The Middle Years and the End

I

THOSE first years of ours in Iowa were the bitter years just before the outbreak of the Civil War (said Grandmother Brown). We were abolitionists, of course. It was bred in our bones to hate slavery. You might say it was part of our inheritance as children of the Northwest Territory. Both Dan’l’s people and mine were clear on that point. We were accustomed from our earliest youth to seeing runaway slaves along the Ohio River and advertisements offering rewards to anyone who would return them to their masters. I remember seeing slave owners coming over from Kentucky with chains and whips, looking for their slaves, and my horror at the sight. I remember particularly one time when we were living at the Brice House, seeing a man there who had caught his slave and was taking him back handcuffed. The black man had to eat weighted with irons. Think of a nice little girl standing in the dining-room door seeing that pitiful sight! Someone said the other day that the negroes were better off in slave days than they are now. How could that be, when now their children are taught and they are treated like human beings? See what good ministers some of them are! One of them preached a fine sermon here in our Presbyterian church not so long ago.

Oh, I never could have been anything but an abolitionist, a Whig, a Republican.

Dan’l felt the same way. Once, coming home from New Orleans, he saw a slave sale in St. Louis, saw men and women exposed for sale on a block in front of the courthouse, saw the auctioneer trying their agility and running his finger around their mouths exactly as if they were horses. We all hated slavery. My father helped many a slave get away on the underground railway and Dan’l’s folks did too.

Naturally our children imbibed our feelings in regard to the institution of slavery. That meant trouble for them almost from the first in the country schools of southeastern Iowa. Denmark was an exception with its abolitionists and fugitive slaves.

I remember how mad Lizzie was when some children at school called her ‘a black abolitionist’ and sang: —

But when she wept about it at home Dan’l said, ‘Why, of course you’re an abolitionist — a black abolitionist. You don’t want slaves.’ He explained it all to her and she went back to school and said to the children, ‘I am what you say I am and proud of it.’ And when they’d abuse Lincoln she’d fairly yell and dance with rage. Lincoln did n’t know she was such a booster. During the war there were continual rallies in Fort Madison and Denmark. Often a Copperhead would make a slighting remark about Uncle Sam or about Lincoln, a soldier would resent it, and then there would be a fight.

There were about as many rebels along the Missouri border as there were Union men. Our countryside was very unsafe in those days. Folks would drive off each other’s cattle and steal anything they could lay hands on. When the Lincoln and Douglas campaign was on, Will and Charlie joined the ‘Wide-Awake Boys’ in hip-hurrahing for Lincoln. They’d get together down in Augusta and march back and forth, carrying lamps filled with crude oil. It looked rather pretty as they described figures in their marching. There was a tonguey lawyer over in Fort Madison making speeches for Douglas, but nothing he or anyone else could have said about how Kansas should come into the Union would have changed our boys’ allegiance to Lincoln. They were thoroughly grounded in the principles of the abolitionists. Dan’l and I had read aloud to them Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as it came out, serially, in the paper. They’d just get ‘raring’ mad over that story. And over in Denmark there was a good man named Cable, who had know n their Grandfather Foster back in Ohio and worked with him helping slaves get away. I remember his driving over to our farm one day and telling us about his experiences. The boys sat on the edge of their chairs taking it all in.

It seemed afterward as if we had seen that war coming all our lives, but at the time when Fort Sumter was fired upon we were as excited as if the course of events had been wholly unforeseen. Feeling against President Buchanan was very strong with us. He was clearly a Southern sympathizer. He had allowed the Treasury to be robbed.

Lincoln’s call for volunteers reached many of our folks in Ohio, but our own particular family in Iowa was hardly subject to call at first. Will was only fourteen years old when the war broke out. But before it was over he and Dan’l both went up to Burlington to enlist. I could n’t cat that day. I felt that it was no worse for my men than for thousands of others all over the land, but oh, how glad I was when they came home again after only a day’s absence! Both were rejected. Dan’l had broken his arm and shoulder when he was a young man and they had been so set that he was never again able to straighten out his arm completely. And a chisel had fallen on Will’s bare foot when he was a child and cut off two of his toes. The doctor had sewed them on again, but Will had worked one toe free from the bandage so that it turned under his foot. He could never have tramped like a soldier.

