SUNSHINE SKETCHES OF A LITTLE TOWN

By Stephen Leacock, 1869-1944

 Preface

 I The Hostelry of Mr. Smith II The Speculations of Jefferson Thorpe III The Marine Excursion of the Knights of Pythias IV The Ministrations of the Rev. Mr. Drone V The Whirlwind Campaign in Mariposa VI The Beacon on the Hill VII The Extraordinary Entanglement of Mr. Pupkin VIII The Fore-ordained Attachment of Zena Pepperleigh and Peter Pupkin IX The Mariposa Bank Mystery X The Great Election in Missinaba County XI The Candidacy of Mr. Smith XII L'Envoi. The Train to Mariposa

Preface

I know no way in which a writer may more fittingly introduce his work tothe public than by giving a brief account of who and what he is. By thismeans some of the blame for what he has done is very properly shifted tothe extenuating circumstances of his life. 

I was born at Swanmoor, Hants, England, on December 30, 1869. I am notaware that there was any particular conjunction of the planets at thetime, but should think it extremely likely. My parents migrated toCanada in 1876, and I decided to go with them. My father took up a farmnear Lake Simcoe, in Ontario. This was during the hard times of Canadianfarming, and my father was just able by great diligence to pay the hiredmen and, in years of plenty, to raise enough grain to have seed for thenext year's crop without buying any. By this process my brothers andI were inevitably driven off the land, and have become professors, business men, and engineers, instead of being able to grow up as farmlabourers. Yet I saw enough of farming to speak exuberantly in politicaladdresses of the joy of early rising and the deep sleep, both of bodyand intellect, that is induced by honest manual toil. 

I was educated at Upper Canada College, Toronto, of which I was headboy in 1887. From there I went to the University of Toronto, whereI graduated in 1891. At the University I spent my entire time in theacquisition of languages, living, dead, and half-dead, and knew nothingof the outside world. In this diligent pursuit of words I spent aboutsixteen hours of each day. Very soon after graduation I had forgottenthe languages, and found myself intellectually bankrupt. In other wordsI was what is called a distinguished graduate, and, as such, I tookto school teaching as the only trade I could find that need neitherexperience nor intellect. I spent my time from 1891 to 1899 on the staffof Upper Canada College, an experience which has left me with a profoundsympathy for the many gifted and brilliant men who are compelled tospend their lives in the most dreary, the most thankless, and the worstpaid profession in the world. I have noted that of my pupils, those whoseemed the laziest and the least enamoured of books are now risingto eminence at the bar, in business, and in public life; the reallypromising boys who took all the prizes are now able with difficulty toearn the wages of a clerk in a summer hotel or a deck hand on a canalboat. 

In 1899 I gave up school teaching in disgust, borrowing enough moneyto live upon for a few months, and went to the University of Chicagoto study economics and political science. I was soon appointed to aFellowship in political economy, and by means of this and some temporaryemployment by McGill University, I survived until I took the degree ofDoctor of Philosophy in 1903. The meaning of this degree is that therecipient of instruction is examined for the last time in his life, andis pronounced completely full. After this, no new ideas can be impartedto him. 

From this time, and since my marriage, which had occurred at thisperiod, I have belonged to the staff of McGill University, first aslecturer in Political Science, and later as head of the department ofEconomics and Political Science. As this position is one of the prizesof my profession, I am able to regard myself as singularly fortunate. The emolument is so high as to place me distinctly above the policemen, postmen, street-car conductors, and other salaried officials of theneighbourhood, while I am able to mix with the poorer of the businessmen of the city on terms of something like equality. In point ofleisure, I enjoy more in the four corners of a single year than abusiness man knows in his whole life. I thus have what the business mancan never enjoy, an ability to think, and, what is still better, to stopthinking altogether for months at a time. 

I have written a number of things in connection with my college life--abook on Political Science, and many essays, magazine articles, and soon. I belong to the Political Science Association of America, to theRoyal Colonial Institute, and to the Church of England. These things, surely, are a proof of respectability. I have had some small connectionwith politics and public life. A few years ago I went all round theBritish Empire delivering addresses on Imperial organization. When Istate that these lectures were followed almost immediately by the Unionof South Africa, the Banana Riots in Trinidad, and the Turco-Italianwar, I think the reader can form some idea of their importance. InCanada I belong to the Conservative party, but as yet I have failedentirely in Canadian politics, never having received a contract to builda bridge, or make a wharf, nor to construct even the smallest sectionof the Transcontinental Railway. This, however, is a form of nationalingratitude to which one becomes accustomed in this Dominion. 

Apart from my college work, I have written two books, one called"Literary Lapses" and the other "Nonsense Novels. " Each of these ispublished by John Lane (London and New York), and either of them can beobtained, absurd though it sounds, for the mere sum of three shillingsand sixpence. Any reader of this preface, for example, ridiculous thoughit appears, could walk into a bookstore and buy both of these books forseven shillings. Yet these works are of so humorous a character that formany years it was found impossible to print them. The compositors fellback from their task suffocated with laughter and gasping for air. Nothing but the intervention of the linotype machine--or rather, of thekind of men who operate it--made it possible to print these books. Evennow people have to be very careful in circulating them, and the booksshould never be put into the hands of persons not in robust health. 

Many of my friends are under the impression that I write these humorousnothings in idle moments when the wearied brain is unable to perform theserious labours of the economist. My own experience is exactly the otherway. The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts andfigures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientifictreatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiryinto the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to writesomething out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is anarduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, fewand far between. Personally, I would sooner have written "Alice inWonderland" than the whole Encyclopaedia Britannica. 

In regard to the present work I must disclaim at once all intentions oftrying to do anything so ridiculously easy as writing about a real placeand real people. Mariposa is not a real town. On the contrary, it isabout seventy or eighty of them. You may find them all the way from LakeSuperior to the sea, with the same square streets and the same mapletrees and the same churches and hotels, and everywhere the sunshine ofthe land of hope. 

Similarly, the Reverend Mr. Drone is not one person but about eight orten. To make him I clapped the gaiters of one ecclesiastic round thelegs of another, added the sermons of a third and the character of afourth, and so let him start on his way in the book to pick up suchindividual attributes as he might find for himself. Mullins and Bagshawand Judge Pepperleigh and the rest are, it is true, personal friendsof mine. But I have known them in such a variety of forms, with suchalternations of tall and short, dark and fair, that, individually, I should have much ado to know them. Mr. Pupkin is found whenever aCanadian bank opens a branch in a county town and needs a teller. As forMr. Smith, with his two hundred and eighty pounds, his hoarse voice, his loud check suit, his diamonds, the roughness of his address andthe goodness of his heart, --all of this is known by everybody to be anecessary and universal adjunct of the hotel business. 

The inspiration of the book, --a land of hope and sunshine where littletowns spread their square streets and their trim maple trees besideplacid lakes almost within echo of the primeval forest, --is largeenough. If it fails in its portrayal of the scenes and the country thatit depicts the fault lies rather with an art that is deficient than inan affection that is wanting. 

Stephen Leacock. McGill University, June, 1912. 

ONE. The Hostelry of Mr. Smith

I don't know whether you know Mariposa. If not, it is of no consequence, for if you know Canada at all, you are probably well acquainted with adozen towns just like it. 

There it lies in the sunlight, sloping up from the little lake thatspreads out at the foot of the hillside on which the town is built. There is a wharf beside the lake, and lying alongside of it a steamerthat is tied to the wharf with two ropes of about the same size as theyuse on the Lusitania. The steamer goes nowhere in particular, for thelake is landlocked and there is no navigation for the Mariposa Belleexcept to "run trips" on the first of July and the Queen's Birthday, andto take excursions of the Knights of Pythias and the Sons of Temperanceto and from the Local Option Townships. 

In point of geography the lake is called Lake Wissanotti and the riverrunning out of it the Ossawippi, just as the main street of Mariposa iscalled Missinaba Street and the county Missinaba County. But thesenames do not really matter. Nobody uses them. People simply speak of the"lake" and the "river" and the "main street, " much in the same wayas they always call the Continental Hotel, "Pete Robinson's" and thePharmaceutical Hall, "Eliot's Drug Store. " But I suppose this is justthe same in every one else's town as in mine, so I need lay no stress onit. 

The town, I say, has one broad street that runs up from the lake, commonly called the Main Street. There is no doubt about its width. WhenMariposa was laid out there was none of that shortsightedness which isseen in the cramped dimensions of Wall Street and Piccadilly. MissinabaStreet is so wide that if you were to roll Jeff Thorpe's barber shopover on its face it wouldn't reach half way across. Up and down the MainStreet are telegraph poles of cedar of colossal thickness, standing at avariety of angles and carrying rather more wires than are commonly seenat a transatlantic cable station. 

On the Main Street itself are a number of buildings of extraordinaryimportance, --Smith's Hotel and the Continental and the Mariposa House, and the two banks (the Commercial and the Exchange), to say nothing ofMcCarthy's Block (erected in 1878), and Glover's Hardware Store with theOddfellows' Hall above it. Then on the "cross" street that intersectsMissinaba Street at the main corner there is the Post Office and theFire Hall and the Young Men's Christian Association and the office ofthe Mariposa Newspacket, --in fact, to the eye of discernment a perfectjostle of public institutions comparable only to Threadneedle Street orLower Broadway. On all the side streets there are maple trees andbroad sidewalks, trim gardens with upright calla lilies, houses withverandahs, which are here and there being replaced by residences withpiazzas. 

To the careless eye the scene on the Main Street of a summer afternoonis one of deep and unbroken peace. The empty street sleeps in thesunshine. There is a horse and buggy tied to the hitching post in frontof Glover's hardware store. There is, usually and commonly, the burlyfigure of Mr. Smith, proprietor of Smith's Hotel, standing in hischequered waistcoat on the steps of his hostelry, and perhaps, furtherup the street, Lawyer Macartney going for his afternoon mail, or theRev. Mr. Drone, the Rural Dean of the Church of England Church, goinghome to get his fishing rod after a mothers' auxiliary meeting. 

But this quiet is mere appearance. In reality, and to those who know it, the place is a perfect hive of activity. Why, at Netley's butcher shop(established in 1882) there are no less than four men working on thesausage machines in the basement; at the Newspacket office there areas many more job-printing; there is a long distance telephone withfour distracting girls on high stools wearing steel caps and talkingincessantly; in the offices in McCarthy's block are dentists and lawyerswith their coats off, ready to work at any moment; and from the bigplaning factory down beside the lake where the railroad siding is, youmay hear all through the hours of the summer afternoon the long-drawnmusic of the running saw. 

Busy--well, I should think so! Ask any of its inhabitants if Mariposaisn't a busy, hustling, thriving town. Ask Mullins, the manager of theExchange Bank, who comes hustling over to his office from the MariposaHouse every day at 10. 30 and has scarcely time all morning to go out andtake a drink with the manager of the Commercial; or ask--well, forthe matter of that, ask any of them if they ever knew a more rushinggo-a-head town than Mariposa. 

Of course if you come to the place fresh from New York, you aredeceived. Your standard of vision is all astray, You do think the placeis quiet. You do imagine that Mr. Smith is asleep merely because hecloses his eyes as he stands. But live in Mariposa for six months or ayear and then you will begin to understand it better; the buildings gethigher and higher; the Mariposa House grows more and more luxurious;McCarthy's block towers to the sky; the 'buses roar and hum to thestation; the trains shriek; the traffic multiplies; the people movefaster and faster; a dense crowd swirls to and fro in the post-officeand the five and ten cent store--and amusements! well, now! lacrosse, baseball, excursions, dances, the Fireman's Ball every winter and theCatholic picnic every summer; and music--the town band in the park everyWednesday evening, and the Oddfellows' brass band on the street everyother Friday; the Mariposa Quartette, the Salvation Army--why, after afew months' residence you begin to realize that the place is a mere madround of gaiety. 

In point of population, if one must come down to figures, the Canadiancensus puts the numbers every time at something round five thousand. Butit is very generally understood in Mariposa that the census is largelythe outcome of malicious jealousy. It is usual that after the census theeditor of the Mariposa Newspacket makes a careful reestimate (basedon the data of relative non-payment of subscriptions), and brings thepopulation up to 6, 000. After that the Mariposa Times-Herald makesan estimate that runs the figures up to 6, 500. Then Mr. Gingham, the undertaker, who collects the vital statistics for the provincialgovernment, makes an estimate from the number of what he calls the"demised" as compared with the less interesting persons who are stillalive, and brings the population to 7, 000. After that somebody elseworks it out that it's 7, 500; then the man behind the bar of theMariposa House offers to bet the whole room that there are 9, 000 peoplein Mariposa. That settles it, and the population is well on the way to10, 000, when down swoops the federal census taker on his next round andthe town has to begin all over again. 

Still, it is a thriving town and there is no doubt of it. Even thetranscontinental railways, as any townsman will tell you, run throughMariposa. It is true that the trains mostly go through at night anddon't stop. But in the wakeful silence of the summer night you may hearthe long whistle of the through train for the west as it tears throughMariposa, rattling over the switches and past the semaphores andending in a long, sullen roar as it takes the trestle bridge over theOssawippi. Or, better still, on a winter evening about eight o'clock youwill see the long row of the Pullmans and diners of the night expressgoing north to the mining country, the windows flashing with brilliantlight, and within them a vista of cut glass and snow-white table linen, smiling negroes and millionaires with napkins at their chins whirlingpast in the driving snowstorm. 

I can tell you the people of Mariposa are proud of the trains, even ifthey don't stop! The joy of being on the main line lifts the Mariposapeople above the level of their neighbours in such places as Tecumsehand Nichols Corners into the cosmopolitan atmosphere of through trafficand the larger life. Of course, they have their own train, too--theMariposa Local, made up right there in the station yard, and runningsouth to the city a hundred miles away. That, of course, is a realtrain, with a box stove on end in the passenger car, fed with cordwoodupside down, and with seventeen flat cars of pine lumber set between thepassenger car and the locomotive so as to give the train its full impactwhen shunting. 

Outside of Mariposa there are farms that begin well but get thinner andmeaner as you go on, and end sooner or later in bush and swamp and therock of the north country. And beyond that again, as the background ofit all, though it's far away, you are somehow aware of the great pinewoods of the lumber country reaching endlessly into the north. 

Not that the little town is always gay or always bright in the sunshine. There never was such a place for changing its character with the season. Dark enough and dull it seems of a winter night, the wooden sidewalkscreaking with the frost, and the lights burning dim behind the shopwindows. In olden times the lights were coal oil lamps; now, of course, they are, or are supposed to be, electricity, brought from the powerhouse on the lower Ossawippi nineteen miles away. But, somehow, thoughit starts off as electricity from the Ossawippi rapids, by the time itgets to Mariposa and filters into the little bulbs behind the frostywindows of the shops, it has turned into coal oil again, as yellow andbleared as ever. 

After the winter, the snow melts and the ice goes out of the lake, thesun shines high and the shanty-men come down from the lumber woods andlie round drunk on the sidewalk outside of Smith's Hotel--and that'sspring time. Mariposa is then a fierce, dangerous lumber town, calculated to terrorize the soul of a newcomer who does notunderstand that this also is only an appearance and that presently therough-looking shanty-men will change their clothes and turn back againinto farmers. 

Then the sun shines warmer and the maple trees come out and LawyerMacartney puts on his tennis trousers, and that's summer time. Thelittle town changes to a sort of summer resort. There are visitors upfrom the city. Every one of the seven cottages along the lake is full. The Mariposa Belle churns the waters of the Wissanotti into foam as shesails out from the wharf, in a cloud of flags, the band playing and thedaughters and sisters of the Knights of Pythias dancing gaily on thedeck. 

That changes too. The days shorten. The visitors disappear. The goldenrod beside the meadow droops and withers on its stem. The maples blazein glory and die. The evening closes dark and chill, and in the gloomof the main corner of Mariposa the Salvation Army around a naphtha lamplift up the confession of their sins--and that is autumn. Thus the yearruns its round, moving and changing in Mariposa, much as it does inother places. 

If, then, you feel that you know the town well enough to be admittedinto the inner life and movement of it, walk down this June afternoonhalf way down the Main Street--or, if you like, half way up from thewharf--to where Mr. Smith is standing at the door of his hostelry. Youwill feel as you draw near that it is no ordinary man that you approach. It is not alone the huge bulk of Mr. Smith (two hundred and eightypounds as tested on Netley's scales). It is not merely his costume, though the chequered waistcoat of dark blue with a flowered patternforms, with his shepherd's plaid trousers, his grey spats andpatent-leather boots, a colour scheme of no mean order. Nor is itmerely Mr. Smith's finely mottled face. The face, no doubt, is a notableone, --solemn, inexpressible, unreadable, the face of the heaven-bornhotel keeper. It is more than that. It is the strange dominatingpersonality of the man that somehow holds you captive. I know nothing inhistory to compare with the position of Mr. Smith among those who drinkover his bar, except, though in a lesser degree, the relation of theEmperor Napoleon to the Imperial Guard. 

When you meet Mr. Smith first you think he looks like an over-dressedpirate. Then you begin to think him a character. You wonder at hisenormous bulk. Then the utter hopelessness of knowing what Smith isthinking by merely looking at his features gets on your mind and makesthe Mona Lisa seem an open book and the ordinary human countenance assuperficial as a puddle in the sunlight. After you have had a drinkin Mr. Smith's bar, and he has called you by your Christian name, yourealize that you are dealing with one of the greatest minds in the hotelbusiness. 

Take, for instance, the big sign that sticks out into the street aboveMr. Smith's head as he stands. What is on it? "JOS. SMITH, PROP. "Nothing more, and yet the thing was a flash of genius. Other men who hadhad the hotel before Mr. Smith had called it by such feeble names asthe Royal Hotel and the Queen's and the Alexandria. Every one of themfailed. When Mr. Smith took over the hotel he simply put up the signwith "JOS. SMITH, PROP. , " and then stood underneath in the sunshine asa living proof that a man who weighs nearly three hundred pounds is thenatural king of the hotel business. 

But on this particular afternoon, in spite of the sunshine and deeppeace, there was something as near to profound concern and anxiety asthe features of Mr. Smith were ever known to express. 

The moment was indeed an anxious one. Mr. Smith was awaiting a telegramfrom his legal adviser who had that day journeyed to the county townto represent the proprietor's interest before the assembled LicenseCommissioners. If you know anything of the hotel business at all, you will understand that as beside the decisions of the LicenseCommissioners of Missinaba County, the opinions of the Lords of thePrivy Council are mere trifles. 

The matter in question was very grave. The Mariposa Court had justfined Mr. Smith for the second time for selling liquors after hours. TheCommissioners, therefore, were entitled to cancel the license. 

Mr. Smith knew his fault and acknowledged it. He had broken the law. Howhe had come to do so, it passed his imagination to recall. Crime alwaysseems impossible in retrospect. By what sheer madness of the momentcould he have shut up the bar on the night in question, and shut JudgePepperleigh, the district judge in Missinaba County, outside of it? Themore so inasmuch as the closing up of the bar under the rigid licenselaw of the province was a matter that the proprietor never trusted toany hands but his own. Punctually every night at 11 o'clock Mr. Smithstrolled from the desk of the "rotunda" to the door of the bar. If itseemed properly full of people and all was bright and cheerful, thenhe closed it. If not, he kept it open a few minutes longer till he hadenough people inside to warrant closing. But never, never unless he wasassured that Pepperleigh, the judge of the court, and Macartney, theprosecuting attorney, were both safely in the bar, or the bar parlour, did the proprietor venture to close up. Yet on this fatal nightPepperleigh and Macartney had been shut out--actually left on the streetwithout a drink, and compelled to hammer and beat at the street door ofthe bar to gain admittance. 

This was the kind of thing not to be tolerated. Either a hotel must berun decently or quit. An information was laid next day and Mr. Smithconvicted in four minutes, --his lawyers practically refusing to plead. The Mariposa court, when the presiding judge was cold sober, and ithad the force of public opinion behind it, was a terrible engine ofretributive justice. 

So no wonder that Mr. Smith awaited with anxiety the message of hislegal adviser. 

He looked alternately up the street and down it again, hauled out hiswatch from the depths of his embroidered pocket, and examined the hourhand and the minute hand and the second hand with frowning scrutiny. 

Then wearily, and as one mindful that a hotel man is ever the servant ofthe public, he turned back into the hotel. 

"Billy, " he said to the desk clerk, "if a wire comes bring it into thebar parlour. "

The voice of Mr. Smith is of a deep guttural such as Plancon or Edouardde Reske might have obtained had they had the advantages of the hotelbusiness. And with that, Mr. Smith, as was his custom in off moments, joined his guests in the back room. His appearance, to the untrainedeye, was merely that of an extremely stout hotelkeeper walking from therotunda to the back bar. In reality, Mr. Smith was on the eve of one ofthe most brilliant and daring strokes ever effected in the history oflicensed liquor. When I say that it was out of the agitation of thissituation that Smith's Ladies' and Gent's Cafe originated, anybody whoknows Mariposa will understand the magnitude of the moment. 

Mr. Smith, then, moved slowly from the doorway of the hotel through the"rotunda, " or more simply the front room with the desk and the cigarcase in it, and so to the bar and thence to the little room or back barbehind it. In this room, as I have said, the brightest minds of Mariposamight commonly be found in the quieter part of a summer afternoon. 

To-day there was a group of four who looked up as Mr. Smith entered, somewhat sympathetically, and evidently aware of the perplexities of themoment. 

Henry Mullins and George Duff, the two bank managers, were both present. Mullins is a rather short, rather round, smooth-shaven man of less thanforty, wearing one of those round banking suits of pepper and salt, witha round banking hat of hard straw, and with the kind of gold tie-pin andheavy watch-chain and seals necessary to inspire confidence in mattersof foreign exchange. Duff is just as round and just as short, andequally smoothly shaven, while his seals and straw hat are calculated toprove that the Commercial is just as sound a bank as the Exchange. Fromthe technical point of view of the banking business, neither of them hadany objection to being in Smith's Hotel or to taking a drink as longas the other was present. This, of course, was one of the cardinalprinciples of Mariposa banking. 

Then there was Mr. Diston, the high school teacher, commonly known asthe "one who drank. " None of the other teachers ever entered a hotelunless accompanied by a lady or protected by a child. But as Mr. Diston was known to drink beer on occasions and to go in and out of theMariposa House and Smith's Hotel, he was looked upon as a man whose lifewas a mere wreck. Whenever the School Board raised the salaries of theother teachers, fifty or sixty dollars per annum at one lift, it waswell understood that public morality wouldn't permit of an increase forMr. Diston. 

Still more noticeable, perhaps, was the quiet, sallow looking mandressed in black, with black gloves and with black silk hat heavilycraped and placed hollow-side-up on a chair. This was Mr. GolgothaGingham, the undertaker of Mariposa, and his dress was due to the factthat he had just come from what he called an "interment. " Mr. Ginghamhad the true spirit of his profession, and such words as "funeral"or "coffin" or "hearse" never passed his lips. He spoke always of"interments, " of "caskets, " and "coaches, " using terms that werecalculated rather to bring out the majesty and sublimity of death thanto parade its horrors. 

To be present at the hotel was in accord with Mr. Gingham's generalconception of his business. No man had ever grasped the true principlesof undertaking more thoroughly than Mr. Gingham. I have often heard himexplain that to associate with the living, uninteresting though theyappear, is the only way to secure the custom of the dead. 

"Get to know people really well while they are alive, " said Mr. Gingham;"be friends with them, close friends and then when they die you don'tneed to worry. You'll get the order every time. "

So, naturally, as the moment was one of sympathy, it was Mr. Gingham whospoke first. 

"What'll you do, Josh, " he said, "if the Commissioners go against you?"

"Boys, " said Mr. Smith, "I don't rightly know. If I have to quit, thenext move is to the city. But I don't reckon that I will have to quit. I've got an idee that I think's good every time. "

"Could you run a hotel in the city?" asked Mullins. 

"I could, " said Mr. Smith. "I'll tell you. There's big things doin'in the hotel business right now, big chances if you go into it right. Hotels in the city is branching out. Why, you take the dining-roomside of it, " continued Mr. Smith, looking round at the group, "there'sthousands in it. The old plan's all gone. Folks won't eat now in anordinary dining-room with a high ceiling and windows. You have to get'em down underground in a room with no windows and lots of sawdust roundand waiters that can't speak English. I seen them places last time I wasin the city. They call 'em Rats' Coolers. And for light meals they wanta Caff, a real French Caff, and for folks that come in late anotherplace that they call a Girl Room that don't shut up at all. If I go tothe city that's the kind of place I mean to run. What's yours, Gol? It'son the house?"

And it was just at the moment when Mr. Smith said this that Billy, thedesk-clerk, entered the room with the telegram in his hand. 

But stop--it is impossible for you to understand the anxiety with whichMr. Smith and his associates awaited the news from the Commissioners, without first realizing the astounding progress of Mr. Smith in thethree past years, and the pinnacle of public eminence to which he hadattained. 

Mr. Smith had come down from the lumber country of the Spanish River, where the divide is toward the Hudson Bay, --"back north" as they calledit in Mariposa. 

He had been, it was said, a cook in the lumber shanties. To this day Mr. Smith can fry an egg on both sides with a lightness of touch that is thedespair of his own "help. "

After that, he had run a river driver's boarding-house. 

After that, he had taken a food contract for a gang of railroad navvieson the transcontinental. 

After that, of course, the whole world was open to him. 

He came down to Mariposa and bought out the "inside" of what had beenthe Royal Hotel. 

Those who are educated understand that by the "inside" of a hotel ismeant everything except the four outer walls of it--the fittings, thefurniture, the bar, Billy the desk-clerk, the three dining-room girls, and above all the license granted by King Edward VII. , and ratifiedfurther by King George, for the sale of intoxicating liquors. 

Till then the Royal had been a mere nothing. As "Smith's Hotel" it brokeinto a blaze of effulgence. 

From the first, Mr. Smith, as a proprietor, was a wild, rapturoussuccess. 

He had all the qualifications. 

He weighed two hundred and eighty pounds. 

He could haul two drunken men out of the bar each by the scruff of theneck without the faintest anger or excitement. 

He carried money enough in his trousers pockets to start a bank, andspent it on anything, bet it on anything, and gave it away in handfuls. 

He was never drunk, and, as a point of chivalry to his customers, neverquite sober. Anybody was free of the hotel who cared to come in. Anybodywho didn't like it could go out. Drinks of all kinds cost five cents, or six for a quarter. Meals and beds were practically free. Any personsfoolish enough to go to the desk and pay for them, Mr. Smith chargedaccording to the expression of their faces. 

At first the loafers and the shanty men settled down on the place in ashower. But that was not the "trade" that Mr. Smith wanted. He knewhow to get rid of them. An army of charwomen, turned into the hotel, scrubbed it from top to bottom. A vacuum cleaner, the first seen inMariposa, hissed and screamed in the corridors. Forty brass beds wereimported from the city, not, of course, for the guests to sleep in, butto keep them out. A bar-tender with a starched coat and wicker sleeveswas put behind the bar. 

The loafers were put out of business. The place had become too "hightoned" for them. 

To get the high class trade, Mr. Smith set himself to dress the part. He wore wide cut coats of filmy serge, light as gossamer; chequeredwaistcoats with a pattern for every day in the week; fedora hats lightas autumn leaves; four-in-hand ties of saffron and myrtle green with adiamond pin the size of a hazel nut. On his fingers there were as manygems as would grace a native prince of India; across his waistcoat laya gold watch-chain in huge square links and in his pocket a gold watchthat weighed a pound and a half and marked minutes, seconds and quarterseconds. Just to look at Josh Smith's watch brought at least ten men tothe bar every evening. 

Every morning Mr. Smith was shaved by Jefferson Thorpe, across the way. All that art could do, all that Florida water could effect, was lavishedon his person. 

Mr. Smith became a local character. Mariposa was at his feet. All thereputable business-men drank at Mr. Smith's bar, and in the littleparlour behind it you might find at any time a group of the brightestintellects in the town. 

Not but what there was opposition at first. The clergy, for example, who accepted the Mariposa House and the Continental as a necessary anduseful evil, looked askance at the blazing lights and the surging crowdof Mr. Smith's saloon. They preached against him. When the Rev. DeanDrone led off with a sermon on the text "Lord be merciful even unto thispublican Matthew Six, " it was generally understood as an invitation tostrike Mr. Smith dead. In the same way the sermon at the Presbyterianchurch the week after was on the text "Lo what now doeth Abiram in theland of Melchisideck Kings Eight and Nine?" and it was perfectly plainthat what was meant was, "Lo, what is Josh Smith doing in Mariposa?"

But this opposition had been countered by a wide and sagaciousphilanthropy. I think Mr. Smith first got the idea of that on the nightwhen the steam merry-go-round came to Mariposa. Just below the hostelry, on an empty lot, it whirled and whistled, steaming forth its tunes onthe summer evening while the children crowded round it in hundreds. Downthe street strolled Mr. Smith, wearing a soft fedora to indicate that itwas evening. 

"What d'you charge for a ride, boss?" said Mr. Smith. 

"Two for a nickel, " said the man. 

"Take that, " said Mr. Smith, handing out a ten-dollar bill from a rollof money, "and ride the little folks free all evening. "

That night the merry-go-round whirled madly till after midnight, freighted to capacity with Mariposa children, while up in Smith's Hotel, parents, friends and admirers, as the news spread, were standing fourdeep along the bar. They sold forty dollars' worth of lager alone thatnight, and Mr. Smith learned, if he had not already suspected it, theblessedness of giving. 

The uses of philanthropy went further. Mr. Smith subscribed toeverything, joined everything, gave to everything. He became anOddfellow, a Forester, A Knight of Pythias and a Workman. He gave ahundred dollars to the Mariposa Hospital and a hundred dollars to theYoung Men's Christian Association. 

He subscribed to the Ball Club, the Lacrosse Club, the Curling Club, to anything, in fact, and especially to all those things which neededpremises to meet in and grew thirsty in their discussions. 

As a consequence the Oddfellows held their annual banquet at Smith'sHotel and the Oyster Supper of the Knights of Pythias was celebrated inMr. Smith's dining-room. 

Even more effective, perhaps, were Mr. Smith's secret benefactions, the kind of giving done by stealth of which not a soul in town knewanything, often, for a week after it was done. It was in this way thatMr. Smith put the new font in Dean Drone's church, and handed over ahundred dollars to Judge Pepperleigh for the unrestrained use of theConservative party. 

So it came about that, little by little, the antagonism had died down. Smith's Hotel became an accepted institution in Mariposa. Even thetemperance people were proud of Mr. Smith as a sort of character whoadded distinction to the town. There were moments, in the earlier quietof the morning, when Dean Drone would go so far as to step in to the"rotunda" and collect a subscription. As for the Salvation Army, theyran in and out all the time unreproved. 

On only one point difficulty still remained. That was the closing ofthe bar. Mr. Smith could never bring his mind to it, --not as a matter ofprofit, but as a point of honour. It was too much for him to feel thatJudge Pepperleigh might be out on the sidewalk thirsty at midnight, thatthe night hands of the Times-Herald on Wednesday might be compelledto go home dry. On this point Mr. Smith's moral code was simplicityitself, --do what is right and take the consequences. So the bar stayedopen. 

Every town, I suppose, has its meaner spirits. In every genialbosom some snake is warmed, --or, as Mr. Smith put it to GolgothaGingham--"there are some fellers even in this town skunks enough toinform. "

At first the Mariposa court quashed all indictments. The presidingjudge, with his spectacles on and a pile of books in front of him, threatened the informer with the penitentiary. The whole bar of Mariposawas with Mr. Smith. But by sheer iteration the informations had provedsuccessful. Judge Pepperleigh learned that Mr. Smith had subscribed ahundred dollars for the Liberal party and at once fined him for keepingopen after hours. That made one conviction. On the top of this had comethe untoward incident just mentioned and that made two. Beyond thatwas the deluge. This then was the exact situation when Billy, the deskclerk, entered the back bar with the telegram in his hand. 

"Here's your wire, sir, " he said. 

"What does it say?" said Mr. Smith. 

He always dealt with written documents with a fine air of detachment. Idon't suppose there were ten people in Mariposa who knew that Mr. Smithcouldn't read. 

Billy opened the message and read, "Commissioners give you three monthsto close down. "

"Let me read it, " said Mr. Smith, "that's right, three months to closedown. "

There was dead silence when the message was read. Everybody waited forMr. Smith to speak. Mr. Gingham instinctively assumed the professionalair of hopeless melancholy. 

As it was afterwards recorded, Mr. Smith stood and "studied" with thetray in his hand for at least four minutes. Then he spoke. 

"Boys, " he said, "I'll be darned if I close down till I'm ready to closedown. I've got an idee. You wait and I'll show you. "

And beyond that, not another word did Mr. Smith say on the subject. 

But within forty-eight hours the whole town knew that something wasdoing. The hotel swarmed with carpenters, bricklayers and painters. There was an architect up from the city with a bundle of blue printsin his hand. There was an engineer taking the street level with atheodolite, and a gang of navvies with shovels digging like fury as ifto dig out the back foundations of the hotel. 

"That'll fool 'em, " said Mr. Smith. 

Half the town was gathered round the hotel crazy with excitement. Butnot a word would the proprietor say. Great dray loads of square timber, and two-by-eight pine joists kept arriving from the planing mill. Therewas a pile of matched spruce sixteen feet high lying by the sidewalk. 

Then the excavation deepened and the dirt flew, and the beams went upand the joists across, and all the day from dawn till dusk the hammersof the carpenters clattered away, working overtime at time and a half. 

