“It was a great sorrow,” she said in her weary, beautiful way. “It was a sorrow so great that we never could quite believe it.” She spoke slowly, with a little pause between each word. “In one day our three sons were taken from us. It was at a theatre—there was a fire—I never talk of it. I cannot. We have traveled; we have lived here and there, and we have been unable to get back our strength and interest. My Charles—” she laid her white hand on her husband’s knee—“tries to make out that he has. But I know better. But he’s more unselfish than I, that’s all. Sometimes I’ve shut myself up for weeks at a time, and seen no one except my nurse. It was the only way that I could control myself. Well, not to talk of that, we have come, naturally enough, to look at life in a very different way from what we used to look at it. We see that we’ve got to stop living for ourselves alone. If we’re to be happy again, we must enlarge our family. We must take in everyone we can reach who needs us, or who will care for us. So we have come down here where every one seems simple and friendly, and where we can offer our neighborly offices, to spend the next few years. We heard of the fine old Atherton place, and finding that it was for sale, we bought it and have made a home there which we really are coming to love, though we had thought we never could really care for a home again. And now we want to be doing something—something really interesting.”
“We want to play a new game,” broke in Mr. Carson, “and to get as many as we can to come and play with us.”
“We want,” went on Mrs. Carson, “to go into these mountain industries. We want the old handicrafts to be revived; the weaving, the basket making and the pottery. And we want your help and advice.”
“Oh, yes’m,” cried Mary McBirney enthusiastically. “Thomas and I have talked many and many’s the time, of the good that might come from such a thing. Why, there’s chair makers in these parts that can make a chair that’ll go down to their great-great-grandchildren.”
“Just the thing, just the thing, madam!” answered Mr. Carson. “They’ve got the knowledge, and they’ve the talent, but they don’t use their knowledge sufficiently, and they don’t understand how to market their wares.”
“It’s true,” Mr. McBirney admitted. “They’re poorer than Job’s turkey. They just set around and mourn their fate. They stir up a little patch of ground, and think they’ve done everything there is to be done.”
“They’re too far from markets and railroads,” said Mr. Carson. “In the beginning the mountains called them, they were so beautiful; and then they cast a spell over them. It’s as if the people were hypnotized, and hadn’t leave to move.”
“That’s it,” agreed Mrs. McBirney. “You see them creeping down into town as shy as deer. And you can tell by looking at them, that there ain’t enough in the pantry to go around. They’re just plumb starved, that’s what they are.”
“Starved for lack of food, and society, and excitement,” Mr. Carson added. “Their stomachs and their minds and hearts are empty.”
“Yes, sir, just plumb empty.”