Chapter I: Part 1

AN IDYL OF THE WABASH

AN IDYL OF THE WABASH
AND OTHER STORIES

BY
ANNA NICHOLAS

_Made out o’ truck ’at’s jes’ a-goin’ to waste
’Cause smart folks thinks it’s altogether too
Outrageous common._--RILEY.

NEW YORK
HURST & COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

Copyright 1898
The Bowen Merrill Company

Copyright 1912
The Bobbs-Merrill Company

An Idyl of the Wabash

TO MY MOTHER

CONTENTS

PAGE.

AN IDYL OF THE WABASH 1

AT A WAY-STATION 32

MRS. BROOKS’S CHANGE OF HEART 60

AN ABIDING LOVE 77

A FARMHOUSE DRAMA 101

THE SOLUTION OF A TEXT 131

AN OCCULT EXPERIENCE 141

AN ITINERANT PAIR 177

A MOVEMENT IN ART 201

THE QUICKENING OF A SOUL 221

Herewith together you have flower and thorn,
Both rose and brier, for thus together grow
Bitter and sweet, but wherefore none may know.

--ALDRICH.

AN IDYL OF THE WABASH

AN IDYL OF THE WABASH

When Miss Callista Rogers first came from her Vermont home to the little Indiana town of Honeyport, on the Wabash, she had a sense of almost perilous adventure--something like that felt by the pioneer women who followed up the ever-advancing and now forever vanished frontier.

“It is so very far away,” she said to her family before starting, “and while, of course, there are no Indians and no danger of having one’s scalp taken, or anything of that sort, still, things will be queer and the people can’t be expected to be like those in Vermont, not having had the same advantages.”

After she reached Honeyport she wrote to her sister that the people were queer, but that they seemed friendly, and she thought she should get along real well. At that time Miss Callista was not much past her first youth, but she had lived long enough to have imbibed the very firm conviction that New England opinions and New England ways were the only opinions and only ways worth considering seriously. Holding such belief, it might naturally have been expected that she would come into conflict with her new associates, but a fair degree of discretion prevented her from airing her views too aggressively, and her wholesome humor and evident kindliness of spirit led her Hoosier friends to be indulgent to such of her unflattering opinions as were inadvertently betrayed and to regard her with considerable favor.

She had come to Indiana to teach school, and to Honeyport through the intercession in her behalf of Deacon Knox, an old family friend at home whose second cousin had married Rev. Calvin Evans, pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Honeyport.

In those days--it was soon after the war--teaching, especially in the rural districts and village communities, was not the complicated and exacting science it has since become. Miss Callista was fairly well grounded in the common English branches; in the way of accomplishments she knew a little music, and as a crowning acquirement had an acquaintance with the rudiments of the Latin language. This last she was not called upon to teach, but the consciousness that she was on familiar terms--hardly a speaking acquaintance, to be sure--with the ancient tongue was a source of infinite satisfaction to her; it gave her a sense of superiority and power.

There were some preliminaries to be undergone before she was officially authorized to teach the young idea of Honeyport, an examination among the rest, but this was not severe, and she stood it successfully. As for the methods of teaching to be adopted, there were no fixed rules as now under the elaborate and inflexible system in vogue. She was free to follow her own judgment, which was for the most part good, being based on New England common sense and a power of adaptation to the pupils’ individual needs which every successful teacher must have. So she taught in one of the two schools of Honeyport very acceptably to the people, who were easy-going and not yet affected by the “higher education” fad.

But Miss Callista did not so easily adapt herself to her new environment in all respects. She did not like the appearance of the town and the surrounding country, to begin with. The country was too level. Her soul yearned for the hills as the souls of those born among them must do till memory fails. She missed the blue distances, the lights and shadows, the feeling of companionship the mountains gave. The prairie was monotonous and the sky shut down too close. The village itself was trying to her sense of thrift and order. She could not free her mind concerning it in her letters home, for she was resolved to give nothing but agreeable impressions to the mother and sister back in the trim and prim but picturesque Vermont town.

To Mrs. Evans, the pastor’s wife, she unburdened her mind when her sensibilities were too deeply outraged. In Mrs. Evans she had found a congenial acquaintance. That lady had lived in Indiana for so many years that she had acquired some of the habits and peculiarities of what Miss Callista called the natives, but she had been born in New England and cherished its traditions. Consequently, she sympathized in a measure with the strictures made by the new teacher, but she was a discreet woman, as became a minister’s wife, and the confidences poured into her ears went no further. Understanding this, Miss Callista felt free to express her true sentiments on all matters. She was especially indignant over the slipshod ways of the village.

“It’s perfectly scandalous,” she said, “the way they let the grass grow in the gutters and the way they let the pigs and cattle run loose in the street. They ought to have more pride. Why, when I rode up Main street in the Paw Paw hack that first day and saw the sidewalks almost covered by high grass, and cows and pigs lying right on the walks, and people stepping around them, I expected to find slovenly housekeeping, too. Like town, like people, I thought. Didn’t turn out jest that way, I’m free to confess. There are some very nice, neat housekeepers here.”

Another peculiarity of the natives excited Miss Callista’s scorn.