"It don't matter what it costs, " said Mr. Smith; "get it done. "

Rapidly the structure took form. It extended down the side street, joining the hotel at a right angle. Spacious and graceful it looked asit reared its uprights into the air. 

Already you could see the place where the row of windows was to come, averitable palace of glass, it must be, so wide and commodious were they. Below it, you could see the basement shaping itself, with a low ceilinglike a vault and big beams running across, dressed, smoothed, and readyfor staining. Already in the street there were seven crates of red andwhite awning. 

And even then nobody knew what it was, and it was not till theseventeenth day that Mr. Smith, in the privacy of the back bar, brokethe silence and explained. 

"I tell you, boys, " he says, "it's a caff--like what they have in thecity--a ladies' and gent's caff, and that underneath (what's yours, Mr. Mullins?) is a Rats' Cooler. And when I get her started, I'll hire aFrench Chief to do the cooking, and for the winter I will put in a 'girlroom, ' like what they have in the city hotels. And I'd like to see who'sgoing to close her up then. "

Within two more weeks the plan was in operation. Not only was the caffbuilt but the very hotel was transformed. Awnings had broken out in ared and white cloud upon its face, its every window carried a box ofhanging plants, and above in glory floated the Union Jack. The verystationery was changed. The place was now Smith's Summer Pavilion. Itwas advertised in the city as Smith's Tourists' Emporium, and Smith'sNorthern Health Resort. Mr. Smith got the editor of the Times-Herald towrite up a circular all about ozone and the Mariposa pine woods, withillustrations of the maskinonge (piscis mariposis) of Lake Wissanotti. 

The Saturday after that circular hit the city in July, there were menwith fishing rods and landing nets pouring in on every train, almosttoo fast to register. And if, in the face of that, a few little drops ofwhiskey were sold over the bar, who thought of it?

But the caff! that, of course, was the crowning glory of the thing, thatand the Rats' Cooler below. 

Light and cool, with swinging windows open to the air, tables withmarble tops, palms, waiters in white coats--it was the standing marvelof Mariposa. Not a soul in the town except Mr. Smith, who knew it byinstinct, ever guessed that waiters and palms and marble tables can berented over the long distance telephone. 

Mr. Smith was as good as his word. He got a French Chief with anaristocratic saturnine countenance, and a moustache and imperial thatrecalled the late Napoleon III. No one knew where Mr. Smith got him. Some people in the town said he was a French marquis. Others said he wasa count and explained the difference. 

No one in Mariposa had ever seen anything like the caff. All down theside of it were the grill fires, with great pewter dish covers that wentup and down on a chain, and you could walk along the row and actuallypick out your own cutlet and then see the French marquis throw it onto the broiling iron; you could watch a buckwheat pancake whirledinto existence under your eyes and see fowls' legs devilled, peppered, grilled, and tormented till they lost all semblance of the originalMariposa chicken. 

Mr. Smith, of course, was in his glory. 

"What have you got to-day, Alf?" he would say, as he strolled over tothe marquis. The name of the Chief was, I believe Alphonse, but "Alf"was near enough for Mr. Smith. 

The marquis would extend to the proprietor the menu, "Voila, m'sieu, lacarte du jour. "

Mr. Smith, by the way, encouraged the use of the French language inthe caff. He viewed it, of course, solely in its relation to the hotelbusiness, and, I think, regarded it as a recent invention. 

"It's comin' in all the time in the city, " he said, "and y'aint expectedto understand it. "

Mr. Smith would take the carte between his finger and thumb and stareat it. It was all covered with such devices as Potage la Mariposa--FiletMignon a la proprietaire--Cotellete a la Smith, and so on. 

But the greatest thing about the caff were the prices. Therein lay, aseverybody saw at once, the hopeless simplicity of Mr. Smith. 

The prices stood fast at 25 cents a meal. You could come in and eat allthey had in the caff for a quarter. 

"No, sir, " Mr. Smith said stoutly, "I ain't going to try to raise noprices on the public. The hotel's always been a quarter and the caff's aquarter. "

Full? Full of people?

Well, I should think so! From the time the caff opened at 11 till itclosed at 8. 30, you could hardly find a table. Tourists, visitors, travellers, and half the people of Mariposa crowded at the littletables; crockery rattling, glasses tinkling on trays, corks popping, thewaiters in their white coats flying to and fro, Alphonse whirling thecutlets and pancakes into the air, and in and through it all, Mr. Smith, in a white flannel suit and a broad crimson sash about his waist. Crowded and gay from morning to night, and even noisy in its hilarity. 

Noisy, yes; but if you wanted deep quiet and cool, if you wanted to stepfrom the glare of a Canadian August to the deep shadow of an enchantedglade, --walk down below into the Rats' Cooler. There you had it; darkold beams (who could believe they were put there a month ago?), greatcasks set on end with legends such as Amontillado Fino done in gilt ona black ground, tall steins filled with German beer soft as moss, and aGerman waiter noiseless as moving foam. He who entered the Rats'Cooler at three of a summer afternoon was buried there for the day. Mr. Golgotha Gingham spent anything from four to seven hours there of everyday. In his mind the place had all the quiet charm of an interment, withnone of its sorrows. 

But at night, when Mr. Smith and Billy, the desk clerk, opened up thecash register and figured out the combined losses of the caff and theRats' Cooler, Mr. Smith would say:

"Billy, just wait till I get the license renood, and I'll close up thisdamn caff so tight they'll never know what hit her. What did that lambcost? Fifty cents a pound, was it? I figure it, Billy, that every one ofthem hogs eats about a dollar's worth a grub for every twenty-five centsthey pay on it. As for Alf--by gosh, I'm through with him. "

But that, of course, was only a confidential matter as between Mr. Smithand Billy. 

I don't know at what precise period it was that the idea of a petitionto the License Commissioners first got about the town. No one seemed toknow just who suggested it. But certain it was that public opinionbegan to swing strongly towards the support of Mr. Smith. I think it wasperhaps on the day after the big fish dinner that Alphonse cooked forthe Mariposa Canoe Club (at twenty cents a head) that the feeling beganto find open expression. People said it was a shame that a man like JoshSmith should be run out of Mariposa by three license commissioners. Whowere the license commissioners, anyway? Why, look at the license systemthey had in Sweden; yes, and in Finland and in South America. Or, forthe matter of that, look at the French and Italians, who drink all dayand all night. Aren't they all right? Aren't they a musical people? TakeNapoleon, and Victor Hugo; drunk half the time, and yet look what theydid. 

I quote these arguments not for their own sake, but merely to indicatethe changing temper of public opinion in Mariposa. Men would sit in thecaff at lunch perhaps for an hour and a half and talk about the licensequestion in general, and then go down into the Rats' Cooler and talkabout it for two hours more. 

It was amazing the way the light broke in in the case of particularindividuals, often the most unlikely, and quelled their opposition. 

Take, for example, the editor of the Newspacket. I suppose there wasn'ta greater temperance advocate in town. Yet Alphonse queered him with anOmelette a la License in one meal. 

Or take Pepperleigh himself, the judge of the Mariposa court. He wasput to the bad with a game pie, --pate normand aux fines herbes--thereal thing, as good as a trip to Paris in itself. After eating it, Pepperleigh had the common sense to realize that it was sheer madness todestroy a hotel that could cook a thing like that. 

In the same way, the secretary of the School Board was silenced with astuffed duck a la Ossawippi. 

Three members of the town council were converted with a Dindon farci ala Josh Smith. 

And then, finally, Mr. Diston persuaded Dean Drone to come, and as soonas Mr. Smith and Alphonse saw him they landed him with a fried flounderthat even the apostles would have appreciated. 

After that, every one knew that the license question was practicallysettled. The petition was all over the town. It was printed in duplicateat the Newspacket and you could see it lying on the counter of everyshop in Mariposa. Some of the people signed it twenty or thirty times. 

It was the right kind of document too. It began--"Whereas in the bountyof providence the earth putteth forth her luscious fruits and hervineyards for the delight and enjoyment of mankind--" It made youthirsty just to read it. Any man who read that petition over was wild toget to the Rats' Cooler. 

When it was all signed up they had nearly three thousand names on it. 

Then Nivens, the lawyer, and Mr. Gingham (as a provincial official) tookit down to the county town, and by three o'clock that afternoon thenews had gone out from the long distance telephone office that Smith'slicense was renewed for three years. 

Rejoicings! Well, I should think so! Everybody was down wanting toshake hands with Mr. Smith. They told him that he had done more to boomMariposa than any ten men in town. Some of them said he ought to runfor the town council, and others wanted to make him the Conservativecandidate for the next Dominion election. The caff was a mere babelof voices, and even the Rats' Cooler was almost floated away from itsmoorings. 

And in the middle of it all, Mr. Smith found time to say to Billy, the desk clerk: "Take the cash registers out of the caff and the Rats'Cooler and start counting up the books. "

And Billy said: "Will I write the letters for the palms and the tablesand the stuff to go back?"

And Mr. Smith said: "Get 'em written right away. "

So all evening the laughter and the chatter and the congratulations wenton, and it wasn't till long after midnight that Mr. Smith was able tojoin Billy in the private room behind the "rotunda. " Even when he did, there was a quiet and a dignity about his manner that had never beenthere before. I think it must have been the new halo of the Conservativecandidacy that already radiated from his brow. It was, I imagine, atthis very moment that Mr. Smith first realised that the hotel businessformed the natural and proper threshold of the national legislature. 

"Here's the account of the cash registers, " said Billy. 

"Let me see it, " said Mr. Smith. And he studied the figures without aword. 

"And here's the letters about the palms, and here's Alphonse up toyesterday--"

And then an amazing thing happened. 

"Billy, " said Mr. Smith, "tear'em up. I ain't going to do it. It ain'tright and I won't do it. They got me the license for to keep the caffand I'm going to keep the caff. I don't need to close her. The bar'sgood for anything from forty to a hundred a day now, with the Rats'Cooler going good, and that caff will stay right here. "

And stay it did. 

There it stands, mind you, to this day. You've only to step round thecorner of Smith's Hotel on the side street and read the sign: LADIES'AND GENT'S CAFE, just as large and as imposing as ever. 

Mr. Smith said that he'd keep the caff, and when he saida thing he meantit!

Of course there were changes, small changes. 

I don't say, mind you, that the fillet de beef that you get there now isperhaps quite up to the level of the filet de boeufs aux champignons ofthe days of glory. 

No doubt the lamb chops in Smith's Caff are often very much the same, nowadays, as the lamb chops of the Mariposa House or the Continental. 

Of course, things like Omelette aux Trufles practically died out whenAlphonse went. And, naturally, the leaving of Alphonse was inevitable. No one knew just when he went, or why. But one morning he was gone. Mr. Smith said that "Alf had to go back to his folks in the old country. "

So, too, when Alf left, the use of the French language, as such, felloff tremendously in the caff. Even now they use it to some extent. Youcan still get fillet de beef, and saucisson au juice, but Billy the deskclerk has considerable trouble with the spelling. 

The Rats' Cooler, of course, closed down, or rather Mr. Smith closed itfor repairs, and there is every likelihood that it will hardly open forthree years. But the caff is there. They don't use the grills, becausethere's no need to, with the hotel kitchen so handy. 

The "girl room, " I may say, was never opened. Mr. Smith promised it, itis true, for the winter, and still talks of it. But somehow there's beena sort of feeling against it. Every one in town admits that every bighotel in the city has a "girl room" and that it must be all right. Still, there's a certain--well, you know how sensitive opinion is in aplace like Mariposa. 

TWO. The Speculations of Jefferson Thorpe

It was not until the mining boom, at the time when everybody went simplycrazy over the Cobalt and Porcupine mines of the new silver country nearthe Hudson Bay, that Jefferson Thorpe reached what you might call publicimportance in Mariposa. 

Of course everybody knew Jeff and his little barber shop that stood justacross the street from Smith's Hotel. Everybody knew him and everybodygot shaved there. From early morning, when the commercial travellers offthe 6. 30 express got shaved into the resemblance of human beings, therewere always people going in and out of the barber shop. 

Mullins, the manager of the Exchange Bank, took his morning shave fromJeff as a form of resuscitation, with enough wet towels laid on his faceto stew him and with Jeff moving about in the steam, razor in hand, asgrave as an operating surgeon. 

Then, as I think I said, Mr. Smith came in every morning and there wasa tremendous outpouring of Florida water and rums, essences and reviversand renovators, regardless of expense. What with Jeff's white coat andMr. Smith's flowered waistcoat and the red geranium in the window andthe Florida water and the double extract of hyacinth, the little shopseemed multi-coloured and luxurious enough for the annex of a Sultan'sharem. 

But what I mean is that, till the mining boom, Jefferson Thorpe neveroccupied a position of real prominence in Mariposa. You couldn't, forexample, have compared him with a man like Golgotha Gingham, who, as undertaker, stood in a direct relation to life and death, or toTrelawney, the postmaster, who drew money from the Federal Government ofCanada, and was regarded as virtually a member of the Dominion Cabinet. 

Everybody knew Jeff and liked him, but the odd thing was that till hemade money nobody took any stock in his ideas at all. It was only afterhe made the "clean up" that they came to see what a splendid fellowhe was. "Level-headed" I think was the term; indeed in the speech ofMariposa, the highest form of endowment was to have the head set onhorizontally as with a theodolite. 

As I say, it was when Jeff made money that they saw how gifted he was, and when he lost it, --but still, there's no need to go into that. Ibelieve it's something the same in other places too. 

The barber shop, you will remember, stands across the street fromSmith's Hotel, and stares at it face to face. 

It is one of those wooden structures--I don't know whether you knowthem--with a false front that sticks up above its real height and givesit an air at once rectangular and imposing. It is a form of architecturemuch used in Mariposa and understood to be in keeping with thepretentious and artificial character of modern business. There is a red, white and blue post in front of the shop and the shop itself has a largesquare window out of proportion to its little flat face. 

Painted on the panes of the window is the remains of a legend that oncespelt BARBER SHOP, executed with the flourishes that prevailed in thegolden age of sign painting in Mariposa. Through the window you can seethe geraniums in the window shelf and behind them Jeff Thorpe with hislittle black scull cap on and his spectacles drooped upon his nose as hebends forward in the absorption of shaving. 

As you open the door, it sets in violent agitation a coiled spring upabove and a bell that almost rings. Inside, there are two shaving chairsof the heavier, or electrocution pattern, with mirrors in front of themand pigeon holes with individual shaving mugs. There must be ever somany of them, fifteen or sixteen. It is the current supposition of eachof Jeff's customers that everyone else but himself uses a separate mug. One corner of the shop is partitioned off and bears the sign: HOT ANDCOLD BATHS, 50 CENTS. There has been no bath inside the partition fortwenty years--only old newspapers and a mop. Still, it lends distinctionsomehow, just as do the faded cardboard signs that hang against themirror with the legends: TURKISH SHAMPOO, 75 CENTS, and ROMAN MASSAGE, $1. 00. 

They said commonly in Mariposa that Jeff made money out of the barbershop. He may have, and it may have been that that turned his mind toinvestment. But it's hard to see how he could. A shave cost five cents, and a hair-cut fifteen (or the two, if you liked, for a quarter), andat that it is hard to see how he could make money, even when he had bothchairs going and shaved first in one and then in the other. 

You see, in Mariposa, shaving isn't the hurried, perfunctory thing thatit is in the city. A shave is looked upon as a form of physical pleasureand lasts anywhere from twenty-five minutes to three-quarters of anhour. 

In the morning hours, perhaps, there was a semblance of haste about it, but in the long quiet of the afternoon, as Jeff leaned forward towardsthe customer, and talked to him in a soft confidential monotone, like aportrait painter, the razor would go slower and slower, and pause andstop, move and pause again, till the shave died away into the meredrowse of conversation. 

At such hours, the Mariposa barber shop would become a very Palace ofSlumber, and as you waited your turn in one of the wooden arm-chairsbeside the wall, what with the quiet of the hour, and the low drone ofJeff's conversation, the buzzing of the flies against the window paneand the measured tick of the clock above the mirror, your head sankdreaming on your breast, and the Mariposa Newspacket rustled unheeded onthe floor. It makes one drowsy just to think of it!

The conversation, of course, was the real charm of the place. You see, Jefferson's forte, or specialty, was information. He could tell you morethings within the compass of a half-hour's shave than you get in daysof laborious research in an encyclopaedia. Where he got it all, Idon't know, but I am inclined to think it came more or less out of thenewspapers. 

In the city, people never read the newspapers, not really, only littlebits and scraps of them. But in Mariposa it's different. There they readthe whole thing from cover to cover, and they build up on it, inthe course of years, a range of acquirement that would put a collegepresident to the blush. Anybody who has ever heard Henry Mullins andPeter Glover talk about the future of China will know just what I mean. 

And, of course, the peculiarity of Jeff's conversation was that he couldsuit it to his man every time. He had a kind of divination about it. There was a certain kind of man that Jeff would size up sideways ashe stropped the razor, and in whose ear he would whisper: "I see whereSaint Louis has took four straight games off Chicago, "--and so hold himfascinated to the end. 

In the same way he would say to Mr. Smith: "I see where it says thatthis 'Flying Squirl' run a dead heat for the King's Plate. "

To a humble intellect like mine he would explain in full the relationsof the Keesar to the German Rich Dog. 

But first and foremost, Jeff's specialty in the way of conversationwas finance and the money market, the huge fortunes that a man with theright kind of head could make. 

I've known Jefferson to pause in his shaving with the razor suspendedin the air as long as five minutes while he described, with his eyehalf closed, exactly the kind of a head a man needed in order to makea "haul" or a "clean up. " It was evidently simply a matter of the head, and as far as one could judge, Jeff's own was the very type required. I don't know just at what time or how Jefferson first began hisspeculative enterprises. It was probably in him from the start. Thereis no doubt that the very idea of such things as Traction Stock andAmalgamated Asbestos went to his head: and whenever he spoke of Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Rockefeller, the yearning tone of his voice made it assoft as lathered soap. 

I suppose the most rudimentary form of his speculation was the hens. That was years ago. He kept them out at the back of his house, --whichitself stood up a grass plot behind and beyond the barber shop, --and inthe old days Jeff would say, with a certain note of pride in his voice, that The Woman had sold as many as two dozen eggs in a day to the summervisitors. 

But what with reading about Amalgamated Asbestos and Consolidated Copperand all that, the hens began to seem pretty small business, and, inany case, the idea of two dozen eggs at a cent apiece almost makes oneblush. I suppose a good many of us have felt just as Jeff did about ourpoor little earnings. Anyway, I remember Jeff telling me one day thathe could take the whole lot of the hens and sell them off and crackthe money into Chicago wheat on margin and turn it over in twenty-fourhours. He did it too. Only somehow when it was turned over it cameupside down on top of the hens. 

After that the hen house stood empty and The Woman had to throw awaychicken feed every day, at a dead loss of perhaps a shave and a half. But it made no difference to Jeff, for his mind had floated away alreadyon the possibilities of what he called "displacement" mining on theYukon. 

So you can understand that when the mining boom struck Mariposa, Jefferson Thorpe was in it right from the very start. Why, no wonder; itseemed like the finger of Providence. Here was this great silver countryspread out to north of us, where people had thought there was only awilderness. And right at our very doors! You could see, as I saw, thenight express going north every evening; for all one knew Rockefeller orCarnegie or anyone might be on it! Here was the wealth of Calcutta, asthe Mariposa Newspacket put it, poured out at our very feet. 

So no wonder the town went wild! All day in the street you couldhear men talking of veins, and smelters and dips and deposits andfaults, --the town hummed with it like a geology class on examinationday. And there were men about the hotels with mining outfits andtheodolites and dunnage bags, and at Smith's bar they would hand chunksof rock up and down, some of which would run as high as ten drinks tothe pound. 

The fever just caught the town and ran through it! Within a fortnightthey put a partition down Robertson's Coal and Wood Office and openedthe Mariposa Mining Exchange, and just about every man on the MainStreet started buying scrip. Then presently young Fizzlechip, who hadbeen teller in Mullins's Bank and that everybody had thought a worthlessjackass before, came back from the Cobalt country with a fortune, andloafed round in the Mariposa House in English khaki and a horizontalhat, drunk all the time, and everybody holding him up as an example ofwhat it was possible to do if you tried. 

They all went in. Jim Eliot mortgaged the inside of the drug store andjammed it into Twin Tamagami. Pete Glover at the hardware store boughtNippewa stock at thirteen cents and sold it to his brother at seventeenand bought it back in less than a week at nineteen. They didn't care!They took a chance. Judge Pepperleigh put the rest of his wife's moneyinto Temiskaming Common, and Lawyer Macartney got the fever, too, andput every cent that his sister possessed into Tulip Preferred. 

And even when young Fizzlechip shot himself in the back room of theMariposa House, Mr. Gingham buried him in a casket with silver handlesand it was felt that there was a Monte Carlo touch about the wholething. 

They all went in--or all except Mr. Smith. You see, Mr. Smith had comedown from there, and he knew all about rocks and mining and canoes andthe north country. He knew what it was to eat flour-baked dampers underthe lee side of a canoe propped among the underbrush, and to drink thelast drop of whiskey within fifty miles. Mr. Smith had mighty little usefor the north. But what he did do, was to buy up enough early potatoesto send fifteen carload lots into Cobalt at a profit of five dollars abag. 

Mr. Smith, I say, hung back. But Jeff Thorpe was in the mining boomright from the start. He bought in on the Nippewa mine even before theinterim prospectus was out. He took a "block" of 100 shares ofAbbitibbi Development at fourteen cents, and he and Johnson, the liverystablekeeper next door, formed a syndicate and got a thousand sharesof Metagami Lake at 3 1/4 cents and then "unloaded" them on one of thesausage men at Netley's butcher shop at a clear cent per cent advance. 

Jeff would open the little drawer below the mirror in the barbershop and show you all kinds and sorts of Cobalt country miningcertificates, --blue ones, pink ones, green ones, with outlandish andfascinating names on them that ran clear from the Mattawa to the HudsonBay. 

And right from the start he was confident of winning. "There ain't nodifficulty to it, " he said, "there's lots of silver up there in thatcountry and if you buy some here and some there you can't fail to comeout somewhere. I don't say, " he used to continue, with the scissors openand ready to cut, "that some of the greenhorns won't get bit. But if afeller knows the country and keeps his head level, he can't lose. "

Jefferson had looked at so many prospectuses and so many pictures ofmines and pine trees and smelters, that I think he'd forgotten that he'dnever been in the country. Anyway, what's two hundred miles!

To an onlooker it certainly didn't seem so simple. I never knew themeanness, the trickery, of the mining business, the sheer obstinatedetermination of the bigger capitalists not to make money when theymight, till I heard the accounts of Jeff's different mines. Take thecase of Corona Jewel. There was a good mine, simply going to ruin forlack of common sense. 

"She ain't been developed, " Jeff would say. "There's silver enough inher so you could dig it out with a shovel. She's full of it. But theywon't get at her and work her. "

Then he'd take a look at the pink and blue certificates of the CoronaJewel and slam the drawer on them in disgust. Worse than that wasthe Silent Pine, --a clear case of stupid incompetence! Utter lack ofengineering skill was all that was keeping the Silent Pine from making afortune for its holders. 

"The only trouble with that mine, " said Jeff, "is they won't go deepenough. They followed the vein down to where it kind o' thinned out andthen they quit. If they'd just go right into her good, they'd get itagain. She's down there all right. "

But perhaps the meanest case of all was the Northern Star. That alwaysseemed to me, every time I heard of it, a straight case for the criminallaw. The thing was so evidently a conspiracy. 

"I bought her, " said Jeff, "at thirty-two, and she stayed right theretight, like she was stuck. Then a bunch of these fellers in the citystarted to drive her down and they got her pushed down to twenty-four, and I held on to her and they shoved her down to twenty-one. Thismorning they've got her down to sixteen, but I don't mean to let go. No, sir. "

In another fortnight they shoved her, the same unscrupulous crowd, downto nine cents, and Jefferson still held on. "They're working her down, "he admitted, "but I'm holding her. "

No conflict between vice and virtue was ever grimmer. 

"She's at six, " said Jeff, "but I've got her. They can't squeeze me. "

A few days after that, the same criminal gang had her down further thanever. 

"They've got her down to three cents, " said Jeff, "but I'm with her. Yes, sir, they think they can shove her clean off the market, butthey can't do it. I've boughten in Johnson's shares, and the whole ofNetley's, and I'll stay with her till she breaks. "

So they shoved and pushed and clawed her down--that unseen nefariouscrowd in the city--and Jeff held on to her and they writhed and twistedat his grip, and then--

And then--well, that's just the queer thing about the mining business. Why, sudden as a flash of lightning, it seemed, the news came over thewire to the Mariposa Newspacket, that they had struck a vein of silverin the Northern Star as thick as a sidewalk, and that the stock hadjumped to seventeen dollars a share, and even at that you couldn't getit! And Jeff stood there flushed and half-staggered against the mirrorof the little shop, with a bunch of mining scrip in his hand that wasworth forty thousand dollars!

Excitement! It was all over the town in a minutes. They ran off a newsextra at the Mariposa Newspacket, and in less than no time there wasn'tstanding room in the barber shop, and over in Smith's Hotel they hadthree extra barkeepers working on the lager beer pumps. 

They were selling mining shares on the Main Street in Mariposa thatafternoon and people were just clutching for them. Then at night therewas a big oyster supper in Smith's caff, with speeches, and the Mariposaband outside. 

And the queer thing was that the very next afternoon was the funeralof young Fizzlechip, and Dean Drone had to change the whole text ofhis Sunday sermon at two days' notice for fear of offending publicsentiment. 

But I think what Jeff liked best of it all was the sort of publicrecognition that it meant. He'd stand there in the shop, hardlybothering to shave, and explain to the men in the arm-chairs how he heldher, and they shoved her, and he clung to her, and what he'd said tohimself--a perfect Iliad--while he was clinging to her. 

The whole thing was in the city papers a few days after with aphotograph of Jeff, taken specially at Ed Moore's studio (upstairs overNetley's). It showed Jeff sitting among palm trees, as all mining mendo, with one hand on his knee, and a dog, one of those regular miningdogs, at his feet, and a look of piercing intelligence in his face thatwould easily account for forty thousand dollars. 

I say that the recognition meant a lot to Jeff for its own sake. But nodoubt the fortune meant quite a bit to him too on account of Myra. 

Did I mention Myra, Jeff's daughter? Perhaps not. That's thetrouble with the people in Mariposa; they're all so separate and sodifferent--not a bit like the people in the cities--that unless you hearabout them separately and one by one you can't for a moment understandwhat they're like. 

Myra had golden hair and a Greek face and would come bursting throughthe barber shop in a hat at least six inches wider than what theywear in Paris. As you saw her swinging up the street to the TelephoneExchange in a suit that was straight out of the Delineator and brownAmerican boots, there was style written all over her, --the kind ofthing that Mariposa recognised and did homage to. And to see her in theExchange, --she was one of the four girls that I spoke of, --on her highstool with a steel cap on, --jabbing the connecting plugs in and outas if electricity cost nothing--well, all I mean is that you couldunderstand why it was that the commercial travellers would stand roundin the Exchange calling up all sorts of impossible villages, andwaiting about so pleasant and genial!--it made one realize how naturallygood-tempered men are. And then when Myra would go off duty and MissCleghorn, who was sallow, would come on, the commercial men would be offagain like autumn leaves. 

It just shows the difference between people. There was Myra who treatedlovers like dogs and would slap them across the face with a banana skinto show her utter independence. And there was Miss Cleghorn, who wassallow, and who bought a forty cent Ancient History to improve herself:and yet if she'd hit any man in Mariposa with a banana skin, he'd havehad her arrested for assault. 

Mind you, I don't mean that Myra was merely flippant and worthless. Notat all. She was a girl with any amount of talent. You should have heardher recite "The Raven, " at the Methodist Social! Simply genius! And whenshe acted Portia in the Trial Scene of the Merchant of Venice at theHigh School concert, everybody in Mariposa admitted that you couldn'thave told it from the original. 

So, of course, as soon as Jeff made the fortune, Myra had herresignation in next morning and everybody knew that she was to go toa dramatic school for three months in the fall and become a leadingactress. 

But, as I said, the public recognition counted a lot for Jeff. Themoment you begin to get that sort of thing it comes in quickly enough. Brains, you know, are recognized right away. That was why, of course, within a week from this Jeff received the first big packet of stuff fromthe Cuban Land Development Company, with coloured pictures of Cuba, and fields of bananas, and haciendas and insurrectos with machetes andHeaven knows what. They heard of him, somehow, --it wasn't for a modestman like Jefferson to say how. After all, the capitalists of the worldare just one and the same crowd. If you're in it, you're in it, that'sall! Jeff realized why it is that of course men like Carnegie orRockefeller and Morgan all know one another. They have to. 

For all I know, this Cuban stuff may have been sent from Morgan himself. Some of the people in Mariposa said yes, others said no. There was nocertainty. 

Anyway, they were fair and straight, this Cuban crowd that wrote toJeff. They offered him to come right in and be one of themselves. If aman's got the brains, you may as well recognize it straight away. Justas well write him to be a director now as wait and hesitate till heforces his way into it. 

Anyhow, they didn't hesitate, these Cuban people that wrote to Jeff fromCuba--or from a post-office box in New York--it's all the same thing, because Cuba being so near to New York the mail is all distributed fromthere. I suppose in some financial circles they might have been slower, wanted guarantees of some sort, and so on, but these Cubans, youknow, have got a sort of Spanish warmth of heart that you don't seein business men in America, and that touches you. No, they asked noguarantee. Just send the money whether by express order or by bank draftor cheque, they left that entirely to oneself, as a matter between Cubangentlemen. 

And they were quite frank about their enterprise--bananas and tobaccoin the plantation district reclaimed from the insurrectos. Youcould see it all there in the pictures--tobacco plants and theinsurrectos--everything. They made no rash promises, just admittedstraight out that the enterprise might realise 400 per cent. Or mightconceivably make less. There was no hint of more. 

So within a month, everybody in Mariposa knew that Jeff Thorpe was "inCuban lands" and would probably clean up half a million by New Year's. You couldn't have failed to know it. All round the little shop therewere pictures of banana groves and the harbour of Habana, and Cubans inwhite suits and scarlet sashes, smoking cigarettes in the sun and tooignorant to know that you can make four hundred per cent. By planting abanana tree. 

I liked it about Jeff that he didn't stop shaving. He went on justthe same. Even when Johnson, the livery stable man, came in with fivehundred dollars and asked him to see if the Cuban Board of Directorswould let him put it in, Jeff laid it in the drawer and then shaved himfor five cents, in the same old way. Of course, he must have felt proudwhen, a few days later, he got a letter from the Cuban people, from NewYork, accepting the money straight off without a single question, andwithout knowing anything more of Johnson except that he was a friend ofJeff's. They wrote most handsomely. Any friends of Jeff's were friendsof Cuba. All money they might send would be treated just as Jeff's wouldbe treated. 

One reason, perhaps, why Jeff didn't give up shaving was because itallowed him to talk about Cuba. You see, everybody knew in Mariposa thatJeff Thorpe had sold out of Cobalts and had gone into Cuban RenovatedLands--and that spread round him a kind of halo of wealth and mysteryand outlandishness--oh, something Spanish. Perhaps you've felt it aboutpeople that you know. Anyhow, they asked him about the climate, andyellow fever and what the negroes were like and all that sort of thing. 

"This Cubey, it appears is an island, " Jeff would explain. Ofcourse, everybody knows how easily islands lend themselves to makingmoney, --"and for fruit, they say it comes up so fast you can't stopit. " And then he would pass into details about the Hash-enders and theresurrectos and technical things like that till it was thought a wonderhow he could know it. Still, it was realized that a man with money hasgot to know these things. Look at Morgan and Rockefeller and all the menthat make a pile. They know just as much as Jeff did about the countrieswhere they make it. It stands to reason. 

Did I say that Jeff shaved in the same old way? Not quite. There wassomething even dreamier about it now, and a sort of new element in theway Jeff fell out of his monotone into lapses of thought that I, forone, misunderstood. I thought that perhaps getting so much money, --well, you know the way it acts on people in the larger cities. It seemedto spoil one's idea of Jeff that copper and asbestos and banana landsshould form the goal of his thought when, if he knew it, the little shopand the sunlight of Mariposa was so much better. 

In fact, I had perhaps borne him a grudge for what seemed to me hisperpetual interest in the great capitalists. He always had some item outof the paper about them. 

"I see where this here Carnegie has give fifty thousand dollars for oneof them observatories, " he would say. 

And another day he would pause in the course of shaving, and almostwhisper: "Did you ever _see_ this Rockefeller?"

It was only by a sort of accident that I came to know that there wasanother side to Jefferson's speculation that no one in Mariposa everknew, or will ever know now. 

I knew it because I went in to see Jeff in his house one night. Thehouse, --I think I said it, --stood out behind the barber shop. You wentout of the back door of the shop, and through a grass plot with petuniasbeside it, and the house stood at the end. You could see the lightof the lamp behind the blind, and through the screen door as you camealong. And it was here that Jefferson used to sit in the evenings whenthe shop got empty. 

There was a round table that The Woman used to lay for supper, and aftersupper there used to be a chequered cloth on it and a lamp with a shade. And beside it Jeff would sit, with his spectacles on and the paperspread out, reading about Carnegie and Rockefeller. Near him, but awayfrom the table, was The Woman doing needlework, and Myra, when shewasn't working in the Telephone Exchange, was there too with her elbowson the table reading Marie Corelli--only now, of course, after thefortune, she was reading the prospectuses of Dramatic Schools. 

So this night, --I don't know just what it was in the paper that causedit, --Jeff laid down what he was reading and started to talk aboutCarnegie. 