Oh, that was a dreadful war! Soldiers were n’t provided with doughnuts in those days. Often they had nothing but wormy hardtack and black coffee. The worms would float to the top of the coffee, but the best they could do was to skim them off and swallow the coffee thankfully. They used to beg in their letters for onions, for most of the soldiers got the scurvy for lack of fresh vegetables. Like the Irishman, they might have said, ‘I prefer onions to strawberries; they’re more expressive.’ No one sent them things in packages or cans; we did n’t have canned goods in those days. No one knit socks for them. We scraped lint for them; now army surgeons use absorbent cotton.

I had no sons in the ranks, and I had only one day’s experience. I don’t know anything about the real agony of war mothers. In the World War a neighbor’s son came in to tell me goodbye. A tall, straight, fine-looking young man — the work of a good woman. Isn’t it terrible that he was there to be shot at?

II

As time went on, we became quite prosperous on our farm. The thing that set us on our feet was cheesemaking. Our neighbor, Mrs. Andrews, had a little vat big enough to make small cheeses in. I borrowed it once and made a few. I pressed them under the fence rail with a weight on top, and they were very nice. It put Dan’l in the mind of cheese-making on a larger scale. He concluded to sell the fine carriage which we had brought with us from Ohio and so seldom used and to buy cows with the money we received from the sale. He added to our herd until they brought us an income of about $300 a month for cheese. The ‘Dan Brown Cheese’ made quite a name for itself in southeastern Iowa.

Cheese-making itself was not heavy work. A boy could do it. The hard part was caring for the cows and milking them, and the older boys did that. Gus stayed in the cheese house more than any of the others. One thing that I did not like about cheese-making was that it kept someone at work every Sunday. We could n’t let all that cheese spoil, and the cows gave milk on Sunday the same as other days.

I found it interesting to watch the process of cheese-making. We used to strain the milk, put the rennet in, and then go to breakfast. When we had finished breakfast, it was time to cut the cheese lengthwise of the vat, then crosswise; later to drain off the whey, gather the cheese into hoops, and cap it. One has to be awfully clean with cheese, scraping out the corners of the vat thoroughly in washing it, or the cheese will be sour. I never made the cheese; merely fixed things so that they’d be clean — the vat, the frames, the cloths — and so that the work would be easy.

Oh, yes, I did make one cheese. It became a family joke: ‘Mother’s Cheese.’ I read in a magazine that one could make good cheese of skimmed milk, and I followed the recipe. When I thought the cheese should be ripe, I tried to cut it — but, goodness, it would n’t cut any more than a piece of wood. So Charlie tried to cut it, first with a knife, then with a hatchet, finally with an axe. Half he gave to Dash, the dog, who was delighted, at first, to have for once all the cheese he wanted. But Dash grew quite melancholy working over that cheese. He had it around for months. He even buried it in a manure pile, hoping to soften it, but his hopes were never realized. The boys used to pass the other half at table to all newcomers. It looked like cheese, it smelled like cheese, — an elegant smell! — but it might as well have been rubber.

As we became prosperous, I did not become more reconciled to life on our Iowa farm. I took satisfaction in the improvements we had made, but it seemed to me that our life grew more burdensome each year. The family was larger. It seemed to take more strength to keep things going, and I had lost some of my courage when our little Lottie died. And I could n’t see much opportunity in that part of the country for my children.

I look back to those years on the farm as the hardest years of my life; but there are, of course, some happy memories of the life there. Always where there are growing things — plants and children — there is beauty.

I think it was the coming of the piano that made the big change in our lives — the change that eventually led us away from the farm. Will and Charlie were young men by this time, reaching out towards a life of their own. Restless. Looking for entertainment, of course. Fine-looking young men, both of them. Both were fond of horses, and each wanted a nice team to drive. They used to go over to Stevensons’ a good deal, where there were young people fond of music. One son played the violin, another the bass viol, a daughter the piano. Will would mount his horse and ride over with his fiddle under his arm to join them, and Charlie was off with a horse or team to see his sweetheart, Lyde McCabe.

