Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town quotes

But to write something out of one’s own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far between.

Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopaedia Britannica.

In regard to the present work I must disclaim at once all intentions of trying to do anything so ridiculously easy as writing about a real place and real people. Mariposa is not a real town.

In regard to the present work I must disclaim at once all intentions of trying to do anything so ridiculously easy as writing about a real place and real people.

Mariposa is not a real town. On the contrary, it is about seventy or eighty of them.

You may find them all the way from Lake Superior to the sea, with the same square streets and the same maple trees and the same churches and hotels, and everywhere the sunshine of the land of hope.

I don’t know whether you know Mariposa. If not, it is of no consequence, for if you know Canada at all, you are probably well acquainted with a dozen towns just like it.

There it lies in the sunlight, sloping up from the little lake that spreads out at the foot of the hillside on which the town is built.

On all the side streets there are maple trees and broad sidewalks, trim gardens with upright calla lilies, houses with verandahs, which are here and there being replaced by residences with piazzas.

To the careless eye the scene on the Main Street of a summer afternoon is one of deep and unbroken peace.

The empty street sleeps in the sunshine. There is a horse and buggy tied to the hitching post in front of Glover’s hardware store. There is, usually and commonly, the burly figure of Mr.

To the careless eye the scene on the Main Street of a summer afternoon is one of deep and unbroken peace.

The empty street sleeps in the sunshine.

There is a horse and buggy tied to the hitching post in front of Glover’s hardware store. There is, usually and commonly, the burly figure of Mr.

Mr. Smith knew his fault and acknowledged it. He had broken the law. How he had come to do so, it passed his imagination to recall.

Crime always seems impossible in retrospect.

By what sheer madness of the moment could he have shut up the bar on the night in question, and shut Judge Pepperleigh, the district judge in Missinaba County, outside of it?

To be present at the hotel was in accord with Mr. Gingham’s general conception of his business. No man had ever grasped the true principles of undertaking more thoroughly than Mr. Gingham.

I have often heard him explain that to associate with the living, uninteresting though they appear, is the only way to secure the custom of the dead.

“Get to know people really well while they are alive,” said Mr. Gingham; “be friends with them, close friends and then when they die you don’t need to worry. You’ll get the order every time.”

He carried money enough in his trousers pockets to start a bank, and spent it on anything, bet it on anything, and gave it away in handfuls.

He was never drunk, and, as a point of chivalry to his customers, never quite sober.

Anybody was free of the hotel who cared to come in. Anybody who didn’t like it could go out. Drinks of all kinds cost five cents, or six for a quarter. Meals and beds were practically free.

He always dealt with written documents with a fine air of detachment.

I don’t suppose there were ten people in Mariposa who knew that Mr. Smith couldn’t read.

Billy opened the message and read, “Commissioners give you three months to close down.”

Light and cool, with swinging windows open to the air, tables with marble tops, palms, waiters in white coats—it was the standing marvel of Mariposa.

Not a soul in the town except Mr. Smith, who knew it by instinct, ever guessed that waiters and palms and marble tables can be rented over the long distance telephone.

Mr. Smith was as good as his word. He got a French Chief with an aristocratic saturnine countenance, and a moustache and imperial that recalled the late Napoleon III. No one knew where Mr. Smith got him.

Mr. Smith was as good as his word. He got a French Chief with an aristocratic saturnine countenance, and a moustache and imperial that recalled the late Napoleon III. No one knew where Mr. Smith got him.

Some people in the town said he was a French marquis. Others said he was a count and explained the difference.

No one in Mariposa had ever seen anything like the caff.

He who entered the Rats’ Cooler at three of a summer afternoon was buried there for the day. Mr. Golgotha Gingham spent anything from four to seven hours there of every day.

In his mind the place had all the quiet charm of an interment, with none of its sorrows.

But at night, when Mr. Smith and Billy, the desk clerk, opened up the cash register and figured out the combined losses of the caff and the Rats’ Cooler, Mr. Smith would say:

There it stands, mind you, to this day. You’ve only to step round the corner of Smith’s Hotel on the side street and read the sign: Ladies’ and Gent’s Café, just as large and as imposing as ever.

