Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/435

 insect was not due for yet four months. And yet they had really been "stung!"

One of these men of abnormal appetite, was George Waggoner and the other was Obadiah Osborne, a preacher in the United Brethren Church. They were, of course, entirely unconscious of the part they had played in the tragedy of the pie. In January, 1891, when I was Speaker of the House of Representatives, my daughters, then eighteen and twenty years respectively, visited me for a few days in Salem. Happening to meet Waggoner in the corridors of the State House, I informed the girls, after an introduction, that he was the man whom they had never forgotten, recalling to his mind at the same time the two little girls who had so suddenly fled from the kitchen on that day 'way back in 1876, trying to escape from a yellow jacket, in April.

The instance was related in the presence of a dozen House members and it was unanimously agreed among them afterwards that it was the only time in their acquaintance with Waggoner that he was plainly embarrassed. He apologized profusely to the girls, urging a furious appetite in extenuaation, but seemed wholly unable to think of a way of making restitution that would be in any sense adequate.

A man, more than a woman, is subjectively and retrospectively gripped by a childhood environment, and at odd times through life he keeps looking back at it wistfully from whatever change may be his of geography or of status. A man bears the coming of old age more complacently than a woman, but a boyhood seems somehow more difficult to leave behind in forgotten severance than a girlhood. This characteristic existed in unique emphasis and magnitude in Homer Davenport, so that he is a pronounced example of a regional product. All the time that he worked in a great city as a famous man he was nostalgic for Silverton.