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                           HEROES OF TO-DAY

           [Illustration: John Muir among his beloved trees]




                           HEROES OF TO-DAY

                 JOHN MUIR ⁂ JOHN BURROUGHS ⁂ WILFRED
                  GRENFELL ⁂ ROBERT F. SCOTT ⁂ SAMUEL
                       PIERPONT LANGLEY ⁂ EDWARD
                   TRUDEAU ⁂ BISHOP ROWE ⁂ JACOB A.
                       RIIS ⁂ HERBERT C. HOOVER
                        RUPERT BROOKE ⁂ GEORGE
                              W. GOETHALS

                                  BY
                            MARY R. PARKMAN

                 Author of “Heroines of Service,” etc.

                           ILLUSTRATED WITH
                              PHOTOGRAPHS

                            [Illustration]

                               NEW YORK
                            THE CENTURY CO.
                                 1917


                       Copyright, 1916, 1917, by
                            THE CENTURY CO.

                      _Published September, 1917_


                                  TO
                               MY FATHER




FOREWORD


Once, when I had been telling a group of children some stories of the
heroes of old, one of the number who had always followed the tales with
breathless interest, said:

“Tell us the story of a hero of to-day!”

“There are no heroes to-day, no _real_ heroes, are there?” put in
another. “Oh, of course I know there are great men who do important
things,” he added, “but there isn’t any _story_ to what they do, is
there?--anything like the daring deeds of the knights and vikings, or of
the American pioneers?”

Of course I tried to tell the children that the times in which we live
bring out as true hero stuff as any time gone by. Nay, I grew quite
eloquent in speaking of the many phases of our complex modern life with
its many duties, its new conscience, its new feeling of individual
responsibility for the welfare of all.

Then I told the stories of some of the heroes who are fighting “in the
patient modern way,” not against flesh and blood with sword and spear,
but against the unseen enemies of disease and pestilence; against the
monster evils of ignorance, poverty and injustice. We decided that the
“modern viking,” Jacob Riis, had a story that was as truly adventurous
as those of the plundering vikings of long ago; that Dr. Grenfell, the
strong friend of Labrador, had certainly proved that life might be a
splendid adventure; and that the account of Captain Scott’s noble
conquest of every danger and hardship, and at the last of disappointment
and defeat itself, was indeed an “undying story.” Joyously we followed
the trail of that splendid hero of the heights, John Muir, and of that
gentle lover of the friendly by-paths of Nature, John Burroughs, and
found that there was no spot in woods or fields, among mountains or
streams, that did not have its wonder tale. The stories of those brave
souls--like Edward Trudeau, the good physician of Saranac, and Samuel
Pierpont Langley, the inventor of the heavier-than-air flying-machine,
who struggled undaunted in the face of failure for a success that only
those who should come after them might enjoy, were particularly
inspiring. From them we turned to the heroic figure of the
“prophet-engineer,” General Goethals, who proved that faith and
perseverance can truly remove mountains; and Herbert C. Hoover, master
of mines and of men, whose great talent for organization and efficient
management brought bread to starving millions.

Carlyle has said that “the history of what man has accomplished in this
world is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.”
When the real history of our day is written, will it not be seen that
some of its most important and significant chapters are those which have
nothing to do with great cataclysms, such as the wars of nation against
nation? Will it not be seen that the victories of peace are not only “no
less renowned than war,” but that they are, in truth, the most enduring?
These “heroes of to-day”--doctor, naturalist, explorer, missionary,
engineer, inventor, journalist, patriot--workers for humanity in many
places and in many ways, are indeed

    “A glorious company, the flower of men,
     To serve as model for the mighty world,
     And be the fair beginning of a time.”