"This Carnegie, I bet you, would be worth, " said Jeff, closing up hiseyes in calculation, "as much as perhaps two million dollars, if you wasto sell him up. And this Rockefeller and this Morgan, either of them, tosell them up clean, would be worth another couple of million--"

I may say in parentheses that it was a favourite method in Mariposa ifyou wanted to get at the real worth of a man, to imagine him clean soldup, put up for auction, as it were. It was the only way to test him. 

"And now look at 'em, " Jeff went on. "They make their money and what dothey do with it? They give it away. And who do they give it to? Why, tothose as don't want it, every time. They give it to these professors andto this research and that, and do the poor get any of it? Not a cent andnever will. "

"I tell you, boys, " continued Jeff (there were no boys present, but inMariposa all really important speeches are addressed to an imaginaryaudience of boys)--"I tell you, if I was to make a million out of thisCubey, I'd give it straight to the poor, yes, sir--divide it up into ahundred lots of a thousand dollars each and give it to the people thathadn't nothing. "

So always after that I knew just what those bananas were being grownfor. 

Indeed, after that, though Jefferson never spoke of his intentionsdirectly, he said a number of things that seemed to bear on them. Heasked me, for instance, one day, how many blind people it would take tofill one of these blind homes and how a feller could get ahold of them. And at another time he asked whether if a feller advertised for some ofthese incurables a feller could get enough of them to make a showing. I know for a fact that he got Nivens, the lawyer, to draw up a documentthat was to give an acre of banana land in Cuba to every idiot inMissinaba county. 

But still, --what's the use of talking of what Jeff meant to do? Nobodyknows or cares about it now. 

The end of it was bound to come. Even in Mariposa some of the peoplemust have thought so. Else how was it that Henry Mullins made such afuss about selling a draft for forty thousand on New York? And why wasit that Mr. Smith wouldn't pay Billy, the desk clerk, his back wageswhen he wanted to put it into Cuba?

Oh yes; some of them must have seen it. And yet when it came it seemedso quiet, --ever so quiet, --not a bit like the Northern Star mine andthe oyster supper and the Mariposa band. It is strange how quiet thesethings look, the other way round. 

You remember the Cuban Land frauds in New York and Porforio Gomezshooting the detective, and him and Maximo Morez getting clear away withtwo hundred thousand? No, of course you don't; why, even in the citypapers it only filled an inch or two of type, and anyway the names werehard to remember. That was Jeff's money--part of it. Mullins got thetelegram, from a broker or someone, and he showed it to Jeff just as hewas going up the street with an estate agent to look at a big empty loton the hill behind the town--the very place for these incurables. 

And Jeff went back to the shop so quiet--have you ever seen an animalthat is stricken through, how quiet it seems to move?

Well, that's how he walked. 

And since that, though it's quite a little while ago, the shop's opentill eleven every night now, and Jeff is shaving away to pay back thatfive hundred that Johnson, the livery man, sent to the Cubans, and--

Pathetic? tut! tut! You don't know Mariposa. Jeff has to work prettylate, but that's nothing--nothing at all, if you've worked hard all yourlifetime. And Myra is back at the Telephone Exchange--they were gladenough to get her, and she says now that if there's one thing she hates, it's the stage, and she can't see how the actresses put up with it. 

Anyway, things are not so bad. You see it was just at this time thatMr. Smith's caff opened, and Mr. Smith came to Jeff's Woman and said hewanted seven dozen eggs a day, and wanted them handy, and so the hensare back, and more of them, and they exult so every morning over theeggs they lay that if you wanted to talk of Rockefeller in the barbershop you couldn't hear his name for the cackling. 

THREE. The Marine Excursions of the Knights of Pythias

Half-past six on a July morning! The Mariposa Belle is at the wharf, decked in flags, with steam up ready to start. 

Excursion day!

Half past six on a July morning, and Lake Wissanotti lying in the sun ascalm as glass. The opal colours of the morning light are shot from thesurface of the water. 

Out on the lake the last thin threads of the mist are clearing away likeflecks of cotton wool. 

The long call of the loon echoes over the lake. The air is cool andfresh. There is in it all the new life of the land of the silent pineand the moving waters. Lake Wissanotti in the morning sunlight! Don'ttalk to me of the Italian lakes, or the Tyrol or the Swiss Alps. Takethem away. Move them somewhere else. I don't want them. 

Excursion Day, at half past six of a summer morning! With the boat alldecked in flags and all the people in Mariposa on the wharf, and theband in peaked caps with big cornets tied to their bodies ready to playat any minute! I say! Don't tell me about the Carnival of Venice andthe Delhi Durbar. Don't! I wouldn't look at them. I'd shut my eyes! Forlight and colour give me every time an excursion out of Mariposa downthe lake to the Indian's Island out of sight in the morning mist. Talkof your Papal Zouaves and your Buckingham Palace Guard! I want to seethe Mariposa band in uniform and the Mariposa Knights of Pythias withtheir aprons and their insignia and their picnic baskets and theirfive-cent cigars!

Half past six in the morning, and all the crowd on the wharf and theboat due to leave in half an hour. Notice it!--in half an hour. Alreadyshe's whistled twice (at six, and at six fifteen), and at any minutenow, Christie Johnson will step into the pilot house and pull the stringfor the warning whistle that the boat will leave in half an hour. So keep ready. Don't think of running back to Smith's Hotel for thesandwiches. Don't be fool enough to try to go up to the Greek Store, next to Netley's, and buy fruit. You'll be left behind for sure if youdo. Never mind the sandwiches and the fruit! Anyway, here comes Mr. Smith himself with a huge basket of provender that would feed a factory. There must be sandwiches in that. I think I can hear them clinking. And behind Mr. Smith is the German waiter from the caff with anotherbasket--indubitably lager beer; and behind him, the bar-tender of thehotel, carrying nothing, as far as one can see. But of course if youknow Mariposa you will understand that why he looks so nonchalant andempty-handed is because he has two bottles of rye whiskey under hislinen duster. You know, I think, the peculiar walk of a man with twobottles of whiskey in the inside pockets of a linen coat. In Mariposa, you see, to bring beer to an excursion is quite in keeping with publicopinion. But, whiskey, --well, one has to be a little careful. 

Do I say that Mr. Smith is here? Why, everybody's here. There's Hussellthe editor of the Newspacket, wearing a blue ribbon on his coat, forthe Mariposa Knights of Pythias are, by their constitution, dedicated totemperance; and there's Henry Mullins, the manager of the Exchange Bank, also a Knight of Pythias, with a small flask of Pogram's Special in hiship pocket as a sort of amendment to the constitution. And there's DeanDrone, the Chaplain of the Order, with a fishing-rod (you never sawsuch green bass as lie among the rocks at Indian's Island), and witha trolling line in case of maskinonge, and a landing net in case ofpickerel, and with his eldest daughter, Lilian Drone, in case of youngmen. There never was such a fisherman as the Rev. Rupert Drone. 

Perhaps I ought to explain that when I speak of the excursion as beingof the Knights of Pythias, the thing must not be understood in anynarrow sense. In Mariposa practically everybody belongs to the Knightsof Pythias just as they do to everything else. That's the great thingabout the town and that's what makes it so different from the city. Everybody is in everything. 

You should see them on the seventeenth of March, for example, wheneverybody wears a green ribbon and they're all laughing and glad, --youknow what the Celtic nature is, --and talking about Home Rule. 

On St. Andrew's Day every man in town wears a thistle and shakes handswith everybody else, and you see the fine old Scotch honesty beaming outof their eyes. 

And on St. George's Day!--well, there's no heartiness like the good oldEnglish spirit, after all; why shouldn't a man feel glad that he's anEnglishman?

Then on the Fourth of July there are stars and stripes flying over halfthe stores in town, and suddenly all the men are seen to smoke cigars, and to know all about Roosevelt and Bryan and the Philippine Islands. Then you learn for the first time that Jeff Thorpe's people came fromMassachusetts and that his uncle fought at Bunker Hill (it must havebeen Bunker Hill, --anyway Jefferson will swear it was in Dakota allright enough); and you find that George Duff has a married sister inRochester and that her husband is all right; in fact, George was downthere as recently as eight years ago. Oh, it's the most American townimaginable is Mariposa, --on the fourth of July. 

But wait, just wait, if you feel anxious about the solidity of theBritish connection, till the twelfth of the month, when everybody iswearing an orange streamer in his coat and the Orangemen (every man intown) walk in the big procession. Allegiance! Well, perhaps you rememberthe address they gave to the Prince of Wales on the platform of theMariposa station as he went through on his tour to the west. I thinkthat pretty well settled that question. So you will easily understandthat of course everybody belongs to the Knights of Pythias and theMasons and Oddfellows, just as they all belong to the Snow Shoe Club andthe Girls' Friendly Society. 

And meanwhile the whistle of the steamer has blown again for a quarterto seven:--loud and long this time, for any one not here now is latefor certain; unless he should happen to come down in the last fifteenminutes. 

What a crowd upon the wharf and how they pile on to the steamer! It's awonder that the boat can hold them all. But that's just the marvellousthing about the Mariposa Belle. 

I don't know, --I have never known, --where the steamers like the MariposaBelle come from. Whether they are built by Harland and Wolff of Belfast, or whether, on the other hand, they are not built by Harland and Wolffof Belfast, is more than one would like to say offhand. 

The Mariposa Belle always seems to me to have some of those strangeproperties that distinguish Mariposa itself. I mean, her size seems tovary so. If you see her there in the winter, frozen in the ice besidethe wharf with a snowdrift against the windows of the pilot house, shelooks a pathetic little thing the size of a butternut. But in the summertime, especially after you've been in Mariposa for a month or two, andhave paddled alongside of her in a canoe, she gets larger and taller, and with a great sweep of black sides, till you see no differencebetween the Mariposa Belle and the Lusitania. Each one is a big steamerand that's all you can say. 

Nor do her measurements help you much. She draws about eighteen inchesforward, and more than that, --at least half an inch more, astern, andwhen she's loaded down with an excursion crowd she draws a good twoinches more. And above the water, --why, look at all the decks on her!There's the deck you walk on to, from the wharf, all shut in, withwindows along it, and the after cabin with the long table, and abovethat the deck with all the chairs piled upon it, and the deck in frontwhere the band stand round in a circle, and the pilot house is higherthan that, and above the pilot house is the board with the gold name andthe flag pole and the steel ropes and the flags; and fixed in somewhereon the different levels is the lunch counter where they sell thesandwiches, and the engine room, and down below the deck level, beneaththe water line, is the place where the crew sleep. What with steps andstairs and passages and piles of cordwood for the engine, --oh no, Iguess Harland and Wolff didn't build her. They couldn't have. 

Yet even with a huge boat like the Mariposa Belle, it would beimpossible for her to carry all of the crowd that you see in the boatand on the wharf. In reality, the crowd is made up of two classes, --allof the people in Mariposa who are going on the excursion and all thosewho are not. Some come for the one reason and some for the other. 

The two tellers of the Exchange Bank are both there standing side byside. But one of them, --the one with the cameo pin and the long facelike a horse, --is going, and the other, --with the other cameo pin andthe face like another horse, --is not. In the same way, Hussell of theNewspacket is going, but his brother, beside him, isn't. Lilian Drone isgoing, but her sister can't; and so on all through the crowd. 

And to think that things should look like that on the morning of asteamboat accident. 

How strange life is!

To think of all these people so eager and anxious to catch the steamer, and some of them running to catch it, and so fearful that they mightmiss it, --the morning of a steamboat accident. And the captain blowinghis whistle, and warning them so severely that he would leave thembehind, --leave them out of the accident! And everybody crowding soeagerly to be in the accident. 

Perhaps life is like that all through. 

Strangest of all to think, in a case like this, of the people who wereleft behind, or in some way or other prevented from going, and alwaysafterwards told of how they had escaped being on board the MariposaBelle that day!

Some of the instances were certainly extraordinary. Nivens, the lawyer, escaped from being there merely by the fact that he was away in thecity. 

Towers, the tailor, only escaped owing to the fact that, not intendingto go on the excursion he had stayed in bed till eight o'clock and sohad not gone. He narrated afterwards that waking up that morningat half-past five, he had thought of the excursion and for someunaccountable reason had felt glad that he was not going. 

The case of Yodel, the auctioneer, was even more inscrutable. He hadbeen to the Oddfellows' excursion on the train the week before and tothe Conservative picnic the week before that, and had decided not togo on this trip. In fact, he had not the least intention of going. Henarrated afterwards how the night before someone had stopped him on thecorner of Nippewa and Tecumseh Streets (he indicated the very spot) andasked: "Are you going to take in the excursion to-morrow?" and he hadsaid, just as simply as he was talking when narrating it: "No. " And tenminutes after that, at the corner of Dalhousie and Brock Streets (heoffered to lead a party of verification to the precise place) somebodyelse had stopped him and asked: "Well, are you going on the steamer tripto-morrow?" Again he had answered: "No, " apparently almost in the sametone as before. 

He said afterwards that when he heard the rumour of the accidentit seemed like the finger of Providence, and fell on his knees inthankfulness. 

There was the similar case of Morison (I mean the one in Glover'shardware store that married one of the Thompsons). He said afterwardsthat he had read so much in the papers about accidents lately, --miningaccidents, and aeroplanes and gasoline, --that he had grown nervous. Thenight before his wife had asked him at supper: "Are you going on theexcursion?" He had answered: "No, I don't think I feel like it, " and hadadded: "Perhaps your mother might like to go. " And the next evening justat dusk, when the news ran through the town, he said the first thoughtthat flashed through his head was: "Mrs. Thompson's on that boat. "

He told this right as I say it--without the least doubt or confusion. Henever for a moment imagined she was on the Lusitania or the Olympicor any other boat. He knew she was on this one. He said you could haveknocked him down where he stood. But no one had. Not even when he gothalfway down, --on his knees, and it would have been easier still toknock him down or kick him. People do miss a lot of chances. 

Still, as I say, neither Yodel nor Morison nor anyone thought aboutthere being an accident until just after sundown when they--

Well, have you ever heard the long booming whistle of a steamboat twomiles out on the lake in the dusk, and while you listen and count andwonder, seen the crimson rockets going up against the sky and then heardthe fire bell ringing right there beside you in the town, and seen thepeople running to the town wharf?

That's what the people of Mariposa saw and felt that summer evening asthey watched the Mackinaw life-boat go plunging out into the lakewith seven sweeps to a side and the foam clear to the gunwale with thelifting stroke of fourteen men!

But, dear me, I am afraid that this is no way to tell a story. I supposethe true art would have been to have said nothing about the accidenttill it happened. But when you write about Mariposa, or hear of it, ifyou know the place, it's all so vivid and real that a thing like thecontrast between the excursion crowd in the morning and the scene atnight leaps into your mind and you must think of it. 

But never mind about the accident, --let us turn back again to themorning. 

The boat was due to leave at seven. There was no doubt about thehour, --not only seven, but seven sharp. The notice in the Newspacketsaid: "The boat will leave sharp at seven;" and the advertising posterson the telegraph poles on Missinaba Street that began "Ho, for Indian'sIsland!" ended up with the words: "Boat leaves at seven sharp. " Therewas a big notice on the wharf that said: "Boat leaves sharp on time. "

So at seven, right on the hour, the whistle blew loud and long, and thenat seven fifteen three short peremptory blasts, and at seven thirty onequick angry call, --just one, --and very soon after that they cast offthe last of the ropes and the Mariposa Belle sailed off in her cloud offlags, and the band of the Knights of Pythias, timing it to a nicety, broke into the "Maple Leaf for Ever!"

I suppose that all excursions when they start are much the same. Anyway, on the Mariposa Belle everybody went running up and down all over theboat with deck chairs and camp stools and baskets, and found places, splendid places to sit, and then got scared that there might be betterones and chased off again. People hunted for places out of the sun andwhen they got them swore that they weren't going to freeze to pleaseanybody; and the people in the sun said that they hadn't paid fiftycents to be roasted. Others said that they hadn't paid fifty cents toget covered with cinders, and there were still others who hadn't paidfifty cents to get shaken to death with the propeller. 

Still, it was all right presently. The people seemed to get sorted outinto the places on the boat where they belonged. The women, the olderones, all gravitated into the cabin on the lower deck and by gettinground the table with needlework, and with all the windows shut, theysoon had it, as they said themselves, just like being at home. 

All the young boys and the toughs and the men in the band got down onthe lower deck forward, where the boat was dirtiest and where the anchorwas and the coils of rope. 

And upstairs on the after deck there were Lilian Drone and Miss Lawson, the high school teacher, with a book of German poetry, --Gothey I thinkit was, --and the bank teller and the younger men. 

In the centre, standing beside the rail, were Dean Drone and Dr. Gallagher, looking through binocular glasses at the shore. 

Up in front on the little deck forward of the pilot house was a groupof the older men, Mullins and Duff and Mr. Smith in a deck chair, andbeside him Mr. Golgotha Gingham, the undertaker of Mariposa, on a stool. It was part of Mr. Gingham's principles to take in an outing of thissort, a business matter, more or less, --for you never know what mayhappen at these water parties. At any rate, he was there in a neat suitof black, not, of course, his heavier or professional suit, but a softclinging effect as of burnt paper that combined gaiety and decorum to anicety. 

"Yes, " said Mr. Gingham, waving his black glove in a general way towardsthe shore, "I know the lake well, very well. I've been pretty much allover it in my time. "

"Canoeing?" asked somebody. 

"No, " said Mr. Gingham, "not in a canoe. " There seemed a peculiar andquiet meaning in his tone. 

"Sailing, I suppose, " said somebody else. 

"No, " said Mr. Gingham. "I don't understand it. "

"I never knowed that you went on to the water at all, Gol, " said Mr. Smith, breaking in. 

"Ah, not now, " explained Mr. Gingham; "it was years ago, the firstsummer I came to Mariposa. I was on the water practically all day. Nothing like it to give a man an appetite and keep him in shape. "

"Was you camping?" asked Mr. Smith. 

"We camped at night, " assented the undertaker, "but we put inpractically the whole day on the water. You see we were after a partythat had come up here from the city on his vacation and gone out in asailing canoe. We were dragging. We were up every morning at sunrise, lit a fire on the beach and cooked breakfast, and then we'd light ourpipes and be off with the net for a whole day. It's a great life, "concluded Mr. Gingham wistfully. 

"Did you get him?" asked two or three together. 

There was a pause before Mr. Gingham answered. 

"We did, " he said, --"down in the reeds past Horseshoe Point. But it wasno use. He turned blue on me right away. "

After which Mr. Gingham fell into such a deep reverie that the boat hadsteamed another half mile down the lake before anybody broke the silenceagain. 

Talk of this sort, --and after all what more suitable for a day on thewater?--beguiled the way. 

Down the lake, mile by mile over the calm water, steamed the MariposaBelle. They passed Poplar Point where the high sand-banks are with allthe swallows' nests in them, and Dean Drone and Dr. Gallagher looked atthem alternately through the binocular glasses, and it was wonderful howplainly one could see the swallows and the banks and the shrubs, --justas plainly as with the naked eye. 

And a little further down they passed the Shingle Beach, and Dr. Gallagher, who knew Canadian history, said to Dean Drone that itwas strange to think that Champlain had landed there with his Frenchexplorers three hundred years ago; and Dean Drone, who didn't knowCanadian history, said it was stranger still to think that the hand ofthe Almighty had piled up the hills and rocks long before that; andDr. Gallagher said it was wonderful how the French had found their waythrough such a pathless wilderness; and Dean Drone said that it waswonderful also to think that the Almighty had placed even the smallestshrub in its appointed place. Dr. Gallagher said it filled him withadmiration. Dean Drone said it filled him with awe. Dr. Gallagher saidhe'd been full of it ever since he was a boy; and Dean Drone said so hadhe. 

Then a little further, as the Mariposa Belle steamed on down the lake, they passed the Old Indian Portage where the great grey rocks are; andDr. Gallagher drew Dean Drone's attention to the place where the narrowcanoe track wound up from the shore to the woods, and Dean Drone said hecould see it perfectly well without the glasses. 

Dr. Gallagher said that it was just here that a party of five hundredFrench had made their way with all their baggage and accoutrementsacross the rocks of the divide and down to the Great Bay. And Dean Dronesaid that it reminded him of Xenophon leading his ten thousand Greeksover the hill passes of Armenia down to the sea. Dr. Gallagher said thehe had often wished he could have seen and spoken to Champlain, and DeanDrone said how much he regretted to have never known Xenophon. 

And then after that they fell to talking of relics and traces of thepast, and Dr. Gallagher said that if Dean Drone would come round to hishouse some night he would show him some Indian arrow heads that he haddug up in his garden. And Dean Drone said that if Dr. Gallagher wouldcome round to the rectory any afternoon he would show him a map ofXerxes' invasion of Greece. Only he must come some time between theInfant Class and the Mothers' Auxiliary. 

So presently they both knew that they were blocked out of one another'shouses for some time to come, and Dr. Gallagher walked forward and toldMr. Smith, who had never studied Greek, about Champlain crossing therock divide. 

Mr. Smith turned his head and looked at the divide for half a second andthen said he had crossed a worse one up north back of the Wahnipitaeand that the flies were Hades, --and then went on playing freezeout pokerwith the two juniors in Duff's bank. 

So Dr. Gallagher realized that that's always the way when you try totell people things, and that as far as gratitude and appreciation goesone might as well never read books or travel anywhere or do anything. 

In fact, it was at this very moment that he made up his mind to give thearrows to the Mariposa Mechanics' Institute, --they afterwards became, asyou know, the Gallagher Collection. But, for the time being, the doctorwas sick of them and wandered off round the boat and watched HenryMullins showing George Duff how to make a John Collins without lemons, and finally went and sat down among the Mariposa band and wished that hehadn't come. 

So the boat steamed on and the sun rose higher and higher, and thefreshness of the morning changed into the full glare of noon, and theywent on to where the lake began to narrow in at its foot, just wherethe Indian's Island is, all grass and trees and with a log wharf runninginto the water: Below it the Lower Ossawippi runs out of the lake, andquite near are the rapids, and you can see down among the trees the redbrick of the power house and hear the roar of the leaping water. 

The Indian's Island itself is all covered with trees and tangled vines, and the water about it is so still that it's all reflected double andlooks the same either way up. Then when the steamer's whistle blows asit comes into the wharf, you hear it echo among the trees of the island, and reverberate back from the shores of the lake. 

The scene is all so quiet and still and unbroken, that MissCleghorn, --the sallow girl in the telephone exchange, that I spokeof--said she'd like to be buried there. But all the people were so busygetting their baskets and gathering up their things that no one had timeto attend to it. 

I mustn't even try to describe the landing and the boat crunchingagainst the wooden wharf and all the people running to the same side ofthe deck and Christie Johnson calling out to the crowd to keep to thestarboard and nobody being able to find it. Everyone who has been on aMariposa excursion knows all about that. 

Nor can I describe the day itself and the picnic under the trees. 'Therewere speeches afterwards, and Judge Pepperleigh gave such offenceby bringing in Conservative politics that a man called PatriotusCanadiensis wrote and asked for some of the invaluable space of theMariposa Times-Herald and exposed it. 

I should say that there were races too, on the grass on the open sideof the island, graded mostly according to ages, races for boys underthirteen and girls over nineteen and all that sort of thing. Sportsare generally conducted on that plan in Mariposa. It is realized that awoman of sixty has an unfair advantage over a mere child. 

Dean Drone managed the races and decided the ages and gave out theprizes; the Wesleyan minister helped, and he and the young student, whowas relieving in the Presbyterian Church, held the string at the winningpoint. 

They had to get mostly clergymen for the races because all the men hadwandered off, somehow, to where they were drinking lager beer out of twokegs stuck on pine logs among the trees. 

But if you've ever been on a Mariposa excursion you know all about thesedetails anyway. 

So the day wore on and presently the sun came through the trees on aslant and the steamer whistle blew with a great puff of white steam andall the people came straggling down to the wharf and pretty soon theMariposa Belle had floated out on to the lake again and headed for thetown, twenty miles away. 

I suppose you have often noticed the contrast there is between anexcursion on its way out in the morning and what it looks like on theway home. 

In the morning everybody is so restless and animated and moves toand fro all over the boat and asks questions. But coming home, as theafternoon gets later and the sun sinks beyond the hills, all the peopleseem to get so still and quiet and drowsy. 

So it was with the people on the Mariposa Belle. They sat there on thebenches and the deck chairs in little clusters, and listened to theregular beat of the propeller and almost dozed off asleep as they sat. Then when the sun set and the dusk drew on, it grew almost dark on thedeck and so still that you could hardly tell there was anyone on board. 

And if you had looked at the steamer from the shore or from one ofthe islands, you'd have seen the row of lights from the cabin windowsshining on the water and the red glare of the burning hemlock from thefunnel, and you'd have heard the soft thud of the propeller miles awayover the lake. 

Now and then, too, you could have heard them singing on thesteamer, --the voices of the girls and the men blended into unisonby the distance, rising and falling in long-drawn melody:"O--Can-a-da--O--Can-a-da. "

You may talk as you will about the intoning choirs of your Europeancathedrals, but the sound of "O--Can-a-da, " borne across the waters of asilent lake at evening is good enough for those of us who know Mariposa. 

I think that it was just as they were singing like this: "O--Can-a-da, "that word went round that the boat was sinking. 

If you have ever been in any sudden emergency on the water, you willunderstand the strange psychology of it, --the way in which what ishappening seems to become known all in a moment without a word beingsaid. The news is transmitted from one to the other by some mysteriousprocess. 

At any rate, on the Mariposa Belle first one and then the other heardthat the steamer was sinking. As far as I could ever learn the firstof it was that George Duff, the bank manager, came very quietly to Dr. Gallagher and asked him if he thought that the boat was sinking. Thedoctor said no, that he had thought so earlier in the day but that hedidn't now think that she was. 

After that Duff, according to his own account, had said to Macartney, the lawyer, that the boat was sinking, and Macartney said that hedoubted it very much. 

Then somebody came to Judge Pepperleigh and woke him up and said thatthere was six inches of water in the steamer and that she was sinking. And Pepperleigh said it was perfect scandal and passed the news on tohis wife and she said that they had no business to allow it and that ifthe steamer sank that was the last excursion she'd go on. 

So the news went all round the boat and everywhere the people gatheredin groups and talked about it in the angry and excited way that peoplehave when a steamer is sinking on one of the lakes like Lake Wissanotti. 

Dean Drone, of course, and some others were quieter about it, and saidthat one must make allowances and that naturally there were two sides toeverything. But most of them wouldn't listen to reason at all. I think, perhaps, that some of them were frightened. You see the last time butone that the steamer had sunk, there had been a man drowned and it madethem nervous. 

What? Hadn't I explained about the depth of Lake Wissanotti? I hadtaken it for granted that you knew; and in any case parts of it are deepenough, though I don't suppose in this stretch of it from the big reedbeds up to within a mile of the town wharf, you could find six feet ofwater in it if you tried. Oh, pshaw! I was not talking about a steamersinking in the ocean and carrying down its screaming crowds of peopleinto the hideous depths of green water. Oh, dear me no! That kind ofthing never happens on Lake Wissanotti. 

But what does happen is that the Mariposa Belle sinks every now andthen, and sticks there on the bottom till they get things straightenedup. 

On the lakes round Mariposa, if a person arrives late anywhere andexplains that the steamer sank, everybody understands the situation. 

You see when Harland and Wolff built the Mariposa Belle, they left somecracks in between the timbers that you fill up with cotton waste everySunday. If this is not attended to, the boat sinks. In fact, it is partof the law of the province that all the steamers like the Mariposa Bellemust be properly corked, --I think that is the word, --every season. Thereare inspectors who visit all the hotels in the province to see that itis done. 

So you can imagine now that I've explained it a little straighter, theindignation of the people when they knew that the boat had come uncorkedand that they might be stuck out there on a shoal or a mud-bank half thenight. 

I don't say either that there wasn't any danger; anyway, it doesn't feelvery safe when you realize that the boat is settling down with everyhundred yards that she goes, and you look over the side and see only theblack water in the gathering night. 

Safe! I'm not sure now that I come to think of it that it isn't worsethan sinking in the Atlantic. After all, in the Atlantic there iswireless telegraphy, and a lot of trained sailors and stewards. But outon Lake Wissanotti, --far out, so that you can only just see the lightsof the town away off to the south, --when the propeller comes to astop, --and you can hear the hiss of steam as they start to rake out theengine fires to prevent an explosion, --and when you turn from the redglare that comes from the furnace doors as they open them, to theblack dark that is gathering over the lake, --and there's a night windbeginning to run among the rushes, --and you see the men going forwardto the roof of the pilot house to send up the rockets to rouse the town, safe? Safe yourself, if you like; as for me, let me once get back intoMariposa again, under the night shadow of the maple trees, and thisshall be the last, last time I'll go on Lake Wissanotti. 

Safe! Oh yes! Isn't it strange how safe other people's adventures seemafter they happen? But you'd have been scared, too, if you'd been therejust before the steamer sank, and seen them bringing up all the women onto the top deck. 

I don't see how some of the people took it so calmly; how Mr. Smith, forinstance, could have gone on smoking and telling how he'd had a steamer"sink on him" on Lake Nipissing and a still bigger one, a side-wheeler, sink on him in Lake Abbitibbi. 

Then, quite suddenly, with a quiver, down she went. You could feel theboat sink, sink, --down, down, --would it never get to the bottom? Thewater came flush up to the lower deck, and then, --thank heaven, --thesinking stopped and there was the Mariposa Belle safe and tight on areed bank. 

Really, it made one positively laugh! It seemed so queer and, anyway, if a man has a sort of natural courage, danger makes him laugh. Danger!pshaw! fiddlesticks! everybody scouted the idea. Why, it is just thelittle things like this that give zest to a day on the water. 

Within half a minute they were all running round looking for sandwichesand cracking jokes and talking of making coffee over the remains of theengine fires. 

I don't need to tell at length how it all happened after that. 

I suppose the people on the Mariposa Belle would have had to settle downthere all night or till help came from the town, but some of the menwho had gone forward and were peering out into the dark said that itcouldn't be more than a mile across the water to Miller's Point. Youcould almost see it over there to the left, --some of them, I think, said"off on the port bow, " because you know when you get mixed up in thesemarine disasters, you soon catch the atmosphere of the thing. 

So pretty soon they had the davits swung out over the side and werelowering the old lifeboat from the top deck into the water. 

There were men leaning out over the rail of the Mariposa Belle withlanterns that threw the light as they let her down, and the glare fellon the water and the reeds. But when they got the boat lowered, itlooked such a frail, clumsy thing as one saw it from the rail above, that the cry was raised: "Women and children first!" For what was thesense, if it should turn out that the boat wouldn't even hold women andchildren, of trying to jam a lot of heavy men into it?

So they put in mostly women and children and the boat pushed out intothe darkness so freighted down it would hardly float. 

In the bow of it was the Presbyterian student who was relieving theminister, and he called out that they were in the hands of Providence. But he was crouched and ready to spring out of them at the first moment. 

So the boat went and was lost in the darkness except for the lantern inthe bow that you could see bobbing on the water. Then presently it cameback and they sent another load, till pretty soon the decks began tothin out and everybody got impatient to be gone. 

It was about the time that the third boat-load put off that Mr. Smithtook a bet with Mullins for twenty-five dollars, that he'd be home inMariposa before the people in the boats had walked round the shore. 

No one knew just what he meant, but pretty soon they saw Mr. Smithdisappear down below into the lowest part of the steamer with a malletin one hand and a big bundle of marline in the other. 

They might have wondered more about it, but it was just at this timethat they heard the shouts from the rescue boat--the big Mackinawlifeboat--that had put out from the town with fourteen men at the sweepswhen they saw the first rockets go up. 

I suppose there is always something inspiring about a rescue at sea, oron the water. 

After all, the bravery of the lifeboat man is the truebravery, --expended to save life, not to destroy it. 

Certainly they told for months after of how the rescue boat came out tothe Mariposa Belle. 

I suppose that when they put her in the water the lifeboat touched itfor the first time since the old Macdonald Government placed her on LakeWissanotti. 

Anyway, the water poured in at every seam. But not for a moment, --evenwith two miles of water between them and the steamer, --did the rowerspause for that. 

By the time they were half-way there the water was almost up to thethwarts, but they drove her on. Panting and exhausted (for mind you, ifyou haven't been in a fool boat like that for years, rowing takes it outof you), the rowers stuck to their task. They threw the ballast overand chucked into the water the heavy cork jackets and lifebelts thatencumbered their movements. There was no thought of turning back. Theywere nearer to the steamer than the shore. 

"Hang to it, boys, " called the crowd from the steamer's deck, and hangthey did. 

They were almost exhausted when they got them; men leaning from thesteamer threw them ropes and one by one every man was hauled aboard justas the lifeboat sank under their feet. 

Saved! by Heaven, saved, by one of the smartest pieces of rescue workever seen on the lake. 

There's no use describing it; you need to see rescue work of this kindby lifeboats to understand it. 

Nor were the lifeboat crew the only ones that distinguished themselves. 

Boat after boat and canoe after canoe had put out from Mariposa to thehelp of the steamer. They got them all. 

Pupkin, the other bank teller, with a face like a horse, who hadn't goneon the excursion, --as soon as he knew that the boat was signalling forhelp and that Miss Lawson was sending up rockets, --rushed for a rowboat, grabbed an oar (two would have hampered him), and paddled madlyout into the lake. He struck right out into the dark with the crazyskiff almost sinking beneath his feet. But they got him. They rescuedhim. They watched him, almost dead with exhaustion, make his way to thesteamer, where he was hauled up with ropes. Saved! Saved!!

