The Philistine
A Periodical of Protest.

You have too much respect upon the world! They lose it that do buy it with much care.—Merchant of Venice.

Printed Every Little While for The Society of The Philistines and Published by Them Monthly. Subscription, One Dollar Yearly

Single Copies, 10 Cents. November, 1896.

THE PHILISTINE.

Contents for November.

We are printing four hundred copies on Hand-Made Paper of Mr. Hubbard’s Ruskin-Turner Essay. The book will contain twelve full-page photogravures from negatives taken especially for us in the National Gallery at London.

Price, per volume, $5.00. Twenty copies specially illumined by Bertha C. Hubbard; price $10.00 each.

ART AND LIFE, by Vernon Lee.

We have printed a small edition on Japan Vellum of this exquisite Essay and are illuminating the copies by hand. Bound in classic limp vellum, tied with tapes; price, $5.00 per copy. Twelve copies, no two alike, illumined by Mr. W. W. Denslow; also, Ten copies specially illumined by Mr. William B. Faville. Price, $25.00 each.

VOLS. II and III of the Philistine.

Handsomely bound in Buckram and Antique Boards, One Dollar per volume.

VOLUME ONE of the Philistine.

Bound in Antique Boards, price $2.00 each.

OUT OF PRINT:

• The Song of Songs,
• The Journal of Koheleth.

THE LEGACY.

Mr. Hubbard’s new two-volume novel, entitled THE LEGACY, is now ready for delivery. The book has 450 pages of text on Dickinson’s rough Dekel Edge paper; photogravure portrait of author and illustrations on Japan paper. Bound in bottle green chamois, silk lined. Price $3.00, for the two volumes, express paid.

THE
ROYCROFT PRINTING SHOP,
EAST AURORA, N. Y.

Philistine Readers

will be interested in a monthly illustrated magazine that is devoted exclusively to literature and its progress in America and England. No person who lays claims to culture and wide reading can afford to be without The Bookman.

To any reader mentioning The Philistine we will send a sample copy free of all charge.

ADDRESS
THE BOOKMAN
151 Fifth Ave New York City

The smell of kerosene in the pantry sickened the woman who was pouring it into lamps. Through the window and side-door the quintessence of the July noonday palpitated in. Twinkling black flies buzzed on the ceiling.

[162]

The woman pulled out the spice-drawer and sat down on it. It slanted uncomfortably forward, and she smelled with loathing the warm fragrance of spilled cinnamon. The kitchen clock whirred and struck eleven.

She went to the side-door and called to a man forking hay somewhere in the blinding distance.

“Abel! Abel! when do you want”——

“Can’t hear a word you say,” he called back impatiently. He leaned on his pitchfork, a blur of blue clothes back of dazzling hay and steel.

“What time do you want—I should have—dinner?”

Her voice rose high on the last word.

“Well!” the man kicked at something in the confused grass. “Well, quarter past twelve, I guess. Got to go over to Sydney’s, you know, well, say half past twelve, that’ll give me plenty a’ time; half past twelve.” He lifted a fork full of wizened hay and began to whistle.

The woman shut the door. She turned to the window, leaned out in the hot light, and pulled to the blinds. Standing up in the sudden darkness she felt a hammering in the back of her head. Pink and green lizard-like coils of nothing swam over the china-shelf.

“It’s them pink plates,” she said aloud. “No sir! it’s in my eyes!”

[163]

She rested her head against the warm plaster for a minute. Her eyes blinked at the incessant colored coilings in the air. Her hanging hands seemed to pull at her shoulders. Something fused into a troublous unreality the shelves, the odors, and the drone of flies.

Suddenly she became aware of waking up from a swift uncomfortable dream. A shiver of air stirred through the shutters. She shrank away from it, cold. As she stepped into the dark front hall, a hot rush of blood flushed her face like air from an oven. She sat down by the back window, let her hands drop, and woke up again from rapid dreaming.

