Mary Rosetta Parkman

“ WHEN a boy has a name like George Washington Goethals he must have something out of the ordinary about him to let it pass with his companions on the playground. Should he prove a weakling, should the other boys discover any flaw in the armor of his self-confidence, such a name would be a mockery and a misfortune.
Is there any one who cannot recall certain rarely uncomfortable moments of his childhood when he wished that the fates had provided him with a Christian name that the other chaps couldn’t send back and forth like a shuttlecock, with a new derisive turn at each toss? ”

“ Jacob’s friends called it Rag Hall, and said it was a shame that such an ugly, ill-smelling pile should spoil the neighborhood of Castle Hill, where they loved to play among the tall grass and swaying reeds of the moat.
Rag Hall came to fill a large place in Jacob’s thoughts. It was the grim shadow of his bright young world. Surely the world as God had made it was a place of open sky, fresh life-giving breezes, and rolling meadows of dewy, fragrant greenness. How did it happen that people could get so far away from all that made life sweet and wholesome? ”

“ When it was known that he had gone to “do his bit” in the great war, people said fearfully, “Death loves a shining mark!” When news came that he was dead, it seemed as if the shadow of loss could never be lightened. Yet it is not for the song of the poet or the sacrifice of the soldier that he will be remembered, but for something rare and beautiful in the man himself that won the hearts of all who knew him.
They said of Rupert Brooke, “He is the ideal youth of England—of merry England!” ”

“ It was while he was still a student that he decided what his life work must be. “Man cannot live by bread alone”—these words had a very vital meaning for him. There were many in the world, he knew, who spent all their days struggling for bread, as if that alone could satisfy their longing for life. Very simply he said to himself: “I must use my strength to help where help is most needed. I must go to the far-off, frontier places where people live and die without light and without hope.” ”

“ Mosses, brilliant lichens, and bright berries cover the rocky ground, the evergreens stand in unrivaled freshness, and gleaming trout and salmon dart out of the water, where great ice-bergs go floating by like monster fragments of the crystal city of the frost giants, borne along now by the arctic current to tell the world about the victory of the sun over the powers of cold in the far North. ”

“ But should you ask me who of all this mighty company of the brave was the bravest, I should answer, Captain Scott. Some one has called his story, “The Undying Story of Captain Scott.” Would you like to hear it, and know for yourself why it is that as long as true men live this is a story that cannot die?
Most people who work know what they are working for; most men who are fighting for a cause know where they give their strength and their lives. The explorer alone has to go forward in the dark. He does not know what he will find. ”

“ It was often said of a gale on the Labrador coast, “That’s a wind that’ll bring Grenfell.” The doctor, impatient of delays, and feeling the same exhilaration in a good stiff breeze that a lover of horses feels in managing a spirited thoroughbred, never failed to make use of a wind that might help send him on his way.
What sort of people are these to whom Dr. Grenfell ministers? They are, as you might think, simple, hardy men, in whom ceaseless struggle against bleak conditions of life has developed strength of character and capacity to endure. ”

“ Every child to-day knows that they were shutting out the one thing that could cure them. But do you know that it was Edward Trudeau who taught us that? He was really the discoverer of the importance of fresh air as a cure for many ills, and, still better, as a means of keeping well. Besides this, he lived the life of a true hero. Listen to his story and see if you will not say with me that his was as brave a fight as that of any hero of battle. And his victory was one in which the whole world has a share. ”

“ All that we can say is that each child is himself alone, and that as the days go by the things he sees and hears, the things he thinks about and loves, the things he dreams and the things he does, are somehow made a part of him just as the soil and sunshine are made into the tree.
What was it in the Iowa farm life that became a part of the Quaker boy, Herbert Hoover? He learned to look life in the face, simply and frankly. Hard work, resolute wrestling with the brown earth, made his muscles firm and his nerves steady. ”

“ The next year found the youth of seventeen teaching a country school for eleven dollars a month and “board around.” How homesick he felt for the blue hills at home, for the old barn, with the nests of the swallows and phœbe-birds beneath its roof, for the sugar-bush, and the clear, laughing trout-streams. He could see his mother hurrying through her churning so that she might go berrying on the sunny slope of Old Clump, and he knew what she brought back with the strawberries—dewy dreams of daisies and buttercups, lilting echoes of bobolinks and meadow-larks. ”

“ The dauntless Northmen, who pushed across the seas and discovered America, could not have thrilled more at the sight of their Vineland than did this Dane of our own day when he saw the sky-line of the great city. This must indeed be a new world of opportunity for strong men.
It took only a day of wandering about the crowded streets, however, to convince this seeker that a golden chance is as hard to find in the New York of to-day as gold was in those disillusioning days of the early explorers. ”

“ He keeps nothing for himself but the small salary as mission doctor to pay actual living expenses. All of the industrial enterprises—coöperative stores, sawmills, reindeer, fox-farms, are deeded to the Deep-Sea Mission, and become its property as soon as they begin to be profitable.
Would you like to spend a day with Dr. Grenfell in summer, when he cruises about in his hospital-ship three or four thousand miles back and forth, from St. John’s all along the Labrador coast? You would see what a wonderful pilot the doctor is as he faces the perils of hidden reefs, icebergs, fogs, and storms. ”

