Aunt 'Liza's Hero, and Other Stories

"Go on, I wish you luck, young lady," he would observe. "You can count on me for anything a one-armed man can do. But what's the use? I've tried and tried to get some 'Merican sentiment into these youngsters. 'Tain't no go – and never will be. But you can count on me to hooray for you all the same. I'll be thar if nobody else is."

"Maybe you tried to scold them into patriotism, as the squire does," said the little teacher. "I don't think that's the best way."

"It didn't work, anyhow," said the veteran, and walked away.

Miss Atworth's programme, besides the decoration of the schoolhouse, comprised tableaux and the recitation of patriotic poems and addresses by her larger pupils. But most of the children soon received strict orders to hurry home at four o'clock, to attend to the milking and evening chores. They were also kept at work till the last possible minute in the morning. But with only noon-time and recess for practising their parts, her enthusiasm worked wonders.

"It ought to be a grand success," said Miss Atworth, as she took a final approving survey of the decorations the afternoon of the twenty-first. "Only it's a little too warlike. I wish I had an old-fashioned pruning-hook to hang across that sword between the windows."

"Mr. Schmidt has one," volunteered Sarah Gates. "But he's so mad about our wasting so much time, as he calls it, that it's as much as a fellow's head is worth to ask him for it. I heard him tell pa he was going to keep Karl at home to-morrow night. Isn't that mean?"

"Keep Karl at home!" cried Miss Atworth, in dismay. "He couldn't be so mean as that!"

Karl was the brightest pupil in her room – a big, manly boy of sixteen. He was kept at home every spring and fall to help with the work, although his father was not poor. She had taken an especial interest in him from the first, had drilled him carefully in his declamation, and counted on him as the star of the entertainment.

"Pa wasn't going to let me come, either," continued Sarah, "till ma told him you'd picked me out of all the school to be the Goddess of Liberty, and that I was going to have a gold crown on, and gold stars spangled over my dress. Ma's awful proud because I was chosen to be a goddess."

The little teacher smiled. She was not without worldly wisdom, and had given Sarah such a prominent part in the hope that it might conciliate the whole Gates family. Fortunately nothing was required of the goddess but long hair and a pretty face – about all Sarah had to boast of. She simply could not learn.

Miss Atworth locked the door and started rapidly homeward. What should she do if Karl must be left out of the performance? A quarter of a mile brought her to the lane leading from the pike to the Schmidt place, and there she stopped with sudden resolve.

"I'll beard that old lion in his den, and ask him for his pruning-hook. That will be an excuse for going, and will give me an opportunity to plead Karl's cause."

It was nearly dark when Miss Atworth ran up the squire's front walk, and danced through the house into the kitchen.

"Oh, such luck!" she cried, gaily. "I went to see Mr. Schmidt, and some good angel prompted me to speak to him in German. It was such bad German – perhaps that's what pleased him. Anyway it thawed him right out. He lent me his pruning-hook, and showed me over his big barn. Of course I admired his fine cattle, and then, as he got more and more pleased at my showing such an astonishing lot of sense, I praised Karl so highly that he made a complete surrender. He is coming to-morrow night to bring the whole Schmidt family, from the old grossmutter, to the baby. Hurrah for Washington's Birthday!"

Never had the old public hall held such an astonished and delighted audience as the one that crowded into it that memorable night. Gay festoons of bunting, countless little flags, and wreaths of evergreen transformed the dingy old place completely.

A large picture of Washington placidly beamed from its place of honour. Over and around it, reaching almost across the stage, was draped a great silken flag, borrowed for the occasion.

Peter Dowling, in his old blue army clothes, with one sleeve pinned across his breast, sat far back, looking bewildered by the wonders the little teacher had accomplished.

Miss Atworth had arranged the programme with great tact. Each child felt prominent, and those who, she secretly knew, would be failures in anything else, were honoured beyond measure when she skilfully grouped them into a series of effective historical tableaux.

"It's enough to make even a graven image feel patriotic," whispered Squire Hardy to his wife, as the children's sweet voices made the room ring with the grand old national airs.

Declamations followed each other in rapid succession. Then came a scene, with recitations, in which Uncle Sam and all the States of the Union took part. The very air seemed charged with the little teacher's electrical spirit of patriotic enthusiasm.