The start of this shiver shook her permanently awake. Her wide eyes looked out through the shutter-slits, on a blue-green shady spot in the door-yard. “I should like,” she said slowly, “to lay down under them trees—on a shawl—and go to sleep. But I s’pose there’s bugs dropping off the trees—oh, but it looks nice!—There’s Abel’s dinner, let me see, new potatoes, dock-greens, bacon. I wonder if folks could see me from the road? oh, it would look awful silly! I got a good mind to do it, though. I’m just beat out! I don’t see how women keep up and do their work—Abel’s got to have his dinner—I got a good mind”——

She began to be agitated. She was pressed upon[164] by tradition, by generations of women that never had slighted their work. Their transmitted canonized habits stifled her, wrapping innumerable folds about her small wrestling will. The sleepy air about her magnified her labor. She had never heard of such a thing, her mother never would have done it! and was Abel to go over to Sidney’s on an empty stomach? But her will to get dinner seemed paralyzed.

There was a small swirl and soar of dust up the road, as of a strong summer wind. The trees swished outside, the new cool air billowed up the little hall. The woman looked out again at the sheltered place in the yard; then she picked up the small rug by the door and went out.

It was a dry, cool place, under blue-green layers of maple boughs. There were lumps and hollows in the turf, and the grass was fat and long. The branches plashed gently as a faintly piping bird pushed through them. Two or three small leaves blew down and stirred in the woman’s hair. The grass protruded gently against her face; every breath renewed the fresh smell of it. Far away clicked a hay-gathering machine, in the olive, billowy, upland fields—thick timothy starred with goldenrod. Her eyes closed on the white road, curving down hill between cushiony meadows, but from an[165] infinite drowsy distance she heard a tin pail swing with a creak, and dimly fancied the glare on it.

At noon, Abel finished the patch, dropped his pitchfork, and tramped up across the lumpy ground. His blue shirt was hot and damp, pricked through by the dazzle. He could almost see the tan thicken on his hands. The swing of walking and walking towards home and towards dinner was keen pleasure. He liked to lift his great boots and stamp down the dry, puffy sod.

Inside the kitchen door there was a sleepy and motionless air; nothing hummed on the stove but the multitudinous flies about the boiler. Cups and saucers gleamed whitely through the glass pantry door.

“Clara!”

“Clara!” Twice Abel’s voice cut the monotone, but it closed in again like deep water.

He burst through the hall and swung back the front door. In the flood of daylight his eyes caught the red and white stripes of her skirt, low among fringes of grass under the maple.

His heart jumped in a great fright. There seemed to be insects in his blood that buzzed. His pulses dinned and pounded. The skin was drawn tight to bursting round his neck. He stopped still, than ran and jumped the piazza railing with a smothered[166] shout. He stumbled across the lawn, hindered by his tense veins as by strings. His body seemed to have swollen in a sort of anger.

She lay there on the hall rug. One hand stirred in the sleek grass as an eager little ant crept over it.

Abel’s breath came easier.

He sat down by her on the sod. She had become so valuable that he could not bear to touch her or speak to her, but he reached up and lightly shook the branches. An insect was flung down in confusion, a mass of kicking black legs.

She looked up with surprised eyes at the broad blue chest and the bared arm just letting go the bough. Abel leaned over and flicked a caterpillar from her sleeve. Her hand shrank away, and he took hold of it, drawing her sidewise until she sat up.

“I thought you—well, I had a good scare!” said Abel.

“It was dreadful hot,” she said stupidly, “and I was so tired I couldn’t—oh, you haven’t had no dinner, and you got to go over to Sidney’s! oh my, what time is it? I forgot. I don’t know how I forgot. I just let it go. Oh, what possessed me? well, I was so hot and tired, I just couldn’t”——

“There! I don’t care a snap!”

He sat looking at her warm throat and face.[167] “Say, I’ll skirmish ’round and git dinner myself,” he added. “You stay right here—or, come—I’ll help you int’ the house.”

He threw the rug over one arm and put the other round her waist. He would have liked to push the stars aside for her. She put her head on his shoulder.

Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn.

It was no discredit to anyone to be on speaking terms with Satan in the early days. The best of us could have tipped a hat to him on the street or had him to a wheel meet without loss of social prestige. For Satan was good people before a certain event which is a prologue to human history. He was one of the Princes of Light and moved in the best circles once upon a time, when everybody was well-bred and had a tide, like an Irishman’s ancestors.

