HULL HOUSE-CHILDREN'S BUILDING Legislature are plain and subject to no dispute. They require the closing of every tippling-house on Sunday. This has been the law of the State for many years, and every Mayor of Chicago has taken an oath to enforce it. Yet it is a far day since any real or sincere effort was made in this direction. Republicans and Democrats alike have said that local public sentiment was against all sumptuary legislation, and by common consent of the active politicians Chicago has enjoyed all the delights of a "wide-open Sunday." To quiet the clamor of those who demanded better things, the Aldermen have passed ordinances providing for screens upon the saloon doors, and this was taken to be a compliance with the State law. But even this practice has fallen into desuetude. MISS JANE ADDAMS Not the least among the deplorable features of this business has been the attitude of many Christian people. It is by no means. an uncommon thing to hear persons of high repute say, "This Sunday law cannot be enforced. Don't try. Let us seek good government on other lines, and be content with half a loaf rather than no bread." It is needless to suggest that infinitely worse than a wide-open 66 Civil Service Commissioners Sunday," with all that it may imply, is the corrupting influence of this theory that a public officer, whose duties are purely ministerial, is to be permitted to enforce one law and ignore another. A people who tamely submit to government of this kind should not be surprised to find that it leads to all forms of abuse. Yet, unfortunately, this is the condition in Chicago to-day. The Mayor, who is, or was until recently, a Methodist Sundayschool teacher, makes no effort whatever to enforce this law for Sunday observance, and the city betrays no indignation at his neglect. At But there are signs of progress. the instance of the journeymen, barbers and the shop clerks, the Legislature at its last session passed stringent Sundayclosing laws, and an earnest effort for their enforcement is now making, and with fairly successful result. What those who have been striving for good government failed to accomplish bids fair of realization from the purely selfish labors of the overworked employees. Chicago has gathered its full share of the ripe fruit of misgovernment. Swindling contractors, corrupt and corrupting franchise-grabbers, and "boodling" public officials have all found here a rich field for their operations. has, however, always been a little upper room with a devoted band struggling against great odds. The Civil Service Reform League, with barely enough members to fill an THE NATATORIUM IN THE Y. M. C. A. BUILDING There attorney's office, labored diligently for a dozen years, and finally secured the passage of an ideal law, the enforcement of which has been placed in the hands of an honest, intelligent, and resolute commission. Under the operation of this act, which is far and away the best in the country, the CHRISTOPHER HOLZ rule of the spoilsman is fast disappearing, and, since this is believed to be the fundamental reform, an era of better things is hoped for. The Citizens' Association has been, periodically, an important agency for good. Some years ago it took up the work of prosecuting corrupt officials, and succeeded in sending a dozen or more to the State prison. The Civic Federation, which represents in a degree a temporary outburst of public spirit in anticipation of the World's Fair, has done much good work in the way of cleaning the streets and alleys, finding work and food for the unemployed, and punishing offenders against the election laws. JNE autumn day I left the Hudson River at Rondout and made a three hours' journey by a little branch railroad far back into the Catskills. At the little town of Roxbury I left the train and climbed a steep, mile-and-a-half hill, and that brought me to the boyhood home of John Burroughs, where I found John Burroughs himself sitting at the kitchen window. The region is one of great, mounding, mountain-like hills, with now and then a small village lost among them, and farms scattered sparingly along their slopes. The fields and patches of woodland checker their sides, and the drifting cloud-shadows add to the intricacy of the pattern. The hills turn blue in the distance, and look like great waves rolling in from a distant ocean. The Burroughs farm-house is in a wide hilltop hollow with a fine panoramic view across the low valleys and hills eastward. In our walks about the place we visited the sugar-bush, the scene of many of Mr. Burroughs's youthful exploits with the family musket, we gathered nuts in a neighboring beech-wood, and we explored the brook where once he swam and fished. Most interesting of all, we followed the winding road he had trodden so often on his way to and from school, and we did not stop till we came to the little rusty-red school-house that looks just