The Garter
Consider the garter. It toileth not; neither doth it sin. It stretcheth far, yet giveth not. When comes night it relaxeth, yet morn finds it willing and ready, yea, happy to take, up its appointed task. It hath no visible means of support; it upholds its end and other things; it is the tie that binds. Without it our lives would indeed be loose lived. It enters far into the career of woman, yet, blows no horn about it. It hideth modestly. Once off the shelf of a blatant shop it retireth for life and man sees it no more.
* * *
All the world knocks a knocker.
Questions and Answers
Dear Captain Billy—I am writing a scenario on army life. Could you suggest an appropriate title?—Amy Tour.
How about: “Rumors From the Seventh Pew.” All soldiers will appreciate it, I am sure, and especially the Pugetites from Seattle who live on the Sound.
* * *
Dear Captain Bill—A friend and myself have an argument and we wish you to settle it. Where hangs the sign: “Don’t leave your seat until the machinery stops running”?—Sultan of Kokomo.
Well, your sultanic majesty, the only place I recall having seen such a sign was on a merry-go-round, but it might also have appeared on our Robbinsdale trolley.
* * *
Dear Captain Billy—How can I become adept in the shimmy dance?—Flora Daw.
Walk fast; stop quick. Continue this motion.
* * *
Dear Captain Billy—Why do girls roll their stockings?—Noah Count.
Because they are afraid the teddy bears will chew the tops off of them.
* * *
Dear Uncle Billy—While sitting in front of a bath house at Hot Springs I fell asleep and soon found myself swinging in a hammock in a shaded nook of the dells of Wisconsin. Nearby sat a young lady magnificently gowned in a low neck and short skirt creation, with her feet on a sugar barrel reading to me from the Whiz Bang. In the distance came a short, fat man carrying two bottles of Hamm’s Export just off the ice. I was about to reach for a bottle when the heavy hand of Friend Mac touched me on the shoulder and awakened me. What I want to know is, what should I do to Mac for shaking me out of my dream before the climax.—Ham Spear.
Your story reminds me of some of my dreams in the Islands, when someone would always awaken me before the Colonel had time to hand me the discharge papers I was dreaming about. I would suggest you pour hot water on Mac next time he slumbers. He will then dream of entering the gates of hell.
* * *
Dear Skipper—I’m in love with a fat girl and she insists on sitting on my lap. Advice, please.—Kennett B. Goode.
Suggest that you place an ironing board over the arms of a chair. You could then hold her on your lap indefinitely and not get tired.
* * *
Dear Skipper Bill—Can you give me the name of a rare and almost extinct bird?—School Johnnie.
Old Crow.
* * *
Dear Skipper Billy—Give me a definition of falling in love which “in the spring turns a young man’s fancy,” etc.—Bob Wire.
Love is a feeling that you feel when you feel you’re going to feel a feeling that you’ve never felt before.
* * *
Dear Captain Billy—What is a Whiffem Poof?—Geo. Logical.
A Whiffem Poof, Geo., is a small fish that swims backward to keep the water from running into its eyes.
* * *
Dear Captain Billy—Can you give us a new phrase or word to describe the bedroom movies in which ladies are shown in the filmy robes du nuit, etc.—Screen Hound.
How would it be to call such pictures “Filmies”?
* * *
Dear Captain Billy—Would you recommend walking on an empty stomach as an aid to digestion?—Horace D’Oevers.
Walking on an empty stomach is excellent for indigestion, but be careful who you walk on.
* * *
Dear Skipper Billy—What is your idea of the height of imagination?—Ross Field.
To sit on a cake of ice and have someone throw limburger cheese in your face and imagine you are having a sleigh ride.
* * *
Dear Bill—Who was the best known enlisted man in the United States army?—Count Lehman.
Joe Latrine.
* * *
Dear W. B. Bill—I’m a bashful young man. How can I have a girl?—Busch Wah.
