Charles Battell Loomis

“ We had grown to love the country in all its moods and I felt sure that in winter also we would find it full of the stimulus of life, but even with James for a companion, we knew that Minerva would not outstay the first snow storm, and since his situation with the liveryman now only awaited my announcement and his acceptance of it, we were going to count the winter in New York as simply so many days of anticipation of the next summer’s joys with perhaps the same crowd of congenial people, and it might be two of them keeping house in a new bungalow. ”

“ A few drops of rain fell, but the wind was south and we seemed to be going east.
"Isn't this gay?" called the young girls, as we jiggled along in holiday mood. Suddenly a silver bolt of jagged lightning cleft the sky to the south, and almost instantaneously a peal of thunder that sounded as if it had been born and bred on Connecticut hills, so loud was it, told us that the people living to the south of us were going to get wet. ”

“ For Ethel was just stepping into the carriage.
“That’s Minerva,” said Ethel to Rose. “Our cook. You know her, don’t you? Perfect jewel, but it’s the first time she has ever been away from New York, and she is very mournful.”
“So Philip was saying,” said Rose. “I tell him to give her a box of this dreadful chewing candy. It’s some we got at the only store in South Edgeley, and if she starts a piece it will keep her busy chewing for an hour at least. You’re not afraid to leave her, are you?”
“No, I’m not afraid,” said Ethel; “but I’m afraid she will be. She’s a hare for timidity. Oh, Minerva! ”

“ Breakfast was delicious. We have never had a cook who had so much—well, you might call it temperament, as Minerva has. She will toss off a roll with the lightness that makes it a work of art, and her fried chicken is better than the broiled chicken of most cooks.
Ethel already better, and the breakfast such a poem: why, I felt that I was to be envied, and I wondered how people could be content to spend their summers on alien piazzas, eating hotel dinners and watching hotel dwellers dress and pose and gossip. ”

“ The folk tale that follows was told me, not by a Dublin jarvey, but by a Dublin artist whose command of the right word was as great as his command of his brush.
He regaled me with many stories of Irishmen and Ireland and never let pass a chance to abuse the English in the most amusingly good-natured way. To him the English as a race were a hateful, selfish lot. Most of the Englishmen he knew personally were exceptions to this rule, but he was convinced that the average Englishman was a man who was nurtured in selfishness and hypocritical puritanism. ”

“ The banjoist had seen us first, and had told Minerva, and both had jumped to their feet, the man to bow and Minerva to run into the kitchen, where she was followed by her friend.
By the time we had come up to the front path to the veranda the coloured man had come out from the kitchen and in most melodious tones said,
“Minerva wanted to know if you would like dinner served on the piazza, the evening being so pleasant.”
Delmonico never had a head waiter with the aplomb, the native dignity, the utter unconsciousness of self that this superbly built man displayed. ”

“ If a man gets ten dollars a week in New York and lives in a crowded Harlem flat for which he pays at least five dollars a week, is he as well off as this Irishman, in his native land, with all the fresh air in the world, fowls and fresh eggs, and butter of his wife's making, and one of the loveliest views imaginable before him? ”

“ There seemed to be something fascinating in the clear-cut tones of the burglar’s voice for Minerva stood in the kitchen listening intently to every word.
“I hope you will enjoin on him the necessity of being honest,” said Ethel with evident enjoyment.
“Example is better than precept, Mrs. Vernon,” said he, looking her straight in the eyes. “I’m not much of a preacher myself. I sometimes say to him, ‘Do as you see me do, my boy, but try to do it better.’ I do hope to enable him to make an easy entry into the homes of really good people. ”

“ The river Lee runs through the center of Cork, and at evening it is a favorite place for fishing, also for learning to swim on dry land.
The fishermen seem to fish for the love of casting, and the little boys swim on the pavement—two pursuits as useless as they are pleasant. Over the bridge the fishermen leaned, and cast their lines in anything but pleasant places—for the river is malodorous—and the little boys stood on benches and dived to the pavement, where they spat and then went through the motions of swimming. ”

“ You see now-a-days when men in all walks of life write of what they have done, and make books of their writings, the people who read books have gotten to the point when they look with suspicion on a story that is written by a mere professional writer. They say, “Oh, he has done nothing but write. Let us read the book of the man who has first done and has then written.”
But you who have read thus far may feel in a way friendly to Minerva, and the rest, and so I take you into my confidence and make the pun to you that won for me a rebuke from Ethel. Letters spell livelihood for me. ”