[168]

Satan was Walking Delegate to the created universe a few thousand years ago. He assumed that dignity soon after a disturbance in heaven, where he undertook to unionize the angels and was thrown out. What happened after his celebrated fall is told in the book of Genesis. He came into the Garden eastward in Eden and found labor progressing there peacefully. The man was tending the trees and truck, and all the beasts of the earth were obedient to him; and the woman did not know too much to be happy. After he had organized things, labor was a penalty and a trial to the human race, and the sweat of the brow had become a badge of punishment.

Satan was not himself condemned to work. Walking delegates never labor. He was simply required to go in and out on his belly from that day, in his capacity as an agitator and promoter of strikes.

It has been whispered to me by a sage who dwells among the hills of Persia and holds the modified sun-worship of the Ghebers, that Satan’s claim to the authorship of evil in the world is in dispute. An investigation is going on in the hill country, whence cometh great help in the solution of world-old riddles. It was started some forty centuries back, more or less, by one Zoroaster, who so Frenchified the religion of that day that the absorbent Hebrews, ever[169] ready to trace the idea of sex in anything, adopted the dual theory of divinity, and were called to order by the first and greatest of their prophets later on. But in the title search of creation conducted by the Persian sages something came to light which abated the pretensions of the Walking Delegate. It was found that what he called his particular dominion was held on no better title than a quit claim, and the Jewish Prophet who set forth the unity of the Final Authority made proclamation of this also, in these words:

“I form the light and create darkness; I make peace and create evil; I the Lord do all these things.”

It may be remarked that the proclamation of the divine herald here cited is not fully acknowledged up to this day, even in the churches that profess his theology. But, seeing that it took a dozen centuries to set aside the idea of a dual divinity, it is not surprising that twenty-five centuries have passed without an absolute clearing of squat claims to universal dominion—for idolatry is of rapid growth, but it decays exceeding slowly, and so reverses the general law of primitive nature.

So it happens that the Walking Delegate of the Garden, who organized the original lock-out, is in chancery for all time defending a pretender’s claim.[170] There is a caveat on the process of disintegration, which is part of creation, antedating his. Near a thousand years before Isaiah proclaimed the divine origin of evil the Levite priests almost discovered the great principle when they set forth the marks and tints whereby the leper’s brand of death might be known. They blindly testified to a marvelous fact that, once fully recognized, ends the theory that death is a penalty. They found the leper’s ominous ulcers uniform and complex. They almost knew that the complexity of destruction is as ingenious as the complexity of life, and the product of as high a creative power.

A sad day it was for the authority of our alienated friend, the Walking Delegate, when the seeds of disease were found and science proclaimed, twenty-five centuries after Isaiah, that the Lord of All created the parasite, which has life, as he created the life the destroyer feeds on.

In the economy of Providence great changes come mostly from unexpected sources. They were not Parsees or Levites who sought the bacteria of disease. They had no direct quarrel with the Father of Lies, but they doomed Satan when they found in their sterilized culture tubes the sign manual of the Creator of Evil. The germ theory, there established, sealed the fate of catastrophe. Henceforth Satan[171] was an intruder. It was not sin that brought death into the world. Death was in the world before sin. The tree of life itself, in the midst of the Garden, was “for the healing of the nations.” The fruit the man and woman were free to eat yielded its life to their hunger; and hunger itself implied disintegration and death.

Not the Walking Delegate who failed to create a lock-out in heaven, but the Creative Intelligence that shaped all things and set life in motion everywhere, is the author of the check that keeps all in balance. He makes peace and creates evil.

Our old friend Satan is an interloper and a fraud. Some day, perhaps, we shall rattle his armor and find no living thing therein—like the terrifying empty casque and breastplates that did duty for a ghost in miser Gaspard’s window.

William McIntosh.