Wiser men than I have puzzled over this question and never found a solution. However, I don’t see why you want one.
* * *
Dear Captain Bill—Who is it that attracts all the town girls to the depot, and who always suspects the playing card manufacturers, and who causes the farmer to load his shotgun?—Watt Hoe.
Traveling Men, of course, God bless ’em.
* * *
Dear Skipper—What is considered the safest place on a battleship?—Otto Know.
I believe if I were a sailor during an engagement that I might find it necessary to seek the seclusiveness of “the head.”
* * *
Dear Captain Bill—Will you please tell me what is a Nymph?—Farmer Boy.
A Nymph, my boy, is a hasher with a good form who gets a job in a bathing girls’ show exhibiting her Prowess.
* * *
Democratic as he is, even the bootlegger treats his friend, the cop, from the bottle reserved “For Officers Only.”
Limber Kicks
Of sweethearts she has quite a few,
They come from near and far;
But the sailor who comes there each night
She calls her evening’s tar.
* * *
“Won’t you step into the parlor?”
Said the spider to the fly.
“You bet your life I’ll not,” she said.
And winked her other eye.
“You must think I’m easy,
And that you are very sly,
No knock-out drops in mine, sir,
For I’m a Spanish fly.”
* * *
Mary had a little lamb,
A joyous, youthful mutton;
And when they played at parlor games
’Twas Mary got the butt’n.
* * *
Little Mary had a monkey
On a painted stick,
She sucked the paint all off one day,
It made poor Mary sick.
* * *
The boy sat on the moon-lit deck,
His head was in a whirl;
His eyes and mouth were full of hair,
And his arms were full of girl.
Whiz Bang Editorials
“The Bull is Mightier Than the Bullet”
“Life is a jest and all things show it; I thought so once but now I know it,” is Gay’s gloomy epitaph in Westminster Abbey. Did he receive this impression when he walked the streets of London? In his poem, “Trivia,” he tells us how to walk the streets, what to wear, the good people to address, the industrious ones to encourage, and the bad folks to pass by.
Poe, in his “Man in the Crowd,” writes of the mass of people, and of beggar, tramp and peddler; of the modest, pretty girl; of the women of the town like the statue in Lucian “with a surface of Parian marble and with interior filled with filth”; and of a man who walked all the crowded streets of London to get away from himself.
De Quincy visits the Strand and says: “There one feels like a single wave in the total Atlantic—like one plant in the forest of America.” The loneliness of his heart oppresses him among the crowd of unending faces which have no friendly word for him, and he stands “among hurrying figures of men weaving to and fro, seeming like a masque of maniacs or a pageant of phantoms.”
Stand on the corners, walk the streets of our own big cities, the capitals of the Old World, or far-away countries, and behold the extremes of work and idleness, vice and virtue, sickness and health, innocent mirth and mad amusement. The people follow each other like the waves of a storm-tossed sea, and long after you have returned to your room their walking, talking, laughing and crying comes to you like the sad moan of the sea trying to be at peace.
Nature is the place to study God in the book of field, mountain and ocean. City streets are the place to study man in the sham, struggle and sin of life.
In the afternoon and evening, work gives way to play. All classes meet and mingle on the street; silk and cotton, glove and hard hand, auto and carriage, revel in a democracy of delight. It is as necessary and natural to play as to work, and we must have rest, recreation and rejoicing.
At night good people say an early “Good night,” read their Bible, pray, put out the light, and snore. The Devil begins just then to light his red lamp and lead his votaries into paths that too often end in disease of body, darkness of mind, and death of soul. Next morning high society may hush up the disgrace and infamy, but guilty hearts know their own bitterness and that evening’s comedy has turned to morning’s tragedy.
Cities resemble a Demon’s brain, and the women of the night are its evil thoughts. There are too many wantons with powdered face, brazen look and leering laughter; too many giddy girls with bare necks and shoulders, abbreviated skirts and hobbled feet walking the streets.