They might have gone on that way half the night, picking up therescuers, only, at the very moment when the tenth load of people leftfor the shore, --just as suddenly and saucily as you please, up came theMariposa Belle from the mud bottom and floated. 

FLOATED?

Why, of course she did. If you take a hundred and fifty people off asteamer that has sunk, and if you get a man as shrewd as Mr. Smithto plug the timber seams with mallet and marline, and if you turn tenbandsmen of the Mariposa band on to your hand pump on the bow of thelower decks--float? why, what else can she do?

Then, if you stuff in hemlock into the embers of the fire that you wereraking out, till it hums and crackles under the boiler, it won't belong before you hear the propeller thud thudding at the stern again, andbefore the long roar of the steam whistle echoes over to the town. 

And so the Mariposa Belle, with all steam up again and with the longtrain of sparks careering from the funnel, is heading for the town. 

But no Christie Johnson at the wheel in the pilot house this time. 

"Smith! Get Smith!" is the cry. 

Can he take her in? Well, now! Ask a man who has had steamers sink onhim in half the lakes from Temiscaming to the Bay, if he can take herin? Ask a man who has run a York boat down the rapids of the Moose whenthe ice is moving, if he can grip the steering wheel of the MariposaBelle? So there she steams safe and sound to the town wharf!

Look at the lights and the crowd! If only the federal census taker couldcount us now! Hear them calling and shouting back and forward from thedeck to the shore! Listen! There is the rattle of the shore ropes asthey get them ready, and there's the Mariposa band, --actually formingin a circle on the upper deck just as she docks, and the leader with hisbaton, --one--two--ready now, --

"O CAN-A-DA!"

FOUR. The Ministrations of the Rev. Mr. Drone

The Church of England in Mariposa is on a side street, where the mapletrees are thickest, a little up the hill from the heart of the town. Thetrees above the church and the grass plot that was once the cemetery, till they made the new one (the Necropolis, over the brow of the hill), fill out the whole corner. Down behind the church, with only the drivingshed and a lane between, is the rectory. It is a little brick house withodd angles. There is a hedge and a little gate, and a weeping ash treewith red berries. 

At the side of the rectory, churchward, is a little grass lawn with lowhedges and at the side of that two wild plum trees, that are practicallyalways in white blossom. Underneath them is a rustic table and chairs, and it is here that you may see Rural Dean Drone, the incumbent of theChurch of England Church, sitting, in the chequered light of the plumtress that is neither sun nor shadow. Generally you will find himreading, and when I tell you that at the end of the grass plot where thehedge is highest there is a yellow bee hive with seven bees that belongto Dean Drone, you will realize that it is only fitting that the Dean isreading in the Greek. For what better could a man be reading beneath theblossom of the plum trees, within the very sound of the bees, than thePastorals of Theocritus? The light trash of modern romance might puta man to sleep in such a spot, but with such food for reflection asTheocritus, a man may safely close his eyes and muse on what he readswithout fear of dropping into slumber. 

Some men, I suppose, terminate their education when they leave theircollege. Not so Dean Drone. I have often heard him say that if hecouldn't take a book in the Greek out on the lawn in a spare half hour, he would feel lost. It's a certain activity of the brain that must bestilled somehow. The Dean, too, seemed to have a native feeling for theGreek language. I have often heard people who might sit with him onthe lawn, ask him to translate some of it. But he always refused. Onecouldn't translate it, he said. It lost so much in the translation thatit was better not to try. It was far wiser not to attempt it. If youundertook to translate it, there was something gone, something missingimmediately. I believe that many classical scholars feel this way, andlike to read the Greek just as it is, without the hazard of trying toput it into so poor a medium as English. So that when Dean Dronesaid that he simply couldn't translate it, I believe he was perfectlysincere. 

Sometimes, indeed, he would read it aloud. That was another matter. Whenever, for example, Dr. Gallagher--I mean, of course, old Dr. Gallagher, not the young doctor (who was always out in the country inthe afternoon)--would come over and bring his latest Indian relics toshow to the Dean, the latter always read to him a passage or two. Assoon as the doctor laid his tomahawk on the table, the Dean wouldreach for his Theocritus. I remember that on the day when Dr. Gallagherbrought over the Indian skull that they had dug out of the railwayembankment, and placed it on the rustic table, the Dean read to him solong from Theocritus that the doctor, I truly believe, dozed off in hischair. The Dean had to wait and fold his hands with the book across hisknee, and close his eyes till the doctor should wake up again. And theskull was on the table between them, and from above the plum blossomsfluttered down, till they made flakes on it as white as Dr. Gallagher'shair. 

I don't want you to suppose that the Rev. Mr. Drone spent the whole ofhis time under the trees. Not at all. In point of fact, the rector'slife was one round of activity which lie himself might deplore but waspowerless to prevent. He had hardly sat down beneath the trees of anafternoon after his mid-day meal when there was the Infant Class atthree, and after that, with scarcely an hour between, the Mothers'Auxiliary at five, and the next morning the Book Club, and that eveningthe Bible Study Class, and the next morning the Early Workers' Guild ateleven-thirty. The whole week was like that, and if one found time tosit down for an hour or so to recuperate it was the most one could do. After all, if a busy man spends the little bit of leisure that he getsin advanced classical study, there is surely no harm in it. I suppose, take it all in all, there wasn't a busier man than the Rural Dean amongthe Anglican clergy of the diocese. 

If the Dean ever did snatch a half-day from his incessant work, he spentit in fishing. But not always that, for as likely as not, instead oftaking a real holiday he would put in the whole afternoon amusingthe children and the boys that he knew, by making kites and toys andclockwork steamboats for them. 

It was fortunate for the Dean that he had the strange interest andaptitude for mechanical advices which he possessed, or otherwise thiskind of thing would have been too cruel an imposition. But the Rev. Mr. Drone had a curious liking for machinery. I think I never heard himpreach a better sermon than the one on Aeroplanes (Lo, what now see youon high Jeremiah Two). 

So it was that he spent two whole days making a kite with Chinese wingsfor Teddy Moore, the photographer's son, and closed down the infantclass for forty-eight hours so that Teddy Moore should not miss thepleasure of flying it, or rather seeing it flown. It is foolish to trusta Chinese kite to the hands of a young child. 

In the same way the Dean made a mechanical top for little MarjorieTrewlaney, the cripple, to see spun: it would have been unwise to allowthe afflicted girl to spin it. There was no end to the things that Mr. Drone could make, and always for the children. Even when he was makingthe sand-clock for poor little Willie Yodel (who died, you know) theDean went right on with it and gave it to another child with just thesame pleasure. Death, you know, to the clergy is a different thing fromwhat it is to us. The Dean and Mr. Gingham used often to speak of it asthey walked through the long grass of the new cemetery, the Necropolis. And when your Sunday walk is to your wife's grave, as the Dean's was, perhaps it seems different to anybody. 

The Church of England Church, I said; stood close to the rectory, atall, sweeping church, and inside a great reach of polished cedar beamsthat ran to the point of the roof. There used to stand on the same spotthe little stone church that all the grown-up people in Mariposa stillremember, a quaint little building in red and grey stone. About it wasthe old cemetery, but that was all smoothed out later into the grassplot round the new church, and the headstones laid out flat, and no newgraves have been put there for ever so long. But the Mariposa childrenstill walk round and read the headstones lying flat in the grass andlook for the old ones, --because some of them are ever so old--forty orfifty years back. 

Nor are you to think from all this that the Dean was not a man withserious perplexities. You could easily convince yourself of thecontrary. For if you watched the Rev. Mr. Drone as he sat reading in theGreek, you would notice that no very long period every passed withouthis taking up a sheet or two of paper that lay between the leaves of theTheocritus and that were covered close with figures. 

And these the Dean would lay upon the rustic table, and he would addthem up forwards and backwards, going first up the column and then downit to see that nothing had been left out, and then down it again to seewhat it was that must have been left out. 

Mathematics, you will understand, were not the Dean's forte. They neverwere the forte of the men who had been trained at the little Anglicancollege with the clipped hedges and the cricket ground, where RupertDrone had taken the gold medal in Greek fifty-two years ago. You willsee the medal at any time lying there in its open box on the rectorytable, in case of immediate need. Any of the Drone girls, Lilian, orJocelyn, or Theodora, would show it to you. But, as I say, mathematicswere not the rector's forte, and he blamed for it (in a Christianspirit, you will understand) the memory of his mathematical professor, and often he spoke with great bitterness. I have often heard him saythat in his opinion the colleges ought to dismiss, of course ina Christian spirit, all the professors who are not, in the mostreverential sense of the term, fit for their jobs. 

No doubt many of the clergy of the diocese had suffered more or lessjust as the Dean had from lack of mathematical training. But the Deanalways felt that his own case was especially to be lamented. For yousee, if a man is trying to make a model aeroplane--for a poor family inthe lower part of the town--and he is brought to a stop by the need ofreckoning the coefficient of torsion of cast-iron rods, it shows plainlyenough that the colleges are not truly filling their divine mission. 

But the figures that I speak of were not those of the model aeroplane. These were far more serious. Night and day they had been with the rectornow for the best part of ten years, and they grew, if anything, moreintricate. 

If, for example, you try to reckon the debt of a church--a large churchwith a great sweep of polished cedar beams inside, for the specialglorification of the All Powerful, and with imported tiles on the rooffor the greater glory of Heaven and with stained-glass windows for theexaltation of the All Seeing--if, I say, you try to reckon up the debton such a church and figure out its interest and its present worth, lessa fixed annual payment, it makes a pretty complicated sum. Then if youtry to add to this the annual cost of insurance, and deduct from itthree-quarters of a stipend, year by year, and then suddenly rememberthat three-quarters is too much, because you have forgotten theboarding-school fees of the littlest of the Drones (including French, asan extra--she must have it, all the older girls did), you have got a sumthat pretty well defies ordinary arithmetic. The provoking part of itwas that the Dean knew perfectly well that with the help of logarithmshe could have done the thing in a moment. But at the Anglican collegethey had stopped short at that very place in the book. They had simplyexplained that Logos was a word and Arithmos a number, which at thetime, seemed amply sufficient. 

So the Dean was perpetually taking out his sheets of figures, and addingthem upwards and downwards, and they never came the same. Very oftenMr. Gingham, who was a warden, would come and sit beside the rector andponder over the figures, and Mr. Drone would explain that with a book oflogarithms you could work it out in a moment. You would simply open thebook and run your finger up the columns (he illustrated exactly the wayin which the finger was moved), and there you were. Mr. Gingham saidthat it was a caution, and that logarithms (I quote his exact phrase)must be a terror. 

Very often, too, Nivens, the lawyer, who was a sidesman, and Mullins, the manager of the Exchange Bank, who was the chairman of the vestry, would come and take a look, at the figures. But they never could makemuch of them, because the stipend part was not a matter that one coulddiscuss. 

Mullins would notice the item for a hundred dollars due on fireinsurance and would say; as a business man, that surely that couldn'tbe fire insurance, and the Dean would say surely not, and change it:and Mullins would say surely there couldn't be fifty dollars for taxes, because there weren't any taxes, and the Dean would admit that of courseit couldn't be for the taxes. In fact, the truth is that the Dean'sfigures were badly mixed, and the fault lay indubitably with themathematical professor of two generations back. 

It was always Mullins's intention some day to look into the finances ofthe church, the more so as his father had been with Dean Drone at thelittle Anglican college with the cricket ground. But he was a busy man. As he explained to the rector himself, the banking business nowadaysis getting to be such that a banker can hardly call even his Sundaymornings his own. Certainly Henry Mullins could not. They belongedlargely to Smith's Hotel, and during the fishing season they belongedaway down the lake, so far away that practically no one, unless it wasGeorge Duff of the Commercial Bank, could see them. 

But to think that all this trouble had come through the building of thenew church. 

That was the bitterness of it. 

For the twenty-five years that Rural Dean Drone had preached in thelittle stone church, it had been his one aim, as he often put it in hissermons, to rear a larger Ark in Gideon. His one hope had been to set upa greater Evidence, or, very simply stated, to kindle a Brighter Beacon. 

After twenty-five years of waiting, he had been able at last to kindleit. Everybody in Mariposa remembers the building of the church. Firstof all they had demolished the little stone church to make way for thenewer Evidence. It seemed almost a sacrilege, as the Dean himself said, to lay hands on it. Indeed it was at first proposed to take the stone ofit and build it into a Sunday School, as a lesser testimony. Then, when that provided impracticable, it was suggested that the stone bereverently fashioned into a wall that should stand as a token. And wheneven that could not be managed, the stone of the little church waslaid reverently into a stone pile; afterwards it was devoutly sold to abuilding contractor, and, like so much else in life, was forgotten. 

But the building of the church, no one, I think, will forget. TheDean threw himself into the work. With his coat off and his whiteshirt-sleeves conspicuous among the gang that were working at thefoundations, he set his hand to the shovel, himself guided theroad-scraper, urging on the horses; cheering and encouraging the men, till they begged him to desist. He mingled with the stone-masons, advising, helping, and giving counsel, till they pleaded with himto rest. He was among the carpenters, sawing, hammering, enquiring, suggesting, till they besought him to lay off. And he was night and daywith the architect's assistants, drawing, planning, revising, till thearchitect told him to cut it out. 

So great was his activity, that I doubt whether the new church wouldever have been finished, had not the wardens and the vestry men insistedthat Mr. Drone must take a holiday, and sent him on the Mackinaw trip upthe lakes, --the only foreign travel of the Dean's life. 

So in due time the New Church was built and it towered above the mapletrees of Mariposa like a beacon on a hill. It stood so high that fromthe open steeple of it, where the bells were, you could see all thetown lying at its feet, and the farmsteads to the south of it, and therailway like a double pencil line, and Lake Wissanotti spread out likea map. You could see and appreciate things from the height of the newchurch, --such as the size and the growing wealth of Mariposa, --that younever could have seen from the little stone church at all. 

Presently the church was opened and the Dean preached his first sermonin it, and he called it a Greater Testimony, and he said that it was anearnest, or first fruit of endeavour, and that it was a token or pledge, and he named it also a covenant. He said, too, that it was an anchorageand a harbour and a lighthouse as well as being a city set upon a hill;and he ended by declaring it an Ark of Refuge and notified them thatthe Bible Class would meet in the basement of it on that and every otherthird Wednesday. 

In the opening months of preaching about it the Dean had called thechurch so often an earnest and a pledge and a guerdon and a tabernacle, that I think he used to forget that it wasn't paid for. It was only whenthe agent of the building society and a representative of the HosannaPipe and Steam Organ Co. (Limited), used to call for quarterly paymentsthat he was suddenly reminded of the fact. Always after these men cameround the Dean used to preach a special sermon on sin, in the courseof which he would mention that the ancient Hebrews used to put unjusttraders to death, --a thing of which he spoke with Christian serenity. 

I don't think that at first anybody troubled much about the debt on thechurch. Dean Drone's figures showed that it was only a matter of timebefore it would be extinguished; only a little effort was needed, a little girding up of the loins of the congregation and they couldshoulder the whole debt and trample it under their feet. Let them butset their hands to the plough and they could soon guide it into the deepwater. Then they might furl their sails and sit every man under his ownolive tree. 

Meantime, while the congregation was waiting to gird up its loins, theinterest on the debt was paid somehow, or, when it wasn't paid, wasadded to the principal. 

I don't know whether you have had any experience with GreaterTestimonies and with Beacons set on Hills. If you have, you will realizehow, at first gradually, and then rapidly, their position from year toyear grows more distressing. What with the building loan and the organinstalment, and the fire insurance, --a cruel charge, --and the heatand light, the rector began to realize as he added up the figures thatnothing but logarithms could solve them. Then the time came when notonly the rector, but all the wardens knew and the sidesmen knew that thedebt was more than the church could carry; then the choir knew and thecongregation knew and at last everybody knew; and there were specialcollections at Easter and special days of giving, and special weeks oftribulation, and special arrangements with the Hosanna Pipe and SteamOrgan Co. And it was noticed that when the Rural Dean announced aservice of Lenten Sorrow, --aimed more especially at the businessmen, --the congregation had diminished by forty per cent. 

I suppose things are just the same elsewhere, --I mean the peculiar kindof discontent that crept into the Church of England congregation inMariposa after the setting up of the Beacon. There were those whoclaimed that they had seen the error from the first, though they hadkept quiet, as such people always do, from breadth of mind. There werethose who had felt years before how it would end, but their lips weresealed from humility of spirit. What was worse was that there wereothers who grew dissatisfied with the whole conduct of the church. 

Yodel, the auctioneer, for example, narrated how he had been to the cityand had gone into a service of the Roman Catholic church: I believe, tostate it more fairly, he had "dropped in, "--the only recognized meansof access to such a service. He claimed that the music that he had heardthere was music, and that (outside of his profession) the chanting andintoning could not be touched. 

Ed Moore, the photographer, also related that he had listened to asermon in the city, and that if anyone would guarantee him a sermon likethat he would defy you to keep him away from church. Meanwhile, failingthe guarantee, he stayed away. 

The very doctrines were impeached. Some of the congregation began tocast doubts on eternal punishment, --doubts so grave as to keep themabsent from the Lenten Services of Sorrow. Indeed, Lawyer Macartney tookup the whole question of the Athanasian Creed one afternoon with JoeMilligan, the dentist, and hardly left a clause of it intact. 

All this time, you will understand, Dean Drone kept on with his specialservices, and leaflets, calls, and appeals went out from the Ark ofGideon like rockets from a sinking ship. More and more with every monththe debt of the church lay heavy on his mind. At times he forgot it. Atother times he woke up in the night and thought about it. Sometimesas he went down the street from the lighted precincts of the GreaterTestimony and passed the Salvation Army, praying around a naphtha lampunder the open sky, it smote him to the heart with a stab. 

But the congregation were wrong, I think, in imputing fault to thesermons of Dean Drone. There I do think they were wrong. I can speakfrom personal knowledge when I say that the rector's sermons were notonly stimulating in matters of faith, but contained valuable materialin regard to the Greek language, to modern machinery and to a varietyof things that should have proved of the highest advantage to thecongregation. 

There was, I say, the Greek language. The Dean always showed thegreatest delicacy of feeling in regard to any translation in or out ofit that he made from the pulpit. He was never willing to accept even thefaintest shade of rendering different from that commonly given withoutbeing assured of the full concurrence of the congregation. Either thetranslation must be unanimous and without contradiction, or he could notpass it. He would pause in his sermon and would say: "The original Greekis 'Hoson, ' but perhaps you will allow me to translate it as equivalentto 'Hoyon. '" And they did. So that if there was any fault to be found itwas purely on the side of the congregation for not entering a protest atthe time. 

It was the same way in regard to machinery. After all, what betterillustrates the supreme purpose of the All Wise than such a thing asthe dynamo or the reciprocating marine engine or the pictures in theScientific American?

Then, too, if a man has had the opportunity to travel and has seen thegreat lakes spread out by the hand of Providence from where one leavesthe new dock at the Sound to where one arrives safe and thankful withone's dear fellow-passengers in the spirit at the concrete landing stageat Mackinaw--is not this fit and proper material for the constructionof an analogy or illustration? Indeed, even apart from an analogy, is itnot mighty interesting to narrate, anyway? In any case, why should thechurch-wardens have sent the rector on the Mackinaw trip, if they hadnot expected him to make some little return for it?

I lay some stress on this point because the criticisms directedagainst the Mackinaw sermons always seemed so unfair. If the rectorhad described his experiences in the crude language of the ordinarynewspaper, there might, I admit, have been something unfitting about it. But he was always careful to express himself in a way that showed, --or, listen, let me explain with an example. 

"It happened to be my lot some years ago, " he would say, "to find myselfa voyager, just as one is a voyager on the sea of life, on the broadexpanse of water which has been spread out to the north-west of us bythe hand of Providence, at a height of five hundred and eighty-one feetabove the level of the sea, --I refer, I may say, to Lake Huron. " Now, how different that is from saying: "I'll never forget the time I went onthe Mackinaw trip. " The whole thing has a different sound entirely. Inthe same way the Dean would go on:

"I was voyaging on one of those magnificent leviathans of the water, --Irefer to the boats of the Northern Navigation Company, --and was standingbeside the forward rail talking with a dear brother in the faith who wasjourneying westward also--I may say he was a commercial traveller, --andbeside us was a dear sister in the spirit seated in a deck chair, whilenear us were two other dear souls in grace engaged in Christian pastimeon the deck, --I allude more particularly to the game of deck billiards. "

I leave it to any reasonable man whether, with that complete andfair-minded explanation of the environment, it was not perfectly properto close down the analogy, as the rector did, with the simple words: "Infact, it was an extremely fine morning. "

Yet there were some people, even in Mariposa, that took exceptionand spent their Sunday dinner time in making out that they couldn'tunderstand what Dean Drone was talking about, and asking one anotherif they knew. Once, as he passed out from the doors of the GreaterTestimony, the rector heard some one say: "The Church would be all rightif that old mugwump was out of the pulpit. " It went to his heart like abarbed thorn, and stayed there. 

You know, perhaps, how a remark of that sort can stay and rankle, and make you wish you could hear it again to make sure of it, becauseperhaps you didn't hear it aright, and it was a mistake after all. Perhaps no one said it, anyway. You ought to have written it down at thetime. I have seen the Dean take down the encyclopaedia in the rectory, and move his finger slowly down the pages of the letter M, looking formugwump. But it wasn't there. I have known him, in his little studyupstairs, turn over the pages of the "Animals of Palestine, " looking fora mugwump. But there was none there. It must have been unknown in thegreater days of Judea. 

So things went on from month to month, and from year to year, and thedebt and the charges loomed like a dark and gathering cloud on thehorizon. I don't mean to say that efforts were not made to face thedifficulty and to fight it. They were. Time after time the workers ofthe congregation got together and thought out plans for the extinctionof the debt. But somehow, after every trial, the debt grew largerwith each year, and every system that could be devised turned out morehopeless than the last. 

They began, I think, with the "endless chain" of letters of appeal. Youmay remember the device, for it was all-popular in clerical circles someten or fifteen years ago. You got a number of people to write each ofthem three letters asking for ten cents from three each of their friendsand asking each of them to send on three similar letters. Three eachfrom three each, and three each more from each! Do you observe thewonderful ingenuity of it? Nobody, I think, has forgotten how theWilling Workers of the Church of England Church of Mariposa sat downin the vestry room in the basement with a pile of stationery threefeet high, sending out the letters. Some, I know, will never forget it. Certainly not Mr. Pupkin, the teller in the Exchange Bank, for it washere that he met Zena Pepperleigh, the judge's daughter, for thefirst time; and they worked so busily that they wrote out ever so manyletters--eight or nine--in a single afternoon, and they discoveredthat their handwritings were awfully alike, which was one of the mostextraordinary and amazing coincidences, you will admit, in the historyof chirography. 

But the scheme failed--failed utterly. I don't know why. The letterswent out and were copied broadcast and recopied, till you could see theMariposa endless chain winding its way towards the Rocky Mountains. But they never got the ten cents. The Willing Workers wrote for it inthousands, but by some odd chance they never struck the person who hadit. 

Then after that there came a regular winter of effort. First of all theyhad a bazaar that was got up by the Girls' Auxiliary and held in thebasement of the church. All the girls wore special costumes that werebrought up from the city, and they had booths, where there was everyimaginable thing for sale--pincushion covers, and chair covers, and sofacovers, everything that you can think of. If the people had once startedbuying them, the debt would have been lifted in no time. Even as it wasthe bazaar only lost twenty dollars. 

After that, I think, was the magic lantern lecture that Dean Drone gaveon "Italy and her Invaders. " They got the lantern and the slides up fromthe city, and it was simply splendid. Some of the slides were perhapsa little confusing, but it was all there, --the pictures of the denseItalian jungle and the crocodiles and the naked invaders with theirinvading clubs. It was a pity that it was such a bad night, snowinghard, and a curling match on, or they would have made a lot of moneyout of the lecture. As it was the loss, apart from the breaking of thelantern, which was unavoidable, was quite trifling. 

I can hardly remember all the things that there were after that. Irecollect that it was always Mullins who arranged about renting the halland printing the tickets and all that sort of thing. His father, youremember, had been at the Anglican college with Dean Drone, and thoughthe rector was thirty-seven years older than Mullins, he leaned uponhim, in matters of business, as upon a staff; and though Mullins wasthirty-seven years younger than the Dean, he leaned against him, inmatters of doctrine, as against a rock. 

At one time they got the idea that what the public wanted was notanything instructive but something light and amusing. Mullins saidthat people loved to laugh. He said that if you get a lot of people alltogether and get them laughing you can do anything you like with them. Once they start to laugh they are lost. So they got Mr. Dreery, theEnglish Literature teacher at the high school, to give an evening ofreadings from the Great Humorists from Chaucer to Adam Smith. They camemighty near to making a barrel of money out of that. If the people hadonce started laughing it would have been all over with them. As it was Iheard a lot of them say that they simply wanted to scream with laughter:they said they just felt like bursting into peals of laughter allthe time. Even when, in the more subtle parts, they didn't feel likebursting out laughing, they said they had all they could do to keep fromsmiling. They said they never had such a hard struggle in their livesnot to smile. 

In fact the chairman said when he put the vote of thanks that he wassure if people had known what the lecture was to be like there wouldhave been a much better "turn-out. " But you see all that the peoplehad to go on was just the announcement of the name of the lecturer, Mr. Dreery, and that he would lecture on English Humour All SeatsTwenty-five Cents. As the chairman expressed it himself, if the peoplehad had any idea, any idea at all, of what the lecture would be likethey would have been there in hundreds. But how could they get an ideathat it would be so amusing with practically nothing to go upon?

After that attempt things seemed to go from bad to worse. Nearlyeverybody was disheartened about it. What would have happened to thedebt, or whether they would have ever paid it off, is more than Ican say, if it hadn't occurred that light broke in on Mullins in thestrangest and most surprising way you can imagine. It happened that hewent away for his bank holidays, and while he was away he happened tobe present in one of the big cities and saw how they went at it thereto raise money. He came home in such a state of excitement that he wentstraight up from the Mariposa station to the rectory, valise and all, and he burst in one April evening to where the Rural Dean was sittingwith the three girls beside the lamp in the front room, and he criedout:

"Mr. Drone, I've got it, --I've got a way that will clear the debt beforeyou're a fortnight older. We'll have a Whirlwind Campaign in Mariposa!"

But stay! The change from the depth of depression to the pinnacle ofhope is too abrupt. I must pause and tell you in another chapter of theWhirlwind Campaign in Mariposa. 

FIVE. The Whirlwind Campaign in Mariposa

It was Mullins, the banker, who told Mariposa all about the plan of aWhirlwind Campaign and explained how it was to be done. He'd happened tobe in one of the big cities when they were raising money by a WhirlwindCampaign for one of the universities, and he saw it all. 

He said he would never forget the scene on the last day of it, when theannouncement was made that the total of the money raised was even morethan what was needed. It was a splendid sight, --the business men of thetown all cheering and laughing and shaking hands, and the professorswith the tears streaming down their faces, and the Deans of theFaculties, who had given money themselves, sobbing aloud. 

He said it was the most moving thing he ever saw. 

So, as I said, Henry Mullins, who had seen it, explained to the othershow it was done. He said that first of all a few of the business mengot together quietly, --very quietly, indeed the more quietly thebetter, --and talked things over. Perhaps one of them would dine, --justquietly, --with another one and discuss the situation. Then these twowould invite a third man, --possibly even a fourth, --to have lunch withthem and talk in a general way, --even talk of other things part of thetime. And so on in this way things would be discussed and looked atin different lights and viewed from different angles and then wheneverything was ready they would go at things with a rush. A centralcommittee would be formed and sub-committees, with captains of eachgroup and recorders and secretaries, and on a stated day the WhirlwindCampaign would begin. 

Each day the crowd would all agree to meet at some stated place andeach lunch together, --say at a restaurant or at a club or at some eatingplace. This would go on every day with the interest getting keener andkeener, and everybody getting more and more excited, till presently thechairman would announce that the campaign had succeeded and there wouldbe the kind of scene that Mullins had described. 

So that was the plan that they set in motion in Mariposa. 

I don't wish to say too much about the Whirlwind Campaign itself. Idon't mean to say that it was a failure. On the contrary, in many waysit couldn't have been a greater success, and yet somehow it didn't seemto work out just as Henry Mullins had said it would. It may be thatthere are differences between Mariposa and the larger cities that onedoesn't appreciate at first sight. Perhaps it would have been better totry some other plan. 

Yet they followed along the usual line of things closely enough. Theybegan with the regular system of some of the business men gettingtogether in a quiet way. 

First of all, for example, Henry Mullins came over quietly to Duff'srooms, over the Commercial Bank, with a bottle of rye whiskey, andthey talked things over. And the night after that George Duff came overquietly to Mullins's rooms, over the Exchange Bank, with a bottleof Scotch whiskey. A few evenings after that Mullins and Duff wenttogether, in a very unostentatious way, with perhaps a couple of bottlesof rye, to Pete Glover's room over the hardware store. And then allthree of them went up one night with Ed Moore, the photographer, toJudge Pepperleigh's house under pretence of having a game of poker. Thevery day after that, Mullins and Duff and Ed Moore, and Pete Glover andthe judge got Will Harrison, the harness maker, to go out without anyformality on the lake on the pretext of fishing. And the next nightafter that Duff and Mullins and Ed Moore and Pete Glover and Pepperleighand Will Harrison got Alf Trelawney, the postmaster, to come over, justin a casual way, to the Mariposa House, after the night mail, and thenext day Mullins and Duff and--

But, pshaw! you see at once how the thing is worked. There's no need tofollow that part of the Whirlwind Campaign further. But it just showsthe power of organization. 

And all this time, mind you, they were talking things over, and lookingat things first in one light and then in another light, --in fact, justdoing as the big city men do when there's an important thing like thisunder way. 

So after things had been got pretty well into shape in this way, Duffasked Mullins one night, straight out, if he would be chairman ofthe Central Committee. He sprung it on him and Mullins had no time torefuse, but he put it to Duff straight whether he would be treasurer. And Duff had no time to refuse. 

That gave things a start, and within a week they had the wholeorganization on foot. There was the Grand Central Committee and sixgroups or sub-committees of twenty men each, and a captain forevery group. They had it all arranged on the lines most likely to beeffective. 

In one group there were all the bankers, Mullins and Duff and Pupkin(with the cameo pin), and about four others. They had their photographstaken at Ed Moore's studio, taken in a line with a background oficebergs--a winter scene--and a pretty penetrating crowd they looked, Ican tell you. After all, you know, if you get a crowd of representativebank men together in any financial deal, you've got a prettyconsiderable leverage right away. 

In the second group were the lawyers, Nivens and Macartney and therest--about as level-headed a lot as you'd see anywhere. Get the lawyersof a town with you on a thing like this and you'll find you've got asort of brain power with you that you'd never get without them. 

Then there were the business men--there was a solid crowd foryou, --Harrison, the harness maker, and Glover, the hardware man, andall that gang, not talkers, perhaps, but solid men who can tell you toa nicety how many cents there are in a dollar. It's all right to talkabout education and that sort of thing, but if you want driving powerand efficiency, get business men. They're seeing it every day in thecity, and it's just the same in Mariposa. Why, in the big concernsin the city, if they found out a man was educated, they wouldn't havehim, --wouldn't keep him there a minute. That's why the business men haveto conceal it so much. 

Then in the other teams there were the doctors and the newspaper men andthe professional men like Judge Pepperleigh and Yodel the auctioneer. 

It was all organized so that every team had its headquarters, two ofthem in each of the three hotels--one upstairs and one down. And itwas arranged that there would be a big lunch every day, to be held inSmith's caff, round the corner of Smith's Northern Health Resort andHome of the Wissanotti Angler, --you know the place. The lunch wasdivided up into tables, with a captain for each table to see aboutthings to drink, and of course all the tables were in competition withone another. In fact the competition was the very life of the wholething. 

It's just wonderful how these things run when they're organized. Takethe first luncheon, for example. There they all were, every man in hisplace, every captain at his post at the top of the table. It was hard, perhaps, for some of them to get there. They had very likely to be intheir stores and banks and offices till the last minute and then make adash for it. It was the cleanest piece of team work you ever saw. 

You have noticed already, I am sure, that a good many of the captainsand committee men didn't belong to the Church of England Church. Glover, for instance, was a Presbyterian, till they ran the picket fence ofthe manse two feet on to his property, and after that he became afree-thinker. But in Mariposa, as I have said, everybody likes to be ineverything and naturally a Whirlwind Campaign was a novelty. Anyway itwould have been a poor business to keep a man out of the lunches merelyon account of his religion. I trust that the day for that kind ofreligious bigotry is past. 

Of course the excitement was when Henry Mullins at the head of the tablebegan reading out the telegrams and letters and messages. First of allthere was a telegram of good wishes from the Anglican Lord Bishop ofthe Diocese to Henry Mullins and calling him Dear Brother in Grace theMariposa telegraph office is a little unreliable and it read: "DearBrother in grease, " but that was good enough. The Bishop said that hismost earnest wishes were with them. 

Then Mullins read a letter from the Mayor of Mariposa Pete Glover wasmayor that year--stating that his keenest desires were with them: andthen one from the Carriage Company saying that its heartiest good willwas all theirs; and then one from the Meat Works saying that its nearestthoughts were next to them. Then he read one from himself, as head ofthe Exchange Bank, you understand, informing him that he had heardof his project and assuring him of his liveliest interest in what heproposed. 

