Chapter I: WALKED across the bridge from New Jersey into Easton, Pennsylvania,

one afternoon. I discovered there was a college atop of the hill. In exchange for a lecture on twenty-six great men[4] based on a poem on the same theme, that I carried with me, the boys entertained me that night. They did not pay much attention to the lecture. Immediately before and after was a yell carnival. There was to be a game next day. They were cheering the team and the coach with elaborate reiteration. All was astir.

But for all this the boys spoke to me gently, gave me the privileges of the table, the bath-room, the dormitory. The president of the Y. M. C. A. lent me a clean suit of pajamas. He and two other young fellows delighted my vain soul, by keeping me up late reciting all the poems I knew.

I record these things for the sake of recording one thing more, the extraordinary impression of buoyancy that came from that school. It was inspiring to a degree, a draught of the gods. Coming into that place not far from the centre of hard-faced Easton-town I realized for the first time what sheltered, nurtured boy-America was like, and what wonders may lie beneath the roofs of our cities.

THAT WHICH MEN HAIL AS KING

WOULD I might rouse the Cæsar in you all,
(That which men hail as king, and bow them down)
Till you are crowned, or you refuse the crown.
Would I might wake the valor and the pride,
The eagle soul with which he soared and died,
Entering grandly then the fearful grave.
God help us build the world, like master-men,
God help us to be brave.

NEAR SHICKSHINNY

I

LEAVING New Jersey I kept from all contact with money, and was consequently turning over in memory many delicious adventures among the Pennsylvania-German farmers. After crossing that lovely, lonely plateau called Pocono Mountain, I descended abruptly to Wilkesbarre by a length of steep automobile road called Giant Despair.

It was a Sunday noon in May. Wilkesbarre was a mixture of Sabbath calm and the smoke of torment that ascendeth forever. One passed pious faces too clean, sooty faces too restless. I hurried through, hoping for more German farmers beyond. But King Coal had conspired against the traveller, and would not let him go. The further west I walked, the thicker the squalor and slag heaps, and the presence of St. Francis seemed withdrawn from me, though I had been faithful in my fashion.

King Coal is a boaster. He says he furnishes food for all the engines of the earth. He says he is the maker of steam. He says steam is the twentieth century. He holds that an infinite number of black holes in the ground is a blessing.

He may say what he likes, but he has not excused himself to me. He blasts the landscape. Never do human beings drink so hard to forget their sorrow as in the courtyards of this monarch. To dig in a mine makes men reckless, to own one makes them tormentors.

I had a double reason for hurrying on. My rules as a mendicant afoot were against cities and railroads. I flattered myself I was called and sent to the agricultural laborer.

When the land grew less black and less inhabited, I mistakenly rejoiced, assuming I should soon strike the valleys where grain is sown and garnered. Yet the King was following me still, like a great mole underground. There was no coal on the surface. The land was rusty-red and ashen-gray,--as though blasted by the torch of a Cyclops and only yesterday cooled by the rain. The best grain that could have been scattered among such rocks with the hope of a crop was a seed of dragons’ teeth.

How long the desolation continued! Toward the end of the day in the midst of the nothingness, I came upon a saloon full of human creatures roaring drunk. Otherwise there was not so much as a shed in sight.

Four vilely dirty little girls came down the steps carrying beer. One of them, too intoxicated for her errand, entrusted her can to her companions. They preceded me toward the smoke-veiled sun by a highway growing black again with the foot-prints of the King.

Now there was a deafening explosion. I sat down on a rock examining myself to see if I was still alive. The children pattered on. My start seemed to amuse them immensely. I followed toward the new civil war, or whatever it was.

Just over the crest and around the corner I encountered the King’s never-varying insignia, the double-row of “company houses.”

Every dwelling was as eternally and uniformly damned as its neighbor, making the eyes ache, standing foursquare in the presence of the insulted daylight. Every porch and railing was jig-sawed in the same ruthless way. Every front yard was grassless. Everything was made of wood, yet seemed made of iron, so black it was, so long had it stood in the wasting weather, so steadily had it resisted the dynamite now shaking the earth.

There they stood, thirty houses to the left, thirty to the right, with what you might call a street between, whose ruts were seemingly cut by the treasure-chariots of the brimstone princes of the nether world.

Two-thirds of the way through, several young miners were exploding giant powder. As I approached I saw another was loading his pistol with ball-cartridges and shooting over the hills at the sun. He did not put it out.

The group of children with the beer served these knights of dynamite, holding up the cans for them to drink. The little cup-bearers were then given pennies. They scurried home.

