“Right at the foot of the street here,” he commented very cheerfully, at the same time bustling about and getting out the half sacks of bran and other things. “It’s just as it was in your father’s day, only it is a wagon company now. All the woolen mills in this section died out long ago. Your father foresaw that. He told me they would. I went into the electric lighting business afterward, but they crowded me out of it—consolidation and all that. Then I got into this business. It isn’t much but it’s a living. One seventyfive,” he said to the boy, who put the money on the desk and went out.
“Yes, indeed, I knew your father. He was a fine man. He worked for us off and on for pretty near fifteen year, after his own mill went up. This was no country for woolen manufacture, though. We couldn’t compete with the East. Why, I read here not long ago that two hundred mills in Indiana, Ohio and Illinois had closed up in twenty years—two hundred! Well, that’s all over. So you’re Theodore! You couldn’t stay and have lunch with me, could you?”
“Thank you, I couldn’t possibly,” I replied. “I’m only a guest in this car and I can’t detain them too long. I did want to see you, though, and so I came.”
“That’s right; that’s right,” he said. “It’s good of you. Times have changed with me some, but then, I’ve lived a long time. I’ve a son in New York. He’s with ... (he mentioned a large and successful company). You ought to call on him some time. He’d be glad to see you, I’m sure.”
He rambled on about one thing and another and followed me ... to the door.
“You couldn’t tell me, by any chance, where the first house my father ever occupied in Terre Haute stands?” I said idly.
“Yes, I can. It’s right around here in Second Street, one block south, next to a grocery store. You can’t miss it. It’s a two story brick now, but they added a story a long time ago. It was a one story house in his time, but then it had a big yard and lots of trees. I remember it well. I used to go there occasionally to see him.... Right down there at the foot of the street,” he called after me.
I climbed into the car and down we went to the old mill to stare at that, now whirring with new sounds and looking fairly brisk and prosperous; then back to the old brick house, looking so old and so commonplace that I could well imagine it a fine refuge after a storm. But I had never even heard of this before and was not expecting to find it. Then we raced forth Sullivan-ward and I was heartily glad to be gone.
The territory into which we were now passing was that described in the first chapter of this book—of all places that I ever lived in my youth the most pleasing to me and full of the most colorful and poetic of memories. Infancy and its complete non-understanding had just gone. For me, when we arrived here, adolescence—the inquisitive boy of twelve to sixteen—had not yet arrived. This was the region of the wonder period of youth, when trees, clouds, the sky, the progression of the days, the sun, the rains, the grass all filled me with delight, an overpowering sense of beauty, charm, mystery. How eager I was to know, at times—and yet at other times not. How I loved to sit and gaze just drinking it all in, the sensory feel and glory of it. And then I had gone on to other ideas and other places and this had never come back—not once in any least way—and now I was to see it all again, or the region of it——
Sullivan, as we found on consulting our map, lay only twentyfive miles south, or thereabouts. Our road lay through a perfectly flat region, so flat and featureless that it should have been uninteresting and yet it was not. I have observed this of regions as of people, that however much alike they may appear to be in character there is, nevertheless, a vast difference in their charm or lack of it. This section in which I had been partially reared had charm—not the charm of personal predisposition, as others will testify, but real charm. The soil was rich—a sandy loam. The trees were shapely and healthy—peaceful trees, not beaten by angry winds and rains. The fields were lush with grass or grain—warm bottom lands these, composed of soil carried down by ancient rivers—now, in the last hundred years or so, given names. As we came out of Terre Haute I turned and looked back at it, a prosperous, vigorous town. East of it, in a healthy, fruitful region, in that hill country around Reelsville and Brazil, there had been coal mines—soft coal mines, providing work and fuel. Here on our route to Sullivan were other mines, at Farmersburg, seven miles out, a town by the way which I recalled as being somehow an outpost of the priest who read mass at Sullivan, at Shelburne and other places still farther south. You could see the black, dirty breakers across flat green fields in which stood round healthy trees.