“ Look at Shakespeare, the last Catholic that England had, as you might say, and look at his work with its artistry, its absence of dogmatism, and then look at Protestant and tiresome Wordsworth and Protestant and didactic Tennyson. Spenser was a great artist. Spenser was a Catholic. Catholicism emancipates the artistic side of a man's nature, puritanism seals it up, dams it, condemns him to preach sermons.
"The Irish are the most artistic people on the face of the earth when Protestantism has not been allowed to stamp their idealism out of them." ”

“ I had never seen Minerva in such spirits, and it seemed to me that she clung to James’ arm in a way that signified something approaching an understanding between them. What if he married her? How could we find work for him in New York?
She almost danced along, and his own stride was to a certain extent cake-walkey. We saw them enter an ice cream saloon immediately, and we knew they would be happy all day long.
There was joy in the air and we were happy. There is no question about it; as a people we are beginning to take our holidays less sadly. ”

“ Ugh. I never felt anything so creepy in my life. I flung him from me (with a wild cry, Ethel says, although I think she is mistaken) . At any rate I tossed the snake far from me, and he made his sinuous, chilly, gliding, repulsive way to his waiting family. And probably wrote a book on the bad habits of human beings from his short and superficial observation of them.
There is a certain rooted antipathy to snakes that lies deep at the base of our being. I cannot explain it, but I know it’s there. I am no snake charmer.
Minerva might have said something, but she knew her place, and refrained. ”

“ I hear voices borne on the summer wind of this day and they bring good tidings to me. They tell me that the right to work for a fair wage shall belong to each man and each woman who chooses to exercise it. They tell me—these voices—that the right to stop others from working shall be taken from those who think they hold it (Hear, hear) and that the right of the rich to eternally grab is no right.
“These voices tell me that the arts have found in these United States a soil in which they may flourish undisturbed. ”

“ Your hammer-thrower needs brawn, your chess player brains, your golf player a caddy—and a vocabulary, but anyone can go fishing. Of course there is a great difference between going fishing and catching fish, and I am one of that large army that goes fishing and returns from fishing as innocent of fish as at the moment of departure.
But to the man with eyes, there are many things besides fish that he can catch, and, although no hint of a nibble came to my patient fingers, I reveled in the day and would have stayed longer if I had not felt anxious about Ethel and Minerva. ”

“ When Minerva came in with a smoking hot omelet he said,
“Handsomest omelet I ever saw. If it tastes like that I’ll eat every bit myself. You’re a born cook, Minerva.”
Minerva grinned and went into the pantry whence she emerged with bread and butter.
As for the burglar he kept up a running fire of talk about supposed friends of ours.
“Rather sad, that accident to Tom’s nephew, wasn’t it?” said he.
“I hadn’t heard of it,” said Ethel, while I admitted a like ignorance.
“Is that so? Tom is no letter writer. Why little Sanderson fell down an elevator shaft and ripped all the buttons off his shoes.” ”

“ I foresaw what would happen if Minerva left and Ethel went into the kitchen permanently. A sanitarium for her and I an enforced bachelor in some city room—for we had let our flat for the summer.
I do not often interfere with the household work, for my business keeps me at home most of the time, and I hold that when man and wife are both at home it is better to have but one housekeeper and that one a woman, but now I went out into the kitchen to try to mend matters, and I found Minerva looking at the steadily falling rain that was making Mount Nebo look like a ghost of itself. ”

“ We dismissed Minerva from our thoughts, or at least I, man-like dismissed her from mine. I don’t suppose that Ethel was able to do so, but we did not talk of her again, preferring to drink in the beauties of nature and call each other’s attention to each draught. Rare is that nature lover who can silently absorb the loveliness of a landscape. ”

“ THE STORY OF A PIPE. I SUPPOSE that there are prettier places in the world than western Massachusetts, although I should consider it a profitless task to try to find them, but whether it arose from the beauty of the scenery or the witchery of the mountain air, certain it is that we have never stayed at a country place that exercised such a charm over us as did the rolling hills and valleys around Clover Lodge. Ethel was not less under its influence than I, and we have seen how Minerva, coming there with an evident and pronounced disgust for it, was now coming to look on it as home. ”

“ Poor Minerva! She must have been surprised to see that country horses were just like those of the city. Certainly a horse has more evil potentiality than a stupid little bat, but when a beast has you by the hair and you see him, as it were, through the back of your head, he is apt to loom large and terrifying.
Quiet was soon restored and Ethel came down with the lantern. ”