An American Idyll. I: Episodes in the Life of Carleton H. Parker

I

SUCH hosts of memories come tumbling in on me. Fifteen years ago, September 3, 1903, I met Carl Parker. He had just returned to college, two weeks late for the start of his senior year. There was much concern among his friends, for he had gone on a twomonths’ hunting trip into the wilds of Idaho, and had planned to return in time for college. I met him his first afternoon in Berkeley. He was on the top of a step-ladder, helping to put up an awning for our sorority dance that evening, uttering his proverbial joyous banter to anyone who came along.

Thus he was introduced to me, a Freshman of two weeks. He called down gayly, ‘How do you do, young lady?’ Within a week we were fast friends, I looking up to him as a Freshman would to a Senior, and a Senior seven years older than herself at that. Within a month I remember deciding that if ever I became engaged I would tell Carl Parker before I told anyone else on earth!

After about two months he was calling one evening with his pictures of Idaho. Such a treat as my mountainloving soul did have! I have yet the map he drew that night, with the trails and camping places marked. And I said, innocence itself, ‘I’m going to Idaho on my honeymoon!’ And he said, ‘I’m not going to marry till I find a girl who wants to go to Idaho on her honeymoon!’ Then we both laughed.

But the deciding event in his eyes was when we planned our first long walk in the Berkeley hills for a certain Saturday, November 22, and that morning it rained. One of the tenets I was brought up on by my father was that bad weather was never an excuse for postponing anything; so when Carl telephoned anon and said, ‘Of course the walk is off,’‘But why? I asked.

‘The rain!’ he answered.

‘As if that makes any difference!'

At which he gasped a little and said, all right, he’d be around in a minute; which he was, in his Idaho outfit, the lunch he had suggested being entirely responsible for bulging one pocket. Off we started in the rain, and such a day as we had! We climbed Grizzly Peak, — only we did not know it for the fog and rain, — and just over the summit, in the shelter of a very drippy oak tree, we sat down for lunch. A fairly sanctified expression came over Carl’s face as he drew forth a rather damp and frayedlooking paper-bag — as a king might look who uncovered the chest of his most precious court jewels before a courtier deemed worthy of that honor. And before my puzzled and somewhat doubtful eyes he spread his treasure — jerked bear-meat, nothing but jerked bear-meat. I never had seen jerked anything, let alone tasted it. I was used to the conventional picnic sandwiches done up in waxed paper, plus a stuffed egg, fruit, and cake. I was ready for a lunch after the conservative pattern, and here I gazed upon a mess of most unappetizing-looking, wrinkled, shrunken jerked bear-meat, the rain dropping down on it through the oak tree. I would have gasped if I had not caught the look of awe and reverence on Carl’s face as he gazed eagerly — and with what respect — on his offering.

I merely took a hunk of what was supplied, set my teeth into it, and pulled. It was salty, very — it looked queer, tasted queer, was queer. Yet that lunch! We walked farther, sat now and then under other drippy trees, and at last decided we must slide home — by that time soaked to the skin, and I minus the heel to one shoe. I had just got myself out of the bath and into dry clothes when the telephone rang. It was Carl. Could he come over to the house and spend the rest of the afternoon? It was then about four-thirty. He came, and from then on things were decidedly — different.

How I should love to go into the details of that Freshman year of mine! I shall not go into detail — only to say that the night of the Junior Prom of my Freshman year Carl Parker asked me to marry him, and two days later, up again in our hills, I said that I would. To think of that now — to think of waiting two whole days to decide whether I would marry Carl Parker or not! ! And for fourteen and a half years from the day I met him, there was never one small moment of misunderstanding, one day that was not happiness — except when we were parted. Perhaps there are people who would consider it stupid, boresome, to live in such peace as that. All I can answer is that it was not stupid, it was not boresome — oh, how far from it. In fact, in those early days we took outvow that the one thing we would never do was to let the world get commonplace for us; that the time should never come when we would not be eager for the start of each new day. The Kipling poem we loved the most, for it was the spirit of both of us, was ‘The Long Trail.’ You know the last of it: —

