This ends the section of my letters home that in themselves make a
consecutive story. But to finish with a bit of a nosegay, and show one
of the unexpected rewards of troubadouring, let me tell the tale of
the Five Little Children Eating Mush.
One should not be so vain as to recount a personal triumph. Still this
is a personal triumph. And I shall tell it with all pride and vanity.
Let those who dislike a conceited man drop the book right here.
I had walked all day straight west from Rocky Ford. It was pitch dark,
threatening rain--the rain that never comes. It was nearly ten
o'clock. At six I had entered a village, but had later resolved to
press on to visit a man to whom I had a letter of introduction from
my loyal friend Dr. Barbour of Rocky Ford.
There had been a wash-out. I had to walk around it, and was
misdirected by the good villagers and was walking merrily on toward
nowhere. Around nine o'clock I had been refused lodging at three
different shanties. But from long experience I knew that something
would turn up in a minute. And it did.
I walked right into the fat sides of a big country hotel on that
interminable plain. It was not surrounded by a village. It was simply
a clean hostelrie for the transient hands who worked at irrigating in
that region.
I asked the looming figure I met in the dark: "Where is the boss of
this place?"
"I am the boss." He had a Scandinavian twist to his tongue.
"I want a night's lodging. I will give in exchange an entertainment
this evening, or half a day's work to-morrow."
"Come in."
I followed him up the outside stairway to the dining-room in the
second story. There was his wife, a woman who greeted me cheerfully in
the Scandinavian accent. She was laughing at her five little children
who were laughing at her and eating their mush and milk.
Presumably the boarders had been delayed by their work, and had dined
late. The children were at it still later.
They were real Americans, those little birds. And they had memories
like parrots, as will appear.
"Wife," said the landlord, "here is a man that will entertain us
to-night for his keep, or work for us to-morrow. I think we will take
the entertainment to-night. Go ahead, mister. Here are the kids. Now
listen, kids."
To come out of the fathomless, friendless dark and, almost in an
instant, to look into such expectant fairy faces! They were laughing,
laughing, laughing, not in mockery, but companionship. I recited every
child-piece I had ever written--(not many).
They kept quite still till the end of each one. Then they pounded the
table for more, with their tin spoons and their little red fists.
So, with misgivings, I began to recite some of my fairy-tales for
grown-ups. I spoke slowly, to make the externals of each story plain.
The audience squealed for more.... I decided to recite six jingles
about the moon, that I had written long ago: How the Hyæna said the
Moon was a Golden Skull, and how the Shepherd Dog contradicted him and
said it was a Candle in the Sky--and all that and all that.
The success of the move was remarkable because I had never pleased
either grown folks or children to any extent with those verses. But
these children, through the accumulated excitements of a day that I
knew nothing about, were in an ecstatic imaginative condition of soul
that transmuted everything.
The last of the series recounted what Grandpa Mouse said to the Little
Mice on the Moon question. I arranged the ketchup bottle on the edge
of the table for Grandpa Mouse. I used the salts and peppers for the
little mice in circle round. I used a black hat or so for the
swooping, mouse-eating owls that came down from the moon. Having acted
out the story first, I recited it, slowly, mind you. Here it is: