Chapter VI: Introduction: ix (4)

“Masheh Mindel, with a husband in America, Masheh Mindel the wife of a man earning twenty-four rubles a week! The sky is falling to the earth!”

We looked at her with new reverence. Already she was a being from another world. The dead, sunken eyes became alive with light. The worry for bread that had tightened the skin of her cheek-bones was gone. The sudden surge of happiness filled out her features, flushing her face as with wine. The two starved children clinging to her skirts, dazed with excitement, only dimly realized their good fortune in the envious glances of the others. But the letter went on:

Thirdly, I come to tell you, white bread and meat I eat every day,
just like the millionaires. Fourthly, I have to tell you that I am
no more Gedalyah Mindel. _Mister_ Mindel they call me in America.
Fifthly, Masheh Mindel and my dear children, in America there are
no mud huts where cows and chickens and people live all together.
I have for myself a separate room, with a closed door, and before
any one can come to me, he must knock, and I can say, “Come in,” or
“Stay out,” like a king in a palace. Lastly, my darling family and
people of the village of Sukovoly, there is no czar in America.

My father paused. The hush was stifling. “No czar--no czar in America!” Even the little babies repeated the chant, “No czar in America!”

In America they ask everybody who should be the President. And I,
Gedalyah Mindel, when I take out my citizen's papers, will have as
much to say who shall be our next President as Mr. Rockefeller,
the greatest millionaire. Fifty rubles I am sending you for your
ship-ticket to America. And may all Jews who suffer in Golluth
from ukases and pogroms live yet to lift up their heads like me,
Gedalyah Mindel, in America.

Fifty rubles! A ship-ticket to America! That so much good luck should fall on one head! A savage envy bit us. Gloomy darts from narrowed eyes stabbed Masheh Mindel. Why should not we, too, have a chance to get away from this dark land! Has not every heart the same hunger for America, the same longing to live and laugh and breathe like a free human being? America is for all. Why should only Masheh Mindel and her children have a chance to the New World?

Murmuring and gesticulating, the crowd dispersed. Every one knew every one else's thought--how to get to America. What could they pawn? From where could they borrow for a ship-ticket?

Silently, we followed my father back into the hut from which the Cossack had driven us a while before. We children looked from mother to father and from father to mother.

“_Gottunieu!_ the czar himself is pushing us to America by this last ukase.” My mother's face lighted up the hut like a lamp.

“_Meshugeneh Yideneh!_” admonished my father. “Always your head in the air. What--where--America? With what money? Can dead people lift themselves up to dance?”

“Dance?” The samovar and the brass pots reëchoed my mother's laughter. “I could dance myself over the waves of the ocean to America.”

In amazed delight at my mother's joy, we children rippled and chuckled with her. My father paced the room, his face dark with dread for the morrow.

“Empty hands, empty pockets; yet it dreams itself in you--America,” he said.

“Who is poor who has hopes on America?” flaunted my mother.

“Sell my red-quilted petticoat that grandmother left for my dowry,” I urged in excitement.

“Sell the feather-beds, sell the samovar,” chorused the children.

“Sure, we can sell everything--the goat and all the winter things,” added my mother. “It must be always summer in America.”

I flung my arms around my brother, and he seized Bessie by the curls, and we danced about the room, crazy with joy.

“Beggars!” said my laughing mother. “Why are you so happy with yourselves? How will you go to America without a shirt on your back, without shoes on your feet?”

But we ran out into the road, shouting and singing:

“We'll sell everything we got; we're going to America. White bread and meat we'll eat every day in America, in America!”

That very evening we brought Berel Zalman, the usurer, and showed him all our treasures, piled up in the middle of the hut.

“Look! All these fine feather-beds, Berel Zalman!” urged my mother. “This grand fur coat came from Nijny[28] itself. My grandfather bought it at the fair.”

I held up my red-quilted petticoat, the supreme sacrifice of my ten-year-old life. Even my father shyly pushed forward the samovar.

“It can hold enough tea for the whole village,” he declared.

“Only a hundred rubles for them all!” pleaded my mother, “only enough to lift us to America! Only one hundred little rubles!”

“A hundred rubles! _Pfui!_” sniffed the pawnbroker. “Forty is overpaid. Not even thirty is it worth.”

But, coaxing and cajoling, my mother got a hundred rubles out of him.

* * * * *

Steerage, dirty bundles, foul odors, seasick humanity; but I saw and heard nothing of the foulness and ugliness about me. I floated in showers of sunshine; visions upon visions of the New World opened before me. From lip to lip flowed the golden legend of the golden country:

“In America you can say what you feel, you can voice your thoughts in the open streets without fear of a Cossack.”

“In America is a home for everybody. The land is your land, not, as in Russia, where you feel yourself a stranger in the village where you were born and reared, the village in which your father and grandfather lie buried.”

“Everybody is with everybody alike in America. Christians and Jews are brothers together.”

“An end to the worry for bread, an end to the fear of the bosses over you. Everybody can do what he wants with his life in America.”

“There are no high or low in America. Even the President holds hands with Gedalyah Mindel.”

“Plenty for all. Learning flows free, like milk and honey.”

“Learning flows free.” The words painted pictures in my mind. I saw before me free schools, free colleges, free libraries, where I could learn and learn and keep on learning. In our village was a school, but only for Christian children. In the schools of America I'd lift up my head and laugh and dance, a child with other children. Like a bird in the air, from sky to sky, from star to star, I'd soar and soar.

