Douglas, Lloyd C.
Stories
3
Chapters
44
Words
295.9 K
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Reading
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Many people, including myself, dislike prefaces. If the man has anything to say, let him proceed to say it without explaining how he came by the idea. His reasons for writing it should turn up presently. In the case of this book, however, I felt that the reader should be informed, at the outset, concerning the nature of my project. In the event that you skipped my preface, let me repeat that on the advice of my physician I intended to write something every day; something remembered from a life which had…- 69.7 K • Completed
- There are a few stories about my mother in her advanced years—stories well-known in the small Indiana town where she lived so long—which will a little better acquaint you with her stalwart individualism and her witty eccentricities—interesting items about her which did not fit very well into the pattern of the earlier chapters. They are disconnected, but worth telling, I think. One of the typical stories about her was told of an occasion, in her ninetieth year, when, cane in hand, and a basket on…
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- When the Nineteenth Century was at halfway mark or thereabouts, a baker's dozen of small colleges, fostered by as many Protestant denominations and engaged primarily in the education of young men for the ministry, began a serious struggle for survival in Ohio. Not long afterward, in the more prosperous areas of all the midwestern states, many more colleges than could be adequately supported, entered upon their perilous existence. It was not that the elder statesmen of the churches hadn't realized…
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- So now we were living at Mama's old home which none of us had seen since Grandma Cassel's death, four years earlier. The proverbial saying that it takes more than a house to make a home was true. The place was not as we had remembered it. On the occasions of our visits there, everything looked about the way it had looked in Mama's teens; the enchanted little carpenter shop with the lathe that turned out toys, the spice-scented garden, enclosed in a tall picket fence reinforced with hollyhocks and…
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- If only June could have been induced to furnish the climate in northern Indiana all the year round, Papa might have continued indefinitely as pastor of the Monroeville charge; but those long drives through howling blizzards and bottomless mud were getting him down. During our fourth winter there he was afflicted with bad colds and a tedious attack of influenza (at that time known as "la grippe"), an enervating malady that often persisted until it was equivalent to a pernicious anemia. So, when it had…
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- That was a tedious winter, memorable for its high gales, heavy snowfalls, wet feet and bad colds. But when spring finally arrived it came in with all the hustle, bustle and bounce characteristic of the tardy. Tossing aside its earmuffs and mittens it had the audacity to rebuke us for not having the garden readied for seeding; and why hadn't we mulched the cherry trees? In a week the country roads had shed their snowdrifts, and the mud had been milled into dust. The mammoth perennial peonies, for…
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- Of our six months' residence in Columbia City, while we waited for Papa's return from Des Moines, I have nothing to report but our unhappiness. The new, jerry-built house in which we lived stood forlornly in the middle of a block of vacant lots. The owner had not sodded or seeded a lawn, and the raw, yellow clay was a muddy pond; for it rained endlessly throughout the autumn, winter and early spring. We had very few visitors. I doubt whether many of our friends knew we were back in town. Mama read…
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- When my father entered college, after three years as teacher of a country school near his home in northern Ohio, he discarded the redundant s which, until then, had adorned the family name. On the flyleaf of the only book preserved from my grandfather's small library, a leather-bound, pocket-size volume entitled Comstock's Philosophy (an elementary treatise on Physics) published in London, in 1782, appears the faded signature of William Douglass, the final s resembling a dissipated ƒ in a perilous…
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- My mama, née Sarah Jane Cassel, eighth child in a compact family of ten, was born a little more than a century ago in the then small village of Mount Eaton, Ohio, where her father, Samuel Cassel, owned and operated a sawmill, a gristmill, and what was vaguely remembered as a "woolen mill." As a tot Mama was called Sam, she told us, not only because she was her father's favorite but because she was always at his heels, though she did not resemble him in any way, as he was reportedly a quiet,…
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- My father, Alexander Jackson Douglas, was fifty when I was born. He had lived longer than most men of his years, having been a farmer, a schoolmaster, a college student, a lawyer, a State Senator; and, when we first met, a rural preacher. He had also sired a large family and was a grandfather to children older than I, so that by the time we of the second crop came along little kids were no novelty and certainly no treat. My younger brother and I were taught by our mama to call our father Papa, which…
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