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"The illness of Rudyard Kipling has brought to mind the fact that the author visited this region several years ago. During his boyhood in India he lived in the town where resided a daughter of Rev. Dr. R. T. Taylor for many years president of Beaver College. Dr. Taylor's daughter, the wife of a Civil Service attache (and their) families (by) reason of their nationality, became very intimate. After Mr. Kipling had left India he came to this country on a visit and reading tour. Beaver was among the places he visited, and he put in a fortnight or more there as the guest of Dr. Taylor and other prominent families in the valley.
"Many interesting ancedotes are told of him since that time. His habits were naturally much influenced by the life he had lived in India. It is related that one morning just after he arrived a messenger was sent from the house where he was a guest to a barber in the town to have him come with his tools and shave the distinguished literary figure.
"The knight of the razor set off post haste, supposing that his waiting customer was ill. He found him in bed, but in remarkable spirits for one who, as he thought, was too ill to sit up. As he was about to leave he discovered that if there was any one ill in the residence it was not Mr. Kipling, and that his presence had been required simply because the creator of "Mowgli: and his jungle friend did not like to be shaved after he arose. The barber still tells with gusto of his daily visits to the famous Englishman."
"But there be many pictures on my mind ... Of musquash (his disguise for Beaver-Ed.) itself lighted by the same mysterious agency, flares of gas eight feet long, roaring day and night at the corners of the grass-grown streets because it wasn't worthwhile to turn them out, of fleets of coal-flats being hauled down the river on an interminable journey to St. Louis; of factories nestling in woods where all the axe handles and shovels in the world seemed to be manufactured daily; and last, of that quaint forgotten German community, the Brotherhood of Perpetual Separation, who founded themselves when the State was yet young and land cheap, and are now dying out because they will neither marry nor give in marriage and their recruits are very few. The advance in the value of land has almost smothered these poor old people in a golden affluence that they never desired.
They live in a little village where the houses are built old Dutch fashion, with their front doors away from the road, and cobbled paths all about. The cloistered peace of Musquash is a metropolitan riot beside the hush of that village. And there is, too, a love-tale tucked away among the flowers. It has taken seventy years in the telling, for the brother and sister loved each other well, but they loved their duty to the brotherhood more. So they have lived and still do live, seeing each other daily, and separated for all time. Any trouble that might have been is altogether wiped out of their faces, which are as calm as those of very little children.
"To the uninitiated those constant ones resemble extremely old people in garments of absurd cut. But they love each other." This "brother and sister" were Jacob Henrici and Gertrude Rapp.
Historian Bausman also includes a quotation about Beaver which appeared in Kipling's book FROM SEA TO SEA.