By their eyes and queer speech I guessed that these children were Poles, or of some other race from Eastern Europe. I guessed the same about the men celebrating. Every porch on both sides of that street held some heavy headed creatures from presumably the same foreign parts. They were, no doubt, good citizens after their peculiar fashion, but with countenances that I could not read. Though the next explosion seemed to jolt the earth out of its orbit, they merely blinked.

I said to myself, “This is not the fourth of July. Therefore it must be the anniversary of the day when ‘Freedom shrieked’ and ‘Kosciuszko fell.’”

I reached the end of the street; nothing beyond but a hollow of hills and a dubious river, enclosing a new Tophet, that I learned afterwards was Shickshinny. It was late. I wanted to get beyond to the green fields.

I zigzagged across that end of the street to folk on the front porches that I thought were Americans. Each time I vainly attempted conversation with some dumb John Sobieski in Sunday clothes. I wondered what were the Polish words for bread, shelter, and dead broke.

II

THE SON OF KING COAL

Some spick and span people came out on the porch of the last house. Possibly they could understand English. I went closer. They were out and out Americans.

So I looked them in the eye and said: “I would like to have you entertain me to-night. I am a sort of begging preacher. I do not take money, only food and lodging.”

“A beggin’ preacher?”

“My sermon is in poetry. I can read it to you after supper, if that will suit.”

“What sort of poetry?” asked the man.

“I can only say it is my own.”

“Why I just LOVE poetry,” said the woman. “Come in.”

“Come up,” said the man, and hustled out a chair.

“I’ll go right in and get supper,” said the wife. She was a breezy creature with a loud musical voice. She doubtless developed it by trying to talk against giant powder.

I told the man my story, in brief.

After quite a smoke, he said, “So you’ve walked from Wilkesbarre this afternoon. Why, man, that’s seventeen miles.”

I do not believe it was over fourteen.

He continued, “I’m awful glad to see a white man. This place is full of Bohunks, and Slavs, and Rooshians, and Poles and Lickerishes (Lithuanians?). They’re not bad to have around, but they ain’t Cawcasians. They all talk Eyetalian.”

The fellow’s manner breathed not only race-fraternity, but industrial fraternity. It had no suggestion of sheltered agricultural caution. It was sophisticated and anti-capitalistic. It said, “You and I are against the system. That’s enough for brotherhood.”

Now that he stood and refilled his pipe from a tobacco box nailed just inside the door, I saw him as in a picture-frame. He had powerful but slanting shoulders. He was so tall he must needs stoop to avoid the lintel. With his bent neck, he looked as though he could hold up a mine caving in. His general outlines seemed to be hewn from fence-rails, then hung with grotesque muscles of loose leather. His eyebrows were grown together. From looking down long passageways his eyes were marvellously owl-like. He was cadaverous. He had a beak nose. He had a retreating chin but, breaking the rules of phrenology, he managed to convey the impression of a driving personality. He looked like an enormous pick-axe.

He calmly commented: “Them Polacks waste powder awful. Not only on Sunday, for fun, but down in the mine they use twice too much. And they can’t blast the hardest coal, either.... And they’re always gettin’ careless and blowin’ themselves to hell and everybody else. It’s awful, it’s awful,” he said, but in a most philosophic tone.

He lowered his voice and pointed with his pipe stem: “Them people that live in the next house are supposed to be Cawcasians, but they haven’t a marriage license. They let their little girl go for beer this afternoon, for them fellows explodin’ powder over there. ’Taint no way to raise a child. That child’s mother was a well-behaved Methodist till she married a Polack, and had four children, and he died, and they died, and some say she poisoned them all. Now she’s got this child by this no-account white man. They live without a license, like birds. Yet they eat off weddin’s.”

“Eat off weddings?”

“Yes,” he said. “These Bohunks and Lickerishes all have one kind of a wedding. It lasts three days and everybody comes. The best man is king. He bosses the plates.”

“Bosses the plates?”

“Yes. They buy a lot of cheap plates. Every man that comes must break a plate with a dollar. The plate is put in the middle of the floor. He stands over it and bangs the dollar down. If he breaks the plate he gets to kiss and hug the bride. If he doesn’t break it, the young couple get that dollar. He must keep on givin’ them dollars in this way till he breaks the plate. Eats and plates and beer cost about fifty dollars. The young folks clear about two hundred dollars to start life on.”

“And,” he continued, “the folks next door make a practice of eatin’ round at weddin’s without puttin’ down their dollars.”

I began to feel guilty.

