Poetry

OH MILLERSVILLE! -- Fern Gravel --Prairie Press ($2).

Every so often some precocity in pigtails mesmerizes a U. S. publisher into printing her verse creations. The resultant rash on the nation's body poetic generally passes away as soon as the publisher's advertising appropriation has been spent. Oh Millersville! is a collection of juvenilia that no American will want to see pass away.

"Fern Gravel" was the pen name of a sub-teen authoress whose soul simultaneously exfoliated in and was griped by her Iowa home town, early in the 1900s. Her verses, now brought to light (she had entrusted them to the safekeeping of an adult confidant), are as good examples of dead-pan lyricism as have ever been printed.

Most of Fern Gravel's eager observation centred on Millersville's inhabitants; and most of these inhabitants she took exactly as they came:

My Sunday-school teacher

Is Miss Minnie King.

She is not of any use as a teacher

But I love to hear her sing.

A more disturbing character was Fern's uncle, a druggist who scandalized her and the "Reverent Mr. Dotson" by selling whiskey to town drunks. This unethical druggist kept a curious machine on his tobacco counter which Fern feared was unethical too.

My uncle has a cigar machine

There are holes around the edges and numbers in between.

Mr. Dotson says that such a thing

Is only a way of gambeling;

But my uncle says it is not.

A person puts a nickel in the slot And pushes a little handle down

And a little ball goes around and around,

And if it stops on the number zero

He gets three cigars, or on double o;

But if it is 5 or 19 or 33

My uncle has the nickel free. . . .

Oh Millersville! fleetingly depicts a town, an age, and a little poker-faced girl who was expected to be seen and not heard. Until her eleventh year she whispered her excited, and exciting, appraisals of things and people into her own ears and those of a friend. Then she dried up for good.

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