By John Knarr

Frazier Hunt graduated from Manchester High School in 1903. As a successful war correspondent, radio commentator and author, Hunt traveled world-wide, interviewing all kinds of persons, from American Presidents to revolutionaries. A historical sign now stands in front of the large brick house on North Mill Street where he lived for ten years during his youth. Hunt even has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, being inducted in 1960.

Frazier Hunt was born on December 1, 1885, in the northwestern Illinois town of Rock Island on the Mississippi River. His mother’s name was Amanda Frazier; his father’s name was Jasper Newton Hunt. Frazier had an older brother named Jasper Newton Hunt, Jr. Seventeen days after Frazier Hunt was born, his mother tragically died.

The little Eel wound and twisted like some giant namesake through this Hoosier town of North Manchester….Eel River ran along one side of the town and then suddenly twisted in a short U-curve and cut in directly back of Main Street. The stores on one side of the street clung to the high riverbank.

Hunt remembers the hired help. Molly was a black nursemaid from Arkansas who delighted in telling ghost stories and scaring the Hunt boys out of their wits. Molly’s health failed and she returned to Arkansas. The new hired girl was a neighbor, Rettie Grossnickle. According to the 1894 Wabash County Directory, Retta Grossnickle lived at the corner of Walnut and Sixth Streets.

Hunt recalls his Uncle’s love for horses, storytelling, and boxing.

If the weather was uncertain Jasper and I would dutifully report at Sunday school. In due course of time we’d relinquish our precious nickels to the red plush maw of the collection basket. But if it was a lovely spring or summer day, the call of the wild was usually too much for us. We’d head straight for town and the fleshpots. These were mostly of two varieties—peanuts from Crip Johnson’s peanut wagon on the corner of the vacant lot beyond the post office, or a salmon sandwich soaked in catsup, at the Star Restaurant [sic; possibly Tilman’s. Oddly, on page 74 Hunt also refers to a Star Restaurant in the small Illinois town of Alexis where he briefly owned and edited a newspaper.]. I never could get enough salmon, and as for catsup it was strictly forbidden on our table. Auntie claimed that such things as catsup and even vinegar were craved only by drunkards.

Uncle always insisted on having his pie on the same plate that he had used for his meat and potatoes. He always said it tasted better that way. He liked to eat pie with his knife, too. Auntie scolded him a good deal about it and told him that it was a bad example to set for us boys. But he stuck to his colors. That is, except when we had company from Chicago—and especially Uncle’s rich sister, Aunt Addie. Auntie tolerated no foolishness from Uncle then. He had to eat his pie with his fork. And he had to carve and serve just as if he always did it.

3 Lot 11 in Edmund Halderman’s Second Addition to North Manchester. On April 3, 1893, J.S. Mathews of Wabash County acquired the property for $2500.00 from John and Dora Domer and John and May Curtner. See Wabash Co. Deed Book 57, Page 365.

A.F. Hunt graduated from the old Central High School in 1903. Hunt became a prominent wartime correspondent, author, radio and television personality. It is especially interesting to read his recollections of the events of 1898 and of other incidents when he was a boy living in North Manchester (1893-1903). This article is Part 2. The first part of Hunt’s recollections was printed in the February issue of the Newsletter. Frazier Hunt’s autobiography was published in 1938 by Simon and Schuster, ONE AMERICAN AND HIS ATTEMPT AT EDUCATION. Because Hunt at times chose not to use actual names of persons, some notes of clarification, correction, and commentary are included. Hunt’s own writings are here italicized.

Note: According to a front page article in the North Manchester Journal (March 15, 1901), "Whoopee Doodle" was the nickname of Charles Colpetzer. Whoopee was once fined in Squire Abbott’s court to the tune of $27 for giving liquor to minors [the boys of Peter Maurer, Hank Lautzenhiser and M. Shaffer]. Some of the local folks were apparently sympathetic to Colpetzer, for the editors wrote, "Owing to the well known easily influenced mental condition of Whoopee the boys are really more to blame than he and the ends of justice would have been better served if a good sound spanking had been administered to each and everyone of them….A collection amounting to about half the fine and cost was taken up and Mr. Maurer, for whom Whoopee works, stayed the docket for the rest to keep him from going to jail." Peter Mowrer was listed in the 1900 Federal Census as a "drayman", living on Fourth Street, and a neighbor to Frank Lavey, the jeweler. From Colpetzer’s World War I Draft Registration Card, we learn that Charley was ten years older than Hunt.

Note: The Inter-Ocean was a Chicago-based newspaper with twelve pages of reading matter. It was billed as "The Greatest Republican Paper of the West" and "better adapted to the needs of the people west of the Allegheny Mountains than any other paper." One could subscribe to it on a daily or weekly basis; a Sunday edition was also available. And special subscription rates could be obtained if it was ordered in conjunction with the local North Manchester Journal. The Weekly Inter Ocean cost $1.00 per year; combined with the Journal it was a reasonable total of $1.35 (see display ad in North Manchester Journal, June 24, 1897).

For weeks there was increasing excitement. Early one morning in April I was awakened by the sound of a fife and drum. I jumped out of bed, hurried to the window, and looked out on the warm, gray dawn. On the sidewalk stood Asa Foster[sic], whose father owned the livery stable under the Opera House, and three or four other men. They were dressed in semimilitary costumes; a single legging, a military blouse, a webb cartridge belt, and a broad-brimmed army hat. Apparently they had made two uniforms do for the five of them. They were taking turns rolling the drum. But Asa was the only one who could play the fife. At each corner they would stop and sound off their martial music. Then there would be a thick-tongued order and the squad would march unsteadily to the next corner. Now and again one of these unofficial representatives of Company E [sic: D] would shout, "War’s declared! Whee! Whoopee! Remember the Maine!"

Note: About midnight on a Monday, April 25, 1898, Co. D of the Indiana National Guard was called into service for the Spanish-American War. The townspeople were notified of the order by the blowing of the water works whistle and the tolling of bells. [North Manchester Journal, April 28, 1898]: "Tuesday morning witnessed one of the greatest patriotic demonstrations ever seen here. It was perfectly spontaneous. Business was practically suspended and the people filled the streets waving flags. The occasion is one that will ever be memorable in the annals of the town….A procession was formed headed by the band, to escort the company to the railroad. Gen. John A. Logan Grand Army Post acted as escort of honor and with flags flying, drums beating the procession moved to the depot followed by the entire population of the town. Fully 3,000 people were assembled around the depot and when the time came for the train to leave dry eyes were few in that large crowd." The company was under the command of Capt. B.F. Clemens. They marched to the Big Four station to take the train to Indianapolis. Following the train of Company D was a special one bearing the companies from Warsaw, Goshen, Elkhart, South Bend and other northern Indiana towns. These companies arrived in Indianapolis late on Tuesday afternoon; camp was made at the state fair grounds with the entire force of the Indiana National Guard.

Research Note: No record for a Mary Brown could be found. An obituary in the North Manchester Journal (May 29, 1902) was printed for Beatrice Willis, born August 31, 1885, and died May 25, 1902: "For about two years she has been a constant sufferer. Yet she never murmured at her lot. She was at all times patient and kind to those about her. Her fortitude was remarkable to those who knew the pain she suffered." Beatrice was the oldest child of A.C. and Lizzie Willis. Her father was the longtime foreman at Dunbar & Mathews, manufacturers of butter tubs. Hunt’s cousin, Lloyd Mathews, had a half-interest in this factory. The North Manchester Journal applauded (January 14, 1897) the Dunbar-Mathews enterprise: "Without any desire to disparage North Manchester’s many other important enterprises, it is a fact that not one of them contributes as much to local interests as does the factory of Dunbar & Mathews." This factory suffered a disastrous fire in September 1897. Briefly in 1897-1898, Frazier Hunt’s father, Jasper N. Hunt, was owner of several lots in Hymer’s Addition including "an entire interest in all the buildings, kilns, sheds, and fixtures, boilers, engines and machinery, tools, appliances and furniture, thereon and being part of and belonging to the heading factory plant of Dunbar and Mathews; Subject to a mortgage of Six Thousand dollars now assigned to J.S. Mathews." [Wabash Co. Deed Book 68, p. 3]

Uncle was sure that the worst had happened. For terrifying minutes he searched up and down the bank for signs of a pair of blue overalls, shirt, and a wide-brimmed straw hat. Then he led the way back to the barn and turned Nellie toward home. It was a stifling hot afternoon but Uncle did not spare the mare. He trotted her hard all the way. She was white with lather when we reached the brick house on the corner.Auntie could see at first glance that Uncle was worried. And Uncle could tell without asking that there had been no sight or word of poor Jasper. There was a moment of tearful consultation. The Uncle trotted Nellie up Maple Avenue [sic-Mill Street] to Main Street and we found Newt Eidelberger [i.e. Lautzenhiser], the town marshal. Uncle quickly explained that he was afraid that his nephew, Jasper Hunt, had been drowned about two and a half miles up the river. Like a prairie fire the word spread up and down Main Street. Within five minutes a half-dozen rigs, filled with volunteers, were heading for the scene of the tragedy. Others in skiffs and boats, with ropes and grappling hooks, were rowing upstream to help with the search.

It was on a late May day, shortly before the end of the school year [sic: June 17, 1897]. The afternoon classes had just been dismissed when word flashed over the playground that Vern Sherman [sic: Byron Hamm] and Don Adams [sic: Ernest Ebbinghouse] had been drowned in a bend of the river near the gravel pit, a half mile north of the town. [sic-at mouth of Pony Creek] Like leaves driven by a high wind, we boys scattered through alleys and across fields to the tragic spot. High waters from the late spring rains swept swiftly by the bend, making little whirlpools that sucked bits of branches and twigs and driftwood to their doom.

