Sixes and Sevens

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Of course there was nothing the matter with me, but I was very ill.
I couldn't work, sleep, eat, or bowl. The only way I could get any
sympathy was to go without shaving for four days. Even then somebody
would say: "Old man, you look as hardy as a pine knot. Been up for a
jaunt in the Maine woods, eh?"

Then, suddenly, I remembered that I must have outdoor air and
exercise. So I went down South to John's. John is an approximate
relative by verdict of a preacher standing with a little book in his
hands in a bower of chrysanthemums while a hundred thousand people
looked on. John has a country house seven miles from Pineville. It
is at an altitude and on the Blue Ridge Mountains in a state too
dignified to be dragged into this controversy. John is mica, which is
more valuable and clearer than gold.

He met me at Pineville, and we took the trolley car to his home. It
is a big, neighbourless cottage on a hill surrounded by a hundred
mountains. We got off at his little private station, where John's
family and Amaryllis met and greeted us. Amaryllis looked at me a
trifle anxiously.

A rabbit came bounding across the hill between us and the house.
I threw down my suit-case and pursued it hotfoot. After I had run
twenty yards and seen it disappear, I sat down on the grass and wept
disconsolately.

"I can't catch a rabbit any more," I sobbed. "I'm of no further use in
the world. I may as well be dead."

"Oh, what is it--what is it, Brother John?" I heard Amaryllis say.

"Nerves a little unstrung," said John, in his calm way. "Don't worry.
Get up, you rabbit-chaser, and come on to the house before the
biscuits get cold." It was about twilight, and the mountains came up
nobly to Miss Murfree's descriptions of them.

Soon after dinner I announced that I believed I could sleep for a year
or two, including legal holidays. So I was shown to a room as big and
cool as a flower garden, where there was a bed as broad as a lawn.
Soon afterward the remainder of the household retired, and then there
fell upon the land a silence.

I had not heard a silence before in years. It was absolute. I raised
myself on my elbow and listened to it. Sleep! I thought that if I only
could hear a star twinkle or a blade of grass sharpen itself I could
compose myself to rest. I thought once that I heard a sound like
the sail of a catboat flapping as it veered about in a breeze, but
I decided that it was probably only a tack in the carpet. Still I
listened.

Suddenly some belated little bird alighted upon the window-sill, and,
in what he no doubt considered sleepy tones, enunciated the noise
generally translated as "cheep!"

I leaped into the air.

"Hey! what's the matter down there?" called John from his room above
mine.

"Oh, nothing," I answered, "except that I accidentally bumped my head
against the ceiling."

The next morning I went out on the porch and looked at the mountains.
There were forty-seven of them in sight. I shuddered, went into the
big hall sitting room of the house, selected "Pancoast's Family
Practice of Medicine" from a bookcase, and began to read. John came
in, took the book away from me, and led me outside. He has a farm of
three hundred acres furnished with the usual complement of barns,
mules, peasantry, and harrows with three front teeth broken off. I had
seen such things in my childhood, and my heart began to sink.

Then John spoke of alfalfa, and I brightened at once. "Oh, yes," said
I, "wasn't she in the chorus of--let's see--"

"Green, you know," said John, "and tender, and you plow it under after
the first season."

"I know," said I, "and the grass grows over her."

"Right," said John. "You know something about farming, after all."

"I know something of some farmers," said I, "and a sure scythe will
mow them down some day."

On the way back to the house a beautiful and inexplicable creature
walked across our path. I stopped irresistibly fascinated, gazing
at it. John waited patiently, smoking his cigarette. He is a modern
farmer. After ten minutes he said: "Are you going to stand there
looking at that chicken all day? Breakfast is nearly ready."

"A chicken?" said I.

"A White Orpington hen, if you want to particularize."

"A White Orpington hen?" I repeated, with intense interest. The fowl
walked slowly away with graceful dignity, and I followed like a child
after the Pied Piper. Five minutes more were allowed me by John, and
then he took me by the sleeve and conducted me to breakfast.