“Land! land!” came the joyous shout. All crowded and pushed on deck. They strained and stretched to get the first glimpse of the “golden country,” lifting their children on their shoulders that they might see beyond them. Men fell on their knees to pray. Women hugged their babies and wept. Children danced. Strangers embraced and kissed like old friends. Old men and old women had in their eyes a look of young people in love. Age-old visions sang themselves in me, songs of freedom of an oppressed people. America! America!

Between buildings that loomed like mountains we struggled with our bundles, spreading around us the smell of the steerage. Up Broadway, under the bridge, and through the swarming streets of the Ghetto, we followed Gedalyah Mindel.

I looked about the narrow streets of squeezed-in stores and houses, ragged clothes, dirty bedding oozing out of the windows, ash-cans and garbage-cans cluttering the sidewalks. A vague sadness pressed down my heart, the first doubt of America.

“Where are the green fields and open spaces in America?” cried my heart. “Where is the golden country of my dreams?” A loneliness for the fragrant silence of the woods that lay beyond our mud hut welled up in my heart, a longing for the soft, responsive earth of our village streets. All about me was the hardness of brick and stone, the smells of crowded poverty.

“Here's your house, with separate rooms like a palace,” said Gedalyah Mindel, and flung open the door of a dingy, airless flat.

“_Oi weh!_” cried my mother in dismay. “Where's the sunshine in America?” She went to the window and looked out at the blank wall of the next house. “_Gottunieu!_ Like in a grave so dark!”

“It ain't so dark; it's only a little shady,” said Gedalyah Mindel, and lighted the gas. “Look only!”--he pointed with pride to the dim gas-light--“No candles, no kerosene lamps, in America. You turn on a screw, and put to it a match, and you got it light like with sunshine.”

Again the shadow fell over me, again the doubt of America. In America were rooms without sunlight; rooms to sleep in, to eat in, to cook in, but without sunshine, and Gedalyah Mindel was happy. Could I be satisfied with just a place to sleep in and eat in, and a door to shut people out, to take the place of sunlight? Or would I always need the sunlight to be happy? And where was there a place in America for me to play? I looked out into the alley below, and saw pale-faced children scrambling in the gutter. “Where is America?” cried my heart.

My eyes were shutting themselves with sleep. Blindly I felt for the buttons on my dress; and buttoning, I sank back in sleep again--the dead-weight sleep of utter exhaustion.

“Heart of mine,” my mother's voice moaned above me, “father is already gone an hour. You know how they'll squeeze from you a nickel for every minute you're late. Quick only!”

I seized my bread and herring and tumbled down the stairs and out into the street. I ate running, blindly pressing through the hurrying throngs of workers, my haste and fear choking every mouthful. I felt a strangling in my throat as I neared the sweat-shop prison; all my nerves screwed together into iron hardness to endure the day's torture.

For an instant I hesitated as I faced the grated windows of the old building. Dirt and decay cried out from every crumbling brick. In the maw of the shop raged around me the roar and the clatter, the merciless grind, of the pounding machines. Half-maddened, half-deadened, I struggled to think, to feel, to remember. What am I? Who am I? Why am I here? I struggled in vain, bewildered and lost in a whirlpool of noise. “America--America, where was America?” it cried in my heart.

Then came the factory whistle, the slowing down of the machines, the shout of release hailing the noon hour. I woke as from a tense nightmare, a weary waking to pain. In the dark chaos of my brain reason began to dawn. In my stifled heart feelings began to pulse. The wound of my wasted life began to throb and ache. With my childhood choked with drudgery, must my youth, too, die unlived?

Here were the odor of herring and garlic, the ravenous munching of food, laughter and loud, vulgar jokes. Was it only I who was so wretched? I looked at those around me. Were they happy or only insensible to their slavery? How could they laugh and joke? Why were they not torn with rebellion against this galling grind, the crushing, deadening movements of the body, where only hands live, and hearts and brains must die?

I felt a touch on my shoulder and looked up. It was Yetta Solomon, from the machine next to mine.

“Here's your tea.”

I stared at her, half-hearing.

“Ain't you going to eat nothing?”

“_Oi weh_, Yetta! I can't stand it!” The cry broke from me. “I didn't come to America to turn into a machine. I came to America to make from myself a person. Does America want only my hands, only the strength of my body, not my heart, not my feelings, my thoughts?”

“Our heads ain't smart enough,” said Yetta, practically. “We ain't been to school, like the American-born.”

“What for did I come to America but to go to school, to learn, to think, to make something beautiful from my life?”

“'Sh! 'Sh! The boss! the boss!” came the warning whisper.

A sudden hush fell over the shop as the boss entered. He raised his hand. There was breathless silence. The hard, red face with the pig's eyes held us under its sickening spell. Again I saw the Cossack and heard him thunder the ukase. Prepared for disaster, the girls paled as they cast at one another sidelong, frightened glances.

“Hands,” he addressed us, fingering the gold watch-chain that spread across his fat stomach, “it's slack in the other trades, and I can get plenty girls begging themselves to work for half what you're getting; only I ain't a skinner. I always give my hands a show to earn their bread. From now on I'll give you fifty cents a dozen shirts instead of seventy-five, but I'll give you night-work, so you needn't lose nothing.” And he was gone.

The stillness of death filled the shop. Every one felt the heart of the other bleed with her own helplessness. A sudden sound broke the silence. A woman sobbed chokingly. It was Balah Rifkin, a widow with three children.

