Back Home Part 14

Everybody goes the middle day of the Fair, everybody that you ever did know or hear tell of. You'll be going along, kind of half-listening to the man selling Temperance Bitters, and denouncing the other bitters because they have "al-cue-hawl" in them, and "al-cue-hawl will make you drunk," (which is perfectly true), and kind of half-listening to the man with the electric machine, declaring: "Ground is the first conductor; water is the second conductor," and you'll be thinking how slippery the gra.s.s is to walk on, when a face in the crowd will, as it were, sting your memory. "I ought to know that man," says you to yourself. "Now, who the mischief is he? Barker? No, 't isn't Barker, Barkdull? No. Funny I can't think of his name. Begins with B I'm pretty certain." And you trail along after him, as if you were a detective, sort of keeping out of his sight, and yet every once in a while getting a good look at him.

"Mmmmmm!" says you. "What is that fellow's name? Why, sure. McConica."

And you walk up to him and stick out your hand while he's ga.s.sing with somebody, and there's that smile on your face that says: "I know you but you don't know me," and he takes it in a limp sort of fas.h.i.+on, and starts to say: "You have the advantage of--" when, all of a sudden, he grabs your hand as if he were going to jerk your arm out of its socket and beat you over the head with the b.l.o.o.d.y end, and shouts out: "Why, h.e.l.lO, Billy! Well, suffering Cyrus and all hands round! Hold still a second and let me look at you. Gosh darn your hide, where you been for so long? I though you'd clean evaporated off the face the earth. Why, how AIR you? How's everything? That's good. Let me make you acquainted with my wife. Molly, this is Mr.--" But she says: "Now don't you tell me what his name is. Let me think. Why, Willie Smith! Well, of all things!

Why, how you've changed! Honest, I wouldn't have knowed you. Do you mind the time we went sleigh-ridin' the whole posse of us, and got upset down there by Hanks's place?" And then you start in on "D' you mind?" and "Don't you recollect?" and you talk about the old school-days, and who's married, and who's moved out to Kansas, and who's got the Elias Hoover place now, and how Ella Trimble--You know Ella Diefenbaugh, old Jake Diefenbaugh's daughter, the one that lisped. Course you do. Well, she married Ed Trimble, and he died along in the early part of the summer.

Typhoid. Was getting well but he took a relapse, and went off like that!

And now she's left with three little ones, and they guess poor Ella has a pretty hard time making out. And this old schoolmate that you start to tell a funny story about is dead, and the freckle-faced boy with the buck teeth that put the rabbit in the teacher's desk, he's dead, too, and the boy that used to cry in school when they read:

"Give me three grains of corn, mother, Only three grains o f corn; To save what little life I have, mother, Till the coming o f the morn."

well, he studied law with old judge Rodehaver, and got to be Prosecuting Attorney, but he took to drinking--politics, you know--and now he's just gone to the dogs. Smart as a steel-trap, and bright as a dollar. Oh, a terrible pity! A terrible pity. And as you hear the fate of one after another of the happy companions of your childhood, and the sadness of life comes over you, they start to tell something that makes you laugh again. I tell you. Did you ever see one of these concave gla.s.ses, such as the artists use when they want to get an idea of how a picture looks all together as a whole, and not as an a.s.semblage of parts? Well, what the concave gla.s.s is to a picture, so such talk is to life. It sort of draws it all together, and you see it as a whole, its suns.h.i.+ne and its shadow, its laughter and its tears, its work and its play, its past and its present. But not its future. The Good Man has mercifully hidden that from us.

It does a body good to get such a talk once in a while.

