Arthur Meighen became leader of the Conservative and the Unionist Party, and therefore Prime Minister on July 10, 1920, when Robert Borden resigned. Frank Carvell was the Chief Commissioner of the Board of Railway Commissioners. The railway companies applied for a 35 per cent increase in rates, and as the above cartoon shows, this was not well received.
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, September 1, 1934.
“The smell of ketchup being boiled,” said Jimmie Frise, “is of all the odors in nature or art the most beautiful to me.”
“It’s a swell smell,” I admitted.
“This season of the year,” went on Jimmie, “the year in its fulness, the fields ripe, the fruits burdening the trees, everything deeply and richly colored; the sunflowers and the zinnias, the great cannas red and yellow, no pale fragile flowers left, but only the blazing hues; the season of completion, of consummation, of perfection; and over it floating like an incense of thanksgiving the smell of pickling. Especially ketchup.”
“It smells swell,” I confirmed.
“Spring,” said Jimmie, “is like a child, beautiful, winsome and all that. But you have no desire to seize spring and hug her to your bosom. Early summer is like a young woman. Beautiful, attractive, but you can’t be sure whether she is sulky or perhaps she has funny teeth or maybe a high, squeaky voice. But late summer, ah, and early fall! There’s the woman, the matron, the mother of children. Her character stands clearly before you. She smiles and is at ease, her chief work done.”
“What’s winter, Jim?” I asked.
“Some old dame,” growled Jim, with a look at the weather. “I wish my family was home from the cottage and all of them up to their elbows in pickles. I’d stay home all day and lie on the chesterfield, with the radio going, and just inhale the pickle smell until I was saturated.”
“You are all worked up,” I remarked.
“It seems to purify the lungs,” said Jim. “It is the deepest breath you can take, pickle smell. It touches those farthest, deepest, little corners of your lungs, like the ears of a pillow slip that haven’t been touched for ages.”
“My family will be home soon,” I said, “and you can come over and hang around while they are pickling.”
“What do they make?” asked Jim, sitting up eagerly.
“Oh, ketchup,” I said, “and a kind of chopped-up mustard pickle with a lot of celery seed and curry in it.”
“Ah,” breathed Jim.
“And then a kind of small gherkins,” I added, “not sweet, not sour, but a kind of crisp, crunchy, sweetish, vinegary…”
“Stop!” cried Jim.
“Then we do up some pickled peaches,” I said, “with cloves. And crabapples and pickled punkin.”
“Pickled punkin?” exclaimed Jim.
“Well, some kind of squash or something,” I said. “It comes out in sort of square transparent pieces about the size of a small matchbox and it is lovely with cold beef.”
“Oooh!” breathed Jimmie.
“Then we make a kind of conserve,” I said, “with plums, peaches, apples and a lot of spices dumped in. It is different every year. It is a sort of adventure, after all the other pickling is done and there are still a dozen and half sealers left over and some odds and ends of peanut butter jars and things.”
“The Women Have All the Fun”
“Personally,” said Jim, “I don’t think women adventure half enough in the realm of pickles. Look at all the things there are to pickle and all the different ways there are to pickle them. In brine, in vinegar; sweet, sour; yet when all is said and done we have only four or five kinds of pickles. Look at the grocery store shelves. Not six different kinds. You would think there would be hundreds of kinds.”
“I’ve often thought,” I said, “that I might take a whirl at a little pickling myself. Some experimenting, you know. When the ladies are out some afternoon, after the regular pickling season is over.”
“The women,” said Jim, “have all the fun.”
“It isn’t hard,” I pointed out. “You just get the big preserving kettle and you boil up whatever you are doing, with either vinegar or sugar to preserve it. And you put it into the sealers, and there you are.”
Jim looked at me out of the sides of his eyes.
“What do you say,” he asked, “if we try to work out a pickle of our own?”
“Any time,” I agreed.
“A pickle,” said Jim, “that will embody all the things we like. Onions, curry, everything.”
“I bet we could work out a pretty fair pickle,” I concurred.
“Partly sweet,” said Jim, “and partly sour. Briney at the same time. A pickle that will be all pickles at once.”
“I don’t see,” I suggested, “why we shouldn’t include ketchup in the recipe. Work ketchup right in with mustard pickles, for example. And when you are eating them you never could tell when a nice snappy whole gherkin might pop up on your plate.”
“We will call it,” said Jim, “pickle surprise.”
“We’ll make it at my house to-morrow,” I said.
“No, no,” begged Jimmie. “I have everything ready at my house.”
“It was me suggested making them,” I said. “If it is a success we can then go over to your house the next day and make you up a batch.”
“It will be a success all right,” assured. Jim. “It isn’t like baking a cake. It is all in the ingredients.”
I went home early and spent the evening preparing for the pickling bee. I brought up from the cellar a good supply of sealers, quart and pint sizes, and a number of those numerous assorted jelly jars and modernistic marmalade glasses that seem to accumulate in a house nowadays.
I got the two big preserving kettles up and went through all the cupboards left so tidy during the absence of the family for the summer and laid out rows and rows of spices. There was allspice and cloves, tumeric and nutmeg, cassia and capsicum.
There was a bottle of “Preservit” and a small bottle labelled “Kitchen Kumfort, Gives a Flavor to Everything.” There was even a vial of bright red coloring and on it it said “Preserving.”
There was celery salt and paprika, onion salt and bay leaves.
Jimmie and I started by calling at the corner store for the raw materials of our pickle surprise. We got gherkins and silver onions, cauliflower and tomatoes.
“And why not a cabbage?” asked Jim. “If cauliflower, why not cabbage?”
So we took the cabbage. And beets and string beans and two quarts of vinegar and a large tin of mustard.
And, laden with baskets and bags, we repaired to my house for the great experiment. We laid out all the materials and stripped to our BVD’s1 like sailors going into action.
Trusting to Inspiration
“Now,” said Jim, “what is to be the foundation of this pickle?”
“Gherkins,” said I.
“Ketchup,” disagreed Jim. “Ketchup will be the liquid in which all the rest of the things float.”
“Very well,” I said, “we will peel the tomatoes first and boil them and strain them through a cloth bag or a fresh sock.”
“That’s a woman’s way of doing it,” said Jimmie. “This is to be a man’s pickle. We’ll just dump the tomatoes in like everything else.”
“But the skins will come loose,” I expostulated. “And go floating around like pieces of chamois or those exploded toy balloons.”
“As we stir the pickle,” said Jim, “we can catch the skins as they appear and fork them out.”
“How much water do you put in the kettle to start with?” I asked.
