The Scrap Book, Volume 1, No. 4
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Title: The Scrap Book, Volume 1, No. 4
Author: Various
Release date: April 24, 2010 [eBook #32121]
Language: English
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THE SCRAP BOOK.
Vol. I. JUNE, 1906. No. 4.
June,--BUNKER HILL--June,
1775. 1843.
Peroration of the Address Delivered by Daniel Webster,
June 17, 1843, at the Dedication of the
Monument That Now Marks the Scene of
the Famous Revolutionary Struggle.
We have indulged in gratifying recollections of the past, in the
prosperity and pleasures of the present, and in high hopes for the future.
But let us remember that we have duties and obligations to perform,
corresponding to the blessings which we enjoy. Let us remember the trust,
the sacred trust, attaching to the rich inheritance which we have received
from our fathers. Let us feel our personal responsibility, to the full
extent of our power and influence, for the preservation of the principles
of civil and religious liberty. And let us remember that it is only
religion, and morals, and knowledge, that can make men respectable and
happy under any form of government. Let us hold fast the great truth that
communities are responsible as well as individuals; that no government is
respectable which is not just; that without unspotted purity of public
faith, without sacred public principle, fidelity, and honor--no mere forms
of government, no machinery of laws, can give dignity to political
society. In our day and generation let us seek to raise and improve the
moral sentiment, so that we may look, not for a degraded, but for an
elevated and improved future. And when both we and our children shall have
been consigned to the house appointed for all living, may love of
country--and pride of country--glow with equal fervor among those to whom
our names and our blood shall have descended! And then, when honored and
decrepit age shall lean against the base of this monument, and troops of
ingenuous youth shall be gathered round it, and when the one shall speak
to the other of its objects, the purposes of its construction, and the
great and glorious events with which it is concerned--there shall rise,
from every youthful breast, the ejaculation--"Thank God, I--I also--am an
American!"
The Latest Viewpoints of Men Worth While.
Praise and Blame for American Women From Dr. Emil
Reich--Earl Grey and Secretary Root Discuss the Relations of
Canada and the United States--William J. Bryan Defines the
Limits of Socialism--Rabbi Schulman Explains Certain
Prejudices Against the Jews--William T. Jerome, Senator
Lodge, and Norman Hapgood Criticize or Defend the Noble Army
of Muck-Rakers--With Other Interesting Expressions of
Opinion on Current Issues of the Day.
_Compiled and edited for_ THE SCRAP BOOK.
FEMININE RULE MAY DOOM OUR COUNTRY.
American Women Are Like the Spartans
in Their Desire to Dominate the
American Man.
Dr. Emil Reich has been lecturing to fashionable London on such
universally fascinating themes as woman and love. According to the news
despatches, so great has been the popularity of his talks that there have
not been seats enough to accommodate his titled hearers, and at one
lecture the Duchess of Portland sat on the floor. He has said of "Love and
Personality":
Personality is always a mystery with its antithetically
mingled elements in man and woman. Women have loved wrongly
and known it, were perfectly aware of it--they only know
also that they were helpless to avoid it; the desire of
their lives has been gratified, something has happened.
What was there about George Sand, save perhaps pretty good
eyes, to send such men as Alfred de Musset and Friedrich
Chopin absolutely crazy? Nothing interesting about her--even
her unattractiveness enhanced by her constant smoking. Yet
she could inspire the "Prelude," which Chopin composed on
seeing her approach in a garden in Minorca--the greatest
piece of music ever compressed into a single page.
Goethe's Gretchen, the little bourgeoise, without apparent
attractiveness, yet inspiring his mighty genius--what is
this mystery of man and woman? The beauty of nations differs
very much. The Latins are less beautiful than the
Anglo-Saxons. The angularity of the North German woman is
notorious; an uncharming person. Why? It has nothing
whatever to do with race. The growth of the Hanseatic cities
brought great wealth in North Germany; money-bags married
money-bags; the result was a people of severely plain
aspect. There are not many money-bags in America, although
there are many money-bags in the hands of a few.
American Men Marry for Love.
The American is insulted if mention of dowry is made in his
wedding arrangements. He marries because he loves the woman
and she him. Hence, the American people have become
exceedingly beautiful. Then the facilities for divorce
presented in the United States are an important factor in
the beautification process. Love is really at the bottom of
it all--not money-bags or race, but love.
The French are always talking about _l'amour, l'amour_; but
really there is no _amour_ there at all--people generally
talk most about what they haven't got or don't know. Yes,
indeed, so rare is _l'amour_ in France that it accounts for
the decline in facial beauty of the French woman--not in
movement, for in movement she excels the world, but in face.
Rome and Greece were ruined by treating marriage as a matter
of business.
Complementary to Dr. Reich's praise of the American woman's beauty is his
criticism of her love of domination. In that characteristic he reads the
doom of America. We quote his reasons from the New York _American_:
Nations differ in nothing so much as in their women. The
French, English, or American woman is easily
distinguishable. The American woman is totally different
from the English woman. So is the French woman, though the
difference in this case is not so intense; so is the German
woman; so is the woman of Italy. The American woman, while
differing from all her European sisters of to-day, bears a
marked resemblance to the woman of ancient Sparta. The
Spartans resembled the present-day Americans; the Athenians
were like the English.
I do not blame, I do not praise; I only say, and I say
emphatically, that the American woman is not womanly; she is
not a woman. The whole of the United States is under
petticoat government, and man is practically non-existent.
In America, woman commands man. Man does not count there.
The last man that came to America was Christopher Columbus.
To-day, man has no existence; he does not talk in the
drawing-room, but is a dummy. The woman lives one life, the
man another, and they are totally distinct from each other.
The Best Complexion in the World.
She is as new as a man born to-day is new; she is made up of
restlessness and fidgetiness long before she is twenty-five.
But she is very beautiful; she has the best complexion in
the world--better than that of any European woman. She is
also well built and handsome. You see fine specimens of the
American woman in Kentucky and Massachusetts.
A few miles distant from the Athens of old--what would be
but a short railway journey in these days--lay Sparta. The
Spartans were imperialists, and they wanted to conquer the
whole of Greece. The Spartan woman, as I have remarked, was
like the American woman of to-day. She never dreamed of
lovers; her idea was nothing less than conquering man; she
never thought of him as more than a fellow athlete.
The Spartan Woman Ruined Sparta.
There was no womanhood in them, no more than in so many
sticks. The Athenians said that they were very fine, but
there was nothing feminine about them. They were far richer,
too, than the men, for the men went to the wars and died,
and the women thus became rich. Aristotle said that the
Spartan woman was sure to ruin Sparta very quickly. And so
she did, for we find Sparta trying to rule Greece in the
fourth century B.C.; in the third century she was sinking;
in the second century she had ceased to exist.
Modern British men and women, what are they? That is what I
want to bring out. A nation can never survive with women of
the Spartan type, which, as I have told you, is the American
woman of to-day. The Romans were the same, and they ruined
their empire. They had one idea, an all-absorbing idea which
killed all ideas of religion, of art, of everything--the
idea of empire. They spent their entire life in that one
absorbing pursuit--domination; in such a country woman has
no place.
GROWING EMPIRE AT OUR NORTH.
Development of New National Spirit in
the Dominion Discussed by Earl
Grey and Secretary Root.
Canada has been making tremendous strides in the last few years. The
opening up of the vast untilled grain lands of the Northwest has been
followed by an influx of new blood from other countries, and particularly
from the United States. Throughout the Dominion energy is dictating to
enterprise. In all the provinces there are stirrings of a new national
spirit.
Relations between Canada and the United States are certain to assume a
different character in view of the changing local conditions. The future
before Canada is so great in its promise that any pronouncement by high
authorities as to her newer feelings is at present very important. Such
pronouncement was made at the dinner given in New York by the Pilgrims of
the United States to Earl Grey, Governor-General of Canada. The earl and
Mr. Root, our Secretary of State, made significant speeches.
Said Earl Grey:
Any idea of the possible annexation of Canada by the United
States is scouted by us as an impossibility as great as you
would regard the annexation of the United States by Canada.
And now, gentlemen, may I say the more we see of Americans
the better we shall be pleased. All we want is to know each
other better than we do, and to help each other as much as
we can. If Canada can at any time help the United States in
any direction which will improve the conditions of life for
your people, she will consider it a blessed privilege to be
allowed to render that assistance; and I feel sure that the
people of the United States will also be only too glad to
assist us in our struggle toward the realization of high
ideals and toward the attainment of a national character
distinguished by the fulness with which the principles of
fair play, freedom, and duty shall be applied by the people
of Canada to the various occupations of their lives.
There are several questions outstanding between the Dominion
of Canada and the United States which have been left open
too long, and which call for settlement.
Both governments desire to take advantage of the opportunity
which the present feeling of amity between the two countries
affords, and I am persuaded that the people on both sides of
the frontier will be glad when their respective governments
have given effect to their desires.
Secretary Root denied the rumor that at this banquet any sensational or
unexpected announcement would be made, declaring that all existing
questions between Canada and the United States had been settled. "I wish,"
he said, "it was so." But he pointed out the attitude that must be adopted
to facilitate the settlement of disputes--an attitude considerate and
just.
Of the changed conditions in Canada he said:
I think the American people recognize the fact that much has
taken place on the other side of the border--much which
materially affects the theoretical, assumed, or supposed
relations between the United States and Canada.
It was with apparent doubt that the American people read the
treaty of the eighteenth century, whether Canada was to
become a part of the United States, and in 1812, the British
governor-general of Canada wrote that a majority of his
people were rather in favor of the Americans than the
English.
We must recognize that a great change has taken place.
Canada is no longer the outlying country that it once was,
when a few remnants of French descendants were left upon its
borders to subsist upon precarious livelihoods. It has
become a great community with increasing population and
wealth.
In her relations with England one can see that, while she is
loyal to her mother country, as she has attained maturity
she has contracted a personality of her own. Her relations
to us have become of great importance. With enormous natural
wealth, and with vigor and energy, she is protecting her
industries, as we are protecting ours.
Her people are proud of their country, as we are proud of
ours, and we appreciate that from what was a little dominion
upon our borders there has grown a great and powerful
nation. And the people of America look with no grudging or
jealous eye upon her development.
HOW MUCH SOCIALISM DO OUR PEOPLE WANT?
Bryan Suggests that "Individualism"
Best Defines Limit to Be Set
on Socialistic Tendencies.
A tendency toward factional alignment at present characterizes the radical
movement which has been sweeping over the country. The different elements
of that movement are beginning to offer their individual claims for
recognition. At this juncture William Jennings Bryan contributes to the
_Century_ an important article on "Individualism _versus_ Socialism," in
which he seeks to dispel the fogs which have enveloped the economic
situation. First, he defines the two terms opposed in his title:
For the purpose of this discussion individualism will be
defined as the private ownership of the means of production
and distribution where competition is possible, leaving to
public ownership those means of production and distribution
in which competition is practically impossible; and
socialism will be defined as the collective ownership,
through the state, of all the means of production and
distribution.
Mr. Bryan points out that much of the strength shown by socialism is due
to the fact that "socialists advocate certain reforms which individualists
also advocate."
Take, for illustration, the public ownership of water-works;
it is safe to say that a large majority of the people living
in cities of any considerable size favor their public
ownership--individualists because it is practically
impossible to have more than one water system in a city, and
socialists on the general ground that the government should
own all the means of production and distribution. Then, too,
some of the strength of socialism is due to its condemnation
of abuses which, while existing under individualism, are not
at all necessary to individualism--abuses which the
individualists are as anxious as the socialists to remedy.
It is not only consistent with individualism, but is a
necessary implication of it, that the competing parties
should be placed upon substantially equal footing; for
competition is not worthy of that name if one party is able
arbitrarily to fix the terms of the agreement, leaving the
other with no choice but to submit.
The civil service, says Mr. Bryan, is our nearest approach to ideal
socialism. Does it afford a stimulus to the higher development of the
civil servants?
Justice requires that each individual shall receive from
society a reward proportionate to his contribution to
society. Can the state, acting through officials, make this
apportionment better than it can be made by competition? At
present official favors are not distributed strictly
according to merit, either in republics or in monarchies; it
is certain that socialism would insure a fairer division of
rewards? If the government operates all the factories, all
the farms, and all the stores, there must be superintendents
as well as workmen; there must be different kinds of
employment, some more pleasant, some less pleasant. Is it
likely that any set of men can distribute the work or fix
the compensation to the satisfaction of all?
At present private monopoly is putting upon individualism an
undeserved odium, and it behooves the individualist to
address himself energetically to this problem in order that
the advantages of competition may be restored to industry.
And the duty of immediate action is made more imperative by
the fact that the socialist is inclined to support the
monopoly, in the belief that it will be easier to induce the
government to take over an industry after it has passed into
the hands of a few men.
In the substance of his opinion Mr. Bryan's "individualism" does not seem
to be very far removed from Fabian socialism--or at least not from such
socialism as is expressed, say, by Robert Hunter, who said not long ago,
while speaking about the problems of poverty:
I have been asked if I think socialism is the cure for these
evils. As we do not know what state socialism would bring
about, we cannot say. But I am sure that certain socialistic
measures are necessary. We need municipal tenements, as they
have in Liverpool, Birmingham, and London, where the
children will have healthful surroundings, plenty of places
to play, and there are no landlords to exact profits.
Other places have nationalized the coal fields, and the poor
get coal at cost. At Rochester, in England, the death-rate
has been cut down one-half by the municipalization of the
milk-supply, and the children of the poor, instead of the
pale-blue poison they used to have, get a fine, healthful
food. These are socialistic measures, and every advance we
make is toward socialism.
FALSE SYMPATHY WITH CRIMINALS.
That Sham Humanitarianism Has Become
a Stench Is the Declaration
of a Leading Humanitarian.
Andrew D. White, ex-president of Cornell University, ex-ambassador to
Germany--scholar, publicist, humanitarian--said wholesome words to the
Cornell students a few weeks ago on the problem of "High Crime in the
United States." The basis of his address was the fact that more murders
are committed every year in the United States than in any other country.
His attitude in regard to lynch-law is rather startling:
The number of homicides that are punished by lynching
exceeds the number punished by due process of law. There is
nothing more nonsensical or ridiculous than the goody-goody
talk about lynching. Much may be said in favor of Goldwin
Smith's quotation, "that there are communities in which
lynch-law is better than any other."
From this he proceeded to decry over-wrought sentiment in favor of
criminals:
Germs of maudlin sentimentality are widespread. On every
hand we hear slimy, mushy, gushy expressions of sympathy,
the criminal called "plucky," "nervy," "fighting against
fearful odds for his life."
It is said that society has no right to put murderers to
death. In my opinion, society must fall back on the law of
self-preservation. It should cut through and make war, in my
opinion, for its life. Life imprisonment is not possible,
because there is no life imprisonment.
In the next year nine thousand people will be murdered. As I
stand here to-day I tell you that nine thousand are doomed
to death with all the cruelty of the criminal heart, and
with no regard for home and families, and two-thirds of
those murders will be due to the maudlin sentiment sometimes
called mercy.
I have no sympathy for the criminal. My sympathy is for
those who will be murdered, for their families and for their
children.
This sham humanitarianism has become a stench. The cry now
is for righteousness. The past generation has abolished
human slavery. It is for the present to deal with the
problems of the future and among them this problem of crime.
Young men, like Jerome, like Folk and Hughes, resolve never
to be servants of criminals, but to do your best to punish
crime as it should be punished.
OLD MALIGNMENTS OF THE CHOSEN PEOPLE.
The Long-Existent Prejudice Against the
Jew Is Explained by a Leading
Rabbi of New York.
No other race has been so vilified as the Jew. Hatred for Hebrews has been
endemic in Europe since the Dark Ages, and even to-day in France and
Germany the anti-Semitic movements have considerable strength. How can
this be? Is the feeling a survival of anger at a race which rejected
Jesus? Or is it based on desperate hostility toward a race which can
succeed in business where a Gentile fails?
The Rev. Dr. S. Schulman, of the Temple Beth-El, New York City, in a
recent sermon sought to answer these questions. Part of his discourse we
quote:
We are the victims of the world's literature, of its
prevailing creed, and the popular judgment. The greatest
master in the world's literature, seeking a type that on
account of peculiar conditions and circumstances could stand
for cruel hatred and implacable revenge, deliberately
changed the contents of a story and made _Shylock_ the Jew
the embodiment of inhuman revenge.
The poet must have felt that if ever in a human soul there
could arise such unyielding hate as he desired to portray it
might, in a sense, be justified in one whose heart rankled
with the memories of ages of persecution and unjust hatred
to which his race had been subjected.
Here was one, the poet seemed to say, who could well execute
the villainies he had been taught. He therefore produced a
character dramatically consistent, but at the same time he
did an everlasting injury to the Jew, because he produced a
character altogether historically untrue. The Jew is
anything but vindictive; he forgets injuries readily; that
is why he is so optimistic; he has a horror of shedding
blood, and whatever vices the Jew may be capable of, the one
of ferocious cruelty cannot be saddled upon him.
Nevertheless, the word Shylock has become in English speech
synonymous with everything that is bad. This injustice in
literature will persist until some great genius possessing
the broad-mindedness of a Lessing and the dramatic power of
a Shakespeare shall arise among English-speaking people and
create an English Nathan the Wise.
The Western world's creed centers in an event which,
strictly speaking, belongs to the same category as that of
the killing of Socrates, the burning of Giordano Bruno, and
of Servetus. Thus, classic Greek, Catholic, and Protestant
were all equally guilty of sacrificing the best of their
time. The progress of mankind has, sad to say, often been
purchased by the martyrdom of some of the noblest men that
walked on earth.
Yet it is the Jewish people that have been singled out to be
held up to the world as Deicides, and every child at the
time when the soul is most receptive is inoculated with an
antipathy against every living Jew because of an event that
took place nineteen hundred years ago.
It is therefore no wonder that the world is prejudiced
against the Jew.
MANDATES OF ART TO HER VOTARIES.
A Great Word-Artist Shows That Under
the Levity of Bohemian Life Is a Serious
and Lofty Philosophy.
The late Lafcadio Hearn was one of the great prose-poets of the time. The
glimpse into his intimate mind which the _Critic_ affords by printing a
sheaf of his letters to H.E. Krehbiel, the music critic, will be
appreciated by all who followed his literary wanderings up to the time of
his settlement in Japan. The letters were written many years ago, when
Hearn was still in his early prime. When he learned of the death of Mr.
Krehbiel's child he wrote this exquisite expression of sympathy:
Your letter rises before me as I write like a tablet of
white stone bearing a dead name. I see you standing beside
me. I look into your eyes and press your hand and say
nothing.
Hearn was ever an artist, and he ever knew what art meant. In advising his
friend to break away from the exhausting routine of daily journalism, he
gave a typical expression of his philosophy of life:
Under the levity of Henri Mürger's picturesque Bohemianism
there is a serious philosophy apparent which elevates the
characters of his romance to heroism. They followed one
principle faithfully--so faithfully that only the strong
survived the ordeal--never to abandon the pursuit of an
artistic vocation for any other occupation, however
lucrative; not even when she remained apparently deaf and
blind to her worshipers.
The conditions pictured by Mürger have passed away in Paris
as elsewhere; the old barriers to ambition have been broken
down. But I think the moral remains.
So long as one can live and pursue his natural vocation in
art, it is a duty with him never to abandon it if he
believes that he has within him the elements of final
success. Every time he labors at aught that is not of art he
robs the divinity of what belongs to her.
Do you never reflect that within a few years you will no
longer be the YOUNG MAN--and that, like Vesta's fires, the
enthusiasm of youth for an art-idea must be well fed with
the sacred branches to keep it from dying out?
I think you ought really to devote all your time and
energies and ability to the cultivation of one subject, so
as to make that subject alone repay you for all your pains.
And I do not believe that art is altogether ungrateful in
these days; she will repay fidelity to her, and recompense
sacrifices. I don't think you have any more right to play
reporter than a great sculptor to model fifty-cent plaster
figures of idiotic saints for Catholic processions, or
certain painters to letter steamboats at so much a letter.
