United States -- Social life and customs -- 20th century -- Fiction; Villages -- Fiction
He too came West in a prairie schooner and remembers all its wildness,
its uncouthness, its railroadless state. And he tells marvellous
stories about snakes, Indians and the little Chicago town built out on
the mudflats. He remembers very well indeed the steady stream of
ox-teams toiling over the few crude state roads. And he has in his
house rare volumes, valuable editions of famous works. He lets you
examine these if he thinks you are trustworthy and have a gentle way
with books.
There is another rare soul, the Reverend Alexander Campbell, who must
be introduced this rainy spring day. He is a retired Green Valley
minister and is full of humor and wisdom. He is an easily traced
descendant of the Scottish Stuarts. On a rainy day you will always
find him busy writing up the history of his family. Not that he
himself cares a fig for his genealogy. He is writing the book because
it gives him something to do and earns him a little peace from the
women folks.
He is a man whom the Lord has seen fit to try with a host of female
relatives, all family proud. He can fight the Devil and has done so
quite gallantly in four or five volumes of really good old-fashioned
sermons, "books," as he will tell you with a twinkle in his eye, "that
nobody could or would read nowadays." But he can not fight the women
of his family, so with a mournful chuckle he sits down every rainy day
and labors mightily on this great "historical work."
On sunny days he goes about his grounds, petting his trees and his
chickens, and working in his garden. He has several ingenious methods
of fighting weeds and raises the earliest, best and latest sweet corn
in Green Valley.
But men like the Colonel and Joshua Stillman and the Reverend Alexander
Campbell are representatives of Green Valley's leisure class. They
give Green Valley its high peace, its aristocratic flavor. But they
are a little remote from the town's workday life, being given to dreams
and memories and scholarly pursuits. They know little of the doings
and talks that go on in Billy Evans' livery barn, or the hotel. They
do, of course, go to the barber shop, the bank and the postoffice, and
always when abroad give courteous greeting to every townsman. But they
have never sat in the smoky, red-painted blacksmith shop or among the
patriarchs and town wits who in summer keep open-air sessions on the
wide, inviting platform in front of Uncle Tony's hardware store, and in
winter hold profound meetings around the store's big, glowing stove.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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