Three Short Cathers

OBSCURE DESTINIES--Willa Cather-- Knopf.

Neighbor Rosicky, when Doctor Burleigh told him he had a bad heart, said, "So? No, I guess my heart was always pretty good. I got a little asthma, maybe." A Bohemian farmer with Rosicky's resilient enjoyment of life was not likely to be much worried but Rosickv's wife made him sit in the kitchen and take life easy while his sons did the plowing. Rosicky's long habit of friendliness finally got the better of him. He thought the thistles ought to be cleared out of the alfalfa field on his son Rudolph's farm. "He put the horses to the buggy rake and set about raking up those thistles. He behaved with guilty caution. . . ." Two days later. Neighbor Rosicky was dead. He was buried in a little square of long grass that seemed right "for a man who had helped to do the work of great cities and had always longed for the open country and had got to it at last. . . ."

Old Mrs. Harris lived obscurely in her daughter's house, baking cakes and sleeping on a rickety settee. This state of affairs bothered the neighbors who thought Mrs. Templeton might treat her old mother more generously. It did not greatly disturb Mrs. Harris or Mrs. Templeton. Old Mrs. Harris remembered her big house in Tennessee whence the family had moved West. She took a quiet interest in the doings of her grandchildren, Victoria, Ronald, Adelbert. She was glad when Mrs. Rosen came over from next door to have a chat. When Mrs. Harris felt that she was going to die. she accepted this fact also with the wise fortitude which her daughter and granddaughter would have to await their own senility to acquire.

Two Friends, R. E. Dillon and J. H. Trueman, lived in a little wooden town in Kansas. They played checkers on winter nights, talked in the summer. Dillon-- Irish, arrogant, with a musically vibrating voice and a changeable grey eye--was the town's biggest banker. Trueman, solid and more of a sport, was a cattleman. Their friendship was impressive, impervious to differences in their characters. It had become as substantial as a monument before it ended, in a breath of anger over politics, the year Bryan first ran for President.

In these "three new stories of the West" Author Gather's readers may be surprised by discovering none of the pastel coloring of Shadows on the Rock. They are more in the tone of Author Gather's earlier books--My Antonia, A Lost Lady. With the rest of Author Gather's work, they share the charm of an artistry that is warm, simple and intelligent, the charm of a writer who feels about her characters somewhat as Doctor Burleigh feels about old Neighbor Rosicky: "The doctor picked up his stethoscope and frowned at it. ... He wished it had been telling tales about some other man's heart, some old man who didn't look the Doctor in the eye so knowingly, or hold out such a warm brown hand when he said goodbye. . . ."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.