In one sense, too, art is exacting. To acquire real eminence
in any one branch of any art, one must study nothing else
for a lifetime. A very wide general knowledge may be
acquired only at the expense of depth.
PURSUIT OF A HUSBAND BY THE MODERN WOMAN.
After All, Says the New York "Times,"
It Is Doubtless Better for Man to Be
Chosen Than for Him to Choose.
Taking up a discussion inaugurated by the _St. James Gazette_, of London,
the New York _Times_ says what it has to say on the subject of choosing
wives.
The English paper said frankly that the title would better be "The Choice
of a Husband," inasmuch as the male, though unaware of the fact, is
generally not the pursuer, but the pursued. This condition, however, is by
no means to the discredit of woman.
As the _Times_ remarks, "A young woman whose intentions are both serious
and honorable has nothing at all to be ashamed of in endeavoring by all
womanly means to acquire the man whom she believes she can make happy and
knows that she means to try to."
In America and England there is objection to the man who marries for any
other reason than being in love. Yet the _mariage de convenance_ is not
altogether without legitimate recommendations. To quote the _Times_:
If one is really bent on making a marriage of reason instead
of waiting for a "call," excellent recipes may be given him.
A wise man once advised his son, who had shown some
disposition to choose instead of waiting to be chosen, to
"look for a good woman's daughter." It would be hard to find
any better basis for a happy union.
In general, of course, mixed marriages, whether the mixture
be of religion or of country, would be viewed by a wise
adviser with apprehension, although Lord Curzon's experience
is only one of very many as to the possible happiness of
marriages between persons of different nationalities, much
more alike as are the nationalities of Lord and Lady Curzon
than any other two nationalities.
Dr. Johnson's famous saying that marriages would be happier
if they were arranged by the Lord Chancellor, due regard
being paid to the ages and conditions of the parties, has
never been accepted as a working rule in his own country. In
France, again, there is the wholly "reasonable" and
extremely circumspect Count Boni Castellane, whose marriage
of reason has so lately been shown to be so far from a
success.
There are quite enough more failures of the same kind to
offset the unhappy marriages of romance. It is of these, of
course, that Burton declares that matches are made in
heaven, though matches of the sulfurous kind, of which all
of us know some instances, suggest a very different place of
manufacture.
The Marriage of Reason.
Swift's saying that the reason why so few marriages are
happy is that "young ladies spend their time in making nets,
not in making cages," is doubly outrageous. In the first
place, it is an outrageous begging of the question. The
testimony of less cynical observers in our day and country
is that most marriages are entitled to be called happy.
In the second place, it outrageously puts the whole blame
for unhappy marriages on the female partner, contrary alike
to probability and to fact. But at least as many of the
marriages are failures in which men "choose" their wives, or
think they do, as in cases in which men become the prey of
their own imaginations.
And there is this to be said from the point of view of
reason in favor of marriages with which reason has nothing
to do. In the first months of married life there are
necessarily very many differences to be adjusted and small
incompatibilities of ways of thinking and feeling to be
reconciled. That, as all experienced spouses know, is the
trying period.
Marriage is like life in that it is a school wherein whoso
does not learn must suffer. Now, to diminish the friction of
this trying time no better lubricant could possibly be
provided than the romantic love, which cannot be expected to
last forever, but which may very probably outlast this
greatest necessity for it of the early connubial period.
When the glamour of the romance "fades into the light of
common day," and a real man and a real woman take the places
of the creatures of each other's fancy, and passion cools
into at best the tenderest of friendships, both parties are
better off, and will acknowledge themselves to be better off
because the romance has been.
EVERY MAN MASTER OF HIS OWN STOMACH.
Instinct Best Determines What You
Should Eat, So Eat What Your
Normal Instinct Tells You To.
In that series of compromises which we call life there is no compromise
more perplexing than the compromise with the stomach. No problem requires
more earnest thought than the food problem. It is the stomach that makes
men work. There would be no produce exchange were it not for the
stomach--no yellow fields of wheat and corn, no grazing herds of cattle,
no fleets of white-sailed fishing-vessels. Clothing and shelter are
secondary demands. The stomach is master; and, as is ever likely to be the
case with autocrats, it is selfish--wherefore we humor it--we hold out
crutches to it--we offer it tempting inducements to be lenient with us.
A sense of relief, therefore, is produced by reading Dr. Woods
Hutchinson's article, "Some Diet Delusions," in the April _McClure's_; for
therein is advanced the doctrine of "intelligent omnivorousness." Says Dr.
Hutchinson:
Every imaginable experiment upon what would and what would
not support life must have been tried thousands of years
ago, and yet our most striking proofs of how highly men
value their "precious right of private haziness," as George
Eliot shrewdly terms it, are to be found in the realm of
dietetics. The "light that never was on sea or land" still
survives for the most matter-of-fact of us in the memory of
"the pies that mother used to make," and nowhere else do we
find preferences so widely accepted as evidence, and
prejudices as matters of fact, as in this arena. In fact, if
we were merely to listen to what is said, and still more to
read what is printed, we would come to the conclusion that
the human race had established absolutely nothing beyond
possibility of dispute in this realm.
When the Doctors Disagree.
Every would-be diet-reformer, and we doctors are almost as
bad as any of them, is absolutely certain that what
nine-tenths of humanity find to be their food is a deadly
poison. One philosopher is sure that animal food of every
description, especially the kind that involves the shedding
of blood, is not only absolutely unfit for human food, but
is the cause of half the suffering and wickedness in the
world. Another gravely declares that the only thing which,
above all things, is injurious is salt. Another takes up his
parable against pork. Still another is convinced that half
the misery of the world is due to the use of spices; and one
dietetic Rousseau proclaims a return to very first
principles by the abolition of cooking.
Another attacks the harmless and blushing tomato, and lays
at its door the modern increase of cancer, insanity, and a
hundred kindred evils; while Mrs. Rohrer has gently but
firmly to be restrained whenever she hears the mild-eyed
potato mentioned.
There is almost an equally astonishing Babel when one comes
to listen to the various opinions as to the amount of food
required. Eighteen grave and reverend doctors assure us that
overeating is the prevalent dietetic sin of the century,
while the remainder of the two dozen are equally positive
that the vast majority of their patients are underfed. One
man preaches the gospel of dignified simplicity on one meal
a day and one clean collar a week, while the lean and
learned Fletcher declares that if we only keep on
masticating our one mouthful of food long enough we shall
delude the stomach into magnifying it into ten, and can dine
sumptuously on a menu-card and a biscuit.
Fortunately, when it comes to practise, philosophers,
reformers, and doctors alike have about as much influence
here as they have over conduct in other realms--and that is
next to none at all. The man in the street follows his
God-given instincts and plods peacefully along to his three
square meals a day, consisting of anything he can find in
the market, and just as much of it as he can afford, with
special preference for rich meats, fats, and sugars.
Instinct Far Superior to Reason.
Here, as everywhere, instinct is far superior to reason, and
a breakfast diet of sausage and buckwheat cakes with maple
syrup and strong coffee has carried the white man half
around the world; while one of salads and cereals, washed
down with a post-prandial subterfuge, would leave him
stranded, gasping, in the first ditch he came to.
All the basal problems of dietetics were, by the mercy of
Heaven, settled long ago in the farmhouse kitchen, in the
commissary department of the army in the field, in the
cook's galley amidships, and in the laboratory.
There is little more room for difference of opinion upon
them than there is about the coaling of engines. Simply a
matter of size of boiler and fire-box, the difference in
heating power and ash between Welsh and Australian, and the
amount of work to be got out of the machine, multiplied by
the time in which it is to be accomplished.
Dr. Hutchinson proceeds to give reasons why spices do _not_ heat the
blood, why pork is a most excellent food, why fish is no better for the
brain than other things, why vegetarianism is a mistake, and so on. His
principal caution is not to eat in a hurry; his principal advice is,
virtually, to eat whatever seems to agree with you.
All of which brings to mind the story of the old dyspeptic who, after a
long term of misery, one day apostrophized his stomach thus:
"I have humored you for many years. I have coaxed you, coddled you, petted
you. I have gone hungry to please you. I have swallowed bad-tasting
medicines on your account. I have been your servant--but now I am through.
From this time I will eat what I please and drink what I please. If you
protest, I shall ignore you. Hereafter you are the servant, I am the
master. Now make the best of that!"
This brave man's stomach, we are told, was so thoroughly cowed by the
words that it never again demanded a milk diet.
THE EXPOSURE OF EXPOSURE.
Things That Are Being Said About the
"Journalism of Conscience" by Critics,
Passionate and Dispassionate.
When fire is discovered in a house it sometimes happens that the tenants,
in their excitement, hurl fragile bric-à-brac from the windows and with
much effort carry the feather beds down-stairs and out to safety. Suppose
that the incongruity of such action suddenly becomes apparent. The alarmed
tenants may reverse the process. Better still, they may endeavor to put
out the fire. But to cease all effort because they stand convicted of
excited folly would be absurd.
The inevitable reaction from recent wild exposures in finance and politics
has lately shown itself. Prominent men and leading journals have convicted
the "yellow" newspapers and magazines, and the people influenced by them,
of excited folly. Senator Lodge has said in the Senate, concerning
sensational contributors to the magazines:
Writers of that type come and go. They seize upon the
excitement of the moment and presently rise like a flock of
shore birds and whirl away to another spot where they think
they can find a fresh feeding ground. These modern imitators
of Titus Oates will pass away as he passed away. They will
bring no innocent heads to the block as he did, although
they may here and there cause distress. They will not end in
the pillory as he did, because the pillory has been
abolished, but they will go out of fashion just as he did
into silence and contempt.
District Attorney William T. Jerome, speaking at a banquet in New York,
referred to magazine articles which have described the Senate as
treasonable.
Treason is an ugly word. It is punishable by death. We have
got so used to superlatives that our own racy tongue has
become debauched and we have no superlatives left. The
Senate of the United States--is it a treasonable body? A
body that holds a man like Murray Crane, of Massachusetts?
Because some men are there who ought not to be there--some
who bought the position--shall we say that the governors of
our body politic are guilty of treason? Base men are there,
but when in the bright, breezy sentiments of modern
newspaper life you assert there is treason, you either lie
or misconceive the meaning of the English language.
On the other side, Norman Hapgood says, in _Collier's_:
Who is doing most to make railroad and beef trust facts and
problems understood? Who but the same magazine which has
printed the history of Standard Oil and explained to the
people the needed changes in State and city government. What
a farce to speak of _McClure's Magazine_ as yellow; what a
dull, injurious farce, unless by yellow we mean every
movement of benefit to our kind! Did Mr. Steffens's printing
of the news about Philadelphia do any harm to the
inhabitants of that town? Did it, or did it not, act as a
battle-cry which spurred the good citizens and the
newspapers of that town to action? When original, living,
and conscientious journalism speaks, the routine newspapers
are sometimes forced to echo bold words which receive the
public's approving seal.
So the balance of expressed opinion on the subject shifts up and down. In
all the confusion we sometimes hear an opinion like that, uttered by
Herbert S. Hadley, attorney-general of Missouri:
There is no reason to question the efficacy of existing laws
so long as they are supported by public sentiment, for law
is, in fact, merely the reflection of the moral sense of the
country. What I mean by that statement may be illustrated by
the fact that while a vast majority of lawyers, as well as
laymen, will to-day agree that corporations are amenable to
laws from which an individual might be exempt, the same
proposition would have met with violent refutation hardly
more than two years ago by most lawyers and many laymen.
But the public is now practically agreed, and the courts
have sustained this view, that corporations are not above
the laws of the State which made their existence possible.
An officer of a company may to-day refuse to answer
questions on the ground that he would himself be
incriminated by replying, but he cannot refuse to answer on
the ground that his company would be incriminated. In other
words, corporations are no longer considered to have the
same rights as individuals and cannot evade investigation
and prosecution by maintaining a policy of silence.
Such is the moral sense of the country and such is the law
as determined by the highest courts, and with such a
condition of public sentiment and law it is no longer
possible for public officials to plead that they cannot get
at the facts whenever there is a suspicion that any
corporation has failed to comply with the laws of the State
which created it.
LEGITIMATE SCOPE OF DRAMATIC ART.
Waxworks May Deceive for a Moment,
But They Do Not Leave the Lasting
Impression of Michelangelo's Moses.
Otis Skinner, the actor, recently made a plea for the teaching of dramatic
art in our public schools and colleges. In that way, he urged, public
taste can be improved to the point where a better quality of plays and
acting will be required to fill the theaters. He was speaking before the
Ethical Culture Society, in New York. In beginning he explained at some
length what he considered art, drawing his distinctions very carefully:
The purpose of the play is to hold a mirror up to nature,
although such things as horror, meanness, lust, or crime
must not be shown for their sake alone, merely to display
accurate dramatic photographs. They must be utilized toward
a definite end. The stage has many detractors, and among
them are the ones that say the stage does not represent real
life always. Nor should it. I will give you a definition of
art which I got from Dr. Adler. It explains what I mean:
"Art is the pattern, and not so many ells cut from the
fabric of life."
Some years ago in London I went to Mme. Tussaud's waxworks.
Curious to identify the figures, I turned to a lady and
asked her where I might obtain a program. There was no
answer. I became embarrassed and a little angry when I saw I
was the subject of amusement for the crowd. I looked closer.
The lady was made of wax. Well, I don't remember how she
looked, but I do remember every line of the beauties of the
Venus of Milo, which I saw in the Louvre, and of
Michelangelo's Moses. I did not consider them figures or
real persons, yet they live with me.
The charge that the theater gives too much attention to vice was discussed
by Mr. Skinner. When used on the stage to heighten the dramatic effect,
the simulation of drunkenness, he said, is ethically right. "Mrs. Warren's
Profession," he declared flatly, was quite properly suppressed, since
there was no reason for it except the exhibition of vice. False and
namby-pamby melodrama, on the other hand, is fully as detrimental to
dramatic art.
He outlined the plot of a play in which a poor young man, after rescuing
the daughter of a multimillionaire by a feat of virtually impossible
agility and strength, is promptly provided for by the thankful parent, and
marries the girl.
The story, as he told it, was glaringly untrue to life--wherefore he
denounced it as immoral. It represented the extreme of romantic falsity,
just as "Mrs. Warren's Profession" represented the extreme of disgustingly
literal reality.
In art no extreme is acceptable--a lesson which the Greeks, with their
supreme intuition of artistic fitness, taught the world once and for all.
WOMAN HAS ALWAYS EARNED HER LIVING.
The New York "Sun" Disposes of the
Old Notion That She is the Mere
"Beneficiary of Man."
The Rev. John L. Scudder, of Jersey City, recently preached a sermon on
the subject, "Business Women--Do They Reduce the Number of Marriages, and
Do They Make Good Wives?" He said, among other things, that if the
business woman marries, she marries "as an equal and not as a dependent";
that, therefore, we must expect fewer marriages in proportion to the
population. But he added:
The business woman of to-day refuses to be a moon revolving
around a masculine earth--she will be a twin star or
nothing. I believe her industrial training will make her a
better wife, for she will know the value of a dollar and be
able to sympathize with her husband in his daily toil.
She will apply business methods to domestic economy. Should
her husband attempt to maltreat her, she has courage enough
to separate from him and return to self-support. What she
has done once she can do again. Being fearless and decided,
she will be respected and well treated. The broader outlook
she has acquired in the business world will make her a
superior wife and a more capable mother.
The era of feminine imbecility and cowardice is passing
away, and in its place we see about us a new age of
well-rounded, exalted womanhood.
An Equal Partnership.
The New York _Sun_ does not agree with Mr. Scudder. In the course of an
editorial on the subject it says:
It may be remarked that nobody who enters into a partnership
of any sort can expect to retain absolute personal freedom.
The rule is equally true in business and marriage. The
attempt to exercise absolute personal freedom by one or both
partners is pretty sure to result in disaster to any
enterprise of any description.
But this is not the main point. Mr. Scudder's most serious
fallacy lies in the notion that in any healthy marriage
relation the woman is non-self-supporting and the mere
"beneficiary of man." The proposition is as absurd as it
would be to say that the member of a law firm who pleads in
the courts is a mere tender, a mere appendage, a mere
beneficiary of the gentleman who sits in the office, sees
the clients, and collects the bills, or that the expert
engineer at the head of a steel plant is a mere tender to
the man who manages the finances of the concern.
Nobody earns his or her livelihood more honorably or more
directly than the wife and mother of a family who does her
duty. She is her husband's business partner in a phase of
his life which is at least as vital to his interests as the
outside one by which he makes his money under the eye of the
world. If the couple are partners in a poor and struggling
concern, the wife contributes as much to the general success
by the work of her hands as the man does by his; if they are
more fortunate, and prosperous, the woman's busy brain
contriving and ruling in the household is earning by
earnest, eager, expert, and honorable exertion as good a
livelihood as the husband is able to provide her with.
The law holds good in the realms of wealth and luxury. The
woman who creates and maintains an eminent social position
for her family is likely to be her husband's most important
ally, and her share of all the benefits that they enjoy in
common is not a mere gratuity; it does not come to her from
her husband's bounty; it is her compensation for the
services she does in advancing the interests of the
alliance.
OUR OPPORTUNITY TO EDUCATE CHINA.
Great Possibilities Lie Ahead for Us if
We Take the Lead in Teaching the
Chinese Western Ways.
Dr. Edmund J. James, president of the University of Illinois, favors the
appointment of an educational commission for the study of the social,
intellectual, and industrial situation in China. The reasons for his
suggestion are contained in a memorandum which he recently submitted to
President Roosevelt, and may be briefly stated as follows:
A great service would be done to both countries if the
government of the United States would at the present
juncture send an educational commission to China, whose
chief function should be to visit the imperial government,
and, with its consent, each of the provincial governments of
the empire, for the purpose of extending through the
authorities of these provinces to the young Chinese who may
desire to go abroad to study a formal invitation on the part
of our American institutions of learning to avail themselves
of the facilities of such institutions.
China is upon the verge of a revolution. Every great nation
of the world will inevitably be drawn into more or less
intimate relations with this gigantic development. It is for
them to determine, each for itself, what these relations
shall be--whether those of amity and friendship and kindness
or those of brute force and the mailed fist. The United
States ought not to hesitate as to its choice in this
matter.
The nation which succeeds in educating the young Chinese of
the present generation will be the nation which, for a given
expenditure of effort, will reap the largest possible
returns in moral, intellectual, and commercial influence.
LAST WORDS OF FAMOUS MEN.
When a man is in the full flower of health and intellectual activity, his
utterances, either guarded or careless, usually are more or less tinctured
by his social environments--environments that are rather more artificial
than natural. But when the shadow of death falls upon him, and earthly
vanities crowd out of the chamber that is marked as the vestibule of his
tomb, the language he speaks is that of the man himself--one who realizes
that he is nearer eternal truth than human pretense. For this reason the
last words he speaks on earth are more significant of his true character
than any he has spoken before. No better proof of this fact may be adduced
than is to be found in the following collection of sentences uttered by
dying men:
=Adams, John= (1735-1826), American statesman: "Jefferson
survives."
=Adams, John Quincy= (1767-1848), American statesman: "This
is the last of earth! I am content!"
=Beethoven, Ludwig van= (1770-1827), German composer: "I
shall hear now!" (He was deaf.)
=Bozzaris, Markos= (1790-1823), Greek patriot: "To die for
liberty is a pleasure and not a pain."
=Brooks, Phillips= (1835-1893), American clergyman: "I am
going home."
=Byron, Lord= (1788-1824), English poet: "I must sleep now."
=Charles I= of England (1600-1649): "Remember."
=Charles II= of England (1630-1685): "Don't let poor Nelly
(Nell Gwynne) starve."
=Chesterfield, Lord= (1694-1773), English courtier: "Give
the doctor a chair."
=Columbus, Christopher= (1440-1506), Italian navigator:
"Lord, into Thy hands I commit my spirit."
=Cowper, William= (1731-1800), English poet: "Feel? I feel
unutterable, unutterable despair. What does it signify?"
=Cromwell, Oliver= (1599-1658), English statesman: "My
desire is to make what haste I may to be gone."
