{8367}
Hopkins ran the city page nine days, and then he came into the city hall where I was trying a simple drunk and bade me adieu.
I just say this to show how difficult it is for a fine penman to get ahead as a journalist. Of course good, readable writers like Knox and John Hancock may become great, but they have to be men of sterling ability to start with.
I have some of the most bloodcurdling horrors preserved for the purpose of showing Hopkins' wonderful and vivid style. I will throw them in.
“A little son of our esteemed fellow townsman, J.H. Hayford, suffered greatly last evening with virulent colic, but this A.M., as we go to press, is sleeping easily.”
Think of shaking the social foundations of a mountain mining and stock town with such grim, nervous prostrators as that! The next day he startled Southern Wyoming and Northern Colorado and Utah with the maddening statement that “our genial friend, Leopold Gussenhoven's fine, yellow dog, Florence Nightingale, had been seriously threatened with insomnia.”
That was the style of mental calisthenics he gave us in a town where death by opium and ropium was liable to occur, and where five men with their Mexican spurs on climbed one telegraph pole in one night and sauntered into the remote indefinitely. Hopkins told me that he had tried to do what was right, but that he had not succeeded very well. He wrung my hand and said:
“I have tried hard to make theSentinelfill a long want felt, but I have not been fortunate. The foreman over there is a harsh man. He used to come in and intimate in a frowning and erect tone of voice, that if I did not produce that copy p.d.q., or some other abbreviation or other, that he would bust my crust, or words of like import.
“Now that's no way to talk to a man of a nervous temperament who is engaged in copying a list of hotel arrivals, and shading the capitals as I was. In the business college it was not that way. Everything was quiet, and there was nothing to jar a man like that.
“Of course I would like to stay on theSentineland draw the princely salary, but there are two hundred reasons why I cannot do it. So far as the physical effort is concerned, I could draw the salary with one hand tied behind me, but there is too much turmoil and mad haste in daily journalism to suit me, and another thing, the proprietor of theSentinelthis morning stole up behind me and struck me over the head with a wrought-iron side stick weighing ten pounds. If I had not concealed a coil spring in my plug hat, the blow would have been deleterious to me.
“Then he threw me out of the door against a total stranger, and flung pieces of coal at me and called me a copper-plate ass, and said that if I ever came into the office again he would assassinate me.
“That is the principal reason why I have severed my connection with theSentinel.”
As he said this, Mr. Hopkins took out a polka-dot handkerchief wiped away a pearly tear the size of a walnut, wrung my hand, also the polka-dot wipe, and stole out into the great, horrid hence.
The justice of the peace is sometimes a peculiarity, and if someone does not watch him he will exceed his jurisdiction. It took a constable, a sheriff, a prosecuting attorney and a club to convince a Wyoming justice of the peace that he had no right to send a man to the penitentiary for life. Another justice in Utah sentenced a criminal to be hung on the following Friday between twelve and one o'clock of said day, but he couldn't enforce the sentence. A Wisconsin justice of the peace granted a divorce and in two weeks married the couple over again—ten dollars for the divorce and two dollars for the relapse. Another Badger justice bound a young man over to appear and answer at the next term of the Circuit Court for the crime of chastity, and the evidence was entirely circumstantial, too.
Another one, when his first case came up, jerked a candle box around behind the dining-room table, put his hat on the back of his head, borrowed a chew of tobacco from the prisoner and said: “Now, boys, the court's open. The first feller that says a word unless I speak to him will get paralyzed. Now tell your story.” Then each witness and the defendant reeled off his yarn without being sworn. The justice fined the defendant ten dollars and made the complaining witness pay half the costs. The justice then took the fine and put it in his pocket, adjourned court, and in an hour was so full that it took six men to hold his house still long enough for him to get into the doors.
A North Park justice of the peace and under-sheriff formed a partnership years ago for the purpose of supplying people with justice at New York prices, and by doing a strictly cash business they dispensed with a good deal of justice, such as it was.
