In Our Town

As the dinner hour grew near she raged—so the servants said—whenever the telephone rang

So there came a time when they began to take trips to the seashore and the mountains, flitting from hotel to hotel. In the office we knew when they changed quarters, for at each resort John Markley would see the reporters and give out a long interview, which was generally prefaced by the statement that he was a prominent Western capitalist, who had refused the nomination for Governor or for Senator, or for whatever Isabel Markley happened to think of; and papers containing these interviews, marked in green ink, came addressed to the office in her stylish, angular hand. During grand opera season one might see the Markleys hanging about the great hotels of Chicago or Kansas City, he a tired, sleepy-faced, prematurely old man, who seemed to be counting the hours till bed-time, and she a tailored, rather overfed figure, with a freshly varnished face and unhealthy, bright, bold eyes, walking slightly ahead of her shambling companion, looking nervously about her in search of some indefinite thing that was gone from her life.

One day John Markley shuffled into our office, bedizened as usual, and fumbled in his pocket for several minutes before he could find the copy of the Mexican Herald containing the news of his boy's death in Vera Cruz. He had passed the time of life for tears, yet when he asked us to reprint the item he said sadly: "The old settlers will remember him—maybe. I don't know whether they will or not." He seemed a pitiful figure as he dragged himself out of the office—so stooped and weazened, and so utterly alone, but when he turned around and came back upon some second thought, his teeth snapped viciously as he snarled: "Here, give it back. I guess I don't want it printed. They don't care for me, anyway."

The boys in his office told the boys in our office that the old man was cross and petulant that year, and there is no doubt that Isabel Markley was beginning to find her mess of pottage bitter. The women around town, who have a wireless system of collecting news, said that the Markleys quarrelled, and that she was cruel to him. Certain it is that she began to feed on young boys, and made the old fellow sit up in his evening clothes until impossible hours, for sheer appearance sake, while his bed was piled with the wraps of boys and girls from what our paper called the Hand-holders' Union, who were invading the Markley home, eating the Markley olives and canned lobster, and dancing to the music of the Markley pianola. Occasionally a young travelling man would be spoken of by these young people as Isabel Markley's fellow.

Mrs. Markley began to make fun of her husband to the girls of the third-rate dancing set whose mothers let them go to her house; also, she reviled John Markley to the servants. It was known in the town that she nicknamed him the "Goat." As for Markley, the fight was gone from him, and his whole life was devoted to getting money. That part of his brain which knew the accumulative secret kept its tireless energy; but his emotions, his sensibilities, his passions seemed to be either atrophied or burned out, and, sitting at his desk in the back room of the Mortgage Company's offices, he looked like a busy spider spinning his web of gold around the town. It was the town theory that he and Isabel must have fought it out to a finish about the night sessions; for there came a time when he went to bed at nine o'clock, and she either lighted up and prepared to celebrate with the cheap people at home, or attached one of her young men, and went out to some impossible gathering—generally where there was much beer, and many risqué things said, and the women were all good fellows. And thus another year flew by.

One night, when the great house was still, John Markley grew sick and, in the terror of death that, his office people say, was always with him, rose to call for help. In the dark hall, feeling for an electric-light switch, he must have lost his way, for he fell down the hard oak stairs. It was never known how long he lay there unable to move one-half of his body, but his wife stood nearly an hour at the front door that night, and when she finally switched on the light, she and the man with her saw Markley lying before them with one eye shut and with half his face withered and dead, the other half around the open eye quivering with hate. He choked on an oath, and shook at her a gnarled bare arm. Her face was flushed, and her tongue was unsure, but she laughed a shrill, wicked laugh and cried: "Ah, you old goat; don't you double your fist at me!"

Whereupon she shuddered away from the shaking figure at her feet and scurried upstairs. And the man standing in the doorway, wondering what the old man had heard, wakened the house, and helped to carry John Markley upstairs to his bed.

It was nearly three months before he could be wheeled to his office, where he still sits every day, spinning his golden web and filling his soul with poison. They say that, helpless as he is, he may live for a score of years. Isabel Markley knows how old she will be then. A thousand times she has counted it.

To see our town of a summer twilight, with the families riding abroad behind their good old nags, under the overhanging elms that meet above our newly-paved streets, one would not think that there could exist in so lovely a place as miserable a creature as John Markley is; or as Isabel, his wife, for that matter. The town—out beyond Main Street, which is always dreary and ugly with tin gorgons on the cornices—the town is a great grove springing from a bluegrass sod, with porch boxes making flecks of colour among the vines; cannas and elephant ears and foliage plants rise from the wide lawns; and children bloom like moving flowers all through the picture.