“It’s a good deal like my begging supper and breakfast of you.” He hadn’t meant it that way. “No,” he said, “you’re takin’ the only way to see the country. Why, man, I used to travel like you, before I was married, except I didn’t take no book nor poetry nor nothin’, and wasn’t afeered of box-cars the way you are.... I been in every state in the Union but Maine. I don’t know how I kept out of there.... I’ve been nine years in this house. I don’t know but what I see as much as when I was on the go....

“That fellow Gallic over there that was shootin’ that pistol at the sky killed a man named Bothweinis last year and got off free. It was Gallic’s wedding and Bothweinis brought fifty dollars and said he was goin’ to break all the plates in the house. He used up twelve dollars. He broke seven plates and kissed the bride seven times. Then the bride got drunk. She was only fifteen years old. She hunted up Bothweinis and kissed him and cried, and Gallic chased him down towards Shickshinny and tripped him up, and shot him in the mouth and in the eye.... The bride didn’t know no better.... He was an awful sight when they brought him in. The bride was only a kid. These Bohunk women never learn no sense anyway. They’re not smart like Cawcasian women, and they fade in the face quick.”

He reflected: “My wife’s a wonderful woman. I have been with her nine years, and she learns me something every day, and she still looks good in her Sunday clothes.”

He became lighter in tone again. “What these Bohunks need is a priest and a church to make them behave. They mind a priest some, if he is a good priest. They’re all Catholics, or no church....”

“Seems though sometimes a man’s got to shoot. Some of them devils over there used to throw rocks at my door, but one Sunday I filled ’em full of buckshot and they quit. The justice upheld me. I didn’t have to pay no fine. They’ve been pretty good neighbors since, pretty good neighbors.”

There was a sound as though the flagstones of eternity had been ripped up. He saw I didn’t like it and said consolingly, “They’ll stop and go to supper pretty soon. They eat too much to do anything but set, afterwards. They don’t have nothin’ to eat in the old country but raw turnips. Here they stuff themselves like toads. I don’t see how they save money the way they do. The mine owners squeeze the very life out of ’em and they wallow in beer. I’ve always made big money, but somehow never kept it. Me and my wife are spenders. But I ain’t afraid, for I am the only man on the street that can dig the hardest coal. I could dig my way out of hell with my pick, and by G---- once I did it, too.”

The wife came to the door newly decked in an elaborate lace waist, torn, alas, at the shoulder. Husband was right. She looked good. She announced radiantly: “Come to supper.”

Then she rushed down between the houses and shouted: “Jimmy and Frank, come here! What you doin’? Get down off that roof. What you doin’, associatin’ with them Polack children? What you doin’ with them switches?” Then she swore heartily, as unto the Lord, and continued, “They’re helpin’ them Polack kids switch that poor little drunk American child. Come down off that coal shed!”

They slunk into sight. She snatched their switches from them.

“Who started it?”

Jimmy admitted he started it. He looked capable of starting most anything, good or bad. He had eyes like black diamonds, a stocky frame, and the tiny beginnings of his mother’s voice.

“I don’t know whether to lick you or not,” she said judicially. Finally: “Go up to bed without supper.”

Jimmy went.

She addressed us in perfect good humor, as a musical volcano might: “Come and eat.”

III

THE DAUGHTER OF THE KING

Never did I see beefsteak so thick. There was a garnish of fried onions. There was a separate sea of gravy. There was a hill of butter, a hill of thickly sliced bread. There was a delectable mountain of potatoes. That was all. These people were living the simple life, living it in chunks.

At table, as everywhere, the husband solemnly deferred to the wife. She was to him a druid priestess. And so she was radiant, as woman enthroned is apt to be. Of course, no young lady from finishing school would have liked the way we tunnelled and blasted our way through the provender. We were gloriously hungry and our manners were a hearty confession of the fact.

My passion for the joys of the table partially sated, I began to realize the room. There were hardly any of the comforts of home. There was a big onyx time-piece, chipped, and not running. Beside it was a dollar alarm-clock in good trim.

There were in the next room, among other things, two frail gilt parlor chairs, almost black. The curtains were streaked with soot and poorly ironed. She said she had washed them yesterday. But, she continued, “I just keep cheerful, I don’t keep house. Doesn’t seem like I can, this street is so awful dirty and noisy and foreign.”

“Yet you like it,” said the husband.

“Yes,” she said, “that’s because I’m half Irish. The Irish were born for excitement.”

“What’s _your_ ancestry?” I asked the husband.

“My father was a mountain white. Moved here from North Carolina, and dug coal and married a Pennsylvania Dutch lady.”

“It’s your turn,” she said to me. “You are a preacher?”

“That’s a kind of an excuse I make.”

