The Minneapolis journal. [volume], September 17, 1904, The Journal Junior, Page 5, Image 30

About The Minneapolis journal. [volume] (Minneapolis, Minn.) 1888-1939

Image provided by: Minnesota Historical Society; Saint Paul, MN

                
A BENEFACTOR
By Katharine Tynan,
Copyright, 1903.
In THBEE PARTSPART X,
UST inside the dock gates was the little house.
When Patrick Donovan, the dock-watchman, had
walkod over the dock side one foggy night it
had been a grace of the directors to allow his
widow and children to occupy the cottage
which had been theirs while he lived. There was a pen
sion, tooa very small pension, but it sufficed, with the
money the widow earned by washing and mending the
clothes of some of Pat's former comrades in the dock to
keep the wolf from tho door.
No one but Susy Donovan knew how grateful to her
self tho grace of the dock directors was. Night after
xught she put up her simple prayers for them, the great
unapproachable gentlemen in black broadcloth, with gold
chains meandering across their capacious chests, who at
tended a board meeting in a city office once a month or so,
and whose gold grew while they'slept.
Sometimes, on a rare visit to the dock, taking friends
round perhaps, one of them would notice the pretty cot
tage, and pat a young Donovan's curly head benevolently
but it is to be doubted if any one of them knew that it
was the widow of the drowned watchman who inhabited
the cottage, or remembered Patrick Donovan and his fate
at all. Some one had brought the matter before them at
a board meeting, and they had given a benevolent, care
less assent, and that was the end of it, so far as they were
concerned.
It was not so with Susy Donovan and her children.
What it meant to them, or at least to Susy, only God wh
heard her prayers knew.
Outside the dock walls was the great, evil, prowling
city Around the docks was a labyrinth of wicked streets,
given o\er to such sins as Susy only vaguely guessed at.
At night, when the dolegate were shut, beasts of prey
roamed under cover of the daikness. Mulder was not
uncommon Screams and foul oaths and blows and evil
ldnguage went on all night. A very city of the plain it
seemed to Susy and she was wont to -wonder at the clem
ency of an offended God who did not purge the place
with fire
Within the walls was stillness, save for the lapping
of the water. All round stood the big warehouses In the
dock basins loomed here and there a ghostly ship, with
only the light at the masthead alive Nothing stirred in
the darkness ext epting a rat now and again, but, as Susy
said, the iats were God's creatures, and incapable of sin.
As compared with the human rats of the sewers outside,
who would count the little beasts anything but comfort
able and friendly
Pat Dono\an. had been a sailor before ever he be
came a dock-watchman, and it was an injury to his leg
when a spar came down in a sto'm that had made him
take to a landsman's life He had the sailor's simple
deftness and ciaftsmanship, and it was his handiwoik
about the cottage that drew the directors' benevolent
smiles as they went by.
The cottage was crusted with shellwork in many
quaint designs mosaic of stones and shells made tha
little garden before the dooi, where nothing tenderer
would grow Sailors coming batk from foreign travel
would remember Pat's tastes, and bring him a few curi
osities in the shape of shells or stones or a bit of coral, or
a bird's egg ^.11 was grist to Pat 's mill He decorated
Prixe Winning Pictures in the Angle Family Contest
Fust PrizeCarl W Jones, A Tenth Grade, Cential High School, 1816 Colfax Avenue S.
Second PrizeHaiold Mcradon, Ninth Grade, Central High School, 3208 Park Avenue.
Third PrizeMarie Berger, Ninth Grade, Murray School, 20 Langford Place, St. Paul, Minn.
The Angle Boys Oat for Their First Football Practice.Carl W. Jones.
The Jockey of the Angle Family.Harold XcFadoa. Shoemaker Ancle.Maria Berger.
^t^^ttrV
FEE JOURNAL JUNIOR, MINNEAPOLIS* MINNESOTA, SATURDAY SBPT. 17, 1904
hia cottage with the cleverness of the bower-bird, and it
was really something to be shown to visitors to the docks.
Susy's only dread was that some day Pat might be
forgotten, and the cottage taken from her. She was as
scared of the world outside as a hare. The thought that
the day might come when the children would be obliged
to enter the world beyond the dock-walls turned her sick
with fear.
