professions ought to be made strictly avocational, strictly incidental
to some real business. Let our Presidents preach (how they love it!);
let our preachers nurse the sick, catch fish, or make tents. It is
easier for the camel, with both his humps, to squeeze through the eye
of the needle than for the professional man of any sort to perform
regularly his whole duty with sound sense and sincerity.
But ballast is a universal human need--chores, I mean. It is my
privilege frequently to ride home in the same car with a broker’s
bookkeeper. Thousands of dollars’ worth of stock pass through his
hands for record every day. The “odor” of so much affluence clings to
him. He feels and thinks and talk in millions. He lives over-night, to
quote his own words, “on the end of a telephone wire.” That boy makes
ten dollars a week, wears “swagger clothes,” and boards with his
grandmother, who does all his washing, except the collars. What ails
him? and a million other Americans like him? Only the need to handle
something smaller, something realer than this pen of the recording
angel--the need of chores. He should have the wholesome reality of a
buck-saw twice a day; he might be saved if he could be interested in
chickens; could feed them every morning, and every evening could “pick
up the eggs.”
So might many another millionaire. When a man’s business prohibits his
caring for the chickens, when his affairs become so important that he
can no longer shake down the furnace, help dress one of the children,
or tinker about the place with a hammer and saw, then that man’s
business had better be put into the hands of a receiver, temporarily;
his books do not balance.
I know of a college president who used to bind (he may still) a cold
compress about his head at times, and, lying prone upon the floor,
have two readers, one for each ear, read simultaneously to him
different theses, so great was the work he had to do, so fierce his
fight for time--time to lecture to women’s clubs and to write his
epoch-making books.
Oh, the multitude of epoch-making books!
But as for me, I am a Commuter, and I live among a people who are
Commuters, and I have stood with them on the banks of the Ohio,
according to the suggestion of one of our wisest philosophers (Josh
Billings, I think), and, in order to see how well the world could get
on without me, I have stuck my finger into the yellow current, pulled
it out, and looked for the hole.
The placid stream flowed on.
So now, when the day’s work is done, I turn homeward here to Mullein
Hill, and these early autumn nights I hang the lantern high in the
stable, while four shining faces gather round on upturned buckets
behind the cow. The lantern flickers, the milk foams, the stories
flow--“Bucksy” stories of the noble red-man; stories of Arthur and the
Table Round, of Guyon and Britomart, and the heroes of old; and
marvelous stories of that greatest hero of them all--their father, far
away yonder when he was a boy, when there were so many interesting
things to do, and such fun doing them!
Now the world is so “full of a number of things”--things to do still,
but things, instead of hands, and things instead of selves, so many
things to do them with--even a _thing_ to milk with, now! But I will
continue to use my hands.
No, I shall probably never become a great milk-contractor. I shall
probably remain only a Commuter to the end. But if I never become
anything great,--the Father of my Country, or the Father of Poetry, or
the Father of Chemistry, or the Father of the Flying Machine,--why, I
am at least the father of these four shining faces in the lantern
light; and I have, besides them, handed down from the past, a few more
of life’s old-fashioned inconveniences, attended, gentle reader, with
their simple old-fashioned blessings.
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
U · S · A
End of Project Gutenberg's The Face of the Fields, by Dallas Lore Sharp