It was a misdemeanor to kill game and ship it out of the State, and as there was a good deal killed there, consisting of elk, antelope and black tail deer especially, and as it could not be hauled out of the Park at that season without going across the Wyoming line and back again into the State of Colorado, the under-sheriff would load himself down with warrants, signed in blank, and station himself on horseback at the foot of the pass to the North. He would then arrest everybody indiscriminately who had any fraction of a deer, antelope or elk on his wagon, try the case then and there, put on a fine of $25 to $75, which if paid never reached the treasury, and then he would wait for another victim. The average man would rather pay the fine than go back a hundred miles through the mountains to stand trial, so the under-sheriff and justice thrived for some time. But one day the under-sheriff served his patent automatic warrant on a young man who refused to come down. The officer then drew one of those large baritone instruments that generally has a coward at one end and a corpse at the other. He pointed this at the young man and assessed a fine of $50 and costs. Instead of paying this fine, the youth, who was quite nimble, but unarmed, knocked the bogus officer down with the butt end of his six-mule whip, took his self-cocking credentials away and lit out. In less than a week the justice and his copper were in the refrigerator.
I was once a justice of the peace, and a good many funny little incidents occurred while I held that office. I do not allude to my official life here in order to call attention to my glowing career, for thousands of others, no doubt, could have administered the affairs of the office as well as I did, but rather to speak of one incident which took place while I was a J.P.
One night after I had retired and gone to sleep a milkman, called Bill Dunning, rang the bell and got me out of bed. Then he told me that a man who owed him a milk bill of $35 was all loaded up and prepared to slip across the line overland into Colorado, there to grow up with the country and acquire other indebtedness, no doubt. Bill desired an attachment for the entire wagon-load of goods and said he had an officer at hand to serve the writ.
“But,” said I, as I wrapped a “welcome” husk door mat around my glorious proportions, “how do you know while we converse together he is not winging his way down the valley of the Paudre?”
“Never mind that, jedge,” says William. “You just fix the dockyments and I'll tend to the defendant.”
In an hour Bill returned with $35 in cash for himself and the entire costs of the court, and as we settled up and fixed the docket I asked Bill Dunning how he detained the defendant while we made out the affidavit bond and writ of attachment.
“You reckollect, jedge,” says William, “that the waggin wheel is held onto the exle with a big nut. No waggin kin go any length of time without that there nut onto the exle. Well, when I diskivered that what's-his-name was packed up and the waggin loaded, I took the liberty to borrow one o' them there nuts fur a kind of momento, as it were, and I kept that in my pocket till we served the writ and he paid my bill and came to his milk, if you'll allow me that expression, and then I says to him, 'Pardner,' says I, you are going far, far away where I may never see you again. Take this here nut,' says I, 'and put it onto the exle of the oft hind wheel of your waggin, and whenever you look at it hereafter, think of poor old Bill Dunning, the milkman.'”
I presume that I shall not be accused of sacrilege in referring to the Chinese god as an inferior piece of art. Viewed simply from an artistic and economical standpoint, it seems to me that the Chinaman should have less pride in his bow-legged and inefficient god than in any other national institution.
I do not wish to be understood as interfering with any man's religious views; but when polygamy is made a divine decree, or a basswood deity is whittled out and painted red, to look up to and to worship, I cannot treat that so-called religious belief with courtesy and reverence. I am quite liberal in all religious matters. People have noticed that and remarked it, but the Oriental god of commerce seems to me to be greatly over-rated. He seems to lack that genuine decision of character which should be a feature of an over-ruling power.
I ask the phrenologist to come with me and examine the head of the alleged Josh, and to state whether or not he believes that the properly balanced head of a successful god should not have a more protuberant knob of spirituality, and a less pronounced alimentiveness. Should the bump of combativeness hang out over the ear, while time, tune and calculation are noticeably reticent? I certainly wot not.