It was at its height when Karl came forward to give the famous speech of Patrick Henry. His delivery was so much better than the rehearsals had led her to expect that even Miss Atworth was surprised. He seemed to find an inspiration in the crowd. A storm of applause followed the "Give me liberty or give me death."

"What shall we do?" she whispered in dismay as the persistent clapping of many hands called him back. "I wish you had prepared for an encore."

"Oh, I know!" said Karl, and in another instant was on the stage again.

In the deep hush that followed, his clear, musical voice rose in German. He was reciting "Mein Vaterland." Old grandmothers who knew but a few words of English rocked themselves back and forth in excited delight; Mr. Schmidt beamed with vast smiles; many an eye grew dim, thinking of the old beloved home across the seas. But the boy was thinking of his own native country. There was no mistaking his meaning, as he turned in closing, to wave his hand toward the portrait and the flag:

"My Fatherland!" he cried with true feeling, and then, after a moment of general surprise, deafening applause broke out.

As it subsided Miss Atworth stepped forward to announce the last song, but Peter Dowling, his face aflame with new delight and old memories, rose, stalked up the aisle as if unconscious of all the eyes fixed on him, and swung himself up on the high platform with one long step.

"Friends," he began, "I've been livin' kind of dead among ye for many's the year. Now I want to say a word or two. I ain't no great at speechifyin', but these old songs and pieces we've been a-listenin' to have spirited me up like the trumpet doos an old war-horse."

As he spoke he waved the stump of his right arm so vigorously that the empty sleeve was torn from its pinning across his breast and flapped pathetically.

"I want to say," he went on, "that I fit for that old flag, and yet, livin' here so long, and never a celebration for young or old, I'd half forgot my patriotism. It's our school-teacher has woke me up to seeing the truth. Now that we hev beat our swords into pruning-hooks, and peace has pitched her tent alongside ours to stay, I can't help thinking there's danger in settlin' down too comfortable and off gyard like.

"This country," he raised his voice higher, "ain't teaching its children enough of the feelin' of patriotism. It takes the same kind of principle to make a good citizen that it doos a good soldier. It ought to be the very bone and sinew of every school in this whole land. I could talk all night on that subject, now I've got started. But what I want to say is this:

"I propose that we all get out our pocket-books, and throw in to get a handsome flag to fly over this schoolhouse. Take an old soldier's word for it, there ain't no greater inspiration anywhere, to make a fellow put in his best licks, and come out on top. Now, Miss Teacher, I'll just get the sense of this meeting."

He paused a moment, then turned to the audience: "All who want to express their thanks for this evening's entertainment, and are willing a collection should be took, say aye!"

Such a storm of ayes followed, that Peter caught up his slouched hat and began to pass it around, with his only arm. Dimes and quarters clinked into it, while an occasional dollar showed how deeply selfish hearts had been stirred by the uplifting influences of the hour.

Miss Atworth seated herself at the piano, and beckoned to the bewildered Goddess of Liberty to lead the States again across the stage. Some of the smaller ones straggled sadly out of line, but as Karl, at a nod from his teacher, caught the great flag from its place and stood with it in the midst of them, every voice rang out full and true on the chorus:

"Yes, we'll rally round the flag, boys,We'll rally once again,Shouting the battle-cry of freedom!"

People seemed loath to go when it was all over. They came up to the teacher with awkward expressions of pleasure and appreciation.

"I'll never forget this night," drawled one faded, overworked woman, to whose eyes the rich colours and tinsel of the stage decorations had seemed a part of fairyland. "That music was so sweet, and my little Meta looked like a picture with her hair curled, and that beautiful dress on you made her. I really didn't know she was so pretty. I'm going to fix her up and get her a lot of nice things after this."

"Well, it was worth while," said the little teacher, as she dropped into a chair at home, too tired to take off her wraps.

"Indeed it was," answered the squire. "Jake Schneider's new patriotism rose so he said he'd put a walk on each side of the school for half a mile, even if nobody'd help him. Then a lot of 'em began to talk it over. The upshot was that old Schmidt is going to give the logs, and they're all going to work to-morrow to hew them off and stake them down."

