Garland

“ They were always racing in those days, rejoicing in their abounding vigor. With them reaping was a game, husking corn a test of endurance and skill, threshing a "bee." It was a Dudley against a McClintock, a Gilfillan against a Garland, and my father's laughing descriptions of the barn-raisings, harvestings and railsplittings of the valley filled my mind with vivid pictures of manly deeds. Every phase of farm work was carried on by hand. Strength and skill counted high and I had good reason for my idolatry of David and William. ”

“ Garland, are you satisfied?” asked the inspector.
We had gone back to the garden, and Garland was leaning against a tree, his hands thrust in his pockets and his eyes fixed on the ground. Frost pulled his long moustache and breathed quickly.
“Are you satisfied?” he repeated.
“We must talk sense or we shall all go mad,” was Garland’s answer. “The thing is absurd, you know. Men don’t disappear. Let us work this thing out logically. There are only three planes in space and we know matter is indestructible. If Digby left this house he went up, down, or horizontally. Up is out of the question. ”

“ Garland was one of the professors chosen in 1229 for the new university of Toulouse, and remained in the south during the Albigensian crusade, of which he gives a detailed account in books iv.-vi. In 1232 or 1233 the hatred of the people made further residence in Toulouse unsafe for the professors of the university, who had been installed by the Catholic party. Garland was one of the first to fly, and the rest of his life was spent in Paris, where he finished his poem in 1252. Garland’s grammatical works were much used in England, and were often printed by Richard Pynson and Wynkyn de Worde. ”

“ In this village of Onalaska, lived my grandfather and grandmother Garland, and their daughter Susan, whose husband, Richard Bailey, a quiet, kind man, was held in deep affection by us all. Of course he could not quite measure up to the high standards of David and William, even though he kept a store and sold candy, for he could neither kill a bear, nor play the fiddle, nor shoot a gun—much less turn hand-springs or tame a wild horse, but [Pg 28] we liked him notwithstanding his limitations and were always glad when he came to visit us. ”

“ The girls wore gowns which they themselves had made, and were, of course, equally self-conscious. The knowledge that their sleeves did not fit was of more concern to them than the thought of breaking down—but the fear of forgetting their lines also contributed to their dread and terror.
While the names which preceded mine were called off that first afternoon, I grew colder and colder till at last I shook with a nervous chill, and when, in his smooth, pleasant tenor, Prof. Bush called out "Hamlin Garland" I rose in my seat with a spring like Jack from his box. ”

“ I wrote to my brother. "After eight years of cultivation, father's farm possesses neither tree nor vine. Mother's head has no protection from the burning rays of the sun, except the shadow which the house casts on the dry, hard door-yard. Where are the 'woods and prairie lands' of our song? Is this the 'fairy land' in which we were all to 'reign like kings'? [Pg 404] Doesn't the whole migration of the Garlands and McClintocks seem a madness?"
Thereafter when alone, my mother and I often talked of the good old days in Wisconsin, of David and Deborah and William and Frank. ”

“ Hamlin Garland—short-story writer, novelist.
Born on a farm near West Salem, Wisconsin, 1860, of Scotch and New England ancestry. During his boyhood, his father moved first to Iowa, then to Dakota. As a boy, Mr. Garland helped his father with all the hard work of making farmland out of prairie. While still in his teens, he was able to do a man’s work. His schooling was desultory, but he finished the course at Cedar Valley Seminary, Osage, Iowa, then taught, 1882-3. In 1883 he took up a claim in Dakota, but the next year went to Boston and began his career as teacher and writer. ”

“ Garland came to Bordeaux at once; but as he was no accountant, though evidently an educated man, I could give him nothing better than a place as what you call a storekeeper, which he filled for eight years, giving every satisfaction as to honesty and general good character. I know nothing more of him, and my son, who is at present absent, travelling in the East, does not, to the best of my belief, know anything that could assist you in your search for his relatives. The girl he married here was an orphan, and had no relatives living. ”

