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In Our Town

<h2>XVII</h2> <h3>The Tremolo Stop</h3> Our business has changed greatly since Horace Greeley's day. And, although machines have come into little offices like ours, the greatest changes have come in the men who do the work in these offices. In the old days—the days before the great war and after it—printers and editors were rarely leading citizens in the community. The editor and the printer were just coming out of the wandering minstrel stage of social development, and the journeyman who went from town to town seeking work, and increasing his skill, was an important factor in the craft. One might always depend upon a tramp printer's coming in when there was a rush of work in the office, and also figure on one of the tourists in the office leaving when he was needed most. From the ranks of this wayward class came the old editors and reporters; they were postgraduates from the back room of newspaper offices and they brought to the front room their easy view of life. Some of these itinerant writing craftsmen had professional fame. There was Peter B. Lee, who had tramped the country over, who knew Greeley and Dana and Prentice and Bob Burdett and Henry Watterson, and to whom the cub in country offices looked with worshipful eyes. There was "Old Slugs"—the printer who carried his moulds for making lead slugs, and who, under the influence of improper stimulants, could recite stirring scenes from the tragedies of Shakespeare. There was Buzby—old Buzby, who went about from office to office leaving his obituary set up by his own hand, conveying the impression that at last the end had come to a misspent life. Then there was J. N. Free—the "Immortal J. N.," as he called himself, a gaunt, cadaverous figure in broad hat and linen duster, with hair flowing over his shoulders, who stalked into the offices at unseemly hours to "raise the veil" of ignorance and error, and "relieve the pressure" of psychic congestion in a town by turning upon it the batteries of his mind. They were a dear lot of old souls out of accord with the world about them, ever seeking the place where they would harmonise. They might have stepped out of Dickens's books or Cruikshank's pictures, and, when one recalls them now, their lineaments seem out of drawing and impossible in the modern world. And yet they did live and move in the world that was, and the other day when we were looking over the files we came across the work of Simon Mehronay,—the name which he said was spelled Dutch and sounded Irish,—and it does not seem fair to set down the stories of the others who have made our office traditions without giving some account of him. For to us he was the most precious of all the old tribe of journalistic aborigines. He came to the office one bright April day with red mud on his shoes that was not the mud of our river bottoms, and we knew that he had ridden to town "blind baggage"—as they say of men who steal their way—from the South. The season was ripe for the birds to come North and it was the mud of Texas that clung to him. His greeting as he strode through the front room not waiting for a reply was "How's work?" And when the foreman told him to hang up his coat, he found a stick, got a "chunk of copy," and was clicking away at his case three minutes from the time he darkened the threshold of the office. There he sat for two weeks—the first man down in the morning and the last to quit at night—before anyone knew whence he came or whither he was bound. He had a little "false motion," the foreman said, and clattered his types too audibly in the steel stick, but as he got up a good string of type at the end of the day and furnished his own chewing tobacco, he created no unfavourable comment in the office. He was a bald little man, with a fringe of hair above the greasy velvet collar of his coat, with beady, dancing black eyes, and black chin whiskers and a moustache that often needed dyeing. It was the opinion of the foreman and the printers that Mehronay's weakness was liquor, though that opinion did not arise from anything that he said. For during the first two weeks we did not hear him say much, but in the years that followed, his mild little voice that ever seemed to be teetering on the edge of the laugh into which he fell a score of times during an hour, became a familiar sound about the office, and the soft, flabby little hand which the other printers laughed about, during the first week of his employment with us, has rested on most of the shoulders in the shop guiding us through many sad ways. In those days there were only three of us in the front room. All the bookkeeping and collecting and reporting and editorial writing were done by the three, and it happened that one morning near the first of the month, when the books needed attention, no one had heard the performance of "Hamlet" given by Thomas Keene at the opera house the night before, and no one about the paper could write it up. Wherefore there was perturbation; but in an hour this came from the back room set up in type and proved in the galley: "There were more clean shaves in town last night than have been seen here for a long time. Everyone who wears cuffs and a necktie got a 'twice-over' and was 'out amongst 'em.' In the gallery of the opera house roosted the college faculty and the Potter boy who holds the Cottonwood Valley belt as the champion lay-down collar swell, and near him was Everett Fowler, who was making his first public appearance in his new parted spring whiskers, and was the observed of all observers. Colonel Alphabetical Morrison, with his famous U-shaped hair-cut, lent the grace of his presence to the dress circle. The first Methodist Church