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Show ALONG LIFE TRAIL By THOMAS A. CLARK Dean of Men, University of Illinois. ((J). 1924, Western Newspaper Union.) THE VANISHED POMPS OF YESTERDAY EDWARD, the seventeen-year-old son of my next-door neighbor, was In a state of nllnd. He was going to take his "girl" to a party and was a good deal humiliated because the family fam-ily did not own a coach or a limousine, and the journey from her house to the scene of the social orgle a distance of four or five blocks would have to be made In an open car. "It's rotten luck to have to take a girl that way," he complained to his uwujci, nil oj'Lupanieiii; 3a 111 u l aj ti o always al-ways are. "I don't know what she'll think. All the other fellows have closed Packards or Marmons, and I have to go ln an open Bulck." It was Indeed a cruel fate. It was not thus when I was seventeen. seven-teen. We went in style then. I was to take Hattie Barlow to the Fourth of July celebration in Mink Grove. She was a mighty pretty girl, and she was thirteen. It seems a little young now, as I think It over, but that fact never occurred to me then. I made elaborate preparations for the event. I washed the lumber wagon and swept It out carefully. I made a fresh cushion for the spring seat, and tied a new ribbon on the long buggy whip I carried. I trimmed the manes and tails of the mules I was to drive and brushed and curried them until their coats shone like ebony, though I didn't know much about ebony then. We went In the morning so that we could be part of the parade which was headed by the local band and lead by Taylor Rowlett riding a spirited bay horse and wearing a beautiful red sash made of shiny paper muslin. It was some parade I I remember that Hattie wore a white shirtwaist and a bright blue silk skirt that her aunt had sent her from Boston. Her hat was white with a band of yellow daisies around it, and as I said, she was mighty pretty. I had two dollars and a half to spend. We stayed all day and had lunch ln the grove, and rode the merry-go-round, and ate Ice cream, and popcorn pop-corn balls, and everything; but dinner we ate at the Martin house, the big hotel in town. It was the first time I had ever eaten at a hotel and It cost me twenty-five cents each for the dinner, but there were no tips. We didn't start home until after the fireworks. fire-works. We drove slowly, and the moon was shining and the night birds were calling and, as I think I've said before, she was mighty pretty, and I was very happy amid the splendor of it. But It's all vanished now, though Sir Frederick Fred-erick Hamilton didn't have a thing on us that night ! SELF-ENTERTAINMENT FRANK MARSHAL lives In the village vil-lage near which I was born. He was a farmer until he was forty-five a prosperous farmer whose land had been left him by his father. He had never really worked hard. He had gone to the district school until he was fourteen and his father had even sent him to a boys' academy for a time and had offered to put him through college, but he was not fond of study, he saw nothing very practical prac-tical in books or ln education, and he came back home at the end of his first jettr hi me acauemy anu announced that he was through. He went to work on the farm, and a few years later, his father having died, he inherited It and took charge of It. He developed no interest outside of the routine work in which he was engaged. en-gaged. He had no avocations, no hobbies, hob-bies, no recreations, He never read a book so far as I know; he had no Interest In-terest in newspapers excepting in the one or two technical agricultural papers pa-pers which his father had subscribed for and which he paid for each year In an uninterested way. He had no Interest in music; he could not play a game ; the details of travel confused him and got on his nerves. He was totally without resources for self-entertainment. It had never occurred to him when he was young that old age would one day catch up with him and separate him from his old occupation, and if he were then to be happy there mut be something within Uim to form a basis of that happiness. He moved to town when he was forty-flve and gave up work. He sits by the radiator ln winter and oh the porch ln summer, restless and discontented. discon-tented. His chief Interest ls tending the furnace ln winter and mowing the lawn In summer. He has four times as much money as he can spend, but he's wretchedly unhappy because he has never learned to enjoy himself. One of the happiest persons I ever knew was an old lady, blind and bedridden. bed-ridden. She had read widely and this reading had taken her Into fields of poetry and romance, and Into every foreign country on the globe. As she lay ln bed her mind was filled with beautiful memories; her imagination carried her far away from the scene of her misfortune. She repeated to herself the beautiful things she had committed to memory; she sat with the people she had met ln history and biography and fiction. No one who vicited her was ever impressed with the fact that she was helpless and blind, for her mind was full of thlnge for her own entertainment. |