A Daughter of the Middle Border | Page 6

meeting him one day on the street wearing, as usual, a long,
gray plaid ulster with enormous pockets at the sides. Confronting me
with coldly solemn visage, he thrust his right hand into his pocket and
lifted a heavy brass candlestick to the light. "Look," he said. I looked.
Dropping this he dipped his left hand into the opposite pocket and
displayed another similar piece, then with a faint smile lifting the
corners of his wide, thin-lipped mouth, he gravely boomed, "Brother
Garland--you see before you--a man--who lately--had ten dollars."
Thereupon he went his way, leaving me to wonder whether his wife
would be equally amused with his latest purchase.
His library was filled with all kinds of curious objects--worthless junk
they seemed to me--clocks, snuffers, butterflies, and the like but he also
possessed many autographed books and photographs whose value I
granted. His cottage which was not large, swarmed with growing boys
and noisy dogs; and Mrs. Field, a sweet and patient soul, seemed sadly
out of key with her husband's habit of buying collections of rare moths,
door-knockers, and candle molds with money which should have gone
to buy chairs and carpets or trousers for the boys.
Eugene was one of the first "Colyumists" in the country, and to fill his
"Sharps and Flats" levied pitilessly upon his friends. From time to time
we all figured as subjects for his humorous paragraphs; but each new
victim understood and smiled. For example, in his column I read one
morning these words: "La Crosse, a small city in Wisconsin, famous
for the fact that all its trains back into town, and as the home of Hamlin
Garland."
He was one of the most popular of Western writers, and his home of a
Sunday was usually crowded with visitors, many of whom were actors.
I recall meeting Francis Wilson there--also E. S. Willard and Bram
Stoker--but I do not remember to have seen Fuller there, although, later,
Roswell, Eugene's brother, became Fuller's intimate friend.

George Ade, a thin, pale, bright-eyed young Hoosier, was a frequent
visitor at Field's. George had just begun to make a place for himself as
the author of a column in the News called "Stories of the Street and of
the Town"; and John T. McCutcheon, another Hoosier of the same lean
type was his illustrator. I believed in them both and took a kind of elder
brother interest in their work.
In the companionship of men like Field and Browne and Taft, I was
happy. My writing went well, and if I regretted Boston, I had the
pleasant sense of being so near West Salem that I could go to bed in a
train at ten at night, and breakfast with my mother in the morning, and
just to prove that this was true I ran up to the Homestead at Christmas
time and delivered my presents in person--keenly enjoying the smile of
delight with which my mother received them.
West Salem was like a scene on the stage that day--a setting for a rural
mid-winter drama. The men in their gayly-colored Mackinac jackets,
the sleighbells jingling pleasantly along the lanes, the cottage roofs
laden with snow, and the sidewalks, walled with drifts, were almost
arctic in their suggestion, and yet, my parents in the shelter of the
friendly hills, were at peace. The cold was not being driven against
them by the wind of the plain, and a plentiful supply of food and fuel
made their fireside comfortable and secure.
During this vacation I seized the opportunity to go a little farther and
spend a few days in the Pineries which I had never seen. Out of this
experience I gained some beautiful pictures of the snowy forest, and a
suggestion for a story or two. A few days later, on a commission from
McClure's, I was in Pittsburg writing an article on "Homestead and Its
Perilous Trades," and the clouds of smoke, the flaming chimneys, the
clang of steel, the roar of blast-furnaces and the thunder of monstrous
steel rollers made Wisconsin lumber camps idyllic. The serene white
peace of West Salem set Pittsburg apart as a sulphurous hell and my
description of it became a passionate indictment of an industrial system
which could so work and so house its men. The grimy hovels in which
the toilers lived made my own homestead a poem. More than ever
convinced that our social order was unjust and impermanent, I sent in

my "story," in some doubt about its being accepted. It was printed with
illustrations by Orson Lowell and was widely quoted at the time.
Soon after this I made a trip to Memphis, thus gaining my first
impression of the South. Like most northern visitors, I was immediately
and intensely absorbed in the negroes. Their singing