tinkling of tiny bells all about me that were set to swinging as I
moved along. The crusted snow was strewn with them; every twig was
hung, and every pearl-bent grass blade. Then off through the woods
rang the chime of louder bells, sleigh bells; then the shrill squeal of
iron runners over dry snow; then the broken voices of men; and soon
through the winding wood road came the horses, their bay coats white,
as all things were, with the glittering dust of the hoar frost.
It was beautiful work. The mid-afternoon found us in the thick of a
whirling storm, the grip of the cold relaxed, the woods abloom with the
clinging snow. But the crop was nearly in. High and higher rose the
cold blue cakes within the ice-house doors until they touched the
rafter plate.
It was hard work. The horses pulled hard; the men swore hard, now and
again, and worked harder than they swore. They were rough, simple men,
crude and elemental like their labor. It was elemental work--filling a
house with ice, three hundred-pound cakes of clean, clear ice, cut from
the pond, skidded into the pungs, and hauled through the woods all
white, and under a sky all gray, with softly-falling snow. They earned
their penny; and I earned my penny, and I got it, though I asked only
the wages of going on from dawn to dark, down the crystal hours of the
day.
[Illustration: Seed catalogues]
IV
SEED CATALOGUES
"The new number of the 'Atlantic' came to-day," She said, stopping by
the table. "It has your essay in it."
"Yes?" I replied, only half hearing.
"You have seen it, then?"
"No"--still absorbed in my reading.
"What is it you are so interested in?" she inquired, laying down the
new magazine.
"A seed catalogue."
"More seed catalogues! Why, you read nothing else last night."
"But this is a new one," I replied, "and I declare I never saw turnips
that could touch this improved strain here. I am going to plant a lot
of them this year."
"How many seed catalogues have you had this spring?"
"Only six, so far."
"And you plant your earliest seeds--"
"In April, the middle of April, though I may be able to get my first
peas in by the last of March. You see peas"--she was backing
away--"this new Antarctic Pea--will stand a lot of cold; but beans--do
come here, and look at these Improved Kentucky Wonder Pole Beans!"
holding out the wonderfully lithographed page toward her. But she
backed still farther away, and, putting her hands behind her, looked at
me instead, and very solemnly.
I suppose every man comes to know that unaccountable expression in his
wife's eyes soon or late: a sad, baffled expression, detached, remote,
as of things seen darkly, or descried afar off; an expression which
leaves you feeling that you are afar off,--discernible, but infinitely
dwindled. Two minds with but a single thought--so you start; but soon
she finds, or late, that as the heavens are high above the earth, so
are some of your thoughts above her thoughts. She cannot follow. On
the brink she stands and sees you, through the starry spaces, drift
from her ken in your fleet of--seed catalogues.
I have never been able to explain to her the seed catalogue. She is as
fond of vegetables as I, and neither of us cares much for turnips--nor
for carrots, nor parsnips either, when it comes to that, our two hearts
at the table beating happily as one. Born in the country, she
inherited a love of the garden, but a feminine garden, the garden
_parvus, minor, minimus_--so many cut-worms long, so many cut-worms
wide. I love a garden of size, a garden that one cut-worm cannot sweep
down upon in the night.
For years I have wanted to be a farmer, but there in the furrow ahead
of me, like a bird on its nest, she has sat with her knitting; and when
I speak of loving long rows to hoe, she smiles and says, "For the
_boys_ to hoe." Her unit of garden measure is a meal--so many beet
seeds for a meal; so many meals for a row, with never two rows of
anything, with hardly a full-length row of anything, and with all the
rows of different lengths, as if gardening were a sort of geometry or a
problem in arithmetic, figuring your vegetable with the meal for a
common divisor--how many times it will go into all your rows without
leaving a remainder!
Now I go by the seed catalogue, planting, not after the dish, as if my
only vision were a garden peeled and in the pot, but after the Bush.,
Peck, Qt., Pt., Lb., Oz., Pkg.,--so many pounds to the acre, instead of
so many seeds to the meal.
And I have tried to show her that gardening is something of a risk,
attended by chance, and no such exact science as dressmaking; that you
cannot sow seeds as you can sew buttons; that the seed-man has no
machine for putting sure-sprout-humps into each of his minute wares as
the hook-and-eye-man has; that with all wisdom and understanding one
could do no better than to buy (as I am careful to do) out of that
catalogue whose title reads "Honest Seeds"; and that even the Sower in
Holy Writ allowed somewhat for stony places and other inherent hazards
of planting time.