II

After we decided to get married, and that as soon as ever we could, — I being at the ripe and mature age of, as mentioned, a Freshman of just eighteen years, he a Senior, with no particular prospects, not even sure as yet what field he would go into, — we commenced discussing what we might do and where we might go. Our main idea was to get as far away from everybody as we could and live the very fullest life we could, and at last, we decided on Persia. Why Persia? I cannot recall the steps now that brought us to that conclusion. But I know that first Christmas I sent Carl my picture in a frilled high-school-graduation frock and a silk Persian flag tucked behind it, and that flag remained always the symbol for us that we would never let our lives get stale, never lose the love of adventure, never ‘settle down,’ intellectually at any rate. Can you see my father’s face that sunny March day, Charter Day it was, when we told him we were engaged? My father being the conventional, traditional sort who had never let me have a real ‘caller’ even, lest I become interested in boys and think of matrimony too young. Carl Parker was the first male person who was ever allowed at my home in the evening. He came seldom, since I was living in Berkeley most of the time, and anyway, we much preferred prowling all over our end of creation, servant-girland-policeman fashion. Also, when I married, according to father, it was to be someone, preferably an attorney of parts, about to become a judge, with a large bank-account. Instead, at eighteen, I and this almost unknown, to him, Senior stood before him and said, ‘We are going to be married,’ or words to that general effect. And — here is where I want you to think of the expression on my conservative father’s face. Fairly early in the conversation he found breath to say, —

‘And what, may I ask, are your prospects?’

‘None, just at present.’

‘And where, may I ask, are you planning to begin this married career you seem to contemplate?’

‘In Persia.’

Can you see my father? ‘Persia?’

‘Yes, Persia.’

‘And what, for goodness’ sake, are you two going to do in Persia?'

‘We don’t, know just yet, of course, but we’ll find something.’

I can see my father’s point of view now, though I am not sure but that I shall prefer a son-in-law for our daughter who would contemplate absolute uncertainty in Persia in preference to an assured legal profession in Oakland, California. It was two years before my father became at all sympathetic, and that condition was far from enthusiastic. So it was a great joy to me to have him say, a few months before his death, ‘You know, Cornelia, I want you to understand that, if I had had the world to pick from, I’d have chosen Carl Parker for your husband. Your marriage is a constant source of satisfaction to me.’

Carl finished his Senior year, and a full year it was for him. He was editor of the Pelican, the University funny paper, editor of the University of California Magazine, the most serious publication on the campus outside the technical journals; he made every ‘honor’ organization there was to make; he and a fellow student wrote the successful Senior Extravaganza; he was a reader in economics and graduated with honors. And he saw me every single day.

I feel like digressing here a moment to assail that old principle — my father, along with countless others, held it so strongly — that a fellow who is really worth while ought to know by his junior year in college just what his life-work is to be. A few with an early developed special aptitude do, but very few. Carl entered college in August, 1896, in engineering, but after a term found that it had no further appeal for him. ‘But a fellow ought to stick to a thing, whether he likes it or not!’ If one must be dogmatic, then I say, ‘A fellow should never work at anything he does not like.’ One of the things in our case which brought such constant, criticism from relatives and friends was that we changed around so much. Thank God, we did! It took Carl Parker until he was over thirty to find just the work he loved the most and in which his soul was content — University work. And he was thirty-seven before he found just the phase of economic study that fired him to his full enthusiasm — his loved field of the application of psychology to economics. And some would have had him stick to engineering j ust because he started engineering!

He hurt his knee broad-jumping in his Freshman year at college, and finally had to leave, going to Phoenix, Arizona, and then back to the Parker ranch at Vacaville for the better part of a year. The family was away during that time, and Carl ran the place alone. He returned to college in August, 1898, this time taking up mining. After a year’s study in mining he wanted the practical side. In the summer of 1899 he worked underground in the Hidden Treasure Mine, Placer county, California. In 1900 he left college again, going to the coal-mines of Rossland, British Columbia. From August, 1900, to May, 1901, he worked in four different mines. It was with a considerable feeling of pride that he always added, ‘I got to be machine-man before I quit.’