“ And then, one day, I heard my father read to my mother a paragraph from the county paper which ran like this, "It is reported that Richard Garland has sold his farm in Green's Coulee to our popular grocer, Mr. Speer. Mr. Speer intends to make of it a model dairy farm."
This intention seemed somehow to reflect a ray of glory upon us, though I fear it did not solace my mother, as she contemplated the loss of home and kindred. She was not by nature an emigrant,—few women are. She was content with the pleasant slopes, the kindly neighbors of Green's Coulee. ”

“ Fiction of Adventure
There is no questioning the force that Hamlin Garland has been in the literature of our time. He has told his story of his [Pg 23] own life and literary activities in “A Son of the Middle Border” (1917) , a volume that was at once accepted as one of the foremost of American literary autobiographies. In no way detracting from the quality of Mr. Garland’s later work is the ventured opinion that he has never surpassed some of his earlier stories. His writing career began about 1890, when the first of the tales of “Main-Traveled Roads” struck a fresh note in fiction. ”

“ But her joy was superb, and Garland had a very soft heart.
"Oh—how that is nize! Me? I got go. I dunno—all times seem lig I b'long 'cross west-ocean. Seem lig I different from aeverybody else. Me? I got have somebody lig me—somebody touch me—hole my hands—so—so—so!" She illustrated fervidly.
Garland, alarmed at her dynamic emotion, released them. She returned them to him.
"But—nobody don' wish. Others—Japan people—they don' lig be ligued. But me? I got be—else I got pain in my heart an' am ill. You aever have those pain at you' heart—lig you all times falling down—down—down? ”

“ In addition to his military character, Dick Garland also carried with him the odor of the pine forest and exhibited the skill and training of a forester, for in those early days even at the time when I began to remember the neighborhood talk, nearly every young man who could get away from the farm or the village went north, in November, into the pine woods which covered the entire upper part of the State, and my father, who had been a raftsman and timber cruiser and pilot ever since his coming west, was deeply skilled with axe and steering oars. ”

“ Garland’s people have this peculiar characteristic, that they have not had a literary world made for them to live in. They seem to move and act in the cold gray light of reality, and in that trying light they are evidently human.”—Chicago Record. ”

“ With my father's death I ceased to regard the La Crosse Valley even as my summer home. I decided to make my permanent residence in the East, and my wife and daughters whose affections were so deeply inwound with the Midland, loyally consented to follow, although it was a sad surrender for them. As my mother, Isabel McClintock, had given up her home and friends in the Valley to follow Richard Garland into the new lands of the West, so now Zulime Taft, A Daughter of the Middle Border, surrendered all she had gained in Illinois and Wisconsin to follow me into the crowded and dangerous East. ”

“ But speaking as an ordinary member of society—we’ll dispense with the ‘the’—from the bottom of my heart I rejoice that a man so infamous as William Garland is no longer able to do harm to his fellow creatures. ”

“ Thousands upon thousands have unquestionably perished.
[77] The most fascinating member of the Chap-Book series is undoubtedly the Garland—not so much a volume by a given author, such as the Court of Venus (1558) and Deloney's Garland of Good Will, 1596, as a miscellany by sundry hands. The next earliest of these collections known to us at present are the Muses' Garland, 1603, and Love's Garland, 1624. Those in Pepys's library at Cambridge are of much later date, yet of some no duplicates can be quoted, so vast has been the destruction of these ephemerides. ”

“ Garland could never have anticipated when she first removed thither after her husband’s death.
The lower half of the garden, farthest from the road, was the most snug and sheltered part of this snug and sheltered enclosure, and it was well watered as the land of Lot. ”

“ Rose came out, and he put his arm about her.
"Hark!" he commanded. "Do you hear the wind in the tree-tops? It brings me the roar of the city this morning. I hear the grind of cars, the roar of mills, the throb of presses; the city calls me and I must go. My vacation is over. I must say good-by tonight."
"It's very beautiful up here now," she said a little wistfully. "The sumac is beginning to turn and the hills are like jewels."
"Oh yes, it is beautiful," he said smiling a little. "But down there life is. Infinite novelty, ceaseless change. As you love the country, so I love the city. ”

