Part 9

Besides the wind, and dust, and insects, and reptiles, there was the sun, for Jethro Somerton had never planted a tree near his house. Tree-roots had a way of weakening foundations, he said; besides, trees would grow tall in the course of time, and perhaps attract the lightning. Still more, trees shaded roofs, so the spring and autumn rains remained in the shingles to cause dampness and decay, instead of drying out quickly.

But her own house seemed cool by comparison with some which she entered in the village and in the farming districts: houses such as most new settlers in the West have put up with their own hands and as quickly as possible; houses innocent of lath and plaster, and with only inch-thick wooden walls, upon which the sun beat so fiercely that by midday the inner surface of the wall almost blistered the hand that touched it. Not to have been obliged to enter such houses would have spared Grace much discomfort, but it was the hospitable custom of the country to hail passers-by, in the season of open doors and windows, and Grace, besides being bound by the penalties peculiar to general favorites everywhere, was alive to the fear of being thought "stuck up" by any one.

Quickly she uprooted many delicate, graceful vines which she had planted to train against the sides of her own house, and replaced them with seeds of more rampant varieties. For days she made a single room of the house fairly endurable by keeping in it a large block of ice, brought from the ice-house by Philip in mid-morning; but the season's stock of the ice-house had not been estimated with a view to such drafts, so for the sake of the "truck" in cold storage she felt obliged to discontinue the practice. Wet linen sheets hung near the windows and open doors afforded some relief; but when other sufferers heard of them and learned their cost, and ejaculated "Goodness me!" or something of similar meaning, Grace was compelled to feel aristocratic and uncomfortable. She expressed to Caleb and to Doctor Taggess her pity for sufferers by the heat, and asked whether nothing could be done in alleviation.

"My dear woman, they don't suffer as much as you imagine," the Doctor replied. "In the first place, they are accustomed to the climate, as you are not; most of them were born in it. Another cooling fact is that neither men nor women wear as much clothing in hot weather as you Eastern people. They, or most of them, are always hard at work, and therefore always perspiring, which is nature's method of keeping people fairly comfortable in hot weather. I don't doubt that I suffer far more as I drive about the county, doing no harder work than holding the reins, than any farmer whom I see ploughing in the fields."

"I'm very glad to hear it, for their sakes, though not for your own. But how about the sick, and the poor little babies?"

"Ah, this is a sad country for sick folks, and for weaklings of any kind. Stifle in winter--roast in summer; that is about the usual way. Imagine, if you can, how an honest physician feels when he's called to cases of sickness in some houses that you've seen."

"Caleb," Grace said, "was it as hot in the South, during the war, as it is out here?"

"No," said Caleb, promptly, "though the Eastern men complained a great deal."

"What did the soldiers do when they became sick in hot weather?"

"They died, generally, unless they was shipped up North, or to some of the big camps of hospitals, where they could get special attention."

"But until then were there no ways of shielding them from the heat of the sun?"

"Oh, yes. If the camp hospital was a tent, it had a fly--an extra thickness of canvas, stretched across it to shade the roof an' sides. Then, if any woods was near by, and usually there was,--there's more woodland in old Virginia than in this new state,--some forked sticks an' poles an' leafy tree-boughs would be fetched in, an' fixed so that the ground for eight or ten feet around would be shady."

"Do you remember just how it was done?"

"Do I? Well, I reckon I was on details at that sort o' work about as often as anybody."

"Won't you do me a great favor? Hire a man and wagon to-morrow--or to-day, if there's time--and go to some of our woodland near town, and get some of the material, and put up such a shade on the south and west sides of our house; that is, if you don't object."

"Object? 'Twould be great fun; make me feel like a boy again, I reckon. But I ought to remind you that the thing won't look a bit pretty, two or three days later, when the leaves begin to fade. Dead leaves an' a white house don't 'compose,' as I heard you say one day to a woman about two calicoes that was contrary to each other. Besides, 'tain't necessary, for double-width sheetin', or two widths of it side by side, an' right out of the store here, would make a better awnin', to say nothin' o' the looks, an' you can afford it easy enough."

"Perhaps, but there are other people who can't, and I want to show off a tree-bough awning to some who need contrivances like it."

"I--see," said Caleb, departing abruptly, while Doctor Taggess exclaimed:--

"And here I've been practising in some of those bake-ovens of houses for thirty years, and never thought of that very simple means of relief! Good day, Mrs. Somerton; I'll go home and tell my wife what I've heard, then I think I'll read some of the penitential Psalms and some choice bits of Proverbs on the mental peculiarities of fools."

The arbor was completed by dark, and on the next day, and for a fortnight afterward, almost every woman who entered the store was invited to step into the garden and see how well, and yet cheaply, the house was shaded from the sun. All were delighted, though some warned the owner that the shade would kill her vines, whereupon Doctor Taggess, who spent parts of several hours in studying the structure, suggested that if the probable copyists were to set their posts and frameworks securely, they might serve as support for quick-growing hardy vines that might be "set" in the spring of the following year, and clamber all over the skeleton roof before the hottest days came. Thereupon Grace volunteered to write a lot of nursery men to learn what vines, annual or perennial, grew most rapidly and cost least, and to leave the replies in the store for general inspection.

"Doctor," Grace asked during one of the physician's visits of inspection, "where did the settlers of this country come from, that they never think of certain of their own necessities? Don't scold me, please; I'm not going to abuse your darling West; besides, 'tis my West as well as yours, for every interest I have is here. But Eastern farmers and villagers plant shade trees and vines near their houses, unless they can afford to build piazzas,--and perhaps in addition to piazzas. They shade their village streets, too, and many of their highways. Aren't such things the custom in other parts of the United States?"

"They certainly are in my native state, which is Pennsylvania," the Doctor replied, "and some of the handsomest villages and farm-houses I've seen are in Ohio and Kentucky. But I imagine the work was done by the second or third or fourth generation; I don't believe the original settlers could find the time and strength for such effort. As to our people, they came from a dozen or more states--East, West, and Middle, with a few from the South. I honestly believe they're quite as good as the average of settlers of any state, but I shouldn't wonder if you've failed to comprehend at short acquaintance the settler or the farmer class in general. In a new country one usually finds only people who've been elbowed out of older ones, either by misfortune or bad management, or through families having become too large to get a living out of their old homesteads, and with no land near by that was within reach of their pockets. There are as many causes in farming as in any other business for men trying to make a start somewhere else, but a starter in the farming line is always very poor. Almost any family you might name in this county brought itself and all its goods and implements in a single two-horse wagon. Your things, Caleb told me, filled the greater part of a railway car. Quite a difference, eh?"

"Yet most of the things were ours, when we thought ourselves very poor."

"Just so. So you can't imagine the poverty of these people. They lived in their wagons until they had some sort of roof over their heads; a man who could spend a hundred dollars for lumber and nails and window-sash passed for one of the well-to-do class. Some of them had no money whatever; their nearest neighbors would help them put up a log house, but afterward they had to work pretty hard to keep the wolf from the door until they could grow something to eat and to sell. They had hard times, of so many varieties, that now when they are sure of three meals a day, some cows, pigs, and chickens, credit at a store, and a crop in the ground, they think themselves well off, no matter how many discomforts they may have to endure."

"But, Doctor, they're human; they have hearts and feelings."

"Yes, but they have more endurance than anything else. It has become second nature to them; so some of them would long endure a pain or discomfort rather than relieve it. Doubt it, if you like, but I am speaking from a great mass of experience. I've heard much of the endurance of the North American Indian, but the Indian is a baby to these farmer-settlers. Endurance is in their every muscle, bone, and nerve, and they pass it down to their children. Eastern babies would scream unceasingly at maladies that some of our youngsters bear without a whimper. Many of the Presidents of the United States were born of just such stock; of course they were examples of the survival of the fittest, for any who are weak in such a country must go to the wall in a hurry, if they chance to escape the grave--and the graveyards are appallingly full."

