George Fitch

“ It is just like old times, especially when Ed Smith lays down his horn after a slight altercation with some one and goes home never to come back—just as he has done for the last thirty years.
That's the worst of music. One's art, you know, has so much influence over one's temper. To see our band soaring majestically down Main Street and playing "Canton Halifax" in one great throbbing rough-house of melody you would never believe that anything but brotherly love existed between the players. As a matter of fact, we never wasted any harmony among ourselves. ”

“ Homeburg is paved with rich black dirt, and in order to keep the populace out of the bosom of the soil in the muddy seasons, the brick crossings are built high and solid, forming a series of impregnable "thank-ye-marms" all over the town. One of our great diversions during the tourist season is to watch the reckless strangers from some other State dash madly into town at forty miles an hour and hit the crossing at the head of Main Street. There is a crash and a scream as the occupants of the tonneau soar gracefully into the top. ”

“ When DeLancey was haughty after that, we always praised this feat, and you'd be surprised to see how soon he got his nose down out of the zenith.
Every day old Number Eleven brings in its mail-bag full of hopes and triumphs, of good news, bad news, and tragedy. Every day it brings the new ideas from the world outside and the latest wrinkles in hanging on to this whirling old sphere in a pleasant and successful manner. We get our styles from the Chicago men who step off of its platforms and tarry with us. We send our brides off on it with an entire change of bill at each performance. ”

“ I always strive to admit all of New York's good points, and I've gotten a job here largely to encourage the old town and help it along. But I do think that in one respect New York is in the bush league, [Pg 281] so to speak. Even with such people as you to help, you can't get much Christmas out of it. When I think of Homeburg to-day, I feel proud and haughty. You can beat us on most everything else, but when it comes to Christmas, we can't notice you. You don't compete.
Christmas in this town is only a feat. It's a race against time in two heats. ”

“ You city folks may have your financial flurries, but if you've never been around and between and under a bank scrap in a small town, you don't know what trouble is. There were a couple of failures that needn't have happened, and a lot of partisan financiering, and then the town rose up and sat down on our social leaders with a most pronounced scrunch. We can stand just about so much society in Homeburg, but when it gets to elbowing into business, churches, schools and funerals, we are more sensible than you metropolitans are. ”

“ And that, Jim, is why I can't speed myself up to appreciate a young man who has never worked and never intends to. I still have to look at him with my Homeburg eyes. And in Homeburg, when a man doesn't work when he has a chance and takes what amusement we have to offer as a steady diet in perfect content, we know something is the matter with him—and we are sorry for him.
Leisure has killed more people in Homeburg than work ever did. For years our biggest problem was the job of keeping our retired farmers alive. ”

“ We ride in every new automobile, and, what is more, we go over it as carefully as a farmer does a new horse. We open its hood and pry into its internal economy. We crank it to test its compression—half the Homeburg men who have achieved broken wrists by the crank route haven't autos at all. We denounce the owner's judgment on oils and take his machine violently away from him in order to prove that it will pull better uphill with the spark retarded. At night, during the summer, we hurry through supper and then go out on the front porch to wait for a chance to act as ballast. ”

“ Homeburg is a good town, and it makes its girls behave even if it has to half kill them.
You haven't any idea, Jim, how much bustle and noise and excitement and general enthusiasm a passenger train can put into a small town for a few minutes. Just imagine yourself in Homeburg on a cold winter afternoon. It's four o'clock. The sun has stood the climate as long as it can and is getting ready to duck for shelter [Pg 9] behind the dreary fields to the west. If you ran an automobile a mile a minute down the walk on Main Street you wouldn't have to toot for a soul. ”

“ Our little boys dream of the time when they will grow up and join the company and wear seven-pound red helmets at fires, and come home tired and muddy in the gray dawn after a fire and demand hot coffee from their admiring women-folks; and as for the Homeburg girls—well, the greatest social function of our town, or of the county for that matter, is the annual ball of the Homeburg fire department. ”

“ Since the automobile has begun to rage in our midst, the garage is the center of our city life. The machine owners stop each day for lubricating oil and news and conversation; the non-owners stroll over to inspect the visiting cars and give advice when necessary; and the loafers have abandoned the implement store, Emerson's restaurant, and the back of McMuggins' drug store in favor of the garage, because they find about seven times as much there to talk about. The city garage can't compare with ours for adventure and news. ”

“ And that is one of the reasons why, when I see a man in New York with nothing to do from choice, I think of the sad [Pg 98] army of the unemployed in Homeburg draping themselves around the grain office every day in fine weather, and wearing away the weary years in idleness because they are too old to work, and don't have to, anyway.
Of late years we have been working earnestly to conserve our retired farmers. They are fine men, and we hate to see them wasted. We have been trying to reduce their leisure—just as a city man tries to reduce his flesh. We elect them to everything possible. ”

“ That grocery salesman who gets here once a week is coming across the square two jumps to a rod. Go it, old man! Go it, train! Ball will always stop for a woman, but the drummers have to take her on the fly. There! He's on—all but his hat. Red Nolan will keep that for him till his next trip.
She's moving fast now. The brakeman hops the next to the last car with grace and carelessness. From every platform devoted friends and relatives are spilling—it is a point of honor in Homeburg to remain with your loved ones in the car as long as you dare before leaping for life. The last car sweeps by. ”