was represented by Brother-in-law John Markley, who is wearing a new flowered necktie, sent by his daughter in California (if you must know), and General Durham of the Statesman says that when the orchestra played 'Turkey in the Straw,' and Bill Master began to shake the sand-box—which is a new wrinkle in musical circles in our town—John Markley's feet began to wiggle until people thought this was his 'chill day.' After 'Turkey in the Straw,' the orchestra struck up something quick and devilish, which Charley Hedrick, who played the snare drum at Gettysburg, and is therefore entitled to speak on musical subjects, says was 'The Irish Washerwoman.' After this appropriate overture the curtain rose and the real show began. "Mr. Keene's Hamlet is not so familiar to our people as his Richard III., but it gave great satisfaction; for it is certainly a Methodist Hamlet from the clang of the gong to the home-stretch. The town never has stood for Mr. Lawrence Barrett's Unitarian Hamlet, and the high church Episcopal Hamlet put on the boards last winter by Mr. Frederick Paulding was distinctly disappointing. One of the most searching scenes in the play was enacted when Ophelia got the power and had to be carried out to the pump. The Chicago brother who plays the ghost has a great voice for his work. He brought many souls to a realizing sense that they are sin-stricken and hair-hung over the fiery pit. The groans and amens from the sanctified in the audience were a delicate compliment to his histrionic ability. The queen seems to have been a Presbyterian, and the king a Second Day Adventist of an argumentative type. And they were not popular with the audience, but the boy preacher who did Laertes was exceedingly blessed with the gift of tongues. Brother Polonius seems to have been a sort of presiding elder, and, when his exhortation rose, the chickens in Mike Wessner's coop, in the meat-market downstairs, gave up hope of life and lay down to be cut up and fried for breakfast. The performance was a great treat and, barring the fact that some switchmen, thinking Ophelia was full, giggled during the mad scene, and the further fact that someone yelled, 'Go for his wind, Ham!' during the fencing scene, the evening with Shakespeare's weirdest hero was a distinct credit to Mr. Keene, his company and our people." We wrote a conventional report of the performance, and printed Mehronay's account below it, under the caption From Another Reporter, and it made the paper talked about for a week. Now in our town Keene was a histrionic god of the first order, and so many church people came to the office to "stop the paper" that circulation had a real impetus. We have never had a boom in subscription that did not begin with a lot of angry citizens coming in to stop the paper. It became known about town who wrote the Keene article, and Mehronay became in a small way a public character. We encouraged him to write more, so every morning the first proof slips that came in began to have on them ten or a dozen short items of Mehronay's writing. There was a smile in every one of them, and if he wrote more than ten lines there was a laugh. It was Mehronay who referred to Huddleson's livery-stable joint—where the old soaks got their beer in a stall and salted it from the feed-box—as "a gilded palace of sin." It was Mehronay who wrote the advertisement of the Chinese laundryman and signed his name "Fat Sam Child of the Sun, Brother of the Moon and Second Cousin by marriage to all the Stars." It was Mehronay who took a galley of pi which the office devil had set up from a wrecked form, and interspersed up and down the column of meaningless letters "Great applause"—"Tremendous cheering"—Cries of "Good, good!—that's the way to hit 'em!"—"Hurrah for Hancock"—and ran it in the paper as a report of Carl Schurz's speech to the German-American League at the court-house. It was Mehronay who put the advertisement in the paper proclaiming the fact that General Durham of the Statesman office desired to purchase a good second-hand fiddle, and explaining that the owner must play five tunes on it in front of the Statesman office door before bringing it in. Mehronay originated the fiction that there was an association in town formed to insure its members against wedding invitations which, in case of loss, paid the afflicted member a pickle dish or a napkin ring, to present as his offering to the bride. Mehronay started a mythical Widowers' Protective Foot-racing Society, and the town had great sport with the old boys whose names he used so wittily that it transcended impudence. Mehronay got up a long list of husbands who wiped dishes when the family was "out of a girl," as our people say, and organised them into a union to strike for their altars and their kitchen fires. When we sent him out to write up a fire, however, he generally forgot the amount of insurance and the extent of the loss, but he told all about the way the crowd tried to boss the fire department; and if we sent him out to gather the local markets, he made such a mess of it that we were a week straightening matters up. Figures didn't mean anything to Mehronay. When the bank failed, he tried to write something about it, but mixed the assets and the liabilities so hopelessly that we had to keep him busy with other things, so that he would have no time to touch the bank story. They used to say around town that when he laid down a piece of money, however large, on a store counter he never waited for his change, but be it said to the credit of most of the merchants that they would save it for Mehronay and give it to him on his next visit to the store, when he would be as joyful as a child. Gradually he left the back room and became a fixture