At each of these telegrams and messages there was round after round ofapplause, so that you could hardly hear yourself speak or give an order. But that was nothing to when Mullins got up again, and beat on thetable for silence and made one of those crackling speeches--just the waybusiness men speak--the kind of speech that a college man simply can'tmake. I wish I could repeat it all. I remember that it began: "Now boys, you know what we're here for, gentlemen, " and it went on just as good asthat all through. When Mullins had done he took out a fountain penand wrote out a cheque for a hundred dollars, conditional on the fundreaching fifty thousand. And there was a burst of cheers all over theroom. 

Just the moment he had done it, up sprang George Duff, --you know thekeen competition there is, as a straight matter of business, between thebanks in Mariposa, --up sprang George Duff, I say, and wrote out a chequefor another hundred conditional on the fund reaching seventy thousand. You never heard such cheering in your life. 

And then when Netley walked up to the head of the table and laid downa cheque for a hundred dollars conditional on the fund reaching onehundred thousand the room was in an uproar. A hundred thousand dollars!Just think of it! The figures fairly stagger one. To think of a hundredthousand dollars raised in five minutes in a little place like Mariposa!

And even that was nothing! In less than no time there was such a crowdround Mullins trying to borrow his pen all at once that his waistcoatwas all stained with ink. Finally when they got order at last, andMullins stood up and announced that the conditional fund had reached aquarter of a million, the whole place was a perfect babel of cheering. Oh, these Whirlwind Campaigns are wonderful things!

I can tell you the Committee felt pretty proud that first day. There wasHenry Mullins looking a little bit flushed and excited, with his whitewaistcoat and an American Beauty rose, and with ink marks all over himfrom the cheque signing; and he kept telling them that he'd known allalong that all that was needed was to get the thing started and tellingagain about what he'd seen at the University Campaign and about theprofessors crying, and wondering if the high school teachers would comedown for the last day of the meetings. 

Looking back on the Mariposa Whirlwind, I can never feel that it wasa failure. After all, there is a sympathy and a brotherhood inthese things when men work shoulder to shoulder. If you had seen thecanvassers of the Committee going round the town that evening shoulderto shoulder from the Mariposa House to the Continental and up toMullins's rooms and over to Duffs, shoulder to shoulder, you'd haveunderstood it. 

I don't say that every lunch was quite such a success as the first. It'snot always easy to get out of the store if you're a busy man, and a goodmany of the Whirlwind Committee found that they had just time to hurrydown and snatch their lunch and get back again. Still, they came, andsnatched it. As long as the lunches lasted, they came. Even if they hadsimply to rush it and grab something to eat and drink without time totalk to anybody, they came. 

No, no, it was not lack of enthusiasm that killed the Whirlwind Campaignin Mariposa. It must have been something else. I don't just know whatit was but I think it had something to do with the financial, thebook-keeping side of the thing. 

It may have been, too, that the organization was not quite correctlyplanned. You see, if practically everybody is on the committees, it isawfully hard to try to find men to canvass, and it is not allowable forthe captains and the committee men to canvass one another, because theirgifts are spontaneous. So the only thing that the different groupscould do was to wait round in some likely place--say the bar parlourof Smith's Hotel--in the hope that somebody might come in who could becanvassed. 

You might ask why they didn't canvass Mr. Smith himself, but of coursethey had done that at the very start, as I should have said. Mr. Smithhad given them two hundred dollars in cash conditional on the lunchesbeing held in the caff of his hotel; and it's awfully hard to get aproper lunch I mean the kind to which a Bishop can express regret at notbeing there--under a dollar twenty-five. So Mr. Smith got back his ownmoney, and the crowd began eating into the benefactions, and it gotmore and more complicated whether to hold another lunch in the hope ofbreaking even, or to stop the campaign. 

It was disappointing, yes. In spite of all the success and the sympathy, it was disappointing. I don't say it didn't do good. No doubt a lot ofthe men got to know one another better than ever they had before. I havemyself heard Judge Pepperleigh say that after the campaign he knewall of Pete Glover that he wanted to. There was a lot of that kind ofcomplete satiety. The real trouble about the Whirlwind Campaign was thatthey never clearly understood which of them were the whirlwind and whowere to be the campaign. 

Some of them, I believe, took it pretty much to heart. I know that HenryMullins did. You could see it. The first day he came down to the lunch, all dressed up with the American Beauty and the white waistcoat. Thesecond day he only wore a pink carnation and a grey waistcoat. The thirdday he had on a dead daffodil and a cardigan undervest, and on the lastday, when the high school teachers should have been there, he only worehis office suit and he hadn't even shaved. He looked beaten. 

It was that night that he went up to the rectory to tell the news toDean Drone. It had been arranged, you know, that the rector should notattend the lunches, so as to let the whole thing come as a surprise;so that all he knew about it was just scraps of information about thecrowds at the lunch and how they cheered and all that. Once, I believe, he caught sight of the Newspacket with a two-inch headline: A QUARTEROF A MILLION, but he wouldn't let himself read further because it wouldhave spoilt the surprise. 

I saw Mullins, as I say, go up the street on his way to Dean Drone's. It was middle April and there was ragged snow on the streets, and thenights were dark still, and cold. I saw Mullins grit his teeth as hewalked, and I know that he held in his coat pocket his own cheque forthe hundred, with the condition taken off it, and he said that therewere so many skunks in Mariposa that a man might as well be in the HeadOffice in the city. 

The Dean came out to the little gate in the dark, --you could see thelamplight behind him from the open door of the rectory, --and he shookhands with Mullins and they went in together. 

SIX. The Beacon on the Hill

Mullins said afterward that it was ever so much easier than he thoughtit would have been. The Dean, he said, was so quiet. Of course if Mr. Drone had started to swear at Mullins, or tried to strike him, it wouldhave been much harder. But as it was he was so quiet that part of thetime he hardly seemed to follow what Mullins was saying. So Mullinswas glad of that, because it proved that the Dean wasn't feelingdisappointed as, in a way, he might have. 

Indeed, the only time when the rector seemed animated and excited in thewhole interview was when Mullins said that the campaign had been ruinedby a lot of confounded mugwumps. Straight away the Dean asked if thosemugwumps had really prejudiced the outcome of the campaign. Mullinssaid there was no doubt of it, and the Dean enquired if the presenceof mugwumps was fatal in matters of endeavour, and Mullins said thatit was. Then the rector asked if even one mugwump was, in the Christiansense, deleterious. Mullins said that one mugwump would kill anything. After that the Dean hardly spoke at all. 

In fact, the rector presently said that he mustn't detain Mullins toolong and that he had detained him too long already and that Mullins mustbe weary from his train journey and that in cases of extreme wearinessnothing but a sound sleep was of any avail; he himself, unfortunately, would not be able to avail himself of the priceless boon of slumberuntil he had first retired to his study to write some letters; so thatMullins, who had a certain kind of social quickness of intuition, sawthat it was time to leave, and went away. 

It was midnight as he went down the street, and a dark, still night. That can be stated positively because it came out in court afterwards. Mullins swore that it was a dark night; he admitted, under examination, that there may have been the stars, or at least some of the lessimportant of them, though he had made no attempt, as brought out oncross-examination, to count them: there may have been, too, the electriclights, and Mullins was not willing to deny that it was quite possiblethat there was more or less moonlight. But that there was no light thatnight in the form of sunlight, Mullins was absolutely certain. All that, I say, came out in court. 

But meanwhile the rector had gone upstairs to his study and had seatedhimself in front of his table to write his letters. It was here alwaysthat he wrote his sermons. From the window of the room you lookedthrough the bare white maple trees to the sweeping outline of the churchshadowed against the night sky, and beyond that, though far off, wasthe new cemetery where the rector walked of a Sunday (I think I told youwhy): beyond that again, for the window faced the east, there lay, at novery great distance, the New Jerusalem. There were no better things thata man might look towards from his study window, nor anything that couldserve as a better aid to writing. 

But this night the Dean's letters must have been difficult indeed towrite. For he sat beside the table holding his pen and with his headbent upon his other hand, and though he sometimes put a line or two onthe paper, for the most part he sat motionless. The fact is that DeanDrone was not trying to write letters, but only one letter. He waswriting a letter of resignation. If you have not done that for fortyyears it is extremely difficult to get the words. 

So at least the Dean found it. First he wrote one set of words and thenhe sat and thought and wrote something else. But nothing seemed to suit. 

The real truth was that Dean Drone, perhaps more than he knew himself, had a fine taste for words and effects, and when you feel that asituation is entirely out of the common, you naturally try, if you havethat instinct, to give it the right sort of expression. 

I believe that at the time when Rupert Drone had taken the medalin Greek over fifty years ago, it was only a twist of fate that hadprevented him from becoming a great writer. There was a buried author inhim just as there was a buried financier in Jefferson Thorpe. In fact, there were many people in Mariposa like that, and for all I know you mayyourself have seen such elsewhere. For instance, I am certain that BillyRawson, the telegraph operator at Mariposa, could easily have inventedradium. In the same way one has only to read the advertisements of Mr. Gingham, the undertaker, to know that there is still in him a poet, who could have written on death far more attractive verses than theThanatopsis of Cullen Bryant, and under a title less likely to offendthe public and drive away custom. He has told me this himself. 

So the Dean tried first this and then that and nothing would seem tosuit. First of all he wrote:

"It is now forty years since I came among you, a youth full of life andhope and ardent in the work before me--" Then he paused, doubtful of theaccuracy and clearness of the expression, read it over again and againin deep thought and then began again:

"It is now forty years since I came among you, a broken and melancholyboy, without life or hope, desiring only to devote to the service ofthis parish such few years as might remain of an existence blightedbefore it had truly begun--" And then again the Dean stopped. He readwhat he had written; he frowned; he crossed it through with his pen. This was no way to write, this thin egotistical strain of complaint. Once more he started:

"It is now forty years since I came among you, a man already temperedand trained, except possibly in mathematics--" And then again the rectorpaused and his mind drifted away to the memory of the Anglican professorthat I spoke of, who had had so little sense of his higher mission as toomit the teaching of logarithms. And the rector mused so long thatwhen he began again it seemed to him that it was simpler and better todiscard the personal note altogether, and he wrote:

"There are times, gentlemen, in the life of a parish, when it comes toan epoch which brings it to a moment when it reaches a point--"

The Dean stuck fast again, but refusing this time to be beaten wentresolutely on:

"--reaches a point where the circumstances of the moment make the epochsuch as to focus the life of the parish in that time. "

Then the Dean saw that he was beaten, and he knew that he not onlycouldn't manage the parish but couldn't say so in proper English, and ofthe two the last was the bitterer discovery. 

He raised his head, and looked for a moment through the window at theshadow of the church against the night, so outlined that you couldalmost fancy that the light of the New Jerusalem was beyond it. Then hewrote, and this time not to the world at large but only to Mullins:

"My dear Harry, I want to resign my charge. Will you come over and helpme?"

When the Dean at last rose from writing that, I think it was far on inthe night. As he rose he looked again through the window, looked onceand then once more, and so stood with widening eyes, and his face settowards what he saw. 

What was that? That light in the sky there, eastward?--near or far hecould not say. Was it already the dawn of the New Jerusalem brighteningin the east, or was it--look--in the church itself, --what is that?--thatdull red glow that shines behind the stained-glass windows, turning themto crimson? that fork of flame that breaks now from the casement andflashes upward, along the wood--and see--that sudden sheet of fire thatsprings the windows of the church with the roar of splintered glass andsurges upward into the sky, till the dark night and the bare trees andsleeping street of Mariposa are all illumined with its glow!

Fire! Fire! and the sudden sound of the bell now, breaking upon thenight. 

So stood the Dean erect, with one hand pressed against the table forsupport, while the Mariposa fire bell struck out its warning to thesleeping town, --stood there while the street grew loud with the tumultof voices, --with the roaring gallop of the fire brigade, --with the harshnote of the gong--and over all other sounds, the great seething of theflames that tore their way into the beams and rafters of the pointedchurch and flared above it like a torch into the midnight sky. 

So stood the Dean, and as the church broke thus into a very beaconkindled upon a hill, --sank forward without a sign, his face against thetable, stricken. 

You need to see a fire in a place such as Mariposa, a town still half ofwood, to know what fire means. In the city it is all different. Tothe onlooker, at any rate, a fire is only a spectacle, nothing more. Everything is arranged, organized, certain. It is only once perhaps in acentury that fire comes to a large city as it comes to the little woodentown like Mariposa as a great Terror of the Night. 

That, at any rate, is what it meant in Mariposa that night in April, thenight the Church of England Church burnt down. Had the fire gained buta hundred feet, or less, it could have reached from the driving shedbehind the church to the backs of the wooden shops of the Main Street, and once there not all the waters of Lake Wissanotti could stay thecourse of its destruction. It was for that hundred feet that theyfought, the men of Mariposa, from the midnight call of the bell till theslow coming of the day. They fought the fire, not to save the church, for that was doomed from the first outbreak of the flames, but to stopthe spread of it and save the town. They fought it at the windows, and at the blazing doors, and through the yawning furnace of the openbelfry; fought it, with the Mariposa engine thumping and panting in thestreet, itself aglow with fire like a servant demon fighting its ownkind, with tall ladders reaching to the very roof, and with hose thatpoured their streams of tossing water foaming into the flames. 

Most of all they fought to save the wooden driving shed behind thechurch from which the fire could leap into the heart of Mariposa. Thatwas where the real fight was, for the life of the town. I wish you couldhave seen how they turned the hose against the shingles, ripping andtearing them from their places with the force of the driven water: howthey mounted on the roof, axe in hand, and cut madly at the raftersto bring the building down, while the black clouds of smoke rolled involumes about the men as they worked. You could see the fire horsesharnessed with logging chains to the uprights of the shed to tear thebuilding from its place. 

Most of all I wish you could have seen Mr. Smith, proprietor, as I thinkyou know, of Smith's Hotel, there on the roof with a fireman's helmeton, cutting through the main beam of solid cedar, twelve by twelve, thatheld tight still when the rafters and the roof tree were down already, the shed on fire in a dozen places, and the other men driven from thework by the flaming sparks, and by the strangle of the smoke. Not soMr. Smith! See him there as he plants himself firm at the angle of thebeams, and with the full impact of his two hundred and eighty poundsdrives his axe into the wood! I tell you it takes a man from the pinecountry of the north to handle an axe! Right, left, left, right, downit comes, with never a pause or stay, never missing by a fraction ofan inch the line of the stroke! At it, Smith! Down with it! Till witha shout from the crowd the beam gapes asunder, and Mr. Smith is on theground again, roaring his directions to the men and horses as they hauldown the shed, in a voice that dominates the fire itself. 

Who made Mr. Smith the head and chief of the Mariposa fire brigade thatnight, I cannot say. I do not know even where he got the huge red helmetthat he wore, nor had I ever heard till the night the church burnt downthat Mr. Smith was a member of the fire brigade at all. But it's alwaysthat way. Your little narrow-chested men may plan and organize, but whenthere is something to be done, something real, then it's the man of sizeand weight that steps to the front every time. Look at Bismarck andMr. Gladstone and President Taft and Mr. Smith, --the same thing in eachcase. 

I suppose it was perfectly natural that just as soon as Mr. Smith cameon the scene he put on somebody's helmet and shouted his directionsto the men and bossed the Mariposa fire brigade like Bismarck with theGerman parliament. 

The fire had broken out late, late at night, and they fought it till theday. The flame of it lit up the town and the bare grey maple trees, andyou could see in the light of it the broad sheet of the frozen lake, snow covered still. It kindled such a beacon as it burned that from theother side of the lake the people on the night express from the northcould see it twenty miles away. It lit up such a testimony of flame thatMariposa has never seen the like of it before or since. Then when theroof crashed in and the tall steeple tottered and fell, so swift adarkness seemed to come that the grey trees and the frozen lake vanishedin a moment as if blotted out of existence. 

When the morning came the great church of Mariposa was nothing but aragged group of walls with a sodden heap of bricks and blackened wood, still hissing here and there beneath the hose with the sullen anger ofa conquered fire. Round the ruins of the fire walked the people ofMariposa next morning, and they pointed out where the wreck of thesteeple had fallen, and where the bells of the church lay in a moltenheap among the bricks, and they talked of the loss that it was and howmany dollars it would take to rebuild the church, and whether it wasinsured and for how much. And there were at least fourteen people whohad seen the fire first, and more than that who had given the firstalarm, and ever so many who knew how fires of this sort could beprevented. 

Most noticeable of all you could see the sidesmen and the wardens andMullins, the chairman of the vestry, talking in little groups about thefire. Later in the day there came from the city the insurance men andthe fire appraisers, and they too walked about the ruins, and talkedwith the wardens and the vestry men. There was such a luxury ofexcitement in the town that day that it was just as good as a publicholiday. 

But the strangest part of it was the unexpected sequel. I don't knowthrough what error of the Dean's figures it happened, through what lackof mathematical training the thing turned out as it did. No doubt thememory of the mathematical professor was heavily to blame for it, butthe solid fact is that the Church of England Church of Mariposa turnedout to be insured for a hundred thousand, and there were the receiptsand the vouchers, all signed and regular, just as they found them in adrawer of the rector's study. There was no doubt about it. The insurancepeople might protest as they liked. The straight, plain fact was thatthe church was insured for about twice the whole amount of the cost andthe debt and the rector's salary and the boarding-school fees of thelittlest of the Drones all put together. 

There was a Whirlwind Campaign for you! Talk of raising money, --that wassomething like! I wonder if the universities and the city institutionsthat go round trying to raise money by the slow and painful methodcalled a Whirlwind Campaign, that takes perhaps all day to raise fiftythousand dollars, ever thought of anything so beautifully simple asthis. 

The Greater Testimony that had lain so heavily on the congregation wentflaming to its end, and burned up its debts and its obligations andenriched its worshippers by its destruction. Talk of a beacon on a hill!You can hardly beat that one. 

I wish you could have seen how the wardens and the sidesmen and Mullins, the chairman of the vestry, smiled and chuckled at the thought of it. Hadn't they said all along that all that was needed was a little faithand effort? And here it was, just as they said, and they'd been rightafter all. 

Protest from the insurance people? Legal proceedings to prevent payment?My dear sir! I see you know nothing about the Mariposa court, in spiteof the fact that I have already said that it was one of the mostprecise instruments of British fair play ever established. Why, JudgePepperleigh disposed of the case and dismissed the protest of thecompany in less than fifteen minutes! Just what the jurisdictionof Judge Pepperleigh's court is I don't know, but I do know that inupholding the rights of a Christian congregation--I am quoting here thetext of the decision--against the intrigues of a set of infernal skunksthat make too much money, anyway, the Mariposa court is without anequal. Pepperleigh even threatened the plaintiffs with the penitentiary, or worse. 

How the fire started no one ever knew. There was a queer story that wentabout to the effect that Mr. Smith and Mr. Gingham's assistant had beenseen very late that night carrying an automobile can of kerosene up thestreet. But that was amply disproved by the proceedings of the court, and by the evidence of Mr. Smith himself. He took his dying oath, --nothis ordinary one as used in the License cases, but his dying one, --thathe had not carried a can of kerosene up the street, and that anyway itwas the rottenest kind of kerosene he had ever seen and no more use thanso much molasses. So that point was settled. 

Dean Drone? Did he get well again? Why, what makes you ask that? Youmean, was his head at all affected after the stroke? No, it was not. Absolutely not. It was not affected in the least, though how anybody whoknows him now in Mariposa could have the faintest idea that his mind wasin any way impaired by the stroke is more than I can tell. The engagingof Mr. Uttermost, the curate, whom perhaps you have heard preach in thenew church, had nothing whatever to do with Dean Drone's head. It wasmerely a case of the pressure of overwork. It was felt very generallyby the wardens that, in these days of specialization, the rector wascovering too wide a field, and that if he should abandon some of thelesser duties of his office, he might devote his energies more intentlyto the Infant Class. That was all. You may hear him there any afternoon, talking to them, if you will stand under the maple trees and listenthrough the open windows of the new Infant School. 

And, as for audiences, for intelligence, for attention--well, if I wantto find listeners who can hear and understand about the great spacesof Lake Huron, let me tell of it, every time face to face with the blueeyes of the Infant Class, fresh from the infinity of spaces greaterstill. Talk of grown-up people all you like, but for listeners let mehave the Infant Class with their pinafores and their Teddy Bears andtheir feet not even touching the floor, and Mr. Uttermost may preach tohis heart's content of the newer forms of doubt revealed by the highercriticism. 

So you will understand that the Dean's mind is, if anything, evenkeener, and his head even clearer than before. And if you want proof ofit, notice him there beneath the plum blossoms reading in the Greek:he has told me that he finds that he can read, with the greatest ease, works in the Greek that seemed difficult before. Because his head is soclear now. 

And sometimes, --when his head is very clear, --as he sits there readingbeneath the plum blossoms he can hear them singing beyond, and hiswife's voice. 

SEVEN. The Extraordinary Entanglement of Mr. Pupkin

Judge Pepperleigh lived in a big house with hardwood floors and a widepiazza that looked over the lake from the top of Oneida Street. 

Every day about half-past five he used to come home from his office inthe Mariposa Court House. On some days as he got near the house he wouldcall out to his wife:

"Almighty Moses, Martha! who left the sprinkler on the grass?"

On other days he would call to her from quite a little distance off:"Hullo, mother! Got any supper for a hungry man?"

And Mrs. Pepperleigh never knew which it would be. On the days when heswore at the sprinkler you could see his spectacles flash like dynamite. But on the days when he called: "Hullo, mother, " they were simplyirradiated with kindliness. 

Some days, I say, he would cry out with a perfect whine of indignation:"Suffering Caesar! has that infernal dog torn up those geraniums again?"And other days you would hear him singing out: "Hullo, Rover! Well, doggie, well, old fellow!"

In the same way at breakfast, the judge, as he looked over themorning paper, would sometimes leap to his feet with a perfect howl ofsuffering, and cry: "Everlasting Moses! the Liberals have carried EastElgin. " Or else he would lean back from the breakfast table withthe most good-humoured laugh you ever heard and say: "Ha! ha! theConservatives have carried South Norfolk. "

And yet he was perfectly logical, when you come to think of it. Afterall, what is more annoying to a sensitive, highly-strung man than aninfernal sprinkler playing all over the place, and what more agreeableto a good-natured, even-tempered fellow than a well-prepared supper? Or, what is more likeable than one's good, old, affectionate dog boundingdown the path from sheer delight at seeing you, --or more execrable thanan infernal whelp that has torn up the geraniums and is too old to keep, anyway?

As for politics, well, it all seemed reasonable enough. When theConservatives got in anywhere, Pepperleigh laughed and enjoyed it, simply because it does one good to see a straight, fine, honest fightwhere the best man wins. When a Liberal got in, it made him mad, and hesaid so, --not, mind you, from any political bias, for his office forbidit, --but simply because one can't bear to see the country go absolutelyto the devil. 

I suppose, too, it was partly the effect of sitting in court all daylistening to cases. One gets what you might call the judicial temper ofmind. Pepperleigh had it so strongly developed that I've seen him kicka hydrangea pot to pieces with his foot because the accursed thingwouldn't flower. He once threw the canary cage clear into the lilacbushes because the "blasted bird wouldn't stop singing. " It was astraight case of judicial temper. Lots of judges have it, developed injust the same broad, all-round way as with Judge Pepperleigh. 

I think it must be passing sentences that does it. Anyway, Pepperleighhad the aptitude for passing sentences so highly perfected that he spenthis whole time at it inside of court and out. I've heard him hand outsentences for the Sultan of Turkey and Mrs. Pankhurst and the Emperor ofGermany that made one's blood run cold. He would sit there on the piazzaof a summer evening reading the paper, with dynamite sparks flying fromhis spectacles as he sentenced the Czar of Russia to ten years in thesalt mines--and made it fifteen a few minutes afterwards. Pepperleighalways read the foreign news--the news of things that he couldn'talter--as a form of wild and stimulating torment. 

So you can imagine that in some ways the judge's house was a prettydifficult house to go to. I mean you can see how awfully hard it musthave been for Mr. Pupkin. I tell you it took some nerve to step up onthat piazza and say, in a perfectly natural, off-hand way: "Oh, howdo you do, judge? Is Miss Zena in? No, I won't stay, thanks; I think Iought to be going. I simply called. " A man who can do that has got tohave a pretty fair amount of savoir what do you call it, and he's got tobe mighty well shaved and have his cameo pin put in his tie at a prettyundeniable angle before he can tackle it. Yes, and even then he may needto hang round behind the lilac bushes for half an hour first, and cooloff. And he's apt to make pretty good time down Oneida Street on the wayback. 

Still, that's what you call love, and if you've got it, and are wellshaved, and your boots well blacked, you can do things that seem almostimpossible. Yes, you can do anything, even if you do trip over the dogin getting off the piazza. 

Don't suppose for a moment that Judge Pepperleigh was an unapproachableor a harsh man always and to everybody. Even Mr. Pupkin had to admitthat that couldn't be so. To know that, you had only to see ZenaPepperleigh put her arm round his neck and call him Daddy. She would dothat even when there were two or three young men sitting on the edge ofthe piazza. You know, I think, the way they sit on the edge in Mariposa. It is meant to indicate what part of the family they have come to see. Thus when George Duff, the bank manager, came up to the Pepperleighhouse, he always sat in a chair on the verandah and talked to the judge. But when Pupkin or Mallory Tompkins or any fellow like that came, he satdown in a sidelong fashion on the edge of the boards and then they knewexactly what he was there for. If he knew the house well, he leaned hisback against the verandah post and smoked a cigarette. But that tooknerve. 

But I am afraid that this is a digression, and, of course, you know allabout it just as well as I do. All that I was trying to say was that Idon't suppose that the judge had ever spoken a cross word to Zena in hislife. --Oh, he threw her novel over the grape-vine, I don't deny that, but then why on earth should a girl read trash like the Errant Quest ofthe Palladin Pilgrim, and the Life of Sir Galahad, when the house wasfull of good reading like The Life of Sir John A. Macdonald, and PioneerDays in Tecumseh Township?

Still, what I mean is that the judge never spoke harshly to Zena, exceptperhaps under extreme provocation; and I am quite sure that he never, never had to Neil. But then what father ever would want to speak angrilyto such a boy as Neil Pepperleigh? The judge took no credit himself forthat; the finest grown boy in the whole county and so broad and big thatthey took him into the Missinaba Horse when he was only seventeen. Andclever, --so clever that he didn't need to study; so clever that he usedto come out at the foot of the class in mathematics at the Mariposahigh school through sheer surplus of brain power. I've heard the judgeexplain it a dozen times. Why, Neil was so clever that he used to beable to play billiards at the Mariposa House all evening when the otherboys had to stay at home and study. 

Such a powerful looking fellow, too! Everybody in Mariposa remembershow Neil Pepperleigh smashed in the face of Peter McGinnis, the Liberalorganizer, at the big election--you recall it--when the old MacdonaldGovernment went out. Judge Pepperleigh had to try him for it the nextmorning--his own son. They say there never was such a scene even in theMariposa court. There was, I believe, something like it on a smallerscale in Roman history, but it wasn't half as dramatic. I remember JudgePepperleigh leaning forward to pass the sentence, --for a judge is bound, you know, by his oath, --and how grave he looked and yet so proud andhappy, like a man doing his duty and sustained by it, and he said:

"My boy, you are innocent. You smashed in Peter McGinnis's face, but youdid it without criminal intent. You put a face on him, by Jehoshaphat!that he won't lose for six months, but you did it without evil purposeor malign design. My boy, look up! Give me your hand! You leave thiscourt without a stain upon your name. "

They said it was one of the most moving scenes ever enacted in theMariposa Court. 

But the strangest thing is that if the judge had known what every oneelse in Mariposa knew, it would have broken his heart. If he could haveseen Neil with the drunken flush on his face in the billiard room of theMariposa House, --if he had known, as every one else did, that Neil wascrazed with drink the night he struck the Liberal organizer when the oldMacdonald Government went out, --if he could have known that even on thatlast day Neil was drunk when he rode with the Missinaba Horse to thestation to join the Third Contingent for the war, and all the street ofthe little town was one great roar of people--

But the judge never knew, and now he never will. For if you could findit in the meanness of your soul to tell him, it would serve no purposenow except to break his heart, and there would rise up to rebuke you thepictured vision of an untended grave somewhere in the great silences ofSouth Africa. 

Did I say above, or seem to imply, that the judge sometimes spokeharshly to his wife? Or did you gather for a minute that her lot wasone to lament over or feel sorry for? If so, it just shows that you knownothing about such things, and that marriage, at least as it existsin Mariposa, is a sealed book to you. You are as ignorant as MissSpiffkins, the biology teacher at the high school, who always sayshow sorry she is for Mrs. Pepperleigh. You get that impression simplybecause the judge howled like an Algonquin Indian when he saw thesprinkler running on the lawn. But are you sure you know the other sideof it? Are you quite sure when you talk like Miss Spiffkins does aboutthe rights of it, that you are taking all things into account? You mighthave thought differently perhaps of the Pepperleighs, anyway, if you hadbeen there that evening when the judge came home to his wife with onehand pressed to his temple and in the other the cablegram that saidthat Neil had been killed in action in South Africa. That night theysat together with her hand in his, just as they had sat together thirtyyears ago when he was a law student in the city. 

Go and tell Miss Spiffkins that! Hydrangeas, --canaries, --temper, --blazes! What does Miss Spiffkins know about it all?

But in any case, if you tried to tell Judge Pepperleigh about Neil nowhe wouldn't believe it. He'd laugh it to scorn. That is Neil'spicture, in uniform, hanging in the dining-room beside the Fathers ofConfederation. That military-looking man in the picture beside him isGeneral Kitchener, whom you may perhaps have heard of, for he was veryhighly spoken of in Neil's letters. All round the room, in fact, andstill more in the judge's library upstairs, you will see pictures ofSouth Africa and the departure of the Canadians (there are none of thereturn), and of Mounted Infantry and of Unmounted Cavalry and a lot ofthings that only soldiers and the fathers of soldiers know about. 

So you can realize that for a fellow who isn't military, and who wearsnothing nearer to a uniform than a daffodil tennis blazer, the judge'shouse is a devil of a house to come to. 

I think you remember young Mr. Pupkin, do you not? I have referred tohim several times already as the junior teller in the Exchange Bank. Butif you know Mariposa at all you have often seen him. You have noticedhim, I am sure, going for the bank mail in the morning in an office suiteffect of clinging grey with a gold necktie pin shaped like a ridingwhip. You have seen him often enough going down to the lake front aftersupper, in tennis things, smoking a cigarette and with a paddle and acrimson canoe cushion under his arm. You have seen him entering DeanDrone's church in a top hat and a long frock coat nearly to his feet. You have seen him, perhaps, playing poker in Peter Glover's roomover the hardware store and trying to look as if he didn't hold threeaces, --in fact, giving absolutely no sign of it beyond the wild flush inhis face and the fact that his hair stands on end. 

That kind of reticence is a thing you simply have to learn in banking. I mean, if you've got to be in a position where you know for a factthat the Mariposa Packing Company's account is overdrawn by sixty-fourdollars, and yet daren't say anything about it, not even to thegirls that you play tennis with, --I don't say, not a casual hint as areference, but not really tell them, not, for instance, bring down thebank ledger to the tennis court and show them, --you learn a sort ofreticence and self-control that people outside of banking circles nevercan attain. 

Why, I've known Pupkin at the Fireman's Ball lean against the wall inhis dress suit and talk away to Jim Eliot, the druggist, without givingthe faintest hint or indication that Eliot's note for twenty-sevendollars had been protested that very morning. Not a hint of it. I don'tsay he didn't mention it, in a sort of way, in the supper room, just toone or two, but I mean there was nothing in the way he leant up againstthe wall to suggest it. 

But, however, I don't mention that as either for or against Mr. Pupkin. That sort of thing is merely the A B C of banking, as he himself toldme when explaining why it was that he hesitated to divulge the exactstanding of the Mariposa Carriage Company. Of course, once you get pastthe A B C you can learn a lot that is mighty interesting. 

So I think that if you know Mariposa and understand even the rudimentsof banking, you are perfectly acquainted with Mr. Pupkin. What? Youremember him as being in love with Miss Lawson, the high school teacher?In love with HER? What a ridiculous idea. You mean merely because on thenight when the Mariposa Belle sank with every soul on board, Pupkin putoff from the town in a skiff to rescue Miss Lawson. Oh, but you're quitewrong. That wasn't LOVE. I've heard Pupkin explain it himself a dozentimes. That sort of thing, --paddling out to a sinking steamer at nightin a crazy skiff, --may indicate a sort of attraction, but not real love, not what Pupkin came to feel afterwards. Indeed, when he began to thinkof it, it wasn't even attraction, it was merely respect, --that's allit was. And anyway, that was long before, six or seven months back, andPupkin admitted that at the time he was a mere boy. 

Mr. Pupkin, I must explain, lived with Mallory Tompkins in rooms overthe Exchange Bank, on the very top floor, the third, with Mullins's ownrooms below them. Extremely comfortable quarters they were, with twobedrooms and a sitting-room that was all fixed up with snowshoes andtennis rackets on the walls and dance programmes and canoe club badgesand all that sort of thing. 

Mallory Tompkins was a young man with long legs and check trousers whoworked on the Mariposa Times-Herald. That was what gave him his literarytaste. He used to read Ibsen and that other Dutch author--BumstoneBumstone, isn't it?--and you can judge that he was a mighty intellectualfellow. He was so intellectual that he was, as he himself admitted, a complete eggnostic. He and Pupkin used to have the most tremendousarguments about creation and evolution, and how if you study at a schoolof applied science you learn that there's no hell beyond the presentlife. 