CONTENTS


CHAPTER                                                             PAGE

I THE LAIRD OF SKYLAND: JOHN MUIR                                      3

II THE SEER OF WOODCHUCK LODGE: JOHN BURROUGHS                        31

III THE DEEP-SEA DOCTOR: WILFRED GRENFELL                             53

IV THE CAPTAIN OF HIS SOUL: CAPTAIN SCOTT                             81

V A MODERN VIKING: JACOB RIIS                                        105

VI A PIONEER OF THE OPEN: EDWARD L. TRUDEAU                          133

VII “THE PROPHET-ENGINEER”: GEORGE WASHINGTON GOETHALS               163

VIII A SHEPHERD OF “THE GREAT COUNTRY”: BISHOP ROWE                  201

IX A HERO OF FLIGHT: SAMUEL PIERPONT LANGLEY                         233

X A POET-SOLDIER: RUPERT BROOKE                                      263

XI A CITIZEN OF THE WORLD: HERBERT C. HOOVER                         295




ILLUSTRATIONS


                                                                    PAGE

John Muir Among His Beloved Trees                          _Frontispiece_

John Muir and John Burroughs in the Yosemite Valley                   25

Dr. Wilfred T. Grenfell                                               55

The Hospital at St. Anthony, Northern Newfoundland                    66

Captain Robert F. Scott                                               87

Jacob A. Riis                                                        110

The Jacob A. Riis Settlement                                         119

Edward L. Trudeau                                                    146

First Sanitarium Cottage Built                                       155

Major Goethals                                                       178

The “Man of Panama” at Panama                                        195

Bishop Peter T. Rowe                                                 213

Samuel P. Langley                                                    248

Rupert Brooke                                                        274

Herbert C. Hoover                                                    300

The Belgian Children’s Christmas Card                                317




THE LAIRD OF SKYLAND: JOHN MUIR

    Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.
    Nature’s peace will flow into you
    As sunshine into trees;
    The winds will blow their freshness into you,
    And the storms their energy;
    While cares will drop off like autumn leaves.
               JOHN MUIR.




HEROES OF TO-DAY




THE LAIRD OF SKYLAND


A small Scotch laddie was scrambling about on the storm-swept, craggy
ruins of Dunbar Castle. He was not thinking of the thousand years that
had passed over the grim fortress, or of the brave deeds, celebrated in
legend and ballad, that its stones had witnessed. He was glorying in his
own strength and daring that had won for him a foothold on the highest
of the crumbling peaks, where he could watch the waves dash in spray,
and where, with out-flung arms and face aglow with exultation, he felt
himself a part of the scene. Sea, sky, rocks, and wild, boy heart seemed
mingled together as one.

Little John Muir loved everything that was wild. The warnings and
“skelpings” of his strict father could not keep him within the safe
confines of the home garden. The true world was beyond--the salt
meadows, with nests of skylarks and field-mice, the rocky pools along
the shore where one might find crabs, eels, and all sorts of interesting
scaly creatures. But above all, there were the rocky heights where one
might climb.

Sometimes the truant was sent to bed without his supper. But even then
he made opportunities for climbing feats. In company with his little
brother David, John played games of “scootchers” (dares) in which the
boys crept out of their dormer-windows and found congenial
mountaineering exercise on the slate roof, sometimes hanging from the
eaves by one hand, or even--for an instant--by a single finger.

It was only on Saturdays and during vacations, however, that these lads
could taste the delights of roving. Johnnie Muir’s school-days began
when he was not quite three years old. Can you picture the sturdy infant
trudging along, with the sea-wind blowing out behind him like a flag the
little green bag that his mother had hung around his neck to hold his
first book? This infant had already learned his letters, however, from
the shop signs, and it was not long before he passed the first
mile-stone and spelled his way into the second book. When eight years
old, John entered the grammar-school. Here he studied Latin and French,
besides English, history, geography, and arithmetic. In regard to the
methods employed, this doughty Scotchman used to say, with a twinkle:
“We were simply driven pointblank against our books like a soldier
against the enemy, and sternly ordered: ‘Up and at ’em! Commit your
lessons to memory!’ If we failed in any part, however slight, we were
whipped, for the grand, simple, Scotch discovery had been made that
there was a close connection between the skin and the memory, and that
irritating the skin excited the memory to any required degree.”

From the school playground the boys loved to watch the ships at sea and
guess where they were bound. In stormy weather, that brought the salt
spume from the waves over the wall, they often saw the brave vessels
tossed against the rocky shore. Many of John’s school-books showed ships
at full sail on the margins, particularly the one that stirred his
imagination most--the reader which told about the forests of America,
with their wonderful birds and sugarmaple trees.

One evening, when John and David were loyally trying to forget dreams of
voyages to magic lands where brave adventure awaited one at every turn,
and master their lessons for the next day, their father came into the
room with wonderful news.