in the front office. He wrote locals and editorials and helped with the advertising, drawing for this the munificent salary of fifteen dollars a week, which should have kept him like a prince; but it did not—though what he did with his money no one knew. He bought no new clothes, and never buttoned those he had. Before sending him out on the street in the morning, someone in the office had to button him up, and if it was a gala day—say circus day, or the day of a big political pow-wow—we had to put a clean paper collar on Mehronay above his brown wool shirt and shove out the dents in his derby hat—a procedure which he called "making a butterfly of fashion out of an honest workin' man." He slept in the press-room, on a bed which he rolled up and stowed behind the press by day, and in the evening he consorted with the goddess of nicotine—as he called his plug tobacco—and put in his time at his desk with a lead pencil and a pad of white paper writing copy for the next day's issue. Nothing delighted him so much as a fictitious personage or situation which held real relations with local events or home people. One of the best of his many inventions was a new reporter who, according to Mehronay's legend, had just quit work for a circus where he had been employed writing the posters. Mehronay's joy was to write up a local occurrence and pretend that the circus poster-writer had written it and that we had been greatly bothered to restrain his adjectives. A few days after the Sinclair-Handy wedding—a particularly gorgeous affair in one of the stone churches, which had been written up by the bride's mother, as the whole town knew, in a most disgusting manner—Mehronay sat chuckling in his corner, writing something which he put on the copy-hook before going out on his beat. It was headed A Dazzling Affair and it ran thus: "For some time we have realised that we have not been doing full justice to the weddings that occur in this town; we have been using a repressed and obsolete style which is painful to those who enter into the joyous spirit of such occasions, and last night's wedding in the family of the patrician Skinners we assigned to our gentlemanly and urbane Mr. J. Mortimer Montague, late of the publicity department of the world-famed Robinson Circus and Menagerie. The following graceful account from Mr. Montague's facile pen is the most accurate and satisfactory report of a nuptial event we have ever recorded in these columns." And thereafter followed this: "Last evening, just as the clock in the steeple struck nine, a vast concourse of the beauty and the chivalry of our splendid city, composing wealth beyond the dreams of the kings of India and forming a galaxy only excelled in splendour by the knightly company at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, assembled to witness the marriage of Miss May Skinner and Mr. John Fortesque. The great auditorium was a bower of smilax and chrysanthemums, bewildering, amazing, superb in its verdant labyrinth. As the clock was striking the hour, the ten-thousand-dollar pipe-organ filled the edifice with strains of most seductive, entrancing music, played by Miss Jane Brown, the only real left-handed organist in the civilised world. Then came the wedding party, magnificent, radiant, resplendent with the glittering jewels of the Orient, dazzling with gorgeousness, stupefying and miraculous in its revelation of beauty. There were six handsome ushers—count them—six, ten bridesmaids—ten—a bevy of real, live, flower-bearing fairies, captured at an immense outlay of time and money in far Caucasia. The bride's resplendent costume and surpassing beauty put the blush upon the Queen of Sheba, made Hebe's effulgence fade as the moon before the sun; and as the long courtly train of knights errant and ladies-in-waiting passed the populace, they presented a regal spectacle, never equalled since the proud Cleopatra sailed down the perfumed lotus-bearing Nile in her gilded pageant to meet Marc Antony, while all the world stood agape at the unheard-of triumph. "To describe the bride's costume beggars the English language; and human imagination falls faint and feeble before the Herculean task. From the everlasting stars she stole the glittering diamonds that decked her alabaster brow and hid them in the Stygian umbrage of her hair. From the fleecy, graceful cloud she snared the marvellous drapery that floated like a dream about her queenly figure, and from the Peri at Heaven's gate she captured the matchless grace that bore her like an enchanted wraith through the hymeneal scene. "The array of presents spread in the throne-room of the Skinner palace has been unexcelled in lavish expenditure of fabulous and reckless prodigal wealth anywhere in the world. Golden tokens literally strewed the apartment, merely as effulgent settings for the mammoth, appalling, maddening array of jewels and precious stones, sunbursts and pearls without price, that gleamed like a transcendent electrical display in the hypnotising picture." There was more of the same kind, but it need not be set down here. However, it should be said that nothing we ever printed in the paper before or since set the town to laughing as did that piece. We have calls to-day for papers containing the circus-poster wedding, and it was printed over two decades ago. It was Mehronay's first great triumph in town; then the expected happened. For three days he did not appear at the office and we suspected the truth—that by day he slept the sleep of the unjust in the loft of Huddleson's stable and by night he vibrated between the Elite oyster parlour, where he absorbed fabulous quantities of soup, and Red Martin's gambling-room, where he disported himself most festively