Weekly Caledonian. (St. Johnsbury, Vt.) 1919-1920, 1919-04-09
CHAPTER Nv.


CHAPTER Nv.
In Which Herb Truman Comes Back
Stays for But Little While ant
Then Goes His Way Also Arount
the Bend in the Road by tn,
Sumachs.
If Toms decision to pass up the
ministry for Il newspapermanS ca
reer was another great disappoint
ment in his mothers life, old Mary
never made any fuss about it. If she
had ever dreamed of a time when she
should look up into a pulpit and see
her son there, preaching the message
of the good God to world of sin.
sick and heart hungry men and wo.
men, and realized like many Other
dreams of hers that it would never
matcrialize, she buried that also in
her poor tired mother heart and went
on working to educate the rest of the
boys.
Tom Purse was good boy. lie
was too good for the Boston Chronicle
Office! He had been on the Hub
paper year and seven months, send
ing what money he could back to
his mother, when word came that OPP
portunity had opened for him to go
down to New York. He accepted the
place and then for Il time we lost
track of him. Next we heard he wa,
married!
The other boys were coming along
now. Fred had taken an agricultural
course at Amherst and in the sum-
mer he used the poor little hillside
farm to try out his experiments. Then
he returned to college each fall and
left the hired man to reap the har-
vest. And many is the phenomenal
| turnip or apple or melon that Mary
| brought us to the office with a pathc-
tic pride on her plain features-fea-
lures where now all traces of beauty
and girlhood had faded, leaving her
a plain old woman with hair rapidly
growing white. Then, after gradu-
alton, the next we heard, he had
taken chair in an agricultural col
legc out in Ohio.
For some time Teddy worked for
US carrying papers and washing
forms and doing odd jobs. But
Tcddy's mind worked in mechanical
grooves. lie nearly killed himself
trying OFT Il homemade flying ma
chine. And if we were to hesitate
and in a weak moment yield to the
wishes of Sam Hold, about the biggest
incident of drama we could drain
from those years "when nothn' didn't
happen" was the time that he con-
structed an automobile that got away
from him at the top of Maple Street
hill, careened wildly down into Main
Street and went bang into the win
dow of Ben Williams clothing store.
The window was pl..te-glass and
Mary and Teddy had to pay for it.
He left school in the second year OF
4 technical course to g" With 4 firm
of engineers out in Chicago who
wanted young men badly in prosper
Gus back-fire that resulted from the
1907 panic. Last we heard of Ted,
he was on big bridge job somewhere
in western Pennsylvania.
Dick stayed around Paris until he
was nineteen. But he was the bust
ness man and Yankee trader of the
family. He tended store for Alec
Potherton, our local shoeman, and
stuck to college afterward simply be-
cause he thought it would equip him
to do a bigger business. He gradu-
ated with the help of his brothers.
and mother-and then took place
with firm of wholesale shoemen in
Lynn and Brocton. He used practi-
cally his whole salary the first two
years, getting his younger brothers,
George and Dexter, through school.
George plowed through law-school,
stayed for time with a firm of Bos.
ton attorneys and then went under
his own sail. The last we heard of
him, he was married, so for lawyer
he must have prospered.
Dexter was the last to leave and
the day he set out for Pittsburg,
there wasn't more pitiful sight in
Paris County than "Aunt Mary"
For that was the name the town gave
her-in all kindness.
She laid her frail old hand down
quietly on the case and said in a
voice trembling with emotion:
"If only one of my boys had only
turned out preacher! But not a
oAle did! Not-a-one!"
THAT was the nearest to COM
plaint we ever heard her make.
1Shey must have been lonesome
day9 for her, after Dexter went.
Old faces must have fioated at times
in the space over her typecases; old
voices called across the years. On
gray days it must have come to her
that all she had to do was walk
around the type-rack and find Jack at
his old place over the imposing
stones, or Daddy Joe over in the ad-
alley, OF Lawrence Briggs rolling his
glass eye around the stove clandes-
timely to the terror of Annie Seavers
and the other girl. But they were
all gone. Jack and all of them.
ouoopt.p,r M Ny;,,rol Dr;.,.,, o,.l