It was a shock to discover that she, that most well built girl, so discrete, so comely, so able a thing in appearance, should be so stupid. There are things that she cannot learn. She will never finish school. Positively stupid. Why her little brother, no bigger than Hop o' my Thumb has caught up to her and will soon outstrip her. Her older brother is the brightest boy in the High School. She will I suppose breed stupid children. Plant wizards choose the best out of lots running into the millions. Choose here there everywhere for hybrids. A ten-pound white leghorn cockerel, hens that lay eggs big enough to spoil the career of any actor. She might though have bright children. What a pity that one so likely should be so stupid. Easier to work with but I should hate a child of mine to be that way. Excuses—Try first. Argue after. Excuses. Do not dare.
There sat the seven boys—nine years old and there-abouts—planning dire tortures for any that should seduce or touch in any way their sisters. Each strove to exceed the other. Tying his antagonist to a tree Apollo took out his knife and flayed him. For sweet as the flute had been yet no man can play the flute and sing at the same time. But the God had first played his harp and then sung to his own accompaniment—a thing manifestly unfair. No doubt, his sense of being in the wrong whetted his lust for the other's hide. In any case he got what he was after. He was the winner and that was all there was about it.
Each boy would think with a secret glow of a new torture: I would dip his hands in boiling lead—they often melted old pieces of lead in a plumber's pot over a field fire to make slugs for their bean shooters—then I would tie a rope to his feet and drag him on cinders etc.... each inventing a worse torture than that pictured before. And all for their sisters' virtue. So there under the east wall of the Episcopal Church they sat in a group on the grass and talked together for an hour.
The real empire builders of our colonial period were not the statesmen, the men of wealth, the great planters but the unknown pioneers who fought single-handed and at once both the primeval wilderness and the lurking savage. The hand crooked to the ploughtail was shaped to the trigger.
The Mesa Verde cliff dwellers—a much advanced race—formed a partnership with nature in the science of home building. Masterpieces of architecture, the survivals of the cliff dwellings tell the story of the ages.
On the top of a point high above the steep cliffs stood Sun Temple, so called, scene of the great ceremonial dramas of the clan. The building is in the form of the letter D and many of the stones which make up the thousand-odd feet of walls are highly decorated.
The corner stone of the building contains a fossil leaf of a palm tree. Influenced by anything which even in shape resembled the sun, the primitive people walled in the leaf on three sides and made a shrine.
The wordbayetais merely Spanish forbaize. Great quantities of this were made in England for the Spanish and Mexican trade, the major part of which was of a brilliant red color. In this way Englishbaizebecame Spanishbayetato the Indians of the American Southwest. Familiar with the art of weaving, these Indians unraveled the bayeta, retwisted it into one, two or three strands, and then rewove it into their blankets, which are now almost priceless. This old blanket was picked up by the author in a New Mexican corral, for the purpose of wiping his buggy axle. It was covered with filth and mud. A number of washings revealed this glorious specimen of the weaver's art.
Accepted by a cultured and talented belle, Lincoln, according to his law partner, had already been refused by Sarah Rickard, an obscure miss of sixteen, of whom apparently nothing further is known.
It was twelve feet from the rock into the water. As he stood looking down it seemed twenty. His eyes being five feet from his heels made it seem by that much higher than it was. He had never dived from such a height in his life. He had climbed up there to dive and he must dive or yield. What would he yield? At least it was something he did not intend to yield. He tried his best to imitate the others, he stood on the edge and plunged. It seemed to him that he plunged. As a matter of fact he dropped over the edge with his body bent almost double so that his thighs hit the water with a stinging impact, also the lower part of his belly, also the top of his head. He did not feel certain of himself for a moment or two after rising to the surface. That was about enough. Memory began to fill the blank of his mind.
There it was still, the men around Mrs. Chain's table on Locust St.: $3.50 a week. A week? Yes, three-fifty a week. And that place in Leipzig where they had only half cooked fresh pork.Schwein schlacherei! Bah. One week was enough there. Fraulein Dachs,pflaumen suppe. That purple and sweet soup. The white cakes they sold on the station platform near Malaga, what were they called? It seemed to be some native bake peculiar to the place. The devil fish in a black sauce in Seville. Big lumps of dough, big as snowballs,sauer braten. But Mrs. Chain's prunes were the most wonderful. Watery tidbits. It was prunes or applesauce. Her daughter was simple I guess. Did her best to land one of the students, kept it up for twenty years. At that table I met one of my dearest friends. Will you have some bread? Yes. That look. It was enough. Youth is so rich. It needs no stage setting. Out went my heart to that face. There was something soft there, a reticence, a welcome, a loneliness that called to me. And he, he must have seen it in me too. We looked, two young men, and at once the tie was cemented. It was gaged accurately at once and sealed for all time. The other faces are so many prunes.
