A Far Country | Page 7

the end! I have often since wondered where
the topics came from.
It was not until nearly seven o'clock that the train arrived which
brought home my Cousin Robert. He was a big man; his features and
even his ample moustache gave a disconcerting impression of rugged
integrity, and I remember him chiefly in an alpaca or seersucker coat.
Though much less formal, more democratic--in a word--than my father,
I stood in awe of him for a different reason, and this I know now was
because he possessed the penetration to discern the flaws in my
youthful character, --flaws that persisted in manhood. None so quick as

Cousin Robert to detect deceptions which were hidden from my
mother.
His hobby was carpentering, and he had a little shop beside the stable
filled with shining tools which Willie and I, in spite of their attractions,
were forbidden to touch. Willie, by dire experience, had learned to keep
the law; but on one occasion I stole in alone, and promptly cut my
finger with a chisel. My mother and Cousin Jenny accepted the fiction
that the injury had been done with a flint arrowhead that Willie had
given me, but when Cousin Robert came home and saw my bound hand
and heard the story, he gave me a certain look which sticks in my mind.
"Wonderful people, those Indians were!" he observed. "They could
make arrowheads as sharp as chisels."
I was most uncomfortable....
He had a strong voice, and spoke with a rising inflection and a marked
accent that still remains peculiar to our locality, although it was much
modified in my mother and not at all noticeable in my father; with an
odd nasal alteration of the burr our Scotch-Irish ancestors had brought
with them across the seas. For instance, he always called my father Mr.
Par- r-ret. He had an admiration and respect for him that seemed to
forbid the informality of "Matthew." It was shared by others of my
father's friends and relations.
"Sarah," Cousin Robert would say to my mother, "you're coddling that
boy, you ought to lam him oftener. Hand him over to me for a couple
of months--I'll put him through his paces.... So you're going to send
him to college, are you? He's too good for old Benjamin's grocery
business."
He was very fond of my mother, though he lectured her soundly for her
weakness in indulging me. I can see him as he sat at the head of the
supper table, carving liberal helpings which Mary and Helen and Willie
devoured with country appetites, watching our plates.
"What's the matter, Hugh? You haven't eaten all your lamb."
"He doesn't like fat, Robert," my mother explained.
"I'd teach him to like it if he were my boy."
"Well, Robert, he isn't your boy," Cousin Jenny would remind him....
His bark was worse than his bite. Like many kind people he made use
of brusqueness to hide an inner tenderness, and on the train he was hail
fellow well met with every Tom, Dick and Harry that

commuted,--although the word was not invented in those days,--and the
conductor and brakeman too. But he had his standards, and held to
them....
Mine was not a questioning childhood, and I was willing to accept the
scheme of things as presented to me entire. In my tenderer years, when
I had broken one of the commandments on my father's tablet (there
were more than ten), and had, on his home-coming, been sent to bed,
my mother would come softly upstairs after supper with a book in her
hand; a book of selected Bible stories on which Dr. Pound had set the
seal of his approval, with a glazed picture cover, representing Daniel in
the lions' den and an angel standing beside him. On the somewhat
specious plea that Holy Writ might have a chastening effect, she was
permitted to minister to me in my shame. The amazing adventure of
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego particularly appealed to an
imagination needing little stimulation. It never occurred to me to doubt
that these gentlemen had triumphed over caloric laws. But out of my
window, at the back of the second storey, I often saw a sudden, crimson
glow in the sky to the southward, as though that part of the city had
caught fire. There were the big steel-works, my mother told me,
belonging to Mr. Durrett and Mr. Hambleton, the father of Ralph
Hambleton and the grandfather of Hambleton Durrett, my schoolmates
at Miss Caroline's. I invariably connected the glow, not with
Hambleton and Ralph, but with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego!
Later on, when my father took me to the steel-works, and I beheld with
awe a huge pot filled with molten metal that ran out of it like water, I
asked