Parnassus on Wheels | Page 3

may have seen,
and would be glad to know whether he may call upon you in order to
acquaint himself with the local colour of your neighbourhood.
We would be glad to pay you a royalty of 10 percent upon the retail
price of the book, and we enclose duplicate contracts for your signature
in case this proves satisfactory to you.
Believe us, etc., etc.,
DECAMERON, JONES & CO.
I have since thought that "Paradise Lost" would have been a better title
for that book. It was published in the autumn of 1907, and since that
time our life has never been the same. By some mischance the book

became the success of the season; it was widely commended as "a
gospel of health and sanity" and Andrew received, in almost every mail,
offers from publishers and magazine editors who wanted to get hold of
his next book. It is almost incredible to what stratagems publishers will
descend to influence an author. Andrew had written in "Paradise
Regained" of the tramps who visit us, how quaint and appealing some
of them are (let me add, how dirty), and how we never turn away any
one who seems worthy. Would you believe that, in the spring after the
book was published, a disreputable-looking vagabond with a knapsack,
who turned up one day, blarneyed Andrew about his book and stayed
overnight, announced himself at breakfast as a leading New York
publisher? He had chosen this ruse in order to make Andrew's
acquaintance.
You can imagine that it didn't take long for Andrew to become spoiled
at this rate! The next year he suddenly disappeared, leaving only a note
on the kitchen table, and tramped all over the state for six weeks
collecting material for a new book. I had all I could do to keep him
from going to New York to talk to editors and people of that sort.
Envelopes of newspaper cuttings used to come to him, and he would
pore over them when he ought to have been ploughing corn. Luckily
the mail man comes along about the middle of the morning when
Andrew is out in the fields, so I used to look over the letters before he
saw them. After the second book ("Happiness and Hayseed" it was
called) was printed, letters from publishers got so thick that I used to
put them all in the stove before Andrew saw them--except those from
the Decameron Jones people, which sometimes held checks. Literary
folk used to turn up now and then to interview Andrew, but generally I
managed to head them off.
But Andrew got to be less and less of a farmer and more and more of a
literary man. He bought a typewriter. He would hang over the pigpen
noting down adjectives for the sunset instead of mending the weather
vane on the barn which took a slew so that the north wind came from
the southwest. He hardly ever looked at the Sears Roebuck catalogues
any more, and after Mr. Decameron came to visit us and suggested that
Andrew write a book of country poems, the man became simply

unbearable.
And all the time I was counting eggs and turning out three meals a day,
and running the farm when Andrew got a literary fit and would go off
on some vagabond jaunt to collect adventures for a new book. (I wish
you could have seen the state he was in when he came back from these
trips, hoboing it along the roads without any money or a clean sock to
his back. One time he returned with a cough you could hear the other
side of the barn, and I had to nurse him for three weeks.) When
somebody wrote a little booklet about "The Sage of Redfield" and
described me as a "rural Xantippe" and "the domestic balance-wheel
that kept the great writer close to the homely realities of life" I made up
my mind to give Andrew some of his own medicine. And that's my
story.


CHAPTER TWO
It was a fine, crisp morning in fall--October I dare say--and I was in the
kitchen coring apples for apple sauce. We were going to have roast
pork for dinner with boiled potatoes and what Andrew calls Vandyke
brown gravy. Andrew had driven over to town to get some flour and
feed and wouldn't be back till noontime.
Being a Monday, Mrs. McNally, the washerwoman, had come over to
take care of the washing. I remember I was just on my way out to the
wood pile for a few sticks of birch when I heard wheels turn in at the
gate. There was one of the fattest white horses I ever saw, and a queer
wagon, shaped like a van. A funny-looking little