The next Monday morning Karl stopped at Miss Atworth's desk to say joyfully, "O teacher! father was so pleased. He is going to hire another hand and let me keep on till the end of the term."

"Then I need never regret my sacrifice," thought the happy girl.

That celebration was the beginning of better times in Hardyville. When the doors were barred for vacation, and the grass grew rank on the bare playground, the new flag still floated from the schoolhouse belfry.

Many a boy catching sight of the glorious flag as he plodded through the furrows behind his plough, felt himself lifted beyond the bounds of his little horizon, to some great plane of endeavour where all great things were possible. Still those beckoning folds teach a silent lesson of loftier ideals, and a broader humanity to people whom the little teacher thrilled with her enthusiastic spirit.

AN OLD DAGUERREOTYPE

Caleb Speed pushed back his chair from the dinner-table with anger and disgust in his face. The door had just banged behind a big, hearty boy of seventeen, whom he could still see through the narrow window trudging off toward the barn.

The lively whistle that sounded through the closed windows seemed to aggravate the man's ill-temper. He walked over to the fireplace, and kicked the smouldering logs with his heavy boot.

"If there's any one thing that riles me all over," he exclaimed, angrily, "it's having that boy always setting himself up to be in the right, and everybody else in the wrong!"

"Well, he 'most generally is in the right," answered Caleb's wife, clearing the table. "It's remarkable what a memory Jerry has, 'specially for dates. At the quilting here last week the women folks were trying to settle when 'twas old Mis' Lockett died, and Jerry knew to the day. He said 'twas two days after Deacon Stone's cows were killed by lightning, and that happened on the thirteenth of September, just a hundred years to the very day after Wolfe captured Quebec. You can't trip Jerry up in history."

"Well," answered her husband, impatiently, "he needn't be so sassy about it. We had a dispute over them same cows. I was telling the new minister about the storm, and I happened to say they was standing under a pine-tree. He chipped in, 'Why, no, it wasn't, uncle; it was an oak.' 'It was a pine!' says I. 'No, it wasn't; it was an oak,' says he.

"Just then Hiram Stone came by, and Jerry yelled to know which 'twas. Hiram said, 'Oak.' Then Jerry grinned as malicious, and said, 'I told you so! I knew I was right!' If he hadn't been my dead sister's only child and the minister looking on – " Caleb stopped in anger.

Mrs. Speed made no comment. She was fond of her husband's nephew. He had grown to be almost like a son in the five years he had lived with them. They were not old – not many years older than Jerry; for Caleb's sister had been older than he.

Mrs. Speed only laughed at the patronizing manners which he sometimes assumed, to the great annoyance of his young uncle. But Caleb Speed was too dogmatic himself to tolerate such a spirit in any one else.

"He sha'n't sit up and contradict me at my own table!" Caleb declared. "I'll thrash him first! He's got to show me proper respect. He needn't think because I've given him advantages that I couldn't have myself, that he knows it all, and I don't know anything!"

"Now, Caleb, what's the use? It's only Jerry's way," said Mrs. Speed, soothingly.

"Dear me!" she sighed, as Caleb went to his work. "It's a pity they can't get along as they used to. Caleb's so touchy he can't stand anything. I must tell Jerry to be more careful."

But when Jerry came in to supper and began his lively joking, she forgot the little lecture she had planned.

"The Spencers are going to move West next week," remarked Mr. Speed. "Land's cheap, and I guess they need more elbow-room for such a big family. Greenville is a mighty thriving place, they say."

"You mean Grandville, don't you, uncle?" suggested Jerry.

"I generally say what I mean, young man!" was the curt reply.

"Well, it's Grandville, anyway!" persisted Jerry, feeling in his pockets. "Jack Spencer is out there now. I got a letter from him yesterday begging me to go out there to him. Oh, here it is! Look at the postmark. It is Grandville! I knew I was right about it."

Nettled by the tone and his own mistake, Mr. Speed finished his supper in moody silence. The boy had no idea how his habit had grown, or how sensitive his uncle had become in regard to it. "Why, Aunt Lucy," he insisted, when she remonstrated with him, "I never contradict people unless I know positively that they are wrong!"

