"Oh, no, thank you. You are very kind. But I have work in my garden. I went to a picnic once in my youth. It was a very enjoyable occasion. I wanted to tell you that I think it will rain before night. The wind has switched to the east and the temperature is five degrees higher." The queer old codger.

And then, as the years went by, he began to include others than the immediate neighborhood in his gifts -people he had not known before and with whom he became acquainted in the cemetery.

A cemetery is a friendly place. You talk with people there whom you have not known in town. "The grass ought to be mowed," you may say to the wealthy widow by her husband's mausoleum, or "Do you think the peonies will be out by Memorial Day?" to the Italian fruit vender by his baby's grave. So people who talked to the old man "out there," even though they lived across town, became the recipients of his garden. products.

For three years he lived his queer busy life there alone with his garden and his thermometers.

22

It was in December of the third winter after his wife's death that the gray clouds of the big snow began rolling up from the northwest. Someone saw him slip out of his gate, lantern in hand, and hurry down the

street.

"You don't suppose that poor old man is going out there to the cemetery?" Mother was solicitous. She put a shawl over her head and hurried out a side door. We could hear her calling, "Oh, Mr. Parline!" When she came in she had deep sympathy

in her eyes. "I told him I thought he ought not to go out when it looked so snowy. He said in his dignified old way, 'That's why I want to go. I must get out for a few minutes before the storm breaks.' I suppose he feels that he protects her just as he used to. Isn't it pathetic?"

We had supper. Company came. It began to snow-soft, damp, heavy flakes. It was late when it came to us that there was no light in the Parline cottage. Father went over. When he found no one, he went after two other neighbors and together they went "out there." I think from the first they expected to find-what they found. He was huddled up against the stone where he had crumpled while stooping down to look at the thermometer. The doctor said death had been instantaneous, that he had evidently taxed himself hurrying to make the trip before the storm broke.

They brought him home. Neighbors went into the little house, not so immaculate as in the old days, but in order. In the kitchen they talked in low tones about the old man, as though from the front room where he lay he might hear their comments.

A queer old man, they all agreed, but kind, unusually kind. Mother went into the cellar and brought up scarlet-cheeked apples and mellow pears. "He would have wanted to pass them around," she said, with that understanding of humanity which she always seemed to possess. Scrupulously she polished them before she served them.

The cousin and a young married daughter came. The cousin cried a little, tears that were not especially

sad. "I didn't feel that I knew him very well," she told us. "When I took care of Cousin Sarah he was always very kind to me. He brought me everything from the garden and kept me supplied with fuel. But I never really got acquainted with him. When we did talk it seemed to be only about the weather. But he was a good old man."

They took him "out there" where his wife was, and the dead geraniums under their thick covering of snow, and the parsley from the vegetable garden and the thermometer.

In the evening Mother and I went over and sat a while with the cousin and her daughter. They replenished the fire in the kitchen stove with some of the wood Mr. Parline had brought in. They brought apples and elderberry wine from the cellar. The house had that lonely feeling which hangs over one from which a soul has just gone.

Drawn by thoughts of the old man's hobby, Mother walked over to the huge bank calendar hanging there on the kitchen wall. The last day of the year it was, and so the last of the calendar with its one vacant page. Mother thumbed over the closing pages, each one filled with the old

man's wavering writing. Indications of snow. Wind in the east. Temperature 20 at the north side of the house. 19 at the barn. 18 out there. Underneath was a home-made set of shelves, all the old calendars of the bygone years in neat piles, the dates printed on the backs.

Through the clean, small-paned window, we could see low clouds breaking and slipping into the east. We were no doubt thinking the same thought-of the old man lying "out there" in the dignity of death, with the scudding clouds and the wind in the west, the old man who had lived close to the wind and the rain, the hail and the snow. Death would not seem so significant to him tonight as the importance of the setting-the rift in the clouds and the end of the storm.

There was the last vacant page on the calendar. He would have wanted it filled. Mother looked at it for a moment, then picked up the short, stubby pencil hanging limply on its long string, and wrote the weather for the day-the gentle old man's long Day: Shadows gone from the valley-no night—and the need of no candle-sunshine-eternal sunshine— and the Seven Stars.

T

wo years ago a widely-read commentator on things American devoted several syndicated newspaper columns to a gay and enthusiastic obituary for Chautauqua. According to his diagnosis Chautauqua was dead-quite dead, a victim of motion-pictures, radio, Ford and awakening sophistication. Middle-aged readers shook their heads and wondered what the world was coming to. The Young Wise Ones nodded knowingly-give them time and they'd destroy all the hokum on which the booberie was fed.

Eight months later in the autumn of 1926, Chautauqua romped home from the most successful season in its history. And last year, in spite of the fact that the largest system of them all was caught-talent, tents and trucks in the Mississippi floods, it registered another high mark in attendance. This spring it takes the road again, newly tailored, prosperous, with the tolerant dignity of successful middle age. The corpse refuses to stay dead.

Perhaps the reason that the commentators have predicted its demise so often and so heartily is that they don't know the American people nearly so well as they think, or, more significant in this case, they don't know the new order under the big

brown tent. They don't know that three big systems-Redpath, Swarthmore and Community-have taken the places of a dozen little groups, that Chautauqua has shortened her skirts and bobbed her hair, that she is as much at home on Broadway and the Avenue to-day as she is on Main Street and the Courthouse Square. She is modern, alert, rejuvenated. Responsible, among other things, for this renascence are the very factors the critics said would destroy her— the motion-picture, radio, Ford and awakened sophistication.

But in the beginning let these facts be made clear.