“About three or four inches,” said Jim.
“Should we wash the cauliflower and things?” I asked.
“Nonsense,” said Jim. “Modern public health laws have done away with all those old-fashioned things. Vegetables and fruits nowadays are sanitary before they go before the public.”
“We just dump them in?”
“Correct,” said Jim. “Only we can cut them up into loose pieces.”
So we cut up tomatoes and cauliflower, cabbage and beets, string beans and celery. The gherkins and little silver onions we left whole.
“The gherkins feel a bit gritty,” I offered.
“That’s just the natural feel of them,” said Jim.
“How much salt?”
“Oh, a handful or two,” said I.
We turned on the stove before starting to mix the spices and flavorings. Then we went to the kitchen cabinet shelf and selected the spices.
“Allspice,” read Jim. “A couple of good handfuls.”
“Turmeric,” said I. “A level spoonful or two.”
Into the big preserving kettle we ladled them, spices and powders, Kitchen Kumfort and Preservit, vinegar and mustard.
“How about this coloring?” asked Jim, examining the little bottle.
“It’s for coloring jellies and cakes,” I explained.
“Most pickles are a dull brown or greenish gray,” said Jim. “Pickle surprise will be noted for its bright, happy color. Like cranberry jelly on the New Year’s dinner table.”
He dumped in the contents of the bottle.
“What’s this?” asked Jim.
“Beef cubes,” I replied.
“H’m,” said Jim, peeling one and tossing it into the pot.
“Now,” said he, “when it begins to cook we can taste it from time to time and add this and that to get it right. The way women go by the rules is the reason all pickles are alike. We will trust to inspiration.”
To let it get started we went in and turned on the radio, one or the other of us going into the kitchen every few minutes to see if it was boiling.
It took a long time to get going. But once it did, the most exciting odors began to fill the house. We stirred the cauldron, which had not yet taken on any definite color, but was red and green and white and yellow as the various ingredients floated to the surface. But the red coloring extract and the tomatoes were slowly exerting themselves and the faster it boiled the redder it got.
“Let’s walk over to the store and see if there is anything we have overlooked,” suggested Jimmie. “It will take a long time for those cauliflowers and onions to cook. Don’t let’s spoil it by hurrying.”
Over at the store we got some radishes and an egg plant.
“There are, two things I never heard of being pickled,” said Jim.
The man in the store suggested that plums and peaches made an awfully nice base for a mixed pickle. So we took some fruit and Jim got a small box of preserved ginger.
“It’s a sort of spice,” he explained.
Everything But Spinach
When we got home we split the big kettle’s contents in half and filled both the cauldrons, adding the new things we had bought. I caught Jimmie slipping a banana into the kettle.
“Who ever heard of a pickled banana?” I demanded.
“That’s the point,” said Jimmie.
So the two cauldrons stewed and boiled and everything began to cook and get soft and the rich red color began to dominate. Such softish items as the banana and the cauliflower gradually collapsed and grew limp and dissolved themselves amidst the multitude, while the firmer items, such as the cucumbers, got rather swollen and pale looking. The radishes bobbed about the top and the tomato skins swirled up and Jimmie and I were kept busy watching for them and snatching them as they were flung upward in the boiling. And the richest spicy odor imaginable filled the house.
“We ought to start tasting now,” said Jim. So we took spoons and blew and cooled and tasted.
“M’m,” said I. “It doesn’t taste like anything.”
“That,” said Jim, “is because it tastes like everything.”
But I could not detect it.
“It needs a little more character,” I suggested, “and it ought to be thicker. It is too loose the way it is. I hate loose pickles.”
“Ketchup is loose,” pointed out Jimmie.
Yet it didn’t taste like ketchup and it didn’t taste like mustard pickles and it didn’t taste like gherkins. It had a taste all its own.
“A kind of surprising taste,” said Jim. “That is why we call it pickle surprise.”
“I think it has stewed long enough,” I said. “How would you like to rinse off those sealers?”
Jim turned the tap on and rinsed the sealers while I got the ladle and prepared to scoop the surprise into the bottles. Jim put them on a tray as he rinsed them and I ladled in the pickle.
“Snick!” went the first jar.
“Snuck!” went the second jar.
“Tinkle, click,” went the third one.
“Those jars are cracking!” cried Jimmie.
So we waited for the pickle to cool before putting it in the jars, which we since have been told is not good practice.
We went to supper and came back and tasted the cooling pickle surprise.
It was gritty.
I mean, in addition to everything else, it was gritty.
“You should have, washed those beets,” I complained to Jim. “And the cauliflower. In fact, we should have washed everything.”
“That reminds me,” said Jim, rinsing out his mouth at the sink. “We forgot spinach. In our next batch we must put in some spinach.”
“And a parsnip or two,” I said. “When we do your batch we can profit by what we learned with this.”
But at bedtime Jim telephoned to say his family had arrived home from the cottage.
“They will be making ketchup Friday,” he said. “How about coming over for the afternoon?”
“Swell,” said I.
So I gave my seven bottles and four jars to charity.
Editor’s Notes: This tory appeared in Silver Linings (1978).
By Gregory Clark, September 3, 1927.
We show our visitors the Humber, but not the Don.
We parade them through Sunnyside, but we avoid the shady side.
We present to them the university, though the jail is a quite handsome building.
We drive them through miles of wealthy residential streets where nobody lives at all. And fail to show them the hundreds of miles of homely residential streets where people really live.
We show them the churches and say Toronto is the city of churches. We show them the trees and say Toronto is the city of trees.
But we fail to mention that Toronto is the city of policemen, the city of poles, telegraph poles, telephone poles, hydro poles, the city of parked cars, the city of licenses, drivers’ licenses, dog licenses, car licenses, liquor licenses, gun licenses, fishing licenses, the city of narrow streets.
We strive to show strangers that we have everything that everybody else has. We hide the things that are our own. We want them to think that Toronto is just like every other city. But we know in our hearts that it is strange, even to us.
For a dollar and a half you can get a two hour, twenty-two mile ride in one of the city’s own sightseeing coaches. They run you up Jarvis street, through Rosedale, calling out the names of the prominent and distinguished owners of some of the heaviest houses, across to Casa Loma, along Davenport road, down to High Park, the Humber, Sunnyside, the Lake Shore drive and back downtown. The shorter dollar drive takes in the university, parliament buildings and the “swell” residential regions.
But if you want to see what Toronto really is you must see not one but two of everything. For each cathedral you must see a mission. For each mansion you must see a four-roomed bungalow.