There are certain streets, like the one past the Markley mansion, upon which we make it a point always to drive with our visitors—show streets we may as well frankly call them—and one of these leads down a wide, handsome street out to the college. There the town often goes in its best bib and tucker to hear the lecturers whom Mrs. Markley feeds. Last winter one came who converted Dan Gregg—once Governor, but for ten years best known among us as the town infidel. The lecturer explained how matter had probably evolved from some one form—even the elements coming in a most natural way from a common source. He made it plain that all matter is but a form of motion; that atoms themselves are divided into ions and corpuscles, which are merely different forms of electrical motion, and that all this motion seems to tend to one form, which is the spirit of the universe. Dan said he had found God there, and, although the pious were shocked, in our office we were glad that Dan had found his God anywhere. While we were sitting in front of the office one fine evening this spring, looking at the stars and talking of Dan Gregg's God and ours, we began to wonder whether or not the God that is the spirit of things at the base of this material world might not be indeed the spirit that moves men to execute His laws. Men in the colleges to-day think they have found the moving spirit of matter; but do they know His wonderful being as well as the old Hebrew prophets knew it who wrote the Psalms and the Proverbs and the wisdom of the Great Book. That brought us back to the old question about John Markley. Was it God, moving in us, that punished Markley "by the rod of His wrath," that used our hearts as wireless stations for His displeasure to travel through, or was it the chance prejudice of a simple people? It was late when we broke up and left the office—Dan Gregg, Henry Larmy, the reporter, and old George. As we parted, looking up at the stars where our ways divided out under the elms, we heard, far up Exchange Street, the clatter of the pianola in the Markley home, and saw the high windows glowing like lost souls in the night.

"A Bundle of Myrrh"

One of the first things that a new reporter on our paper has to learn is the kinology of the town. Until he knows who is kin to whom, and how, a reporter is likely at any time to make a bad break. Now, the kinology of a country town is no simple proposition. After a man has spent ten years writing up weddings, births and deaths, attending old settlers' picnics, family reunions and golden weddings, he may run into a new line of kin that opens a whole avenue of hitherto unexplainable facts to him, showing why certain families line up in the ward primaries, and why certain others are fighting tooth and toe-nail.

The only person in town who knows all of our kinology—and most of that in the county, where it is a separate and interminable study—is "Aunt" Martha Merryfield. She has lived here since the early fifties, and was a Perkins, one of the eleven Perkins children that grew up in town; and the Perkinses were related by marriage to the Mortons, of whom there are over fifty living adult descendants on the town-site now. So one begins to see why she is called "Aunt Martha" Merryfield. She is literally aunt to over a hundred people here, and the habit of calling her aunt has spread from them to the rest of the population.

She lives alone in the big brick house on the hill, though her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren are in and out all day and most of the night, so that she is not at all lonesome. She is the only person to whom we can look for accurate information about local history, and when a man dies who has been at all prominent in affairs of the town or county or State, we always call up "Aunt" Martha on the 'phone, or send a reporter to her, to learn the real printable and unprintable truth about him. She knows whom he "went with" before he was married, and why they "broke off," and what crowd he associated with in the early days; how he got his money, and what they used to "say" about him. If a family began putting on frills, she can tell how the head of the house got his start by stealing "aid" sent to the grasshopper sufferers and opening a store with the goods. If a woman begins speaking of the hired girl as her "maid," contrary to the vernacular rules of the town, Aunt Martha does not hesitate to bring up the subject of the flour-sack underwear which the woman wore when she was a girl during the drought of '60.

Aunt Martha used to bring us flowers for the office table, and it was her delight to sit down and take out her corn-knife—as she called it—and go after the town shams. She has promised a dozen times to write an article for the paper, which she says we dare not print, entitled "Self-made Women I Have Known." She says that men were always bragging about how they had clerked, worked on farms, dug ditches and whacked mules across the plains before the railroads came; but that their wives insisted that they were princesses of the royal blood. She says she is going to include in her Self-made Women only those who have worked out, and she maintains that we will be surprised at the list.

Her particular animosity in the town is Mrs. Julia Neal Worthington. Aunt Martha told us that when Tim Neal came to town he had a brogue you could scrape with a knife and an "O" before his name you could hoop a hogshead with. "And that woman," exclaimed Aunt Martha, when she was under full sail, "that woman, because she has two bookcases in the front room and reads the book-reviews in the Delineator, thinks that she is cultured. When her folks first came to town they were as poor as Job's turkey, which was not to their discredit—everyone was poor in those days. The old man Neal was as honest an old Mick as you'd meet in a day's journey, or at a fair, and he used to run a lemonade and peanut stand down by the bank corner. But his girls, who were raised on it, until they began teaching school, used to refer to the peanut stand as 'papa's hobby,' pretend that he only ran it for recreation, and say: 'Now why do you suppose papa enjoys it?—We just can't get him to give it up!' And now Julia is president of the Woman's Federation, has stomach trouble, has had two operations, and is suffering untold agonies with acute culturitis. And yet," Aunt Martha would say through a beatific smile, "she's a good-enough woman in many ways, and I wouldn't say anything against her for the world."

