Red Lodge daily news combined with Carbon County news., 1935-02-06

SAGu ONGI1duu III answer Inc II
spective families Of Abigail an
Philip had been perfectly delighte
at their, venture, and wrote tina
they were certainly envious Of tn
dwellerS in a country where ther
was no snow, no thunderstormE
and no poverty.
Abigail wrote glowing account
Of her new life to the family a
home. She and Philip were goinl
to build a really nice frame house
with bay windows, a bathroom, ant
cupola. Everything they touched
prospered: people called them ''tht
Lucky Lawrenees."
And Abigail had eight daughters
and one son, and the girls all mar
ried, during the last Sixties anG
early Seventies, in land in which
women were still rare and priced
San Francisco grew like a mush.
room, and Philip might have opened
a thousand doors to great wealth,
had he been a man to see. But he
closed one after the other with his
own hand, and went blindly on in
an. infatuation of satisfaction with
his rolling acres, his miles of fruit
trees, the growing family over
which he ruled supreme.
Some Of the girls went east when
they married, some lived in San
Francisco or Stockton, some died.
1t was not salubrious day for pio-
neer women, with one out of every
seven dying in childbirth. Some
were poor, opening boarding
houses, scrimping. in lonely cross
road villages.
But no one Of them ever forgot
that she was a Lucky Lawrence,
and belonged to a distinguished
New England family. They talked
incessantly of the significant fact
that the Lawrences had not come
to California as pioneers-oh, dear
no! Mother Lawrence had come to
San Francisco harbor on her we'd
ding trip, on one of Grandfather
Baldwin's own trading ships.
The one son, Patterson Law
renee, duly married, too, and lived
in the house with which his par
ents had replaced the old adobe
hacienda.
Abigail, and after her her daugh-
ter-in-law, in their fertor to en-
courage shade in that hot, dry
country, planted everything upon
which they could put their hands,
close to the house. They did not
foresee that the pampas grass and
the verbena trees, the peppers and
roses and evergreens, would grow
closer, thicker. darker every year.
Eventually the pretentious old
frame building, with its scallops of
millwork and its bay windows, its
cupola and balustraded roof, was
caught tightly in dusty heavy leaf
age, and the garden filed with
mossy, slippery patches where evenI
in summer no light crept in on the
sickly grass.
For thirty years the House Of
Lawrence had been in eclipse, and
the garden showed it. Acre by
acre old Philip Lawrence and his
son Patterson had watched their
fortunes decline; the old pioneer OF
the Yerba Buena days lived to see
the end of the century, and the end
Of his. own prosperity, and died,
leaving what remained in hands
even less capable than his own.
For Patterson Lawrence was a
poet, who lived merely to gather
worthless old books about him, to
dream over the painstaking PEN
ming Of Insignificant essays, which
we're rarely printed and for which
he was never paid.
At forty he married a poets
who had been precari-
ously existing for all her sixteen
years upon bread, water, and the
'Sonnets from the Portuguese" in
a shanty on Rincon hill. Editha, .
before her early death, brought to
he House of Lawrence two sons
and three daughters. Sixteen when
she married, ten years later, when |
Ariel was born, she quietly, hap
PLY expired, to music, as it were.
For Patterson had been reading
poetry to her, the four older chill
iren, by some miracle, quiet and
down by the creek, and
Ariel in her mothers arms taking
1 fourth-day view of life. when ,
leath came. 1
"She looks as If she were listen l
ng, Pat! She's going to be a great l
poet, and make all our fortunes Z"
Gditha had said. And one minute !
ater she had slipped away, leav-
ng the prophecy to gild little (
Ariel's childhood.
The widowed elderly father did G
he best he could for them all until t
lis oldest son was nearly eighteen
md Gail a capable, bustling house
manager two years younger. Then g
he big guns began to boom across q
he water, the service flags flashed s
n answer upon many a quiet flag |
)ole in Clippersville, and Patterson
lawrence, fifty-eight years old, put |
l copy Of Keats in one pocket and {
4 copy Of Shelley in the other and t