“_Oi weh!_”--she tore at her scrawny neck,--“the bloodsucker! the thief! How will I give them to eat, my babies, my hungry little lambs!”

“Why do we let him choke us?”

“Twenty-five cents less on a dozen--how will we be able to live?”

“He tears the last skin from our bones.”

“Why didn't nobody speak up to him?”

Something in me forced me forward. I forgot for the moment how my whole family depended on my job. I forgot that my father was out of work and we had received a notice to move for unpaid rent. The helplessness of the girls around me drove me to strength.

“I'll go to the boss,” I cried, my nerves quivering with fierce excitement. “I'll tell him Balah Rifkin has three hungry mouths to feed.”

Pale, hungry faces thrust themselves toward me, thin, knotted hands reached out, starved bodies pressed close about me.

“Long years on you!” cried Balah Rifkin, drying her eyes with a corner of her shawl.

“Tell him about my old father and me, his only bread-giver,” came from Bessie Sopolsky, a gaunt-faced girl with a hacking cough.

“And I got no father or mother, and four of them younger than me hanging on my neck.” Jennie Feist's beautiful young face was already scarred with the gray worries of age.

America, as the oppressed of all lands have dreamed America to be, and America as it is, flashed before me, a banner of fire. Behind me I felt masses pressing, thousands of immigrants; thousands upon thousands crushed by injustice, lifted me as on wings.

I entered the boss's office without a shadow of fear. I was not I; the wrongs of my people burned through me till I felt the very flesh of my body a living flame of rebellion. I faced the boss.

“We can't stand it,” I cried. “Even as it is we're hungry. Fifty cents a dozen would starve us. Can you, a Jew, tear the bread from another Jew's mouth?”

“You fresh mouth, you! Who are you to learn me my business?”

“Weren't you yourself once a machine slave, your life in the hands of your boss?”

“You loafer! Money for nothing you want! The minute they begin to talk English they get flies in their nose. A black year on you, trouble-maker! I'll have no smart heads in my shop! Such freshness! Out you get! Out from my shop!”

Stunned and hopeless, the wings of my courage broken, I groped my way back to them--back to the eager, waiting faces, back to the crushed hearts aching with mine.

As I opened the door, they read our defeat in my face.

“Girls,”--I held out my hands--“he's fired me.” My voice died in the silence. Not a girl stirred. Their heads only bent closer over their machines.

“Here, you, get yourself out of here!” the boss thundered at me. “Bessie Sopolsky and you, Balah Rifkin, take out her machine into the hall. I want no big-mounted _Americanerins_ in my shop.”

Bessie Sopolsky and Balah Rifkin, their eyes black with tragedy, carried out my machine. Not a hand was held out to me, not a face met mine. I felt them shrink from me as I passed them on my way out.

In the street I found I was crying. The new hope that had flowed in me so strongly bled out of my veins. A moment before, our unity had made me believe us so strong, and now I saw each alone, crushed, broken. What were they all but crawling worms, servile grubbers for bread?

And then in the very bitterness of my resentment the hardness broke in me. I saw the girls through their own eyes, as if I were inside of them. What else could they have done? Was not an immediate crust of bread for Balah Rifkin's children more urgent than truth, more vital than honor? Could it be that they ever had dreamed of America as I had dreamed? Had their faith in America wholly died in them? Could my faith be killed as theirs had been?

Gasping from running, Yetta Solomon flung her arms around me.

“You golden heart! I sneaked myself out from the shop only to tell you I'll come to see you to-night. I'd give the blood from under my nails for you, only I got to run back. I got to hold my job. My mother--”

I hardly saw or heard her. My senses were stunned with my defeat. I walked on in a blind daze, feeling that any moment I would drop in the middle of the street from sheer exhaustion. Every hope I had clung to, every human stay, every reality, was torn from under me. Was it then only a dream, a mirage of the hungry-hearted people in the desert lands of oppression, this age-old faith in America?

Again I saw the mob of dusty villagers crowding about my father as he read the letter from America, their eager faces thrust out, their eyes blazing with the same hope, the same faith, that had driven me on. Had the starved villagers of Sukovoly lifted above their sorrows a mere rainbow vision that led them--where? Where? To the stifling submission of the sweat-shop or the desperation of the streets!

“God! God!” My eyes sought the sky, praying, “where--where is America?”

* * * * *

Times changed. The sweat-shop conditions that I had lived through had become a relic of the past. Wages had doubled, tripled; they went up higher and higher, and the working-day became shorter and shorter. I began to earn enough to move my family uptown into a sunny, airy flat with electricity and telephone service. I even saved up enough to buy a phonograph and a piano.

My knotted nerves relaxed. At last I had become free from the worry for bread and rent, but I was not happy. A more restless discontent than ever before ate out my heart. Freedom from stomach needs only intensified the needs of my soul.

I ached and clamored for America. Higher wages and shorter hours of work, mere physical comfort, were not yet America. I had dreamed that America was a place where the heart could grow big with giving. Though outwardly I had become prosperous, life still forced me into an existence of mere getting and getting.

_Ach!_ how I longed for a friend, a real American friend, some one to whom I could express the thoughts and feelings that choked me! In the Bronx, the uptown Ghetto, I felt myself farther away from the spirit of America than ever before. In the East Side the people had yet alive in their eyes the old, old dreams of America, the America that would release the age-old hunger to give; but in the prosperous Bronx good eating and good sleeping replaced the spiritual need for giving. The chase for dollars and diamonds deadened the dreams that had once brought them to America.