before the gang assembled there. The morning of the fourth day Mehronay appeared—but not at his desk. We found him sitting glumly on his stool at the case in the back room, clicking the types, with his hat over his eyes and the smile rubbed off his face. We were a month coaxing Mehronay back in to the front room. His self-respect grew slowly, but finally it returned, and he sat at his desk turning off reams of copy so good that the people read the paper up one side and down the other hunting for his items. He is the only man we have ever had around the paper who could write. Everyone else we have employed has been a news-gatherer. But Mehronay cared little for what we call news. He went about the town asking for news, and getting more or less of it, but the way he put it was much more important than the thing itself. He had imagination. He created his own world in the town, and put it in the paper so vividly that before we realised it the whole town was living in Mehronay's world, seeing the people and events about them through his merry countenance. No one ever referred to him as Mr. Mehronay, and before he had been on the street six months he was calling people by their first names, or by nicknames, which he tagged onto them. He was so fatherly to the young people that the girls in the Bee Hive, or the White Front, or the Racket Store used to brush his clothes when they needed it, if we in the office neglected him, and smooth his back hair with their pocket combs, and he—never remembering the name of the particular ministering angel who fixed him up—called one and all of them "darter," smiled a grateful smile like an old dog that is petted, and then went his way. The girls in the White Front Drygoods Store gave him a cravat, and though it was made up, he brought it every morning in his pocket for them to pin on. He was as simple as a child, and, like a child, lived in a world of unrealities. He swore like a mule driver, and yet he told the men in the back room that he could never go to sleep without getting down and saying his prayers, and the only men with whom he ever quarrelled were a teacher of zoölogy at the College, who is an evolutionist, and Dan Gregg, the town infidel. One morning when we were sitting in the office before going out to the street for the morning's grist, Mehronay dog-eared a fat piece of copy and jabbed it on the hook as he started for the door. "My boy was drunk last night," he said. "Me and his mother felt so bad over it that I gave him a pretty straight talk this morning. There it is." The office dropped its jaw and bugged its eyes. "Oh, yes," he continued. "Didn't you know I had a boy? He's been the best kind of a boy till here lately. I can see his mother don't like it and his sister's worried too." His face for a second wore an expression of infinite sadness, and he sighed even while the smile came back on the face he turned to us from the door as he said: "Sometimes I think he is studying law with old Charley Hedrick and sometimes I think he is in the bank with John Markley; but he is always with me, and was such a decent boy when I had him out to the College. But I saw him with Joe Nevison last night, and I knew he'd been drinking." With that he closed the door behind him and was gone. This was the article that Mehronay left on the hook: "Your pa was downtown this morning, complaining about his 'old trouble,' that crick in his back that he got loading hay one hot day in Huron County, Ohio, 'before the army.' The 'old trouble,' as you will remember, bothers your pa a good deal, and your ma thinks that his father must have been a pretty hard-hearted man to let him work so hard when he was a boy. Your pa likes to have you and your ma think that when he was a boy he did nothing but work and go to prayer-meeting and go around doing noble deeds out of the third reader, but a number of the old boys of the Eleventh Kansas, who knew your pa in the sixties, are prepared to do a lot of forgetting for him whenever he asks it. The truth about your pa's 'old trouble' is that he was down at Fort Leavenworth just after the close of the war, and after filling up on laughing-water at a saloon, he got into a fight with the bartender, was kicked out of the saloon, and slept in the alley all night. That was his last whizz. He took an invoice of his stock and found that he had some of the most valuable experiences that a man can acquire, and he straightened up and came out here and grew up with the country. Your ma met him at a basket-meeting, and she thought he was an extremely pious young man, and they made a go of it. "So, Bub, when you think that by breathing on your coat sleeve to kill the whisky you can fool your pa, you are wrong. Your pa in his day ate three carloads of cardamon seeds and cloves and used listerine by the barrel. He knew which was the creaky step on the stairs in his father's house and used to avoid it coming in at night, just as you do now, and he knows just what you are doing. More than that, your pa speaks from the bitterest kind of experience when he pleads with you to quit. It is no goody-goody talk of a mutton-headed old deacon that he is giving you; it has taken him a year to get his courage up to speak to you, and every word that he speaks is boiled out of an agony of bitter memories. He knows where boys that start as you are starting end if they don't turn back. Your pa turned, but he recollects the career of the Blue boys, who are divided between the penitentiary, the poor-house and the southwest corner of hell; he recalls the Winklers—one dead, one a porter in a saloon in Peoria, one crazy; and he looks at you, and it seems to him that he must take you in his arms as he did when you were a little child