Jasper County Democrat, Volume 12, Number 27, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 July 1909 — HER BURNED MUSHROOMS. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

HER BURNED MUSHROOMS.

in the Train of the Disaster Came Happiness.

By ANITA CARR.

[Copyrighted. 1909, by Associated Literary Press.] Flighty—that was what the* nice motherly old ladles of Hillside called Carrie Danielson. Now, if a person happens to be very tall and correspondingly broad and wears No. 6 shoes nobody ever applies that adjective to her. If you are flighty it stands to reason you are small and fluffy and never quiet. That had been Carrie’s description through her girlhood and early married life. She was a pretty little thing, but with strength enough of character in her face in spite of her tilted nose and small, red mouth and curved cheek had any one stopped to consider those Attractions as modified by the resolute chin and angle of the head. She loved the gayeties of life and the sunshine. Happiness surrounded her as an aureole, and she ran from trouble, to the displeasure of her critics who fastened the adjective upon her. She and Tom were happy those three years before the railway aceident that

ended tils life and for a time crippled her. Hillside never had liked Carrie Danielson so well as during those months when It could treat her as helpless and nurse and command her. She was In their hands, and her neighbors rioted In the placid joy of doing good unto one who had never seemed to yearn for their counsel or advice. They had planned It all out In those first sad days after the accident just what Carrie should do after she had fully recovered. “Of course she will sell this cottage,” Mrs. Barnes said during one of the long night watches. “They’d just got It paid for too! She can go back to her folks. It’s too bad they moved away when they did!” "Yes,” agreed Mrs. Croft, “she’ll have to. Tom didn’t leave her anything besides the cottage. She can’t live on air, and she’s not the go-ahead sort who can do things for themselves. Carrie’s always been so flighty.” When Carrie Danielson finally got well and was able to go about as usual, very pale and quiet In her black clothes and different from the gay and laughing girl they had always known. Hillside was disgruntled and shocked by the upsetting of all Its plans for her. "No,” she told the man who wanted to buy her cottage; “I’m going to keep it and stay right here. It Is home to me. It Is not for sale.” Mrs. Barnes went over at once when the news reached her. “Carrie,” she began abruptly, “how are you going to do It? What are you going to live on?” There was a faint gleam of the old humorous smile on Carrie’s lips as she surveyed her inquisitor’s grimly disapproving face. “I’m going to grow mushrooms,” she announced, “and ship them to New York.” Perhaps had It been any other commodity than mushrooms Hillside would not have seethed with disapproval as It did. Mushrooms to them were objects of suspicion, classed with weeds and other obnoxious products of nature, without which the human race could get along famously. That there were enough persons in the world who yearned for mushrooms to give Carrie a living Income seemed highly Improbable, but all the protests were met by her with facts, figures and methods, for she had studied the subject thoroughly before deciding to go into it. The determination with which she clung to. her project was another matter for surprise. No one had dreamed she had such persistence In her. And the mushroom sheds were built and the beds made, and Carrie started In business. The first check Carrie received from the big New York fyitel she cried over before half the women of the town had gazed upon It with their own eyes and had seen money really was forthcoming for the queer creamy white fungi that had been so carefully packed In

baskets and put on the train by their grower’s own bands. It was not such a large check, bnt it was something, and she had earned It From then on Hillside had to admit that possibly Carrie had more brains than had been imagined. Still, they could at once abandon the oversight they kept upon her. “She will never outgrow her flightiness,” Mrs. Barnes said one day. “I met her downtown in this cold, raw wind with no fur around her neck and Just a lace blouse over her throat Carrie needs some one to look aftet her.” “Oh, she’ll marry again,” said Mrs Croft comfortably. “She’s too pretty not to. And there’s no sense in her living alone in that little cottage and growing those toadstools—well, they look just the same, anyway—all the rest of her life! But she doesn’t seem to have eyes for any one, and poor Tom’s been gone four years now. Dr. White would be pretty attentive to her if she’d let him, and he’s a fine man.” Yet, when Dr. White soon after asked Carrie to marry him she shook her head with a faint little smile and refused him. “It isn’t that I don’t appreciate you,” she said, with an instinct to soften her refusal, “bnt, you see, I’m so busy here. I—l haven’t time to be happy.” Yet there was a pang of regret in her heart as she watched his tall figure down the hill, for their cheerful comradeship had brightened her days. He had brought her books and pamphlets on her work, had advised and sympathized, and she knew she would miss his brief but almost daily calls. But love, she told herself, she was done with. Time had softened her sorrow, but for her she thought the ordinary happy life of a woman was over and finished. Dr. White after a time bravely tried to renew their former unsentimental comradeship, but that, too, seemed destroyed and the attempt a farce. “I can’t do it, Carrfe,” he broke out hoarsely one day. “I love you, and I can’t pretend not to! I’m going away. Oh, Europe—Japan—anywhere to get away!” And he went, and the days dragged on, each one operilng a little wider the eyes of the woman in the small cottage as to what really was in her heart. But bravery was a part of Carrie Danielson’s very nature, and nobody guessed. “I guess Carrie didn’t give a rap be cause Dr. White went to Europe,” Mrs. Barnes said to Mrs. Croft. “She's Just as smiling and bright as ever!” “She’s getting kind of peaked looking, seems to the,” commented Mrs. Croft shrewdly. It was an overturned lamp that brought disaster to Carrie. Amid the frantic struggles and shouts of the inefficient Hillside fire department her cottage and mushroom sheds burned to the ground. She took it very resignedly when it happened, but the next day, wandering alone around the blackened pile, her nerves gave way. She was crying quietly, sitting on the charred remnants of a box, when Dr. White found her. He had come straight to her from the trnln. Perhaps he took courage from her very forlomness and discouragement, so different from her usual bright self reliance. ' Tm glad it happened!” he said emphatically. “Glad because now maybe you’ll have time to think of me a little bit!” "K-Fve thought of you a lot,” Carrie Danielson admitted as she dabbed her eyes and made instinctive passes at her tumbled hair. It was good to see him again. Dr. White deliberately sat down on the blackened box and reached for her hand. “Now we’ll talk it over!” he said.

“I—I HAVEN’T TIME TO BE HAPPY.”