Mallory Tompkins used to prove absolutely that the miracles were onlyelectricity, and Pupkin used to admit that it was an awfully goodargument, but claimed that he had heard it awfully well answered in asermon, though unfortunately he had forgotten how. 

Tompkins used to show that the flood was contrary to geology, and Pupkinwould acknowledge that the point was an excellent one, but that he hadread a book, --the title of which he ought to have written down, --whichexplained geology away altogether. 

Mallory Tompkins generally got the best of the merely logical side ofthe arguments, but Pupkin--who was a tremendous Christian--was muchstronger in the things he had forgotten. So the discussions often lastedtill far into the night, and Mr. Pupkin would fall asleep and dream of asplendid argument, which would have settled the whole controversy, onlyunfortunately he couldn't recall it in the morning. 

Of course, Pupkin would never have thought of considering himself on anintellectual par with Mallory Tompkins. That would have been ridiculous. Mallory Tompkins had read all sorts of things and had half a mind towrite a novel himself--either that or a play. All he needed, he said, was to have a chance to get away somewhere by himself and think. Everytime he went away to the city Pupkin expected that he might return withthe novel all finished; but though he often came back with his eyes redfrom thinking, the novel as yet remained incomplete. 

Meantime, Mallory Tompkins, as I say, was a mighty intellectual fellow. You could see that from the books on the bamboo bookshelves in thesitting-room. There was, for instance, the "Encyclopaedia Metropolitana"in forty volumes, that he bought on the instalment plan for two dollarsa month. Then when they took that away, there was the "History ofCivilization, " in fifty volumes at fifty cents a week for fifty years. Tompkins had read in it half-way through the Stone Age before theytook it from him. After that there was the "Lives of the Painters, " onevolume at a time--a splendid thing in which you could read all aboutAahrens, and Aachenthal, and Aax and men of that class. 

After all, there's nothing like educating oneself. Mallory Tompkins knewabout the opening period of all sorts of things, and in regard to peoplewhose names began with "A" you couldn't stick him. 

I don't mean that he and Mr. Pupkin lived a mere routine of studiousevenings. That would be untrue. Quite often their time was spent in muchless commendable ways than that, and there were poker parties in theirsitting-room that didn't break up till nearly midnight. Card-playing, after all, is a slow business, unless you put money on it, and, besides, if you are in a bank and are handling money all day, gambling has afascination. 

I've seen Pupkin and Mallory Tompkins and Joe Milligan, the dentist, andMitchell the ticket agent, and the other "boys" sitting round the tablewith matches enough piled up in front of them to stock a factory. Tenmatches counted for one chip and ten chips made a cent--so you see theyweren't merely playing for the fun of the thing. Of course it's ahollow pleasure. You realize that when you wake up at night parched withthirst, ten thousand matches to the bad. But banking is a wild life andeverybody knows it. 

Sometimes Pupkin would swear off and keep away from the cursed thing forweeks, and then perhaps he'd see by sheer accident a pile of matches onthe table, or a match lying on the floor and it would start the craze inhim. I am using his own words--a "craze"--that's what he called it whenhe told Miss Lawson all about it, and she promised to cure him of it. She would have, too. Only, as I say, Pupkin found that what he hadmistaken for attraction was only respect. And there's no use worrying awoman that you respect about your crazes. 

It was from Mallory Tompkins that Pupkin learned all about the Mariposapeople, because Pupkin came from away off--somewhere down in theMaritime Provinces--and didn't know a soul. Mallory Tompkins used totell him about Judge Pepperleigh, and what a wonderfully clever man hewas and how he would have been in the Supreme Court for certain if theConservative Government had stayed in another fifteen or twenty yearsinstead of coming to a premature end. He used to talk so much about thePepperleighs, that Pupkin was sick of the very name. But just as soon ashe had seen Zena Pepperleigh he couldn't hear enough of them. He wouldhave talked with Tompkins for hours about the judge's dog Rover. And asfor Zena, if he could have brought her name over his lips, he would havetalked of her forever. 

He first saw her--by one of the strangest coincidences in the world--onthe Main Street of Mariposa. If he hadn't happened to be going up thestreet and she to be coming down it, the thing wouldn't have happened. Afterwards they both admitted that it was one of the most peculiarcoincidences they ever heard of. Pupkin owned that he had had thestrangest feeling that morning as if something were going to happen--afeeling not at all to be classed with the one of which he had oncespoken to Miss Lawson, and which was, at the most, a mere anticipationof respect. 

But, as I say, Pupkin met Zena Pepperleigh on the 26th of June, attwenty-five minutes to eleven. And at once the whole world changed. Thepast was all blotted out. Even in the new forty volume edition ofthe "Instalment Record of Humanity" that Mallory Tompkins had justreceived--Pupkin wouldn't have bothered with it. 

She--that word henceforth meant Zena--had just come back fromher boarding-school, and of all times of year coming back from aboarding-school and for wearing a white shirt waist and a crimsontie and for carrying a tennis racket on the stricken street of atown--commend me to the month of June in Mariposa. 

And, for Pupkin, straight away the whole town was irradiated withsunshine, and there was such a singing of the birds, and such a dancingof the rippled waters of the lake, and such a kindliness in the facesof all the people, that only those who have lived in Mariposa, and beenyoung there, can know at all what he felt. 

The simple fact is that just the moment he saw Zena Pepperleigh, Mr. Pupkin was clean, plumb, straight, flat, absolutely in love with her. 

Which fact is so important that it would be folly not to close thechapter and think about it. 

EIGHT. The Fore-ordained Attachment of Zena Pepperleigh and Peter Pupkin

Zena Pepperleigh used to sit reading novels on the piazza of the judge'shouse, half hidden by the Virginia creepers. At times the book wouldfall upon her lap and there was such a look of unstilled yearning in herviolet eyes that it did not entirely disappear even when she picked upthe apple that lay beside her and took another bite out of it. 

With hands clasped she would sit there dreaming all the beautifulday-dreams of girlhood. When you saw that faraway look in her eyes, it meant that she was dreaming that a plumed and armoured knight wasrescuing her from the embattled keep of a castle beside the Danube. Atother times she was being borne away by an Algerian corsair over theblue waters of the Mediterranean and was reaching out her arms towardsFrance to say farewell to it. 

Sometimes when you noticed a sweet look of resignation that seemedto rest upon her features, it meant that Lord Ronald de Chevereux waskneeling at her feet, and that she was telling him to rise, that herhumbler birth must ever be a bar to their happiness, and Lord Ronald wasgetting into an awful state about it, as English peers do at the leastsuggestion of anything of the sort. 

Or, if it wasn't that, then her lover had just returned to her side, tall and soldierly and sunburned, after fighting for ten years in theSoudan for her sake, and had come back to ask her for her answer andto tell her that for ten years her face had been with him even inthe watches of the night. He was asking her for a sign, any kind ofsign, --ten years in the Soudan entitles them to a sign, --and Zena wasplucking a white rose, just one, from her hair, when she would hear herfather's step on the piazza and make a grab for the Pioneers of TecumsehTownship, and start reading it like mad. 

She was always, as I say, being rescued and being borne away, and beingparted, and reaching out her arms to France and to Spain, andsaying good-bye forever to Valladolid or the old grey towers ofHohenbranntwein. 

And I don't mean that she was in the least exceptional or romantic, because all the girls in Mariposa were just like that. An Algeriancorsair could have come into the town and had a dozen of them for theasking, and as for a wounded English officer, --well, perhaps it's betternot to talk about it outside or the little town would become a regularmilitary hospital. 

Because, mind you, the Mariposa girls are all right. You've only to lookat them to realize that. You see, you can get in Mariposa a print dressof pale blue or pale pink for a dollar twenty that looks infinitelybetter than anything you ever see in the city, --especially if you canwear with it a broad straw hat and a background of maple trees and thegreen grass of a tennis court. And if you remember, too, that these arecultivated girls who have all been to the Mariposa high school and cando decimal fractions, you will understand that an Algerian corsair wouldsharpen his scimitar at the very sight of them. 

Don't think either that they are all dying to get married; because theyare not. I don't say they wouldn't take an errant knight, or a buccaneeror a Hungarian refugee, but for the ordinary marriages of ordinarypeople they feel nothing but a pitying disdain. So it is that each oneof them in due time marries an enchanted prince and goes to live in oneof the little enchanted houses in the lower part of the town. 

I don't know whether you know it, but you can rent an enchanted housein Mariposa for eight dollars a month, and some of the most completelyenchanted are the cheapest. As for the enchanted princes, they findthem in the strangest places, where you never expected to see them, working--under a spell, you understand, --in drug-stores and printingoffices, and even selling things in shops. But to be able to find themyou have first to read ever so many novels about Sir Galahad and theErrant Quest and that sort of thing. 

Naturally then Zena Pepperleigh, as she sat on the piazza, dreamedof bandits and of wounded officers and of Lord Ronalds riding onfoam-flecked chargers. But that she ever dreamed of a junior bankteller in a daffodil blazer riding past on a bicycle, is pretty hard toimagine. So, when Mr. Pupkin came tearing past up the slope of OneidaStreet at a speed that proved that he wasn't riding there merely topass the house, I don't suppose that Zena Pepperleigh was aware of hisexistence. 

That may be a slight exaggeration. She knew, perhaps, that he wasthe new junior teller in the Exchange Bank and that he came from theMaritime Provinces, and that nobody knew who his people were, and thathe had never been in a canoe in his life till he came to Mariposa, andthat he sat four pews back in Dean Drone's church, and that his salarywas eight hundred dollars. Beyond that, she didn't know a thing abouthim. She presumed, however, that the reason why he went past so fast wasbecause he didn't dare to go slow. 

This, of course, was perfectly correct. Ever since the day when Mr. Pupkin met Zena in the Main Street he used to come past the house on hisbicycle just after bank hours. He would have gone past twenty times aday but he was afraid to. As he came up Oneida Street, he used to pedalfaster and faster, --he never meant to, but he couldn't help it, --till hewent past the piazza where Zena was sitting at an awful speed with hislittle yellow blazer flying in the wind. In a second he had disappearedin a buzz and a cloud of dust, and the momentum of it carried him clearout into the country for miles and miles before he ever dared to pauseor look back. 

Then Mr. Pupkin would ride in a huge circuit about the country, tryingto think he was looking at the crops, and sooner or later his bicyclewould be turned towards the town again and headed for Oneida Street, andwould get going quicker and quicker and quicker, till the pedals whirledround with a buzz and he came past the judge's house again, like abullet out of a gun. He rode fifteen miles to pass the house twice, andeven then it took all the nerve that he had. 

The people on Oneida Street thought that Mr. Pupkin was crazy, but ZenaPepperleigh knew that he was not. Already, you see, there was a sortof dim parallel between the passing of the bicycle and the last ride ofTancred the Inconsolable along the banks of the Danube. 

I have already mentioned, I think, how Mr. Pupkin and Zena Pepperleighfirst came to know one another. Like everything else about them, it wasa sheer matter of coincidence, quite inexplicable unless you understandthat these things are fore-ordained. 

That, of course, is the way with fore-ordained affairs and that's wherethey differ from ordinary love. 

I won't even try to describe how Mr. Pupkin felt when he first spokewith Zena and sat beside her as they copied out the "endless chain"letter asking for ten cents. They wrote out, as I said, no less thaneight of the letters between them, and they found out that theirhandwritings were so alike that you could hardly tell them apart, exceptthat Pupkin's letters were round and Zena's letters were pointed andPupkin wrote straight up and down and Zena wrote on a slant. Beyond thatthe writing was so alike that it was the strangest coincidence in theworld. Of course when they made figures it was different and Pupkinexplained to Zena that in the bank you have to be able to make a sevenso that it doesn't look like a nine. 

So, as I say, they wrote the letters all afternoon and when it was overthey walked up Oneida Street together, ever so slowly. When they gotnear the house, Zena asked Pupkin to come in to tea, with such an easyoff-hand way that you couldn't have told that she was half an hour lateand was taking awful chances on the judge. Pupkin hadn't had time to sayyes before the judge appeared at the door, just as they were stepping upon to the piazza, and he had a table napkin in his hand and the dynamitesparks were flying from his spectacles as he called out:

"Great heaven! Zena, why in everlasting blazes can't you get in to teaat a Christian hour?"

Zena gave one look of appeal to Pupkin, and Pupkin looked one glance ofcomprehension, and turned and fled down Oneida Street. And if the scenewasn't quite as dramatic as the renunciation of Tancred the Troubadour, it at least had something of the same elements in it. 

Pupkin walked home to his supper at the Mariposa House on air, and thatevening there was a gentle distance in his manner towards Sadie, thedining-room girl, that I suppose no bank clerk in Mariposa ever showedbefore. It was like Sir Galahad talking with the tire-women of QueenGuinevere and receiving huckleberry pie at their hands. 

After that Mr. Pupkin and Zena Pepperleigh constantly met together. They played tennis as partners on the grass court behind Dr. Gallagher'shouse, --the Mariposa Tennis Club rent it, you remember, for fiftycents a month, --and Pupkin used to perform perfect prodigies of valour, leaping in the air to serve with his little body hooked like a letterS. Sometimes, too, they went out on Lake Wissanotti in the evening inPupkin's canoe, with Zena sitting in the bow and Pupkin paddling in thestern and they went out ever so far and it was after dark and the starswere shining before they came home. Zena would look at the stars andsay how infinitely far away they seemed, and Pupkin would realize that agirl with a mind like that couldn't have any use for a fool such ashim. Zena used to ask him to point out the Pleiades and Jupiter and Ursaminor, and Pupkin showed her exactly where they were. That impressedthem both tremendously, because Pupkin didn't know that Zena rememberedthe names out of the astronomy book at her boarding-school, and Zenadidn't know that Pupkin simply took a chance on where the stars were. 

And ever so many times they talked so intimately that Pupkin came mightynear telling her about his home in the Maritime Provinces and about hisfather and mother, and then kicked himself that he hadn't the manlinessto speak straight out about it and take the consequences. 

Please don't imagine from any of this that the course of Mr. Pupkin'slove ran smooth. On the contrary, Pupkin himself felt that it wasabsolutely hopeless from the start. 

There were, it might be admitted, certain things that seemed to indicateprogress. 

In the course of the months of June and July and August, he had takenZena out in his canoe thirty-one times. Allowing an average of two milesfor each evening, Pupkin had paddled Zena sixty-two miles, or more thana hundred thousand yards. That surely was something. 

He had played tennis with her on sixteen afternoons. Three times he hadleft his tennis racket up at the judge's house in Zena's charge, andonce he had, with her full consent, left his bicycle there all night. This must count for something. No girl could trifle with a man to theextent of having his bicycle leaning against the verandah post all nightand mean nothing by it. 

More than that--he had been to tea at the judge's house fourteen times, and seven times he had been asked by Lilian Drone to the rectory whenZena was coming, and five times by Nora Gallagher to tea at the doctor'shouse because Zena was there. 

Altogether he had eaten so many meals where Zena was that his mealticket at the Mariposa lasted nearly double its proper time, andthe face of Sadie, the dining-room girl, had grown to wear a look ofmelancholy resignation; sadder than romance. 

Still more than that, Pupkin had bought for Zena, reckoning italtogether, about two buckets of ice cream and perhaps half a bushel ofchocolate. Not that Pupkin grudged the expense of it. On the contrary, over and above the ice cream and the chocolate he had bought her a whitewaistcoat and a walking stick with a gold top, a lot of new neckties anda pair of patent leather boots--that is, they were all bought on accountof her, which is the same thing. 

Add to all this that Pupkin and Zena had been to the Church of EnglandChurch nearly every Sunday evening for two months, and one evening theyhad even gone to the Presbyterian Church "for fun, " which, if you knowMariposa, you will realize to be a wild sort of escapade that ought tospeak volumes. 

Yet in spite of this, Pupkin felt that the thing was hopeless: whichonly illustrates the dreadful ups and downs, the wild alternations ofhope and despair that characterise an exceptional affair of this sort. 

Yes, it was hopeless. 

Every time that Pupkin watched Zena praying in church, he knew that shewas too good for him. Every time that he came to call for her and foundher reading Browning and Omar Khayyam he knew that she was too cleverfor him. And every time that he saw her at all he realized that she wastoo beautiful for him. 

You see, Pupkin knew that he wasn't a hero. When Zena would clasp herhands and talk rapturously about crusaders and soldiers and firemen andheroes generally, Pupkin knew just where he came in. Not in it, that wasall. If a war could have broken out in Mariposa, or the judge's housebeen invaded by the Germans, he might have had a chance, but as itwas--hopeless. 

Then there was Zena's father. Heaven knows Pupkin tried hard to pleasethe judge. He agreed with every theory that Judge Pepperleigh advanced, and that took a pretty pliable intellect in itself. They denouncedfemale suffrage one day and they favoured it the next. One day the judgewould claim that the labour movement was eating out the heart of thecountry, and the next day he would hold that the hope of the world layin the organization of the toiling masses. Pupkin shifted his opinionslike the glass in a kaleidoscope. Indeed, the only things on which hewas allowed to maintain a steadfast conviction were the purity of theConservative party of Canada and the awful wickedness of the recall ofjudges. 

But with all that the judge was hardly civil to Pupkin. He hadn't askedhim to the house till Zena brought him there, though, as a rule, all thebank clerks in Mariposa treated Judge Pepperleigh's premises as theirown. He used to sit and sneer at Pupkin after he had gone till Zenawould throw down the Pioneers of Tecumseh Township in a temper andflounce off the piazza to her room. After which the judge's manner wouldchange instantly and he would relight his corn cob pipe and sit andpositively beam with contentment. In all of which there was something somysterious as to prove that Mr. Pupkin's chances were hopeless. 

Nor was that all of it. Pupkin's salary was eight hundred dollars a yearand the Exchange Bank limit for marriage was a thousand. 

I suppose you are aware of the grinding capitalistic tyranny of thebanks in Mariposa whereby marriage is put beyond the reach of ever somany mature and experienced men of nineteen and twenty and twenty-one, who are compelled to go on eating on a meal ticket at the Mariposa Houseand living over the bank to suit the whim of a group of capitalists. 

Whenever Pupkin thought of this two hundred dollars he understood allthat it meant by social unrest. In fact, he interpreted all forms ofsocial discontent in terms of it. Russian Anarchism, German Socialism, the Labour Movement, Henry George, Lloyd George, --he understood thewhole lot of them by thinking of his two hundred dollars. 

When I tell you that at this period Mr. Pupkin read Memoirs of theGreat Revolutionists and even thought of blowing up Henry Mullins withdynamite, you can appreciate his state of mind. 

But not even by all these hindrances and obstacles to his love for ZenaPepperleigh would Peter Pupkin have been driven to commit suicide (oh, yes; he committed it three times, as I'm going to tell you), had it notbeen for another thing that he knew stood once and for all and in coldreality between him and Zena. 

He felt it in a sort of way, as soon as he knew her. Each time that hetried to talk to her about his home and his father and mother and foundthat something held him back, he realized more and more the kind ofthing that stood between them. Most of all did he realize it, with asudden sickness of heart, when he got word that his father and motherwanted to come to Mariposa to see him and he had all he could do to headthem off from it. 

Why? Why stop them? The reason was, simple enough, that Pupkin wasashamed of them, bitterly ashamed. The picture of his mother and fatherturning up in Mariposa and being seen by his friends there and going upto the Pepperleigh's house made him feel faint with shame. 

No, I don't say it wasn't wrong. It only shows what difference offortune, the difference of being rich and being poor, means in thisworld. You perhaps have been so lucky that you cannot appreciate whatit means to feel shame at the station of your own father and mother. Youthink it doesn't matter, that honesty and kindliness of heart are allthat counts. That only shows that you have never known some of thebitterest feelings of people less fortunate than yourself. 

So it was with Mr. Pupkin. When he thought of his father and motherturning up in Mariposa, his face reddened with unworthy shame. 

He could just picture the scene! He could see them getting out of theirLimousine touring car, with the chauffeur holding open the door forthem, and his father asking for a suite of rooms, --just think of it, asuite of rooms!--at the Mariposa House. 

The very thought of it turned him ill. 

What! You have mistaken my meaning? Ashamed of them because they werepoor? Good heavens, no, but because they were rich! And not rich in thesense in which they use the term in Mariposa, where a rich person merelymeans a man who has money enough to build a house with a piazza and tohave everything he wants; but rich in the other sense, --motor cars, Ritzhotels, steam yachts, summer islands and all that sort of thing. 

Why, Pupkin's father, --what's the use of trying to conceal it anylonger?--was the senior partner in the law firm of Pupkin, Pupkin andPupkin. If you know the Maritime Provinces at all, you've heard of thePupkins. The name is a household word from Chedabucto to Chidabecto. And, for the matter of that, the law firm and the fact that Pupkinsenior had been an Attorney General was the least part of it. AttorneyGeneral! Why, there's no money in that! It's no better than the Senate. No, no, Pupkin senior, like so many lawyers, was practically a promoter, and he blew companies like bubbles, and when he wasn't in the MaritimeProvinces he was in Boston and New York raising money and floatingloans, and when they had no money left in New York he floated it inLondon: and when he had it, he floated on top of it big rafts of lumberon the Miramichi and codfish on the Grand Banks and lesser fish in theFundy Bay. You've heard perhaps of the Tidal Transportation Company, andFundy Fisheries Corporation, and the Paspebiac Pulp and Paper Unlimited?Well, all of those were Pupkin senior under other names. So just imaginehim in Mariposa! Wouldn't he be utterly foolish there? Just imagine himmeeting Jim Eliot and treating him like a druggist merely because heran a drug store! or speaking to Jefferson Thorpe as if he were a barbersimply because he shaved for money! Why, a man like that could ruinyoung Pupkin in Mariposa in half a day, and Pupkin knew it. 

That wouldn't matter so much, but think of the Pepperleighs and Zena!Everything would be over with them at once. Pupkin knew just what thejudge thought of riches and luxuries. How often had he heard thejudge pass sentences of life imprisonment on Pierpont Morgan andMr. Rockefeller. How often had Pupkin heard him say that any man whoreceived more than three thousand dollars a year (that was the judicialsalary in the Missinaba district) was a mere robber, unfit to shakethe hand of an honest man. Bitter! I should think he was! He was not sobitter, perhaps, as Mr. Muddleson, the principal of the Mariposa highschool, who said that any man who received more than fifteen hundreddollars was a public enemy. He was certainly not so bitter as Trelawney, the post-master, who said that any man who got from society morethan thirteen hundred dollars (apart from a legitimate increase inrecognition of a successful election) was a danger to society. Still, he was bitter. They all were in Mariposa. Pupkin could just imagine howthey would despise his father!

And Zena! That was the worst of all. How often had, Pupkin heard hersay that she simply hated diamonds wouldn't wear them, despised them, wouldn't give a thank you for a whole tiara of them! As for motor carsand steam yachts, --well, it was pretty plain that that sort of thing hadno chance with Zena Pepperleigh. Why, she had told Pupkin one night inthe canoe that she would only marry a man who was poor and had his wayto make and would hew down difficulties for her sake. And when Pupkincouldn't answer the argument she was quite cross and silent all the wayhome. 

What was Peter Pupkin doing, then, at eight hundred dollars in a bank inMariposa? If you ask that, it means that you know nothing of the lifeof the Maritime Provinces and the sturdy temper of the people. I supposethere are no people in the world who hate luxury and extravagance andthat sort of thing quite as much as the Maritime Province people, and, of them, no one hated luxury more than Pupkin senior. 

Don't mistake the man. He wore a long sealskin coat in winter, yes; butmark you, not as a matter of luxury, but merely as a question of hislungs. He smoked, I admit it, a thirty-five cent cigar, not because hepreferred it, but merely through a delicacy of the thorax that made itimperative. He drank champagne at lunch, I concede the point, not inthe least from the enjoyment of it, but simply on account of a peculiaraffection of the tongue and lips that positively dictated it. His ownlonging--and his wife shared it--was for the simple, simple life--anisland somewhere, with birds and trees. They had bought three or fourislands--one in the St. Lawrence, and two in the Gulf, and one off thecoast of Maine--looking for this sort of thing. Pupkin senior often saidthat he wanted to have some place that would remind him of the littleold farm up the Aroostook where he was brought up. He often boughtlittle old farms, just to try them, but they always turned out to be sonear a city that he cut them into real estate lots, without even havinghad time to look at them. 

But--and this is where the emphasis lay--in the matter of luxury for hisonly son, Peter, Pupkin senior was a Maritime Province man right to thecore, with all the hardihood of the United Empire Loyalists ingrained inhim. No luxury for that boy! No, sir! From his childhood, Pupkin seniorhad undertaken, at the least sign of luxury, to "tan it out of him, "after the fashion still in vogue in the provinces. Then he sent him toan old-fashioned school to get it "thumped out of him, " and after thathe had put him for a year on a Nova Scotia schooner to get it "knockedout of him. " If, after all that, young Pupkin, even when he came toMariposa, wore cameo pins and daffodil blazers, and broke out intoribbed silk saffron ties on pay day, it only shows that the old Adamstill needs further tanning even in the Maritime Provinces. 

Young Pupkin, of course, was to have gone into law. That was hisfather's cherished dream and would have made the firm Pupkin, Pupkin, Pupkin, and Pupkin, as it ought to have been. But young Peter was keptout of the law by the fool system of examinations devised since hisfather's time. Hence there was nothing for it but to sling him into abank; "sling him" was, I think, the expression. So his father decidedthat if Pupkin was to be slung, he should be slung good and far--cleaninto Canada (you know the way they use that word in the MaritimeProvinces). And to sling Pupkin he called in the services of an oldfriend, a man after his own heart, just as violent as himself, who usedto be at the law school in the city with Pupkin senior thirty years ago. So this friend, who happened to live in Mariposa, and who was a violentman, said at once: "Edward, by Jehoshaphat! send the boy up here. "

So that is how Pupkin came to Mariposa. And if, when he got there, hisfather's friend gave no sign, and treated the boy with roughness andincivility, that may have been, for all I know, a continuation of the"tanning" process of the Maritime people. 

Did I mention that the Pepperleigh family, generations ago, had taken upland near the Aroostook, and that it was from there the judge's fathercame to Tecumseh township? Perhaps not, but it doesn't matter. 

But surely after such reminiscences as these the awful things that areimpending over Mr. Pupkin must be kept for another chapter. 

NINE. The Mariposa Bank Mystery

Suicide is a thing that ought not to be committed without very carefulthought. It often involves serious consequences, and in some casesbrings pain to others than oneself. 

I don't say that there is no justification for it. There often is. Anybody who has listened to certain kinds of music, or read certainkinds of poetry, or heard certain kinds of performances upon theconcertina, will admit that there are some lives which ought not to becontinued, and that even suicide has its brighter aspects. 

But to commit suicide on grounds of love is at the best a very dubiousexperiment. I know that in this I am expressing an opinion contraryto that of most true lovers who embrace suicide on the slightestprovocation as the only honourable termination of an existence thatnever ought to have begun. 

I quite admit that there is a glamour and a sensation about the thingwhich has its charm, and that there is nothing like it for causing agirl to realize the value of the heart that she has broken and whichbreathed forgiveness upon her at the very moment when it held in itshand the half-pint of prussic acid that was to terminate its beating forever. 

But apart from the general merits of the question, I suppose there arefew people, outside of lovers, who know what it is to commit suicidefour times in five weeks. 

Yet this was what happened to Mr. Pupkin, of the Exchange Bank ofMariposa. 

Ever since he had known Zena Pepperleigh he had realized that his lovefor her was hopeless. She was too beautiful for him and too good forhim; her father hated him and her mother despised him; his salary wastoo small and his own people were too rich. 

If you add to all that that he came up to the judge's house one nightand found a poet reciting verses to Zena, you will understand thesuicide at once. It was one of those regular poets with a solemn jackassface, and lank parted hair and eyes like puddles of molasses. I don'tknow how he came there--up from the city, probably--but there he wason the Pepperleighs' verandah that August evening. He was recitingpoetry--either Tennyson's or Shelley's, or his own, you couldn'ttell--and about him sat Zena with her hands clasped and Nora Gallagherlooking at the sky and Jocelyn Drone gazing into infinity, and a littletubby woman looking at the poet with her head falling over sideways--infact, there was a whole group of them. 

I don't know what it is about poets that draws women to them in thisway. But everybody knows that a poet has only to sit and saw the airwith his hands and recite verses in a deep stupid voice, and all thewomen are crazy over him. Men despise him and would kick him off theverandah if they dared, but the women simply rave over him. 

So Pupkin sat there in the gloom and listened to this poet recitingBrowning and he realized that everybody understood it but him. He couldsee Zena with her eyes fixed on the poet as if she were hanging on toevery syllable (she was; she needed to), and he stood it just aboutfifteen minutes and then slid off the side of the verandah anddisappeared without even saying good-night. 

He walked straight down Oneida Street and along the Main Street just ashard as he could go. There was only one purpose in his mind, --suicide. He was heading straight for Jim Eliot's drug store on the main cornerand his idea was to buy a drink of chloroform and drink it and die rightthere on the spot. 

As Pupkin walked down the street, the whole thing was so vivid in hismind that he could picture it to the remotest detail. He could even seeit all in type, in big headings in the newspapers of the following day:

APPALLING SUICIDE. PETER PUPKIN POISONED. 

He perhaps hoped that the thing might lead to some kind of publicenquiry and that the question of Browning's poetry and whether it isaltogether fair to allow of its general circulation would be fullyventilated in the newspapers. 

Thinking of that, Pupkin came to the main corner. 

On a warm August evening the drug store of Mariposa, as you know, is alla blaze of lights. You can hear the hissing of the soda-water fountainhalf a block away, and inside the store there are ever so manypeople--boys and girls and old people too--all drinking sarsaparilla andchocolate sundaes and lemon sours and foaming drinks that you take outof long straws. There is such a laughing and a talking as you neverheard, and the girls are all in white and pink and cambridge blue, andthe soda fountain is of white marble with silver taps, and it hissesand sputters, and Jim Eliot and his assistant wear white coats with redgeraniums in them, and it's just as gay as gay. 

The foyer of the opera in Paris may be a fine sight, but I doubt if itcan compare with the inside of Eliot's drug store in Mariposa--for realgaiety and joy of living. 

This night the store was especially crowded because it was a Saturdayand that meant early closing for all the hotels, except, of course, Smith's. So as the hotels were shut, the people were all in the drugstore, drinking like fishes. It just shows the folly of Local Option andthe Temperance Movement and all that. Why, if you shut the hotels yousimply drive the people to the soda fountains and there's more drinkingthan ever, and not only of the men, too, but the girls and young boysand children. I've seen little things of eight and nine that had tobe lifted up on the high stools at Eliot's drug store, drinking greatgoblets of lemon soda, enough to burst them--brought there by their ownfathers, and why? Simply because the hotel bars were shut. 

What's the use of thinking you can stop people drinking merely bycutting off whiskey and brandy? The only effect is to drive them totaking lemon sour and sarsaparilla and cherry pectoral and carokacordial and things they wouldn't have touched before. So in the long runthey drink more than ever. The point is that you can't prevent peoplehaving a good time, no matter how hard you try. If they can't have itwith lager beer and brandy, they'll have it with plain soda and lemonpop, and so the whole gloomy scheme of the temperance people breaksdown, anyway. 

But I was only saying that Eliot's drug store in Mariposa on a Saturdaynight is the gayest and brightest spot in the world. 

And just imagine what a fool of a place to commit suicide in!

Just imagine going up to the soda-water fountain and asking for fivecents' worth of chloroform and soda! Well, you simply can't, that's all. 

That's the way Pupkin found it. You see, as soon as he came in, somebodycalled out: "Hello, Pete!" and one or two others called: "Hullo, Pup!"and some said: "How goes it?" and others: "How are you toughing it?"and so on, because you see they had all been drinking more or less andnaturally they felt jolly and glad-hearted. 

So the upshot of it was that instead of taking chloroform, Pupkinstepped up to the counter of the fountain and he had a bromo-seltzerwith cherry soda, and after that he had one of those aerated seltzers, and then a couple of lemon seltzers and a bromo-phizzer. 

I don't know if you know the mental effect of a bromo-seltzer. 

But it's a hard thing to commit suicide on. 

You can't. 

You feel so buoyant. 

Anyway, what with the phizzing of the seltzer and the lights and thegirls, Pupkin began to feel so fine that he didn't care a cuss for allthe Browning in the world, and as for the poet--oh, to blazes with him!What's poetry, anyway?--only rhymes. 

So, would you believe it, in about ten minutes Peter Pupkin was offagain and heading straight for the Pepperleighs' house, poet or no poet, and, what was more to the point, he carried with him three great bricksof Eliot's ice cream--in green, pink and brown layers. He struck theverandah just at the moment when Browning was getting too staleand dreary for words. His brain was all sizzling and jolly with thebromo-seltzer, and when he fetched out the ice cream bricks and Zenaran to get plates and spoons to eat it with, and Pupkin went with herto help fetch them and they picked out the spoons together, they were solaughing and happy that it was just a marvel. Girls, you know, need nobromo-seltzer. They're full of it all the time. 

And as for the poet--well, can you imagine how Pupkin felt when Zenatold him that the poet was married, and that the tubby little woman withher head on sideways was his wife?

So they had the ice cream, and the poet ate it in bucketsful. Poetsalways do. They need it. And after it the poet recited some stanzas ofhis own and Pupkin saw that he had misjudged the man, because it wasdandy poetry, the very best. That night Pupkin walked home on air andthere was no thought of chloroform, and it turned out that he hadn'tcommitted suicide, but like all lovers he had commuted it. 

I don't need to describe in full the later suicides of Mr. Pupkin, because they were all conducted on the same plan and rested on somethingthe same reasons as above. 