I disagree with many good people and count not William Shakespeare a demi-god. Rather would I think of him as a man—a toiler; a master-workman, selecting from the folio-forests the fine grained woods with which to build that matchless instrument whose melodies still sing a lullaby to our life’s regrets. Using but the best of the forest, leaving the lumber for us, the crude makers of discordant fiddles. I like to dream of him as at the Inns reading Plowden’s late Reports; gibing perhaps at the Year Books’ vile Latin, or at Littleton’s unintelligible[173] jumble. But best of all I love that quiet midsummer’s evening when the friendly barrister from over the way drops in to chat with the master. (A sergeant, also, is sometimes there, but he is too dignified for all occasions and I never allow him to talk much at any time.) The gossip from the City to the Hall is exchanged. The barrister from over the way amusingly chronicles Sir Edward Coke’s chagrin at his late granted absolution—Sir Edward’s marriage ceremony having been irregular “evidently,” as the absolution read, “through ignorance of the law.” The twilight deepens and the young man seated apart near the window lays aside the book he has been reading. The master takes it up and idly turns the pages. Many of the triumphs and defeats there chronicled are very real ones to him. He pauses a moment at Lady Hales’ case. The funereal rows of black type awaken memories of his first days at Westminster, when with lips apart he stared at the six sergeants—two for the Lady and four for the Crown—as they delivered their intricate arguments. As the master ends his solemn recital of the Lady’s struggle for her own, the youngster near the window laughs. And we to this day laugh with him when we hear the case retried by poor mad Ophelia’s grave-diggers.

Sir James Hales, the son of a Baron of the Exchequer,[174] was a Justice of the Common Pleas, a suicide and ergo, a felon. For, “while walking through divers streets and highways of Cambridge, he did wantonly enter a ditch flowing there-through and himself therein feloniously and voluntarily drowned.” In those days of simple justice such an atrocious crime was, though falling perhaps a little short of rank burglary, at least felony without benefit of clergy. This same spirit of simple justice not only denied him christian burial but also escheated his goods and chattels to the Crown, leaving his guilty widow, guilty through her marriage to such an atrocious criminal, penniless. In 1550, Lady Hales caused an action of trespass to be brought against one Petit, a lessee holding under the Crown, claiming that Sir James’ alleged crime was not consummate until after his death and “the dead can do no wrong.”

“The death precedes the forfeiture,” argued the widow’s learned council, “for until the death is fully consummate he is not a felon; for if he had killed another he should not have been a felon until the other had been dead and for the same reason he cannot be a felon until the death of himself be fully had and consummate.”

The sergeants for the Crown insisted that the crime lay in the act done in the life-time which was[175] the cause of the death. “The act consists of three parts: the imagination, the resolution and the perfection. The death is only a sequel to the act.”

“It must be ‘se offendendo;’ it cannot be else. For here lies the point; if I drown myself wittingly, it argues an act: and an act hath three branches, it is, to act, to do, and to perform: argal, she drowned herself wittingly.”

Sir Anthony Brown, in delivering the judgment of the Court, said: “Sir James Hales is dead; and how came he to his death? It may be answered, By drowning. And who drowned him? Sir James Hales. And when did he drown him? In his life-time. So that Sir James Hales, being alive, caused Sir James Hales to die, and the act of the living man was the death of the dead man.”

“If the man go to this water, and drown himself, it is, will he, nill he, he goes—mark you that; but if the water come to him and drown him, he drowns not himself; argal, he that is not guilty of his own death shortens not his own life.”

“But is this law?”

“Ay, marry, is’t! crowner’s quest law.”

Preston Kendall.

A poor little cricket hidden in the flowery grass, regarded a butterfly, flying o’er the prairie. The insect shone with bright colors. Blue, purple and gold sparkled on his wings. Young, beautiful, little beau! He ran from flower to flower, taking and quitting all, even the most beautiful.

“Ah!” said the cricket, “how different is my life from his! Mother Nature has given him all and me nothing. I have no talent, still less figure. No one looks at me—I am ignored everywhere! As well not live at all!”

As he spoke, a troop of children arrived in the meadow. They all ran after the butterfly—they all wished to have it. Hats, handkerchiefs, bonnets, served to entrap him. The insect vainly sought to escape them. He soon became their conquest. One caught him by the wing, another by the body, a third by the head. It did not need so many efforts to pull the poor thing to pieces. “Oh! Oh!” said the cricket, “I am not so discontented as I was: it costs too much to shine in the world!”

Eleanor M. Winn.

[177]

f Heaven or Hell I have no power to sing,

I cannot ease the burden of your fears,

Or make quick-coming death a little thing,

Or bring again the pleasure of past years,

Nor for my words shall ye forget your tears,

Or hope again for aught that I can say,

The idle singer of an empty day.

