, toil, or sorrow;
  No thinking of that tiresome thing--tomorrow.
  Too bad it did not last; the serpent came
  And Adam fell, and great has been his blame.
  I'm not so sure!  Perhaps the snake was wise;
  The fall of Adam may have been his rise!
  The only creatures that can live in ease
  Day after day, and not be hurt, are these:
  The long-haired Persian--and the Pekinese!




CONFIRMATION

The Garden Party for the Sunset Home was a gorgeous one; one of those
careless, easy-going affairs that require such careful planning.  It
was held on a beautiful chiffon-velvet lawn, where great beds of
hydrangeas, with their huge globes of pink and blue flowers, gave a
touch of exotic splendor to the scene.  Under the fruit trees, loaded
with yellow and red apples, and purple plums, stood the tables, where
women, in brightly colored clothes, drank tea and consumed ribbon
sandwiches with great gayety.  The amber sunlight of August, like a
gold frame, flattered each color into greater brilliance and beauty.

"It would have been nice to have brought the old people here to-day,"
said one woman to me.  "Everything is so lovely, too bad no one thought
of it."  I agreed with her.

Somewhere near me a hard-voiced woman was talking about the stock
market, and the fortunes that had been lost ...  I turned away.  The
day was too beautiful for that; I was in accord with the orthophonic
which was tunefully advising everyone to give themselves a pat on the
back--a pat on the back...

But suddenly the strident voice mentioned a name which beat down the
song; and won from the hydrangeas and the ribbon sandwiches and
everything.

"I keep thinking of old Mrs. Concord to-day," she said, "as I look
around.  Many a time she gave her lovely grounds for parties like this,
and now ...  Yes, they lost everything.  Poor Chester, he was the only
boy ...  It will never be known for sure ...  It may have been monoxide
... but of course he was frightfully involved.  Mrs. Concord put up all
her jewelry, silver, and even her furs to clear his name, and walked
out of the big house with a hand bag ...  She is in the Sunset Home now
... has been there a year ...  No, I've never seen her.  It would only
embarrass her."

I did not hear any more; the party was over for me; the row of tables
across the lawn heaved drunkenly; the sunshine paled and hardened, and
the wind that had just stirred the leaves of the apple-trees, took to
itself an edge of ice.

I found the hostess, and told her I had had a lovely time, and made my
escape--I had to find out for sure.

A mutual friend, to whom I phoned, confirmed the story.

That night, instead of sleeping, I thought rather bitterly of life and
its ironies.  Why should disaster come to Mrs. Concord? ...  I knew her
first in a little prairie town, to which I had gone to teach.  The
Concords owned the big red brick house on the hill.  Mrs. Concord was
everyone's friend; she led the choir, played the organ, entertained
visiting ministers, gathered in the strangers on Sunday evenings; a
gracious, charming woman...

I met her again, in the city, before the war; and afterwards, when her
two eldest boys had gone.  The Red Cross women met in her house, to
roll bandages ...  And again I saw her, all in black, for the two boys
were not among the men who returned.  But she carried on.  Later we
went to the same church and I was a member of her class.  Mr. Concord
did not recover from the loss of his boys, but she and Chester, the
youngest boy, a handsome young fellow, lived on in the big house, where
I was often a guest ...  Having gone farther west, I had not seen her
now for some years.

I thought that night, with a sore heart, of the psalmist's words about
his having never seen the righteous forsaken, and wondered what he
meant.  Surely to eat the bread of charity in that bleak house that
sits with its back to the road, is to be forsaken ...  The next day I
went to see her.

The matron received me, and when I made known my errand drew me into a
small reception room and shut the door.

"Yes, she is here, and she is a fair marvel.  I don't think she
realizes what it means.  Not a word out of her about her past life.  If
our way of living seems plain, she doesn't show it ...  And the things
she has done for the old buddies here!  She should have a salary from
the Board, and I've told them so ...  She sings and plays for them,
reads to them, writes their letters, reconciles them to their families,
listens to their woes and comforts them ... the hardest of them, and we
have some tough ones ...  I'll find her now and send her down."

Mrs. Concord, tall, slim, and stately, came in.  If there was any
embarrassment, it was mine.

"How good of you to find me out!" she said.  She was the same graceful
woman, a little thinner, her hair whiter.  She was dressed in a black
lace dress, without even a ring on her finger.

"It's all right," she said smiling; "I am really quite happy here.  It
was the best thing to do.  I had a niece who would have given me a
home, but you know an old person might be an embarrassment."

"You," I said, "could never be that!"

"One never knows.  I'll probably live to be a hundred.  Anyway, here I
am, and I am quite happy.  The matron thinks I do not remember....  She
has been wonderfully good to me."

Then she sat down beside me, and I took her shapely little hand in
mine.  I could not keep back the tears.

"We've talked a lot about God's goodness," she said simply, "and His
care; His perpetual care; how He watches over us and will not let us
stumble or fall."

I nodded, and there was a choking silence.  Then her voice rang out, a
young voice, full of triumph--

"It is all true," she said, "every word of it.  I have come through the
fire, and I am not burned; not even singed."

She lifted my hand, and put it on her head; I marvelled at the glow in
her face.

"You see," she said, "it is not wet.  And I have come through the
flood, but not once did the billows go over my head.  Not once.  Every
anchor held ...  God does not send a cordon of angels to help His
people any more, He sends work, and strength to do it.  And I have
something to do here, too.  My life is not over.  I am still living.
One night a week ago the matron wakened me.  One of the old men was
dying, and calling for me ... the waves were rising, he said, they were
going to swallow him.  At sunrise he died quietly with a smile on his
face.  Think of that!  I was able to comfort a soul in mortal agony ...
No, no, do not feel sorry for me.  I am not even grieving over Chester
...  Somewhere in the many mansions, I will find them all.  I always
believed the promises; I believed and hoped they were true, but now ...
I know!"

When I came away, I looked back at the square, drab house that sits
with its back to the road.  Its western windows were gleaming with the
glory of the sunset.

It was a dull house no longer, nor can it ever be to me, for within its
gray walls, I saw the glory of God.




[End of _Be Good to Yourself_ by Nellie L. McClung]
