"So this old mariner, Bartholomew Diaz, called that place the cape of torments and of storms and blessed his Maker that he was safely gone by it. And even so, in the lives of us all, there is a Cape of Storms, the which to pass safely is delightful fortune, and on which to be wrecked is the common fate. For it often happens that this Corner Dangerous holds a woman's face." * * *
—An Unknown Author
1894
ST. JOSEPH
FRIDENAU
CHICAGO
1895
[PROLOGUE]
"Life is a cup that is better to sip than to drain; the taste of the dregs is very bitter in the mouth." I shall never forget those words of our dear minister's, I suppose, because so much that has happened since he first uttered them to us as we sat in his Sunday-school class has shown me the truth of them. Dick himself, I remember, was especially loth to believe Mr. Fairly's monition; indeed, none of us young bloods cared to think that there was anything in the life before us that was not altogether worth living, and when Dick spoke up plainly and quite proudly, arguing against the pastor's words, we were all silent approvers of his challenge. Dick was always the bravest boy in the village; and we had long since come to be admirers rather than rivals. But Mr. Fairly only shook his head and smiled a little—he had a wonderful smile, and his eyes were always shining with kindness—and patted Dick on the head, with a gentle, "Well, well, my boy, let us hope so; let us hope so. Perhaps you will be fortunate above your fellows."
The incident dwells in my memory for many reasons. It was, as I have said, a curiously prophetic sentence of our pastor's; besides that, it was the last Sunday that we were all together in Lincolnville, we boys who had played, and fought and learned together. Early in the week, Dick—somehow, long after the world has come to know him only as Richard Lancaster, I am still unable to think of him as anything but the "Dick" of my boyhood—was to leave the village for the world; he was going to begin a life for himself, up there in that mysteriously magnetic maelstrom—the town. Like Dick Whittington of old, and every fresh young blood every day of this world's life, he was going up to town to conquer. Before him lay the beautiful pathway into a glorious future; promises and pleasures were like hedges to that way that he was going to tread. He was all eagerness, all hope, all ambition. And, to be just, perhaps there was never a boy went up to town from Lincolnville who had better cause to be full of pleasant hopes for his future than Dick. Certainly, it was the first time the little place had evolved such a talent; and it felt a pardonable pride in the boy; it expected, perhaps, even more than he did, and was looking forward to the reflected glory of being his native village.
If you have traveled through the West at all, and have anything more than a car-window acquaintance with the great Middle West, you know Lincolnville fairly well, I think. Not that you may ever have been to the village itself, but because it is a type of thousands of other villages scattered throughout the country.
It is the county-seat, and is built upon the checker-board plan, with a sort of hollow square in the middle, filled, as an Irishman might say, with a park. The sides of this square form the business heart of the place; each street that runs away from the square is lined with pretty dwelling-houses of frame or brick, so that the village looks like an octopus with four large tentacles stretching toward every point of the compass. The streets are fringed with shade trees of every sort, and in midsummer the place looks like a veritable nest of green and cool bowers. The county is strictly and agricultural one; the farmers come to "town," as they call it, every Saturday; at least, hitch their horses to the iron railing that surrounds the park, and spend the day selling produce, buying dry goods, implements or other necessaries. The face of the village rarely changes; there is an occasional fire on the "square," mayhap, and then the newer building that fills the gap is in decided improvement over the old one; young men are forever going out into the world, and old men are for ever coming back thither to die; for the rest, one might fancy that, if you came into the world again a hundred years from now, you would find the same farmers doing their "trading" at exactly the same stores that they now favor. On occasions of a political convention, or a circus, the town takes on a festive aspect, and the roads leading to the square are filled, all day long, with wagons that have come from the further edges of the county. During the three or four days of the County Fair, too, there is great activity between the village and the Fair Grounds, and, if it be a dry summer, the air between those places is merely one huge cloud of dust. Occasionally the pretty little Opera House has an entertainment that draws out such of the citizens as have no very severe religious scruples against the theatre. For the rest, the place is an admirable home of quiet. Young blood chafes at this quiet; old blood finds there the peace it seeks.