STOPPING to look at the old school door I went in. I recalled how, once upon a time, when we were first starting to school here, we tried to induce Ed to enter, he being the youngest and very shy as to education. But he refused to go and ran back home. The next day my sister Sylvia and I and Tillie took him, but at the gate he once more balked and refused to enter. It was a dreadful situation, for already we others had found the discipline here to be very stern. Perhaps it was Ed's subconscious realization of what was about to be done to his soul that terrified him. At any rate, when pressed to come he cried and even screamed, making such an uproar that that same Herr Professor Ludwig Falk, ogreific soul that he was, came rushing out, grabbed him, and carried him, squalling, within. For a time he was not to be dealt with even there, but finding eventually that no one harmed him, he sat down and from that day to the time he left, two years later, learned nothing at all, not even his catechism,-- for which same I am truly grateful. But the formalism of the church caught him, its gold and colors and thunderings as to hell, and now he is as good a Catholic as any and as fearful of terrific fires.

Once inside, in the same room in which I used to sit and fear for my life and learned nothing, I encountered a black-garbed sister, her beads dangling at her waist, the same kind that used to overawe and terrify me in my youth. Because she looked at me curiously I bowed and then explained: "Once I went to school here-over thirty years ago." (I could see she assumed I was still a good Catholic.) I went on: "I sat in this seat here. It was the third row from the wall, about six seats back. A Mr. Falk was my teacher here then, and a Father Dudenhausen the pastor."

"Yes," she said simply, "I have heard of Mr. Falk- but he has not been here for years. He left many years ago. Father Dudenhausen died fifteen years ago."

"Yes, so I hoard," I replied, "and Father Livermann—do you know of him?"

"No, I never heard of him, but if you will go to the pastor in the house back of the church, he can tell you. He would be pleased to see someone who had been here so long ago."

I smiled. I was only fortyfour, but how old I really was, after all.

Then Franklin came in with his camera.

"Do you mind if we take a picture of it?" I asked. "Not at all," she replied. "It would be nice."

"How would you like to sit at the desk there? I have sat in rooms where a sister was my teacher."

"Oh, I think I'd better not," she replied. "I'm not sure if it's permissible. 1
Just then another, an older, nun came in, and she put the matter to her in soft whispers.

She was dying to do it. I could see that.

"Well, the rules,” I heard the other say aloud.

There was more whispering, and then she mounted the platform and turned her head sidewise so that her bonnet concealed her face. Franklin snapped her.

"Would you like a copy of it, if it turns out well?" I inquired.

"Oh, it would please me very much." "And your name?"

"Sister Mary Caroline-3i6 Vine Street." I look one last look and went out.

Outside was the yard in which we had always played. As an eleven and twelve-year-old boy, this had seemed a dreadful place to me-one of brawls and arguments. I was not a fighter nor tough enough physically to share in the rough sports that went on here-leap frog, snap the whip, and bean bag. I did, but I was always getting the worst of it and in addition, for some unaccountable reason, I was always finding myself involved in fights. Suddenly, out of a clear sky, without my having said a word to anybody, I would be the object of some bucky little American's or German-American's rage or opposition-a fist would be shaken in my face. I would be told to "wait till after school." After school a crowd would gather. I would be led, as it were, like a lamb to the slaughter. The crowd would divide into "sides." I would he urged to take off my coat and "go for him." But I was never much on the go. Somehow I did not know how to fight; even when at times I thought I ought to, or might win. A chance blow once won me a victory and great applause. I knocked my opponent flat-and all
the fight out of him apparently-but quite by accident. I hadn't intended to at all. At other times I received undeserved beatings, which left me wondering what I had done and why life was so fierce. It made me shy of other boys. I kept out of trouble by keeping away from them, wandering about by myself and rejoicing in the beauty of life as a whole-its splendid, spectacular reality.

Inside the Church was nothing to disturb me or cause me to alter my point of view. It was just the same. There was the Reverend Anton Dudenhausen's confessional, front, left; and here were all the altars, statues, stations, windows, just as I had left them. I looked up at the organ loft where I had pumped air for the organ, weekdays and Sundays. It was apparently as I had left it. Kind heaven, I exclaimed to myself, standing in here, what a farce life is anyhow. Here is this same Church, from the errors and terrors of which I managed by such hard straits of thought to escape, and here is a city and a school pouring more and more victims into its jaws and maw year after year, year after year! Supposing one does escape? Think of all the others! I And if this were the middle ages I would not even dare write this. They would burn me at the stake. As it is, if any attention is paid to me at all I will be denounced as a liar, a maligner, a person with a diseased brain, as one of my dear relatives (Catholic of course) condescended to remark. Yet at my elbow as I write stands the Encyclopedia Britannica and Van Ranke's "History of The Papacy," and a life of Torquemada, to say nothing of scores of volumes demolishing the folly of religious dogma completely-and yet-and yet-the poor victims of such unbelievable tommyrot as this would be among the first to destroy me and these things-the very first.