Leaning against a weeping willow, surrounded by several men, was Skeet Rogers [i.e. Ralph Quivey]. He had played hooky with the two victims when Vern had doubled up with cramps, and Don, gallantly hurrying to his rescue, had been pulled down by him. It was Skeet who had run, white-faced and sobbing, the quarter mile to the nearest house for help.

I began with the original crime of playing hooky [sic] and talked so fast and earnestly that in their own vicarious grief they practically forgot to say anything about my being late for supper. The next day there was a strange unreality about school. At noon word was passed that the bodies of both boys had been recovered and that they were being brought to Stewart’s furniture and undertaking establishment.

Note: According to W.E. Billings (Tales of the Old Days, p.8), the "Devil’s Hole" was located in the Eel river not too distant from the college’s athletic fields. "In Indian days it seems that there was sort of spring that shot forth its waters from the bed of the river…. It was a dangerous place in the river and after an Indian had lost his life in the whirl of waters in that hole the tribe named it the Devil’s Hole…." Just to the north, the river by the Cook home "used to be a great swimming place for the boys from town, but later it has filled with logs and is not so popular, for it is a bit dangerous, the water being pretty deep there."

Frazer Arnold (Town of My Fathers) recounts the tragedy differently. He recalls the incident as happening at the mouth of Pony Creek where it flows into the Eel. He remembers Ernest Ebbinghouse saving his own life one day during "a dangerous moment" when he "had already begun to gurgle and choke". Two days later after a heavy rainstorm when the river and creek were flooding, the Ebbinghouse boy along with Byron Hamm drowned. "A small boy with them had reported that Byron Hamm was seized with cramps in the chilly stream; young Ebbinghaus had swum to his rescue, but both had disappeared in the yellow flood-water. Men searched the bottom with grappling hooks on long poles, and the body of Byron Hamm was not found till the next day, as I recall. They were fine, promising boys, and the whole town went into mourning. It was the only drowning in my time….Speaking for my own time in North Manchester, there was no other case of someone who lost his life in an attempt to save that of another person." (pp. 7-8)

Research Note: According to the N.M. Journal (June 24, 1897), the drownings took place on the previous Thursday morning, June 17, "at a point opposite where Pony creek empties into the river, a favorite swimming hole with boys for years." Hamm, Ebbinghous and John Snyder had gone swimming in the river, and only the Snyder boy came out alive. Their friends Ralph Quivey and Kent Gingerick were non-swimmers and had stayed on the bank of the swollen river. All five boys were between 14 and 17 years of age. According the newspaper account, a deep hole existed at the mouth of Pony Creek; the place where the boys went down was 12 or 15 feet deep. The two who lost their lives had become exhausted in the water and "unable to stem the current of the river." Both bodies were taken to the Stewart & Ellwood’s undertaking rooms and prepared for burial. Both funerals were held at the Methodist Episcopal church; burials were in Oaklawn cemetery. Ernest Ebbinghous b. April 1, 1882 was the son of Mr. and Mrs. Albert Ebbinghous. Byron Hamm b. Nov 2, 1881 was the only living child of Mr. and Mrs. M.A. Hamm.

But the North Manchester girl who was to have a really profound effect on my early years was Mariam [sic-Miriam] Stewart. Her father owned the furniture store and undertaking establishment. The family had traveled extensively over America and were more or less people about town. In their library I saw my first Navajo rug and Indian handicraft. Mariam had an older cousin, a Detroit newspaperman, who used to visit in North Manchester, and it was from him that I first caught a little of the excitement and adventure of this great profession. He wore yellow gloves, carried a cane, and was my ideal of a dashing, successful reporter.… Mariam contributed her own romantic imagination, and on winter evenings in front of her fireplace, or on summer afternoons as we drove down the country roads, she assured me that I could do anything I wanted to if I only wanted to do it enough.

Note: Beany Laidlaw was Albert Laidlaw whose father Walter was the slate roofer who occasionally played comedy parts at the Hamilton Opera House. In one production he was "Bean" a correspondent for Leslie’s magazine. Albert Laidlaw recalled in a memoir (I Remember North Manchester, 1950) that Miriam Stewart often starred in school programs based on literary classics.

Hunt remembers Frazer Arnold. For two or three years Frazer Arnold and I had been under the spell of Richard Harding Davis. It was a matter of some difficulty for me to decide whether I wanted to be a Captain Macklin soldier of fortune or a Dick Davis war correspondent.

The Mathews were great friends of my parents, and I liked to go swimming and skating with A.F., or "Hunty." He was in the class ahead of me in school, and was slim, tall for his age, and full of ideas. We used to trade books of adventure and were always steering each other into exciting things to read. These were better literature than my friends and I had been reading for a short time a couple of years earlier, called dime novels, although the price was 5c, of which a typical title was, "Frank Merriwell’s Revenge, or Caught in His Own Trap!"

Hunt remembers Clem Drake. Note: J.T. Drake was listed in the 1900 census and lived in the vicinity of Eighth Street in North Manchester.

Clem would look up at me out of his pale blue eyes and slowly shake his head. Then from his rich background as soldier, college man, and student of world affairs, he would go on confidentially: "Pork barrel! That’s the real trouble with America. Too much graft! Why, all these fellows do down there in Washington is to trade votes with each other. Just horse trading: one helps get a new post office for Peoria, and in return he gets a bridge over the Wabash."

Research Note: A somewhat different, interesting and detailed account was published by Hopkins and Billings in the North Manchester Journal (June 4, 1903): "One of the important features of baccalaureate Sunday is a trip and a big country dinner which the classes always enjoy under the direction of George Burdge. This year he had three carriages at the church ready for the graduates as soon as the services were over and the trip commenced. Mr. Burdge drove one of the carriages himself, and the other drivers had sealed instructions, one set to be opened at the Christian church and the other at the Vandalia station. The outfit that went to the Christian church was told to go to the home of R.T. Adams, two miles south of town. Mr. Adams met them with a broad smile, and saying the plans had been changed, and they should go to the home of Sam Landis. Arriving there, Mr. Landis made them an impressive speech, and directed them to the home of Lewis Naber, a mile east of town. The other rig after driving to the Vandalia station found orders to go to the home of Ed Rittenhouse at Liberty Mills. Just as they reached the Rittenhouse home, the carriage driven by Mr. Burdge appeared, and instead of stopping they followed it out into the country, at last losing it. Then they returned to Mr. Rittenhouse’s for instructions, and were likewise sent to the home of Mr. Naber. There Mrs. Naber assisted by Mrs. John Lockwood and Mrs. Henry Ulrey, had a splendid dinner prepared, and with Mr. Burdge for leader the class forgot all about the work and trials of the year in enjoying the dinner."

The first week of my freshman year I acquired (for the most obvious reasons) the nickname of "Spike". It was to become as much a part of me as my arms and legs. At various times it has been just a little embarrassing to me, but I have had to make the best of it. More than once I’ve shaken it off, but invariably it trails me down. In north Russia, far up the Yangtze, in the wilds of Haiti, "down under" in Australia, I’ve been free of it momentarily. But just as I was about to secure some little dignity from my rather formal name of Frazier, someone out of my past would suddenly pop up, and then I would be branded "Spike" again. Note: Hunt’s height was six feet four inches tall (p. 91).

Frazer Arnold recalls: I can clear up the question of how A.F. became Frazier Hunt. His mother was Amanda Frazier, who, as a mere girl, had become a county superintendent of schools in Illinois and had grown famous along that part of the Mississippi River as an educator, before she married. She died when A.F. was born. He didn’t like the first name given him, and no one in Illinois suggested using his middle name of Frazier, so he decided he would be known simply by initials. He was A.F. or "Spike" Hunt all through college and until he became a newspaper writer. My mother had been Nell Frazer from Warsaw, and my father was also named from his mother’s family of Thomson. Hunt had seen I was apparently thriving with the first name of Frazer, and so later adopted his mother’s family name for the by-line of his successful stories and articles in the Chicago Tribune and in New York papers and magazines, and afterward of his dispatches as a war correspondent.

EDITOR’S NOTE. Several articles are uploaded to the North Manchester Historical Society web site which add considerable more content to some of the local topics covered in this issue. Read more at nmanchesterhistory.org --

>military>Spanish-American War

>obits>Cyrus D. Johnson/Beatrice Willis

>biographies>Frazier Hunt

>North Manchester>A.F. Hunt (includes excerpts from autobiography)

>Eel River>Tragedy

>Eel River>Devil’s Hole

>businesses>Dunbar-Mathews

>businesses>undertakers (article by Mike McKee)

>more>fires>Dunbar-Mathews

Excerpts from Frazier Hunt, ONE AMERICAN AND HIS ATTEMPT AT EDUCATION (1938), relating to NORTH MANCHESTER, INDIANA.

Chapter One, “From the Mississippi to the Eel”

Frazier Hunt was born in Rock Island in northwestern Illinois on the Mississippi. His mother’s name was Amanda Frazier.

“…She was a babe in arms when on an early spring day in the middle forties [1840s] Grandmother and Grandfather Frazier drove their two wagons overland from the old homestead at Hubbard, in northeastern Ohio, southward to the Ohio—the river the Indians called the Beautiful River. Here they loaded the wagons, four horses, two cows, the crude farm instruments, household effects, and their eleven children on board a flat-bottomed, paddle-wheel steamer. With the whistle blowing a gay hail and farewell, they started on the third great western pilgrimage of the Frazier tribe.

Some thirty-five years after this tribal migration, my father, a tall slender man of rare dignity, drifted west from the Alleghenies as a schoolbook salesman. In the little county-seat town of Aledo, where my mother was starting her second term as county superintendent of schools, they met, and my father wooed and won her.

