CHAPTER 34
Thomas Howell and John Reed
A botanist whom fate would cheat
By putting him in the grocery trade
In village stores and south Hood Street
Where all day long he measured and weighed—
And dreams be naught that housewives cook.
He murmured not, but simply took
Twenty-one long years, to make a book,
And didn't stop till it was made.
Rhymes of Research.
Place over him a stone
And write with a soft sigh,
"For people not my own
I laid me down to die."
marya zaturensky.
They were two widely different men of Portland: one magnetic and light-hearted, with money and social position, who accomplished things dashingly and easily by instinctive genius; the other of ungregarious personality and touched by the contagion of Oregon somberness, with scant earnings and without social status, who put into his thick book the most work that has ever gone into an Oregon volume; one with clubs named after him in many cities and looked upon by the foreign nation he died for in somewhat the same way as Byron in Greece and Lafayette in America; the other simply recorded year after year in the annual catalogue of a university for the great gift that he gave—one buried in the Kremlin in Moscow; the other occupying an obscure grave in Vancouver, Washington; one John Reed, the revolutionist; the other Thomas Howell, the botanist. There is a meaning for a cultural soil when it can be recorded that two such significant and divergent personalities were nurtured in Portland, one for twenty years, the other much
