Page:Cartoons by Bradley.djvu/27

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

there. Tent life did not end for them until the rattlesnakes came out at the end of winter and insisted on sharing their living quarters and drinking water from the same spring.

On returning to Chicago Mr. and Mrs. Bradley lived in Evanston for some years, but in 1909 they built a home in Wilmette, on the lake shore. There are four children: Francis, John Freeman, Sarah Elizabeth, and Margaret.

In Wilmette were passed what must have been Luther Bradley's most precious years. He was up there on a bluff, where Lake Michigan, perfect semblance of the sea, greeted him morning and night. It received him placidly at bathing time,—and his "season" ended only when his bathing suit fairly froze to the sand. He had a fine, long walk from the railroad station—an excellent bracer in zero weather, just like old times. And he grew a flower garden, and built a summer house, with stairs of rock up the cliff. And he helped the boys to put up a little clubhouse down near the beach. In front of this he laid out a tennis court. And the lake, as though grateful for his tenancy, "made" land for him until his beach was increased eastward by hundreds of feet.

There, after his hair became gray, he revived his boyhood pleasures, and romped with a company of admirers more congenial and outspoken than those who praised his cartoons: the children, both his own and the neighbors. Tennis, swimming, skating, boating, football, campfires on the beach, a thousand "days of real sport."

Of all the tributes he received, give me the one spoken by a little boy, a newcomer thereabouts, who after skating one day with Luther Bradley and a group of shouting sprites, remarked,

"Who was that big gray-haired feller? Say, he's a real feller!"


EARLY in January, 1917, his physique, so remarkably sustained, suddenly seemed to give way. He felt tired, and could not understand why. He would "soon be all right." Several times he had recovered from

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