Have you ever seen a dish of small birds all lying on their backs on the dish and with feet in the air, all roasted stiff but brown and savory? Rice birds I think they called them. Or snails or baked eggs?
The old man raked slowly. It took him all day to finish the small lawn. But it was autumn and the leaves had fallen thickly. The bird bath was full of leaves. It was a sentimental picture. But after all why? The leaves must fall into every corner. If they fall into the bird bath that is all there is to it. Still it calls many things to the mind that are not evoked by the twingling of waves on a lake shore in August.
Clark had taken a job as clerk at Pocono, and she was a Quakeress. They got to know each other very, very well. And this girl in the steamer chair, it was the cattle men who attracted her. Let her go then, he said tying the cord with a piece of gauze twisted into a rope. When you bathe the baby for the first time do not put him into a tub but sponge him off carefully before the fire with castile soap and warm water. Be careful not to get the soap into his eyes. Is it nitrate of silver they use for a baby's eyes?
I could not tell whether it was a baby or a doll the little girl was coddling. The Italians' babies are often so very small. They dress them up so grotesquely too. It must be a rigid custom with them.
Nothing at all. All at once it seemed that every ill word he had ever heard spoken struck his ear at the same moment. What a horrible roar it made. But there were other things, too many to record. Corners of rooms sacred to so many deeds. Here he had said so and so, done so and so. On that picnic he had dared to be happy. All the older women had watched him. With one girl under each arm he had let his spirit go. They had been closer than anything he could now imagine.
Particles of falling stars, coming to nothing. The air pits them, eating out the softer parts. Sometimes one strikes the earth or falls flaming into Lake Michigan with a great hiss and roar. And if the lawless mob that rules Ireland with its orderly courts and still more orderly minds will not desist it must be crushed by England. So that to realize the futility of American men intent upon that virtue to be found in literature, literature, that is, of the traditional sort as known in France and Prussia—to realize how each serious American writer in turn flares up for a moment and fizzles out, burnt out by the air leaving no literary monument, no Arc de Triomphe behind him, no India subdued—To realize this it is necessary to go back to the T'ang dynasty where responsibility rested solely on the heads of the poets—etc., etc... Or better still why not seek in Aleppo or Jerusalem for the strain to save us.
America is lost. Ah Christ, Ah Christ that night should come so soon.
And the reason is that no American poet, no American man of letters has taken the responsibility upon his own person. The responsibility for what? There is the fire. Rush into it. What is literature anyway but suffering recorded in palpitating syllables? It is the quiet after the attack. Picking a sliver of bone from his mangled and severed leg he dipped it in his own gore and wrote an immortal lyric. Richard Cœur de Lion shot through the chest with an iron bolt wrote the first English—no, French, poem of importance. What of democratic Chaucer? He was only a poet but Richard was a man, an adventurer, a king. The half mad women rush to impregnate themselves against him. And this is literature. This is the great desirable. Soaked in passion,baba au rhum, the sheer proof of the spirit will do the trick and America will be King. Up America. Up Cœur de Lion. Up Countess Wynienski the queen of Ireland.
Polyphemus took first one shape then another but Odysseus, the wise and crafty, held firm. He did not let go but Polyphemus did. In fact the God could not exist without Odysseus to oppose him.
Why man, Europe is YEARNING to see something new come out of America.
In a soup of passion they would see a little clam. Let us smile. This is—
The danger is in forgetting that the good of the past is the same good of the present. That the power that lived then lives today. That we too possess it. That true novelty is in good work and that no matter how good work comes it is good when it possesses power over itself. Europe's enemy is the past. Our enemy is Europe, a thing unrelated to us in any way. Our lie that we must fight to the last breathe is that it is related to us.
