The Making of Mary | Page 3

comin' on to Christmas, an' people won't be hard on ye. Tell 'em you aint got no folks."
* * * * *
The forlorn little pilgrim took up her march down the snow-covered road.

THE MAKING OF MARY.
CHAPTER I.
MY wife is a theosophist. This fact may account for her numerous eccentricities or be simply one of them. I incline to the latter opinion, because she preferred the unbeaten to the beaten track, both in walk and conversation, long before Modern Buddhism was ever heard of in the small Western town of whose chief newspaper (circulation largest in Michigan) I have the honor to be editor and proprietor.
How such a hot-house plant as Theosophy ever took root in the swamps and sands of the Wolverine State may seem surprising at the first glance, but let the second rest upon our environment--the absence of mountain or swift-flowing river, the presence of fever and ague and half-burnt pine woods--and it will be seen that this Eastern lore with its embarrassment of symbols supplies a long-felt want to starving imagination. We of the West are forever reaching beyond our grasp, have intelligence and perception, but lack the culture necessary for discrimination, and therefore the romantic souls among us who rise above the rampant materialism of the majority go to the other extreme, and hail with enthusiasm the new-old religion.
"It's better to believe too much than too little, but you theosophists swallow an awful lot," I say to Belle when she tries to convert me.
I am well aware that many of my fellow-citizens consider me a subject for commiseration because I have lived for twenty years with so erratic a house-mate, for I have not deemed it necessary to explain to them that without the stimulus of her enlivening spirit, without the element of surprise constantly contributed by my wife's love of variety, the daily life, and therefore the daily paper, of their favorite editor would partake of that flatness which is the predominant characteristic of this western part of the State of Michigan.
Our four sons and two daughters enjoy their mother fully as much as I do, for is she not the most fascinating romancer they ever knew? Now that they are all of an age to be attending school and looking out for themselves, after the manner of independent young Americans, they require from her nothing but sympathy, for their grandmother sews their buttons on. Grandma!--Ay, there's the rub.
I have no hesitation in owning that I am Scotch by birth. My mother left her native land to make her home with us entirely too late in life to allow Western ideas regarding Sabbath observance, the rearing of children, or the amount of respect due to the opinion of elders, to become ingrafted upon Scottish prejudice concerning these matters.
Mrs. Gemmell Senior has, however, the national peculiarity of judging "blood thicker than water," and whatever her convictions may be concerning the methods of Mrs. Gemmell Junior, she restricts the expression of them to our family circle--in fact, I may say, to myself. She generally seizes me when I lie at my ease on the well-worn lounge in our sitting room, more properly dubbed the "nursery," for it is Liberty Hall for the youngsters. Two rooms have been knocked into one to accommodate their dolls' houses, bookshelves, toys, and printing machines. Belle had the whole side torn out of the house to build an open fire-place, on purpose to burn slabs, over which the children roast pop-corn to their hearts' content.
"A body wad think," said my mother one cold night five or six years ago, when I lay on the sofa, trying to send my weariness off in smoke, "A body wad think there had been nae cherritable wark dune in the toon ava, till they theossiphies set aboot it. If yer provost and baillies lookit efter things as they ocht, there wad be a dacent puirs-house for the idignant folk, an' a wheen daft leddies like Eesabel needna gang roun' speirin' at yon infeedels for their siller tae build a hoose o' refuse."
"There is a county poorhouse, mother, but it doesn't happen to be located in this city, and they won't take in anybody there that hasn't been a resident of the county for a certain time."
"Aweel! there's plenty o' kirks, though ye never darken the door o' ane. Do they no' leuk efter their ain puir folk?"
"Yes; but after nobody else's. This House of Refuge is to be non-sectarian, non-religious, humanitarian, in the broadest sense of the term. Ah! There's Belle now," and I gave a sigh of relief as I heard my wife's latch-key in the front door.
She came in with an out-of-door breeze, her dark face glowing from the wintry wind, flakes of newly fallen snow resting like diamonds upon her prematurely white hair,