VEST I POCKET ESSAYS GEORGE FITCH 807.73 Fitch, George P552v Vest pocket essays L'SRARY CF T! '.c WALT DISNEY STUDIO GAG FILE VEST POCKET ESSAYS VEST POCKET ESSAYS GEORGE FITCH Author of "At Good Old Siwash," etc. A bed of old Earth's salt, too toon dissolved, and never to be replaced. B. L. T. NEW YORK BARSE & HOPKINS PUBLISHERS Copyright, 1916, by Barse & Hopkins TO THE SMILE KING "He came and laughed and went his way; Lending something to the day That flashed as with a mystic light Something wise and kind and gay. So when he went into the night Out beyond our mortal sight, Lo! he left us with his clay God's joy flashing from the height." WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE. "His mind was pure, his thoughts were clean, He knew mankind and life; With smiles he forced the problems of The Everlasting strife." "They say he's dead. It is not true. I can believe that never. A soul like his could never die, George Fitch will live forever." ROT K. MOOT/TON. The quiet, modest, kindly Smile King has gone. And yet the Smile King is here. This little volume will tell you so. And you will believe it. All too soon he went but he lived a LIFE. For four years he daily fed his clean, non-stinging Smile Essays to a great nation of humans, through the daily newspapers, whose readers read and laughed and loved. And through this little book let us hope that millions will again read and laugh and love. George Fitch was one of the rarest friends I ever had or ever hope to have. He was fine and strong and just. And the silent Influence that his big heart radiated can never grow less bright nor less beautiful. Like the never ending Seasons his good works are sure to come into newness year in and year out, until that time shall come when there shall be no more Seasons just one long, never ending, beau- tiful Day. GEOBGE MATTHEW ADAMS. CONTENTS PAGE I STUDIES IN ANATOMY NOSES 15 EARS 17 FEET 10 HAIR 21 MOUTHS 23 II NATURAL HISTORY THE HEN 27 THE MOUSE 29 THE CATERPILLAR 31 THE BOA CONSTRICTOR 33 THE MOSQUITO 35 THE FLY 37 THE PEACOCK 39 THE DEER 41 III THE CHANGING SEASONS JANUARY 45 FEBRUARY 47 THE 29TH OF FEBRUARY 49 MARCH 51 APRIL 53 MAY 55 JUNE 57 JULY 59 AUGUST 61 SEPTEMBER 63 CONTENTS PAGE OCTOBER 65 NOVEMBER 67 DECEMBER 69 IV AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS CORRESPONDENCE SCHOOLS 73 PATRIOTISM 75 HONESTY 77 NEUTRALITY 79 PRIDE 81 PULLS 83 HOSPITALITY 85 THE BANANA 87 MUD '. . . 89 CHATAUQUAS . 91 V AMERICAN INVENTIONS FLATS 95 MOVING PICTURES 97 THE TIN CAN 99 WASH DAY . 101 BRASS BANDS 103 CLOSETS 105 MATCHES 107 FIRELESS COOKERS 109 VI AMERICANS USEFUL AND OTHERWISE LAWYERS 113 MILLIONAIRES 115 FARMERS 117 DOCTORS 119 DIRECTORS 121 FINANCIERS . . 123 BOOKKEEPERS .. 125 CONTENTS PAGE DEMAGOGUES 127 EMIGRANTS 129 PROMOTERS 131 COMMITTEES 133 VII IN SOCIETY DIAMONDS 137 HATS 139 CANES 141 COLLARS 143 NECKTIES 145 THE DOLLAR 147 MENUS 149 SOCIETY 151 VIII SAFETY VALVES FRESH AIR 155 GOLF BALLS 157 CIGARETTES 159 MOTOR BOATS 161 FISHING 163 VACATION 165 PICNICS 167 FUN 169 PROFANITY 171 IX MORE OR LESS BUNK PROMISES 175 LOVE 177 SUPERSTITION 179 ELOQUENCE 181 LUCK 183 HYPOCRISY 185 CABBAGES 187 KINGS . . 189 STUDIES IN ANATOMY NOSES THE nose is the most prominent human fea- ture. It stands boldly out from the mid- dle of the face like the prow of a battle- ship, and while it is not handsome in itself, we have become so accustomed to it that a man with- out a nose attracts m'ore attention than an actor with a haircut. The nose is used to strain dust, dirt, cinders and microbes out of the air before it is taken into the lungs and also to extract the odors from said air and submit samples of them to the brain for in- spection. Owing to this last duty, it is more en- joyable to have noses in some localities than it is in others. In the orange groves of California, a nose is a great source of pleasure, but on a trip through the stock yards of Chicago, it is a nui- sance. Like the ear, the nose should be fitted with check valves, so that it could be thrown out of gear when not desirable. Noses vary greatly in architecture. Among the most prominent varieties is the Roman nose, which is a stern, uncompromising beak shaped like a ship's rudder. The "pug" or retrousse nose is also firmly fastened on a great many peo- ple, who would never think of specifying it in an 15 NOSES order. It is a small nose which creeps down un- ostentatiously from the forehead, and leaps joy- fully upward at the southern terminus, giving the owner a pert and saucy expression, which may not coincide with his disposition worth a cent. The Grecian nose is noted for its beautiful straight lines and classic design, but it must be noted that men with Grecian noses do not run for office any faster than men with nondescript wind splitters. There are also flat, spreading noses, weird, wan- dering noses and large, meaty probosci. Nature is very careless, both in designing and affixing noses, and has managed to get about 90 per cent of them on crooked. Moreover, many noses have de- fective flues and are badly plumbed, causing great distress and grief to their owners. Because the nose always precedes the human face into trouble, it is usually a great sufferer in combat. It is a very poor weapon of offense, yet reckless owners are continually trying to knock opponents down, by hitting them on the fists with their noses. Noses usually come in two colors, red and white. The latter are much more highly esteemed, though men will often spend years of time and a great deal of money in coloring a nose until it gleams like a red signal beacon in the darkness. It is generally conceded, however, that while on the whole the effect produced is weird and picturesque, it is not worth the trouble and expense. 16 EARS EARS are weirdly constructed projections on the side of the head, designed to catch floating sounds of all kinds and herd them into the hearing mechanism within, where they are manufactured into information, ideas, suspi- cions, wrath, ecstasy, political beliefs and other well known products. Ears are very crudely designed and have not improved from year to year like automobiles. It is impossible to furl up an ear and keep out un- desirable sounds. A man need only see what he chooses but he has no lids on his ears and must go through the world hearing vast quantities of things which are of no use to him. If ears were only fitted with puckering strings, many a nervous man would sleep soundly through the uproar made by falling leaves, and fathers would not be so fatal to earnest young men with deep reverberating voices, who come to sit on their front porches and talk with their daughters at night. Among man's greatest curses, in fact, are the superfluous things which he hears. If a man could only lock up his ears and throw the key down the well whenever a get-rich-quick promoter hove in sight he would be greatly blessed by nature, while the ability to explain to a father whose baby 17 EARS has just thought up a new epigram, that the time lock on his ears would not go off for another hour would brighten many a man's life considerably. Ears are considered ornamental and are made in a great variety of sizes and designs. Some ears stand out straight from the head like studding sails, making navigation in a high wind difficult for their owners, while others are movable and can be flapped back and forth successfully, though not with any great benefit. It is maintained by scientists that prehistoric man was able to flap his ears vigorously, but even this fact does not make us sorry that we live in an enlightened age. Ears can take care of themselves in summer but are a great nuisance in winter owing to the eager- ness with which they freeze up. A water pipe is warm blooded compared with an ear. When an ear freezes it cannot be thawed out with a blow- pipe but must be rubbed with snow after which it becomes vast and red and bulbous and painful. An ear which could be filled with an anti-freeze compound in winter, like an automobile radiator, would become instantly popular and the demand for it would be enormous. Women's ears do not freeze as easily as those of men, possibly because women generally keep their ears busy. Even the present crude variety of ear can be protected from frost by stuffing it carefully into a velvet case called an earmuff. But most people consider the preventative worse than the cure. 18 FEET FEET are the terminals of the human sys- tem, and cause about as much trouble to their owners, as any other kind of trans- portation terminals. Feet were made by turning up the lower end of the human frame, thus enabling man to stand without a prop after he has discovered the knack. They consist of a heel, an instep and five toes, most of which are perpetually insurging against the administration. A foot is harder to keep happy and contented with its surroundings than a girl who has just returned from college, full of higher education. Moreover, very few toes get along well together. They have no esprit de corps, so to speak. There is continual friction between them, and this leads to so much bad feeling and so many sore spots, that many a tortured proprietor of ten belligerent toes has looked with sad envy on a wooden-legged friend. Until some international court of arbitra- tion is formed to settle the claims of rival toes, which insist on occupying the same place at the same time, man cannot hope for complete peace and happiness. Feet are very retiring, seldom appearing in pub- lic. They live in shoes, boots and slippers. This 19 FEET is one of the great sources of indignation among feet. The man who will spend three days in hav- ing his shoulders fitted perfectly to a new coat, will leave the job of fitting his feet with shoes to a machine in Lynn, Mass., which has never seen them and has no interest in them whatever. Until the invention of the bicycle, the automo- bile, the street car, and the elevator, feet were used extensively for walking. Now, however, they are more or less superfluous. A great many men leave them on their desks all day and on the man- telpiece most of the evening. Owing to their great distance from the central heating station, it is very difficult to keep feet properly heated in cold weather. Frigid feet are one of the curses of mankind. They are not only painful, but have a sad effect upon the brain. If it had not been for a national attack of cold feet, which swept over this country more than half a century ago, the boundaries of the United States would now extend almost to Hudson's Bay. Feet come in sizes varying from Number 1 on a double A last, to Number 19, standard gauge. Small feet are generally preferred, though they are not so useful. In China they are so greatly esteemed, that Chinese women wear their corsets on their feet. There has been much unprofitable discussion as to where the largest feet can be found, but it can be safely said that as a rule, they belong to the most truthful women. 20 HAIR is a material used by the Great Architect to thatch the human dome of thought. It comes late and leaves early, like a fashionable guest, and does no work while it remains. Nevertheless, it is greatly beloved, and there is no sadder sight than that of a man of fifty bidding good-by to his hair. Women wear their hair as long as possible, and do it up in a great variety of rolls, coils, loops, braids, puffs, waves, waterfalls, explosions, cas- cades, turrets, colonnades, wings, apses, and flying buttresses. Men also wear their hair as long as possible, which accounts for the great prosperity of hair tonic manufacturers. Hair comes in a great many colors, including black, brown, yellow, gray, auburn, Titian, blonde and bronze. Some very frank people also have red hair. Red hair is noted because of the prom- inence with which it stands out on the landscape, and the inflammability which it is supposed to im- part to the disposition. Red-haired men are usually good fighters, but this is because they had plenty of practice in their youth. Hair is affixed to the scalp in a careless and in- effectual manner, particularly in the case of man, 21 HAIR and after adhering to its owner for a few decades, it usually begins to lose its grip. This causes baldness, which is sadly alluded to as a sign of wis- dom by a great many men, whose foreheads sweep majestically back to their collars. As a rule, the hair retreats in an orderly and dignified manner, but occasionally it plays a dastardly trick by re- tiring from the sides, leaving a small and lonesome oasis of hair in the middle of a vast and shining desert. Hair is reduced to order by the use of a brush and a comb, by means of which a neat furrow, called a "part," can be made. Formerly the hair was parted in the middle, like the Republican party, but men whose heads are heavy enough to retain their balance under the strain, now wear the part on one side. Hair is harvested once a month by a barber, who will also wash, singe, mas- sage, oil, grease, and electrify it unless the owner watches him carefully. In its old age, hair be- comes white and beautiful. It is also supposed to turn white under the influence of great fright, but if this were true* the successive Roosevelt booms would have made Wall Street look like a vast snowdrift. 22 MOUTHS f flHE mouth is the port of entry for the hu- man system, and also its organ of public- M ity. Through the mouth we take in food and water for another hard day's talking, and through the mouth we also issue interviews, prom- ises, explanations, boasts, excuses, apologies, ap- peals, denials, retorts, courteous and fighting words. The mouth is connected with the alimentary canal by the esophagus and with the brain by some mysterious wireless telegraph line, which is gen- erally out of repair. The mouth is the busiest part of the body, because when it is not eating it has to talk. Some men are able to do both at the same time, but not in such a manner as to give pleasure to the spectators. Some mouths are even required to work while their owners are asleep. The fate of a mouth, which must talk all day, and then put up a very fair imitation of a sawmill at night, is indeed a sad one. Some mouths are very large and homely, wan- dering across the face in a most disorderly and unattractive way, while other mouths seem to have been fashioned by an artist for the sole pur- pose of being kissed, and are so small and dainty 23 MOUTHS and pretty that it seems almost a sacrilege to re- quire their owners to poke potatoes, and ham- burger steak and sauerkraut and other comesti- bles into them. The mouth is located just south of the nose, and can be tightly closed when nec- essary, by means of the lower jaw. This, how- ever, is a piece of mechanism which is very poorly understood by most people, and in consequence, the mouth often remains open at the most inop- portune times, allowing conversation to escape which should have been safely bottled up back of the ears. If some mouths could be fitted with Maxim Silencers, their owners would stand a much better chance of getting elected to public office. The mouth is also a weather bureau for the dis- position. By its shape, we can tell whether to look for sunshine and warm weather, or squalls, storms and brickbats from its owner. When it is curved upward on either side, its owner can gen- erally be tackled for small loans with impunity, but beware of a mouth which sags at the ends. 24 NATURAL HISTORY THE HEN THE hen is a small nervous biped which has solved the problem of being valuable to society without a brain and should, there- fore, be a great rebuke to the thousands of young men who are content to roll their own cigarettes while father pays for them. The hen is distinguished for her lack of sense. She is particularly lacking in common or garden sense. Whenever she gets into a garden she makes a perfect fool of herself. Born with a loud voice and no particular cerebral development back of it, she blunders through life from one peril to an- other. Ten thousand generations of hens have tried to figure out how to cross a road between the wheels of a vehicle, but not one of them has con- tributed anything but feathers towards the solu- tion of the problem. There is nothing so ap- palling as the hen's lack of thought unless pos- sibly it is the sight of the larger female biped who deposits seven bundles on the ledge of a stamp window, burrows into a two bushel handbag for a dime and then stamps five letters while twenty people wait behind her. The hen begins life as a chick about the size of a quarter's worth of protected butter. At the age of three months she is a pullet and can be dis- membered and fried in bread crumbs and bacon 27 THE HEN fat with magnificent results. At the age of six months she becomes pensive and unless closely watched will gather up an old door knob, a harness ring, and a bicycle bell and will set on them all winter with the laudable intent of becoming a mother. Nothing is stronger or more beautiful than the maternal instinct of the hen, and nothing is so detrimental to the cause of cheap living and fresh eggs for the masses. The hen has no teeth and is compelled to swal- low her food whole like a hurried business man. She eats bugs, worms, corn, garden seeds and gravel and welds them all into eggs which she lays cautiously in secluded places and then advertises the fact in a hoarse, enthusiastic voice. She lays these eggs at the rate of one a day when they are worth ten cents a dozen, and at the rate of one a month when they are selling for five cents apiece. The egg is the triumph of the hen. When she lays eggs, she ceases to become a nuisance and be- comes a national asset, greater than the wheat field or the scion of aristocracy. Billions of ig- norant hens with no future to look forward to and no past to be proud of are busy safeguarding the prosperity of America by laying eggs. This should be a precious thought to the humble and diffident citizen who does not go to the polls and cast a ballot for progress because his efforts will be so small. Let him lay it in the box while others do the same and great will be the results. 28 THE MOUSE A MOUSE is a small, sleek, svelt, lissom animal about the size of a small knot- hole. Knotholes and mice were made for each other. If it were not for the mouse there would be no use for a knothole in a house. But whenever there is a mouse around, a knothole be- comes a grand entrance and a lightning exit. Mice are gray and are covered with fur and can move from hitherto elsewhere quicker than Johnny Evers when he is catching a scrub run- ner off second. The mouse has a long bare tail by which he can be caught by a brave man after he has been chased over $150 worth of furniture. He also has small round ears like clover leaves, two beady black eyes and a long pointed mouth adorned with whiskers and four chisel-like teeth several sizes too large for him. The mouse's teeth are his greatest fault. If he didn't have them he might be tolerated in society. But although he is clean and pretty and graceful he very quickly gnaws himself out of popularity. A mouse never hangs around a house waiting for a door to be opened. He gnaws his way through it. After a mouse has inhabited a house for a few months he has not only become a great-great-great- grandfather, but has constructed a subway system 29 THE MOUSE which makes that of New York's look childish. He does all of this work after midnight when he will not be annoyed by questions and onlookers. There are several things louder than a mouse who is devouring an oak door at 2 A. M. A steam-ham- mer is one of them. When a mouse has gorged himself on wood and varnish he tops off with a dessert of silk dresses, book bindings and bank notes. A mouse's idea of Paradise is to get into a stocking full of $10 bills, desiccate them and raise a family in the soft re- mains. Mice are not dangerous even when attacked and are pitiable pictures of fright when they are caught and held by the scruff of the neck. How- ever, women are as afraid of them as men are of brand new babies, or politicians are of issues, or actors are of work, or millionaires are of the in- come tax. One undersized mouse can rid a house of an entire card party by climbing up on the table and looking casually around, and can stam- pede a suffragette meeting quicker than nine po- licemen armed with pistols. When women have finally secured the ballot universally the mouse will become as large a factor in politics as the $2 bill, and the party which votes its women early and then stocks the polling places with fierce and car- nivorous mice will be vindicated by the people by an overwhelming majority. 30 THE CATERPILLAR THE caterpillar is a small, fuzzy object, which looks something like a young man's mustache in its first stages. The caterpillar is, in fact, the sophomore of the insect family. He is voracious and undesirable, but later on he will emerge from that state and become something entirely different. The butter- fly is as different as the caterpillar, from which it comes, as the husband and father is from the bouncing young sophomore of the open-face, rib- bon-hatted type. The caterpillar usually emerges from obscurity in the spring and eats himself into a comatose con- dition by early summer. He eats green things, as the sophomore eats pie, and in both cases some one else has to pay the bill. For this reason the caterpillar is unpopular and the man who pounds one with a rock until it departs this life in a messy manner, never has to sit up nights holding his ramping conscience with both hands. Some caterpillars are very beautiful, being gor- geously decorated with various colored fur, like a woman in winter time. As a matter of fact, the caterpillar is all dressed up and has nowhere to 31 THE CATEEPILLAE go. He wanders aimlessly through life and his only ambition is to crawl out on the edge of a small twig and drop down upon the passing pedestrian. It takes the caterpillar upwards of three weeks to crawl a mile and at the end of the journey he gen- erally turns around and starts back. Still, those of us who spend whole days watching automobiles chase each other round a mile track should not laugh derisively at the caterpillar. He is entitled to some amusement. THE BOA CONSTRICTOR w i ^nE boa constrictor is a cross between an animal and a parade. It is found in the M hot, moist countries, which are favorable to luxuriant growths of all kinds, and attains a length varying from 789 feet, as viewed by the startled eye, to 30 feet, when stretched out and measured with a tape line. The boa constrictor is a snake, but acts more like a railway collision. When it has gotten its growth it is as big around as a beer keg and its constant outdoor life gives it large muscles and great endurance. It has neither arms nor legs, but its educated and versatile tail makes up for this lack. When the boa constrictor wraps itself around a personal enemy, gets a half-hitch with its tail around a tree and then begins to contract, its victim's ribs fold up like an accordeon. The boa constrictor travels by chasing itself 'along the ground and climbs trees without bother- ing to hunt for a toe hold. Its favorite occupation is to festoon itself gracefully from the branch of a tree and wait for something to pass underneath. When this happens, the extensive and hungry snake drops itself swiftly about its dinner and squeezes once with a loud-cracking noise. 