Sometimes he would go down at night to the offices of the bank belowhis bedroom and bring up his bank revolver in order to make an end ofhimself with it. This, too, he could see headed up in the newspapers as:

BRILLIANT BOY BANKER BLOWS OUT BRAINS. 

But blowing your brains out is a noisy, rackety performance, and Pupkinsoon found that only special kinds of brains are suited for it. So healways sneaked back again later in the night and put the revolver in itsplace, deciding to drown himself instead. Yet every time that he walkeddown to the Trestle Bridge over the Ossawippi he found it was quiteunsuitable for drowning--too high, and the water too swift and black, and the rushes too gruesome--in fact, not at all the kind of place for adrowning. 

Far better, he realized, to wait there on the railroad track and throwhimself under the wheels of the express and be done with it. Yet, thoughPupkin often waited in this way for the train, he was never able to pickout a pair of wheels that suited him. Anyhow, it's awfully hard to tellan express from a fast freight. 

I wouldn't mention these attempts at suicide if one of them hadn'tfinally culminated in making Peter Pupkin a hero and solving for him thewhole perplexed entanglement of his love affair with Zena Pepperleigh. Incidentally it threw him into the very centre of one of the mostimpenetrable bank mysteries that ever baffled the ingenuity of some ofthe finest legal talent that ever adorned one of the most enterprisingcommunities in the country. 

It happened one night, as I say, that Pupkin decided to go down intothe office of the bank and get his revolver and see if it would blow hisbrains out. It was the night of the Firemen's Ball and Zena had dancedfour times with a visitor from the city, a man who was in the fourthyear at the University and who knew everything. It was more than PeterPupkin could bear. Mallory Tompkins was away that night, and when Pupkincame home he was all alone in the building, except for Gillis, thecaretaker, who lived in the extension at the back. 

He sat in his room for hours brooding. Two or three times he picked up abook--he remembered afterwards distinctly that it was Kant's Critiqueof Pure Reason--and tried to read it, but it seemed meaningless andtrivial. Then with a sudden access of resolution he started from hischair and made his way down the stairs and into the office room of thebank, meaning to get a revolver and kill himself on the spot and letthem find his body lying on the floor. 

It was then far on in the night and the empty building of the bank wasas still as death. Pupkin could hear the stairs creak under his feet, and as he went he thought he heard another sound like the opening orclosing of a door. But it sounded not like the sharp ordinary noise ofa closing door but with a dull muffled noise as if someone had shutthe iron door of a safe in a room under the ground. For a moment Pupkinstood and listened with his heart thumping against his ribs. Then hekicked his slippers from his feet and without a sound stole into theoffice on the ground floor and took the revolver from his teller's desk. As he gripped it, he listened to the sounds on the back-stairway and inthe vaults below. 

I should explain that in the Exchange Bank of Mariposa the offices areon the ground floor level with the street. Below this is another floorwith low dark rooms paved with flagstones, with unused office desks andwith piles of papers stored in boxes. On this floor are the vaults ofthe bank, and lying in them in the autumn--the grain season--there isanything from fifty to a hundred thousand dollars in currency tied inbundles. There is no other light down there than the dim reflection fromthe lights out on the street, that lies in patches on the stone floor. 

I think as Peter Pupkin stood, revolver in hand, in the office ofthe bank, he had forgotten all about the maudlin purpose of his firstcoming. He had forgotten for the moment all about heroes and loveaffairs, and his whole mind was focussed, sharp and alert, with theintensity of the night-time, on the sounds that he heard in the vaultand on the back-stairway of the bank. 

Straight away, Pupkin knew what it meant as plainly as if it werewritten in print. He had forgotten, I say, about being a hero and heonly knew that there was sixty thousand dollars in the vault of the bankbelow, and that he was paid eight hundred dollars a year to look afterit. 

As Peter Pupkin stood there listening to the sounds in his stockingedfeet, his faced showed grey as ashes in the light that fell through thewindow from the street. His heart beat like a hammer against his ribs. But behind its beatings was the blood of four generations of Loyalists, and the robber who would take that sixty thousand dollars from theMariposa bank must take it over the dead body of Peter Pupkin, teller. 

Pupkin walked down the stairs to the lower room, the one below theground with the bank vault in it, with as fine a step as any of hisancestors showed on parade. And if he had known it, as he came down thestairway in the front of the vault room, there was a man crouched in theshadow of the passage way by the stairs at the back. This man, too, helda revolver in his hand, and, criminal or not, his face was as resoluteas Pupkin's own. As he heard the teller's step on the stair, he turnedand waited in the shadow of the doorway without a sound. 

There is no need really to mention all these details. They are onlyof interest as showing how sometimes a bank teller in a corded smokingjacket and stockinged feet may be turned into such a hero as even theMariposa girls might dream about. 

All of this must have happened at about three o'clock in the night. This much was established afterwards from the evidence of Gillis, thecaretaker. When he first heard the sounds he had looked at his watch andnoticed that it was half-past two; the watch he knew was three-quartersof an hour slow three days before and had been gaining since. The exacttime at which Gillis heard footsteps in the bank and started downstairs, pistol in hand, became a nice point afterwards in the cross-examination. 

But one must not anticipate. Pupkin reached the iron door of the banksafe, and knelt in front of it, feeling in the dark to find the fractureof the lock. As he knelt, he heard a sound behind him, and swung roundon his knees and saw the bank robber in the half light of the passageway and the glitter of a pistol in his hand. The rest was over in aninstant. Pupkin heard a voice that was his own, but that sounded strangeand hollow, call out: "Drop that, or I'll fire!" and then just as heraised his revolver, there came a blinding flash of light before hiseyes, and Peter Pupkin, junior teller of the bank, fell forward on thefloor and knew no more. 

At that point, of course, I ought to close down a chapter, or volume, or, at least, strike the reader over the head with a sandbag to forcehim to stop and think. In common fairness one ought to stop here andcount a hundred or get up and walk round a block, or, at any rate, picture to oneself Peter Pupkin lying on the floor of the bank, motionless, his arms distended, the revolver still grasped in his hand. But I must go on. 

By half-past seven on the following morning it was known all overMariposa that Peter Pupkin the junior teller of the Exchange had beenshot dead by a bank robber in the vault of the building. It was knownalso that Gillis, the caretaker, had been shot and killed at the foot ofthe stairs, and that the robber had made off with fifty thousand dollarsin currency; that he had left a trail of blood on the sidewalk and thatthe men were out tracking him with bloodhounds in the great swamps tothe north of the town. 

This, I say, and it is important to note it, was what they knew athalf-past seven. Of course as each hour went past they learned moreand more. At eight o'clock it was known that Pupkin was not dead, butdangerously wounded in the lungs. At eight-thirty it was known that hewas not shot in the lungs, but that the ball had traversed the pit ofhis stomach. 

At nine o'clock it was learned that the pit of Pupkin's stomach was allright, but that the bullet had struck his right ear and carried it away. Finally it was learned that his ear had not exactly been carried away, that is, not precisely removed by the bullet, but that it had grazedPupkin's head in such a way that it had stunned him, and if it had beenan inch or two more to the left it might have reached his brain. This, of course, was just as good as being killed from the point of view ofpublic interest. 

Indeed, by nine o'clock Pupkin could be himself seen on the Main Streetwith a great bandage sideways on his head, pointing out the traces ofthe robber. Gillis, the caretaker, too, it was known by eight, had notbeen killed. He had been shot through the brain, but whether the injurywas serious or not was only a matter of conjecture. In fact, by teno'clock it was understood that the bullet from the robber's second shothad grazed the side of the caretaker's head, but as far as could beknown his brain was just as before. I should add that the first reportabout the bloodstains and the swamp and the bloodhounds turned out tobe inaccurate. The stains may have been blood, but as they led to thecellar way of Netley's store they may have also been molasses, though itwas argued, to be sure, that the robber might well have poured molassesover the bloodstains from sheer cunning. 

It was remembered, too, that there were no bloodhounds in Mariposa, although, mind you, there are any amount of dogs there. 

So you see that by ten o'clock in the morning the whole affair wassettling into the impenetrable mystery which it ever since remained. 

Not that there wasn't evidence enough. There was Pupkin's own storyand Gillis's story, and the stories of all the people who had heard theshots and seen the robber (some said, the bunch of robbers) go runningpast (others said, walking past), in the night. Apparently the robberran up and down half the streets of Mariposa before he vanished. 

But the stories of Pupkin and Gillis were plain enough. Pupkin relatedthat he heard sounds in the bank and came downstairs just in time tosee the robber crouching in the passage way, and that the robber wasa large, hulking, villainous looking man, wearing a heavy coat. Gillistold exactly the same story, having heard the noises at the sametime, except that he first described the robber as a small thin fellow(peculiarly villainous looking, however, even in the dark), wearing ashort jacket; but on thinking it over, Gillis realized that he had beenwrong about the size of the criminal, and that he was even bigger, ifanything, than what Mr. Pupkin thought. Gillis had fired at the robber;just at the same moment had Mr. Pupkin. 

Beyond that, all was mystery, absolute and impenetrable. 

By eleven o'clock the detectives had come up from the city under ordersfrom the head of the bank. 

I wish you could have seen the two detectives as they moved to and froin Mariposa--fine looking, stern, impenetrable men that they were. Theyseemed to take in the whole town by instinct and so quietly. They foundtheir way to Mr. Smith's Hotel just as quietly as if it wasn't design atall and stood there at the bar, picking up scraps of conversation--youknow the way detectives do it. Occasionally they allowed one or twobystanders--confederates, perhaps, --to buy a drink for them, and youcould see from the way they drank it that they were still listening fora clue. If there had been the faintest clue in Smith's Hotel or in theMariposa House or in the Continental, those fellows would have been atit like a flash. 

To see them moving round the town that day--silent, massive, imperturbable--gave one a great idea of their strange, dangerouscalling. They went about the town all day and yet in such a quietpeculiar way that you couldn't have realized that they were working atall. They ate their dinner together at Smith's cafe and took an hour anda half over it to throw people off the scent. Then when they got themoff it, they sat and talked with Josh Smith in the back bar to keep themoff. Mr. Smith seemed to take to them right away. They were men of hisown size, or near it, and anyway hotel men and detectives have ageneral affinity and share in the same impenetrable silence and in theirconfidential knowledge of the weaknesses of the public. 

Mr. Smith, too, was of great use to the detectives. "Boys, " he said, "Iwouldn't ask too close as to what folks was out late at night: in thistown it don't do. "

When those two great brains finally left for the city on thefive-thirty, it was hard to realize that behind each grand, impassibleface a perfect vortex of clues was seething. 

But if the detectives were heroes, what was Pupkin? Imagine him withhis bandage on his head standing in front of the bank and talking of themidnight robbery with that peculiar false modesty that only heroes areentitled to use. 

I don't know whether you have ever been a hero, but for sheerexhilaration there is nothing like it. And for Mr. Pupkin, who had gonethrough life thinking himself no good, to be suddenly exalted into theclass of Napoleon Bonaparte and John Maynard and the Charge of the LightBrigade--oh, it was wonderful. Because Pupkin was a brave man now andhe knew it and acquired with it all the brave man's modesty. In fact, I believe he was heard to say that he had only done his duty, and thatwhat he did was what any other man would have done: though when somebodyelse said: "That's so, when you come to think of it, " Pupkin turned onhim that quiet look of the wounded hero, bitterer than words. 

And if Pupkin had known that all of the afternoon papers in the cityreported him dead, he would have felt more luxurious still. 

That afternoon the Mariposa court sat in enquiry, --technically it wassummoned in inquest on the dead robber--though they hadn't found thebody--and it was wonderful to see them lining up the witnesses andholding cross-examinations. There is something in the cross-examinationof great criminal lawyers like Nivens, of Mariposa, and in the counterexaminations of presiding judges like Pepperleigh that thrills you tothe core with the astuteness of it. 

They had Henry Mullins, the manager, on the stand for an hour and ahalf, and the excitement was so breathless that you could have heard apin drop. Nivens took him on first. 

"What is your name?" he said. 

"Henry August Mullins. "

"What position do you hold?"

"I am manager of the Exchange Bank. "

"When were you born?"

"December 30, 1869. "

After that, Nivens stood looking quietly at Mullins. You could feel thathe was thinking pretty deeply before he shot the next question at him. 

"Where did you go to school?"

Mullins answered straight off: "The high school down home, " and Nivensthought again for a while and then asked:

"How many boys were at the school?"

"About sixty. "

"How many masters?"

"About three. "

After that Nivens paused a long while and seemed to be digesting theevidence, but at last an idea seemed to strike him and he said:

"I understand you were not on the bank premises last night. Where wereyou?"

"Down the lake duck shooting. "

You should have seen the excitement in the court when Mullins said this. The judge leaned forward in his chair and broke in at once. 

"Did you get any, Harry?" he asked. 

"Yes, " Mullins said, "about six. "

"Where did you get them? What? In the wild rice marsh past the river?You don't say so! Did you get them on the sit or how?"

All of these questions were fired off at the witness from the court in asingle breath. In fact, it was the knowledge that the first ducks of theseason had been seen in the Ossawippi marsh that led to the terminationof the proceedings before the afternoon was a quarter over. Mullins andGeorge Duff and half the witnesses were off with shotguns as soon as thecourt was cleared. 

I may as well state at once that the full story of the robbery of thebank of Mariposa never came to the light. A number of arrests--mostlyof vagrants and suspicious characters--were made, but the guilt of therobbery was never brought home to them. One man was arrested twentymiles away, at the other end of Missinaba county, who not onlycorresponded exactly with the description of the robber, but, inaddition to this, had a wooden leg. Vagrants with one leg are alwaysregarded with suspicion in places like Mariposa, and whenever a robberyor a murder happens they are arrested in batches. 

It was never even known just how much money was stolen from the bank. Some people said ten thousand dollars, others more. The bank, no doubtfor business motives, claimed that the contents of the safe were intactand that the robber had been foiled in his design. 

But none of this matters to the exaltation of Mr. Pupkin. Good fortune, like bad, never comes in small instalments. On that wonderful day, everygood thing happened to Peter Pupkin at once. The morning saw him ahero. At the sitting of the court, the judge publicly told him that hisconduct was fit to rank among the annals of the pioneers of TecumsehTownship, and asked him to his house for supper. At five o'clock hereceived the telegram of promotion from the head office that raisedhis salary to a thousand dollars, and made him not only a hero but amarriageable man. At six o'clock he started up to the judge's house withhis resolution nerved to the most momentous step of his life. 

His mind was made up. 

He would do a thing seldom if ever done in Mariposa. He would propose toZena Pepperleigh. In Mariposa this kind of step, I say, is seldom taken. The course of love runs on and on through all its stages of tennisplaying and dancing and sleigh riding, till by sheer notoriety ofcircumstance an understanding is reached. To propose straight out wouldbe thought priggish and affected and is supposed to belong only topeople in books. 

But Pupkin felt that what ordinary people dare not do, heroes areallowed to attempt. He would propose to Zena, and more than that, hewould tell her in a straight, manly way that he was rich and take theconsequences. 

And he did it. 

That night on the piazza, where the hammock hangs in the shadow ofthe Virginia creeper, he did it. By sheer good luck the judge hadgone indoors to the library, and by a piece of rare good fortune Mrs. Pepperleigh had gone indoors to the sewing room, and by a happy trickof coincidence the servant was out and the dog was tied up--in fact, no such chain of circumstances was ever offered in favour of mortal manbefore. 

What Zena said--beyond saying yes--I do not know. I am sure that whenPupkin told her of the money, she bore up as bravely as so fine a girlas Zena would, and when he spoke of diamonds she said she would wearthem for his sake. 

They were saying these things and other things--ever so many otherthings--when there was such a roar and a clatter up Oneida Street asyou never heard, and there came bounding up to the house one of the mostmarvellous Limousine touring cars that ever drew up at the home of ajudge on a modest salary of three thousand dollars. When it stoppedthere sprang from it an excited man in a long sealskin coat--worn notfor the luxury of it at all but from the sheer chilliness of the autumnevening. And it was, as of course you know, Pupkin's father. He had seenthe news of his son's death in the evening paper in the city. They drovethe car through, so the chauffeur said, in two hours and a quarter, andbehind them there was to follow a special trainload of detectives andemergency men, but Pupkin senior had cancelled all that by telegram halfway up when he heard that Peter was still living. 

For a moment as his eye rested on young Pupkin you would almost haveimagined, had you not known that he came from the Maritime Provinces, that there were tears in them and that he was about to hug his son tohis heart. But if he didn't hug Peter to his heart, he certainly didwithin a few moments clasp Zena to it, in that fine fatherly way inwhich they clasp pretty girls in the Maritime Provinces. The strangestthing is that Pupkin senior seemed to understand the whole situationwithout any explanations at all. 

Judge Pepperleigh, I think, would have shaken both of Pupkin senior'sarms off when he saw him; and when you heard them call one another"Ned" and "Phillip" it made you feel that they were boys again attendingclasses together at the old law school in the city. 

If Pupkin thought that his father wouldn't make a hit in Mariposa, it only showed his ignorance. Pupkin senior sat there on the judge'sverandah smoking a corn cob pipe as if he had never heard of Havanacigars in his life. In the three days that he spent in Mariposa thatautumn, he went in and out of Jeff Thorpe's barber shop and Eliot's drugstore, shot black ducks in the marsh and played poker every evening ata hundred matches for a cent as if he had never lived any other life inall his days. They had to send him telegrams enough to fill a satchel tomake him come away. 

So Pupkin and Zena in due course of time were married, and went to livein one of the enchanted houses on the hillside in the newer part of thetown, where you may find them to this day. 

You may see Pupkin there at any time cutting enchanted grass on a littlelawn in as gaudy a blazer as ever. 

But if you step up to speak to him or walk with him into the enchantedhouse, pray modulate your voice a little musical though it is--for thereis said to be an enchanted baby on the premises whose sleep must notlightly be disturbed. 

TEN. The Great Election in Missinaba County

Don't ask me what election it was, whether Dominion or Provincial orImperial or Universal, for I scarcely know. 

It must, of course, have been going on in other parts of the countryas well, but I saw it all from Missinaba County which, with the town ofMariposa, was, of course, the storm centre and focus point of the wholeturmoil. 

I only know that it was a huge election and that on it turned issues ofthe most tremendous importance, such as whether or not Mariposa shouldbecome part of the United States, and whether the flag that had wavedover the school house at Tecumseh Township for ten centuries should betrampled under the hoof of an alien invader, and whether Britons shouldbe slaves, and whether Canadians should be Britons, and whether thefarming class would prove themselves Canadians, and tremendous questionsof that kind. 

And there was such a roar and a tumult to it, and such a waving of flagsand beating of drums and flaring of torchlights that such parts of theelection as may have been going on elsewhere than in Missinaba countymust have been quite unimportant and didn't really matter. 

Now that it is all over, we can look back at it without heat or passion. We can see, --it's plain enough now, --that in the great election Canadasaved the British Empire, and that Missinaba saved Canada and thatthe vote of the Third Concession of Tecumseh Township saved MissinabaCounty, and that those of us who carried the third concession, --well, there's no need to push it further. We prefer to be modest about it. Ifwe still speak of it, it is only quietly and simply and not more thanthree or four times a day. 

But you can't understand the election at all, and the conventions andthe campaigns and the nominations and the balloting, unless you firstappreciate the peculiar complexion of politics in Mariposa. 

Let me begin at the beginning. Everybody in Mariposa is either a Liberalor a Conservative or else is both. Some of the people are or havebeen Liberals or Conservatives all their lives and are calleddyed-in-the-wool Grits or old-time Tories and things of that sort. Thesepeople get from long training such a swift penetrating insight intonational issues that they can decide the most complicated question infour seconds: in fact, just as soon as they grab the city papers out ofthe morning mail, they know the whole solution of any problem you canput to them. There are other people whose aim it is to be broad-mindedand judicious and who vote Liberal or Conservative according to theirjudgment of the questions of the day. If their judgment of thesequestions tells them that there is something in it for them in votingLiberal, then they do so. But if not, they refuse to be the slaves of aparty or the henchmen of any political leader. So that anybody lookingfor henches has got to keep away from them. 

But the one thing that nobody is allowed to do in Mariposa is to haveno politics. Of course there are always some people whose circumstancescompel them to say that they have no politics. But that is easilyunderstood. Take the case of Trelawney, the postmaster. Long ago he wasa letter carrier under the old Mackenzie Government, and later he wasa letter sorter under the old Macdonald Government, and after that aletter stamper under the old Tupper Government, and so on. Trelawneyalways says that he has no politics, but the truth is that he has toomany. 

So, too, with the clergy in Mariposa. They have no politics--absolutelynone. Yet Dean Drone round election time always announces as his textsuch a verse as: "Lo! is there not one righteous man in Israel?" or:"What ho! is it not time for a change?" And that is a signal for all theLiberal business men to get up and leave their pews. 

Similarly over at the Presbyterian Church, the minister says that hissacred calling will not allow him to take part in politics and thathis sacred calling prevents him from breathing even a word of harshnessagainst his fellow man, but that when it comes to the elevation of theungodly into high places in the commonwealth (this means, of course, thenomination of the Conservative candidate) then he's not going to allowhis sacred calling to prevent him from saying just what he thinks ofit. And by that time, having pretty well cleared the church ofConservatives, he proceeds to show from the scriptures that the ancientHebrews were Liberals to a man, except those who were drowned in theflood or who perished, more or less deservedly, in the desert. 

There are, I say, some people who are allowed to claim to have nopolitics, --the office holders, and the clergy and the school teachersand the hotel keepers. But beyond them, anybody in Mariposa who saysthat he has no politics is looked upon as crooked, and people wonderwhat it is that he is "out after. "

In fact, the whole town and county is a hive of politics, and peoplewho have only witnessed gatherings such as the House of Commons atWestminster and the Senate at Washington and never seen a ConservativeConvention at Tecumseh Corners or a Liberal Rally at the Concessionschool house, don't know what politics means. 

So you may imagine the excitement in Mariposa when it became known thatKing George had dissolved the parliament of Canada and had sent out awrit or command for Missinaba County to elect for him some other personthan John Henry Bagshaw because he no longer had confidence in him. 

The king, of course, is very well known, very favourably known, inMariposa. Everybody remembers how he visited the town on his great tourin Canada, and stopped off at the Mariposa station. Although he was onlya prince at the time, there was quite a big crowd down at the depot andeverybody felt what a shame it was that the prince had no time to seemore of Mariposa, because he would get such a false idea of it, seeingonly the station and the lumber yards. Still, they all came to thestation and all the Liberals and Conservatives mixed together perfectlyfreely and stood side by side without any distinction, so that theprince should not observe any party differences among them. And hedidn't, --you could see that he didn't. They read him an address allabout the tranquillity and loyalty of the Empire, and they purposelyleft out any reference to the trouble over the town wharf or the big rowthere had been about the location of the new post-office. There was ageneral decent feeling that it wouldn't be fair to disturb the princewith these things: later on, as king, he would, of course, _have_ toknow all about them, but meanwhile it was better to leave him with theidea that his empire was tranquil. 

So they deliberately couched the address in terms that were just asreassuring as possible and the prince was simply delighted with it. Iam certain that he slept pretty soundly after hearing that address. Why, you could see it taking effect even on his aides-de-camp and the peopleround him, so imagine how the prince must have felt!

I think in Mariposa they understand kings perfectly. Every time thata king or a prince comes, they try to make him see the bright side ofeverything and let him think that they're all united. Judge Pepperleighwalked up and down arm in arm with Dr. Gallagher, the worst Grit in thetown, just to make the prince feel fine. 

So when they got the news that the king had lost confidence in JohnHenry Bagshaw, the sitting member, they never questioned it a bit. Lostconfidence? All right, they'd elect him another right away. They'd electhim half a dozen if he needed them. They don't mind; they'd elect thewhole town man after man rather than have the king worried about it. 

In any case, all the Conservatives had been wondering for years how theking and the governor-general and men like that had tolerated such a manas Bagshaw so long. 

Missinaba County, I say, is a regular hive of politics, and not themiserable, crooked, money-ridden politics of the cities, but thestraight, real old-fashioned thing that is an honour to the countryside. Any man who would offer to take a bribe or sell his convictionsfor money, would be an object of scorn. I don't say they wouldn't takemoney, --they would, of course, why not?--but if they did they wouldtake it in a straight fearless way and say nothing about it. Theymight, --it's only human, --accept a job or a contract from thegovernment, but if they did, rest assured it would be in a broadnational spirit and not for the sake of the work itself. No, sir. Notfor a minute. 

Any man who wants to get the votes of the Missinaba farmers and theMariposa business men has got to persuade them that he's the right man. If he can do that, --if he can persuade any one of them that he is theright man and that all the rest know it, then they'll vote for him. 

The division, I repeat, between the Liberals and the Conservatives, is intense. Yet you might live for a long while in the town, betweenelections, and never know it. It is only when you get to understandthe people that you begin to see that there is a cross division runningthrough them that nothing can ever remove. You gradually become aware offine subtle distinctions that miss your observation at first. Outwardly, they are all friendly enough. For instance, Joe Milligan the dentist isa Conservative, and has been for six years, and yet he shares the sameboat-house with young Dr. Gallagher, who is a Liberal, and they evenbought a motor boat between them. Pete Glover and Alf McNichol were inpartnership in the hardware and paint store, though they belonged ondifferent sides. 

But just as soon as elections drew near, the differences in politicsbecame perfectly apparent. Liberals and Conservatives drew away from oneanother. Joe Milligan used the motor boat one Saturday and Dr. Gallagherthe next, and Pete Glover sold hardware on one side of the store and AlfMcNichol sold paint on the other. You soon realized too that one of thenewspapers was Conservative and the other was Liberal, and that therewas a Liberal drug store and a Conservative drug store, and so on. Similarly round election time, the Mariposa House was the Liberal Hotel, and the Continental Conservative, though Mr. Smith's place, where theyalways put on a couple of extra bar tenders, was what you might callIndependent-Liberal-Conservative, with a dash of Imperialism thrown in. Mr. Gingham, the undertaker, was, as a natural effect of his calling, an advanced Liberal, but at election time he always engaged a specialassistant for embalming Conservative customers. 

So now, I think, you understand something of the general politicalsurroundings of the great election in Missinaba County. 

John Henry Bagshaw was the sitting member, the Liberal member, forMissinaba County. 

The Liberals called him the old war horse, and the old battle-axe, andthe old charger and the old champion and all sorts of things of thatkind. The Conservatives called him the old jackass and the old army muleand the old booze fighter and the old grafter and the old scoundrel. 

John Henry Bagshaw was, I suppose, one of the greatest political forcesin the world. He had flowing white hair crowned with a fedora hat, and asmooth statesmanlike face which it cost the country twenty-five cents aday to shave. 

Altogether the Dominion of Canada had spent over two thousand dollars inshaving that face during the twenty years that Bagshaw had representedMissinaba County. But the result had been well worth it. 

Bagshaw wore a long political overcoat that it cost the country twentycents a day to brush, and boots that cost the Dominion fifteen centsevery morning to shine. 

But it was money well spent. 

Bagshaw of Mariposa was one of the most representative men of the age, and it's no wonder that he had been returned for the county for fiveelections running, leaving the Conservatives nowhere. Just think howrepresentative he was. He owned two hundred acres out on the ThirdConcession and kept two men working on it all the time to prove that hewas a practical farmer. They sent in fat hogs to the Missinaba CountyAgricultural Exposition and the World's Fair every autumn, and Bagshawhimself stood beside the pig pens with the judges, and wore a pair ofcorduroy breeches and chewed a straw all afternoon. After that if anyfarmer thought that he was not properly represented in Parliament, itshowed that he was an ass. 

Bagshaw owned a half share in the harness business and a quarter sharein the tannery and that made him a business man. He paid for a pew inthe Presbyterian Church and that represented religion in Parliament. Heattended college for two sessions thirty years ago, and that representededucation and kept him abreast with modern science, if not ahead of it. He kept a little account in one bank and a big account in the other, sothat he was a rich man or a poor man at the same time. 

Add to that that John Henry Bagshaw was perhaps the finest orator inMariposa. That, of course, is saying a great deal. There are speakersthere, lots of them that can talk two or three hours at a stretch, butthe old war horse could beat them all. They say that when John HenryBagshaw got well started, say after a couple of hours of talk, he couldspeak as Pericles or Demosthenes or Cicero never could have spoken. 

You could tell Bagshaw a hundred yards off as a member of the Houseof Commons. He wore a pepper-and-salt suit to show that he came from arural constituency, and he wore a broad gold watch-chain with danglingseals to show that he also represents a town. You could see from hisquiet low collar and white tie that his electorate were a Godfearing, religious people, while the horseshoe pin that he wore showed that hiselectorate were not without sporting instincts and knew a horse from ajackass. 

Most of the time, John Henry Bagshaw had to be at Ottawa (though hepreferred the quiet of his farm and always left it, as he said, with asigh). If he was not in Ottawa, he was in Washington, and of course atany time they might need him in London, so that it was no wonder that hecould only be in Mariposa about two months of the year. 

That is why everybody knew, when Bagshaw got off the afternoon trainone day early in the spring, that there must be something very importantcoming and that the rumours about a new election must be perfectly true. 

Everything that he did showed this. He gave the baggage man twenty-fivecents to take the check off his trunk, the 'bus driver fifty cents todrive him up to the Main Street, and he went into Callahan's tobaccostore and bought two ten-cent cigars and took them across the street andgave them to Mallory Tompkins of the Times-Herald as a present from thePrime Minister. 

All that afternoon, Bagshaw went up and down the Main Street ofMariposa, and you could see, if you knew the signs of it, that there waspolitics in the air. He bought nails and putty and glass in the hardwarestore, and harness in the harness shop, and drugs in the drug store andtoys in the toy shop, and all the things like that that are needed for abig campaign. 

Then when he had done all this he went over with McGinnis the Liberalorganizer and Mallory Tompkins, the Times-Herald man, and Gingham(the great Independent-Liberal undertaker) to the back parlour in theMariposa House. 

You could tell from the way John Henry Bagshaw closed the door before hesat down that he was in a pretty serious frame of mind. 

"Gentlemen, " he said, "the election is a certainty. We're going to havea big fight on our hands and we've got to get ready for it. "

"Is it going to be on the tariff?" asked Tompkins. 

"Yes, gentlemen, I'm afraid it is. The whole thing is going to turn onthe tariff question. I wish it were otherwise. I think it madness, butthey're bent on it, and we got to fight it on that line. Why they can'tfight it merely on the question of graft, " continued the old war horse, rising from his seat and walking up and down, "Heaven only knows. Iwarned them. I appealed to them. I said, fight the thing on graft and wecan win easy. Take this constituency, --why not have fought the thing outon whether I spent too much money on the town wharf or the post-office?What better issues could a man want? Let them claim that I am crookedand let me claim that I'm not. Surely that was good enough withoutdragging in the tariff. But now, gentlemen, tell me about things in theconstituency. Is there any talk yet of who is to run?"

Mallory Tompkins lighted up the second of his Prime Minister's cigarsand then answered for the group:

"Everybody says that Edward Drone is going to run. "

"Ah!" said the old war horse, and there was joy upon his face, "is he?At last! That's good, that's good--now what platform will he run on?"

"Independent. "

"Excellent, " said Mr. Bagshaw. "Independent, that's fine. On a programmeof what?"

"Just simple honesty and public morality. "

"Come now, " said the member, "that's splendid: that will helpenormously. Honesty and public morality! The very thing! If Drone runsand makes a good showing, we win for a certainty. Tompkins, you mustlose no time over this. Can't you manage to get some articles in theother papers hinting that at the last election we bribed all the votersin the county, and that we gave out enough contracts to simply pervertthe whole constituency. Imply that we poured the public money into thiscounty in bucketsful and that we are bound to do it again. Let Dronehave plenty of material of this sort and he'll draw off every honestunbiased vote in the Conservative party. 

"My only fear is, " continued the old war horse, losing some of hisanimation, "that Drone won't run after all. He's said it so oftenbefore and never has. He hasn't got the money. But we must see to that. Gingham, you know his brother well; you must work it so that we payDrone's deposit and his campaign expenses. But how like Drone it is tocome out at this time!"

It was indeed very like Edward Drone to attempt so misguided a thing asto come out an Independent candidate in Missinaba County on a platformof public honesty. It was just the sort of thing that anyone in Mariposawould expect from him. 

Edward Drone was the Rural Dean's younger brother, --young Mr. Drone, they used to call him, years ago, to distinguish him from the rector. He was a somewhat weaker copy of his elder brother, with a simple, inefficient face and kind blue eyes. Edward Drone was, and always hadbeen, a failure. In training he had been, once upon a time, an engineerand built dams that broke and bridges that fell down and wharves thatfloated away in the spring floods. He had been a manufacturer andfailed, had been a contractor and failed, and now lived a meagre life asa sort of surveyor or land expert on goodness knows what. 

In his political ideas Edward Drone was and, as everybody in Mariposaknew, always had been crazy. He used to come up to the autumn exercisesat the high school and make speeches about the ancient Romans and TitusManlius and Quintus Curtius at the same time when John Henry Bagshawused to make a speech about the Maple Leaf and ask for an extra halfholiday. Drone used to tell the boys about the lessons to be learnedfrom the lives of the truly great, and Bagshaw used to talk to themabout the lessons learned from the lives of the extremely rich. Droneused to say that his heart filled whenever he thought of the splendidpatriotism of the ancient Romans, and Bagshaw said that whenever helooked out over this wide Dominion his heart overflowed. 

Even the youngest boy in the school could tell that Drone was foolish. Not even the school teachers would have voted for him. 