Again, how can the physiognomy of the Celestial Josh be consistent with a moral and temperate god? The low brow would not indicate a pronounced omniscience, and the Jumbo ears and the copious neck would not impress me with the idea of purity and spirituality.
It is, no doubt, wrong to attack sacred matters for the purpose of gaining notoriety; but I believe I am right, when I assert that the Chinese god must go. We should not be Puritanical, but we might safely draw the line at the bow-legged and sedentary goddess of leprosy.
If Confucius bowed the suppliant knee to that goggle-eyed jim-jam Josh, I am grieved to know it. If such was the case, the friends of Confucius should keep the matter from me. I cannot believe that the great philosopher wallowed in the dust at the feet of such a polka-dot carricature of a gorilla's horrid dream.
I bought a Chinese god once, for four bits. He was not successful in the profession which he aimed to follow. Whatever he may have been in China, he was not a very successful god in the English language. I put him upon the mantel, and the clock stopped, the servant girl sent in her resignation, and a large dog jumped through the parlor-window. All this happened within two hours from the time I erected the lop-eared, knocked-kneed and club-footed Oolong in my household.
{Illustration: THE DOG EXITS.}
{0373}
Perhaps this may have been largely due to my ignorance of his habits. Possibly if I had been more familiar with his eccentricities, it would have been all right; but as it was, there was no book of instructions given with him, and I couldn't seem to make him work.
During the week following, the prospect shaft of the New Jerusalem mine struck a subterranean gulf-stream and water-logged the stock, a tall yellow dog, under the weight of a great woe, picked out my cistern to suicide in, and I skated down the cellar-stairs on my shoulder-blades and the phrenological location known as Love of Home, in such a terrible manner as to jar the foundations of the earth, and kick a large hole out of the bosom of the night.
I then met with a change of heart, and overthrew the warty heathen god, and knocked him galley west. My hens at once began to watch the produce market, and, noticing the high price of eggs, commenced to orate with great zeal instead of standing around with their hands in their pockets. I saw the new moon over my right shoulder, and all nature seemed gay once more.
The above are a few of my reasons for believing that the Chinese god is either greatly over-estimated, or else shippers and producers are flooding the market with fraudulent gods.
I have an uncle who is a physician, and a very busy one at that. He is a very active man, and allows himself very little relaxation indeed. How many times he has said to me, “Well, I can't stand here and fool away my time with you. I've got a typhoid fever patient down in the lower end of town who will get well if I don't get over there this forenoon.”
He never allows himself any relaxation to speak of, except to demonstrate the truth of spiritualism. He does love to monkey with the supernatural, and he delights in getting hold of some skeptical friend and convincing him of the presence of spirits beyond a doubt. I've known him to ignore two cases of croup and one case of twins to attend a seance and help convince a doubting Thomas on the spirit question.
I believe that he and I, together with a little time in which to prepare, could convince the most skeptical. He says that with a friend to assist him, who isen rapport, and who has a little practice, he can reach the stoniest heart. He is a very susceptible medium indeed, and created a great furore in his own town. He said it was a great comfort to him to converse with his former patients, and he felt kind of attached to them, so that he hated to be separated from them, even in death.
Spiritualism had quite a run in his neighborhood at one time, as I have said. Even his own family yielded to the convincing proof and the astounding phenomena. If his wife hadn't found some of his spiritual tracks down cellar, she would have remained firm, no doubt, but the doctor forgot and left his step-ladder down there, and that showed where the hole in the floor opened into his mysterious cabinet.
He said if he had been a little more careful, no doubt he could have convinced anybody of the presence of spirits or anything else. He said he didn't intend to give up as long as there was anything left in the cellar.
He had such unwavering confidence in the phenomena that all he asked of anybody was faith and a buckskin string about two feet long.