Once Miss Larrabee, the society editor, brought back this from a visit to Aunt Martha: "I know, my dear, that your paper says there are no cliques and crowds in society in this town, and that it is so democratic. But you and I know the truth. We know about society in this town. We know that if there ever was a town that looked like a side of bacon—streak of lean and streak of fat all the way down—it is this blessed place. Crowds?—why, I've lived here over fifty years and it was always crowds. 'Way back in the days when the boys used to pick us up and carry us across Elm Creek when we went to dances, there were crowds. The girls who crossed on the boys' backs weren't considered quite proper by the girls who were carried over in the boys' arms. And they didn't dance in the same set."

Miss Larrabee says she looked into the elder woman's eyes to find which crowd Aunt Martha belonged to, when she flashed out:

"Oh, child, you needn't look at me—I did both; it depended on who was looking! But, as I was saying, if anyone knows about society in this town, I do. I went to every dance in town for the first twenty-five years, and I have made potato salad to pay the salary of every Methodist preacher for the past thirty years, and I ought to know what I'm talking about." There was fire enough to twinkle in her old eyes as she spoke. "Beginning at the bottom, one may say that the base of society is the little tads, ranging down from what your paper calls the Amalgamated Hand-holders, to the trundle-bed trash just out of their kissing games. It's funny to watch the little tads grow up and pair off and see how bravely they try to keep in the swim. I've seen ten grandchildren get out and I've a great-grandchild whose mother will be pushing her out before she is old enough to know anything. When young people get married they all say they're not going to be old-marriedy, and they hang on to the dances and little hops until the first baby comes. Then they don't get out to the dances much, but they join a card club."

In her dissertation on the social progress of young married people, Aunt Martha explained that after the second year the couple go only to the big dances where everyone is invited, but they pay more attention to cards. The young mother begins going to afternoon parties, and has the other young married couples in for dinner. Then, before they know it, they are invited out to receptions and parties, where little tads preside at the punch-bowls and wait on table, and are seen and not heard. Aunt Martha continued:

"By the time the second baby comes they take one of two shoots—either go in for church socials or edge into a whist club. In this town, I think, on the whole, that the Congregational Whist Club is younger and gayer than the Presbyterian Whist Club, but in most towns the Episcopalians have the really fashionable club. Of course, these clubs never call themselves by the church names, but they are generally made up along church lines—except we poor Methodists and Baptists—we have to divide ourselves out among the others to keep the preacher from going after us."

Aunt Martha's eyes danced with the mischief in her heart as she went on: "Now, if after the second baby comes, the young parents begin to feel like saving money, and being someone at the bank, they join the church and go in for church socials, which don't take so much time or money as the whist clubs and receptions. The babies keep coming and the young people keep on improving their home, moving from the little house to the big house; the young man's name begins to creep into lists of directors at the bank, and they are invited out to the big parties, and she goes to all the stand-up and 'gabble-gobble-and-git' receptions. As they grow older, they are asked with the preachers and widows for the first night of a series of parties at a house to get them out of the way and over with before the young folks come later in the week. When they get to a point where the young folks laugh and clap their hands at little pudgy daddy when he dances 'Old Dan Tucker' at the big parties in the brick houses, it's all up with them—they are old married folks, and the next step takes them to the old folks' whist club, where the bankers' wives and the insurance widows run things. That is the inner sanctuary, the holy of holies in the society of this town."

After a pause Aunt Martha added: "You'd think, to hear these chosen people talk, that the benighted souls who go to missionary teas, Woman's Relief Corps chicken-pie suppers, and get up bean-dinners for the church on election day, live on another planet. Yet I guess we're all made of the same kind of mud.

"That reminds me of the Winthrops. When they came here, back in the sixties, it happened to be Fourth of July, and the band was out playing in the grove by the depot. Mrs. Winthrop got off the train quite grandly and bowed and waved her hand to the band, and the Judge walked over and gave the band leader five dollars. They said afterward that they felt deeply touched to find a raw Western town so appreciative of the coming of an old New England family, that it greeted them with a band. Before Mrs. Winthrop had been here three weeks she called on me, 'as one of the first ladies of the town,' she said, to organise and see if we couldn't break up the habit of the hired girls eating at the table with the family." Aunt Martha smiled and her eyes glittered as she added: "After they organised, the titled aristocracy of this town did their own work and sent the washing out for a year or more."