=Franklin, Benjamin= (1706-1790), American philosopher: "A
dying man can do nothing easy."
=Frederick the Great= of Prussia (1712-1786): "We are over
the hill. We shall go better now."
=Gilbert, Sir Humphrey= (1539-1583), English navigator: "We
are as near heaven by sea as by land."
=Gladstone, William Ewart= (1809-1898), British statesman:
"Amen."
=Goethe= (1749-1832), German poet: "Open the shutters and
let in more light."
=Greeley, Horace= (1811-1872), American journalist: "It is
done."
=Hale, Nathan= (1755-1776), American patriot: "I only regret
that I have but one life to give to my country."
=Havelock, Henry= (1795-1857), English general: "Tell my son
to come and see how a Christian can die."
=Henry, Patrick= (1736-1810), American orator and patriot:
"Here is a book (the Bible) worth more than all others ever
printed; yet it is my misfortune never to have found time to
read it. It is now too late. I trust in the mercy of God."
=Holmes, Oliver Wendell= (1809-1894), American poet and
prose-writer: "That is better, thank you." (To his son, who
had just assisted him to his favorite chair.)
=Humboldt, Friedrich von= (1769-1859), German savant: "How
grand these rays! They seem to beckon earth to heaven."
=Jefferson, Thomas= (1743-1826), American statesman: "I
resign my spirit to God and my daughter to my country."
=Julian= (331-363), Roman emperor: "O Galilean, Thou hast
conquered!"
=Keats, John= (1795-1821), English poet: "I feel the daisies
growing over me."
=Latimer, Hugh= (1485-1555), English reformer: "Be of good
cheer, brother; we shall this day kindle such a torch in
England as I trust shall never be extinguished." (To
Nicholas Ridley, who was burned with him.)
=Lawrence, James= (1781-1813), American naval officer:
"Don't give up the ship."
=Louis XIII= of France (1601-1643): "There come to me
thoughts that torment me."
=Louis XIV= of France (1638-1715): "I thought dying had been
harder."
=Louis XVIII= of France (1755-1824): "A king should die
standing."
=McKinley, William= (1843-1901), American statesman and
President: "Good-by. All good-by. It is God's way. His will
be done."
=Moody, Dwight L.= (1837-1899), American evangelist: "Earth
is receding; heaven is approaching; God is calling me."
=Napoleon= (1769-1821), Emperor of France: "Head of the
army."
=Napoleon III= of France (1803-1873): "Were you at Sedan?"
(To Dr. Conneau.)
=Nelson, Horatio= (1758-1805), English admiral: "I thank God
I have done my duty."
=Palmer, John= (1740-1798), English actor: "There is another
and better world."
=Pitt, William= (1759-1806), English statesman: "Oh, my
country, how I love thee!"
=Raleigh, Sir Walter= (1552-1618), English courtier and
navigator: "Why dost thou not strike? Strike, man!" (To his
executioner.)
=Scott, Sir Walter= (1771-1832), Scotch poet and novelist:
"I feel as if I were to be myself again. God bless you all."
=Scott, Winfield= (1786-1866), American general: "James,
take good care of the horse."
=Sidney, Sir Philip= (1622-1683), English patriot: "I would
not change my joy for the empire of the world."
=Thurlow, Edward= (1732-1806), English lawyer: "I'll be shot
if I don't believe I'm dying."
=Vane, Henry= (1612-1662), English statesman: "Ten thousand
deaths for me ere I stain the purity of my conscience."
=Washington, George= (1732-1799), American general and
statesman: "It is well, I am about to die, and I look upon
it with perfect resignation."
=Webster, Daniel= (1782-1852), American statesman: "I still
live."
=Wellington, Duke of= (1769-1852), British general and
statesman: "Yes, if you please." (To a servant asking if he
would have some tea.)
=Wesley, John= (1703-1791), English divine: "The best of all
is, God is with us. Farewell."
OLDEN TIME PUBLICITY.
How an artful tradesman drew attention to the presence and the excellence
of his wares in 1875.
REMEMBER
Governor Tilden says that John Hanson told him that he heard Web Wagner
say that Anna E. Dickinson told him that D.S. Decker heard that there was
no doubt that John McLaren said that S.T. Benedict thought Fred. Seward
had told Jim Johnson that Cushney had declared to John Fulton that it was
generally believed that Harry Hull said, in plain terms, that he heard Al
Berry say that his friend, Harriet Beecher Stowe, had said that Fred.
Hotchkiss informed her, at Delmonico's, that it was well known all over
the country that Fin Helwig had caught Jimmey Farthing in saying that in
his opinion it was a matter of fact, of great public interest, that Nate
Wells had said Fred. Howell told him that COHEN BROS. would receive, on
Thursday, Oct. 28th, the first invoice of LYNN HAVEN OYSTERS, never before
sold in Gloversville, and all for 35 cents a quart.
New York, 1875.
When Vesuvius Destroyed Pompeii.
BY THE YOUNGER PLINY--79 A.D.
Pliny the Younger--Caius Plinius Cæcilius Secundus--was
perhaps, the most cultivated and graceful man of letters of
the first century A.D. Literally a man of letters, he left
ten books of his "Epistles," which he himself
collected--probably even wrote with a view to
publication--and their fluent charm still pleases the taste
of the reader. One of his letters, written while he was
Governor of Bithynia, asks instructions from the Emperor
Trajan as to what policy should be pursued against the sect
of Christians.
In other epistles he tells two excellent ghost stories. But
the two letters which are most vital in their human
interest, and which record the most thrilling events, are
the two addressed to his friend, the historian Tacitus,
concerning the great eruption of Vesuvius on August 24, A.D.
79. Pliny was only seventeen years of age when he witnessed
this eruption, which destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum, and
in which his uncle, the elder Pliny, author of the
celebrated natural history, perished.
Until the year 79 Vesuvius was not suspected of being a
volcano. The mountain was covered with vegetation, and the
ancient crater was like a circular bowl scooped from the
summit. Then came the explosion which buried Pompeii and
Herculaneum. Never since has the volcano long remained
quiet. The most serious eruptions have been those of 203,
472, 512, 685, 983, 1066, 1631, 1779, 1794, 1822, 1855,
1865, 1872, 1878, 1880, 1895, and 1906.
Pliny's descriptions of the scenes on the slopes of the
vengeful volcano--the raining ashes; the fleeing, terrified
crowds--are as fresh and vivid to-day as those Roman
frescoes which it has been the good fortune of the modern
archeologist to uncover after two thousand years of burial
beneath the Vesuvian scoriæ.
Letter No. 1.
Your request that I would send you an account of my uncle's death, in
order to transmit a more exact relation of it to posterity, deserves my
acknowledgments, for if this accident shall be celebrated by your pen the
glory of it, I am well assured, will be rendered forever illustrious. And
notwithstanding he perished by a misfortune which, as it involved at the
same time a most beautiful country in ruins, and destroyed so many
populous cities, seems to promise him an everlasting remembrance;
notwithstanding he has himself composed many and lasting works, yet I am
persuaded the mentioning of him in your immortal writings will greatly
contribute to render his name immortal.
Happy I esteem those to be to whom by the provision of the gods has been
granted the ability either to do such actions as are worthy of being
related or to relate them in a manner worthy of being read; but peculiarly
happy are they who are blessed with both these uncommon talents, in the
number of which my uncle, as his own writings and your history will
evidently prove, may justly be ranked.
It is with extreme willingness, therefore, that I execute your commands,
and should indeed have demanded the task if you had not enjoined it. He
was at that time with the fleet under his command at Misenum.
On the 24th of August, about one in the afternoon, my mother desired him
to observe a cloud which appeared of a very unusual size and shape. He
had just taken a turn in the sun and, after bathing himself in cold water
and making a light luncheon, gone back to his books; he immediately arose
and went out upon a rising ground from whence he might get a better sight
of this very uncommon appearance.
A cloud, from which mountain was uncertain at this distance (but it was
found afterward to come from Mount Vesuvius), was ascending, the
appearance of which I cannot give you a more exact description of than by
likening it to that of a pine-tree, for it shot up to a great height in
the form of a very tall trunk, which spread itself out at the top into a
sort of branches, occasioned, I imagine, either by a sudden gust of air
that impelled it, the force of which decreased as it advanced upward, or
the cloud itself being pressed back again by its own weight, expanded in
the manner I have mentioned; it appeared sometimes bright and sometimes
dark and spotted, according as it was either more or less impregnated with
earth and cinders.
The Elder Pliny's Heroism.
This phenomenon seemed to a man of such learning and research as my uncle
extraordinary and worth further looking into. He ordered a light vessel to
be got ready, and gave me leave, if I liked, to accompany him. I said I
had rather go on with my work, and it so happened he had himself given me
something to write out.
As he was coming out of the house he received a note from Rectina, the
wife of Bassus, who was in the utmost alarm at the imminent danger which
threatened her, for her villa lying at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, there
was no way of escape by sea; she earnestly entreated him, therefore, to
come to her assistance.
He accordingly changed his first intention, and what he had begun from a
philosophical he now carried out in a noble and generous spirit. He
ordered the galleys to put to sea, and went himself on board with an
intention of assisting not only Rectina, but the several towns which lay
thickly strewn along the beautiful coast.
Hastening then to the place from whence others fled with the utmost
terror, he steered his course direct to the point of danger, and with so
much calmness and presence of mind as to be able to make and dictate his
observations upon the motion and all the phenomena of that dreadful scene.
He was now so close to the mountain that the cinders, which grew thicker
and hotter the nearer he approached, fell into the ships, together with
pumice-stones and black pieces of burning rock; they were in danger, too,
not only of being aground by the sudden retreat of the sea, but also from
the vast fragments which rolled down from the mountain and obstructed all
the shore.
Here he stopped to consider whether he should turn back again, to which,
the pilot advising him, "Fortune," said he, "favors the brave; steer to
where Pomponianus is." Pomponianus was then at Stabiæ (Castellamare),
separated by a bay which the sea, after several insensible windings, forms
with the shore.
He had already sent his baggage on board, for though he was not at that
time in actual danger, yet being within sight of it, and indeed extremely
near, if it should in the least increase he was determined to put to sea
as soon as the wind, which was blowing dead inshore, should go down.
It was favorable, however, for carrying my uncle to Pomponianus, whom he
found in the greatest consternation. He embraced him tenderly, encouraging
and urging him to keep up his spirits, and, the more effectually to soothe
his fears by seeming unconcerned himself, ordered a bath to be got ready,
and then, after having bathed, sat down to supper with great cheerfulness,
or at least (what is just as heroic) with every appearance of it.
Meanwhile broad flames shone out in several places from Mount Vesuvius,
which the darkness of the night contributed to render still brighter and
clearer. But my uncle, in order to soothe the apprehensions of his friend,
assured him it was only the burning of the villages, which the country
people had abandoned to the flames; after this he retired to rest, and it
is most certain he was so little disquieted as to fall into a sound sleep,
for his breathing, which on account of his corpulence was rather heavy
and sonorous, was heard by the attendants outside.
The court which led to his apartment being now almost filled with stones
and ashes, if he had continued there any time longer it would have been
impossible, for him to have made his way out.
So he was awakened and got up and went to Pomponianus and the rest of his
company, who were feeling too anxious to think of going to bed. They
consulted together whether it would be most prudent to trust to the
houses, which now rocked from side to side with frequent and violent
concussions as though shaken from their very foundations, or fly to the
open fields, where the calcined stones and cinders, though light indeed,
yet fell in large showers and threatened destruction.
Tied Pillows on Their Heads.
In this choice of dangers they resolved for the fields, a resolution
which, while the rest of the company were hurried into it by their fears,
my uncle embraced upon cool and deliberate consideration. They went out
then, having pillows tied upon their heads with napkins, and this was
their whole defense against the storm of stones that fell round them.
It was now day everywhere else, but there a deeper darkness prevailed than
in the thickest night, which, however, was in some degree alleviated by
torches and other lights of various kinds. They thought proper to go
farther down upon the shore to see if they might safely put to sea, but
found the waves still running extremely high and boisterous.
There my uncle, laying himself down upon a sailcloth which was spread for
him, called twice for some cold water, which he drank, when immediately
the flames, preceded by a strong whiff of sulfur, dispersed the rest of
the party and obliged him to rise.
He raised himself up with the assistance of two of his servants, and
instantly fell down dead, suffocated, as I conjecture, by some gross and
noxious vapor, having always had a weak throat, which was often inflamed.
As soon as it was light again, which was not till the third day after this
melancholy accident, his body was found entire, and without any marks of
violence upon it, in the dress in which he fell, and looking more like a
man asleep than dead.
During all this time my mother and I, who were at Misenum--but this has no
connection with your history, and you did not desire any particulars
besides those of my uncle's death, so I will end here, only adding that I
have faithfully related to you what I was either a witness of myself or
received the news of immediately after the accident happened, and before
there was time to vary the truth.
You will pick out of this narrative whatever is most important, for a
letter is one thing, a history another; it is one thing writing to a
friend, another writing to the public. Farewell.
Letter No. 2.
The letter which, in compliance with your request, I wrote to you
concerning the death of my uncle has raised, it seems, your curiosity to
know what terrors and dangers attended me while I continued at Misenum,
for there, I think, my account broke off.
Though my shock'd soul recoils, my tongue shall tell.
My uncle having left us, I spent such time as was left on my studies (it
was on their account, indeed, that I had stopped behind) till it was time
for my bath. After which I went to supper, and then fell into a short and
uneasy sleep.
There had been noticed for many days before a trembling of the earth,
which did not alarm us much, as this is quite an ordinary occurrence in
Campania, but it was so particularly violent that night that it not only
shook but overturned, as it would seem, everything about us.
My mother rushed into my chamber, where she found me rising, in order to
awaken her. We sat down in the open court of the house, which occupied a
small space between the buildings and the sea. As I was at that time but
eighteen years of age, I know not whether I should call my behavior in
this dangerous juncture courage or folly; but I took up Livy, and amused
myself with turning over that author, and even making extracts from him,
as if I had been perfectly at my leisure.
Just then a friend of my uncle, who had lately come to him from Spain,
joined us, and, observing me sitting by my mother with a book in my hand,
reproved her for her calmness and me at the same time for my careless
security; nevertheless, I went on with my author.
Though it was now morning, the light was still exceedingly faint and
doubtful; the buildings all around us tottered, and though we stood upon
open ground, yet as the place was narrow and confined there was no
remaining without imminent danger; we therefore resolved to quit the town.
Effects of the Earthquakes.
A panic-stricken crowd followed us, and (as to a mind distracted with
terror every suggestion seems more prudent than its own) pressed on us in
dense array to drive us forward as we came out. Being at a convenient
distance from the houses, we stood still in the midst of a most dangerous
and dreadful scene.
The chariots, which we had ordered to be drawn out, were so agitated
backward and forward, though upon the most level ground, that we could not
keep them steady even by supporting them with large stones. The sea seemed
to roll back upon itself and to be driven from its banks by the convulsive
motion of the earth; it is certain at least the shore was considerably
enlarged, and several sea animals were left upon it. On the other side a
black and dreadful cloud, broken with rapid, zigzag flashes, revealed
behind it variously shaped masses of flame; these last were like sheet
lightning, but much larger.
Upon this our Spanish friend, whom I mentioned above, addressed himself to
my mother and me with great energy and urgency. "If your brother," he
said, "if your uncle be safe, he certainly wishes you may be so, too; but
if he perished it was his desire, no doubt, that you might both survive
him; why, therefore, do you delay your escape a moment?" We could never
think of our own safety, we said, while we were uncertain of his.
Upon this our friend left us and withdrew from the danger with the utmost
precipitation. Soon afterward the cloud began to descend and cover the
sea. It had already surrounded and concealed the island of Capri and the
promontory of Misenum.
My mother now besought, urged, even commanded me to make my escape at any
rate, which, as I was young, I might easily do; as for herself, she said,
her age and corpulency rendered all attempts of that sort impossible;
however, she would willingly meet death if she could have the satisfaction
of seeing that she was not the occasion of mine. But I absolutely refused
to leave her, and, taking her by the hand, compelled her to go with me.
She complied with great reluctance, and not without many reproaches to
herself for retarding my flight.
The ashes now began to fall upon us, though in no great quantity. I looked
back; a dense, dark mist seemed to be following us, spreading itself over
the country like a cloud. "Let us turn out of the highroad," I said,
"while we can still see, for fear that, should we fall in the road, we
should be pressed to death in the dark by the crowds that are following
us."
We had scarcely sat down when night came upon us, not such as we have when
the sky is cloudy, or when there is no moon, but that of a room when it is
shut up and all the lights put out.
The Terror of the People.
You might hear the shrieks of women, the screams of children, and the
shouts of men; some calling for their children, others for their parents,
others for their husbands, and seeking to recognize each other by the
voices that replied; one lamenting his own fate, another that of his
family; some wishing to die, from the very fear of dying; some lifting
their hands to the gods, but the greater part convinced that there were
now no gods at all, and that the final endless night of which we have
heard had come upon the world.
Among these there were some who augmented the real terrors by others
imaginary or wilfully invented. I remember some who declared that one part
of Misenum had fallen, that another was on fire; it was false, but they
found people to believe them.
It now grew rather lighter, which we imagined to be rather the forerunner
of an approaching burst of flames (as in truth it was) than the return of
day; however, the fire fell at a distance from us; then again we were
immersed in thick darkness, and a heavy shower of ashes rained upon us,
which we were obliged every now and then to stand up to shake off,
otherwise we should have been crushed and buried in the heap.
I might boast that during all this scene of horror not a sigh or
expression of fear escaped me, had not my support been grounded in that
miserable though mighty consolation that all mankind were involved in the
same calamity, and that I was perishing with the world itself.
At last this dreadful darkness was dissipated by degrees, like a cloud or
smoke; the real day returned, and even the sun shone out, though with a
lurid light, as when an eclipse is coming on. Every object that presented
itself to our eyes (which were extremely weakened) seemed changed, being
covered deep with ashes as if with snow.
We returned to Misenum, where we refreshed ourselves as well as we could,
and passed an anxious night between hope and fear, though indeed with a
much larger share of the latter, for the earthquake still continued, while
many frenzied persons ran up and down, heightening their own and their
friends' calamities by terrible predictions.
However, my mother and I, notwithstanding the danger we had passed, and
that which still threatened us, had no thoughts of leaving the place till
we could receive some news of my uncle.
You will read this narrative without any view of inserting it in your
history, of which it is not in the least worthy, and indeed you must put
it down to your own request if it should appear not worth even the trouble
of a letter. Farewell.
THE OLDEST CITY IN THE WORLD.
The Damascus Seen by Saul of Tarsus Still Exists, Presenting the Same
Scenes and Cherishing the Same Customs That Characterized It 1,000 Years
Ago.
If you were suddenly asked to name the oldest city in the world which is
still in a flourishing condition, what would be your answer?
In nine cases out of ten, the person to whom such a query might be
propounded would hark back to Egypt, Greece, or Rome. He would be wrong.
The oldest city in the world is Damascus.
Tyre and Sidon have crumbled on the shore; Baalbec is a ruin; Palmyra is
buried in a desert; Nineveh and Babylon have disappeared from the Tigris
and the Euphrates. Damascus remains what it was before the days of
Abraham--a center of trade and travel--an isle of verdure in the desert;
"a presidential capital," with martial and sacred associations extending
through thirty centuries.
It was near Damascus that Saul of Tarsus saw the light above the
brightness of the sun; the street which is called Strait, in which it was
said "he prayed," still runs through the city.
The city which Mohammed surveyed from a neighboring height and was afraid
to enter "because it was given to man to have but one paradise, and for
his part he was resolved not to have it in this world," is to-day what
Julian called the "Eye of the East," as it was in the time of Isaiah "the
head of Syria."