But rather, when aweary of your mirth,

From full heart still unsatisfied ye sigh,

And, feeling kindly unto all the earth,

Grudge every minute as it passes by,

Made the more mindful that the sweet days die—

Remember me a little then, I pray,

The idle singer of an empty day.

The heavy trouble, the bewildering care

That weighs us down who live and earn our bread,

These idle verses have no power to bear;

So let me sing of names remembered,

Because they, living not, can ne’er be dead,

Or long time take their memory quite away

From us poor singers of an empty day.

Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time,

Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?

Let it suffice me that my murmuring rhyme

Beats with light wing against the ivory gate,

Telling a tale not too importunate

To those who in the sleepy region stay,

Lulled by the singer of an empty day.

William Morris.

“O, it is naught! It is naught,” said Clangingharp. “It is all a yawning void, the ghost of a joke, a mosquito’s dream, a lecture by Barrett Wendell.”

It was at the Universalist State Convention, held at Herkimer, N. Y., in September. Rev. Dr. Bolles was there—charming bookish old Dr. Bolles who is not so very old; then what if he was, seeing that his heart is the heart of youth! Dr. Bolles he met there a certain Literary Fellow who he had not seen for a Long While. Now the Literary Fellow he loves old Dr. Bolles and Dr. Bolles he likes the Literary Fellow, and not having met for a Long While, they embraced each other there on the sidewalk; then they went into the tavern called the Farmer Tavern to get dinner. They paid for the dinner at the desk; they paid a youth wearing a dimun pin, in good silver coin and then walked arm in arm into the dining room. The landlord was there seating his “guests.” Now the landlord’s name is Jay but it should be December, for he is as chilly a man as ever edited an intercollegiate chip-munk magazine. He is tall and[179] stooping, with a yellow chin whisker; he is wheezy, and discerning (nit) and has a brass watch chain and one wisp of hair, that looks like dry hay, on his Number Six head. There was a convention in town and a horse race beside, and consequently the landlord was busy as a monkey catching fleas.

“Here you, sit here, and you fellow, here,” he bawled, snatching out two chairs at different tables.

“We can’t do that,” said Dr. Bolles, “you see we haven’t met for a Long While and we must sit together, otherwise we would have no appetite!”

“You set where I tell you!” cried the hustling, bustling landlord.

“We paid in advance!” said Dr. Bolles wofully.

“Yes, in our innocence we paid in advance.”

“Say, you fellers better git!” shouted the Ramrod.

“He can’t take a joke, can he?” said Dr. Bolles, turning to the Literary Fellow.

“No, he stood under an umbrella when God rained humor.”

“What a recruit he’d make for a Fallstaff Army?”

“Ah, your pencil—thank you—I’ll sketch him!”

By this time the fifty people in the dining room were in a roar of laughter and the landlord was in a red rage. “Here, you two fellows—go down and[180] git your money back if you can’t be peac’ble! You mustn’t raise no row in my house.”

The Literary Fellow sketched.

“Come, we will go and get our money back,” said Dr. Bolles, sighting and snapping an imaginary kodak at the landlord. And out they walked, arm in arm, with stately dignity. They got their money back and once outside the tavern that is called the Farmer Tavern they laughed a loud peal of merriment at the landlord who stood under an umbrella when the heavens rained Philistine jokes. And the moral of this true tale is, don’t gibe a landlord who has a brass watch chain and a billy-goat whisker. And far away across the moor echoed the piteous cry of the curlew.

There may be a difference twixt red-headed men and men with red hair, but I cannot explain it now. I’ve heard it said that no one ever saw an imbecile or a pauper with red hair, and that there are no red-headed old maids save those who are determined to remain old maids. All of which was brought up by my thinking of my red-head friend, Ellis—Ellis who writes “The Smoking Room” in the Northwestern Lumberman. Ellis might have graduated at a college of which Ras Wilson was president, but at a guess I don’t believe either one of them ever crossed a campus—and I’m glad. College would have ironed[181] all of the individuality out of these strong men and given us instead a pair of droning curates. Emerson said “wealth is good for those who can use it,” and I say college is good for those who know how. Now Ellis is not the smartest man who ever lived, and no one claims that Ras Wilson is, not even Ras himself; but when I think of these men I mumble to myself, “Thou hast not much head, Teddy, but thou hast a heart and perhaps ’twill serve as well.” Into all the work these men do they infuse a deal of throbbing human sympathy. You seem to feel that you are in the presence of a fellow on whom you can rely; one who has nothing to conceal, who is afraid of no man and of whom no man is afraid. And the moral of it is, while we cannot all be geniuses we can be gentle men if we have a mind to.