He and his brother, a reformed member of Congress, read the inmost thoughts of a skeptical friend all one evening by the aid of supernatural powers and a tin tube. The reformed member of Congress acted as medium, and the doctor, who was unfortunately and ostensibly called away into the country early in the evening, remained at the window outside, where he could read the queries written by the victim on a slip of paper. Then he would run around the house and murmur the same through a tin tube at another window by the medium's ear.
It was astounding. The skeptical man would write some deep question on a slip of paper, and after the medium had felt of his brow, and groaned a few hollow groans, and rolled his eyes up, he would answer it without having been within twenty feet of the question or the questioner. The victim said he would never doubt again.
What a comfort it was to know that immortality was an established fact. If he could have heard a man talking in a low tone of voice through an old tin dipper handle, at the south window on the ground floor, and occasionally swearing at a mosquito on the back of his neck, he would have hesitated.
An old-timer over there said that Woodworth would be a mighty good physician if he would let spiritualism alone. He claimed that no man could be a great physician and surgeon and still be a fanatic on spiritualism.
I have always taken a great interest in war incidents, and more so, perhaps, because I wasn't old enough to put down the rebellion myself. I have been very eager to get hold of and hoard up in my memory all its gallant deeds of both sides, and to know the history of those who figured prominently in that great conflict has been one of my ambitions.
I have also watched with interest the steady advancement of Phil Sheridan, the black-eyed warrior with the florid face and the Winchester record. I have also taken some pains to investigate the later history of the old Winchester war horse.
“Old Rienzi died in our stable a few years after the war,” said a Chicago livery man to me, a short time ago. “General Sheridan left him with us and instructed us to take good care of him, which we did, but he got old at last, and his teeth failed upon him, and that busted his digestion, and he kind of died of old age, I reckon.”
“How did General Sheridan take it?”
“Oh, well, Phil Sheridan is no school girl. He didn't turn away when old Rienzi died and weep the manger full of scalding regret. If you know Sheridan, you know that he don't rip the blue dome of heaven wide open with unavailing wails. He just told us to take care of its remains, patted the old cuss on the head a little and walked off. Phil Sheridan don't go around weeping softly into a pink bordered wipe when a horse dies. He likes a good horse, but Rienzi was no Jay-Eye-See for swiftness, and he wasn't the purtiest horse you ever see, by no means.”
“Did you read lately how General Sheridan don't ride on horseback since his old war horse died, and seems to have lost all interest in horses?”
“No, I never did. He no doubt would rather ride in a cable car or a carriage than to jar himself up on a horse. That's all likely enough, but, as I say, he's a matter of fact little fighter from Fighttown. He never stopped to snoot and paw up the ground and sob himself into bronchitis over old Rienzi. He went right on about his business, and, like old King What's-His-name he hollered for another hoss, and the War Department never slipped a cog.”
Later on I read that the old war horse was called Winchester and that he was still alive in a blue grass pasture in Kentucky. The report said that old Winchester wasn't very coltish, and that he was evidently failing. I gathered the idea that he was wearing store teeth, and that his memory was a little deficient, but that he might live yet for years. After that I met a New York livery stable prince, at whose palace General Sheridan's well-known Winchester war horse died of botts in '71. He told me all about it and how General Sheridan came on from Chicago at the time, and held the horse's head in his lap while the fleet limbs that flew from Winchester down and saved the day, stiffened in the great, mysterious repose of death. He said Sheridan wept like a child, and as he told the touching tale to me I wept also. I say I wept. I wept about a quart, I would say. He said also that the horse's name wasn't Winchester nor Rienzi; it was Jim.
I was sorry to know it. Jim is no name for a war horse who won a victory and a marble bust and a poem. You can't respect a horse much if his name was Jim.
