Ephemera: Century in a school book...

The book is falling apart, its cloth cover tattered, its pages brittle, its markings faded.

It has a burned patch near the center, evidence of a fire; it had been consigned to a trash bin with a hundred other old books and ledgers taken from a lumber company storehouse and was one of only a few rescued from the flame.

It contains the elementary studies of a child, Ethel Louise Hauss of Century, from Nov. 2, 1914, to July 5, 1915 — her careful penmanship for lessons in grammar, history, spelling, arithmetic, literature, natural sciences, art and more. Her father was CEO of the lumber company that built Century at the turn of the 20th century.

The book contains her personality, her innocence. It projects her fondness for family and friends. It holds in its disintegrating pulpwood pages the stuff of a child’s life.

She describes her room on the third floor of her home: "From the large window that faces the south and west, I can see the smoke from the mill, piles of lumber, roofs of the houses and the crowns of many trees."

An essay about her cat specifies it has "two ears, two eyes, one nose, one mouth, a tail, four feet" and "can see better at night than in the daytime." And there’s her pet squirrel, Nutkins, for whom Papa had a fine cage made.

"It is cruel to keep animals in cages," she decides, and then adds, "I wish I was one of the Morris children in Beautiful Joe because they have so many pets."

Her friend, Henry, had a large white goat named Billy. They hitched Billy to a cart one day, but the lines broke when the goat tried pulling the children in a cart.

Another essay, The Travels of a Water Nymph, purports to be a tale of Ethel becoming lost in the woods, following a brook, catching fish, and at last coming upon some men building a raft of logs. "We all got on board and floated down the river to the mill," she writes.

She depicts a spontaneous Saturday picnic under a tree: The children asked their mothers for food, and they spread a blanket on the ground. "We had bread and butter, apples, milk, water, cake, cookies and many other things I can’t remember."

She describes the post office — a small building, painted white, with six windows for plenty of light — which she visited every morning. "I want to be a post-mistress," she writes.

Ethel married and lived for many years in nearby Brewton, Ala. She and her husband made significant donations of money and artwork to Auburn University.

She did not become a "postmistress."

Peace.

(The preceding appeared as my "Undercurrents" column in The News Herald, Sunday, May 9, 2004.)