This is the end of the story, or is it the beginning?
OLD DAYS
AT
BEVERLY FARMS
In writing these hap-hazard memories of the old days at Beverly Farms, I did not mean that they should be egotistical, but in spite of my good intentions I am afraid they are. You see it is almost impossible to separate yourself from your own memories! I throw myself upon the mercy of the Court!
Summer of 1916.
We have a little Reading Club here at Beverly Farms. We read whatever happens to come up, from Chesterton's Dickens to "The Woman who was Tired to Death," interspersed with real poems from "North of Boston." I belong to the Club. I am the oldest member of it, in fact, I am the oldest person in New England—on stormy days! When the weather is fine and the wind south-west, I am young enough to have infantile paralysis!
One day, in my enforced absence from the Club, my colleagues conspired against me, and with no regard to my feelings, selected me to write up some remembrances of old Beverly Farms. Hence these tears! Elsie Doane belongs to this Club. Elsie is behind me about half a century, if you allow the Family Bible to know anything about so indifferent a thing as age. She was one of the few infants under my care when she was pupil and I was teacher, who had a real love for literature for literature's sake, and we had good chummy times when it was stormy and we carried dinner to school, and ate it peacefully in an atmosphere that smelt of a leaky furnace and fried doughnuts, in spite of open windows.
It doesn't smell that way now, for Mr. Little has made the school-house of that day a pretty summer home for whomsoever will live in it. Elsie promises to set me right whenever I go astray as to what happened at old Beverly Farms, how it looked, what legends it had—how its people lived and behaved, and so forth, and so forth. She is a foxy little thing, and I suspect that when she is floored on my reminiscences, she will appeal to her mother, who, she says is older than she is! We do not promise any coherence in our stories. It will be somewhat of a hash that we shall give our listeners wherein it will be difficult to decide whether it is "fish, flesh, fowl, or good red herring." But we have no reporter at our Club, so we give our memories free rein.
I often wish I could catch and fix, by the kodak of memory, some of the celebrities of my childhood, in this little village.