Produced by Aaron Cannon
THE FRIENDLY ROAD
New Adventures in Contentment
By David Grayson (Pseud. of Ray Stannard Baker)
Author of
“Adventure in Contentment,”
“Adventures in Friendship”
Illustrated by Thomas Fogarty
Copyright, 1913, by DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
“Surely it is good to be alive at a time like this.”
THE FRIENDLY ROAD
A WORD TO HIM WHO OPENS THIS BOOK
I did not plan when I began writing these chapters to make an entire
book, but only to put down the more or less unusual impressions, the
events and adventures, of certain quiet pilgrimages in country roads.
But when I had written down all of these things, I found I had material
in plenty.
“What shall I call it now that I have written it?” I asked myself.
At first I thought I should call it “Adventures on the Road,” or “The
Country Road,” or something equally simple, for I would not have the
title arouse any appetite which the book itself could not satisfy. One
pleasant evening I was sitting on my porch with my dog sleeping near me,
and Harriet not far away rocking and sewing, and as I looked out across
the quiet fields I could see in the distance a curving bit of the town
road. I could see the valley below it and the green hill beyond, and
my mind went out swiftly along the country road which I had so recently
travelled on foot, and I thought with deep satisfaction of all the
people I had met on my pilgrimages--the Country Minister with his
problems, the buoyant Stanleys, Bill Hahn the Socialist, the Vedders in
their garden, the Brush Peddler. I thought of the Wonderful City, and of
how for a time I had been caught up into its life. I thought of the
men I met at the livery stable, especially Healy, the wit, and of that
strange Girl of the Street. And it was good to think of them all living
around me, not so very far away, connected with me through darkness and
space by a certain mysterious human cord. Most of all I love that which
I cannot see beyond the hill.
“Harriet,” I said aloud, “it grows more wonderful every year how full
the world is of friendly people!”
So I got up quickly and came in here to my room, and taking a fresh
sheet of paper I wrote down the title of my new book:
“The Friendly Road.”
I invite you to travel with me upon this friendly road. You may find,
as I did, something which will cause you for a time, to forget yourself
into contentment. But if you chance to be a truly serious person, put
down my book. Let nothing stay your hurried steps, nor keep you from
your way.
As for those of us who remain, we will loiter as much as ever we please.
We'll take toll of these spring days, we'll stop wherever evening
overtakes us, we'll eat the food of hospitality--and make friends for
life!
DAVID GRAYSON.
CONTENTS
Preface
I. I Leave My Farm
II. I Whistle
III. The House by the Side of the Road
IV. I Am the Spectator of a Mighty Battle, in which Christian
Meets Apollyon
V. I Play the Part of a Spectacle Peddler
VI. An Experiment in Human Nature
VII. The Undiscovered Country
VIII. The Hedge
IX. The Man Possessed
X. I Am Caught Up Into Life
XI. I Come to Grapple with the City
XII. The Return
CHAPTER I. I LEAVE MY FARM
“Is it so small a thing
To have enjoyed the sun,
To have lived light in spring?”
It is eight o'clock of a sunny spring morning. I have been on the road
for almost three hours. At five I left the town of Holt, before six I
had crossed the railroad at a place called Martin's Landing, and an hour
ago, at seven, I could see in the distance the spires of Nortontown. And
all the morning as I came tramping along the fine country roads with my
pack-strap resting warmly on my shoulder, and a song in my throat--just
nameless words to a nameless tune--and all the birds singing, and all
the brooks bright under their little bridges, I knew that I must soon
step aside and put down, if I could, some faint impression of the
feeling of this time and place. I cannot hope to convey any adequate
sense of it all--of the feeling of lightness, strength, clearness, I
have as I sit here under this maple tree--but I am going to write as
long as ever I am happy at it, and when I am no longer happy at it, why,
here at my very hand lies the pleasant country road, stretching away
toward newer hills and richer scenes.
