When I go to a theater I enjoy it thoroughly. A theater is a good thing, and the actor is a stunning person—but how eagerly and gladly I come back into my own room where there is a faithful, little, tan deer standing waiting, all so pathetic and sweet, upon the desk.
When I go out into two crowded rooms among some fascinating persons that I have heard of before—women with fine-wrought gowns—I like that, too, and I wouldn’t have missed it—but how utterly restful and adorable it is to come back to my own room where there is my comfortable quiet friend in a rusty black flannel frock, sitting waiting—and her hands so soft and good to feel.
When I read gold treasures of literature—Vergil, it may be, or a Browning, or Kipling—I am enchanted and enthralled. I marvel at these people and how they can write. I think how marvelous is writing, at last—but how gladly and thankfully, after two hours or three, I return back to these my young-books of Trowbridge.
They are about people living on farms, and they are written so that you know that red-root grows among wheat-spears, and must be weeded out, and that the farmer’s boys have to milk the cows mornings before breakfast and evenings after supper. For they have supper in the Trowbridge books—and it is even attractive and tastes good.
When the lads go to gather kelp to spread on the land, and are gone for the day by the seashore, they eat roasted ears of corn, and cold-boiled eggs, and bread-and-butter, and three bottles of spruce beer—and if you really know the Trowbridge books you can eat of these with them, and with a wonderful appetite.
When a slim boy of sixteen goes to hunt for his uncle’s horse that had been stolen in the night (because the boy left the stable door unlocked), along pleasant country roads and smiling farms in Massachusetts—if you really know the Trowbridge books—the slim boy of sixteen is not more anxious to find the horse than you are. When the boy and the reader first start after the horse they are far too wretched and anxious to eat—for the crabbed uncle told them they needn’t come back to the farm without that horse. But long before noon they are glad enough that they have a few doubled slices of buttered bread to eat as they go. When at last they come upon the horse calmly feeding under a cattle-shed at a county fair twenty miles away, they are quite hungry, and in their joy they purchase a wedge of pie and some oyster crackers, so that they needn’t be out of sight of the horse while they eat. And the reader—if he really knows the Trowbridge books—would fain stop here, for there is trouble ahead of him. He would fain—but he can not. He must go on—he must even come in crucial contact with Eli Badger’s hickory club—he must go with the boy until he sees him and the horse at last safely back at Uncle Gray’s farm, the horse placidly munching oats in his own stall, and the boy eating supper once more with appetite unimpaired, and the crabbed uncle once more serene. And—if you know Trowbridge’s books—you can eat, too, tranquilly.
When a boy is left alone in the world by the death of his aunt and starts out to find his uncle in Cincinnati—if you know Trowbridge’s books—you prepare for hardship and weariness, but still occasional sandwiches and doughnuts (but not the greasy kind). And always you know there must be a haven in the house of the uncle in Cincinnati. Only—if you know the Trowbridge books—you are fearful when you get to the uncle’s door, and you would a little rather the boy went in to meet him while you waited outside. Trowbridge’s uncles are apt to be so sour as to heart, and so bitter as to tongue, and so sarcastic in their remarks relating to boys who come in from the country to the city in order that they—the uncles—may have the privilege of supporting them. Though you know—if you know the Trowbridge books—that Trowbridge’s boys never come into the city for that purpose. The heavy-tempered uncles, too, are made aware of this before long, and change the tenor of their remarks accordingly—and after some just pride on the part of the nephews, all goes well. Whereupon your feeling of satisfaction is more than that of the boy, of the uncle, of Trowbridge himself.
But these roasted ears of corn and cold-boiled eggs are among the lesser delights of the young-books of Trowbridge. The most fascinating things in them are the conversations. They are so real that you hear the voices and see the expressions of the faces.