“You can’t be any worse than the preacher we had here,” continued the wife. “He lived down toward Shickshinny. He preached in an old chapel. He wouldn’t start a Sunday school. We needed one bad enough. He just married folks. He hardly ever buried them. They say he was afraid. And,” she continued, with a growing tone of condemnation, “it’s a preacher’s BUSINESS to face death.

“Just about the time two of our children died of diphtheria, was when he came to these parts. He was a Presbyterian, and I was raised a Presbyterian, and he wouldn’t preach the funeral of my two babies. He promised to come, and we waited two hours. So I just read the Bible at the grave.”

This she recounted with a bitter sense of insult.

“And the same day he locked up his mother, too.”

“Locked up his mother?”

“Yes. Some said he wanted to visit a woman he didn’t want her to know about. They said he was afraid she would follow him and spy. He locked up the old lady, and she about yelled the roof off, and the neighbors let her out.

“And then,” continued my hostess, “when he was dying, he sent for a Wilkesbarre priest.”

“Sent for a priest?” I exclaimed, completely mystified.

“Yes,” she whispered. “He must have been a Catholic all the time. And the priest wouldn’t come either. _That’s what that old preacher got for being so mean._”

She continued: “That preacher wasn’t much meaner than the man is in the company store.”

She was bristling again.

“He won’t deliver goods up here unless you run a big bill. If I want anything much while big Frank here is at work, I have to take Jimmy’s little play express-wagon and haul it up.”

And now she was telling me of her terrible fright three days ago, down at the company store, when there was a rumor of an accident in one of the far tunnels of the mine.

“All the foreign women came running down the hill, half-crazy. I am used to false alarms, but I could hardly get up to this house with my goods. I was expecting to see big Frank brought in, just like he was before little Frank was born, eight years ago.”

Little Frank lifted his face from its business of eating to listen.

“The first thing that boy ever saw was his father on the floor there, covered with blood.”

“You don’t remember it, Frank?” asked his father, grinning.

“Nope.”

The wife continued: “There was only one doctor came. We had a time between us. The other doctor was tendin’ the men husband had dug out. The coal fell on them and mashed them flat. It couldn’t quite mash husband. He’s too tough,” she said, lovingly. “He grabbed his pick and he tunnelled his way through, with the blood squirting out of him.”

Husband grinned like a petted child. He said: “It wasn’t quite as bad as that, but I was bloody, all right.”

She continued with a gesture of impatience: “This is cheerful Sunday night talk. Let’s try something else. What kind of a poem are you goin’ to read?”

“It tells boys how to be great men, but it’s for fellows of from fifteen to twenty. You’ll have to save it for your sons till they grow a bit.”

She was at the foot of the stairway like a flash.

“Son, dress and come down to supper.”

Son was down almost as soon as she was in her chair, pulling on a stocking as he came. And he was hungry. He ate while we talked on and on.

IV

THE GRANDSONS OF THE KING

After the supper the dishes waited. The wife said: “Now we will have the poetry.” I said in my heart, “Maybe this is the one house in a hundred where the seed of these verses will be sown upon good ground.”

We went into the parlor, distinguished as such by the battered organ. The mother had Frank and Jimmy sit in semicircle with her and big Frank, while I plunged into my rhymed appeal. After the dynamite of the day I did not hesitate to let loose the thunders. I did not hesitate to pause and expound:--the poem being, as I have before described, many stanzas on heroes of history, with the refrain, ever and anon: _God help us to be brave._ No, kind and flattering reader, it was not above their heads. Earnestness is earnestness everywhere. The whole circle grasped that I really expected something unusual of those boys with the black-diamond eyes, no matter what kind of perversity was in them at present.

I said, in so many words, as a beginning, that nitro-glycerine was not the only force in the world, that there is also that dynamite called the power of the soul, and that detonation called fame.

But I did not dwell long upon my special saints, Francis of Assisi and Buddha, nor those other favorites who some folk think contradict them: Phidias and Michael Angelo. I dwelt on the strong: Alexander, Cæsar, Mohammed, Cromwell, Napoleon, and especially upon the lawgivers, Confucius, Moses, Justinian; and dreamed that this ungoverned strength before me, that had sprung from the loins of King Coal, might some day climb high, that these little wriggling, dirty-fisted grandsons of that monarch might yet make the world some princely reparation for his crimes.

After the reading the mother and father said solemnly, “it is a good book.”

Then the wife showed the other two pieces of printed matter in the household, a volume of sermons, and a copy of _The House of a Thousand Candles_. You have read that work about the candles. The sermons were by the Reverend Wood M. Smithers. You do not know the Reverend Mister Smithers? He has collected in one fair volume all the sermons that ever put you to sleep, an anthology of all those discourses that are just alike.