We are deceived when they cry that negro music is the only true American creation. It IS the only true from the European point of view. Everything is judged from that point of view. But to us it is only new when we consider it from a traditional vantage. To us it means a thousand things it can never mean to a European. To us only can it be said to be alive. With us it integrates with our lives. That is what it teaches us. What in hell does it matter to us whether it is new or not when it IS to us. It exists. It is good solely because it is a part of us. It is good THEREFORE and therefore only is it new. Everything that is done in Europe is a repetition of the past with a difference. Everything we do must be a repetition of the past with a difference. I mean that if negro music is new in an absolute sense—-which it is not by any means, if we are to consider the Ethiopian—the probable Ethiopian influence in Egypt—then it is new to Europe as it is to us.
It is not necessary for us to learn from anyone but ourselves—at least it would be a relief to discover a critic who looked at American work from the American viewpoint.
We are a young nation and have not had time or opportunity to catch up with nations that had ten centuries start of us. We still labor under the handicap of our Puritan lineage....
We shall not be able to plead childhood any longer.
Eric the Red landed in Providence, Long Island, and was put in a cage so everyone could see him.
This sort of stupidity we have to combat. I am not talking of the mass of plumbers and carpenters. I am talking of the one thing that is permanent. Spirits. I am saying that America will screw whom it will screw and when and how it will screw. And that it will refrain from screwing when it will and that no amount of infiltration tactics from "superior civilizations" can possibly make us anything but bastards.
We are only children when we acknowledge ourselves to be children. Weight of culture, weight of learning, weight of everything such as abandon in any sense has nothing to do with it. We must first isolate ourselves. Free ourselves even more than we have. Let us learn the essentials of the American situation.
We who despise the blackguards in the old sense. We too are free. Free! We too, with paddles instead of turbines will discover the new world. We are able. We are kings in our own right.
We care nothing at all for the complacent Concordites? We can look at that imitative phase with its erudite Holmeses, Thoreaus, and Emersons. With one word we can damn it: England.
In Patagonia they kick up the skulls of the river men out of the dust after a flood. In Peru, in Machu Pichu the cyclopean wall on the top of the Andes remains to rival the pyramids which after all may have been built of blocks of some plaster stuff of which we have lost the combination.
I know not a land except ours that has not to some small extent made its title clear. Translate this into ancient Greek and offer it to Harvard engraved on copper to be hung in the waterclosets which freshmen use.
And why do they come to naught? these falling stars, etc.
It has been generally supposed that among the peoples of the earth the age of maturity comes earliest in the tropics and increases gradually as one goes northward. But in North America this rule has one striking exception. It is not rare among Esquimau women that they have their first child at 12 and children born before the mothers were 11 have been recorded. Point Barrow Alaska 300 miles north of the Arctic circle.
But the early maturity of the Esquimau girls is strictly in accord with the supposition that the hotter the environment the earlier the maturity. To all intents and purposes the typical Esquimau lives under tropical or subtropical conditions. The temperature of the Esquimau house indoors frequently rises to 90°. When they go out the cold air does not have a chance to come in contact with the body, except for the limited area of the face. When an Esquimau is well dressed his two layers of fur clothing imprison the body heat so effectively that the air in actual contact with his skin is always at the temperature of a tropical summer. He carries the climate about with him inside his clothes.
When an Esquimau comes inside such a house as the one I have been speaking of he strips off all clothing, immediately on entering, except his knee breeches, and sits naked from the waist up and from the knees down. Great streams of perspiration run down the face and body and are being continually mopped up with handfuls of moss.
The effect of the overheated houses is more direct upon the women than the men for they remain indoors a large part of the winter.
Otherwise in North America among the Indians as one goes north from Mexico toward the arctic sea the colder the average temperature of the air that is in contact with the body through the year, the later the maturity of the girls. The most northerly of the Atabasca Indians appear to suffer a great deal from the cold.
The Dog Rib and Yellow Knife Indians are often so poorly clad that they have to be continually moving, for if they stop for even half an hour at a time their hands become completely numb.
In the evenings their wigwams are cheerful with a roaring fire but while one's face is almost scorched with the heat of the roaring flames one's back has hoar-frost forming upon it. At night the Indians go to sleep under their blankets covering up their heads and shivering all night. The average age of maturity of the girls of these tribes is as high or higher than that of north European whites.
But north from the Slavey and Dog Rib Indians to the Esquimau country the conditions suddenly change. One comes in contact with a people that has a system of living almost perfectly adapted to a cold climate, while the northern Indians have a system almost unbelievably ill adapted to the conditions in which they live.
In Puritan New England they wrapped the lover and his lass in one blanket and left them before the dying hearth after the family retired. There was a name for it which I have forgotten.
