Page:The American Magazine (1906-1956) - volume 73.pdf/442

422 letters of some of the other correspondents abounded in thrilling adventures and pictureesque situations. Mr. Chamberlin told us of men underfed and dying of fever, of polluted streams and wells, of mismanaged commissariats. When we asked him to make his reports more heroic and patriotic, he replied that he could not describe what he did not see, or narrate what did not happen. When word came by telegraph that our men had driven the Spaniards from their strongest positions, we imagined a fierce army of Weylers, black-bearded desperadoes overcome by the superior valor of American soldiers. A few days later Mr. Chamberlin’s letter described a handful of Spanish boys, mild-mannered, soft-voiced, willing to shoot and be shot, but with no very clear idea of what the war was about.

The ‘‘Listener in the Town” and the “Listener in the Country” brought to the battlefield an intellectual honesty, a sense of justice, a tender humanity which were wasted upon teaders who preferred exciting fiction to disillusion and truthfulness. That Mr. Chamberlin knows what true heroism is, his excellent life of John Brown bears eloquent witness. Yet I think that he is a better biographer of bird, tree and flower.

How glad we were to get him back from Cuba, and to walk with him again in the fields and woods, whose inhabitants were his life-long friends! For forty years he has been a busy journalist, working in Chicago, Newport, Boston, and in New York, where he is now editorial writer and critic for the Evening Mail. His vacation hours he has spent in the heart of nature, and he has told me more than any other of my friends about shy creatures that love shady places and hide in the hollow of tree and wall. He knows all the plants that grow, and all the birds that fly between Newbury, Vermont, and Wrentham, Massachusetts. The collection of his sketches from the well-known column of the Boston Transcript, called “The Listener,” contains as fine flashes of descriptive writing as any I have read. “My Whippoorwill,” for instance, is the expression of a man with rare gifts of style and still rarer gifts of perception. His portraits of dogs have the quality so remarkable in Maeterlinck’s essay and in “Rab and His Friends"— truth to the personality of the dog without the false imputation of human characteristics to our four-footed comrades.

Mr. Chamberlin’s newspaper work has made it necessary for him to live in many parts of the country. Wherever he has set up his household gods, he has surrounded them with a little garden, and although he knew his tenancy was to be brief, he always planted trees for later comers to enjoy. At Wrentham he gathered about him a host of friends— men and women already distinguished in their profession, as well as young men and women hoping to become famous and much in need of his unfailing help. Many young writers owe their start to Mr. Chamberlin. But of course I have no right to express their gratitude. All I can say is that I am still learning from that book of nature, from that special page in it which he first interpreted for me. He is so inseparably associated with this corner of Massachusetts that I regard him as a habitant here and only a visitor in New York.

I understand that newspapers are not hospitable to radical and progressive ideas. Mr. Chamberlin’s thought, as he expresses it to his friends, is far in advance of his written work. His conscience is alive to the wrongs and perils of our social institutions. Long before I knew what it all meant, he talked with us about Socialism and William Morris’s “News from Nowhere.” The work of a journalist is for the greater part anonymous, so that Mr. Chamberlin’s name may be unknown to many readers of these words. The affections and services of friends are also anonymous. The influences which most ennoble and sweeten life may be hidden from fame; but they live immortal in other lives.

HELEN KELLER.

AGNES NESTOR

AMONG the throng drawn to the capitol of Illinois during the session of 1911 one figure, that of a gray-eyed, sweet-faced little working girl became familiar to every legislator, doorkeeper and page. To the casual visitor’s question as to who the girl in the gallery was the answer would have been:

“That's little Miss Nestor, Agnes Nestor, a glove maker by trade. She’s one of the girls that the Unions have sent down here to lobby for bill 440. “The Girls’ Bill” we call it. Two years ago she engineered a bill through the Legislature limiting the hours of women factory workers to ten a day. Now she wants us to give the same protection to girls in mercantile establishments, to telegraph and telephone operators and so forth. Pass? Of course it won’t pass. The employers will put up a great fight. It may get