"And 'tis the women and children that fill them!" Grace said.

"Yes," assented the Doctor. "If I could have my way, no women and children would be allowed in a new section until the men had made decent, comfortable homes, with crops ready for harvest, all of which shows what an impracticable old fool a man of experience may become."

"But a little work, by the men of some of these places, would make the women and children so much more comfortable!"

"Yes, but the women and children don't think to ask it, and the men don't notice the deficiency."

"But why shouldn't they? Many men elsewhere are perpetually contriving to make their families more comfortable."

"Yes, but seldom unless the necessity of doing so is forced to their attention in some way. Besides, to do so, they must have the contriving, inventive faculty, which is one of the scarcest in human nature!"

"Oh, Doctor! I've often heard that we Americans are the most inventive people in the world."

"So we are, according to the Patent Office reports, though the patents don't average one to a hundred people, and not more than one in ten of them is worth developing. I am right in saying that invention--except, perhaps, of lies--is among the rarest of human qualities. It requires quick perception and a knack at construction, as well as no end of adaptiveness and energy, all of which are themselves rare qualities. Countless generations ached seven or eight hours of every twenty-four, until a few years ago, when some one invented springy bottoms for beds. Countless generations of men had to cut four times as much wood as now, and innumerable women smoked their eyes out, cooking over open fires, before any one thought of making stoves of stone or of iron plates. Almost every labor-saving contrivance you've seen might have been perfected before it was, if the inventive faculty hadn't been so rare. Why, half of the newest contrivances of the day are so simple and obvious, that smart men, when they see them, want to shoot themselves for not having themselves invented them."

"So, to come back to what we were talking of--the prospect of country women and children being made more comfortable is extremely dismal."

"Not necessarily; country people have their special virtues, though many of them have about as little inventive capacity as so many cows. Still, they're great as copyists. For instance, my wife told me that every girl in the county wanted a dress exactly like one you made of two bits of dead-stock calico. They're already copying, I'm glad to say, your brushwood shade for the sides of the house. So, if you'll go right on inventing--"

"But I didn't invent the brushwood shade; you yourself heard Caleb tell me of it."

"Oh, yes, after you'd dragged it out of his memory, where it had been doing nothing for almost a quarter of a century."

"I'm sure I didn't design the combination of calicoes; the idea was far older than the calicoes themselves."

"Perhaps, but you adapted it, as you did Caleb's army hospital shade. Don't ever forget that most so-called inventors, including the very greatest, are principally adapters. 'Tis plain to see that you have the faculty, so don't waste any time in pitying those who haven't; just go on, perceiving and inventing--or adapting, if you prefer to call it so. Try it on everything, from clothes and cookery to religion, and you may depend on most of the people hereabouts to copy you to the full measure of their ability. There! I don't think you'll want to hear the sound of my voice again in a month. Caleb isn't the only man who finds it hard to get off of a hobby."

XIV--FUN WITH A CAMERA

FOR some days after Grace's camera arrived there were many customers and commercial travellers who had to wait for hours to see the one person with whom they preferred to transact business in the store, for a camera is procrastination's most formidable rival in the character of a thief of time. Grace made "snap-shots" at almost everything, and John Henry Bustpodder, the most enterprising of Philip's competitors, took great satisfaction in disseminating the statement that he reckoned the new store-keeper's wife was running to seed, for she'd been seen chasing a whirlwind and trying to shoot it with a black box.

But the Somerton customers regarded the general subject from a different standpoint, for Grace surprised some of them with pictures taken, without their knowledge, of themselves in their wagons, or in front of their houses, or on the way to church. They were not of high quality; but as the best the natives had previously seen were some dreadful tintypes perpetrated annually by a man who frequented county fairs, they were doubly satisfactory, for she would not accept pay for them. She surprised herself, also, sometimes beyond expression, by some of her failures, which were quite as dreadful as anything she had dreamed after almost stepping on snakes--people without heads, or with hands larger than their bodies, or with other faces superimposed upon their own. She also made the full quantity and variety of other blunders peculiar to amateurs, and she stained her finger-tips so deeply that Philip pretended to suspect her of the cigarette habit; but she persisted until she succeeded in getting some pictures which she was not ashamed to send to her aunt and to some of her acquaintances in the city.