Mr. Smith said that he’d keep the caff, and when he said a thing he meant it!

Of course there were changes, small changes.

But, as I said, the public recognition counted a lot for Jeff. The moment you begin to get that sort of thing it comes in quickly enough.

Brains, you know, are recognized right away.

That was why, of course, within a week from this Jeff received the first big packet of stuff from the Cuban Land Development Company, with coloured pictures of Cuba, and fields of bananas, and haciendas and insurrectos with machetes and Heaven knows what.

Oh yes; some of them must have seen it. And yet when it came it seemed so quiet—ever so quiet—not a bit like the Northern Star mine and the oyster supper and the Mariposa band.

It is strange how quiet these things look, the other way round.

You remember the Cuban Land frauds in New York and Porforio Gomez shooting the detective, and him and Maximo Morez getting clear away with two hundred thousand? No, of course you don’t;

And since that, though it’s quite a little while ago, the shop’s open till eleven every night now, and Jeff is shaving away to pay back that five hundred that Johnson, the livery man, sent to the Cubans, and—

Pathetic? tut! tut! You don’t know Mariposa.

Jeff has to work pretty late, but that’s nothing—nothing at all, if you’ve worked hard all your lifetime.

Half past six on a July morning! The Mariposa Belle is at the wharf, decked in flags, with steam up ready to start.

Half past six on a July morning, and Lake Wissanotti lying in the sun as calm as glass. The opal colours of the morning light are shot from the surface of the water.

In Mariposa practically everybody belongs to the Knights of Pythias just as they do to everything else. That’s the great thing about the town and that’s what makes it so different from the city.

Everybody is in everything.

You should see them on the seventeenth of March, for example, when everybody wears a green ribbon and they’re all laughing and glad—you know what the Celtic nature is—and talking about Home Rule.

In the same way, Hussell of the Newspacket is going, but his brother, beside him, isn’t. Lilian Drone is going, but her sister can’t; and so on all through the crowd.

And to think that things should look like that on the morning of a steamboat accident.

To think of all these people so eager and anxious to catch the steamer, and some of them running to catch it, and so fearful that they might miss it—the morning of a steamboat accident.

And to think that things should look like that on the morning of a steamboat accident.

How strange life is!

To think of all these people so eager and anxious to catch the steamer, and some of them running to catch it, and so fearful that they might miss it—the morning of a steamboat accident.

And the captain blowing his whistle, and warning them so severely that he would leave them behind—leave them out of the accident! And everybody crowding so eagerly to be in the accident.

Perhaps life is like that all through.

Strangest of all to think, in a case like this, of the people who were left behind, or in some way or other prevented from going, and always afterwards told of how they had escaped being on board the Mariposa Belle that day!

He knew she was on this one. He said you could have knocked him down where he stood. But no one had. Not even when he got halfway down—on his knees, and it would have been easier still to knock him down or kick him.

People do miss a lot of chances.

Still, as I say, neither Yodel nor Morison nor anyone thought about there being an accident until just after sundown when they—

There was a pause before Mr. Gingham answered.

“We did,” he said⁠—“down in the reeds past Horseshoe Point. But it was no use. He turned blue on me right away.”

After which Mr. Gingham fell into such a deep reverie that the boat had steamed another half mile down the lake before anybody broke the silence again.

and Dean Drone said that it was wonderful also to think that the Almighty had placed even the smallest shrub in its appointed place. Dr. Gallagher said it filled him with admiration. Dean Drone said it filled him with awe.

Dr. Gallagher said he’d been full of it ever since he was a boy; and Dean Drone said so had he.

Then a little further, as the Mariposa Belle steamed on down the lake, they passed the Old Indian Portage where the great grey rocks are; and Dr.

… his head and looked at the divide for half a second and then said he had crossed a worse one up north back of the Wahnipitae and that the flies were Hades—and then went on playing freezeout poker with the two juniors in Duff’s bank.

So Dr. Gallagher realized that that’s always the way when you try to tell people things, and that as far as gratitude and appreciation goes one might as well never read books or travel anywhere or do anything.

In fact, it was at this very moment that he made up his mind to give the arrows to the Mariposa Mechanics’ Institute—they afterwards became, as you know, the Gallagher Collection.