in the prairie fire, and run to safety with you. And when he talks to you with his bashful, halting speech, you just sit there and grin, and cut his heart to its core, for he knows you do not understand. "It's rather up to you, Bub. In the next few months you will have to decide whether or not you are going to hell. Of course the 'vilest sinner may return' at any point along the road—but to what? To shattered health; to a mother heart-broken in her grave; to a wife damned to all eternity by your thoughtless brutality; and to children who are always afraid to look up the alley, when they see a group of boys, for fear they may be teasing you—you, drunk and dirty, lying in the stable filth! To that you will 'return,' with your strength spent, and your sportive friends, gone to the devil before you, and your chance in life frittered away. "Just sit down and figure it out, Bub. Of course there are a lot of good fellows on the road to hell; you will have a good time going; but you'll be a long time there. You'll dance and play cards and chase out nights, and soak your soul in the essence of don't-give-a-dam-tiveness, and you'll wonder, as you go up in the balloon, what fun there is in walking through this sober old earth. Friends—what are they? The love of humanity—what is it? Thoughtfulness to those about you? Gentility—What are these things? Letteroll—letteroll! But as you drop out of the balloon, the earth will look like a serious piece of landscape. "When you are old, the beer you have swilled will choke your throat; the women you have flirted with will hang round your feet and make you stumble. All the nights you have wasted at poker will dim your eyes. The garden of the days that are gone, wherein you should have planted kindness and consideration and thoughtfulness and manly courage to do right, will be grown up to weeds, that will blossom in your patches and in your rags and in your twisted, gnarly face that no one will love. "Go it, Bub! don't stop for your pa's sake; you know it all. Your pa is merely an old fogy. Tell him you can paddle your own canoe. But when you were a little boy, a very little boy, with a soft, round body, your pa used to take you in his arms and rub his beard—his rough, stubby, three-days' beard—against your face and pray that God would keep you from the path you are going in. "And so the sins of the father, Bub—but we won't talk of that." Three months later, when the Methodists opened their regular winter revival, Mehronay, becoming enraged at what he called the tin-horn clothes of the travelling evangelist conducting the meetings, began to make fun of him in the paper; and, as a revivalist in a church is a sacred person while the meetings are going on, we had to kill Mehronay's items about the revival; whereupon, his professional pride being hurt, Mehronay went forth into the streets, got haughtily drunk, and strutted up and down Main Street scattering sirs and misters and madams about so lavishly that men who did not appreciate his condition thought he had gone mad. That night he went to the revival, and sat upon the back seat alone, muttering his imprecations at the preacher until the singing began, when the heat of the room and the emotional music mellowed his pride, and he drowned out the revivalist's singing partner with a clear, sweet tenor that made the congregation turn to look at him. Mehronay knew the gospel hymns by heart, as he seemed to know his New Testament, and the cunning revivalist kept the song service going for an hour. When Mehronay was thoroughly sober there was a short prayer, and the singer on the platform feelingly sang "There Were Ninety and Nine" with an adagio movement, and Mehronay's face was wet with tears and he rose for prayers. He came to the office chastened and subdued next morning and wrote an account of the revival so eulogistic that we had to tone it down, and for a week he went about damning, with all the oaths in the pirate's log, Dan Gregg and the College professor who taught evolution. But no one could coax him back to the revival. As spring came we thought that he had forgotten the episode of his regeneration, and perhaps he had forgotten it, but the Saturday before Easter he put on the copy-hook an Easter sermon that made us in the office think that he had added another dream to his world. It was a curious thing for Mehronay to write; indeed, few people in town realised that he did write it; for he had been rollicking over town on his beat every day for months after the revival, and half the pious people in town thought he shammed his emotion the night he came to the church merely to mock them and their revivalist. But we in the office knew that Mehronay's Easter sermon had come as the offering of a contrite heart. It is in so many scrapbooks in the town that it should be reprinted here that the town may know that Mehronay wrote it. It read: "The celebration of Easter is the celebration of the renewal of life after the death that prevails in winter. People of many faiths observe a spring festival of rejoicing, and of prayer for future bounty. Probably the Easter celebration is like that at Christmas and Thanksgiving—a survival of some ancient pagan rite that men established out of overflowing hearts, rejoicing at the end of a good season and praying for favour at the beginning of a new one. "To the Christian world Easter symbolises a Divine tragedy. The coming of Easter, as it is set forth in the Great Book, is a most powerful story; it is the story of one of the deepest passions that may move the human heart—the passion of father-love. "Once there lived in the desert a man and his little child—a very little boy, who sometimes was a bad little boy, and who did not do as he was