Until to-day I have not really been quite clear in my own mind as to the
step I have taken. My sober friend, have you ever tried to do anything
that the world at large considers not quite sensible, not quite sane?
Try it! It is easier to commit a thundering crime. A friend of mine
delights in walking to town bareheaded, and I fully believe the
neighbourhood is more disquieted thereby than it would be if my friend
came home drunken or failed to pay his debts.
Here I am then, a farmer, forty miles from home in planting time, taking
his ease under a maple tree and writing in a little book held on his
knee! Is not that the height of absurdity? Of all my friends the Scotch
Preacher was the only one who seemed to understand why it was that I
must go away for a time. Oh, I am a sinful and revolutionary person!
When I left home last week, if you could have had a truthful picture of
me--for is there not a photography so delicate that it will catch the
dim thought-shapes which attend upon our lives?--if you could have had
such a truthful picture of me, you would have seen, besides a farmer
named Grayson with a gray bag hanging from his shoulder, a strange
company following close upon his steps. Among this crew you would have
made out easily:
Two fine cows. Four Berkshire pigs. One team of gray horses, the
old mare a little lame in her right foreleg. About fifty hens, four
cockerels, and a number of ducks and geese.
More than this--I shall offer no explanation in these writings of any
miracles that may appear--you would have seen an entirely respectable
old farmhouse bumping and hobbling along as best it might in the rear.
And in the doorway, Harriet Grayson, in her immaculate white apron, with
the veritable look in her eyes which she wears when I am not comporting
myself with quite the proper decorum.
Oh, they would not let me go! How they all followed clamoring after me.
My thoughts coursed backward faster than ever I could run away. If you
could have heard that motley crew of the barnyard as I did--the hens
all cackling, the ducks quacking, the pigs grunting, and the old mare
neighing and stamping, you would have thought it a miracle that I
escaped at all.
So often we think in a superior and lordly manner of our possessions,
when, as a matter of fact, we do not really possess them, they possess
us. For ten years I have been the humble servant, attending upon the
commonest daily needs of sundry hens, ducks, geese, pigs, bees, and of
a fussy and exacting old gray mare. And the habit of servitude, I find,
has worn deep scars upon me. I am almost like the life prisoner who
finds the door of his cell suddenly open, and fears to escape. Why, I
had almost become ALL farmer.
On the first morning after I left home I awoke as usual about five
o'clock with the irresistible feeling that I must do the milking. So
well disciplined had I become in my servitude that I instinctively
thrust my leg out of bed--but pulled it quickly back in again, turned
over, drew a long, luxurious breath, and said to myself:
“Avaunt cows! Get thee behind me, swine! Shoo, hens!”
Instantly the clatter of mastery to which I had responded so quickly
for so many years grew perceptibly fainter, the hens cackled less
domineeringly, the pigs squealed less insistently, and as for the
strutting cockerel, that lordly and despotic bird stopped fairly in the
middle of a crow, and his voice gurgled away in a spasm of astonishment.
As for the old farmhouse, it grew so dim I could scarcely see it at all!
Having thus published abroad my Declaration of Independence, nailed my
defiance to the door, and otherwise established myself as a free person,
I turned over in my bed and took another delicious nap.
Do you know, friend, we can be free of many things that dominate our
lives by merely crying out a rebellious “Avaunt!”
But in spite of this bold beginning, I assure you it required several
days to break the habit of cows and hens. The second morning I awakened
again at five o'clock, but my leg did not make for the side of the
bed; the third morning I was only partially awakened, and on the fourth
morning I slept like a millionaire (or at least I slept as a millionaire
is supposed to sleep!) until the clock struck seven.