The talk drifted back to the old days, and Aunt Martha got out her photograph-album and showed Miss Larrabee the pictures of those whom she called "the rude forefathers of the village," in their quaint old costumes of war-times. In the book were baby pictures of middle-aged men and women, and youthful pictures of the old men and women of the town. But most interesting of all to Miss Larrabee were the daguerreotypes—quaint old portraits in their little black boxes, framed in plush and gilt. The old woman brought out picture after picture—her husband's among the others, in a broad beaver hat with a high choker taken back in Brattleboro before he came to Kansas. She looked at it for a long minute, and then said gaily to Miss Larrabee: "He was a handsome boy—quite the beau of the State when we were married—Judge of the District Court at twenty-four." She held the case in her hand and went on opening the others. She came to one showing a moustached and goateed youth in a captain's uniform—a slim, straight, soldierly figure. As she passed it to Miss Larrabee Aunt Martha looked sidewise at her, saying: "You wouldn't know him now. Yet you see him every day, I suppose." After the girl shook her head, the elder woman continued: "Well, that's Jim Purdy, taken the day he left for the army." She sighed as she said: "Let me see, I guess I haven't happened to run across Jim for ten years or more, but he didn't look much like this then. Poor old Jim, they tell me he's not having the best time in the world. Someway, all the old-timers that are living seem to be hard up, or in bad health, or unhappy. It doesn't seem right, after what they've done and what they've gone through. But I guess it's the way of life. It's the way life gets even with us for letting us outlive the others. Compensation—as Emerson says."

"Jim Purdy, taken the day he left for the army"

Miss Larrabee came down the lilac-bordered walk from the stately old brick house, carrying a great bouquet of sweet peas and nasturtiums and poppies and phlox, a fleeting memory of some association she had in her mind of Uncle Jimmy Purdy and Aunt Martha kept tantalising her. She could not get it out of the background of her consciousness, and yet it refused to form itself into a tangible conception. It was associated vaguely with her own grandmother, as though, infinite ages ago, her grandmother had said something that had lodged the idea in the girl's head.

When the occasion made itself, Miss Larrabee asked her grandmother the question that puzzled her, and learned that Martha Perkins and Jim Purdy were lovers before the war, and that she was wearing his ring when he went away—thinking he would be back in a few weeks with the Rebellion put down. In his first fight he was shot in the head and was in the hospital for a year, demented; when he was put back in the ranks he was captured and his name given out among the killed. In prison his dementia returned and he stayed there two years. Then for a year after his exchange he followed the Union Army like a dumb creature, and not until two years after the close of the war did the poor fellow drift home again, as one from the dead—all uncertain of the past and unfitted for the future.

And his sweetheart drank her cup alone. The old settlers say that she never flinched nor shrank, but for years, even after her marriage to the Judge, the young woman kept a little grave covered with flowers, that bore the simple words: "Martha, aged five months and three days." They say that she did not lose her courage and that she bent her head for no one. But the war brought her neighbours so many sorrows that Martha's trouble was forgotten, the years passed and only the old people of the community know about the little grave beside the Judge's and their little boy's. Jimmy Purdy grew into a smooth-faced, unwrinkled, rather blank-eyed old man, clerking in the bookstore for a time, serving as City Clerk for twenty years, and later living at the Palace Hotel on his pension. He worshipped Aunt Martha's children and her children's children, but he never saw her except when they met in some casual way. She was married when he came back from the war, and if he ever knew her agony he never spoke of it. Whenever he talked of the events before the war, his face wore a troubled, baffled look, and he did not seem to remember things clearly. He was a simple old man with a boyish face and heart who was confused by the world growing old around him.

One day they found him dead in his bed. And Miss Larrabee hurried out to Aunt Martha's to get the facts about his life for the paper. It was a bright October morning as she went up the walk to the old brick house, and she heard someone playing on the piano, rolling the chords after the grandiose manner of pianists fifty years ago. A voice seemed to be singing an old ballad. As the girl mounted the steps the voice came more distinctly to her. It was quavering and unsure, but with a moan of passion the words came forth:

Suddenly the voice choked in a groan. As she stood by the open door Miss Larrabee could see in the darkened room the figure of an old woman racked with sobs on a great mahogany sofa, and on the floor beside her lay a daguerreotype, glinting its gilt and glass through the gloom.

The girl tiptoed across the porch, down the steps through the garden and out of the gate.