It was another day ended. Another day added to the days that had gone before. Merest superstition. The eternal moment remained twining in its hair the flowers of yesterday and tomorrow. The newer street lights sparked in the dark. The uphill street which that morning had been filled at its far end with the enormous medal-with-rays of the sun was now flecked with sparkles. It was Carlstadt, established as a free thinker's corporation by Carl Weiss of Berne from which all churches had been excluded. Another day—any day—.
There lay that great frame of a man with his heavy features relaxed his loose jowls rising and falling with each breath while the busy surgeons tinkered at his elbow. Soon they struck gold and out spurted the red. Martha, who had not gone downstairs for over an hour caught it in a white porcelain bowl, an ounce, two ounces—she thought—estimating the amount swiftly. Then four ounces, eight. He was a large man. When will they check it! His breathing had grown easier. He was benefited. A pint! He was white. In an hour men on horseback were riding north and south. Washington was dead. It was another day. Any day.
Davy Crockett had a literary style. Rather than blow his squirrel to bits he'd strike the tree just under its belly so that the concussion would stun it. Such was the country with the element of time subtracted. What is time but an impertinence?
Homesteading in the far western states was a struggle. Every child born there had a mother who is thrice a heroine. A woman in such a country approached motherhood at a time when her husband had to be away from home. Up to the day of her confinement she had to milk, churn, care for the chickens, work in the garden and carry water to the house from a well three hundred yards away... The day of her confinement she did a large washing then walked two miles to the home of a neighbor.
For that the brat seized her by the lug with his little sharp teeth and drew blood. We'll have to put him on the bottle.
Nothing, save for the moment! In the moment exists all the past and the future! Evolution—! Anti-peristalsis. Eighty-seven years ago I was born in a little village in the outskirts of Birmingham. The past is for those that lived in the past, the present is for today. Or—today! The little thing lay at the foot of the bed while the midwife—It was in England 1833. And now by the sea a new world death has come and left his chewing gum in an artery of her brain. But I'll pay you for this, she said as they were sliding her into the ambulance, I'll pay you for this. You young people think you are awfully smart, don't you. I don't want to see them again, those fuzzy things, what are they, trees?
Good gracious, do you call this making me comfortable? The two boys had her on the stretcher on the floor. Yes, stay here a week then I can do what I please but you want to do what you please first. I wonder how much she planned.
Another day, going evening foremost this time. Leaning above her baby in the carriage was Nettie Vogelman, grown heavier since we knew her in the sixth grade twenty-five years before and balancing great masses of prehistoric knowledge on her head in the shape of a purple ostrichplume hat.
But where is romance in all this—with the great-coat she was wearing hanging from the bulge of her paps to the sidewalk? Romance! When knighthood was in flower. Rome. Eliogabalus in a skirt married his man servant.
We struggle to comprehend an obscure evolution—opposed by the true and static church—when the compensatory involution so plainly marked escapes our notice. Living we fail to live but insist on impaling ourselves on fossil horns. But the church balanced like a glass ball where the jets of evolution and involution meet has always, in its prosperous periods, patronised the arts. What else could it do? Religion is the shell of beauty.
The fad of evolution is swept aside. It was only mildly interesting at the best. I'll give you a dollar my son for each of these books you read: Descent of Man and Origin of Species, reprinted by Dombie and Sons, Noodle Lane, Ken. W. London; England 1890.
Who will write the natural history of involution beginning with the stone razor age in Cornwall to the stone razor age in Papua? Oh China, China teach us! Ottoman, Magyar, Moor, teach us. Norse Eric the Discoverer teach us. Cœur de Lion, teach us. Great Catherine teach us. Phryne, Thaïs, Cleopatra, Brunehilde, Lucretia Borgia teach us. What was it, Demosthenes, that she said to you? Come again?
Borne on the foamy crest of involution, like Venus on her wave, stript as she but of all consequence—since it is the return: See they return! From savages in quest of a bear we are come upon rifles, cannon. From Chaldeans solving the stars we have fallen into the bellies of the telescopes. From great runners we have evolved into speeches sent over a wire.
But our spirits, our spirits have prospered! Boom, boom. Oh yes, our spirits have grown—
The corrosive of pity, Baroja says, giving up medicine to be a baker.
Marriage is of the church because it is the intersection oflociby which alone there is place for a church to stand. Beauty is an arrow. Diana launched her shaft into the air and where the deer and the arrow met a church was founded and there beauty had died.