She said she had read them over and over again to the family. I believed it. There was butter on the page. I said in my heart: “She is not to be baffled by any phraseology. If she can get a kernel out of Wood M. Smithers, she will also derive strength from my rhyme.”

She promised she would have each of the boys pick out one of the twenty-six great men for a model, as soon as they were schooled enough to choose. She put the poem in the kitchen table drawer, where she kept some photographs of close relatives, and I had the final evidence that I had become an integral part of the family tradition.

V

ON TO SHICKSHINNY

They sent me up to bed. I put out the lamp at once, lest I should see too much. I went to sleep quickly. I was as quickly awakened. Being a man of strategies and divertisements, I reached through the blackness to the lamp that was covered with leaked oil. I rubbed this on my hands, and thence, thinly over my whole body. Coal oil too thick makes blisters; thin enough, brings peace.

I remember breakfast as a thing apart. Although the table held only what we had for supper, warmed over, although the morning light was grey, and the room the worse for the grey light, the thing I cannot help remembering was the stillness and tenderness of that time. Father and mother spoke in subdued human voices. They had not yet had occasion to shout against the alarums and excursions of the day. And the sensitive faces of the boys, and the half-demon, half-angel light of their eyes stirred me with marvelling and reverence for the curious, protean ways of God.

And now I was walking down the steeps of Avernus into Shickshinny, toward the smoke of torment that ascends forever. Underfoot was spread the same dark leprosy that yesterday had stunted flower and fruit and grass-blade.

I hated King Coal still, but not so much as of yore.

WHAT THE SEXTON SAID

YOUR dust will be upon the wind
Within some certain years,
Though you be sealed in lead to-day
Amid the country’s tears.

When this idyllic churchyard
Becomes the heart of town,
The place to build garage or inn,
They’ll throw your tombstone down.

Your name so dim, so long outworn,
Your bones so near to earth,
Your sturdy kindred dead and gone,
How should men know your worth?

So read upon the runic moon
Man’s epitaph, deep-writ.
It says the world is one great grave.
For names it cares no whit.

It tells the folk to live in peace,
And still, in peace, to die.
At least, so speaks the moon to me,
The tombstone of the sky.

DEATH, THE DEVIL, AND HUMAN KINDNESS

THE SHRED OF AN ALLEGORY

I

THE UNDERTAKER

CURIOUS are the agencies that throw the true believer into the occult state. Convalescence may do it. Acts of piety may do it. Self-mortification may do it.

After reading my evening sermon in rhyme in the house of the stranger, I had slept on the lounge in the parlor. The lounge had lost some of its excelsior, and the springs wound their way upwards like steel serpents. So strenuous had been the day I could have slumbered peacefully on a Hindu bed of spikes.

I awoke refreshed, despite several honorable scars. What is more important I left that house with faculties of discernment.

I did not realize at first that I was particularly spiritualized. I was merely walking west, hoping to take in Oil City on my route. Yet I saw straight through the bark of a big maple, and beheld the loveliest ... but I have not time to tell.

Then I heard a fluttering in a patch of tall weeds and discovered what the people in fairyland call ... but no matter. We must hurry on.

At noon your servant was on the front step of a store near a cross-roads called Cranberry, Pennsylvania. The store was on the south side of the way by which I had come. I sat looking along wagon tracks leading north, little suspecting I should take that route soon.

On one side overhead was the sign: “Fred James, Undertaker.” On the other: “Fred James, Grocer.”

“_And so_,” I thought, “_I am going to meet, face to face, one of the eternal powers._ He may call himself Fred James all he pleases. His real name is Death.”

I met the lady Life, once upon a time, long ago. She had innocent blue eyes. Alone in the field I felt free to kiss the palm of her little hand, under the shadow of the corn.

It has nothing to do with the tale, but let us here reflect how the corn-stalk is a proud thing, how it flourishes its dangerous blades, guarding the young ear. It will cut you on the forehead if the wind is high. Above the blades is the sacred tassel like a flame.

Once, under that tassel, under those dangerous blades, I met Life, and for good reason, bade her good-by. After her solemn words of parting, she called me back, and mischievously fed me, from the pocket of her gingham apron, crab apples and cranberries. Ever since that time those fruits have been bitter delights to my superstitious fancy.

And here I was at CRANBERRY cross-roads, with a funeral director’s sign over my head. A long five minutes I meditated on the mystery of Life and Death and cranberries. A fat chicken, apparently meditating on the same mystery, kept walking up and down, catching gnats.

