About this book

American nights entertainment

Grant M. Overton

JESSE LYNCH WILLIAMS’S _The Adventures of a Freshman_, his _Princeton Stories_, and his _The Day Dreamer_ (“The Stolen Story,” a newspaper classic) FRANCIS ROLT-WHEELER’S Young Journalists Round the World Series--_Plotting in Pirate Seas_, _Hunting Hidden Treasure in the Andes_, _Heroes of the Ruins_, _A Toreador of Spain_, _The Magic-Makers of Morocco_ STEWART EDWARD WHITE’S _The Adventures of Bobby Orde_ RUSSELL DOUBLEDAY’S _Cattle Ranch to College_, and his _A Gunner Aboard the “Yankee”_ O. HENRY’S _The Ransom of Red Chief_ and _Other O. Henry Stories for Boys_ RALPH STOCK’S _The Cruise of the Dream Ship_. The hobo seafaring adventures of a boy. A fine book, not nearly well enough known LEWIS E. THEISS’S _A Champion of the Foothills_ CAROLINE DALE SNEDEKER’S _The Perilous Seat_. The story of a young Greek girl who saved her country JOSLYN GRAY’S _Elsie Marley_, her _Rosemary Greenaway_, and her newest tale, _The Old Mary Metcalf Place_. Other Joslyn Gray stories are _Bouncing Bet_, _The January Girl_, _Rusty Miller_, and _Kathleen’s Probation_ MARGARET W. EGGLESTON’S _Fireside Stories for Girls in Their Teens_ E. F. BENSON’S _David Blaize_ and his _David Blaize and the Blue Door_ ISLA MAY MULLINS’S _Captain Pluck_ (founded on fact) MARION AMES TAGGART’S _The Annes_, her _Captain Sylvia_, her _The Daughters of the Little Grey House_ (_The Little Grey House_ should be read first) and her _“Who Is Sylvia?”_ (a sequel to _Captain Sylvia_) Mainly Historical. FRANCIS ROLT-WHEELER’S Romance-History of America Series--_In the Days Before Columbus_, _The Quest of the Western World_, and _The Coming of the Peoples_, each illustrated by C. A. Federer NOAH BROOKS’S _First Across the Continent_. The story of the Lewis and Clark expedition CYRUS TOWNSEND BRADY’S _In the Wasp’s Nest_ (War of 1812) and _On the Old Kearsage_ (Civil War) SIDNEY DARK’S _The Child’s Book of England_ and his _The Child’s Book of France_ BASIL MATHEWS’S _The Quest of Liberty: The Adventures of the “Mayflower” Pilgrims_ H. E. MARSHALL’S _This Country of Ours: The Story of the United States_ EVERETT T. TOMLINSON’S _Young People’s History of the American Revolution_, his _Places Young Americans Want to Know_, his _Fighters Young Americans Want to Know_, his _The Story of General Pershing_, his _Scouting on the Border_, his _Mysterious Rifleman_ Young Heroes of Our Navy, a series comprising ROSSITER JOHNSON’S _The Hero of Manila_, J. BARNES’S _Commodore Bainbridge_, his _With the Flag in the Channel_, his _Midshipman Farragut_, and his _The Hero of Erie_ (Commodore Perry); and MOLLY ELLIOTT SEAWELL’S _Decatur and Somers_, her _Paul Jones_, and her _Little Jarvis, the Heroic Midshipman_ _Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children_, edited by JOSEPH BUCKLIN BISHOP RICHARD HARDING DAVIS’S _Real Soldiers of Fortune_ and his _With Both Armies in South Africa_ A. HYATT VERRILL’S _The Real Story of the Pirate_, and his _The Real Story of the Whaler_ STEWART EDWARD WHITE’S _Daniel Boone: Wilderness Scout_ BERNARD MARSHALL’S _The Torch Bearers_, a new novel of the time of Oliver Cromwell RUSSELL DOUBLEDAY’S _Stories of Inventors_ Inventions, Games, Plays, and the Fascinations of Science. A. FREDERICK COLLINS’S _The Book of the Microscope_, his _The Book of Wireless Telegraph and Telephone_, his _The Book of Stars_, _The Book of Magic_, _The Book of Electricity_, _The Home Handy Book_, _How to Fly_, _The Amateur Mechanic_ FRANK M. RICH’S _The Jolly Tinker_. How to make all sorts of things out of the simplest materials, how to mend shoes, repair books, make a cardboard loom, etc. RAY STANNARD BAKER’S _The Boy’s Book of Inventions_ and his _The Boy’s Second Book of Inventions_ have already been mentioned GILBERT T. PEARSON’S _The Bird Study Book_ FRANK M. CHAPMAN’S _Bird Life_, his _Our Winter Birds_, his _What Bird Is That?