38 THE BOA CONSTRICTOR After this nothing remains for the boa but to eat its meal. This is a very serious matter with it, however. Nature, for the protection of the rest of us, makes it hard for the boa to eat. He has to unjoint his jaws and swallow his meal whole. To see a hungry constrictor tucking away a pig twice his size is an interesting but painful sight. When the boa constrictor has finished his meal, he has a knot as large as a barrel half way between his head and tail, and is all in. For the next month or more the boa is as sleepy and indifferent as a political party after it has won an election and has gotten all the offices. He will not move and can be sawed into cord lengths with impunity. The boa constrictor lives mostly in Brazil. This is one of the greatest reasons why we should all be thankful because we live in North America. THE MOSQUITO THE mosquito is the smallest known bird of prey. It is one-fourth of an inch long, and weighs less than a masher's brain, but it can hoist a full grown man out of a porch chair more quickly than a derrick, and even after he has gone indoors it will follow him and feast upon him until death doth them part. The mosquito consists of a drilling outfit, a suc- tion pump and a reservoir attached to a small aero- plane with a loud exhaust. He lives on human gore and his appetite is so enormous that three large yearling mosquitoes will almost entirely de- flate a fat baby in an hour. The mosquito obtains his meal by roosting on his hosf; and drilling a prospect shaft with great rapidity, after which he lowers his pumping outfit and drinks until he bulges. Owing to the mos- quito's carelessness in not sterilizing his instru- ments, he generally poisons his victim, causing a lump which varies in size from a peanut in the day- time when you can see it, to a watermelon at night when you can't. It should be the duty of all citi- zens to catch and sterilize as many mosquitoes as possible. This can be done by boiling them for an hour. 35 THE MOSQUITO Mosquitoes breed in stagnant water and can be exterminated by pouring kerosene on all ponds and pools. A barrel of oil in June will save nine bil- lion slaps in August. In some parts of the coun- try mosquitoes are so large and ravenous that they carry straws and imbibe their victims through wire screens as a summer girl laps up a soda. Mosquitoes can be kept out of the house by plac- ing the latter on barges in the middle of a large ocean. The roar of lions in Africa is no more ter- rifying than the loud, menacing hum of one mos- quito who has squeezed through a hole in the screen, and is cruising about the bedroom at mid- night and looking you over with a critical and hungry eye. Mosquitoes have strong heads and can dine for hours on a Kentucky Colonel without becoming intoxicated. But they are no match for gold mine promoters or ward politicians. Many a mosquito has retired from the cheek of one of these species of citizen with a bent and twisted drill, and has gotten a cold and cruel laugh from a world which has no sympathy for him. 36 THE FLY THE fly is only a little thing but he is as un- popular as if he were a trust. He is unpopular for three reasons : 1 because he gets up too early in the morning; 2 because he comes where he hasn't been invited, and 3 be- cause he does not keep his feet clean. The fly hasn't a thing to do in the world and could well afford to sleep until 10 o'clock. In- stead he gets up at daybreak and flies around the nearest bedroom like a French monoplane going after the Gordon-Bennett cup. When he has fin- ished 1100 circuits he cools off by flying 700 times around the exposed ear of the person who sup- poses himself to be sleeping in that room. Then he sits down on the forehead of said person and digs holes in his skin with all the vim of a small boy excavating in a piano with a new jackknife. Because of these actions a great many taxpayers wake at 5 A. M. entirely against their will and spend the next three hours hating the fly and plan- ning for his ultimate ruin. The fly also attends meals without being asked, spends long hours in parlors, whose owners he does not even know by name, and sneaks into kitch- 37 THE FLY ens through leaky screen doors and gorges him- self on food intended for others. Because of this failing a great many flies get thrown out of Amer- ican homes. It is possible to throw a fly out of the house without ruining him permanently, but very few people take the trouble to practice up in this art. Worst of all is the fly's well known carelessness about his feet. He is the small boy of the insect tribe and likes nothing better than to wade around knee deep in microbes and then track them all over the house. Until the fly sleeps later, rings the doorbell be- fore visiting strangers, and soaks his feet in car- bolic acid each evening, he can never hope to be- come popular in this country, and swatting him will continue to be the great American exercise. THE PEACOCK "IT IT "THEN the Creator finished up Adam % f\ I and Eve He discovered that there jl \ would be no fancy styles in dress for several thousand years, so He made the peacock to supply the deficiency. The peacock consists of a large and magnificent collection of tail feathers equipped with motive power. This motive power consists of a body and a small head with a garret for rent. The mission of the peacock is to wear his gorgeous tail around the landscape and to unfurl it wherever there is to be a spectator to be dazzled. That is all he is good for. The oldtime kings had to eat peacocks to live up to their position, but it was a great chore. Like many other wearers of fine clothes, the peacock is tough and stringy and eminently undesirable in flavor. The peacock's tail is the most gorgeous thing in nature, however. It consists of dozens of fine, long, radiantly tinted feathers and each feather has a beautiful eye at its farther end. These eyes, however, cannot see a thing, which makes ten pea- cocks equal to an entire Chicago police force. The fact that the peacock is as gaudy as a Fifth Avenue parade, while his wife, the peahen, is a 39 THE PEACOCK modest creature, is regarded by some as remark- able. However, man has not always been the som- ber individual that he is to-day. Three hundred years ago a king's courtier was so gaudily dressed that he made a peacock look as if he was in mourn- ing. In those days when a man who had any so- ciety aspirations spent hours each day in arraying himself in gold lace, powdered curls, lace cuff and pink silk panties, the peacock was greatly re- spected for his modesty. In fact, he was gener- ally admired for his good sense. He cost a great deal less than a gentleman, was more useful and didn't fight so much. Nowadays the peacock leads a sad and neglected life except in a few English estates, and in spite of his great beauty, is not appreciated. This is partly because of his voice, which is a cross be- tween an automobile alarm horn and a saw hitting a nail, and partly because he no longer has a press agent. This is a hustling world and very few soci- ety women or peacocks can succeed by true worth alone. 40 THE DEER THE deer is a refined and beautiful third cousin of the cow. It has never gone into domestic science, but lives a wild, free life in the woods, furnishing inspiration to poets, and dinners to wolves, tigers, panthers and various other animals which are not vegetarians. The deer is very delicately made, with Chippen- dale legs, large expressive ears and deep, liquid, soulful eyes. It has a beautiful mottled coat and it spends most of its time trying to keep this coat for itself. This is not because the deer has a self- ish disposition but because it is a very serious matter to have its coat removed. It is always done just subsequent to the death of the deer itself. The deer lives in the forests and plains as far from man as possible and spends its time leaping nimbly from hither to yon. The deer's legs are made of coil springs and it can remove itself from a given portion of the landscape with great rapid- ity. Between removals it spends its time eating grass and herbs and producing fawns or infant deer, which are innocent little creatures composed mostly of ears. Like most beautiful creatures the deer leads an unhappy life and comes to a sad end. This is be- 41 THE DEEE cause it is too well beloved. Its flesh is very pop- ular. Its hide is eagerly sought for by the In- dians who make shoes and clothes out of it And it is greatly esteemed by sportsmen as a mark. There is no more popular pastime than that of going out into the woods and hitting a deer with a rifle bullet. Thousands of men go into the woods each fall to shoot deer. Owing to the growing scarcity of the deer, the hunters have recently taken to shooting each other by mistake. Thus the deer in its quiet and gentle fashion is getting considerable revenge. It is extremely cruel to shoot an innocent, con- fiding deer in the neck almost as cruel as it is to leave the same deer to be chewed up by a mountain lion later on. 42 THE CHANGING SEASONS JANUARY JANUARY is the first month of the year. For this reason we should not be too impatient with it. The succeeding months improve steadily, which shows that practice is necessary to make even a calendar perfect. January arrives after winter has taken off its things and has settled down for keeps. It is one of our finest indoor months, but is not affection- ately regarded by fishermen, baseball players, or scenery sellers. Nature is as beautiful in Janu- ary as she is in July but very few people worship her. It is too much trouble to shovel snow off of her face. January is a fine month in which to read ' * Pick- wick Papers," "The Decline and Fall of the Ro- man Empire," "Potash and Perlmutter," and other gems of literature. It takes some practice to do this, but a man soon learns how to chauffeur a book with one hand and a furnace with the other, and can absorb a great deal of learning during the cold winter evenings. When January is in good form and is going strong, the owner of an old- fashioned tepid-air furnace has to have his meals brought down to the cellar to him and only escapes now and then to shovel 345 lineal feet of sidewalk 45 JANUAEY after each snow. It takes a broad man to accom- modate a snow shovel lame back and a coal shovel lame back at the same time without confusing the two and getting his treatments mixed. January is a favorite month with the amateur gardener. In this month he does his finest work. At no time of the year is he so happy as he is in January as he sits by the fire during the evening, growing ten pound potatoes and melons which have to be cut with a two man saw. Nurserymen become rich in January by accompanying amateur gardeners in their dreams, but no nurseryman is foolish enough to come around in July to pay a friendly calL In Canada, January is greatly beloved because of the toboggan slides, ice palaces and hockey games which flourish in that climate. The style of January used in the United States south of Minnesota is not stable enough to encourage ice palaces, however. The only ice palaces erected in the United States are those built by icemen. They are made out of ice and last all summer, but they are not popular. In January the principal amusements are skat- ing, sleighing, and attending annual meetings. January is now a more pleasant month than it was when it was first discovered, but it will be still fur- ther improved as soon as some method of heating, cooling and ventilating street cars at the same time can be devised. 46 FEBKUARY THE nicest things about February are the thirtieth and thirty-first days of the month, from which we are perpetually ex- cused, and the twenty-ninth day, which comes only once in four years. February comes along when every one is tired of winter, and is about as welcome as a ninth piece of pie or a second attack of mumps. February is just like January only more so at times, but the calendar isn't hard-hearted enough to compel man- kind to serve out all of the usual thirty-day sen- tence. Brevity is the sole cause of February's popularity and this should be a lesson to every lecturer. In February the days grow longer, but this pleasure is offset by the annoyance of receiving telegrams and souvenir cards from friends who are sitting in the sunshine in Southern Califor- nia and exaggerating the climate in perfect safety. More than one man has risen in the middle of' an Illinois February night, and has accumulated fifty miles of north wind under his night shirt while he stood at his front door and receipted for a tele- gram from his wife in Pasadena telling him that 47 FEBRUARY roses are perfuming the air as she sits on the hotel porch without wraps on. Although February contains only twenty-eight days, it is our most eventful month. Its greatest feat has been the production of both Washington and Lincoln. This grateful nation makes holi- days of both birthdays, thus reducing the working days in February to 22, and making it enormously popular with bank clerks and government em- ployes. In February also St. Valentine's day oc- curs. This is a fine day on which to get even with some enemy who is too large to lick, by sending him a beautiful tinted portrait of a fat man with a tomato nose and large fuzzy ears and writing his name underneath so he will catch the resemblance. But February is chiefly noted for its twenty- ninth day, which occurs once in four years thus producing what is known as "leap-year." This name is derived from the fact that in this year un- married young women are supposed to leap fero- ciously upon eligible young men and drag them shrieking to the altar. The open season lasts all year and is of great assistance in ridding the world of bachelors. An extra day every four years is a great boon even if it is in February, and thus far little use of it seems to have been made. It might be a good plan to preserve it as the day on which to read the gold mining circulars which have accu- mulated during the preceding four years. 48 THE 29TH OF FEBRUARY THE 29th of February is the scarcest day in all the years. It was invented by Pope Gregory three centuries ago, in order to take up the slack in the calendar. He discovered that the calendar had been losing time at the rate of one day in every four years, and that if some- thing wasn't done about it, Christmas would even- tually arrive in the dog days, and the world would suffer severely from the heat in December. So he gave every fourth year an extra day and called it Leap Year. As February has been stunted since its birth, it was given the new day. However, even with the extra day, the calendar does not keep exact time with the sun. Few peo- ple realize how necessary it has been to wind up and regulate the calendar, which is as sensitive as an eight-day clock. With an extra day every four years, the calendar would be a trifle fast and would gain a day every 133 years. While this gain would not be enough to cause immediate alarm, or de- press business, except, perhaps, on Wall Street, astronomers are fussy, and like to be exact about such things. So on every hundredth year not di- visible by 400, leap year is omitted. Thus the year 1900 was not a leap year, and great suffering 49 THE 29TH OF FEBKUARY resulted among the joke makers. However, the year 2000 will be a leap year, and so will the year 2400, though by that time scientists will probably be running the earth the other way, and regulat- ing the speed with a push button. We owe a great deal to the patient astronomers, who have stood century after century, stopwatch in hand and eyes glued to the telescope, watching the progress of the earth around the sun, and an- nouncing to an anxious world that it is exactly on time. Before the astronomical time-table was re- vived, the Earth was as much as 11 days late, and there was great grumbling all along the line, but this has all been corrected. Eailroad superin- tendents who are unable to get a train over 100 miles of track and guess within an hour of its ar- rival, have a great deal to learn from astronomers. The 29th of February is a fine day on which to practice economy, forgive enemies, read German philosophy and do other disagreeable duties. People who are born on this day have only one birthday in every four years, which makes them very popular with their relatives. Among those who have been born on the 29th of February are Lillian Russell, Sarah Bernhardt, and many other hardy perennials. 50 MARCH THE month of March is a sort of meteorolog- ical political campaign. It is composed mostly of wind and dust in the eyes. March begins just after we have become very tired of winter and continues until we are heart- ily ashamed of ourselves for having said anything against January and February. It is cold, raw, bleak, changeable, impetuous, blustering and furi- ous. Sometimes March warms up and encourages the householder to believe that he can make his last wagonload of coal do until spring. But it always freezes up again, just as he has gotten down to the last bushel and compels him to chop up the laundry bench and a few old chairs to es- cape an Arctic demise. March comes in like a lion and continues like a rhinoceros, a timber wolf and an insurgent Con- gressman. Existence in March is further compli- cated by Lent, which begins early in the month as a rule, and continues through it. During Lent devout people are supposed to abstain from all earthly pleasures. But no one keeps Lent half as devoutly as the month of March, itself. March was named for Mars, the god of war and is a chip of the old block. In its early history, it 51 MARCH was afflicted with Ides, one of which was fatal to Julius Caesar, but it has entirely recovered from them and is now unincumbered by holidays. The presidents of the United States are inaugurated on the 4th of March but the month hasn't appreci- ated the honor and has treated the parades with much contempt, snowing, raining and hailing on them with great regularity. For this reason, the residents of Washington who think that Presi- dents are elected for the purpose of having inau- gural parades want the beginning of the presiden- tial term pushed on into May; while others who think that a newly elected president should have the job turned over to him before old age carries him off, think he should be inaugurated in Janu- ary, with a parade composed entirely of office seek- ers. 52 APRIL APRIL is a brief, emotional monfh which has only thirty days and spends most of its time weeping for the thirty-first. It arrives just after the backbone of March has been broken, and lasts until it is safe to put on a thin necktie and a cotton vest and go to a baseball game without a footwarmer. April consists of sunshine and sobs in equal doses, like a Hearne melodrama, and is one of our most charming months in spots. When the April sky is blue, and the warm breezes are enticing the diffident radish from the bosom of the garden, April is so fascinating that the whole world goes out of doors in order to breathe it in larger quan- tities. In April, the apple, peach and cherry trees explode into blossom, and nature everywhere be- comes green and fresh and tender. The country roads also lose their hard callous nature and be- come soft and succulent. After April has rained for about nineteen days on an eight hour schedule, the roads become so soft and embracing that the mail carrier has to sit on his buggy top to keep his necktie out of the mud. April is chiefly noted in the United States for the opening of the baseball season. During the 53 APRIL' last ten days of the month a million baseball fans are suddenly turned on and life once more becomes bright and stuffed full of interest. There is no more inspiring sight than that of a baseball fan in April, as he sits in the thick weather on the port side of third and shouts hoarse encouragement to the baserunner, who is sliding grandly to third through the billows, tossing up spray like a racing motor boat. April elections also give us our mayors and al- dermen. Because of this, a great many reformers are demanding that April be left out of the cal- endar. April is barred by two great sorrows the late frost and the early spring housecleaning. The late frost comes like a dastardly assassin and mur- ders the innocent spring vegetables and the con- gressional boom, while the early housecleaning breaks loose with relentless fury in many a happy home and shuffles it up until the distressed hus- band has to find his way through the parlor at night with a guide, to say nothing of saving up enough money to buy back his second and third best pairs of pants from the old clothes man. April is a beautiful month south of Mason and Dixon's celebrated line. North of this line, how- ever, it is like a stock company gold mine it con- sists mostly of prospects. 54 MAY THE month of May is a long stretch of joy inclosed between two of our saddest holi- days. On the first of May millions of sor- rowful Americans bid good-by to the old home- steads which have sheltered them for the past twelve months, and move into other flats with warmer hot water. On the thirty-first of May we mourn the noble dead who fought for their coun- try and left widows to fight for a pension against the stern and unswerving descendants of the men who stayed at home. Otherwise, however, May is our happiest month. It arrives with the last coal bill, and departs before the first fly. In May, Spring becomes entirely con- valescent, and for the first time man can shed his coat and go forth to view the budding world with- out fear of freezing fast in the mud. Astronom- ically, May is the last month of Spring, but ther- mometrically, it is usually the first. Spring is one of our slowest starters, and often finishes entirely before it begins. The month of May is bounded on one side by chest protectors, angora hats, and stump speeches, and on the other side by soda fountains, mosquito netting and vacation folders. It is the happiest 55 MAY month of the year for college students, who steal away to remote campus corners and get engaged in vast droves. It is the busiest month for dress- makers, abutting as it does on June, and it is a brief season of bliss and rest for politicians, who have either just been elected during April, or have been laid quietly away in the peaceful discard to await another year. May, however, is a sorrowful month for the au- tomobilist, who generally discovers while shaking the mothballs out of his last year's car that $150 worth of automobile tires have become limp and dead and excessively no good during the long, cruel winter. May is a generally prosperous month, because in May most people complete the accumulation of cash necessary to take them away on their June vacations. It is a fine month in which to look over prospectuses of summer hotels and ocean voy- ages, if only the looker has strength of mind enough to compromise on a new hammock later on. Of late May has also become a favorite month in which to become the owner of a next year's model 60 H. P. roadster, with the gasoline tank arranged in a more swagger position, and to drive the same thunderously down the street, filling the owners of 7,000 out of date cars with horror and despair. 