The Chicago man, sitting in the sight-seeing coach, thinks how different Toronto is from Chicago. The air is so pure and sweet. The Chicago man, however, does not know about West Toronto. He should be taken to the packing house district and he would feel quite at home. The story is that the Guelph train was reeling through the night on its way to Toronto. A country lady, amusing herself by counting the eggs in the basket on her lap, found a bad one. Yes, it was a bad one. She tossed it out the train window. But the wind of the train caught the egg and bore it in at another window further down, where the brakesman sat dozing, his lantern between his feet, his chin on his chest. The egg struck him on the chest.
Leaping to his feet and seizing the lantern, the brakesman shouted:
“West Toronto! West Toronto station!”
Gotham on Queen Street
“Take the New Yorker round about so that he never sees Queen street, east and west of Yonge, and he will feel he is indeed on foreign soil. But New Yorkers should be shown Queen street, a few blocks west or east of Yonge and he will think he is in Manhattan. For, despite all the ballyhoo about New York, despite all the rubberneck trips we have been taken on in New York, the fact is that the vast majority of the streets of New York are hardly distinguishable from Queen street in its shabbier stretches. The shops are the same, the things in the shops, the people, the language.
The Buffalo man has only to be taken south-east of the King Edward, instead of northwest, and he would think he was in Buffalo.
There are numerous parts of Rosedale which in the houses, gardens and everything but the pinched and limited space around them are almost as nice as Port Hope. Streets of bungalows north of St. Clair might have been taken holus-bolus1 from Kitchener, Oshawa, Stratford.
Toronto has so many things that nobody else has got that we ought to parade them before our guests. What do we want to do but give our visitors a true, honest opinion of the city?
Scores of cities and towns have rivers not unike the Humber, with parks along the banks and bungalows and boathouses and dance-pavilions. But how many cities have rivers like the Don?
The Don is peculiarly Toronto’s river. There is history written in its slow waters. One look at the Don and you can read the soul of Toronto. You can tell from it what kind of city government Toronto had fifty years ago, twenty-five, and to-day. The Don demonstrates the spirit of progress, which sets beauty and public health far above ugly commercialism. It tells of Toronto’s determination, for the job of cleaning up the Don to its present state of beauty must surely have been a desperate undertaking. Any city can have a Humber, especially if it has a few private citizens, with excellent real estate notions, to promote the beautification of it. But the Don’s development is solely to the credit of the city.
Why we take our guests out to the Humber, with its real estate opportunities so badly exposed, when we might show them the Don, with all its moral lessons. and not the slightest real estate suggestion about it save its upper and unseen reaches; is one of those mysteries.
The odd effect of a two hour sight-seeing tour of Toronto as offered by the spiel-coaches is to create an idea of smallness. The one hour cruise seems to bind the city into a town, a university town with a number of venerable churches fully thirty years old.
The emphasis is on the old. But Toronto is young. We wind around about Jarvis street, Rosedale, the lower edge of the Hill, with never a glimpse, a sensation of the enormous vista of Bloor street which flings itself across the city from the uttermost end of Danforth to the Islington end of Bloor. Yonge street, as far as the spieler indicates, is this funny little crowded street full of small shops, like any old cross street in the big cities. We do not show that Yonge street is a pavement that runs from Lake Ontario to North Bay, and beginning to be suburban Toronto nearly all the way.
Toronto of To-day
These deserted mansions bunched together in Rosedale are not Toronto. They are Toronto in 1900. Toronto, 1927, is the thousands of acres of streets and homes spreading away up Yonge street, the whole townships of happy bungalows to the west, the east. Sightseers in Toronto should be run from Islington to Scarboro along the one street, Bloor-Danforth. They should do Yonge street from the bay to Hog’s Hollow.
The Royal Bank could make a fat interest out of air if it would designate one of its elevators for tourists and run them to the roof to look out over the city.
Should we impress visitors with our sameness, our age, the wealth of individuals, or with our differences from other cities, our youth, the independence of hundreds of thousands of people who live far-flung in the finest suburbs there are in America?
The spielers on the coaches make a great point of calling attention to the T. T. C. car barns and the fine T. T. C. cars and so forth. If the spielers could run visitors through miles and miles of homes, and point out that it is the city’s wonderful transportation facilities that makes all this spread possible and renders unnecessary the piled-up apartments of the cities most of the visitors come from, T. T. C. would mean a great deal more than handsome car barns and pretty red cars.
Brownstone distillers mansions, colleges, churches, amusement parks – everything everybody else has got we show.
We speak of them in their own language. “The spire on that cathedral,” says the spieler, “is the tallest spire on the North American continent.”
And as the visitors all know that they have the tallest spire on the North American continent in their own home town it doesn’t matter.
We are shown a white candy box sort of a house and are informed that this is the home of the president of the Lizzie Maria candy works, whose stores downtown are decorated in much the same style as this house, and you will observe, ladies and gentlemen, that the number of the house is the same as the price of his candy per pound – forty-nine cents!
Maybe the guests would rather see the house Dr. Banting lives in – the savior of ten thousand lives per annum. Or the section of the city that was burned by the Americans in 1812. Or the site of the hanging of the rebels – just across the street from the tallest spire on the North American continent – rebels who dared to assert that Canadians should have representative government just as if they were a British people. Or maybe they would rather see the house the city did not present to George Young.
There is so much to see in a city of over ten churches and five picture shows that a reliable guide book cannot be prepared in news paper space. But the Toronto of the rubberneck wagons, the Toronto of the brief guide folders, the brownstone Toronto, the official Toronto, being no different from any other city in this part of the Caucasian world is far different from the Toronto that produces a strangely large share of world-renowned scientists, that marches the biggest Orange procession in the known world, that disappears in summer to the wilds, men, women and children, that operates the biggest annual world’s fair, that owns its public utilities, that won’t support a single cabaret or dive, that votes the same way forever, that had only five or six delicatessen stores and fills the early September air with the odor of preserving ketchup and gherkins and peaches, that is not American and not English, but something pretty much its very own.
And it never shows itself on the city hall steps, nor anywhere around the tallest spire in America, nor in pretentious residential neighborhoods, but is scattered and spread over thirty two square miles of city and another dozen square miles of suburb, very neighborly – over a fence, somewhat dour, not hospitable in the American fashion, yet not inhospitable in the least.
“A city,” old Col. Denison used to say, “unpopular both with burglars and commercial travelers.”
But intensely popular with some three-quarters of a million Torontonians.
Editor’s Note:
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, August 26, 1939.
“How the dickens,” demanded Jimmie Frise hotly, “did you lose the engine?”
“It just fell off,” I stated patiently.
