Five Mile Beach weekly journal., 1923-01-19
n BUNDLE
OF MqRRH
WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Copyright, 1922, by the Macmillan Co.

~ to learn is the kinology of the
town. Until he knows who is kin TO
whom, and how, a reporter is likely
at any time to make a bad break.
Now, the kinology of a country town
is no simple proposition. After a
mar has spent ten years writing up
weddings, births and deaths, attend
ing old settlers picnic& family re-
unions and golden weddings. he may
run into a new line of kin that opens
a whole n of hitherto unex-
plainable facts to him, showing why
certain families line up in the ward
primaries, and why certain others are
fighting tooth and toenail.
The only person in town who knows
all of our kinology-and most of that
in the county, where it is a separate
and interminable study-is Aunt"
Martha Merryfield. She has lived
here since the early fifties, and was a
Perkins, one of the eleven Perkins
children that grew up in town; and
the Perkinses were related by mar
rage to the Mortons, of whom there
are over fifty living adult descendants
on the town-site now SO n begins
to see why she is called "Aunt" Mar
tina Merryfield. She is literally aunt
to over a hundred people here.
She lives alone. i'll the big brick
house on the hill, though her children
and grandchildren are in and out all
day and most of the night, so that
she is not at all lonesome. She is
the only person to whom we can look
for accurate information about local
history, and when a man dies who has
been at all prominent in affairs of the
town or county or state, we always
call up "Aunt" Martha on the phone,
or send a reporter to her, to learn
the real printable and u%nprintable
truth about him.
Aunt Martha used to bring US flow
ers for the office table, and it was
her delight to/sit down and take out
her corn-knife-as she called it-and
go after the town shams. She has
promised a dozen times to write an
article for the paper, which she says
we are not to print, entitled self
Made Women I Have Known" She
says that men were always Dragging
about how they had clerked, worked
on farms. dug bitches and whacked
mules across the plains before the
railroads came; but that their wives
insisted that they were princesses of
the royal blood.
Her particular animosity in the
town is Mrs. Julia Neal Worthington.
Aunt Martha told us that when Tim
Neal came to town he had a brogue
you could scrape with a knife and an
80" before his name you could hoop
a hogshead with. "And that woman"
exclaimed Aunt Martha, when she
was under full sail, that woman, be-
cause she has two bookcases in the
front room ana reads the book re-
views in the Delineat0r, thinks that
she is cultured. When her folks first
came to town they were as poor as
Jobs turkey, which was not to their
discredit-everyone was poor in those
days. The old man Neal was as hon
est an old Mick as you'd meet in a
udN > JOulA Cy, VI ob Am oAo III
used to run a lemonade and peanut
stand down by the bank corner. But
his girls, who were raised on 1t, un-
til they began teaching school, used
to refer to the peanut stand as pa
pas hobby pretend that he only ran
it for recreation, and say: Now why
do you suppose papa enjoys it?-We
- - -oA H.. 80 a;-o & M - And
now Julia is president of the Wom-
ans federation, has stomach trouble,
has had two operations, and is suf-
fering untold agOnies with acute cul-
turitfs. And yet" Aunt Martha would
say through a beatific smile, shes
a ~good-enough woman in many ways,
and l wouldn't say anything against
her for the world"
Once Miss Larrabee. the society
reporter, brought back this from a
visit to Aunt Martha: II know, my
dear, that your paper says there are
no cliques and crowds in society in
this town. and that it is so demo
cratic. But you and l know the truth.
We know about society in this town.
We know that if there ever was a
town that looked like a side of ba-
con-streak of lean and streak of fat
all the way down--it is this blessed
place. Crowds?-why, I've lived here
over fifty years and 1t was always
crowds. WAY back in the days when
the boys used to pick US up and carry
us across Elm Greek when we went
to dances, there were crowds. The
girls who crossed on the boys backs
weren't considered quite proper by
the girls who were carried over in
the boys arms. And they didn't dance
n the same set"
Miss Larrabee says she locked into
the elder woman's eyes to find which
crowd Aunt Martha belonged to, when
she flashed out:
"Oh, child, you needn't look at me-
| did both; it depended on who was
Ioo1vs-~ Dr1f @ 7 VOC cnx-in0 If