told. On a day when the father was away about his business the child, playing, wandered out on the desert and was lost. From home the desert beckoned the little boy; it seemed fair and fine to adventure in. When the boy had been gone for many hours the father returned and could not find him, and knew that the child was lost. But the father knew the desert; he knew how it lured men on; he knew its parching thirst; he knew its thorns and brambles, and its choking dust and the heat that beats one down. "And when he saw that the boy was lost his heart was aflame with anguish; he could all but feel the desert fire in the little boy's blood, the cactus barbs in the bleeding little feet, and the great lonesomeness of the desert in the little boy's heart; and as from afar the man heard a wailing little voice in his ears calling, 'Father, father!' like a lost sheep. But it was only a seeming, and the house where the little boy had played was silent. "Then the father went to the desert, and neither the desert fire murmuring at his brow, nor the sand that filled his mouth, nor the stones and prickles that cut his feet, nor the wild beasts that lurked upon the hillsides, could keep out of his ears the bleat of that little child's voice crying 'Father, father!' When the night fell, still and cold and numbing, the father pressed on, calling to the child in his agony; for he thought it was such a little boy, such a poor, lonesome, terror-stricken little boy out in the desert, lost and in pain, crying for help, with no one to hear. "And wandering so, the father died, with his heart full of unspeakable woe. But they found the wayward child in the light of another day. And he never knew what his father suffered, nor why his father died, nor did he understand it all till he had grown to a man's stature, and then he knew; and he tried to live his days as his father had lived, and to lay down his life, if need be, for his friend. "This is the Easter story that should come to every heart. The Christ that came into the desert of this weary life, and walked here foot-sore, heart-broken and athirst, came here for the love that was in His heart. Who put it there—whether the God that gave Shakespeare his brain and Wagner his harmonies, gave Christ His heart—or whether it was the God that paints the lily and moves the mountains in their labours—it matters not. It is one God, the Author and First Cause of all things. It is His heart that moves our own hearts to all their aspirations, to all the benevolence that the wicked world knows; it is His mind that is made manifest in our marvels of civilisation; it is His vast, unknowable plan that is moving the nations of the earth. "Whether it be spirit or law or tendency or person—what matter?—it is our Father, who went to the desert to find His sheep." All day Saturday, in order to square himself with the printers who set up his sermon, and to rehabilitate himself in the graces of the others about the office who knew of his weakness, Mehronay turned in the gayest lot of copy that he had ever written. There was an "assessment call of the Widowers' Protective Association to pay the sad wedding loss of Brother P. R. Cullom, of the Bee Hive," whose wedding was announced in the society column; there was a card of thanks from Ben Pore to those who had come with their sympathy and glue to nurse his wooden Indian which had blown down and broken the night before, and resolutions of respect for the same departed brother, in most mocking language, from the Red Men's Lodge. There was an item saying seven different varieties of Joneses and three kinds of Hugheses were in town from Lebo—the Welsh settlement; there was a call for the uniformed rank of head waiters to meet in regalia at Mrs. Larrabee's reception, signed by the three men in town who were known to have evening clothes, and there was a meeting of the anti-kin society announced to discuss the length of time Alphabetical Morrison's new son-in-law should be allowed to visit the Morrisons before the neighbours could ask when he was going to leave. But when the paper was out Mehronay got a dozen copies from the press and sent them away in wrappers which he addressed, and the piece his blue pencil marked was none of these. For many days after Mehronay wrote his Easter sermon the gentle, low, beelike hum that he kept up while he was at work followed the tunes of gospel hymns, or hymns of an older fashion. We always knew when to expect what he called a "piece" from Mehronay—which meant an article into which he put more than ordinary endeavour—for his bee-song would grow louder, with now and then an intelligible word in it, and if it was to be an exceptional piece Mehronay would whistle. When he began writing the music would die down, but when he was well under sail on his "piece," the steam of his swelling emotions would set his chin to going like the lid of a kettle, and he would drone and jibber the words as he wrote them—half audibly, humming and sputtering in the pauses while he thought. Scores of times we have seen the dear old fellow sitting at his desk when a "piece" was in the pot, and have gathered the men around back of his chair to watch him simmer. When it was finished he would whirl about in his chair, as he gathered up the sheets of paper and shook them together, and say: "I've writ a piece here—a damn good piece!" And then, as he put the copy on the hook and got his hat, he would tell us in most profane language what it was all about—quoting the best sentences and chuckling to himself as he went out onto the street. As the spring filled out and became summer we noticed that Mehronay was singing fewer gospel hymns and rather more sentimental songs than usual. And then the horrible