“Bairns,” he said, “you need na learn your lessons the nicht, for we’re
gaen to America the morn!”

How the words sang in their hearts! “America the morn!” Instead of
grammar, a land where sugar-trees grew in ground full of gold; with
forests where myriads of eagles, hawks, and pigeons circled about
millions of birds’ nests; where deer hid in every thicket; and where
there was never a gamekeeper to deny a lad the freedom of the woods!

Only their grandfather looked troubled, and said in a voice that
trembled more than usual: “Ah, puir laddies! Ye’ll find something else
ower the sea forby gold and birds’ nests and freedom frae lessons.
Ye’ll find plenty of hard, hard work.”

But nothing could cast a shadow on their joy. “I’m gaen to Amaraka the
morn!” they shouted to their envying, doubting schoolmates.

It took six weeks and a half for the old-fashioned sailing-vessel to
cross the Atlantic. The father had taken three of the children, John,
David, and Sarah, to help him make a home in the wilderness for the rest
of the family. The spot selected was near Kingston, Wisconsin, then
settled only by a few scattered, hardy pioneers. Here, with the help of
their nearest neighbors, they built in a day a cabin of rough, bur-oak
logs.

This hut was in the midst of the woods which fringed a flowery meadow
and a lake where pond-lilies grew. The boys had not been at home an hour
before they discovered a bluejay’s nest with three green eggs, and a
woodpecker’s hole, and began to make acquaintance with the darting,
gliding creatures of springs and lake.

“Here,” said John Muir, “without knowing it, we were still at school;
every wild lesson a love lesson, not whipped but charmed into us.”

Soon farm life began in earnest. Fields were cleared and plowed; a frame
house was built on the hill; and the mother with the younger children
came to join these pioneers. It would seem that the long days of
unceasing toil--planting, hoeing, harvesting, splitting rails, and
digging wells--that retarded the growth of the active lad would have
completely quenched the flickerings of his wild, eager spirit. But he
managed to absorb, in the most astonishing way, the lore of woods and
fields and streams, until the ways of birds, insects, fishes, and wild
plant-neighbors were as an open book to him.

It was not long before his alert mind began to hunger for a real
knowledge of the books which in his childish days he had studied without
understanding. He read not only the small collection of religious books
that his father had brought with him from Scotland, but also every stray
volume that he could borrow from a neighbor.

When John was fifteen, he discovered that the poetry in the Bible, in
Shakespeare, and in Milton could give something of the same keen joy
that a Sunday evening on a hilltop made him feel, when sunset and rising
moon and the hushed voices of twilight were all mingled in one thrilling
delight. All beauty was one, he found.

The noble lines echoed in his memory as he cradled the wheat and raked
the hay. The precious opportunities for reading were stolen five minutes
at a time when he lingered in the kitchen with book and candle after the
others had gone to bed. Night after night his father would call with
exasperated emphasis: “John, do you expect me to call you every night?
You _must_ go to bed when the rest do.”

One night as he descended on the boy with more than usual sternness his
anger was somewhat disarmed when he noticed that the book in question
was a Church history. “If you _will_ read,” he added, “get up in the
morning. You may get up as early as you like.”

That night John went to bed wondering how he was going to wake himself
in order to profit by this precious permission. Though his was the sound
sleep of a healthy boy who had been splitting rails in the snowy woods,
he sprang out of bed as if roused by a mysterious reveille long before
daylight, and, holding his candle to the kitchen clock, saw that it was
only one o’clock.

“Five hours to myself!” he cried exultingly. “It is like finding a
day--a day for my very own!”

Realizing that his enthusiasm could not suffice to keep him warm in the
zero weather, and that his father would certainly object to his making a
fire, he went down cellar, and, by the light of a tallow dip, began work
on the model of a self-setting sawmill that he had invented.

“I don’t think that I was any the worse for my short ration of sleep and
the extra work in the cold and the uncertain light,” he said; “I was far
more than happy. Like Tam o’ Shanter I was glorious--‘O’er all the ills
of life victorious.”