So youth and youth meet and die and there the church sets up its ceremony.
Who will write the natural history of involution?
I have forgotten something important that I wanted to say. Thus having forgotten and remembered that it was important the folly of all thought is revealed.
The deer lay panting on the leaves while Diana leaned over it to stab it in the neck with her dagger.
I have forgotten what I wanted to say.
Venus and Adonis.
The second time I saw her it was in a room of a hotel in the city.
As the Southern mountains are not like other mountains, so the mountaineers are not like others. For all their beauty these mountains are treacherous and alien, and the people who must wring a livelihood from the sawmills or from the tiny perpendicular farms high up under the sky come to be wary and secret like their woodlands.
The Cumberland mountain mother, by nature sharp and sane, has studied the moods of the mountains and of the animals. Illiterate though she be, she is full of ripe wisdom. Many, superior to the mountain woman in, say, sanitation might learn from sitting on cabin doorsteps that they are most often inferior to her in sanity.
Yet, frankly, it is often better to sit on the cabin doorstep than to go inside. The mountain mother struggles bravely against dirt, but if you live in a lonely two-room cabin, if you are the sole caretaker of six children under ten, and two cows and a large stony garden, and must help in the cornfield besides, you are excusable if in the end you "quit struggling." The mountain mother does not make herself and her husband and her children slaves to the housekeeping arts.
A mountain woman dips snuff—surreptitiously if she is young, frankly if she is old.
We settle down on the doorstep probably on straight chairs with seats of cornhusks twisted into a rope and then interwoven. There is a sound to which the mountains have accustomed me—the sharp jolting thud when a mother, if she possesses neither cradle nor rocker, puts her baby to sleep by jerking forward and backward on two legs of a straight chair. There is usually some two-year-old lying fast asleep on the bed just inside the door; or on the porch floor, plump and brown as a bun and studded with flies thick as currants.
Mountain children are as vigorous as baby oaks until they reach their teens, and then over-work begins to tell on growing bodies. A reedy boy of thirteen, just beginning to stretch to the length of spine and limb that characterises the mountaineer, often gets a stoop that he never afterward conquers. In the more remote lumber districts I have seen boys of ten and twelve work all day loading cars. There too, slim mountain girls of twelve and fourteen stand all day in the icy spray of the flume to stack bark on the cars.
Here where isolation makes people fiercely individualistic public opinion is as slow to deny a man's right to marry at the age he wishes as it is to deny his right to turn his corn into whisky. At the age when boys and girls first awake to the fact of sex they marry and the parents, although regretfully, let them.
The unmarried mother is most rare. A boy of sixteen sets himself to all the duties of fatherhood. A fourteen-year-old mother, with an ageless wisdom, enters without faltering on her future of a dozen children.
But here is Lory. But again a digression—: In any account of the mountains one must remember that there are three distinct types: the people of the little villages, almost all remote from railroads; the itinerant lumber workers, woodchoppers and mill-hands who follow the fortunes of the portable sawmill as it exhausts first one remote cove then another; and the permanent farmers who have inherited their dwindling acres for generations. Yet at bottom the mountain mother is always the same.
Lory lives in a one-room lumber shack, and moves about once in three months. The walls are of planks with inch-wide cracks between them. There are two tiny windows with sliding wooden shutters and a door. All three must be closed when it is very cold. For better protection the walls are plastered over with newspapers, always peeling off and gnawed by woodrats. The plank floor does not prevent the red clay from oozing up. The shack is some fifteen feet square. It contains two stoves, two beds, two trunks, a table and two or three chairs. In it live six souls: two brothers, their wives and a baby apiece.
Lory is part Indian, one surmises from the straight hair dropping over her eyes and her slow squawlike movements. Her face is stolid except when it flashes into a smile of pure fun. Dark though she is her breast, bared from her dark purple dress, is statue white. She looks down on her first baby with a madonna's love and her words have in them a madonna's awe before a holy thing: "I ain't never a-goin' to whip him. He ain't never a-goin' to need it, for he won't get no meanness if I don't learn him none."
The setting is fairyland. Mountain folk go far toward living on beauty. The women may become too careless and inert even to scrape away the underbrush and plant a few sweet potatoes and cabbages. They may sit through lazy hours mumbling their snuff sticks, as does Mrs. Cole, while children and dogs and chickens swarm about them: but even Mrs. Cole can be roused by the call of beauty.