More and more the all-consuming need for a friend possessed me. In the street, in the cars, in the subways, I was always seeking, ceaselessly seeking for eyes, a face, the flash of a smile that would be light in my darkness.

I felt sometimes that I was only burning out my heart for a shadow, an echo, a wild dream, but I couldn't help it. Nothing was real to me but my hope of finding a friend. America was not America to me unless I could find an American that would make America real.

The hunger of my heart drove me to the night-school. Again my dream flamed. Again America beckoned. In the school there would be education, air, life for my cramped-in spirit. I would learn to think, to form the thoughts that surged formless in me. I would find the teacher that would make me articulate.

I joined the literature class. They were reading “The De Coverley Papers.” Filled with insatiate thirst, I drank in every line with the feeling that any moment I would get to the fountain-heart of revelation. Night after night I read with tireless devotion. But of what? The manners and customs of the eighteenth century, of people two hundred years dead.

One evening, after a month's attendance, when the class had dwindled from fifty to four, and the teacher began scolding us who were present for those who were absent, my bitterness broke.

“Do you know why all the girls are dropping away from the class? It's because they have too much sense than to waste themselves on 'The De Coverley Papers.' Us four girls are four fools. We could learn more in the streets. It's dirty and wrong, but it's life. What are 'The De Coverley Papers'? Dry dust fit for the ash-can.”

“Perhaps you had better tell the principal your ideas of the standard classics,” she scoffed, white with rage.

“All right,” I snapped, and hurried down to the principal's office.

I swung open the door.

“I just want to tell you why I'm leaving. I--”

“Won't you come in?” The principal rose and placed a chair for me near her desk. “Now tell me all.” She leaned forward with an inviting interest.

I looked up, and met the steady gaze of eyes shining with light. In a moment all my anger fled. “The De Coverley Papers” were forgotten. The warm friendliness of her face held me like a familiar dream. I couldn't speak. It was as if the sky suddenly opened in my heart.

“Do go on,” she said, and gave me a quick nod. “I want to hear.”

The repression of centuries rushed out of my heart. I told her everything--of the mud hut in Sukovoly where I was born, of the czar's pogroms, of the constant fear of the Cossack, of Gedalyah Mindel's letter, of our hopes in coming to America, and my search for an American who would make America real.

“I am so glad you came to me,” she said. And after a pause, “You can help me.”

“Help you?” I cried. It was the first time that an American suggested that I could help her.

“Yes, indeed. I have always wanted to know more of that mysterious, vibrant life--the immigrant. You can help me know my girls. You have so much to give--”

“Give--that's what I was hungering and thirsting all these years--to give out what's in me. I was dying in the unused riches of my soul.”

“I know; I know just what you mean,” she said, putting her hand on mine.

My whole being seemed to change in the warmth of her comprehension. “I have a friend,” it sang itself in me. “I have a friend!”

“And you are a born American?” I asked. There was none of that sure, all-right look of the Americans about her.

“Yes, indeed. My mother, like so many mothers,”--and her eyebrows lifted humorously whimsical,--“claims we're descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers, and that one of our lineal ancestors came over in the _Mayflower_.”

“For all your mother's pride in the Pilgrim Fathers, you yourself are as plain from the heart as an immigrant.”

“Weren't the Pilgrim Fathers immigrants two hundred years ago?”

She took from her desk a book and read to me.

Then she opened her arms to me, and breathlessly I felt myself drawn to her. Bonds seemed to burst. A suffusion of light filled my being. Great choirings lifted me in space. I walked out unseeingly.

All the way home the words she read flamed before me: “We go forth all to seek America. And in the seeking we create her. In the quality of our search shall be the nature of the America that we create.”

So all those lonely years of seeking and praying were not in vain. How glad I was that I had not stopped at the husk, a good job, a good living! Through my inarticulate groping and reaching out I had found the soul, the spirit of America.

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS

1. What is the effect of the abrupt beginning? Where else in the
essay is abruptness made a means of producing literary effect?

2. Point out excellent use of local color.

3. Divide the essay into its principal parts.

4. Show that the essay rises in power.

5. How does the writer arouse the reader's sympathy for the
characters?

6. How does the writer awaken the reader's patriotism?

7. What opinion of America do oppressed foreigners have? To what
extent is their opinion well founded? To what extent is their
opinion not well founded?

8. What impressions does a sea-coast city make upon immigrants?

9. What sort of people oppress the immigrants after arrival in
America?

10. To what false beliefs is such oppression due?

11. What opportunities does America present?

12. What spirit should meet the aspirations of immigrants?

13. What will do most to make immigrants into good Americans?

14. Explain how the _Sir Roger de Coverley Papers_ may be taught so
that they will apply to the present as well as to the past.