“Outboard engines can’t fall off,” declared Jim loudly. “If you fasten the screws tight, and look at them once a day. Just once a day. It isn’t much to ask.”
“I am not the kind of man,” I said, “who can look at anything regularly once a day. I’m the kind that fastens things once and for all. And if they don’t hold, it’s just too bad.”
“It sure is too bad,” said Jim. “Here I’ve been counting on borrowing your engine all week. I’ve planned this trip and got everything packed, the lunch hamper and everything. And now you say, quite coolly, your engine fell off.”
“Well, it did,” I stated hotly myself. “Do you imagine I pushed it off, just because you wanted to borrow it today? An engine that cost $140?”1
“You take the loss of it very coolly,” said Jim.
“Well, how else can you take it?” I retorted. “There I was sailing along, with a good old faithful engine humming behind me. And all of a sudden, plop, it’s gone.”
“Didn’t you try to catch it?” demanded Jimmie.
“Catch it?” I cried. “I had hold of it. I was steering it. And it simply yanked itself out of my hand.”
“But you could have made a grab for it,” complained Jim.
“Listen, it was my engine, wasn’t it?” I said angrily. “It wasn’t your engine. Of course I made a grab for it. But it went straight down, leaving a trail of bubbles, and there I was, drifting along without even any oars.”
“I think you were very careless,” said Jim, “with something worth $140.”
With people like Jimmie, it is useless to explain, much less argue. They get an idea in their heads and there it lodges.
“Jim,” I said, “that engine didn’t owe me anything. It was four years old and had done a good $140 worth of work for me. I don’t regret its loss.”
“You could have turned it in on a new one and got $40 for it,” said Jim.
“I admit I am out some cash,” I agreed. “But that isn’t my philosophy. My philosophy is, what’s to be is to be. I even agree that I should be the kind of man who carefully examines the screws on an outboard engine every day, so as to never lose that $40 turn-in value. But it so happens, I am the kind of guy that likes to pay $40 in four years just for the privilege of not having to look at the screws every day. That comes to only $10 a year. It isn’t much to pay for a nice little bit of freedom.”
“You’ll never amount to anything, with that kind of a philosophy,” stated Jim.
“Well, what do I want to amount to?” I inquired. “Do I want to amount to one of those tight, measly, mean old buzzards that go through life peering and prying at the screws of outboard engine, so that he can be the richest guy in the graveyard?”
“I still think you might have taken a little precaution,” said Jim, “especially when you knew I wanted that engine for today.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay, okay.”
“Whereabouts did it fall off?” inquired Jimmie.
“In 15 feet of water,” I said, “right off that point by Bain’s Island. It’s a goner.”
Wesley the Scientist
“Would you know,” pursued Jimmie, “just about where? How far out from the point? And how many yards east or west of the point?”
“I suppose,” I said sweetly, “you are going to dive for it? It only weighs 40 pounds, and it is only in 15 feet of water, and you can’t even swim, much less dive.”
“I had an idea,” said Jim.
“I suppose,” I continued, “that you will row the boat while I dive for it, maybe?”
“No, you’re past all diving,” said Jim, looking at me in the middle, and he is able to express much with his glance. “But down at the Landing there is a young fellow, one of the native sons, who has a sort of diving outfit.”
“You’ll never find it,” I assured him. “I spent two hours peering down in the water and dragging with big fish hooks. It’s probably lodged amongst rocks.”
“This kid,” said Jim, “has a home-made diving outfit. He made it himself. It has a big cylinder that fits over your head, with pads around your shoulders. It is weighted, and he has a hose running down to the head-piece, with an ordinary tire pump to shove the air down.”
“He couldn’t go 15 feet down, I scoffed.
“He charges 25 cents,” said Jim, “to let you down eight feet at the wharf at his place, and see the fish and all the eerie things on the bottom.”
“It’s extremely dangerous,” I declared. “Lots of kids have been drowned playing with amateur diving suits. They get tangled up in the ropes.”
“Well, this boy never lets anybody else monkey with it,” explained Jim. “He takes charge and watches every move. I’m going to see if he won’t help me find your engine.”
“It’s hopeless, Jim,” I assured. “You’d need a scow and everything.”
But when an hour later Jim returned in a boat with a scientific young man and a big iron diving helmet built out of scrap iron, with a whole tackle of hose, pump, ropes and gadgets, they had no scow. The whole outfit was accommodated in an ordinary skiff.
“You pay the costs,” said Jim, “if I get your engine.”
“You won’t get the engine,” I said. “It’s your adventure. How much is it?”
“Fifty cents an hour2,” said Jim.
“Okay then; I’ll pay the cost, and if I get the engine it will be mine.”
“Nothing doing,” I stated firmly. “That’s my engine, even if it is at the bottom of the lake. If you want to go and get it, in order to go on this picnic of yours, okay. But it’s my engine.”
“Very well,” said Jim, “I’ll pay the costs, but I’ll feel a lot freer about borrowing the engine any time I want it.”
“I don’t see how you could feel any freer than you do,” I stated, getting into the boat with them.
The young man’s name was Wesley, a name I had thought had gone out of fashion. He was extremely solemn about his diving apparatus. He had it as neatly coiled and stacked as if it were government property. “The principle of the thing,” he said, “is, Mr. Frise puts the helmet on and sets it snug and lowers himself over this little portable ladder I constructed. You hold the rope and pay it out as he descends. I am pumping. We got to be very watchful the rope and the hose don’t get snarled, or else.”
Owing to Specific Gravity
“How does he get back up?” I inquired.
“Owing to specific gravity,” said Wesley, “he is very light in the water. All he has got to do is sort of wish to come up and he gets light, see.”
“And where does the air go you pump down?” I demanded.
“It just comes up in bubbles,” said Wesley.
So we rowed across to Bain’s Island, and I did a job of navigation. It is not easy to recollect details of your position after the lapse of a whole day, especially when, at the time of the disaster, you were filled with indignation, excitement and no oars in the boat. However, I had Wesley row slowly back and forward, searching my memory and watching the gooseflesh sprout all over Jimmie as he sat with increasing mock cheerfulness in his bathing suit, carefully feeling the iron helmet and the rubber hose and other parts of the machine.
“I think,” I stated finally, “it was just right about here.”
“Do we take soundings first?” asked Jimmie.
“Generally we do,” said Wesley, and he I took a clothes-line with a stone on it and lowered it to the bottom. Then he hauled up, measuring it off in yards against his nose, arm extended.
“Seventeen feet,” said he. “Nigh, three fathoms.”
“Are there any leeches around here?” asked Jimmie. “Or snapping turtles or anything?”
