Bobby Jonks; His Hand and Pen
Man is an animal, but you can easily detect him from the rest of them when he has his hat on. He is of few days and full of things that the doctors cut out if they get half a chance. My Uncle Bob is a bachelor. A bachelor is a man who smokes in bed and burns himself up every once in a while and goes to glory a-hollerin’, while everybody else says “Oh, pshaw!” and “Did you ever?”
All bachelors are wise, but my Uncle Bob knows ’most everything; he says he believes he’d be in Congress right now if it wasn’t for his modesty—no, honesty. But, says he, there is one thing he never could fully make up his mind about, and that is whether clam-digging is fishing or agriculture. A hog is a quadruped; the love of money is the root of all evil—thus we see why the motto of a rich man so often is “Root hog or die!” A man is either a biped or a cripple, according to whether he has messed around in a sawmill or not. The difference between a biped and a quadruped is two legs. A three-legged stool is a tripod, and is mostly used by country editors. A turtle is a quadruped, but he can’t climb a tree and get off a good joke about making a noise like a nut. Neither can some people.
On the only three occasions in a man’s history when he cuts any particular mustard he is called “it”—when he is a baby, a bridegroom and a corpse. And in all three instances he is said by his admiring friends to look real natural. Man was made to mourn, but Uncle Bob says the dad-dogged fool always thinks he can get out of it by marrying again. A woman may be as handsome as a circus horse but she is never satisfied to let another woman be handsome, too. It’s different altogether with a hog—he is perfectly contented to let everybody else be hogs if they want to. Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?
Assessment Insurance
A HOMILY ON THE ROYAL ARCANUM
BY MICHAEL MORONEY
There is no real or true life insurance but the straight old line regular life, where the policy is payable only at death. Term life insurance, so called, is simply banking for the benefit of the company which takes the risk. In regular life insurance the insured has a certain expectancy at the time of taking out the policy. Payment for the amount he is to receive at death is spread out over his expectancy, less four per centum interest compounded, and he pays it in annual, semi-annual, or quarterly installments, as may be agreed upon. If he lives out his expectancy, he will have paid in all he is to receive at death, either directly, or by the interest carried on his premiums. Of course there is a certain amount of loading in the premiums he pays, but for the purposes of our illustration, that need not be considered. In this plan, the policy holder is really insuring himself, and when he dies his beneficiary, or estate, simply receives back the money he has paid in. The fact that there are so many life insurance companies and that they have become so wealthy and powerful, illustrates the power of interest, especially when it is compounded.
The Royal Arcanum professes to give life insurance at actual cost, which it does not and never did. It was organized from the top down. Fifteen persons met in Boston on June 23, 1877, and constituted themselves the Supreme Council. Twelve of them became officers, and three were incorporators simply. This body reserved to itself all the power of legislation and of receiving and paying out the moneys of the order. Provisions were made for the organization of subordinate and grand councils of the order, but they were simply wards of the Supreme Council. Members were received on medical examinations from 21 to 55 years of age and paid for $3,000 insurance, one dollar at 21 years, and up to four dollars at 55 years. The rise from year to year was from 4 to 20 cents. The assessments were to be paid when called for, after the death of a member. The order grew and prospered from year to year until 1898, when the management thought it saw the necessity of increasing the rates. It made 21 at the rate of $1.76 and 54 rate of $7.00. The rise each year was from 6 to 44 cents. At this time the order had 195,105 members, and the loss in membership in the order in the next six months was about 10,000.
However the order continued to prosper until after the annual meeting of the Supreme Council in 1905, when it adopted a new table of rates, which began at $1.89 at 21 and rose to $16.08 at 65, but from Oct. 1, 1905, all the members were to be assessed at attained ages, whereas before that all had been assessed at entrance ages. In other words, on Oct. 1, 1905, each old member was required to reënter the order as a new member, and pay at attained ages. New members after that date were to pay at entrance ages, but all were to pay $16.08 per month on $3,000 when they reached 65 years. At the time of the making of this new rate the order had over 300,000 members. Since then it has lost 50,000 members, and a majority of its members are opposed to the new rates.
There was no occasion for the new rates, as, under the laws of the order, additional assessments could have been made, at any time, to provide for excessive mortality, and the order could have been worked out on additional assessments until it failed, as it is bound to do.