Our Loathed but Esteemed Contemporary

No one remembers a time when there were not two newspapers in our town—generally quarrelling with each other. Though musicians and doctors and barbers are always jealous of their business rivals, and though they show their envy more or less to their discredit, editors are so jealous of one another, and so shameless about it, that the profession has been made a joke. Certainly in our town there is a deep-seated belief that if one paper takes one side of any question, even so fair a proposition as street-paving, the other will take the opposing side.

Of course, our paper has not been contrary; but we have noticed a good many times—every one in the office has noticed it, the boys and girls in the back-office, and the boys and girls in the front-office—that whenever we take a stand for anything, say for closing the stores at six o'clock, the General swings the Statesman into line against it. If he has done it once he has done it fifty times in the last ten years; and, though we have often felt impelled to oppose some of the schemes which he has brought forward, it has been because they were bad for the town, and perhaps because, even though they did seem plausible, we knew that the unscrupulous gang that was behind these schemes would in some way turn them into a money-making plot to rob the people. We never could see that justification in the Statesman's position. To us it seemed merely pigheadedness. But the passing years are teaching us to appreciate the General better, and each added year is seeming to make us more tolerant of his shortcomings.

Counting in the three years he was in the army, he has been running the Statesman for forty-five years, and for thirty-five years he was master of the field. For thirty years this town was known as General A. Jackson Durham's town. He ran the county Republican conventions, and controlled the five counties next to ours, so that, though he could never go to Congress himself, on account of his accumulation of enemies, he always named the successful candidate from the district, and for a generation held undisturbed the selection of post-masters within his sphere of influence. In State politics he was more powerful than any Congressman he ever made. Often he came down to the State Convention with blood in his eye after the political scalp of some politician who had displeased him, and the fight he made and the disturbance he started, gave him the name of Old Bull Durham. On such occasions, he would throw back his head, shut his eyes and roar his wrath at his opponents in a most disquieting manner, and when he returned home, whether he had won or lost his fight, his paper would bristle for two or three weeks with rage, and his editorial page would be full of lurid articles written in short exclamatory sentences, pocked with italics, capital letters and black-faced lines.

He advertised the fact that he was a good hater by showing callers at his office his barrel

For General A. Jackson Durham was a fire-eater and was proud of it. He advertised the fact that he was a good hater by showing his barrel to callers at his office. In that barrel he had filed away every disreputable thing that he had been able to find against friend or foe, far or near, and when the friend became a foe, or the foe became troublesome, the General opened his barrel. He kept also an office blacklist, on which were written the names of the men in town that were never to be printed in the Statesman. When we established our little handbill of a newspaper, he made all manner of fun of our "dish-rag," as he called it, and insisted on writing so much about our paper that people read it to see what we had to say. Other papers had made the mistake of replying to the General in kind, and people had soon tired of the quarrel and dropped the new quarrelling paper for the old one. The State never had seen the General's equal as a wrangler; but we did not fight back, and there was only a one-sided quarrel for the people to tire of. We grew and got a foothold in the town, but the General never admitted it. He does not admit it now, though his paper has been cut down time and again, and is no larger than our little dish-rag was in the beginning. But he still maintains his old assumption of the power that departed years ago. He walked proudly out of the County Convention the day that it rode over him, and he still begins the names of the new party leaders in the county in small letters to show his contempt for them.

The day of his downfall in the County Convention marked the beginning of his decline in State politics. When it was known that his county was against him, people ceased to fear him and in time new leaders came in the State whom he did not know even by sight; but the General did not recognise them as leaders. To him they were interlopers. He sent his paper regularly to the old leaders, who had been shoved aside as he had been, and wrote letters to them urging them to arouse the people to throw off the chains of bossdom. Five years ago he and a number of lonesome and forgotten ones, who formerly ruled the State with an iron hand, and whose arrogance had cost the party a humiliating defeat, organised the "Anti-Boss League," and held semi-annual conventions at the capital. They made long speeches and issued long proclamations, and called vehemently upon the people to rend their chains, but some way the people didn't heed the call, and the General and his boss-busters, as they were called, began to have hard work getting their "calls" and "proclamations" and "addresses" into the city papers. The reporters referred to them as the Ancient Order of Has-Beens, and wounded the General's pride by calling him Past Master of the Grand Lodge of Hons. He came home from the meeting of the boss-busters at which this insult had been heaped upon him and bellowed like a mad bull for six months, using so much space in his paper that there was no room at all for local news.

In the General's idea of what a newspaper should contain; news does not come first, and he does not mind crowding it out. He believes that a newspaper should stand for "principles." The Statesman was started during the progress of the Civil War, when issues were news, and the General has never been able to realize that in times of peace people buy a newspaper for its news and not for its opinions. He never could understand our attitude toward what he called "principles." When the town was for free silver, we were for the gold standard, and we never exerted ourselves particularly for a high tariff, and when the General saw our paper grow in spite of its heresies, he was amazed, and expressed his amazement in columns of vitriolic anger. Because we often ignored "issues" and "principles" and "great basic and fundamental ideas," as he called his contentions on the silver and tariff questions, for lists of delegates at conventions, names of pupils at the county institute, and winners of prizes at the fair, he was filled with alarm for the future of the noble calling of journalism.