“I never see,” she told Mrs. Evans, “such a dowdy set as they be. Why, they don’t care how they look. The women don’t dress up of afternoons, and farmers’ wives don’t put on a fresh dud when they come to town; jest wear their old limpsy calicoes and sunbunnets. The men ain’t a mite better, though, to be sure, that’s the women’s fault. Husbands are much what the wives make ’em, as you know. I don’t set no great store by fashions and folderols myself,” she went on, “but it’s certainly a dreadful shame they don’t slick up more when they go to meeting--particularly the Campbellites. Go over to that church an’ you won’t see a man with a starched shirt bosom. Not that I look at such things, specially, but if you have eyes you must see. Clean enough, all of ’em, mebbe, but no stiffenin’. I’d like to clear starch ’em all once--men, women and children.

“And there is another thing. Folks around here surmise and wonder, but can’t guess one of the main reasons why I set up my own little housekeeping. Of course, in the first place, I wanted to economize, but, Mrs. Evans, another great thing was that I jest wanted something good to eat. I do’ know as I’m so very dainty about my eating, an’ I do’ know _but_ I be. Anyhow, I don’t like the cooking I get at most places. Of course, if you’d felt clear to take me it would a’ been all right s’ far as the table’s concerned, but most places they don’t suit me. They can’t make a good cup o’ tea; they don’t know how to make yeast bread, and not one of ’em can make a decent pie. I will say for ’em, though, that they can fry chicken to beat all creation.”

Miss Callista conceived a peculiar animosity toward the religious sect variously known as “Disciples,” “Christians” and “Campbellites.” Just why was not clear. It may have been due to the fact that she had never heard of the denomination back in Vermont, and being, as she considered, a purely western product, it was, therefore, to be distrusted as somehow unorthodox and subversive of pious principles. The sect was numerously represented in that locality, and the congregation which worshiped in one of the three churches of Honeyport was larger than either the Methodists or Presbyterians could muster.

“I shan’t call ’em Disciples,” sniffed Miss Callista, “jest as if they were as good as the Twelve, an’ I shan’t call ’em Christians. The idear! Jest as if they had a patent on the name. They don’t like to be called Campbellites, but I shall call ’em Campbellites the hull time. How any reasonable human being can believe in the docterns of that church does beat me. An’ there they’ll set an’ listen to jest the scrappiest kind o’ sermons, when, by crossin’ the street, they could hear your husband’s stirrin’ discourses.”

It will be seen from this that Miss Callista was not a woman of broad mind, and that, though she made her opinions plain to the comprehension, they were not expressed in that correct and elegant language so desirable in the teachers of youth. It is but just, however, to say that she was aware of some of these verbal lapses. As she herself remarked:

“Nobody understands grammar, and what is proper language, better than I do, and in school I always take great care to speak correctly. When I come home, though, it’s too much trouble to be thinking of the parts of speech, and I drop into an easier sort o’ talk, as I put on a kitchen apron or an old pair o’ shoes.”

Her idioms and accents she was unconscious of, and therefore could not drop. The born New Englander seldom does. She would say “Indianar,” and “idear,” and “Mariar” to the end of her days. She was quick to detect what she considered errors in others, however.

“‘Bucket!’ Don’t let me hear you say ‘bucket,’” she would tell her pupils. “It’s a ridiculous word; say ‘pail.’ And don’t say you ‘reckon’ or ‘low’ you’ll do so and so; say ‘guess.’”

Miss Callista had come West to teach because, even if she could get a school at her home, with all the eager candidates in competition for every place, better salaries were paid in Indiana. For her own part she would have preferred to stay in Vermont, even with the scant wages of the district school, but she had a mother and sister who needed her earnings, and it was for them she started out to seek a better fortune. The mother was a widow with a tiny home to call her own and an income hardly in proportion; the sister, a fragile girl with the New England scourge, consumption, already making its signs visible. Miss Callista must be the bread winner, and she went bravely about her task. She loved her family and her home; she had none of the self-assertiveness that is needed for those who would get on in the world; she dreaded the separation from her dear ones, and yet it never occurred to her to rebel against fate that made such a trial possible. She did not dream that she was heroic, and yet it is in such actions that the heroism of the latter days is found--a heroism not less than that which led the knights of old on their crusades.

Many and many a day in her new abiding place homesickness pressed upon her like a tangible weight; her heart ached for a sight of dear faces and familiar scenes; the very sun shining in the heavens took on a forbidding look, and the birds sang a melancholy tune. But if the poor, lonely little woman wept it was when no one knew. She kept a brave face and wrote cheery letters to the invalid at home. Every penny of her salary but that which supplied her own barest needs went to make the life of that invalid easier. She not only made no complaint over her own deprivations and sacrifices; she made the sacrifices gladly and did not know them to be such. Women are often like that. If the beneficiaries accepted the gifts as a matter of course and without appreciation of the life that was being given also, why, that was not unusual either. The human creature is often so.