From Damascus came the damson, our blue plums, and the delicious apricot
of Portugal called damasco; damask, our beautiful fabric of cotton and
silk, with vines and flowers raised upon a smooth, bright ground; the
damask rose introduced into England in the time of Henry VIII; the
Damascus blade, so famous the world over for its keen edge and wonderful
elasticity, the secret of whose manufacture was lost when Tamerlane
carried the artist into Persia; and that beautiful art of inlaying wood
and steel with gold and silver, a kind of mosaic engraving and sculpture
united--called damaskeening--with which boxes, bureaus, and swords are
ornamented.
A FEAST OF AUTO SONG.
The Egotism of the Motor-Car, Even in the Realm of Poesy, Proves More
Than a Match for the Wit of People Who Continue to Traduce It Until
They Decide What Model They Will Buy.
UNCLE HENRY ON THE PASSING OF THE HORSE.
Every little while they tell us that the horse has got to go;
First the trolley was invented 'cause the horses went so slow,
And they told us that we'd better not keep raisin' colts no more.
When the street cars got to moting that the horses pulled before,
I thought it was all over for old Fan and Doll and Kit,
S'posed the horse was up and done for,
But
he
ain't
went
yit!
When the bike craze first got started people, told us right away,
As you probably remember, that the horse had saw his day;
People put away their buggies and went kitin' 'round on wheels;
There were lots and lots of horses didn't even earn their meals.
I used to stand and watch 'em with their bloomers as they'd flit,
And I thought the horse was goin',
But
he
ain't
went
yit!
Then they got the horseless carriage, and they said the horse was done.
And the story's been repeated twenty times by Edison;
Every time he gets another of his batteries to go
He comes whoopin' out to tell us that the horse don't stand a show.
And you'd think to see these chauffeurs, as they go a-chauffin', it
Was good-by to Mr. Dobbin,
But
he
ain't
went
yit!
When the people git to flying in the air I s'pose they'll say,
As we long have been a-sayin', that the horse has had his day.
And I s'pose that some old feller just about like me'll stand
Where it's safe, and watch the horses haulin' stuff across the land;
And he'll mebby think as I do, while the crows above him flit,
"Oh, they say the horse is done for,
But
he
ain't
went
yit!"
_Chicago Record-Herald._
HE BIDED HIS TIME
There lived, one time, a shiftless chap, who wasn't satisfied;
To settle down and plug along he never could abide.
He felt the fire of greatness burn within his eager breast,
And knew himself cut out for deeds the highest and the best.
His spirit fairly fumed and frothed at cruel Fate's restraint;
Of favorless environment he ever made complaint.
"But some fine day," he used to say, "I'll set the world afire;
It's not for me unknown to be when I do so aspire."
Each day our hero might have found some labor to pursue;
On every side stood waiting work for willing hands to do;
The neighborhood wherein he dwelt had crying need of men
To mow the lawns, for instance, and to beat the rugs--but then
A man so keenly conscious of his real inward worth
Could hardly care to tackle toil so tainted of the earth.
And so, to pass the time away until his chance should come,
He boarded with his mother when he wasn't drinking rum.
No doubt, good-natured reader, you opine and apprehend
That this vain, shiftless person met a mean and sorry end.
The facts are these: He waited till the time, for us so sad,
When wagons run with gasoline became the reigning fad.
A sudden, wild demand arose for drivers, men with cheek,
And Shifty got a handsome job at fifty bones a week,
The people stare, where'er he goes; he's gained his great desire,
And every-day he sets the world, or part of it, afire.
_Newark Evening News._
WHAT THEY CALL IT.
Grandma says we're right in style,
A-sittin' in our automobile.
Grandpa says we're fit to kill,
A-ridin' in our automo-bill.
Ma, she says we ought to feel
Grateful fer our automo-beel.
Pa says there ain't no other man
Kin run an auto like he can.
Auntie preaches near and far
'Bout our lovely touring car.
Uncle Bill says he ain't seen
Nowhere such a good machine.
Brother Jim, he keeps a-braggin'
'Bout the speed of our new wagon.
But, oh, it sounds so grand and noble
When sister Sue says automoble.
_Puck._
AN "AUTO" IDYL.
The automobile owner crawled
With haste into his car
And said good-by, for he was called
To travel fast and far.
He grasped the steering wheel with glee
And gave the clutch a yank,
And then, with objurgations, he
Climbed down again to crank.
Again he mounted to the seat
Prepared like wind to fly,
Yet there he lingered in the street;
The water tank was dry.
He filled the tank; it seemed a cinch,
Once more he starts to chauff,
Behold, he does not move an inch--
The differential's off.
In rage he toils with might and main
Till he is faint and weak;
Again he starts--and stops again;
The tire's sprung a leak.
The shades of night are falling fast,
But joy illumes his brow,
He shoots ahead--his trouble past,
Pray who can catch him now?
And yet, around the corner we
May find the same machine;
Its owner is not there, for he
Has gone for gasoline.
_Council Bluffs Nonpareil._
SHORT STORY OF SPEED.
Thisisthewayheracedalong
Ateighteenmilesanhour;
This the speed he walked back home
When busted was his power.
_Exchange._
SONG OF THE AUTOMOBILE.
By Joe Cone.
I am coming, I am coming, don't you hear my thunder roll,
Don't you feel my mighty power thro' your body and your soul;
Don't you dread my awful presence, my momentous throbbing feel?
I'm a dashing, thrashing, bucking, clucking
Auto-mo-bile!
I'm a wonder, I'm a snorter, I'm a bull put on parade,
I'm a devil, I'm a terror for the people who're afraid;
I can paralyze the horses, I can make 'em dance a reel,
I'm a rearing, tearing, rumbling, grumbling
Auto-mo-bile!
Clear the track, ye meek and lowly, for I claim the right of way!
There's no limit to my tenure, or my speed by night or day;
To the woods with everybody, that's the way we devils feel,
I'm a lusty, dusty, ramming, jamming
Auto-mo-bile!
_The Pneus._
GRAVE, GAY, AND EPIGRAMMATIC.
LOVE, THE ILLUSION.
Love is just a cobweb, wet with morning dew;
Love is just a fairy spell, invisible to view;
A tread--a touch too heavy, and the cobweb is not there!
A sigh too long, and lo!--the spell has vanished into air!
Love is just a morning-glory, doomed at noon to die;
Love is only half a story, told in passing by;
Love is gold so delicate, the faintest flame would melt it;
Love's--NOTHING; but--God help the man who's never known nor felt it!
_Helen Rowland in Life._
WON HIS BET.
General Miles, in company with a friend, was walking down Pennsylvania
Avenue, when a person, entirely unknown to the veteran soldier, rushed up
to him, and grasping his hand, said, warmly, "Well, Nelse, old boy, I'll
bet anything you don't remember me!"
"You win!" coldly and laconically replied Miles, as he released himself
from the grasp of the stranger and resumed his walk.--_Woman's Home
Companion._
SORRY HE LEARNED IT.
Attorney William S. Barnes, of San Francisco, has a new office boy. The
last boy with whom he was associated resigned a few days ago because the
law business did not suit his peculiar temperament.
"How long have you been here?" asked Barnes, when the small boy made known
his intention to engage in a different vocation.
"Six months," replied the boy.
"And you don't like the law business?"
"Naw. It's no good, and I tell you straight, I'm mighty sorry I learned
it."--_Technical World._
WHAT FIELD WANTED.
Eugene Field, sad of countenance and ready of tongue, strayed into a New
York restaurant and seated himself at a table. To him there came a swift
and voluble waiter, who said:
"Coffee, tea-chocolate, ham 'n' 'ggs--beef-steak--mutton--chop--fishballs
--hash'n'--beans," and much more to the same purpose.
Field looked at him long and solemnly, and at last replied:
"Oh, friend, I want none of these things. All I require is an orange and a
few kind words."
DECIDEDLY "WILLIN'."
Miss Maude Adams has a favorite story about a certain "Miss Johnsing" and
an uncertain "Culpeper Pete."
Pete became enamored of the dusky maiden and not having the courage to
"pop" face to face, called up the house where she worked and asked for her
over the telephone. When he got her on the line he asked:
"Is dat Miss Johnsing?"
"Ya-as."
"Well, Miss Johnsing, I'se got a most important question to ask you."
"Ya-as."
"Will you marry me?"
"Ya-as! Who is it, please?"--_Exchange._
A HEROIC RESCUE.
The following sublime paragraph is from one of the latest fashionable
novels:
"With one hand he held her beautiful head above the chilling waves, and
with the other called loudly for assistance!"--_Exchange._
WHY SHE WAS MADE OF A RIB.
A young woman having asked a surgeon why woman was made from the rib of a
man in preference to any other bone, he gave the following gallant answer:
"She was not taken from the head lest she should rule over him; nor from
his feet, lest he should trample upon her; but she was taken from his
side, that she might be his equal; from under his arm, that he might
protect her; from near his heart that he might cherish and love
her."--_Exchange._
A GRACIOUS JUDGE.
Lord Ellenborough once said to a barrister, upon his asking in the midst
of a boring harangue: "Is it the pleasure of the court that I should
proceed with my statement?" "Pleasure, Mr. Smith, has been out of the
question for a long time, but you may proceed."--_Old scrap book._
LIGHT.
The night has a thousand eyes,
And the day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun.
The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one;
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.
_Francis W. Bourdillon._
CURE FOR A NAGGING WIFE.
Having advertised as a widower in search of Wife No. 2, a man of St. Gall,
Switzerland, showed the fifty replies and photographs which he had
received to his wife, and, stating that if she did not want him there were
others who did, he effectively cured her of her "nagging" habits.--_Le
Petit Parisien._
A RICH RETORT.
It is said of the late Marquis of Townsend that when a young man and
engaged in battle, he saw a drummer at his side killed by a cannon ball,
which scattered his brains in every direction. His eyes were at once fixed
on the ghastly object, which seemed to engross his thoughts.
A superior officer observing him, supposed he was intimidated by the
sight, and addressed him in a manner to cheer his spirits.
"Oh," said the young marquis, with calmness but severity, "I am not
frightened; I am only puzzled to make out how any man with such a quantity
of brains ever came to be here!"--_Old scrap book._
GREELEY ON JOURNALISM.
Horace Greeley's favorite poem of his own make was:
Man's a vapor,
Full of woes;
Starts a paper--
Up she goes!
JUST AROUND THE CORNER.
Lloyd Osbourne says that Robert Louis Stevenson once invited a friend to
visit him in Samoa. His friend replied that nothing would give him
greater pleasure, if he could secure the leisure to do so.
"By the way, Louis," added he, "how do you get to Samoa, anyhow?"
"Oh, easily," responded Stevenson, "you simply go to America, cross the
continent to San Francisco, and it's the second turning to the
left."--_Woman's Home Companion._
THE ANGEL'S KINDNESS.
The recording angel suddenly put his fingers in his ears.
"What was that for?" asked St. Peter, when they had been removed.
"Oh, I saw Brown's new derby hat blow off, just as he was getting on a
car," was the explanation of this kind-hearted action.--_Smart Set._
DUNBAR'S RESIGNATION.
Paul Laurence Dunbar, the negro poet, is dead. Incomparable in his
presentation of his race's language and thoughts, he occupied a unique
position in the literary world. W.D. Howells called him the only man of
pure African blood and of American civilization to feel the negro life
esthetically and express it lyrically. Last year, while he was dying of
consumption, he contributed to _Lippincott's_ this verse-sermon of
resignation:
Because I had loved so long,
God in his great compassion
Gave me the gift of song.
Because I had loved so vainly
And sung with such faltering breath,
The Master in infinite mercy
Offers the boon of death.
A RETORT TURKISH.
The following we take to be of Turkish origin:
"As a woman was walking, a man looked at and followed her.
"'Why,' said she, 'do you follow me?'
"'Because,' he replied, 'I have fallen in love with you.'
"'Why so? My sister, who is coming after me, is much handsomer than I am.
Go and make love to her.'
"The man turned back, and saw a woman with an ugly face, and, being
greatly displeased, returned, and said:
"'Why should you tell me a falsehood?'
"The woman answered 'Neither did you tell _me_ the truth; for, if you were
in love with _me_, why did you look back for another woman?'"
FLASHES OF ROYAL REPARTEE.
While there is no royal road to cleverness, the real road, such as it is,
frequently is traveled by royal feet. In these days the functions of
royalty are not of a nature that is likely to develop merry dispositions.
Rich in sly humor was the reply of Henry IV of France, who one day reached
Amiens after a prolonged journey. A local orator was deputed to harangue
him, and commenced with a lengthy string of epithets:
"Very great sovereign, very good, very merciful, very magnanimous----"
"Add also," interrupted the weary monarch, "very tired."
The same king, who appears to have been a constant sufferer from the
stupid orations of these wordy windbags, was listening to a speech in a
small country town, when an ass brayed at a distance.
"Pardon me, gentlemen," said the witty sovereign; "one at a time, please."
Henry's minister, Sully, was a Protestant, and happening to hear that a
famous physician had quitted Calvinism for Catholicism, the king said to
him:
"My friend, your religion is in a bad way--the doctors give it up."
George III was the author of many clever sayings. Meeting Lord Kenyon at a
levée soon after that eminent justice had been guilty of an extraordinary
explosion of ill humor in the Court of King's Bench, the king remarked to
him:
"My lord chief justice, I hear that you have lost your temper, and from my
great regard for you I am glad to hear it, for I hope you will find a
better one."
On another occasion, when coming out of the House of Lords after opening
the session, he said to the lord chancellor:
"Did I deliver the speech well?"
"Very well indeed," was the reply.
"I am glad of that," said the king, "for there was nothing in it."
When Royalty Had Worst of It.
The laugh, however, has not always been upon the side of royalty. When the
Prince-Bishop of Liège was riding to battle at the head of a fine body of
troops he was asked by a spectator how he, a minister of religion, could
engage in the iniquities of war.
"I wage war," said the prelate, "in my character of prince, not of
archbishop."
"And pray," continued the interrogator, "when the devil carries off the
prince, what will become of the archbishop?"
Decidedly the worst of the exchanges did an Eastern sovereign receive
when, having bought several horses from some merchants, he gave them a lac
of rupees to purchase more for him. Soon after they had departed, he, in a
sportive humor, ordered his vizier to make out a list of all the fools in
his dominions. The vizier did so, and put his majesty's name at the head
of them. The king asked why. The vizier replied:
"Because you entrusted a lac of rupees to men you didn't know, and who
will never come back."
"Aye, but suppose they should come back?"
"Then," said the vizier, "I shall erase your name and insert theirs."
In the answer which a German prince was given there seems to be a rebuke
for his misgovernment implied. Having in a dream seen three rats, one fat,
the other lean, and the third blind, he sent for a celebrated Bohemian
gipsy and demanded an explanation.
"The fat rat," said she, "is your prime minister, the lean rat your
people, and the blind rat yourself."
Court Laureate Too Frank.
One of the Shahs of Persia was more anxious than able to acquire fame as a
poet. He had just completed a new performance in very "peculiar meter,"
and summoned the court poet into the royal presence to hear the poem read.
The laureate, when his opinion was asked (in theatrical language),
"damned" the composition.
The Shah, enraged at this uncourtly criticism, gave orders that the court
poet should be taken to the stable and tied up in the same stall with a
donkey. Here the poor sinner remained until his royal rival had
perpetrated another poem, when he was again commanded to appear before the
throne and submit to a second infliction of sovereign dulness.
He listened in silence while the new poem was read, and at the conclusion,
his opinion being required, he fell upon his knees and significantly
exclaimed to the royal author:
"Send me back to the donkey!"
The Nation's Debt to Mothers.
BY GILSON WILLETS.
Great Americans Who Have Achieved World-Wide Reputations By
Reason of the Success That Has Attended Their Careers,
Ascribe Their Triumphs to Maternal Influence.
_An original article written for_ THE SCRAP BOOK.
The debt which the United States owes to the mothers of its citizens is
one that is beyond the expression of either figures or language. It is a
debt on which the republic can only pay the interest--interest that
consists of the manifestation of an ever-increasing reverence for American
motherhood; for, with all its magnificent resources, the nation is too
poor to make even a feeble attempt to pay the principal.
No better evidence of the effect of maternal influence on the careers of
successful Americans need be adduced than that which is offered here.
In the lives of the Presidents of the United States, it is found that the
nation owes much to American mothers.
George Washington was only eleven years old when his father died, leaving
the widowed mother, Mary Washington, with five children to educate and
direct. She used daily to gather her children around her and teach them
the principles of religion and morality from a little manual in which she
wrote all her maxims.
That manual was preserved by Washington as one of his most valued
treasures, "and was consulted by me many times in after-life." A French
general, on retiring from the presence of Mary Washington, remarked: "It
is not surprising that America should produce great men, since she can
boast of such mothers."
Andrew Jackson.
A few days previous to the birth of Andrew Jackson his father died, and
the widow and her two little sons rode to the churchyard in the wagon
with the coffin. The support of the family fell, then, entirely upon the
mother. She went to the home of her brother-in-law and there engaged
herself as housekeeper.
Until her sons were old enough to take care of themselves she toiled for
them, clothed them, and educated them as best she could.
Many stories are told of Mrs. Jackson's benevolence, her thrift, her
decision of character, and "a rigid honesty and pride of good name that
went hand in hand with a quick and jealous self-respect which was not
likely to be patient under any injustice."
When Andrew Jackson became President, he said of his mother:
"One of the last injunctions given me by her was never to institute a suit
for assault and battery, or for defamation; never to wound the feelings of
others, nor suffer my own to be outraged. These were her words of
admonition to me. I remember them well, and have never failed to respect
them."
Thomas Jefferson.
Thomas Jefferson's father died when the lad was fourteen, and then his
mother became more than ever his companion and adviser. Thomas had,
indeed, always lived more under the influence of his mother than of his
busy father. She was a woman of unusual refinement of character, having
the culture of the best society. Thus equipped, she assumed the training
of Thomas. Upon the death of her husband she found herself her children's
guardian, responsible for a vast entailed estate that was to go to the
eldest son, Thomas.
John Quincy Adams.
John Quincy Adams's father was devoted to his family; but, engrossed in
political activities, he was frequently absent from home for long periods.
From the hour in which the boy learned to talk, his mental activities
received an uncommon stimulus from his mother.
"Being taught by my mother to love my country," wrote John Quincy Adams,
when he became President, "I did it literally by learning to love the
actual hills and rocks and trees, and the very birds and animals." And he
added elsewhere: "All that I am my mother made me."
It is an interesting coincidence that the three martyred Presidents should
each have been peculiarly dominated by a mother's influence.
Abraham Lincoln.
That expression of habitual melancholy in Lincoln's face, for example, was
really a reproduction of the features of Nancy Hanks Lincoln, his mother.
For, through long drudgery and privation, in cabin after cabin, Mrs.
Lincoln had lost all her comeliness, and became bent and care-worn and
sad-faced while Abraham was still an impressionable youth.
How Lincoln reverenced that mother is told by all his biographers. She it
was who, possessing the accomplishments of reading and writing, not common
at that time among the poor people of Kentucky, taught Abraham his letters
and gave him his first lessons in writing.
When Mrs. Lincoln died her son spent months roving the woods, vainly
trying to recover from his grief. The mother was buried without any
funeral service, there being no minister in the vicinity. But Abraham
traversed the country for twenty miles in every direction till he found an
itinerant preacher and induced him to come to his mother's grave and there
preach a funeral sermon.
"Now," he said, "I have henceforth but one purpose in life: to live as she
would have me live."
And in after years Lincoln was deeply and visibly affected whenever he
heard of any incident involving the love of mother and son.
James A. Garfield.
What a contrast is this experience of Lincoln's to that of General Ulysses
S. Grant, whose mother survived his Presidential career, and to that of
Garfield, whose mother lived to stand by his side when he read his
inaugural address on the steps of the Capitol and then to weep at his
tomb! And to that of McKinley, upon whose venerable mother the eyes of the
nation were turned with tender interest on March 4, 1897, when she was the
first person to whom McKinley spoke as President of the United States!
"Eliza," said the father of James A. Garfield to his wife, on his
dying-bed in a log cabin in the wilderness bordering the Ohio River, "I
have brought you four young saplings into these woods. Take care of them."