And early one July, when the corn on the Illinois prairie had been laid by, the two were married. They stood under a lilac bush on the lawn of the mile-square farm of the bride’s dearest sister, Martha, and her husband, Joe Mathews, who soon were to have so much to do with my own life.

In the little city of Rock Island, overlooking the Mississippi, they set up housekeeping. And they were very happy. When they had been married two and a half years my brother was born. They were happier than ever now. Life left nothing to be desired. Almost two years after this, early on the morning of December 1, 1885, I was born.

But something was wrong.

Seventeen days later my beautiful mother was dead.

My brother and I were to go to Martha and Joseph Mathews. My father’s schoolbook business was taking him to Chicago as headquarters, and since he would be away most of the time it had been my mother’s last request that Aunt Martha and Uncle Joe raise her two boys.

It was late in January when they started home with the two motherless babies. They took the train to St. Louis and then the boat down the Mississippi to Memphis. From there it was less than a day’s railroad journey to the village of Hazen, a score of miles east of Little Rock, the sleepy capital of Arkansas.

Three or four years before this, Uncle Joe, tired of prosaic farming on the rich Illinois prairie, had gone south and bought a fourteen-thousand-acre cattle ranch outside Hazen. He lost money by the hatful, and by the time I was old enough to run away from Molly, the colored nursemaid, he had engineered a trade. The ranch, with good will and poison grasses thrown in for luck, was swapped sight unseen for two farms in Missouri and one in Indiana. We now migrated north to one of these farms—a rolling quarter-section lying on the edge of the pleasant little town of Centralia, Missouri. Molly went with us.

For five years we lived in this border state. Then Uncle and Auntie, we two boys—and, of course, Molly—drifted up to the tiny village of New Boston, on the Illinois bank of the Mississippi. It was here that Grandfather Frazier and his eleven children had landed, almost a half century before. Uncle’s and Auntie’s only daughter, Tillie, newly married to Chart Gregory, was teaching school here.

It was very thrilling to be on the Great River. Every day or two an old side-wheeler went by; now and then a small stern-wheeler, with the wide, clumsy wooden wheel churning up waves that hit the shore long after she disappeared around the bend. In the spring great log rafts silently floated downstream; there were long sweeps at the ends, and often a tiny hut and strange, bearded men on board. When you sat barefooted on the banks and watched the river and these living things floating along, with the water moving always and endlessly, it made you think queer thoughts. You wanted to go along. Life didn’t stand still as you were doing now: it had motion—it was restless and moving.

I knew all about Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Cousin Tillie read us both books that year on the river. Sometimes, when I played in the great empty icehouses in the fall before the river froze—or maybe when I was down at the fishhouse or watching the logs or dead tree branches go swinging by in the muddy waters—I pretended I was Huck. It was wonderful to make dream voyages down the river with Tom.

I was going on eight when we left the Great River and moved to Indiana. I didn’t want to go. I wanted to stay on here by the old Father of Waters.

But I had nothing to say about it: I was only a little boy whose mother was dead.

For my growing years I needed a quieter stream than the great Mississippi. This was to be the little Eel. It, too, was to get into my blood. Its gentle flowing waters were to set the pace for ten years of my life. It was a slow and dreamy pace, part and parcel of the mood of a time that is gone, and of a place that is changed beyond recognition. The spell of that mood is ended as well. It had to do with jogging carriage horses, dusty gravel roads, the smell of plowed fields, wood fires, kerosene lamps, ice-cream socials, church cantatas, the poems of James Whitcomb Riley, and the books of Tarkington, Eggleston, and Nicholson.

The little Eel wound and twisted like some giant namesake through this Hoosier town of North Manchester. Most of its twenty-eight hundred people came from Pioneer families that had drifted up from Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Virginias. Many, however, had come westward from Pennsylvania and belonged to that strange faith—or rather way of life—called the Dunkards. They gave the community a substance and stability, yet there was a slightly bizarre touch about them.

Our red-brick, two-story house stood at the corner of Maple Avenue and Eighth Street. Great maple trees locked their branches together in the middle of the wide graveled street. Eel River ran along one side of the town and then suddenly twisted in a short U-curve and cut in directly back of Main Street. The stores on one side of the street clung to the high riverbank. At the far end of town, about a quarter mile farther on from our house, was a little Dunkard school that later was to be known as Manchester College.

We had a comfortable house but there were no electric lights, telephone, bathroom, furnace, or city water—except a hydrant for watering the lawn. Behind the house we had a garden and a barn with a double carriage room. At the far end of the grape arbor was a little building painted the same color as the barn. It had a crescent in the door and stars high up on the two sides.

I thought we had a pretty big house. There were a kitchen, dining room, sitting room, parlor, and spare bedroom downstairs. Under the kitchen and dining room was a cemented cellar, and here in the fall were stored bins of potatoes, cabbages, and turnips, and barrels of apples and pears. Upstairs were three bedrooms. When Uncle and Auntie were away for the evening Molly left her bedroom door ajar so that she could hear Jasper and me if we had any trouble in our sleep. We used to have plenty of trouble. Usually it was traceable to Molly’s one serious weakness: she simply couldn’t resist telling us ghost stories the minute Uncle and Auntie had their backs turned. She’d faithfully promise Auntie that under no circumstances would she indulge in anything that even slightly resembled a ghost story, but it was no use.

As soon as Uncle and Auntie had left, Molly would hurry through the dishes. Then she’d get us seated around the kitchen stove or maybe around the glowing hard-coal burner in the sitting room. The single kerosene lamp on the table was already casting weird shadows when she’d begin.

She had three or four favorites that we both knew perfectly, but soon Molly’s doleful voice, and her wide-open eyes with the whites showing, reinforced by dramatic gestures, had us fairly paralyzed with fear. She was an artist. She built up suspense and then poured on the terror. We knew the exact moment when Molly would jump to her feet and scream, but it never failed to send us into a state bordering on hysterics. It gave me a permanent horror of death and the grave. To this day I carry an actual fear of darkness and strange sounds.

After two or three years in Indiana Molly began to fail in health. She knew she was going to die and she longed for her homeland and her own family. Finally Uncle pensioned her off and sent her back to her people in Arkansas. We all went down to the Nickel Plate station when she left. She shook hands with Uncle and held Auntie’s hand quite awhile. Then she hugged Jasper and after that put her great arms around me. In a second Uncle and Jasper were sniffling but Auntie and Molly and I were out-and-out crying.

Then we found a new hired girl, Rettie Grossnickle, a neighbor of ours. Rettie was fat and good-natured, and ran over the outside heels of her shoes. She was a Dunkard girl, about nineteen years old. She got $1.50 a week and did the washing and ironing. Except when we had company she ate with the family. Of course when we were by ourselves things weren’t so very fancy. Uncle always insisted on having his pie on the same plate that he had used for his meat and potatoes. He always said it tasted better that way. He liked to eat pie with his knife, too. Auntie scolded him a good deal about it and told him that it was a bad example to set for us boys. But he stuck to his colors. That is, except when we had company from Chicago—and especially Uncle’s rich sister, Aunt Addie. Auntie tolerated no foolishness from Uncle then. He had to eat his pie with his fork. And he had to carve and serve just as if he always did it. Rettie would wear a neat white apron, and pass the plates and things from the left side. Naturally she ate in the kitchen.

Auntie was up on almost all these social matters. She had lived on farms and ranches all her life, but now that she and Uncle had retired and settled in North Manchester, she wanted to have everthing nice and proper. That summer just before we moved to Indiana, we spent six weeks at the Chicago World’s Fair. One day Auntie went into Marshall Field’s and without consulting Uncle bought a set of brocaded, overstuffed chairs and a beautiful rug for the parlor. Uncle never quite got over the shock. Certainly he never enjoyed sitting on those expensive brocaded chairs. As a matter of fact he never got much chance, because the parlor was shut tight except when we had very special parties for Aunt Addie, or when my father came down from Chicago, or when it was the monthly meeting of the W.C.T.U. or the Ladies’ Chatauqua Reading Circle.

Uncle always let Auntie have pretty much her own way—unless it cost too much. He had a perpetual fear that he might end his days in the poorhouse. Sooner or later he was sure Auntie would run through their three farms and the mortgages they held—and then there would be that poorhouse on the hill staring them in the face. Auntie’s little extravagances caused the only spats they ever had. He simply couldn’t understand why she wanted to put on city airs. For instance, Auntie always had a roll of toilet paper that she kept hidden in the bottom of a dresser drawer. When Aunt Addie or some of the high-toned Chicago relatives came down she hung this cherished roll on a string in the little building at the end of the grape arbor. My brother and I got full and explicit instructions about that roll. Of course, Uncle would have nothing to do with it. He had his own ideas about such high-falutin nonsense. He was a great corncob man. The rest of us compromised with last year’s Montgomery & Ward catalog.

From the opening of the earliest May buds to the fading of the last bloom of summer Uncle went about with a rose in his mouth. Forty and more years before, when he was breaking the tough sod on his section of land in western Illinois, he would pull up his horses and cut wild roses from the fragrant bushes. While his strong hands gripped his breaking plow he carried the roses in his mouth. Later, in the little Indiana town of North Manchester, many of the inhabitants called him “Posy” Mathews. And when he drove along the shaded residential streets in his wide-seated phaeton, with his rose balanced on his great white beard, they smiled a little and shook their heads.

Uncle was a year or two over sixty when he finally retired and moved to Indiana. He thought he’d done his full share of hard work. Then, of course, it was quite a task in itself to take care of another set of orphan boys. He and Auntie were always raising someone else’s children. The full count of these motherless and homeless boys would have run into a good half dozen. Their own children were out in the world, and they had retired from this peculiar philanthropy when my brother and I came along and they took us into their hearts.