“ His love of the sands and the purple buttes of the plain did not blind him to the beauty of coloring and the gracious majesty of these peaks, clothed as they were with the russet and gold and amber of ripened grasses, which grew even to the very summits (only the kingliest of the peaks were permitted to wear the ermine robes which denoted sovereignty) ; the Continental Divide was, indeed, much more impressive than he had expected it to be.
He was not one of those who seek out strange women, and he had no hope of meeting the girl of the mountain-side again. ”

“ Their circulation is a matter that brings the social student in touch with the middle-class life. Not only the chap-books and the horn-books, but the so-called Garlands, rudimentary anthologies of popular poems and spirited ballads, served to relieve the drudgery of commonplace lives, toned the sluggish mind by quickening the imagination. A curious part of the history of these Garlands is their sudden disappearance, brought about by two types of hawkers, known as the “Primers-up” and “Long-Song Sellers,” who peddled a new kind of ware. ”

“ Mary had hardly been more than an acquaintance at school, but now she seemed a staff to lean upon. Rose looked to her as a guide to a refuge, a hiding-place from all these terrors.
Out under the prodigious arching roof she stepped, into the tumult of clanging bells, of screeching, hissing steam and of grinding wheels. The shouts of men echoed here and there in the vaulted roof, mysteriously as in a cavern. Up the long walk, streams of people moved, each one laden, like herself, with a valise. ”

“ Smiley turned to me with a note of satisfaction in her voice, and said: "I like this room and this furniture; I feel the right associations here. The air is full of spirit power."
"I am glad your mind is at ease," said I, "for I am anxious for a very conclusive sitting. You tell 'Mitchell' that Miller is decidedly worth converting. I want 'Wilbur' to do his best, for I intend to tighten the bonds on you to-night."
She fearlessly faced me. "I am in your hands, Mr. Garland; do as you like. Mr. Mitchell told me this morning that he would yet convince you of the reality of the spirit world. ”

“ Thereafter I lay in wait for an opportunity to display myself in all my London finery.
* * * * * *
Two months later as I was mounting the central staircase of the Chicago Art Institute, on my way to the Annual Reception, I met two of my fellow republicans in Prince Albert Frock suits. At sight of me they started with surprise—surprise and sorrow—exclaiming, "Look at Hamlin Garland!" Assuming an expression of patrician ease, I replied, "Oh, yes, I have conformed. In London one must conform, you know.—The English are quite inexorable in all matters of dress, you understand." ”

“ Old Hugh established them in a lonely cabin on the edge of the village, and thereafter took care of them, nursing grandfather with his own hands until he was well. "And that's the way the McClintocks and the Garlands first joined forces," my father often said in ending the tale. "But the name of the man who carried your Aunt Susan in his wagon from Milwaukee to Monticello I never knew."
[Pg 10] I cannot understand why that sick girl did not die on that long journey over the rough roads of Wisconsin, and what it all must have seemed to my gentle New England grandmother I grieve to think about. ”

“ What folly!" said his pacifist neighbors—"to leave your wife and children for an idea, a mere sentiment; to put your life in peril for a striped silken rag." But he went. For thirteen dollars a month he marched and fought while his plow rusted in the shed and his cattle called to him from their stalls.
My conscious memory holds nothing of my mother's agony of waiting, nothing of the dark days when the baby was ill and the doctor far away—but into my subconscious ear her voice sank, and the words Grant, Lincoln, Sherman, "furlough," "mustered out," ring like bells, deep-toned and vibrant. ”

“ Part V. Shewing when the Taylor had got the money, and his marriage over told her father how he had tricked him.
Printed by J. Chalmers & Co. CastleStreet Aberdeen
THE TAYLOR’s GARLAND.
To the tune of, king William and his Forresters
You pretty young maids that has mourn’d many years
Come chear up your hearts and dry up your tears
Let not your grief and sorrows take birth;
For here I have bought you a garland of mirth.
A Garland of pleasure a garland of love,
How a young man did happen to prove
Successful in all his adventures of late ”