Chapter I: Front Matter

ROUND ROBIN

OTHER VOLUMES IN THE

“LITTLE
SCHOOLMATES” SERIES

_Edited by_

_FLORENCE CONVERSE_

IN SUNNY SPAIN _Katharine Lee Bates_
UNDER GREEK SKIES _Julia D. Dragoumis_
A BOY IN EIRINN _Padraic Colum_
THE LAIRD OF GLENTYRE _Emma M. Green_
ELSBETH _Margarethe Müller_
GENEVIÈVE _Laura Spencer Portor_
KATRINKA: The Story of a Russian Child _Helen E. Haskell_
TREASURE FLOWER: A Child of Japan _Ruth Gaines_
THE VILLAGE SHIELD: A Story of Mexico
_Ruth Gaines_ and _Georgia Willis Read_
A BOY OF BRUGES: A Story of Belgian Child Life
_Emile_ and _Tita Cammaerts_
THE CART OF MANY COLORS: A Story of Italy
_Nannine La Villa Meiklejohn_
ARCHAG THE LITTLE ARMENIAN Translated from the French of
_Charles H. Schnapps_

ROUND ROBIN

BY
ABBIE FARWELL BROWN

_America! America!
God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!_
--KATHARINE LEE BATES

NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 FIFTH AVENUE

Copyright, 1921
By E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
_All Rights Reserved_

_Printed in the United States of America_

TO
Katharine Lee Bates
SEER OF TRUTH, SAYER OF BEAUTY,
SOWER OF WISDOM

_God hath made of one blood all nations
of men to dwell on the face of the earth._

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

A LETTER TO THE ONE WHO READS THIS BOOK xi

I. THE GOLDEN GIRL 1

II. THE ROUND ROBIN CLUB 12

III. FAIRY RING 21

IV. DICK’S CLAMBAKE 39

V. MIDSUMMER EVE 65

VI. THE PATCHWORK QUILT 81

VII. SAL SEGUIN 100

VIII. IDLEWILD 115

IX. NELLY SACKETT’S HOME 124

X. A REAL HERO 135

XI. THE EAGLE’S NEST 146

XII. LOST 162

XIII. ANOTHER SIDE 176

XIV. COSTUMES 184

XV. TANTE’S BIRTHDAY PARTY 199

XVI. NEIGHBORS 218

XVII. MYSTERY 228

XVIII. FIRE 243

XIX. NEWS 254

XX. LAW AND LIBERTY 269

XXI. COUSINS 279

XXII. A CHIP OF THE OLD BLOCK 292

XXIII. A BEGINNING 306

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

It seemed empty _Frontispiece
Facing page_
“Look!” whispered Cicely 59

But nothing answered 71

Nancy clung close to the trunk 159

A fairy creature--a gnome--a gypsy queen 207

“Why it’s sage” 263

A LETTER TO THE ONE WHO READS THIS BOOK

DEAR SCHOOLMATE:

This is a stay-at-home story, the only one in our series. We have been to Greece and Spain, to Russia, Germany, and France, to Belgium, to Japan, to Ireland and Mexico, to Armenia and Scotland and Italy. We played with the royal children in the palace of the Tsar, before their great tragedy touched them; we went to school in Paris with Geneviève, and in Aintab with Archag, and out to domestic service with Mattina in Athens; we sang Spanish riddles with Pilarica, and listened to Scottish hero-tales with the young Laird; we lived in a Mexican cave and sailed in a Japanese boat; we spent Christmas in Germany, before the War; we tramped the roads of Ireland with gay Finn, before the revolution; we followed Pieter when he fought for his Belgium; and we came home from the Italian victory in a little Sicilian cart of many colors. And now we are going to stay at home and live as Americans live, and get acquainted with ourselves and each other.

America is a palace of a thousand windows, some of them opening on the past and some of them looking toward the future; and in my letters to you I have tried to open a few of the windows that look back into our pasts; magic casements they are, for we have as many pasts as we have races in America. And two things I have tried to tell you about those races:

Why they came to America
and
What they brought to America.

Turn over the pages of the letters, if you have kept them, and you will find that they are really chapters in a short history of America’s colonists and immigrants. All the chapters are not written yet, all the windows are not opened; some day perhaps there will be a Scandinavian chapter to tell us why the hardy, industrious Norse and Swedes are here, farming our northwestern prairies, and what gifts they brought to make America more beautiful; and some day we may open a Dutch window, looking across the perilous sea from old New York to Holland.

But this time, my letter is not a little chapter of past history, for most of the young people in this story are descendants of the Puritans who settled New England and the Cavaliers who settled Virginia; and we already know by heart those two chapters of our past. Don’t we? Plymouth Rock, Paul Revere, Pocahontas:

“_A cargo of tea
Thrown into the sea,
In seventeen-hundred
And sixty-three._”

Those are the keys which unlock that magic casement. You can open it for yourself, anytime. The “Round Robin” window which I am opening in this letter, looks not into the past nor yet into the future, but into the present. It looks right into the hearts of American boys and girls of to-day.

From the East and the West and the North and the South of our United States they come. Two or three, in the story, have fathers who were foreign born, but most of them are of “American Stock,” as we say when we mean that our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers were the children of English colonists. We say it proudly, we whose ancestors fought the American Revolution, whose grandfathers saw the passing of slavery, whose brothers did their bit in the Great War. Proudly, because we believe that whatsoever of freedom, of democracy, of holiness there is in America to-day, was first planted and rooted here by our ancestors, those first English settlers.