And there are the young fellows and the girls. This young gentleman in the rimless eye-gla.s.ses, who is now beginning to "go out among 'em" the last time you saw him was in meeting when Elder Drown was preaching, and my gentleman stood up in the seat and shouted shrilly: "'T ain't at all, man. 'T ain't at all!" And this sweet girl-graduate--the last time you saw her was just after Becky Daly, in the vain effort to "peacify" the squalling young one, had given her a fresh egg to play with. I kind o' like the looks of the younger generation of girls. But I don't know about the young fellows. They look to me like a trifling lot. Nothing like what they were in our young days. I don't see but what us old codgers had better hold on a while longer to the County Clerk's office, and the Sheriff's office, and the Probate judges.h.i.+p, and the presidency of the National Bank. It wouldn't be safe to trust the destinies of the country in the hands of such heedless young whiffets. Engaged to be married! Oh, get out! What? Those babies?

I kept awake most of the time the man was lecturing on: "The Republic: Will it Endure?" but I don't remember that he said anything in it about the crops. (We can't go 'round meeting the folks all day. We really must give a glance at the exhibition.) And I am one of those who hold to the belief that while the farmers can raise ears of corn as long as from your elbow to your fingertips, as big 'round as a rollingpin, and set with grains as regular and even as an eight-dollar set of artificial teeth; as long as they grow potatoes the size of your foot, and such pretty oats and wheat, and turnips, and squashes, and onions, and apples and all kinds of truck, and raise them not only in increasing size but increasing quant.i.ties to the acre I feel as if the Republic would last the year out anyway. Not that I have any notion that mere material prosperity will make and keep us a free people, but it goes to show that the farmers are not plodding along, doing as their fathers did before them, but that they are reading and studying, and taking advantage of modern methods. There are two ways of increasing your income. One is by enlarging your output, and the other is by enlarging your share of the proceeds from the sale of that output. The Grand Dukes will not always run this country. The farmers saved the Union once by dying for it; they will save it again by living for it.

The scientific fellows tell us that we have not nearly reached the maximum of yield to the acre of crops that are harvested once a year, but in regard to the crops that are harvested twice a day it looks to me as if we were doing fairly well. Nowadays we hardly know what is meant by the expression, "Spring poor." It is a sinister phrase, and tells a story of the old, cruel days when farmers begrudged their cattle the little bite they ate in wintertime, so that when the gra.s.s came again the poor creatures would fall over trying to crop it. They were so starved and weak that, as the saying went, they had to lean up against the fence to breathe. They don't do that way now, as one look at the fine, sleek cows will show you. A cow these days is a different sort of a being, her coat like satin, and her udder generous, compared with the wild-eyed things with burrs in their tails, and their flanks crusted with filth, their udders the size of a kid glove, and yielding such a little dab of milk and for such a short period. Hear the dairymen boast now of the miraculous yearly yield in pounds of b.u.t.ter and milk, and when they say: "You've got to treat a cow as if she were a lady," it sounds like good sense.

Pigs are naturally so untidy about their persons, and have such shocking table-manners that it seems difficult to treat a sow like a lady, but that one in the pen yonder, with her litter of sucking pigs, seems very interesting. Come, let's have a look. Aren't the little pigs dear things? I'd like to climb in and take one of them up to pet it; do you s'pose she'd mind it if I did? I can see decided improvement in the modern hogs over old Mose Batch.e.l.ler's. If you remember, his were what were known as "razorbacks." They could go like the wind, and the fence was not made that could stop them. If they couldn't root under it, they could turn themselves sidewise and slide through between the rails.

It was told me that, failing all else, they could give their tails a swing--you remember the big b.a.l.l.s of mud they used to have on their tails' ends--they could swing their tails after the manner of an athlete throwing the hammer, and fly over the top of the tallest stake-and-rider fence ever put up. I don't know whether this is the strict truth or not, but it is what was told me as a little boy, and I don't think people would wilfully deceive an innocent child.