The years went on until five had passed since Miss Callista had seen the faces of her kin and the blue Vermont hills. At the beginning she had not dreamed that so long a time would elapse before she could return, but one thing and another had delayed her visit. The invalid sister had needed so many things. The malady made inroads and delicacies were wanted to keep up her strength; medicines, too, and the doctor must be paid. Once a famous specialist came up from Boston to see her, and that cost money. This fifth winter just ended had been spent by the ailing one in Florida, but she was now at home again, and a turn of fortune in the shape of a railroad rate war made it suddenly possible for Miss Callista to go to see her and the dear mother. The cost of travel, the rival passenger agents declared, was less than that of staying at home. So, the spring term having just ended, she joyfully went her way.

She was in time for the end. Though it was early June and the sun shone with torrid strength on the Honeyport prairie, and the roses were in bloom, it was not so surely summer but that a wintry blast swept down from the north through the Vermont valleys and undid all the healing wrought by the Florida airs. The ailing sister was cut down as a lily by the frost. She died in Miss Callista’s arms--faithful arms that had scarce time to rest before they held the mother’s weary form while her soul breathed itself away. The mother had lived for the stricken daughter, and that beloved life ended, she, too, was done with earth.

The summer vacation was not over when Miss Callista came back to Honeyport. The charm of her childhood’s home was gone. Later in life the glamour of the mountains would come back to her and her heart would yearn for a sight of them, but now they chilled her and she was glad to return to the once despised village on the Wabash, with the unbroken, shadowless landscape and the level horizon. Out of the old home life were left only memories and a few household goods. When some of these treasures were unloaded at the door of her Indiana home--a heavy oaken secretary, a spindle-legged table, a straight-backed, comfortless-looking chair--the men who lifted them into place wondered that she went to the expense of shipping such old-fashioned furnishings when she might have bought finer ones at home for less money. But the women who saw them did not wonder--women who had found for themselves how the heart clings to inanimate things when they alone are left to speak of the dead.

So Miss Callista, permanently transplanted, settled down in a bit of a cottage next to the Presbyterian parsonage, still occupied by her friends, the Evanses, and resumed her occupation of teaching. There was no one now to save for and deny herself for, but, being an unselfish creature, this only brought her pain. Nevertheless, as time went on life grew more comfortable for her. She indulged in an occasional bit of finery; now and then she went on an excursion somewhere. Once she went to Indianapolis to attend the state fair, and once she went to Chicago and came back dizzy and bewildered, glad to be in the quiet home away from the busy whirl.

The years went on until more than fifteen had passed since she set foot on Hoosier soil. All this time she had not escaped the speculations all normally constituted people are bound to indulge in concerning the matrimonial prospects of their spinster friends. It was assumed that she was not only ready, but anxious to marry when the opportunity and the man offered, and kindly neighbors kept a lookout for both. Miss Callista alone seemed indifferent. Apparently she took no thought of such possibilities. She was polite in a sedate way to the occasional marriageable men who showed a disposition to hover around her, but she gave encouragement to none. Her Honeyport friends suspected that she had wasted her heart on some unappreciative Vermont Yankee, but this was not the case.

The truth was that the marriageable male beings who had come within her range of possibilities had not been quite to her liking. The farmers who constituted the most of these eligibles were too rough and careless in dress, too much given to tobacco chewing and too loudly hilarious in their conversation to please her somewhat fastidious taste. She may not have cherished a definite ideal of the man who would meet her requirements, but she had a clear conception of what would not do. So the years had gone swiftly by, bringing few changes in the routine of her life, or even in her appearance. She was a plump and comely body, and in some respects more attractive than in her younger days, for lines of care and anxiety and homesickness had given way to placid contentment in her work and in every-day affairs. She looked forward to no change in her mode of life or her experiences, but, as so often happens when change comes into an uneventful existence, it comes unexpectedly and creates a complete transformation in the little world.

Mrs. Evans, still her nearest neighbor and closest friend, fell ill and came swiftly down to death’s door. Before she passed through she said to Miss Callista, who was her faithful attendant:

“When I am gone Calvin will marry again after a proper time. He will; oh, yes. It is a man’s way, and it will be Calvin’s way. He will need somebody to look after him. I want you to be the one, and I have told him so. You will know how and will do for him as I would.”

This was said gaspingly between paroxysms of pain, but with all the firmness and decision for which Mrs. Evans was noted when at her best estate. It was the supreme proof of a woman’s faith in another that she could put her husband into her keeping, and, having given it, she closed her eyes and opened them no more.

This last communication made a powerful impression on Miss Callista. It was a startling surprise, but she accepted it unquestioningly as a guide to her future.

What Mrs. Evans wanted Mr. Evans to do had always been done, and she had not the faintest doubt that he would follow his wife’s instructions in this, as he had been accustomed to do in all other matters.

She grieved for her friend’s death, but almost insensibly she began to adjust herself to coming conditions. The bereaved man assumed the conventional appearance of gentle melancholy by which the newly-made widower is so easily recognized, and his earliest sermons had a tenderly pathetic tone that she, in common with the other women of the congregation, considered very touching and appropriate. But even in this sacred stage of his widowerhood she felt herself looking upon him with a new interest and a secret sense of possession. She had been brought up to revere ministers as a class, and had always had a respectful regard for Mr. Evans because of his profession and because he had been kind to her. He was not her ideal of manly beauty, being gaunt of frame and bald of head; moreover, he was twenty years older than she, being nearly sixty. However, she recognized the fact that it was not for her to make age a barrier, since no widower of sixty was likely to consider himself other than desirable even to a maid of twenty.

