I. The young man
who came to stay
II. The strange lady
III. Lonesomeness
IV. The walrus and the Carpenter
V. At the pasture bars:
Elder-bushes may have stings
VI. June
VII. Morning: “Some in
rags and some in Tags and some in Velvet gowns”
VIII. Glad afternoon: The girl by
the blue tent pole
IX. Night: It is bad luck
to sing before breakfast
X. The court-house bell
XI. John Brown’s body
XII. Jerry the Teller
XIII. James Fisbee
XIV. A rescue
XV. Nettles
XVI. Pretty marquise
XVII. Helen’s toast
XVIII. The treachery of H. Fisbee
XIX. The great Harkless comes home
THE YOUNG MAN WHO CAME TO STAY
There is a fertile stretch of flat lands in Indiana
where unagrarian Eastern travellers, glancing from
car-windows, shudder and return their eyes to interior
upholstery, preferring even the swaying caparisons
of a Pullman to the monotony without. The landscape
lies interminably level: bleak in winter, a desolate
plain of mud and snow; hot and dusty in summer, in
its flat lonesomeness, miles on miles with not one
cool hill slope away from the sun. The persistent
tourist who seeks for signs of man in this sad expanse
perceives a reckless amount of rail fence; at intervals
a large barn; and, here and there, man himself, incurious,
patient, slow, looking up from the fields apathetically
as the Limited flies by. Widely separated from
each other are small frame railway stations—sometimes
with no other building in sight, which indicates that
somewhere behind the adjacent woods a few shanties
and thin cottages are grouped about a couple of brick
stores.
On the station platforms there are always two or three
wooden packing-boxes, apparently marked for travel,
but they are sacred from disturbance and remain on
the platform forever; possibly the right train never
comes along. They serve to enthrone a few station
loafers, who look out from under their hat-brims at
the faces in the car-windows with the languid scorn
a permanent fixture always has for a transient, and
the pity an American feels for a fellow-being who
does not live in his town. Now and then the train
passes a town built scatteringly about a court-house,
with a mill or two humming near the tracks. This
is a county-seat, and the inhabitants and the local
papers refer to it confidently as “our city.”
The heart of the flat lands is a central area called
Carlow County, and the county-seat of Carlow is a
town unhappily named in honor of its first settler,
William Platt, who christened it with his blood.
Natives of this place have sometimes remarked, easily,
that their city had a population of from five to six
thousand souls. It is easy to forgive them for
such statements; civic pride is a virtue.