Why, Will even wanted to have a horse to go off riding round on Sunday. Charlie was of a more serious nature and would n’t have done that, but Will would. It got so that when Dan’l wanted a horse he almost had to ask the boys for it. He threatened to sell the horses. And one day there drove into our yard a strange man and woman, agents for the Chickering piano and the Wheeler and Wilson sewing machine. We made a deal with them for a piano worth $700. Father turned over in payment a team of horses worth $150 (a fine scheme to keep the boys more at home) and the rest in cash, including $300 that had come to me from my father’s estate.

The day that piano was brought in was a great day. We sent word to the Stevensons to come over and bring with them Libbie Knapp, who was going to school at Denmark Academy and played the piano. How we made the welkin ring! The Stevensons could read music. Will could n’t read a note, but once he got the melody in his head he could keep up with anybody. We played and sang for hours thal day, and the old lady who had sold us t he piano leaned back in her chair, listening to us and watching us ail. Before she left, she suddenly pointed to Charlie Stevenson and Will, saying, ‘I want this boy and this one’ — Charlie to help her sell pianos and Will to sell sewing machines.

Well, they were ripe for such offers.

Charlie Stevenson and Will went with Mrs. Cole to her headquarters in Milwaukee. She kept Will there until he learned all about sewing machines. Then she gave him a horse and wagonload of machines and sent him through the country to sell them. He spent a couple of years driving thus over the State of Wisconsin. Charlie and he met regularly at the county fairs and then they had a great time, Charlie playing the piano and Will the violin. They drew crowds of rubes around them, and then they ‘demonstrated’ the sewing machine.

After that, Will never went back to the farm for any great length of time. He went to firing on the new railroad that ran between Fort Madison and Keokuk, but not for long. About that time he heard that a bookstore in Fort Madison, having a branch store in Keokuk, was for sale. He remembered that on a farm just outside of Fort Madison lived Libbie Knapp, whom he had known at Denmark Academy, and he persuaded Dan’l to buy the bookstore in the hope that he would let him run it.

That fall we all moved into town except Charlie. We were all glad to go, even Dan’l. Gus had broken away the year before and gone to Fort Madison, where he got a job in Schaefer’s drug store. Charlie was married the January after we left, Will the next June. Dan’l took Will and Gus into the bookstore with him and rented the farm to Charlie for five years until Charlie could finance the purchase of a farm of his own in Missouri. Then Dan’l sold the farm for $10,000.

I’ve often thought that a considerable part of that $10,000 surely belonged to me, for all our married life I was just saving, saving. We should n’t have had anything if I had n’t been. The secret of the whole thing was just dimes, dimes. I never got anything I did n’t need, and when I had it I took care of it. A neighbor who saw me patching an old dress said, ‘I’d never try to save an old calico dress!’ Well, I would. I’d save anything that could be used. Our neighbor Mr. McChord said to Brother John: ‘Some of the rest of us could own a farm and store and move into town if our wives knew how to save the dimes as your sister does.’

We received $10,000 for a farm that had cost us only $3500. But it had cost us, in addition, fourteen years of our lives and most exhausting labor. It had been little better than a wilderness when we took it; we left it in a good state of cultivation. Those fourteen years seemed a long time to me, a big price to pay. We had buried there two children, and our youth was gone. Eight months before we left the farm our last child was born there, a boy whom we named Herbert Daniel.

When I felt the first birth pangs at his coming I was on my knees scrubbing the pantry floor. To give him birth caused me almost as much suffering as my first child had caused. But he was the last.

I was nearly forty-three years old and my hair was gray by this time. My neighbor Mrs. Johnson said she’d be so ashamed she would n’t know what to do if she had a baby after her hair was gray.

Only — I’m proud of the baby of my old age that Mrs. Johnson told me I ought to be ashamed of. He’s a useful man down there in Washington.

III

Fort Madison in 1870 was a town of perhaps five thousand people, with about forty saloons and no plumbing. It was hot in summer down there between the river bluff and the river. Only two or three families had then thought of building up on the hill. But, after the farm, it all looked good to me.

It was several years before we had a home of our own again, and for the first few weeks we lived on Front Street. The life on the river fascinated me. Steamboats carrying passengers and pushing raft boats plied up and down the stream, and I was never tired of watching them. I would get up in the night when I heard a boat coming; I used to think it a beautiful sight to see one steaming up the river all aglow with lights. Come to think of it, the very first electric lights I ever saw were on a river steamboat.