56 JUNE JUNE, the peerless month of roses and ro- mance, strawberries and straw hats, soft breezes and still softer conversation, is the most poetic month of the year. By June Nature has gotten over her waking up grouch and has got- ten down to her job of upholstering the world in flowers and vegetation. The world is handsomer in June than in any other month and the weather has more decent intervals. In June, people fall in love with each other with- out effort and get married in the evening under floral bells in the presence of large companies of invited presents. June averages a wedding every 1% seconds. It isn't June weather, however, which makes its weddings, but the fact that it usually takes until June for the prospective bride- groom to recover from Christmas and save enough for his wedding trip. June is also very prolific in commencements. In June thousands of eager young high school stu- dents and collegians graduate in loud, clear tones, and hundreds of college towns sink into a coma- tose state for the next three months. Commence- ment is a very happy season for newly fledged graduates and also for the weary fathers who foot 57 JUNE the college bills, for "commencement" means "Get-through-ment" for them. June gives us our early spring vegetables, our cherries and presidential nominees and also our tornadoes and bugs. These are its greatest draw- backs. The June tornado is unusually fierce and carnivorous, and the beautiful hazy, lazy June weather must be strained through screens before it is let into the house, in order to free it from its vast entomological deposits. In June the Inter- national Bugs' union holds a convention around every arc light and the friendly but undesirable June Bug enters many a peaceful home through the keyhole and gets so tangled up in daughter's golden hair that she has to take it off and beat it with a club to get rid of him. In June the music of a million birds mingles with the twitter of ten thousand lawn mowers and the swift, sullen swat of the folded newspaper as it caves in the ribs of the early summer fly. In June the woodland ants hail the returning picnic with hungry joy, the small boy takes off his shoes and carefully loses them, the reckless man shucks off his coat and the cautious man removes his win- ter underwear. In June the thermometer aviates, while the price of eggs dives deep and the straw hat blooms until the first summer shower. June is indeed a month of bliss, with plenty of season- ing in it. 58 JULY JULY is the hottest of months and is named for Julius Caesar, who made it so hot for the barbarians and standpatters in and around Rome a few years before the British shipping regulations were formulated. July begins with palm leaf fans, shirt sleeves and a rising thermometer, and closes with brass sunsets, feverish refrigerators, and ice on the back of the neck. Its mission is to be hot and it sticks to its job day and night, like a man who is repair- ing automobiles at 80 cents an hour. In July men carry their coats over their shoul- ders and sleep on the parlor floor with a mosquito net for a quilt. In July dogs go mad and froth at the mouth, like New York editors discussing Roosevelt, and Texans shoot each other over the crop outlook if no better excuse can be found. In July corn grows so fast at night that the noise disturbs the farmers, and the automobilist who rushes off in search of pleasure comes home in a few hours and takes a quart of dirt out of his hair with a vacuum cleaner. In July men are hot and irritable, and one word doesn't lead to another, but to a paving brick. A man who could be pounded on the head with safety 59 JULY in December, will walk ten blocks during the last of July to find a friend and get up an argument over the Panama Canal with him and make a pur- ple aster out of his left eye. Political conventions are held in June, but no party thinks of starting the campaign in July. If it did there wouldn't be one left to vote in November. July was responsible for our national freedom. The Continental Congress met in Philadelphia in June and by July 4th had gotten hot enough and mad enough to issue the Declaration of Inde- pendence. July also furnished the battle of Gettysburg, the Siege of Vicksburg, the capture of the Bastile and many other heated events of great importance. July is regarded with devotion by laundry men, hotel keepers, druggists, ice men and writers of love stories which can be read without slipping the brain into gear. But the husband of the wife who moves to the seashore in summer comments on July in hissing tones as he ascends the stool in a quick lunch counter on an evening that is stuffed full of calorics, and asks his neighbor to reef his elbow and make room for a plate of iced beans. 60 AUGUST NO ONE has ever found any particular ex- cuse for August, and its only enjoyable feature is the fact that after it is over September will arrive on the scene. August comes after the world has panted fever- ishly through July, and its sole mission is to make the latter month seem like a summer resort. In August the thermometer takes a thirty-day lease on the nineties and makes a century run every other day. People who have perspired good-na- turedly through July give up in August and say unkind things even to the minister when he comes to tea. If August could be eliminated the amount of ill-nature in this country would be decreased about 45 per cent. August has 31 days and there isn't a holiday among them. In June and July the thermometer occasionally comes down at night and visits the 70 mark, but in August it only gets a little less hot after midnight. People with $300 mahogany beds and $11,000 rooms leave them in August and go downstairs to sleep on the front porch on a $2.50 cot and a sheet. This would be a shocking thing to do in June, but nothing is very shocking in Au- gust. 61 AUGUST Nobody works very hard in August except soft drink men and baseball players, who run better when they are hot, like automobiles. Even presi- dential campaigns are put on ice in August. It is no month in which to use burning language. In August the world is divided into two classes those who can run away, and those who have to face it. With the aid of an ice chest, an electric fan, and a sleeping porch, August can be endured very successfully at home, but the babies who have to live in a superheated tenement on sour milk very frequently decide that the world is not worth living in and retire from it. This causes hard feel- ings among parents and philanthropists, and it is generally agreed that the men who charge high prices for tenement rooms without windows and the men who increase the price of ice to mothers in order to reduce it to saloonkeepers will eventually land in a climate which is always August or worse. 62 SEPTEMBER SEPTEMBER is a medium weight, low pres- sure month which begins at the end of the electric fan season and ends at the begin- ning of the thick underwear solstice. It was named by the Romans who used it as the seventh month of the calendar, but who afterwards en- larged the year, owing to the growth of business and pushed it on to ninth place, where it has served with marked success ever since Augustus Caesar was a senior in college. September is the first month of autumn and is regarded with affection by all people who haven't been able to spend the summer at the seashore. To these it comes as a great relief, but to the man who has concealed his family in a summer resort for three months it consists mostly of overdue bills and a frantic hunt for a new cook. In September colleges begin to become feverish again and violate the noise regulations by manu- facturing freshmen without mufflers in huge quantities. In September also the football candi- date dons a leather soup kettle and a rubber fender for his nose, and begins to insert himself into the thorax of the enemy at the rate of five yards per insertion, next to pure reading matter. 63 SEPTEMBER In September apples, grapes and watermelons ripen in the temperate zones and a wave of crime spreads over the land extending from 9 p. M. until early morning. July is the most fatal month for dogs, but September is hardest on their digestions. Hundreds of farmers' dogs permanently impair their health in September by eating trousers which do not bear a pure food label. In September, the open season for ducks, prairie chickens, and straw hats begins. Very few of us are able to assassinate a duck, but even the hum- blest citizen can leap upon a straw hat on the first of September and reduce it to ruin with a cry of rage. Because of the difficulty which September usually experiences in cooling off, it has been pro- posed to extend the closed season for straw hats to the fifteenth. This, however, will be a difficult task and will not be accomplished until long after the inauguration date has been pushed forward into May. September has one holiday, Labor Day. It is so called because on this day every one takes a rest and makes a few hoarse remarks about capital. 64 OCTOBER OCTOBER is a serious, thoughtful month, which happens after September and just before the coal question becomes intense. It is not naturally an exciting period, but has been made so artificially in America by the invention of football, the open season for hunting, the world's championship baseball games, and the closing of the political campaigns. Because of these four things, October produces more cases of heart failure, pocketbook failures, sore throat, broken ribs and buckshot in the face than any other month, and rivals July in the over- working of physicians. In October vegetation closes up the year's busi- ness and retires into winter quarters. The fields become brown, and the summer girl takes off her $250 coat of tan with lemon juice and writes for samples of the latest society pink. October usu- ally begins as coldly as an emotional actress before a small house, but warms up by noon and becomes rarely and pensively beautiful until 5 P. M., when dusk begins and the thermometer begins to slide like the Brooklyn baseball team in July. By 7 o'clock the American husband is usually in the cellar chopping up an old chair for fuel. October 65 OCTOBER is a frail month as far as heat goes, and has no vitality at all. In October the leaves become red and gold, and the sumach flames on the hills, while the corn husker rolls out at 5 A. M. and picks corn until his thumb throbs like an overdue tooth. The blare of the brass band and the hoarse shriek of the orator shake the land at night, while in the afternoons the earnest fullback pulls his knee out of his op- ponent's face and picks the teeth out of it with a low shriek of pain. October is of no great use to humanity, but helps fill up the year, and enables us to forget the ap- proach of winter by the use of its celebrated In- dian summer, which is a slight rally of the fast sinking thermometer towards the close of the month. Americans should treat October with great respect because it was in this month that Columbus first looked upon America and took back his glowing reports to Spain. Think what he might have said about it if he had found it in January I 66 NOVEMBER NOVEMBER, a month which is introduced by the calendar in the hope of making it popular, is a thirty-day sentence imposed by Nature on humanity and served out principally under an umbrella. November is a month which would like to be- come winter, but which hasn't quite got the nerve. It is usually composed of ten rainy days, ten cloudy days and ten snowy days or freezing days with a pinch of sunshine between the various divisions. It is useful because it makes December seem pleasant in comparison. In November the trees finish disrobing and as they wave their bare limbs against the sky, the wind converses through them. There is nothing more talkative than a November wind. Along about 10 P. M. on a bleak, damp night, a November wind likes nothing better than to come along and hang around the entire evening, reminding you that the rent is almost due, and that it is a long time until spring, and that Death by freezing is particularly sad, and that unless you pay your last winter's coal bill pretty soon, you will have to go to bed to keep warm. A November wind is more pessimistic than anything on earth, except a Wall Street operator during a spasm of public honesty. 67 NOVEMBER November was invented by the Romans, who did so many terrible things in the early Christian era. It was so named because it was the ninth month at that time. The growth of business has compelled the addition of two more months since then, both of them being of much better quality. In November automobiling, croquet and lawn socials begin their long winter's sleep, but football is very popular because it is easier to keep warm in a football game than it is in a house where the furnace is being repaired. Football in November is a game to decide whether the player will dent the ground or the ground will dent the player. The ground usually wins. Corn husking and riding to the polls in an opposition carriage are also two popular outdoor sports during this month. There are three great uses for the month of No- vember. It kills malaria, flies and political cam- paigns. None of these are able to survive the climate of this month. If it were not for Novem- ber political campaigns might go on right up to Christmas and entail vast suffering among the rich. Most of our public officials are elected in November, but we cannot justly blame the month for this. November was first put prominently on the map by the Pilgrim fathers. About 1630, when they discovered that there were only a few days of the month left, they instituted a Thanksgiving festival, which has been observed ever since with increased gratitude and devotion. 68 DECEMBER DECEMBER is a pleasant, steam-heated month whose principal missions are to wind up the calendar and the bank sur- plus. It is a more agreeable month than Novem- ber, because while we expect the weather to be bad, it is sometimes fine, whereas in November we still hope for pleasant weather and what we get instead cannot be effectively commented upon in polite so- ciety. In December man retires indoors and only uses the outside air while passing through it from one set of radiators to another. The icicle and snow- ball crops ripen and when a man stands on a street corner waiting for the dim future in the shape of a street car, he looks like an engine with a leaky steam pipe. December is one of the few months in which the human breath is visible and it is worthy of note that the breath is always pure white, no matter how it tastes to the producer. Dark brown and sulphur blue exhausts are only figments of literature. In December, also, the sidewalks begin to be- come pugnacious. Nothing is more quiet than a sidewalk in July or more unreliable and blood- thirsty than a sidewalk in December after an ice storm. It is a common thing for a December side- 69 DECEMBER walk to approach a victim stealthily from behind and to leap upon his neck and shoulders with the ferocity of a young tiger. Thousands of people have suffered severe injury by being attacked by hostile sidewalks and porch steps in December. This country is now tolerably free from wolves and Indians, but until the man-eating sidewalk has been subdued, life will still continue to be sadly- uncertain. The most prominent feature of December is Christmas, which finally comes to a head on the 25th of the month. This festival has made De- cember one of our most prominent and successful months. The younger half of the world spends the first part of December counting the days until Christmas, and the older portion spends the last half of the month counting its money with a slightly dejected air. In December the days keep getting shorter, along with the people, until the 21st when winter is for- mally opened and the sun goes to bed before the banks close. The 21st is the shortest day of the year astronomically, but the 26th is shorter finan- cially by a tremendous majority. In December, the owner of the automobile wraps it in goose-grease and moth balls and packs it away until spring. This has made December a delight- ful month in many respects, and has increased greatly the esteem in which it is held by pedes- trians. 70 AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS CORRESPONDENCE SCHOOLS A CORRESPONDENCE school is an educa- tional institution with a long distance at- tachment which enables a man to stuff himself with knowledge at the rate of two cents an ounce, rural free delivery included. It is very easy to attend a correspondence school. All that is necessary is to be a good corre- spondent. A man need not be a careful dresser, or a durable end runner, or a master with the banjo, or a swan-like dancer. He does not need to possess a chilled steel voice box, or a wagon load of sofa pillows, or talent for organizing under- classmen, or an inordinate nocturnal appetite for pie. All he needs is a bushel of two-cent stamps and a little spare time in the evening. With this equipment he can in a few months familiarize him- self with the principles of mechanical drawing, electricity, German, Spanish, shoulderless French, intensive farming, swimming under water, journal- ism, horse doctoring, ship building, Marathon run- ning, cake designing, skyscraper planning, piano playing, preaching, law, scenario writing, auto driving, plain legislating, home plumbing, avia- ting, or hair cutting. 73 CORRESPONDENCE SCHOOLS It will thus be seen that the correspondence school has a vast curriculum. Hundreds of thou- sands of Americans are attending these schools around the kitchen table at night, and all over the land worried young chauffeurs are sitting in mo- tionless automobiles trying to find out from a fat book how to get home in time for supper. The student of the correspondence school does not wear a hat banged up in front, or mysterious jeweled pins, but he can easily be distinguished by his college flag, which is a brunette forefinger on his right hand. The yell of the correspondence school is, "Gee whiz! Postage due!" and some fine records are held by the students, who make them while sprinting for the last mail collection. The correspondence school has developed greatly, but it still lingers behind the ordinary col- lege in many important branches of science. It does not teach lawn tennis or strolling or debating or bonfire building or neophite spanking. It does not develop a taste in neckties and finances and in the beauties of obtaining money by mail. The col- lege sophomore with a pa who is susceptible to good literature can make a record which the cor- respondent student can never hope to approach. 74 PATRIOTISM PATRIOTISM is a strange and mysterious enthusiasm which inspires men to go out on the battlefield and get shot into human colanders in defense of their country. It also leads men to stand up in public places and make invidious remarks concerning the ad- ministration which has been running things into the ground. In the old days this proceeding was as fatal as the other. Even in this day, a great many patriots who have criticised congress have been misunderstood. Patriots are full of love for their country and will do almost anything for it, even to paying taxes willingly, though patriots of this sort are rare. Patriots have always been plentiful, though the job is unhealthy and the pay very bad as a rule. Throughout history patriots have been busy mak- ing speeches with the sheriff in full pursuit, fight- ing armies with an old fashioned musket, which kicked harder than it shot, and languishing in damp and badly furnished dungeons for years at a time. In the early days, the patriot who got hanged, instead of being boiled in oil, considered himself a pet of Fortune. However, when the pa- triot has died, he has always been embalmed in history and children have spoken of him as an old 75 PATRIOTISM friend long after the rich man next door has been forgotten, even by his descendants. David was one of the earliest patriots and suc- ceeded in making the business pay handsomely after great privations. Alfred the Great was a King and a patriot at the same time, which is usu- ally a harder job than to ride two horses going in opposite directions. Bolivar, Kosciusko and Gari- baldi had a hard job making a living as patriots, but even to-day cigars are named after them. George Washington was so great a patriot that England offered the highest market price for his head. But he retained it himself, and afterwards willed it to a grateful nation to use on its postage stamps. Even China has now accumulated enough pa- triots to make trouble for the chief object of the patriot is to furnish trouble. Countries that have had plenty of patriots have had severe internal pains, but have become mighty, while countries that have run out of patriots, have slumbered peacefully along and have finally gone out of busi- ness with heavy liabilities. Nowadays America is so rich and powerful that the American patriot cannot fight for his country, but must save it in other ways. 76 HONESTY HONESTY is so hard to define that most people do not tackle the job except for the benefit of their neighbors. The dictionary, which is one of our most suc- cessful side-steppers, says "honesty is freedom from fraud or guile. ' ' It forgets to mention that honesty usually means freedom from money also. The proverb says honesty is the best policy. It is amazing to see how many people have a horror of playing policy. The old Spartans admired honesty greatly. Stealing was honest in their eyes, but getting caught with the goods was a great crime. The ever recurring bribery investigations have re- vealed the fact that the United States ia full of Spartans. Some men are so honest that they will not steal a man's money so long as they can get it by selling him stock in a defunct gold mine. Other men would shudder with horror at the thought of sell- ing decayed mining stock, when the same results can be obtained in a perfectly legal manner by borrowing the money and going into bankruptcy with no visible assets. Many men are so honest that they will not steal a pin. But they would hold the coat of a personal 77 HONESTY friend while he stole a battleship. Still others de- cline to steal anything at all, preferring to leave the job to litigation, which usually gives excellent satisfaction. There are also men with whom you could trust your watch with perfect safety, but who would take a stock company away from you with a merry laugh. Some men are honest in small things, because there is no profit in piker pilfering. Others are honest in large things, because there is less risk in small packages. Thus it is to be seen plainly that the standards of honesty vary as widely as plurality guesses by leaders of opposite parties. Standards vary in legislatures also. In some the members are so honest that they will only sell their votes for polit- ical support. In others the members will not ac- cept money and would indignantly return the bundles they find in their pockets if they had time and could remember to do it. In still others, when a member doesn't pawn his desk and chair, he runs for reelection on his good record. It will not do for us to judge the honesty of