Caleb, who endeavored to master everything mechanical and technical that came within his view, took so great interest in the camera, even begging permission to see the developing process, that Philip one day said to him:--

"Caleb, if your interest in that plaything continues, I shan't be surprised if some day I hear you advance the theory that even photography is a means of grace," and Caleb cheerily replied:--

"Like enough, for anythin's a means o' grace, if you know how to use it right."

"Even snakes?" Grace asked, with a smile that was checked by a shudder.

"Of course. The principal use o' snakes, so far as I can see, is to scare lots o' people almost to death, once in a while, an' a good scare is the only way o' makin' some people see the error o' their ways."

"H'm!" said Philip. "That's rather rough on my wife, eh?"

"Oh, no," said Caleb. "Some folks--mentionin' no names, an' hopin' no offence'll be took, as I once read somewhere--some folks are so all-fired nice, an' good, an' lucky, an' pretty much everythin' else that's right, that I do believe they need to be scared 'most to death once in a while, just to remind 'em how much they've got to be thankful for, an' how sweet it is to live."

Grace blushed, and said:--

"Thank you, Caleb; but if you're right, I'm afraid I'm doomed to see snakes frequently for the remainder of my natural life."

"Speakin' o' snakes as a means o' grace," said Caleb, "p'r'aps 'twould int'rest you to know that some awful drunkards in this county was converted by snakes. Yes'm; snakes in their boots scared them drunkards into the kingdom."

"In--their--boots?" murmured Grace, with a wild stare. "How utterly dreadful! I didn't suppose that the crawling things--"

"Your education in idioms hasn't been completed, my dear," said Philip. "'Snakes in their boots' is Westernese for delirium tremens."

"Oh, Caleb! How could you? But do tell me how photography is to be a means of grace."

"I'll do it--as soon as I can find out. I'm askin' the question myself, just now, an' I reckon I'll find the answer before I stop tryin'. There don't seem to be anythin' about your camera that'll spile, an' I've read that book o' instructions through an' through, till I've got it 'most by heart. Would you mind lettin' me try to make a pictur' or two some day?"

"Not in the least. You're welcome to the camera and outfit at almost any time."

Meanwhile Grace continued to "have lots of fun" with the camera. She resolved to have a portrait collection of all the babies in the town; and as she promised prints to the mothers of the subjects, she had no difficulty in obtaining "sittings." To the great delight of the mothers, the pictures were usually far prettier than the babies, for Grace smiled and gesticulated and chirruped at the infants until she cajoled some expression into little faces usually blank. Incidentally she got some mother pictures that impressed her deeply and made her serious and thoughtful for hours at a time.

Her greatest success, however, according to the verdict of the people, was a print with which she dashed into the store one day, exclaiming to her husband and Caleb:--

"Do look at this! I exposed the plate one Sunday morning, weeks ago, and then mislaid the holder, so that I didn't find it until to-day."

It was a picture of the front of the church, taken a few moments before service began--the moments, dear to country congregations, in which the people, too decorous to whisper in church, yet longing to chat with acquaintances whom they had not met in days or weeks, gathered in little groups outside the building. The light had been exactly right; also the distance and the focus, and the people so well distributed that the picture was almost as effective as if its material had been arranged and "composed" by an artist.

"Je--ru--salem!" exclaimed Caleb. "Why, the people ain't much bigger than tacks, an' yet I can pick out ev'ry one of 'em by name. Well, well!"

He took the print to the door and studied it more closely. When he returned with it, he continued:--

"That's a great pictur'. It ought to have a name."