Then we lived for a couple of years in a house next to Dr. Toof, the dentist, on Third Street. Dr. Toof stuttered. He came across to get some water from our well one day when I was on the back porch cutting Dan’l’s hair. ‘Th-th-at ’s the w-way you s-s-ave your d-d-imes, is it?’ he ha-ha’d as he went by. Why, of course I always trimmed Dan’l’s hair and beard. I cut the boys’ hair also as long as we lived on the farm. I did it well, too.

When Herbert was about five years old we bought this old home, and I have lived here now for over half a century. It had been built in 1841, the year that the Court House was erected. Two stories in front, one at the rear. Back of that were the washhouse, woodhouse, and stable with a warehouse above. Gus said that the house ‘looked like a cow lying down.’ It was n’t much. We bought it of an old seafaring man who had a wife as rough in her speech as he was. When I made some criticism of the house she said, ‘I’m not selling you the damned old house — I’m just selling you the lots.’

Those were beautiful. The trees — fine old oaks full of squirrels — would have made any corner beautiful. Then Dan’l planted a maple tree at the back which shaded our kitchen nicely for years and years. I hated to have Gus cut it down when he made over the old house. Herbie — the little baby boy — had held up that maple tree while his father was planting it. But it offended Gus; a limb fell down and broke his bird basin. He tore down the grape arbor, too, that used to flank the house just outside the dining room, and he closed up the well. I think the way we had it, with the brick pavement and the grape arbor just outside the dining room, was nice. It was pleasant and cool to sit there in summer and look out into the depths of the garden in the days before we had given Will two of the lots to build his house on, when the garden really was something. ’T was a beautiful place those first ten years.

The corner of the fence was just full of roses. And to the left of the house there was a row of hollyhocks; they were like great double roses. At one time we had quantities of sunflowers at the back. I remember how Herbie trimmed our Jersey cow from horn to horn with little sunflowers, a wreath around her neck and a girdle of big ones across her back. Then he drove her down to the watering trough in front of the Democrat to show her off.

We always kept a cow, of course, and a few chickens and turkeys; at first also some white pigs and a hive of bees. I was amused one time when we had nine little turkeys. Coming home from church on Sunday morning, I found the whole nine sitting in a row on the front porch as if waiting for me. We ate some of them, but Herbie did n’t like the idea. ‘It’s just a shame to pet them and then eat them!’ he said. He was like Lincoln with his pig. We had one turkey that kept going over into a neighbor’s yard where there was a high bunch of weeds, higher than your head. The turkey made her nest there. Dan’l told the neighbor about it and asked him to spare her, but he was a sour old man; he cut down the weeds and spoiled her nest. She flew up on the fence and never would come down to eat; stayed up there until she fell off dead. I had no idea a feathered fowl could be so sensitive, but she was.

I could n’t do much in the next dozen years. During the whole of Herbie’s childhood I was a poor sick thing. And so there were a great many days and weeks at that time when I lay in bed all day with only my baby boy to keep me company. For a good while, life seemed to pass me by. I felt old and worn, and I thought that I looked prematurely old. My hair was white. Stung by Mrs. Johnson’s amazement at my having a baby after my hair had turned, I dyed it, using a recipe that I found in a paper.

Yes, I was just silly enough to do it. I continued to keep it dyed for a while after we came to Fort Madison. And then I suddenly came to my senses and saw that my face did n’t match the dyed hair. A servant girl who came to us stared at me and then at Dan’l. ‘Be you his wife? I thought you was his mother,’ she said. She had only one eye, but she should have seen better than that! I decided to let my hair be any color it would. But I suffered a lot in my pride before I had it all white again. Slowly, so slowly, the clean white streak got wider and wider, while the rest was a dirty green.

I got rather melancholy, being in poor health, and alone so much. And I was n’t happy in my church associations. I wanted to unite with the Presbyterian church where I belonged, but I had persuaded myself that it was my duty to go with Dan’l to the Baptist church. When we were living on the farm, a minister of the Baptist church came out to the schoolhouse near by and preached. Dan’l and Charlie united with the church. Later, Will and Charlie and Dan’l and I were all immersed in the Fort Madison church. In black alpaca slips, with bare feet! Why, the whole front of their rostrum was a bathtub!

