A Son of the Middle Border

by Hamlin Garland

This was a golden summer for us all. My mother found time to read. My father enjoyed companionship with the leading citizens of the town, while Franklin, as first assistant in a candy store, professed himself to be entirely content. My own holidays were spent in fishing or in roving the woods with Mitchell and George, but on Sundays the entire family dressed for church as for a solemn social function, fully alive to the dignity of Banker Brush, and the grandeur of Congressman Deering who came to service regularly—but on foot, so intense was the spirit of democracy among us.

Theoretically there were no social distinctions in Osage, but after all a large house and a two seated carriage counted, and my mother's visitors were never from the few pretentious homes of the town but from the farms. However, I do not think she worried over her social position and I know she welcomed callers from Dry Run and Burr Oak with cordial hospitality. She was never envious or bitter.

In spite of my busy life, I read more than ever before, and everything I saw or heard made a deep and lasting record on my mind. I recall with a sense of gratitude a sermon by the preacher in the Methodist Church which profoundly educated me. It was the first time I had ever heard the power of art and the value of its mission to man insisted upon. What was right and what was wrong had been pointed out to me, but things of beauty were seldom mentioned.

With most eloquent gestures, with a face glowing with enthusiasm, the young orator enumerated the beautiful phases of nature. He painted the starry sky, the sunset clouds, and the purple hills in words of prismatic hue and his rapturous eloquence held us rigid. "We have been taught," he said in effect, "that beauty is a snare of the evil one; that it is a lure to destroy, but I assert that God desires loveliness and hates ugliness. He loves the shimmering of dawn, the silver light on the lake and the purple and snow of every summer cloud. He honors bright colors, for has he not set the rainbow in the heavens and made water to reflect the moon? He prefers joy and pleasure to hate and despair. He is not a God of pain, of darkness and ugliness, he is a God of beauty, of delight, of consolation."

In some such strain he continued, and as his voice rose in fervent chant and his words throbbed with poetry, the sunlight falling through the window-pane gave out a more intense radiance, and over the faces of the girls, a more entrancing color fell. He opened my eyes to a new world, the world of art.

I recognized in this man not only a moving orator but a scholar and I went out from that little church vaguely resolved to be a student also, a student of the beautiful. My father was almost equally moved and we all went again and again to hear our young evangel speak but never again did he touch my heart. That one discourse was his contribution to my education and I am grateful to him for it. In after life I had the pleasure of telling him how much he had suggested to me in that sermon.

There was much to allure a farmer boy in the decorum of well-dressed men and the grace of daintily clad women as well as in the music and the dim interior of the church (which seemed to me of great dignity and charm) and I usually went both morning and evening to watch the regal daughters of the county aristocracy go up the aisle. I even joined a Sunday school class because charming Miss Culver was the teacher. Outwardly a stocky, ungraceful youth, I was inwardly a bold squire of romance, needing only a steed and a shield to fight for my lady love. No one could be more essentially romantic than I was at this time—but fortunately no one knew it!

Mingling as I did with young people who had been students at the Seminary, I naturally developed a new ambition. I decided to enter for the autumn term, and to that end gained from my father a leave of absence during August and hired myself out to bind grain in the harvest field. I demanded full wages and when one blazing hot day I rode on a shining new Marsh harvester into a field of wheat just south of the Fair Ground, I felt myself a man, and entering upon a course which put me nearer the clothing and the education I desired.

Binding on a harvester was desperately hard work for a sixteen-year-old boy for it called for endurance of heat and hunger as well as for unusual celerity and precision of action. But as I considered myself full-grown physically, I could not allow myself a word of complaint. I kept my place beside my partner hour after hour, taking care of my half of ten acres of grain each day. My fingers, raw and bleeding with the briars and smarting with the rust on the grain, were a torture but I persisted to the end of harvest. In this way I earned enough money to buy myself a Sunday suit, some new boots and the necessary books for the seminary term which began in September.

Up to this time I had never owned an overcoat nor a suit that fitted me. My shirts had always been made by my mother and had no real cuffs. I now purchased two boxes of paper cuffs and a real necktie. My intense satisfaction in these garments made mother smile with pleasure and understanding humor.