She also confessed to herself that she had always considered the wife of a minister blessed among women, and that, while she had never hoped to marry one, the sudden and unexpected prospect of doing so was very agreeable indeed. She felt herself fitted to the labor of smoothing life’s pathway for a servant of the Lord. Not that she could assist in sermon-writing, as she had suspected the first Mrs. Evans of doing, but she could minister to his comfort in a more material way. She could take household cares from his shoulders; she could make him presentable to the public; she could keep him posted on many ins and outs of the parish; above all, she could feed him well, and she held that of all men ministers needed to be well fed. She considered it a reasonable proposition that a man could administer a far higher degree of spiritual consolation to his flock when his stomach was comfortably filled than when it was empty or dyspeptic from poor food.

The very church building began to take on a new aspect. She saw that it needed a new carpet and a coat of paint, and her mind leaped forward to the time when, as minister’s wife, she could have an influence in bringing such improvements about. But she kept all such thoughts concealed in her own heart. Her manner toward her pastor was more sedate and dignified than ever. The knowledge imparted by her deceased friend had given her a self-consciousness which put an end to the little neighborly attentions she had been accustomed to offer when the wife was alive, such as sending over a favorite dish, or now and then an embroidered handkerchief, or even taking his hose from the mending basket and darning them in the highest style of the art. Now, she thought, such things would “make talk”--dreadful bugbear of lone women--and she left Mr. Evans entirely to the mercies of Nancy, his inefficient and elderly serving woman, and to other female parishioners who, with husbands to approve their actions, might safely venture where she could not tread.

It was the more easy to give up her accustomed service in her reverend neighbor’s house from the fact that her spare hours were now largely devoted to the entertainment of the Littledale twins--the three-year-old children of the Rev. Amos Littledale, the Campbellite minister, who lived across the street.

Miss Callista’s animosity to the Campbellites had in no wise abated, and was generally understood in the community, but the feeling was directed to them as a sect and not as individuals. Certainly, it did not include the babies, especially such sweet and attractive ones as these. Long before their mother died, several months back, her heart had gone out to those twins, and when they manifested a fondness for her, based though she knew it was on her supply of buns and cookies, she became their devoted friend. She had once confided to Mrs. Evans, with a maidenly blush, that if she had been married and the Lord had seen fit to bless her with children, she would have liked twins.

Mr. Littledale’s young sister was his housekeeper and guardian of the babies, and Miss Callista, seeing that the burden of care was heavy for the girl, cheerfully relieved and aided her in many ways. It would do no harm to make the young things happy while it could be done, she thought. “It wasn’t at all likely they would have much chance to be happy if their father married that flirty young Mattie Stone, over on the West pike, as seemed likely. Strange that a man couldn’t show better judgment when he married, especially when he took a second partner. There was Mr. Littledale, all of thirty-one, or maybe thirty-two years old, and Mat Stone wasn’t over twenty, and a giddy piece, too. There was Jane Embree, steady and settled, and of a suitable age, and willing, and he never so much as looked her way. But law sakes, what could you expect of a man and a preacher at that, in a church that had the hull New Testament for its creed and no confession of faith and no definite thing you could get at to tell what the members did believe, or why they couldn’t be just plain Baptists, or even Methodists or Presbyterians, who will immerse you if you insist on it?”

But, with all her absorption in the infants Miss Callista did not fail to keep a watchful eye on Widower Evans. She was a woman and not unobservant, and had therefore not failed to note the peculiarities of widowers. She knew at about what period deepest grief began to lift its clouds and life present some attractions once more; it was a very early period in a majority of cases. She could invariably detect the first indications that the bereaved one was “able to take notice,” as cynical old ladies have it; she knew well the signs that he was not only contemplating further matrimonial possibilities in a general way, but also when he had ceased to generalize and had fixed his eye upon a concrete individual as a desirable consoler. She saw Mr. Evans emerge into the first of these stages, her proximity as next-door neighbor being a point of vantage. He shaved oftener than he had been accustomed to doing; he buttoned his frock coat when he went out, instead of allowing it to hang open in a saggy, slovenly way; he carried himself more erectly, and with almost a jaunty air. Before his best coat was in the least shiny he began to wear it every day, and bought a new one for Sundays.

Miss Callista observed this piece of extravagance with a thrill; it was significant of immediate activity in the matrimonial field. It was barely six months since Mrs. Evans had died, but her expectant successor considered it probable that he would wish to marry as soon as the conventional year of mourning had expired, and it was a matter of course that the necessary preliminaries should be arranged before that date.