“ I suppose those old Romans thought the chariot-races were pretty nifty, but if an old Roman should reassemble himself and watch the dray-race to a Homeburg fire, he'd wonder how he ever managed to sit through a silly little dash around an arena. From the south comes a cloud of dust and a terrific racket. At an equal distance from the east comes another cloud of dust and an even more terrible uproar, Clay Billings's dray having more loose spokes than Bill Dorgan's. The clouds approach with tremendous speed. ”

“ Because of our great interest in automobiles, vicarious or otherwise, there is no class-hatred in Homeburg. If a man were to stop by the roadside and begin to denounce the automobile as an oppressor of the pedestrian, he would in all probability be kidnaped by some acquaintance before he was half through and carried forty miles away for company's sake. ”

“ I've known Homeburg men to give up a trip to Chicago because Chet and Pelty began to trade their autos just before train time. [Pg 227]
In New York an auto means comfort and pleasure and advertisement, like a fur-lined overcoat with a Persian lamb collar. But in Homeburg it means a lot more. It keeps us busy and happy and full of conversation and debate. It pulls our old, retired farmers out of their shells and makes them yell for improvements. It unbuckles our tight-wads and gives our ingenious young loafers something to do. ”

“ But whenever I see New York people harboring telephones in their homes which absolutely decline to be civil until you feed them five cents, I think of our Homeburg blessings and am content. Six dollars a year buys a telephone at home, and about the only families which haven't telephones are a few widows who live frugally on nothing a year, and old Mr. Stephens, who has one hundred thousand dollars loaned out on mortgages and spends half an hour picking out the biggest eggs when he buys half a dozen. ”

“ We town people are judged by our editors according to our patronage. If a man gives two jobs of letterheads in succession to the Argus, Ayers looks on him as a man who has stabbed him in the back and has twisted the sword. If the Board of Education spends $67 for commencement invitations with the Democrat one year and $69.50 with the Argus the next, things aren't exactly calm and peaceable again until the discrimination has been explained. ”

“ He is a self-unmade man. With no resources, not even a loving wife with a wash tub, he lives a life of perfect ease and idleness. He doesn't even have to hunt for means of killing time, as DeLancey does. Time with him dies a natural death. He is not implicated in the sad event in any way. All he does is to watch its demise. He watches whole hours pass away while leaning against the door-frame of the Delmonico Hotel. Chet Frazier and Sim Bone got into an argument one day, and to settle it they went over and took Gibb away from the building. ”

“ Now and then a farmer comes out of a store, takes a half hitch on the muffler around his neck, puts on his bearskin gloves and unties his rig. You watch him drive off, the wheels yelling on the hard snow, and wonder if it isn't more cheerful out in the frozen country with the corn shocks for company. It's the terrible half hour of bleak, fading light before the electricity is turned on and the cozy dark comes down—the loneliest hour of the winter's day. ”

“ Nothing is lonelier on week days than our golf club, and one of the chief duties of the caretaker at the Commercial Club is to dust off the reading table. We have our clubs, and that is the main object. We know that they are there, and that we could enjoy them if we wanted to. Perhaps we do want to. But it's a hard art to learn. And, oh, how patiently and earnestly DeLancey is trying to teach us! If it were any one but he, we might learn faster. ”

“ Lafe Simpson, who runs the Argus, is a younger man than Ayers and more ambitious. Oh, yes, we have two papers. In a town the size of Homeburg you simply have to have two papers, because half of the people are always mad at one paper. The Argus and Democrat trade subscription lists about every seven years—not counting the hard-shell Democrats and blown-in-the-bottle Republicans who have to stand by their papers whether they get mad at them or not. I've been taking the Democrat for about five years because Simpson got too busy in the school election one year to suit me. ”

“ So a caucus was called, and the Grand Opera House, which holds six hundred human beings, and about a hundred boys in the front seats, was jammed until it bulged. We knew that no woman could out-argue our seasoned old politicians, and when Calvin Briggs, who has planned all the inside work in the congressional district for twenty years, got up and showed just why woman ought not to intrude, there was an abashed silence all over the house, until Emma Madigan, who is a town character and does just as she pleases, got up. ”

“ Why, it wouldn't be worth while owning a machine! As it is, we are all busy. I've ridden in twenty new machines this year and passed my opinion on them. It has taken a good deal of my spare time. I've [Pg 204] thought sometimes of buying one myself, but I don't believe it would be right. If I had a car myself, I would have to neglect all the others. It wouldn't do. Besides, I like to be peculiar.
Is every one in Homeburg a millionaire? Goodness, no! Our brag is that we have less people per automobile than any other town, but then that's the ordinary brag with an Illinois small town. ”

“ I watched Teddy Roosevelt go down the street common as dirt and could have gone up in the same elevator with him, they'll want me to give a lecture in the Woodmen Hall. It certainly beats all what you can see in New York for nothing.
That's where you have all the luck, Jim—you big city folks. You keep your interesting people at home; there's nowhere bigger for them to go. No matter how famous or successful they are, they have to stick around and mingle unless they get Europitis of the intellect. ”

“ That's what you are going to find out, Jim, when woman begins to vote for herself around here and to vote you into the bargain. She isn't going to play the game according to the old rules. She has no use for them. She has her own way of going about things politically, and while it is effective, its wear and tear on mankind is terrific. When the Homeburg women first attempted to place a woman on the school board, about fifteen years ago, most of the men objected, and they decided to hold a town caucus and call the women in. ”