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ASA HOLMES
ANNIE.FELLOWS.JOHNSTON
[Illustration]
Asa Holmes
or
At the Cross-roads
Works of
Annie Fellows Johnston
The Little Colonel Series
(_Trade Mark, Reg. U. S. Pat. Of._)
Each one vol., large 12mo, cloth, illustrated
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The above 8 vols., _boxed_ 12.00
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The above 3 vols., _boxed_ 3.75
Cosy Corner Series
Each one vol., thin 12mo, cloth, illustrated
The Little Colonel $.50
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Two Little Knights of Kentucky .50
Big Brother .50
Ole Mammy's Torment .50
The Story of Dago .50
Cicely .50
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The Quilt that Jack Built .50
Flip's "Islands of Providence" .50
Mildred's Inheritance .50
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Joel; A Boy of Galilee $1.50
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L. C. PAGE & COMPANY
200 Summer Street Boston, Mass.
[Illustration]
Asa Holmes
or
At the Cross=Roads
By
Annie Fellows Johnston
Author of
"The Little Colonel," "Two Little Knights
of Kentucky," etc.
With a Frontispiece by
Ernest Fosbery
[Illustration]
Boston
L.C. Page & Company
Publishers
_Copyright, 1900, 1901_
BY E. S. BARNETT
_Copyright, 1902_
BY L. C. PAGE AND COMPANY
(INCORPORATED)
_All rights reserved_
_Seventh Impression_
Colonial Press
Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds & Co.
Boston, Mass., U. S. A.
TO
A Dear Old Philosopher
WHOSE CHEERFUL OPTIMISM AND SUNNY FAITH HAVE
SWEETENED LIFE FOR ALL WHO KNOW HIM
Asa Holmes
or
At the Cross-roads
Chapter I
THERE is no place where men learn each other's little peculiarities more
thoroughly than in the group usually to be found around the stove in a
country store. Such acquaintance may be of slow growth, like the oak's,
but it is just as sure. Each year is bound to add another ring to one's
knowledge of his neighbours if he lounges with them, as man and boy,
through the Saturday afternoons of a score of winters.
A boy learns more there than he can be taught in schools. It may be he
is only a tow-headed, freckle-faced little fellow of eight when he rides
over to the cross-roads store for the first time by himself. Too timid
to push into the circle around the fire, he stands shivering on the
outskirts, looking about him with the alertness of a scared rabbit,
until the storekeeper fills his kerosene can and thrusts the weekly mail
into his red mittens. Then some man covers him with confusion by
informing the crowd that "that little chap is Perkins's oldest," and he
scurries away out of the embarrassing focus of the public eye.
But the next time he is sent on the family errands he stays longer and
carries away more. Perched on the counter, with his heels dangling over
a nail keg, while he waits for the belated mail train, he hears for the
first time how the government ought to be run, why it is that the
country is going to the dogs, and what will make hens lay in cold
weather. Added to this general information, he slowly gathers the belief
that these men know everything in the world worth knowing, and that
their decisions on any subject settle the matter for all time.
He may have cause to change his opinion later on, when his sapling
acquaintance has gained larger girth; when he has loafed with them,
smoked with them, swapped lies and spun yarns, argued through a decade
of stormy election times, and talked threadbare every subject under the
sun. But now, in his callow judgment, he is listening to the wit and
wisdom of the nation. Now, as he looks around the overflowing room,
where butter firkins crowd the calicoes and crockery, and where hams and
saddles swing sociably from the same rafter, as far as his knowledge
goes, this is the only store in the universe.
Some wonder rises in his childish brain as he counts the boxes of
axle-grease and the rows of shining new pitchforks, as to where all the
people live who are to use so many things. He has yet to learn that this
one little store that is such a marvel to him is only a drop in the
bucket, and that he may travel the width of the continent, meeting at
nearly every mile-post that familiar mixture of odours--coal oil,
mackerel, roasted coffee, and pickle brine. And a familiar group of men,
discussing the same old subjects in the same old way, will greet him at
every such booth he passes on his pilgrimage through Vanity Fair.
Probably in after years Perkins's oldest will never realise how much of
his early education has been acquired at that Saturday afternoon
loafing-place, but he will often find himself looking at things with the
same squint with which he learned to view them through 'Squire Dobbs's
short-sighted spectacles. Many a time he will find that he has been
unconsciously warped by the prejudices he heard expressed there, and
that his opinions of life in general and men in particular are the
outgrowth of those early conversations which gave him the creed of his
boyhood.