_ and his _Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America_ _Birds Worth Knowing_, by NELTJE BLANCHAN; _Butterflies Worth Knowing_, by CLARENCE M. WEED; _Flowers Worth Knowing_ (NELTJE BLANCHAN adapted by ASA DON DICKINSON); and _Trees Worth Knowing_, by JULIA ELLEN ROGERS Game books by EDNA GEISTER--_It Is To Laugh_, her _Let’s Play_, and her _Fun Book_ _The Magic Sea Shell and Other Plays for Children_, by JOHN FARRAR _Three to Make Ready_, by LOUISE AYRES GARNETT. Plays _Ten Minutes by the Clock_, by ALICE C. D. RILEY. Plays S. LYLE CUMMINS’S _Plays for Children_ Three Books for Parents. FLORENCE V. BARRY’S _A Century of Children’s Books_ ANNIE CARROLL MOORE’S _New Roads to Childhood_, and her _Roads to Childhood: Views and Reviews of Children’s Books_. By the supervisor of work with children in the New York Public Library. _10. The Man Called Ralph Connor_ i Once upon a time there was a Scotsman of Clan Gordon, those Highlanders ye ken of Blair Athol in the North Country, properly named with a God-fearing name, Daniel, and a fine, stirring preacher, too. Fire was on his lips but the flame burning in his heart was tender and you should have lived to hear him piping “Lochaber No More.” The pibrochs sounded something beautiful as he played; and when he stopped piping it was to begin relating wonderful old stories; he kenned them all. Away back in the 1840s it was he came out to Canada with other folk from the North of Scotland and fetched up in a Highland settlement in Ontario, Glengarry, in the Indian Lands. Full twenty years this man of God spent in Glengarry, taking a wife from among the Robertsons. Her father had come to New England first, moving on to Sherbrooke in the Province of Quebec. I could tell you a deal about her family; there was a cousin, Andrew Murray, of Clairvaux, led the Dutch Reformed South African Church; ye’ll have heard of Robertson Smith and he was another cousin; the writer M. M. Robertson was a sister. Mary Robertson taught philosophy as a lass of twenty in Mount Holyoke College in New England. They offered to make her principal on the death of Mary Lyons and she was duly considering for a while. She was of the Robertsons of Aberdeen, ye ken, and twenty-two years aged. But there was this young Highlander, Daniel Gordon of Glengarry in the Indian Lands, who was swaying congregations. Well, then, she turned her small, straight back on the principalship and married him, and went away from that pleasant place and company and fine position that stood waiting for her to live in the backwoods of Canada, a rare wild parish with the railway twenty-five miles off and a long journey to everywhere. She was a remarkable woman. Daniel Gordon took her to his home in the woods. In the year 1860 she bore him a son; they named the boy Charles. The laddie played about the square brick house with wide verandas that stood in a natural park of pines and maples, with a glebe of some twenty-four acres and forest all about. Two miles by a path through the woods took him to school in a clearing, and two miles back. They played games in the shadows of the pines. There was a rich green darkness and a curious coolness and a curious warmth there for them; the tops of the pines murmured like distant bagpipes and everything smelt sharp and sweet. On a day when the boy was eleven Daniel Gordon went to sway another congregation in Western Ontario, taking his wife and the boy along, for that there were better schools for Charley to go to. What with this, and high school in a neighbouring town, the lad makes ready for Toronto and the University. He didna do badly at the University, though he was no sober-sided student. He sang in the glee club and played quarterback at Rugby football in the champion team for Western Ontario. Some honours in classics he got and went on to the study of theology at Knox College. He was not too strong in those