But she follows only afar off, affirming the primary meaning of that
parable to be plainly set forth in the context, while the secondary
meaning pointeth out the folly of sowing seed anywhere save on good
ground--which seemed to be only about one quarter of the area in the
parable that was planted; and that anyhow, seed catalogues, especially
those in colors, designed as they are to catch the simple-minded and
unwary, need to be looked into by the post-office authorities and if
possible kept from all city people, and from college professors in
particular.
She is entirely right about the college professors. Her understanding
is based upon years of observation and the patient cooking of uncounted
pots of beans.
I confess to a weakness for gardening and no sense at all of proportion
in vegetables. I can no more resist a seed catalogue than a toper can
his cup. There is no game, no form of exercise, to compare for a
moment in my mind with having a row of young growing things in a patch
of mellow soil; no possession so sure, so worth while, so interesting
as a piece of land. The smell of it, the feel of it, the call of it,
intoxicate me. The rows are never long enough, nor the hours, nor the
muscles strong enough either, when there is hoeing to do.
Why should she not take it as a solemn duty to save me from the hoe?
Man is an immoderate animal, especially in the spring when the doors of
his classroom are about to open for him into the wide and greening
fields. There is only one place to live,--here in the hills of
Hingham; and there is nothing better to do here or anywhere, than the
hoeing, or the milking, or the feeding of the hens.
A professor in the small college of Slimsalaryville tells in a recent
magazine of his long hair and no dress suit, and of his wife's doing
the washing in order that they might have bread and the "Eugenic
Review" on a salary of twelve hundred dollars a year. It is a sad
story, in the midst of which he exclaims: "I may even get to the place
where I can _spare time_ (italics mine) to keep chickens or a cow, and
that would help immensely; but I am so constituted that chickens or a
cow would certainly cripple my work." How cripple it? Is n't it his
work to _teach_? Far from it. "Let there be light," he says at the
end of the essay, is his work, and he adds that he has been so busy
with it that he is on the verge of a nervous break-down. Of course he
is. Who would n't be with that job? And of course he has n't a
constitution for chickens and a cow. But neither does he seem to have
constitution enough for the light-giving either, being ready to
collapse from his continuous shining.
But isn't this the case with many of us? Aren't we overworking--doing
our own simple job of teaching and, besides that, taking upon ourselves
the Lord's work of letting there be light?
I have come to the conclusion that there might not be any less light
were the Lord allowed to do his own shining, and that probably there
might be quite as good teaching if the teacher stuck humbly to his
desk, and after school kept chickens and a cow. The egg-money and
cream "would help immensely," even the Professor admits, the
Professor's wife fully concurring no doubt.
Don't we all take ourselves a little seriously--we college professors
and others? As if the Lord could not continue to look after his light,
if we looked after our students! It is only in these last years that I
have learned that I can go forth unto my work and to my labor until the
evening, quitting then, and getting home in time to feed the chickens
and milk the cow. I am a professional man, and I dwell in the midst of
professional men, all of whom are inclined to help the Lord out by
working after dark--all of whom are really in dire constitutional need
of the early roosting chickens and the quiet, ruminating cow.
To walk humbly with the hens, that's the thing--after the classes are
dismissed and the office closed. To get out of the city, away from
books, and theories, and students, and patients, and clients, and
customers--back to real things, simple, restful, healthful things for
body and soul, homely domestic things that lay eggs at 70 cents per
dozen, and make butter at $2.25 the 5-pound box! As for me, this does
"help immensely," affording me all necessary hair-cuts (I don't want
the "Eugenic Review"), and allowing Her to send the family washing
(except the flannels) to the laundry.
Instead of crippling normal man's normal work, country living (chickens
and a cow) will prevent his work from crippling him--keeping him a
little from his students and thus saving him from too much teaching;
keeping him from reading the "Eugenic Review" and thus saving him from
too much learning; curing him, in short, of his "constitution" that is
bound to come to some sort of a collapse unless rested and saved by
chickens and a cow.
"By not too many chickens," she would add; and there is no one to match
her with a chicken--fried, stewed, or turned into pie.
The hens are no longer mine, the boys having taken them over; but the
gardening I can't give up, nor the seed catalogues.