“No,” I assured him. “This is fine clear water, though we did have quite a pest of watersnakes around Bain’s Island last summer.”
“Don’t we anchor?” suggested Jim, seeing no anchor in the boat.
“No, you act as an anchor,” said Wesley, “and you can walk along the bottom if you like.”
“What are the signals?” asked Jim.
“Mr. Clark holds the signal rope,” explained Wesley. “One means okay, two means less air, three means pull me up.”
Jim repeated these signals three times very loudly, and then swung on to the ladder that Wesley had hung overside. After a long last look at the coiled hose, the rope, which I held anxiously in my hand, and a final repetition of the signal numbers, Jim signalled Wesley to put the helmet on. It weighed Jim down, so heavy was it. Yet when he swung down and had the helmet half submerged he smiled cheerfully through the glass at us and moved his head around to show he was perfectly comfortable.
With a mute wave of his hand, he let go the ladder and I felt his weight on the rope. He weighed about 30 pounds, it seemed.
It was a grisly sort of feeling, paying out that rope with your friend tied to it. The rope was tied to a belt around Jim’s chest, and a feeling of tremendous responsibility brought perspiration out all over me.
It was spooky, too, to see the continuous bubbles rising as Wesley slowly and anxiously pumped. But spookiest of all was to feel the boat being towed, via the rope in my hands, as Jim started to walk slowly around on the bottom.
He kept giving the one short jerk which meant okay.
“He’s okay,” I kept saying breathlessly to Wesley.
“Don’t pay out the rope,” commanded Wesley, the scientist. “Just let him have enough to tow us.”
Jim walked this way and that. He seemed to climb over small hills and go down into little valleys. He probably wasn’t down two minutes, but it seemed like an hour when he finally signalled three.
“Up,” I said, rising and starting to haul.
“Up,” echoed Wesley, very scientific, pumping with one hand and gently lifting the hose in with the other, coiling it.
And with a great bubble and burst, out came Jim’s helmet beside the ladder and behind the steamy glass Jim was beaming.
“He’s got it,” I shouted.
“I See Something Shining”
Wesley hoisted the heavy helmet off, and Jim, all warm, breathed the cool air and then gasped “I see something shining about 50 feet to the north there.”
“It couldn’t be that far out,” I protested. “This is about where it fell off.”
“Of course,” agreed Jim. “But all I’m doing is looking on the bottom.”
So Wesley rowed over in the direction Jim indicated, and again Jim went overside and again vanished into 16 feet of water, Wesley and I, a little more courageously this time, manned the pump and the signal rope.
“Okay,” came the signal and Jim hit bottom. And then almost at once came a series of sharp single jerks, okay, okay, okay.
“He’s got it,” I cried happily.
“You’ll need to lift pretty easy,” said Wesley. “He’ll have his hands full.”
Jim seemed to cruise around the bottom quite a bit, returning to the same place each time, and finally, after all of three minutes, punctuated with seemingly joyous single jerks that all was well, Jim gave the three jerks to hoist. And as I hoisted, I knew the engine was with him.
Out of the water burst the round bell of the helmet. Through the steamy glass Jim beamed and shouted soundlessly.
Then out of the water came the propeller end of an engine.
But it was not mine.
It was a bigger, much newer engine than mine. It showed some signs of having been in the water a considerable time.
But in addition to the engine up flopped a steel fishing rod and reel, which Jim had tied by its line to the engine. Various other gadgets appeared, as I let go the rope and grabbed the engine to help hoist it on board. A wet sack of tools, a square brown tackle box, a heavy Thermos jar still full of something.
Wesley hoisted the helmet off Jim.
“Salvage,” cried Jim breathlessly.
“This isn’t my engine,” I accused.
“No, and I saw no signs of yours,” replied Jim. “But I found this one, and it’s mine.”
“And all the tackle,” I complained.
“That,” said Wesley, “must be the outfit those American tourists lost when they dumped here early in the season. They dragged all day for it and then gave it up in disgust.”
“Did they leave any address?” asked Jim.
“No, they were just passers-by,” said Wesley. “I guess this is all yours.”
“But look here,” I interrupted. “How about my engine?”
“Ask Wesley,” suggested Jim, turning to inspect his beautiful big engine.
“How about continuing right now,” I said. “I’ll pay the costs.”
“You can go down,” said Jim. “I’m too cold.”
He was blue. There were two leeches on him. He was shaking like a dog on a doorstep.
“Wesley,” I suggested, “how much would you charge to get a friend and spend a day finding my engine here?”
“Fifty cents an hour, and a dollar an hour for my friend who goes down,” said Wesley.
So tomorrow Wesley and his friend and I will continue the search for my engine. I know exactly where I lost it. It was about 100 feet this way of where we looked today. It is a wonder to me Jimmie did not see it shining.
Anyway, he’s gone on his picnic, with his new engine.
Editor’s Notes:
This story appeared in Greg Clark & Jimmie Frise Outdoors (1979).
By Gregory Clark, August 29, 1925.
Nothing Anywhere That Equals in Size, Color, Imagination, Speed, and Smoothness, The Great Pageant Before the Grandstand at the Canadian National Exhibition – “Cully” Ross, Pageant-Master Supreme, Discusses Secrets of His Amazing Art
Toronto does not brag.
If she did there would have been a great deal more heard about the Biggest Show on Earth.
For the Biggest Show on Earth is held in the sixty-ninth largest city of the world – Toronto.
It is a show, a drama. A thousand actors perform in it. Four hundred musicians make the music for it. Its stage is eight hundred and fifty feet across. Its audience sits up to a fifth of a mile away from the centre of the stage. Other cities of the world have big shows – carnivals in Venice, fetes in Paris, religious processions in Tokio or Calcutta. But the Biggest Show on Earth is no rough-and-ready carnival, no come-as-you-please procession. It is a play, a pageant. It tells a story. It is a piece of stagecraft on a gigantic scale.
It is the pageant in front of the grand stand at the Exhibition.
Acres of stage, thousands of square feet of scenery, spotlights like cannon and floodlights like a storm of light, and a thousand actors without a spoken word to help them, smoothly performing the clear and sharp movements that will tell the furthest spectator, a thousand feet away, high in his twenty-five cent seat, the epic story of the building of empire and the founding of nation upon nation within an empire.
“Why,” asks a big theatrical man visiting the city to see this astonishing piece of stage-craft, “Isn’t this show advertised to the ends of the earth? It’s tremendous!”
