AT THE SCHOOLHOUSE FRIDAY EVENING MAJOR IRWIN ANDERSON THE ACTOR IN SONG AND DANCE MARVELOUS MAGIC-LANTERN SHOW A VISIT TO ALL THE WONDERS OF THE WORLD 10 CENTS And then the evenings in the farmhouses! Aldrich would sit like an Indian in his corner by the farmhouse stove; and he must have been saying to himself constantly: “Now, how did I get into this? How did I get into this?” The farmer’s wife, the hired man and perhaps a grown daughter would be there and there would be a maiden of uncertain age--the farm woman’s sister, who had never married and so just stayed about and worked for her board--and, in a corner, two or three towheaded boys who would presently have to go off to bed. All the others silent, but father talking and talking. An actor in the house! It was wonderful, like having Charlie Chaplin to dinner with you nowadays! Father was in his element now. This was pie for him. No hungry sons about, no sick wife, no grocery bills or rent to be paid. This the golden age--timeless; there was no past, no future--the quiet, unsophisticated people in the room were putty to his hands. Surely there was something magnificent in my father’s utter disregard for the facts of life. In the picture I have of him--that is to say in my fancy--in the picture I have of him during his pilgrimages of that winter I always see his partner in the affair, Aldrich, fast asleep in a chair. But the farmer and his wife, and the wife’s sister--they are not asleep. The unmarried woman in the house is, let us say, thirty-eight. She is tall and gaunt and has several teeth missing and her name is Tilly. It would be bound to be Tilly. And when father has been in the house two hours he is calling her “Tilly,” and the farmer he is addressing familiarly as “Ed.” After the evening meal the farmer has had to go to his stable to look at his stock, to bed the stock down for the night, and father has gone with him. Father runs about the stable holding the lantern. He boasts about the horses and cattle in his father’s stables when he was a boy. Whether that early home of his ever existed anywhere but in his fancy is doubtful. What a fellow, wanting to be loved, was my father!