At length it was revealed to me that when things have their proper rhythm Life and Death are interwoven, like willows plaited for a basket. Somewhat later in the afternoon I speculated that when times are out of joint, it is because Death reigns without Life for a partner, with the assistance of the Devil rather. But do not remember this. It anticipates the plot.

One does not hasten into the presence of the undertaker. One rather waits. HE was coming. I did not look round. Even at noon he cast a considerable shadow.

The shadow dwindled as he sat on the same step and asked: “What road have you come?” His non-partisan drawl was the result, we will suppose, of not knowing which side of the store the new customer approached.

“I came from over there. I have been walking since sunrise.”

He had some account of my adventures, and my point of view as a religious mendicant. I knew I would have to ask the further road of him, but disliked the necessity. He waited patiently while I watched my friend, the fat chicken, explore an empty, dirty, bottomless basket for flies.

“I want to go west by way of Oil City,” I finally said.

He answered: “Oil City is reached by the north road, straight in front of you as you sit. It is about an hour’s walk to the edge of it. It is a sort of trap in the mountains. When you get in sight of it, _keep on going down_.” This he said very solemnly.

He put his hand on my shoulder: “Come in and rest and eat first. It won’t cost you a cent.”

I was hungry enough to eat a coffin handle, and so I looked at him and extended my hand. He was a handsome chap, with a grey mustache. His black coat was buttoned high. He was extra neat for a country merchant, and chewed his tobacco surreptitiously. His face was not so bony and stern as you might think.

I gave him an odd copy of the _Tree of Laughing Bells_, still remaining by me. He looked at the outside long, doing the cover more than justice. Then he opened it, with a certain air of delicate appreciation. I urged him to postpone reading the thing till I was gone.

His store was high and long and narrow and cool. There was a counter to the west, a counter to the east. Behind the western one were tall coffin cupboards. As he proudly opened and shut them, one could not but notice the length of his fingers and their dexterity. He showed plain coffins and splendid coffins. He unscrewed the lid of one, that I might see the silky cushions within. They looked easier than last night’s lounge.

As he stepped across what might be called the international date line of the store, and entered the hemisphere of groceries, he began to look as though he would indulge in a merry quip. A faint flush came to his white countenance, that shone among the multi-colored packages.

Before us were the supplies of a rural general store, from the kitchen mop to the blue parlor vase. Hanging from the ceiling was an array of the flamboyant varnished posters of the seedsmen, with pictures of cut watermelons, blood-red, and portraits of beets, cabbages, pumpkins.

I read his home-made sign aloud: “I guarantee every seed in the store. Pansy seeds a specialty.”

“Not that they all grow,” he explained. “But the guarantee keeps up the confidence of the customers. I have made more off of vegetable and flower seeds this year than caskets.”

He pulled out a chip plate and fed me with dried beef, sliced thin.

He smiled broadly, and set down a jar. The merry quip had arrived.

“Why,” he asked, “is a stick of candy like a race-horse?”

I remained silent, but looked anxious to know. Delighted with himself, he gave the ancient answer, and with it several sticks of candy. Kind reader, if you do not know the answer to the riddle, ask your neighbor.

There was no end of sweets. He skilfully sliced fresh bread, and spread it with butter and thick honey-comb. With much self-approval he insisted on crowding my pockets with supper.

“Nobody knows how they will treat you around Oil City. _I go often, but never for pleasure. Only on funeral business._”

He gave me pocketfuls of the little animal crackers, so daintily cut out, that used to delight all of us as children. Since he insisted I take something more, I took figs and dates.

He held up an animal cracker, shaped like a cow, and asked: “When was beefsteak the highest?” I ventured to give the answer.

Death is not a bad fellow. Let no man cross his grey front stoop with misgiving. The honey he serves is made by noble bees. Yet do not go seeking him out. No doubt his acquaintance is most worth while when it is casual, unexpected, one of the natural accidents. And he does not always ask such simple riddles.

II

THE TRAP WITHOUT THE BAIT

It was about two o’clock when the north road left the cornfields and reached the hill crests above the city. How the highway descended over cliffs and retraced itself on ridges and wound into hollows to get to the streets! At the foot of the first incline I met a lame cat creeping, panic-stricken, out of town.

Oil City is an ugly, confused kind of place. There are thousands like it in the United States.

I reached the post-office at last. _There was no letter for me at the general delivery. I was expecting a missive._ And now my blistered heels, and my breaking the rule to avoid the towns, and my detour of half a day were all in vain.