Half the time Uncle was either humming a little tune or reciting poetry. He had a verse or two that seemed to fit almost everything. In the morning he’d come to the bottom of the stairs and in the kindliest of voices recite: “Up, men, he cried, today yon rocky cliff please God! We’ll pass.”

Jasper and I, of course, promptly turned over and went back to sleep.

A few minutes later we’d hear him at it again. This time his voice would be slightly louder, but still not threatening. We’d roll over again. Then the third call would come, and it would have little to do with poetry. Uncle’s patience and good humor would be practically exhausted. “Boys, will I have to come up there?” he would shout.

“We’ll be down in a second, Uncle,” we would answer, doing a fireman’s act. By the time we got downstairs, washed ourselves in the galvanized pan that hung on a nail above the wide-mouthed cistern pump in the kitchen, combed our hair, and sat down for breakfast, Uncle’s eyes would be twinkling, and he would be his kindly, happy self.

We got so we could tell pretty well when certain verses of Uncle’s were coming. Whenever we’d be driving with him behind old Nellie and we’d pass Mr. Baker’s blacksmith shop, there wasn’t any question about it at all. If it was in the summertime Uncle would take the rose from his mouth and begin:

Under a spreading chestnut tree
The village smith stands….

But if it was autumn and we were driving by the fields of yellow corn out to Cousin Lloyd’s farm, there was always a little uncertainty about Uncle’s first choice. He usually went in for the old New England bedtime poets, but he had also learned bits from the beloved Hoosier contemporary, James Whitcomb Riley. So a cornfield in September gave him two shots. He could either do Riley’s

When the frost is on the pumpkin
And the corn is in the shock,

or he could go straight into Longfellow’s Yankee classic:

Up from the meadows rich with corn
Clear in the cool September morn….

But I think Uncle really delighted most in Whittier. The poet was his own mother’s second cousin, and he held a teaching certificate signed by the gentle old New Englander. Naturally this doubly endeared him to Uncle. About once a week he would feel the Whittier mood coming on, and we’d usually be favored with bits of Snow-Bound, or a part of the extremely sentimental ballad about the little girl who spelled down her boyhood sweetheart and then begged his forgiveness for doing it. The end had a very touching moral:

He lives to learn in life’s hard school,
How few who pass above him
Lament their triumph and his loss,
Like her—because they love him.

Uncle also made quite a specialty of little snatches of song. He’d sort of half-hum and half-sing them. His favorites were “In the Gloaming, Oh, My Darling,” and “Sweet Nellie Grey.” He like to hum when he was driving, and while our old mare would jog along he’d work away on his own version of “Dear, dear, what can the matter be?” If he were driving in town he had a way of bowing low and touching his whip hand to his hat in a graceful salute when he passed acquaintances. He had the same elaborate greeting for men and women alike. I suppose the fact that his large, well-shaped head was entirely balk had something to do with the fact that he never actually raised his hat.

But it was really as a storyteller that Uncle reached the higher altitudes. As a boy in New Hampshire, not yet eighteen years old, Uncle had bought his time from his father, and in 1851 answered the fantastic and irresistible call of the gold fields of California. He remained there four years, and returned to “the States” only after a mine had caved in on him and all but crushed his right leg. With four thousand dollars in gold in his money belt, he made his way back across the Isthmus. In 1855 he migrated to the Mississippi River country, and settled on a rich section of Illinois prairie. Here he met my mother’s favorite sister, Martha, and they promptly married. When the Civil War came he tried his best to go with Bob Ingersoll’s Third Illinois Cavalry, but his bad leg barred him. So he and Auntie did their bit for the Union by distributing wagonloads of potatoes and vegetables, hams and quarters of beef, to the widows of soldiers. It was about this time that they went into the business of raising other people’s children. There were plenty of war orphans in those days.

My brother and I never were sure quite just what period of Uncle’s life we would rather hear him spin yarns about—his own boyhood in New Hampshire, his California gold days, his early years on the Illinois prairies, or his adventures in the cattle country. It was the California days that won most of the time. But it was by no means an easy task to get Uncle started. Auntie had issued a sort of Papal Bull against the telling of stories on school nights, but it was not much more effective than her edict against Molly’s ghost stories. We had our own secret methods of approach. Often we’d bait him with some innocent question about the width of the Isthmus of Panama, the California vigilantes, or the old abolition days when he was a boy in New England. He’d be reading his Chicago Inter-Ocean by our study lamp on the dining-room table. Auntie would be quietly dreaming while she was darning our stockings. Uncle would take a swift glance into the sitting room. He’d try it. Often he’d get clear through a story before Auntie would catch him.

I suppose our favorite was about the time when Uncle was mixed up in the mutiny on the ship going down to Panama in the gold-rush days. Still, it wasn’t exactly a mutiny because Uncle was only a poor eighteen-year-old farmer boy, traveling steerage to the gold fields. The third-class passengers couldn’t eat the terrible food they were given. So one day they broke into the bakery shop, slugged the bakers, and escaped with armloads of pies and cakes. Then the poor fellows had a battle with the ship officers, which ended only when my uncle and two other men dragged the captain to the rail and threatened to throw him overboard to the sharks. These ferocious, man-eating sharks were thick in that part of the Caribbean, so the Captain promised to give the men good food if they wouldn’t toss him overboard: it would have been just the same as tossing a baby to a pack of wolves in the depths of the Siberian forest….We knew all about that story, too….

As a rule, if we got one favorite story in an evening we figured we’d done pretty well. But sometimes if we were good and lucky he’d tell us two or three wonderful tales of California: about the bearbaiting and the rattlesnake pits, the stagecoach robberies and the hangings, or the coming of the vigilantes. But the prize story that he never did tell more than a few times concerned a prospecting trip he and six or eight other men made in California in the wintertime. A blizzard swept down on them. They lost the trail and ran out of food. One man froze to death and a second gave up, and they were forced to leave him dying, with his cocked revolver by his side. They simply couldn’t bear to shoot him themselves.

A moral always came at the end of this story. Uncle would say, “Both the poor devil who froze to death and the one we had to leave behind were heavy drinkers. They might have been living to this day, boys, if they hadn’t been drinkers.”

Uncle sure was death on liquor. As a matter of fact he had three pet cranks: prohibition, woman suffrage, and tobacco. His own father, a merry little man who could putter around his tool shed in Illinois and sing all day long on a few swigs out of a jug, had, oddly enough, made Uncle a violent Prohibitionist. Somehow or other, Uncle figured that tobacco led to drink, so he eventually turned against the weed, as well. He felt that only woman suffrage could do away with these two mighty evils.

I used to repeat a good deal of what Uncle told me to Beany and Butch and Skinny and the others in the gang. My version would go something like this:

It seemed that if a feller ever started drinkin’ once he jes’ couldn’t ever control his appetite after that. Why sometimes jes’ one drink would start a feller toward fillin’ a drunkard’s grave. And there was a hundred thousand poor victims of alcohol who filled drunkards’ graves every year. Why, you could see it fer yerself. Jes’ slip along the alley behind Johnson’s saloon almost any summer afternoon and peek through the high board fence, and what’d’ya see? Why, you sal ole Alf Hooper lyin’ out there on his back, with the sun blazin’ down on him and his mouth open and big bluebottle flies buzzin’ around his matted beard….Yes, sir, if a young feller ever let ‘em give him one drink maybe he’d be having’ to drink all the time. Why, they had people who was so low they’d lie in wait and set traps jes’ to get boys—and girls, too, fer that matter—to take their first drink….And there was another thing ‘at proved it. Jes’ look how saloonkeepers sprinkled beer in front of their saloons so’s when some poor drunkard who was on his way to work in the morning would smell this beer. Then his old appetite would rise up in him and he’d have to go in there, and he’d drink and drink. When he’d go home maybe he’d beat up his wife and even steal pennies from his little girl—or maybe even her shoes—to buy more licker with.

Then, too, auntie used to say that when she was living in Illinois you could always tell whether there’d been a Republican or Democrat rally in Aledo. The Republicans would always drive home by her house quiet and respectable like. But the Democrats would come home a-whoopin’ and a-yellin’, with their horses runnin’ and everybody dead-drunk. Anyhow, Democrats eat dead cats.

And we had a shirt-tail uncle who used to drink, too. He wasn’t really an uncle but he was the brother of one of our uncles-in-law. Of course, I never saw him myself, but once in a while I would hear Auntie or Uncle tell about him. He sure was what you call a periodical drunkard. Maybe for three months he wouldn’t drink a single drop, then all of a sudden he’d go off on an awful tear. He was a bachelor, so he didn’t have any wife or little children worrying about him. But all the relatives used to be ashamed of him. Liquor affected different people different ways.

Yes, sir, it was something awful what happened to the inside of a drunkard’s stomach. Every year or two we had a lecturer come to the Methodist Church and he had charts showing what alcohol did to you. If you only drank a little you just had small spots on the inside of your stomach. And if you were a moderate drinker you had spots maybe as big as a dime. But if you were a regular drunkard you had awful-lookin’ red spots as big as a silver dollar. And when you got that way there was nothing that could save you from fillin’ a drunkard’s grave.

No, sir, you just couldn’t trust drink at all. Once there was a boy in Aledo who inherited fifty thousand dollars when his father died, and he took to heavy drinking right away. He used to pay twenty-five dollars to have his pants made with silk linings. He even bought a team of fast trotters, and he used to drive around the country and drink all the time, and it wasn’t very long until all his money was gone, and he spent the rest of his life drivin’ a dray. Yes, sirree, it just showed what drink would do. When I grew up I wasn’t never going to drink a single drop….