If there were no girls,—but there are more girls than boys, and necessarily for wives and mothers to fill the vacancies caused by war, vice and death. If there were no streets,—but streets are essential as arteries of commerce, avenues of friendly meeting and public parade.
Morning, noon and night we walk the street and see dishonesty, impurity, poverty and disease,—old and young jostling each other in seeming joy; but their tell-tale faces speak of a heart with a secret grave of shame, where they fear they may stumble over a ghastly grinning skull that will mock their joy.
It will take more than Art Galleries, Symphony Concerts, Parks, Vice Commissions and Grand Jury reports to make the streets of city life clean and its boys and girls good citizens. The cure for sin is not a piece of court-plaster to cover over wrong, but the Gospel of hand, head and heart that trains a child’s soul, mind and will in the way he should go so that when he is old his steps will not depart from it.
* * *
The merits and demerits of prohibition and the lawful consumption of the grand old hootch of the good old days have been subject to warm debates as far back as history can be traced. Here’s one from Hollinshed’s Chronicles of 1577:
We distinguisheth three sortes thereof—Simplex, Composita, Perfectissima—Beying Moderately taken, sayeth he, it sloweth age, it strengthen youth; it helpeth digestion; it cutteth fleume; it abandoneth melancholie; it relisheth the taste; it lighteneth the mynd; it quickeneth the spirites; it cureth the hydropsie; it healeth the strangury; it pounceth the stone; it repelleth gravel; it puffeth away ventositie; it kepyth and preserveth the bed from whyrlyng, the eyes from dazelyng, the tongue from lispyng, the mouth from snafflyng, the teethe from chatteryng, the throte from ratlyng, the reason from stieflyng, the stomach from womblyng, the harte from swellyng, the bellie from wirtchyng, the guts from rumblyng, the hands from shiveryng, the sinoews from shrinkyng, the veynes from crumplyng, the bones from akyng, the marrow from soakyng—and trulie it is a sovereign liquor if it be orderlie taken.
Sir Walter Scott brought out the point that prohibition is as intemperate as drunkenness, when he wrote:
“Know, foolish Saracen,” replied the Christian without hesitation, “that thou blasphemest the gifts of God....
“The juice of the grape is given to him that will use it wisely, as that which cheers the heart of man after toil, refreshes him in sickness and comforts him in sorrow. He who so enjoyeth it may thank God for His wine cup as for His daily bread; and he who abuseth the gift of Heaven is not a greater fool in his intoxication than thou in thine abstinence.”
* * *
Literary criticism is prone to make a great deal of bother about something that nobody cares two pins for, but sometimes, after the fabric of discussion has been thoroughly masticated, literary criticism does come down to bed rock and agree on one point which is incontrovertible. Among the subjects in which there is at present a universal agreement is the declaration that the American short story is the highest in perfection of any form of fiction that is put out in the world. Even the French, artists as they are, must take a back seat when it comes to the writing of tales that are brief and effective.
It was the coruscating Ouida who emphasized the fact that flowers of the most exquisite beauty have their origin in the backyard heaps—wonderful passion blossoms bloom gorgeously in surroundings that are the worst. The connection has never been established, but the coincidence is indisputable, that the vaunted American short story, so clean morally and so harmless that the most modest virgin may read it without fear of being corrupted, is modeled upon the naughty story, conspicuously American in its construction, which would paralyze with horror any virgin who should happen to lend to its recital an attentive ear.
If one could but divest himself of his moral pulchritude, what paeans of praise would be poured forth in honor of that sinful and abhorrent thing, the naughty story! It is so brilliant, so forceful, so perfectly filed down and sharpened and polished until its edge is like the edge of a Damascus blade and its point is finer than a needle’s! Instinctively the teller of such a tale flings aside every detail which is not absolutely essential to the narrative. There is not a word too much. There is not a trace of description which, could be dispensed with. All—all is sacrificed to the exigency of brevity and to the final effect.
* * *