The one in my hands was exceptionally radiant, and exceptionally full
of Novelties and Specialties for the New Year, among them being an
extraordinary new pole bean--an Improved Kentucky Wonder. She had
backed away, as I have said, and instead of looking at the page of
beans, looked solemnly at me; then with something sorrowful, something
somewhat Sunday-like in her voice, an echo, I presume, of lessons in
the Catechism, she asked me--
"Who makes you plant beans?"
"My dear," I began, "I--"
"How many meals of pole beans did we eat last summer?"
"I--don't--re--"
"Three--just three," she answered. "And I think you must remember how
many of that row of poles we picked?"
"Why, yes, I--"
"Three--just three out of thirty poles! Now, do you think you remember
how many bushels of those beans went utterly unpicked?"
I was visibly weakening by this time.
"Three--do you think?"
"Multiply that three by three-times-three! And now tell me--"
But this was too much.
"My dear," I protested, "I recollect exactly. It was--"
"No, I don't believe you do. I cannot trust you at all with beans.
But I should like to know why you plant ten or twelve kinds of beans
when the only kind we like are limas!"
"Why--the--catalogue advises--"
"Yes, the catalogue advises--"
"You don't seem to understand, my dear, that--"
"Now, _why_ don't I understand?"
I paused. This is always a hard question, and peculiarly hard as the
end of a series, and on a topic as difficult as beans. I don't know
beans. There is little or nothing about beans in the history of
philosophy or in poetry. Thoreau says that when he was hoeing his
beans it was not beans that he hoed nor he that hoed beans--which was
the only saying that came to mind at the moment, and under the
circumstances did not seem to help me much.
"Well," I replied, fumbling among my stock of ready-made reasons,
"I--really--don't--know exactly why you don't understand. Indeed, I
really don't know--that _I_ exactly understand. _Everything_ is full
of things that even I can't understand--how to explain my tendency to
plant all kinds of beans, for instance; or my 'weakness,' as you call
it, for seed catalogues; or--"
She opened her magazine, and I hastened to get the stool for her feet.
As I adjusted the light for her she said:--
"Let me remind you that this is the night of the annual banquet of your
Swampatalk Club; you don't intend to forego that famous roast beef for
the seed catalogues?"
"I did n't intend to, but I must say that literature like this is
enough to make a man a vegetarian. Look at that page for an
old-fashioned New England Boiled Dinner! Such carrots. Really _they_
look good enough to eat. I think I 'll plant some of those improved
carrots; and some of these parsnips; and some--"
"You had better go get ready," she said, "and please put that big stick
on the fire for me," drawing the lamp toward her, as she spoke, so that
all of its green-shaded light fell over her--over the silver in her
hair, with its red rose; over the pink and lacy thing that wrapped her
from her sweet throat to the silver stars on her slippers.
"I'm not going to that Club!" I said. "I have talked myself for three
hours to-day, attended two conferences, and listened to one address.
There were three different societies for the general improving of
things that met at the University halls to-day with big speakers from
the ends of the earth. To-morrow night I address The First Century
Club in the city after a dinner with the New England Teachers of
English Monthly Luncheon Club--and I would like to know what we came
out here in the woods for, anyhow?"
"If you are going--" She was speaking calmly.
"Going where?" I replied, picking up the seed catalogues to make room
for myself on the couch. "_Please_ look at this pumpkin! Think of
what a jack-o'-lantern it would make for the boys! I am going to
plant--"
"You 'll be cold," she said, rising and drawing a steamer rug up over
me; then laying the open magazine across my shoulders while giving the
pillow a motherly pull, she added, with a sigh of contentment:--
"Perhaps, if it had n't been for me, you might have been a great
success with pumpkins or pigs--I don't know."
[Illustration: The Dustless-Duster]
V
THE DUSTLESS-DUSTER
There are beaters, brooms and Bissell's Sweepers; there are dry-mops,
turkey-wings, whisks, and vacuum-cleaners; there are--but no matter.
Whatever other things there are, and however many of them in the
closet, the whole dust-raising kit is incomplete without the
Dustless-Duster.
For the Dustless-Duster is final, absolute. What can be added to, or
taken away from, a Dustless-Duster? A broom is only a broom, even a
new broom. Its sphere is limited; its work is partial. Dampened and
held persistently down by the most expert of sweepers, the broom still
leaves something for the Dustless-Duster to do. But the
Dustless-Duster leaves nothing for anything to do. The dusting is done.