An organization within the order has been formed to contest the new rates, and this has brought a suit in the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts to have them declared invalid. The protestants claim that when each member entered the order he made a contract to pay assessments at age entrance, and that while the Supreme Council may call extra assessments, as mortality may require, it cannot increase the rates, or compel members to pay at attained ages. Also that the new rates are unreasonable and will create a surplus of $3,700,000 every year, which is contrary to the laws of the order and of the State of Massachusetts. The Supreme Council claims that each member when he entered the order surrendered all his rights to protest or object to any action of that body and agreed in advance to approve any action which it might take in regard to rates.
All of the old life insurance policies of every kind and character are based on contract, and it was supposed that the rates at entrance in a fraternal order constituted a contract between the member and the supreme body of the order. Many of the courts of the several states have so held, but it was for the Supreme Council of the Royal Arcanum to defy reason and common sense and to claim that they were the autocrats of the order. All insurance should be like a deposit in a savings bank, that can hardly be lost. The Royal Arcanum, however, has depended upon lapses. Thirty-five is the age usually taken for illustration in insurance. At that age the average of lapses per 1,000 lives is 37 per cent plus. In May, 1905, there were 305,083 members in the order. That would mean that out of 305,083 members if all were of the age of 36, in any year, 111,000 would lapse. The average policy in the Royal Arcanum is $2,231.67 and out of that there would be lost by lapse, $826.70. If all the members were 36 years of age, on the whole $680,848,000 insurance in force there would be lost by lapse, at thirty-six years, $251,923,760 annually. Now in honest insurance there should be no lapses or forfeitures and in the insurance of the future there will be nothing of the kind. But on this plan, no matter how long one has paid, or how much he has paid in, if he stops paying, he loses all. Misfortune or accident may compel him to stop paying, but no matter what may be the cause, he loses, and other persons dying quickly have had the benefit of the money he has paid in. A member who entered in 1879 at the age of 36 will have paid in on September 1, 1905, about $800, or $30.72 per year. A person insured at the sum of $3,000 would have to live to the age of 133 to pay that sum out at the rate for the first 26 years. But assume the insured has paid $800 to October 1, 1905, and remains in the order. He pays $97.20 the first year of the new rates, $103.68 the second year and $192.96 the third year and the same sum each year thereafter. His expectancy is 12.81 years at 63. If he lives out his expectancy, he will have paid into the order, $3,277.12, or $277.12 more than he will receive. But suppose he should live till 85 years of age, he will by that age pay in $5,205.72, or about $2,205.75 more than he can draw out.
Will any man join an order of that kind where he shall forfeit all by the failure to make a single payment? So long as he can get into a company which will give him paid-up insurance, extended insurance, or a cash-surrender value, he will not.
Every man insured in a fraternal association is in the condition of Damocles. The sword suspended over his head is likely to drop at any time. The moment confidence is lost the whole matter dissolves like a rope of sand, and the insurance is gone. Suppose the Royal Arcanum had ceased to do business on June 1, 1905, $680,648,000 of its insurance would have terminated at that time, which would have been a loss of about $2,231.67 to each member. That is, 305,083 persons would have lost $2,231.67 insurance each. These same persons and their predecessors had paid in $97,004,175.82 of which $94,790,627.86 had been paid out on death losses. Since the new rates have been published the order has lost 50,000 members carrying $111,583,500 insurance. Of the sum paid in, $36,090,650 has been paid in by men who have dropped out and the balance of loss is to be paid by the survivors. Thus it is ever with assessment companies. They must and will fail as soon as it is demonstrated that the adopted rates will not carry any organization for a generation. The new rates of the Royal Arcanum have simply demonstrated the utter worthlessness of assessment companies, and the value of regular life insurance where each policy holder contributes a fund to pay his own policy.
The Royal Arcanum is no better than a suicide club, for it is only the suicides and the weaklings who can have any benefit of the order. The new rates require the members to pay greater sums in premiums than in old line companies, and at the same time the company insists upon the old and exploded system of forfeitures, refuses any paid up or extended insurance, and any cash-surrender values. Who will sit down to a feast of this character? No one but an old member who has paid in too much to stop, and no new man will join the order. The whole scheme of the new rates was to drive the old members out so that the order would not be compelled to pay their death losses. The order is an autocracy. There are twelve life members in the Supreme Council who represent no one but themselves. Three of these are original charterers and nine are Supreme Past Regents. There are twenty-nine officers, who as such are members of the Supreme Council. These thirty-eight by the aid of twenty representatives can control the Supreme Council, and there is added a new life member every two years in a new Supreme Past Regent. No one should be a member of the Supreme Council but some one who represents a constituency. Yet John Haskell Butler, of 244 Washington Street, Boston, Mass., controls the entire Supreme body. In this he is ably supported by W. O. Robson, Supreme Secretary. How these two gentlemen of eminent talent could be imposed on in the adoption of the new rate, which in the case of the old member who entered at thirty-six years, compels him to pay a surcharge of $64.18 per annum more than necessary to carry his risk, or in his expectancy a total of $1,226.98 more than he should pay, or 70 per centum more than his equitable share, is more than we can understand.