The reason appears to be that the big show is done by Toronto people, from the trained dancers who make the beautiful ballet in the foreground up to the lone man who conceives. designs, executes, manages, directs it – Captain Cully Ross, of the Queen’s Own, pageant-master, director of all amusements and entertainment of the whole exhibition, who for thirty years has been doing his stuff for the great Canadian fair, and who is said to be the foremost pageant-master in America.
Because it is local the big show is taken for granted. When you see this year’s scene, St. Paul’s in the centre, with the streets of Old London spreading to right and left hundreds of feet, life size, it will be hard to realize that these are not actual buildings fading into the perspective. As all the nations of the empire on which the sun never sets begin to congregate in historical order against this scene, with their forty or fifty different types of costume, company after company of them, piling up the mighty story of the growth of the British nations, some sense of wonder at the skill back of this drama on the giant scale is certain to assail you.
Pageant Just 50 Minutes Long
The pageant at Wembley took six hours to unfold in two three-hour sessions on successive nights. The pageant at Toronto Exhibition takes in the neighborhood of fifty minutes, from the moment the eleven massed bands crash out the prelude to the scene until the curtain falls, so to speak, in a triumphant blaze of fireworks.
This fifty-minute pageant is one of the lessons Toronto has learned, via the shrewd showman gift of observation possessed by Captain Cully Ross.
He works from a central, picturesque idea, both in his scenery and his action, and then spreads about that central theme enough pageantry to make it graphic and vivid. He reduced the story of Cleopatra to fifty-two minutes. By one of those weird gifts he selected the Cleopatra story two years ago before King Tut’s tomb became the popular subject of the news, and by the time the pageant was presented it was right in the limelight.
“A pageant,” says he, “is a huge, simple, orderly drama, done in broad, swift strokes. To inspire the onlooker, it must not tire him.”
The grand stand show opens with a three-ring circus. For more than an hour acrobats, clowns and animals entertain the twenty-five thousand spectators. Then comes a few moments of community singing.
Why did Captain Ross introduce community singing before the pageant opens. Just an idle fancy? Ah, there is magic in the showman.
To dissipate the circus spirit into thin air, to make a break from clowns and fun-makers, to set the mind of the twenty-five thousand in tune for the stately magic of the pageant which is the biggest show on earth, these men who have made a science of the entertainment of the human mind and heart have introduced a few minutes of darkness. The lights that flooded the circus rings die down. In the gloaming, music, unseen musicians, swell forth old familiar tunes. In silence, the words of the songs are flashed on screens. Rollicky tunes to remind you you are on a holiday night, unbending. Then kindlier tunes near to the heart. Then semi-sacred songs, and even hymns, to make you rejoice in the velvet starry sky and the beloved kindly land that is being celebrated this night in excitement and music and the moving of great throngs. Hymns, songs, that you yourself are wheedled into singing. Then –
Then the magic lights strike into the dark and you see a fair and stately city. Nigh four hundred musicians, massed under Colonel Mackenzie Rogan, the greatest bandmaster in the British Empire, specially brought out from England just to conduct these hundreds of instruments. And the biggest show on earth, the glorification of Canada and the empire of which she is a member, has begun before your eyes, prepared and damp with the emotion of song.
Director Never in Evidence
To jam on a great jamboree of color and noise is one thing. To do what Captain Cully Ross does is another. You will see whether he is a great showman or not.
At pageants elsewhere in the world, a gentleman in a nice smart suit, evening dress if you like, will be seen standing in the foreground, between you and the stage, and with a stick, or a megaphone, he directs the stiff figures marching and countermarching about the vast scene. He is the pageant master. At the biggest show on earth, you will see no stage direction. Cully Ross is there, all right. He is on the stage. Sometimes he is a Zulu or a soldier (he’s worn the uniform since he was a boy bugler in the Northwest Rebellion) or an admiral or a high priest. So are his three assistant directors, scattered at strategic points around the acres of stage. But you will not see him nor them. It is a drama you are watching. Nothing mars the illusion of light and shadow, color and stately graceful movement.
Eight giant Nubian slaves are carrying a high priest in a sedan chair to the centre of the vast stage. They deposit the burden too soon and the sharp voice of Cully Ross, disguised as an acolyte or something cuts in – “Pick him up, boys! Pick him up!”
One of the giant Nubian slaves turns and says in an injured voice – “That’s all very well, Mr. Ross, but you don’t have to carry this big bullock around!”
One beauty of the pageant is that the asides are not heard by the audience.
This year’s pageant is called the “Ties That Bind.” From the earliest Anglo Saxons to the triumphs of Vimy and Jutland, the story of the building empire is told.
How far in advance these pageants are planned nobody knows. Captain Ross is always busy with his next one before the one in hand is off. In addition to the conceiving and designing of the pageant, he happens also to have full charge of every item coming under the head of amusement and entertainment in the whole exhibition, Midway, bands, street minstrels, all. But early in the spring, the scene painters are at work in their big studio in Hamilton, working out the eight hundred foot set in sections, eight by sixteen feet, to be set up piece by piece on the great scaffolding at the Exhibition Grounds. Weeks before the show opens, the dancers, actors and supers to the number of a thousand are chosen and being drilled.
The costumes are authentic. Willie Clarkson, the famous London costumer who has the finest collection of fancy dress, has supplied many of the pageant costumes in past years, the rest coming from big houses in Philadelphia. There is nothing shoddy and haphazard in the dress of these thousand actors two weeks.
“How on earth do you manage to get a thousand costumes from abroad and fit them to your regiment of actors?”
“Regiment is good,” said Captain Ross. “Anybody who has had much to do with the militia knows the business of fitting a costume. You see, you make sure there are no mirrors around, to begin with. Then you put the costume on the wearer, take a good handful of the slack at the back, so drawing it tight across the front. Then you say – ‘Splendid fit! Splendid fit! Take it! There you are!’ If you speak fast, pat it on his shoulders, and don’t let go the hold on the slack until he has looked up, he is out and gone with it in a twinkling. Fitting costumes is one of the arts.”
Plans Made Months Ahead
The secret of a good show is attention to detail. By getting his plans away in mid-winter, Captain Ross is ready for the details. In this show he wanted pigeons around St. Paul’s. How to get those pigeons in sufficient numbers and how to get them to fly at night, against all the laws of nature, is one of the details he has had to work out. It matches a problem of two years ago, when the Cleopatra pageant was the feature, when Captain Ross had to find a camel in four days. He got it.