Dan’l was religiously inclined all his life; seemed to like to go to church. All his people were Univcrsalists, but at Amesville we went often to the Presbyterian church.

I thought it did n’t make much difference what church we went to, so long as it was a Protestant denomination. But I always thought that the Close Communion of the Baptists was wrong. I used to wonder what I’d do when my mother came to see us some Communion Sunday, and, because she was a Presbyterian and not a Baptist, would have to be excluded from the Communion table where Dan’I and I would be welcome. I worried about it quite a bit. And then, when such a Sunday came and we were on our way to the Baptist church in Fort Madison, a terrible rain cloud appeared in the sky. We whirled around and drove home again. And that was the way of that. Afterward, in Fort Madison, Sister Ann and her husband, both Presbyterians, were visiting us on Communion Sunday. When they got up to go out, I went with them, stared at by the whole congregation.

It’s just like this: We’ve no right to say who is worthy of Communion. If Jesus were here on earth now, there would be a multitude following Him all the time. Just as there was then! Every request a poor soul made of Him was granted. No place would be big enough for the crowds, unless it would be the park. He would bid them all come to Communion. It’s what the heart feels that counts. It reminds me of what Hedel Schultz, a girl that worked for us, said to me. She had been to confession. ‘God is the only one that can forgive our sins,’ I told her. She answered: ‘Mrs. Brown, you don’t know how I am inside. I’m praying when I am peeling potatoes.’ I’ve had so many Catholic girls working for me who were exemplary in every way that it does n’t become me to say anything against Catholics, even though I am a Presbyterian. There was Mary Voight. I said to her: ‘Why, this is n’t Friday! You’ve eaten no meat. You’ve hardly touched your breakfast.’ And she answered, ‘Well, Mrs. Brown, if you must know, I’m fasting while I pray for a friend.’ Now that’s real. Ah, there’s lots o’ good in Catholicism. Remembering Lent’s a mighty good thing. And so I decided that Close Communion would n’t do for me. It is n’t right to say who shall and shan’t commune. Let God be the judge!

There’s so much I don’t understand in all the churches. I pass it over. I just live by what I understand. I understand what love means — that’s enough.

No, I wasn’t happy among the Baptists! I was very unhappy. But all the time I did my duty. Dan’l was a pillar of the church for many years and I stood by him, going to meetings when I felt able and feeding generously all the brethren he brought home. All the visiting deacons and itinerant preachers stopped with us when in town. It makes me think of what Georgiana Rochester said when my brother drove her home from a party and the chickens all began to fly as they turned in at the gate. ‘Dear me! They think it’s a preacher coming!’ The fatted calf we killed for preachers in those days was usually fried chicken.

For a while the Baptist minister and his wife lived at our house and boarded with us. They did a good deal to wean me from their church. In the first place, Brother Jones — that name will do for him as well as any other — was always preaching Temperance and he was one of the most intemperate people I ever saw. He used to get all tea’d up on tea — the strongest anyone could drink, cup after cup. And then how he’d carry on, berating everyone! He had ten weeks of ‘protracted meeting’ that winter; about wore us out, scolding and scolding. One night he got hold of a nice comfortable text. It was so restful for a change that I rose in meeting and made a speech myself, saying that we were so glad to be praised a little after having been scolded so much. Once, while he was having meetings, Gus had a carbuncle and I stayed to dress it. I came in late. And then Brother Jones knelt down and scolded away to the Lord about my being so late. That’s no way. God is Love. He does n’t rave and go on at us like that.

My dissatisfaction with the Baptist church worried me for years, but finally I made up my mind to go back where I belonged. We were visiting a cousin, Sarah Glazier, who had married a man named John Patterson. John had been brought up a Quaker and had the nice Quaker ways. He led the Wednesday night prayer meeting, and on the way home he and Dan’l lingered behind, talking together. Next morning Sarah said to me: ‘Dan’l told John that he expected you would leave the Baptist church and go back to the Presbyterian, and that if you did he meant to follow.’ Well, it did n’t take me long to change over after that.