When his sawmill was tested in a stream that he had dammed up in the
meadow, he set himself to construct a clock that might have an
attachment connected with his bed to get him up at a certain hour in the
morning. He knew nothing of the mechanism of timepieces beyond the laws
of the pendulum, but he succeeded in making a clock of wood, whittling
the small pieces in the moments of respite from farm-work. At length the
“early-rising machine” was complete and put in operation to his
satisfaction. There was now no chance that the weary flesh would betray
him into passing a precious half-hour of his time of freedom in sleep.

“John,” said his father, who had but two absorbing interests, his stern
religion and his thriving acres, “John, what time is it when you get up
in the morning?”

“About one o’clock,” replied the boy, tremblingly.

“What time is that to be stirring about and disturbing the whole
family?”

“You told me, Father--” began John.

“I know I gave you that miserable permission,” said the man with a
groan, “but I never dreamed that you would get up in the middle of the
night.”

The boy wisely said nothing, and the blessed time for study and
experimentation was not taken away.

Even his father seemed to take pride in the hickory clock that he next
constructed. It was in the form of a scythe to symbolize Time, the
pendulum being a bunch of arrows to suggest the flight of the minutes. A
thermometer and barometer were next evolved, and automatic contrivances
to light the fire and to feed the horses at a given time.

One day a friendly neighbor, who recognized that the boy was a real
mechanical genius, advised him to take his whittled inventions to the
State Fair at Madison. There two of his wooden clocks and the
thermometer were given a place of honor in the Fine Arts Hall, where
they attracted much attention. It was generally agreed that this
farm-boy from the backwoods had a bright future.

A student from the university persuaded the young inventor that he might
be able to work his way through college. Presenting himself to the dean
in accordance with this friendly advice, young Muir told his story,
explaining that except for a two-month term in the country he had not
been to school since he had left Scotland in his twelfth year. He was
received kindly, given a trial in the preparatory department, and after
a few weeks transferred to the freshman class.

During the four years of his college life John Muir made his way by
teaching school a part of each winter and doing farm-work summers. He
sometimes cut down the expense of board to fifty cents a week by living
on potatoes and mush, which he cooked for himself at the dormitory
furnace. Pat, the janitor, would do anything for this young man who
could make such wonderful things. Years afterward he pointed out his
room to visitors and tried to describe the wonders it had contained. It
had, indeed, looked like a branch of the college museum, with its
numerous botanical and geological specimens and curious mechanical
contrivances.

Although he spent four years at the State University, he did not take
the regular course, but devoted himself chiefly to chemistry, physics,
botany, and geology, which, he thought, would be most useful to him.
Then, without graduating, he started out “on a glorious botanical and
geological excursion which has lasted,” he said, in concluding the story
of his early life, “for fifty years and is not yet completed.”

He journeyed afoot to Florida, sleeping on the ground wherever night
found him. “I wish I knew where I was going,” he wrote to a friend who
asked about his plans. “Only I know that I seem doomed to be ‘carried of
the spirit into the wilderness.’”

Because he loved the whole fair earth and longed to know something of
the story that its rocks and trees might tell, he wandered on and on.
After going to Cuba, a siege of tropical fever, contracted by sleeping
on swampy ground, caused him to give up for a time a cherished plan to
make the acquaintance of the vegetation along the Amazon.

“Fate and flowers took me to California,” he said. He found there his
true Florida (Land of Flowers), and he found, also, what became the
passion of his life and his life work--the noble mountains, the great
trees, and the marvelous Yosemite. Here he lived year after year,
climbing the mountains, descending into the cañons, lovingly, patiently
working to decipher the story of the rocks, and to make the wonder and
beauty which thrilled his soul a heritage for mankind forever.

He lived for months at a time in the Yosemite Valley, whose marvels he
knew in every mood of sunshine, moonlight, dawn, sunset, storm, and
winter whiteness of frost and snow. He would wander for days on the
heights without gun or any provisions except bread, tea, a tin cup,
pocket-knife, and short-handled ax.

Once, on reading a magazine article by an enthusiastic young
mountain-climber, who dilated upon his thrilling adventures in scaling
Mount Tyndall, Mr. Muir commented dryly: “He must have given himself a
lot of trouble. When I climbed Tyndall, I ran up and back before
breakfast.”

At a time when trails were few and hard to find, he explored the Sierra,
which, he said, should be called, not the Nevada, or Snowy Range, but
the Range of Light. When night came,