"My husband he's choppin' at the first clearin' two miles from here, and he's been plumb crazy over the yaller lady slippers up that-a-way. He's been sayin' I must take the two least kids, what ain't never seen sech, and go up there and see 'em 'fore they was gone. So yesterday we went. It sure was some climb over them old logs, but Gawd them lady slippers was worth it." I shall never understand the mystery of a mountain woman's hair. No matter how old, how worn or ill she may be, her hair is always a wonder of color and abundance.
Ma Duncan at fifty-five is straight and sure-footed as an Indian; tall and slim and dark as a gypsy, with a gypsy's passionate love of out-of-doors. Her neighbors send for Ma Duncan from far and near in time of need. Going forth from her big farm boarding-house on errands of mercy. Up wild ravines to tiny cabins that seem to bud out like lichens from grey boulders wet with mountain streams, over foot logs that sway crazily over rock creeks, through waist-high undergrowth Ma Duncan goes with her stout stick.
As we reach a little grassy clearing Ma Duncan drops down to stretch out happily: So as I can hear what the old earth has to say me... Reckon it says, "Quit your fussin' you old fool. Ain't God kept your gang a young uns all straight so fur? He ain't a-going back on you now, just because they're growd."
Presently Ma Duncan sits up, her hands about her knees, her hat fallen from her wealth of hair, her gun on the ground beside her—often she carries a gun in the hope of getting a gray squirrel to be done in inimitable brown cream gravy for breakfast.
She looks out sadly over much worn woodland, with the great stumps remaining:
"I wish you could have seen the great old trees that used to be here. If folks wasn't so mad for money they might be here and a preachin' the gospel of beauty. But folks is all for money and all for self. Some-day when they've cut off all the beauty that God planted to point us to him, folks will look round and wonder what us human bein's is here fur—"
"The mountain woman lives untouched by all modern life. In two centuries mountain people have changed so little that they are in many ways the typical Americans."
"The Lord sent me back" former pastor tells men in session at the church. With tears in his eyes, he enters meeting, escorted by two sons. Dramatic scene follows as he asks forgiveness for mistake he has made. Was in Canada and Buffalo. His explanation of absence is satisfactory to family and members he met last night.
Miss Hannen in seclusion at home. Her family declines to give statement.
Dominie Cornelius Densel, forty eight years old, former pastor, etc... who left his wife and eight children etc. came home last night.
Miss T. Hannen, twenty-six years old, etc... who disappeared from her home, etc... on the same afternoon that the dominie was numbered among the missing also came to her home the same evening.
Pictures of the missing dominie and member of his church who are home again.
Commodius renamed the tenth month Amazonius. But he died a violent death and the old name was returned.
I had five cents in my pocket and a piece of apple pie in my hand, said Prof. M. I. Pupin, of Columbia University describing the circumstances of his arrival in America in the steerage of the steamship Westphalie from Hamburg half a century ago.
Today that American scholar of Serbian birth holds the chair in electro-mechanics at Columbia University.
Prof. Pupin is merely one of a host of former immigrants whose names are linked with the great strides in science, commerce, finance and industry and whose careers furnish living proof that America, besides breeding great men, imports them.
Claude Monet was born in Columbia, Ohio.
In industry and commerce the stories of many of the successful immigrants read like romances.
There is C. C. A. Baldi of Philadelphia who began with nothing and who is now one of America's foremost citizens of foreign birth. When he landed in this country thirty years ago he had only a few pennies in the pockets of his ragged trowsers. He knew no English and knew nothing of American customs, but he had heard of the opportunities which America offers to a wide-awake, ambitious immigrant willing to work.
Mr. Baldi bought thirty lemons with his pennies. He peddled them and with the proceeds of sales bought more lemons and peddled them. Before long he had a cart loaded with hundreds of lemons. In time the push-cart became a store and the store grew into a great business.
Other spectacular instances of success are furnished by the careers of Louis J. Horowitz, one of America's greatest builders and S. M. Schatzkin, who came to this country twenty-five years ago with 3 dollars carefully tucked away in his clothes and began peddling coal in the East side of New York. Today Schatzkin has large sums invested in many big American enterprises.
Horowitz, who came here thirty years ago, built the Woolworth and the Equitable buildings, one the tallest and the other the largest office building in point of floor space in the world. His first job was that of an errand boy. Later he worked as a parcel wrapper, then as a stock boy and then as a shoe salesman. After selling shoes he started selling real estate.
