twenty years at hull house

not, but that it was very important not to pretend to understand what

you didn't understand and that you must always be honest with yourself inside, whatever happened. Perhaps on the whole as valuable a

lesson as the shorter catechism itself contains.

My memory merges this early conversation on religious doctrine

into one which took place years later when I put before my father the

situation in which I found myself at boarding school when under great

evangelical pressure, and once again 1 heard his testimony in favor of

"mental integrity above everything else."

At the time we were driving through a piece of timber in which the

wood choppers had been at work during the winter, and so earnestly

were we talking that he suddenly drew up the horses to find that he did

not know where he was. We were both entertained by the incident, I that my father had been "lost in his own timber" so that various cords

of wood must have escaped his practiced eye, and he on his side that

he should have become so absorbed in this maze of youthful speculation. We were in high spirits as we emerged from the tender green of

the spring woods into the clear light of day, and as we came back into

the main road I categorically asked him: —

"What are you? What do you say when people ask you?"

His eyes twinkled a little as he soberly replied:

"1 am a Quaker."

"But that isn't enough to say," I urged.

"Very well," he added, "to people who insist upon details, as some

one is doing now, I add that I am a Hicksite Quaker"; and not another

word on the weighty subject could 1 induce him to utter.

These early recollections are set in a scene of rural beauty, unusual at least for Illinois. The prairie round the village was broken into hills,

one of them crowned by pine woods, grown up from a bag full of Norway pine seeds sown by my father in 1844, the very year he came to

Illinois, a testimony perhaps that the most vigorous pioneers gave at

least an occasional thought to beauty. The banks of the mill stream

rose into high bluffs too perpendicular to be climbed without skill, and

containing caves of which one at least was so black that it could not be

explored without the aid of a candle; and there was a deserted limekiln

which became associated in my mind with the unpardonable sin of

Hawthorne's "Lime-Burner." My stepbrother and I carried on games

and crusades which lasted week after week, and even summer after