It was at that time that he became a member of the Western Federation of Miners — an historical fact which inimical capitalists later endeavored to make use of from time to time, to do him harm. How I loved to listen by the hour to the stories of those grilling days — up at four in the pitch-dark and snow, to crawl up, with the blessing of a dear old Scotch landlady and a ‘pastie,’ to his job. He would tell our sons of tamping in the sticks of dynamite, while their eyes bulged. Sometimes it would be an old Vacaville crony who would appear, and stories would fly of those boy times — of the exploits up Put ah Creek with Pee Wee Allen; of the prayer-meeting when Carl bet he could out-pray the minister’s son, and won; of the tediously thought-out assaults upon an ancient hired man on the place, which would fill a book and delight the heart of Tom Sawyer himself; and how his mother used to sigh and add to it all, ‘If only he had ever come home on time to his meals!'

One article that recently appeared in a New York paper began, —

‘They say of him that, when he was a small boy, he displayed the same tendencies that later on made him great in his chosen field. His family possessed a distinct tendency toward conformity and respectability, but Carl was a companion of every “alley-bum ” in Vacaville. His respectable friends never won him away from his insatiable interest in the under-dog. They now know it makes valid his claim t o achievement.’

After the British Columbia mining days, he took what money he had saved and left for Idaho, where he was to meet his chum, Hal Bradley, for his first Idaho trip — a dream of theirs for years. The Idaho stories he could tell Oh, why can I not remember them word for word? Three and a half months he and Hal were there, — hunting, fishing, jerking meat, trailing after lost horses, — having his dreams of Idaho come true. (If our sons fail to have those dreams!)

When Hal returned to college, the wanderlust was still too strong in Carl, and he stopped off in Spokane, Washington, penniless, to try pot-luck. There were more tales to delight a gathering. In Spokane he took a hand at reporting, claiming to be a person of large experience, since only those of large experience were desired by the editor of the Spokesman Review. He was given sport, society, and the tenderloin to cover, at nine dollars a week. Since he never could go anywhere without making folks love him, it was not long before he had his cronies among the ‘sports,’ kind souls ‘in society’ who took him in, and at least one strong loyal friend, — who called him ‘Bub’ and gave him much excellent advice that he often used to refer to, — who w as the owner of the biggest gambling-joint in town. Spokane was wide open in those days, and ‘some town.’ It was the society friends who seem to have saved his life: for nine dollars did not go far, even then. I have heard hostesses of those days tell of the meal he could consume. ‘ But I’d been saving for it all day with just ten cents in my pocket.’ I met a pal of those days who used to save Carl considerable of his nine dollars by ‘ smooching ’ his wash into his own home laundry.

About then Carl’s older brother, somewhat fastidious, ran into him in Spokane. Boyd tells of how Carl insisted he should spend the night at his room instead of going to a hotel. ‘Is it far from here?’ ‘Oh, no!’ So they started out with Boyd’s suitcase and walked and walked through the ‘darndest part of town you ever saw.’ Finally, after crossing untold rail road-tracks and ducking round sheds and through alleys, they came to a rooming-house that was ‘a holy fright.’ ‘It’s all right inside,’ Carl explained. When they reached Carl’s room, there was one not over-broad bed in the corner and a red head showing, snoring contentedly.

‘ Who’s that? ’ the brother asked.

‘Oh, a fellow I picked up some place.’

‘Where am I to sleep?’

’Right in here — the bed’s plenty big enough for three!’

And Boyd says, though it was 2 a.m. and miles from any place, he lit out of there as fast as he could move. Boyd adds, ‘ I don’t believe he even knew that red-headed guy’s name!’

The reporting went rather lamely it seemed, however. The editor said it read amateurish, and he felt he would have to make a change. Carl made for some files where all the dailies were kept, and read and re-read the yellowest of the yellow. As luck would have it, that very night a big fire in a crowded apartment house broke out. It was not in Carl’s beat, but he decided to cover it anyhow. Along with the firemen he managed to get up on the roof; he jumped here, he flew there, demolishing the only suit of clothes he owned. But what an account he handed in! The editor discarded entirely the story of the reporter sent to cover the fire, ran in Carl’s word for word, and raised him to twelve dollars a week.

