The Indianapolis journal. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1867-1904, 1883-09-01
IMPRESSIONS OF ACTON.
Prof Swing Proved to Have Within Him the
Making of Society Editor.

Prof Swing Proved to Have Within Him the
Making of a Society Editor
Letter in Chicago Weekly Magazine.
Here in a hundred cottages not costly but
neat a large circle of acquaintances and
friends pass three weeks in August They
confirm the opinion of Boston's hermit that
man was created to be always in close COM
mun1on with nature that his lungs were
made for pure air and his eye to gaze at the
green and the blue, and his ear not only to
hear the sublime music of instrument and
voice but the morning songs of birds and the
murmur of midnight air among the venera-
bic trees. The grass comes up to the door
OF each cottage, the boughs reach down TO
each roof. The dust, the huckster-stand, the
crowds of horses, buggies and wagons which
made bedlam of the old camp-grounds,
are things of the past. The clean, rapid
railway carries the multitude hither and
away, and thus the disorder and barbarisln
OF yesterday have given place to the most
pleasing refinement-but it is a refinement
full of simplicity. In the center of this Au-
gust village stands a gothic hail. a vaulted
cruciform-roof under which the audiences
assemble. Three times day the bell calls, and
from all the tents the happy children from
the woods come forth to see and hear. Lee
lures upon all subjects consume the first
week; then the stream of happiness bends
and for two more weeks flows through the
Ndle vi religion. 20 become converted mere
would seem easy, for if the public service
should fail to touch the heart one could not
but awaken in the night after the popular
preachers were all asleep and to read in the
sky and woods and this phenomenon of life
the proofs of righteous God and the i'm
mortality OF mani for how came such a scene
into earth, and can such loving friends and
worshpers be destined TO a terminus of
dust?
The central mind of this encampment is
the Hon. Will Cumback of Greensburg To
ability and taste a lawyer and a public
man, Cumback has Away added philan-
thropic element, and has all through a life
which has passed its middle point Iectured
upon Temperance, or liberty, or education or
religion. In the years before the war he was
the friend of the black slave, and now he
continues his form of service, and loves to
help men of any color to escape from bond
age to vice or ignorance. His cottage is a
and preachers, and lawyers, and ed
itors who may be on the grounds
on a given day. These sit inside or
outside, as taste may incline. Here is Dr.
Sims, of Syracuse, n. Y, clergyman who
has been pastor in two or more Eastern
cities. His style is simple clear, full of wit
and of general good will toward the human
race. DR.. George Jenkins, from a charge
at Jacksonville, Ind, occupies a half
of the Cumback tent. He was reared in
Clermont County, Ohio, which helped rear
Grant. When this Jenkins was youngm imam
he formed an attachment to books and
though laughed at by all the adjoining farm
ers for studying Latin and all big books, he
soon moved away from this local ridcule,
and for thirty years has served faithfully and
successfully man and God.
All groupings of mortality are imperfect
when woman is omitted. Woman is here in
full force. Each tent-door is ornamented by
few of these EN- blems of higher life. In
our little corner of the grove there is quite
an assem- blage of city ladies, of whom one
will dare mention only those who are per-
haps accustomed to the rudeness of such re-
porting pens. Here an attractive Mrs. Hal
ford, whose husband is editor of an Indian
apolis daily, who no doubt would be an idler
at the tent-door had he not on his heart the
care of lecture in the evening. His wife is
an unusual embodiment of language and
sense and vivacity. Near her all day
sve face with its lines OF sensibility
and of almost melancholy. Her
childhood was passed in Switzerland but in
some way she became a companion of the
girl Kate Chase, and passed in Washington
in the Chase mansion those years when the
life of father and daughter was so brilliant
in different ways, wisdom and beauty. In
the Chase home this Swiss girl married. and
now her happy hearth is in the capital Of In
diana She is still champion of Kate Chase
but she has found other missions and other
friends in new arena. Her words are
English, with kind of Modjeska accent or
languid finals, but they come in such an
earnest and poetic manner that the hearer
rather wishes that the speaker would go on
till the campmeeting were over.
In this Cumback social ring are a Doctor
Carey and wife who seem quite distin.
guished, and, if common rumor is reliable,
they are worthy of fame. The Doctor is
skilled in his profession, and Mrs. Carey has
a noble face and Is a leader in a high sense of
the term. She can help give picnic to a
thousand poor children, or she can clap her
hands at an opera; she can talk upon all
topics as modestly as girl but as easily as a
member of the Concord Academy. Such is
the group around the door of the Cumb back
cottage. Thunder the shade of ether trees here
many other such groups can be found then
Indiana ought to be proud of her children
of number and quality. Illinois can equal
this display but cannot 90 much beyond it.
Education, etiquette, refinement, TASTE are
carried about by literature and the arts, and
| by the wonderful intermingling of travel
and society has reached common level.
Goodness and kindness and wit and learning
and beauty are scattered over all the fields
from Boston to st. Paul. East and West
and North and South are one. The time is
coming when the many denominations in
religion will be also as one. Books, arts and
travel are making many hearts once separate
to become kindred from this date onward.