A little way down Vine Street from the school was the old foundry, now enlarged and doing a -good business in old metal melting and recasting. We turned into Main, where it joined Vine, and there a block away was Blounts Iron Works unchanged. Thirtythree years had not made a particle of difference. The walls were as red and dusty, the noise as great. I went along the windows, looking in, and so interesting were the processes that Franklin joined me. In exactly the same positions, at the same windows, were seemingly the same men at the exact ma-chines, heating, welding, shaping and grinding shares. It was astonishing. I felt young for the moment. At these windows, with my books under my arm, I had always lingered as long as I dared, only I recalled now that my eyes then came just above the window sills, whereas now the sills touched my middle chest. It was almost too good to be true.

And there, up Main Street, quite plainly was the rail- road station we entered the night we came from Sullivan, and whence we departed two years later for Chicago and Warsaw-only it had been rebuilt. It was a newer, a grander affair-a Union Station, no less. Then we had slipped in, my mother and her helpless brood, and were met by Paul and put on a little one horse street car which had no conductor at the rear but only a small step, and in which, after depositing coins in a case where a light was, we rode a few blocks to Franklin Street. I recalled the night, the stars, the clang of summer engine bells, the city's confusing lights. It seemed so wonderful, this city; after Sullivan, so great. It had forty or fifty-thousand people then (seventyfive thousand today). On the train, as we came in, it seemed as if we were coming into fairyland.

"Mister," I said to a passing Southern water type, a small, gypsyish, swarthy little man, can you tell us where Franklin Street is?"

"Why, sweetheart, right they it is-right they at the conoh."

The eyes poured forth a volume of gentle sunny humor. I smiled back. It was like being handed a bouquet of roses.

We turned into Franklin Street and rode such a little way—two blocks say. The house was easy to identify, even though the number had now been made 1415. It was now crowded in between a long row of brick and frame houses, of better construction, and the neighbor- hood had changed entirely in physical appearance though not in atmosphere. Formerly, save for our house, all was o en common here. You could see from our house to the station at which we had arrived-from our house to the interesting potteries which I still hoped to find, east or toward the country. You could see north to the woods and an outlying Catholic Orphan Asylum.

Now all that was changed. It was all filled with houses. Streets that in my time had not even been platted now ran east and west and north and south. Our large yard and barn were gone. The house had no lawn at all, or just a tiny scrap in front. The fine common& at the back where all the neighborhood boys gathered to play ball, circus, top, marbles, was solidly built over with houses. I remembered how I used to run, kicking my bare toes in clover-blooms in the summer. Once a bee stung me and I sat down and cried; then getting no aid, I made a paste of mud and saliva and held that on-instructions from big Ed Fisher, one of our neighborhood gang. I recalled how Ed and I played one old cat here with Harry Trochee, the gypsy trader's son, up the street, and how we both hated to have to run up the street to Main Street to the grocer's or butcher's for anything. Here I could stand and see the steeple of Holy Trinity, clear across the city at Third and Pine, and hear the Angelus tolled, morning, noon and night. It was beautiful to me-I have often paused to listen-and to feel. Across the com 'Mon of a Saturday I have wandered to the potteries, to look in at the windows at so many interesting things that were being made.

"Shall we stop?" asked Franklin, as we neared the door. I

"Please don't. I don't want to go in.”

Some little children were playing on our small front porch. And next came the potteries themselves, over in the exact region where they should have been, but now swollen to enormous proportions. The buildings extended for blocks. Hundreds, if not thousands, of men and women must have been at work here. You could see them at all the windows, turning cups, saucers, plates, bowls, pitchers, tureens-thousands in a day. The size and the swing of it all was like a song. We got out and wandered about up and down the low red walls, looking at windows and doors, seeing the thousands upon thousands of bits of clay being shaped into the forms which they retain for a little while only to be returned to their native nothingness again. So may we be shaped and cast back broken-to be used some day for something else.

"The methods have changed," said one man, talking to me through a window.

"Twenty years ago a lot of the work was still done by hand, but now we do it all by machinery. We have forms like this"-and he held up one. "You see we put just so much clay in and press this down and that makes the exact thickness. It can't be more or less. I make a hundred and twenty plates an hour."

He made twenty while we looked on.

Another man, at the next window, was putting handles on cups.

After this there was nothing of interest to see, so we consulted the map and decided that our best plan was to go first to Boonville in Warwick County, the next county cast; then northeast to Huntingberg and Jasper in Dubois County, and then still northeast through Kellerville and Norton into Orange County, and so reach French Lick and West Baden.

Neither of us had ever been there. 'It was of some slight interest to me as being famous-a great cure and the quondam resort of my brother Paul, who was fond of places of this kind. Indeed, he was a kind of modern Falstaff, roystering with drinkers and women and having a gay time of it wherever he was-a vigorous animal Soul, with a world of sentiment and a capacity for living which was the admiration and the marvel of all beholders.