15. How may we help immigrants to do work that will make them into
good Americans?

16. Show that the conclusion of the essay emphasizes its entire
thought.

17. Show what rhetorical methods are employed in the essay.

SUBJECTS FOR WRITTEN IMITATION

1. How I Became a Good American 11. Modernizing the De
Coverley Papers
2. An Immigrant's Experience 12. The Value of Sympathy
3. The Meaning of Freedom 13. The Spirit of America
4. The Land of Opportunity 14. Showing the Way
5. Making Good Americans 15. First Experiences in America
6. The School and the Immigrant 16. Letters from People
in Other Lands

7. My Coming to America 17. Being a Good American
8. Life in the Crowded Sections 18. Enemies of America
9. Sweat Shop Experiences 19. Uplifting the Foreign-Born
10. My Various Homes 20. The America I Love

DIRECTIONS FOR WRITING

Write down some worthy thought that you have concerning America. Then write a series of extremely personal incidents that will show graphically how you arrived at the thought you have in mind. Make the incidents short, condensed, and highly emphatic. Employ realistic characters, and give realistic quotations from their speech. Use the incorrect grammar, the slang, and the foreign words that the characters employ daily. Arrange the incidents so that they will rise more and more to your principal thought. Make your last incident reveal that thought.

FOOTNOTES:

[28] Nijny-Novgorood. A Russian city on the Volga, the scene of a great annual fair.

MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD
By WILLIAM HENRY SHELTON

_(1840-). An American patriot and author. He served in many battles
in the Civil War, and had thrilling experiences as a prisoner of
war, escaping no less than four times. He is author of_ A Man
Without a Memory; The Last Three Soldiers; The Three Prisoners.

=Every one has happy memories of childhood. He loves to conjure up
the old familiar scenes, the kindly people, and the days that were
days of wonder.=

=The two sketches by Mr. Shelton are extracts from a long essay
called _Our Village_, in which he recalls delightfully all his
early surroundings and all his old companionships.=

=In these extracts, as in the entire essay, Mr. Shelton avoids
formal autobiography. He merely recalls the things that impressed
him most. As far as possible he lifts himself back into the spirit
of the past, and sees once again, but with added love, the things
that have gone forever.=

MY FIRST SCHOOL

One day in the summer when I was four years old I was taken to the village school at the foot of the hill below the tavern. I have no recollection of how I got there, but my return to my grandmother's was so dramatic that it has impressed itself indelibly on my memory. Perhaps I was taken to school by the sentimental schoolmistress herself, who was a girl of sixteen and an intimate friend of my aunt, to whom, in after years, when she became a famous novelist, she used to send her books. Her maiden name was Mary Jane Hawes, but there was a red-haired, freckle-faced boy in one of the pretty houses facing the side of the church, who went to Yale College and gave her another name.

The school-house consisted of one room, with an entry without any floor where the wood was cut and stored. The school-room was square, with a box-stove in the center. A form against the wall extended around three sides of the room, affording seats for the larger pupils, and in front of these a row of oak desks for slates and books was fantastically carved by generations of jack-knives, and made against the backs of a second row of desks was a low front form for the A-B-C children. On the fourth side, flanking the door, were a blackboard on one hand and on the other the schoolma'am's desk, usually decorated with a bunch of wild flowers or a red apple, either the gifts of a sincere admirer or the would-be bribe of some trembling delinquent.

On the occasion of my first visit to the school I wore a blue-and-white dress of muslin-de-laine that was afterward made into a cushion for a rocking-chair in my mother's parlor. I was evidently dressed in my very best in honor of the occasion, and all went well until recess came. There was a rumble of thunder, and the sky had been growing dark with portent of storm, and the leaves and dust were flying on the wind when the children were released for play. I wanted to do everything that the other boys did, and so, when they scampered out with a rush, I followed without fear. Just as we came into the open the thunder-storm burst upon us. The wind blew off one boy's hat and whirled it in the direction of the village, and all the other boys joined in the chase. As I started to follow them a gust of wind and rain beat me to the ground, and drenched my dress with mud and water.

I was promptly rescued by the schoolma'am and taken into the entry, where she undressed me on the wood-pile and wrapped me in her own woolen shawl, which was a black-and-red pattern of very large squares. Thus bundled up and rendered quite helpless except as to my lungs, I was laid on the floor near the stove, where I remained for the amusement of the children until the shower was over, when a bushel-basket was sent for to the nearest house, which was the house of shoemaker Talmadge. Into this basket, commonly used for potatoes and corn, I was put, wrapped in the black-and-red shawl and packed around with my soiled clothes, and two of the big boys, John Pierpont and John Talmadge, carried me up the hill and through the village to my grandmother's house.

In the summer following I went to school again, and again to the sentimental schoolma'am, who loved to teach, but abhorred to punish. Her gentle punishments rarely frightened the youngest children.

She would say, “Henry, you have disobeyed me, and I shall have to cut off your ear,” and with these ominous words she would draw the back of her penknife across the threatened ear. I must have been very small, for on one occasion she threatened to shut me up in one of the school desks.

Our mad recreation out of school was “playing horse.” We drove each other singly and in pairs by means of wooden bits and reins of sheep-twine, and some prancing horses were led, chewing one end of a twine string, and neighing and prancing almost beyond the control of the infant groom.

In the congressman's woods, close by the school-house, we built stalls and mangers against logs and in fence corners, and gathered horse-sorrel and sheep-sorrel for hay. The stalls were bedded with grass and protected from the sun by a roof of green boughs, and the horses were watered and curried and groomed in imitation of that service at the stage stables, and the steeds themselves kicked and bit like the vicious leaders.

Other teachers followed the young and sentimental one, and the surplus of the dinner-baskets, thrown out of the window or cast upon the wood-pile, bred a colony of gray rats that lived under the school-house and came out to take the air in the quiet period after the door was padlocked at night and even ventured to come up into the school-room and look over the books and otherwise nibble at learning. When I had advanced to the dignity of pictorial geography, as set forth in a thin, square-built, dog-eared volume, which not having been opened for a whole day by a certain prancing horse, he was left to learn his lesson while the teacher went to tea at the house below the tavern, and the wheat stubble under the window was soon alive with gray rodents that looked like the colony of seals in the geography.