Now and then, too, you could have heard them singing on the steamer—the voices of the girls and the men blended into unison by the distance, rising and falling in long-drawn melody: “O—Can-a-da—O—Can-a-da.”

You may talk as you will about the intoning choirs of your European cathedrals, but the sound of “O⁠—Can-a-da,” borne across the waters of a silent lake at evening is good enough for those of us who know Mariposa.

I think that it was just as they were singing like this: “O—Can-a-da,” that word went round that the boat was sinking.

Oh, pshaw! I was not talking about a steamer sinking in the ocean and carrying down its screaming crowds of people into the hideous depths of green water. Oh, dear me no! That kind of thing never happens on Lake Wissanotti.

But what does happen is that the Mariposa Belle sinks every now and then, and sticks there on the bottom till they get things straightened up.

On the lakes round Mariposa, if a person arrives late anywhere and explains that the steamer sank, everybody understands the situation.

Safe yourself, if you like; as for me, let me once get back into Mariposa again, under the night shadow of the maple trees, and this shall be the last, last time I’ll go on Lake Wissanotti.

Safe! Oh yes! Isn’t it strange how safe other people’s adventures seem after they happen?

But you’d have been scared, too, if you’d been there just before the steamer sank, and seen them bringing up all the women on to the top deck.

… was that he spent two whole days making a kite with Chinese wings for Teddy Moore, the photographer’s son, and closed down the infant class for forty-eight hours so that Teddy Moore should not miss the pleasure of flying it, or rather seeing it flown.

It is foolish to trust a Chinese kite to the hands of a young child.

In the same way the Dean made a mechanical top for little Marjorie Trewlaney, the cripple, to see spun: it would have been unwise to allow the afflicted girl to spin it. There was no end to the things that Mr.

Drone could make, and always for the children. Even when he was making the sand clock for poor little Willie Yodel (who died, you know) the Dean went right on with it and gave it to another child with just the same pleasure.

Death, you know, to the clergy is a different thing from what it is to us.

The Dean and Mr. Gingham used often to speak of it as they walked through the long grass of the new cemetery, the Necropolis. And when your Sunday walk is to your wife’s grave, as the Dean’s was, perhaps it seems different to anybody.

But at the Anglican college they had stopped short at that very place in the book. They had simply explained that Logos was a word and Arithmos a number, which at the time, seemed amply sufficient.

So the Dean was perpetually taking out his sheets of figures, and adding them upwards and downwards, and they never came the same.

Very often Mr. Gingham, who was a warden, would come and sit beside the rector and ponder over the figures, and Mr. Drone would explain that with a book of logarithms you could work it out in a moment.

It’s all right to talk about education and that sort of thing, but if you want driving power and efficiency, get business men. They’re seeing it every day in the city, and it’s just the same in Mariposa.

Why, in the big concerns in the city, if they found out a man was educated, they wouldn’t have him⁠—wouldn’t keep him there a minute. That’s why the business men have to conceal it so much.

Then in the other teams there were the doctors and the newspaper men and the professional men like Judge Pepperleigh and Yodel the auctioneer.

I have myself heard Judge Pepperleigh say that after the campaign he knew all of Pete Glover that he wanted to. There was a lot of that kind of complete satiety.

The real trouble about the Whirlwind Campaign was that they never clearly understood which of them were the whirlwind and who were to be the campaign.

Some of them, I believe, took it pretty much to heart. I know that Henry Mullins did. You could see it. The first day he came down to the lunch, all dressed up with the American Beauty and the white waistcoat.

Then he wrote, and this time not to the world at large but only to Mullins:

“My dear Harry, I want to resign my charge. Will you come over and help me?”

When the Dean at last rose from writing that, I think it was far on in the night.

The Greater Testimony that had lain so heavily on the congregation went flaming to its end, and burned up its debts and its obligations and enriched its worshippers by its destruction.

Talk of a beacon on a hill! You can hardly beat that one.

I wish you could have seen how the wardens and the sidesmen and Mullins, the chairman of the vestry, smiled and chuckled at the thought of it. Hadn’t they said all along that all that was needed was a little faith and effort?

