Thanksgiving-Day game with the Northern University of Pennsylvania. The
photographer's fence, you might think, was the summit of my career at
McGraw, reached as it was in my last year there. To the admiring eyes of
my fellows it was, but the McLaurins of Tuckapo and the Malcolms of Windy
Valley were above all a practical people and to them I am indebted for a
little common-sense, which told me that I could not play foot-ball all my
life, nor would the heavy bass voice, so effective in the glee club,
support a family, and deep in my heart I admitted the possibilities of a
family. I might strive to keep that thought in the background, but it
would rise when I dreamed of a home. That home was not a plain stone
farm-house, hidden among giant trees. My view had broadened. I dreamed
of a Queen Anne cottage, with many gables, and a flat clipped lawn, with
a cement walk leading over it to an iron gate. I looked back with
affectionate contempt to the art I had known in my youth, to the Rogers
group, Lady Washington's ball, Lincoln and his cabinet, the lambrequin
and the worsted motto. On my walls there would be a Colosseum,
Rembrandt's portrait of himself, a smattering of Madonnas, a Winged
Victory, and a Venus de Milo. To preside with me over such a house, to
sit at the piano of an evening and play accompaniments while I sang
sentimental songs, to fly with me over the country in a side-bar buggy,
behind a fleet trotter, I thought only of Gladys Todd. She was
accomplished, highly trained, it seemed to me, in all the finer arts of
life. In our valley the women never rose above their petty household
problems. They could talk, but only of recipes and church affairs, and
if they left this narrow environment at all it was to fare far--to India
and China, the foreign mission field. My view had broadened. Gladys
Todd had her being in higher airs. She painted. Pastels of flowers and
plaques adorned with ideal heads covered the walls of the Todd parlor.
She wrote. Doctor Todd assured me, speaking without prejudice, that his
daughter's essay on "The Immortality of the Soul," which she had written
out of pure love of the labor, equalled, if it did not surpass, the best
work of the senior class. She sang. Perhaps I see her now in the same
wizard lights of distance that glorified the mountains in my boyhood, but
I always recall her as a charming old-fashioned picture, sitting at her
piano and babbling her little songs in French and German. Of the quality
of her French and German I had no means of judging, but that she could
use them at all was to me surpassingly enchanting.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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