There were a lot more stories Uncle and Auntie would tell Jasper and me that in turn we’d retail to our gang. Uncle was the leading member of the Prohibition party in all that part of Indiana and consequently he was an authority on liquor. He was a friend and ardent support of John G. Wooley, who was the perpetual candidate for president on the Prohibition ticket. Uncle was the perpetual candidate for congressman from our district, just the same way. Every four years, when the national election time rolled around, Uncle’d got excited. He’d reorganize the local Prohibition party, and they would rent the opera house and import a speaker and maybe a quartet from the headquarters in Chicago. I say “they” would do all that, but it was really Uncle who did the big part of it. There were a few true believers who’d put up two or three dollars each—maybe as much as five dollars—but Uncle had to take a good deal of that out in trade.

For instance, there was Mr. Baker who ran the blacksmith shop. He’d put down for three dollars, but since he had a houseful of girls he was always a little short of cash. So one fine day Uncle would say, “Boys, I wish you’d take Nellie down to Mr. Baker’s shop and have her shod all the way round.” When we’d ask for the dollar and a half to pay for it, Uncle would answer, “Now, don’t say anything about it, boys, but Mr. Baker is going to shoe Nellie twice for nothing. He’s going to give that to the Cause.”

The most exciting time that Uncle ran for Congress was in 1900, when McKinley and Roosevelt ran on the Republican ticket and Bryan ran on the Democratic ticket. Of course, John G. Wooley ran on the Prohibition ticket; well, I suppose he didn’t just exactly run much—he was just on the ticket.

Uncle spent quite a little money that year. He went all over the Congressional district, and had a speaker and quartet from Chicago. The local Prohibition committees helped some but it wasn’t so very much.

Auntie hinted that she’d like to take a trip back to Uncle’s home in New Hampshire rather than have him spend so much money on his campaign for Congress. I guess it was about the only time that Auntie ever had to chide Uncle for spending too much money. But Uncle was adamant. He wouldn’t tell how much he was spending or where the money was going. In fact, he wouldn’t confess anything.

He was pretty calm about it all, too. Of course, we didn’t have any big Prohibition parades, and Uncle even let me carry a torchlight in a Democratic rally for William Jennings Bryan.

On election day Uncle was pretty busy hauling old people and cripples to the polls. We used to tease him afterward by saying that some of them must have voted for McKinley or even Bryan.

It wasn’t until late the next evening that we got the total returns from all the five counties in the Congressional district.

The Republican candidate received more than twenty thousand votes, and the Democratic runner-up got somewhere around fourteen thousand.

The best count they could give Uncle was 184 votes.

AUNTIE AND THE RIVER

If there is such a thing in this world as an actual heart of gold Aunt Martha surely had one. To all suffering she was as sensitive as a little girl. Tears always seemed to be just behind her soft, wide-set brown eyes.

She could never so much as mention my mother without these warm eyes immediately dissolving in a flood of emotion. Uncle was almost as tenderhearted. With him, too, all suffering was personal.

We did not talk much about my mother and her untimely death, but when we did a mood of futility seemed to settle down on the whole household. Gay and full as my boyhood was, there was always a hidden sense of incompleteness about it. And to this touch of mystery was added an unspoken conviction of the ultimate cruelty of life. I was brought up to believe that my mother was one woman in a million—as I believe to this day—and that her death was one of infinite pathos and incalculable loss.

It was always a joy to be just a little sick when Auntie was around to take care of you. Not that I particularly liked to soak my feet in a mustard bath or to have my throat rubbed with goose grease and wrapped in a red flannel rag, but I did like the outpouring of affection and concern. Toward evening Auntie’d come into the bedroom with a pan of warm water, a washcloth, and a towel, and ever so gently she’d bathe my face and hands and comb my hair. Then she’d disappear and in a few minutes return with a tray with a white napkin over it, and there’d be a poached egg, milk toast, and a cup of sassafras tea.

Auntie was very strong on the family. As long as she could claim any sort of kinship with even the most distant and obscure relatives, she treated them with kindness and affection. They were always welcome to come and visit us, and if they were in difficulties they could count on practical help.

As a consequence when the heat in Chicago became insufferable we invariably had our red-brick house in North Manchester well filled. Some of these visiting relatives were rich, and some were poor as church mice, but most were in-between—what we used to call “in comfortable circumstances.”

I suppose Uncle Easton was really the poorest of the lot. I never knew quite how he had been able to do it as a Methodist minister but some way or other he had accumulated a fortune of fifty thousand dollars. His wife, who was my mother’s and Auntie’s sister, died shortly after this and soon Uncle Easton retired from the pulpit. In an unguarded moment of generous enthusiasm he divided his fortune between his two sons, with the idea that he would live half a year with each. It was the old story—bucket-shop gambling, race horses, bad investments—and before long the kindly old fellow found himself without home or money or job. Eventually he ended up in a hall bedroom in Chicago, with his sons occasionally sending him a few dollars and the family making up the rest. Each summer he’d come to Indiana for two or three weeks of peace, good food, and gracious welcome.

For a nonchurchgoer Uncle contributed rather generously to the Methodist Church. It was largely to make certain that Uncle Easton would be asked to fill the pulpit at least on one Sunday evening of each year. Along in the middle of the week preceding this big event Auntie would get to work on his shiny frock coat, press and sponge his pants, iron his best shirt, and on Saturday night see that he had a nice bath in the washtub in the kitchen. Defiantly proud, she would bully Uncle into getting ready for church, and a little after ten on Sunday she would lead the way to the surrey and drive off with the two of them. That morning Uncle Easton would be asked to give the closing prayer, and the announcement would be read that the distinguished visiting pastor from Chicago had consented to conduct the evening services. Auntie was always a good manager.

Once when Uncle Joshua Snyder [from Nebraska] visited us she even ran him in for an evening’s preaching. Uncle Joshua was Aunt Harriet’s husband, and he was what you might call a mighty man of the Lord. He’d  been a captain in an Illinois infantry regiment in the Civil War, and had made quite a reputation as a fighting parson. In the early seventies he and his family had migrated to Nebraska, and there he had struggled through the grasshopper and locust invasions, and the Populist and free-silver epidemics. I never was sure whether it was preaching or farming that was his side line, but he always was most enthusiastic about his preaching.

…And I shall never live long enough to forget Uncle Joshua’s attempts to attract the Lord’s attention before each meal. Uncle Joshua was a tall, rawboned giant, with a square-cut beard, blazing blue eyes, and a voice that might have won him a national hog-calling championship, if he hadn’t been interested in the higher things of life.

He’d open up as soon as the family had gathered for feed, first reading at length from his Bible. Then he’d close the good book, raise his head to broadcast his plea for forgiveness, for rain and better crops, and for whatever odds and ends that he might inadvertently have overlooked at the previous session. Jasper and I weren’t used to such goings-on, and it took all of Auntie’s strong personality to keep us quiet and subdued. She’d sit between us and keep a restraining hand on each of us. Uncle Joshua never seemed to run out of heavenly requests and suggestions.

His brother, Uncle Titus, was quite a different type. Uncle Titus had married another of the Frazier girls, Aunt Mariah….He simply believed in living and let live. He even smoked cigars, and I imagine that his brother, Uncle Joshua, used to have to do quite a lot of praying and interceding with the Lord for him at times.

…Of all the relatives who visited us in Indiana it was Aunt Addie who caused the most consternation. Aunt Addie was Uncle’s sister, and her husband was one of the richest men in Chicago. He tried long and desperately to divorce Aunt Addie….If she would accept a divorce she could have a million settled on her and her children, but she wasn’t interested. …

It was for Aunt Addie’s private use that auntie had that secret roll of toilet paper. The best was none too good for her. She had lived years abroad, and could talk French and German just about as easily as she could English. And there wasn’t hardly anything that she didn’t know all about.

I was very proud of Aunt Addie and of most of our other visitors, too. But my brother Jasper didn’t enjoy company of any kind. He grew like a weed, and by the time he was fourteen he was almost six feet tall. Shy, awkward, and overgrown, he couldn’t stand all the endless talk and excitement of summer guests. He liked to be alone, or with Ed Butterbaugh, the Dunkard boy who lived next door. He was happy, too, at Cousin Lloyd’s and Cousin Rouie’s farm at Liberty Mills, three miles up Eel River. For one thing, he was reasonably safe there from Chicago relatives.

After one particularly hard July run of visitors Jasper decided to spend a week at Cousin Lloyd’s farm. He had explicit instructions as to what he was and was not to do. Most of them had to do with swimming in Eel River, which formed the boundary line on two sides of the farm. Only when Cousin Lloyd was along was he so much as to put a toe in the muddy waters. And he was to be back home before noon on Saturday so that he could help with the chores and have his regular Saturday bath and be ready for Sunday school on the following morning.

“Now don’t forget what you promised about the river,” Auntie warned him for the tenth time. Then she kissed him good-by.

The river was the bane of Auntie’s life. She was frightened all summer on account of the swimming, scared all winter on account of the skating, and worried half sick the rest of the time  because of the hunting and trapping along its banks and brakes. Every few years the river claimed its toll, and one tragedy was hardly forgotten by mothers or foster parents before a fresh one would shock the little community.

The last one had occurred only two months before this. It was on a late May day, shortly before the end of the school year. The afternoon classes had just been dismissed when word flashed over the playground that Vern Sherman and Don Adams had been drowned in a  bend of the river near the gravel pit, a half mile north of the town. Like leaves driven by a high wind, we boys scattered through alleys and across fields to the tragic spot. High waters from the late spring rains swept swiftly by the bend, making little whirlpools that sucked bits of branches and twigs and driftwood to their doom.

