Maine Farmer

A FEW FOOLISH ONES--Gladys Hasty Carroll--Macmillan ($2.50).

According to U. S. political tradition, Massachusetts is a rock, Maine a weathervane.

In A Few Foolish Ones, Author Carroll bothers her readers with no more political implications than she did in As the Earth Turns, but both these novels might be taken as regretful commentaries on New England's changing folkways. Author Carroll's sympathies are conservative; the "few foolish ones" of her title refer to the dwindling minority who remain stubbornly loyal to the old U. S. traditions. She compares them to birds whose love of home overcomes their fear of winter. Like As the Earth Turns, A Few Foolish Ones is a quiet and well-told tale of the second rank.

Gus Bragdon, Maine farmer, had a long day. Its morning began in 1870, when Gus was merely the youngest of the Bragdon boys, farming his few stony acres when the weather would let him, working in the winter at the Navy Yard at Kittery. The Blaines, aristocrats of the neighborhood, looked down on the Bragdons as closefisted grubbers; so did everyone else but the no-account Linscotts. But the Bragdons had never been whiffle-minded, and Gus was the least whiffle-minded of the lot. He went his taciturn way, refused to get religion, left the church when his brethren's intolerance got too foolish for him. He worked long hours, salted away his cash, traded shrewdly in wood lots.

Noon of Gus's day found him with broader acres, a growing family, big holdings in wood lots; he was now a power in the community. A fire cleaned out most of his beloved trees; Gus said nothing much but went on adding to his holdings. His daughter Kate could have married the last of the Blaines if she had really wanted him, but she was too much a chip of the old block to try domesticating a wanderer. Gus's evening found him unchanged as ever, hardened irrevocably in his ways. A grandfather now, with his children leaving home for the specious advantages of town, foreigners and automobiles invading his old-fashioned peace and wont, Gus was rightly reputed richest man in the countryside, but it never affected his clothes or his habits. He still worked hard, took his butter and eggs to market himself, pulled his own teeth.

When he knew his long day was almost over Gus cashed in shrewdly on his wood-lot holdings, arranged all his affairs like the solid old Yankee he was. Then he got his daughter Kate to cook him the kind of food he always liked: beans and bannock, with plenty of pepper. As his dying remark he murmured one of the family's favorite jokes.

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