"Maybe," she answered. "But what real difference does it make whether the weasels killed five chickens or six, or that it was the black pig and not the spotted one that rooted up the garden? Those are such little things to bicker about, just for the satisfaction of saying, 'I told you so!'"

She imitated Jerry's tone and manner so well that he laughed a little sheepishly.

"Well, I'll turn over a new leaf," he promised, "just to please you."

Caleb Speed's farm was in southern Maine, near the coast. Jerry had grown up with the sound of the sea in his ears. It had long sung only a meaningless monotone to the boy, but it had begun to fill him with something of its own restless spirit. And about this time the Spencer boys were urging him to go West.

"No," he answered; "I owe it to Uncle Caleb to stay here. He was too good to me when I was a little shaver for me to leave him now when he needs me. He shall have the best service I can give him until I am twenty-one; then I'll be free to follow you."

But there came a crisis. Uncle Caleb gave Jerry a sum of money to pay a bill in town. There was a five-dollar piece in a roll of bills, and the gold-piece had disappeared.

Jerry insisted that he could not have had the money. "I know, Aunt Lucy. Uncle Cale handed me the roll of bills, and I put it down in this pocket, and never touched it till I got to town. When I took it out there were the bills just as he had handed them to me, and not a thing more."

"Maybe there's a hole in your pocket," she suggested.

She turned it wrong side out, but found no place where a coin could have slipped through.

"Well, it's a mystery where it went," she said. "I can't understand it."

"Pooh! It's no mystery," answered Jerry, contemptuously. "Uncle simply didn't give it to me. He thought he had rolled it up in the bills, but was mistaken. That's all!"

"What do you mean by that?" cried Caleb, jumping up white with anger. "I tell you it was wrapped up in the bills, and if you can't account for it, you've either lost it or spent it!"

Jerry bounded up-stairs to his room, stuffed his best suit of clothes into a little brown carpet-bag, and then poured out the contents of an old, long-necked blue vase. He had thirty dollars saved toward buying a horse of his own. Then he marched defiantly down-stairs to his uncle.

"I never saw or touched your gold-piece," he declared, "but I'll not go away leaving you to say that I took any of your money!"

He threw down a five-dollar bill and started to the door. As he turned the knob, he looked back at the woman by the fireplace, with her face in her apron.

"Good-bye, Aunt Lucy," he said, with a choke in his voice. "You've been awful good to me – I'll never forget that!"

Then he shut the door abruptly, and went out into the night. It lacked only five minutes of train-time when he reached the station, determined to go to a cousin of his father's who lived in Vermont, and write from there to Jack Spencer that he would work his way out West as soon as he could.

Tingling with the recollection of his uncle's reproaches, the boy sat up very straight and wide-awake in the train for a long time. Then his tension relaxed, and for lack of something else to do, he felt in his pocket for Jack Spencer's letter. As he pulled it from its envelope something else fell into his hand. It was a gold-piece.

He could scarcely believe his eyes as he sat dropping it from one hand into another. How had the coin got into the letter. For a time he could not guess; then the truth suddenly became clear to him.

The letter had been in his breast-pocket when he stuffed the roll of bills into it, and the coin must have slipped into the open end of the envelope as he pushed the bills down. When he began to search for the money he had changed the letter to another pocket, never dreaming that it contained anything except Jack's glowing description of prairie-life.

Jerry had been keeping his anger warm all the way by telling himself that his uncle had been harsh and unjust. He had even pictured to himself with grim satisfaction how shamefaced Caleb would look sometime when he should come across the coin among his own possessions. And now he had to think of himself as the blunderer and the unjust, foolish person.

But now no apology could be too humble. He would get off at the next station and take the first train home. The case called for an immediate reconciliation.

Then he reasoned that as he had paid for his ticket, he might as well go on to his journey's end and have a short visit. It would be easier, perhaps, to write than to speak his apology.

Jerry soon found his elderly cousin, Tim Bailey, who happened to be working just then in a new store – a combination of a book-store and an old-fashioned daguerreotype gallery; not old-fashioned then, for it was before the photograph had penetrated to the rural regions. Tim's rigorous cross-questioning soon drew the whole story from the boy.