But just as the crown of reportorial success was lighting on his brow, his mother made it plain to him that she preferred to have him return to college. He bought a ticket to Vacaville, — it was just about Christmas, — he also purchased a loaf of bread and a can of sardines, and with thirty cents in his pocket, he left for California, traveling in a day-coach all the way. I remember his story of how, about the end of the second day, he coldbloodedly cultivated a man opposite him who looked as if he could afford to eat, and of how the man ‘came through’ and asked Carl if he would have dinner with him in the diner. The tale of what and how much Carl ordered and the expression and depression of the paying host! It tided him over until he reached home, anyhow — never mind the host!

All his mining experience, plus the dark side of life as contrasted with society, as he saw them both in Spokane, turned his interests into the field of economics. And when he entered college the next spring, it was to ‘major’ in that subject. May and June, 1903, he worked underground in the coal-mines of Nanimo. In July he met Nay Moran in Idaho, for his second Idaho camping-trip, and it was on his return from this outing that I met him and ate his jerked meat and loved him and never stopped doing that for one second.

III

There were three boys and a girl in the Parker family. Each of the other brothers had been encouraged to see the world, and in turn Carl planned fourteen months in Europe after he should graduate, his serious object being, on his return, to act as Extension Secretary to Professor Stephens of the University of California, who was planning to organize Extension work for the first time in California. By that time we had come a bit to our senses, and I had begun to realize that, since there was no money anyhow to marry on. and since I was so young, I had better stay on and graduate from college. Carl could have his trip to Europe and get an option, perhaps, on a tent in Persia.

I stopped writing here to read through Carl’s European letters and laid out. about seven I wanted to quote from: the accounts of three dinners at Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s in London — what knowing them always meant to him! They, perhaps, have forgotten him, but meeting the Webbs and Graham Wallas and that English group could be nothing but red-letter events to a young economic enthusiast one year out of college, studying TradeUnionism in the London School of Economics.

Then there was his South African trip. He was sent out by a London firm, to ‘expert’ a mine near Johannesburg—after he had cabled five times for it, said firm still sent on no money. The bitter disgust and anguish of those weeks — neither of us ever had much patience under such circumstances. But he ex per ted his mine, and found it absolutely worthless; explored the Veldt on a second-hand bicycle; cooked little meals of bacon and mush roundabout wherever he found himself, and wrote to me. Meanwhile he learned much, studied the Coolie question, investigated mine-workings, was entertained by his old college mates, mining experts themselves, in Johannesburg. At last he borrowed money to get back to Europe, claiming that ‘he had learned his lesson and learned it hard.’ About that time he wanted California with a fearful want, and was all done with foreign parts, and claimed that any place just big enough for two suited him — it did not need to be as far away as Persia after all. And finally he came home as fast as ever he could reach Berkeley — did not stop even to telegraph.

I had planned for months a dress I knew he would love, to greet him in. It was hanging ready in the closet. As it was, I had started to retire, — in the same room with a Freshman I was supposed to be ‘rushing’ hard, —when I heard a soft whistle, our whistle, under my window. My heart stopped beating. I just grabbed a raincoat and threw it over me, my hair down in a braid, and in the middle of a sentence to the astounded Freshman, I dashed out. My father had said, ‘If neither of you changes your mind while Carl is away, I have no objection to your becoming engaged.’ In about ten minutes after his return we were engaged, on a bench up in the Deaf and Dumb Asylum grounds — our favorite tryst ing-place. It would have been so foolish to have wasted a new dress on that night. I was clad in cloth of gold for all Carl knew or cared, or could see in the dark, for that matter. The deserted Freshman was sound asleep when I got back — and joined another sorority.

Thereafter, fora time, Carl went into University Extension, lecturing on Trade-Unionism and South Africa. It did not please him altogether, and finally my father, a lawyer himself, persuaded him to go into law. Carl Parker in law! How we used to shudder at it afterwards, but it was just one more broadening experience he got out of life.

Then came the San Francisco earthquake. That was the end of my junior year and we felt that we had to be married when I finished college — nothing else mattered quite as much as that. So when an offer came out of a clear sky from Halsey & Co., for Carl to be a bond salesman on a salary that assured matrimony within a year, though in no affluence, the bottom being all out of t he law business and no enthusiasm for it anyway, we held a consultation and decided for bonds and marriage. What a bond salesman Carl made! Those who knew him knew what has been referred to as ‘the magic of his personality,’ and could understand how he was having the whole of a small country town asking him to dinner on his second visit.