years and capturing scholarships and prizes in the three years’ courses at Knox College did him no good bodily. So then it was settled he should take a year abroad, spent mostly in Edinburgh, where he could walk along gay Princes Street and see the grand sight of Castle Rock, or climb to Arthur’s Seat and look over the Firth of Forth with its speckle of green islands and white sails and the bare country of the Kingdom of Fife, or pace slowly down the Royal Mile to Holyrood, with every step a threefold memory and an historic lesson. I’ll not say this did him any harm, maybe, and what it lacked in one way he made up on his return to Canada, taking his brother and travelling deep into the forest on Lake Nipissing, they seeing no other white man for three months. To crown these journeyings and to confirm the habit of health Charles Gordon spent two more years at Banff. There, in the heart of the Rockies, he climbed mountains and rejoiced in wildness. “Yes, I ought to have been an Indian!” he used to exclaim. ii He was ripe to receive his call at last, and it came. It took him to a life of rough hardship as a missioner in the North-West, all among lumbermen and miners with a congregation to be gathered first, and sore deeficult to sway in assembly. He came well-shod to the work of treading out the harvest in the Lord’s vineyard. He could go into the woods and come out again, or face a man mad with drink, or comfort a sick mother. A tall, slender, well set up young missioner with no very much ruddiness of complexion and a thoughtful, serious face that could yet smile, for a’ that, with crinkles in the eye corners. You would know him for Scots by his look, but the rest is puir American. And he loved those men among whom his work lay. When, along in 1894 and him just well into his thirties, he was asked to a city church, he didna want to respond favourably until he saw where his duty lay. Well, then, he came to Winnipeg and to the ministry of St. Stephen’s because it offered him the grand chance to help those roughened men whose needs he knew. Ye ken, perhaps, Mr. J. A. MacDonald of the Toronto Globe newspaper. MacDonald had been a classmate of Charley Gordon’s and a year or two after Charley Gordon came as preacher to St. Stephen’s, MacDonald was owner of a new little paper called The Westminster and concerned with Canadian Presbyterianism--a frank experiment. Into the office of The Westminster dropped Charley Gordon one fine day. He was in a great heat for money to put into the foothills and the mountain camps. They needed missions out there; I’m burning up with the wish to write an article telling about those men in the pines and along the upland lakes, Charley Gordon tells MacDonald. I’ve facts and figures. MacDonald was quick to say, if Charley wanted to bring home his message to people and loosen the purse-strings, he had a duty to write the thing as a tale, paint a picture with lifelike figures and a warm feeling running through it all. Gordon minded himself of what he had seen and heard in such good plenty; and he went home and sat down to write a story of Christmas Eve among the lumbermen in the Selkirk mountains. When he was fair into it, he found himself carried back and away, so much so that in reading it through after he didna see what brother clergymen might make out of the ringing speech of some of his characters. MacDonald agreed, but sent to find out what name to put on the story. Gordon invented a name, Cannor, out of the first letters of “Canada” and “North-West.” MacDonald picked up the reply telegram and snorted disdain. Cannor, he commented, what sort of a name is that! I’ll make it Connor. And where’s a first name? Frank? Fred? Chris? No. Ralph? Aye, we’ll make it that. This was the birth and christening together, ye’ll ken. The tale of the lumbermen’s Christmas Eve in the mountains was later to become the first chapter of the novel, _Black