For some days after I left home--and I walked out as casually that
morning as though I were going to the barn--I scarcely thought or
tried to think of anything but the Road. Such an unrestrained sense of
liberty, such an exaltation of freedom, I have not known since I was a
lad. When I came to my farm from the city many years ago it was as one
bound, as one who had lost out in the World's battle and was seeking
to get hold again somewhere upon the realities of life. I have related
elsewhere how I thus came creeping like one sore wounded from the field
of battle, and how, among our hills, in the hard, steady labour in the
soil of the fields, with new and simple friends around me, I found a
sort of rebirth or resurrection. I that was worn out, bankrupt both
physically and morally, learned to live again. I have achieved something
of high happiness in these years, something I know of pure contentment;
and I have learned two or three deep and simple things about life: I
have learned that happiness is not to be had for the seeking, but comes
quietly to him who pauses at his difficult task and looks upward. I have
learned that friendship is very simple, and, more than all else, I have
learned the lesson of being quiet, of looking out across the meadows and
hills, and of trusting a little in God.
And now, for the moment, I am regaining another of the joys of
youth--that of the sense of perfect freedom. I made no plans when I
left home, I scarcely chose the direction in which I was to travel,
but drifted out, as a boy might, into the great busy world. Oh, I have
dreamed of that! It seems almost as though, after ten years, I might
again really touch the highest joys of adventure!
So I took the Road as it came, as a man takes a woman, for better or
worse--I took the Road, and the farms along it, and the sleepy little
villages, and the streams from the hillsides--all with high enjoyment.
They were good coin in my purse! And when I had passed the narrow
horizon of my acquaintanceship, and reached country new to me, it seemed
as though every sense I had began to awaken. I must have grown dull,
unconsciously, in the last years there on my farm. I cannot describe the
eagerness of discovery I felt at climbing each new hill, nor the long
breath I took at the top of it as I surveyed new stretches of pleasant
countryside.
Assuredly this is one of the royal moments of all the year--fine, cool,
sparkling spring weather. I think I never saw the meadows richer and
greener--and the lilacs are still blooming, and the catbirds and orioles
are here. The oaks are not yet in full leaf, but the maples have nearly
reached their full mantle of verdure--they are very beautiful and
charming to see.
It is curious how at this moment of the year all the world seems astir.
I suppose there is no moment in any of the seasons when the whole army
of agriculture, regulars and reserves, is so fully drafted for service
in the fields. And all the doors and windows, both in the little
villages and on the farms, stand wide open to the sunshine, and all the
women and girls are busy in the yards and gardens. Such a fine, active,
gossipy, adventurous world as it is at this moment of the year!
It is the time, too, when all sorts of travelling people are afoot.
People who have been mewed up in the cities for the winter now take to
the open road--all the peddlers and agents and umbrella-menders, all the
nursery salesmen and fertilizer agents, all the tramps and scientists
and poets--all abroad in the wide sunny roads. They, too, know well this
hospitable moment of the spring; they, too, know that doors and hearts
are open and that even into dull lives creeps a bit of the spirit of
adventure. Why, a farmer will buy a corn planter, feed a tramp, or
listen to a poet twice as easily at this time of year as at any other!
For several days I found myself so fully occupied with the bustling life
of the Road that I scarcely spoke to a living soul, but strode straight
ahead. The spring has been late and cold: most of the corn and some of
the potatoes are not yet in, and the tobacco lands are still bare and
brown. Occasionally I stopped to watch some ploughman in the fields:
I saw with a curious, deep satisfaction how the moist furrows, freshly
turned, glistened in the warm sunshine. There seemed to be something
right and fit about it, as well as human and beautiful. Or at evening
I would stop to watch a ploughman driving homeward across his new brown
fields, raising a cloud of fine dust from the fast drying furrow
crests. The low sun shining through the dust and glorifying it, the
weary-stepping horses, the man all sombre-coloured like the earth
itself and knit into the scene as though a part of it, made a picture
exquisitely fine to see.
And what a joy I had also of the lilacs blooming in many a dooryard, the
odour often trailing after me for a long distance in the road, and of
the pungent scent at evening in the cool hollows of burning brush
heaps and the smell of barnyards as I went by--not unpleasant, not
offensive--and above all, the deep, earthy, moist odour of new-ploughed
fields.