I somehow got through my senior year, though goodness, how the days dragged! for all I could think of was Carl, Carl, Carl, and getting married. Yet no one — no one on this earth — ever had the fun out of their engaged days that we did when we were toget her. Carl used to say that the accumulated expense of courting me for almost four years came to $10.25. He just guessed at $10.25, though any cheap figure would have done. We just did not care about doing things that happened to cost money. We never did care in our lives, and never would have cared, no matter what our income might have been. Undoubtedly it was the main reason we were so blissful on such a small salary in university work — we could never think at the time of any thing much we were doing without. I remember the happiest Christmas we almost ever had was over in the country, when we spent under two dollars for all of us. We were absolutely down to bed-rock that year, anyway. (It was just after we paid off our European debt.) Carl gave me a book — The Pastor’s Wife — and we gloated over it together all Christmas afternoon! We gave each of the boys a ten-cent cap-pistol and five cents’ worth of caps—they were in their Paradise. I mended three shirts of Carl’s that had been in my basket so long they were really like new to him, — he’d forgotten he owned them! — laundered them, and hung the trio, tied in tissue paper and red ribbon, on the tree. That was a Christmas!

We loved t ramping always more than anything else, and just prowling around the streets arm-in-arm, ending perhaps with an ice-cream soda. Not over costly, any of it. I have kept some little reminder of almost every spree we took in our four engaged years — it is a book of sheer joy from cover to cover. Except always, always the need of saying good-bye — it got so that it seemed almost impossible to say it.

And then came the day when it did not have to be said each time — that day of days, September 7, 1907, when we were married. Idaho for our honeymoon had to be abandoned, as three weeks was the longest vacation period we could wring from a soulless bondhouse. But not even Idaho could have brought us more joy than our seventyfive-mile trip up the Rogue River in Southern Oregon. We hired an old buckboard and two ancient, almost immobile, so-called horses — and with provisions, gun, rods, and sleepingbags, we started forth. The woods were in their autumn glory, the fish were biting, corn was ripe along the roadside, and apples, Rogue River apples, made red blotches under every tree. ‘Help yourselves!’ the farmers would sing out, or would not sing out. It was all one to us.

I found, along with his every other accomplishment, that I had married an expert camp cook. He found he had married a person who could not even boil rice. The first night out on our trip, Carl said, ‘You start the rice while I tend to the horses.’ He knew I could not cook — I had planned to take a course in Domestic Science on graduation; however, Carl preferred to marry me sooner inexperienced, than later experienced. But evidently he thought even a low-grade moron could boil rice. The bride of his heart did not know that rice swelled when it boiled. We were hungry, we would want lots of rice, so I put lots in. By the time Carl came back I had partly cooked rice in every utensil we owned, including the coffeepot and the wash-basin. And still ho loved me!

That honeymoon! Lazy horses poking unprodded along an almost deserted mountain road, glimpses of the river lined with autumn reds and yellows, camp made toward evening in any spot that looked appealing, — and all spots looked appealing, — two fish-rods out, consultation as to flies, leave-taking for half an hour’s parting while one went up the river aways to try his luck, one down. Joyous reunion with much orlittle luck, but always enough for supper— trout rolled in cornmeal and fried, corn on the cob garnered from a willing or unwilling farmer that afternoon, corn bread, the most luscious corn bread in the world, baked camper style by the man of the party, and red, red apples. Eaten by two people who had waited four years for just that. Evenings in a sandy nook by the river’s edge, watching the stars come out above the water. Adventures, such as losing Chocolada, the brown seventy-eight-year-old horse, and finding her up to her neck in a deep stream running through a grassy meaddow with perpendicular banks on either side. We walked miles till we found a farmer. With the aid of himself and his tools, plus a stout rope and a tree, in an afternoon’s time we dug and pulled and hauled and yanked Chocolada up and out on to dry land, more nearly dead than ever by that time. The ancient senile had just fallen in while drinking. And then, after three weeks, back to skirts and collars and civilization, and a continued honeymoon, from Medford, Oregon, to Seattle, Washington, doing all the country banks en route. In Portland we had to be separated for one whole day — it seemed nothing short of harrowing.