After that I found out that General Sheridan's celebrated Winchester horse was raised in Kentucky, also in Pennsylvania and Michigan; that he went out as a volunteer private; that he was in the regular service prior to the war, and that he was drafted, and that he died on the field of battle, in a sorrel pasture, in '73, in great pain on Governor's Island; that he was buried with Masonic honors by the Good Templars and the Grand Army of the Republic; that he was resurrected by a medical college and dissected; that he was cremated in New Orleans and taxidermed for the Military Museum at New York. Every little while I run up against a new fact relative to this noted beast. He has died in nine different States, and been buried in thirteen different styles, while his soul goes marching on. Evidently we live in an age of information. You can get more information nowadays, such as it is, than you know what to do with.
To my friends, regardless of party.—Many friends having solicited me to apply for a foreign mission under the present administration, I have finally consented to do so, and last week filed my application for such missions as might still remain vacant.
To insure my appointment, much will remain for you to do. I now call upon my friends to aid me by their united effort. I especially solicit the aid of my friends who have repeatedly heretofore promised it to me while drunk.
{Illustration: PLENTY OF CORRESPONDENCE.}
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You will see at a glance that I can only make the application. You must support it by your petitions and letters. It would be of little use for one man to write five thousand letters to the president, but if five thousand people each write him a letter in which casual reference is made to my social worth and 7-1/3 octave brain, it will make him pay attention.
My idea would be for each of my friends to set aside one day in each week to write to the president, opening it in a chatty way by asking him if he does not think we are having rather a backward spring, and what he is doing for his cut worms now, and how his folks are, etc., etc. Then gradually lead up to the statement that you think I would be an ornament to the administration if I should go abroad and linger on a foreign strand at $2,000 per linger and stationery.
This will keep the president properly stirred up, and cause him to earn his salary. The effect will be to secure the appointment at last, as you will see if you persevere.
I need not add that I will do what is right by my friends upon receiving my commission.
Do not neglect this suggestion because it comes to you in the form of a circular, but remember it and act upon it. Remember that, although the president is stubborn as Sam Hill, he will at last yield to fatigue, and when tired nature can hold out no longer, the last letter will drop from his nerveless hand and he will surrender.
{Illustration: NURSING THE FIERY STEED.}
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Some of you will urge that I have been an offensive partisan, but when you come to think it over I have not been so all-fired partisan. There have been days and days when it did not show itself very much. However, that is not the point. I want your hearty indorsement and I want it to be entirely voluntary, and if you do not give it, and give it freely and voluntarily, you hadn't better ask me for any more favors.
All the newspapers most heartily indorse me. TheRocky Mountain Whoopvery truthfully says:
“Mr. Nye called at our office yesterday and subscribed for our paper. We are proud to add him to our list of paid-up subscribers, and should he renew his subscription next year, paying in advance, we will cheerfully refer to it among other startling news.”
I have a scrap-book full of such indorsements as this, and now, if my friends will peel their coats and write as they should, I can make this administration open its eyes.
Several papers in Iowa have alluded to my being in town, and referred to the fact that I had paid my bills while there. But press indorsements alone are not sufficient. What is needed is the written testimony of friends and neighbors. No matter how poor or humble or worthless you may be, write to Mr. Cleveland and tell him how much confidence you have in me, and if you can call to mind any little acts of kindness, or any times when I have got up in the night to give you a dollar, or nurse a colicky horse for you, throw that in. Throw it in anyhow. It will do no harm, and may do much good.
I can solemnly promise all my friends that if they will secure my appointment to a foreign country for four years, I will not return during that time. What more can I offer? I will stay longer if I am reappointed. I would do anything for my friends.
Do not throw this circular carelessly aside. Read it carefully over and act upon it. Some of you are poor spellers, and will try to get out of it in that way. Others are in the penitentiary and cannot spare the time. But to one and all I say, write, and write regularly, to the president. Do not wait for a reply from him, because he is pretty busy now; but he will be tickled to death to hear from you, and anything you say about me will give him great pleasure.
N.B.—Please be careful not to inclose this circular in your letter to the president.