The future President was then only two years old. His mother was left to
fight the battle of life alone. She managed, by hard work, to run the
little farm, and even found time to give her sons daily lessons in
Bible-reading. Upon James in particular she impressed her personality,
until her own high nature dominated him deeply.
When James was old enough he drove mules on the tow-path of the Ohio
Canal. One pay-day his wages fell short of the proper amount.
"I want every cent for my mother," he said to his employer, insisting upon
the few extra pennies.
Finally he earned enough to enable him to enter the seminary at Chester,
ten miles from his home. While there, he spent a certain holiday, with his
classmates, on a mountain. As darkness gathered about them--they were to
remain overnight--Garfield took a Testament from his pocket and said:
"Boys, I read a chapter every night simultaneously with my mother. If you
please, I will read it now."
And on the day of his inauguration, he turned to his mother, saying:
"It's all because of you, mother."
William McKinley.
At the outbreak of the Rebellion a "war meeting" was held in Poland,
Ohio, in the Sparrow Tavern. There were speaking and beating of drums, and
finally an appeal for volunteers to defend the flag. The first to step
forth was William McKinley, Jr.
"No, my son," said the senior McKinley, laying a restraining hand upon his
son's arm; "you are too young."
"No, he is not too young--none are too young to carry a light in this dark
hour."
The speaker was William's mother.
"And thus, strange to say," wrote William McKinley, years afterward, "the
usual order of things was in my case reversed: my father would have held
me back from the mighty struggle that was to ensue, on the ground that I
was only eighteen years old; and my mother was the one to say 'Go!' For
she had, and still has, a strong and passionate patriotism. Next to God,
she loves her country. She believed in freedom, and was ready to offer up
even a woman's most priceless jewel--her child--to save her country's
flag. She had convictions, and the intellectual powers to impress those
around her--impressing most of all her son."
McKinley's mother was still living at Canton, Ohio, at the age of
eighty-seven, at the time of her son's first inauguration as President.
That day a seemingly trifling incident endeared the new President in the
hearts of the mothers of the country. For William McKinley, as soon as he
had taken the oath of office, went to his mother and kissed her.
Levi P. Morton.
Levi P. Morton once established a dry-goods house in New York, and failed.
But to his creditors he gave all he possessed, settling for fifty cents on
the dollar. Years afterward he made a great success as a banker, and then
he again gave thought to those whom he had not paid in full as a merchant.
One day all his former creditors received invitations to a banquet. His
guests took their seats at the table, and as each opened his napkin he
found a check for the full amount of his claim, with interest.
"Gentlemen," said Mr. Morton, "the one who deserves the credit for
the--shall we say favors of the evening?--is not your host, but the
mother who, by her early influence, has guided him through life. My
father's salary as the village parson was not sufficient for all the
household expenses; so I went to clerking in the village store for a few
dollars a month. When I brought my wages to my mother she said:
"'Levi, do you owe any of this money to anybody? Yes? Then go at once and
pay it, if it takes every dollar. If you owe money, you are not a free
boy.'
"My emancipation to-night, gentlemen, is the direct result of that
mother's early counsel."
Rockefeller and Rogers.
"My mother," says John D. Rockefeller, "taught me to make everything
count. When I became partner in a grocery, I got some barrels of
beans--cheap, because there were many black ones among them. I expected to
sell them cheap, too. But my mother said:
"'John, put in all your spare time, night and day, sorting those beans,
and then they will be all extra quality and you can sell them at an extra
price.'
"For weeks I worked, picking over those beans, by hand, throwing out all
the black ones. It was a lesson I have never forgotten. Through me, my
mother says to all young men:
"'Throw the worthless out of your life; make everything count.'"
Henry H. Rogers, of the Standard Oil Company, said recently:
"Up to a very few years ago I went to my mother with all my joys and all
my woes, just as I did when a boy."
Once a week, in Fairhaven, the model Massachusetts town for which Mr.
Rogers has done so much, he drives to the grave of that mother whom he
loved.
In his mother's cottage while she lived (she would never consent to move
into the great new castle her son built) Mr. Rogers put a long-distance
telephone. Then, every morning in his New York office, at eleven o'clock
precisely, in the very midst of the battle for millions, he would call a
truce for a few minutes "to telephone my mother."
Stephen V. White.
Stephen V. White, "Deacon White," one of the most trusted men in Wall
Street, has a long strip of canvas hanging on his office-wall on which are
painted, in large letters, these lines:
I shall pass through this world but once;
Any good thing which in passing I can do,
Or any kindness I can show to any human being,
Let me do it now;
Let me not defer it,
Nor neglect it,
For I shall not pass this way again.
"That's my philosophy of life," says Mr. White, "as my mother taught it to
me. Every young man should copy those lines and put the copy in the finest
frame he can afford. For those lines I owe my mother much; it was she who
made me repeat them over and over."
Edwin Markham, "The Man with the Hoe," says:
"It was the influence of my mother--my father having died--that dominated
me. She was an extraordinary woman. She kept a general store in Oregon
City, and conducted the business with remarkable energy. She was known as
the 'Woman Poet of Oregon.'
"It was from her that I got my poetical bent. Her poems were full of
feeling and of the earnestness of a strong religious spirit. They were
published only in newspapers--and to-day my scrap book containing poems
written by my mother is my most precious possession."
John Wanamaker.
"When you marry," said John Wanamaker, to a young men's Bible class,
"remember that your mother-in-law is your wife's mother. Never allow a
so-called 'mother-in-law joke' to make you forget that you are reading a
reflection on some one's mother. My own mother I reverenced. Her maxims
taught me forbearance, tolerance, and the homely lesson of live and let
live."
The mother of Henry O. Havemeyer, the "Sugar King," urged her son to don
overalls and go to work in his father's refinery--though the family was
even then very rich.
"So my mother taught me," says Mr. Havemeyer, "to know the joy of work at
a time when I might have slipped into a life of idleness."
The Rev. Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst, the well-known New York clergyman,
says:
"My father was a farmer, and my mother, with four children on her hands,
and no servant, did all the work of a farmer's wife. Her days were long,
for she also devoted herself to her children, to their character and
education, declining to farm us out to the supervision of nurses or
school-teachers. My mother had the old-fashioned notion that children were
born of mothers in order that they might have mothers to bring them up."
David Starr Jordan, president of Leland Stanford University, was asked
what great man or woman most influenced him as a boy.
He replied, in writing:
"I was far more influenced by my mother than by any other person I ever
knew or heard of."
Fulton, Franklin, and Astor.
Robert Fulton was only three years old when his father died. "So that," he
said, "I grew up under the care of my blessed mother. She developed my
early talent for drawing and encouraged me in my visits to the
machine-shops of the town."
Robert was a dull pupil at school, however, and the teacher complained to
his mother. Whereupon Mrs. Fulton replied proudly:
"My boy's head, sir, is so full of original notions that there is no
vacant chamber in which to store the contents of your musty books."
"I was only ten years old at that time," said Fulton, "and my mother
seemed to be the only human being who understood my natural bent for
mechanics."
The fact that Fulton's mother let the boy have his own way in his
"original notions" had its direct result later in the building of the
first steamboat.
Benjamin Franklin many times, in his own story of his life, mentions the
powerful influence which his mother had over him, referring to her always
with peculiar affection.
"My son," said that mother, "is endowed with more than ordinary talent,
and he shall enter one of the professions, perhaps the ministry."
The family was then very poor, the elder Franklin having no ambition
beyond that of making a bare competence as a ship-chandler. Encouraged by
his mother, however, young Benjamin "took to books" with such ardor that
before he was ten years old his mother spoke of him as "our little
professor," and added:
"He shall serve either humanity or his country; the one as a minister of
the Gospel, the other as a diplomat."
The first John Jacob Astor said: "Whatever I have accomplished through
thrift is due to the teachings of my mother. She trained me to the habit
of early rising; she made me devote the first waking hours to reading the
Bible. Those habits have continued through my life, and have been to me a
source of unfailing comfort. Her death was the greatest grief of my
existence."
WHEN THACKERAY WENT ON STRIKE.
In a Letter Written to the Publisher of an English Magazine, the Famous
Novelist Demanded as Good Pay as That of the "Monthly Nurse."
There are authors' clubs and authors' societies in nearly every national
literary center in the world, but up to the present time the trade of
authorship has not been formally affiliated with that of any kind of
trade-unionism. For this very reason, authors are compelled to make their
demands individually.
This was the situation that confronted William Makepeace Thackeray at a
time when his writings were first beginning to win popularity in England.
It was in 1837, the year after his marriage to Isabella Shawe--a
chronological sequence which perhaps accounts for his increased need of
money. He was contributing "The Yellowplush Papers" to the successive
issues of _Fraser's Magazine_, and he had made up his mind that his work
ought to yield him a more satisfactory financial return. The result was he
went on strike, as may be seen by the following letter which he wrote to
James Fraser, the proprietor of the magazine:
Boulogne, Monday, February.
MY DEAR FRASER:
I have seen the doctor, who has given me commands about the
hundredth number. I shall send him my share from Paris in a
day or two, and hope I shall do a good deal in the diligence
to-morrow. He reiterates his determination to write monthly
for you and deliver over the proceeds to me. Will you,
therefore, have the goodness to give the bearer a check (in
my wife's name) for the amount of his contributions for the
last two months? Mrs. Thackeray will give you a receipt for
the same. You have already Maginn's authority.
Now comes another and not a very pleasant point on which I
must speak. I hereby give notice that I shall strike for
wages. You pay more to others, I find, than to me, and so I
intend to make some fresh conditions about Yellowplush. I
shall write no more of that gentleman's remarks except at
the rate of twelve guineas a sheet and with a drawing for
each number in which his story appears--the drawing two
guineas.
Pray do not be angry at this decision on my part; it is
simply a bargain which it is my duty to make. Bad as he is,
Mr. Yellowplush is the most popular contributor to your
magazine, and ought to be paid accordingly; if he does not
deserve more than the Monthly Nurse or the Blue Friars, I am
a Dutchman. I have been at work upon his adventures to-day,
and will send them to you or not, as you like; but in common
regard for myself I won't work under prices.
Well, I dare say you will be very indignant, and swear I am
the most mercenary of individuals. Not so. But I am a better
workman than most of your crew, and desire a better price.
You must not, I repeat, be angry or, because we differ as
tradesmen, break off our connection as friends.
Believe me that, whether I write for you or not, I shall
always be glad of your friendship, and anxious to have your
good opinion. I am, ever, my dear Fraser (independent of £
s. d.), very truly yours,
W.M. THACKERAY.
MY LADY ON PARADE.
Verses, Old and New, Dealing With Various Phases of That Highly Important
Subject, the Philosophy of Feminine Costume.
WHAT THE CHOIR SANG.
By Harriette Hammond.
A foolish little maiden bought a foolish little bonnet,
With a ribbon, and a feather, and a bit of lace upon it.
And that the other maidens of the little town might know it,
She thought she'd go to meeting the next Sunday just to show it.
But though the little bonnet was scarce larger than a dime,
The getting of it settled proved to be a work of time;
So when 'twas fairly tied, all the bells had stopped their ringing,
And when she came to meeting, sure enough, the folks were singing.
So this foolish little maiden stood and waited at the door;
And as she shook her ruffles out behind, and smoothed them down before.
"Hallelujah! hallelujah!" sang the choir above her head--
"Hardly knew you! hardly knew you!" were the words she thought they
said.
This made the little maiden feel so very, _very_ cross,
That she gave her little mouth a twist, her little head a toss;
For she thought the very hymn they sang was all about her bonnet,
With the ribbon, and the feather, and the bit of lace upon it.
And she would not wait to listen to the sermon or the prayer,
But pattered down the silent street and hurried up the stair,
Till she reached her little bureau, and in a bandbox on it
Had hidden, safe from critic's eye, her foolish little bonnet.
Which proves, my little maidens, that each of you will find
In every Sabbath service but an echo of your mind;
And that the little head that's filled with silly little airs
Will never get a blessing from sermons or from prayers.
AN OMAR FOR LADIES.
By Josephine Dodge Daskam.
One for her Club and her own Latch-key fights,
Another wastes in Study her good Nights.
Ah, take the Clothes and let the Culture go,
Nor heed the grumble of the Women's Rights!
And she who saved her coin for Flannels red,
And she who caught Pneumonia instead,
Will both be Underground in Fifty Years,
And Prudence pays no Premium to the dead.
Th' exclusive Style you set your heart upon
Gets to the Bargain counters--and anon
Like monograms on a Saleslady's tie
Cheers but a moment--soon for you 'tis gone.
They say Sixth Avenue and the Bowery keep
The _dernier cri_ that once was far from cheap;
Green Veils, one season chic--Department stores
Mark down in vain--no profits shall they reap.
_Exchange._
SHE FELT OF HER BELT.
I saw her go shopping in stylish attire,
And she felt
Of her belt
At the back.
Her walk was as free as a springy steel wire,
And many a rubberneck turned to admire
As she felt
Of her belt
At the back.
She wondered if all the contraptions back there
Were fastened just right--'twas an unceasing care,
So she felt
Of her belt
At the back.
I saw her at church as she entered her pew;
And she felt
Of her belt
At the back.
She had on a skirt that was rustly and new,
And didn't quite know what the fastenings might do,
So she felt
Of her belt
At the back.
She fidgeted round while the first prayer was said,
She fumbled about while the first hymn was read--
Oh she felt
Of her belt
At the back.
Jack told her one night that he loved her like mad;
And she felt
For her belt
At the back.
She didn't look sorry, she didn't look glad--
She looked like she thought, "Well, that wasn't so bad."
And she felt
For her belt
At the back.
But--well, I don't think 'twas a great deal of harm,
For what should the maiden have found but an arm
When she felt
For her belt
At the back?
_Los Angeles Herald._
REGRETS.
By Carolyn Wells.
I cannot wear the old gowns
I wore a year ago,
The styles are so eccentric,
And fashion changes so;
These bygone gowns are out of date;
(There must be nine or ten!)
I cannot wear the old gowns,
Nor don those frocks again.
I cannot wear the old gowns,
The skirts are far too tight;
They do not flare correctly, and
The trimming isn't right.
The Spanish flounce is fagoted,
The plaits are box, not knife;
I cannot wear the old gowns--
I'd look like Noah's wife.
I cannot wear the old gowns,
The sleeves are so absurd;
They're tightly fitted at the top,
And at the wrist they're shirred!
The shoulder seams are far too long,
The collars too high-necked;
I cannot wear my old gowns
And keep my self-respect!
_Saturday Evening Post._
MY AUNT.
By Oliver Wendell Holmes.
My aunt! My dear unmarried aunt!
Long years have o'er her flown;
Yet still she strains the aching clasp
That binds her virgin zone;
I know it hurts her--though she looks
As cheerful as she can;
Her waist is ampler than her life,
For life is but a span.
My aunt, my poor deluded aunt!
Her hair is almost gray;
Why will she train that winter curl
In such a springlike way?
How can she lay her glasses down,
And say she reads as well,
When, through a double convex lens,
She just makes out to spell?
Her father--grandpa! Forgive
This erring lip its smiles--
Vowed she would make the finest girl
Within a hundred miles.
He sent her to a stylish school;
'Twas in her thirteenth June;
And with her, as the rules required,
"Two towels and a spoon."
They braced my aunt against a board
To make her straight and tall;
They laced her up, they starved her down,
To make her light and small;
They pinched her feet, they singed her hair,
They screw it up with pins--
Oh, never mortal suffered more
In penance for her sins!
So when my precious aunt was done,
My grandsire brought her back
(By daylight, lest some rabid youth
Might follow on the track);
"Ah!" said my grandsire, as he shook
Some powder in his pan,
"What could this lovely creature do
Against a desperate man?"
Alas, nor chariot nor barouche
Nor bandit cavalcade
Tore from the trembling father's arms
His all-accomplished maid.
For her how happy had it been!
And heaven had spared to me
To see one sad, ungathered rose
On my ancestral tree.
MISMATED MEN OF GENIUS.
Some Distinguished Writers, Artists, and Composers Who Were Rather Less
Fortunate in Choosing Wives With Congenial Temperaments Than in Following
the Paths That Led Them On to Fame.
In writing on the subject of the influence of matrimony on men of genius,
E.P. Whipple, the Boston essayist and lecturer, mentioned the cases of
several who, like Molière and Rousseau, have had unsympathetic wives.
Among these was Sir Walter Scott, who while walking with his wife in the
fields called her attention to some lambs, remarking that they were
beautiful.
"Yes," echoed she, "lambs are beautiful--boiled!"
That incomparable essayist and chirping philosopher, Montaigne, married
but once. When his good wife left him, he shed the tears usual on such
occasions, and said he would not marry again, though it were to Wisdom
herself.
A young painter of great promise once told Sir Joshua Reynolds that he had
taken a wife. "Married!" ejaculated the horrified Sir Joshua; "then you
are ruined as an artist."
Michelangelo, when asked why he never married, replied:
"I have espoused my art, and that occasions me sufficient domestic cares;
for my works shall be my children."
The wives of Dante, Milton, Dryden, Addison, and Steele shed no glory on
the sex, and brought no peace to their firesides.
The list of "unhappily married" is large and brilliant. It includes
William Beckford, the author of "Vathek," who, however, does not seem to
have deserved a happy life, and whose enormous fortune and great talents
were alike wasted.
Lord Lytton was also unhappily, though romantically, married, and a large
part, at least, of the subsequent misery was due to his temper and
conduct. But perhaps full justice has not been done to the ill effects of
the long and hard struggle with poverty, which he maintained with such
success, but with such constant labor, during many years.
The temperaments of Charles Dickens and his wife were so different that
they lived apart for several years preceding the great novelist's death.
Lord and Lady Byron separated about a year after their marriage, and they
never met again.
Sir Henry Irving and his wife spent the last years of their married life
in separate homes.
Haydn's marriage was unhappy. In 1758 the young composer had, after great
struggles, got so far as to obtain a musical directorship with Count
Morzin, and settled in Vienna. His salary was only two hundred florins,
but he had board and lodging free. Many pupils came to him, and among
others two daughters of the hairdresser Keller.
Haydn fell deeply in love with the younger, but his affection was not
returned, for she entered a convent and became a nun.
Father Keller, who was very familiar with Haydn and had helped him
oftentimes with small loans in his early struggles, persuaded the young
composer to marry his elder daughter, and the marriage, after awhile, was
celebrated November 26, 1760.
Maria Anna was, however, no wife for Joseph Haydn. She was extravagant,
bigoted, scolded all day, and was utterly uncompanionable to a musician.
Finally she became so bad that she only did what she thought would annoy
her husband. She dressed in a fashion quite unsuited to her position,
invited clerical men to her table, tore Haydn's written musical scores and
made curl-papers of them, etc., and yet the great composer bore it all as
well as he could.
In one letter he says: "My wife is mostly sick, and is always in a bad
temper. It is the same to her whether her husband is a shoemaker or an
artist."
After he had suffered this state of things in a miserable marriage of
thirty-two years he seemed exhausted, and wrote, then a renowned composer,
to a friend from London:
"My wife, that infernal woman, has written me such horrible things that I
will not return home again."
At last Haydn separated from his wife and placed her as a boarder with a
schoolmaster in Baden, where she died in 1810. Her memory was always
disagreeable to him, even after her death.
A Chapter on Puns.
BY THEODORE HOOK.
Theodore Hook (1788-1841) belonged to that singularly
fortunate class of writers whose fame was greater while they
lived than after death closed the book of life. To
present-day readers Hook is known only as the subject of
many a merry anecdote, the coiner of epigrams, and one of
the most celebrated practical jokers of his time.
But among his contemporaries Theodore Hook was something
more. Before he was twenty years old farces and comic operas
from his pen had been successfully produced on the London
stage, and he was a pet of London society. When he was
thirty he was the editor of the Tory paper _John Bull_, and
the novels that he published at this period attained a high
degree of popularity.
As a punster Hook had few equals, and "A Chapter on Puns,"
which is herewith reprinted for the readers of THE SCRAP
BOOK, constitutes an excellent specimen of the sort of humor
for which its author was famous.