Then came Seattle and house-hunting. We had one hundred dollars a month to live on, and every apartment we looked at rented for from sixty dollars up, until in despair we took two wee rooms, a weer kitchen and bath, for forty dollars. It was just before the panic in 1907 and rents were exorbitant. And from having seventy-five dollars a month spending money before I was married, I jumped to keeping two of us on sixty dollars, which was what was left after the rent was paid. I am not rationalizing when I say I am glad that we did not have a cent more. It was a real sporting event lo make both ends meet! And we did it, and saved a dollar or so, just to show we could. Seattle was quite given to food fairs in those days, and we kept a weather eye out for such. We would eat no lunch, make for the Food Show about three, and nibble at samples all afternoon, coming home well-fed about eight, having bought enough necessities here and there so that our consciences did not hurt. Much of the time Carl had to be on the road selling bonds—we almost grieved our hearts out over that. In fact we got desperate, and when Carl was offered an assistant cashiership in a bank in Ellensburg, Washington, we were just about to accept it when the panic came and the cry was all for retrenchment in banks.

Then we planned farming, planned it with determination. They were too awful — those good-byes. Each got worse and harder than the last. We had divine days in between, to be sure, when we’d prowl out into the woods around the city with a picnic lunch, or bummel along the water-front, ending at a counter we knew which produced, — or the man behind it produced — delectable and cheap clubhouse sandwiches. Bond business and business conditions generally in the Northwest got worse and worse. In March, after six months of Seattle, we were recalled to the San Francisco office. Business results were better, Carl’s salary was considerably raised, but there were still separations.

IV

On July 3, the Marvelous Son was born, and never was there such a father. Even the trained nurse, hardened to new fathers by years of experience, admitted she never had seen anyone take parenthood quite so hard.

Those were magic days — three of us in the family instead of two, and separations harder than ever. Once in all the ten and a half years we were married I saw Carl Parker downright discouraged over his own affairs, and that was the day I met him down town in Oakland and he announced that he could not stand the bond business any longer. He had come to dislike it heartily as a business; and then, leaving the boy and me was just not worth the whole financial world put together. Since his European experience — meeting the Webbs and their kind — he had a hankering for university work, but he felt the money return so small that he just could not contemplate raising a family on it. But now we were desperate. We longed for a life that would give us the maximum chance to be together. Cold-bloodedly we decided that university work would give us that opportunity and the long vacations would give us our mountains.

The work itself did make its strong appeal, too. Professor Henry Morse Stephens and Professor Miller of the University of California had long urged Carl to go into teaching; and at last we decided that if it meant living on husks and skimmed milk all our days, at least we would be eating what there was to eat together, three meals a day every day. We cashed in our savings, we drew on everything there was to draw on, and on February 1, 1909, the three of us embarked for Harvard — with fiftysix dollars and seventy-five cents excess-baggage to pay at the dépôt, such young ignoramuses we were.

That trip east was worth any future hardship we might have reaped. Our seven-months-old baby was one of the young saints of the world — not once in the five days did he peep. We owned the world. And I, who had never been farther from my California home town than Seattle, who never had seen real snow, except our first married Christmas in the Northwest, when we spent four days in the Scenic Hot Springs in the Cascades and skied and sledded and spilled around like six-year-olds! But stretches and stretches of snow! And then just travelling, and together!

And then, to be in Boston! We took a room with a bath in the Copley Square Hotel. The first evening we arrived, Nandy (Carleton, Jr.) rolled off the bed; so when we went gallivanting about Boston shopping for the new home, we left him in the bathtu b, where he could not fall out. We padded it well with pillows, there was a big window letting in plenty of fresh air, we instructed the chambermaid to peep at him now and then, and there we would leave him, well-nourished and asleep. (By the time that story had been passed around by enough people in the home town it developed that one day the baby — just seven months old, remember — got up and turned on the water and was found by the chambermaid sinking for the third time.)

