THREE MONTHS SHORT of the period of five years
allotted to his fool's errand the vagabond arrived in Chicago ready to
take up the practice of law. His boyhood was past. Travel and work are
maturing experiences. Frequently after men have turned their backs on
every other opportunity of gaining wisdom they gain it through toiling
over the stony, tortuous, uphill pathway of experience.
At last my life settled down in earnest during the
early spring of 1896 when the sap was in the maple trees back in my
valley.
The vision of a world-wide fellowship of business
and professional men had not yet come; there were experiences of a
different nature yet to be had; but a wonderful foundation had been laid.
Is it any wonder that an impressionable mind which had found so much good
in the midst of evil, so much friendliness in places that might have been
barren, so much reason for confidence and faith in business men, should be
receptive to such a vision?
Chicago was experiencing hard times. I had
anticipated hard times but I could not see how they could be harder than
the period of my vagrancy; I considered myself a specialist in dealing
with hard times. I made my meager resources stretch as far as I could but
to get started in the practice of law was more difficult than I had
expected it to be. To "hang up my shingle" was a simple matter and while I
had not expected it to attract many, on the other hand I had not thought
that it would be completely ignored; so far as I can remember, the
immediate results were zero.
I spent considerable time about the Courts in
order to familiarize myself with their practices and I read law cases and
precedents into the late hours of the night but as for clients, there
continued to be none. I conferred with other young lawyers but learned
little of benefit to myself; some of them had means of their own; some had
influential relatives and friends and others, like myself, were
struggling. How I managed to get a small law practice started, which
eventually grew into a partnership and later other partnerships of which I
was always the head, is a long story and I need not go into it here, but,
in course of time the wheels began to turn, at first slowly then more
rapidly. In due course I became a member of the Bar Association, the Press
Club, the Bohemian Club, and was active in the Association of Commerce.
However, after five years of folly it was
difficult at first for the boy, now a young man, to settle down and become
wise. He was dreadfully lonesome particularly on holidays and Sundays. He
pondered the question of finding a way to increase his acquaintance with
young men who had come to Chicago from farms and colleges, who knew the
joys of friendliness and neighborliness without form or ceremony but it
took a long while for his thinking to produce results.
The impulse to review the scenes of his boyhood
became pressing and I finally set a day for my departure. Uncle George, to
whom I owed so much, met me at the railway station in Rutland and drove me
to his home in a phaeton drawn by a successor of bay Billy. Uncle George
was still continuing his practice but his heyday had passed; he was taking
things easier at last. The impressive enclosed station had burned and in
its place had been built an unimpressive open station. The voices of the
porters of the three leading hotels, the Bates House, the Berwick and the
Bardwell, extolling the merits of their respective hostelries in
stentorian tones and bewildering jargons, were conspicuous in their
absence and Merchants Row and Center Street were like streets of
Goldsmith's deserted village to the young man from Chicago.
Cottage Street where Uncle George's house, three
storied with mansard roof, was located was not nearly so wide as I had
pictured it. The welcome extended me by Aunt Mellie and Cousin Mattie was
genuine though subdued. Many changes had taken place in the Fox family;
the ring of laughter was no longer heard and most of the children had gone
out from the family roof. Uncle George spent hours on the side veranda
away from the street apparently indulging in meditation; he was as kind as
ever but seldom spoke except in response to remarks of others.
When I mentioned bay Billy, however, he did show
interest and said, "I have owned many a horse in my day, Paul, and I can't
recall ever having had a bad one but the nearest thing to a human being I
have ever seen in horseflesh, was Billy. He had as much affection as any
child and much more obedience; he had ideas of his own but he was not
headstrong. He would follow my orders even though he knew they were wrong
but not without manifesting his disapproval. It was not difficult for me
to read his mind, though not so easily as he read mine. Eventually I got
to the point of taking his judgment in preference to my own unless there
were some facts in the case which he didn't know. I wouldn't trust Billy
to treat any patients of mine, but as for matters within his jurisdiction,
he was generally the final word."