Long ago we quit making fun of him. One day we wrote an article referring to him as "the old man," and it was gossiped among the printers that he was cut to the heart. He did not reply to that, and although a few days later he referred to us as thieves and villains, we never had the heart to tease him again, and now every one around the office has instructions to put "General" before his name whenever it is used. Probably this cheers him up. At least it should do so, for in spite of his pride and his much advertised undying wrath, he is in truth a tender-hearted old man, and has never been disloyal to the town. It is the apple of his eye. His fierceness has always been more for publication than as an evidence of good faith. He likes to think that he is unforgiving and relentless, but he has a woman's heart. He fought the renomination of Grant for a third term most bitterly, but when the old commander died, the boys in the Statesman office say that Durham sniffled gently while he wrote the obituary, and when he closed with the words "Poor Grant," he laid his head on the table and his frame shook in real sorrow.

Most of the subscribers have left his paper, and few of the advertisers use it, but what seems to hurt him worst is his feeling that the town has gone back on him. He has given all of his life to this town; he has spent thousands of dollars to promote its growth; he has watched every house on the town-site rise, and has made an item in his paper about it; he has written up the weddings of many of the grandmothers and grandfathers of the town; he has chronicled the birth of their children and children's children. The old scrapbooks are filled with kind things that the General has written. Old men and old women scan these wrinkled pages with eyes that have lost their lustre, and on the rusty clippings pasted there fall many tears. In this book many a woman reads the little verse below the name of a child whom only she and God remember. In some other scrapbook a man, long since out of the current of life, reads the story of his little triumph in the world; in the family Bible is a clipping from the Statesman—yellow and crisp with years—that tells of a daughter's wedding and the social glory that descended upon the house for that one great day. So, as the General goes about the streets of the town, in his shiny long frock-coat and his faded campaign hat, men do not laugh at him, nor do they hate him. He is the old buffalo, horned out of the herd.

The profession of newspaper making is a young man's profession. The time will come when over at our office there will be a shrinkage. Even now our leading citizens never go away from town and talk to other newspaper men that they do not say that if someone would come over here and start a bright, spicy newspaper he could drive us out of town and make money. The best friends we have, when they talk to newspaper men in other towns are not above saying that our paper is so generally hated that it would be no trouble to put it out of business. That is what people said of the General in the eighties. They do not say it now.

For the fight is over with him. And he is walking on an old battlefield, reviewing old victories, not knowing that another contest is waging further on. Sometimes the boys in the Statesman office get their money Saturday night, and sometimes they do not. If they do not, the General grandly issues "orders" on the grocery stores. Then he takes his pen in hand and writes a stirring editorial on the battle of Cold Harbor, and closes by enquiring whether the country is going to forget the grand principles that inspired men in those trying days.

In the days when the Statesman was a power in the land, editorials like this were widely quoted. He was department commander of the G. A. R. at a time when such a personage was as important in our State as the Governor. The General's editorials on pensions were read before the Pensions Committee in Congress and had much weight there, and even in the White House the General's attitude was reckoned with. When he rallied the old soldiers to any cause the earth trembled, but now the General's editorials pass unheeded. When he calls to "the men who defended this country in one great crisis to rise and rescue her again," he does not understand that he is speaking to a world of ghosts, and that his "clarion note" falls on empty air. The old boys whom he would arouse are sleeping; only he and a little handful survive. Yet to him they still live; to him their power is still invincible—if they would but rally to the old call. He believes that some day they will rally, and that the world, which is now going sadly wrong, will be set right. With his hands clasped behind him, looking through his steel-rimmed glasses, from under his shaggy brows, he walks through a mad world, waiting for it to return to reason. In his fiery black eyes one may see a puzzled look as he views the bewildering show. He is confused, but defiant. His head is still high; he has no thought of surrender. So, day after day, he riddles the bedlam about him with his broadsides, in the hourly hope of victory.

It was only last week that the General was in Jim Bolton's livery stable office asking Jim if he had any old ledgers, that the Statesman office might have. He explained that he tore off their covers, cut them up and used the unspoiled sheets for copy-paper. In Bolton's office he met a farmer from the Folcraft neighbourhood in the southern end of the county, who hadn't seen the General for half-a-dozen years. "Why—hello General," exclaimed the farmer with unconcealed surprise, as though addressing one risen from the dead. "You still around here? What are you doing now?" The old man tucked the ledger under his arm, straightened up with great dignity, and tried not to wince under the blow. He put one hand in his shiny, frayed, greenish-black frock-coat, and replied with quiet dignity, "I am following my profession, sir—that of a journalist." And after fixing the farmer with his piercing black eyes for a moment, the General turned away and was gone.