“ Soon farm life began in earnest. Fields were cleared and plowed; a frame house was built on the hill; and the mother with the younger children came to join these pioneers. It would seem that the long days of unceasing toil—planting, hoeing, harvesting, splitting rails, and digging wells—that retarded the growth of the active lad would have completely quenched the flickerings of his wild, eager spirit. But he managed to absorb, in the most astonishing way, the lore of woods and fields and streams, until the ways of birds, insects, fishes, and wild plant-neighbors were as an open book to him. ”

“ How splendidly he proves that a man can rise above circumstances, and still march on and laugh on no matter what may be happening about him or to him!”
We have seen how the Bishop of Alaska fares in winter when the world is a vast whiteness save only for the heaving dark of the sea; when the avalanches are booming on the mountains; when the winds are sweeping through the cañons, and all the air is filled with ice-dust. ”

“ An age “of blood and iron” had swallowed up the golden age. England would be merry England no longer.
England! The name rang in his ears like a knell. England invaded! “I realized with a sudden tightening of the heart,” he said, “that the earth of England was like a loved face, like a friend’s honor—something holy. The full flood of what England meant to my inmost self swept me on from thought to thought. ”

“ He never ceased to marvel at the people who remained untouched in the presence of Nature’s rarest loveliness. “They have eyes and see not,” he mourned, as he saw some sleek, comfortable tourists pausing a moment in their concern about baggage to point casually with their canes to the Upper Yosemite Falls, coming with its glorious company of shimmering comets out of a rainbow cloud along the top of the cliff, and passing into another cloud of glory below. ”

“ We’ll have to make our own trails over snow-covered mountains, across glaciers, and through cañons, but the prize is there, boys, for those who have the grit to win out.”
“You talk about knowing Alaska,” put in another, scornfully, “and you see there nothing but fish, big game, and the chance to find some of the yellow dust that drives men mad. It’s a fairer land than you have ever even dreamed of, with greener pines and nobler fiords than Norway can show, and mountains more sublime than the Alps. ”

“ It was Scott’s plan to sail as far as the ship could go during the time of light, build a comfortable hut for winter quarters, then go ahead with sledges and carry loads of provisions, leaving them in depots along the path of their journey south, which was to begin with the coming of the next long day.
Patient watchfulness, not only by the man in the crow’s nest, but on the part of all hands, was needed to guide the ship through the great{92} masses of ice that pressed closer and closer about, as if they longed to seize and keep it forever in their freezing hold. ”

“ But the men who went into the jungles of darkest Africa said, “As long as there is something hidden we must go to find it.” And the men who went into the still, white, frozen lands of the North said: “There is no truth that can stay untouched. When we know the secrets of the North and the South, we shall the better understand the East and the West.”
The whisper, “Something hidden,” came to Robert Falcon Scott when he was a little boy in Devonshire, England. ”

“ Near the Danish coast where the sea and the low-lying fields grapple hand to hand in every storm, and where the waves at flood tide thunder against the barrows beneath which the old vikings were buried, is the quaint little town of Ribe. This is the sea’s own country. It seems as if the people here, who never fear to go down to the sea in ships, have scorned to pile up dikes between them and their greatest friend, who can, in a moment of anger, prove their greatest enemy. ”

“ Hoover would say without any hesitation that the work which he volunteered to do when the storm of the great war broke on Europe in August, 1914, was “paying” in the same way. This citizen of the world was at his London headquarters, from which, as consulting engineer, he was directing vast mining interests, when the panic of fear seized the crowds of American tourists who had gone abroad as to a favorite pleasure-park and had found it suddenly transformed into a battle-field. Hundreds of people were as frightened and helpless as children caught in a burning building. ”

“ A canal was a canal; an isthmus was an isthmus. Of course, the man who had made a way for ships through Suez could join the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific at Panama. No one seemed to realize that the digging of a ditch through one hundred miles of level, sandy desert was an entirely different problem from cutting a waterway through solid rock and removing mountains, to say nothing of diverting into a new channel the flow of a turbulent river and reconciling the widely different tides of two oceans. ”

“ To one used to the vastness of a level land stretching as far as eye could see, it seemed as if the hills and forests hedged him in on every side—as if he could not breathe. To ease the restlessness of his homesick spirit, he determined to try his fortune at coal-mining. ”

“ It was a sea-gull rising into the air, its wings flashing white in the bright sunshine.
“How does he do it?” he said aloud. “How is it that he can float about like that without any effort? It is just when he begins to mount into the air that he flaps his wings; now he is hardly moving them at all. He seems to be held up by the air just as a kite is!”
This was not the first time that young Samuel Langley had watched the flight of the sea-gulls.{234} And the sight of a hawk circling above the tree-tops could always set him a-staring. ”

“ The tools that had carved the beauties of Yosemite were not, he concluded, those of the hidden fires of the earth, the rending of earthquake and volcanic eruption, but the slow, patient cleaving and breaking by mighty{18} glaciers, during the eons when the earth’s surface was given over to the powers of cold—the period known as the Ice Age.
“There are no accidents in nature,” he said. “The flowers blossom in obedience to the same law that keeps the stars in their places. Each bird-song is an echo of the universal harmony. Nature is one.” ”

“ Hoover came to America to tell about conditions in Belgium and the work of the Relief Commission. Looking his fellow-citizens quietly in the face he said: “America has received virtually all the credit for the help given, and we do not deserve it. Out of $250,000,000 that have been spent, only $9,000,000 have come from the United States, the rich nation blest with peace—who owes, moreover, much of her present prosperity to the misfortunes of the unhappy Belgians, for the greater part of the money expended for relief supplies has come to this country.” ”