And then, at evening, to hear the sound of voices from the dooryards as
I pass quite unseen; no words, but just pleasant, quiet intonations of
human voices, borne through the still air, or the low sounds of cattle
in the barnyards, quieting down for the night, and often, if near a
village, the distant, slumbrous sound of a church bell, or even the
rumble of a train--how good all these sounds are! They have all come
to me again this week with renewed freshness and impressiveness. I am
living deep again!
It was not, indeed, until last Wednesday that I began to get my fill,
temporarily, of the outward satisfaction of the Road--the primeval
takings of the senses--the mere joys of seeing, hearing, smelling,
touching. But on that day I began to wake up; I began to have a desire
to know something of all the strange and interesting people who are
working in their fields, or standing invitingly in their doorways, or so
busily afoot in the country roads. Let me add, also, for this is one of
the most important parts of my present experience, that this new desire
was far from being wholly esoteric. I had also begun to have cravings
which would not in the least be satisfied by landscapes or dulled by the
sights and sounds of the road. A whiff here and there from a doorway
at mealtime had made me long for my own home, for the sight of Harriet
calling from the steps:
“Dinner, David.”
But I had covenanted with myself long before starting that I would
literally “live light in spring.” It was the one and primary condition I
made with myself--and made with serious purpose--and when I came away I
had only enough money in my pocket and sandwiches in my pack to see me
through the first three or four days. Any man may brutally pay his way
anywhere, but it is quite another thing to be accepted by your humankind
not as a paid lodger but as a friend. Always, it seems to me, I have
wanted to submit myself, and indeed submit the stranger, to that test.
Moreover, how can any man look for true adventure in life if he always
knows to a certainty where his next meal is coming from? In a world so
completely dominated by goods, by things, by possessions, and smothered
by security, what fine adventure is left to a man of spirit save the
adventure of poverty?
I do not mean by this the adventure of involuntary poverty, for I
maintain that involuntary poverty, like involuntary riches, is a credit
to no man. It is only as we dominate life that we really live. What I
mean here, if I may so express it, is an adventure in achieved poverty.
In the lives of such true men as Francis of Assisi and Tolstoi, that
which draws the world to them in secret sympathy is not that they lived
lives of poverty, but rather, having riches at their hands, or for the
very asking, that they chose poverty as the better way of life.
As for me, I do not in the least pretend to have accepted the final
logic of an achieved poverty. I have merely abolished temporarily from
my life a few hens and cows, a comfortable old farmhouse, and--certain
other emoluments and hereditaments--but remain the slave of sundry cloth
upon my back and sundry articles in my gray bag--including a fat pocket
volume or so, and a tin whistle. Let them pass now. To-morrow I may wish
to attempt life with still less. I might survive without my battered
copy of “Montaigne” or even submit to existence without that sense
of distant companionship symbolized by a postage-stamp, and as for
trousers--
In this deceptive world, how difficult of attainment is perfection!
No, I expect I shall continue for a long time to owe the worm his silk,
the beast his hide, the sheep his wool, and the cat his perfume! What
I am seeking is something as simple and as quiet as the trees or the
hills--just to look out around me at the pleasant countryside, to enjoy
a little of this show, to meet (and to help a little if I may) a few
human beings, and thus to get nearly into the sweet kernel of human
life. My friend, you may or may not think this a worthy object; if
you do not, stop here, go no further with me; but if you do, why, we'll
exchange great words on the road; we'll look up at the sky together,
we'll see and hear the finest things in this world! We'll enjoy the sun!
We'll live light in spring!