Oil City, in her better suburbs, as a collection of worthy families in comfortable homes, may have much to say for herself. But as a corporate soul she has no excuse. The dominant, shoddy architecture is as eloquent as the red nose of a drunkard. I do not need to take pains to work her into my allegory. The name she has chosen makes her a symbol. No doubt others reach the very heart of her only to find it empty as the post-office was to me. Baffling as this may be, there is another risk. Escape is not easy.

Almost out of town at last, I sat down by the fence, determined not to stir till morning. I said, “I can sleep with my back against this post.”

I had just overtaken the lame cat, and she now moved past me over the ridge to the cornfields. She seemed most unhappy. I looked back to that oil metropolis. _I wondered how many had lived and died there when they would have preferred some other place._

III

A MYSTERIOUS DRIVER

A fat Italian came by in a heavily-tired wagon. The wagon was loaded with green bananas. The fruit-vendor stopped and looked me over. He most demonstratively offered me a seat beside him. He had a Benvenuto Cellini leer. He wore one gold earring. He looked like the social secretary of the Black Hand.

He was apparently driving on into the country. Therefore I suffered myself to be pulled up on to the seat. Around the corner we came to green fields and bushes, and I thanked the good St. Francis and all his holy company.

I said to my charioteer: “As soon as you get a mile out, let me down. I do not want to get near any more towns for awhile.”

“Allaright,” he said. On his wrist was tattooed a blue dagger. The first thing he did was unmerciful. He went a yard out of his way to drive over the lame cat which had stopped in despair, just ahead of us. Pussy died without a shriek. Then the cruel one, gathering by my manner that I was not pleased with this incident, created a diversion. He reproved his horse for not hurrying. It was not so much a curse as an Italian oration. The poor animal tried to respond, but hobbled so, his master surprised me by checking the gait to a walk. Then he cooed to the horse like a two hundred pound turtledove.

In a previous incarnation this driver must have been one of the lower animals, he had so many dealings with such. Some rocks half the size of base-balls were piled at his feet. A ferocious dog shot out from a cottage doorway. With lightning action he hurled the ammunition at the offender. The beast retreated weeping aloud from pain. And Mr. Cellini showed his teeth with delight.

And now, after passing several pleasant farm-houses, where I ran a chance for a free lodging for the asking, I was vexed to be suddenly driven into a town. We hobbled, rattled on, into a wilderness thicker every minute with fire-spouting smoke-stacks.

“This ees Franklin,” said my charioteer. “Nice-a-town. _MY_ town,” he added earnestly. “I getta reech (rich) to-morrow.”

He began to cross-examine the writer of this tale. I counselled myself not to give my name and address, lest I be held for ransom.

After many harmless inquiries, he asked in a would-be ingratiating manner, “Poppa reech?”

“No. Poor.”

“Poppa verra reech?”

“No. Awfully poor. But happy and contented.”

“Where your Poppa leeve?”

“My father is the Man in the Moon.”

That answer changed him completely. I seemed to have given the password. I had joined whatever it was he belonged to. He gave me three oranges as a sign.

I had hoped we would drive past the smoke and fire. But he turned at right angles, into the midst of it, and drove into a big black barn. He waved me good-by in the courtliest manner, as though he were somebody important, and I were somebody important.

Pretty soon I asked a passer-by the nearest way to the suburbs. I had to walk on the edges of my feet they were so tired. The street he pointed out to me was nothing but a continuation of tar-black, coughing, out-of-door ovens, side by side, shoulder to shoulder, on to the crack of doom. I presume, in the language of this vain world, they were coke ovens.

I opened my eyes as little as possible and breathed hardly at all. Then, by way of diversion, I nibbled animal crackers, first a dog, then a giraffe, then a hippopotamus, then an elephant.

Those ovens looked queerer as the street led on. There were subtle essences abroad when the smoke cleared away, and when the great roar ceased there were vague sounds that struck awe into the heart. I may be mistaken, but I think I know the odor of a burning ghost on the late afternoon wind, and the puffing noise he makes.

As the cinders crunched, crunched, underfoot, the conviction deepened: “These ovens are not mere works of man. Dying sinners snared and corrupted by Oil City are carried here when the city has done its work--carried in the wagon of Apollyon, under bunches of green bananas. Body and soul they are disintegrated by the venomous oil; they crumble away in the town of oil, and here in the town of ovens, the fragments are burned with unquenchable fire.”

Now it was seven o’clock. The street led south past the aristocratic suburbs of Franklin, and on to the fields and dandelion-starred roadside.

IV

THE ALLEGORY BREAKS DOWN. MY FRIEND HUMANKINDNESS WITH THE GREEN GALLUSES

I hoped for a farm-hand’s house. Only in that sort will they give free lodging so near town. And, friends, I found it, there on the edge of the second cornfield. The welcome was unhesitating.