“Life is a warfare,” remarked Clangingharp as he rolled a cigarette. He paused, licked the edges of the paper calmly, viewed his work with critical eye, applied the match, blew three whiffs through his nose and continued, “Life is a warfare—between the sexes. I’ll leave it to any truthful man or woman who has arrived at years of discretion, married or single, if life is not one long campaign between man and woman. There are continual skirmishes, advances, repulsions, nocturnal surprises, ambuscades, diplomatic consultations, parleys with one or both trying[182] to outwit the other. After stormy times peace is declared with good priestly reservations; sometimes they call it eternal peace because it lasts a whole day. It’s mostly a game of strategy. Armistices are agreed on only for the sake of getting into the other’s camp to find out what is going on. ‘All is fair in love and war’ is a fool proverb. Bless my soul, love is war:—have you a match? Thank you!”

A worthy young man writes me from Keokuk after this wise: I want to tell you something about Agnes Repplier. I just drew from our town library here a book of essays by her and on the first page is a notice that the book was placed in the library September 15, 1890. Yet I was the first person who ever called for the volume, and the leaves were still uncut.

The incident related is interesting, but it is not a fact about Agnes Repplier; it is a fact about Keokuk.

“Who are those who will eventually be damned?” asked a Seeker after Truth of the Busy Pastor. “Oh, the others, the others, the others!” was the reply.

Mrs. E. A. Richmond of West Medford, Mass., has been granted Letters Patent as Chief Musician to the Society of the Philistines. All parties expecting to strike the lyre and lift the tuneful lay at Christmas-tide[183] around the merry yule log, should supply themselves at once with a copy of Mrs. Richmond’s Philistine Phantasia. It is dedicated to the American Academy of Immortals. Price, single copies, fifty cents.

That Philistine giant, Col. Robert Mitchell Floyd, is cultivating a fine tonsure, yet his nature is as frolicsome as that of a country boy at recess. When Death calls for the Colonel he will have to wait, smoke a cigar and hear a good story, and by that time, egad! the destroyer will forget his errand. The Colonel is bookish, and has written some choice verse and better prose, but the thing he is to bring out soon is a compilation of over a hundred poems relating to the fruit that cost us Paradise. Incidentally there will also be in the book selections on apple pie, apple fritters, hard cider, baked apples and apple jack.

Midnight Oil—high test—recommended by Charles G. D. Roberts; also the Gilbert Parker XXX brand Local Color in casks. Address,

Prof. John Peascod,
Room 1101 Philistine Building,
East Aurora, N. Y.

All jokes in the Lotos are warranted worked out by the publishers’ own Egyptologist.

[184]

My friend, Nixon Waterman, has been sending out Ms. and getting it back for about forty-seven years. Now the tide has turned. Three publishers, within a single week, have written him asking him to send ’em articles. One request would have been all right—but three! Land sakes!! Straightway did Nixon hasten to the printers and order ten thousand blanks printed, of which the following is a copy:

I am in receipt of a letter from a gentleman in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, who says he hesitates about sending his dollar for membership in the Society of the Philistines because he is slightly bowlegged; and[185] not looking well in a dress suit could not attend the Annual Dinner. His case will be considered by the School of Philosophy at its next session.

A certain trifler, one Livy S. Richard, has this gentle gibe in a recent number of the Scranton Tribune: “It is a fact that Mr. Hubbard was tossed by a small Irish bull into the Irish Sea and drowned, but as all really good men go to East Aurora when they die, there is no change in his postoffice address.”

The next Annual Philistine Dinner will probably be in honor of Mr. Yone Noguchi.

