Image provided by: Washington County Cooperative Library Service; Hillsboro, OR
About Washington County news. (Forest Grove, Washington County, Or.) 1903-1911 | View Entire Issue (Sept. 1, 1904)
12 By C I C I L Y A L L E N : Copyright, tool, by A. S. Richardson The woman who writes was not obliged 10 go to the office every day. She went principally because she liked the great, noisy building, with its rush of hurrying feet, the dramatic en trances and exits of newsgatlierers and even the hammering of the stereo- typers. This was her life, and it helped her to forget. She lived far up on the heights in a white stone apartment house, whose en trance was gorgeous in upholstery and palms and whose windows overlooked the glistening river. The elevated trains whirled her through the tene- u»ent life of the great city, and she al ways laid down her morning paper when she reached the point where the windows of the dull brick houses almost touched the Iron railing of the road. So it happened that there came a morning when the woman who writes leaned forward in sudden wonder. In one of the dullest, dingiest tenements a window shone out like a solitary star in an overcast sky. It had been washed H IIE T O S S E D IN TO T H E W IN D O W A U U I i K Y , OMLONU P A C K A G E . and polished till it gleamed like French plate, and between the prim ruffles of un old fashioned dimity curtain peered a face in whose soft, blue gray eyes hopefulness and homesickness strug gled for supremacy. The train had slowed up for a curve, and she studied the quaint picture hun grily till the cars swept round the bend. The next morning she watched for the clean window, the dimity cur tains and the sweet English face and the next morning and the next. The figure In the window was not always idle. Once the supple hands were polishing tinware, which, to the woman who writes, recalled n faraway farmhouse, where rows of milk pans once gleamed in the sunshine. Follow ing an unaccountable impulse, she nodded cheerily. The blue gray eyes opened wide in friendly surprise, the flush on the fresh English face deep ened. and from that day the morning greeting was exchanged regularly. The summer quivered and shimmer ed into fall, and fail tossed its smart colors and sparkling hours into the outstretched arms of winter. The wiuds howled and the storms raged at STRONGEST IN THE WORLD Everybody knows that “ Strongest in the W orld” means T h e Equitable Life. R ates no higher than other companies T. H. PETERS, Special Agent, 306 Oregonian Building, Portland, Or. ONLY 70 HOURS P o rtla n d to Ghicago Via O. R. & IV. Go. Oregon Sh o rt Lin e , Union P acific and Chicago & Northwestern Railway The only Double Tracked Railway be tween Missouri River and Chicago.. . Tw o Through T ra in s Daily You c a n g et o n th e t r a i n i n P o r t l a n d a n d n e e d n o t £et o f f u n t i l y o u a r r i v e i n C h i c a g o See that Your Ticket R ead s Via the G. & N. W. R Y . A. G. BA R K ER , GENERAL AGENT, C. E . BOCKMANN, PASSENGER AGENT, No. 153 Third St., Portland, Or. white ashes. Then she crossed to he- desk and wrote: My Dear Robert—It has all been ■. wretched mistake, this thinking l . u wr could set along without each otlv r. 1 have been a little slow in fin ’. ¡rg it cut hut now I am sure. Do not thinls i hnvt seored a failure and then have turned to you. My work never looked s.< prom.sing; but. oh. the emptiness of it all! You said once I must come to you. Well, 1 am coming, dear—coming because I can't stay away any longer. I am writing to mother to send Rob-your Rob and mint. Just think! I’ve not seen him for sir; months, and you’ve not seen him, oh, it must seem like years. I've been selfish, Robert, but I never saw it that way—un* td today. Cable me Just cue word— “Come." I will understand. Yours. EMILY. 1 ik FROM WINDOW TO W IN D O W ! the tenement window, now closed and stuffed about with bits of rags. The blue gray eyes still smiled their greet ing across a row of scarlet geraniums to the woman behind the car window, who, after the train had swept round the curve, would lean back half wea rily and weave romances of the life behind the white curtains and crimson blossoms. She could see the English husband coming in from his work. He would be strong and straight and young, of course, very gentle and ten der with the girl who had come to him from across the seas. Wherefore the happy lovelight in the blue gray eyes if all these things were not so? Then a frugal supper, smoking hot, would be placed on the table. The teapot would be of brown and yellow stone, like the one at the farm. Hut the woman who writes never mounted the narrow stairs leading to the tenement room. She had been