The pigs nowaday aren't as smart as that, but they cut up better at hog-killing time. They aren't quite so trim; indeed, they are nothing but cylinders of meat, whittled to a point at the front end, and set on four pegs, but as you lean on the top-rail of the pens out at the County Fair and look down upon them, you can picture in your mind, without much effort, ham, and sidemeat, and bacon, and spare-ribs, and smoked shoulder, and head-cheese, and liver-wurst, and sausages, and glistening white lard for crullers and pie-crust--Yes, I think pigs are right interesting. I know they've got Scripture for it, the folks that think it is wrong to eat pork, but somehow I feel sorry for them; they miss such a lot, not only in the eating line, but other ways. They are always being persecuted, and hara.s.sed, and picked at. Whereas the pork-fed man, it seems to me, sort of hankers to be picked at. It gives him a good chance to slap somebody slonchways. He feels better after he has seen his persecutors go away with a cut lip, and fingering of their teeth to see if they're all there.

You'll just have to take me gently but firmly by the sleeve and lead me past the next exhibit, the noisy one, where there's so much cackling and crowing. I give you fair warning that if you get me started talking about chickens, the County Fair will have to wait till some other time.

I don't know much about ducks, and geese, and guinea-hens, and pea-fowl, and turkeys, but chickens--Why, say. We had a hen once (Plymouth Rock she was; we called her Henrietta), and honestly, that hen knew more than some folks. One time she--all right. I'll hush. Let's go in here.

I don't remember whether the pies, and cakes, and canned fruit, and such are in Pomona Hall or the Fine Arts Hall. Fine Arts Hall I think. They ought to be. I speak to be one of the judges that give out the premiums in this department. I'd be generous and let somebody else do the judging of the cakes, because I don't care much for cake. Oh, I can manage to choke it down, but I haven't the expert knowledge, practical and scientific, that I have in the matter of pie. I'd bear my share of the work when it came to the other things, jellies and preserves, and pies, but not cake. Wouldn't know just exactly how to go at it in the matter of jellies. I'd take a gla.s.s of currant, and hold it up to the light to note its crimson glory. And I'd lift off the waxed paper top and peer in, and maybe give the jelly a shake. And then I'd take a spoon and taste, closing my eyes so as to appear to deliberate--they'd roll up in an ecstacy anyhow--and I'd smack my lips, and say: "Mmmmm!" very thoughtfully, and set the gla.s.s back, and write down in my book my judgment, which would invariably be: "First Prize." Because if there is anything on top of this green earth that I think is just about right, it is currant jelly. Grape jelly is nice, and crab-apple jelly has its good points, and quince jelly is very delicate, but there is something about currant jelly that seems to touch the spot. Quince preserves are good if there is enough apple with the quince, and watermelon preserves are a great favorite, not because they are so much better tasting, but because the lucent golden cubes in the spicy syrup appeal so to the eye. But if you want to know what I think is really good eating in the preserve line, you just watch my motions when I come to the tomato preserves, these little fig-tomatoes, and see how quick the red card is put on them. Yes, indeed. It's been a long time, hasn't it? since you had any tomato-preserves, you that haven't been "Back Home" lately.

It's no great trick to put up other fruit so that it will keep, but I'd look the canned tomatoes over pretty carefully, and if I saw that one lady had not only put them up so that they hadn't turned foamy, but had also succeeded with green corn, and that other poser, string beans, I'd give her first premium, because I'd know she was a first-rate housekeeper, and a careful woman, and one that deserved encouragement.

But I'd save myself for the pies. I can tell a rich, short, flaky crust, and I can tell the kind that is as brown as a dried apple, and tough as the same on the top, and sad and livery on the bottom. And I know about fillings, how thick they ought to be, and how they ought to be seasoned, and all. Particularly pumpkin-pies, because I had early advantages that way that very few other boys had. I was allowed to sc.r.a.pe the crock that had held the pumpkin for the pies. So that's how I know as much as I do.

