Part 22

That dear woman is ballooning, and without a boy of her own for ballast. Only successful mothers and doting old grandfathers (who can still go on all fours) should be allowed to kindergarten. Who was it but old Priam, to whom Andromache used to lead little Astyanax?

The truth is, all of the theorizing, sermonizing, inculcating professions ought to be made strictly avocational, strictly incidental to some real business. Let our Presidents preach (how they love it!); let our preachers nurse the sick, catch fish, or make tents. It is easier for the camel, with both his humps, to squeeze through the eye of the needle than for the professional man of any sort to perform regularly his whole duty with sound sense and sincerity.

But ballast is a universal human need--chores, I mean. It is my privilege frequently to ride home in the same car with a broker’s bookkeeper. Thousands of dollars’ worth of stock pass through his hands for record every day. The “odor” of so much affluence clings to him. He feels and thinks and talk in millions. He lives over-night, to quote his own words, “on the end of a telephone wire.” That boy makes ten dollars a week, wears “swagger clothes,” and boards with his grandmother, who does all his washing, except the collars. What ails him? and a million other Americans like him? Only the need to handle something smaller, something realer than this pen of the recording angel--the need of chores. He should have the wholesome reality of a buck-saw twice a day; he might be saved if he could be interested in chickens; could feed them every morning, and every evening could “pick up the eggs.”

So might many another millionaire. When a man’s business prohibits his caring for the chickens, when his affairs become so important that he can no longer shake down the furnace, help dress one of the children, or tinker about the place with a hammer and saw, then that man’s business had better be put into the hands of a receiver, temporarily; his books do not balance.

I know of a college president who used to bind (he may still) a cold compress about his head at times, and, lying prone upon the floor, have two readers, one for each ear, read simultaneously to him different theses, so great was the work he had to do, so fierce his fight for time--time to lecture to women’s clubs and to write his epoch-making books.

Oh, the multitude of epoch-making books!

But as for me, I am a Commuter, and I live among a people who are Commuters, and I have stood with them on the banks of the Ohio, according to the suggestion of one of our wisest philosophers (Josh Billings, I think), and, in order to see how well the world could get on without me, I have stuck my finger into the yellow current, pulled it out, and looked for the hole.

The placid stream flowed on.

So now, when the day’s work is done, I turn homeward here to Mullein Hill, and these early autumn nights I hang the lantern high in the stable, while four shining faces gather round on upturned buckets behind the cow. The lantern flickers, the milk foams, the stories flow--“Bucksy” stories of the noble red-man; stories of Arthur and the Table Round, of Guyon and Britomart, and the heroes of old; and marvelous stories of that greatest hero of them all--their father, far away yonder when he was a boy, when there were so many interesting things to do, and such fun doing them!

Now the world is so “full of a number of things”--things to do still, but things, instead of hands, and things instead of selves, so many things to do them with--even a thing to milk with, now! But I will continue to use my hands.

No, I shall probably never become a great milk-contractor. I shall probably remain only a Commuter to the end. But if I never become anything great,--the Father of my Country, or the Father of Poetry, or the Father of Chemistry, or the Father of the Flying Machine,--why, I am at least the father of these four shining faces in the lantern light; and I have, besides them, handed down from the past, a few more of life’s old-fashioned inconveniences, attended, gentle reader, with their simple old-fashioned blessings.

The Riverside Press

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