Until last Tuesday, then, I was carried easily and comfortably onward
by the corn, the eggs, and the honey of my past labours, and before
Wednesday noon I began to experience in certain vital centres
recognizable symptoms of a variety of discomfort anciently familiar to
man. And it was all the sharper because I did not know how or where I
could assuage it. In all my life, in spite of various ups and downs in
a fat world, I don't think I was ever before genuinely hungry. Oh, I've
been hungry in a reasonable, civilized way, but I have always known
where in an hour or so I could get all I wanted to eat--a condition
accountable, in this world, I am convinced, for no end of stupidity. But
to be both physically and, let us say, psychologically hungry, and not
to know where or how to get anything to eat, adds something to the zest
of life.
By noon on Wednesday, then, I was reduced quite to a point of necessity.
But where was I to begin, and how? I know from long experience the
suspicion with which the ordinary farmer meets the Man of the Road--the
man who appears to wish to enjoy the fruits of the earth without working
for them with his hands. It is a distrust deep-seated and ages old. Nor
can the Man of the Road ever quite understand the Man of the Fields. And
here was I, for so long the stationary Man of the Fields, essaying
the role of the Man of the Road. I experienced a sudden sense of the
enlivenment of the faculties: I must now depend upon wit or cunning or
human nature to win my way, not upon mere skill of the hand or strength
in the bent back. Whereas in my former life, when I was assailed by a
Man of the Road, whether tramp or peddler or poet, I had only to stand
stock-still within my fences and say nothing--though indeed I never
could do that, being far too much interested in every one who came my
way--and the invader was soon repelled. There is nothing so resistant as
the dull security of possession the stolidity of ownership!
Many times that day I stopped by a field side or at the end of a lane,
or at a house-gate, and considered the possibilities of making an
attack. Oh, I measured the houses and barns I saw with a new eye! The
kind of country I had known so long and familiarly became a new and
foreign land, full of strange possibilities. I spied out the men in the
fields and did not fail, also, to see what I could of the commissary
department of each farmstead as I passed. I walked for miles looking
thus for a favourable opening--and with a sensation of embarrassment at
once disagreeable and pleasurable. As the afternoon began to deepen I
saw that I must absolutely do something: a whole day tramping in the
open air without a bite to eat is an irresistible argument.
Presently I saw from the road a farmer and his son planting potatoes in
a sloping field. There was no house at all in view. At the bars stood a
light wagon half filled with bags of seed potatoes, and the horse which
had drawn it stood quietly, not far off, tied to the fence. The man and
the boy, each with a basket on his arm, were at the farther end of the
field, dropping potatoes. I stood quietly watching them. They stepped
quickly and kept their eyes on the furrows: good workers. I liked the
looks of them. I liked also the straight, clean furrows; I liked the
appearance of the horse.
“I will stop here,” I said to myself.
I cannot at all convey the sense of high adventure I had as I stood
there. Though I had not the slightest idea of what I should do or say,
yet I was determined upon the attack.
Neither father nor son saw me until they had nearly reached the end of
the field.
“Step lively, Ben,” I heard the man say with some impatience; “we've got
to finish this field to-day.”
“I AM steppin' lively, dad,” responded the boy, “but it's awful hot. We
can't possibly finish to-day. It's too much.”
“We've got to get through here to-day,” the man replied grimly; “we're
already two weeks late.”
I know just how the man felt; for I knew well the difficulty a farmer
has in getting help in planting time. The spring waits for no man. My
heart went out to the man and boy struggling there in the heat of their
field. For this is the real warfare of the common life.
“Why,” I said to myself with a curious lift of the heart, “they have
need of a fellow just like me.”
At that moment the boy saw me and, missing a step in the rhythm of the
planting, the father also looked up and saw me. But neither said a word
until the furrows were finished, and the planters came to refill their
baskets.
“Fine afternoon,” I said, sparring for an opening.
“Fine,” responded the man rather shortly, glancing up from his work. I
recalled the scores of times I had been exactly in his place, and had
glanced up to see the stranger in the road.
“Got another basket handy?” I asked.
