Weekly Caledonian. (St. Johnsbury, Vt.) 1919-1920, 1919-03-05

winch tne Town Is appropriately
Mortified and Ostracizes the Wood
Girl Socially.
"There's a girl in the Office wants
a jobw announced Nimrod Briggs
compositor, returning to the back
room with his fingers full of proofs
We went into the front Office. A
girl in pitifully plain clothing and a
pale, pretty face, stood on the Other
side of the battered counter
1t was our first view of Mary
Wood Many years have passed since
that far-of Spring forenoon. We
have seen Mary in many different
places, under many cruel Circumstance
es, resolutely facing many hard stu
atoms in life, mostly with Il smile on
her face But as we saw her in that
Office that morning, she was the Mary
Wood we have liked best to rcmem-
ber-before care and anxiety and
struggle came to heretofore love
had levied it's price, taken it's pound
of flesh from her heart and the soft
bloom from her features-betore
disappointment and cruel suffering
and noble effort had changed her
from that gentle-faced blushinG girl,
surprised in the presence of strang-
. &c., ,'r 4--nirnl Amoricnn wife
.rl her.
va remembers a woman, not
by her hair or her eyes or her voice
alone, for all women possess these
thinos. A man remembers a woman
by the way she moves. The sweet
hearts of our boyhood,-we remem-
Der them as we saw them coming
down a lane in the summer sunset
or along village street rooted with
maples-or we recollect the motion
of delicate fingers deity plying small
yellow old piano keys that produced
those haunting melodies of long ago.
The toss of head, the carriage Of
shoulder, the motion of a hand-So
they have remained with US, personal
tiles which the years have failed to
eradicate or dissolve with the passing
of familiar scenes or forgotten
hours.
And we remember Mary Wood that
day, not so much for the soft brown
hair parted on the fair high forehead,
nor the lines of her graceful figure
nor the sweet patient frightened look
deep in her dark eyes but for t.
graceful way in which she came over
and begged for work and the chance
to earn a living for herself.
She got it!
Mary went to work for US immedi-
ately, learning the case"
Sam got her boarding place with
one Mrs. Mathers, a widowed lady,
who ran a boarding house on School
street.
The first few days slipped away
by Saturday she could get up fairly
stable string of locals
And she tried to "find herself" in
our community.
1t was something of novelty in
those days for women to be employ
ed in printing offices. Our news
papers of those years were produced
by journeymen printers, popularity
known as Cramps" They were
strange loveable souls, more or less
out of plumb with the world around
them, who drifted from place to place,
staying only long enough to earn the
wherewithal to finance them further
in their wapderlust. Most of them
drank to excess. They could thor
oughly be relied upon to demand en-
ployment when there was no more
work than the regular staff could
handle and equally faithfully they laid
down on the job or moved onward
just when work was burying the office
and they were needed most.
1t occasioned some talk therefore
in the village when Sam Hold depart
ed from the traditions of the profess
sion and sought local girls to do his
typesetting as being dependable, all
the-year-round work-folk. This talk
was revived when it became known
that the Wood girl after humliat-
ing experience with drunken step
father at their lonely farmhouse on
the Cobb Hill road had secured a
place and intended to pay her own
way and care for herself by taking
o'nn,ovncrt II tho local nowsnnnn"
Office
/ ,.t. 90 '.'od rs n rather radical
procedure for her to take her place
at the case alongside the fiotsam and
jetsam of human life who commonly
lived off printing offices-and rub
shoulders with them in the days work
Conservative parents commented dub
iouslv on the idea of mice" young
lady overhea"'nr the luaberous ard
ofttimes hirhly-hued talk circulating
among employees of a printing estab-
lishment and taking up with the
erinv, monotonous, Darkroom life
which in those DAYS was typical of
newspaper offices the nation over.
And conservative fathers and mothers
of "nice" DAUGHTERS frequently dis
cussine it when Mary Wood passed
by. it followed that those "nice"
DAUGHTERS gradually came to acquire
the same ideas and rate Mary ac-
cordinrly.
1t was hard place in which to
place the girl, the more so because
she could not understand what Law