After I had been there a week I began to grow alarmed. I was sleeping
and eating well and actually beginning to enjoy life. For a man in
my desperate condition that would never do. So I sneaked down to the
trolley-car station, took the car for Pineville, and went to see one
of the best physicians in town. By this time I knew exactly what to do
when I needed medical treatment. I hung my hat on the back of a chair,
and said rapidly:

"Doctor, I have cirrhosis of the heart, indurated arteries,
neurasthenia, neuritis, acute indigestion, and convalescence. I am
going to live on a strict diet. I shall also take a tepid bath at
night and a cold one in the morning. I shall endeavour to be cheerful,
and fix my mind on pleasant subjects. In the way of drugs I intend to
take a phosphorous pill three times a day, preferably after meals, and
a tonic composed of the tinctures of gentian, cinchona, calisaya, and
cardamon compound. Into each teaspoonful of this I shall mix tincture
of nux vomica, beginning with one drop and increasing it a drop each
day until the maximum dose is reached. I shall drop this with a
medicine-dropper, which can be procured at a trifling cost at any
pharmacy. Good morning."

I took my hat and walked out. After I had closed the door I remembered
something that I had forgotten to say. I opened it again. The doctor
had not moved from where he had been sitting, but he gave a slightly
nervous start when he saw me again.

"I forgot to mention," said I, "that I shall also take absolute rest
and exercise."

After this consultation I felt much better. The reestablishing
in my mind of the fact that I was hopelessly ill gave me so much
satisfaction that I almost became gloomy again. There is nothing more
alarming to a neurasthenic than to feel himself growing well and
cheerful.

John looked after me carefully. After I had evinced so much interest
in his White Orpington chicken he tried his best to divert my mind,
and was particular to lock his hen house of nights. Gradually the
tonic mountain air, the wholesome food, and the daily walks among
the hills so alleviated my malady that I became utterly wretched and
despondent. I heard of a country doctor who lived in the mountains
nearby. I went to see him and told him the whole story. He was a
gray-bearded man with clear, blue, wrinkled eyes, in a home-made suit
of gray jeans.

In order to save time I diagnosed my case, touched my nose with my
right forefinger, struck myself below the knee to make my foot kick,
sounded my chest, stuck out my tongue, and asked him the price of
cemetery lots in Pineville.

He lit his pipe and looked at me for about three minutes. "Brother,"
he said, after a while, "you are in a mighty bad way. There's a chance
for you to pull through, but it's a mighty slim one."

"What can it be?" I asked eagerly. "I have taken arsenic and gold,
phosphorus, exercise, nux vomica, hydrotherapeutic baths, rest,
excitement, codein, and aromatic spirits of ammonia. Is there anything
left in the pharmacopoeia?"

"Somewhere in these mountains," said the doctor, "there's a plant
growing--a flowering plant that'll cure you, and it's about the only
thing that will. It's of a kind that's as old as the world; but of
late it's powerful scarce and hard to find. You and I will have to
hunt it up. I'm not engaged in active practice now: I'm getting along
in years; but I'll take your case. You'll have to come every day in
the afternoon and help me hunt for this plant till we find it. The
city doctors may know a lot about new scientific things, but they
don't know much about the cures that nature carries around in her
saddlebags."

So every day the old doctor and I hunted the cure-all plant among the
mountains and valleys of the Blue Ridge. Together we toiled up steep
heights so slippery with fallen autumn leaves that we had to catch
every sapling and branch within our reach to save us from falling. We
waded through gorges and chasms, breast-deep with laurel and ferns;
we followed the banks of mountain streams for miles; we wound our way
like Indians through brakes of pine--road side, hill side, river side,
mountain side we explored in our search for the miraculous plant.

As the old doctor said, it must have grown scarce and hard to find.
But we followed our quest. Day by day we plumbed the valleys, scaled
the heights, and tramped the plateaus in search of the miraculous
plant. Mountain-bred, he never seemed to tire. I often reached home
too fatigued to do anything except fall into bed and sleep until
morning. This we kept up for a month.

One evening after I had returned from a six-mile tramp with the old
doctor, Amaryllis and I took a little walk under the trees near the
road. We looked at the mountains drawing their royal-purple robes
around them for their night's repose.

"I'm glad you're well again," she said. "When you first came you
frightened me. I thought you were really ill."

"Well again!" I almost shrieked. "Do you know that I have only one
chance in a thousand to live?"

Amaryllis looked at me in surprise. "Why," said she, "you are as
strong as one of the plough-mules, you sleep ten or twelve hours every
night, and you are eating us out of house and home. What more do you
want?"

"I tell you," said I, "that unless we find the magic--that is, the
plant we are looking for--in time, nothing can save me. The doctor
tells me so."

"What doctor?"

"Doctor Tatum--the old doctor who lives halfway up Black Oak Mountain.
Do you know him?"