No doubt the photograph habit, when once formed, is one of the most baneful, and productive of the most intense suffering in after years, of any with which we are familiar. Some times it seems to me that my whole life has been one long, abject apology for photographs that I have shed abroad throughout a distracted country.
Man passes through seven distinct stages of being photographed, each one exceeding all previous efforts in that line.
First he is photographed as a prattling, bald-headed baby, absolutely destitute of eyes, but making up for this deficiency by a wealth of mouth that would make a negro minstrel olive green with envy. We often wonder what has given the average photographer that wild, hunted look about the eyes and that joyless sag about the knees. The chemicals and the indoor life alone have not done all this. It is the great nerve tension and mental strain used in trying to photograph a squirming and dark red child with white eyes, in such a manner as to please its parents.
An old-fashioned dollar store album with cerebro-spinal meningitis, and filled with pictures of half-suffocated children in heavily-starched white dresses, is the first thing we seek on entering a home, and the last thing from which we reluctantly part.
The second stage on the downward road is the photograph of the boy with fresh-cropped hair, and in which the stiff and protuberant thumb takes a leading part.
Then follows the portrait of the lad, with strongly marked freckles and a look of hopeless melancholy. With the aid of a detective agency, I have succeeded in running down and destroying several of these pictures which were attributed to me.
Next comes the young man, 21 years of age, with his front hair plastered smoothly down over his tender, throbbing dome of thought. He does not care so much about the expression on the mobile features, so long as his left hand, with the new ring on it, shows distinctly, and the string of jingling, jangling charms on his watch chain, including the cute little basket cut out of a peach stone, stand out well in the foreground. If the young man would stop to think for a moment that some day he may become eminent and ashamed of himself, he would hesitate about doing this.
Soon after, he has a tintype taken in which a young lady sits in the alleged grass, while he stands behind her with his hand lightly touching her shoulder as though he might be feeling of the thrilling circumference of a buzz saw. He carries this picture in his pocket for months, and looks at it whenever he may be unobserved.
Then, all at once, he discovers that the young lady's hair is not done up that way any more, and that her hat doesn't seem to fit her. He then, in a fickle moment, has another tintype made, in which another young woman, with a more recent hat and later coiffure, is discovered holding his hat in her lap.
This thing continues, till one day he comes into the studio with his wife, and tries to see how many children can be photographed on one negative by holding one on each knee and using the older ones as a back-ground.
The last stage in his eventful career, the old gentleman allows himself to be photographed, because he is afraid he may not live through another long, hard winter, and the boys would like a picture of him while he is able to climb the dark, narrow stairs which lead to the artist's room.
Sadly the thought comes back to you in after years, when his grave is green in the quiet valley, and the worn and weary hands that have toiled for you are forever at rest, how patiently he submitted while his daughter pinned the clean, stiff, agonizing white collar about his neck, and brushed the velvet collar of his best coat; how he toiled up the long, dark, lonesome stairs, not with the egotism of a half century ago, but with the light of anticipated rest at last in his eyes—obediently, as he would have gone to the dingy law office to have his will drawn—and meekly left the outlines of his kind old face for those he loved and for whom he had so long labored.
It is a picture at which the thoughtless may smile, but it is full of pathos, and eloquent for those who knew him best. His attitude is stiff and his coat hunches up in the back, but his kind old heart asserts itself through the gentle eyes, and when he has gone away at last we do not criticise the picture any more, but beyond the old coat that hunches up in the back, and that lasted him so long, we read the history of a noble life.
Silently the old finger-marked album, lying so unostentatiously on the gouty centre table, points out the mile-stones from infancy to age, and back of the mistakes of a struggling photographer is portrayed the laughter and the tears, the joy and the grief, the dimples and the gray hairs of one man's life-tine.
In answer to a former article relative to the dearth of woman here, we are now receiving two to five letters per day from all classes and styles of young, middle-aged and old women who desire to come to Wyoming.
Some of them would like to come here to work and obtain an honest livelihood, and some of them desire to come here and marry cattle kings.