Almost unconsciously she began to preen herself like a little bird in the spring. Her brown hair waved with an extra crinkle; she put a fresh bow on her summer bonnet and wore a pink ribbon at her throat where brown had been. People said how young Miss Callista looked and how well she “held her age.” They also began to say what a suitable wife she would make for Mr. Evans; some of them, in the free-spoken rural way, said it to her, and made her blush and try to look angry. But they began to say, too, that Mr. Evans seemed to be looking with a favorable eye upon the Widow Jackson, out on West Main street. He had been seen to walk home with her from prayer-meeting, and he dropped in with what some considered needless frequency to administer spiritual consolation to the widow’s son, who was in the last stages of what was known as “decline.”

This information gave Miss Callista a shock. Could it be possible, she asked herself, that he was about to disregard his wife’s dying injunction? He showed no indications of any leaning in her direction, save that he had come over once or twice in a neighborly way, and when other neighbors were present, to sit on her little porch and chat in the twilight. But he had never walked home with her from prayer-meeting, though she attended regularly and it was right in his way. She cogitated over the matter a good deal, and as a result of her reflections decided upon what she considered a bold move and a counter attraction to the widow’s blandishments. She resolved to invite him to supper, no matter if folks did say she was setting her cap for him. She wasn’t doing anything of the kind, and she wasn’t anyways anxious, she said to herself, to marry him, but something was due to her friend Mrs. Evans; and certainly that lady would not approve of Mrs. Jackson. And what a poor figure she would cut at the head of the missionary society and the sewing circle, sure enough! Perhaps, it was her (Miss Callista’s) duty gently to remind him of his late partner’s wishes. So she spent the most of one Saturday afternoon in concocting the preacher’s favorite dishes, and when they were ready to serve, stepped to the back fence, and, in a casual way, as if it were a sudden thought, asked him to come over and have a bit of supper. She said, she knew Nancy had gone to see her folks, and she thought he might enjoy a cup of tea and something warm instead of a cold bite by himself.

He came with alacrity, and was presently installed at the table with Miss Callista opposite and a Littledale twin at each side of her. It had seemed to her that the presence of the twins would at once preserve the proprieties and offer no barrier to confidential conversation. The babies behaved like little angels, but there was no conversation that all the world might not have heard. She plied her guest with fried chicken, with the lightest of rolls, with strawberry shortcake and with his favorite temperance tipple of diluted blackberry cordial, put up by her own hands the year before. He ate heartily and joyously, and made a variety of facetious remarks to the twins, but he went home without so much as a look indicating a thought of his wife’s sacred injunction.

Miss Callista did not like it. She took the twins to their gate and kissed them good-night with an abruptness and irritation of manner hitherto unknown to them. She was beginning to have a little resentment on her own account as well as on that of the departed Mrs. Evans, whose request was being ignored. Her vanity was touched. Queer taste a man had, she thought, who could see anything in that Widow Jackson better than he saw in her; and everybody knew the widow couldn’t cook a decent meal to save her life.

Miss Callista was modest, but no woman is so unduly self-depreciating that she does not secretly recognize her own superiority to certain other women.

But the supper did have its effect, after all, for during the weeks following Mr. Evans fell into the way of walking home with Miss Callista after Sunday evening service and of coming oftener to sit on her porch in the dusk. But he did not discontinue his visits to the widow. The situation was quite interesting to the parishioners and the village gossips, and people began to take sides. The women discussed the matter over the back fences, and the men who sat around the grocery stores wagered small sums on the outcome.

One day in August Miss Callista was surprised by the receipt of a letter. It was from Mr. Evans, who had been spending a week or so with a sister in Lafayette. It read thus:

“Miss Callista--Esteemed Friend: I take this means of addressing
you in regard to an important matter. When my lamented Jane was in
her last illness, she foresaw that I should find the burden of
loneliness too great to bear, and she advised me to marry again after
a proper time had passed, and strongly recommended you as a suitable
partner. Indeed, she was so urgent that she exacted a promise that
I would follow her advice. At that time I was much agitated and
distressed, and scarcely knew what I was saying, but since I have
recently come to reflect upon the matter it has seemed to me that
her views were very judicious. The time is near when I can, without
reproach, enter again into the marriage state, and for many reasons
it seems expedient for me to do so. Inasmuch as you were on terms of
close friendship with my dear Jane, and will doubtless desire, as I
do, to carry out her wishes as far as possible in all respects, I ask
your consideration of the matter in hand. As my wife you can greatly
increase your field of usefulness, and I feel assured that the Lord
will fit your strength to the new duties and responsibilities. I
write this in order to prepare your mind. I shall return to-morrow
and will call on you, when we can discuss the subject in all its
bearings.
“Yours in the Lord,
“CALVIN H. EVANS.”

Miss Callista read this epistle several times. At first she experienced a sense of triumph and elation. There was no longer any doubt about the matter. She, and not the Widow Jackson, had won the prize. On the second reading she added the comment, “if he is a prize.” The third time red spots began to grow on her cheeks, and she talked to herself as people who live alone are apt to do.

“He talks as if he were asking me to marry him all on his first wife’s account, and had no special interest in the matter himself. Mrs. Evans was a good woman, but another woman wants some better reason for marrying the widower than that. And then he doesn’t out and out ask me to marry him; jest takes it for granted that I will jump at the chance once my mind is prepared. Conceited old thing, if he is a preacher. He seems to have some doubt, too, of my being equal to the new duties, and--and he never even says he likes me or will try to make me happy, or anything. A woman, even if she is going to be a second wife and isn’t as young as she was, wants a little love-making on her own account.”