Some of his vast company of actors get stage fright. One year, the Queen Mary of the pageant came forth ardently chewing gum. Yet in another, the Prince of Wales was so real, officers standing near sprang to attention as he passed by. In the Cleopatra pageant, there was a water scene on which, the Queen’s barge floated in. A prominent railroad man called Captain Ross over to enquire how many million gallons of water were required for that scene. He was dumbfounded when told that the water was merely mechanical lights rippling on canvas and that the Queen’s barge, floating so softly in, was being yo-heaved by a gang of stage hands from behind.
A Texan interested in the show business on the large scale, asked Captain Ross about the bands that play in the dark at the Dufferin gate bandstand at half past ten when the crowds are going home.
“Looks like a waste of money, playing a band at that hour, after the show’s all over,” said the Texan.
“Music lifts tired feet,” replied Cully Ross.
He hates to send the people home tired. His pageant is short and swift. He greets them on; the way home with music, instead of the weary sound of a thick throng plodding off into the dark, with the sound of sleepy children crying and all the let-down of departure from big day. He plays them out to the street cars, always merry and bright.
For the same reason, he makes his final Saturday night the most tremendous of the whole two weeks, spends extra money on the works, closes the show up with a bang. Don’t let your show die away on you, is one of his maxims. Look after the ends and the middle will take care of itself. The tune is kept to highest pitch right to the last minute.
There is psychology in the show business. It is largely the business of creating an illusion. To fill the hearts of twenty-five thousand people who have been making the rounds of the fair seeing the handiwork of the dominion, with pride. of their native land is the job of that pageant, with its music and splendor and story. It is the biggest annual show on earth. And it is made in Canada.
At the time, the number of cylinders in the engine meant the car was more expensive and therefore had more status. Four cylinder was low end and eight cylinder was high end.
Only in the good old days could everyone be friendly without getting into trouble over it
By Gregory Clack, Illustrated by James Frise, August 20, 1938.
“It’s a pretty good old world,” said Jimmie Frise.
“If it weren’t for the people in it,” I modified.
“I mean the people too,” said Jim, as he gazed with deep feeling over the ripe fields, the matronly trees in their full garments of the last summer. “I mean everything. She’s a pretty good old world.”
“I really don’t think,” I submitted, “that the world was intended to hold so many people. It would be perfect world if the people were more scattered.”
“You’ll end up a hermit,” warned Jimmie.
“No, I’m sociable enough,” I explained. “But you don’t see nature cluttering up the earth with other species. The birds and deer and other creatures aren’t crowded into space the way humans are. Nature spaces all creatures out, pleasantly. Did you know, for instance, that in the bird world, each pair of birds selects a precise area in which to live, and they don’t depart from it? Maybe an acre or two, in which only one pair of wrens, one pair of robins, one pair of warblers, and so forth, are organized into a sort of bird society.”
“I never knew that,” admitted Jim.
“Oh, yes,” I stated. “It’s called distribution. There can be a number of different kinds of birds in each of these little areas, but if another couple of the same species as any of those already settled there tries to intrude or trespass, there is a fierce fight.”
“How about starlings?” asked Jim. “They live in vast mobs.”
“Only after the nesting season is over,” I informed him. “During the nesting season, they are scattered just the same as all other birds, one pair to so much acreage.”
“The passenger pigeon lived in rookeries,” stated Jim. “Millions all nesting together.”
“Yes,” I cried, “and where is the passenger pigeon today? Extinct. Like the buffalo and all other creatures that live in herds. It is fatal, under nature laws, to live in herds.”
“Humans are different,” commented Jim, as we drove along the side road. “Humans aren’t bound by the rules that govern birds and animals.”
“I think they are,” I replied, “and I think that is one of the big truths science is going to hit on in the coming century. Science is going to discover that there are far too many people in the world.”
“And what,” enquired Jim, “will science do about it?”
“Weed us out,” I declared, “before nature does. Nature weeds out a little more thoroughly and painfully than science.”
“Birth control?” enquired Jim.
“Far better than birth control,” I stated. “I am willing to bet that fifty years from now, you will have to petition the government for a permit to have a child.”
“A permit?” cried Jim, scandalized.
“Certainly,” I decreed. “A permit. A man and wife will have to go before a board of examiners, who will not merely give them a thorough going over as to their physical fitness to have a child, but an intelligence test and everything else, check up on their political views and opinions, just to see if the world needs any more of that kind of opinion and intelligence.”
“Talk about dictators,” breathed Jim.
“Then, if you get a good report,” I explained, “you apply to the government for a permit to have a child. Most of the applications, of course, will be refused. Very few people will have the joy of having children. In a couple of generations, the human race will thus be reduced to a nice comfortable number. The world will not be overcrowded, the way it is now. It will be a very pleasant place to live.”
“It sounds like a heck of a world to me,” said Jim.
“Yes, according to present standards,” I admitted. “But what right has anybody to have as many children as they want? Nature doesn’t allow other creatures to have as many as they want, no, siree. A fish lays two million eggs, in the hope that about ten of them will hatch out and survive to be mature fish. In the bird world, for every five eggs a robin lays, only one robin survives to come back the next spring.”
“How do you know?” demanded Jim.
“Oh, well,” I said, “I was giving you round numbers.”
“That’s the trouble with science,” declared Jimmie. “It deals in round numbers. In fact, it deals in numbers of any kind and that is where it is wrong. Life is not to be solved by numbers. Life is a riddle, a mystery. Strange and beautiful forces drive us all, beasts, birds, insects, plants, to multiply and replenish the earth. Life is beautiful. It must be as beautiful, in its way, to that bug that just smacked against our windshield, as it is to us. A bug lives five days, we live three-score years and ten. But I venture the opinion that that bug crams as much excitement and adventure and strangeness and beauty into its five days, in proportion, as we do into our three score and ten years.”
“I wish the world weren’t quite so crowded,” I insisted. We could ride on the highways in peace, instead of having to be doping along these side roads.”
“Yeah,” said Jim, “and who would pay the taxes for highways? You and who else?”
“People are so pushing, so greedy,” I pointed out. “Each generation seems to be getting greedier and more pushing. Now you take in my grandmother’s time. They had bees. Barn raisings, sewing bees, threshing bees. People all helped one another, just two generations ago.”
“They had to,” explained Jim. “They couldn’t afford to hire anybody, so they had to gang up for the benefit of each other to get certain big jobs done.”
“Nowadays,” I continued, “we live unto ourselves. We do not know who our neighbors are. We nod to them, politely, in the garden, that’s all. How do we know what insuperable problems those neighbors are wrestling with? How do we not know that if we were neighbors in the old-fashioned way, what a godsend we might be to our next door neighbors?”