I suppose, however, when all is said and done, that there is no pie that can quite come up to an apple-pie. You take nice, short crust that's been worked up with ice-water, and line the tin with it, and fill it heaping with sliced, tart apples--not sauce. Mercy, no!--and sweeten them just right, and put on a lump of b.u.t.ter, and some allspice, and perhaps a clove, and a little lemon peel, and then put on the cover, and trim off the edge, and pinch it up in scallops, and draw a couple of leaves in the top with a sharp knife, and have the oven just right, and set it in there, and I tell you that when ma opens the oven-door to see how the pie is coming on, there distils through the house such a perfume that you cry out in a choking voice: "Say! Ain't dinner 'most ready?"

But I fully recognize the fact that very often our judgment is warped by feeling, and I am inclined to believe that even the undoubted merit of the apple-pie would not prevail against a vinegar-pie, if such should be presented to me for my decision. A vinegar-pie? Well, it has a top and bottom crust, the same as any other pie, but its filling is made of vinegar, diluted with water to the proper degree of sub-acidity, sweetened with mola.s.ses, thickened with flour, and all baked as any other pie. You smile at its crude simplicity, and wonder why I should favor it. To you it doesn't tell the story that it does to me. It doesn't take you back in imagination to "the airly days," when folks came over the mountains in covered wagons, and settled in the Western Reserve, leaving behind them all the civilization of their day, and its comforts, parting from relatives and friends, knowing full well that in this life they never more should look upon their faces--leaving everything behind to make a new home in the western wilds.

Is was a land of promise that they came to. The virgin soil bore riotously. There were fruit-trees in the forest that Johnny Appleseed had planted on his journeyings. The young husband could stand in his dooryard and kill wild turkeys with his rifle. They fed to loathing on venison, and squirrels, and all manner of game, and once in a great while they had the luxury of salt pork. They were well-nourished, but sometimes they pined for that which was more than mere food. They hungered for that which should be to the meals' victuals what the flower is to the plant.

"I whoosh't--I woosh't was so we could hev pie," sighed one such. (Let us call him Uriah Kinney). I think that sounds as if it were his name.

"Land's sakes!" snapped his wife, exasperated that he should be thinking of the same thing that she was. "Land's sakes! Haow d' ye s'pose I kin make a pie when I hain't got e'er a thing to make it aout o'? You gimme suthirnn to make it aout o', an' you see haow quick--"

"I ain't a-faultinn ye, Mary Ann," interposed Uriah gently. "I know haow 't is. I was on'y tellin' ye. I git I git a kind o' hum'sick sometimes.

'Pears like as if I sh'd feel more resigned like.... Don't ye cry, Mary Ann. I know, I know. You feel julluk I do 'baout back home, an' all luk that."

O woman! When the heft of thy intellect is thrown against a problem, something has got to give. Not long after, Uriah sits down to dinner, and can hardly ask a blessing, he has to swallow so. A pie is on the table!

"Gosh, Mary Ann, but this is good!" says he, holding out his hand for the third piece. "This is lickinn good!" And he celebrates her achievement far and wide.

"My Mary Ann med me a pie t' other day, was the all-firedest best pie I ever et."

"Med you what?"

"Med me a pie."

"Pie? Whutch talkinn' baout? Can't git nummore pies naow. Frot 's all gin aout."

"I golly, she med it just the same. Smartest woman y' ever see." The man dribbled at the mouth.

"What sh' make it aout o'?"

"Vinegar an' worter, I think she said. I d' know 's I ever et anythinn I relished julluk that. My Mary Ann, tell yew! She's 'baout's smart 's they make 'em."

I wish I knew who she really was whom I have called Mary Ann Kinney, she that made the first vinegar-pie. I wish I knew where her grave is that I might lay upon it a bunch of flowers, such as she knew and liked--sweet-william, and phlox, and larkspur, and wild columbine. It couldn't make it up to her for all the hards.h.i.+ps she underwent when she was bringing up a family in that wild, western country, and especially that fall when they all had the "fever 'n' ager" so bad, Uriah and the twins chilling one day, and Hiram and Sophronia Jane the next, and she just as miserable as any of them, but keeping up somehow, G.o.d only knows how. It couldn't make it up to her, but as I laid the pretty posies against the leaning headstone on which is written:

"A Loving Wife, a Mother Dear, Faithful Friend Lies Buried Here."

