The Rise of Silas Lapham | Page 5

you discovered this mineral paint on the old farm
yourself?"
Lapham acquiesced in the return to business. "I didn't discover it," he
said scrupulously. "My father found it one day, in a hole made by a tree
blowing down. There it was, lying loose in the pit, and sticking to the
roots that had pulled up a big, cake of dirt with 'em. I don't know what
give him the idea that there was money in it, but he did think so from
the start. I guess, if they'd had the word in those days, they'd considered
him pretty much of a crank about it. He was trying as long as he lived
to get that paint introduced; but he couldn't make it go. The country
was so poor they couldn't paint their houses with anything; and father
hadn't any facilities. It got to be a kind of joke with us; and I guess that
paint-mine did as much as any one thing to make us boys clear out as
soon as we got old enough. All my brothers went West, and took up
land; but I hung on to New England and I hung on to the old farm, not
because the paint-mine was on it, but because the old house was--and

the graves. Well," said Lapham, as if unwilling to give himself too
much credit, "there wouldn't been any market for it, anyway. You can
go through that part of the State and buy more farms than you can
shake a stick at for less money than it cost to build the barns on 'em. Of
course, it's turned out a good thing. I keep the old house up in good
shape, and we spend a month or so there every summer. M' wife kind
of likes it, and the girls. Pretty place; sightly all round it. I've got a
force of men at work there the whole time, and I've got a man and his
wife in the house. Had a family meeting there last year; the whole
connection from out West. There!" Lapham rose from his seat and took
down a large warped, unframed photograph from the top of his desk,
passing his hand over it, and then blowing vigorously upon it, to clear it
of the dust. "There we are, ALL of us."
"I don't need to look twice at YOU," said Bartley, putting his finger on
one of the heads.
"Well, that's Bill," said Lapham, with a gratified laugh. "He's about as
brainy as any of us, I guess. He's one of their leading lawyers, out
Dubuque way; been judge of the Common Pleas once or twice. That's
his son--just graduated at Yale--alongside of my youngest girl.
Good-looking chap, ain't he?"
"SHE'S a good-looking chap," said Bartley, with prompt irreverence.
He hastened to add, at the frown which gathered between Lapham's
eyes, "What a beautiful creature she is! What a lovely, refined,
sensitive face! And she looks GOOD, too."
"She is good," said the father, relenting.
"And, after all, that's about the best thing in a woman," said the
potential reprobate. "If my wife wasn't good enough to keep both of us
straight, I don't know what would become of me." "My other daughter,"
said Lapham, indicating a girl with eyes that showed large, and a face
of singular gravity. "Mis' Lapham," he continued, touching his wife's
effigy with his little finger. "My brother Willard and his family--farm at
Kankakee. Hazard Lapham and his wife--Baptist preacher in Kansas.
Jim and his three girls--milling business at Minneapolis. Ben and his

family--practising medicine in Fort Wayne."
The figures were clustered in an irregular group in front of an old
farm-house, whose original ugliness had been smartened up with a coat
of Lapham's own paint, and heightened with an incongruous piazza.
The photographer had not been able to conceal the fact that they were
all decent, honest-looking, sensible people, with a very fair share of
beauty among the young girls; some of these were extremely pretty, in
fact. He had put them into awkward and constrained attitudes, of course;
and they all looked as if they had the instrument of torture which
photographers call a head-rest under their occiputs. Here and there an
elderly lady's face was a mere blur; and some of the younger children
had twitched themselves into wavering shadows, and might have
passed for spirit-photographs of their own little ghosts. It was the
standard family-group photograph, in which most Americans have
figured at some time or other; and Lapham exhibited a just satisfaction
in it. "I presume," he mused aloud, as he put it back on top of his desk,
"that we sha'n't soon get together again, all of us."
"And you say," suggested Bartley, "that you stayed right along on the
old place, when the