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Show I . .. - . I Who Was 1 1 Who? 1 k a S5 , i 2 By Louise M. Comstock 3 THE BAREFOOT BOY POSING before the camera barefoot and with "turned-up pautaloons"' just to make the matter conclusive, a retired Lutheran preacher of Nebraska, Ne-braska, recently got his name and his picture in the papers as the original Barefoot Boy who inspired the American Amer-ican poet, John Greenleaf Whittier, to write bis well known praises of carefree care-free boyhood out in the country. An examination of the details of his life, however, and of the circumstances under which Whittier wrote his poem, lead to the conclusion that the Ne-braskan Ne-braskan and the barefoot boy could not have been one and the same person. This preacher states that he came to America from the old country in 1S62. Whittier is known to have written "The Barefoot Boy" while he was editing the Middlesex Standard at Lowell, Mass., and to have taken his theme from seeing a boy there starting start-ing out to bis day's work in the field, rake over shoulder. It is a matter of record that Whittier edited the Middlesex Middle-sex Standard for six months, starting in the fall of 1S45, nearly twenty years before the preacher ever saw the shores of this country. Is it not more logical, and more pleasing, to suppose that Whittier's model is the very spirit of boyhood itself, viewing the world through unspoiled eyes. FRANKIE AND JOHNNY tr? RANKLE and Johnny were lov-" lov-" ers" goes a familiar song, and few of its many singers perhaps know that Frankie and Johnny were real lovers, who lived in the negro section of St. Louis not so long ago, and that Frankie Is still alive, a thick-set colored col-ored woman, now fifty-nine years old, with graying hair and a razor scar received some forty years ago across one cheek. Frankie herself is not prone to discuss dis-cuss how she "got her man who done her wrong," but the facts of the case may be dug up out of various police, morgue and hospital records and shaped Into a readable if sordid tale. Allen Britt, later Albert and still later Johnny, came to St.' Louis with his parents in 1S91, and there, at an Orange Blossom ball in Stole's- hall at Thirteenth and Biddle streots, met Frankie Baker, handsome but ten years his senior, and formed for her his fatal attachment. One night Frankie found Johnny in the ill-lighted hallway of the Phoenix hotel lavishingly on a pretty negress named Alice Pryor the attentions she claimed exclusively as her own. took him home, and as the climax of a violent quarrel which lasted all night shot him with bis own gun just as he was advancing on her with a drawn knife. Fatally wounded. Johnny staggered stag-gered to his own home where his father called the police and his mother an ambulance to take him to the hospital. hos-pital. He died four days later and his funeral was a gala affair, well attended. at-tended. Almost immediately after, the wretched affair was being celebrated cele-brated in song, and Frankie. freed of the toils of the law, bore herself with the pride of a wrong well avenged. PRINCE CHARMING M O, LADIES have never actually L worn glass slippers. But the Cinderella Cin-derella theme, the story of the downtrodden down-trodden heroine to whom at last has come a Prince ("harming and bliss forever, for-ever, has become so deeply imbedded In our literature, and In our very hearts, that we are scarcely surprised to find it founded on a real happening. hap-pening. About 1730 a talented and wealthy French actor, named Thevenard, then a man over sixty, wandering about the streets of Paris, observed upon a cobbler's stall awaiting repair a woman's wom-an's slipper. So dainty was it. and of sucli grace, that Thevenard was struck with admiration nnd curiosity about its owner, and a sort of fascination whk-h would not leave him, even after he had returned home and several days had passed. Unable to free himself him-self from his uncanny Interest, he at length returned to the cobbler's slall, but could gain from him no clew as to the slipper's owner. Days passed, and that worn little slipper became an obession with the I great man. Again and again, irritated irri-tated by his own folly but unable to do otherwise, he returned to the stall and watched the cobbler as he worked upon the tiny shoe, always hoping in vain that the owner would appear. She appeared only when the shoe was-done, was-done, and proved to be a charming girl enough, but of the poorest and humblest class. But since this was a real fairy tale, that made not the slightest difference, and this Prince Charming and his Cinderella were married nnd lived happily ever after. ((F) 1922. Western N ew-jpa ner Union.) |