“There is one somewhere around here,” he answered not too cordially. The
boy said nothing at all, but eyed me with absorbing interest. The gloomy
look had already gone from his face.
I slipped my gray bag from my shoulder, took off my coat, and put them
both down inside the fence. Then I found the basket and began to fill it
from one of the bags. Both man and boy looked up at me questioningly. I
enjoyed the situation immensely.
“I heard you say to your son,” I said, “that you'd have to hurry in
order to get in your potatoes to-day. I can see that for myself. Let me
take a hand for a row or two.”
The unmistakable shrewd look of the bargainer came suddenly into the
man's face, but when I went about my business without hesitation or
questioning, he said nothing at all. As for the boy, the change in his
countenance was marvellous to see. Something new and astonishing had
come into the world. Oh, I know what a thing it is to be a boy and to
work in trouting time!
“How near are you planting, Ben?” I asked.
“About fourteen inches.”
So we began in fine spirits. I was delighted with the favourable
beginning of my enterprise; there is nothing which so draws men together
as their employment at a common task.
Ben was a lad some fifteen years old-very stout and stocky, with a fine
open countenance and a frank blue eye--all boy. His nose was as freckled
as the belly of a trout. The whole situation, including the prospect of
help in finishing a tiresome job, pleased him hugely. He stole a glimpse
from time to time at me then at his father. Finally he said:
“Say, you'll have to step lively to keep up with dad.”
“I'll show you,” I said, “how we used to drop potatoes when I was a
boy.”
And with that I began to step ahead more quickly and make the pieces
fairly fly.
“We old fellows,” I said to the father, “must give these young sprouts a
lesson once in a while.”
“You will, will you?” responded the boy, and instantly began to drop the
potatoes at a prodigious speed. The father followed with more dignity,
but with evident amusement, and so we all came with a rush to the end of
the row.
“I guess that beats the record across THIS field!” remarked the lad,
puffing and wiping his forehead. “Say, but you're a good one!”
It gave me a peculiar thrill of pleasure; there is nothing more pleasing
than the frank admiration of a boy.
We paused a moment and I said to the man: “This looks like fine potato
land.”
“The' ain't any better in these parts,” he replied with some pride in
his voice.
And so we went at the planting again: and as we planted we had great
talk of seed potatoes and the advantages and disadvantages of mechanical
planters, of cultivating and spraying, and all the lore of prices and
profits. Once we stopped at the lower end of the field to get a drink
from a jug of water set in the shade of a fence corner, and once we set
the horse in the thills and moved the seed farther up the field. And
tired and hungry as I felt I really enjoyed the work; I really enjoyed
talking with this busy father and son, and I wondered what their home
life was like and what were their real ambitions and hopes. Thus the sun
sank lower and lower, the long shadows began to creep into the valleys,
and we came finally toward the end of the field. Suddenly the boy Ben
cried out:
“There's Sis!”
I glanced up and saw standing near the gateway a slim, bright girl of
about twelve in a fresh gingham dress.
“We're coming!” roared Ben, exultantly.
While we were hitching up the horse, the man said to me:
“You'll come down with us and have some supper.”
“Indeed I will,” I replied, trying not to make my response too eager.
“Did mother make gingerbread to-day?” I heard the boy whisper audibly.
“Sh-h--” replied the girl, “who is that man?”
“_I_ don't know” with a great accent of mystery--“and dad don't know.
Did mother make gingerbread?”
“Sh-h--he'll hear you.”
“Gee! but he can plant potatoes. He dropped down on us out of a clear
sky.”
“What is he?” she asked. “A tramp?”
“Nope, not a tramp. He works. But, Sis, did mother make gingerbread?”
So we all got into the light wagon and drove briskly out along the shady
country road. The evening was coming on, and the air was full of the
scent of blossoms. We turned finally into a lane and thus came promptly,
for the horse was as eager as we, to the capacious farmyard. A motherly
woman came out from the house, spoke to her son, and nodded pleasantly
to me. There was no especial introduction. I said merely, “My name is
Grayson,” and I was accepted without a word.
