Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 207, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 September 1917 — IN STRANGE CITY [ARTICLE]

IN STRANGE CITY

Lot of One Transplanted From , Small Town is Hard. •• You Gfn\ Tell Whom You Want to jyw UfotH You Know, Which . Jhinfle Complicated. It gives you a queer feeling to be suddenly transplanted from the little home town to a crowded city street made up of houses, houses, houses, where you don’t know a soul, and never expect to, says a writer in the Indianapolis News. City folk don’t care who lives across the street or next door. They have thelr friends scattered about in various places where they can find them when they want them. But we small town folk just wonder and wonder who lives behind all those lovely front doors, and when we catch a glimpse of the inhabitants we’re interested in them and wonder where they came from and what names they all bear. If by chance we find, from the telephone directory, that the people just back of us wear the very same name we wear, we wonder if they might be some of our long lost kith and kin, and if we’d like ’em if we knew ’em! It’s always risky business hunting up kinfolk, so we’ll not try it; but really, the woman is so pretty, and the baby so cunning, and the young man who comes home in the machine at the end of the day is so proud of both of them, that we’d just like to say “Howdy—you’ve got the same name we have !** and take the consequences.

There’s the two-year-old baby three houses down the street, who waves her tiny hand and calls “By-by” when we pass. We’d like so to know her name, and answer the friendly little greeting. And there is the lonely boy across the street, who isn’t used to city ways yet. He sits on the front steps with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, the most dejected looking lump of boyhood that you could imagine. You want to cheer him up, and tell him things will be better when he gets acquainted, but how in the world is he to get acquainted? And the young woman who walks up and down the back yard of the house across the alley, carrying a tiny baby in her arms and looking anxiously down into its little face. If I was only a little grayer I’d risk assuming a grandmotherly air and ask her if the baby is sick. And there’s the old man who sits on the front porch of the handsome house nearer the car line. We can’t decide for certain whether he is sad or grouchy —feeling the bitterness of having to live off a son-in-law—or whether he is a hectoring old duffer, worrying the soul out of his daughter-in-law. Back home we’d know all about it. And the handsome woman who sometimes buys fruit on one side of the Italian’s cart while you’re buying on the other side—you’d like to know her, or you think you would. ,

That’s the trouble in the city. 'You can’t know for certain whom you want to know, until you know—which makes things complicated. Gradually you grow accustomed to the strange houses and strange faces, and form your own ideas. Gradually you get on speaking terms with the shy baby boy next door, so that when you go out on the back porch he doesn’t make a wild dive for his back porch, but stands up in his sand pile, waving his hands excitedly while he tells you some wonderful rlgamarole about his bucket and spoon, and you find him quite as lovable as any baby at home. The city throws the spell about you, and you find it mighty interesting and entertaining, and you grow to love the strange street because it seems home after the little trips away fKom it,- but for country folk used to country ways, give us the home-town, where every house beams on us like a familiar face as we pass—where we know the people behind the front doors, and love them, just because they are our home folk.