Something happened to the draft from the home bank that should have reached Boston almost at the same time we did. We gazed into the family pocketbook one fine morning, to find it, to all intents and purposes, practically empty. Hurried meeting of the finance committee. By unanimous consent of all present we decided — as many another mortal in a strange town has decided — on the pawn-shop. I wonder if my dear grandmother will read this — she probably will. Carl first submitted his gold watch — the baby had dropped it once and it had shrunken in value thereby in the eyes of the pawn-shop man, though not in ours. The only other valuable we had along with us was my grandmother’s wedding present to me, which had been my grandfather’s wedding present to her — a glorious old-fashioned breast-pin. We were allowed fifty dollars on it, which saved the day. What will my grandmother ever say when she knows that her bridal gift resided for some days in a Boston pawn-shop!

We moved out to Cambridge in due time and settled at Bromley Court, on the very edge of the Yard. We thrilled to all of it — we drank in every ounce of dignity and tradition the place afforded, and our wild Western souls exulted. We knew no one when we reached Boston, but our first Sunday we were invited to dinner in Cambridge by two people who were ever after our cordial, faithful friends, Mr. and Mrs. John Graham Brooks. They made us feel at once that Cambridge was not the socially icy place it is painted in song and story. Then I remember the afternoon I had a week’s wash strung on an improvised line back and forth from one end of our apartment to the other. Just as I hung the last damp garment, the bell rang and there stood an immaculate gentleman in a cutaway and silk hat who had come to call — an old friend of my mother’s. He ducked under wet clothes, and we set two chairs where we could see each other, and yet nothing was dripping down either of our necks, and there we conversed and he ended by inviting us both to dinner — on Marlborough Street at that! His house on Marlborough Street! We boldly and excitedly figured up on the way home from it that that one meal had cost more than it cost us to live for two weeks — it honestly did.

We did our own work, of course, and we lived on next to nothing. I wonder now how we kept so well that year. Of course, we fed the baby everything he should have, — according to Holt in those days, — and we ate the mutton left from his broth and the beef after the juice had been squeezed out of it for him, and bought storage eggs for ourselves, and queer butter out of a barrel, and were absolutely, absolutely blissful. Perhaps we should have spent more on food and less on baseball. I am glad we did not. Almost every Saturday afternoon that first semester we fared forth early, Nandy in his go-cart, to get a seat in the front row of the baseball grandstand. I remember one Saturday we were late, front seats all taken. We had to pack baby and go-cart more than halfway up to the top. There we barricaded him, still in the go-cart, in the middle of the aisle. Along about the seventh inning, the game waxed particularly exciting —we were beside ourselves with enthusiasm. Fellow onlookers seemed even more excited — they called out things — they seemed to be calling in our direction. Fine parents we were: there was Nandy, go-cart and all, bumpety-bumping down the grandstand steps. I remember again the Stadium, the day of the big track meet. Every time the official announcer would put the megaphone to his mouth to call out winners and time to a hushed and eager throng, Nandy, not yet a year old, would begin to squeal at the top of his lungs, for joy. Nobody could hear a word the official said. We were as distressed as anyone; we, too, had pencils poised to jot down records.

Carl studied very hard. The first few weeks, until we got used to the new wonder of things, he used to run home from college whenever he had a spare minute. At that time he was rather preparing to go into Transportation as his main economic subject; but by the end of the year he knew Labor would be his love. (His first published economic article was a short one that appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Economics for May, 1910, on ‘The Decline of TradeUnion Membership.’

We had a tragic summer. Carl felt that he must take his Master’s degree, but had no foreign language. Three terrible, wicked, unforgivable professors assured him that if he could be in Germany six weeks during summer vacation, he could get enough German to pass the examination for the A.M. We believed them, and he went, though of all the partings we ever had, that was the very worst. Almost at the last he just could not go — but we were so sure that it would solve the whole A.M. problem. He went third class on a German steamer, since we had money for nothing better. Oh, the misery of that summer! We never talked about it much. He went to Freiburg, to a German cobbler’s family, but later changed, since the cobbler’s son looked upon him as a provision of Providence sent to practise his English upon. His heart was breaking and mine was breaking, and he was working, working at German (and languages came fearfully hard for him), morning, afternoon, and night, with two lessons a day, his only diversion being a daily walk up a hill, with a cake of soap and a towel, to a secluded waterfall he discovered. He wrote a letter and a post-card a day to the babe and me. I have just re-read all of them, and my heart aches afresh for the homesickness that summer meant to both of us. He got back two days before our wedding anniversary — days like those first few after our reunion are not given to many mortals. I would say no one had ever tasted such joy. The baby gurgled aboutand was kissed within an inch of his life.