as it did forty-five years ago. It was recess time, and we went inside. The same old box desks were in use that had been there when Mr. Burroughs was a district school-boy. He found the same seat that long ago was his, and there among the other jackknife hewings were the initials he had cut-J. B. The reminiscences I report below were the results of two conversations, given as nearly as possible in the speaker's The illustrations (with the exception of those on pages 335 and 337) are from photographs taken by Mr. Johnson. own words. The first was an evening talk in the kitchen, where the farm family had gathered after the day's work was done and the supper dishes had been cleared off the long table. The second was a morning talk in the neat, ragcarpeted sitting-room, where a wood fire burned in the sheetiron stove to temper the chill of the windy autumn day.. Mr. Burroughs said: "About the first thing I have any remembrance of is of being scared. The folks went off to Pennsylvania on a visit, and left us children to take care of things while they were gone. We got along well enough in the daytime, but,. come night, it was different. I know that first night the older children were out quite late-I believe they'd gone down to the village. It got dark, and still they didn't come: home, and we three or four younger ones sat huddled up in the kitchen and didn't dare go to bed. I don't know what scared the others, but I remember looking into the dark cavity of the bedroom-that was father's and mother's. room, and the door was open-and every time I looked into its gloom and vacancy I was filled with dread and foreboding. "We used to hear a good many spook stories. Grandfather was a great hand for spook stories. He'd been one of Washington's soldiers and had had a good deal of experience, and he believed in 'em just as thoroughly as we don't believe in 'em. He'd seen a great many spooks, and he'd sit down in the evening and tell these ghost stories by the hour. It would make our youthful hair stand on end as we listened to the tale of things he'd seen-those dreadful apparitions. He used to tell bear stories, war stories,. and Indian stories, besides. But the spooks made the most vivid impression, and I didn't outgrow my fear of them till I got old enough to go to see the girls. Then suddenly my fears all left me. I'd been thinking I couldn't go to see the girls at all and stay out late, I was so afraid as soon as night came. "From the age of ten to fourteen I couldn't even go One day, a little before Christmas, he found a new sled. out in the barn. He came to the house in the greatest state of excitement about that sled, and we explained to him that perhaps Santa Claus intended to give it to him, and, if he kept quiet, like enough he would get it on Christmas morning. Sure enough, on Christmas morning there he found the sled hitched to his bed. That made a great impression, and it was a cruel shock to the boy when he was told there was no Santa Claus. He felt a personal loss. I remember how he sighed and said, 'Well, if there ain't any Santa Claus there's an awful lot of lying in this world.' "Speaking about being afraid, there was an old man, half crazy, used to wander about the country here that we children made a good deal of a bugbear of. He was perfectly harmless and innocent, but we were in mortal terror of him. Whenever we saw any one coming slow along the road the way he did, we'd say, 'Guess that's old John Corbin.' Then we scurried over the fence and hid. He was simply a little off, you know, and would go mumbling to himself along the road. He had an orchard down near the school-house, and he buried his apples there in the ground. Some of the bigger boys broke into his apple-hole and stole apples, and I can remember just how he caught them at it and chased them away and shook his stick. "We used to have an apple-hole up back of the house-most people did. We would stow fifteen or twenty bushels of our best apples there. Toward spring we'd dig them out, and they had a delightful flavor that apples kept in the house didn't have. They seemed to be seasoned and concentrated. We'd reach down through the hole we'd cut through the frozen ground, and part away the straw that lay over them, and pick out such apples as we wanted. We'd get so expert we could tell the different kinds by the sense of touch. There was a difference in the shape and in the surface, and there was the winesap that I could tell by some peculiarity of the stem. There were all kinds in the apple-hole mixed together, and a good part of them went to school to eat with our dinners. "When I was a little fellow I used to help mother a good deal. Mother used to spin wool. She had the wheel up in one of the chambers, and you'd hear the wheel go wz-z-z-z, and her footsteps going backward and forward. It was a pleasant enough sound, but it grew rather, monotonous when you heard it all