“They’re young Brown’s Tuxis boys,” he told them. “The neighborhood has needed such a man for a long time. I tried to organize a class in agriculture up there two years ago, and I couldn’t get any response at all. There was a
little store and ‘stopping house,’ that was about the worst hang-out for boys that I have ever seen. In the winter a run-down, semi-professional hockey player came in on the pretext of coaching a team, and supplied about every undesirable influence that they hadn’t had up to that time. The boys from the farms around were getting in just about as deep as the village crowd. No person going in occasionally could hope to do much, but when Brown came home he went right after it, and the boys follow him like sheep. They asked for a course themselves this year, and I couldn’t have had a better class of boys if I had hand-picked them. I believe Brown has a very live Bible class composed largely of boys who used to spend most of their Sunday afternoons smoking behind the barn.... It just demonstrates the same old truth over again, that no good movement will ever get anywhere in a community, unless there are some people who care about it right on the ground. As we’ve agreed before, what the country needs is more people—of the right kind.”
“How about the city people who come out?” Billy inquired casually. He was brazenly proud of what he would do for his own community in this regard.
“Wonderful,” the Representative replied; “wonderful. They must sometimes find the people they have to live with very trying, though.”
“Which remark quite justifies the criticism I have heard of some Agricultural Representatives—that they have no sympathy with farm people. What were you going to say about your commuters?”
“One family I have in mind weren’t just commuters, though they weren’t actually year-round, out-and-out residents. A neighborhood loses something, of course, in the family that goes to town for the winter, but the point I want to make is that sometimes we get a certain breadth of view from experience in the city. This happened in Haven Hollow. Perhaps you don’t know the place, but to drive through and see it, with its green fields and blue sky, and a quiet broken only by sheep bells and birds and children’s voices, you would expect it to be the most safe and peaceful little cup of a world on the face of the earth. You would expect it to be filled to the brim with all the old, sterling virtues of honesty and neighborly love—and in all the outward signs and tokens it was, but the Hollow had a besetting sin of its own. It was distrustful and cruelly critical of anything it did not understand. The object of its criticism might be something new in the schools or the government or the very personal affairs of its neighbors. A typical case is reported of one woman who had knit socks for the Red Cross, and also sent boxes of clothing to the sufferers in the fires of Northern
Ontario and Halifax. A few months afterwards, she explained to her friends that she had put a card with her name and address in the box that went to New Ontario and she had a nice letter back from there. She had forgotten to put her name in the box that went to Halifax, and she received no letter back from there. She supposed the Red Cross officials had gotten hold of her box and that the Halifax people never saw it at all.
“Things were going like this when the new family bought a strip of land on the river-front and built a summer home on it. They had seen the Hollow from a train window and thought it would be a nice, peaceful spot to retire to. They were very popular; they opened their house for all sorts of community gatherings and all went merry as a marriage bell till Poppy Andrews came home for a visit.
“Poppy had left the Hollow ten years before to study music—a very clever, level-headed girl, they say. A few years later she married a man who sang like a nightingale and kept his marriage vows like a beetle, and Poppy got a divorce. You can imagine the dust that would stir up in the Hollow. They took it as a public disgrace, and Poppy had been ostracized ever since. The new family took her in as they did everyone else; only the woman seemed to have a particular fondness for her. The rest of the Hollow was alarmed
about it, especially the woman who was always ready to shoulder the responsibility of going to people with painful gossip under the pretext ‘I thought you ought to know.’