Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town LifeAnderson, Sherwood
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Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life
Anderson, Sherwood
City and town life -- Fiction; Ohio -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Pastoral fiction
The woman in the streets did not remember the words of the doctor and
would not have turned back had she remembered. She was very cold but
after walking for five minutes no longer minded the cold. First she
went to the end of her own street and then across a pair of hay scales
set in the ground before a feed barn and into Trunion Pike. Along
Trunion Pike she went to Ned Winters’ barn and turning east followed a
street of low frame houses that led over Gospel Hill and into Sucker
Road that ran down a shallow valley past Ike Smead’s chicken farm to
Waterworks Pond. As she went along, the bold, excited mood that had
driven her out of doors passed and then returned again.
There was something biting and forbidding in the character of Kate
Swift. Everyone felt it. In the schoolroom she was silent, cold, and
stern, and yet in an odd way very close to her pupils. Once in a long
while something seemed to have come over her and she was happy. All of
the children in the schoolroom felt the effect of her happiness. For a
time they did not work but sat back in their chairs and looked at her.
With hands clasped behind her back the school teacher walked up and
down in the schoolroom and talked very rapidly. It did not seem to
matter what subject came into her mind. Once she talked to the children
of Charles Lamb and made up strange, intimate little stories concerning
the life of the dead writer. The stories were told with the air of one
who had lived in a house with Charles Lamb and knew all the secrets of
his private life. The children were somewhat confused, thinking Charles
Lamb must be someone who had once lived in Winesburg.
On another occasion the teacher talked to the children of Benvenuto
Cellini. That time they laughed. What a bragging, blustering, brave,
lovable fellow she made of the old artist! Concerning him also she
invented anecdotes. There was one of a German music teacher who had a
room above Cellini’s lodgings in the city of Milan that made the boys
guffaw. Sugars McNutts, a fat boy with red cheeks, laughed so hard that
he became dizzy and fell off his seat and Kate Swift laughed with him.
Then suddenly she became again cold and stern.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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