About this time the rats, having taken formal possession of the old school-house, a new school-house was built in our village just beyond my grandmother's house and facing her orchard.

(_page 97_)

MY GREAT-GRANDMOTHER

My great-grandmother was the widow of an Episcopal clergyman, the Rev. Titus Welton, whose son was the first rector of the village church. My only acquaintance with my great-grandfather was connected with the white headstone that bore his name in the graveyard. With the exception of a quaint water-color portrait in profile of my grandmother in a mob-cap bound with a black ribbon, which was equally a portrait of the flowered back of the rocking-chair in which she sat, she survives in my memory in a series of pictures. I see her sitting before the open fire, knitting, with one steel needle held in a knitting-sheath pinned to her left side, or taking snuff from a flat, round box that contained a vanilla bean to perfume the snuff. Her hands were twisted with rheumatism, and she walked with a cane. On one occasion I trotted by her side to church and carried her tin foot-stove, warm with glowing coals.

She slept in a high post bed in her particular room over the sitting-room, which was warmed in winter by a sheet-iron drum connected with the stove below, and in one corner was a copper warming-pan with a long handle. When I sat at table in my high-chair eating apple-pie in a bowl of milk, she sat on the side nearest the fire eating dipped toast with a two-tined fork. The fork may have had three tines, but silver forks had not yet made their appearance.

My great-grandmother lived just long enough to have her picture taken on a plate of silvered copper by the wonderful process of Daguerre,[29] a process so like something diabolical that she protected her soul from evil, as all sitters in that part of the country did, by resting her hand on a great Bible, the back turned to the front, so that the letters “Holy Bible” could be read, proving that the great book was not a profane dictionary. The operator who took her daguerreotype traveled from town to town, hiring a room in the village tavern furnished with a chair, a stand on tripod legs, a brown linen table-cloth, and the aforesaid Bible, and when such of the people as had the fee to spare, the courage to submit to a new-fangled idea, and no fear that the face on the magical plate would fade away like any other spirit face when they opened the stamped-leather case with the red plush lining after it had lain overnight in the darkened parlor, he moved on like the cracker baker or any other itinerant showman.

My great-grandmother had never sent or received a message by telegraph or ridden in a railway-carriage, and died in peace just before those portentous inventions came to destroy forever the small community life in which she had lived.

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS

1. Why does the writer employ such simple language?

2. What sort of events does he narrate?

3. Why does he give so few details concerning his early schooldays?

4. How does he look upon his early misfortunes?

5. Why does he do little more than present the picture of his
great-grandmother?

6. Point out examples of gentle humor.

7. What do the sketches reveal concerning life in the past?

8. What spirit characterizes both sketches?

SUBJECTS FOR WRITTEN IMITATION
1. My First Schooldays 11. Punishments I Remember
2. My Grandparents 12. Queer Old Customs
3. An Early Misfortune 13. My First Superstitions
4. Some Vanished Friends 14. A Wonderful Day
5. My Old Home 15. Gifts
6. Playmates 16. My First School-books
7. Old Toys 17. Pictures of Childhood
8. My First Games 18. My Relatives
9. A First Visit 19. A Great Event
10. My First Costumes 20. Relics of the Past

DIRECTIONS FOR WRITING

Throw yourself back into the past. Conjure up the people with whom you used to associate. See once again the places where you played and where you lived. Think how happy it all was, and how good it is to look at it once more. Then put down on paper the things that you remember with the greatest interest. Write in such a way that you will give the reader the very spirit that you have. Remember: you are not to communicate facts; you are to communicate emotion.

FOOTNOTES:

[29] Louis Daguerre (1789-1859). A French painter who perfected one of the earliest methods of photography.

A VISIT TO JOHN BURROUGHS
By SADAKICHI HARTMANN

_Author of the first_ History of American Art, _and also of a_
History of Japanese Art. _His poems, short stories, and essays
appear in many magazines_.

=John Burroughs was a delightful essayist and a delightful man.
Although he preferred to live the most simple of lives and to spend
his time in meditation on the beauties of natural scenery, and the
wonders of animal life, he attracted to himself the companionship
of some of the greatest in the land, and the love of all people. To
visit him would, indeed, have been a delight.=

=_A Visit to John Burroughs_ is not a dull narrative of the
events of a visit, nor is it the report of an interview with the
nature-lover. It is an article that admits one into the charm of
Burroughs' spirit. We are with the man in his simple, book-filled
home; we learn his love for pasture and mountain-side, for birds
and for gardening; and we gain some of that spirit of contentment
and peace that made him, in his gray old age, appear like a prophet
in the midst of an over-hurrying generation.=

In some places time passes without making any change. The little village on the Hudson where John Burroughs made his home half a century ago has shown no ambition of expansion. There is no building activity, and the number of inhabitants has scarcely increased. The little church stands drowsily on the hill, and the same old homesteads grace the road. More freight-trains may rattle by, and more automobiles pass on the main road, but the physiognomy of the town has remained unchanged. It is as if time had stood still. The mist shuts out the rest of the world, river and hills disappear, the stems of the grape-vines look like a host of goblins, and the wet trees make darker silhouettes than usual.