Chautauqua has accepted the modern mode without accepting jazz, has relaxed not one inch from its old standards; it is as clean to-day as when the original company of Swiss Bell Ringers played their first night under the Chautauqua tent. It still offers the same stanch triumvirate-entertainment, education and inspiration.

In the latter part of the last century, three purveyors of these commodities met to discuss the future. They were James Redpath, P. T. Barnum and Major J. B. Pond.

Pond said: "I am aiming at the group on top of the intellectual heap. A small, intelligent group that will

pay well to hear foreign celebrities is the audience that means success."

Barnum, on the other hand, insisted that "the crowd's the thing." He urged "Tom Thumb, freaks, noise, thrills."

Redpath, founder of the first Lyceum agency, which in turn fathered the first traveling Chautauqua, disagreed with both.

"Celebrities and thrills appeal to the extremes," he said. "My course is between the two. Substantial and instructive entertainment for the mass of sturdy citizens is my aim." So the showmen went their separate ways, always friendly, and never encroaching one upon another. The three successful institutions bearing their names to-day indicate that each was right.

To understand what has happened and is happening to Chautauqua, it is necessary to remember its background. When it first became a national institution, a quarter century ago, it was designed to appeal to the mass of mid-west citizens. In those days the "church sociable" was the high spot in the entertainment of most small towns. Conservative citizens frowned on the drama. The dance was damned. Reedorgans wheezed asthmatic melodies in a million forbidding parlors. Substantial property owners wrote letters to the "Times" insisting that something must be done to protect life and limb from the furious speed of the bicyclist. The peace of Sabbath afternoons was being desecrated by the "century runs" of crack cyclists over hundred mile courses.

Young blades were sure to belong to either or both of two civic organi

zations, the Alert Hook and Ladder Company or the True Blue Rifles. The sprightly charade was succeeding the spelling-bee. Bloomers, Carrie Nation, the race of the Oregon, the Klondike, Oom Paul, the horseless carriage, and a little later Upton Sinclair, "The Jungle," muck-raking, trusts and rebates were topics of the hour. The tempo of American life was slow; there was time to digest occasional doses of excitement. The country was groping out of a gray era of mediocrity. In most towns Chautauqua presented the only dramatic entertainment from year end to year end, except for the annual visit of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which was just then beginning to advertise "Two Topsies."

The result was that a great many Chautauqua programs were mediocre according to present-day standards. They could be nothing else and survive. Their appeal was to the mass of citizens. But even then they brought to the wide spaces of the Middle West clean humor, old fashioned spell-binding, and a group of personable and vigorous lecturersmost of them with a message-to whom the people listened avidly, not once but season after season. A glance at the lists of attractions in the early days of the various Chautauqua systems and of the Lyceum stage which preceded them, proves that even then mediocrity was far from universal. Among the Lyceum stars of the latter half of the nineteenth century were Ik Marvel, Horace Mann, Horace Greeley, Bishop Potter, Ralph Waldo Emerson (who lectured to a total of thirtyseven dollars in paid admissions at the Chicago Y. M. C. A.), Wendell

Phillips, Henry Ward Beecher, Petroleum V. Nasby, Josh Billings, Mark Twain, Charles Sumner, Frances E. Willard, General Lew Wallace (then known only as "a man of authority on Mexico"), Edward Everett Hale, Wilkie Collins, Mary A. Livermore, Bayard Taylor, Bret Harte, Tom Nast, and "the nineteenth wife of Brigham Young," all touring, so it happened, under the banner of James Redpath.

With such names the Lyceum platform could not be entirely dull. The new traveling Chautauqua of the early nineteen hundreds carried on the Lyceum tradition. Its patrons were satisfied, and understandably. Sophistication was still centered in the cities, and particularly in the cities of the East. The small town clung to its old amusements. Audiences demanded "the good old songs" and got them. Senators and exsenators began to appear popularly on the platform. The lectures became stereotyped after a a time. "Heaven, home and mother" covered their offerings. Smugness, complacency and sentimentalism made a rich background for the new game of muck-raking.

Then came the phonograph. And the radio. And the automobile. And hard roads. Main Street became an extension of Broadway. The Avenue was reflected in the Courthouse Square.

There was one observing showman who perceived this link between city and country almost as soon as it developed and recognized it not only as a distinct social phenomenon, but a signboard pointing the way plainly to packed tents. He was Harry P. Harrison, now general manager of

the Redpath Bureau of Chicago. He knew Main Street and Broadway, and that folks were folks on both sides of the Hudson River. He knew that the "hinterland" had enough brains and taste to appreciate the best Broadway could offer in clean amusement, that it still was humbleminded enough not to scorn "inspiration," but was sharp enough to distinguish between genuine inspiration and blah. What the country wanted in entertainment and information must be good, clean, modern, authoritative and interesting. So the new Chautauqua evolved, a slow process beginning experimentally about 1912, and continuing through to-day.

For years the Hon. U. U. Umptahtah filled in his valuable time, between sittings of Congress, under the Chautauqua tent, where his white waistcoat and rumbling platitudes met with approval half mixed with awe. Generations of rustics in their Sunday-best listened admiringly to his flowery and melodious appeal to Higher Things. These same rustics to-day would feel constrained to run the honorable Senator and his assembly of trick words off the boards. and out of town. They demand facts-figures-authoritative information. Give them the truth, they say, let inspiration take its course.

So last year Tom Skeyhill, journalist, historian and world traveler, marched up and down the circuits of one of the "Big Three" companies, describing the career of Mussolini. Skeyhill had served in Rome as a newspaper correspondent. He saw the first triumphant parade of the Blackshirts, "through Cæsar's gate." From the press gallery he saw the Premier demand a vote of confidence,