twenty years at hull house

the feeling. Happily, however, this specter was laid before it had time

to grow into a morbid familiar by a very trifling incident. One day I met my father coming out of his bank on the main street of the neighboring city which seemed to me a veritable whirlpool of society and

commerce. With a playful touch of exaggeration, he lifted his high

and shining silk hat and made me an imposing bow. This distinguished

public recognition, this totally unnecessary identification among a

mass of "strange people" who couldn't possibly know unless he himself

made the sign, suddenly filled me with a sense of the absurdity of the

entire feeling. It may not even then have seemed as absurd as it really

was, but at least it seemed enough so to collapse or to pass into the

limbo of forgotten specters.

I made still other almost equally grotesque attempts to express this

doglike affection. The house at the end of the village in which I was

born, and which was my home until I moved to Hull-House, in my

earliest childhood had opposite to it —only across the road and then

across a little stretch of greensward —two mills belonging to my father;

one flour mill, to which the various grains were brought by the neighboring farmers, and one sawmill, in which the logs of the native timber were sawed into lumber. The latter offered the great excitement of

sitting on a log while it slowly approached the buzzing saw which was

cutting it into slabs, and of getting off just in time to escape a sudden

and gory death. But the flouring mill was much more beloved. It was

full of dusky, floury places which we adored, of empty bins in which we

might play house; it had a basement with piles of bran and shorts

which were almost as good as sand to play in, whenever the miller let us wet the edges of the pile with water brought in his sprinkling pot

from the mill-race.

In addition to these fascinations was the association of the mill with

my father's activities, for doubtless at that time I centered upon him all

that careful imitation which a little girl ordinarily gives to her mother's

ways and habits. My mother had died when I was a baby and my fa- *ther's second marriage did not occur until my eighth year.

I had a consuming ambition to possess a miller's thumb, and would

sit contentedly for a long time rubbing between my thumb and fingers

the ground wheat as it fell from between the millstones, before it was

taken up on an endless chain of mysterious little buckets to be bolted

into flour. I believe I have never since wanted anything more desper