The Old Leaven of Romance

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

JUST what it was all about, that novel of Charles Kingsley’s named Yeast, I have forgotten, much as I enjoyed it years ago when it was a leading book of the hour. I doubt if a clear remembrance of its contents could give to me now one half the pleasure I find in its title alone.

“ Yeast: ” I catch the malty smell, — wafted down fifty years and more. Again I see the sign “ yeast ” over the low, recessed brewery door ; it is “ right after school” of a Friday afternoon, and I, the parson’s little girl, in white, stiffly starched pantalettes, am setting forth with the children of the neighborhood on the weekly trip to the brewery for yeast, — a little tin pail in my hand in which a copper cent is rattling. I join the race across the long bridge with a troop of boys and girls. That was the day when brewers’ yeast was greatly preferred to salt rizin, or pertater m’tins, by many housekeepers, even those who had rigid views upon the temperance question seldom permitting those views to militate against the Saturday’s baking, providing that the yeast was retailed where a bar was not in evidence.

Unlike the most of the regular tasks of a properly trained, useful child of fifty years ago, — when the boy Ralph Waldo, like many of his class, filled the kitchen wood-box, set the table, and scoured the steel knives and forks daily, — going for yeast to a brewery had an abiding charm for children who, but for the weekly errand, might never have entered the locality where the brewery was located, — a new world to many of us, with delightful phases of comradery, — for that little tin pail was a social leveler, — a marvelous promoter of the democratic Idea. The old stone brewery, high up above a deep ravine, actualized my idea of a giant’s castle. That beyond the vaultlike room in the cellar, where a big man in a white apron filled our pails with a long-handled ladle from great jars, and mopped up the counter, and scooped in our coppers with impressive dignity, dungeons could be found, I never doubted. The sawdust on the floor, the grimy window barred with heavy cobwebs, was fascinatingly associated with certain story-books I had been forbidden to read, — Romance of the Forest, and the like. When the hot rolls came in on a Sunday morning I had it all over again, but saying nothing about it, of course, — the mist from the cataract, the roar of the falling water, the smell of malt, — had I not seen the yeast of those rolls foaming round in the eddies of the swift current ? . . . It was the rule to lift your pail cover and take a sniff. Strange that what Smelled so good was so disappointing to taste, for taste we did, once at least, satisfied to sniff ever after. There could be no loitering on the way home, else the mysterious byways leading off the main thoroughfare had been explored; but it was something to see, through the cracks in the sidewalk and fearfully close to our feet, the madly rushing waters of raceways, — to hear the hum of machinery, — to watch for one thrilling moment a gigantic wheel that came up creaking and dripping from a black abyss to plunge headlong into blackness again. I had only to make myself believe, as I easily could, that it was alive, that suffering wheel, to experience the sensation that was the supreme culmination of the enjoyment of the trip. “ No yeast to-day,” was sometimes hung out by the brewery door. My friend who writes poems of a fair sort, and who used to carry a yeast pail, says that she would give something for that old signboard to hang up in her workshop at times.

“ Now Johnny,” my grandson hears often, “ run to the grocery, quick, please, and bring a cake of compressed yeast.” How can I help feeling sorry for Johnny ? So much has been “ compressed ” out of his experience. General Crook, I remember, could not explain just why a hostile Apache suited him better in a blanket than in store clothes ; nor why an old warrior of Geronimo’s hostiles who used an ear trumpet offended his ideas concerning the fitness of things, — as did papooses with nursing bottles and medicine men smoking cigarettes. Verily, the compressed yeast of utility has made short work of much of the old leaven of romance.