Here is a true story with a moral for those who can find it: A certain teacher in the primary department of one of the Chicago public schools had a six-year-old boy in her room who seemed rather perverse and very dull. When she would talk to the class he would sit with open mouth and stare at her. Five minutes afterward he could not, or would not, repeat three words of what he had been told. She could not get him to study; and so she scolded him, had him stand on the floor, “stay after school,” and once tried whipping him. At last in despair she explained the matter to the principal. “For th’ Lord!” that gentleman exclaimed, “we can’t use the Public School funds to learn imbeciles! they should send[186] that kid to the Home for Feeble Minded.” And this was the advice sent by a big brother to the parents. The parents decided to accept the advice and they took the little boy to the Home for Feeble Minded and asked that he be received as an inmate.

The matron took the child on her lap, talked to him, read to him and showed him pictures. Then she said to the parents, “This boy is fully as intelligent as any of your other children, perhaps more so—but he is deaf.”

To Herbert S.:—Thanks for your well-meant letter. But the Roycroft holds no copyright on the Songs of Solomon and cannot therefore “stop that man Mosher from pirating the stuff,” as you suggest. None of Solomon’s stuff is covered by copyright.

Mr. Warner once wrote a particularly good article wherein he says, “What is wanted in this era of literature, is not writers but discriminating readers.” Mr. Warner wrote a long preachment in order to make the matter plain. Now if I were at all given to sarkastical remarks I might say something just here. As it is I’ll only hint that no one wishes Mr. Warner to cease bookmaking and become a book buyer; but if Mr. Warner should cease to write and begin to read, why then I hope he’ll buy and read my books—no one need prove they are good, I acknowledge it myself. Catalogue on application.

[187]

After all, there surely are too many people writing. I think I will draw up a list, the first rainy day, of the fellows who I think should quit. I’ll publish the names and if the rogues don’t stop perhaps there is a way to make ’em; there used to be.

No mistake, Chimmie played a good game of ball. Then he could shout, too. I believe he is the only man who ever thoroughly rattled the Scranton pitcher. For this and other things his salary was raised; fame came to him and invitations, dainty and perfumed, fluttered his way by every mail. He was even invited to a Progressive Euchre at the Smythe’s on the Avenue. Now every one knows that Miss Mame Smythe is not only artistic but bookish, besides she elocutes beautiful.

“And did you accept the invitation?” I asked Chimmie, who was telling me the tale.

“Did I go? Well dats wot I did—see!”

“And I suppose you had a good time?”

“I didn’t say dat. Miss Mame she sent ’em in too hot. I couldn’t ezackly get on to her curves—see?”

“What did she say to you?”

“Well, one thing she said was, ‘Mister Fadden, which do you prefer, art or letters?’”

“Yes; and what did you say?”

“Wot t’ell could I say?”

[188]

Literary aspirants in want of Homeric laurel trees (laurus nobilis) should apply at the Philistine Nurseries, East Aurora, N. Y.

“What is your religious creed?” asked the interviewer of Miss Amy Leslie.

“I believe in the Nebular Hypothesis and a Tariff for Revenue only,” was the somewhat ambiguous reply.

A celebrated Russian Princess has just dashed off a “pot boiler.” It appears in the last number of Bloxam’s. This fact in itself is of no importance. What impresses one is the frigid accuracy in description. The intelligent reader is introduced to a locomotive engine (whose name, by the way, is Zenobia and furnishes the title of the soup procurer) having eight-foot driving wheels. The headlight shines upon and irradiates the steam thrown off when in motion, to accomplish which feat the engine must advance backward. The stomach of this unique colossus is innocently ignorant of coal, being fed with logs and having a preference for chestnut timber; and its grinding genius, the hero, is engineer and fireman combined.

It is only just to remark that had the engine been fed with coal there would have been no romance to chronicle. Verily fiction is stranger than truth.

[189]

Dr. MacDonald, the Nordau of America, has favored me with a copy of his book, Abnormal Woman. The learned doctor cites a hundred cases of “females” whose acquaintanceship he made through “personals.” In pursuing his subject he pursued many women and some of the women pursued him; and his argument is, that the fact of these women having had anything to do with him proves their abnormality. Motion granted without prejudice or costs.

