BETWEEN the Grand Canyon and the ship there might be “many a slip,” especially as I was to conclude my guardianship of the travellers in my own town, prosaically placed in the great Mississippi Valley, which consists of two plains—one at the top and the other at the bottom, filled with corn and hogs, and most prosperous and contented people.

The place towards which we journeyed holds two things which are the biggest, most beautiful, and best things in the world—my home and my work, both of which my guests wished to see. I was anxious that they should; for there, if anywhere, they could come close to that I gloried in most, the American Spirit.

After the barren plains, the monotonous miles of sage-brush, and the long, straight stretches of railroad tracks, it was good to look upon green meadows and commodious farmhouses sheltered by groves of maple and elm, and surrounded by great fields of young corn just peeping above the black, rich clods.

During the last few hours of the trip the Herr Director thought every station at which the train stopped was our destination, and began gathering his various belongings. When finally we reached it he jumped out almost before the train stopped, so eager was he to see the place where he was to spend at least a fortnight, and really see the American home from the inside.

Again fortune favored me. It was early June. The air was soft from recent rains, the grassy lawns were wonderfully green; peonies were opening their buds, adding touches of color, snowballs hung thick upon the bushes, and blooming roses filled the air with sweet odors.

It seemed as if our neighbors had conspired to make the town ready for my distinguished visitors, and I could see that they enjoyed the peace of it, the friendliness of the park-like streets, the sight of well-kept homes set in gardens, and the cordial greetings of the people we met.

Their appreciation of all they saw before reaching the house, and their evident delight in the rooms prepared for them, not to mention their astonishment at finding their trunks awaiting them there, afforded me not only pleasure, but a great sense of relief; I felt that the race was won. I had faith to believe that they would be happy in our town of six thousand inhabitants, which is not unlike other places of the same size. It has its public park, two or three shopping streets, churches, schoolhouses, a few factories large and small, clubs, lodges, and all the things of which like towns may legitimately boast; yet it has a background peculiarly its own.

It was founded by an intrepid pioneer who brought a colony of New Englanders from the hills of Massachusetts to this treeless prairie, and with the imperious will of his race said: “Let there be a town!” And lumber was carted over miles of deep mud, cabins were built and there was a town.

And again he said: “Let there be a railroad!” And he diverted the course of a great railroad system miles out of its way, and there was a railroad.

And he said: “There must be no saloon in this place!” So more than half a century before strong drink was acknowledged to be a social and physical foe, he had seen its true nature and put prohibition into every deed of real estate, thus making it impossible for liquor to gain a foothold.

Years passed and he said: “Let there be a college!” and he brought one across the state, and there was a college; a young, infant thing just started by Christian missionaries who had come from the East, each of them to plant a church, all of them to plant a college.

This infant educational institution was put into its rude cradle in the midst of an unshaded campus, and when it had grown to generous size, with buildings to house it and trees to shade it, a cyclone swept the campus bare, and instead of a joyous Commencement, which was but a few days distant, there were funerals and desolation, wreck and ruin.

On a pile of dÉbris sat the same pioneer with a determined smile playing upon his face, and at once, while the tears upon the mourners’ cheeks were still wet, he and others like him began rebuilding the town and the college.

Those men now “rest from their labor” in that bit of rolling prairie saved from the plowmen and the harvester, and consecrated to hold our dead until the great day.

The morning after our arrival in Grinnell, the Herr Director and the Frau Directorin, who, during our travels, had little opportunity to indulge their fondness for exercise, walked out to the cemetery. It is a beautiful, well-kept spot, but half spoiled by crowding headstones. From it can be seen church steeples peeping through the elm trees which shelter the town; the ugly stand-pipe and the tall chimney of our one big factory. At our feet lay the little artificial lake where much fishing is done, and sometimes fish are caught. As far as we could see were prosperous farms with their comfortable homes, generous barns, turreted silos, and wide meadows where calves and colts grazed.

One of our virtues, the Herr Director thought, was that we do not boast about our dead. Whatever boasting we do, and we do not boast too much, it ceases when the earth covers us. He saw no fulsome eulogies carved upon the headstones; often nothing but a name and the two dates of birth and death.

In the face of that great and last achievement we are very humble and honest; although in our little cemetery lie buried men and women of whom I should like to boast. They were the great, real Americans who worked diligently, honestly and humbly, who left no huge fortunes to curse the next generation; but built their modest homes, and before the roof tree was lifted, had built a church and a schoolhouse. They put their tithes into the Lord’s treasury before they put money into a bank, and while they were still wading through mud, anchored the college upon a rock, making its growth and permanence their great extravagance.