Cousin Mattie and I drove to Wallingford the day
following my arrival in Rutland. We took the Creek Road and every turn of
it was reminiscent of days of long ago. It was the same road over which
the family funeral party had taken the remains of grandmother that October
day; the same road I had tramped frequently. As we approached Wallingford
landmarks became more and more frequent. We passed the Jay Newton, the
Robert Marsh and the Hudson farms, the fork factory, the fair grounds, the
Catholic church, the Hull farm house, the Stafford house, and finally drew
up before the old home, the beloved home of my boyhood. Of course we
visited the cemetery next and spent reverential moments by the graves of
our grandparents.
Within a day or two I had taken up quarters in the
Inn at Wallingford and was renewing my acquaintance with old friends and
familiar places. My Sabbath School teacher, Anna Laurie Cole, was my most
efficient and available assistant in my efforts to build a bridge between
the pulsating present and the dreamy past; happily she still lives and
still constitutes my connecting link between the two periods.
One after another I visited favorite spots. The
swimming hole in Otter Creek near the covered bridge where naked
youngsters had disported themselves within plain sight of passing
vehicles, plunging from the rocks into the creek, not so much from a
modest desire to cover their nakedness as from a more immodest desire to
impress passing home folks with the belief that they were imps of Satan
turned loose. I was sorry to note that new growths of underbrush had
intruded themselves in places, which in other days had been reserved for
the use of the feet of graceless youngsters. In other respects, Otter
Creek had not changed.
Next in order was Fox Pond of the glamorous past.
In summer, autumn, winter or spring, Fox Pond was the piece de resistance,
except when it had to give way to the even more romantic charms of Little
Pond.
The "ice bed," Childs' brook, hillsides and
mountains all were visited in turn. During the days of my visit to the
valley of my heart's desire, I had ample opportunity to bring back to
memory incidents of my boyhood which had been obscured by the turbulent
events of the years which followed. In moments of quiet reflection on
hillside and mountain, I looked down into the valley through which Otter
Creek flows so peacefully and during such tranquil moments, I was
astonished at my resemblance to the boy out of whom I had grown; amazed at
times in the realization of the fact, how few changes had taken place.
Fundamentally, I was the same. The two old folks whose bones were resting
peacefully beneath the soil of the cemetery down in the valley, had
fashioned me as definitely as an artist could fashion clay. Their ideals
had become my ideals and the process had come about so gradually and so
naturally that neither grandparents nor grandchild were aware of it.
Surely I had fallen far short of living up to these ideals but the ideals
were still there. The principles of my grandparents had been made crystal
clear; they could not have been made more clear if the words integrity,
frugality, tolerance and unselfishness had been carved in gargantuan
letters on the bare face of majestic White Rocks.
There were moments while indulging myself in
daydreams on the mountainside when my conscience rebuked me for not being
up and doing; so many things needed to be done in this busy world and
there was so little time in which to do them, and then the thought came to
me that perhaps men had to dream and where could there have been a more
lovely dreamland than this very mountainside.
One day while resting from my climb on the top of
a stone and rail fence which separated two pastures, I looked down the
mountain, beyond pasturelands where cows were grazing, to the meadowland
along the creek where the hay crop was being harvested. The click of the
mowing machine was sweet music to my ears. The frugal farmer was
rhythmically swinging his scythe along the borders and in the corners to
save the few remaining wisps of timothy and clover with voluntary crops of
daisies and buttercups thrown in. The hired men were loading cured hay of
previous cuttings on hayricks for transfer to barn lofts for use during
the long winter months when deep snow would blanket the meadows and bring
nitrogen to the soil to maintain its fertility. I was too far up the
mountainside to enjoy the exquisite odor of the new mown hay but I drank
in the peace and tranquility of the scene and stored it up in my museum of
happy memories.
I recalled the fact that somehow many of my dreams
had come true. I had visited the land of Tom Brown of Rugby and Oxford;
the land of Shakespeare and Dickens; Burns and Scott; I had realized the
witchery of the Lakes of Killarney, the glory of the sunset on the Alpine
Mountains and the soft shading of Italian skies.
These and
many other wonders in many countries I had been privileged to see, without
the aid of grandfather but at the cost of years of unstinted toil, danger
and even hunger at times. Perhaps dreaming is not so bad if one dreams
good dreams and makes them come true; all too soon my vacation would be
ended and I would be back in the grind again.
