ABSTRACT
Jennie Hubble was both shocked and amused by the contents of the unmarked package she had discovered on the doorstep early one morning. Some anonymous prankster, bent on having the last laugh on “Little John,” had delivered a bottle of fine whiskey to the home of Wheaton’s most notorious teetotaler. A giggling Betsy rode around the neighborhood on her brother’s broad shoulders and assumed the same perch when Edwin took his three youngest sisters to the circus. He also bought tickets to Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird, the dreamy, melancholy fantasy based on the quest for the Blue Bird of Happiness by Tyltyl and Mytyl, the children of a poor woodcutter. On September 7, 1910, Edwin said his goodbyes and left Shelbyville by train, bound for Montreal. There he would join his fellow Rhodes Scholars and board the steamer Canada for the eleven-day voyage up the St. Lawrence and across the Atlantic.