“Necessity is the mother of most social inventions,” said Jim. “We’ve worked out our present system of everybody living unto himself as the most comfortable way to live. We’d soon get sick of busybodies who would keep coming and ringing the bell at all hours of the day, asking if there was any little neighborly thing they might do for us, like helping to hang curtains or mend a tap.”
“I hate to see such a sudden change,” I stated, “in only two generations, from the husking bees of my grandmother to the cold shoulder we exhibit today, along miles and miles of streets in countless cities, towns and villages.”
“Ah, the villages aren’t so bad,” interposed Jim. “And the country too. It’s pretty neighborly right around here, I would say. Look at these lonely little farms, on this rocky soil. I bet you the people who live around here know where they can find a helping hand nearby.”
Ahead of us, an elderly man was standing on the side of the road, mopping his brow with a red handkerchief.
“There’s a fellow,” said Jim, “who doesn’t find the world too crowded. Why don’t you move up into this neighborhood, if it is a little seclusion you want?”
“He’s holding up his hand,” I remarked. “Will we stop?”
“Be old-fashioned,” suggested Jim, “like your grandmother, and see what help you can be.”
I slowed the car and rolled to a stop beside the old chap. He put one foot on the running board and leaned on the side of the car.
“You didn’t see nothing,” he asked, “of a cow back up the road that way, did you?”
“What kind of a cow?” I inquired kindly.
“Oh, just a red and white cow,” said the farmer, “with some black speckles on her back. I never rightly studied her. Her name is Bella.”
“Well,” said Jim, “we’ve passed a lot of cows along the road. How far would she be?”
“Well, sir,” said the farmer, shifting his position on the running board, “I couldn’t say. I milked her this morning and I ain’t seed her since. She’s got the habit of wandering off. I must put a bell on her one of these days.”
“I’m afraid,” I said, “we can’t be of much help to you. It’s hard to tell one cow from another if you are a stranger.”
“Well, sir,” admitted the old boy, “that’s a funny thing. I had this cow now about four years. I see her every day, but I never rightly took a good look at her. I’d know her when I see her, but if you was to ask me to describe her, I wouldn’t know exactly whether she was mostly brown or white or black. She’s a kind of combination of them all. I’ve owned so many cows, in my time.”
“Well,” I said. “I guess….”
“How would you like,” suggested Jim, “if we drove you a ways up the way we’re going? We might run into her.”
“Much obliged,” said the old boy, as if he had been awaiting this suggestion and he started trying various ways to open the car door.
“Hop in,” invited Jim, swinging the door open for him, and I gave Jim a sideways look. Jim is always making generous gestures like this, especially when I am driving.
“This is very kind of you,” said the old boy, leaning back with a big sigh.
So I drove slowly along the country road, not going too fast because after all, a cow doesn’t stray too far.
We drove leisurely along one whole concession, and no sign of Bella. We saw several cows idly chewing in the roadside, and my heart leaped as we approached each of them, but the old boy cried, “not her, not her.”
I slowed the car at the corner of the concession road, but the old boy made no move to get out.
“I kind of thought,” he mused, “that she would have come this way, but I guess I was mistaken. She must have gone up the side road instead of along here.”
“We’ll take you around the concession,” invited Jim, heartily. “It’s only a few minutes in a car but a long way on your feet.”
“Old feet like mine,” agreed the old boy. “And the rheumaticks, too.”
I turned the car north to go around the concession, while Jim and the old boy chatted about the rheumaticks and how they began to get bad about the end of summer. I did not go so slow this time. I stepped on it and slowed up just long enough, as we came to a cow along the roadside, for the old chap to call out, “not her.”
We made the complete tour of the four sides of the concession without seeing any signs of Bella. When we came back to the corner where we had picked up the old boy, I slowed the car with a sort of finality, which I was sure would serve for a hint.
But Jim again spoke up, ignoring a nudge I gave him.
“I bet we weren’t ten minutes going around that whole concession,” he said. “Now, figure out the likeliest way she went. What way does she usually go?”
“Well, sir,” said the old farmer, “it’s half a dozen of one and six of the other. I find her as often one way as the other.”
“All right,” smiled Jim, “you choose which way now. Will we go around this concession or that one?”
The old boy sat, cogitating. He took off his hat and scratched his head.
“Well, sir,” he said, “I kind of got a hunch that she went this way today.”
He indicated the south-eastern concession, an area two miles and a half by a mile and a half.
“We’ll take the east road first,” said Jim.
I turned the car and drove smartly down the east road. This was a swampy road and we met no cows at all. At the end of the concession, we turned on to a better road and we saw cows in the distance being slowly driven along the road by a little girl, going home for the evening milking. I slowed the car as we passed and the old boy called out to the child if she had seen Bella.
“Yes, Mr. Brown,” said the little girl. “She went past here about noon.”
“Ah, getting hotter,” cried Jim, and I put on the gas and we chased with more interest after the elusive Bella.
Around the concession we raced at a good clip, but by now the cows were fewer and farther between and we saw no sign of Bella.
“Try,” suggested the old man, “off this way. Two weeks ago she strayed and I found her away down here.”
This was in a new direction entirely, and a good three miles from where we had found the old man.
“There she is,” cried Mr. Brown, delightedly, after we had gone only a hundred yards. Bella was feeding along the roadside with a perfectly easy conscience. “The rapscallion. I’ll have to sell her to the cattle buyer if she keeps this up.”
I slowed alongside Bella and let Mr. Brown out.
“It’s a long walk home,” said Jim. “Leading a cow.”
“It’s a long walk,” agreed the old boy, taking a rope halter from his hip pocket, “without any cow.”
“Jim,” I hissed, “are we going to spend the night around here?”
“We’ll tow the cow,” said Jim.
“We will like heck,” I said, starting to change gears, while, Mr. Brown, in the friendliest, fashion, tied the rope on Bella who looked around lazily.
“You can’t abandon an old man like that,” charged Jimmie. “What would your grandmother think of you, driving a poor old boy miles away from his home and then leaving him with a cow?”
“My grandmother,” I informed him, “stayed at home. She didn’t go traipsing about the country in a motor car offering to tow cows home.”
“Mr. Brown,” called Jim, silkily, “climb aboard and we’ll give you a lift. You can lead Bella.”
“I was hoping you’d suggest that,” admitted Mr. Brown, hauling Bella over the ditch and getting eagerly back into the car.
So in low gear, we rode along, with Bella hauling and dragging behind, while Jimmie and Mr. Brown talked about all kinds of country subjects and I sat thinking about my grandmother and the good old days when men could be neighborly without getting into all kinds of trouble.
More illustrations from a story by Merrill Denison.
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