There is one class of people who, with a depravity of appetite not
excelled by that of the celebrated Anna Maria Schurman, who rejoiced in
eating spiders, thirst after puns. If you fall in with these, you have no
resource but to indulge them to their heart's content; but in order to
rescue yourself from the imputation of believing punning to be wit, quote
the definition of Swift, and be, like him, as inveterate a punster as you
possibly can, immediately after resting everything, and hazarding all,
upon the principle that the worse the pun the better.
In order to be prepared for this sort of _punic_ war (for the disorder is
provocative and epidemic), the moment any one gentleman or lady has, as
they say in Scotland, "let a pun," everybody else in the room who can or
cannot do the same sets to work to endeavor to emulate the example. From
that period all rational conversation is at an end, and a jargon of
nonsense succeeds which lasts till the announcement of coffee, or supper,
or the carriages puts a happy termination to the riot.
Addison says, "One may say of a pun, as the countryman described his
nightingale, that it is _vox et præterea nihil_, a sound, and nothing but
a sound;" and in another place he tells us that "the greatest authors in
their most serious works make frequent use of puns; the sermons of Bishop
Andrews and the tragedies of Shakespeare are full of them; if a sinner was
punned into repentance as in the latter, nothing is more usual than to see
a hero weeping and grumbling for a dozen lines together;" but he also
says, "It is indeed impossible to kill a weed which the soil has a natural
disposition to produce. The seeds of punning are in the minds of all men,
and though they may be subdued by reason, reflection, and good sense, they
will be very apt to shoot up in the greatest genius that is not broken and
cultivated by the rules of art."
Here is something like a justification of the enormity; and, as the pupil
is to mix in all societies, he may as well be prepared.
Puns may be divided into different classes; they may be made in different
ways, introduced by passing circumstances, or by references to bygone
events; they may be thrown in _anecdotically_, or conundrumwise.
It is to be observed that feeling, or pity, or commiseration, or grief
are not to stand in the way of a pun--that personal defects are to be made
available, and that sense, so as the sound answers, has nothing to do with
the business.
If a man is pathetically describing the funeral of his mother or sister or
wife, it is quite allowable to call it a "black-_burying_ party," or to
talk of a "fit of _coffin_"; a weeping relative struggling to conceal his
grief may be likened to a commander of "_private tears_"; throw in a joke
about the phrase of "funerals _performed_" and a re-_hearsal_; and wind up
with the anagram _real-fun_, funeral.
I give this instance first, in order to explain that nothing, however
solemn the subject, is to stand in the way of a pun.
It is allowable, when you have run a subject dry in English, to hitch in a
bit of any other language which may sound to your liking. For instance, on
a fishing party. You say fishing is out of your _line_; yet, if you did
not keep _a float_, you would deserve a _rod_; and if anybody affects to
find fault with your joke, exclaim: "Oh, _vous bête_!"
There you have _line_, _rod_, _float_, and _bait_ ready to your hand.
Call two noodles from the city in a punt, endeavoring to catch small fry,
"_East Angles_"; or, if you please, observe that "the _punters_ are losing
the fish," "catching nothing but a cold," or that "the fish are too deep
for them." Call the Thames a "_tidy_" river; but say you prefer the _Isis_
in hot weather.
Personal deformities or constitutional calamities are always to be laid
hold of. If anybody tells you that a dear friend has lost his sight,
observe that it will make him more hospitable than ever, since now he
would be glad _to see anybody_.
If a clergyman breaks his leg, remark that he is no longer a clergyman,
but a _lame man_. If a poet is seized with apoplexy, affect to disbelieve
it, although you know it to be true, in order to say--
Poeta nascitur non _fit_;
and then, to carry the joke one step farther, add, "that it is not a _fit_
subject for a jest."
A man falling into a tan-pit, you may call "sinking in the _sublime_"; a
climbing boy suffocated in a chimney meets with a _sootable_ death; and a
pretty girl having caught the smallpox is to be much _pitted_.
On the subject of the ear and its defects, talk first of something in
which _a cow sticks_, and end by telling the story of the man who, having
taken great pains to explain something to his companion, at last got in a
rage at his apparent stupidity, and exclaimed, "Why, my dear sir, don't
you comprehend? The thing is as plain as A, B, C." "I dare say it is,"
said the other; "but I am D, E, F."
It may be as well to give the beginner something of a notion of the use he
may make of the most ordinary words, for the purpose of quibbleism. For
instance, in the way of observation: The loss of a hat is always _felt_;
if you don't like sugar, you may _lump_ it; a glazier is a _panes_-taking
man; candles are burnt because _wick-ed_ things always come to _light_; a
lady who takes you home from a party is kind in her _carriage_, and you
say "Nunc est _ridendum_" when you step into it; if it happen to be a
chariot, she is a _charitable_ person; birds'-nests and king-killing are
synonymous, because they are _high trees on_; a bill for building a bridge
should be sanctioned by the Court of _Arches_ as well as the House of
_Piers_; when a man is dull, he goes to the seaside to _Brighton_; a
Cockney lover, when sentimental, should live in _Heigh Hoburn_; the
greatest fibber is the man most to _re-lie_ upon; a dean expecting a
bishopric looks _for lawn_; a _sui_-cide kills pigs, and not himself; a
butcher is a gross man, but a fig-seller is a _grocer_; Joshua never had a
father or mother, because he was the son of a _Nun_; your grandmother and
great-grandmother were your _aunt's sisters_; a leg of mutton is better
than heaven, because nothing is better than heaven, and a leg of mutton is
better than nothing.
Races are matters of _course_; an ass never can be a horse, although he
may be a _mayor_; the Venerable Bede was the mother of Pearl; a baker
makes bread when he _kneads_ it; a doctor cannot be a doctor all at once,
because he comes to it by _degrees_; a man hanged at Newgate has taken a
_drop_ too much; the _bridle_ day is that on which a man leads a woman to
the _halter_. Never mind the aspirate; in punning all's fair.
Puns interrogatory are at times serviceable. You meet a man carrying a
hare: ask him if it is his own _hare_, or a wig?--there you stump him. Why
is Parliament Street like a compendium? Because it goes to a _bridge_. Why
is a man murdering his mother in a garret a worthy person? Because he is
above committing a crime. Instances of this kind are innumerable; and if
you want to render your question particularly pointed, you are, after
asking it once or twice, to say "D'ye give it up?"--then favor your
friends with the solution.
Puns scientific are effective whenever a scientific man or men are in
company, because, in the first place, they invariably hate puns,
especially those which are capable of being twisted into jokes which have
no possible relation to the science of which the words to be joked upon
are terms; and because, in the next place, dear, laughing girls, who are
wise enough not to be sages, will love you for disturbing the
self-satisfaction of the philosophers, and raising a laugh or titter at
their expense.
Where there are three or four geologists of the party, if they talk of
their scientific tours made to collect specimens, call the old ones
"ninny-hammers," and the young ones "chips of the old block"; and then
inform them that claret is the best specimen of _quartz_ in the world.
If you fall in with a botanist who is holding forth, talk of the quarrels
of flowers as a sequel to the loves of the plants, and say they decide
their differences with _pistols_.
In short, sacrifice everything to the pursuit of punning, and in the
course of time you will acquire such a reputation for waggery that the
whole company will burst into an immoderate fit of laughing if you only
ask the servants for bread, or say "No" to the offer of a cutlet.
GREAT WRITERS OFTEN POOR TALKERS.
Among Those Who Were Singularly Deficient in the Art of Conversation Were
Corneille, Addison, Milton, Dante, and Goldsmith.
"He wrote like an angel and talked like poor poll," was the manner in
which Oliver Goldsmith was described by one of his contemporaries, and all
acounts agree that the author of "The Deserted Village" made a sorry
figure as a conversationalist. But Goldsmith was far from being the only
writer of undoubted genius whose conversation was devoid of charm. Indeed,
there is a wealth of evidence to prove that the art of writing well and
talking well are not akin.
Descartes, the famous mathematician and philosopher; La
Fontaine, celebrated for his witty fables; Buffon, the great
naturalist, were all singularly deficient in the powers of
conversation.
Marmontel, the novelist, was so dull in society that his
friend said of him, after an interview, that he must go and
read his tales to recompense himself for the weariness of
hearing him.
As to Corneille, the grandest dramatist in France, he was
completely lost in society--so absent and embarrassed that
he wrote of himself a witty couplet importing that he was
never intelligible but through the mouth of another.
Wit on paper seems to be something widely different from
that play of words in conversation, which, while it
sparkles, dies; for Charles II, the wittiest monarch that
sat on the English throne, was so charmed with the humor of
"Hudibras" that he caused himself to be introduced in the
character of a private gentleman to Butler, its author. The
witty king found the author a very dull companion, and was
of opinion, with many others, that so stupid a fellow could
never have written so clever a book.
Addison, whose classic elegance has long been considered a
model of style, was shy and absent in society, preserving,
even before a single stranger, stiff and dignified silence.
In conversation Dante was taciturn and satirical.
Rousseau was remarkably trite in conversation--not a word of
fancy or eloquence warmed him.
Milton was unsocial, and even irritable, when much pressed
by talk of others.
FAMOUS LOVE POEMS.
An Elizabethan Dramatist and One of the Cavaliers of
Charles I Gave to Our Language Two of
Its Most Charming Lyrics.
The English language is particularly rich in poetical expressions of the
tender passion, but among these two have long been regarded as preeminent.
One, "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love," was written by Christopher
Marlowe (1564-1593), the only great predecessor of Shakespeare in the
British drama. This lyric, which is described by old Izaak Walton as "that
smooth song which was made by Kit Marlowe," is one of the most beautiful
of its kind that has come down to us from the Elizabethan period. It has
frequently been imitated by minor poets, and a delightful reply to it was
made by Sir Walter Raleigh.
The second famous love poem published herewith was from the pen of the
gay, loyal, brave, but unfortunate Cavalier, Sir Richard Lovelace
(1618-1658). The exquisite verses constituting his address "To Althea from
Prison" were written while the young poet was confined as a prisoner, by
order of the Puritan Parliament, in the Gatehouse of Westminster, for
presenting to the Commons a petition from Kentish royalists in the king's
favor. He was released on bail which amounted to two hundred thousand
dollars. The young woman to whom the lines "To Althea" were written
subsequently became the wife of another. Lovelace died in the most abject
poverty.
* * * * *
THE PASSIONATE SHEPHERD TO HIS LOVE.
BY CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE.
Come live with me, and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, and hills, and fields,
Woods or steepy mountains yields.
And we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.
And I will make thee beds of roses,
And a thousand fragrant posies;
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;
A gown made of the finest wool,
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold;
A belt of straw and ivy buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs:
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me, and be my love.
The shepherd swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May-morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me, and be my love.
* * * * *
TO ALTHEA FROM PRISON.
BY RICHARD LOVELACE.
When Love with unconfined wings
Hovers within my gates,
And my divine Althea brings
To whisper at my grates;
When I lie tangled in her hair
And fettered to her eye,
The birds that wanton in the air
Know no such liberty.
When flowing cups run swiftly round
With no allaying Thames,
Our careless heads with roses bound,
Our hearts with loyal flames;
When thirsty grief in wine we steep.
When healths and draughts go free--
Fishes, that tipple in the deep,
Know no such liberty.
When like committed linnets I
With shriller throat shall sing
The sweetness, mercy, majesty,
And glories of my king;
When I shall voice aloud how good
He is, how great should be,
Enlarged winds, that curl the flood,
Know no such liberty.
Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for a hermitage;
If I have freedom in my love
And in my soul am free;
Angels alone, that soar above,
Enjoy such liberty.
Speech on Duluth.
BY JAMES PROCTOR KNOTT.
James Proctor Knott was born in Kentucky on August 29, 1830.
He went to Missouri in 1850 and there began the practise of
law. In 1858 he was elected to the Missouri Legislature and
subsequently he became attorney-general. He returned to
Kentucky in 1862 and was elected to Congress from that State
in 1866. It was while in Congress that Mr. Knott attained
national fame as a humorist. As a satirist he had no equal
among his fellow members, and he was responsible for several
bills being "laughed out of the House."
Mr. Knott's most famous speech was delivered in the House of
Representatives, January 27, 1871, on the joint resolution
extending the time to construct a railroad from the St.
Croix River to the west end of Lake Superior. At that time
Duluth was a small and almost unknown village. Knott's
grandiloquent forecast of its future, intended as a satire,
has since been in great part verified by the city's
wonderful development. It now has a population of more than
fifty-five thousand persons, and as one of the principal
shipping points of the great Northwestern grain-fields it is
world-famous.
Of this speech, which has long been regarded as a model of
its kind, an abridged version is given below. The complete
text may be found in the third section of the appendix of
the _Congressional Globe_ for 1870-1871, beginning on page
68.
Mr. Speaker: As to those great trunk-lines of railway spanning the
continent from ocean to ocean, I confess my mind has never been fully made
up. But with regard to the transcendent merits of the gigantic enterprise
contemplated in this bill--to construct a railroad from the St. Croix
River, or lake, to the west end of Lake Superior and to Bayfield--I never
entertained a shadow of a doubt.
Now, sir, who that is not as incredulous as St. Thomas himself will doubt
for a moment that the Goshen of America is to be found in the sandy
valleys and upon the pine-clad hills of the St. Croix?
Sir, I have been satisfied for years that if there was any portion of the
inhabited globe absolutely in a suffering condition for a railroad, it was
these teeming pine-barrens of the St. Croix.
At what particular point on that noble stream such a road should be
commenced I knew was immaterial, and so it seems to have been considered
by the draftsman of this bill. It might be up at the spring or down at the
foot-log, or the water-gate, or the fish-dam, or anywhere along the bank,
no matter where. But in what direction should it run, or where should it
terminate, were always to my mind questions of the most painful
perplexity, until I accidentally overheard some gentlemen the other day
mention the name of "Duluth."
Duluth! The word fell on my ear with a peculiar and indescribable charm,
like the gentle murmur of a low fountain stealing forth in the midst of
roses, or the soft, sweet accent of an angel's whisper in the bright,
joyous dream of sleeping innocence.
Duluth! 'Twas the name for which my soul had panted for years, as the hart
panteth for the water-brooks. But where was Duluth?
Never in all my limited reading had my vision been gladdened by seeing the
celestial word in print. And I felt a profound humiliation in my
ignorance that its dulcet syllables had never before ravished my
delighted ear. I was certain the draftsman of this bill had never heard of
it, or it would have been designated as one of the termini of this road.
I asked my friends about it, but they knew nothing of it. I rushed to the
library and examined all the maps I could find. I discovered in one of
them a delicate, hair-like line diverging from the Mississippi near a
place called Prescott, which I supposed was intended to represent the
river St. Croix; but I could nowhere find Duluth.
Nevertheless, I was confident that it existed somewhere, and that its
discovery would constitute the crowning glory of the present century, if
not of all modern times.
Thanks to the beneficence of that band of ministering angels who have
their bright abodes in the far-off capital of Minnesota, just as the agony
of my anxiety was about to culminate in the frenzy of despair, this
blessed map was placed in my hands; and as I unfolded it a resplendent
scene of ineffable glory opened before me, such as I imagine burst upon
the enraptured vision of the wandering peri through the opening gates of
paradise.
There, there for the first time my enchanted eye rested upon the ravishing
word "Duluth."
If gentlemen will examine it, they will find Duluth not only in the center
of this map, but represented in the center of concentric circles one
hundred miles apart, and some of them as much as four thousand miles in
diameter, embracing alike in their tremendous sweep the fragrant savannas
of the sunlit South, and the eternal solitudes of snow that mantle the
ice-bound North.
I find by reference to this map that Duluth is situated somewhere near the
western end of Lake Superior; but as there is no dot or other mark
indicating its exact location, I am unable to say whether it is actually
confined to any particular spot, or whether "it is just lying around there
loose."
But, however that may be, I am satisfied that Duluth is there or
thereabout, for I see it stated here on this map that it is exactly
thirty-nine hundred and ninety miles from Liverpool, though I have no
doubt, for the sake of convenience, it will be moved back ten miles so as
to make the distance an even four thousand.
Then, sir, there is the climate of Duluth, unquestionably the most
salubrious and delightful to be found anywhere on the Lord's earth. Now, I
have always been under the impression, as I presume other gentlemen have,
that in the regions around Lake Superior it was cold enough, for at least
nine months in the year, to freeze the smoke-stack off a locomotive.
But I see it represented on this map that Duluth is situated exactly
half-way between the latitudes of Paris and Venice; so that gentlemen who
have inhaled the exhilarating airs of the one or basked in the golden
sunlight of the other may see at a glance that Duluth must be a place of
untold delights, a terrestrial paradise, fanned by the balmy zephyrs of an
eternal spring, clothed in the gorgeous sheen of ever-blooming flowers,
and vocal with the silvery melody of Nature's choicest songsters.
As to the commercial resources of Duluth, sir, they are simply illimitable
and inexhaustible, as shown by this map. I see it stated here that there
is a vast scope of territory, embracing an area of over two million square
miles, rich in every element of material wealth and commercial prosperity,
all tributary to Duluth.
Look at this map; do not you see from the broad brown lines drawn around
this immense territory, that the enterprising inhabitants of Duluth intend
some day to enclose it all in one vast corral, so that its commerce would
be bound to go there whether it would or not? And on this map, sir, I find
within a convenient distance the Piegan Indians, which of all the many
accessories to the glory of Duluth I consider the most inestimable.
For, sir, I see vast "wheat-fields" represented on this map in the
immediate neighborhood of the buffaloes and the Piegans; and though the
idea of there being these immense wheat-fields in the very heart of a
wilderness, hundreds and hundreds of miles beyond the utmost verge of
civilization, may appear to some gentlemen as rather incongruous, as
rather too great a strain on the "blankets" of veracity, to my mind there
is no difficulty in the matter whatever.
Here, you will observe, are the buffaloes, directly between the Piegans
and Duluth, and here, on the right of Duluth, are the Creeks. Now, sir,
when the buffaloes are sufficiently fat from grazing on these immense
wheat-fields, you see it will be the easiest thing in the world for the
Piegans to drive them on down, stay all night with their friends, the
Creeks, and go into Duluth in the morning.
Sir, I might stand here for hours and hours and expatiate with rapture
upon the gorgeous prospects of Duluth as depicted upon this map. But human
life is far too short and the time of this House far too valuable to allow
me to linger longer upon the delightful theme. Nevertheless, sir, it
grieves my very soul to be compelled to say that I cannot vote for the
grant of lands provided for in this bill.
Ah, sir, you can have no conception of the poignancy of my anguish that I
am deprived of that blessed privilege! There are two insuperable obstacles
in the way. In the first place, my constituents for whom I am acting here
have no more interest in this road than they have in the great question of
culinary taste now perhaps agitating the public mind of Dominica as to
whether the illustrious commissioners who recently left this capital for
that free and enlightened republic would be better fricasseed, boiled, or
roasted; and in the second place, these lands which I am asked to give
away, alas! are not mine to bestow.
My relation to them is simply that of trustee to an express trust. And
shall I ever betray that trust?
Never, sir! Rather perish Duluth! Perish the paragon of cities! Rather let
the freezing cyclones of the bleak Northwest bury it forever beneath the
eddying sands of the raging St. Croix.
NATURE'S WILDERNESS COMPASSES.
Some Simple Facts Concerning Woodcraft Which Will Enable Wanderers in a
Forest to Get Their Bearings and Find Their Camps.
With the coming of vacation time, men's thoughts turn to woods and
streams, and there is a general rush for "the tall timber."
That many will wander far afield and lose themselves in "trackless
forests" is inevitable, but there is a sure way of finding oneself which
is well worth remembering, for it is a serious matter to be actually lost
in dense woods.
Find a mature tree that stands apart from its fellows. Even
if it is only slightly separate it will do. The bark on this
tree will be harder, drier, and lighter in color on the
south side. On the north it will be darker, and often at the
roots it will have a clump of mold or moss.
On the south side of all evergreen trees, gum which oozes
from wounds or knotholes will be hard and amber-colored; on
the north side this gum is softer, gets covered with dust,
and is of a dirty gray.
In fall or winter, trees which show a rough bark will have
nests of insects in the crevices on their south side.