Witness? oh witness these lives my dainty cousins. Dear Madam:—It has often been said that one of the most interesting spots in America is the small space covered by the desk of the editor of the Atlantic Monthly.
All the qualities which make up the interest of life,—joy, sorrow, romance, ambition, experience,—seem to center in this spot in turn, radiating from every nook and corner of the world.
"Adventures," remarked the talented Mr. Disraeli, "are for the adventurous," and it is to those who think of life as the supreme adventure that the Atlantic is most confidently addressed.
If you care for a magazine that satisfies, vexes and delights by turn, you can safely subscribe to the Atlantic Monthly for the coming year.
Public Service Railway Company, Newark, N. J. Amazonius 10, 1920.—To our Patrons: As a fair minded citizen, your impartial consideration of the facts set forth in subjoined letter, written by me to the Board of Public Utility Commissioners under date of Amazonius 7th. 1920, is respectfully requested. Very truly yours? Thomas N. McCarter, President.
To the Board of Public Utility Commissioners of the State of New Jersey, Trenton, New Jersey. Dear Sirs: The rate of fare of 7 cents, with one cent for a transfer, etc..., etc... Such large cities as Boston, New Haven, Hartford and Pittsburg already have a 10c. flat rate. Etc... etc... Under the foregoing statement of facts the company is forced to file herewith a flat rate of 10c. where 7c. is now charged. Etc... Etc...
Now when Christmas bells ring clearTelling us that love is hereAnd children singGifts that speak of thoughtful loveJust like angels from aboveGlad tidings bring.
Rugs, mirrors, chairs, tables, W. & J. Sloane, N.Y., Wash., San F. Christmas Gifts Sure to be Appreciated.: Standing lamps, table lamps, book ends, Sheffield ware, desk sets, framed prints, porcelains, soft pillows, foot rests (D-2968 Rocking foot rest in Mahogany. Formerly $45.00. Sale Price $30.00!) sconces, mantel clocks, wall clocks, tall clocks, small tables, smoking stands, occasional chairs, screens, oriental rugs, Chinese embroideries, vacuum cleaners—Mirrors. Small Oriental Rugs: Mossouls, Pergames, Beloochistans, Lilehennas, Sarouks and Kirmanshahs.
California was peopled by the Indians first and then by the Padres who brought with them their sprigs of vine and of orange and of fig and also the art of irrigation. So that you will find today from the very northernmost part, from Klamath Lake down to the Imperial Valley in the South, the lands of California watered and made as fertile as the valley of the Nile.
That's all right. Yes Sir. But I come from the Eastern shore of Maryland. I'm an East Sho' man. Have you ever been on the Eastern Sho'? No? Well sir, we're a strange people and we have some strange legends on the East Sho'. When Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden they fell sick and the Lord was very much disturbed over them, so he called a council of his angels and wanted to know where they should be taken for a change of air.
Gabriel suggested the Eastern Sho' of Maryland but the Lord said, No, No; that wouldn't be sufficient change.
Yes sir, down at Chincoteague they have the biggest and the finest oysters in the world. Big as your hand and when you get a half dozen of them a couple of hours out of the water you know you have something.
It was at Chincoteague two Spanish galleons went ashore in the old days and some ponies swam ashore. To this day they have a yearly round-up on the island where the breed of these ponies is coralled, a short special breed of horse.
Tangier Island is another place. That's where the sheriff shot the boy who wouldn't go in off his front porch on Sunday morning during church service. Either in church or in the house during that hour. He shot him all right. They have little individual canals up to their back doors from the bay.
And the native, coming up to him suddenly with a knife as long as your arm, said;Yo soy mas hombre que tu! and started a swing at him. Had he not been so quick to seize a chair and bring it down on the man's head—What would have happened?
Sometimes the men would come in and say there was a turkey nest down in the meadow and they'd send me to look for it.
Once I fell in the mireage up to my waist. My, they was mad at me. "Can't tramp a meadow without falling in the mireage?" they said.
I miss it often. At nine they let me drive the hay-hoist with one horse and later with two. One morning I had the young team out. It was Allie's team of greys, they was only just no more than colts. They shied at a piece of paper. I could hear the men up in the barn yelling. "Hey, what's the matter down there!" But it was no use. I tried to get to their heads. I wasn't afraid of them. Allie said afterward he wouldn't have been surprised to have seen me killed.