"Well, that's easily settled," said Tim. "Just you write to 'em and own up, and say you're going to stop with me over Christmas, but that you'll be along about New Year to turn over a new leaf. They'll bring out the fatted calf when you get back. I know Caleb like a book. He can't hold spite."

Jerry settled himself to write the letter. But he found himself hard to please, and tore up several drafts. Writing apologies was not such easy work, after all! Then Tim put his grizzled head in at the door, with a beaming smile.

"Look here, boy, I've got an idee! The picture business is dull this morning. Go up and get yours took. You can send it along for a Christmas gift. Sha'n't cost you a cent, either. I get all my work done gratis, for sending him so much trade."

Three days after, Jerry dropped into the post-office a little package addressed to his uncle, containing, besides a letter, an excellent likeness of himself. Jerry made in the letter a straightforward acknowledgment of his mistake, and accompanied this manly apology with an earnest request to be allowed to return home.

He had grown so homesick for a sight of the old place that he could scarcely see the lines on his paper. And Aunt Lucy – well, he almost broke down at the thought of all her motherly kindness to him.

"Now I'll surely get an answer by Wednesday," he thought, but Wednesday went by, and another week passed, and although he called regularly at the post-office, no word came.

"Well, I've done all I could," he said. "It's plain they don't want me back."

Tim's sympathetic old heart ached for the boy's distress. He even offered to go up to the farm and intercede in his behalf.

"No indeed!" Jerry answered, defiantly. "I'll never beg my way back. I'm not the kind to go where I'm not wanted."

"Maybe they never got your letter."

Jerry hooted at the idea. "No, they don't want to make up. That's the long and the short of it."

When he finally started West, Tim Bailey went with him. Out on the far Western prairies, Jerry struck deep root in the favourable soil, and as the years passed on, became as much of a fixture as the new town that bore his name. Year after year he worked on, widening his fields, improving his buildings, working early and late, solely for the pleasure of accumulating.

Tim Bailey had grown old and rheumatic, almost childish, but he still assumed a sort of guardianship over Jerry. One day he put down his newspaper, wiped his spectacles, and scanned the rough, burly-looking man on the other side of the stove, as if he had been a stranger.

"Look here, Jerry," he said presently, "you're getting to look old, and your hair's all a-turning gray. Now you've got to quit pegging away so hard and take a holiday, before you get like me, so stiff and rheumatic you can't get away. Why don't you go to the World's Fair? It 'ud be a burning shame for the richest man in Trigg County to miss such a show."

Thus it came about that one day Jerry rubbed his eyes in a bewildered way to find himself in the midst of a surging crowd that thronged the entrances of the Fair.

He plodded along the Midway Plaisance, his umbrella under his arm and his hands in his pockets; he walked and stared till late in the afternoon. It was late in May, the spring ploughing had been a good preparation in pedestrianism, but the long furrows, enlivened only by the pipe of a quail or the cry of a catbird, had never brought such weariness as Jerry felt now.

He did not realize he was so tired until he dropped into a seat in one of the gondolas on the lagoon, and remarked confidentially to the gondolier that he was "clean beat out."

It was the first time Jerry had spoken since he entered the grounds. The man made no reply.

He studied the fellow keenly a moment, and then turned to the crowds, surging along the banks in every direction. Not a soul in all that multitude even knew his name.

A feeling of utter loneliness crept over him, and when the boat landed he was saying to himself that he would give the finest colt in his pastures for the sight of a familiar face.

A few steps farther, and he saw one. It was in the government building, where an amused crowd was exclaiming over the Dead Letter Exhibit. Jerry edged along in front of the case, wondering at the variety of shipwrecked cargoes that had drifted into this government haven.

A vague pity stirred in him for all the hopes that had gone into the grave of the dead letter office – rings that had never found the fingers they were to have clasped, gifts that might have unlocked long silences, tokens of friendship that were never received, never acknowledged – all caught in this snarled web that no human skill could possibly unravel.

Then he saw the familiar face. It smiled out at him from the case of an old daguerreotype, till his heart began to beat so hard that he glanced guiltily around, to see if any one else heard it. The blood rushed to his head, and he felt dizzy.

It was that picture of himself, taken so long ago up in Vermont! He was not likely to be mistaken in it – the only picture he had ever had taken in his life.