Leaning against a weeping willow, surround by several men, was Skeet Rogers. He had played hooky with the two victims when Vern had doubled up with cramps, and Don, gallantly hurrying to his rescue, had been pulled down by him. It was Skeet who had run, white-faced and sobbing, the quarter mile to the nearest house for help.

Men in skiffs, with ropes and grabhooks, were slowly rowing up and down the river dragging for the bodies. People were speaking in hushed tones. A score of times the grappling hooks would catch some moving object that could not be brought to the surface; then a man or one of the older boys would slip off his clothes and dive into the muddy, treacherous water. Each time he would come up and shake his head; he had found only a water-logged chunk or a sunken branch.

The sun dropped behind a clump of sycamores and most of the crowd drifted away. I was two hours late getting home and there would be trouble. But I could tell Uncle and Auntie what the boys’ fathers had said and how they had looked. I had the whole picture of the tragedy to give them.

I began with the original crime of playing hooky and talked so fast and earnestly that in their own vicarious grief they practically forgot to say anything about my being late for supper. The next day there was a strange unreality about school. At noon word was passed that the bodies of both boys had been recovered and that they were being brought to Stewart’s furniture and undertaking establishment.

With school out that afternoon most of the boys hurried down town. In the alley back of the furniture store, we joined the queue that was slowly moving through the back door to view the bodies. I stepped in line and soon was close to the screen door. But most of my courage had run out by this time. I wasn’t so sure, after all, that I wanted to look at poor Vern and Don. They were two years older than I was and they had teased me several times, but I could hardly gloat over them now.

At last I was at the door. I took one swift glance inside. On long tables lay the two slender, white bodies, with the faces puffed and swollen. I turned like a frightened deer and darted down the alley for home.

The rest of that summer was a little difficult for most of the boys of the town. We could no longer lazy through the whole afternoon at Devil’s Hole, but had to report home at the end of an hour or two. It seemed to me that about half the time when we’d return, Auntie would be pacing the lawn and looking in the direction of the swimming hole. When she’d see us swinging barefoot down the walk in our overalls and straw hats, she’d wave and then pretend she was working with her flowers.

So it was that Jasper’s instructions were very exact on this July day. He was to go swimming only with Cousin Lloyd, and he was to be home by Saturday noon.

That week I went swimming every afternoon with Beany Laidlaw, half-witted George, and the gang. But it was lonesome without Jasper. On Thursday, however, things picked up. A letter came from Aunt Addie saying that she had changed her plans and that she would be arriving from Chicago the following evening. To Auntie it was an overwhelming piece of news.

For thirty hours the house underwent a mad session of cleaning, dusting and airing. I was assigned to mow and trim the lawn, hoe the garden, wash the surrey, and curry and comb old Nellie until she fairly shone. At the last minute Auntie remembered to bring out the special roll of toilet paper. Everything had to be just so when Aunt Addie visited us.

In the rush and excitement of Aunt Addie’s arrival, and with all the subsequent visiting that had to be done that first evening, Jasper was almost forgotten. But along about noon Saturday when Cousin Lloyd drove up with Curtis and little Marion on the seat beside him, both Auntie and Uncle wanted to know right away where Jasper was.

“Oh, he thought he’d better be getting back, so he said he’d just hoof it home,” Cousin Lloyd casually explained.

“But where is he now?” Uncle insisted. “What time’d he leave the farm?”

“Must’ve been about half past nine,” Cousin Lloyd answered.

“He should have been here an hour ago, then,” Uncle concluded. “ “Now, just how was he going to come?”

“Well, I think he said he’d cut down across the back of the farm and cross the ford, instead of coming by the covered bridge. It’d save him about a half mile.”

“So you think he crossed at the ford, eh?” Uncle repeated.

“Yes, but there’s no danger there,” Cousin Lloyd assured them. “It’s low this time of the year.”

But the mere mention of the river had done its work. Jasper should have reported a full hour and more before. There was no telling what had happened. Even in late summer Eel River had deep holes and shifting bottoms. There were a hundred places where a boy could drown almost any time of the year.

Cousin Lloyd and the two children were urged to stay for noon dinner, but Cousin Lloyd had some important work to do at the farm and they drove off. He repeated to Uncle and Auntie that there was no cause for worry. Jasper would be showing up at any minute now. He’d probably stopped somewhere in town to play two o’cat, talk pigeons, or help a boy out with a chore.

Even Aunt Addie’s golden words couldn’t dispel the cold fear that soon began to clutch the hearts of Uncle and Auntie. Jasper had never acted this way before in his whole life. He was a very trustworthy boy. When he was told to do anything he never failed to do it, and when he was given a definite time to report home he was always there with minutes to spare.

Conversation at the dinner table drifted quite a little. Even Little Addie’s approaching marriage had to give way to the complete recounting of the recent drowning of the two boys. Few, if any, of the gruesome details were omitted. I even got in some of my best licks. Then suddenly the tears began to swim in Auntie’s eyes.

“Now, don’t worry, Mattie,” Uncle said in the kindliest of tones. “I’ll hitch up Nellie and drive out to the farm. Jasper’s all right.” But there was no ring of conviction in Uncle’s words.

At the farm Uncle found Cousin Lloyd, and we hurried across the cornfields to the ford. There in the mud they found Jasper’s footprints. Cousin Lloyd stripped off his clothes and waded the river. There were no footprints on the other side.

“This means he was drowned right here,” Uncle managed to say.

“No, no,” Cousin Lloyd argued. “He might have waded up the river a little ways and come out there by that gravel. It wouldn’t show footprints….He couldn’t drown in this shallow water. He was a good swimmer for a boy.”

But it didn’t do much good. Uncle was sure that the worst had happened. For terrifying minutes he searched up and down the bank for signs of a pair of blue overalls, shirt, and a wide-brimmed straw hat. Then he led the way back to the barn and turned Nellie toward home. It was a stifling hot afternoon but Uncle did not spare the mare. He trotted her hard all the way. She was white with lather when we reached the brick house on the corner.

Auntie could see at first glance that Uncle was worried. And Uncle could tell without asking that there had been no sight or word of poor Jasper. There was a moment of tearful consultation. The Uncle trotted Nellie up Maple Avenue to Main Street and we found Newt Eidelberger, the town marshal. Uncle quickly explained that he was afraid that his nephew, Jasper Hunt, had been drowned about two and a half miles up the river. Like a prairie fire the word spread up and down Main Street. Within five minutes a half-dozen rigs, filled with volunteers, were heading for the scene of the tragedy. Others in skiffs and boats, with ropes and grappling hooks, were rowing upstream to help with the search.

Again Uncle and I trotted poor Nellie at top speed to the farm. She was dripping with sweat and breathing heavily when we got there. By this time Cousin Lloyd had become a little worried and had gone to the crossroads settlement of Liberty Mills for help. Men were down by the ford when we arrive.

For a half hour Uncle directed the awesome search. Then he felt that he ought to go back and personally report to Auntie, as there was no telephone or telegraph between the towns. Again Nellie was called upon to contribute her last ounce of strength. She was never to be the same again. She did not actually make the supreme sacrifice and drop dead in her tracks, but she almost did.

Back in town we found Auntie sitting on the lawn in a rocking chair, surrounded by consoling neighbors. Aunt Addie was fanning her, and now and again giving her a sniff from a bottle of camphor. Auntie was crying softly and muttering pathetically, “How can I ever tell his father?...What will he say?...It’s all my fault!...Oh, poor Jasper!”

It was close to four o’clock by this time, and there seemed no chance that we would ever see Jasper alive again. The whole town knew of the tragedy, and it was clear that if he had stopped with some neighbor boy it would have been reported long ago.

The immensity of my loss was just beginning to dawn on me when I glanced toward the house from the little group of mourners gathered on the lawn under the mulberry tree. For a second my eyes would not believe the truth of what they saw.

From around the corner of the house strode Jasper. He was alive. He wasn’t even wet!

“There he is!” I yelled.

Confused and dumfounded, poor Jasper stood in his tracks. Auntie, sobbing with joy and with arms outstretched, hurried toward him. She held him tight to her heart, and her tears were like drops of warm rain on his ruffled brown hair.

A hundred questions poured on him. Flushed, shy, and slightly belligerent, yet with a feeling of some great though unknown guilt, he stood speechless.

It took some minutes to get the full story, even if it was short and sweet: he had arrived home by 11:30 that morning, and glancing in through the sitting-room windows had seen Aunt Addie. That meant another two weeks of company. He’d been tricked; they’d run Aunt Addie in on him while he was at Cousin Lloyd’s.

He took a second quick glance to make sure. Then he edged his way along the street side of the house, and quickly slipped out to the barn and up to the haymow. Cousin Rouie had given him a handful of cookies when he had left the farm, and he was temporarily fortified against the pangs of hunger.

There, safe in the haymow, he fell asleep over a Nick Carter nickel novel and dozed peacefully until four in the afternoon.

GOING ON THIRTEEN (CHAPTER THREE)

It was a great blow to our household when Rettie Grossnickle, our hired girl, decided that she would go to North Dakota and take out a claim. Rettie had a regular beau, who was a hardworking drunkard farmer boy, and after a lengthy courtship it was finally decided that the two would set up a pioneer home together.

It was the tail end of America’s free-land era. It was, in fact, the end of a whole civilization. The city was now to become the American magnet. No longer could the eager, the restless, and the dissatisfied throw a gourd of spring water on the fire, whistle for the dog, and go forth to new lands.

Rettie and her young man sensibly agreed not to marry until they had filed separately on their individual half-sections of Dakota wheatland. First, they chose claims that lay together. Then they built a double cabin, resting half on one claim and half on the other. After paying the ten-dollar government fees, they were married. During these first years Rettie used to write Auntie now and again. Then we moved away from North Manchester, and for more than thirty years Rettie has been only a memory. Without her my boyhood would have lost much of its color.