So we were off.

In so far as this part of the trip was concerned, I can truthfully say the attraction was off. There was still Bloomington, my one year university town, but beside Warsaw and Terre Haute and Sullivan and Evansville- how it paled I Chicago was really of much more interest to me, the Chicago that I visited between Evansville and Warsaw, but this trip did not include that. Besides, I had been to Chicago so often since.

We followed hot, wet bottom lands to Boonville, a poorer town even than Sullivan, with unpaved streets and a skimpy county fair not to he compared with the one of Knox County, in which Vincennes was situated. Then we struck northeast through a region where the roads were so bad that it seemed we should never come through with the car. Water puddles, and streams even, blocked the way. At one place we shot over a bridge the far end of which sank as we crossed, and a ditch of nine feet of depth yawned beside the track, separated by but one foot of earth I Death seemed to zip close to my ear at that moment. We saw poor homes, poor stores, wretched farms, shabby, almost ragged people. At one town, Selvin, on the road to Huntingberg, a pretty country girt "tending" the general store there asked us if we were coming from Boonville, and when we said yes, asked if we had seen the fair.

"Yes,” replied Franklin.

"It's fine, isn't it?" she commented.

"Yes," he replied gently.

You can imagine the isolation of this region when I tell you that our automobile attracted universal attention; that we saw only one other between Boonville and Huntingberg; that dogs and horses ran away frightened at the horn; and that children ran out to see. This did not seem quite possible.

At Holland, however, in the southwest corner of Dubois County, we encountered a splendid road, smooth and white along which we tore. Indeed, this whole county proved a revelation, for whereas the two preceding ones were poor, wretched even, this was prosperous and delightful to look upon. Great meadows of emerald were interspersed with splendid forests of ash and beech. One saw sheep and Jersey and Holstein cattle in the fields, and for a novelty, new for me in America, repeated flocks of snow white geese, great droves of them,-a region, no doubt, given to feather raising.

Huntingberg was alive and clean-a truly handsome little town with well built houses, wide streets, attractive stores, a brisk, businesslike atmosphere. It was really charming, romantically so. Beyond it was an equally fine road leading to jasper, the county seat. On this we encountered a beech grove so noble and well planned that it had the sanctity and aroma of a great cathedral. Through the columns of trees one could see the sun sinking-a great red ball of fire. The sky was sapphire and the air cool. Those lowings and bleatings and callings and tinklings of evening were just beginning. We ran the car into a fence pocket, and letting down the bars of a gate walked into this great hall. 1 was deeply impressed-moved really. I put my arms behind my back and gazed aloft into the silvery branches. I laid reverent hands on their smooth, silvery trunks-and my cheek. I almost asked them to bless me-to help me grow strong, natural, frank-all that a struggling mind in a mystic world should become. I spoke to the red sun in the West and bade it adieu for another night. I looked into the small still pools of water to be found here, wherein stars would see their faces latterly, and begged of all wood sprites and water nymphs, nixies and pixies, that some day, soon perhaps, they would make me one in their happy councils and revels. I looked up through the trees to the sky, and told myself again, as I do each day, that life is good, that in spite of contest and bitterness and defeated hopes and lost ambitions and sickness and envy and hate and death-still, still, there is this wondrous spectacle which, though it may have no part or lot with us, or we with it, yet provides all we know of life. The' sigh of winds, the lap of waters, the call of birds-all color, fragrance, yearning, hope, sweet memory-of what old mysteries are these compounded!

* * * * * * *

Jasper, the county seat, was another town of which I most heartily approved. It was beautiful, like the rest of this striking county. The court house, like most of those in this region and elsewhere, was new, but in this instance built with considerable taste and individuality-not a slavish copy-and set in a square at the intersection of four wide streets on a slight rise of ground, so that coming townward from any direction, and from a long way off, one could see it commanding one of these striking approaches. What a charming place in which to grow up, I thought!

Again, there was a river here, that selfsame Patoka of Princeton, and as we entered from the south, it provided some most interesting views, sylvan and delicate. Still once more there was a church here-St. Joseph's Roman Catholic-which was a triumph of taste. Most Roman Catholic Churches, and for that matter every other denominational church in America, have enough spent on them to insure originality and charm in design, if only taste were not wanting-but taste, that priceless, inexpensive thing, is rarely ever present. They build and build, slavish copies of European models, usually of cathedrals, so that when one sees an original design it is like a breath of fresh air entering a stuffy room. This Church was built of a faintly greenish gray stone, and possessed a soaring, yet delicate bell tower at one corner. It stood on a considerable rise, in an open space and at right angles with a low flat brown convent or school, which gave its entrance way a plaza-like atmosphere. But for the fact that it was late and we were in a hurry, and it was locked, we would have entered, but we would have had to go for a key.