Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight

by Mathew Joseph Holt

"Alright, Mary."

Her mother accompanied her to Winchester and there, with face stained by tears and the coal dust of the local train, bade her good-bye. Mary bought her ticket by way of New York, on the C. & O. At the advice of the agent, who was a kindly man and had grown daughters of his own, she purchased a Pullman ticket and was told when she arrived in New York to go straight to the traveler's aid matron in the station.

When the train pulled up, her cheap, little trunk was put in the baggage car and she, with a paper shoe box of lunch under her arm and a cheap handbag in the other hand, boarded the train and took a seat in the day coach, where she would have remained, except that the agent, seeing her talking through the window with her mother, pointed her out to the conductor as a Pullman passenger. After the train started, the conductor piloted her to her section and, as he went out, whispered to the car conductor to shoo off the drummers.

In New York the station matron put her aboard her train and sent a telegram to the college, asking that some one meet her, which Mary signed and paid for.

She was unable to qualify for the freshman course, but was permitted to enter on probation. Her natural ability and application were such that in a few months she had qualified herself to continue in the class and at the end of the spring term was ranked among the most proficient of the freshmen.

Upon her arrival she had been given a room with a little snob, the only child of a newly rich couple who lived in a suburb of Boston. Her roommate did everything she could to make Mary as miserable as possible. She made fun of her clothes, ridiculed her local idioms and expressions and laughed at her inexperience. She would not study and tried to keep Mary from doing so. She rolled on Mary's bed, keeping her own tidy; appropriated three-fourths of the closet and most of the drawers of the dresser and washstand, leaving for Mary the bottom drawer of each and closet hooks in the dark corner. She reported to the matron that Mary was not neat and quarrelled all the time. But the matron, wise to the girls of her day and generation, had her suspicions, and by a careful and unsuspected surveillance soon became cognizant of true conditions.

Mary was changed to share the room of a girl from Austin, Miss Litton, whose disposition was more like her own. From then on conditions became comfortable.

After Dorothy returned home, Cornwall's friends said he was hard hit, because he turned his back on social diversions. He merely reverted to his habits preceding her visit. For a while he was invited everywhere, but declined; finally they discontinued sending invitations and left him to his hermithood.

His sole recreation was the improvement of the old place, at which he spent all the time not given up to his law business. That grew steadily, so that in 1900, six years after he had established himself in Harlan, he had an income in excess of $5,000.00. This, with his mother's annuity of $1,800.00, gave them more than three thousand dollars a year in excess of their actual needs.

The leisure of the fall and winter of 1895 was spent in cleaning up, trimming the trees, transplanting shrubs and vines, including border beds of hydrangeas which were planted around the walls of the house and out-buildings. When spring came and the garden had been plowed, rolled and planted, the grounds were in perfect condition.