"What about the Conservatives?" asked Bagshaw presently; "is there anytalk yet as to who they'll bring out?" Gingham and Mallory Tompkinslooked at one another. They were almost afraid to speak. 

"Hadn't you heard?" said Gingham; "they've got their man already. "

"Who is it?" said Bagshaw quickly. "They're going to put up Josh Smith. "

"Great Heaven!" said Bagshaw, jumping to his feet; "Smith! the hotelkeeper. "

"Yes, sir, " said Mr. Gingham, "that's the man. "

Do you remember, in history, how Napoleon turned pale when he heardthat the Duke of Wellington was to lead the allies in Belgium? Do youremember how when Themistocles heard that Aristogiton was to lead theSpartans, he jumped into the sea? Possibly you don't, but it may helpyou to form some idea of what John Henry Bagshaw felt when he heard thatthe Conservatives had selected Josh Smith, proprietor of Smith's Hotel. 

You remember Smith. You've seen him there on the steps of hishotel, --two hundred and eighty pounds in his stockinged feet. You'veseen him selling liquor after hours through sheer public spirit, and yourecall how he saved the lives of hundreds of people on the day when thesteamer sank, and how he saved the town from being destroyed the nightwhen the Church of England Church burnt down. You know that hotel ofhis, too, half way down the street, Smith's Northern Health Resort, though already they were beginning to call it Smith's British Arms. 

So you can imagine that Bagshaw came as near to turning pale as a man infederal politics can. 

"I never knew Smith was a Conservative, " he said faintly; "he alwayssubscribed to our fund. "

"He is now, " said Mr. Gingham ominously; "he says the idea of thisreciprocity business cuts him to the heart. "

"The infernal liar!" said Mr. Bagshaw. 

There was silence for a few moments. Then Bagshaw spoke again. 

"Will Smith have anything else in his platform besides the tradequestion?"

"Yes, " said Mr. Gingham gloomily, "he will. "

"What is it?"

"Temperance and total prohibition!"

John Henry Bagshaw sank back in his chair as if struck with a club. There let me leave him for a chapter. 

ELEVEN. The Candidacy of Mr. Smith

"Boys, " said Mr. Smith to the two hostlers, stepping out on to thesidewalk in front of the hotel, --"hoist that there British Jack over theplace and hoist her up good. "

Then he stood and watched the flag fluttering in the wind. 

"Billy, " he said to the desk clerk, "get a couple more and put them upon the roof of the caff behind the hotel. Wire down to the city and geta quotation on a hundred of them. Take them signs 'American Drinks' outof the bar. Put up noo ones with 'British Beer at all Hours'; clear outthe rye whiskey and order in Scotch and Irish, and then go up to theprinting office and get me them placards. "

Then another thought struck Mr. Smith. 

"Say, Billy, " he said, "wire to the city for fifty pictures of KingGeorge. Get 'em good, and get 'em coloured. It don't matter what theycost. "

"All right, sir, " said Billy. 

"And Billy, " called Mr. Smith, as still another thought struck him(indeed, the moment Mr. Smith went into politics you could see thesethoughts strike him like waves), "get fifty pictures of his father, oldKing Albert. "

"All right, sir. "

"And say, I tell you, while you're at it, get some of the old queen, Victorina, if you can. Get 'em in mourning, with a harp and one of themlions and a three-pointed prong. "

It was on the morning after the Conservative Convention. Josh Smith hadbeen chosen the candidate. And now the whole town was covered with flagsand placards and there were bands in the streets every evening, andnoise and music and excitement that went on from morning till night. 

Election times are exciting enough even in the city. But there theexcitement dies down in business hours. In Mariposa there aren't anybusiness hours and the excitement goes on _all_ the time. 

Mr. Smith had carried the Convention before him. There had been a feebleattempt to put up Nivens. But everybody knew that he was a lawyer and acollege man and wouldn't have a chance by a man with a broader outlooklike Josh Smith. 

So the result was that Smith was the candidate and there were placardsout all over the town with SMITH AND BRITISH ALLEGIANCE in big letters, and people were wearing badges with Mr. Smith's face on one side andKing George's on the other, and the fruit store next to the hotel hadbeen cleaned out and turned into committee rooms with a gang of workerssmoking cigars in it all day and half the night. 

There were other placards, too, with BAGSHAW AND LIBERTY, BAGSHAW ANDPROSPERITY, VOTE FOR THE OLD MISSINABA STANDARD BEARER, and up townbeside the Mariposa House there were the Bagshaw committee rooms witha huge white streamer across the street, and with a gang of Bagshawworkers smoking their heads off. 

But Mr. Smith had an estimate made which showed that nearly two cigarsto one were smoked in his committee rooms as compared with the Liberals. It was the first time in five elections that the Conservative had beenable to make such a showing as that. 

One might mention, too, that there were Drone placards out, --five or sixof them, --little things about the size of a pocket handkerchief, with astatement that "Mr. Edward Drone solicits the votes of the electors ofMissinaba County. " But you would never notice them. And when Drone triedto put up a streamer across the Main Street with DRONE AND HONESTY thewind carried it away into the lake. 

The fight was really between Smith and Bagshaw, and everybody knew itfrom the start. 

I wish that I were able to narrate all the phases and the turns of thegreat contest from the opening of the campaign till the final pollingday. But it would take volumes. 

First of all, of course, the trade question was hotly discussed in thetwo newspapers of Mariposa, and the Newspacket and the Times-Heraldliterally bristled with statistics. Then came interviews with thecandidates and the expression of their convictions in regard to tariffquestions. 

"Mr. Smith, " said the reporter of the Mariposa Newspacket, "we'd liketo get your views of the effect of the proposed reduction of thedifferential duties. "

"By gosh, Pete, " said Mr. Smith, "you can search me. Have a cigar. "

"What do you think, Mr. Smith, would be the result of lowering the _advalorem_ British preference and admitting American goods at a reciprocalrate?"

"It's a corker, ain't it?" answered Mr. Smith. "What'll you take, lageror domestic?"

And in that short dialogue Mr. Smith showed that he had instantaneouslygrasped the whole method of dealing with the press. The interview in thepaper next day said that Mr. Smith, while unwilling to state positivelythat the principle of tariff discrimination was at variance with soundfiscal science, was firmly of opinion that any reciprocal interchangeof tariff preferences with the United States must inevitably lead to aserious per capita reduction of the national industry. 

"Mr. Smith, " said the chairman of a delegation of the manufacturers ofMariposa, "what do you propose to do in regard to the tariff if you'reelected?"

"Boys, " answered Mr. Smith, "I'll put her up so darned high they won'tnever get her down again. "

"Mr. Smith, " said the chairman of another delegation, "I'm an old freetrader--"

"Put it there, " said Mr. Smith, "so'm I. There ain't nothing like it. "

"What do you think about imperial defence?" asked another questioner. 

"Which?" said Mr. Smith. 

"Imperial defence. "

"Of what?"

"Of everything. "

"Who says it?" said Mr. Smith. 

"Everybody is talking of it. "

"What do the Conservative boys at Ottaway think about it?" answered Mr. Smith. 

"They're all for it. "

"Well, I'm fer it too, " said Mr. Smith. 

These little conversations represented only the first stage, theargumentative stage of the great contest. It was during this period, forexample, that the Mariposa Newspacket absolutely proved that the priceof hogs in Mariposa was decimal six higher than the price of oranges inSouthern California and that the average decennial import of eggs intoMissinaba County had increased four decimal six eight two in the lastfifteen years more than the import of lemons in New Orleans. 

Figures of this kind made the people think. Most certainly. 

After all this came the organizing stage and after that the big publicmeetings and the rallies. Perhaps you have never seen a county being"organized. " It is a wonderful sight. 

First of all the Bagshaw men drove through crosswise in top buggies andthen drove through it again lengthwise. Whenever they met a farmer theywent in and ate a meal with him, and after the meal they took him out tothe buggy and gave him a drink. After that the man's vote was absolutelysolid until it was tampered with by feeding a Conservative. 

In fact, the only way to show a farmer that you are in earnest is to goin and eat a meal with him. If you won't eat it, he won't vote for you. That is the recognized political test. 

But, of course, just as soon as the Bagshaw men had begun to get thefarming vote solidified, the Smith buggies came driving through in theother direction, eating meals and distributing cigars and turning allthe farmers back into Conservatives. 

Here and there you might see Edward Drone, the Independent candidate, wandering round from farm to farm in the dust of the political buggies. To each of the farmers he explained that he pledged himself to give nobribes, to spend no money and to offer no jobs, and each one of themgripped him warmly by the hand and showed him the way to the next farm. 

After the organization of the county there came the period of the publicmeetings and the rallies and the joint debates between the candidatesand their supporters. 

I suppose there was no place in the whole Dominion where the tradequestion--the Reciprocity question--was threshed out quite so thoroughlyand in quite such a national patriotic spirit as in Mariposa. For amonth, at least, people talked of nothing else. A man would stop anotherin the street and tell him that he had read last night that the averageprice of an egg in New York was decimal ought one more than the price ofan egg in Mariposa, and the other man would stop the first one later inthe day and tell him that the average price of a hog in Idaho was pointsix of a cent per pound less (or more, --he couldn't remember which forthe moment) than the average price of beef in Mariposa. 

People lived on figures of this sort, and the man who could remembermost of them stood out as a born leader. 

But of course it was at the public meetings that these things were mostfully discussed. It would take volumes to do full justice to all themeetings that they held in Missinaba County. But here and there singlespeeches stood out as masterpieces of convincing oratory. Take, forexample, the speech of John Henry Bagshaw at the Tecumseh Corners SchoolHouse. The Mariposa Times-Herald said next day that that speech would godown in history, and so it will, --ever so far down. 

Anyone who has heard Bagshaw knows what an impressive speaker he is, andon this night when he spoke with the quiet dignity of a man old in yearsand anxious only to serve his country, he almost surpassed himself. Nearthe end of his speech somebody dropped a pin, and the noise it made infalling fairly rattled the windows. 

"I am an old man now, gentlemen, " Bagshaw said, "and the time must sooncome when I must not only leave politics, but must take my way towardsthat goal from which no traveller returns. "

There was a deep hush when Bagshaw said this. It was understood to implythat he thought of going to the United States. 

"Yes, gentlemen, I am an old man, and I wish, when my time comes to go, to depart leaving as little animosity behind me as possible. But beforeI _do_ go, I want it pretty clearly understood that there are more darnscoundrels in the Conservative party than ought to be tolerated in anydecent community. I bear, " he continued, "malice towards none and I wishto speak with gentleness to all, but what I will say is that how anyset of rational responsible men could nominate such a skunk as theConservative candidate passes the bounds of my comprehension. Gentlemen, in the present campaign there is no room for vindictive abuse. Let usrise to a higher level than that. They tell me that my opponent, Smith, is a common saloon keeper. Let it pass. They tell me that he has stoodconvicted of horse stealing, that he is a notable perjurer, that he isknown as the blackest-hearted liar in Missinaba County. Let us not speakof it. Let no whisper of it pass our lips. 

"No, gentlemen, " continued Bagshaw, pausing to take a drink of water, "let us rather consider this question on the high plane of nationalwelfare. Let us not think of our own particular interests but letus consider the good of the country at large. And to do this, let mepresent to you some facts in regard to the price of barley in TecumsehTownship. "

Then, amid a deep stillness, Bagshaw read off the list of prices ofsixteen kinds of grain in sixteen different places during sixteen years. 

"But let me turn, " Bagshaw went on to another phase of the nationalsubject, "and view for a moment the price of marsh hay in MissinabaCounty--"

When Bagshaw sat down that night it was felt that a Liberal vote inTecumseh Township was a foregone conclusion. 

But here they hadn't reckoned on the political genius of Mr. Smith. When he heard next day of the meeting, he summoned some of his leadingspeakers to him and he said:

"Boys, they're beating us on them statissicks. Ourn ain't good enough. "

Then he turned to Nivens and he said:

"What was them figures you had here the other night?"

Nivens took out a paper and began reading. 

"Stop, " said Mr. Smith, "what was that figure for bacon?"

"Fourteen million dollars, " said Nivens. 

"Not enough, " said Mr. Smith, "make it twenty. They'll stand for it, them farmers. "

Nivens changed it. 

"And what was that for hay?"

"Two dollars a ton. "

"Shove it up to four, " said Mr. Smith: "And I tell you, " he added, "ifany of them farmers says the figures ain't correct, tell them to go toWashington and see for themselves; say that if any man wants the proofof your figures let him go over to England and ask, --tell him to gostraight to London and see it all for himself in the books. "

After this, there was no more trouble over statistics. I must say thoughthat it is a wonderfully convincing thing to hear trade figures of thiskind properly handled. Perhaps the best man on this sort of thing in thecampaign was Mullins, the banker. A man of his profession simply has tohave figures of trade and population and money at his fingers' ends andthe effect of it in public speaking is wonderful. 

No doubt you have listened to speakers of this kind, but I questionwhether you have ever heard anything more typical of the sort of effectthat I allude to than Mullins's speech at the big rally at the FourthConcession. 

Mullins himself, of course, knows the figures so well that he neverbothers to write them into notes and the effect is very striking. 

"Now, gentlemen, " he said very earnestly, "how many of you know just towhat extent the exports of this country have increased in the last tenyears? How many could tell what per cent. Of increase there has been inone decade of our national importation?"--then Mullins paused and lookedround. Not a man knew it. 

"I don't recall, " he said, "exactly the precise amount myself, --not atthis moment, --but it must be simply tremendous. Or take the question ofpopulation, " Mullins went on, warming up again as a born statisticianalways does at the proximity of figures, "how many of you know, how manyof you can state, what has been the decennial percentage increase in ourleading cities--?"

There he paused, and would you believe it, not a man could state it. 

"I don't recall the exact figures, " said Mullins, "but I have them athome and they are positively colossal. "

But just in one phase of the public speaking, the candidacy of Mr. Smithreceived a serious set-back. 

It had been arranged that Mr. Smith should run on a platform of totalprohibition. But they soon found that it was a mistake. They hadimported a special speaker from the city, a grave man with a white tie, who put his whole heart into the work and would take nothing for itexcept his expenses and a sum of money for each speech. But beyond themoney, I say, he would take nothing. 

He spoke one night at the Tecumseh Corners social hall at the same timewhen the Liberal meeting was going on at the Tecumseh Corners schoolhouse. 

"Gentlemen, " he said, as he paused half way in his speech, --"while weare gathered here in earnest discussion, do you know what is happeningover at the meeting place of our opponents? Do you know that seventeenbottles of rye whiskey were sent out from the town this afternoonto that innocent and unsuspecting school house? Seventeen bottles ofwhiskey hidden in between the blackboard and the wall, and every singleman that attends that meeting, --mark my words, every single man, --willdrink his fill of the abominable stuff at the expense of the Liberalcandidate!"

Just as soon as the speaker said this, you could see the Smith men atthe meeting look at one another in injured surprise, and before thespeech was half over the hall was practically emptied. 

After that the total prohibition plank was changed and the committeesubstituted a declaration in favour of such a form of restrictivelicense as should promote temperance while encouraging the manufactureof spirituous liquors, and by a severe regulation of the liquor trafficshould place intoxicants only in the hands of those fitted to use them. 

Finally there came the great day itself, the Election Day that brought, as everybody knows, the crowning triumph of Mr. Smith's career. There isno need to speak of it at any length, because it has become a matter ofhistory. 

In any case, everybody who has ever seen Mariposa knows just whatelection day is like. The shops, of course, are, as a matter of custom, all closed, and the bar rooms are all closed by law so that you have togo in by the back way. All the people are in their best clothes and atfirst they walk up and down the street in a solemn way just as they doon the twelfth of July and on St. Patrick's Day, before the fun begins. Everybody keeps looking in at the different polling places to see ifanybody else has voted yet, because, of course, nobody cares to votefirst for fear of being fooled after all and voting on the wrong side. 

Most of all did the supporters of Mr. Smith, acting under hisinstructions, hang back from the poll in the early hours. To Mr. Smith'smind, voting was to be conducted on the same plan as bear-shooting. 

"Hold back your votes, boys, " he said, "and don't be too eager. Waittill she begins to warm up and then let 'em have it good and hard. "

In each of the polling places in Mariposa there is a returning officerand with him are two scrutineers, and the electors, I say, peep in andout like mice looking into a trap. But if once the scrutineers get a manwell into the polling booth, they push him in behind a little curtainand make him vote. The voting, of course, is by secret ballot, so thatno one except the scrutineers and the returning officer and the two orthree people who may be round the poll can possibly tell how a man hasvoted. 

That's how it comes about that the first results are often socontradictory and conflicting. Sometimes the poll is badly arrangedand the scrutineers are unable to see properly just how the ballotsare being marked and they count up the Liberals and Conservatives indifferent ways. Often, too, a voter makes his mark so hurriedly andcarelessly that they have to pick it out of the ballot box and look atit to see what it is. 

I suppose that may have been why it was that in Mariposa the resultscame out at first in such a conflicting way. Perhaps that was how itwas that the first reports showed that Edward Drone the Independentcandidate was certain to win. You should have seen how the excitementgrew upon the streets when the news was circulated. In the big ralliesand meetings of the Liberals and Conservatives, everybody had prettywell forgotten all about Drone, and when the news got round at aboutfour o'clock that the Drone vote was carrying the poll, the people weresimply astounded. Not that they were not pleased. On the contrary. They were delighted. Everybody came up to Drone and shook hands andcongratulated him and told him that they had known all along that whatthe country wanted was a straight, honest, non-partisan representation. The Conservatives said openly that they were sick of party, utterly donewith it, and the Liberals said that they hated it. Already three or fourof them had taken Drone aside and explained that what was needed in thetown was a straight, clean, non-partisan post-office, built on a pieceof ground of a strictly non-partisan character, and constructed undercontracts that were not tainted and smirched with party affiliation. Twoor three men were willing to show to Drone just where a piece of groundof this character could be bought. They told him too that in the matterof the postmastership itself they had nothing against Trelawney, thepresent postmaster, in any personal sense, and would say nothing againsthim except merely that he was utterly and hopelessly unfit for his joband that if Drone believed, as he had said he did, in a purified civilservice, he ought to begin by purifying Trelawney. 

Already Edward Drone was beginning to feel something of what it meantto hold office and there was creeping into his manner the quietself-importance which is the first sign of conscious power. 

In fact, in that brief half-hour of office, Drone had a chance tosee something of what it meant. Henry McGinnis came to him and askedstraight out for a job as federal census-taker on the ground that hewas hard up and had been crippled with rheumatism all winter. NelsonWilliamson asked for the post of wharf master on the plea that hehad been laid up with sciatica all winter and was absolutely fit fornothing. Erasmus Archer asked him if he could get his boy Pete into oneof the departments at Ottawa, and made a strong case of it by explainingthat he had tried his cussedest to get Pete a job anywhere else and itwas simply impossible. Not that Pete wasn't a willing boy, but he wasslow, --even his father admitted it, --slow as the devil, blast him, andwith no head for figures and unfortunately he'd never had the schoolingto bring him on. But if Drone could get him in at Ottawa, his fathertruly believed it would be the very place for him. Surely in the IndianDepartment or in the Astronomical Branch or in the New Canadian Navythere must be any amount of opening for a boy like this? And to all ofthese requests Drone found himself explaining that he would take thematter under his very earnest consideration and that they must rememberthat he had to consult his colleagues and not merely follow the dictatesof his own wishes. In fact, if he had ever in his life had any envy ofCabinet Ministers, he lost it in this hour. 

But Drone's hour was short. Even before the poll had closed in Mariposa, the news came sweeping in, true or false, that Bagshaw was carryingthe county. The second concession had gone for Bagshaw in a regularlandslide, six votes to only two for Smith, --and all down the townshipline road (where the hay farms are) Bagshaw was said to be carrying allbefore him. 

Just as soon as that news went round the town, they launched theMariposa band of the Knights of Pythias (every man in it is a Liberal)down the Main Street with big red banners in front of it with the mottoBAGSHAW FOREVER in letters a foot high. Such rejoicing and enthusiasmbegan to set in as you never saw. Everybody crowded round Bagshaw on thesteps of the Mariposa House and shook his hand and said they were proudto see the day and that the Liberal party was the glory of the Dominionand that as for this idea of non-partisan politics the very thoughtof it made them sick. Right away in the committee rooms they beganto organize the demonstration for the evening with lantern slides andspeeches and they arranged for a huge bouquet to be presented to Bagshawon the platform by four little girls (all Liberals) all dressed inwhite. 

And it was just at this juncture, with one hour of voting left, thatMr. Smith emerged from his committee rooms and turned his voters on thetown, much as the Duke of Wellington sent the whole line to the chargeat Waterloo. From every committee room and sub-committee room theypoured out in flocks with blue badges fluttering on their coats. 

"Get at it, boys, " said Mr. Smith, "vote and keep on voting till theymake you quit. "

Then he turned to his campaign assistant. "Billy, " he said, "wire downto the city that I'm elected by an overwhelming majority and tell themto wire it right back. Send word by telephone to all the polling placesin the county that the hull town has gone solid Conservative and tellthem to send the same news back here. Get carpenters and tell them torun up a platform in front of the hotel; tell them to take the bar doorclean off its hinges and be all ready the minute the poll quits. "

It was that last hour that did it. Just as soon as the big posterswent up in the windows of the Mariposa Newspacket with the telegraphicdespatch that Josh Smith was reported in the city to be elected, and wasfollowed by the messages from all over the county, the voters hesitatedno longer. They had waited, most of them, all through the day, notwanting to make any error in their vote, but when they saw the Smith mencrowding into the polls and heard the news from the outside, they wentsolid in one great stampede, and by the time the poll was declaredclosed at five o'clock there was no shadow of doubt that the county wassaved and that Josh Smith was elected for Missinaba. 

I wish you could have witnessed the scene in Mariposa that evening. Itwould have done your heart good, --such joy, such public rejoicing as younever saw. It turned out that there wasn't really a Liberal in the wholetown and that there never had been. They were all Conservatives and hadbeen for years and years. Men who had voted, with pain and sorrow intheir hearts, for the Liberal party for twenty years, came out thatevening and owned up straight that they were Conservatives. Theysaid they could stand the strain no longer and simply had to confess. Whatever the sacrifice might mean, they were prepared to make it. 

Even Mr. Golgotha Gingham, the undertaker, came out and admitted thatin working for John Henry Bagshaw he'd been going straight against hisconscience. He said that right from the first he had had his misgivings. He said it had haunted him. Often at night when he would be working awayquietly, one of these sudden misgivings would overcome him so that hecould hardly go on with his embalming. Why, it appeared that on the veryfirst day when reciprocity was proposed, he had come home and said toMrs. Gingham that he thought it simply meant selling out the country. And the strange thing was that ever so many others had just the samemisgivings. Trelawney admitted that he had said to Mrs. Trelawney thatit was madness, and Jeff Thorpe, the barber, had, he admitted, gone hometo his dinner, the first day reciprocity was talked of, and said to Mrs. Thorpe that it would simply kill business in the country and introducea cheap, shoddy, American form of haircut that would render true loyaltyimpossible. To think that Mrs. Gingham and Mrs. Trelawney and Mrs. Thorpe had known all this for six months and kept quiet about it! Yet Ithink there were a good many Mrs. Ginghams in the country. It is merelyanother proof that no woman is fit for politics. 

The demonstration that night in Mariposa will never be forgotten. Theexcitement in the streets, the torchlights, the music of the band ofthe Knights of Pythias (an organization which is conservative in all butname), and above all the speeches and the patriotism. 

They had put up a big platform in front of the hotel, and on it wereMr. Smith and his chief workers, and behind them was a perfect forest offlags. They presented a huge bouquet of flowers to Mr. Smith, handed tohim by four little girls in white, --the same four that I spoke of above, for it turned out that they were all Conservatives. 

Then there were the speeches. Judge Pepperleigh spoke and said thatthere was no need to dwell on the victory that they had achieved, because it was history; there was no occasion to speak of what part hehimself had played, within the limits of his official position, becausewhat he had done was henceforth a matter of history; and Nivens, thelawyer, said that he would only say just a few words, because anythingthat he might have done was now history; later generations, he said, might read it but it was not for him to speak of it, because it belongednow to the history of the country. And, after them, others spoke in thesame strain and all refused absolutely to dwell on the subject (for morethan half an hour) on the ground that anything that they might have donewas better left for future generations to investigate. And no doubt thiswas very true, as to some things, anyway. 

Mr. Smith, of course, said nothing. He didn't have to, --not for fouryears, --and he knew it. 

TWELVE. L'Envoi. The Train to Mariposa

It leaves the city every day about five o'clock in the evening, thetrain for Mariposa. 

Strange that you did not know of it, though you come from the littletown--or did, long years ago. 

Odd that you never knew, in all these years, that the train was thereevery afternoon, puffing up steam in the city station, and that youmight have boarded it any day and gone home. No, not "home, "--of courseyou couldn't call it "home" now; "home" means that big red sandstonehouse of yours in the costlier part of the city. "Home" means, in a way, this Mausoleum Club where you sometimes talk with me of the times thatyou had as a boy in Mariposa. 

But of course "home" would hardly be the word you would apply to thelittle town, unless perhaps, late at night, when you'd been sittingreading in a quiet corner somewhere such a book as the present one. 

Naturally you don't know of the Mariposa train now. Years ago, when youfirst came to the city as a boy with your way to make, you knew of itwell enough, only too well. The price of a ticket counted in those days, and though you knew of the train you couldn't take it, but sometimesfrom sheer homesickness you used to wander down to the station on aFriday afternoon after your work, and watch the Mariposa people gettingon the train and wish that you could go. 

Why, you knew that train at one time better, I suppose, than any othersingle thing in the city, and loved it too for the little town in thesunshine that it ran to. 

Do you remember how when you first began to make money you used to planthat just as soon as you were rich, really rich, you'd go back homeagain to the little town and build a great big house with a fineverandah, --no stint about it, the best that money could buy, planedlumber, every square foot of it, and a fine picket fence in front of it. 

It was to be one of the grandest and finest houses that thoughtcould conceive; much finer, in true reality, than that vast palace ofsandstone with the porte cochere and the sweeping conservatories thatyou afterwards built in the costlier part of the city. 

But if you have half forgotten Mariposa, and long since lost the way toit, you are only like the greater part of the men here in this MausoleumClub in the city. Would you believe it that practically every one ofthem came from Mariposa once upon a time, and that there isn't one ofthem that doesn't sometimes dream in the dull quiet of the long eveninghere in the club, that some day he will go back and see the place. 

They all do. Only they're half ashamed to own it. 

Ask your neighbour there at the next table whether the partridge thatthey sometimes serve to you here can be compared for a moment to thebirds that he and you, or he and some one else, used to shoot as boys inthe spruce thickets along the lake. Ask him if he ever tasted duck thatcould for a moment be compared to the black ducks in the rice marshalong the Ossawippi. And as for fish, and fishing, --no, don't ask himabout that, for if he ever starts telling you of the chub they usedto catch below the mill dam and the green bass that used to lie in thewater-shadow of the rocks beside the Indian's Island, not even the longdull evening in this club would be long enough for the telling of it. 

But no wonder they don't know about the five o'clock train for Mariposa. Very few people know about it. Hundreds of them know that there is atrain that goes out at five o'clock, but they mistake it. Ever so manyof them think it's just a suburban train. Lots of people that take itevery day think it's only the train to the golf grounds, but the jokeis that after it passes out of the city and the suburbs and the golfgrounds, it turns itself little by little into the Mariposa train, thundering and pounding towards the north with hemlock sparks pouringout into the darkness from the funnel of it. 

Of course you can't tell it just at first. All those people that arecrowding into it with golf clubs, and wearing knickerbockers and flatcaps, would deceive anybody. That crowd of suburban people going homeon commutation tickets and sometimes standing thick in the aisles, thoseare, of course, not Mariposa people. But look round a little bit andyou'll find them easily enough. Here and there in the crowd those peoplewith the clothes that are perfectly all right and yet look odd in someway, the women with the peculiar hats and the--what do you say?--lastyear's fashions? Ah yes, of course, that must be it. 

Anyway, those are the Mariposa people all right enough. That man withthe two-dollar panama and the glaring spectacles is one of the greatestjudges that ever adorned the bench of Missinaba County. That clericalgentleman with the wide black hat, who is explaining to the man withhim the marvellous mechanism of the new air brake (one of the mostconspicuous illustrations of the divine structure of the physicaluniverse), surely you have seen him before. Mariposa people! Oh yes, there are any number of them on the train every day. 

But of course you hardly recognize them while the train is still passingthrough the suburbs and the golf district and the outlying parts of thecity area. But wait a little, and you will see that when the cityis well behind you, bit by bit the train changes its character. Theelectric locomotive that took you through the city tunnels is off nowand the old wood engine is hitched on in its place. I suppose, veryprobably, you haven't seen one of these wood engines since you were aboy forty years ago, --the old engine with a wide top like a hat on itsfunnel, and with sparks enough to light up a suit for damages once inevery mile. 

Do you see, too, that the trim little cars that came out of the cityon the electric suburban express are being discarded now at the waystations, one by one, and in their place is the old familiar car withthe stuff cushions in red plush (how gorgeous it once seemed!) and witha box stove set up in one end of it? The stove is burning furiously atits sticks this autumn evening, for the air sets in chill as you getclear away from the city and are rising up to the higher ground of thecountry of the pines and the lakes. 

Look from the window as you go. The city is far behind now and right andleft of you there are trim farms with elms and maples near them and withtall windmills beside the barns that you can still see in the gatheringdusk. There is a dull red light from the windows of the farmstead. Itmust be comfortable there after the roar and clatter of the city, andonly think of the still quiet of it. 

As you sit back half dreaming in the car, you keep wondering why it isthat you never came up before in all these years. Ever so many times youplanned that just as soon as the rush and strain of business eased up alittle, you would take the train and go back to the little town to seewhat it was like now, and if things had changed much since your day. But each time when your holidays came, somehow you changed your mind andwent down to Naragansett or Nagahuckett or Nagasomething, and left overthe visit to Mariposa for another time. 

It is almost night now. You can still see the trees and the fences andthe farmsteads, but they are fading fast in the twilight. They havelengthened out the train by this time with a string of flat cars andfreight cars between where we are sitting and the engine. But at everycrossway we can hear the long muffled roar of the whistle, dying to amelancholy wail that echoes into the woods; the woods, I say, for thefarms are thinning out and the track plunges here and there into greatstretches of bush, --tall tamerack and red scrub willow and with atangled undergrowth of bush that has defied for two generations allattempts to clear it into the form of fields. 

Why, look, that great space that seems to open out in the half-dark ofthe falling evening, --why, surely yes, --Lake Ossawippi, the big lake, as they used to call it, from which the river runs down to the smallerlake, --Lake Wissanotti, --where the town of Mariposa has lain waiting foryou there for thirty years. 

This is Lake Ossawippi surely enough. You would know it anywhere by thebroad, still, black water with hardly a ripple, and with the grip of thecoming frost already on it. Such a great sheet of blackness it looks asthe train thunders along the side, swinging the curve of the embankmentat a breakneck speed as it rounds the corner of the lake. 

How fast the train goes this autumn night! You have travelled, I knowyou have; in the Empire State Express, and the New Limited and theMaritime Express that holds the record of six hundred whirling milesfrom Paris to Marseilles. But what are they to this, this mad career, this breakneck speed, this thundering roar of the Mariposa local drivinghard to its home! Don't tell me that the speed is only twenty-five milesan hour. I don't care what it is. I tell you, and you can prove it foryourself if you will, that that train of mingled flat cars and coachesthat goes tearing into the night, its engine whistle shrieking out itswarning into the silent woods and echoing over the dull still lake, isthe fastest train in the whole world. 

Yes, and the best too, --the most comfortable, the most reliable, themost luxurious and the speediest train that ever turned a wheel. 

And the most genial, the most sociable too. See how the passengers allturn and talk to one another now as they get nearer and nearer to thelittle town. That dull reserve that seemed to hold the passengers inthe electric suburban has clean vanished and gone. They aretalking, --listen, --of the harvest, and the late election, and of howthe local member is mentioned for the cabinet and all the old familiartopics of the sort. Already the conductor has changed his glazed hat foran ordinary round Christie and you can hear the passengers calling himand the brakesman "Bill" and "Sam" as if they were all one family. 

What is it now--nine thirty? Ah, then we must be nearing the town, --thisbig bush that we are passing through, you remember it surely as thegreat swamp just this side of the bridge over the Ossawippi? There isthe bridge itself, and the long roar of the train as it rushes soundingover the trestle work that rises above the marsh. Hear the clatter as wepass the semaphores and switch lights! We must be close in now!

What? it feels nervous and strange to be coming here again after allthese years? It must indeed. No, don't bother to look at the reflectionof your face in the window-pane shadowed by the night outside. Nobodycould tell you now after all these years. Your face has changed in theselong years of money-getting in the city. Perhaps if you had come backnow and again, just at odd times, it wouldn't have been so. 

There, --you hear it?--the long whistle of the locomotive, one, two, three! You feel the sharp slackening of the train as it swings roundthe curve of the last embankment that brings it to the Mariposa station. See, too, as we round the curve, the row of the flashing lights, thebright windows of the depot. 

How vivid and plain it all is. Just as it used to be thirty years ago. There is the string of the hotel 'buses, drawn up all ready for thetrain, and as the train rounds in and stops hissing and panting at theplatform, you can hear above all other sounds the cry of the brakesmenand the porters:

"MARIPOSA! MARIPOSA!"

And as we listen, the cry grows fainter and fainter in our ears andwe are sitting here again in the leather chairs of the Mausoleum Club, talking of the little Town in the Sunshine that once we knew.