others by our own for others are judging our honesty by theirs and are looking at us with horror as they do so. 78 NEUTRALITY ABOUT the most valuable and difficult art in the world to-day is that of maintaining neutrality. Neutrality consists of remaining so sympatheti- cally fair-minded between two or more belligerent nations that the said nations will not be inspired to step over and hand the bystanding country a few hearty pokes. This is somewhat harder than walking over Niagara Falls on a tight wire but not so hard as balancing on the end of a feather. After a diplo- matic corps has maintained neutrality with a few hostile nations yammering on either side and in- quiring what it meant by coaling this cruiser and ejecting that one, the members of said corps usually retire to a rest cure for a few months. When France and England were at war in the first breadths of the last century, the United States maintained neutrality for a few years but finally went to war for relief. During the Civil War, England maintained neu- trality by fitting out Confederate cruisers and ejecting the United States merchant marine from the seas. The United States got $15,000,000 for this bum and spurious brand of neutrality, but the merchant marine never came back which 79 NEUTRALITY made the affair a great bargain for Great Britain. Neutrality has been a specialty of Switzerland, and it has stood successfully on the side lines for 650 years. This has been easy for it, however, be- cause it would take a mighty determined enemy to climb up into the 1100th story of Switzerland and bust its neutrality. The United States is now a strictly neutral coun- try, full of Germans, Irish, French and Slavs, who are about as neutral when they get together as two black tom-cats are on a roof. We will not have much trouble in preserving an unblemished fair- ness to all the principals in any by-war, but if we can keep our adopted citizens from massacring each other every time a foreign war breaks out, we will be performing a great feat. 80 PRIDE PRIDE is a genteel paralysis of the brain, accompanied by a marked stiffening of the backbone, to say nothing of the neck. When a man has pride he has to reason around it. This lands him in a great many peculiar places. Many a man is borrowing money from friends who can't afford to lend it because he is too proud to beg. It is much easier for a proud man to die owing money profusely than to stain his record by asking the county to slip him a load of coal. Pride also compels many people to give up com- fortable old friends who have failed to make the In- come Tax Club and to devote their attention ex- clusively to acquaintances in the set ahead. There is nothing more pathetic than the sight of a proud person laboriously enjoying the friendship of a circle of people who would say " Indeed" if his death were to be announced and who would in- quire his initials when sending flowers to the funeral. Pride keeps a vast number of Englishmen idle all of their lives and renders them slightly less use- ful than chinch bugs, because an Englishman who 81 PRIDE is suffering from pride in its last stages would rather die than to work himself. When we con- sider that this sort of pride enables a man to spend twenty years waiting impatiently for some mem- ber of the family to die and pass on the estate, and that this amateur undertaking and embalming profession is considered to be above that of supply- ing the prosperity of a nation, we feel justified in believing that pride is used in many cases as a sub- stitute for brains. Pride causes statesmen to take orders from bosses in order to hang onto the honors of office, and it makes families owe the butcher and baker with great skill and tenacity in order to support an automobile and honk down upon piking pedestrians who pay their bills. If it were possible to oper- ate for pride the world would be better and hap- pier but not half as entertaining to those on the sidelines. 82 "PULLS" THERE are some prizes in this country which are not gotten by "Push." These are obtained by * * Pulls. ' ' A "pull' 5 is a mysterious, natural force which takes the place of muscle, brains, industry or ability and produces equally satisfactory results to the possessor. It is the best utility player in the political game and bats over 300 in business, the drama and society. Having a "pull" means having a friend in power, who is willing to act as a steam windlass for you. When a man with a "pull" desires any- thing from an office to a divorce, he attaches him- self to the object and his powerful friend hooks on, and pulls until the prize is dislodged. A "pull" can haul a man over more talented candidates into a government position. It can secure him a city contract on the highest bid. It can get him out of the police station without a fine, after he has run his automobile through a flock of school chil- dren at full speed. It can get a ship canal in his district, although ships would have to come many miles on wheels to play in it; and it will get a beautiful lady a job as star in a theatrical com- 83 " PULLS" pany, before she has learned how to dodge the drop curtain. It is estimated that over one billion donkey power is being exerted in pulls in this country every day. But nowadays there is always some officious cuss who is sure to come around and cut the rope, just as the pull is being exerted. Re- formers are death on "pulls." Nothing delights a reformer so much as to bisect a pull, just at the critical point, and to watch the indignant woe of the fly-sized pullee who was just about to be hauled into an eagle-sized job. A "pull" is a wonderful thing, but there are some feats which it cannot perform. It cannot get a man on the world's series team. It cannot get poetry read after it is one hundred years old. It cannot cure dyspepsia, and it cannot induce an icy sidewalk to lie quiet and docile, while an im- portant personage is passing over it. A big "pull" will haul a man higher up than a little push, but the altitude isn't half so permanent, for the pullee never knows when the man at the other end of the rope is going to let go to spit on his hands. HOSPITALITY HOSPITALITY is the art of convincing a guest that he is conferring a great favor on you by giving you a chance to enter- tain him on his own terms. Some people are so expert in hospitality that their guests tremble as they leave to think of the desolation they will cause by going. Others are so awkward at the game that after they have en- tertained a guest half an hour, he will trip over a stool and break a leg if necessary in order to get away. There are many kinds of hospitality. Some people believe in stuffing it down the gullets of their guest until he bulges at the seams. Great cruelties are often performed in this manner by hearty eaters, who catch a thin and dyspeptic guest, make him eat fifteen selections with encores, and then assault him with pie at the end of the meal. Other hosts resort to entertainment to show their hospitality and talk to their guests faithfully and maddeningly. There is nothing that will make a guest yearn more soulfully for a spiked club than to be led into a library full of fascinating books and magazines, and talked to in relays for three hours by an entire family of hosts, 85 HOSPITALITY none of whom has enough interesting information to round out a complete sentence. Still other hosts rely entirely upon their native cities and tow their guests about them with great energy, showing them the union depot, the water tower, the courthouse, the nine-story office build- ing, the village millionaire and other inspiring sights. But hospitality doesn't consist of a good cook or a full flow of conversation, or a pair of agile and persevering feet. It varies, in fact, with every guest. First size up your guest and then pre- scribe for him. You can talk old times with one man and send him away glowing with affection. For the second guest you may have to depend on tender beefsteak, while if you will sit quietly and allow the third guest to do all the talking, he will wring your hand at leaving and tell you that for hospitality you have the F. F. V.'s looking like hotel clerks. It is not hard to size up a guest and decide what brand of hospitality to hand out to him. Forty or fifty years of practice will quite often make one fairly proficient in the art. Some hospitality is very fine like silk, but wears out in a few days. Other hospitality is almost perpetual. Young women are fragile things, but are equipped with hospitality of almost deadly durability, entertaining their school friends for months at a time with the utmost fortitude. 86 THE BANANA THE banana is a soft, delicious fruit about the size of a policeman's billy. It comes in bunches like trouble and has made it possible for the Italian race to prosper in America. Bananas can now be purchased in this country wherever the nickel can be found. But forty years ago, they were a great rarity and people gathered together around a banana for the privi- lege of peeling it and taking adventurous bites. It grows in the tropics and consists of a large plant with extensive leaves and a stalk in the middle which produces, when kindly treated, a bunch of bananas each year and sometimes throws in a tarantula or a small snake for good measure. The banana is picked when green, but when kept long enough becomes tender and melting. It is al- most as nutritious as beef, and in Africa has formed both dinner and dessert for millions of people ever since Africa was founded by Nature. In this country, the banana is still rated as a delicacy and is principally used by travelers to stave off starvation on way trains, and by small boys to combine pleasure and excitement. With five cents' worth of bananas a small boy can eat himself into a warped and distended state and can 87 THE BANANA also carpet a large section of sidewalk with the discarded skins. Stepping on a banana skin is one of the most disconcerting things that can happen in this country. Nothing can floor a man so quickly except possibly a letter which he once wrote to a trusted friend before he thought of run- ning for office. Americans now own millions of acres of banana plantations in Central America and large fleets of steamers are employed to bring the crop to this country. The banana can also be dried and ground into flour. Some day all the jungle be- tween Mexico City and the Isthmus of Panama will be transformed into banana plantations and the Italian peasant who now eats black bread for seventy years and then dies with a sigh of relief, will be able to enjoy bananas without emigrating to this country and selling them for a living. 88 MUD MUD is earth which has been put in soak by nature. Mud is the most valuable thing in the world. After earth has been mud for a while it produces crops, without which mankind would curl up and die like a baby sparrow on a hot doorstep. However, since man does not raise crops on the country roads he has no particular use for mud in that particular spot. All over the central part of this nation the coun- try roads are paved with mud. Mud makes the worst pavement in the world. A five-mile mud pavement in March is as effective as a two-inch oak jail door for keeping a farmer at home. There are hundreds of millions of bushels of grain on the farms of America in the early spring, but they do not have much effect upon the cost of living, be- cause they are separated from the market by sev- eral miles of roads which clasp the farm wagons to their bosom with a glad gurgle and refuse to re- lease them until three teams are hitched on. Wherever mud is used for making roads the farmer sells his grain when the roads are firmest instead of when the market is firmest. 89 MUD American mud is extremely useless on the coun- try roads. It is even more useless on the city streets. It is hard to work up a worry over the fact that the American business man does not wor- ship old masters and broken nosed statuary. But it is easy to become distressed over the aesthetic taste of a man who will wade down town ankle deep in last winter's mud all spring, without call- ing around at the city hall with a rope and plead- ing to be allowed to hang the administration. The efficiency of American city government can be measured in some ways by the amount of mud on the American city street. If the streets are profusely decorated with mud, some of it will al- most certainly get upon the reputations of the aldermen before very long. 90 CHAUTAUQUAS ACHAUTAUQUA is an institution of learning which uses everyday fresh air instead of college atmosphere. The first Chautauqua was founded by one of the first fresh air cranks. He believed that a series of lectures delivered in a comfortable camp would tone down the horrors of acquiring an education to such a de- gree that many middle aged people, who would be run over and seriously stepped on if they got on a college campus, would eagerly soak up learning if obtained at a popular price of admission. This proved to be the case and the original Chautauqua is still attended by many thousands who live happily by the lake side at Chautauqua, New York, during the summer, perfecting them- selves in art, literature, philosophy, stenography, crocheting, burnt-wooding, brass hammering, basket weaving and other branches of wisdom. The Chautauqua has become so popular that it now spreads all over the country like a light rash, beginning in June and continuing until the nights cool off. All that is needed to pull off a Chau- tauqua is a large tent, some pine seats and plenty of " talent." " Talent" is sold by the lecture bu- reaus and comes in $50, $100, $500 and $1,000 lots. 91 CHAUTAUQUAS A plain orator can be secured for $50 an orator with a press agent for $100. Ordinary con- gressmen bring $200 if lively, and governors and senators of the first grade get $500. The highest class of talent gets $1,000 a night and consists of great ministers, great curiosities and William J. Bryan. The Chautauqua has usurped the place of base- ball in our small towns and has become the pre- vailing summer amusement. Every year 25,000,- 000 American people coagulate under tents to listen to ministers, educators, humorists, jubilee singers, string bands, politicians, monologists, re- vivalists, impersonators, authors, explorers and brass bands and to absorb from them enough wis- dom to last through another long, hard winter. Chautauquas are very beneficial to the nation, but it has been recently noticed that the senator who has knocked down another senator can usually command a higher price in the Chautauqua circuit afterwards and that the explorer who has com- puted his diary with a false horizon made by the aid of a basin of water drawn from a Los Angeles faucet gets more money for telling what he doesn't know than a scientist who never got any free ad- vertising. These facts are dimming the glory of the Chau- tauqua to some extent. 92 AMERICAN INVENTIONS FLATS FLATS are an invention whereby people who live in crowded cities can be piled up in layers like pancakes. A flat consists of a collection of living rooms all on one floor. A flat building consists of from six to sixty sets of rooms all under one roof and under the overlordship of a janitor who lives in the base- ment and doses the furnace with coal on the homeopathic plan. A really expert janitor can run a twelve flat furnace all winter on a wagon load of coal and can so chill the tenants when they come down to complain, that their rooms will seem tropical when they return to them. Flats are built of brick, wood, stone, strawboard, felt and tissue paper, the latter being used princi- pally for partitions. An economically built flat building is usually provided with a light well which is entirely filled with conversation. By means of this well the occupant of the top flat can hear what the husband of the first floor says when the coffee doesn't suit him and when the woman in Number 2 tells her late returning spouse that he is a brute, the women in Numbers 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 quiver with simultaneous indignation. Flats have handsome hallways fitted with New 95 FLATS Jersey Turkish rugs, and back porches where one may have a garden consisting of a geranium. They are also provided with bathtubs and two kinds of water, cold and not so cold. In the cities, owing to the high price of ground, aldermen and building material, the rooms in a flat are some- times very small so small that when the daughter is playing the piano, the mother has to wash the dishes gently for fear of splashing on the music so small that the members of the family have to be measured for the bedrooms as they would for vests, and any one weighing over 180 pounds has to work himself into the bathroom by means of glove powder and a shoe horn. Some flats are very magnificent, however, and contain splendid marble lobbies, sun parlors, air filters, vacuum cleaners, automobile elevators, re- frigerated bedrooms and even places where chil- dren and dogs can be stored if they are kept per- fectly quiet. Such flats rent for from $5,000 to $50,000 a year which, however, does not include the privilege of gossiping with the family next door. By means of flats people can live with little exer- tion and great comfort, to say nothing of perfect seclusion. No one will bother them, and when they are at last lowered from the fourth floor to the hearse after a long and peaceful life, the neighbors of twenty years' standing will heave a sigh and say: "Hello, I wonder what poor devil is being planted to-day?" 96 MOVING PICTURES ONE day Edison caught sight of the camera which had hitherto had an easy time, but from that moment it was doomed. Edison harnessed it up with a set of gears and a revolving shutter, and set it to work photographing speed, history, romance, humor and travel. As soon as this was done moving pictures be- came enormously popular. The moving picture theater immediately leaped into being and began to compete with the street car and the cigar store for the nickels of the populace. In consequence, the limited supply of five cent pieces became so overworked that a nickel which doesn't register at three tills each day is loafing on its job. Moving pictures are making us acquainted with the world and familiar with the great men of all times. The scenery of Java, Sahara and Siberia are chestnuts to us, though we may never have traveled 100 miles on a railroad train. For five cents we can see King Solomon quarrel with fifty wives, in colors. We have seen so many battle- ships launched, kings crowned and buried, tigers shot, highwaymen treed, pugilists demolished and mountain peaks scaled, that most of us are ex- tremely blase, and the trees on the streets would 97 MOVING PICTURES have to walk off arm in arm to get more than a yawn out of us. This the trees will never actually do, but they are likely to do anything on a mov- ing picture film which is a great assistance to Na- ture, sometimes. In moving pictures we may also see ferocious Indians chasing the brave hero down a macadam road and barbecuing him against a trolley pole; likewise we may discover the temperamental cow- boys capturing a horse-stealing Mexican and lynching him in the wilderness around the corner from a hat factory in New Jersey. This teaches us not to believe all the moving pictures tell us. It is, in fact, one of the most accomplished of liars. It is possible in a moving picture factory to make a magnificent and awe-inspiring volcano out of a pile of sand, a roman candle and some soapsuds. More people are watching moving pictures to- day than are watching chorus girls, which is a sign that the world is getting better. The picture melo- drama is not a brain strengthener but it is an im- provement over the old "ten, twent', thirty' va- riety because the audience cannot hear the re- marks of the characters. Moving pictures have been taken of practically everything in the world including the pyramids and Washington's monu- ment, but no one has taken a moving picture of a baggageman accommodating a crowd of hurried passengers. A standing or even sitting picture can handle this subject perfectly. 98 THE TIN CAN THE tin can is a humble and homely thing, but as a friend of man, it beats the dog all hollow, and is a strong rival of the horse. When the tin can is filled with early June peas, or July corn, or Michigan peaches, or New Eng- land succotash, it mitigates the horror of winter to an enormous extent. The man who discovered how to can food has been one of the benefactors of his race. He has made it possible for the explorer, the prospector and the railroad surveyor to push on into track- less wastes, living on canned goods, and retracing their steps back to civilization by means of the empty cans. In all parts of the world the tin can is the sign of civilization. The sands of the Sahara may be trackless and unbroken, but if a pile of extinct and dejected tin cans is discovered, it is a sign that man has been there, and has passed on. Man has explored Australia and the Chinese des- erts with the help of tin cans. He has left empty bean cans in Madagascar, preserved pear cans in Thibet, and Chili con carne cans under the eaves of the North Pole. He has made life in Alaska en- THE TIN CAN durable with the aid of a can opener, while the un- tamed native of Africa eats American string beans and sweet potatoes, decorates his ankles with the empty cans, and plasters himself with the nine- colored labels. There was a time when it was profitable to raise only so much vegetables and fruit as could be at once interred in the human stomach. Nowadays, however, most of the crop is put in cans. Each year the ingenious canner discovers a method of canning something new. Everything that grows in America and almost everything that can be killed and boiled is now canned, but there is a vast field in other continents. There is no reason why canned haggis, whale steak and elephant's foot cannot be added to American bills of fare. We are keeping far-off people from starving with American prunes and pumpkins, and should be al- lowed to buy walrus flipper and polar bear steak at the grocery stores in return. 