I looked at my host aghast. To satisfy my sense of the formal, he should have had the dignity to make him Father Adam, and lord of Paradise. How could one round out a day that began loftily with Death, and continued gloriously with some one mighty like the Devil, with this inglorious type now before me? He wrecked my allegory. There is no climax in Stupidity.

Just as the colorless, one-room house had stove, chimney, cupboard, adequate roof, floor, and walls, so the owner had the simplified, anatomical, and phrenological make-up of a man. He had a luke-warm hand-clasp. He smoked a Pittsburg stogy. He had thick vague features and a shock of drab hair. The nearest to a symbol about him was his new green galluses. I suppose they indicated I was out in the fields again.

If his name was not Stupidity, it was Awkwardness. He kept a sick geranium in an old tomato can in the window. He had not cut off the bent-back cover of the can. Just after he gave me a seat he scratched his hand, as he was watering the flower, and swore softly.

Yet one must not abuse his host. I hasten to acknowledge his generous hospitality. If it be not indelicate to mention it, he boiled much water, and properly diluted it with cold, that the traveller might bathe. The bath was accomplished out of doors beneath the shades of evening.

Later he was making preparations for supper, with dull eyes that looked nowhere. He made sure I fitted my chair. He put an old comfort over it. It was well. The chair was not naturally comfortable; it was partly a box.

After much fumbling about, he brought some baked potatoes from the oven. The plate was so hot he dropped it, but so thick it would not break.

He picked up the potatoes, as good as ever, and broke some open for me, spreading them with tolerable butter, and handing them across the table. Then I started to eat.

“Wait a minute,” he said. He bowed his head, closed his dull eyes, and uttered these words: “The Lord make us truly thankful for what we are about to receive. Amen.”

I have been reproved by some of the judicious for putting so much food in these narratives. Nevertheless the first warm potato tasted like peacocks’ tongues, the next like venison, and the next like ambrosia, and the next like a good warm potato with butter on it. One might as well leave Juliet out of Verona as food like this out of a road-story. As we ate we hinted to each other of our many ups and downs. He mumbled along, telling his tale. He did not care whether he heard mine or not.

He had been born nearby. In early manhood he had been taken with the oil fever. It happened in this wise:--He had cut his foot splitting kindling. Meditating ambition as he slowly recovered, he resolved to go to town. He sold his small farm and wasted his substance in speculation. At the same time his young wife and only child died of typhoid fever. He was a laborer awhile in the two cities to the northeast. Then he came back here to plough corn.

He had been saving for two years, had made money enough to go back “pretty soon” and enter what he considered a sure-thing scheme, that I gathered had a close relation to the oil business. He said that he had learned from experience to sift the good from the bad in that realm of commerce.

He put brakes on the slow freight train of his narrative. “I was about to explain, when you ast to come in, that I don’t afford dessert to my meals often.”

“If you will excuse me,” I said, emptying my pockets, “these figs, these dates, these oranges, these animal crackers were given me by Death, and the Devil. Eat hearty.”

“Death and the Devil. What kind are they?”

“They’re not a bad sort. Death gave me honey for dinner, and the Devil did no worse than drive me a little out of my way.”

He smiled vaguely. He thought it was a joke, and was too interested in the food itself to ask any more questions.

The balmy smokeless wind from the south was whistling, whistling past the window, and through the field. How much one can understand by mere whispers! The wind cried, “Life, life, life!” Some of the young corn was brushing the walls of the cottage, and armies on armies of young corn were bivouacing further down the road, lifting their sacred tassels toward the stars.

There was no change in the expression of the countenance of my host, eating, talking, or sitting still in the presence of the night. I may have had too poor an estimate of his powers, but I preached no sermon that evening.

But, like many a primitive man I have met, he preached me a sermon. He had no bed. He gave the traveller a place to sleep in one corner and himself slept in the opposite corner. The floor was smooth and clean and white, and the many scraps of rag-carpet and the clean comfort over me were a part of the sermon. Another part was in his question before he slept: “Does the air from that open window bother you?”

I assured him I wanted all there was, though from the edge of the world.

He had awkwardly folded his new overcoat, and put it under my head.... And so I was beginning to change his name from Stupidity and Awkwardness to Humankindness.

Though in five minutes he was snoring like Sousa’s band, I could not but sleep. When I awoke the sun was in my eyes. It shone through the open door. Mr. Humankindness was up. The smell of baked potatoes was in the air. Outside, rustled the com. The wind cried, “Life, life, life.”

LIFE TRANSCENDENT

This being the name of praise given to a fair lady.