Hardwood trees--the oak, the ash, elms, hickories, mesquits,
etc., have moss and mold on the north. Leaves are smaller,
tougher, lighter in color, and with darker veins on the
south; on the north they are longer, of darker green, and
with lighter veins. Spiders build on the south sides. In the
South, air plants attach themselves to the north sides.
Cedars bend their tips to the south.
Any sawed or cut stump will give you the compass points,
because the concentric rings are thicker on the south side.
The heart of the stump is thus nearer to the north side. All
these things are the effects of the sun.
Stones are bare on the south side, and if they have moss at
all, it will be on the north. At best, on the sunny side
only a thin covering of harsh, half-dry moss will be found.
On the south side of a hill the ground is more noisy
underfoot. On the north side ferns, mosses, and late flowers
grow.
If you are on a marsh, small bushes will give you the
lesson; then leaves and limbs show the same differences.
Almost all wild flowers turn their faces to the south. There
are many other signs that will aid the lost person, but you
will find these enough.
ALL KINDS OF THINGS.
Great Fortunes of To-day Compared With the Wealth of France
Under the Bourbons--The Dangers of Dust, and the
Eccentricities of Electricity--The World's Babel of
Languages--Amusing Anachronisms Perpetrated By Authors and
Artists--A Pin Scratch That Helped Nelson--With Other
Interesting Items Gathered From Various Sources.
FRENCH MILLIONAIRES OF OTHER CENTURIES.
GREATER EXTRAVAGANCE TO-DAY.
Prior to the Seventeenth Century No
Frenchman Had an Income That
Touched the Seven-Figure Mark.
Tales of the magnificent extravagances of France under the Bourbons have
led a wondering later age to think that never since has gold been lavished
upon luxury with so free a hand. But a French writer, the Vicomte Georges
d'Avenel, has taken the trouble to make comparisons, and he has found that
the incomes of to-day are relatively much larger than they were one, two,
and three hundred years ago. The New York _World_ has summarized from the
_Revue des Deux Mondes_ M. d'Avenel's discoveries:
For purposes of exact comparison M. d'Avenel estimates all
fortunes and incomes of bygone times in terms of their
equivalent value to-day, not as mere nominal sums. Up to the
end of the sixteenth century, he shows, no one had an income
of $1,000,000.
Louis IX in the exceptional year of the crusade of 1251
spent $775,000. After the Hundred Years' War, in 1450,
Charles VII's budget was $212,000. In 1516 Francis I, who
was noted for his taste for luxury, had only $259,000 for
his person and his court.
Napoleon III's civil list amounted to $5,000,000, but Louis
XIV had less than $4,000,000 for all expenses of an
extravagant court.
Richelieu and Mazarin derived tremendous incomes from their
privileges, Mazarin leaving by will nearly $40,000,000 to
the king, who refused it and let it pass to Mazarin's eight
nephews and nieces.
Except these three no person up to the time of the
Revolution enjoyed an income of $1,000,000, and the revenues
of Richelieu and Mazarin were subject in fact to charges
really connected with the state.
The conclusion of this investigator is that the very rich of to-day are
six times as rich, or those of equal fortune are twelve times as many, as
the richest men of the old régime; and they are ten times as rich, or
twenty times as many, as the rich princes of the feudal period.
SERIOUS EXPLOSIONS ARE CAUSED BY DUST.
GRAVE DANGER LURKS IN SUGAR.
Particles of Cork Floating in the Atmosphere
of Linoleum Factories Must Be
Kept from Unprotected Lights.
Almost every kind of dust which is composed of inflammable material will
explode when touched by a flame. For instance, the house-maid who uses the
contents of the sugar bowl to light the fire knows that nothing burns more
easily than powdered sugar. Proprietors of large sweetmeat factories have
learned that there is danger from this source.
Some years ago an English inspector of mines conducted a
number of experiments on the explosive power of coal dust. A
disused shaft one hundred and fifty feet deep was chosen
for the purpose. Samples of dust from different collieries
were collected for the purpose. When two hundredweight of
dust was emptied down a shaft and a charge of gunpowder
fired, the result was startling.
Huge tongues of flame, sixty feet in height, shot up from
the mouth of the shaft, and enormous columns of smoke rose
high in the air, forming a great black pall over the scene
of the explosion.
Coal is the carbonized remains of tree mosses. Oddly enough,
these mosses were the big forefathers of the moss we know as
lycopodium, which in a powdered state is used to produce
flash signals. This will help to give an idea of the
intensely inflammable nature of coal dust.
In the manufacture of linoleum no unprotected lights are
allowed in the mixing department. This is on account of the
great danger of exploding the cork dust floating in the air.
An additional danger in linoleum making is that the mixture
of cement and cork dust has the unpleasant property of
spontaneously igniting if left in a warm place. It is,
therefore, customary to mix the material a sackful at a time
in order to reduce the risks of an explosion.
SOME ECCENTRICITIES OF LIGHTNING BOLTS.
TARGETS OF HEAVEN'S ARTILLERY.
Belief That the Electric Fluid Never
Strikes Twice in the Same Place Is
Shown to Be Wrong.
Among the duties assigned to the students of the Agricultural College at
Guelph, Ontario, is that of gathering statistics concerning loss and
damage from lightning in the province. The results thus obtained seem to
show the value of lightning-rods, if properly adjusted, and the
desirability of having trees standing near buildings. Summarizing the last
annual report from the college, the _Free Press_, of London, Ontario,
gives out the following novel facts:
As to the question does lightning strike twice in the same
place, the report says that there may be warrant for the
idea in the fact that where lightning ever strikes there is
very little left to be struck a second time; but where a
barn has once been struck and another barn has been erected
on the same site, that second barn is just as likely to be
struck as the first, and, in some instances, more likely.
The statistics compiled by the college show that in the five
years since 1901 ninety-four trees were struck by lightning,
as follows: Elm, 28; pine, 17; oak, 9; basswood, 7; maple,
7; ash, 4; poplar, 4; cedar, 3; apple, 3; hemlock, 2;
willow, 2; spruce, beech, chestnut, balsam, hickory,
butternut, and fir, 1 each.
The number of cattle killed in the same period was 114;
sheep, 64; horses, 46; pigs, 4. Total, 228.
Barns struck, 179; other buildings, 66.
LIVING LANGUAGES ARE STILL A BABEL.
MODERN CONFUSION OF TONGUES.
Linguists Attempt an Impossible Task if
They Try to Master the Hundreds of
Languages Still Spoken.
Language is, of course, a wonderful telegraph system between minds; but
what a multiplicity of codes! The living languages to-day number eight
hundred and sixty, to say nothing of five thousand dialects. This is a
Babel indeed.
Europe has eighty-nine languages; Asia, one hundred and twenty-three;
Africa, one hundred and fourteen; America, one hundred and seventeen; and
the islands of the Pacific and Indian oceans have four hundred and
seventeen.
Probably the most remarkable linguist the world has ever
known was Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti, who was born at
Bologna in 1774, created cardinal in 1838, and died at Rome
in 1849. The list of languages and dialects which he
acquired reached the astounding total of one hundred and
fourteen.
It would be interesting to know what system was pursued by
Cardinal Mezzofanti in the study of languages, but little
light is now obtainable on this subject.
The most famous linguists of antiquity were Mithridates,
King of Pontus, who is said to have been thoroughly
conversant with the languages of the twenty-five nations
over which his rule extended; and Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt,
of whom Plutarch says that "she spoke most languages," and
that "there were but few of the foreign ambassadors to whom
she gave audience through an interpreter."
THE FLIGHT OF TIME CAUSES MANY ERRORS.
PAINTERS AND WRITERS MIX DATES.
Artists Have Portrayed Abraham Threatening
Isaac with a Blunderbuss, and
Romans Smoking Pipes.
Whether it be due to ignorance or careless impatience, it is true that
many of the greatest writers and painters have been guilty of the most
surprising anachronisms. Thus Shakespeare introduces cannon into the play
of "Hamlet," and in "Julius Cæsar" reference is made to the striking of
the clock, though striking clocks were not invented until fourteen hundred
years after Cæsar's death. Schiller, in his "Piccolomini," refers to
lightning-conductors--at least one hundred and fifty years before they
were invented. Instances might be added almost indefinitely.
The anachronisms of painters are more noticeable, as a rule, than those of
writers. In "The Fancies of Fact" is the following compilation of blunders
by artists:
Tintoretto, in a picture of the Children of Israel gathering
manna, has taken the precaution to arm them with the modern
invention of guns. Cigoli painted the aged Simeon at the
circumcision of the Infant Saviour; and, as aged men in
these days wear spectacles, the artist has shown his
sagacity by placing them on Simeon's nose.
In a picture by Verrio of Christ healing the sick, the
lookers-on are represented as standing with periwigs on
their heads. To match, or rather to exceed, this ludicrous
representation, Dürer has painted the expulsion of Adam and
Eve from the Garden of Eden by an angel in a dress
fashionably trimmed with flounces.
The same painter, in his scene of Peter denying Christ,
represents a Roman soldier very comfortably smoking a pipe
of tobacco.
A Dutch painter, in a picture of the Wise Men worshiping the
Holy Child, has drawn one of them in a large white surplice,
and in boots and spurs, and he is in the act of presenting
to the child a model of a Dutch man-of-war.
In a Dutch picture of Abraham offering up his son, instead
of the patriarch's "stretching forth his hand and taking the
knife," as the Scriptures inform us, he is represented as
using a more effectual and modern instrument; he is holding
to Isaac's head a blunderbuss.
A French artist has drawn, with true French taste, the
Lord's Supper, with the table ornamented with tumblers
filled with cigar-lighters; and, as if to crown the list of
these absurd and ludicrous anachronisms, the Garden of Eden
has been drawn with Adam and Eve in all their primeval
simplicity and virtue, while near them, in full costume, is
seen a hunter with a gun, shooting ducks.
Another famous mixture of periods occurs in a picture of the
Crucifixion, by Fra Angelico. In the foreground are a
Dominican monk, a bishop with a crozier, a mitered abbot,
and a man holding up a crucifix.
A PIN SCRATCH LED TO NELSON'S VICTORY.
DISCOVERY OF THE FRENCH FLEET.
The Noting of the Distress of a French
Maid by Sir John Acton Had a
Strange Result.
The good points of pins have been generally appreciated, but never did a
pin point to a greater result than the one that made possible Nelson's
great victory of the Nile on August 1 and 2, 1798.
It was at this fight that Nelson, with his usual intrepidity, forced a
passage with half of his fleet of fifteen vessels between a small island,
near Aboukir in Egypt, and the French line of battle, while the other half
attacked the enemy in front, completely defeating the French fleet and
capturing or sinking thirteen of its seventeen ships.
The part that the pin played in the story came about in this way:
Sir John Acton, then commander-in-chief of the land and sea
forces of Naples, happened to be in his wife's dressing-room
at the moment she was preparing for dinner.
Lady Acton's French maid was also in the room, and was so
startled at receiving a letter from her brother, a sailor
in the French navy, whom she had believed to be dead, that
she ran a pin into her mistress's flesh.
Apologizing for her carelessness, the maid stated the cause
of her surprise. With carefully suppressed eagerness Sir
John Acton offered to read the letter while the maid
continued her duties. The maid gladly consented.
Having read the letter, the commander-in-chief left the
house in search of Lord Nelson, who had in vain been seeking
the French fleet. He found him and imparted to him the
contents of the letter. It gave all the information the
admiral had so long endeavored to obtain.
Setting sail immediately, Nelson came up with the French,
and the victory of the Nile was the result.
HOW COLUMBUS WAS MISLED BY PARROTS.
MISSED DISCOVERY OF MAINLAND.
The Fate of the Most Important Exploring
Expedition in History Was Decided
by a Flight of Birds.
A flight of birds, coupled with a sailor's superstition, robbed Columbus
of the honor of discovering the continent.
When the great Italian navigator sailed westward over the unknown
Atlantic, he expected to reach Zipangu (Japan). After several days' sail
from Gomera, one of the Canary Islands, he became uneasy at not
discovering Zipangu, which, according to his reckonings, should have been
two hundred and sixteen nautical miles more to the east.
After a long discussion he yielded to the opinion of Martin
Alonzo Pinzon, the commander of the Pinta, and steered to
the southwest.
Pinzon was guided in his opinion solely by a flight of
parrots, which took wing in that direction. It was good luck
to follow in the wake of a flock of birds when engaged upon
a voyage of discovery--a widespread superstition among
Spanish seamen of that day--and this change in the great
navigator's course curiously exemplifies the influence of
small and apparently trivial events in the world's history.
If Columbus had held to his course he would have entered
the Gulf Stream, have reached Florida, and then probably
have been carried to Cape Hatteras and Virginia.
MORE NUTRITION IN GRASS THAN POTATOES.
VALUES OF STOCK-RAISING FOODS.
One Hundred Pounds of Hay Produce a
Better Effect Than Six Times That
Weight of Beets.
The relative values of different foods in stock-raising are shown by the
following table, in which the given number of pounds of the various
articles named produces the same effect as one hundred pounds of hay:
Beets, white 669 pounds
Turnips 469 "
Rye Straw 429 "
Clover, red, uncured 373 "
Clover, red, dry 88 "
Potatoes 350 "
Oat Straw 317 "
Alfalfa 89 "
Buckwheat 78.5 "
Corn 62.5 "
Oats 59 "
Barley 58 "
Rye 53.5 "
Wheat 44.5 "
Oilcake, linseed 43 "
Hay, it will be seen, is rated as being more nutritious than potatoes or
beets.
GREAT FORCE USED TO WRITE LETTERS.
ENERGY SPENT IN LITTLE WAYS.
Every Time the Typewriter Key Is
Pressed, Several Ounces of Manual
Power Are Used.
If a man realized at the end of the day how much energy he had expended in
normal and almost unconscious physical activities, he would be thankful
for the chance to sleep. The writer who pushes his pen over the paper for
several hours at a stretch would doubtless think he had worked hard if he
had excavated a well in the same time; yet it is believed that the sum of
the energy he uses daily in writing would be enough easily to dig a well.
The following figures are quoted from _Answers_:
Our daily expenditure of force is simply enormous, but it
seldom strikes us that we keep on expending force without
noticing it. The stoker of a locomotive, when on duty, is
said to shovel coal at the rate of about one ton an hour.
Presuming that he works at this rate forty hours per week,
it is obvious that in the course of a single year he lifts
over two thousand tons of coal.
Typewriting is not hard work, yet let us see how much energy
it takes to write forty letters on a machine. Every time a
key is pressed to print a letter a few ounces of force is
used, and every time the carriage is returned to begin a new
line between one and four pounds of force is requisitioned.
Forty letters, averaging twenty-six lines each, would mean
about twenty thousand pounds of force expended. Perhaps this
never occurred to you before.
TRIALS OF AN EDITOR IN OLD CALIFORNIA.
SPANISH TYPE HAS ITS FAILINGS.
Publishers of the State's First Newspaper
Found It Difficult to Express Themselves
Typographically.
Makeshifts of pioneer journalism have taxed the ingenuity of many a great
mind. Writing for the _Bookman_, J.M. Scanland tells the story of early
California newspapers. The first paper, the _Californian_, was published
at Monterey by Robert Semple, a Kentuckian, who acted as editor, and the
Rev. Walter Colton, a navy chaplain, who was then stationed at Monterey,
as typesetter and pressman. These two men brought out their first issue on
August 15, 1846. Semple went to the village of Yerba Buena (now called San
Francisco) a short time later, and during his absence Colton printed the
following paragraph:
Our Alphabet.--Our type is a Spanish font picked up here in
a cloister, and has no vv's [w] in it, as there is none in
the Spanish alphabet. I have sent to the Sandvvich Islands
for this letter; in the mean time vve must use tvvo v's. Our
paper at present is that used for vvrapping cigars; in due
time vve will have something better. Our object is to
establish a press in California, and this vve shall in all
probability be able to accomplish. The absence of my partner
for the last three months and my duties as alcalde here have
deprived our little paper of some of those attentions vvhich
I hope it vvill hereafter receive.
VVALTER COLTON.
ODDEST JAIL IN THE UNITED STATES.
IT IS CUT FROM THE SOLID ROCK.
Eternal Cliffs Form the Safe Walls That
Confine Convicts at Clifton, County
Seat of Graham County, Arizona.
Troglodytes of history have lived in their caves from choice. At Clifton,
Graham County, Arizona, are a number of unwilling troglodytes who are kept
within their rocky home by officers of the law. Clifton is one of the
centers of copper mining in Arizona. In one sense it may be inferred that
the queer jail has its advantages, for the temperature of that part of
Arizona frequently rises in summer as high as one hundred and twenty
degrees in the shade.
It comprises four large apartments, hewn in the side of a
hill of solid quartz rock. The entrance to the jail is
through a box-like vestibule, built of heavy masonry, and
having three sets of gates of steel bars.
Here and there, in the rocky walls, holes have been blasted
for windows, and in these apertures a series of massive bars
of steel have been fitted firmly in the rock.
The floor of the rock-bound jail is of cement, and the
prisoners are confined wholly in the larger apartments. In
some places the wall of quartz about the jail is fifteen
feet thick.
Some of the most desperate criminals on the southwest border
have been confined in the Clifton jail, and so solid and
heavy are the barriers to escape that no one there has ever
attempted a break of freedom. The notorious "Black Jack" was
there for months.
FROM THE LIPS OF ANANIAS.
Some Interesting Results Attained by Narrators Who Talked or Wrote While
Seated Between Fancy and Fact and Who Might Have Been More Happy
"Were T'other Dear Charmer Away."
THE MEETING OF EXTREMES.
In a hunter's camp different men began to unfold their yarns. Among others
a Kentuckian said he once shot a buck in such a way that the bullet, after
hitting the right ear, passed through the heel of the right hind foot.
Jeering and laughter greeted the story.
"Brown," called the Kentuckian to his companion, "tell these fellows if
what I say is not as true as gospel!"
"Why, yes," replied the other, "I saw it myself. You see, gentlemen, when
he pulled the trigger of his rifle, the buck was just scratching his head
with his hoof."
Then he whispered to his friend:
"That was a narrow escape. Another time don't lie so far apart."--_New
York Times._
A DAKOTA CYCLONE.
A southeast wind hurled tumble weeds and Russian thistle through the air
at a twenty-nine-mile gait, and the gait went too. Many stoves were drawn
out of the chimneys; the strong wind blew in at the neck of a bottle and
blew the bottom out. Nebraska wagon tracks passed over the town by the
thousands.
The strain on the wire fences was so great that staples were drawn out of
the north side of the posts. A kerosene barrel standing in front of a
grocery store was sucked out of the bunghole and turned inside out, like a
lady's slipper. The dirt blew from a post-hole in the hillside and left
the hole sticking out of the ground about two feet with no dirt around
it.--_Estelline (South Dakota) Bell._
NATURAL CHEMISTRY.
Senator Butt, of the Arkansas Senate, had just finished one of his droll
stories about feeding morphine to a pointer pup and watching him as he
indulged in the ensuing pipe-dream occasioned by the opium, when
Representative De Rossit, known as one of the most veracious men in the
State, said:
"Senator, your dog reminds me of my hen. Needing quinine one day, as we
often do in the bottom, I mixed up an ounce of the drug with molasses and
rolled it out into pills. Leaving the stuff to dry on the front porch, I
went into the house.
"Returning, I saw the last of my pills swallowed by my hen.
"Of course I thought her silly head would burst wide open. She simply
commenced cackling, and has been laying two eggs per day ever since. And
do you know, senator, those eggs are the best chill tonic on the market.
One of them taken internally will knock the spots from any case of malaria
in the State, and shaking ague can't stand before 'em an hour after they
are eaten. I keep that hen dosed; I do, and----"--_Memphis Commercial
Appeal._
A DISJOINTED NARRATIVE.
I have read with much interest the discussion about the joint snake, and
propose to give my experience with it. I have been familiar with the
"joint," or, as we call it here, the "hook-and-eye," snake since I was a
boy.
