[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
Whitehall has romantic appeal, for a number of reasons. It was once the
home of Mrs. C. C. White, pioneer Lincoln resident and Methodist, and,
in its calico and cornbread days, one of Lincoln’s first young ladies.
When in later years one of the White daughters became the wife of an
Italian count there was a general pleased feeling of something or
other—as that east and west do sometimes meet, or that it’s just one
step from pioneer to peeress.
Mrs. White, who had presented Wesleyan university with a college
building named for Mr. White, long deceased, later gave Whitehall to the
state as a home for children. There is sometimes romance in Whitehall
even yet. We once wrote a story about the children, picturing the one
red headed child, a good and wistful little boy. The parents of red
haired twin girls, seeing the picture, arranged to adopt him.
It is of course dangerous to expose yourself to childish charm at
Whitehall—you might come away a parent. Forty years ago a train of New
York waifs was sent out thru Nebraska. A woman, feeling idle curiosity,
went down to see the train come into her small town. As she stood on the
platform she noticed a small boy—he is now a Lincoln man—walking forward
and looking up most earnestly at all the people around him. When he saw
this woman he took her hand and said, modestly but confidently, that he
would like her to be his mother. Altho already supplied with a child of
her own, the woman found it impossible to refuse. And, happily, he
turned out to be the best of sons and the finest of men.