When we do something to displease him, he turns all his guns on us, though probably his foreman has to borrow paper from our office to get the Statesman out. The General regards us as his natural prey and his foreman regards our paper stock as his natural forage—but they use so little that we do not mind.

Once a new bookkeeper in our office saw the General's old account for paper. She sent the General a statement, and another, and in the third she put the words: "Please remit." The day after he had received the insult the General stalked grandly into the office with the amount of money required by the bookkeeper. He put it down without a word and walked over to the desk where the proprietor was working.

"Young man," said the General, as he rapped with his cane on the desk. "I was talking to-day with a gentleman from Norwalk, Ohio, who knew your father. Yes, sir; he knew your father, and speaks highly of him, sir. I am surprised to hear, sir, that your father was a perfect gentleman, sir. Good-morning, sir."

And with that the General moved majestically out of the office.

A Question of Climate

Colonel Morrison had three initials, so the town naturally called him "Alphabetical" Morrison, and dropped the "Colonel." He came to our part of the country in an early day—he used to explain that they caught him in the trees, when he was drinking creek water, eating sheep-sorrel, and running wild with a buffalo tail for a trolley, and that the first thing they did, after teaching him to eat out of a plate, was to set him at work in the grading gang that was laying out the Cottonwood and Walnut Rivers and putting the limestone in the hills. He was one of the original five patriots who laid out the Corn Belt Railroad from the Mississippi to the Pacific, and was appointed one of that committee to take the matter to New York for the inspection of capitalists—and be it said to the credit of Alphabetical Morrison that he was the only person in the crowd with money enough to pay the ferryman when he reached the Missouri River, though he had only enough to get himself across. But in spite of that the road was built, and though it missed our town, it was because we didn't vote the bonds, though old Alphabetical went through the county, roaring in the schoolhouses, bellowing at the crossroads, and doing all that a good, honest pair of lungs could do for the cause. However, he was not dismayed at his failure, and began immediately to organise a company to build another road. We finally secured a railroad, though it was only a branch.

Over his office door he had a sign—"Land Office"—painted on the false board front of the building in letters as big as a cow, and the first our newspaper knew of him was twenty years ago, when he brought in an order for some stationery for the Commercial Club. At that time we had not heard that the town supported a Commercial Club—nor had anyone else heard of it, for that matter—for old Alphabetical was the president, and his bookkeeper, with the Miss dropped off her name, was secretary. But he had a wonderfully alluring letterhead printed, and seemed to get results, for he made a living while his competitors starved. Later, when he found time, he organised a real Commercial Club, and had himself elected president of it. He used to call meetings of the club to discuss things, but as no one cared much for his monologues on the future of the town, the attendance was often light. He issued circulars referring to our village as "the Queen City of the Prairies," and on the circulars was a map, showing that the Queen City of the Prairies was "the railroad axis of the West." There was one road running into the town; the others old Alphabetical indicated with dotted lines, and explained in a foot-note that they were in process of construction.

He became possessed of a theory that a canning factory would pay in the Queen City of the Prairies, and the first step he took toward building it was to invest in a high hat, a long coat and white vest, and a pair of mouse-coloured trousers. With these and his theory he went East and returned with a condition. The canning factory went up, but the railroad rates went wrong, and the factory was never opened. Alphabetical blinked at it through his gold-rimmed glasses for a few weeks, and then organised a company to turn it into a woollen mill. He elected himself president of that company and used to bring around to our paper, notices of directors' meetings, and while he was in the office he would insist that we devoted too much space to idle gossip and not enough to the commercial and industrial interests of the Queen City.

At times he would bring in an editorial that he had written himself, highly excitable and full of cyclonic language, and if we printed it Alphabetical would buy a hundred copies of the paper containing it and send them East. His office desk gradually filled with woodcuts and zinc etchings of buildings that never existed save in his own dear old head, and about twice a year during the boom days he would bring them around and have a circular printed on which were the pictures showing the imaginary public buildings and theoretical business thoroughfares of the Queen City.