100 WASH DAY WASH day is another of the grand old American institutions which is being badly dented by the relentless hoof of progress and our changing civilization. It was once a solemn and alarming institution half way between a volcano and a famine. Clouds of steam rolled up from the basement into the stricken house. The rough grating sound of knuckles being worn off on the washboard and the low, strangling murmur of the mother, trying to reprove three children with her mouth full of clothes pins, brought sadness to father as he sat at the dinner table eating a cold potato of yesterday's publication, and sustaining life with the thought that to-morrow would be ironing day and that if he wanted any dinner he could fry himself an egg. Those were grand old times, but they are rapidly passing away. Wash day is now no more serious than an ordinary attack of measles in the family. Nowadays mother stuffs the washing machine full of dirty clothes on Monday morning, turns on the electric current, and telephones the power house to have the firemen keep up the current, as she wants to get through in time to go to the club in the after- noon. 101 WASH BAY Niagara Falls now washes most of the clothes in Buffalo, New York, and if it ever has a backache it doesn't mention the fact. It not only washes them, but it wrings them and irons them and if it tears any of them in the process it turns the sew- ing machine until mother sews them up. The number of laundresses who call for the clothes in an automobile is growing each month by leaps and bounds. The modern hired girl does not ask "How many in the family please?" She asks: "Have you a washing machine that will turn on with a switch?" And now-days the young man who pulls a diamond ring from his pocket and asks a young lady to trudge with him through life, is giving way to the future husband who pulls the ground plan of a downstairs laundry on his frail young sweetheart, and asks her if she thinks she loves him enough to hang out the clothes, if the local electric light trust or water company will do the rest. One reason why woman is demanding the vote with more and more fury is because she isn't so extinct on Tuesdays as she used to be when wash day was a gymnasium with turkish bath attach- ments. 102 BKASS BANDS A BRASS band is a large number of dis- turbances merged into one harmonious and jambangsome whole. Nothing illustrates more vividly the benefits of union. A trombone played alone on the streets would be a nuisance. A cornet is a crime against an entire neighborhood. No one would go four feet to hear a bass drum by itself unless there was a chance to kick it in. People go out of their way to throw bricks at a clarionet when it is in full cry alone. Yet when these instruments are all played together in a band with a drum major attachment business suspends, windows open to catch the di- vine melody and small boys follow the players from Main Street until past dinner time. The brass band is one of our most useful institu- tions. Without brass bands we could not have circuses, presidential inaugurations or large fu- nerals, and political campaigns would be sadly crippled. A street parade without a brass band would be as aimless and melancholy as a garter snake without a head. Ambition without brass bands would die, for what would be the use of glory if there were no brass band to welcome the suc- cessful candidate back to his native town? Brass bands are of six grades, good, bad, unen- 103 BRASS BANDS durable, horrible, atrocious and worse. There are only a few of the first grade, but almost every small town has a band of the sixth grade. It is composed of earnest young musicians who meet in a lodge hall every Saturday night and practice while the inhabitants stuff cracks in the doors and windows and put on tight shoes to divert their minds. Many a time Death has paused over a small town to take toll, but as he has listened to a fourteen fragment band rolling through " Poet and Peasant" in a heavy sea, the cornets four beats in the lead, with the clarionets and alto horns catching up fast, and the brass horn fast on a bar and send- ing up distress signals, he has shuddered and passed on. No one should object to band practice because there can be no good bands unless the closed season on bad bands is religiously observed. But the scale of prices for bands is not managed right. It is all right for a band to charge $50 per perform- ance after it has learned to play unanimously in one key. But before that time the citizens of the town in which it practices should be allowed to charge 25 cents per practice. This would stop the steady loss of population in the small towns and would stop the drift to the cities to a marked de- gree. 104 CLOSETS CLOSETS are small compartments built in houses for the purpose of concealing clothes, shoes, skeletons, naughty chil- dren and bad housekeeping. Closets are not important to men, because they are not allowed to use them. But they mean everything to women. A home may have a poor furnace, leaky roof and a rheumatic system of plumbing, but if it has two large closets in each room, a woman will rent it with a cry of joy, and will live happily in it until she can find some house which is nine blocks from the street car, but has one more closet and a window in it at that. Closets are very useful, because they keep rooms so clean and orderly, and closet doors are useful, because they can be shut and locked, thus keeping reckless husbands from wandering into the closets and getting lost. Husbands are the greatest drawbacks to closets anyway. A husband is for- ever trying to break into a beautiful, large closet and hang a pair of pants in it. Marriages would be happier if husbands were more considerate in this regard. Only the other day in Seattle, a man who had always been considered kind and noble, broke into a beautiful closet and misplaced eleven 105 CLOSETS skirts, nine waists, four hat boxes, 18 pairs of shoes, a seal skin coat, three muffs, a feather boa, and an opera cape while trying to find a vest ; and the vest wasn't there, either. His wife had given it to the Salvation Army long ago. A good many closets are supposed to contain skeletons, but this is a minor affliction beside a husband. A skeleton doesn't root around in a closet and turn it inside out trying to find its shoes. Closets have been getting larger during the past few years, mainly because of the great growth in the size of hats. A good many houses cannot be rented any more and are being torn down, because their closets will not fit the modern hat, even if it is wedged in sideways. As the closets have grown in size, the sleeping rooms have, of course, become smaller. A great many sleeping rooms are now being hung outside of the house altogether on the pretense that it is healthier to sleep outdoors. But the real reason is because it is so much nicer to use the sleeping room for a closet. 106 MATCHES A MATCH is a canned conflagration which is usually carried in some one else's vest pocket. It is practically the only thing which can be borrowed and never paid back with- out injuring the borrower's credit. A match is made by tipping a splinter of wood with a small sample of the future residence of a misspent life. It can be ignited by drawing it transversely across the rear outside of a pair of cheap trousers from northeast to southwest, or by scratching it on a lamp post, or a white enameled door frame, or a public building, or a red and gold wall paper at $1 a roll. Matches are a modern marvel. A hundred years ago there were no matches to speak of, and only a few men had time enough to acquire the cigar habit. Fifty years ago matches cost a quar- ter a box, and a box was made to last a year in a frugal family. Now matches cost a penny a box and are so cheap that many a man buys ten dol- lars ' worth each year. A match is a little thing merely a stick and a sputter but it is so important that many a man whose time is worth $10 a minute will stop work and hunt through eighteen pockets for one ; and if he cannot find a match, he will go to a friend, whose 107 MATCHES time is worth $5 a minute and stop his work while he borrows one. Men are divided into two classes those who can get along without matches and those who have never been able to give up the cigar habit. When a man learns to smoke, he becomes a slave to the match. He can get along without his wife for three months, while she seashores, but without a match he is lost and useless and dis- tressed. Originally, matches were tipped with sulphur and had to be scratched with great energy and per- sistence, after which it became necessary to go away until the head was consumed. But great im- provements have been made in matches in the last generation. We have now the edible match which can be eaten by babies with marked benefit; the safety match which cannot be lighted unless you can find the box it came in; the windy weather match which cannot be extinguished until it has burned out like Senator LaFollette ; and the noise- less and smell-less match which is a boon to the burglar profession and to husbands who come in late at night. Matches are a great boon to mankind but should not be treated carelessly. One of the easiest ways to get rid of a house, of which you have become wearied, is to leave a box of matches around where a baby or a mouse can get a little innocent amuse- ment out of it. 108 FIRELESS COOKERS THE fireless cooker is a restraining influ- ence on the gas meter which is now bring- ing hope into many a struggling family. It is a sort of a heat calaboose in which a high temperature can be imprisoned over night. It is a chest filled with non-conducting material, and when a pot of beans has been brought to a boil on the fire, it can be locked up in the chest and kept in a fervid and torrid condition, while the gas stove cools off and the meter folds its tired hands and rests. The fireless cooker keeps the heat in the beans instead of allowing it to roam around the kitchen, warming up the furniture and the back porch. A modern fireless cooker will not only cook beans, but it will boil potatoes, roast beefsteak and make ambrosia out of oatmeal. More than this, the fire- less cooker will take an ancient hen with wire wound legs and a gutta-percha breast and will re- duce her, in the course of twelve hours, to a tender and dainty morsel which can be dissected without the use of explosives. The fireless cooker is not only taking a swat at the dizzy price of living, but it is causing bridge whist to spread faster than the measles. With the 109 TIRELESS COOKERS aid of the fireless cooker the tired housewife can put her dinner into solitary confinement at 1 p. M., go off to the whist club and return at 6 o'clock to find it ready for the table. The cooker will also work Sunday mornings and is thus filling the churches once more with women who have spent their Sunday mornings for years watching the oven of the kitchen stove. The fireless cooker is merely a reversible refrig- erator. Between the two, heat and cold are kept where they belong. If a fireless cook, who will also stay where she belongs, can now be invented, housekeeping may yet become the great American pastime. 110 AMERICANS USEFUL AND OTHERWISE LAWYERS THIS essay is going to be a great rebuke to the lawyers, because it is going to tell all about them in 400 words ; whereas, a good lawyer cannot get through the preamble of an in- dictment for chicken stealing in less than 1,000 words, many of which are as long as a bull snake. A lawyer is a passenger to prosperity on the wheels of justice and he usually rides alone. He is the only man who can examine a law and tell what it means without making a chemical analysis. This is because all of our laws are made by law- yers. A lawyer gets $7,500 a year more or less, and mileage for making laws, and $50,000 a year for telling what he meant when he wrote them. And if he is a particularly fine lawyer he can after- wards earn $200,000 a year by demonstrating to the Supreme Court that they are no good anyway. It is a lawyer's business to protect mankind against villains, reformers, justice, injustice, and other lawyers. For this he receives a retaining fee which is a sort of financial tie rope to keep him from going over to the other side. After the case is over he receives another fee. This is not fixed by law, but is rarely more than the client should be able to pay in a lifetime if he practices economy and does not go to law again. 113 LAWYEKS Lawyers are very wise and use hundreds of heavy imported words which the ordinary man could not even lift. Law books are written in large percheron words which prevent common peo- ple from meddling with them and reading what doesn't concern them. The Bible was originally published in this manner but was translated later and this is what will happen to the law books some day. When this happens lawyers will no longer be able to stun a trembling client with a certiorari, mandamus, res adjudicata and other jagged verbal junk, and the Supreme Court will have time to go fishing twice a week. Some lawyers are very honest and will not lie except to a jury. Others are not so particular. It is easy to tell wiiether a lawyer is honest or not by the size of his fee. If he leaves the client any- thing after he has won a judgment from him, he is either honest or so careless that he is a reproach to his profession. 114 MILLIONAIRES A MILLIONAIRE is a man who has enough money to live 100 years on $10,- 000 a year. Very few millionaires do this, however. Some of them live TO years on $100,000 a year and some 50 years on $500 a year. Moreover, some millionaires work themselves to death in three years while trying to get enough money to live 1000 years at $100,000 a year. And yet we put men in insane asylums for such trifles as trying to chase pink mice on the ceiling. Millionaires have no distinguishing features and it is very difficult to detect them, especially dur- ing the open season for assessments. Some mil- lionaires are proud of their money and advertise it by touring cars, fancy wives and large, shapely residences with " Private. Keep out" on the front gate. Others are ashamed of their money and keep it locked tightly in a large steel safe so that it cannot get out and annoy the poor. Some millionaires can be detected by the faces they make when they have to smoke a cheap twen- ty-five cent cigar. On the other hand, some mil- lionaires can be detected by the roar which they put up when the newsboy on the corner tries to hold out a penny on them. 115 MILLIONAIRES Millionaires make themselves principally in two ways: by saving money and by making it impos- sible for any one else to save any. The latter is by far the more popular. By lunching on an apple, wearing the same suit of clothes twenty-five years, and borrowing his neighbor's lawnmower, a man may possibly become a millionaire in time to write a will disposing of it to the lawyers. On the other hand, if a man invents a little trust he may become a millionaire over night by putting up the price of ice owing to the scarcity of Christ- mas trees. New York City has some 10,000 millionaires and 1,000,000 other fellows who are trying to be. There may be other things the matter with New York but they are trifles compared with this. Millionaires, if caught young, can be trained to do a great deal of good, but the millionaire who tries to eat and drink up an income of $50,000 a year with only occasional help, not only acquires indigestion, but a tearless tomb. We should all strive to become millionaires, but not as earnestly as we should strive to keep our taxes paid and our elbows out of other people's ribs. 116 FARMERS FELLOW citizens, when we have unhooked ourselves from the street car strap to- night, and have seated ourselves comfort- ably in the library of our cozy flat, with one elbow in the bathroom and a foot sticking out into the parlor, let us devote a few moments to pity for the poor farmer existing far from city joys. The farmer tills the soil and raises crops and whiskers and future captains of industry. He is a hard-working man and has few joys. Very early in the morning he must get up to see that the hired men do not oversleep. He cannot sit down on a high stool and order coffee and dough- nuts with a careless air. He must wait until his wife has gotten up, and has lighted the gasolene stove, and has cooked bacon and ham and eggs and corn bread and hash and potatoes and gravy, and has warmed up some beans and chicken and roast beef, and stewed corn and has mixed up four gal- lons of cake batter. Many farmers almost starve to death waiting for breakfast. The farmer cannot sit down in a comfortable chair after breakfast, and talk to a pretty stenog- rapher all morning, either. He must harness his team and ride 111 times around a 160-acre field on a hard iron seat. The farmer has a whole barn 117 FAEMERS full of red, white, blue and green and yellow im- plements, all with iron seats, and his is indeed a hard life. Many a farmer has to half-sole his overalls with leather three times during the long summer. The farmer cannot go to a baseball game in the afternoon, either. As soon as he has finished di- gesting his dinner on the lounge, he must mend a leak in his acetylene lighting plant, and put a new pipe in the pianola and repair a tire on his touring car, so that he can drive into town and get pota- toes and ice-cream for supper. And after supper, he cannot spend a peaceful evening on the front porch watching the cars go by. He must drive his family into town to the church social, and he must get a bushel of graphophone records, and must hunt up the stock buyer and trade him a fat pig for a new sideboard, and a patent washing ma- chine. And likewise he will have to get out of his automobile and go home on the interurban, be- cause his daughter 's best young man is home from college and wants to come out and spend the eve- ning teaching her how to play billiards. If it were not for the farmer we would all starve. So let us drop a tear for him and pity him as he toils far out in the country, where the fire engines never pass by. 118 DOCTORS A DOCTOR is a high grade mechanic, who tinkers with the human mechanism and makes repairs and alterations at reason- able rates, depending on the individual. Doctors are so wise that they can tell what makes a man's great toe swell by looking at his grocery bill. A good doctor can take a drop of blood from a total stranger, and after looking at it through a microscope, will often be able to shake hands with at least a dozen varieties of microbes, which are old friends of his. Some doctors are wiser than that. They are so wise that they can tell whether a patient needs 35c worth of medicine or a $350 operation, without looking at him at all, provided they can find his rating in Bradstreet's. These doctors, like some wizards of finance, are considered too wise, however. Doctors are manufactured by medical colleges in such quantities that a new doctor has to wait two years for the sick list to catch up, and give him his share of work. Medical students are very wild, wearing beards on the slightest provocation and going around with their pockets full of pickled ears from the dissecting room. But after they have settled down to practice, they become grave and dignified. There is nothing more dignified 119 DOCTORS than a very young doctor who is trying to diagnose a case of chickenpox, freehand, without looking at the book, except perhaps an old doctor when he meets a young doctor, who has had the audacity to come into the old doctor's town, and breathe up some of his air. Doctors are very formal and are stuffed full of ethics. Doctors must not advertise or encourage the public in any way, except by wearing tall silk hats and joining fraternal orders. Many a man who has acquired a rare and expensive disease has died of it, because the only doctor in his part who knows anything about it, is sitting on the information as cautiously as a 19-year-old hen on a bushel of china eggs. When a doctor has established his business, he calls it his practice. This is a poor name and should be abolished by law. It isn't comforting to a man with liver complaint to be asked who is practicing on him. Doctors lead hard lives and only sleep now and then, owing to the great amount of sickness at night. They also have to trust in Providence for their pay. It is much easier to call a doctor thir- teen miles out into the country to subdue a mess of green corn that has insurged, than it is to drive in and pay him a year later. Doctors do more free work than any other class, except amateur orators, and we should not begrudge them a liberal fee when they sink a shaft into our interiors and re- arrange our works. 120 DIRECTORS A DIRECTOR is a man who goes to a meet- ing to direct the affairs of a stock com- pany during the year which has just closed. It is easy to be a director. All one has to do is to own a share of stock, accept a fee for at- tending each meeting and keep out of the way of the grand jury. Some directors are so foolish as to insist on med- dling with the affairs of the company. But this happens usually only in the crude West. If a director of a great New Jersey corporation com- posed of water and gall in equal parts were to ask the president what he intended to do with the com- pany he would be fired for impertinence. Directors of this sort are called dummy direc- tors. They are elected by double dummy stock- holders and their business is to mind it. Directors get from $10 to $20 per meeting, ac- cording to the enormity of the corporation. They also get a good dinner. After a directorate has been heartened up and made reckless by a dinner, interspersed with high-balls, it can approve in ten minutes transactions which will later take a gov- ernment receiver ten years to untangle. Some men belong to as many as forty direc- torates. After a financier has guessed wrong on 121 DIRECTORS the market a few times and has gone out of busi- ness with nothing but an ornamental bronze front left, he can pick up a good little income, to say nothing of the gout, by serving on the directorate of his friends* companies. The beauty of the director system, as used by our greatest captains of skindustry, is that it pro- vides a body of irresponsible men to assume the responsibility. After a great financier has played ping pong with a fine railroad system for a few years and has reduced it to a shattered or debili- tated wreck, it is a great comfort to refer all in- quiries to a board of directors, who don't know anything about the case and are perfectly ready to say so. Some of our most eminent business men have commented very severely upon the United States government, and have declared that if it were put in charge of a New York corporation the country could be run for half the present expense. It is affecting to hear a great man, who has just run through two or three railroads, declaring with tears in his eyes that the government ought to quit meddling with business and let business run the government. We would be perfectly willing to see the latter experiment tried if the law would only provide an open season on directors. 122 FINANCIERS A FINANCIER is a man who can make two dollars grow for himself where one grew for some one else before. The financier does not do this by earning the money. This would be too simple. Any one can earn money. He does it by ways which common people and governments are not supposed to be able to understand. If the financier had a dollar and needed two, he would not hide one dollar under a brick and earn another. He would use the dollar as first payment on a ten dollar bill and he would then bond the bill for a twenty dollar gold piece and would charge five dollars for doing this. Then he would sell an option on the twenty-dollar gold piece at seventeen dollars for one dollar to forty- five people and would then dispose of a half in- terest in the entire transaction for $150 ; $2 down and the rest payable in short term notes. This is the difference between a financier and the common mutt who would buy the business. It is thus readily apparent that a financier is a very great man and should be treated with respect. Financiers have done this world a great deal of good by coaxing money out of stockings and old stoves and setting it to work. So long as the rest of the world keeps on getting up early and labor- 123 FINANCIERS ing all day to produce crops and things, financiers are wonderfully prosperous and play pool for an automobile a point after their day's business is over. But if the rest of the world ever stopped working for a few years, the financier would starve to death unless some one led him out into a field and showed him how to pull carrots. This, however, does not prevent the financier from being wonderfully scornful of ordinary folks. Nothing makes one of these great men so mad as to be hauled up before a common old supreme court and asked impertinent questions about his busi- ness. When a financier gets hold of a railroad, he does wonderful things with it, buying other railroads right and left and increasing its capital stock and bonded indebtedness beyond all belief. When the railroad fails later on, the financier lays it to gov- ernment interference. It is too bad that the man who spends $11,000 a year on a $5,000 income and goes broke can't lay it to government interfer- ence and continue to be proud and haughty. 