"I have known him since I was able to talk. And is that where you go
every day--is it he who takes you on these long walks and climbs that
have brought back your health and strength? God bless the old doctor."

Just then the old doctor himself drove slowly down the road in his
rickety old buggy. I waved my hand at him and shouted that I would
be on hand the next day at the usual time. He stopped his horse and
called to Amaryllis to come out to him. They talked for five minutes
while I waited. Then the old doctor drove on.

When we got to the house Amaryllis lugged out an encyclopaedia and
sought a word in it. "The doctor said," she told me, "that you needn't
call any more as a patient, but he'd be glad to see you any time as
a friend. And then he told me to look up my name in the encyclopaedia
and tell you what it means. It seems to be the name of a genus of
flowering plants, and also the name of a country girl in Theocritus
and Virgil. What do you suppose the doctor meant by that?"

"I know what he meant," said I. "I know now."

A word to a brother who may have come under the spell of the unquiet
Lady Neurasthenia.

The formula was true. Even though gropingly at times, the physicians
of the walled cities had put their fingers upon the specific
medicament.

And so for the exercise one is referred to good Doctor Tatum on Black
Oak Mountain--take the road to your right at the Methodist meeting
house in the pine-grove.

Absolute rest and exercise!

What rest more remedial than to sit with Amaryllis in the shade,
and, with a sixth sense, read the wordless Theocritan idyl of the
gold-bannered blue mountains marching orderly into the dormitories of
the night?




XV

OCTOBER AND JUNE


The Captain gazed gloomily at his sword that hung upon the wall. In
the closet near by was stored his faded uniform, stained and worn by
weather and service. What a long, long time it seemed since those old
days of war's alarms!

And now, veteran that he was of his country's strenuous times, he had
been reduced to abject surrender by a woman's soft eyes and smiling
lips. As he sat in his quiet room he held in his hand the letter he
had just received from her--the letter that had caused him to wear
that look of gloom. He re-read the fatal paragraph that had destroyed
his hope.


In declining the honour you have done me in asking me to be
your wife, I feel that I ought to speak frankly. The reason
I have for so doing is the great difference between our ages.
I like you very, very much, but I am sure that our marriage
would not be a happy one. I am sorry to have to refer to this,
but I believe that you will appreciate my honesty in giving
you the true reason.


The Captain sighed, and leaned his head upon his hand. Yes, there were
many years between their ages. But he was strong and rugged, he had
position and wealth. Would not his love, his tender care, and the
advantages he could bestow upon her make her forget the question of
age? Besides, he was almost sure that she cared for him.

The Captain was a man of prompt action. In the field he had been
distinguished for his decisiveness and energy. He would see her and
plead his cause again in person. Age!--what was it to come between him
and the one he loved?

In two hours he stood ready, in light marching order, for his greatest
battle. He took the train for the old Southern town in Tennessee where
she lived.

Theodora Deming was on the steps of the handsome, porticoed old
mansion, enjoying the summer twilight, when the Captain entered the
gate and came up the gravelled walk. She met him with a smile that was
free from embarrassment. As the Captain stood on the step below her,
the difference in their ages did not appear so great. He was tall and
straight and clear-eyed and browned. She was in the bloom of lovely
womanhood.

"I wasn't expecting you," said Theodora; "but now that you've come you
may sit on the step. Didn't you get my letter?"

"I did," said the Captain; "and that's why I came. I say, now, Theo,
reconsider your answer, won't you?"

Theodora smiled softly upon him. He carried his years well.
She was really fond of his strength, his wholesome looks, his
manliness--perhaps, if--

"No, no," she said, shaking her head, positively; "it's out of the
question. I like you a whole lot, but marrying won't do. My age and
yours are--but don't make me say it again--I told you in my letter."

The Captain flushed a little through the bronze on his face. He was
silent for a while, gazing sadly into the twilight. Beyond a line of
woods that he could see was a field where the boys in blue had once
bivouacked on their march toward the sea. How long ago it seemed now!
Truly, Fate and Father Time had tricked him sorely. Just a few years
interposed between himself and happiness!

Theodora's hand crept down and rested in the clasp of his firm, brown
one. She felt, at least, that sentiment that is akin to love.