"Them blamed Yankees!" exclaims one of these neighbourhood orators,
tilting his chair back against the counter, and taking a vicious bite at
his plug of tobacco. "They don't know no better than to eat cold bread
the year 'round!" And the boy, accepting the statement unquestioningly,
stores away in his memory not only the remark, but all the weighty
emphasis of disgust which accompanied the remark in the spitting of a
mouthful of tobacco juice. Henceforth his idea of the menu north of the
Mason and Dixon line is that it resembles the bill of fare of a
penitentiary, and he feels that there is something coldblooded and
peculiar about a people not brought up on a piping hot diet of hoe-cake
and beaten biscuit.
In the same way the lad whose opinions are being moulded in some little
corner grocery of a New England village, or out where the roads cross on
the Western prairie, receives his prejudices. It may be years before he
finds out for himself that the land of Boone is not fenced with whiskey
jugs and feuds, and that the cap-sheaf on every shock of wheat in its
domain is not a Winchester rifle.
But these prejudices, popular at local cross-roads, are only the side
lines of which every section carries its own specialty. When it comes to
staple articles, dear to the American heart and essential to its liberty
and progress, their standard of value is the same the country over.
One useful lesson the youthful lounger may learn here, if he can learn
it anywhere, and that is to be a shrewd reader of men and motives. Since
staple characteristics in human nature are repeated everywhere, like
staple dry goods and groceries, a thorough knowledge of the group around
the stove will be a useful guide to Perkins's oldest in forming
acquaintances later in life.
Long after he has left the little hamlet and grown gray with the
experiences of the metropolis, he will run across some queer Dick whose
familiar personality puzzles him. As he muses over his evening pipe,
suddenly out of the smoke wreaths will spring the face of some old
codger who aired his wisdom in the village store, and he will recognise
the likeness between the two as quickly as he would between two cans of
leaf lard bearing the same brand.
But Perkins's oldest is only in the primer of his cross-roads
curriculum now, and these are some of the lessons he is learning as he
edges up to the group around the fire. On the day before Thanksgiving,
for instance, he was curled up on a box of soap behind the chair of old
Asa Holmes--Miller Holmes everybody calls him, because for nearly half a
century his water-mill ground out the grist of all that section of
country. He is retired now; gave up his business to his grandsons. They
carry it on in another place with steam and modern machinery, and he is
laid on the shelf. But he isn't a back number, even if his old deserted
mill is. It is his boast that now he has nothing else to do, he not only
keeps up with the times, but ahead of them.
Everybody goes to him for advice; everybody looks up to him as they do
to a hardy old forest tree that's lived through all sorts of hurricanes,
but has stood to the last, sturdy of limb, and sound to the core. He is
as sweet and mellow as a winter apple, ripened in the sun, and that's
why everybody likes to have him around. You don't see many old men like
that. Their troubles sour them.
Well, this day before Thanksgiving the old miller was in his usual
place at the store, and as usual it was he who was giving the cheerful
turn to the conversation. Some of the men were feeling sore over the
recent election; some had not prospered as they had hoped with their
crops, and were experiencing the pinch of hard times and sickness in
their homes. Still there was a holiday feeling in the atmosphere.
Frequent calls for nutmeg, and sage, and cinnamon, left the air spicy
with prophecies of the morrow's dinner.
The farmers had settled down for a friendly talk, with the comfortable
sense that the crops were harvested, the wood piled away for the winter,
and a snug, warm shelter provided for the cattle. It was good to see the
hard lines relax in the weather-beaten faces, in the warmth of that
genial comradeship. Even the gruffest were beginning to thaw a little,
when the door opened, and Bud Hines slouched in. The spirits of the
crowd went down ten degrees.
Not that he said anything; only gave a gloomy nod by way of greeting as
he dropped into a chair. But his whole appearance said it for him; spoke
in the droop of his shoulders, and the droop of his hat brim, and the
droop of his mouth at the corners. He looked as if he might have sat for
the picture of the man in the "Biglow Papers," when he said:
"Sometimes my innard vane pints east for weeks together,
My natur' gits all goose-flesh, an' my sins
Come drizzlin' on my conscience sharp ez pins."
The miller greeted him with the twinkle in his eye that eighty years
and more have never been able to dim; and Perkins's oldest had his first
meeting with the man who always finds a screw loose in everything.
Nothing was right with Bud Hines. One of his horses had gone lame, and
his best heifer had foundered, and there was rust in his wheat. He
didn't have any heart to keep Thanksgiving, and he didn't see how
anybody else could, with the bottom dropped clean out of the markets and
the new road tax so high. For his part he thought that everything was on
its last legs, and it wouldn't be long till all the Powers were at war,
and prices would go up till a poor man simply couldn't live.
