Father prancing about--the young merchant then, with the young merchant’s heavy silver watch and gold chain--a prospective Marshall Field, a Wanamaker, a Julius Rosenwald, in his own fancy, perhaps. “Hello, you, Ted. When you go’en a get that trace sewed up? These new fangle factory harnesses ain’t worth a tinker’s dam. How’s wheat looking out your way? No, the frost ain’t all out of the ground yet. What do you think of elections, eh? D’you hear what that fellow said--‘all Democrats ain’t horse thieves, but all horse thieves is democrats’? Do you think Frank Means will make it for sheriff?” That--in just that tone--and in a small frame house on a side street of the town myself waiting to be born. What is a birth? Has a man no rights of his own? NOTE IX SUCH a birth in an Ohio Village--the neighbor women coming in to help--rather fat women in aprons. They have had children of their own and are not too excited, but stand about, waiting and indulging in gossip. “If the men had to have the babies there would never be more than one child in a family. What do men know about suffering? It’s the women who have to do all the suffering in life, I always said--I said a woman feels everything deeper than a man--don’t you think so? A woman has intuition, that’s what it is.” And then the doctor coming hurriedly, father having run for him. He would be a large man with side whiskers and large red hands. Well; he is a doctor of the new school, a modernist, like the child he is about to help into the world. What he believes in, is fresh air. Wherever he goes, and no matter what the disease he is treating, he always says the same things. Modernists sometimes are like that. “Clean and fresh air--that’s what I believe in. Throw open the doors and the windows. Let’s have some fresh air in here.” While the child is being born he tells his one joke. One might as well be cheerful. Cheerfulness is a great healer, and what he believes in is in making his patients smile in the midst of suffering. “Do you want to know why I’m so strong on cleanliness?” he asks. “It’s because I’m a damned sinner, I guess, and I don’t go to church, and I’ve heard that cleanliness is next to Godliness. I’m trying to slip into Heaven on a cake of soap--ha! that’s what I’m up to.” A quick nervous laugh from the lips of father. He goes out of the house to tell the story to a neighbor he has seen raking leaves in a near-by yard. It is September now. He is a little unstrung. Under such conditions a man feels faintly guilty. People conspire to give him the feeling. It is as though all the women of the town were pointing accusing fingers and as though all the men were laughing, “greasy-eyed married men,” Bernard Shaw once called them. One will have to set up the cigars to the men, darn ’em. As for the women--they are saying, half jokingly, half in earnest: “There, you devil; see what you have done--this is your doings.”