I waited to help the man, whose name I had now learned--it was
Stanley--with his horse and wagon, and then we came up to the house.
Near the back door there was a pump, with a bench and basin set just
within a little cleanly swept, open shed. Rolling back my collar and
baring my arms I washed myself in the cool water, dashing it over my
head until I gasped, and then stepping back, breathless and refreshed,
I found the slim girl, Mary, at my elbow with a clean soft towel. As
I stood wiping quietly I could smell the ambrosial odours from the
kitchen. In all my life I never enjoyed a moment more than that, I
think.
“Come in now,” said the motherly Mrs. Stanley.
So we filed into the roomy kitchen, where an older girl, called Kate,
was flying about placing steaming dishes upon the table. There was also
an older son, who had been at the farm chores. It was altogether a fine,
vigorous, independent American family. So we all sat down and drew up
our chairs. Then we paused a moment, and the father, bowing his head,
said in a low voice:
“For all Thy good gifts, Lord, we thank Thee. Preserve us and keep us
through another night.”
I suppose it was a very ordinary farm meal, but it seems to me I never
tasted a better one. The huge piles of new baked bread, the sweet farm
butter, already delicious with the flavour of new grass, the bacon and
eggs, the potatoes, the rhubarb sauce, the great plates of new, hot
gingerbread and, at the last, the custard pie--a great wedge of it, with
fresh cheese. After the first ravenous appetite of hardworking men was
satisfied, there came to be a good deal of lively conversation. The
girls had some joke between them which Ben was trying in vain to fathom.
The older son told how much milk a certain Alderney cow had given,
and Mr. Stanley, quite changed now as he sat at his own table from the
rather grim farmer of the afternoon, revealed a capacity for a husky
sort of fun, joking Ben about his potato-planting and telling in a
lively way of his race with me. As for Mrs. Stanley, she sat smiling
behind her tall coffee pot, radiating good cheer and hospitality. They
asked me no questions at all, and I was so hungry and tired that I
volunteered no information.
After supper we went out for half or three quarters of an hour to do
some final chores, and Mr. Stanley and I stopped in the cattle yard and
looked over the cows, and talked learnedly about the pigs, and I admired
his spring calves to his hearts content, for they really were a
fine lot. When we came in again the lamps had been lighted in the
sitting-room and the older daughter was at the telephone exchanging
the news of the day with some neighbour--and with great laughter and
enjoyment. Occasionally she would turn and repeat some bit of gossip to
the family, and Mrs. Stanley would claim:
“Do tell!”
“Can't we have a bit of music to-night?” inquired Mr. Stanley.
Instantly Ben and the slim girl, Mary, made a wild dive for the front
room--the parlour--and came out with a first-rate phonograph which they
placed on the table.
“Something lively now,” said Mr. Stanley.
So they put on a rollicking negro song called. “My Georgia Belle,”
which, besides the tuneful voices, introduced a steamboat whistle and
a musical clangour of bells. When it wound up with a bang, Mr. Stanley
took his big comfortable pipe out of his mouth and cried out:
“Fine, fine!”
We had further music of the same sort and with one record the older
daughter, Kate, broke into the song with a full, strong though
uncultivated voice--which pleased us all very much indeed.
Presently Mrs. Stanley, who was sitting under the lamp with a basket of
socks to mend, began to nod.
“Mother's giving the signal,” said the older son.
“No, no, I'm not a bit sleepy,” exclaimed Mrs. Stanley.
But with further joking and laughing the family began to move about. The
older daughter gave me a hand lamp and showed me the way upstairs to a
little room at the end of the house.
“I think,” she said with pleasant dignity, “you will find everything you
need.”
I cannot tell with what solid pleasure I rolled into bed or how soundly
and sweetly I slept.
This was the first day of my real adventures.