Miss Callista did not reflect, or perhaps did not know, that men to whom it is not given to be sentimental and affectionate on paper are sometimes most eloquent of speech in the tender cause. She continued to cherish resentment, but, nevertheless, went about preparing green corn fritters in case the parson should happen in about supper time.

The twins happened in, as they were wont to do whenever they found the gates unfastened, and after them presently came their father ostensibly in search of the truants. He had come so often on the same errand that he was quite at home, and detected at once Miss Callista’s appearance of irritation, for there was a dangerous sparkle in her usually mild eyes.

“Have the children worried you? I will take them home at once,” he said.

“Worry me--those dear babies? No, indeed; they couldn’t do that. Older people than they are the ones who worry.”

Rev. Mr. Littledale might have made a reputation in the legal profession, he had such a knack of getting the information he wanted by skillful but apparently purposeless questioning. Miss Callista had no intention of telling about Mr. Evans’s proposal, or, more accurately, his proposition, but she was full of the subject, and presently sat down on the sofa in the cool little parlor, the twins promptly climbing up and sitting one on each side with their arms about her.

“What would you think, Mr. Littledale, of a man who would ask a woman to be his second wife just because he thought it would please his first wife? I know--I know a lady--I have heard of a case of the kind.”

Mr. Littledale was shrewd. He had had his eye on Mr. Evans, and needed to know no more.

“Miss Callista,” said he promptly and with shameless disregard of the other man’s possible claims, “Miss Callista, such a man isn’t worth thinking about. He’s a selfish wretch, and no woman could be happy with him. A second wife deserves as much consideration as the first, and on her own account, too. And while we are talking about marrying, Miss Callista, shall I tell you what I have been wanting to say for some time? I want you for my wife. I love you, Miss Callista; the twins love you; won’t you come to us?”

The twins, cherubic creatures, promptly echoed, “Love oo, Miss C’lista,” and proceeded to embrace her, but were dispossessed by their parent.

Miss Callista was taken completely by surprise, but this variety of surprise never wholly disconcerts the most timid of women. She thought rapidly for a moment.

“There! Mr. Littledale’s been dropping in all summer, staying to supper and making himself at home generally, and I never thought anything of it, because he’s younger than I be; and, besides, I s’posed he was engaged to that Stone girl. Folks will say I tried to catch him.”

Like a flash, too, came the thought: “If I say yes, Mr. Evans will have to look somewhere else, and I don’t care if he does. I never made any promise to Jane. The Widow Jackson can have him.”

What Miss Callista said was: “Why, Mr. Littledale, I’m seven years older than you be, and--and I’m a Presbyterian.”

“What do a few years matter? We won’t count them,” was the reply. “And I’m sure I have nothing against Presbyterians. If you mean that I’m a Campbellite, why, please try to forgive me.”

Evidently he received forgiveness, for when Mr. Evans arrived that evening he found Mr. Littledale sitting with Miss Callista on the vine-covered porch, and the corn fritters had all been eaten. The new condition of affairs was gently disclosed to him by his successful rival, and he was perceptibly discomfited. He had, perhaps, not valued Miss Callista at her true worth while he considered her his for the asking, but now that another man had taken her from him she suddenly seemed highly desirable. Possibly the discovery of Rev. Evans’s designs may have inspired Mr. Littledale to unpremeditated action, but this is only a surmise. It is the way of man to be so influenced. Mr. Evans made but a short call, and when he entered his own home the door was heard to slam with what seemed unnecessary violence.

But the Presbyterian pastor was not inconsolable. The very next evening he walked home with the Widow Jackson from prayer-meeting and stayed till 10 o’clock. The morning after, the widow, under strict injunction of secrecy, told Deacon Todd’s wife of her engagement, and by night the whole town knew of it.

Miss Callista also confided in Mrs. Todd.

“I never would have supposed that I’d marry a Campbellite, that is, a Disciple--never, or that I’d be one myself. Of course, a minister’s wife ought, in all decency, to belong to his church, and, of course, I will. I ought to be able to accept the doctern if it’s the hull New Testament, as they say. And there! I’ll have to be immersed, too, I s’pose. I hadn’t thought of that; but I guess I can stand it to go through water, or fire either, for them blessed twins.”

AT A WAY-STATION

Thirty years ago a certain railroad in Indiana was new enough to be still a source of deep interest and curiosity to the people of the sparsely-settled region through which it passed. They had not yet ceased to gather at the stations, morning and evening, to see the “down train” and the “up train.” The projectors of this thoroughfare, having in view, perhaps, legislative appropriations and private subscriptions of stock, had artfully led the public to think that a farming country of marvelous richness was suffering for an outlet; that passengers and produce impatiently waited to crowd its cars. So impressed were guileless citizens with this idea that only a brave man or a fool would have dared to say: “Go to! We need no railroad.” Thus far in the existence of the road the great rush of travel and traffic had not begun; in the meantime, one train daily each way was found enough for all needs.