A recent letter from Michigan, written in lead pencil, and evidently during hours when the writer should have been learning her geography lesson, is very enthusiastic over the prospect of coming out here where one girl can have a lover for every day in the week. She signs herself Rosalinde, with a small r, and adds in a postscript that she “means business.”
Yes, Rosalinde, that's what we are afraid of. We had a kind of a vague fear that you meant business, so we did not reply to your letter. Wyoming already has women enough who write with a lead pencil. We are also pretty well provided with poor spellers, and we do not desire to ransack Michigan for affectionate but sap-headed girls.
Stay in Michigan, Rosalinde, until we write to you, and one of these days when you have been a mother eight or nine times, and as you stand in the golden haze in the back yard, hanging out damp shirts on an uncertain line, while your ripe and dewy mouth is stretched around a bass-wood clothes pin, you will thank us for this advice.
Michigan is the place for you. It is the home of the Sweet Singer and the abiding place of the DetroitFree Press. We can't throw any such influences around you here as those you have at your own door.
Do not despair, Rosalinde. Some day a man, with a great, warm, manly heart and a pair of red steers, will see you and love you, and he will take you in his strong arms and protect you from the Michigan climate, just as devotedly as any of our people here can. We do not wish to be misunderstood in this matter. It is not as a lover that we have said so much on the girl question, but in the domestic aid department, and when we get a long letter from a young girl who eats slate pencils and reads Ouida behind her atlas, we feel like going over there to Michigan with a trunk strap and doing a little missionary work.
I have been thinking the matter over seriously and I have decided that if I had my life to live over again, I would like to be an eccentric millionaire.
I have eccentricity enough, but I cannot successfully push it without more means.
I have a great many plans which I would like to carry out, in case I could unite the two necessary elements for the production of the successful eccentric millionaire.
Among other things, I would be willing to bind myself and give proper security to any one who would put in money to offset my eccentricity, that I would ultimately die. We all know how seldom the eccentric millionaire now dies. I would be willing to inaugurate a reform in that direction.
I think now that I would endow a home for men whose wives are no longer able to support them. In many cases the wife who was at first able to support her husband comfortably, finally shoulders a church debt, and in trying to lift that she overworks and impairs her health so that she becomes an invalid, while hor husband is left to pine away in solitude or dependent on the cold charities of the world.
My heart goes out toward those men even now, and in case I should fill the grave of the eccentric millionaire, I am sure that I would do the square thing by them.
The method by which our wives in America are knocking the church debt silly, by working up their husbands' groceries into “angel food” and selling them below actual cost, is deserving of the attention of our national financiers.
The church debt itself is deserving of notice in this country. It certainly thrives better under a republican form of government than any other feature of our boasted civilization. Western towns spring up everywhere, and the first anxiety is to name the place, the second to incur a church debt and establish a roller rink.
After that a general activity in trade is assured. Of course the general hostility of church and rink will preventennuiand listlessness, and the church debt will encourage a business boom. Naturally the church debt cannot be paid without what is generally known through the West as the “festival and hooraw.” This festival is an open market where the ladies trade the groceries of their husbands to other ladies' husbands, and everybody has a “perfectly lovely time.” The church clears $2.30, and thirteen ladies are sick all the next day.
This makes a boom for the physicians and later on for the undertaker and general tombist. So it will be seen that the Western town is right in establishing a church debt as soon as the survey is made and the town properly named. After the first church debt has been properly started, others will rapidly follow, so that no anxiety need be felt if the church will come forward the first year and buy more than it can pay for.
{Illustration: PUGILISM IN RELIGION.}
{8387}
The church debt is a comparatively modern appliance, and yet it has been productive of many peculiar features. For instance, we call to mind the clergyman who makes a specialty of going from place to place as a successful debt demolisher. He is a part of the general system, just as much as the ice cream freezer or the buttonhole bouquet.