Every day about half past five he used to come home from his office in the Mariposa Court House. On some days as he got near the house he would call out to his wife:

“Almighty Moses, Martha! who left the sprinkler on the grass?”

On other days he would call to her from quite a little distance off: “Hullo, mother! Got any supper for a hungry man?”

He would sit there on the piazza of a summer evening reading the paper, with dynamite sparks flying from his spectacles as he sentenced the Czar of Russia to ten years in the salt mines—and made it fifteen a few minutes afterwards.

Pepperleigh always read the foreign news⁠—the news of things that he couldn’t alter⁠—as a form of wild and stimulating torment.

So you can imagine that in some ways the judge’s house was a pretty difficult house to go to. I mean you can see how awfully hard it must have been for Mr. Pupkin.

Tompkins used to show that the flood was contrary to geology, and

Pupkin would acknowledge that the point was an excellent one, but that he had read a book⁠—the title of which he ought to have written down⁠—which explained geology away altogether.

Mallory Tompkins generally got the best of the merely logical side of the arguments, but Pupkin—who was a tremendous Christian—was much stronger in the things he had forgotten. So the discussions often lasted till far into the night, and Mr.

… singing of the birds, and such a dancing of the rippled waters of the lake, and such a kindliness in the faces of all the people, that only those who have lived in Mariposa, and been young there, can know at all what he felt.

The simple fact is that just the moment he saw Zena Pepperleigh, Mr. Pupkin was clean, plumb, straight, flat, absolutely in love with her.

Which fact is so important that it would be folly not to close the chapter and think about it.

Zena gave one look of appeal to Pupkin, and

Pupkin looked one glance of comprehension, and turned and fled down Oneida Street.

And if the scene wasn’t quite as dramatic as the renunciation of Tancred the Troubadour, it at least had something of the same elements in it.

Pupkin walked home to his supper at the Mariposa House on air, and that evening there was a gentle distance in his manner towards Sadie, the dining room girl, that I suppose no bank clerk in Mariposa ever showed before.

It was like Sir Galahad talking with the tirewomen of Queen Guinevere and receiving huckleberry pie at their hands.

After that Mr. Pupkin and Zena Pepperleigh constantly met together. They played tennis as partners on the grass court behind Dr.

Zena used to ask him to point out the Pleiades and Jupiter and Ursa minor, and Pupkin showed her exactly where they were. That impressed them both tremendously, because

Pupkin didn’t know that Zena remembered the names out of the astronomy book at her boarding-school, and Zena didn’t know that Pupkin simply took a chance on where the stars were.

And ever so many times they talked so intimately that Pupkin came mighty near telling her about his home in the Maritime Provinces and about his father and mother, and then kicked himself that he hadn’t the manliness to speak straight out about it and …

Suicide is a thing that ought not to be committed without very careful thought.

It often involves serious consequences, and in some cases brings pain to others than oneself.

… tell—and about him sat Zena with her hands clasped and Nora Gallagher looking at the sky and Jocelyn Drone gazing into infinity, and a little tubby woman looking at the poet with her head falling over sideways—in fact, there was a whole group of them.

I don’t know what it is about poets that draws women to them in this way.

But everybody knows that a poet has only to sit and saw the air with his hands and recite verses in a deep stupid voice, and all the women are crazy over him.

But everybody knows that a poet has only to sit and saw the air with his hands and recite verses in a deep stupid voice, and all the women are crazy over him.

Men despise him and would kick him off the verandah if they dared, but the women simply rave over him.

So Pupkin sat there in the gloom and listened to this poet reciting Browning and he realized that everybody understood it but him. He could see Zena with her eyes fixed on the poet as if she were hanging on to every syllable (she was;

The only effect is to drive them to taking lemon sour and sarsaparilla and cherry pectoral and caroka cordial and things they wouldn’t have touched before. So in the long run they drink more than ever.

The point is that you can’t prevent people having a good time, no matter how hard you try.

If they can’t have it with lager beer and brandy, they’ll have it with plain soda and lemon pop, and so the whole gloomy scheme of the temperance people breaks down, anyway.