Few among the rural population along the route ever went from home; fewer still expected visitors. Yet they went regularly to see the engine and the gayly painted cars; they indulged in wild speculations as to the probable business and destination of the travelers of whom they caught glimpses. The occasional stranger who stopped at any village was confronted on the platform by groups of men in blue or butternut jeans, all chewing tobacco and expectorating profusely. He passed women in lank calico dresses and limp calico sunbonnets--some old and wrinkled, some young enough to be pretty, but, with rare exceptions, hopelessly plain. Even the dull-eyed babies, in their mothers’ arms, lacked the charm of health and wholesomeness. If the traveler chanced to wonder how one woman, with an expanse of toothless gums, could endure to smile, he might marvel that the next one appeared in public before having her unsightly teeth removed. And while he considered the sad effect of quinine, soda and tobacco on human beauty, he would have been amazed had he known the curiosity his own person excited. “Who is he?” “Where does he live at?” “What brings him down this away?” “How long will he stay?” were questions eagerly discussed.

The railroad had given them something to think about. Do you know what that means, you who have never lived in the country, remote from a business center? It means that the residents, having little outside interest, few books, perhaps no newspapers (there are such places yet), have narrowed their lives down until fresh subjects for thought and conversation are rare. They have talked about each other, about the crops, the calves, the pigs and the weather, until each man knows what another is going to say while he is yet afar off. Any unusual event, a death, an elopement, a fire, is seized upon, talked about from every point of view, turned to every light, over and over, until each thread and shred of the story is worn with age. Finally, it seems to die away, but suddenly revives, and passes on its round until set aside by something equally startling. Think, then, of the vast store of entertainment afforded by a railroad!

On this October evening, thirty years ago, the echoing scream of the locomotive, strange to say, did not draw out the usual number of idlers to gape, open-mouthed, as the train halted, then passed on. More strange still, many passengers alighted at each stopping place--the natives, themselves, returning home with the air of adventurers, breathing sighs of relief, too, as of having safely accomplished a perilous journey. Capacious lunch-baskets, as well as certain additions to their every-day attire--wide hoop-skirts on the women, shirt-collars on the men, for example--suggested that some sort of festivities had been indulged in.

As the excursionists lingered, reluctant to go while anything remained to be seen, their last glances turned from the long line of crowded passenger coaches to a baggage-car with the doors tightly closed, and a curious hush fell on them as it rolled by. What did it mean? A “through passenger,” in search of knowledge, found the path an easy one. The long, lean man at his side, with sunburned, straggling beard and a mouth like a cavern, was full of information. “Political meetin’! Lord, no! ’Lections stirs a feller up some, but there ain’t ary stump-speaker in Indiana ’at kin fetch sech an all-fired big crowd as was out to Newburg to-day. Hangin’ yo’ know--Bill Murdock’s. Hain’t heard about him? Reckon yo’ cain’t live ’round hyer, anywheres, or yo’d a knowed the peticklers. Been a powerful sight o’ talk about it, fust an’ last. Yo’ see ’t happened ’bout this hyer way: Bill, he tuck a notion one night, nigh two months ago now, ’at he’d go down to the Corners to Gimble’s an’ get some ten-penny nails.

“He was a-workin’ old Carter’s farm on the sheers an’ lived up there, full two mile from the Corners. His wife was a finicky little critter, with a mite of a baby, an’ ’peared like she had a warnin’ o’ some kind, for she done her best to coax him to stay to home. But go he would, though what he wanted with them nails jest at that time, more ’an a pin with two heads, no one could ever make out. After he’d bought ’em an’ talked with the fellers in the store a bit--mebbe had a drink or two in the back room--in come Jake Jillson. Jake was a airy sort o’ chap--could afford to be, ’cause his father ’d left him one o’ the best farms in the township, an’ he was beholden to nobody. Well, there’d been some old grutch atween him an’ Bill--no one knows zackly what. Some says Jake had courted Bill’s wife in times past, an’ that she throwed him over; but I don’t reckon that was it. Jake was married two years afore Bill was, an’ taint no ways likely ’at a female woman ’u’d give a well-to-do feller like Jake the go-by an’ take up with a pore man like Bill. They’re too long-headed, women be. ’T any rate, however ’twas, the two soon come to a quarrel. Nobody ’at heard ’em seems to agree jest how it was. Jake he was aggravatin’ an’ kep’ a naggin’. Bill allays was high-tempered, an’ fore anyone seen ’at they was really in airnest, Bill he was chasin’ of Jake over the boxes an’ bar’ls. It was on’y a minute afore he ketched him an’ hit him. The breath was knocked out o’ Jake for good an’ all with that air very pound o’ ten-penny nails.

