The Glenwood post., 1923-09-27
Jennie wore her hat. .n...

seunle wore ner hGi' I8.-.
But In spite of this Ai.. .....
of personality, jim Irwin wa, -, "a.
from his fellows Of tie Woodruff
neighborhood. He was different. In
local parlance, he was an off OK. He
was as odd as Dicks hatband. He ran
In gang by himself. He had always
liked to read, and had piles of liter
ature in his attic room which was
good, because it was cheap.
very few people know that cheap
literature is very likely to be good, be-
cause it is old and unprotected by
copyright. Jim had Emerson. Thoreau,
an Encyclopedia of English Literature,
some editions Of standard poets in pa
per covers, and few Ruskins and
Carlyles-all read to rags.
In fact, Jim had a good library of
publications which can be obtained
gratis, or very cheaply-and he knew
their contents. He had personal
philosophy, which while 1t had cost
him the world in which his fellows
lived, had given him one Of his own, in
which he moved as lonely as a cloud,
and as untouched of the life about
him.
by every test of common life, he
was failure. His family history was
a badge of failure. People despised a
man who was so incontestably smarter
than they, and yet could do no better
with himself than to work in the fields
alongside the tramps and transients
and hoboes. Save for his mother and
their COW and garden and flock of
fowls and their wretched little rented
house, he was a tramp himself.
His duties, his mother, and his dead
fathers status as an outcast took
away his citizenship in Boyville, and
drove him in upon himself, and, at
first, upon his school books and later
upon Emerson, Thoreau, Ruskin and
the poets, and the agricultural reports
and bulletins.
All this degraded-or exalted-him
to the position Of an intellectual farm
hand, with a sense of superiority and
feeling of degradation. 1t made
Jennie Woodruff's "Humphr' potent
to keep him awake that night, and
send him to the road work with Col.
onel Woodruffs team next morning
with hot eyes and hotter heart.
Colonel Woodruff's gray percherons
seemed to feel the unrest of their
driver, for they fretted and actually
executed clumsy prance as Jim
Irwin pulled them up at the end of
the turnpike across Bronson's Slew-a
peat-marsh which annually offered
the men of the Woodruff district the
opportunity to hold the male equiva-
lent of sewing circle while working
out their road taxes. Columbus
Brown, the pathmaster, prided him
self on the Bronson Slew turnpike as
his greatest triumph in road engineer
ing. The work consisted in hauling
dragging and carrying gravel out on
the low fill which carried the road
across the marsh and then watching
1t slowly settle until the next summer.
Haul gravel from the east gravel
bed, jim" called Columbus Brown
from the lowest spot in the middle
of the turnpike. Take Newt here to
help load
Jim smiled his habitual slow, gentle
smile at Newton Bronson, seventeen.
understood, tobacco-staned, profane
and proud of the fact that he had once
beaten his way from Des Moines to
Farbault on freight trains. A source
of anxiety to his father and the sub
ject Of many predictions that he
would come TO no good end, Newton
was out on the road work because he
was likely to be of little use on the
farm. Clearly, Newton was on the
downward road in a double SENSE
and yet Jim Irwin rather liked him.
'The felers have put up job on
you. jim" volunteered Newton, as