report came to the office that Mehronay had been seen by one of the printers walking by night after bed-time under the State Street elms with a woman. Also his items began to indicate a closer knowledge of what was going on in society than Mehronay naturally could have. In the fall we learned through the girls in the Bee Hive that he had bought a white shirt and a pair of celluloid cuffs. This rumour set the office afire with curiosity, but no one dared to tease Mehronay. For no one knew who she was. Not until late in the fall, when Madame Janauschek came to the opera house to play "Macbeth," did Mehronay uncover his intrigue. Then for the first time in his three years' employment on the paper he asked for two show tickets! The entire office lined up at the opera house—most of us paying our own way, not to see the Macbeths, but to see Mehronay's Romeo and Juliet. The office devil, who was late mailing the papers that night, says that about seven o'clock Mehronay came in singing "Jean, Jean, my Bonnie Jean," and that he went to his trunk, took out his celluloid cuffs, a new sky-blue and shell-pink necktie that none of us had seen before, a clean paper collar—and the boy, who probably was mistaken, swears Mehronay also took his white shirt—in a bundle which he proudly tucked under his arm and toddled out of the office whistling a wedding march. An hour later, dressed in this regalia and a new black suit, buttoned primly and exactly in a fashion unknown to Mehronay, he appeared at the opera house with Miss Columbia Merley, spinster, teacher of Greek and Hellenic philosophy at the College. The office force asked in a gasp of wonder: "Who dressed him?" Miss Merley—late in her forties, steel-eyed, thin-chested, flint-faced and with hair knotted so tightly back from her high stony brow that she had to take out two hairpins to wink—Miss Merley might have done it—but she had no kith or kin who could have done it for her, and certainly the hand that smoothed the coat buttoned the vest, and the hand that buttoned the vest put on the collar and tie, and as for the shirt—— But that was an office mystery. We never have solved it, and no one had the courage to tease Mehronay about it the next morning. After that we knew, and Mehronay knew that we knew, that he and Miss Merley went to church every Sunday evening—the Presbyterian church, mind you, where there is no foolishness—and that after church Mehronay always spent exactly half an hour in the parlour of the house where his divinity roomed. A whole year went by wherein Mehronay was sober, and did not look upon the wine when it was red or brown or yellow or any other colour. Now when he "writ a piece" there was frequently something in it defending women's rights. Also he severed diplomatic relations with the girl clerks in the White Front and the Bee Hive and the Racket, and bought a cane and aspired to some dignity of person. But Mehronay's heart was unchanged. The snows of boreal affection did not wither or fade his eternal spring. The sap still ran sweet in his veins and the bees still sang among the blossoms that sprang up along his path. He was everyone's friend, and spoke cheerily to the dogs and the horses, and was no more courteous to the preachers and the bankers, who are our most worshipful ones in town, than to the men from Red Martin's gambling-room, and even the woman in red, whom all the town knows but whom no one ever mentions, got a kind word from Mehronay as they met upon the street. He always called her sister. And so another year went by and Mehronay's "pieces" made the circulation grow, and we were prosperous. It became known about town long before we knew it in the office that if Mehronay kept sober for three years she would have him, and when we finally heard it he was on the last half of the third year and was growing sombre. "In the Cottage by the Sea" was his favourite song, and "Put Away the Little Playthings" also was much in his throat when he wrote. We thought, perhaps—and now we know—that he was thinking of a home that was gone. The day before Mehronay's wedding a child died over near the railroad, and on the morning he was to be married we found this on the copy hook when we came down to open the office, after Mehronay had gone to claim his bride: "A ten-line item appeared in last night's paper, away down in one corner, that brought more hearts together in a common bond—the bond of fear and sympathy and sorrow—than any other item has done for a long time. The item told of the death, by scarlet fever, of little Flossie Yengst. Probably the child was not known outside of her little group of playmates; her father and mother are not of that advertised clique known of men as prominent people; he is an engineer on the Santa Fé, and the mother moves in that small circle of friends and neighbours which circumscribes American motherhood of the best type. And yet last night, when that little ten-line item was read by a thousand firesides in this town, thousands and thousands of hearts turned to that desolate home by the track, and poured upon it the benediction of their sympathies. That home was the meeting-place where rich and poor, great and weak, good and bad, stood equals. For there is something in the death of a little child, something in its infinite pathos, that makes all human creatures mourn. Because in every heart that is not a dead heart, calloused to all joy or sorrow, some little child is enshrined—either dead or living—and so child-love is the one universal emotion of the soul, and child-death is the saddest thing in all the world. "A child's soul is such a small thing, and the world and the systems of worlds, and the infinite stretches of illimitable space, are so wide for a