It is a snake of a brownish-yellow color, and grows to be about three feet
long, but at any stage of its growth it can be unjointed or unhooked. It
is fastened together by a hook-and-eye arrangement, exactly like those
used on ladies' dresses.
On one occasion while out taking a walk I saw a joint snake crawling
slowly along the top of an old stone wall; taking my cane, I gave it a
smart jerk about the middle of the body, and it immediately unhooked into
sixteen pieces, each about two inches long.
Taking the head part and putting it in my hat for safe keeping, I gathered
up the joints, and laying them along in a row in just the reverse order in
which they came apart, with all the eyes in contact, and also the hooks, I
took the head part out of my hat, and laid it alongside of the middle of
the row of joints.
It immediately began to move along the line, and without a moment's
hesitation backed up to the first joint, when a little snap was heard and
the first joint was hooked on. It repeated the process, and in the course
of sixty-five seconds by the watch it was again a complete snake.
Again catching it I took out the ninth joint and also the fourteenth, and
changed places with them, putting the ninth in place of the fourteenth and
then let the snake go on.
He gave one or two wriggles, but finding there was something wrong
commenced examining its joints from his head down, and when he came to the
ninth took it out and laid it on one side, then crawling along the rest of
his joints until he came to where the fourteenth ought to be, but where I
had put the ninth, took that out and hooked it on to the eighth and then
put the fourteenth back in its place, all of which was done in an
incredibly small space of time.
Again I separated him, mixing the joints up promiscuously and hooking them
together, having some difficulty in hooking the tail joint on to the head
part, as the hook and eye did not get very well.
Letting the snake loose, in one hundred and fifteen seconds he was again
properly jointed and I let him go.--_Chicago Inter-Ocean._
OFF THE FARM.
"Yes, sir," said the Dakota man, as a crowd of agriculturists seated
themselves around a little table, "yes, sir; we do things on rather a
sizable scale. I've seen a man start out in the spring and plow a furrow
until fall. Then he turned around and harvested back. We have some big
farms up there, gentlemen. A friend of mine owned one on which he had to
give a mortgage, and the mortgage was due on one end before they could get
it recorded on the other. You see it was laid off in counties."
There was a murmur of astonishment, and the Dakota man continued:
"I got a letter from a man who lives in my orchard just before I left
home, and it had been three weeks getting to the dwelling house, although
it had traveled day and night."
"Distances are pretty wide up there, ain't they?" inquired one.
"Reasonably, reasonably," replied the Dakota man. "And the worst of it is,
it breaks up families so. Two years ago I saw a whole family prostrated
with grief. Women yelling, children howling, and dogs barking. One of my
men had his camp truck packed on seven four-mule teams, and he was going
around bidding everybody good-by."
"Where was he going?" asked a Gravesend man.
"He was agoing half-way across the farm to feed the pigs," replied the
Dakota man.
"And did he ever get back to his family again?"
"It isn't time for him yet," replied the Dakota man.--_Detroit Free
Press._
A SHELL'S STRANGE EXPLOIT.
The late Major Merrill, of Lawrence, was well known in military circles
all over the country. When the G.A.R. encampment was held in Kansas City,
some years ago, the soldiers of the East and those of the West vied with
each other in telling stories of the war. After listening to some pretty
tough yarns, Major Merrill related the following, and carried off the
honors:
"You know, boys, that I served throughout the war in a Massachusetts light
battery. During the fighting at Malvern Hill our ammunition was running
low, and I was sent to the rear for powder.
"I had an open express wagon and four mules. I got about a ton and a half
of loose powder into the wagon and started for the front. About half-way
back to my battery a rebel shell landed right in the middle of the powder,
and, would you believe it, it burned up a bushel and a half before I could
stamp out the fire!"--_Boston Herald._
VITALITY OF A DUCK.
A correspondent at West Point writes as follows:
"Some time since, while out ducking on Dividing Creek, a tributary of
Chesapeake Bay, a hen duck, known as the dipper species, came within easy
range of my gun. I discharged both barrels, completely covering and
breaking her wing with No. 4 shot.
"Being determined to capture the game, a friend and myself secured a boat
and went in pursuit. Getting again in gunshot reach, I discharged two more
barrels, killing the duck to all appearances.
"We picked her up and removed the feathers and entrails, cut her head off
and put her in the water for the purpose of washing the blood off, when,
to our astonishment, she swam away, giving us another pursuit, which was
successful after some trouble. I can prove this."--_Richmond Dispatch._
JUNE, THE MONTH OF BATTLES.
In the Season of Roses Have Been Fought Some of the Most Sanguinary and
Decisive Contests of Modern Times--It Was a Period Fatal to Charles I
and Napoleon.
Though June is frequently called the "Month of Roses," it might with just
as much propriety be designated the "Month of Battles." In it have been
fought some of the most memorable battles of history. Among these were
Naseby, Bunker Hill, Marengo, and Waterloo. In the following list will be
found the names of some of the more important engagements that have been
fought in this month:
June.
1. Lord Howe defeated and almost
destroyed the French fleet 1794
The British frigate Shannon captures
the American frigate Chesapeake,
off Boston 1813
McClellan defeated the Confederates
at Fair Oaks, Virginia 1862
2. The Reign of Terror began 1793
3. Admiral Blake's decisive defeat of
Van Tromp 1653
Lee defeated Grant at Cold Harbor 1864
Hobson sank the Merrimac in
Santiago Harbor 1898
4. Kléber defeated the Austrians at
Altenkirchen 1796
5. Pretoria taken by Lord Roberts 1900
6. Capture of Memphis, Tenn. 1862
7. Capture of Mamelon earthworks,
at Sebastopol, by the French 1855
Siege of Jerusalem begun by the
Crusaders 1099
10. The Russians defeated Napoleon
at Hielsburg 1807
Russia captured Khiva 1873
The Confederates defeated the
Federals at Brice's Cross-Roads,
Mississippi 1864
12. The British defeat the Boers at
Diamond Hill 1900
14. Final defeat of Charles I, at
Naseby, by Cromwell 1645
Battle of Marengo 1800
Napoleon's decisive overthrow of
the Russians at Friedland 1807
Napoleon's defeat of the Austrians
at Raab 1809
15. Siege of Saragossa begun 1808
16. Napoleon's defeat of Blücher at
Ligny 1815
Marshal Ney's indecisive attack
on the British at Quatre Bras 1815
The Federals under Grant attacked
the Confederate lines in
front of Petersburg, Virginia;
fighting continued throughout
the remainder of the month 1864
17. The battle of Bunker Hill 1775
18. Frederick the Great's defeat by the
Austrians at Kolin 1757
War declared against England by
the United States 1812
The battle of Waterloo 1815
Battle between the French under
Grouchy and the Prussians at
Wavre 1815
19. Sinking of the Alabama by the
Kearsarge 1864
21. Encounter between the Leopard
and the Chesapeake 1807
Wellington's decisive victory over
the French at Vittoria, in Spain 1813
23. Clive's great victory at Plassey,
near Calcutta 1757
24. The Austrians defeated the Italians
at Custozza 1866
First engagement of the Santiago
campaign, at Las Guasimas 1898
The Scots under Robert Bruce
defeated the English at Bannockburn 1314
25. Battle of Little Bighorn--The
Custer Massacre 1876
26. The Federals under Fitzjohn Porter
defeated the Confederates
under Longstreet at Mechanicsville,
Virginia 1862
27. Peter the Great defeated Charles
XII at Pultowa 1709
George II defeated the French at
Dettingen 1743
Indecisive battle between the Federals
under McClellan and the
Confederates under Lee at
Gaines Mill, Virginia 1862
The Confederates under Johnston
defeated Federals under Sherman
at Kenesaw Mountain, Georgia 1864
28. The American sloop Wasp captured
the British sloop Reindeer 1814
Capture of Silistria by the Russians 1829
Battle of Fort Moultrie, Charleston,
South Carolina 1776
Washington defeated Clinton in
the battle of Monmouth 1778
How They Got On In The World.
Brief Biographies of Successful Men Who Have Passed Through
the Crucible of Small Beginnings and Won Out.
SUBDUED ARMED PUPILS.
Young Teacher, Destined to Be a Famous
Statesman, Enforced Discipline in the
Class-Room.
James G. Blaine's early youth was spent on the banks of the Monongahela,
where he received the rudiments of his education from his father, an
extremely cultivated man. A common-school course followed, and in due time
he entered Washington College, from which he was graduated at the age of
eighteen.
A few years later he became a teacher of mathematics in a college in
Kentucky, where he gained the respect of his neighbors by quelling,
unarmed, a serious rebellion against his authority, notwithstanding the
fact that his opponents were armed with guns and knives.
It was in Maine, however, as half owner of the _Kennebec Journal_, in
Augusta, and later of the Portland _Advertiser_, at a salary of two
thousand dollars a year, that he first entered the political field.
Possessed of a remarkable memory for facts, and having the minutiæ of
local politics at his tongue's end, he was handicapped by a dislike for
stump-speaking. One of his first speeches was made under especially trying
circumstances.
A celebrated orator billed to speak on campaign issues had failed to put
in an appearance; and Blaine, being present, was forced by some of his
Augusta friends to ascend the platform. Nervous and entirely unprepared,
he began, however, by telling a story. He likened his situation to that of
a farmer, who had a horse for which he asked five hundred dollars. A
horse-trader offered him seventy-five dollars for the animal.
"It's a devil of a drop," said the farmer; "but I'll take it."
This anecdote caused much laughter, and at once put him in close touch
with his audience.
From that time the "Man from Maine" began to be heard of. His political
advance was rapid. The fact that he was not born a New Englander was not a
detriment to him, for, as one of his contemporaries said, "There was a
sort of Western dash about him that took with us Down-Easters." In 1862 he
was elected to Congress, and began his long and distinguished career of
public service at Washington.
BUILT HUDSON TUNNEL.
Resourceful Engineer Also Completed the
Bore Under the East River from
Manhattan to Brooklyn.
Charles M. Jacobs, the builder of the Pennsylvania Railroad tunnel under
the Hudson River, is an Englishman, fifty-six years of age. His father
wished him to go to Cambridge University, but the youth preferred to go to
work, and he did so when sixteen years old.
He entered the office of a ship-building and engineering firm in Hull,
England, and there he became thoroughly grounded in mechanical work and
drafting. He was an earnest worker, and he established a precedent in the
office by getting work to do that was usually assigned to the head men. It
was not customary then to place such reliance on young men.
"Jacobs can do it," his employers were accustomed to say when surprise was
expressed at his being placed in command of big operations. "He knows what
is to be done, and he knows how to handle his men."
When he was twenty-one he went to India as the firm's representative in
some big engineering work, and he did so well that he was sent to China,
Australia, and the European continent. He helped build several tunnels in
London, and in 1889 Austin Corbin, then president of the Philadelphia and
Reading Railroad, brought him to this country to superintend several
important changes that were to be made in the road.
Jacobs liked this country so well and was so favorably impressed by the
outlook for big engineering work that he has remained here, and has become
a citizen.
His First American Success.
He made his first notable success in the construction of the East River
gas tunnel. It was a difficult piece of work, for instead of the river-bed
of solid rock that was supposed to exist, it was found that the bed was
full of fissures through which flowed the mud and water of the river. The
contractors wished to give the bore up and try one fifty feet deeper.
Jacobs refused to do it, and the board of directors of the company, after
listening to his arguments, sided with him.
"Can it be done at the present depth?" he was asked.
"Give me the men and plant, and I'll put it through myself," he answered.
The contractors sued the company and produced a score of experts to prove
that the tunnel could not possibly be built in the way Jacobs wanted it
built.
While the courts were considering the question Jacobs kept right on
digging. He had to encounter difficulties that would have turned most
engineers back. But in the end he pushed the bore through, and the courts,
with this evidence before them, decided against the contractors. He built
the tunnel big enough for trolley-cars in case it might be wanted for that
purpose, and he constructed it so solidly that none of the silt or water
of the East River has been able to filter in.
Another Difficult Task.
In 1877 an attempt was made to tunnel the Hudson River, but the work moved
along fitfully. In July, 1880, an accident that resulted in the death of
twenty men temporarily put an end to it. Two more attempts were made, and
again the work was abandoned. A fourth company revived the scheme, and
made Jacobs the engineer. The work was just in his line, for it gave him
the opportunity to overcome big obstacles and to carry through a project
that would be of big benefit to humanity.
It was an appalling task, for the course was through shifting sand, mud,
and rock, and before it was completed it was necessary to make more than
nine thousand blasts. All these were in the tunnel direct, under the mud
and sand and fifty or sixty feet of river water. Yet the undertaking
resulted in few accidents, for Jacobs knew how to take care of his men,
and he has established a reputation for never sending one where he will
not go himself.
In his early days of wandering in India, China, and Australia he had
learned how to accomplish much by simple means. It was simply learning to
do what he called the obvious thing. But the simple, little, obvious thing
is often the hardest for most people, including engineers, to see.
How He Met an Emergency.
In the building of one of the trolley tunnels under the Hudson, a careless
opening of the doors of the shield--the cylindrical cup pushed along at
the head of the bore, and by means of which all the digging is
done--caused the flooding of one hundred feet of the tunnel. It would be
as hopeless a task to try to bail that mixture of mud and water out as it
would be to drain the Hudson River and the bay adjacent thereto. Jacobs
saved the situation by a very simple expedient.
The cup defender Reliance had just been stripped of her canvas, and Jacobs
got this big spread of sail, sank it flat over the flooded part of the
tunnel, weighted it with a mixture of clay and stone, and thus mended the
bottom of the river so that it didn't continue to leak in mud and water.
It was so very simple that few people would have thought of it.
He completed his first Hudson tunneling work on the 11th of March, 1905,
and all he said when the work was done and he had walked through was:
"There isn't much to tell, except that Henry Hudson was the first man who
crossed over the river and Jacobs was the first man who crossed under it."
WAS INSULTED BY POE.
Romantic Life-Story of Poor Boy Who
Heard the Voice of the Muse in
an Iron Foundry.
Richard Henry Stoddard, who won fame as a poet, critic, and journalist,
fought his way upward through conditions that would have discouraged most
men. His parents were miserably poor and his father died while the boy was
still young. His mother was of a restless, wandering disposition, and when
Richard was ten years old she left her New England home and brought him to
New York. "Here," he says, "we landed at or near the Battery one bright
Sunday morning late in the autumn of 1835, and wandered up Broadway, which
was swarming with hogs."
His step-father's brother-in-law kept an oyster bar, and he at once put
the boy to work learning to open oysters, attending to customers, and
keeping the place clean. The work and the surroundings were rough, and
Stoddard was so manifestly unfitted for his work that he was finally taken
away from the bar and sent into the streets to sell matches. After a few
months of this he was placed in a cheap second-hand clothing store, but
here his earnings were not sufficient to satisfy his family, and though he
was of frail physique his mother apprenticed him to a blacksmith.
"I was put to work at once on the anvil," he says, "and before the day was
over my right hand was so blistered that I had to open its fingers with my
left hand, and detach them from the handle of the sledge hammer that I
wielded."
He was eighteen years old when he was sent to work in an iron foundry, and
he remained at this occupation several years, studying and writing
incessantly at night. One poem, "Ode on a Grecian Flute," was accepted by
the _Broadway Journal_, a little weekly edited by Edgar Allan Poe. Later
the originality of the poem was doubted. Stoddard went to assure Poe that
it was original. He found him asleep in an office chair. On being
awakened and told by Stoddard that the poem was original, Poe jumped up
and yelled:
"You lie! Get out before I throw you out."
Stoddard fled, and the poem was not published. The last glimpse he ever
had of Poe was one cold and stormy autumn day. Stoddard was hurrying along
Broadway, well sheltered by an umbrella, when he noticed Poe, thinly clad,
crouching against the side of a building in an attempt to find refuge from
the storm. Stoddard walked around the corner and paused. He wanted to go
back and offer Poe the shelter of his umbrella, but he did not dare. The
following summer Poe died in Baltimore. Afterward Stoddard wrote the first
genuinely fair and appreciative life of him.
A MIGHTY ELECTRICIAN.
Steinmetz Is Not Yet Forty Years Old and
Has Taken Out Over One Hundred
Patents.
Charles P. Steinmetz, chief expert at the Schenectady Electrical Works,
was born in Breslau, Germany. Though he is only forty years old, he has
already taken out more than one hundred patents for electrical devices,
and some of these are of immense value.
His father was a railroad employee, and on German railroads the pay is
small and the duties exacting. But the father managed to send his son to
the University of Breslau, and here he distinguished himself in
mathematics and chemistry, and spent his leisure time in chemical and
mechanical experiments at home.
At that time the German government was making an effort to stamp out
socialism, and laws of unusual severity were passed against those who
advocated it. Bismarck, who headed the anti-socialist movement, saw to it
that the laws were vigorously enforced. The natural result was a reaction
against the conduct of the government, and the universities became
permeated with socialism.
Steinmetz, then a boy of seventeen, was drawn into the work of
socialistic agitation, and he became the editor of a paper during a period
when the real editor was in prison for _lèse majesté_.
The paper was finally suppressed, and Steinmetz's connection with it was
reported to the university authorities. Then he received information that
a warrant was out for his arrest and he fled to Zurich, Switzerland. Here
he supported himself by tutoring, and by writing for electrical magazines
and for a daily paper.
The articles for the daily paper paid him two dollars a week. His income
was pitifully small, but he managed to save a few dollars, and, meeting
with a young American from San Francisco, he decided to relinquish his
ambition to become a professor of mathematics in some German university.
He then emigrated to America.
Lands as a Poor Immigrant.
Steinmetz and his American friend landed in New York with just twenty
dollars between them. They hired a small room in Brooklyn, where they
started housekeeping together. Steinmetz had acquired this knack during
his Zurich days, and through his first year in America he lived with his
friend in one room, doing their cooking and washing on a gas-stove, and at
the same time conducting electrical and chemical experiments.
Steinmetz had with him when he arrived in this country a couple of letters
of introduction, one to a man who manufactured electrical and chemical
supplies on a small scale. This letter was the first presented, but on
visiting the place Steinmetz was unable to see the manufacturer. He was,
however, told to call again. He called again, and was once more put off
with a polite invitation to return. After two more calls Steinmetz
realized that he was an unwelcome visitor. He thought it over for a few
moments, then laughed and, turning to the clerk, said:
"Oh, well, all right. He'll have to call on me, now, if he wants me--and I
think he will."
Eventually the manufacturer did want Steinmetz, but never got him, for
Steinmetz took the second letter of introduction to Rudolph Eickemeyer,
head of the Eickemeyer Elevator Company, of Yonkers. Eickemeyer sized the
young man up, and at once put him to work as a draftsman, at twelve
dollars a week.
It was while in Yonkers that Steinmetz drew attention to his ability by a
series of articles in an American electrical magazine on alternating
currents. This was followed by the first of the inventions and
improvements that laid the foundation of Steinmetz's substantial fortune.
From the first Steinmetz had taken a lively interest in America and
everything American, and the views for which he was forced to fly from
Europe were so modified that they agreed with the new conditions in which
he found himself. Speaking of them, he said:
"In this country they would be theories without any chance of practical
application, and there is no use in a theory merely for theory's sake."
When the Eickemeyer concern was taken over by the General Electric Company
Steinmetz went with it and was hailed as its greatest asset. He was first
sent to the Thomson-Houston Company--the Lynn, Massachusetts, branch of
the General Electric--and there he worked out the first successful plan
for transmitting power and light, on a large scale, over long distances,
and for controlling currents.
Incidentally he made several important discoveries and improvements in the
arc and incandescent lights and in electric motors.
A Mathematical Wonder.
In addition to being a thorough electrician, Steinmetz is a mathematical
wonder, and there are few tricks of the lightning calculator that he
cannot duplicate and go one better. It had been his intention to become a
professor of mathematics, and doubtless he would have done so had he
remained in Germany. The salary and fees of the professorship would have
given him at best a couple of thousand dollars a year. His work in this
country pays him a big salary, and this is supplemented by a large income
from patents.
Personally he is one of the most popular men in the business. "The
professor," as he is generally known, has been generous in offering
assistance
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