Because there are many who dust, and because they have searched in vain
for a dustless-duster, I should like to say that the Dustless-Duster
can be bought at department stores, at those that have a full line of
departments--at any department store, in fact; for the Dustless-Duster
department is the largest of all the departments, whatever the store.
Ask for it of your jeweler, grocer, milliner. Ask for "The Ideal,"
"The Universal," "The Indispensable," of any man with anything to sell
or preach or teach, and you shall have it--the perfect thing which you
have spent life looking for; which you have thought so often to have,
but found as often that you had not. You shall have it. I have it.
One hangs, rather, in the kitchen on the clothes-dryer.
And one (more than one) hangs in the kitchen closet, and in the cellar,
and in the attic. I have often brought it home, for my search has been
diligent since a certain day, years ago,--a "Commencement Day" at the
Institute.
I had never attended a Commencement exercise before; I had never been
in an opera house before; and the painted light through the roof of
windows high overhead, the strains of the orchestra from far below me,
the banks of broad-leaved palms, the colors, the odors, the confusion
of flowers and white frocks, were strangely thrilling. Nothing had
ever happened to me in the woods like this: the exaltation, the
depression, the thrill of joy, the throb of pain, the awakening, the
wonder, the purpose, and the longing! It was all a dream--all but the
form and the face of one girl graduate, and the title of her essay,
"The Real and the Ideal."
I do not know what large and lofty sentiments she uttered; I only
remember the way she looked them. I did not hear the words she read;
but I still feel the absolute fitness of her theme--how real her simple
white frock, her radiant face, her dark hair! And how ideal!
I had seen perfection. Here was the absolute, the final, the ideal,
the indispensable! And I was fourteen! Now I am past forty; and upon
the kitchen clothes-dryer hangs the Dustless-Duster.
No, I have not lost the vision. The daughter of that girl, the image
of her mother, slipped into my classroom the other day. Nor have I
faltered in the quest. The search goes on, and must go on; for however
often I get it, only to cast it aside, the indispensable, the ultimate,
must continue to be indispensable and ultimate, until, some day--
What matters how many times I have had it, to discover every time that
it is only a piece of cheesecloth, ordinary cheesecloth, dyed black and
stamped with red letters? The search must go on, notwithstanding the
clutter in the kitchen closet. The cellar is crowded with
Dustless-Dusters, too; the garret is stuffed with them. There is
little else besides them anywhere in the house. And this was an empty
house when I moved into it, a few years ago.
As I moved in, an old man moved out, back to the city whence a few
years before he had come; and he took back with him twelve two-horse
wagon-loads of Dustless-Dusters. He had spent a long life collecting
them, and now, having gathered all there were in the country, he was
going back to the city, in a last pathetic, a last heroic, effort to
find the one Dustless-Duster more.
It was the old man's twelve two-horse loads that were pathetic. There
were many sorts of things in those twelve loads, of many lands, of many
dates, but all of one stamp. The mark was sometimes hard to find,
corroded sometimes nearly past deciphering, yet never quite gone. The
red letters were indelible on every piece, from the gross of antique
candle-moulds (against the kerosene's giving out) to an ancient
coffin-plate, far oxidized, and engraved "Jones," which, the old man
said, as he pried it off the side of the barn, "might come in handy any
day."
The old man has since died and been laid to rest. Upon his coffin was
set a new silver plate, engraved simply and truthfully, "Brown."
We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain, says Holy Writ,
that we can carry nothing out. But it is also certain that we shall
attempt to carry out, or try to find as soon as we are out, a
Dustless-Duster. For we did bring something with us into this world,
losing it temporarily, to be forever losing and finding it; and when we
go into another world, will it not be to carry the thing with us there,
or to continue there our eternal search for it? We are not so certain
of carrying nothing out of this world, but we are certain of leaving
many things behind.
Among those that I shall leave behind me is The Perfect Automatic
Carpet-Layer. But I did not buy that. She did. It was one of the
first of our perfections.
We have more now. I knew as I entered the house that night that
something had happened; that the hope of the early dawn had died, for
some cause, with the dusk. The trouble showed in her eyes: mingled
doubt, chagrin, self-accusation, self-defense, defeat--familiar
symptoms. She had seen something, something perfect, and had bought it.
I knew the look well, and the feelings all too well, and said nothing.
