OCR Text |
Show f wiio Was !; I Who? I ? U 1 J By Louise M. Comstock j; ..... . . ... HARRIET LIVERMORE A woman tropical, Intense, In thought and act. In soul and sense, She blended In a like degree The vixen and the devotee. . . . THUS Whittier paints into the charmed circle about the New England Eng-land hearth in "Snowbound" the picture of that "not uufeared, half-welcome guest," the woman evangelist. Nor was the -picture an imaginary one. Harriet Livermore was a real woman and a somewhat notorious figure in a day when woman's place was emphatically emphat-ically in the home. She had traveled widely, preached frequently and eloquently elo-quently of the immanent second coming com-ing of the Christ, and once had defied de-fied every traditioff of her sex by talking talk-ing before congress, and twice on the same day. For some time she had made her home with Lady Hester Stanhope until the two had quarreled over a horse they both desired to ride when the Messiah should reappear. On her return to America she talked herself in and out of the good graces of the people of Plymouth, Mass. She offered to give a free lecture In the village church. Three people In succession suc-cession entered while she was speaking, speak-ing, leaving the door open behind them and necessitating a pause in her eloquence elo-quence and her request to close it. After the third repetition of the offense of-fense she became obviously furious and refused to proceed until one of the audience volunteered to act as door keeper. At the lecture's close the speaker announced she had for sale a certain brand of pills, and asked those who had interrupted her to redeem re-deem themselves by being the first to buy 1 ALICE IN WONDERLAND NOT many little girls Just turned six find themselves suddenly become be-come heroine of a story book destined to be translated into twelve languages, quoted almost as much as Shakespeare and more parodied than any other work in the English language! Nor was Alice Liddell, more familiar to us as Alice in Wonderland, so much different dif-ferent from most children, who find the books without pictures and conver-satioD conver-satioD their elders read so very dull. But she could boast the friendship of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, professor of mathematics at Oxford university, who could be persuaded on occasion to entertain story-hungry little girls with the most delightful of fairy fantasies. fan-tasies. Alice first had her adventures in wonderland during an afternoon's boat ride on the river, with Dodgson at the oars and her two little sisters sitting happily in 'the stern. Then were created cre-ated those "quaint events," the everlasting ever-lasting tea party with the Mad Hatter and the Sleepy Dormouse; the duchess' crazy garden party; the lobster quadrille, quad-rille, the curious lullaby for the baby who "sneezed because he knew it teased." So delighted was Alice with her adventures that the author printed print-ed them out, illustrated them, signed them with his pen name "Lewis Carroll" Car-roll" and presented them to her as "A Christmas Gift to a Dear Child In Memory of a Summer's Day." Just a few years ago Alice, in financial straits, sold the precious manuscript at auction for $77,000, and it was subsequently sub-sequently resold to an American collector col-lector for $150,000: ROBINSON CRUSOE IT IS because Daniel Defoe was a good newspaper man, able to see the "story" in a current news yarn concerning the rescue of a marooned sailor from a desert island that we have today that universal favorite "Robinson Crusoe." The yarn upon which he based his book was about one Alexander Selkirk, Sel-kirk, English mariner born at Largo, Fifeshire, who early went Into privateering pri-vateering in the South seas and by 1704 had earned promotion to command com-mand of the good ship Cinque Ports. As the result of a quarrel with his captain, he was at his own request set ashore at Juan Fernandez, a tiny island some 350 miles west of the coast of Chile, where he lived for four years and four months, much, perhaps, per-haps, as did the character he Inspired. In-spired. He was finally rescued by Capt. Woodes Rogers and returned to civilization. At the time of his death Selkirk had attained rnnk of lieulenant on H. M. S. Weymouth. Not only was it his story upon which Defoe built "Robinson Crusoe." but Juan Fernandez is today frequently frequent-ly known as Crusoe's island, and boasts not only many of the very umbrella um-brella trees that figure in the story, but a Crusoe's cave, and, near the summit of its highest mountain, Selkirk's Sel-kirk's Lookout, a tablet, placed there in lSOS in honor of the original Robinson Rob-inson Crusoe 1 (. 1932. Western Newspaper Union.) |