IV

It took years to work out my church relations. In the meant time I had a long struggle with ill health. My little boy Herbert was my closest and most, constant companion in those difficult years. I was n’t equal to any more hard work. When I could sit up, I occupied myself as usefully as possible with my needle. I made hundreds of yards of carpeting. At one time I had four rooms and the stairs and the hall upstairs all covered with my own carpeting. I was particularly proud of the stair carpet. I made it so that the stripes — of bright colors — ran up and down the stairs. I bossed the weaving of it, invented a special way of having it done, and got the woman who did it to follow my instructions, so that every step looked just like every other one. I’ve had more people admire that carpet and wonder how it was made!

While I sewed, Herbie was always at my side. He was the best-natured child I ever saw. One result of his being by my sick bed so much was that he learned to spell at a tender age. It was one of the games I had to think up to keep him amused. He soon knew all the letters on his blocks. Then I began teaching him to spell the names of things around the room. Before he was five years old he could spell about two hundred words — hard words, too, like ‘ bureau,’ ‘cupboard,’ ‘biscuit,’ though they were words that he used all the time. And so it happened that he spelled the town down when he was only five years old.

You see, they were having a spelling bee in the Court House. Herbie heard it talked about. It seemed as if, just then, all the energies of his mind were directed to knowing just how every object he saw or used was spelt. I sent him to the store one day on an errand and watched him go through the gate, hesitate, and come running back to me. ‘What’s the matter now?’ I wondered. ‘It takes a g to spell “gate,”’ he said. ‘ What for a g to spell “gnat

I listed the words that I knew Herbie could spell, and I said to Gus: ‘Now I want you to take Herbert to the spelling bee. You tell Mr. Johnson, after the school has spelled, to call off these words and hear the baby spell.’

It was a warm night and the windows were open. After a while I could hear a terrible stomping and shouting. I said to myself, ‘They like the baby’s spelling.’ And so they did. But Mr. Johnson hadn’t done just what I had asked. He had put Herbie in the class with the others and then he had given the class Herbie’s list of words. One after another missed a word and sat down, and finally Herbie stood there alone — or sat, rather, for Judge Van Valkenburg held him on the desk, standing beside him. ‘Good for you, Herbie! Don’t be frightened!’ he kept saying. And Herbie wasn’t the least bit frightened, but spelled steadily away, not only the words others had missed, but all on his list.

Then some of the people said he had no right to the prize, as he did n’t go to school. But Mr. Johnson said that that made his right all the better. The prize they gave him was a handsome book, Peeps Abroad for Folks at Home — with his name in it and the date, 1875. He has it yet.

After that, Herbert used to ask: ‘What for does John Van [as everybody used to call Judge Van Valkenburg] say, “Hello, Noah Webster!” when he meets me on the street ? ’ ‘I suppose it’s because Noah Webster made a dictionary,’ I told him. Well, mothers are foolish things. They ’re so wrapped up in their children.

Herbert was a strong believer in prayer when he was a little boy. There was a man named McCutcheon who used to work for Dan’l, selling sewing machines. Dan’l had added to his bookstore and picture-framing establishment an agency for the Domestic sewing machine. McCutcheon drove around the country with a cart and a couple of ponies selling machines for Dan’l. In the final settlement between the two, Dan’l was left with the ponies on his hands. One of them was a very fine little creature — we called her just Pony. But the other, named Bronco, was much inferior — a mustang with an ugly disposition. Dan’l tried hard to sell the ponies and get his money out of the deal. But Herbie had set his heart on having Pony for himself. His father wouldn’t listen to him; said he could n’t afford to lose the sale — could n’t afford to keep a riding horse for Herbert, anyway. But Herbert never gave up hope, and he prayed steadily.

One night Dan’l came home saying, ‘Well, I sold the ponies to-day.’ ‘Don’t tell Herbie until morning,’ I begged him. ‘It will spoil his night’s sleep.’ The next morning I went into his room before he was up and said, ‘Father sold the ponies yesterday, Herbie.’ ‘Then I’ll have to pray some more,’ he said, and down he flopped on his knees. The man who had agreed to buy the ponies backed out at the last and refused to take them. ‘See?’ said Herbie. ‘I prayed.’