Then there is a row or social knock-down-and-drag-out which goes along with the church debt. All these things add to the general interest, and to acquire interest in one way or another is the mission of the c.d.
I once knew a most exemplary woman who became greatly interested in the wiping out of a church debt, and who did finally succeed in wiping out the debt, but in its last expiring death struggle it gave her a wipe from which she never recovered. She had succeeded in begging the milk and the cream, and the eggs and the sandwiches, and the use of the dishes and the sugar, and the loan of an oyster, and the use of a freezer and fifty button-hole bouquets to be sold to men who were not in the habit of wearing bouquets, but she could not borrow a circular artist to revolve the crank of the freezer, so she agitated it herself. Her husband had to go away prior to the festivities, but he ordered her not to crank the freezer. He had very little influence with her, however, and so to-day he is a widower. The church debt was revived in the following year, and now there isn't a more thriving church debt anywhere in the country. Only last week that church traded off $75 worth of groceries, in the form of asbestos cake and celluloid angel food, in such a way that if the original cost of the groceries and the work were not considered, the clear profit was $13, after the hall rent was paid. And why should the first cost of the groceries be reckoned, when we stop to think that they were involuntarily furnished by the depraved husband and father.
I must add, also, that in the above estimate doctors' bills and funeral expenses are not reckoned.
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I'm getting to be quite a connoisseur of hotel keys as I get older. For ten years I have been collecting these mementoes of travel and cording them away in my key cabinet. Some have square brass tags attached to them, others have round ones. Still others affect the octagonal, the fluted, the hexagonal, the scalloped, the plain, the polished, the docorated, the chaste, the Etruscan, the metropolitan, the rural, the cosmopolitan, the shirred, the tucked, the biased, the high neck and long sleeve or thedecolettestyle of brass check.
I have, so far, paid my bills, but I have not returned the keys to my room. Hotel proprietors will please take notice and govern themselves accordingly. When my visit to a pleasant city has become a beautiful memory only, I all at once sit down on something hard and find that it is the key to my former room at the hotel. Sitting down on a key tag of corrugated brass, as big as a buckwheat pancake, would remind most anyone of something or other.
I generally leave my tooth-brush in my room and carry off the key as a kind of involuntary swap, so far as the hotel proprietor is concerned, but I do not think it is a mutual benefit, particularly. I cannot use the key to a hotel 500 miles away, and so far as a tooth-brush is concerned, it generally has pleasant associations only for the owner. A man is fond of his own toothbrush, but it takes years for him to love the tooth-brush of a stranger.
There are a good many associations attached to these keys, like the tags. They point backward to the rooms to which the keys belong. Here is a fat one that led to room number 33-1/2 in the Synagogue hotel. It was a cheerful room, where the bell boy said an old man had asphyxiated himself with gas the previous week. I had never met the old man before, but that night, about 1 o'clock A.M., I had the pleasure of his acquaintance. He came in a sad and reproachful way, and showed me how the post-mortem people had disfigured him. Of course it was a little tough to be mutilated by an inquest, but that's no reason why he should come back there and occupy a room that I was paying for so that I could be alone. He showed me how he blew out the gas, and told me how a man could successfully blow down the muzzle of a shot-gun or a gas jet, but both of these weapons had a way of blowing back.
I have a key that brings back to me the memory of a room that I lived in two days at one time. I do not mean that I lived the two days at once, but that at one period I occupied that room, partially, for two days and two nights, I say I partially occupied it, because I used to occupy it days and share it nights with others; that is, I tried to occupy it nights. I tried to get the clerk to throw off something because I didn't have the exclusive use of the room. He wouldn't throw off anything. He even wanted to fight me because I said that the room was occupied before I got it and after I left it. Finally, I told him that if he would throw a bed quilt over his diamond, so I could see him, I would fight him with buckwheat cakes at five-hundred miles. I took my position the next morning at the place appointed, but he did not appear.