One of the women stood in the road waving a broom. I can see her yet. I might have been able to manage them if it hadn't been for her but they simply jumped over a wagon and smashed the hay-fork and ran down the road two miles. Then they came back again. My but the old man was mad at me. All the black looks I got!
I used to hate the Old Man. Sometimes I'd be getting wood and he'd ask me why I hadn't done something. I'd say I hadn't gotten round to it yet. Maybe he'd throw a piece of wood at me.
I can remember the churning. I wouldn't exactly like to go back to it all but sometimes I miss it terribly. Sometimes it would n't take you more than five minutes to get the butter and sometimes you'd churn for 45 or two hours and sometimes it would never come. We'd get four or five pounds or more at a churning. Then it would have to be washed and salted and packed in jars in the cellar.
So now that it is raining. So now that it is Amazonius—we go to buy a metal syringe at the factory because we know the men who live on our street who own the bricks that make the walls that hold the floors that hold the girls who make mistakes in the inventories:
Every order that comes in is copied. You must rely on your help. As the orders come in they are handled by a girl who puts them on our own uniform order sheets. So right there it begins. You have to rely on a young flyaway who has perhaps been up dancing the night before. It's easy enough for her to write "with" for "without" and—that's the sort of thing that happens. There is a certain minimum of error that you must count on and no reputable house will fail to make good promptly.
The glass blowers have never in my entire experience of 17 years suffered any harm from their trade. Why we had a boy in the old factory, a cripple, a withered leg, the weakest, scrawniest lad you ever saw. He's been blowing for us for 15 or 17 years and you should see him today. Why the fat fairly hangs down over his collar.
In our thermometer work they blow the bulb then fill it with mercury which is in a special container like the cups you get at Child's restaurant say. They never have to touch the stuff. When the bulb is full they seal it. Then the mercury in the bulb is warmed by passing the bulb through a flame. This is to drive it up the capillary tube. There can be no volatilization since the mercury is in the tube and this is the only time the stuff is heated. Then when the metal rises from the heat the other end of the glass is dipped in the stuff so that as the bulb now cools the mercury is sucked up filling the thermometer completely.
Sometimes, of course, a bulb breaks in heating so that the floor is full of the stuff.
The hydrofluoric acid for marking is used under a hood with a special exhaust-blower that has nothing else to do but exhaust that hood. There is not the slightest odor of fumes in the room. The air is as good there as here.
And what is your business?
Rag merchant.
Ah yes. And what does that mean?
Our main specialty is shoddy.
Ah yes. Shoddy is made from—
From woolen rags. The whole mass is put into a vat and the cotton dissolved out. It comes out in a great wet heap of stuff that has to be washed and dried.
Sometimes they burn the cotton out with gas. For instance you'll see a piece of cloth, grey cloth. The gas will take out the black cotton and leave the wool fibres all running in one direction. One of the secrets of the trade is the selection of the colors. That is red shoddy is made from red rags and so on. But they even take the dyes out of the cloth and use it over again.
You know the army coats the boys wore. They were 70% shoddy. It's all wool but the fibre has been broken. It makes a hard material not like the soft new woven woolens but it's wool, all of it.
After the stuff from the vats is dry they put it on the donkeys which turn it into loose skeins. From that stage it goes on to the making of the yarn for weaving when any quantity of fresh wool can be mixed that you desire.
The shortest fibre, that can't be used for anything else, is made into these workingmen's shirts you see. The wool is held in a container in the loosest state possible. This is connected up with a blower in front of which a loom is set for weaving a fairly tight cotton mesh. Then as the loom is working the wool is BLOWN IN! Where the cotton warp and woof cross the shoddy is caught.
Recently a Jew came in to complain of the lightness of the shirts he was getting. All we did was to yell out, "George turn on the blower a little stronger." One washing and the wool is gone. But the Jews are the smart ones. You got to hand it to them. They invent machinery to do anything with that stuff. Why one man made a million before the government stopped him by making cheap quilts.
He took any kind of rags just as they were collected, filth or grease right on them the way they were and teased them up into a fluffy stuff which he put through a rolling process and made into sheets of wadding. These sheets were fed mechanically between two layers of silkolene and a girl simply sat there with an electric sewing device which she guided with her hand and drew in the designs you see on those quilts, you know.
You've seen this fake oilcloth they are advertising now. Congoleum. Nothing but building paper with a coating of enamel.
¡O vida tan dulce!