day. In the hog-pen chamber, back of the house, we had a loom where mother wove cloth and carded wool into rolls. Sometimes there'd be a great pile of those delicate rolls in the hog-pen chamber. I used to run the quill-wheel and fill the hollow elder-stalks with thread. I can't say I liked the work much-boys are not apt to be fond of work. "I pulled flax some, and mother spun and wove it and made garments out of it for us to wear. That linen was stout, too. If you fell out of a tree and you caught on trousers or shirts made of that stuff, it would hold youyou'd hang there-it wouldn't tear. The things were pretty harsh wear when we first put them on at the beginning of warm weather. They were full of shives, and "I used to help make cheese. I was very fond of eating the curd, till one day I ate so much of it I was sickmade a hog of myself, you know. I got thoroughly cloyed that time, and never could eat any curd since. But I like the pot-cheese they make out of lobbered milk. "We would get up at five o'clock in the morning, about the same as they do here now. In winter it wouldn't be quite so early, but it would be early enough so we'd have breakfast by candlelight. Bedtime came pretty early. Eight o'clock was the time for the youngsters, but I know I used to get sleepy before that. Mother was apt to sit up latest. I suppose she'd often be up till ten or eleven sewing for us. "We had a wide, open fireplace. The most I remember about it is lying on the broad hearthstone before the fire watching the crickets come up out of the cracks to sing. I would catch them and kill them. Mother said they ate holes in the stockings. They were never caught in the act that I know of, and I imagine that was just a household superstition without foundation. It's all vivid, too-mother frying meat with the long-handled frying-pan, and her sharpening the knife by rubbing it on the jambs. Up at one side of the fireplace was the great brick oven where she baked bread. Mother would say in the morning, 'Well, we're going to bake to-day, and I want some oven-wood.' Then we'd have to hunt the place over for dry wood-wood that would flash up quick and make a hot fire. "Cider apple-sass was a great institution in those days. We used to cook a great lot of apples for 'sass' every fall, and we boiled down cider for flavoring them in a big kettle out in the yard. "Tallow candles were our light. We used dipped candles. I remember seeing mother make them-dip, dip, dip, forty times or so, and after each dip she put the rods the candles were hung on across the backs of two chairs to let the tallow harden. Our candlesticks had hooks on 'em. The hook was made to fit over the back of a chair. Mother would hook her candle, or perhaps two of them, on the back of a chair to do her work by, and I'd sit in the chair and study arithmetic, or read Robinson Crusoe or The Life of Murphy the Indian-Killer,' and other books of the sort. "I was about seven years old when we had an anti-rent war here. A great many of the farms in this and adjacent counties were of leased land. King George had granted immense sections of the country here to certain of his court favorites, and these favorites divided it up among favorites of their own, and all this land had to pay a tax to them of a shilling an acre. Of course these owners never had anything to do with the land, and settlers took it and improved it and made their homes on it. "The people who lived on the land thought the tax was unjust, and they took the law into their own hands and said they weren't going to pay this tax. They got the idea of disguising themselves as Indians. They wore leather caps pulled over their faces, and were all paint, fur, and feathers dreadful-looking creatures. Father sympathized with their side, and they used to call at our house and we would give them apples and things. They were usually just out on a lark. It was all boys' foolishness, and didn't amount to anything; but the feeling was very bitter, and it divided the neighborhood. "The up-renters we called 'tories.' The down-renters, fixed up as Indians, would roam around nights, mostly, but they would come together any time of day at the signal of the blowing of a horn. They made a law that nobody should blow a horn but to call them together. Jay Gould's father was an up-renter; he was a stiff-necked old fellow, and he was going to blow his horn to call his men to dinner, whether or no. So the first thing he knew he had his house full of Indians threatening to tar and feather the old gentleman. Another time it was known around that the sheriff was going to sell a man out who wouldn't pay his rent, and the Indians gathered and shot the sheriff. "They got so lawless the Legislature had to take the matter in hand, and it undertook to suppress the Indians and imprison their leaders. I'd see the sheriff and his posse riding past-twenty or HIS BOYHOOD TROUT-BROOK |