Lo, Michael!

by Grace Livingston Hill

Under the hand of the skilled carpenter there sprang up immediately a colony of tents and later small one-roomed shacks or bungalows. Michael bought lumber and found apprentices to help, and the carpenter of the colony repaired barns and outhouses, fences, or built shacks, whenever the head of affairs saw fit to need another.

The only person in the whole alley whom Michael had invited in vain to the farm was old Sally. She had steadily refused to leave her gaily papered room, her curtained window and her geranium. It was a symbol of “ould Ireland” to her, and she felt afraid of this new place of Michael’s. It seemed to her superstitious fancy like an immediate door to a Heaven, from which she felt herself barred by her life. It assumed a kind of terror to her thoughts. She was not ready to leave her little bit of life and take chances even for Michael. And so old Sal sat on her doorstep and watched the alley dwellers come and go, listening with interest to each new account of the farm, but never willing to see for herself. Perhaps the secret of her hesitation after all went deeper than superstition. She had received private information that Old Orchard had no Rum Shop around the corner. Old Sally could not run any risks, so she stayed at home.

But the carpenter’s wife was glad to cook for the men when the busy days of planting and weeding and harvesting came, and the colony grew and grew. Two or three other men came down with their families, and helped the carpenter to build them little houses, with a bit of garden back, and a bed of flowers in front. They could see the distant sea from their tiny porches, and the river wound its salty silver way on the other hand. It was a great change from the alley. Not all could stand it, but most of them bore the summer test well. It would be when winter set its white distance upon them, chilled the flowers to slumber, and stopped the labor that the testing time would come; and Michael was thinking about that.

He began hunting out helpers for his purposes.

He found a man skilled in agricultural arts and secured his services to hold a regular school of agriculture during the winter for the men. He found a poor student at Princeton who could run up on the train daily and give simple lessons in reading and arithmetic. He impressed it upon Sam and the other young men that unless they could read for themselves enough to keep up with the new discoveries in the science other farmers would get ahead of them and grow bigger potatoes and sweeter ears of corn than they did. He kept up a continual sunny stream of eager converse with them about what they were going to do, and how the place was going to grow, until they felt as if they owned the earth and meant to show the world how well they were running it. In short, he simply poured his own spirit of enthusiasm into them, and made the whole hard summer of unaccustomed labor one great game; and when the proceeds from their first simple crops came in from the sale of such products as they did not need for their own use in the colony, Michael carefully divided it among his various workmen and at his wish they went in a body and each started a bank account at the little National Bank of the town. It was a very little of course, absurdly little, but it made the workers feel like millionaires, and word of the successes went back to the city, and more and more the people were willing to come down, until by fall there were thirty-eight men, women and children, all told, living on the farm.

Of course that made little appreciable difference in the population of the alley, for as soon as one family moved out another was ready to move in, and there was plenty of room for Michael’s work to go on. Nevertheless, there were thirty-eight souls on the way to a better knowledge of life, with clean and wholesome surroundings and a chance to learn how to read and how to work.

The carpenter was set to get ready more tiny houses for the next summer’s campaign, the tents were folded away, the spring wheat was all in; the fall plowing and fertilizing completed and whatever else ought to be done to a farm for its winter sleep; half a dozen cows were introduced into the settlement and a roomy chicken house and run prepared. Sam set about studying incubators, and teaching his helpers. Then when the cranberries were picked the colony settled down to its study.

The Princeton student and the agricultural student grew deeply interested in their motley school, and finally produced a young woman who came down every afternoon for a consideration, and taught a kindergarten, to which many of the prematurely grown-up mothers came also with great delight and profit, and incidentally learned how to be better, cleaner, wiser mothers. The young woman of her own accord added a cooking school for the women and girls.

Once a week Michael brought down some one from New York to amuse these poor childish people. And so the winter passed.

Once a wealthy friend of Mr. Holt asked to be taken down to see the place, and after going the rounds of the farm and making himself quite friendly roasting chestnuts around the great open fire in the “big house,” as the original cottage was called, returned to New York with many congratulations for Michael. A few days afterward he mailed to Michael the deed of the adjoining farm of one hundred acres, and Michael, radiant, wondering, began to know that his dreams for his poor downtrodden people were coming true. There would be room enough now for many a year to come for the people he needed to bring down.