I believe she 'd get word of it somehow, and understand what I was trying to say by it.

I'll ask to be let off the committee that judges the rest of the exhibits in the Fine Arts Hall, the quilts and the Battenberg, and the crocheting, and such. I know the Log Cabin pattern, and the Mexican Feather pattern, and I think I could make out to tell the Hen-and-Chickens pattern of quilts, but that's as much as ever. And as to the real, hand-painted views of fruit-cake, and grapes and apples on a red table-cloth, I am one of those that can't make allowances for the fact that she only took two terms. I call to mind one picture that Miss Alvalou Ashbaker made of her pap, old "c.o.o.nrod" Ashbaker. The Lord knows he was a "humbly critter," but he wasn't as "humbly" as she made him out to be, with his eyes bulging out of his head as if he was choking on a fishbone. And, instead of her dressing him up in his Sunday clothes, I wish I may never see the back of my neck if that girl didn't paint him in a red-and-black barred flannel s.h.i.+rt, with porcelain b.u.t.tons on it!

And his hair looked as if the calf had been at it. Wouldn't you think somebody would have told her? And that isn't all. She got the premium!

Neither am I prepared to pa.s.s judgment on the fancy penmans.h.i.+p displayed by Professor Swope, framed elegantly in black walnut, and gilt, depicting a bounding deer, all made out of hair-line, shaded spirals, done with his facile pen. (No wonder a deer can jump so, with all those springs inside him.) Professor Swope writes visiting cards for you, wonderful birds done in flourishes and holding ribbons in their bills.

He puts your name on the ribbon place. Neatest and tastiest thing you can imagine. I like to watch him do it, but it makes me feel unhappy, somehow. I never was much of a scribe, and it's too late for me to learn now.

I don't feel so downcast when I examine the specimens of writing done by the children of District No. 34. I can just see the young ones working at home on these things, with their tongues stuck out of one corner of their mouths.

"Rome was not built in a day Rome was not built in a day Rome was not built in a day"

and so on, bearing down hard on the downstroke of the curve in the capital "R," and clubbing the end of the little "t." And in the higher grades, they toil over "An Original Social Letter," describing to an imaginary correspondent a visit to Crystal Lake, or the Magnetic Springs. I can hear them mourn: "What shall I say next?" and "Ma, make Effie play some place else, won't you? She jist joggles the table like everything. Now, see what you done! Now I got to write it all over again. No, I cain't 'scratch it out. How'd it look to the County Fair all scratched out? Plague take it all!"

The same hands have done maps of North and South America, and red-and-blue ink pictures of the circulation of the blood. It does beat all how smart the young ones are nowadays. I could no more draw off a picture of the circulation of the blood--get it right, I mean--why, I wouldn't attempt it.

I am kind of mixed up in my recollection of the hall right next to the Fine Arts. You know it had two doors in each end. Sometimes I can see the central s.p.a.ce between the doors, roped off and devoted to sewing-machines with persons demonstrating that they ran as light as a feather, and how it was no trouble at all to tuck and gather, and fell; to organs, which struck me with amaze, because by some witchcraft (octave coupler, I think they called it) the man could play on keys that he didn't touch, and pianos, whereon young ladies were prevailed to perform "Silvery Waves"--that's a lovely piece, I think, don't you?--and

"Listen to the mocking-bird, TEE-die-eedle-DONG Lisen to the mocking-bird, teedle-eedle-EE-dle DONG The mocking-bird still singing oer her grave, toomatooral-oo-cal-LEE!"

And then again I can see that central, roped-off s.p.a.ce given over to reckless deviltry, sheer impudent, brazen-faced, bold, discipline-defying er--er--wickedness. I had heard that people did things like that, but this was the first time I had ever caught a glimpse of such carryings-on in the broad open daylight, right before everybody. I stood there and watched them for hours, expecting every minute to see fire fall from heaven on them and burn up every son and daughter of Belial. But it didn't.