I knocked at a door and entered, and there sat John Burroughs stretched at full length in a Morris chair before some glowing beech-sticks in the open fireplace. There was not much conversation. What is most interesting in an author's life he expresses in his books, and so we indulged only in an exchange of phrases about his health, of the flight of time, and a few favored authors. The questioning of the interviewer can produce only forced results, and in particular when the interviewed person has reached an age when taciturnity becomes natural, and one prefers to gaze at the dying embers and listen to the drip of the rain outside. That his interest in literature did not lag was shown by a set of Fabre,[30] whom he pronounced the most wonderful exponent in his special line.

A quaint interior was this quiet little room. Conspicuous were the portraits of Whitman,[31] Carlyle,[32] Tolstoy,[33] Roosevelt,[34] and Father Brown of the Holy Order of the Cross, men who in one way or another must have meant something to his life. On the mantelpiece stood another portrait of Whitman and a reproduction of “Mona Lisa.”[35] There were windows on every side, and the rest of the walls consisted of shelves filled with nature books. One shelf displayed the more scientific works, and one was devoted entirely to his own writings. It was the same room in which several years ago, on a summer day in the vagrom days of youth, I had read for the first time “Wake Robin,”[36] that classic of out-of-door literature, and “The Flight of the Eagle,” an appreciation of Walt Whitman.

John Burroughs was fifty then, and had just settled down seriously to his literary pursuits. He had risen brilliantly from youthful penury to be the owner of a large estate. His latest achievement was “Signs and Seasons”; “Riverby,” a number of essays of out-of-door observations around his stone house by the Hudson, was in the making.

There is a wonderful fascination in these books. They reveal a man who has lived widely and intimately, who has made nature his real home. All day long he is mingled with the heart of things; every walk along the river, into the woods, or up the hills is an adventure. He exploits the teachings of experience rather than of books. His essays are always fused with actions of the open. One feels exhilaration in making the acquaintance of a man with an unnarrowed soul who has burst free from the shackles of intellectual authority, who joyfully and buoyantly interprets the beauties about him, shunning no such pleasures as jumping a fence, wading a brook, or climbing a tree or mountain-side.

American literature has always abounded with nature speculation and research. Bryant[37] was a true poet of nature; he loved woods, mountain, and river, and his “To the Yellow Wood Violet,” and “The Blue Gentian” are gems of pictorial nature-writing. Whittier[38] transfigured the beauty of New England life in one poem “Snowbound,” and in his “Autumn Walk” leisurely strolled to the portals of immortality. Whitman stalked about on the open road like a pantheist.[39]

Yet none had the faculties of discovery and interpretation like John Burroughs, the intimate knowledge, the warm vision, to which a wood-pile can become a matter of contemplation, and a back yard or a garden patch become as interesting as any scenery in the world. None of them could have lectured on apple-trees or gray squirrels with such intimacy as Burroughs. Burroughs has never any sympathy with the “pathetic fallacy of endowing inanimate objects with human attributes,” nor would he indorse Machin's propaganda idea of the antagonism of animals against their human masters.

A trout leaping in a mountain stream, the lively whistle of a bird high in the upper air, a bird's nest in an old fence post--these are some of the topics nearest his heart. No nature-writer has ever shown such diversity of interest. Even _Rip Van Winkle_ did not know the mountains as well as does this camper and tramper for a lifetime on the same familiar grounds; over and over again he makes the round from Riverby to Slabsides, to Roxbury in the western Catskills, and back again to the rustic studio near the river. He knows every pasture, mountain-side, and valley of his chosen land. He even named some of the hills. One of them, much frequented by bees, he named “Mount Hymettus,”[40] because there “from out the garden hives, the humming cyclone of humming bees” liked to congregate.

But is his minute observation of weed seeds in the open field or insect eggs on tree-trunks not disastrous to literary expression? Can this style of writing soar above straightforward nature-writing of men like Wilson,[41] Muir,[42] White,[43] and Chapman?[44] Burroughs is capable of making a long-winded analysis of the downward perch of the head of the nut-hatch, but he is no Audubon.[45] As a literary man he is an essayist who etches little vignettes, one after the other, with rare precision. How fine is his sentence about the unmusical song of the blackbirds! “The air is filled with crackling, splintering, spurting, semi-musical sounds which are like salt and pepper to the ear.” Here the poetic temperament finds an utterance far beyond the broad knowledge of nature.

And there is his fine appreciation of Walt Whitman, his grasp of literary values despite working in a comparatively smaller field of activity. John Burroughs has a good deal of Whitman about him, whom he called “the one mountain in our literary landscape.” The man of Riverby is not large of stature, but has the same nonchalance of deportment, the flowing beard, and the ruddy face, a few shades darker than that of the good gray poet; for Whitman was, after all, a city man, while Burroughs always lived his life out of doors.

We talked about the looks of Whitman, whom he had known in Washington in the sixties.

“Yes, he had a decided vitality, although he was already gray and bent at that time. Yes, he would talk if one could draw him out.”

“I believe he talked only for Traubel,”[46] I dryly remarked, at which Burroughs was greatly amused.

Emerson[47] was the god of Burroughs's youth, but Whitman undoubtedly exercised the more lasting influence. This, however, never touched Burroughs's own peculiar nature-fresh-and-homespun style. It lingered only as a vague inspiration in the under rhythm of his work. Whitman had the macrocosmic vision,[48] while Burroughs is an adherent of microcosm. Few can combine both qualities.