Who is it should quit writing things to print? I once asked Clangingharp. “Oh the others, the others, the others,” was the answer.

When literary men are invited to dine they are expected to exhale wisdom at every pore. Thackeray said of a certain lion-hunter: “Should she invite Blondin to lunch, a wire would be stretched across the street and the great man would be expected to sip his tea in midair: did he not do this all the guests would consider themselves victimized.”

I belong to no party, to no school, to no sect. And yet I belong to each; and all belongs to me, for I accept the good in all things. When anything that seems to savor of spite escapes from my ink bottle I am as innocent of vengeful intent as were the simple, swaying reeds that bending before the breeze[190] sighed, “Midas, the king has asses ears.” Now the reeds really never voiced any such sentiment, but Midas mindful that he had asses ears thought they did; for any man having asses ears continually considers himself assailed.

There is a man in East Aurora who strictly “observes” the Seventh Day; and being very pious, and there existing considerable doubt as to which is the Seventh Day, he also rests all the week.

“Ah, he must be a queer man!” I said to the woman in the railroad carriage who insisted on complaining to me of her husband.

“Queer! he’s worse nor that—he’s a wolf in a medicated Jaeger combination suit.”

In a late issue of the Chap Book is the following poem:

How much lovelier it would have been to us all if we could not remember a poem strangely similar—written at least six years ago by Mrs. Pratt, which ran:

[191]

There is nothing half so funny in the joke books as the column in the Serious Family magazines devoted to conduct, which, according to Edwin Arnold, is three-fourths of life—that is, such life as some people have to be content with. There is a delightful humor in the absolution doled out at 25 cents a month, or whatever it is for subscription, to young people and widows and others who want to marry, or don’t, or would like to wear white at a second marriage, or be wedded within six months after a parent’s death, or eat ice cream with a spoon, or take some other liberty with the eternal unfitness of things which is called good manners. The column is usually run a la chaperon—by a lady of middle age plus, and not so pretty as to be in any sort of doubt about the attention she receives. Impartiality is thus secured. She knows the grapes are acid, and can give due warning of cramps and Sun mixture. She also knows the combinations of mauve and other soft tints that best moderate the advertised pangs of widowhood or other consolable conditions. She can tell to a dot how long children must wear deep black and[192] what is the approved cut of mourning garments for first, second and third bereavements and grass ditto. Particulars adapted to all cases may be had in all the journals for ladies and ladies’ ladies published in Philadelphia, which put out their leaves like the original tree of life twelve times a year, with red and yellow covers for Christmas.

I am informed that the death of The New Bohemian was caused by slipping off the gang plank into the Irish Sea. The literary gang plank is very slippery and the Irish Sea is not yet full. Keep your eye on our Obituary Column.

Often I am seized with a desire to buy a ticket to New York by the Empire State Express and become a Great Man. And I think I would ha’ done this long ago had I not once seen Frank Stockton eating green corn off from the cob.

“Why should not America have an Academy of Immortals?” asks Mr. Oscar Fay Adams. Bless you! it has. Any person properly vouched for remitting One Dollar to The Society of the Philistines, East Aurora, N. Y., will be duly enrolled.

Advertisement.—A little before Christmas time “The Roycroft” will issue a dainty little book in red and black, on Japan paper, by Yone Noguchi, pupil and companion of Joaquin Miller.

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A STORY IN VERSE GLYNNE’S WIFE, BY JULIA DITTO YOUNG, AUTHOR OF “Thistle Down,” “Adrift: a Story of Niagara,” etc. Mrs. Young is a poet who has written much but published little. This, her latest and believed by her friends to be her best work, is the product of a mind and heart singularly gifted by Nature, and ripened by a long apprenticeship to Art. As a specimen of the pure “lyric cry,” illustrating the melody possible in the English tongue, the volume seems to stand alone among all the books written by modern versifiers. Five hundred and ninety copies are being printed on smooth Holland hand-made paper, and twenty-five on Tokio Vellum paper. Bound in boards and antique silk; the Vellum copies will have on various pages special water-color designs done by the hand of the author. Every copy will be numbered and signed by Mrs. Young. Price on Holland paper, $2.00; Vellum, $5.00.

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