"Don't take it so hard, please," she said, gently. "It's all for the
best. I've reasoned it out very wisely all by myself. Some day you'll
be glad I didn't marry you. It would be very nice and lovely for a
while--but, just think! In only a few short years what different
tastes we would have! One of us would want to sit by the fireside and
read, and maybe nurse neuralgia or rheumatism of evenings, while the
other would be crazy for balls and theatres and late suppers. No, my
dear friend. While it isn't exactly January and May, it's a clear case
of October and pretty early in June."

"I'd always do what you wanted me to do, Theo. If you wanted to--"

"No, you wouldn't. You think now that you would, but you wouldn't.
Please don't ask me any more."

The Captain had lost his battle. But he was a gallant warrior, and
when he rose to make his final adieu his mouth was grimly set and his
shoulders were squared.

He took the train for the North that night. On the next evening he was
back in his room, where his sword was hanging against the wall. He was
dressing for dinner, tying his white tie into a very careful bow. And
at the same time he was indulging in a pensive soliloquy.

"'Pon my honour, I believe Theo was right, after all. Nobody can deny
that she's a peach, but she must be twenty-eight, at the very kindest
calculation."

For you see, the Captain was only nineteen, and his sword had never
been drawn except on the parade ground at Chattanooga, which was as
near as he ever got to the Spanish-American War.




XVI

THE CHURCH WITH AN OVERSHOT-WHEEL


Lakelands is not to be found in the catalogues of fashionable summer
resorts. It lies on a low spur of the Cumberland range of mountains
on a little tributary of the Clinch River. Lakelands proper is
a contented village of two dozen houses situated on a forlorn,
narrow-gauge railroad line. You wonder whether the railroad lost
itself in the pine woods and ran into Lakelands from fright and
loneliness, or whether Lakelands got lost and huddled itself along
the railroad to wait for the cars to carry it home.

You wonder again why it was named Lakelands. There are no lakes, and
the lands about are too poor to be worth mentioning.

Half a mile from the village stands the Eagle House, a big, roomy
old mansion run by Josiah Rankin for the accommodation of visitors
who desire the mountain air at inexpensive rates. The Eagle House
is delightfully mismanaged. It is full of ancient instead of modern
improvements, and it is altogether as comfortably neglected and
pleasingly disarranged as your own home. But you are furnished with
clean rooms and good and abundant fare: yourself and the piny woods
must do the rest. Nature has provided a mineral spring, grape-vine
swings, and croquet--even the wickets are wooden. You have Art to
thank only for the fiddle-and-guitar music twice a week at the hop in
the rustic pavilion.

The patrons of the Eagle House are those who seek recreation as a
necessity, as well as a pleasure. They are busy people, who may be
likened to clocks that need a fortnight's winding to insure a year's
running of their wheels. You will find students there from the lower
towns, now and then an artist, or a geologist absorbed in construing
the ancient strata of the hills. A few quiet families spend the
summers there; and often one or two tired members of that patient
sisterhood known to Lakelands as "schoolmarms."

A quarter of a mile from the Eagle House was what would have been
described to its guests as "an object of interest" in the catalogue,
had the Eagle House issued a catalogue. This was an old, old mill that
was no longer a mill. In the words of Josiah Rankin, it was "the only
church in the United States, sah, with an overshot-wheel; and the only
mill in the world, sah, with pews and a pipe organ." The guests of
the Eagle House attended the old mill church each Sabbath, and heard
the preacher liken the purified Christian to bolted flour ground to
usefulness between the millstones of experience and suffering.

Every year about the beginning of autumn there came to the Eagle House
one Abram Strong, who remained for a time an honoured and beloved
guest. In Lakelands he was called "Father Abram," because his hair was
so white, his face so strong and kind and florid, his laugh so merry,
and his black clothes and broad hat so priestly in appearance. Even
new guests after three or four days' acquaintance gave him this
familiar title.

Father Abram came a long way to Lakelands. He lived in a big, roaring
town in the Northwest where he owned mills, not little mills with pews
and an organ in them, but great, ugly, mountain-like mills that the
freight trains crawled around all day like ants around an ant-heap.
And now you must be told about Father Abram and the mill that was a
church, for their stories run together.

In the days when the church was a mill, Mr. Strong was the miller.
There was no jollier, dustier, busier, happier miller in all the land
than he. He lived in a little cottage across the road from the mill.
His hand was heavy, but his toll was light, and the mountaineers
brought their grain to him across many weary miles of rocky roads.

