d crannies of the old house. Something depressing,
repellent, was in the air. My sense of joy, my feeling of comfort in its
seclusion were gone.

"Never again will this be a restful home for you or for me," I declared
to my daughter. "Its shadow is now an enemy, its isolation a menace." To
my wife I said, "Let us go back to the city where the highest type of
medical science is at the end of the telephone wire."

She consented, and taking the child in my arms, I left the village with
no intention of ever returning to it. The fire on my family altar seemed
dead, never again to be rekindled.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The Old Soldier Gains a New Granddaughter

For nearly two years I did not even see the Homestead. My aversion to it
remained almost a hatred. The memory of those desolate weeks of
quarantine when my little daughter suffered all the agonies of death,
still lingered over its walls, a poisonous shadow which time alone could
remove. "I shall never live in it again," I repeated to my friends, and
when some one wanted to rent it for the summer I consented--with a
twinge of pain I must confess, for to open it to strangers even for a
few weeks seemed an act of disloyalty to the memory of my mother.

Meanwhile I remained a moderately happy and very busy citizen of
Chicago. Not content with esthetic conditions and in the belief that my
home for years to come must be somewhere in the city's confines, I had
resolved to establish a Club which should be (like the Players in New
York) a meeting place for artists and writers, a rallying point for
Midland Arts. Feeling very keenly the lack of such a rendezvous I said
to Lorado, "I believe the time has come when a successful literary and
artistic club can be established and maintained."

The more I pondered on the situation, the greater the discrepancy
between the Chicago of my day and the Boston of my father's day became.
"Why was it that the Boston of 1860, a city of three hundred thousand
people, should have been so productive of great writers, while this
vast inland metropolis of over two million of people remains almost
negligible in the world of Art and Letters?"

Fuller, who refused, characteristically, to endorse my plan, was openly
discouraging. To him the town was a pestilential slough in which he, at
any rate, was inextricably mired, and though he was not quite so
definite with me, he said to others, "Garland's idea is sure to fail."

Clarkson, Browne an