The woollen mill naturally didn't pay, and he persuaded some Eastern capitalists to install an electric plant in the building and put a streetcar line in the town, though the longest distance from one side of the place to the other was less than ten blocks. But Alphabetical was enthusiastic about it, and had the Governor come down to drive the first spike. It was gold-plated, and Alphabetical pulled it up and used it for a paper-weight in his office for many years, and it is now the only reminder there is in town of the street railway, except a hard ridge of earth over the ties in the middle of Main Street. When someone twitted him on the failure of the street railway he made answer:

"Of course it failed; here I go pawing up the earth, milking out the surplus capital of the effete East, and building up this town—and what happens? Four thousand old silurian fossils comb the moss on the north side of 'em, with mussel shell, and turn over and yawp that old Alphabetical is visionary. Here I get a canning factory and nobody eats the goods; I hustle up a woollen factory, and the community quits wearing trousers; I build for them a streetcar line to haul them to and from their palatial residences, and what do the sun-baked human mud turtles do but all jump off the log into the water and hide from them cars like they were chariots of fire? What this town needs is not factories, nor railroads, nor modern improvements—Old Alphabetical can get them—but the next great scheme I go into is to go down to the river, get some good red mud, and make a few thousand men who will build up a town."

It has been fifteen years and over since Colonel Morrison put on his long coat and high hat and started for the money markets of the East, seeking whom he might devour. At the close of the eighties the Colonel and all his tribe found that the stock of Eastern capitalists who were ready to pay good prices for the fine shimmering blue sky and bracing ozone of the West was running low. It was said in town that the Colonel had come to the end of his string, for not only were the doors of capital closed to him in the East, but newcomers had stopped looking for farms at home. There was nothing to do but to sit down and swap jack-knives with other land agents, and as they had taken most of the agencies for the best insurance companies while the Colonel was on dress parade, there was nothing left for him to do but to run for justice of the peace, and, being elected, do what he could to make his tenure for life.

Though he was elected, more out of gratitude for what he had tried to do for the town than because people thought he would make a fair judge, he got no further than his office in popular esteem. He did not seem to wear well with the people in the daily run and jostle of life. During the forty years he has been in our town, he has lived most of the time apart from the people—transacting his business in the East, or locating strangers on new lands. He has not been one of us, and there were stories afloat that his shrewdness had sometimes caused him to thrust a toe over the dead-line of exact honesty. In the town he never helped us to fight for those things of which the town is really proud: our schools, the college, the municipal ownership of electric lights and waterworks, the public library, the abolition of the saloon, and all of the dozen small matters of public interest in which good citizens take a pride. Colonel Morrison was living his grand life, in his tailor-made clothes, while his townsmen were out with their coats off making our town the substantial place it is. So in his latter days he is old Alphabetical Morrison, a man apart from us. We like him well enough, and so long as he cares to be justice of the peace no one will object, for that is his due. But, someway, there is no talk of making him County Clerk; and there is a reason in everyone's mind why no party names him to run for County Treasurer. He has been trying hard enough for ten years to break through the crust of the common interests that he has so long ignored. One sees him at public meetings—a rather wistful-looking, chubby-faced old man—on the edge of the crowd, ready to be called out for a speech. But no one calls his name; no one cares particularly what old Alphabetical has to say. Long ago he said all that he can say to our people.

The only thing that Alphabetical ever organised that paid was a family. In the early days he managed to get a home clear of indebtedness and was shrewd enough to keep it out of all of his transactions. Tow-headed Morrisons filled the schoolhouse, and twenty years later there were so many of his girls teaching school that the school-board had to make a ruling limiting the number of teachers from one family in the city school, in order to force the younger Morrison girls to go to the country to teach. In these days the girls keep the house going and Alphabetical is a notary public and a justice of the peace, which keeps his office going in the little square board building at the end of the street. But every day for the past ten years he has been coming to our office for his bundle of old newspapers. These he reads carefully, and sometimes what he reads inspires him to write something for our paper on the future of the Queen City, though much oftener his articles are retrospective. He is the president of the Old Settlers' Society, and once or twice a year he brings in an obituary which he has written for the family of some of the old-timers.

One would think that an idler would be a nuisance in a busy place, but, on the contrary, we all like old Alphabetical around our office. For he is an old man who has not grown sour. His smooth, fat face has not been wrinkled by the vinegar of failure, and the noise that came from his lusty lungs in the old days is subsiding. But he has never forgiven General Durham, of the Statesman, for saying of a fight between Alphabetical and another land agent back in the sixties that "those who heard it pronounced it the most vocal engagement they had ever known." That is why he brings his obituaries to us; that is why he does us the honour of borrowing papers from us; and that is why, on a dull afternoon, he likes to sit in the old sway-back swivel-chair and tell us his theory of the increase in the rainfall, his notion about the influence of trees upon the hot winds, his opinion of the disappearance of the grasshoppers. Also, that is why we always save a circus-ticket for old Alphabetical, just as we save one for each of the boys in the office.