Burroughs is an amateur farmer and gardener. He prunes his cherrytrees, cures hay, and thinks of new methods of mowing grain. He experimented with grape-vines, a rather futile occupation at this period of social evolution. He has been a great cherry-picker all his life, and I remember with keen pleasure how delicious those wild raspberries tasted that I shared with him one summer day. He has a celery farm at Roxbury, his birthplace, and when I was last at Slabsides, his bungalow in the hills near West Park, I saw nothing but beets for cattle. I was astonished at this peculiar, indeed, prosaic pastime. And still more so that he had chosen for residence a site in a hollow of the mountain-side, while only a few steps above one can enjoy a most gorgeous view of the surrounding country. Did he make the selection because the place is more sheltered? No, I believe he chose the place intuitively, because it expresses his particular point of view of life. The keen breeze and the wide view serve only for occasional inspiration; but the undergrowth vegetation, the crust of soil, the hum of insects, the little flowers--these are the true stimulants of his eloquent simplicity of style.

Burroughs professed to have a great admiration for Turguenieff's[49] “Diary of a Sportsman.” These exquisite prose poems represent nature at its best, but they are purely poetic, pictorial, with a big cosmic swing to them. This is out of the reach of Burroughs, and he never attempted it. His poems contain, as he says himself, more science and observation than poetry. A few beautiful lines everybody can learn to write, and unless they are fragments of a torso of the most intricate and beautiful construction, they will drop like the slanting rain into the dark wastes of oblivion.

His lessons of nature, accepted as text-books in the public schools, have a true message to convey. They represent the socialization of science. He loves the birds and learned their ways; he could run his course aright, as he has placed his goal rightly. He stirred the earth about the roots of his knowledge deeply, and thereby entered a new field of thought. He became interested in final causes, design in nature.

The transcendentalist[50] of the Emersonian period at last came to his own. There is something of the bigness of Thoreau[51] in his recent writings, Thoreau who in his “Concord and Merrimac River” had a mystical vision, a grip on religious thought, and who, like a craftsman in cloisonné, hammered his philosophic speculations upon the frugal shapes of his observations. In “Ways of Nature” and “Leaf and Tendril” Burroughs has reached out as far as it is possible for a nature writer without becoming a philosopher. He now no longer contemplates the outward appearance of things, but their organic structure, the geological formation of the earth's crust, and the evolution of life. And some ledge of rock will now give him the prophetic gaze into the past and into the future.

And so John Burroughs at eighty-five, still chopping the wood for his own fireside, writing, lecturing, giving advice about phases of farm-work, strolling over the ground, still interested in literature, can serenely fold his hands and wait.

Indeed, this white-bearded man, in his bark-covered study amidst veiled heights and blurred river scenes, furnishes a wonderful intimate picture which will linger in American literature and in the minds of all who yearn for a more intimate knowledge of nature, unaffectedly told, like the song of the robin of his first love, “a harbinger of spring thoughts carrying with it the fragrance of the first flowers and the improving verdure of the fields.”

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS

1. How does the first paragraph indicate the key-note of the
article?

2. What do Burroughs' pictures and books show concerning his
character?

3. What sort of life did Burroughs lead?

4. What is meant by “exploiting the teaching of experience rather
than of books”?

5. How did Burroughs find happiness?

6. What is said concerning Burroughs' faculties of discovery and
interpretation?

7. What diversity of interests did Burroughs show?

8. What is said concerning Burroughs' work as an essayist?

9. Why was Burroughs fond of Walt Whitman?

10. How did Burroughs gain literary style?

11. What is meant by the “socialization of science”?

12. What makes Burroughs such a charming person?

13. Into what sections may the article be divided?

14. What does the article reveal concerning its author?

SUBJECTS FOR WRITTEN IMITATION

1. A Visit with My Teacher 11. Our Unusual Caller
2. A Call on an Interesting Person 12. A Talk with a Tramp
3. In the Office of the Principal 13. The Beggar's Life
4. Visiting My Relatives 14. My Cousin
5. A Visit to Another School 15. A Talk with an Expert
than My Own
6. A Talk with a Fireman 16. My Friend, the Carpenter
7. A Talk with a Policeman 17. Interviewing a Peddler
8. An Interview with a Stranger 18. Talking with a Missionary
9. The Man in the Office 19. In the Printer's Office
10. The Busy Clerk 20. The Railroad Conductor

DIRECTIONS FOR WRITING

Write about an actual visit or interview. In all your work pay most attention to presenting the spirit of the person whom you talk with. The events of your visit, and the remarks that are made, are of less importance than the things that reveal spirit,--the surroundings, the costume, the habits, the work done and the various things that show character. The essay is in no sense to be the story of a visit; it is to give an intimate picture of the person in whom you are interested. Your object is to show character.

FOOTNOTES:

[30] Jean Henri Fabre (1823-1915). A French entomologist who wrote many volumes on insect life, among them being _The Life and Love of the Insects_; _The Life of the Spider_; _The Life of the Fly_.

[31] Walt Whitman (1819-1892). An American poet, noted for highly original poems marked by absence of rhyme and metre. Whitman loved the outdoor world, and had great philosophic insight.

[32] Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881). A brilliant English essayist and historian, strikingly original and unconventional, and a firm upholder of stalwart manhood.

[33] Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910). A great Russian novelist, reformer and philosopher,--a bold and original thinker.

[34] Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919). Ranchman, author, soldier, explorer, and President of the United States, a man of sterling manhood and great personal fearlessness.