“Jerusalem! What a racket it raised! After the folks come to their senses like, they got the sheriff an’ a posse o’ constables an’ scoured around the country right smart of a spell huntin’ Bill, afore they thought o’ going to his house. At last they went there an’ found him a-walkin’ the floor with his baby. He was teetotally wropped up in that woman an’ young un o’ his, but sick baby or not he was drug off to jail, an’ not a minute too soon. A lot o’ men in masks came a-gallopin’ down, an’ would a’ made short work o’ him if he’d been there. No, I don’t know who they were, an’ ef I did, ’twould be safe fer to keep my mouth shet. These hyer things hev to be looked after now an’ then--the law bein’ so slow an’ oncertain. Wasn’t much time lost, though, on this case. The jury wouldn’t a’ dared to a’ brought in ary other verdict than guilty, considerin’ how many rich relations Jake had scattered about this county. They’d made it mighty lively for ary juryman ’at would vote to clear his murderer. An’ so Bill, bein’, as I said, a pore man, with no friends to help him, had no show, an’ had to swing. ’Twas all right, I reckon; somebody has to be made a example of.

“Me an’ Mandy--that’s her in the red caliker a settin’ over yonder--’lowed we’d go up to Newburg to-day, where the hangin’ was at. Hadn’t ary one of us ever saw a man hung, an’ she hadn’t never been on the steam kyars. I hadn’t no notion o’ takin’ the boys, but Mandy, she says, ‘Lawsy, let ’em go, it’ll be a warnin’ to ’em to behave theirselves when they’ve growed up.’ So we all went. An’ jeminey! what a crowd! Best part o’ two counties there, I reckon.”

After a pause, during which the long, lean man ejected tobacco juice vigorously across the traveler into the aisle, he added reflectively: “A circus, I’m free to say, would a’ been more to my taste, but it wouldn’t a’ been so improvin’ to the community. Elder Borum says circuses are corrupt an’ a snare o’ the devil.”

Another pause and more tobacco.

“The--the--deceased is on a kyar back o’ this hyer.”

Just then the train quivered, slackened, stopped where a lonely country road crossed the track; not a human being, not a house in sight--only a platform and a pile of walnut lumber to hide the long, straight, western horizon beyond miles and miles of “rolling” country. In the summer, perhaps, it might have a certain beauty; in the dusk of this autumn day it was desolation. Toward the north a grove of girdled trees waved white, ghostly arms; rain had fallen and the gray earth, the heavy sky alike seemed sodden. The long gray and black curves of the wagon-track wound in and out like a huge serpent crawling over the earth.

Out upon the platform was helped from the baggage-car a young, slender woman with a baby in her arms--a woman in whose eyes was no longer hope, were no more tears.

After her was lifted a pine coffin roughly stained. The men who had touched her gently were less tender of this other burden. They dropped it with a jar that brought a little cry of pain from the woman’s lips. She sank down and placed her hand upon the box as if to shield from harm that which was within. The child upon her lap stared solemnly at the sky. The engine shrieked fiercely as if in haste to go, then rushed on, leaving her with her dead and her despair.

Curious passengers, looking back from a bend in the road, saw her crouching motionless, while a last red gleam from the setting sun broke through the clouds and touched her with a weird light.

Around a curve of serpentine highway they saw, too, a country wagon, the driver an old man with bent head, the horses slow and spiritless. Then the train swept on out of sight.

Not a pleasant story, do you say?

No, yet “’tis true, ’tis pity.” It is one of those dark threads so common in the weft of life that, to our short-sighted eyes, mar the pattern that else might be so fair. We even doubt the wisdom of the Weaver who permits such defects, such shadows to hide the clearer outlines of the web. As if we knew His designs!

Do you wish to hear the sequel--to follow to an end the twisted thread that seems to have crossed and tangled uselessly in the loom of fate?

The mother, who was left with her child at the lonely station, would have been glad to die, no doubt; but, for the sake of the babe, she must live on. She was one of those timid, clinging creatures such as all women are exhorted to become. Masculine wisdom says the manifest destiny of such a one is to be a wife and mother; the same sagacity neglects to go further and provide for her helplessness when destiny fails her. But these two lived, and the child grew and thrived. How they lived only a woman, poor and alone, who toils for her children, day and night, can tell. This mother, like the rest, worked early and late at anything her hands could find to do. She sewed, she washed, she nursed the sick, she drudged for the farmers’ wives in busy seasons. Hours when she should have slept were spent in making the scanty garments of baby Nancy. Little sympathy was manifested for her, though doubtless more was felt than found expression; the American farmer is not demonstrative. She did not ask for pity, and no one saw her weep. The neighbors said “Mrs. Murdock bore up right well under her man’s takin’ off; lucky ’at she was one o’ them kind ’at didn’t have no deep feelin’s.”

Not so with the other widow. Mrs. Jillson’s display of grief was loud and violent. Never was woman so cruelly bereaved, she said. She knew she could not live. If there were no Murdocks on the face of the earth she should die easier; she could grind them to powder herself. “What right had that sly, deceitful hussy to be alive? Not a bit of doubt she worked Bill up to the murder. Jealous, you see, because Jake looked at her once before he knew me.”

Before long, however, her excessive sorrow moderated. She allowed herself to think favorably of life once more. Hysterics and “sinking spells” grew less frequent. In less than a year she married again--entirely on her son’s account, she told her friends. “A lone widow woman couldn’t rightly bring up a boy.”