But still Dan’l would n’t listen to his pleading. He decided to send the ponies down to Charlie’s for pasturage. Herbert took them, riding one and leading the other. It was a distance of about thirty miles. I felt a little anxious about letting him go alone, but the pony he rode was gentle; Herbert was a good rider, and was familiar with the road. He got the ponies there safely and came home again. He went on praying. He had only been home a few days when one morning there came a telegram from Charlie saying that Bronco had been struck by lightning. Herbert’s excitement was intense. ‘There, Father, you said that if anything happened to Bronco I could have Pony!’ And so Dan’l gave in at last. I guess he thought it useless to hold out any longer, if the Lord was on Herbie’s side (said Grandmother).

Epilogue

The years slipped past. One decade followed another — the seventh, the eighth, the ninth, the tenth. It was Grandmother Brown’s hundredth year.

The cold April showers held back for Grandmother’s centennial. Her day dawned clear, if not bright, amid a week of heavy downpour. One could believe that spring, at last, was on the way.

Birthday greetings began early. Although one of the oldest towns of the Middle West, Fort Madison had never before had an opportunity to honor a centenarian. At ten o’clock, the hour when Grandmother was born, the city bells and factory whistles proclaimed, by order of Mayor Tower, their joy in wishing her a happy birthday. Church bells added their jubilant clamor, Protestant and Catholic bells alike. Dear Grandmother got a big thrill, as did we all, from the three minutes of riotous sound. ‘But then,’ she said, naïvely, ‘I really don’t believe I have a single enemy in all this town and I know that I have many friends. The people of Fort Madison have been very good to me. Their loving-kindness makes me very happy.'

First, a radio concert came through the air from Davenport, the announcer telling all listeners that in Fort Madison a sweet old lady was celebrating her centennial and listening in at the morning concert. And then the boys of the high-school band called at her home and were escorted upstairs to the hall outside her room, where they played several selections. Afterward they crossed her threshold and each shook her hand. ‘ I made them a little speech,’ she told me happily. ‘Such nice young boys!’

Presents poured in. Telegrams and letters came also from old friends, tributes from business associates of her sons whom she had never met, greetings from clubs and associations. ‘Just see!’ she exclaimed. ‘Here’s a letter come by air mail. Isn’t that wonderful? I think of the rhyme about Cyrus Green and his flying machine. They laughed a good deal then, because flying would n’t work, but they would n’t laugh now.’

Rapidly the room took on the aspect of a débutante’s boudoir. The Ladies’ Aid, the Missionary Society, and the Social Union of the Presbyterian church each remembered her with floral tributes. The King’s Daughters sent her a hundred sweet peas. The Daughters of the American Revolution gave her a potted plant. The laundryman wrote his felicitations, and a watchman at the ice company sent her flowers. The man who cuts the grass contributed a piece of delicious cake from his own lunch basket. A colored messenger in the departmental service at Washington bestowed on her a picture of the Lincoln Memorial. But of all the gifts and greetings none meant so much to her as the telegram from South Dakota: ‘Dear Mother and All: Congratulations on one hundred summers to you. Wish we could have all been with you on such a rare occasion. Your boy Willie and family.’

The eldest son had suffered a third stroke of paralysis, and Grandmother Brown had been told that he had decided it would be imprudent, in view of his uncertain health, to attempt a long journey.

She might, not unnaturally, have forgotten her nap that exciting morning. But she did not. When the time came, she shooed everybody out of the room and composed herself for slumber. When she awoke, she dressed herself handsomely, unaided, in black lace for her birthday party.

‘Why, Grandmother,’ I said, ‘I thought you wanted to be dressed in the black satin you wore at Adelaide’s wedding! And she’s brought the fichu for you to wear.’

‘Yes, I know,’ she answered. ‘But I found that I should have to have the black satin altered if I wore it again. What’s the use of bothering people?’

And indeed it would have been a carping critic who could have found any fault with Grandmother’s appearance when she was fully dressed. On her feet the new slippers with their smart tulle bows which Adelaide had given her; at her breast the lovely corsage of orchids which Cousin Angie had brought her all the way from Philadelphia; about her shoulders the rich silk shawl with its lavender embroideries which Cousin Frankie Golden had sent her from Indianapolis. ‘The Fosters are all proud. They like their Sunday clothes,’ Grandmother once told me. And at age one hundred she herself had her pride in looking nice.

’You are beautiful, Grandmother,’ I told her.