I seem to recollect that it was a hot day, and that, tucked away where not a breath of air could get to them, were three fellows in their s.h.i.+rtsleeves, one playing on an organ, one on a yellow clarinet, and one on a fiddle. Every chance he could get, the fiddler would say to the organist: "Gimme A, please," and saw away trying to get into some sort of tune, but the catgut was never twisted that would hold to pitch with the perspiration dribbling down his fingers in little rills. The clarinet man looked as if he wanted to cry, and he had to twitter his eyelids all the time to keep the sweat from blinding him, and every once in a while, his soggy reed would let go of a squawk that sounded like a scared chicken. But the organ groaned on unrelentingly, and the tune didn't matter so much as the rhythm which was kept up as regular as a clock, whack! whack! whack! whack! And there were two or three other fellows with badges on that went around shouting: "Select your podners for the next quadrille! One more couple wanted right over here!"

Dancing. M-hm.

The fiddler "called off" and chanted to the tune, with his mouth on one side: "Sullootch podners! First couple forward and back. Side couples the same. Doe see do-o-o-o. Al-lee-man LEFT! Ballunce ALL! Sa-weeny the corners!" I don't know whether I get the proper order of these commands or not, or whether my memory serves me as to their effect, but it seems to me that at "Bal-lunce ALL!" the ladies demurely teetered, first on one foot and then on the other, like a frozen-toed rooster, while the gents fairly tore themselves apart with grape-vine twists and fancy steps, and slapped the dust out of the cracks in the floor. When it came to "SaWEENG your podners!" the room billowed with flying skirts, and the ladies squealed like anything. It made you a little dizzy to watch them do "Graaan' right and left," and you could understand how those folks felt--there were always one or two in each set--who had to be hauled this way and that, not sure whether they were having a good time or not, but hoping they were, their faces set in a sickly grin, while their foreheads wrinkled into a puzzled: "How's that? I didn't quite catch that last remark" expression. I don't know if it affected you in the same way that it did me, but after I had stood there for a time and watched those young men and women thus wasting the precious moments that dropped like priceless pearls into the ocean of Eternity, and were lost irrevocably, young, men and women giving themselves up to present enjoyment without one serious thought in their minds as to who was going to wash the supper dishes, or what would happen if the house took fire while they were away I say I do not know how the sight of such reckless frivolity affected you, but I know that after so long a time my face would get all cramped up from wearing a grin, and I'd have to go out and look at the reapers and binders to rest myself so I could come back and look some. There are two things that you simply have to do at the County Fair, or you aren't right sure you've been. One is to drink a gla.s.s of sweet cider just from the press, (which, I may say in pa.s.sing, is an over-rated luxury. Cider has to be just the least bit "frisky" to be good. I don't mean hard, but "frisky." You know). And the other is to buy a whip, if it is only the little toy, fifteen-cent kind. On the next soap-box to the old fellow that comes every year to sell pictorial Bibles and red, plush-covered alb.u.ms, the old fellow in the green slippers that talks as if he were just ready to drop off to sleep--on the next soap-box to him is the man that sells the whips. You can buy one for a dollar, two for a dollar, or four for a dollar, but not one for fifty cents, or one for a quarter. Don't ask me why, for I don't know. I am just stating the facts. It can't be done, for I've seen it tried, and if you keep up the attempt too long, the whip-man will lose all patience with your unreasonableness, and tell you to go 'long about your business if you've got any, and not bother the life and soul out of him, because he won't sell anything but a dollar's worth of whips, and that's all there is about it.

He sells other things, handsaws, and pencils, and mouth-harps, and two knives for a quarter, of such pure steel that he whittles shavings off a wire nail with 'em, and is particular to hand you the very identical knife he did it with. He has jewelry, though I don't suppose you could cut a wire nail with it. You might, at that.

To him approaches a boy.