It was impossible not to be affected more or less by his gloomy
forebodings, and the old miller, looking around on the listening faces,
saw them settling back in their old discouraged lines. Clasping his
hands more firmly over the top of his cane, he exclaimed: "Now look
here, Bud Hines, I'm going to give you a proverb that was made on
purpose for such a poor, weak-kneed Mr. Ready-to-halt as you are: 'Never
be discouraged, and never be a discourager!' If you can't live up to the
first part, you certainly can to the second. No matter how hard things
go with you, you've no right to run around throwing cold water on other
people. What if your horse has gone lame? You've got a span of mules
that can outpull my yoke of oxen any day. One heifer oughtn't to send a
man into mourning the rest of his days, and it would be more fitting to
be thankful over your good tobacco crop than to groan over the failure
of your wheat. More fitting to the season. As for the rest of the things
you're worrying over, why, man, they haven't happened yet, and maybe
never will. My old grandad used to say to me when I was a lad, 'Never
cross your bridge till you come to it, Asa,' and I've proved the wisdom
of that saying many a time. Suppose'n you put that in your pipe and
smoke it."
If Perkins's oldest learns no other lesson this year than to put those
two proverbs into practice, he will have had a valuable education. How
many Thanksgivings they will help to make for him! How many problems and
perplexities they will solve!
"Never be discouraged; never be a discourager! Don't cross your bridge
until you come to it!" It is a philosophy that will do away with half
the ills which flesh imagines it is heir to.
Thanksgiving Day! How much more it means to the old miller than to the
little fellow beside him on the soap box! To the child it is only a
feast day; to the old man it is a festival that links him to a lifetime
of sacred memories.
"Five and eighty years," he says, musingly, resting his chin on the
wrinkled hands that clasp the head of his cane. A silence falls on the
group around the stove, and through the cracked door the red firelight
shines out on thoughtful faces.
"It's a long time; five and eighty years," he repeats, "and every one of
them crowned with a Thanksgiving. Boys," lifting his head and looking
around him, "you've got a good bit of pike to travel over yet before you
get as far as I've gone, and some of you are already half fagged out and
beginning to wonder if it's all worth while--Bud, here, for instance.
I'd like to give you all a word of encouragement.
"Looking back, I can see that I've had as many ups and downs as any of
you, and more than your share of work and trouble, for I've lived
longer, and nearly all the years are marked with graves. Seems to me
that lately I've had to leave a new grave behind me at every mile-stone,
till now I'm jogging on all alone. Family gone, old neighbours gone, old
friends--I'm the last of the old set. But, still, when all is said and
done, I haven't lost heart, for 'I've lived, seen God's hand through a
lifetime, and all was for best.'
"When I was milling down there on Bear Creek you'd 'a' thought I was a
fool if I hadn't taken my rightful toll out of every bushel of grist
that ran through my hopper, and sometimes I think that the Almighty must
feel that way about us when we go on grinding and grinding, and never
stopping to count up our share of the profit and pleasure and be
thankful over it. I believe that no matter what life pours into our
hopper, we are to grind some toll of good out of it for ourselves, and
as long as a man does his part toward producing something for the
world's good, some kind of bread for its various needs, he will never go
hungry himself.
"And I believe more than that. You've heard people compare old age to a
harvest field, and talk about the autumn of life with its ripened corn
waiting for the reaper Death, and all that, and speak about the 'harvest
home,' as if it were the glorious end of everything. But it never did
strike me that way, boys. The best comes after the harvesting, when the
wheat is turned into flour and the flour into bread, and the full,
wholesome loaves go to make up blood and muscle and brain. That's giving
it a sort of immortality, you might say, raising it into a higher order
of life. And it's the same with a man. His old age is just a ripening
for something better a little further on. All that we go through with
here isn't for nothing, and at eighty-five, when it looks as if a man
had come to the stepping-off place, I've come to believe that 'the best
is yet to be.'"
There is a stir around the door, and the old miller looks around
inquiringly. The mail has come in, and he rises slowly to get his weekly
paper. Perkins's oldest, waiting his turn in front of the little case of
pigeonholes, eyes the old man with wondering side glances. He has not
understood more than half of what he has heard, but he is vaguely
conscious that something is speaking to him now, as he looks into the
tranquil old face. It is the miller's past that is calling to him; all
those honest, hard-working years that show themselves in the bent form
and wrinkled hands; the serene peacefulness that bespeaks a clear
conscience; the big, sunny nature that looks out of those aged eyes; and
above all the great hopefulness that makes his days a perpetual
Thanksgiving.
The mute eloquence of an unspoken invitation thrills the child's heart,
he knows not why:
"Grow old along with me;
The best is yet to be!"
It is the greatest lesson that Perkins's oldest can ever learn.