124 BOOKKEEPERS A BOOKKEEPER is a man who lives on figures. Take figures away from a book- keeper and he will die of starvation un- less he can get a government appointment. Even with the aid of figures it is hard enough for the bookkeeper to make ends meet. After the pale and nervous bookkeeper has finished erecting a pyramid of figures which show that his employer had made $7,000,000 during the last year, he goes out on the street and flips a coin to decide whether to ride home on the street car or to plunge wildly into extravagance and buy a nickel cigar. Bookkeepers not only live on figures but they train them to do many wonderful tricks. A skill- ful bookkeeper can sit down in the middle of a wilderness of wild and unreasonable figures and in six months he can have them showing dividends and surplus accounts where only ruin grew before. For this he sometimes gets as much as $100 a month. The cost of living has gone up industri- ously but the cost of bookkeepers has remained re- markably steady for many years. After the vet- eran bookkeeper has spent all day figuring out some new way for his employer to invest a surplus so that the public will not notice it and demand a cut in the price of gas, he has to go home and figure 125 BOOKKEEPERS all night in order to make $20 a week buy as much as it did before the butcher borrowed a step ladder and put up the price of meat. The bookkeeper is the compass of the employer. The employer does the business and produces the goods, but it takes the humble bookkeeper to show him at the end of the month where he is at. Be- fore bookkeepers were invented men kept their accounts by notched sticks, and when the son of a merchant borrowed his books for a fishing pole, business had to suspend. Many men become such skillful bookkeepers that in the course of a few years they have figured themselves into the proprietor's chair. But many others are strictly honest and die nobly, two dol- lars ahead of the constable. There is a growing suspicion that Ananias was really a bookkeeper who had just finished an an- nual report which had turned $76,000 worth of debts into assets and had manufactured a cash balance of $100,000 out of a few borrowed bonds and a couple of bad checks. However, this is not likely because of the sad fate of Ananias. If he had been that kind of a bookkeeper he would have become rich and respected and would have won great fame for his firm stand against unnecessary agitation against business. 126 DEMAGOGUES FTP"! HE word "demagogue" comes from the Greek words meaning "to lead the mob." M According to Professor Taft and other eminent authorities, "the mob" means the ordi- nary voter who tries to butt in and help govern the country. Thus the word "demagogue" is more or less of a complimentary term depending entirely on the direction in which the said dema- gogue is leading his mob. In early Grecian history the wealthy and refined families ran the government and enjoyed them- selves greatly, while the people often had to wait several days between meals. This led to discon- tent, and whenever a leader could not persuade the best families to elect him, he went out and harangued the rabble, which had a vote but not much of anything else. This proved very profit- able to many leaders and in time the laws of Athens were improved so much that the common citizen got a chance to do some of the grafting himself. Demagogues have been unpopular in certain quarters ever since. Nowadays there are two kinds of demagogues the men who harangue the ordinary voter and plead with him to vote in his own interests, and the men who try to get him to vote in the interest 127 DEMAGOGUES of their party. The demagogues who have stirred up the people have produced a great many reforms which have been very strongly criticised by those who have been reformed while the latter variety of demagogues have stirred up several thousand fierce party quarrels, which have been pulled off at great expense to the nation and have produced no dividends whatever. The demagogue, as we understand him nowa- days, is the man who has to prove that the party in power is bad, vicious, corrupt and totally mis- taken in order that his own party may get into power. This compels him to oppose a great many good measures and to defeat a great many good men. The demagogue believes that nothing can be wrong inside of his own party and that nothing can be right outside of it. Real demagogues, owing to the general growth of intelligence, are getting to be quite scarce, but, unfortunately, they are harder to exterminate than the buffalo and other specimens of early American fauna. A demagogue is incurable, but he can generally be quieted by giving him a nice appointive office. 128 EMIGRANTS WHEN the great trans-Atlantic liner sails from its European port for America, the Emigrant is among those present. He does not stand, however, on the upper deck alongside the band. He crowds to the rail down below where the cattle would be stored if it was that kind of a ship. Upstairs returning millionaires sit on $1,000 di- vans and gorge themselves at meal time with dishes whose names alone are worth a small for- tune. Eight decks below, the Emigrant sleeps in a cubby-hole ventilated with a hose and eats food which has been subjected to cruel and inhuman treatment by the cooks. The Emigrant leaves his own country because it has been too hard on him, and the Old World gets one final slap at him on shipboard. Emi- grants are able-bodied toilers and could whip the tourists above decks with one hand apiece. But the tourist comes happily home while many an emigrant goes over the rail feet first after a few brief words read by the first officer or some bor- rowed minister. It does seem as if the steamship companies could trade a palm garden or two for better ventilation and food below decks. However, if the Emigrant 129 EMIGRANTS were treated as a human being he would probably not be so glad to see America. When the Emigrant reaches New York he bursts out of his chrysalis like a butterfly and becomes an immigrant. He buys an American suit of clothes, gets an American job, wipes his feet on the law in the glorious New World way, and be- gins to call the cashier of some savings bank by his first name. A few years later he goes back to Europe, but he does not go in the steerage. He parades the first-class decks in gorgeous raiment and the poor immigrant looks up at him from be- low and says, "Doubtless this is a Prince.'* America has many faults, and the exquisitely polished European scion of nobility can spend hours in enumerating them without pausing for breath or anything but absinthe. But when we notice what Europe has done to the Emigrant in the past centuries and what America does for him in a few brief years, we should be reasonably con- tent. 130 PROMOTERS A PROMOTER is a man who can mix up a little hope, eloquence, and mathematics into a prospectus, capitalize the same for one million dollars, and sell the stock for real money and 40% commission. A promoter consists almost entirely of opti- mism. He can see a fortune in a shoe buckle, and 50% dividends in a balloon foundry. More than this, his enthusiasm is infectious. After he has leaned against a common citizen for a few hours, talking preferred and common, net and gross profits and stock dividends, the common citizen be- comes an optimist, too, and gets to seeing automo- biles and trips to Europe in place of his $1,000 bank balance. This is one reason why times are always so hard with men of much faith. A good promoter is a genius with figures. Fig- ures can't lie, but they don't have to when they are working with a promoter. He can take a car- pet tack factory 30 feet square and capable of mak- ing $50 a month, and if he can borrow scratch- paper enough, he can figure with that factory un- til he has stretched it into a 40-acre plant, which uses a tank car of ink a week to keep its books. When he has finished his figures, he capitalizes 131 PROMOTERS them at $1,000,000 preferred and $17,000,000 com- mon stock, and goes away a thousand miles, where he sells the stock at par. It is necessary to go some distance away, because the refraction of the air makes a concern of this kind look bigger when it is about five states away. A promoter must be able to see far into the fu- ture and to estimate the possibilities of this glori- ous country, which may be demanding billions of flexible rubber toothpicks in the next few years. He must have unlimited faith in commercial prog- ress, and the ability to write about patent washing machines and new monorail systems so eloquently that the man who reads will be convinced that he is depriving his children of carloads of kopecks by not selling his home and investing. Only the medium grade of writers become authors, and only the second rate conversationalists become pol- iticians. The greatest of these species become promoters. Some promoters get so convincing with their plans that they convince themselves. This is a very bad thing for them, but it has been a fine thing for the country. Most of our railroads have been built by promoters, who oiled and scraped and fought and built on faith and hope; after which the quiet capitalist skipped in at the sher- iff's sale and got the results. This country has been made by faith and promoters. But the men who had the faith seldom got the dividends. 132 COMMITTEES A COMMITTEE is a cold storage ware- house for business. There are over ninety million commit- tees in this country of one kind or another. They hold several meetings each per year. At these meetings enough talking is done to sweep the en- tire state of Texas with a devastating cyclone of carbon dioxide. Sometimes a committee will also do some work, but only when there is nothing more to talk about. Committees are a great convenience. It would be impossible to end any business meeting without appointing a committee for in this case the meet- ing would have to do the business itself. After a man has managed a few hundred public meetings, he can't get his furnace banked at night in his home without appointing himself a committee to attend to the matter and report at some future meeting. There are many kinds of committees, including executive committees, committees of the whole, committees of one, finance committees and stand- ing committees. There are also legislative and congressional committees. The business of these last two committees is to sit on new legislation 133 COMMITTEES with all the fervor and patience of a hen trying to hatch a granite doorknob. After a man has served on legislative committees for a few years he can't attend to his furnace at home at all. He refers it to a committee, kills the bill and his wife has to do it. Committees are composed of two parts the chairman, who does the work, and the members, who get their names in the newspapers. The com- mittee habit has the nation firmly in its grip, and the only way to avoid being appointed on a dozen a year is to attend all possible meetings and refuse in a loud, impressive tone of voice, on the plea of important business affairs. 134 IN SOCIETY DIAMONDS A DIAMOND is a chunk of highly com- pressed prosperity, and is used princi- pally to announce the same. Diamonds are composed of pure carbon. Next to being honest, a diamond is the hardest thing in the world. When it is found, it is rough and unattractive, and it takes months to grind it down into a graceful shape. When a diamond is cut and mounted, it sparkles like best seller con- versation. A large diamond, worn in the shirt front, is a beautiful ornament, and usually detracts a great deal of attention from the plain face above it. Diamonds are found in South Africa and South America. The soil of the United States is not im- pregnated with them, but if Broadway were to be swept with a drag net at night, and the results boiled down, it would yield upwards of a carload of fine stones. The diamond is used by young ladies as an ad- vertisement of their engagement, and nothing so solidifies the love of a girl for her hero as a nice carat stone in a ring. In some cases the more heroes she can have the better, and when she is finally married, she has a barrel of souvenir rings. 137 DIAMONDS Diamonds are often indulged to excess by the very rich. A few diamonds attached to a perfect lady are all right, but when she has to wear them in her teeth and on her ankles in order to make room, she is no better than a pawnbroker's show window. Diamonds are often used by men as an invest- ment. The price of diamonds is always going up, and the man who pays $350 for a diamond as big as a steamboat headlight, can often sell it for $450 in a few years, which is almost as good as putting the money out at interest. However, diamonds are more restless than 18-year-old daughters, and after a man has protected a diamond ring and stud from holdup men, burglars and hard times for a few years, he has to give up his business and take a long rest. Diamonds are also used to cut glass, as well as wide swaths. 138 HATS A HAT is a roof for a man. Nature thatched him when she made him but didn't give him any eaves. The hat pro- vides the proper eaves and drainage and keeps the rain from soaking down into the upper story and warping the mental furniture. Hats have existed for thousands of years, but more severely at some times than at others. There are now about 500 kinds of hats in the world. The Mexican wears a volcano-shaped hat about three feet high with a brim as big as a washbowl. When he takes it off at night he sleeps under it. The college freshman wears a green cap which merely covers his bump of audacity and can be worn in the vest pocket when not in use. In England society among men is divided into two grades. One grade wears the tall silk hat and the other the green golf cap. The derby hat is worn by many modest men. It is a black felt hat modeled after an ostrich egg and must be protected like an infant. Thousands of derby hats are sat upon each year with the most discouraging results. The straw hat is light, cool and also handsome for the first fifteen minutes after it is bought. After that it is rained on and 139 HATS looks like a work-basket in its dotage. The Pan- ama hat is composed of one-third straw and two- thirds bunk. It is woven under water in the thick of the moon and costs as much as the seller thinks the buyer can be worked for. When a man is seen wearing a vast Panama hat with its brim lan- guidly flapping in the breeze like the edge of a cir- cus tent, it is a sign that he can also be sold auto- mobiles, perfumery and hand made shoes. The world has various paroxysms over hats. A few years ago millions of pussy cat hats were sold and men who were getting bald themselves without concern watched these hats moult with rage and woe. Some other year no man is a true sport unless he wears a green felt hat with the brim hanging down like a cigarette from the lip of an unspanked son. Most men are slaves to hats and do not know how to go out of doors without them. Men have burned to death while frantically hunting for their hats. Hats are prominent both in religion and politics. Quakers wear their hats into church and court, while the Missouri and Texas statesman may have the eloquence of Demos- thenes, but unless he wears a broad-brimmed black felt hat, he might as well quit running in advance. 140 CANES THE cane is a necessity of old age and a lux- ury of youth. Old men and a great many young men find it impossible to walk with- out a cane. But not for the same reason. It is the duty of the cane to support an old man. But it is the duty of a stylish young man to sup- port a cane. If a feeble old man were to go forth without a cane, he would fall down and injure himself grievously. On the other hand, if a proper young man were to leave his home and abandon his cane, he would feel as guilty as if he had left a helpless child to its fate. Old men grasp the cane firmly by the handle and rest the other end upon the walk. But if a young man were to do this he would make himself the subject of a great deal of comment. Except when propping himself up while standing in conversa- tion, the young man does not abuse his cane by jamming it into the hard, concrete walk. He handles it tenderly and guards the ferrule from injury. Mud on the end of a young man's cane is as disgraceful as mud on his collar. 141 CANES The green and awkward young man is greatly afflicted by his cane. He sticks it into cracks in the walk, forgets it in public places and has to hold it between his legs when he puts on his gloves. It takes several years to learn to wear a youth's size cane correctly. And the worst of it is the fact that when a man really needs a cane he has to un- learn all that he has learned about it in his gay and carefree youth. The cane is very useful to the old man. But it also serves a purpose for the young man. While a young man is managing a cane, he has no chance to carry his hands in his pockets. If the cane could only be improved so that it would keep its wearer's hands out of other pockets, too, it would be made a compulsory decoration by a grateful nation. 142 COLLARS MUCH has been said on the subject of col- lars but not all of it can be repeated here with propriety. Collars were invented in the sixteenth century along with thumb-screws and other deadly imple- ments. At that time the collar consisted of a wide starched ruff, and after a man had worn these ruffs for a few years, he gladly committed treason and submitted to the ax with pleasure and relief. Decapitation was, in fact, a favorite method of removing the early Elizabethan collar, but how it was put on still remains a mystery. Scientists are inclined to believe, however, that the collar was slipped over the victim's head in infancy and that he was compelled to grow up inside of it. Later on the collar was modified in severity un- til now it is only a minor affliction like the tooth- ache. The modern collar is made of four-ply linen, reenforced with starch. This gives it stiffness enough to saw the epiglottis in two under favor- able conditions, but at the same time does not pre- vent it from being mangled rapidly and success- fully in a laundry. Thanks to the laundry the collar is short lived. This is its only virtue. Be- fore the wearer can learn to hate any one collar intensely, it has gone to the rag-bag. 143 COLLARS The collar comes in various shapes, including the white wings, the chin scratcher and the modi- fied cuff , and is attached to the muzzle of the shirt by two collar buttons. To install the collar, the patient inserts the buttons in the neck-band of the shirt with thumbs and forefingers. He then slips around behind himself and attaches the middle of the collar to the aft collar button with the aid of a jimmy and a button-hook. Then seizing one end of the collar he hauls it around to the forward col- lar button which he holds in place with his knees and buttons the end with both hands and a couple of finger nails. He then grasps the remaining end of the collar and stretches it until it reaches around to the forward button. Bracing the button against his Adam's apple, he rims out the button hole with his thumb-nail, presses it against the collar button with one foot and gradually works it home with both hands and his teeth. Much of the English language was invented during the stress of putting a fifteen collar on a fifteen and one-half neck-band. Collars are white and beautiful like sepulchers. They are useful because of the vast stretches of scrawny, angular, red and flabby necks which they hide from the public. If nature, however, had grown collars from the shoulder-blades as she has grown nails on fingers and toes, she would have made the civilized life much more worth living for men. 144 NECKTIES A NECKTIE is man's substitute for rib- bons, lace, frills, flounces, feathers, re- veres, berthas, jabots, dog collars and other ornaments, too numerous to mention. Very few men attempt to beautify themselves by hanging on decorations. Most men regard this task as hopeless and are content to let their tail- ors sculpture them into attractive shapes and de- signs. It is only in his necktie, as a rule, that man attempts to dazzle the world with color and design. Man's devotion to dress can usually be meas- ured by his neckties. If he buys $15 worth of suit and wears it until the health department objects, he usually has the clothier throw in a necktie which he wears until it comes apart. Many a man has come back home to Boggs' Corners or Crowfoot so changed in features that his old friends would not have recognized him except for his necktie. On the other hand, if a man has a suit for every day in the week and a dozen pairs of beautiful cream colored pants for summer wear, he usually picks out neckties as lovingly as a connoisseur picking out art, and many a man who picks out twenty candidates for office from among two hun- dred in ten seconds will spend an hour trying to 145 NECKTIES decide whether or not a lemon colored tie with gold and sapphire arabesques will bring out his ginger colored hair too prominently. A few men prefer landscape art to neckties and wear beards instead with great economy and suc- cess. And a few old fashioned men use a $100 diamond collar button as a substitute, saving much money in the long run, because a diamond never fades or parts in the back under a heavy strain. But the remainder of mankind spend a few minutes each morning running a necktie through a collar and hauling on the slack end of the knot like a sailor tugging at the mainsheet. There are few sadder features of modern slavery than the sight of a brave patriot trying to choke himself and to swear at the same time while con- forming to fashion's stern decree. To the student of character, the black string necktie denotes either piety or politics; the trig little bow, neatness and efficiency; the chromatic four-in-hand with calliope toots, recklessness at cards ; the two acre folding affair which hides the shirt, an economical disposition ; the flowing cata- ract of crepe de Chine, an artistic disposition far above the thought of work ; and the greasy tie with the front worn off back to the lining an aversion to bathtubs and other fussy ideas. 