Likewise without Nellie, our old mare, those Indiana days would have been incomplete. Nellie was all things to all boys. At one time or another she was family carriage horse, Indian pony, cavalry mount, cow pony, circus and trick horse, race horse, and general utility mare. Nellie was not always happy in her various roles. Most of all, she resented the Indian fights in which she had to take part. At the World’s Fair in Chicago, in the summer of 1893 just before we had moved to Indiana, my eyes had practically popped out of their sockets at Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. It was here that I had received much of my inspiration for Nellie’s various horse acts.

But Nellie really enjoyed the Saturdays in autumn when Jasper and I went nutting. We’d jog along some country road until we came to a woods. All this part of Indiana was once covered with hardwood forests, and even at this date the countryside was dotted with thirty- and forty-acre tracts of timber. Among the oaks and maples were black walnut and butternut trees, and the ground underneath them would be literally covered with the green-barked nuts.

We would tie Nellie to a rail fence, leaving the slipknot loose and easy so that one jerk would free the rope. Then, with two or three empty sacks under our arms, we would shinny over the fence and hunt out the walnut trees. As a rule we had to keep a sharp eye out for the farmer and his dog. If we saw or heard them coming we would make a run for Nellie, throw our sacks in the buggy, and be off in a clout of dust.

The rides home in the autumn twilight were always the loveliest part of the nut-gathering days. The sumac and hazel bushes that fringed the graveled roads blazed with color. The maples, oaks, and elms were like bright Scotch plaids of brilliant reds and crimsons, burnt browns and maroons. Soon a little chill would come in the air and before long a few brave stars would be twinkling in the great, dark blue dome above….I wonder if anything in the world is as beautiful as an Indian summer twilight in Indiana.

There was nothing to hold back a boy’s fancy on those rides home. You could put your feet on top the curved dashboard, lie back in the old leather seat, and just dream away. Maybe for minutes at a time Nellie’d seem to catch your own mood: she’d stop jogging and walk along lazy as anything: probably she was dreaming too.

I suppose I got a good deal of my love for horses from Uncle. He knew all about the trotters and the pacers, and the champions like Maud S. and Nancy Hanks, Lou Dillon and Star Pointer. Uncle used to hold forth, too, on the great prize fighters. Of course, John L. Sullivan was really Uncle’s favorite, but young Jim Corbett had a place in his affection because he set young men such a good example in clean living. That Saint Patrick’s Day in 1897 when lanky Bob Fitzsimmons knocked out Gentleman Jim in the fourteenth round was a sad day for Uncle. He had told us that Bob couldn’t do it. It was one of the few times that Uncle was wrong.

He liked, as well, to talk about the famous train and bank robbers. He’d try to draw a moral for Jasper and me from the career of the James boys of Missouri, but somehow he never could quite stick it out to the death. When it came to the foul shooting of Jesse by Bob Ford, his own cousin, Uncle could not control his inherent sympathies. He always had to conclude that it was a low deed and that Ford eventually got his just dues when he himself was shot down.

Auntie didn’t think Uncle should talk so much about such things as trotting horses, prize fighters, and bank robbers. She offset his race-horse reminiscences by her own ideas about running horses. Everything that had to do with the runners was immoral, she contended. The horses were doped and the races crooked, but even that wasn’t the worst of it—the jockeys were fed whisky when they were boys so as to stunt their growth.

Auntie was a little troubled about our religious training, but Uncle wasn’t. A follower, more or less, of Robert Ingersoll, he was bitter against the organized church because of its conservatism. He contended that it had been largely against the cause of abolition. And he believed that most preachers, and certainly most national church organizations, should come out boldly for temperance and woman suffrage. Their failure to do this settled Uncle’s churchgoing. Only under the strongest pressure from Auntie would Uncle stir out on a Sabbath morning. As for revivals, he scoffed at their hypocrisy and the futility of their conversions. Auntie, on the other hand, wanted to believe in the Bible and the words of the ministers, but she had lived for too many years with a skeptic to swallow it all, hook, line, and sinker.

Consequently, except when Uncle Easton did his annual preaching or there was the annual Methodist sermon against dancing and cardplaying, Jasper and I had only to attend Sunday school. On Sabbath mornings we would be decked out in our best suits and Uncle would ceremoniously hand each of us a nickel for the Sunday-school collection. Unless we voluntarily chose to go to church we were supposed to report home as soon as Sunday school was over. Auntie would usually dress in her black silk, with the pretty lavender and lace trimmings, and her black gloves with the white seams showing on the back, and with her best bonnet on she’d proudly sally forth to the Methodist church. Uncle would stay at home and read the Sunday Inter-Ocean or The Herald.

If the weather was uncertain Jasper and I would dutifully report at Sunday school. In due course of time we’d relinquish our precious nickels to the red plush maw of the collection basket. But if it was a lovely spring or summer day, the call of the wild was usually too much for us. We’d head straight for town and the fleshpots. These were mostly of two varieties—peanuts from Crip Johnson’s peanut wagon on the corner of the vacant lot beyond the post office, or a salmon sandwich soaked in catsup, at the Star Restaurant. I never could get enough salmon, and as for catsup it was strictly forbidden on our table. Auntie claimed that such things as catsup and even vinegar were craved only by drunkards.

Hoopy Doodle usually was hanging around either the restaurant or the peanut wagon on Sunday mornings. Hoopy was harelipped and squint-eyed. Mentally he was a bit under par. On week days he drove a team of ancient mules hitched to an even more ancient dray. On Sundays he ate peanuts and smoked “three-fers” with the boys. He was a wiry, round-shouldered man in his twenties and, despite his speech handicap, he loved to talk. His specialties were horses and mules. He had a definite kinship with them. When he couldn’t get anyone else to listen to him he’d talk to his mules.

Hoopy was an ardent Republican. He even carried his politics to his personal and business affairs. He called the older and blinder of his two mules Grover, after the late president, Grover Cleveland. The younger mule, that was blind only in one eye, he called Bill, after William Jennings Bryan. He always referred to the team as “my Democrats.”

The loafers on Main Street teased Hoopy a good deal. They linked his name to that of every old maid or fly girl in town. If a new milliner or dressmaker or waitress showed up, they soon concocted a tall tale of how they had seen Hoopy strolling with her along the riverbank near the dam—the young bloods’ favorite spot for illicit dates. Hoopy would grin and stoutly deny the allegation. Still, he rather liked to leave an impression of being quite a lady’s man.

Hoopy’s greatest disappointment came when he was refused by our militia company that was drumming up recruits for a possible war with Spain. Those were exciting days.

I remember getting the Chicago Inter-Ocean from our mailbox and seeing spread across its front page the incredible announcement: BATTLESHIP MAIN SUNK! I read through the triple-deck head, then darted out of the post office, and hit it down the alley to carry the message to Uncle. In a voice shaking with emotion he read aloud to Auntie and Jasper and me, with Rettie standing horror-stricken in the doorway, the full details of the mysterious blowing up of the American battleship in Havana harbor, and the deadly intimation that Spanish villains had done it.

Before he was half finished he lowered his paper and solemnly enunciated this prophecy: “Our soldiers will have to drive out ‘Butcher’ Weiler now—and at last poor bleeding Cuba will get justice!” Then he read on.

…

For weeks there was increasing excitement. Early one morning in April I was awakened by the sound of a fife and drum. I jumped out of bed, hurried to the window, and looked out on the warm, gray dawn. On the sidewalk stood Asa Foster, whose father owned the livery stable under the Opera House, and three or four other men. They were dressed in semimilitary costumes; a single legging, a military blouse, a webb cartridge belt, and a broad-brimmed army hat. Apparently they had made two uniforms do for the five of them. They were taking turns rolling the drum. But Asa was the only one who could play the fife. At each corner they would stop and sound off their martial music. Then there would be a thick-tongued order and the squad would march unsteadily to the next corner. Now and again one of these unofficial representatives of Company E would shout, “War’s declared! Whee! Whoopee! Remember the Maine!”

Thrilled as I was by this dramatic announcement, my own high patriotism and pride in country were shocked by this first taste of real war in the raw. Instead of officers in gold braid mounted on milk-white chargers and preceded by silken-clad heralds with long silver trumpets, I was viewing five loafers awakening the good Indiana villagers from virtuous sleep with a ribald and drunken exhibition. I was sure that Asa and all the others were reeking with alcohol. Each of them was certain to fill a drunkard’s grave. Uncle was right: wine was a mocker, strong drink a curse.

There was a school holiday the afternoon that the company entrained for Indianapolis. For at least a part of this day the local G.A.R. heroes had to accept a back seat, although they stood for their rights to the bitter end. Most of them dressed up in their blue uniforms, with their medals and badges, and marched in a body to the station for the farewell ceremonies. But they were merely a part of the decorations; this day was for the new heroes. Mothers, sweethearts, friends, and relatives—the whole town, in fact—turned out to cheer them on their way to glory.

Asa’s gray-haired mother and his rather pretty young wife were on hand with a lunch basket and bunches of flowers. A thousand or more people were at the depot, but most of us boys waited at the armory and marched down Main Street with the company, while the town’s Silver Cornet Band banged away with martial music. On the station platform the soldiers broke ranks and mingled with their families, receiving their final blessings and presents. Then the special train pulled in, and Captain Browning shouted from the car steps for his men to board the two coaches that were reserved for them.

I was jumping about like a jack-in-the-box until I happened to get a good look at Asa. He was drunk again—and in front of his mother and wife! Someone led him to the coach and helped him aboard. When the train slowly pulled out, with the crowd cheering and the bank playing “the Girl I Left Behind Me,” Asa was leaning out of a window, grinning like a baboon and waving meaninglessly. Somehow, after that soldiers never meant quite the same to me.