… out the ice cream bricks and Zena ran to get plates and spoons to eat it with, and Pupkin went with her to help fetch them and they picked out the spoons together, they were so laughing and happy that it was just a marvel.

Girls, you know, need no bromo-seltzer. They’re full of it all the time.

And as for the poet—well, can you imagine how Pupkin felt when Zena told him that the poet was married, and that the tubby little woman with her head on sideways was his wife?

So they had the ice cream, and the poet ate it in bucketsful.

Poets always do. They need it.

And after it the poet recited some stanzas of his own and Pupkin saw that he had misjudged the man, because it was dandy poetry, the very best.

Yet, though Pupkin often waited in this way for the train, he was never able to pick out a pair of wheels that suited him.

Anyhow, it’s awfully hard to tell an express from a fast freight.

I wouldn’t mention these attempts at suicide if one of them hadn’t finally culminated in making Peter Pupkin a hero and solving for him the whole perplexed entanglement of his love affair with Zena Pepperleigh.

Take the case of Trelawney, the postmaster. Long ago he was a letter carrier under the old Mackenzie Government, and later he was a letter sorter under the old Macdonald Government, and after that a letter stamper under the old Tupper Government, and so on.

Trelawney always says that he has no politics, but the truth is that he has too many.

So, too, with the clergy in Mariposa. They have no politics—absolutely none. Yet Dean Drone round election time always announces as his text such a verse as: “Lo! is there not one righteous man in Israel?” or: “What ho!

Similarly round election time, the Mariposa House was the Liberal Hotel, and the Continental Conservative, though Mr. Smith’s place, where they always put on a couple of extra bar tenders, was what you might call Independent-Liberal-Conservative, with a dash of Imperialism thrown in.

Mr. Gingham, the undertaker, was, as a natural effect of his calling, an advanced Liberal, but at election time he always engaged a special assistant for embalming Conservative customers.

So now, I think, you understand something of the general political surroundings of the great election in Missinaba County.

John Henry Bagshaw was, I suppose, one of the greatest political forces in the world. He had flowing white hair crowned with a fedora hat, and a smooth statesmanlike face which it cost the country twenty-five cents a day to shave.

Altogether the Dominion of Canada had spent over two thousand dollars in shaving that face during the twenty years that Bagshaw had represented Missinaba County.

But the result had been well worth it.

Election times are exciting enough even in the city. But there the excitement dies down in business hours.

In Mariposa there aren’t any business hours and the excitement goes on all the time.

Mr. Smith had carried the Convention before him. There had been a feeble attempt to put up Nivens. But everybody knew that he was a lawyer and a college man and wouldn’t have a chance by a man with a broader outlook like Josh Smith.

“Mr. Smith,” said the chairman of a delegation of the manufacturers of Mariposa, “what do you propose to do in regard to the tariff if you’re elected?”

“Boys,” answered Mr. Smith, “I’ll put her up so darned high they won’t never get her down again.”

“Mr. Smith,” said the chairman of another delegation, “I’m an old free trader—”

Here and there you might see Edward Drone, the Independent candidate, wandering round from farm to farm in the dust of the political buggies.

To each of the farmers he explained that he pledged himself to give no bribes, to spend no money and to offer no jobs, and each one of them gripped him warmly by the hand and showed him the way to the next farm.

After the organization of the county there came the period of the public meetings and the rallies and the joint debates between the candidates and their supporters.

I wish you could have witnessed the scene in Mariposa that evening. It would have done your heart good—such joy, such public rejoicing as you never saw.

It turned out that there wasn’t really a Liberal in the whole town and that there never had been.

They were all Conservatives and had been for years and years. Men who had voted, with pain and sorrow in their hearts, for the Liberal party for twenty years, came out that evening and owned up straight that they were Conservatives.

To think that Mrs. Gingham and Mrs. Trelawney and Mrs. Thorpe had known all this for six months and kept quiet about it! Yet I think there were a good many Mrs. Ginghams in the country.

It is merely another proof that no woman is fit for politics.

The demonstration that night in Mariposa will never be forgotten. The excitement in the streets, the torchlights, the music of the band of the Knights of Pythias (an organization which is conservative in all but name), and above all the speeches and the patriotism.