146 THE DOLLAR IT is impossible to speak of the kindly, hard- working dollar in anything but terms of affec- tion. Whatever may be our contempt for twenty-dollar bills and $1,000 bills we can only ad- mit that the plain and capable dollar is a friend of humanity and is full of good works. There are two kinds of dollars, hard and soft. The East prefers the soft dollar which can be folded up and placed in a pocket book in the hip pocket, from which it can easily be extracted by removing the glove and the overcoat and turning the contents of the pocketbook upside down into a hat. The hurried West prefers the hard dollar which is durable, convenient and cannot be mis- taken in the dark for a laundry bill and cast haughtily into the fire. However, hard and soft dollars are equally tal- ented in producing pleasant effects. The amount of -sunshine and joy and internal comfort which a dollar, even an old and dog-eared one can produce, is little short of marvelous. A dollar will set 'em up from ten to forty times to cigars. It will carry us fifty miles by railroad and will support a man for several days. A dollar will buy enough printed wisdom to last some men forty years or it will purchase three hundred laughs in the balcony 147 THE DOLLAB of any theater. A dollar will commit twenty acts of charity. With the 200th part of a dollar, a poor woman purchased a reputation for charity almost 2000 years ago which even now makes a Rockefeller look like a tight wad. With a dollar a man can buy a year's good government and with a dollar he can buy much trouble that he will still be dodg- ing ten years hence. Every one loves the dollar and is hospitable to it. We may be charming and lovable, ingenious and aesthetic, but unless we can induce a certain number of dollars per week to gather beneath our humble roof, we are going to make a failure out of life. No other visitor is as welcome as the dol- lar. The man who will grumble if he has to get out of his chair at 7 p. M. and welcome his mother- in-law, will slide down the banisters at 2 A.M. with a glad shriek and welcome a dollar with both hands. Some men, however, do not seem able to enter- tain the dollar when they have him. They will start the week with fifty of them, and those dollars will make the most ridiculous excuses to leave him and stay gone. Other men who have never enter- tained a human being in their lives are so fascinat- ing to dollars that the little creatures will not only make their permanent homes with them, but will go out and grab other dollars by the neck and haul them in for company. 148 MENUS A MENU is French for a pricelist of gas- tronomical adventures. All hotels and many banquets have menus. In the latter case they are of no interest to the diner, because he has to eat everything any- way, but the hotel menu is one of the most valuable text-books of modern life. Making menus has made many a hotel keeper rich, and failing to understand them has kept many a diner touching the cashier for an advance on next week's salary. The hotel man who understands menu-making can concoct a wonderful dish, label it "Petite pois dans 1'eau chaud au le matre d 'hotel" and sell it for 75 cents a knifeful to the diner who can't read French. But the man who has made a study of the menu with its mysterious and devious ways merely smiles at this wonderful bargain and goes down the street to the lightning lunch, where a waiter yells "side o' peas" and brings him five cents ' worth from the same cannery. Almost all menus are printed in French, but this is not affectation on part of the hotel proprietor. He doesn't care whether the world believes he un- derstands French or not. He merely hasn't the 149 MENUS nerve to put the necessary prices after the dishes in English. The French acts as a sort of anaes- thetic on the diner and deadens the pain of paying 55 cents a reel for string beans, 45 cents for a small hod full of mashed potatoes and $1.25 for a slice of roast beef medium. French is also very useful in menus because it enables the cook to tell the absolute truth while working off the leavings. If he has bought a very old hen which can only be dissected with a cold chisel he has merely to label it "Poulet de temps Napoleon" and sell it for double price to those who judge their food by the length of the label. When the country hotel keeper is stung with a crate of ancient eggs he has to take the loss, but the French chef can slap them on the menu as "Oefs de 1'annee passe" and get 75 cents a pair for last year's eggs. These things teach us, beloved reader, that knowledge is a grand thing and can be made to pay big dividends. Or else it can be used to pre- vent the other man from taking big dividends from you, which is just as important. 150 SOCIETY SOCIETY is a mysterious and delightful pastime, in which every one is interested and of which very few approve. It con- sists of clothes, manners and press notices in equal proportions. The mixing of these three with an unlimited amount of money, is supposed to pro- duce happiness in unalloyed chunks. As a matter of fact, it does not often do this. But it produces envy in the onlookers, which, as every one knows, is just as good as happiness. Society is a continual battle between those who are out and are trying to get in and those who are in and are trying to keep the rest of the world out. More money is spent in social battles than is spent in real war, and the effect on the men in both cases is equally distressing. Getting into society is a difficult and dangerous performance. Some people get in up to their necks and some entirely over their heads. Learn- ing to float on the social wave is one of the most difficult arts. The floater nearly always has to throw away his or her heart to lighten the cargo, and sometimes the stomach and brain go over- board, too. The object of society is to be merry and gay in 151 SOCIETY the society columns of the newspapers. Society is a cooperative affair in which every member is supposed to contribute to the amusement of the rest. Some contribute money and food, while oth- ers contribute good looks, and still others con- tribute ancestors. Fine new gowns and rare old ancestors are always at war in society, and at pres- ent the gowns seem to have the ancestors on the run, owing to the growing scarcity of the latter. Contrary to the general impression, brains can also be contributed to society with good results. Some people are so interesting that they can get into society without money or ancestors. But they usually prefer to go to Congress or build rail- roads. In England, social stations are fixed by law, but this is a free country and any one can get into soci- ety by paying the initiation fee and the hourly dues. One of the easiest ways to get into Amer- ican society is to arrive from the other side and make a noise like a duke. Some people profess great scorn and indigna- tion at society, while others pay no attention to it, but go right on raising children in the most shameless manner. This makes it easy for us to tell who want to get into society and who do not. 152 SAFETY VALVES FRESH AIR FRESH air is air which is not contaminated with carbon dioxide, sewer gas, cuss words, gossip or tobacco smoke. It con- sists of the highest quality of oxygen and nitrogen with a little ozone thrown in to give it tone and is the very finest article used for breathing purposes. Out in the mountains, far from the haunts of man, the air is fresher than country butter. After a man has breathed in a few million cubic feet of it he can eat an ox, hoofs and all, and thinks nothing of taking a small sized bear across his knees and spanking him severely. But the air in a large city is of a much inferior quality. It has been used so much and has been mixed with so many kinds of odors and gases and has had to min- gle with so many sex plays in the theaters and so much politics outside, that it is no better for breathing purposes than so much tar. After a baby has spent a few months in a one-room tene- ment breathing the air after six or eight older peo- ple have been using it and the sun has been frying it until it has addled like an egg, the said baby usually gives up in disgust and goes to a country where harp music is used in place of oxygen to sustain life. 155 FRESH AIR By long practice some people can inure them- selves to air which has not been changed (for weeks. However, the same people can usually find comfort in a shirt which hasn't been changed for a year. Both practices are uncleanly. Americans are very fond of fresh air and con- sume enormous quantities of it, not only at base- ball games and at the seashore, but on golf courses and sleeping porches. A sleeping porch is now used as a specific for a large number of diseases and if its popularity grows, the carpenters will soon be riding in automobiles and the doctors will be working for fifty cents an hour. Fresh air strengthens the lungs, purifies the blood, steadies the temper, untangles the nerves, and braces up the morals. The air in the home should be changed at least once an hour and the air in the theater should be changed immediately after each doubtful joke and suggestive song. If the audience could be changed, too, it would have a great influence in uplifting the stage. 156 GOLF BALLS A GOLF ball is a piece of currency which varies in value from 50 cents to 75 cents. It is legal tender on all golf courses. Golf balls are made of fine rubber by an exten- sive and complicated process, which causes them to cost more than watermelons or nail kegs. A golf ball is about iy 2 inches in diameter when it is bought, but after it has been driven into the long grass it shrinks to the size of a nickel's worth of radium and is extremely difficult to find. Golf balls are very elastic and when hit brutally with a long, large-headed club they sometimes fly almost 1,000 feet. In these days of persistent and almost paralytic peace, about the only danger the average business man faces is that of being shot with a golf ball. When such a ball is traveling at its best speed it is almost as dangerous as a charge from an old-fashioned blunderbuss. Millions of golf balls are made each year in this country, but the visible supply does not increase. In fact, there is no visible supply of golf balls. After a ball has gone into use it is invisible most of the time. In the art of crawling under a leaf or down a worm hole, no insect, however well 157 GOLF BALLS equipped with legs, can excel a golf ball. Each year carloads of bright, new white balls are manu- factured, and by winter each one of these balls has retired to some quiet spot on a golf course, where it will not be interfered with by man. Some day, thousands of years hence, archaeologists, dig- ging around the United States, will find vast de- posits of golf balls in various spots. These spots will represent the golf courses of to-day. The golf ball is an education in extravagance and also in the art of holding one's temper. If a man can drive two or three nice new golf balls into the mysterious unknown without getting mad and biting his club in two he is scandalously extrava- gant. And if he isn't extravagant he mislays his temper even more thoroughly than he has mislaid the balls. 158 CIGARETTES ACIGAKETTE is a small paper cylinder which is used by some people as a sub- stitute for tobacco and by others as a substitute for brains. The cigarette is poisonous in the extreme and a million of them will kill a strong man if he lives long enough to smoke them. It has as few friends in this country as the rattlesnake and is much more violently denounced. Very few boys have been bitten by rattlesnakes, but millions of boys have smoked cigarettes behind the barn just once and have been unable to walk with comfort for a week afterward. Cigarettes are very cheap and if a man will roll them himself he can smoke 100 at a cost of 5 cents for material and $20.00 in time. Spain has stood still for hundreds of years because its people have not learned how to work and roll cigarettes at the same time. Rolling cigarettes is a difficult art and many of our college students labor years to perfect it. When a college boy comes home able to roll a ciga- rette with one hand, you can see about all that he has picked up in college on the ends of his fingers. 159 CIGAKETTES When a young man smokes cigarettes to excess, he becomes so permeated with poison that microbes cannot live in him and he has to linger along for years with a kiln dried brain that rattles in his head like a dried pea in a wash-boiler. Cigarettes are used mostly by boys, loafers, col- lege students, artists and literary men. However, the loafer cannot become a literary man by smok- ing cigarettes. Literary men smoke cigarettes to show off the strength of their brains just as pugi- lists beat up street car conductors to exhibit their muscles. There is a belief that any young man who spends all his time smoking cigarettes will eventually be- come a fool. This is not true. The cigarettes in this case are a result, not a cause. Some women smoke cigarettes. They are of two kinds. When you see a woman smoking ciga- rettes you can be quite sure that either she is too good to associate with you, or you are too good to associate with her. 160 MOTOR BOATS A MOTOR boat is a small, frail vessel, af- flicted with a gasoline engine and an amateur mechanic. When the engine is in full cry and the mechanic is making threats, the boat sometimes develops a speed of 50 miles an hour in its efforts to get away from both of them. Motor boats are used by men fond of machin- ery, and keep them from taking more valuable things apart and repairing them. When a man has a motor boat and two bushels of tools he is perfectly happy and will not stay at home Sun- days and attempt to dissect the plumbing or re- pair the furnace or tune the piano or revive the door bell. A very small boat with an engine in it two sizes larger than an alarm clock will keep two strong men busy all summer, and will even prevent them from adding to the horrors of a presidential campaign by talking politics for mo- tor boats take precedence over politics or the cost of living when two boat owners are conversing. A motor boat is very simple, unlike an automo- bile, and can be started very readily by putting in a new spark plug, adjusting the vibrator, replac- ing the carburetor, repairing the feed pipe, tight- 161 MOTOR BOATS ening the propeller, renewing the batteries and straining the water out of the gasoline. When this is all done the boat will start immediately and proceed with the utmost cheerfulness to a point 11% miles from civilization, at which place it will go into a state of coma for the rest of the day. The man who tries to navigate any motor boat, no matter how expensive, without an auxiliary en- gine in the shape of a stout oar, is not wise. Some motor boats are very powerful and have engines of 400 mule power, not only in strength, but in noise and stubbornness. It takes as long to start these engines as it takes the United States Senate to get heated up over a bribery investiga- tion, but when they are once in action the boat pre- sents an inspiring sight as it leaps from wave to wave, throwing vast sheets of water on either side and sinking gloriously two miles from help. These boats are not comfortable, having only room for a mechanic and an accident policy, but they are the only craft made which are able to over- take a porpoise and butt him from the rear. Motor boating is a fascinating exercise, and when the engine can be persuaded to do its share of the work, is also a pleasant recreation. 182 FISHING FISHING is one of man's most fascinating methods of letting time go on as it darn pleases. A man who fishes is a man who has two hours or two weeks which he doesn't need. So he throws them in the river. The object in fishing is to catch something. This is not hard to do. The man who cannot catch malaria while fishing or thunder after returning home is no fisherman at all. However, the most satisfactory thing to catch while fishing is fish. This is because a fish is the most difficult thing to catch. Only a man with great patience can catch a fish. He must wait un- til the fish gets ready to be caught like a merchant who doesn't advertise. An impatient man would dam a river, pump out the water, and catch his fish by the tail. But this is not considered good ethics in fishing. Impatient men have no business fishing, but should stick to business. Some people regard fishing as an exercise. These people take $37 worth of implements and travel 400 miles north where they spend ten days wading streams and trying to drop an artificial fly 163 FISHING into the mouth of a trout at forty rods with a pat- ent rod. Others regard fishing as a rest. Men of this kind take a day off, hire a boat and sit in it all day long under the shade of a straw hat, soaking angle- worms in the river and soaking themselves in pre- servatives until the mosquitoes fly sideways as they leave them with a full cargo. Still others regard fishing as an excuse. It is useless to offer a fisherman of this sort a job be- cause he is already as busy as he wants to be. Fishing develops patience and encourages the fisher to think grand and solemn thoughts when the mosquitoes are not bothering him. However, it is not wise to fish much before the age of forty. Men who begin to fish early develop too much pa- tience. Some of them are still waiting, at eighty, for good luck to come along and haul them to pros- perity by one leg. Catching fish is largely a matter of luck. But telling about them is a matter of imagination. The best fisher can hardly make a living at it, but a man who is skillful at explaining why he didn't land a 7-foot muskallonge is laying the founda- tion of a successful career as a press agent. 164 VACATION VACATION is one of the few gambles that aren't prohibited by law. You put in all the money you have saved and draw a two weeks ' rest out of a grab bag. If you win you get a nice room next to the breeze on a shady farm with a milch cow. If you lose you get shivers at a northern beach, canned goods in a country board- ing house or a camping party in a wet spell. But whatever it is, it is your vacation. Vacation consists of 11 months of saving, two weeks of scramble, and two weeks of rest. Some people rest by chasing a deer through 100 miles of underbrush and some by climbing a mountain that- only has a hand-hold every 100 feet. Others rest by playing lawn tennis until they are parboiled to a deep red, and still others consider turning a heavy motor boat engine over by hand in a broiling sun to be a relaxation that will send them home feeling like new men. Some people are very hard on their bank ac- counts during vacation, and go to expensive sea- side resorts where the poor things get no rest at all. A man may return from one of these places looking the picture of health, but with a pocket 165 VACATION book which is so emaciated that a two-cent stamp would make a bulge in it. Some people are so rich that they can take a month's vacation and others are so rich that they rest 51 weeks in the year and spend the other week at home watching a hired man cut coupons. But two weeks' vacation is as much as the ordinary man can stand. Ministers usually get a month's vacation, but this is because their congregations need the rest. School teachers have three months' vacation without pay. When a laboring man gets this kind of a vacation he calls it a lock-out and wants to know what the government is going to do about it. People choose their vacations too carelessly and place too much faith in railroad folders and rumor. The best way to choose a place in which to gorge one 's self with rest is to pick it out the year before and encourage a friend to go to it. If he comes back still a friend you can risk it. Of course, some men suffer severely during their vacations and get even by recommending the place of torture to their friends, but fortunately these villains are very few. Vacations are valuable because they give a man a change. Government employes should always spend their vacations at hard labor. 166 PICNICS A PICNIC is a charity affair gotten up for the entertainment of certain varieties of bugs. It consists of a basket of dinner, a hammock, and a rain storm. The dinner is shared between the owner and seven kinds of ants. The hammock is shared by the owner and several mos- quitoes. The thunder storm is used as terminal facilities for the picnic and by the unwilling vic- tims of said picnic as an excuse to get home as soon as the last piece of pie has been consumed or has been scraped off of some small boy. A picnic is composed of people and lunch in equal parts. It is usually several days in incubat- ing and coming to a head. It takes three days to prepare the lunch for a picnic of the first grade, three hours to find a satisfactory spot on which to lay it out, and thirty minutes to make it look like the contents of a pie wagon that has been struck by an automobile. As in the bringing up of children, women do most of the work at a picnic. They pre- pare the lunch, pack the baskets and persuade the men to come. There is also one woman in each picnic who clears up the remains and washes the dishes. She is indispensable and the picnic can- not exist without her. Some towns have gone pic- 167 PICNICS nicless for years because their last willing picnic worker has retired. The men also work at picnics. They carry the lunch baskets and put up the hammocks in such a manner as to cause as much excitement as possible. The groans of the men who are performing these duties can usually be heard at a great distance. Picnics begin to appear sporadically in June and reach their greatest severity in August. When the epidemic is at its height a healthy person may have as many as six picnics a week and yet sur- vive them. A man who has been afflicted with pic- nics can be distinguished by the way one shoulder droops from carrying the ice cream freezer, and also by his habit of looking nervously about him before sitting down. No man who has ever heard the terrible words : ' * Henry, get right up off that cake," can help doing this ever after. Picnics are complicated by baseball, swimming, apple stealing, moonlight chaperones and children, of which the latter are by far the most serious. Four children are as much as an ordinary picnic can have without exploding before three o'clock. Since the automobile has come into general use, the picnic has been much less severe, because the victims are able to come out of it in about one quarter of the time formerly required. 