disillusionized so often. One morning in early spring she caught her breath as the train slowed up before the window. No face peered between the ruffled curtains. A friend ly hand had bowed the sliutti i s to the glaring sunlight. That afternoon she hurried to a shop win re all sorts of dainty baby garments are sold. When she had selected a piece of flannel rich ly embroidered and a robe of sheer linen, edged with filmy lace, she actu ally felt angry at the careless fashion in which the clerk tossed tlie small garments to the wrapper. It seemed almost like a desecration. As she car ried her package to the waiting han som she said to herself: “It is perfectly absurd, considering their station in life. But how her eyes will shine!” She could not send her gift, for she knew neither name nor exact address, but she waited and watched. At last one morning the shutters wer*» thrown back, and in a high backed rocking chair, close to the window, sat the little English wife, her blue gray eves shin ing proudly above a long roll of white flannel, topped by a very small arm very red face. Then the woman who writer: did a ie markable thing. She took ddfberata, eareful aim and tossed Into the tene ment window a bulky, oblong package. For more than a week she had carried that package back and forth every day, waiting for this very opportunity, and yet her arms felt strangely empty. All day long between the woman who writes and lier work came the proud mother light in those blue gray eyes. Wherever she turned it haunted her till her pen lost its cunning and her heartstrings thrilled with a vague longing and unrest. When night came to her brilliantly lighted parlors, where clever men and women gathered to laugh at her witty sayings and to drink the punch she brewed with cunning hand, she was the gayest of them all. Never had she looked more queenly iu her clinging gown of scintillating Jot; never had the clever words come so easily to her smiling lips. She would forget it all— the narrow, pinching life in the tene ment, the red geraniums, the ruffled curtains—yes, even that tantalizing mother love in the other woman’s eyes. Hut when they had all gone, the men who admired her and the women who feared her, the memory of the blue gray eyes came back with insistent strength. She turned out the lights, leaving only the dull crimson glow from the tulip shaped lamp, and under that she sat long and silently, her broad, white forehead resting on lier Jeweled hand. When she rose, a pink flush was creeping over the pearl gray heavens. The other woman was doubtless awake, too. Intent on her husband’s early breakfast. The woman who writes glanced round th* room. Here were drooping roses, there three or four empty punch glasses and yonder a small bronze tray piled high with dull per barrel. Whisky was worth SU gallon, rum $2.75 per gallon, tea $1 pound, corn $1 a bushel, tobacco [ cents a pound, sugar 2G cents pound, loaf sugar 31 cents a poul cambric -$1 a yard, dimity $1 per yJ molasses $1.44 per gallon, raisins j cents per pound, shfrting 38 cents | yard, potatoes 44 cents per bushel. I and wheat $1.53 per bushel, red ill nel 88 cents per yard, oil $1 per The drinker and the smoker ha<| good time in those early days, and I family man had it not nearly so goj Now, happily, whisky and tobacco cj more and necessaries cost very, much less. Dress goods and foods* now be used freely by those who,I living in 1815, would have had a caj dress once in several years and sugar but very seldom. The "old daj were not as good as these.—Retail cers’ Advocate. She addressed the letter with a fever ish hand to I ’aris. When she threw open the window, she saw a workingman in overalls and blouse hurrying toward the city. Per haps the litti* Englishwoman was standing in her doorway watching her stalwart husband off to work, with his A P h ilo s o p h e r . kisses fresh on her lips and her babe Rivers -W h at do you do "hen cradled in her arms. And on the lips of wake up in the night with j 11’1’1! the woman who writes trembled a hap toothache? Brooks—I try to be ti>| py smile. ful it isn’t galloping consumption. Som e P ric e s In 1815 . From an old journal that was kept in 1815 by a merchant of Oswego It would appear that it cost the citizens of that city something to live in those days. Anthracite coal was unknown, am] for Illuminating purposes candles ar.d whale oil were used. Salt in those days was as much a necessity as now, but it cost $1,125 per butlicl, or $0.38 T ry in g to F o r g e t It. Mifkins— Hello, old man! I you think of that cigar I gavejo J night? Bifkins— Don’t ask me to >j I ’m trying to forget It. Let those who complain of work undertake to do nothing, does not convert them, nothing