Susy had come from a mountain-glen straight to the
docks. Pat had been for giving her liberty when he re
ceived the injury which crippled him but then for the
first time Susy had become the ardent one, and pleaded
for an immediate marriage. The employment at the
docks made it easy for them to marry. Susy came to
Liverpool, making a terrible voyage from the quays of
Sligo, and they were married at the tiny church in the
squalid street close to the dock gates, where an old Italian
priest officiated. Except to attend the church and do a
little hasty marketing, Susy had never left the docks
since that hour.
She was a pretty little woman, big-eyed and brown
skinned, and might have had her choice of a husband
since Pat's death if she would but have loked at the men
in anything but a scared way when they began to pay
her attentions at all lover-like. Those attentions would
be the end of the grateful friendliness which Susy had for
every one who was kind to her or the children.
A more worldly-wise woman than Susy might have
thought of the advisability of giving the children a
stronger pair of arms to work for them than her own but
to Susy the thought of breaking that little sacred circle
of herself and the children, wth Pat's empty place ever a
visible presence, by the intrusion of a stranger, would
have been profanation inconceivable.
As it was, they made just enough to live on. The three
children in the cool docks opening on the river throve as
tho they were among those mountain glens to which Susy
looked back as to paradise. They were round-limbed,
strong, healthy babies, the pure peasant blood showing in
their clear skin and rosy cheeks, the clean and innocent
life withm the dock walls leaving their eyes without a
stain except the blue of heaven as it is seen in limpid
water.
As for the future well, sure, the children were com
ing on finely. There was little Pat, 9 years old, and al
ready employed about the docks on jobs that befitted his
years. Presently Susy would have to send him to school.
She had no hope to escape that but by taking him to and
from the school herself he would escape the perils of the
streets He would be no dunce among his fellows, either,
for Susy had taught him what of scholarship she herself
possessed, and he could read the prayer book finely, and
pick bits of neVs for his mother out of the Irish news
paper which Susy found the penny to purchase at the
church door on Sundays.
We have all our dreams and our visions, and Susy had
hersas unattainable they seemed as anything could well
be. There was a certain very great man, one John Adair,
who was to Susy and her brood so remote and magnificent
oh, much more remote and magnificent than anybody
seems to us sophisticated folk'and yet his name was a
household word in the little cottage within the dock
walls He was the chairman of the dock company, and a
living entity to Susy and her children, whereas the other
directors were something abstract and not realizable.
Half a dozen links had bound the great Mr. Adair to
those humble lives, altho the gentleman himself had
not the remotest idea of it. He was a member of a great
English guild which owned half an Irish countryside. He
had not thought much of his responsibilities the mat
ter. Corpoiations are naturally inhuman The Irish ten
ants of the great city company were troublesome folk, for
ever complaining of bad seasons and the failure of crops
forever unreasonably demanding reductions c*f rent. Once
when Mr A Ian had had leisure to visit the wild country
!**~^*2$8
from which he drew a negligible amount of his income^
he had brought away an impression of beautiful solitudes,
air more inspiriting than the finest champagne, purple
mountains, boglands bronze and purple, black mountain
lakes, and here and there a white cottage perched amid the
boulders.
A clean, honest, industrious folk those tenants of the
city company and John Adair had experienced no such
awakening of the conscience as he might have done if pov
erty had worn a less winning aspect. He had admired
everything he saw, from the mountains to the straight,
dignified peasants, and had even been vaguely proud and
pleased to find his own remote family connection with the
countryside commemorated in the beautiful gorge which
was called Glen Adair. Then he had promptly forgotten
all about it. His interests were so inextricably wound up
with the country his fathers had adopted that he had for-'
gotten the little drop of Irish blood in his veins, or he
remembered it only when it was brought to his mind by
such an accident as Pat Donovan, when he required em
ployment at the docks, .applying to the chairman as to a
countryman of his own.
Again he had been reminded when poor Pat had
walked over the side of the docks, and the matter of al
lowing his widow and children the use of the house had
been mentioned at a board meeting. It was Mr. Adair's
fiat that had settled the matter so far as his fellow direc
tors Wfre concerned but the momentary kindliness of
feeling which had prompted his intervention had not
stayed long enough to make any^ impression on a memory
crowded with more important things.