About six weeks later we called our beloved Dr. J—— from a banquet he had long looked forward to, in order to officiate at the birth of our second, known as Thomas-Elizabeth up to October 17, but from about ten-thirty that night as James Stratton Parker. We named him after my grandfather, for the simple reason that we liked the name Jim. How we chuckled when my father’s congratulatory telegram came, in which he claimed pleasure at having the boy named after his father, but cautioned us never to allow him to be nicknamed.

I remember the boresome youth who used to call week in week out, — always just before a meal, — and we were so hard up and got so we resented feeding such an impossible person so many times. He dropped in at noon Friday the 17th for lunch. A few days later Carl met him on the street and announced rapturously the arrival of the new son. The impossible person hemmed and stammered, ‘Why — er, when did it arrive?’ Carl, all beams, replied, ‘The very evening of the day you were at our house for lunch!’

We never laid eyes on that man again! We were almost four months longer in Cambridge, but never did he set foot inside our apartment. Wish someone could have psycho-analysed him — too late now. He died about a year after we left Cambridge. I always felt he never did get over the shock of having escaped Jim’s arrival by such a narrow margin.

And right here I must tell of Dr. J——. He was recommended as the best doctor in Cambridge, but very expensive. Carl said, ‘We may have to economize in everything on earth but we’ll never economize on doctors.’ So we had Dr. J——, had him for all the minor upsets families need doctors for, had him when Jim was born, had him through a queer fever Nandy developed that lasted some time, had him through a bad case of grippe I got (it was at Christmas-time; Carl took care of both babies, did all the cooking, — even to the Christmas turkey I was well enough to eat by then, — got up every two hours for three nights to change an icepack I had to have — that’s the kind of man he was!), had him vaccinate both young, and then, just before we left Cambridge, we sat and held his bill, scared to open the envelope. At length we gathered our courage and gazed upon charges of sixty-five dollars for everything, with a wonderful note which said that, if we would be inconvenienced in paying that, he would not mind at all if he got nothing. Such excitement — we had expected two hundred dollars at the least ! We tore out and bought ten cents’ worth of doughnuts, to celebrate. When we exclaimed to him over his goodness, — of course, we paid the sixty-five dollars, — all he said was, ‘Do you think a doctor is blind? And does a man go steerage to Europe if he has a lot of money in the bank?’ Bless that doctor’s heart! Bless all doctors’ hearts!

When we left for Harvard we had an idea that perhaps one year of graduate work would be sufficient. Naturally, about two months was enough to show us that one year would get us no place. Could we finance an added year at, perhaps, Wisconsin? And then, in November, Professor Miller of Berkeley called to talk things over with Carl. Anon he mentioned, more or less casually, ‘The thing for you to do is to have a year’s study in Germany,’and proceeded to enlarge on that idea. We sat dumb, and the minute the door was closed after him, we flopped. ‘What was the man thinking of — to suggest a year in Germany when we have no money and two babies, one not a year and a half and one six weeks old!’ Preposterous.

That was Saturday afternoon. By Monday morning we had decided we would go! Thereupon we wrote West to finance the plan, and got beautifully sat upon for our ‘notions.’ I f’ we needed money, we had better give up this whole fool University idea and get a decent man-sized job. And then we wrote my father, — or rather I wrote him without telling Carl till after the letter was mailed, — and bless his heart! he replied by a fat God-blessyou-my-children registered letter, with check inclosed, agreeing to my stipulation that it should be a six-per-cent business affair. Suppose we could not have raised that money — suppose our lives had been minus that German experience! Bless fathers! They may scold and fuss at romance and have ‘good sensible ideas of their own’ on such matters, but — bless fathers!

(To be continued)