"H'm!" said Philip, winking at his wife, "how would this do: 'Not exactly a means of grace, but within fifteen minutes of it'--eh?"

"It's a mighty sight nigher than that," said Caleb, solemnly, "besides bein' the best 'throw-in' that's come to light yet. Give copies of that away to customers that don't ever go to church, an' they'll begin to go, hopin' they'll stand a chance o' bein' took in the next; an' if they get under the droppin's of the sanctuary, why, Brother Grateway an' the rest of us'll try to do the rest. Grateway needs some encouragement o' that kind, for he's sort o' down in the mouth about nothin' comin' of his efforts with certain folks in this town. He's dropped warnin's and exhortations on 'em, in season an' out o' season, for quite a spell, but he was tellin' me only yesterday that it seemed like the seed in the parable, that was sowed on stony ground. An' say--Je--ru--salem!--when did you say you took that?"

"Two or three weeks ago," Grace replied.

"An' you didn't develop it till to-day?"

"Not until to-day."

"An' the pictur' has been on the plate all that time?"

"In one way, yes. That is, the plate had been exposed at the subjects, and they had been impressed upon it by the light, although it still looked plain and blank, until the developing fluid was poured upon it."

"How long would it stay so, an' yet be fit to be developed?"

"Oh, years, I suppose. Travellers in Africa and elsewhere have carried such plates, and exposed them, and not developed them until they returned to civilization, perhaps a year or two later."

"I want to know! Got any other plate as old as the one this pictur' was made from?"

"Yes, one; it was in the other side of the same holder."

"Would you mind developin' it to-night, in your kitchen, before company? Nobody that's fussy--only Brother Grateway."

"You know I'll do anything to oblige you and him, Caleb."

"Hooray! Excuse me, please, while I go off an' make sure o' his comin'."

"What do you suppose is on Caleb's mind now?" Grace asked, as Caleb and the picture disappeared.

"I give it up," Philip replied, "though I shan't be surprised if 'tis something relative to a camera being a means of grace."

"I can't imagine how."

"Perhaps not, but let's await--literally speaking--developments."

"He'll be here," said Caleb, a few moments later; he looked gleeful as he said it, and shuffled his feet in a manner so suggestive of dancing that Grace pretended to be shocked, at which Caleb reddened. During the remainder of the afternoon he looked as happy as if he had collected a long-deferred bill, or given the dreaded "malary" a new repulse. He hurried Philip and Grace home to supper, so that the kitchen might sooner be free for photographic purposes, and dusk had scarcely lost itself in darkness when he closed the store and appeared at the house with Pastor Grateway, who expressed himself exuberantly concerning the picture of his church and congregation; but Caleb cut him short by saying:--

"Ev'rythin' ready, Mis' Somerton? Good! Come along, Brother Grateway--you, too, Philip."

While the trays and chemicals were being arranged, Caleb explained to the pastor that photographs were first taken on glass plates, chemically treated, and that the picture proper was made by light passing through a plate to the surface of sensitized paper. When the red lamp was lighted, Caleb continued:--

"Now, when Mis' Somerton lays a plate in that tray, you'll see it's as blank as a sheet o' paper, or as the faces o' some o' the ungodly that you've been preachin' at an' laborin' with, year in and year out. You can't see nothin' on it, no matter if you use a hundred-power magnifyin' glass. But the pictur' 's there all the same; it was took weeks ago; might ha' been months or years, but it's there, an' yet the thing goes on lookin' blank till the developer is poured on it--just like Mis' Somerton's doin' now. Now keep your eye on it. It don't seem to mind, at first--goes on lookin' as blank as the faces o' case-hardened sinners at a revival meetin'. But bimeby--pretty soon--"

"See those spots!" exclaimed the minister. "Eh? Why, to be sure. Well, a photograph plate is a good deal like measles an' religion--it first breaks out in spots. But keep on lookin'--see it come!"

"Wonderful! Wonderful!" exclaimed the minister.