For suppose I had been at home that day and she had been in town?
Still, on my trip into town that morning I ran the risk of meeting the
man who sold me "The Magic Stropless Razor Salve." No, not that man!
I shall never meet him again, for vengeance is mine, saith the _Lord_.
But suppose I had met him? And suppose he had had some other salve,
_Safety_ Razor Salve this time to sell?
It is for young men to see visions and for old men to dream dreams; but
it is for no man or woman to buy one.
She had seen a vision, and had bought it--"The Perfect Automatic
Carpet-Layer."
I kept silence, as I say, which is often a thoughtful thing to do.
"Are you ill?" she ventured, handing me my tea.
"No."
"Tired?"
"No."
"I hope you are not very tired, for the Parsonage Committee brought the
new carpet this afternoon, and I have started to put it down. I
thought we would finish it this evening. It won't be any work at all
for you, for I--I--bought you one of these to-day to put it down
with,"--pushing an illustrated circular across the table toward me.
ANY CHILD CAN USE IT
THE PERFECT AUTOMATIC CARPET-LAYER
No more carpet-laying bills. Do your own laying. No wrinkles. No
crowded corners. No sore knees. No pounded fingers. No broken backs.
Stand up and lay your carpet with the Perfect Automatic. Easy as
sweeping. Smooth as putting paper on the wall. You hold the handle,
and the Perfect Automatic does the rest. Patent Applied For. Price--
--but it was not the price! It was the tool--a weird hybrid tool, part
gun, part rake, part catapult, part curry-comb, fit apparently for
almost any purpose, from the business of blunderbuss to the office of
an apple-picker. Its handle, which any child could hold, was somewhat
shorter and thicker than a hoe-handle, and had a slotted tin barrel, a
sort of intestine, on its ventral side along its entire length. Down
this intestine, their points sticking through the slot, moved the tacks
in single file to a spring-hammer close to the floor. This hammer was
operated by a lever or tongue at the head of the handle, the connection
between the hammer at the distal end and the lever at the proximal end
being effected by means of a steel-wire spinal cord down the dorsal
side of the handle. Over the fist of a hammer spread a jaw of sharp
teeth to take hold of the carpet. The thing could not talk; but it
could do almost anything else, so fearfully and wonderfully was it made.
As for laying carpets with it, any child could do that. But we did n't
have any children then, and I had quite outgrown my childhood. I tried
to be a boy again just for that night. I grasped the handle of the
Perfect Automatic, stretched with our united strength, and pushed down
on the lever. The spring-hammer drew back, a little trap or mouth at
the end of the slotted tin barrel opened for the tack, the tack jumped
out, turned over, landed point downward upon the right spot in the
carpet, the crouching hammer sprang, and--
And then I lifted up the Perfect Automatic to see if the tack went
in,--a simple act that any child could do, but which took automatically
and perfectly all the stretch out of the carpet; for the hammer did not
hit the tack; the tack really did not get through the trap; the trap
did not open the slot; the slot--but no matter. We have no carpets
now. The Perfect Automatic stands in the garret with all its original
varnish on. At its feet sits a half-used can of "Beesene, The Prince
of Floor Pastes."
We have only hard-wood floors now, which we treated, upon the strength
of the label, with this Prince of Pastes, "Beesene"--"guaranteed not to
show wear or dirt or to grow gritty; water-proof, gravel-proof. No rug
will ruck on it, no slipper stick to it. Needs no weighted brush.
Self-shining. The only perfect Floor Wax known. One box will do all
the floors you have."
Indeed, half a box did all the floors we have. No slipper would stick
to the paste, but the paste would stick to the slipper; and the greasy
Prince did in spots all the floors we have: the laundry floor, the
attic floor, and the very boards of the vegetable cellar.
I am young yet. I have not had time to collect my twelve two-horse
loads. But I am getting them fast.
Only the other day a tall lean man came to the side door, asking after
my four boys by name, and inquiring when my new book would be off the
stocks, and, incidentally, showing me a patent-applied-for device
called "The Fat Man's Friend."
"The Friend" was a steel-wire hoop, shaped and jointed like a pair of
calipers, but knobbed at its points with little metal balls. The
instrument was made to open and spring closed about the Fat Man's neck,
and to hold, by means of a clasp on each side, a napkin, or bib, spread
securely over the Fat Man's bosom.