I sometimes wish that our latch-strings hung a little more on the outside. It is easier for us to give a party, with great effort, and our ancestral china, than to have a friend drop in to share family supper; yet there is something that makes for strength in this fine privacy of each family’s circle, and no doubt, as our social occasions are necessarily few, a certain formality is the more a real need. It “keeps up.”
One grave trouble runs through our community, and leaves a black trail. Drink poisons the lives of too many of our working-men.
The drain to the cities, which robs all small places of part of their life’s blood, touches us nearly; the young wings must be tried, the young feet take the road. The restless sand is in the shoes, and one out of perhaps every twenty pairs sold in our street is to take a boy or girl out to make a new home, far from father and mother.
But this, although it robs us, is also our pride and strength. Many of the boys and girls who have gone out from among us have become torch-bearers, and their light shines back to us; and if the town’s veins are drained, it is, by the very means which drain it, made part of the arterial system of the whole country, and throbs with its heart beats. The enormous variety of post-marks on our incoming mail tells its absorbing story.
There is no sameness, even in a small town. Here, as everywhere, the Creator lays here and there His finger of difference; as if He said, “Conformity is the law—and non-conformity.” Why should one clear-eyed boy among us have been born with the voice and vision, and the sorrow-and-reward-full consecration, of high poetry, rather than his brothers? Why should another, of different bringing-up, among a din of voices crying down the town’s possibilities, have had the wit and enterprise, yes, and the vision, too, to build up, here, a vigorous manufactory, whose wares, well planned and well made, now have their market many States away?
I think of a third boy, the child of a well-read, but not a studious household, who at ten was laying hands on everything that he could find to study in the branch of science to which his life was later to be dedicated. He had the same surroundings as the rest of us, we went to school and played at Indians together; and now, for years, in a distant city, his life has led him daily upon voyages of thought, beyond the ken of those who played with him.