Narrow-minded and narrow-hearted people who look with near-sighted spirits through the windows of the past and the windows of the future, bewail the fact that one hundred years from now, “American Stock” will no longer mean to American Schoolchildren, English inheritance. Because, dear Schoolmate, your children and your grandchildren will have married and intermarried with Americans of Latin and Teutonic and Slavic and other blood--with the American grandchildren of Italians, and French, and Germans, and Swedes, and Russians, and Syrians--and who knows how many other races? But these narrow-minded, narrow-hearted, unvisionary people forget that if our America is a free, a democratic, a holy place, one hundred years from now, the American Stock will still be rooted true in the old ideals. And it is by ideals that countries live and are judged.

To Americanize a person means to find out how much, or how little, he knows and cares about freedom and democracy and holiness, and then to help that much or little grow. And all this is done by making friends with the foreigners who come to us from other lands. Making friends with people, as you know very well, means understanding them, loving them, making allowance for them and remembering that they have to make allowance for us also. It means studying their ways, and especially their ways of achieving freedom, their ways of achieving democracy, their ways of achieving holiness--as well as expecting them to study and approve of our ways. Perhaps some of their ways are better than some of ours. If they are, then we shall certainly want to adopt those ways; if they are not, then we must do our American best to convince these immigrant friends that our ways are better. We mustn’t think that a way is bad just because it isn’t our way, and we mustn’t think a way is good just because it is our way.

So you see that Americanizing people means much more than teaching them English, and telling them about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and showing them how to use bathtubs and ballot boxes. It means making sure that they know what freedom means, and what democracy means (Do you know, dear Schoolmate?) and what holiness means; and that their hearts and souls are set toward making America a free, a democratic, a holy nation.

Look into the hearts of the children in this Round Robin, and you will find growing there the old ideals whose names I am repeating so often in this letter, freedom, democracy, holiness; you will find them in the hearts of the young Americans whose fathers were foreign born (I’ll wait and let Miss Abbie Farwell Brown tell you which those are), as well as in Beverly’s courteous little Southern heart, and Nancy’s staunch little New England heart, and Dick’s jolly little wholesome heart of the West. The children in the story would be astonished if they knew that I was saying these things about them. They are just “a bunch” of honest, happy boys and girls, off on a typical American holiday in a summer camp, learning to “get together.” But getting together is the A B C of freedom and democracy and holiness.

It is the A B C of holiness because holiness is “getting together” with God: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.” And getting together with God means finding out God’s will and then doing it; working with Him; building up the nation with Him. And the way to get together with God is by prayer; and by looking back through the ages and following the working of His will in His world, as we see it in the Bible, and in all secular science, art, history, and literature; and then by more prayer. “Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done, _on earth_, as it is in heaven.” That is the prayer of the nation builder, who has “got together” with God. And every American is a nation builder.

It is the A B C of democracy because democracy is “getting together” with your fellow-men: “And thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Fellowship, brotherhood, equal opportunity, all these come from loving thy neighbor as thyself. Government of the people, by the people, for the people, must fail just so long as we fail to love our neighbor as ourself. Democracy means loving all the people all the time; not just one kind of people, the rich, or the poor, or the bankers, or the bakers, or the people who live in our street, but _all_ the people, _all_ the time. In a Democracy, every man is our neighbor.

It is the A B C of freedom, because freedom is “getting together” with the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you.” You can’t be free by yourself; not in America; not in the world. Even if you were a self-supporting hermit, or a Robinson Crusoe, you wouldn’t be free. Solitude isn’t freedom. You wouldn’t be free to marry, alone on a desert island. A man is free when he is at peace with himself. But no man is really at peace with himself so long as some other man is not at peace. God made us so. Even if we are self-righteous and think that we are not to blame for our neighbor’s unhappiness, we can’t be at peace while he is miserable before our eyes and in our ears; but to have to run away from misery isn’t freedom. What does this mean, dear Schoolmate? Why! it means that you and I can never be free until everyone is free. It means that freedom is a spiritual goal; but you don’t have to beat the other fellow to it; the game is to have everybody come up to time. And to have everybody come up to time, we must all play the game according to the rule; be good sports!

And now, you will tell me that these ideals are not merely American, they are the ideals for which every Christian nation ought to strive. That may be; but America has a special claim to them, for it was our English colonial ancestors who put them into political form for us, and breathed their spirit into this government of ours which we called a Republic. We think that freedom, democracy, and holiness have a better chance to grow in our Republic than in the earlier forms of government, such as monarchy. Republics, such as ours, may not be the last word in political freedom, and democracy, and holiness; there may be newer forms of government in which people may have a better chance to be holy, democratic, and free than they have in ours; all history shows how men and governments have grown and changed, down the ages; to grow is to change. But so long as we do think that our ideals have a better chance in a Republic than in anything else, we can keep our government a Republic; for it is we who choose what America shall be; it is we who cast the votes. That is what it means to be an American.

And because freedom and holiness and democracy are the ideals for which every Christian nation ought to strive--and this the nations know, in their secret hearts, as well as you and I know it, dear Schoolmate--because their ideals and ours are really the same, we have, in those ideals, the basis and groundwork, and starting point for an international brotherhood of nations; the one sure way of getting together.

Affectionately yours,
FLORENCE CONVERSE.

ROUND ROBIN

ROUND ROBIN