Not so with Susy Donovan. She had heard of that
merciful word of the chairman, careless as the kind word
one throws to a dog, and had repaid it by an intense
gratitude and many prayers. She had taught her chil
dren to pray for John Adair as the foremost of their
benefactors and where all the dock-directors were re
membered, his name had a significance and a prominence
all its own. On that little drop of Irish blood wander
ing among many English in John Adair's veins, his coun
trywoman had built up a fabric which would have amazed
the rich man if he could have known it. Not only was his
careless kindness to the Donovans ascribed to him as some
thing deliberate but he was the cornerstone in that
dream city of Susy'c, rosily magnificent as the New Jeru
salem heaped of the' stormy sunset clouds in her native
country.
Little Pat was growing very knowing by this tim
and was a sharer in all his mother's thoughts, or in nearly
all of them. After the prayers had been said and the
children tucked in bed, Pat and his mother, sitting over
the embers, were free to build their "castles in Spain.*'
Pat was an imaginative child, and liked to evoke many
situations in which he should render some enormous serv
ice to the great man, such as extinguishing a fire in the
docks, or saving him from being "drownded" or mur
dered, or arresting the flight of his carriage horses, or
something else equally probable.
"Then in coorse," the little castle-builder would go
on, "he'd say to me, 'An what raycompince would ye be
afther axin', Pat Donovan, for the noble deed ye have
performed?' An' I'd up an' say to him, 'Mr. Adair, sir,
ye're kindly welcome. More nor that we owe you, sir but
if I might make so bowld to ax it, send me mother an' mo
an' the childher back to Glen Adair, an' give us a bit o'
land an' a cottage.' An' thin be sure he'd say, 'Pat Dono
van, me boy, right you are. 'Tis little enough for savin*
me from the assassin's knife,' or whatever it might
be."
Pat, you see, had profited by the somewhat lurid serial
literature of his weekly paper.
Then Susy would smile and sigh as she answered him:
"Sure, it would be grand only my little boy's too little
to be doin' them fine things."
"It might be yerself," Pat would say, inventing fur
ther "it might be gettin' hurt in the docks he'd be, some
thin' slippin' on his leg most likely, an' he havin' to be
carried in to you to be minded, an' you giving him the
fine nursin' that the doctor 'ud say, 'Mr. Adair, sir, 'ti
owin' your life you are to the fine tratement you've had
from the woman there.'
"Sure, I'd like to be doin' it for him, Pat, without
raycompince," Susy would say.
Then Pat, who considered himself already quite a man
of the world, would assure his mother that a little bene
faction like that would be "no more nor a flaybite" to
one of Mr. Adair's position, and that it would be "an aise
to his mind" to grant it.
Then Susy would go off at Pat's request into a de
tailed description of Glen Adair, tho Pat knew every word
of it by heart, and had only to look into the embers or to
shut his eyes in order to see it all.
There never was anything more beautiful in fairyland
than that glen, deep in the mountain-side, lined with sil
ver birches and alive with thrushes, a thousand little
streams chattering and singing down its sides till they
emptied themselves into a little river, golden brown, clear
as amber, stealing round mossy boulders, foaming to a
waterfall on the least provocation, revealing here and
there amid the flecks of foam a silver fin going down
stream. The singing of thrushes and the singing of
streams in the air all day, and nothing more hurtful to
soul or body than the black-faced mountain sheep with
their frisking lambs. The few habitations, white, among
the birches. Far below in the little town to which the
glen made a. precipitous descent, the tiny church, whose
"Angelus" bell reminded the glen-dwellers of God three
times daily as tho they needed such reminder!
(To be continued.)
His Very Own Name.
The Little Chronicle.
Little four-year-old Richard Coffey was learning to
spell his own name. His teacher, alter several efforts,
pointed to the letters R-I-C-H-A-R-D and the little fel
low pronounced them.
TeacherYes. Now what does that spell!
RichardTom Coffey's little boy.
A Paper Pipe Organ.
A church organ has just been made in Belgium which
is composed entirely of paper, the pipes being rolls of
cardboard. The sound is sweet, but powerful. The ad- t,
vantage is that the registers close more rapidly, pre
venting echo and rumbling.
The Trains of Chicago. J^
The number of trains arriving daily in Chicago is
1,138. They are upon twenty-three railways, carrying an _%
average of 160,000 passengers. Of these trains, 338 ar *Jg
4KT thru traftV and 804 for subjirban business.
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