The delight of the miller's life was his little daughter, Aglaia.
That was a brave name, truly, for a flaxen-haired toddler; but
the mountaineers love sonorous and stately names. The mother had
encountered it somewhere in a book, and the deed was done. In her
babyhood Aglaia herself repudiated the name, as far as common use
went, and persisted in calling herself "Dums." The miller and his wife
often tried to coax from Aglaia the source of this mysterious name,
but without results. At last they arrived at a theory. In the little
garden behind the cottage was a bed of rhododendrons in which the
child took a peculiar delight and interest. It may have been that she
perceived in "Dums" a kinship to the formidable name of her favourite
flowers.

When Aglaia was four years old she and her father used to go through
a little performance in the mill every afternoon, that never failed
to come off, the weather permitting. When supper was ready her mother
would brush her hair and put on a clean apron and send her across to
the mill to bring her father home. When the miller saw her coming in
the mill door he would come forward, all white with the flour dust,
and wave his hand and sing an old miller's song that was familiar in
those parts and ran something like this:


"The wheel goes round,
The grist is ground,
The dusty miller's merry.
He sings all day,
His work is play,
While thinking of his dearie."


Then Aglaia would run to him laughing, and call:

"Da-da, come take Dums home;" and the miller would swing her to his
shoulder and march over to supper, singing the miller's song. Every
evening this would take place.

One day, only a week after her fourth birthday, Aglaia disappeared.
When last seen she was plucking wild flowers by the side of the road
in front of the cottage. A little while later her mother went out to
see that she did not stray too far away, and she was already gone.

Of course every effort was made to find her. The neighbours gathered
and searched the woods and the mountains for miles around. They
dragged every foot of the mill race and the creek for a long distance
below the dam. Never a trace of her did they find. A night or two
before there had been a family of wanderers camped in a grove near by.
It was conjectured that they might have stolen the child; but when
their wagon was overtaken and searched she could not be found.

The miller remained at the mill for nearly two years; and then his
hope of finding her died out. He and his wife moved to the Northwest.
In a few years he was the owner of a modern mill in one of the
important milling cities in that region. Mrs. Strong never recovered
from the shock caused by the loss of Aglaia, and two years after they
moved away the miller was left to bear his sorrow alone.

When Abram Strong became prosperous he paid a visit to Lakelands and
the old mill. The scene was a sad one for him, but he was a strong
man, and always appeared cheery and kindly. It was then that he was
inspired to convert the old mill into a church. Lakelands was too
poor to build one; and the still poorer mountaineers could not assist.
There was no place of worship nearer than twenty miles.

The miller altered the appearance of the mill as little as possible.
The big overshot-wheel was left in its place. The young people who
came to the church used to cut their initials in its soft and slowly
decaying wood. The dam was partly destroyed, and the clear mountain
stream rippled unchecked down its rocky bed. Inside the mill the
changes were greater. The shafts and millstones and belts and pulleys
were, of course, all removed. There were two rows of benches with
aisles between, and a little raised platform and pulpit at one end.
On three sides overhead was a gallery containing seats, and reached
by a stairway inside. There was also an organ--a real pipe organ--in
the gallery, that was the pride of the congregation of the Old Mill
Church. Miss Phoebe Summers was the organist. The Lakelands boys
proudly took turns at pumping it for her at each Sunday's service.
The Rev. Mr. Banbridge was the preacher, and rode down from Squirrel
Gap on his old white horse without ever missing a service. And Abram
Strong paid for everything. He paid the preacher five hundred dollars
a year; and Miss Phoebe two hundred dollars.

Thus, in memory of Aglaia, the old mill was converted into a blessing
for the community in which she had once lived. It seemed that the
brief life of the child had brought about more good than the three
score years and ten of many. But Abram Strong set up yet another
monument to her memory.

Out from his mills in the Northwest came the "Aglaia" flour, made from
the hardest and finest wheat that could be raised. The country soon
found out that the "Aglaia" flour had two prices. One was the highest
market price, and the other was--nothing.

Wherever there happened a calamity that left people destitute--a fire,
a flood, a tornado, a strike, or a famine, there would go hurrying a
generous consignment of the "Aglaia" at its "nothing" price. It was
given away cautiously and judiciously, but it was freely given, and
not a penny could the hungry ones pay for it. There got to be a saying
that whenever there was a disastrous fire in the poor districts of a
city the fire chief's buggy reached the scene first, next the "Aglaia"
flour wagon, and then the fire engines.