Five months later our town again turned out to welcome home our returning heroes. Their war service had been limited to fighting the malarial mosquitoes of Tampa, the rotten beef of the Quartermaster Corps, and the low-priced mulatto camp followers. Six or eight had died of fever. Several others were marked forever by diseases of one kind or another. But it hadn’t been their fault that they had failed to be in at the kill.

The Tampa campaign had left no mark on Asa. He was drunk when he spread the news of the declaration of war, he was a little drunker when he embarked on the special troop train for the front, and he went back to his mother and wife even drunker than when he left.

Asa was a great help to Uncle in his temperance work with Jasper and me. What a terrible-looking thing the inside of Asa’s stomach must have been!

Toward the end of the war summer I went on my big trip to visit Cousin Tillie in Aledo, Illinois. My father, who lived in Chicago, was at the time out West on schoolbook business, so it was arranged that I was to stay overnight with Aunt Addie, and the next morning be put on the C.B.&Q. train at Union Station for the long journey to Aledo. It was easy enough, except that you had to change trains at Galva and get on the “Harmony Jim.” You had to be on to your job to do that.

…

FAREWELL TO EEL RIVER

I can never understand what became of all those high-school days of mine. I remember the first time as a freshman I nonchalantly strode up the front walk and the high steps into the old red brick building that contained all twelve grades: the grammar-school pupils had to line up in the yard behind and march through the back door to their rooms. I recall vividly that first day of magnificence! And then it seems that in far less time than it used to take to shift the scenes in the opera house it was 1903 and I, a senior, was standing before the president of the school board to receive my diploma.

I was seventeen and a half, six feet two inches tall, slender, eager, and ambitious to see the world and its wonders. Jasper had been at Lewis Institute in Chicago for two years, and Auntie and Uncle had stayed on in North Manchester primarily so that I might finish high school. Then I would go out and on, and eventually I would be educated. No one said much about it—it was taken for granted, much the same as the spring floods of old Eel River. My mother’s dying request had been that Jasper and I were to go to college. She had even left the money for it. After that it was as inevitably a part of our life as that we should grow up.

As a boy of fifteen I had fallen deeply in love with lovely brown-eyed Mary Brown. I used to walk home from church socials with her, and once or twice I had taken her to country picnics. Possibly it was because she was frail, and at times seemed touched with an eery sadness, that I became so sentimentally interested in her. I was reading Poe’s poems at this time, and I remember to this day how the death of the beautiful Annabel Lee loomed like a tragic prophecy.

A winter came when Mary was sent away. I recall taking her a few cuts of Auntie’s potted flowers and of telling her that in the spring when she came back from the sanitarium, strong and well again, we would take long drives together every Saturday afternoon. She smiled and agreed but her starry brown eyes set in her pale white face, with only the tiny fever spots giving it color, seemed to say that it was not to be. I stammered out my good-by. At the door when her mother thanked me for coming, I could say nothing for the lump in my throat.

Mary never took those promised buggy rides. Early that next spring she was buried in the new cemetery—and life went on for the rest of us.

But the North Manchester girl who was to have a really profound effect on my early years was Mariam Stewart. Her father owned the furniture store and undertaking establishment. The family had traveled extensively over America and were more or less people about town. In their library I saw my first Navajo rug and Indian handicraft. Mariam had an older cousin, a Detroit newspaperman, who used to visit in North Manchester, and it was from him that I first caught a little of the excitement and adventure of this great profession. He ware yellow gloves, carried a cane, and was my ideal of a dashing, successful reporter.

For two or three years Frazer Arnold and I had been under the spell of Richard Harding Davis. It was a matter of some difficulty for me to decide whether I wanted to be a Captain Macklin soldier of fortune or a Dick Davis war correspondent. Mariam contributed her own romantic imagination, and on winter evenings in front of her fireplace, or on summer afternoons as we drove down the country roads, she assured me that I could do anything I wanted to if I only wanted to do it enough.

Altogether, it seems to me that these Indiana years were beautiful and complete. I had all the tings it takes to make a boy happy: a pleasant home, amusing playmates, a horse, a river, and many dreams. It was an important period to have lived through; America was slowly emerging from her pioneer age. Not until a dozen years later did the motorcar and hard roads bread the isolation of farm and village life. Motion pictures, too, were a decade away. The pace of a trotting horse was still the pace of the countryside.

I doubt if we actually learned very much in our schools then, but the simple truths of life did not seem blurred by speed and the multitude of distractions that confuse young people so much today. The outside world was far away, but life was close at hand and real….It’s difficult to learn about trees and birds when you’re driving sixty miles an hour. And I am inclined to doubt whether the eternal verities are best acquired from Hollywood motion pictures.

Through these Indiana years the vague figure of my father remained always in the background of my consciousness. He was a strange and lonely man. Upon the death of my mother he buried himself in his books and writing. A Modern Speller of his caught on, and soon it was followed by a series of Modern Readers. Shortly after I left North Manchester he finished work on his Hunt’s Progressive Speller, which in the end was to sell ten million copies.

When Uncle and Auntie took Jasper and me from Rock Island to the ranch in Arkansas, my father moved to Chicago. Here he had a suite of rooms in the home of Mr. Malcolm, a minister, on the west side. More than half the time he was away on state schoolbook adoptions. Eventually, when the reverend gentleman sold his home and moved to California, my father stayed on with the new owners. Here he was to meet the lady who, fourteen years after my mother’s death, was to become his second wife.

…

In September, 1901, after McKinley had been shot, and Theodore Roosevelt was sitting in the White House, Uncle grew more and more incensed over the fact that wine was being served at the formal White House dinners. He thought something should be done about it.

I had heard Uncle orate on all this so many times that eventually his argument seemed to suffer from repetition rather than gain strength. Besides, I was now under the political spell of Clem Drake, our milkman. He reached the height of his influence during my last year in high school.

Clem had had a year at DePauw University….When the Spanish-American War broke out he immediately enlisted in Company E. Not only was his own intense patriotism aroused, but he was stirred deeply by the Cuban cause. In the desperate Tampa campaign no soldier vice had tempted him. In the breast pocket of his blue flannel army shirt he carried the little leather Bible that his widowed mother had given him at the depot when Company E had entrained for the war.

…

Clem’s home was two blocks north of our house, and I’d often drop down to his barn along about eleven o’clock on Saturday mornings when he would be finishing his morning rounds. At this time milk wagons carried their milk and cream in big cans and ladled it into the customer’s own small tin bucket. After Clem unharnessed his horse he had his cans to wash and scald and a few odd chores to do He liked to talk while he went automatically about his tasks.

“We got to be doing something pretty soon about this Congress,” he would say with a serious shake of his head. Then he’d go on in some such vein as this: “They’re spending too much money. They’ve lost touch with the people….Say, A.F., did you know that it cost a million dollars a day to run the Spanish-American War? Just think of that! And we’re spending over one hundred million dollars on our navy this year. Of course, I think we should have a good fleet, but it’s costing us too much.”

Clem would look up at me out of his pale blue eyes and slowly shake his head. Then from his rich background as soldier, college man, and student of world affairs, he would go on confidentially: “Pork barrel! That’s the real trouble with America. Too much graft! Why, all these fellows do down there in Washington is to trade votes with each other. Just horse trading: one helps get a new post office for Peoria, and in return he gets a bridge over the Wabash.”

…he continued to preach against Congress and its waste and extravagances. I’m not sure how many converts he finally had, but I certainly was one of his most ardent followers. Much of my faith in him he returned in full measure. He strongly advised me to go into newspaper work. I could do a lot of good there, and doing good to your fellow man, he assured me, was all that really counted in life.

I used to quote Clem quite a little in our informal high-school debates. And when it came to my graduation oration I chose the subject of “How to Deal with Trusts,” and incorporated my of Clem’s ideas into its powerful line of argument.

This year—1903—the baccalaureate sermon was preached in the First Methodist Church. After the fond parents and admiring friends took their seats, the seven boys and seven girls in the graduating class marched in pairs down the middle aisle to the front row. With the exercises over, the audience gathered on the sidewalk, while the graduates marched out and were ushered into four double carriages.

Now began the exciting graduation drive given annually by the druggist who ran the bookstore. Eight miles from town the head carriage turned into the driveway of a red brick farmhouse. The other drives followed and duly tied their teams to a hitching rack. After a few minutes strolling on the lawn we were called in to one of those country dinners that make your mouth water: crisp fried chicken, mashed potatoes, brown gravy, golden biscuits, jams, preserves, pickled watermelon rind, spiced peaches, pickles, pies, home-made ice cream, and a dozen other good things.

It was late afternoon when we drove back to town. I was strangely conscious that not only were these Indiana years over but that the discipline and tender care of childhood were ended. In three months I would be leaving forever this peaceful community with the sleepy river flowing through it.

I was eager to go, but I knew that it meant leaving behind many things and many people whom I would miss sorely. Even if the ten joyous years here had failed to give me real roots they had at least given me memories of a perfect boyhood.

Almost before I was conscious of it the first of September rolled around, and I was leaving for a year at the Michigan Military Academy at Orchard Lake. Early in the morning Hoopy Doodle, the tongue-tied, half-wit drayman, came for my trunk. A little after nine o’clock Uncle and I started in the phaeton for the depot.

On the porch I kissed Auntie and hurried down the walk to the buggy. In front of Ed Butterbaugh’s house I turned to wave at her. She was leaning against a porch pillar, her face buried in her hands. I knew that she was sobbing.

Suddenly, going away forever didn’t seem so much fun as I had expected it to be.

…