168 FUN FUN is enjoyment with pepper and other spices in it. It is a sort of a class B pleasure. A man with a skyscraper brow can live happily all his life on such class A pleas- ures as literature, music and art. But the ordi- nary human has to have a little fun now and then or he will sour and become a social nuisance. There are several million varieties of fun and most of these are harder on the system than work. If men had to lie in icy swamps all day long shoot- ing ducks for $2 a day the industrial commission would look into their case. A man will spend two days and $200 trying to shin up a 15,000 foot mountain peak, hanging on by his ears and heels in the steep places because it is fun. But if the elevator breaks in his office building and he has to climb four stories he will sue the management. Fun is almost anything that you don't have to do. Baseball is the most fun in the world until a man gets so good that he can command a salary for playing it. Afterwards it is work and when it rains and he doesn't have to play, he weeps with joy. Driving an automobile is glorious fun and some men spend $5,000 a year for the privilege. Other 169 FUN men look pained and down-trodden when you neg- lect to give them 50 cents in addition to the legal fare for running a car four blocks on a nice spring day. Some men can get a great deal of fun out of a checker game and other men can enjoy themselves thoroughly while chasing the weight of a fizzed star through a three-pound book of logarithms. Other men cannot enjoy themselves except by watching two stout prize-fighters reducing each other's faces to Hamburg steaks. Some men get their fun by trying to drown themselves in the Niagara rapids in a motor boat, while a great many more spend happy years trying to drown themselves out of a bottle. Men's tastes in fun have determined the prog- ress of the world. War was once a leading amuse- ment and watching Christian martyrs fry at the stake was considered a noble pastime. "We are more particular now about our fun, but little un- derpaid chorus girls must still amuse us while they last, and when a fun maker turns a gasoline tank into a 60 horse power car and juggernauts through the city at a mile a minute, no one has the heart to lynch him because he is merely amusing himself. When we can get our fun out of turning rascals out of office, swatting the selfish, and inflicting awful surprises on the suffering in the shape of good fellowship, the driver of the millennium will wake from his long sleep and crank up his machine. 170 PROFANITY PROFANITY is Biblical language with a re- verse gear, and is used to back the owner out of the straight and narrow path. Profanity is convenient in many ways. In case of anger it is supposed to prevent the peeved per- son from blowing out through the seams. After a man has emitted about 10 cubic feet of high ten- sion profanity his pounded thumb feels better and he no longer desires to throw the hammer through a $10 window pane. Profanity is also used industrially by steamboat mates and automobile owners. It is next to im- possible to operate a steamboat without a full head of profanity. In the case of the automobile, pro- fanity does the machine no good, but enables the owner to endure the sport. Pilots of large-eared and patient mules use swear words as a sort of self-starter. A mule who will allow a fire to be built underneath him without taking any interest in it, will wake up and walk off all by himself after his owner has pelted him with a bushel of polygonal swear words. Profanity is also used by poor talkers to fill in blanks in their conversation when their brains are missing fire. By the aid of profanity, a man with 171 PROFANITY a one candle power brain can talk steadily for a long time, slipping in one cuss word to two ordi- nary words and thus making his supply last longer. Profanity is mostly descriptive and is very vivid. Some of it is such accurate description that after a man has finished using it, the air smells like an old-fashioned eight day match. Profanity is also very irritating to the hearer. After a man has listened to a few minutes of profanity pro- duced by another man, he often takes the producer by the neck and cleans off half a block of sidewalk with him. It takes a very intelligent man to start a quarrel without the aid of profanity, but with its help any one can cook up a fight in three minutes. Profanity is not refined, and is regarded with horror by the best people, except when it is heard on the stage. If the hired girl were to say "damn" in the average family, she would be fired forthwith, but this word is always greeted with great applause in a play, and is a great boon to the weary author, who would otherwise have to think up something original at that point. Profanity is not a hard art to acquire. It can be learned in the home with the aid of a telephone or a weak-chested furnace in a very few lessons. 172 MORE OR LESS BUNK PROMISES A PROMISE is something that is harder to keep than fresh milk in a thunderstorm. Promises do not spoil, like milk, how- ever. They break. A butterfly 's wing is a tough and durable affair beside a promise. A man who can break 100 glass balls in succession is proud of the record, but many a statesman has broken 11,- 000 promises the first week in office and without any effort either. Promises are legal tender for all kinds of favors and goods, but they are not guaranteed by the gov- ernment, and are very precarious security. Some men turn out an extraordinary high grade of promises which will be redeemed over the counter without question at any time. Other men issue promises faster than a wildcat investment com- pany can turn out bonds, and when the proud holder of one of these promises attempts to cash it he discovers that it is Confederate money. There are two kinds of business which are car- ried on almost entirely by promises love and poli- tics. When a man is in love he thanks kindly Providence for inventing the promise. It is noth- ing for a young man to give a young woman a beautiful home, a private yacht, a limousine, a va- 175 PROMISES cation in Europe, flowers every day until she dies of old age, and unlimited torrents of affection all in promises in a single evening. And it is noth- ing for the same young lady, two years after mar- riage, fo spend three hours trying to trade all of these promises for $1.25 in United States money, in order to buy a new hat and spend the balance on enervating luxuries. The candidate is even more talented on putting out vast issues of very attractive promises. Many a voter has gotten up early and has run all the way to the polls to help elect a noble character who has promised to enforce the laws, uplift the adminis- tration, reduce taxes, increase prosperity, double crop returns, protect the public health, increase the number of potatoes in a bushel, make the street car company call for its customers, and prolong the life of shoes. But later he finds that these promises cannot be fulfilled, owing to the over- worked necessities by satisfying Bill, Mike, Steve, Hank, Toni, and 876 other citizens, each of whom holds a promise good for one public job. People should be as careful in accepting prom- ises as they are in taking notes. They should step around to the nearest information bureau and look up the promissor's ability to pay. 176 LOVE THE poets have been trying to tell us what love is for 4,000 years, but they have made such a hash of it that even to-day thou- sands of people can't tell the difference between love and a business opportunity until after they are married. Love is a peculiarly squashy condition of the head produced by an appetite in the heart. It is a grand thing for the heart, enlarging it to many times its former capacity, but what it does to the mind is mournful to contemplate. Under the in- fluence of love, we see $9 a week clerks buying $5 bunches of violets, strong and fearless young ath- letes weeping great pearly tears, because the letter carrier didn't produce a pink note, and well edu- cated young women regarding Apollo, Shake- speare and Daniel Webster as mere trash, when compared with the magnificent young football players or necktie salesmen who call at their homes each evening. Love blinds the eyes, warps the judgment, spoils the taste, increases the capacity for happiness, takes the sting out of misfortune, softens the dis- position, makes hard work worth while and fills the land with happy and often crowded homes. 177 LOVE Love is an infernally, ridiculously and painfully magnificent thing. It is a 1,000,000 volt shock of personal magnetism against where there is no in- sulation. It preys upon the old and the young alike. It attacks the statuesque young society princess and reduces her from an iceberg to an armful of soft words in three weeks. It steals into the bony frame of the hardened old skinflint, who has just ejected nineteen starving families from his tenement houses, and transforms him into a slave of the barber, the manicure specialist and the florist in less time than it would take a thou- sand dollar bill to earn two bits in interest. Love can be cured, but it isn't worth while. It is too fascinating in its terrible progress. The best treatment is to allay it and mitigate it by means of marriage. There is as much love after marriage as before, but it leaves the brain where it has been messing things up and goes down into the heart where it belongs, Love has remodeled nations, revised history, overthrown kings and champions and has made literature worth reading. It is said that love makes the world go 'round, but it does more than that. It makes the world go 'round and 'round and 'round like another well known intoxicant. But it is a far more divine dizziness. 178 SUPERSTITION SUPERSTITION is the process of getting frightened at something which isn't. The world is not as scary now as it once was. A thousand years ago a dark day would scare the hardiest sinner into repentance, and the man who could obtain advance information regarding a comet or an eclipse could sway whole nations by cashing in on their fears. People have become much wiser of late and there are now only about 11,000 general superstitions extant. One of the most popular superstitions is Friday. Friday has a bad name with millions of people who decline to get married or begin journeys or launch ships or pay bills on Friday. Thirteen is also a terrible number to the super- stitious. Many a man has excused himself from a dinner party of thirteen on the plea of illness, be- cause he believed that if he stayed one of the party would surely die before the end of the year. This is a very valuable superstition because it leaves more to eat for the remaining twelve. It is also considered very dangerous in Africa, Tahiti, Madagascar and some parts of America, to walk under a ladder, to break a mirror, to raise an 179 SUPERSTITION umbrella in a house and to dream of a barking dog three times in succession. Many a man who will drive an automobile around a mile track all day at the rate of 60 miles an hour in great content, would shiver with dread if he saw a black cat on the track ahead whereas common sense would compel the cat to do all the shivering. A great many people still adhere to the supersti- tion that to revise the tariff downward produces bad crops. This belief is rapidly dying out how- ever. Superstitious people lead sad and anxious lives but are relieved by the knowledge that there is an antidote for every bad sign. For instance, if two firm friends, while walking, pass on either side of an obstruction, the words " bread and butter" pro- nounced with great reverence will prevent them from quarreling and beating each other up with clubs. Many people go through life depending happily upon the saving power of antidotes for bad omens. Those people whose memories are so bad that they can't remember either the omens or the antidotes are usually not superstitious. Non-superstitious people often point to the fact that America was discovered on Friday. How- ever, this was extremely unlucky for Mexico, the buffalo, and the Hessian troops in the Revolution. 180 ELOQUENCE ELOQUENCE is the art of arranging words to look like pictures. When a man is elo- quent, he is as dangerous as if he were armed with a large club. He captures states and cities by firing large reverberating words instead of cannon balls at them, and turns murderers and chicken thieves loose upon an unfortunate world by making strong men weep until the jury box has to be bailed out as he tells how badly the prisoner's family will feel if he isn't given another crack at society. An eloquent man can say * ' Good Morning " in a way that would sprout orange trees in Dakota and can cause an audience to rise to its feet and shout wildly by describing the principles of dry farming. All over the world men willingly endure the hor- rors of banquets in order to listen afterward to speakers who can say nothing in such a manner as to make it sound like a celestial choir swinging its feet on a double rainbow. After a man has been eloquent for a few years, he usually goes into politics and runs for office. Dense throngs turn out to hear him speak and as he describes the nobility of character which leads his party to ignore its own interests and produce 181 ELOQUENCE bumper crops when it is out of power, the welkin rings like a fire bell and his friends beg him to get off the legislative ticket and run for president. After the same man has served the people for a few years, he comes back for reelection and takes out a stock of words which sound like the battle cry of freedom with a smile of confidence. But at this point, he usually runs up against some- thing that is seventeen times more eloquent than he is. It is his record. His record doesn't get on a platform and wave its arms. It keeps quiet in fourteen languages, but oh, how eloquent it is ! A good many times a quiet little record only a few lines long will not only out-argue its owner, but will chase him out of town. In the old days when a convention would look up a record in the lumber room and do all the talking itself, said records didn't count so much. But nowadays, unless a statesman can get his record to talk on his side, he usually retires, owing to the pressure of private business, and becomes an em- bittered man. 182 LUCK LUCK is the power, much more mysterious than the attraction of gravitation, which gives you the good things you don't de- serve, and keeps you working for everything you get, when it deserts you and chums up with your hated rival. Luck is not controlled by a trust and cannot be bought in sealed paper packages. Men are born with luck, just as they are born with red hair and Jacksonian democracy though they can lose the luck, while the others are permanent. With luck a man can drop a diamond studded watch into the river and can stun a catfish with a clam full of pearls in its stomach. With luck a man can have $10 worth of chickens stolen and can trace the thief by means of a pocketbook full of $20 bills which the latter has dropped in the hen house. With luck a man can have his political career made instead of ruined by being elected Vice-President up to date this is luck's most wonderful achieve- ment. With luck, a man who can't earn $2 a day with his muscles, or twenty-five cents a day with his brain, can sit down before a little table with funny marks on it and can make $500 in a night by guess- ing where the little ball is going to land. Without 183 LUCK luck he can sit at the same table and leave his shoes and overcoat behind when he goes home. Luck has made as many millionaires as industry has though it doesn't get the credit. And it has made ten times as many paupers. Luck is a fine thing to have in prosperity when you don't need it. It will snuggle up to a rich man like a cat to a saucer of cream, but when a man has learned to think of luck as an old college chum and to depend on it to pull through a big business deal, it is gen- erally somewhere else admiring the scenery. The world is full of men who are trying to persuade luck to earn their living, and you can detect most of them by the way they fail to pay back what they borrow of you. Luck loves nothing better than to lead a good friend into a grandstand and pick out a pony for him which is going to win 20 to 1 in the next race. But when the same friend tries to lead luck into the same stand and pick out another which will win him enough to pay his room rent on Saturday, it couldn't balk harder if it were being abducted. Luck positively refuses to work by the day. Wall Street, the race track, and the little back rooms presided over by deft-fingered men with frantic vests are jammed with pale, sad people who are waiting for their old friend luck to keep its en- gagement with them and who can't imagine why it is late. But it always is. 184 HYPOCRISY ORIGINALLY hypocrisy was the science of preaching one thing loudly and doing another in an eminently stealthy man- ner. There were many hypocrites in the world 1900 years ago, and they were all flourishing until one day they got put together and described by a mysterious itinerant preacher with such consum- ing eloquence that they have been unpopular ever since. Hypocrisy in late years has been borrowed as a weapon by the opponents of reform and its defini- tion has been changed. Nowadays a hypocrite is a man who demands that something shall be changed for the better. It is very easy to prove that such a man is a hypocrite. If he demands that the rascals shall be thrown out he is a " holier than thou" sort of a chap. And yet it can be easily proven that three years ago he took a drink. This makes him a hypocrite and very naturally proves that people should have nothing to do with his reforms. The word " hypocrite'* is now the chief defense of the man who doesn't want moral conditions im- proved. He will admit that they could be im- proved and ought to be improved, but he insists 185 HYPOCKISY that the movement shall be led by a perfect man. If he isn't perfect he is a hypocrite for denouncing vice. Thus vice reigns supreme, slightly rumpled, but wholly vindicated, and the men who cry out against vice have the bony finger of public scorn bored through them for their shocking hypocrisy. According to the new dispensation, every man who tries to live correctly is a hypocrite because sometimes he fails. Virtue is hypocrisy because it isn't as good as it tries to be. The man who yells for the enforcement of the laws is a despicable creature because, most likely, he is breaking some laws himself. Therefore, we have only one virtue left vice. Vice is honest, frank and unashamed and should be honored for it. And the lawbreaker who calmly proclaims the fact and then buys the jury in a broad-minded and public manner, paying spot cash and not cheating anybody is our only true noble- man. Hypocrisy is the curse of the nation, and will be until we learn not to be afraid of it. 186 CABBAGES THE cabbage is a lonely and humble vege- table, which grows fluently and can be raised by a mere amateur without the use of agricultural reports or imported soil. It con- sists of a long, thick root, which is used as a lunch club by cut-worms and a head which varies in size from 5% to 8%. Contrary to conditions in other heads, the more swelled the cabbage head becomes and the softer it is in the middle, the more useful it is to the human race. Cabbages are raised by sowing a quantity of seed in a moist, warm place. When the infant cabbage has amassed a couple of leaves, it is taken out of the nursery and planted in the garden. One man can successfully bring up 100 cabbages in his spare moments. The plant grows slowly and when it reaches maturity, can be harvested by a quick jerk. It is then ready to be transformed into food. To prepare a cabbage for the table in the most successful manner, first lease a forty acre farm a little distance from town. Then set a cook stove in the middle of the field and turn the wind gently away from the town. Select a cabbage with good frontal development, and place it in a kettle of 187 CABBAGES water. Then light the fire and retire swiftly. At the end of two hours, eat a small piece of two- horse-power cheese, in order to neutralize the at- mosphere around the cook stove and remove the cabbage. Wring the smell out of it, season to taste and devour it. You will find it delicious. While being cooked, the cabbage defends itself much as does the celebrated Polish cat, but when it is finally overcome, it is sweet and toothsome. In the fall a fine dish can be made by chopping a hundred heads of cabbage into shoe-strings, and burying the whole in a barrel. During the winter, batches of this preparation can be fried from time to time in a skillet and the result is that sublime delicacy known as " sauerkraut. " It is not neces- sary to advertise to the neighborhood that you are going to have kraut for dinner. The cabbage head is a great lesson to man. It does not swear, nor boast, nor stuff itself full of unsavory facts. There has been some talk of sub- stituting cabbage heads in many department posi- tions in Washington, on the theory that they could do the work perfectly and could be eaten in their old age, instead of pensioned, but nothing has come of this as yet. Reforms move wondrous slowly in this country. 188 KINGS KINGS were invented shortly after the earth cooled off. From that time to this, most countries have had kings, but the 'disease is now steadily decreasing in severity, and is well under control. Originally, a king was a man who was so handy with a sword or a large stone club, that no one dreamed of disobeying him. The early kings were great fighters. A king usually led his army into battle and hewed a neat and workmanlike path through the opposition with his battle ax, until he met some other candidate with a better back hand stroke than his. Then he died and was buried with his hands folded piously, and his toes pointing Heavenward, while the man with the improved chop had a new sweat band put in the crown, and wore it until he got fat and neglected training, about which time he usually met some rising young axman and was filed away in a handsome sarcopha- gus for future generations to gaze at. There was really little difference between the early king busi- ness and the prize-fighting game, except that the former was more unhealthy. When a king succeeded in dying in bed with his boots off and his head on, he passed the crown on to his oldest son. This has always been one of the 189 KINGS weaknesses of the system, owing to the well-known inclinations of the sons of successful fathers to live on their dads and neglect their opportunities. Many a strong king, who had inspired upwards of 11,000 obituaries by his own unaided efforts, has passed on the job of slicing up the opposition to a pimply son, who was an expert dancer, but could not carve a beefsteak, let alone a foe. As the world grew more civilized, however, it amused itself with politics, instead of fighting. This is a very difficult game and of late kings have not been allowed to interfere in it very much. Nowadays a king is expected to wear plenty of uni- forms, to open new churches and colleges, to give free parades whenever possible, and to provide plenty of descendants, but he is not allowed to get gay with the statute books any more. In fact, he has been denatured and mitigated until he is now scarcely more exciting than a president's aide-de- camp. Kings are very expensive, but are usually quiet and well mannered, and old-fashioned countries, like England, Spain and Italy, enjoy them just as they do their cathedrals and art galleries. A king in a circus would draw well in this country, and as large numbers of kings are losing their positions each year, we may yet be able to stock the zoos of this country with well preserved specimens of these queer creatures. 190 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY RY Gr 1 W ALT DISNEY SW.