I have left until the last the two friends who held a place apart in the household:  the farmer and his wife, the old people of another generation with whom we boarded.  They had begun life together forty years ago.  They lived on neighbouring farms.  There was dissension between the families such as we read of in “Pyramus and Thisbe,” “Romeo and Juliet.”  The young people contrived a means of corresponding.  An old coat that hung in the barn, where nobody saw it, served as post-office.  Truman pleaded his cause ardently and won his Louisa.  They fixed a day for the elopement.  A fierce snowstorm piled high its drifts of white, but all the afternoon long the little bride played about, burrowing a path from the garden to her bedroom window, and when night came and brought her mounted hero with it, she climbed up on to the saddle by his side and rode away to happiness, leaving ill nature and quarrels far behind.  Side by side, as on the night of their wedding ride, they had traversed forty years together.  Ill health had broken up their farm home.  When Truman could no longer work they came in to Perry to take boarders, having no children.  The old man never spoke.  He did chores about the house, made the fire mornings, attended to the parlour stove; he went about his work and no one ever addressed a word to him; he seemed to have no more live contact with the youth about him than driftwood has with the tree’s new shoots.  He had lived his life on a farm; he was a land captain; he knew the earth’s secrets as a ship’s captain knows the sea’s.  He paced the mild wooden pavements of Perry, booted, and capped for storm and wind, deep snow and all the inimical elements a pioneer might meet with.  His new false teeth seemed to shine from his shaggy gray beard as a symbol of this new town experience in a rough natural existence, out of keeping, ill assorted.  Tempted to know what his silence hid, I spent an hour with him by the kitchen stove one Sunday afternoon.  His memory went easily back to the days when there were no railroads, no telegraphs, no mills.  He was of a speculative turn of mind: 

“I don’t see,” he said, “what makes men so crazy after gold.  They’re getting worse all the time.  Gold ain’t got no real value.  You take all the gold out of the world and it wouldn’t make no difference whatever.  You can’t even make a tool to get a living with, out of gold; but just do away with the iron, and where would you be?” And again, he volunteered: 

“I think Mr. Carnegie would have done a deal nobler if he had paid his men a little more straight along.  He wouldn’t have had such a name for himself.  But don’t you believe it would have been better to have paid those men more for the work they were doing day by day than it is now to give pensions to their families?  I know what I think about the matter.”

[Illustration:  SUNDAY EVENING AT SILVER LAKE

The mill girls’ excursion resort.  A special train and ’busses run on
Sundays, and “everybody” goes.]