child's soul to wander in, that, sane as we may be, stolid as we may try to be, we think in imagery, and the figure of little feet setting off on the far track to the end of things, hunting God, wrings our heart-strings and makes our throats grip and our eyelids quiver. "And then a child dying, leaving this good world of ours, seems to have had so small a chance for itself. There is something in all of us struggling against oblivion, striving vainly to make some real impress on the current of time, and a child, dying, can only clutch the hands about it and go down—forever. It seems so merciless, so unfair. Perhaps that is why, all over the world, the little graves are cared for best. It is to the little graves that we turn in our keenest anguish and not to the larger mounds; to the little graves that our hearts are drawn in our hours of triumph. And so the child, though dead, lives its appointed time and dies only in the fullness of its years. The little shoes, the little dresses, the 'little tin soldiers covered with rust,' and the memories sweeter than dreams of a honeymoon, these are life's immortelles that never fade. And though men and women come and go upon the earth, though civilisations may wither and pass, these little images remain; and the sun and the stars, which see men come and go, may see these little idols before which every creature bows, and the sun and stars, knowing no time, may think these children's relics are also eternal. "It is a desperately lonely home, that Yengst home, with the little girl gone away on a long journey; but how tight and close other fathers and mothers hugged their little ones last night when their hearts came back from the house of sorrow. And the little ones, feeling no fear, unconscious of the pang of terror that was shooting through the souls about them—the children played on, and maybe, before dropping to sleep, wondered a little at anxious looks they saw in grown-up eyes. "This is the faith of a little child, curious but implicit, in the goodness of those things outside one's self. And 'of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.'" A day or so after the wedding someone said to him: "Mehronay, sometimes your pieces make me cry," and he replied with all the fine sincerity of his heart showing in his eyes: "Yes—and if you only knew how they make me cry! Sometimes when I have written one like—like that—I go to my bed and sob like a child." He turned and walked away, but he came into the office whistling "The Dutch Company." After his wedding we made brave, in a sly way, to rail at Mehronay about his love affair, and he took it good-naturedly. He knew the situation just as it was; his sense of humour allowed him no false view of the matter. One afternoon when the paper was out, George Kirwin, the foreman, and one of the reporters and Mehronay were in the back room leaning against the imposing-stones looking over the paper, when Kirwin said: "Say, Mehronay, how did you get yourself screwed up to ask her?" It was spoken in a joke. The two young men were grinning, but Mehronay looked at the floor in a study as he said: "Well, to be honest—damfino if I ever did—just exactly." He smiled reflectively in a pause and continued: "Nearest I remember was one night we was sitting with our feet on the base-burner and I looked up and says, 'Hell's afire, Commie'—I called her that for short—'why in the devil don't a fine woman like you get married? She got up and come over to where I was a-sitting and before I could say Lordamighty, she put her hand on my shoulder and says real soft and solemn: 'I'll just be damned if I don't believe I will.'" He did not smile when he looked up, but sighed contentedly as he added reverently: "And so, by hell, she did!" If Columbia Merley Mehronay had known this language which her husband's innocent inadvertence put into her mouth she would have strangled him—even then. We did not have Mehronay with us more than a year after his wedding. Mrs. Mehronay knew what he was worth. She asked for twenty-five dollars a week for him, and when we told her the office could not afford it she took him away. They went to New York City, where she peddled his pieces about town until she got him a regular place. There they have lived happily ever after. Mehronay brings his envelope home every Saturday night, and she gives him his carfare and his shaving-money and puts the rest where it will do the most good. When the men from our office go to New York—which they sometimes do—they visit with Mehronay at his office, and sometimes—if there is time for due and proper notice of the function in writing—there is an invitation to dinner. Mehronay fondles his old friends as a child fondles its playmates and he takes eager pleasure in them, but she that was Columbia Merley all but searches their pockets for the tempter. Mehronay has never broken his word. He knows if he does break it she will tear him limb from limb and eat him raw. So he goes to his work, writes his pieces, hums his gentle bee-song—so that men do not like to room with him at the office—and has learned to keep himself fairly well buttoned up in the great city. But Miss Larrabee that was—who used to edit the society page for our paper, but who now lives in New York—told us when she was home that as she was walking down Fourth Avenue one winter day when the street was empty, she saw Mehronay standing before the window of a liquor store looking intently at the display of bottled goods before him. When he saw her half a block away he turned from her and shuffled rapidly down the street, clicking his cane nervously. It was not for him! <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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