‘My child, you’ve kissed the Blarney stone. Beautiful — with all these wrinkles?’

About one o’clock the guests began to gather in the lower rooms of the house. Six tables were spread for the birthday feast. Children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, cousins, and in-law’s, we made a company of fortytwo — not counting Jimmie, who, at eight months, was considered better off at home than at the party with his parents, Edward and Alice.

When all was ready, a son and grandson picked up her chair and bore Grandmother down the stairs. At the foot, she was carried between an aisle of great-grandchildren who sang, kindergarten-fashion, ‘Happy Birthday, Dear Grandma, to You!’

She was seated at the centre of the long hostess table in the dining room, her own born children grouped around her, their wives attending; Gus presiding at one end, Sue at the other; Grandmother’s one daughter sitting opposite her, the oldest son present at her right, the youngest at her left; the three visiting cousins having seats of honor beside Gus and Sue, the rest of us mixed in between. The decorations followed a scheme of pink and white. The centrepiece was a gift from a noted candy manufacturer of Boston, a fragile ornament made to look like a great rose, its graceful petals stretching halfway across the table, a single pink taper rising above the bloom. ‘Lift the petals and there’s candy enough to supply a multitude!’ explained Grandmother with appreciation. ‘And just think, with all its delicacy, Jennie and Chari conveyed it a thousand miles in perfect condition!’

In the bay window of the dining room a long narrow table was laid for the nine youngest guests, all under twelve. There Bessie’s pair of little girls kept company with three brace of small boys, Dan’s two, Lynn’s two, and Adelaide’s two, with Frank’s sevenyear-old, Billy, thrown in for good measure. And at the other four tables in the parlor the guests were grouped according to their generation, greatgrandchildren of high-school age at one table, grandchildren of college age and of middle age at other tables. ‘Herbert said to me,’ I afterward heard Grandmother tell a friend, '“Just see, Mother, what you have started!" And I want to tell you that, as I looked over the company, I was not a bit ashamed of my work!’

As soon as all were seated, Herbert asked his mother to say the blessing and to say it loud, so that all could hear. The admonition was scarcely needed, for the strength of Grandmother’s voice was one of the marvels of her personality. A moving prayer she made, with thanks to God, first of all, for music — the children’s singing having stirred her heart; then thanks for family and friends, for favors of the past and future; a plea for ‘guidance in ways of righteousness’; a prayer for reunion in Heaven, where nevermore partings shall be. When she had finished, all sang, some of us with parched throats and wet eyes —

Since the above was written, Grandmother Brown has slipped from the clasp of Time. Toward the end her will to live weakened. Her body might have functioned longer had her spirit so inclined. But when one has finished all one’s tasks, and survived every contemporary, what motive force is there to keep one going? It was partly because I saw this lagging of the spirit that I began to write these reminiscences. I wanted to put down in Grandmother’s own speech for the benefit of her children’s children her comments on a hundred years of history; but, more than that, I wanted to set Grandmother herself a constructive task, to give her a new interest in life.

Between the birthday parties in celebration of the completion of her ninety-ninth and the completion of her hundredth year, I sent her chapter after chapter as I put them together from the notes I had taken down at her side, and she returned them to me with occasional corrections and additions, sometimes after conference with her oldest son. When she saw her own words typed, she had doubts about the propriety of having told so many intimate matters, but we reassured her.

She was in good health and spirits in April of 1928 when the hundred-andfirst anniversary of her birthday arrived, but, at her own request, there was no family reunion. About this time I tried again to interest her in the story of her life. ’ Herbert has shown our book to General Dawes,’ I wrote her. ‘The Vice President of these United States is a busy man, presiding over the Senate by day and going to dinner parties at night, but sometime between these activities he has read your story. He says that he has read every word of it, and some of it he has read aloud to his wife. He knows that Ohio country almost as well as you do, and is proud, like you, of the part his forebears played in its development.’

Then Grandmother wrote: ‘I have some beautiful, fine white wool, and I will make Mrs. Dawes a shawl, since she likes my story.’ And so, at the age of one hundred and one, Grandmother Brown found herself another task.

On January 8, 1929, ‘contentedly weary of life,’ aged one hundred and one years and nine months, lacking only a day, she fell into her last sleep.

(The End)