Modern Essays for Schools Author:Christopher Morley Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MARY WHITE By William Allen White Mary White—ons seems to know her after reading this sketch written by her father on the day she was buried—would surely hav... more »e laughed unbelievingly if told she would be in a book of this sort, together with Joseph Conrad, one of whose books lay on her table. But the pen, in the honest hand, has always been mightier than the grave. This is not the sort of thing one wishes to mar with clumsy comment. It was written for the Emporia Gazette, which William Allen White has edited since 1895. He is one of the best- known, most public-spirited and most truly loved of American journalists. He and his fellow-Kansan, E. W. Howe of Atchison, are two characteristic figures in our newspaper world, both masters of that vein of canny, straightforward, humane and humorous simplicity that seems to be a Kansas birthright. Mr. White was born in Emporia in 1868. The Associated Press reports carrying the news of Mary White's death declared that it came as the result of a fall from a horse. How she would have hooted at that! She never fell from a horse in her life. Horses have fallen on her and with her—"I'm always trying to hold 'em in my lap," she used to say. But she was proud of few things, and one was that she could ride anything that had four legs and hair. Her death resulted not from a fall, but from a blow on the head which fractured her skull, and the blow came from the limb of an overhanging tree on the parking. The last hour of her life was typical of its happiness. She came home from a day's work at school, topped off by a hard grind with the copy on the High School Annual, and felt that a ride would refresh her. She climbed into her khakis, chattering to her mother about the work she was doing, and hurried to get her horse and be out on the d...« less