They believed in an austere Christ, but believed in Him implicitly, followed Him consistently and left a legacy of simplicity, temperance and frugality.

Yes, I boasted of our dead to my guests. I boasted of that grim, fighting man whose name the town bears, who was the personification of the determined, American pioneer, the conqueror of mere circumstances.

I boasted of that firm, unyielding, controversial Calvinist, George F. Magoun, who ruled the college in his own stern way. He was the last, but not the least of his kind, who built deep and strong and straight upon the foundations of morality and religion; so that others could build loftily and boldly.

I led them to the grave where rests the body of his successor, the two differing from one another in opinions and method at every point; for the younger man was the forerunner of a new dispensation, its prophet, disciple and martyr. Yet both men were made of the same stern, unyielding stuff, and both rested their lives and the hope of life’s better things to come, upon the same foundation.

When the names of those Americans who prophesied the day of the Kingdom, who worked for it and suffered for it, shall be placed upon the honor roll, the name of George A. Gates, now carved upon a modest monument, will be found imperishably written there.

Near by, under the shade of slender white birches, we saw the simple shaft which marks the resting place of one of the Iowa Band, James J. Hill, who holds his place in the annals of the college, not only because he gave the first dollar to help found it, but because of the continued loyalty of his sons.

I wished my guests could have come to us before we buried the man whose life spanned the old and the new—the white-haired, ever youthful, eloquent teacher, Leonard F. Parker, who smiled benignly upon us all until his eyes closed forever, and with their closing, a benediction was gone. He was the type of missionary teacher who began his career in a log cabin, who, whether he taught in a country school or in a great State University, taught with a passion for men. The impress of his personality remained with his pupils long after they had forgotten his erudite lore.

As great as these great Americans were their wives, and no one can ever think of them as less than the equals of their husbands.

If the American woman occupies a unique place in the world, it is not only because the American man has been more generous than his European brother, but because she has proved her equality. She has attained the measure of rights and privileges still denied to most of her sisters elsewhere because she earned and deserved them.

We, the living, sons and daughters of these great teachers by birth and by adoption, cannot hold in too high esteem the legacy they left us. We do not know with as firm an assurance as we ought to know, how much we owe to them, and that, if we waste our inheritance, we waste spiritual forces which we cannot generate.

They were all, in the true sense, provincial, narrow men. They thought of America and of the world and of the world to come, in the terms of their creed, their town and their college; while we who have circled the globe and think in world terms first, and boast of wider vision and larger faith, may be in danger of overlooking the fact that in our small place and places like it may be decided the fate of America, and through America, the fate of the world.

The Herr Director was astonished and the Frau Directorin pained to find that we lived in a servantless house and in practically a servantless town; that we were our own cooks and housemaids, butlers and gardeners. When the Herr Director saw me mowing my lawn in broad daylight he wondered that I did not lose caste among my fellows.

The Frau Directorin was remarkably adaptable. She delighted in wielding the dustless mop (to reduce “the meat”), she dusted the bric-À-brac, and out of the kindness of her heart and in spite of our protests, became “first aid” to my wife.

One morning, just as I was waking, I heard the rattle of a lawn-mower under my window; not the quick, sharp, sustained noise which usually arouses the neighborhood, but a slow, measured sound, by fits and starts. In between I could hear puffing and panting, like that of a small steam engine. When I looked out of the window I saw something which my eyes could not believe. The Herr Director had begun mowing the lawn, and I let him finish it. It pretty nearly finished him; but after his bath and a generous American breakfast, he glowed from health and happiness.

“I never knew,” he said, “the elevating power of physical labor. I think I will take a lawn-mower home with me.”

The Frau Directorin put a damper upon his enthusiasm by reminding him that he would have to take a lawn home with him too, and more than that, the town itself; for in their environment he would not dare use the lawn-mower even if he had one.

I am quite sure now that the Herr Director would have liked to take my little town home with him, with the lawn-mower and the lawn. If he could have done so, he might have changed the course of empires.

I urged him, if he really wished to annex us, to do it soon; for there is no little danger that we, too, shall lose faith in the redemptive power of labor, the sufficiency of little things, the grandeur of plain living and high thinking, the exaltation of the humble, the inheritance for the meek and the reward of the righteous. When we lose those, we have lost that which, in our proud, provincial way, we call “The Grinnell Spirit”—an integral part of the American—the World-spirit.