“They know at last whose cause was right
In God the Father’s sight!”
Old Sol, the black man who turned the press, has passed on with them. Years ago The Southern Live Stock Journal was absorbed by a stronger publication. It is doubtful if in all the town or country you could find an old copy of the paper. Those great editorials which I climbed into the clouds to write were evidently too thin and light for this world. They have all sailed away far from the mind of man. The little building where we started the candle flame which was to burn up all the prejudice and depression in the South seems to be occupied as a negro hotel or boarding house. The little shop where (with Sol on the crank of the press and I feeding in the papers) we turned out what we felt to be a mental feast, is now a kitchen where cow peas, bacon and greens and corn bread form a more substantial food than we ever served up in printer’s ink. It was no longer a molder of public opinion.
“To what base uses we may return, Horatio.”
And yet the sky was blue, the day was fair—the vision had come true. I wished that Colonel O’Brien and Sergeant Hill might stand in front of the old building and look about them. No longer a sea of mud, but smooth, firm pavements. The sidewalks were lined with cars. Beautiful trees shaded the streets, until the town seemed like a New England Village with six generations behind it. Outside, stretching away in every direction, was the thick, beautiful carpet of blue grass and clover. Here and there was a young man in the uniform of the American Union. In the vaults of the banks were great bundles of Liberty bonds. And a gray-haired man on the street corner told me this:
“You will find that the very States which sixty years ago tried to break up the Union will, in the future, prove to be the very ones which must hold it together.”
Yet let me tell Henry Barkman and the millions who felt as he did about his oration, that no one in all that town remembered my former editorials or the great work of the Journal. My literary work has been blown away as completely as the clouds among which it was composed. At the end of the great college commencement exercises a man came on the stage with a great bunch of flowers and bowed in my direction. I am not much in the habit of having verbal bouquets fired at me, but I will confess that I thought: “Here is where my soul-inspiring editorial work is appreciated. All things come round to him who will but wait.”
But this orator, like the rest of them, never dreamed that I ever tried to “uplift the South.” He said I entered into the young life of the town and was remembered with affection because I played baseball with skill and taught that community how to pitch a curved ball!
And let me say to the Henry Barkmans who read this that the lesson of all this is the truest thing I know. Many a man has gone out into life like a knight on a crusade, armed with what he thinks are glorious weapons. In after years people cannot remember what his weapons were, but he got into their hearts with some simple, common thing which seemed foolish beside his great deeds. Nobody remembered my brain children, though they were embalmed in ink and cradled in a printing press. But I put a twist on a baseball, overcame the force of gravity and made the ball dodge around a corner, and my memory remains green for 40 years! Not one of my old subscribers spoke of the paper, but seven of the old baseball club, gray or bald, near-sighted or rheumatic, yet still with the old flame of youth, got together.
I think you older people will get my point. For the benefit of Henry Barkman and his friends perhaps I can do no better than to quote the following: