Omaha Daily Bee Newspaper, August 31, 1902, Page 24

s v —— / VIEW OF THOMPSON'S POINT. JUSTICE BREWER AND HIS GRANDCHILDREN. HEN the president of the United States, during the course of his New England trip, visits his sec- - retary of the treasury in the lat- ter's summer home in Vermont, he will, perforce, be a guest on the poor farm of the town of Charlotte, Vermont. Mr. Shaw himself is one, and another {llus- . trious resident is David J. Brewer, asso- clate justice of the United States supreme court. The justice pays the town $10 a year for the privilege of squatting on the poor farm. The secretary of the treasury, who 18 at present living in another man's cot- tage, has his site selected and expecis to enter into an arrangement for the same extravagant rental. “Just where Theodore Roosevelt will be lodged is a problem that is stirring the most profound minds In the place; for the secretary's cottage has more sturdy demo- cratic simplicity than room; the justice’s cottage is full of grandchildren, who de- mand ample space for playing Indians and other games that would, no doubt, charm the president, but possibly would inter- fere with his peace as a guest; and the only hotel in the place is characterized by hospitality that is in Inverse ratio to its abilities in the line of lodging a president of the United States. ‘When the president enters the quiet pre- cincts of the Charlotte poor farm there is one thing that he will be forced to leave behind. That is his strenuous life. The woods, thick and great as they are, con- tain no catamounts nowadays, although old ‘Squire Atkins, who sits on the pler all day long, has some epics that he will pour into the presidential ear regarding certain passages of daring and danger that once tranepired between himself and sundry panthers and bears, when Mr. Atkins had not reached the age of 85 and when he used to prowl on the mountains full of ambition and ammunition. The fiercest creature in the lake Is the plke perch, which reaches enormous size, of the most versatile of Eng- lishmen is Sir Harry Thompson, the distinguished physician and surgeon. He has been an ex- hibitor of paintings in the Royal Academy and French salon. He is an authority on lMthotomy; he is an astron- omer &nd has a private observatory; he has written many works on surgical sub- jects and on other toples so diverse as “Food and Feeding” and “Motor Cars.” He bhas been professor of pathology and surgery In the Royal College of Surgeons, is president of the Cremation soclety and holds the appointment of surgeon ex- traordinary to the king of the Belgians. __._0_. Willlam Gould Brokaw, a New York so- clety man, Is spending $25,000 to put a small Japanese garden in his estate near Great Neck. Under a French gardener he is employing seventy skilled men on the plot, which is to be omly 200 feet It will contain all of the rare trees, shrubs and flowers native to Japan, and landscape design will be after the J models, There will be little but ve summer houses, tea pagodas and sheiters. The walks and lanes will as all fish do everywhere, but which, even in the memory of the oldest inhahitant has not been known to attack méan. In the hotel the president can indulge in the vices of buying chewing gum and cligars out of a time-honored case in a tiny office. On Sunday afternoons there is church service on the tavern porch. Sometimes a stray clergyman officiates. If the com- munity cannot catch a clergyman, some grave member of the congregation makes an impromptu address. .creury Shaw has been set down for one. Perhaps the president will have to officlate himself at a service. In addition to these dissipations the president can take walks along the banks of the lake. He can even hire a horse and wagon belonging to the poor farm. When all these joys have been tasted to the dregs he can visit the one and only inmate of the farm, who dwells there of inalienable right, being the single, soli- tary, lone pauper of Charlotte, He is an anclent man, much given to abstract thinking, and passing hie days in idyllic ways by watching the money rolling in from the rental pald by the squatters and campers, while the score of poor farm cows busily fatten themselves, nature and man thus combining unselfishly to sup- port him amply. This remarkable place for a president's visit is known as Thompson's Point. It juts out into a most beautiful part of Lake Champlain, and bas the combined charms of lake and mountain scenery to make it lovely. For about three-quarters of a mile the Point is composed of rocks and woods, with just enough soll to nourish the trees. ‘Being quite useless for agriculture, the town conceived the idea of laying it out In half acre lots for campers, who can rent a plot for $10 a year, with a lease for fifteen years. There are thirty-two camps and cottages scattered among the trees now, bul there 18 so much wilderness that they barely serve SUNDAY SERVICE ON TAVERN PORCH. SECRETARY SHAW'S DINING ROOM. to do more than to accentuate the primitive naturs of ths land. Secretary Shaw has become an enthusiast and if the president should attempt to talk high finance with him, the chances are that the conversation will insist on turn- ing to the place that Mr. Shaw has se- lected for his home. At present he and his family occupy the Roberts’ cottage. It is owned by a Connecticut minister. The boss of the country's mints lives as simply as any farmer on his visits there. He gets up every morning at 6 o'clock and rambles around the place as if there were no such thing as a dollar in the world. Almost every morning he takes a long walk through the woods. Sometimes he goes fishing. Mr. Shaw is a religious man, however, and it is quite impossibe to lure him into committing himself as to the weights of those that he catches or the bigger ones that got away. Wherever he goes, except when he goes fishing, he is accompanied by the ‘‘best wo- man in the world.” The best woman in the world recently eat on the rustic porch of the little cottage, and, full cf pride in her husband and love for him, she told how once—!long before Iowa elected him to the chair of governor—he sent her a letter while he was away from home. He dia not address it to her by name. The ad- dress on the envelope was simply: “The Best Woman in the World, Des Moines, Iowa.” And, sald the happy woman, with laugh- ter in which delight and sentiment were prettily mingled, the letter was delivered to her without question. The postoffice folk knew Mr. Shaw’s handwriting, and even the officlal mind knew that to him there was only one woman like that. Mr. Shaw has Installed an official looking desk in the small room called a library, more for convenience in referring to it than for any attributes that deserve the name. The desk is the only plece of fur. niture in the place that suggests business. The antique tidy holds the fort there, and Secretary Shaw SECRETARY SHAW AND HIS DAUGHTERS. TAVERN, POBTOF.FICE AND GENERAL STORE. from carpet to print curtains everything is redoient of “ ‘way back in Vermount.” The dining room is even simpler than the library. The table is covered with a red and white checked cloth, and the decora- tions are of the land. It looks like a room in a nice country boarding house. Justice Brewer lives in his own house— at.least as much of it as his grandchil- dren will let him own. Mestly they climb over the porch and the trees and the jus- tice with generous impartiality. He likes it. Injunctions do not issue there, and if they did they ‘“‘wouldn’t go.” The justice is a satisfying sight when he sallies forth to the tavern. He does not go there for the purposes that one might suspect from this bald statement. He goes there for his mail, the tavern being the hotel, general store, Sunday meeting place and postoffice combined. The postmistress is the wife of Martin Willlams, the tavern keeper. She thinks that there is nobody like the justice. He wears a fine aged cap with flap. Under it his white hair sticks out in true Green mountain style, hallowed since the days of the Green Mountain boys of '76. He sticks to the frock coat, but wears it as frock coats are worn in the country stores and not as they are worn in Washington. In common with the rest of the popu- lace, the justice indulges twice a day in the excitement of seeing the steamboat Chateaguay arrive from Burlington. Cha- teaguay always brings some stirring sur- prise, from a piece of real mnews of the cutside world to a barrel of potatoes. While Secretary Shaw is an old Ver- monter, having attended school in Stowe and having been in business in Burling- ton, the justice is not a whit behind him in patriotic fervor. Although he is a Kan- sas man, he signs himself “Son-in-Law of Vermont,” because he is married to a Vermont woman. Both of thew are full of the lore of the lake and the mountains. They know all about the ancient Narrows, the beautiful People in the Limelight of Publicity be winding, but all in an exact system. The plans have not all been made public, but Mr. Brokaw expects to have the Japanese flower garden completed in the early fall. + Willlam H. Garland, now living at Wash- ington at the age of 93 years, entered the navy when a youth and served several years on forelgn stations. He visited Napoleon at St. Helena and has seen every president of the United States except Washington. When the civil war broke out he responded to the call for volunteers and served till the close of the war. He was instrumental in having female nurses substituted for male nurses in the government hospitals and homes. He lost his efitire family, con- sisting of wife and four children, in the flood at Evansville, Ind., in 1884. He him- self escaped by climbing a tree, where he remained thirty-six hours. He is receiving & pension of $12 a month, on which he sub- siets, .—0—_ Leopold, king of the Belgians, is an en- thusiastic pedestrian, and, furthermore, is fond of making long excursions, afoot and incognito, in the country regiom surround- ing Bruseels. It is related that once he dropped into a wayside inn, where, sur- rounded by an admiring throng, a braggart farmer was offering to back himself for 20 francs to walk ten miles against anyone present. Percelving himself unknown, the king took up the challenge, the couple agreeing to walk to the fifth milestone and back. Off they went, and such good prog- ress did the royal athlete make that he reached the halfway goal over a quarter of a mile ahead. Then depositing on the stone a 20-franc plece, as an indication that he relinquished the contest, he con- tinued on his way at an increased pace and was soon lost in the distance, —_— J. B. Bishop, in a character sketch of the late Lawrence Godkin, editor of the New York Evening Post, in the Sebtember Cen- tury, says: Nothing delighted him more than what he was fond of calling “journal- istic rows.” When one of these broke out between two or more contemporaries, he always followed it with intense enjoyment, and sooner or later fairly itched to take a hand in it. The “joy of combat,” in- herited in the Irish Dblood, was strong In him, and he knew he must watch it. Re- peatedly, when & “row” was on, he would write something about it, just by way of trial, and then take advice. If you sald in criticism that in writing about it he had committed some of the most flagrant of the offenses that he had for years been assalling as the leading characteristics of these “rows,” he would burst into a roar of laughter and say, “Well, I am afraid that is so, but I really should like to show what a pair of humbugs they are.” But he would destroy his “‘copy,” nevertheless. Never was his enjoyment of a “row” keener than when he himself was the object of at- tack, as was very often the case. He would read all the hard things said of him in one paper after another, fairly shaking with pleasure, and then say: “What a delight- ful lot they are! We must stir them up again.” If the able ed tors who thought they were making him miserable with their “scathing” attacks upon him as “Larry” Godkin could have seen him under these conditions, they would have been greatly astonished. o Colonel Amasa A. Sprague, who dled a few daye ago in East Greenwich, R. 1., wus a brother of Rhode Island's War governor, William Sprague. The brothers were at inlet between Thompson’s Point and the famous Split rock, which once was the boundary of the Algonquins and the Iro- quois, its crossing by either tribe being considered as invasion and meaning war. Secretary Shaw probably will tell the president of the Indlan version of the story of “Hero and Leander” that is woven around this spot. There was an Indian Hero. She was an Iroquois. There was an Indian Leander. He was a Mohawk. The Mohawk Leander used to swim this Vermont Hellespont to woo his Hero. One dark and stormy night the black waters that lie deep and cold at the base of the cleft held him in their wel embrace, and the Iroquois Hero waited in vain until the yellow dawn came over the hills. She found him on the rocks, and the Indian story says that her mouth never smiled and her eyes never looked love again, They named the Cleft Rock after him— Re-gloch-ne; the point opposite they named for her—Re-gio-cine. Southeast of the point is a large bay, which was called the “Bay of Vessels.” The fleets mustered during the French and Indian wars met there. Strange fleets they were—great war canoes full of painted, silent men—dugouts with the straightest and keenest and bravest men of Europe— crafts of adventurers, and gzealots and marauders and civilizers all bent together on the one errand of war. Did the eye of any dreamer among them see a vision of the nation whose peacefu! government i{s so simply represented there this year? In those days the land was full of deer and the lake was full of fish. The big wall-eyed pike or pike perch still are plen- tiful, and specimens measuring more thgn | two feet have been taken frequently. Thbeh‘ are no deer nowadays, but that anclent man, "Squire Atkins, knows of times when there were lots of them, and he stands prepared to tell Theodore Roosevelt the full and plaln facts concerning them. one time among the most noted men in America. About the time of the civil war they were worth close to $20,000,000, an enormous fortune in those days. Their cot- ton and print goods establishment pros- pered until the crash came in 1873. They had made investments of doubtful stability and they failed for $8,500,000. The estate was worth double that amount, but through costly litigation it wae practically frittered away. ! —— In a recent lecture on his countrymen Wu Ting Fang made some pungent com- ment on Bret Harte's famous line, *““The Heathen Chinee is Peculiar.” Mr. Wu sald: “From your point of view this is true, but from ours you are peculiar. In China we accept a man’s word in business transactions, here you exact a writing from him. Since foreigners have been doing 80 much business in China native mer- chants have learned to demand some kind of writing from them. We respect age, while you seem to give most respect to money, muscle and brawn. From your polat of view Hercules is a hero. The Chinese do not think so. Pecullar, isn't it?