Jule Ann Darnall's Bonnet

IT has a queer sound, as an item of college expenditure. There it stands, however, in black and white, or rather in the brown and yellow of the musty old manuscript record, —

“For mending Jule Ann Darnall’s bonnet, 50 cents.”

The college stood over on the hill, two miles from town, in those days, and was struggling with the “manual labor system,” plus the various infantile diseases from which young Western colleges suffered so severely before coal-oil fomentations or steel-dust poultices came into vogue. The young aspirant for education, I gather from the same old record, could pay his bills by “whooping” tubs at six cents each, or he might set up barrels “in a truly workmanlike manner in four hoops ” at eighteen cents each, and finish them in the proper season for ten cents additional, kindly taking off the hands of the college at the current cash price “each and every of his barrels which shall not pass inspection.” These were but two of many occupations by which training of hand was made to keep pace with culture of the mind, and the dignity of labor was duly emphasized, as became the democratic times in which Andrew Jackson had just been swept into the presidency, and the be-wigged and be-powdered aristocracy dominant in earlier days had been duly humbled. I know an old alumnus, still living, who went empty-pocketed to that old college farm over sixty years ago, earned his way through, and drove out of town the day after his graduation in a carriage of his own making, with another trailing behind, a good team of horses in front, a bride at his side, and not a dollar of unpaid debt to call him back.

But I am getting too far away from Jule Ann and her bonnet. Why should the college have assumed the expense of mending a bonnet for Jule Ann Darnall ? Was Jule Ann possibly the college milkmaid, and did she wear a bonnet with one of those old-fashioned crowns, projecting far to the rearward, and as she seated herself upon the college milkingstool with the pail at her feet, did the college cow toss her head around at some random fly and rend that spacious bonnet crown with her right horn, the strings tightening under Jule Ann’s chin before the firm new gingham gave way, pail and stool and poor Jule Ann tumbling in a miscellaneous heap, and Bossie running down the pasture field in fright at the mischief she had done ? If such were the case, one can easily imagine Jule Ann’s wrathful demand upon the college steward for at least the material reparation of her bonnet, inasmuch as the disaster to her dignity was so wholly beyond the possibility of repair.

Or was Jule Ann the victim of some student prank ? Did some scapegrace want the whalebones out of that bonnet for some experiment in resiliency, in connection with his researches in physics ? Or was the bonnet purloined as a disguise in some midnight raid upon the college melon-patch, and left mangled in the hedgerow through which the guilty but undetected student wearer had made his escape, thus leaving Jule Ann with a claim in equity against the college which the kindhearted steward could not conscientiously disallow? There is still another possibility. From a barrel in the attic of an old farmhouse, once a part of the college properly, there was recently recovered a letter from the president to his wife, expressing a conviction that the credit of the college in social circles demanded an improvement in his wearing apparel. Perhaps a hitch upward all along the line was felt to be necessary, and the alteration in Jule’s head-dress may have been the addition of a fine feather or two as a concession to critical observers in the neighboring village, and not the repair of disaster at all. At a later date the steward made entry, —

“Sold Jule Ann Darnall two combs, for 5 cents; " —

and with her mended (or amended) bonnet and her two combs, Jule Ann Darnall passed out of the college history, so far as can be ascertained from its written records or its oral traditions.

The natural reflection is that the day when Jule Ann could get into the official records of a college with her defective bonnet and her two-for-a-nickel combs was a day of pretty small things. But among those tub-"whoopers ” and barrel-makers the little college was educating large-minded men. One of them, so thoroughly reliable tradition runs, was wont to still by chewing beech leaves the calls of a hunger which he did not always have the means thoroughly to satisfy. Eleven years later he came back to the college as its president, and after giving it ten years of wonderfully effective teaching, a large new building, a hundred thousand dollars of invested funds, and a hold on the hearts of men who within a few decades were to swell the college properties far beyond a million, he died, doubtless a martyr to the strenuous days of little things, when the college administration was giving the trustees such items as Jule Ann Darnall’s bonnet and combs to puzzle over, rather than the exploded feed-water heaters, collapsed boilers, broken-down dynamos, and the like, which raise the repair bills of to-day from the fifty-cent disbursement for Jule Ann’s bonnet to a height where single items approximate an entire year’s college expenditure in Jule Ann’s day. Yes, it was a little college, and so far as material equipment goes it was working with little tools; but it showed its ability to pick up the boys from those transAllegheny farms and give them the intellectual push which not infrequently sent them forth to be great men. A prosperous generation has looked upon the work of our colleges, called it good, and placed at the disposal of college teachers and administrators a wealth of material equipment which would have been beyond the dreams of imagination seventy-five years ago, when the college steward was penning the quaint records which lie before me. But in the midst of all this luxury of physical appliances, how easy it is to lose that grim mental and moral energy which could do so much with so little, when only the little was at hand. In the history of American college education there is much to be said for Jule Ann Darnall’s time, after all.