The average of the surcharge on all the old members is 67 per centum, and is 27 per centum higher than the new members pay. Naturally, if the membership could be held together, these new rates would create and pile up a surplus, or excess, of $3,700,000 per year over any sum that the laws of Massachusetts permit the society to hold, which at the present time is about $30,000,000.
However, the society has never attempted to create any surplus or reserve over and above about $2,000,000, nearly equal to the proceeds of three assessments. What kind of financing is this which at one fell stroke burdens the members with paying sums which will produce $3,700,000 per year after paying over all mortuary calls? Heretofore the order has preached for twenty-eight years that the surplus remains in the pockets of its members and shall so remain. Now it is to be created and placed in the control of Mr. Butler and his one hundred and fourteen associates who are souls with a single thought. And what for? What kind of actuaries did the Supreme Council employ to make these new rates that such a result is brought about and that the policy of twenty-eight years is reversed at a single session, without any notice to the members? The members of the Royal Arcanum, the men who pay the money disbursed by Mr. Butler and his associates, have no voice in proposing any new legislation for the order, nor in approving or rejecting any enacted by the Supreme Council. They must pay whatever the one hundred and fifteen guardians ask of them or get out of the order.
The $3,700,000 surplus exacted the first year, under the new rates, is not to be used for paid-up or extended insurance or cash-surrender values, but is simply to be kept on hand as a reserve. The reserve, which has heretofore been carried in the pockets of the members, is now to be transferred to the pockets of the Supreme Council. Why are the members of the order, who have carried their insurance at great sacrifices, to have an additional burden placed on them? Why must this great reserve be created unless for the same reasons it was created in the three great companies in New York City? What is the object of creating a reserve when there is no paid-up or extended insurance and no cash-surrender to be made, and when assessments are required to be called for as needed to pay death losses? Why should any assessment company have a reserve beyond a few assessments ahead? What kind of actuaries did the Supreme Council have to make tables to produce such results? What fit guardians of 250,000 people are the one hundred and fifteen members of the Supreme Council who would adopt a table of rates producing such results? The control of the funds must have driven these one hundred and fifteen people mad to have produced tables which will so work. Would it not have been better to have called extra assessments from time to time under the authority of the laws of the order and of the State of Massachusetts, until the order was compelled to fail, than to have adopted the new rates, which are more expensive than old-line insurance and which if approved in the legal contest now pending will insure the failure of the order at once?
The only true assessment insurance is to pay the death losses as they occur, by assessments, and which must include a fund for management and control. When the assessments become too great the company dissolves and that is the end of it. All those who have not died during its existence, or who have lapsed in the same time, have lost their bets, and those who have died have won.
I am not able to give the number who have been members of the order since its origin. It could not have been more than 400,000. Of this number 35,000, or one-twelfth, have died. Over 33 per cent., or 133,333, have lapsed, and if the institution fails, as it certainly will, 367,000 have lost every dollar they have put in, in order that 35,000, or one in twelve, might draw prizes.
Such institutions are contrary to public policy and should be suppressed. Each state insurance department should require such statistics as will show all the facts any one might wish to know.
If I had the exact statistics, I am satisfied the proportion of those who pay in and lose would be much higher than I gave it.
The laws of political economy must be evolved just as we evolve those of nature, and they are as certain when we know them, but any institution which requires a party to live beyond his expectancy in order to pay in the amount of his benefit certificate is a fraud. At 21 a man’s expectancy is 45 years. Now a man at 21 who entered the order June 23, 1874, would have paid in to December 31, 1905, $404. It would take him over 166 years to pay in the $3,000 at the same rate. As he can never do that, his death loss must be paid by some one else, and consequently his insurance by others is a fraud and a gambling transaction.
As eleven persons must contribute to pay the loss of the twelve and then lose everything themselves, the whole scheme is an imposition contrary to the interest of society. Eleven men contribute and lose $250 each that one man’s beneficiary may gain $3,000, and these eleven men lose every dollar they put in. After twenty-eight years of preaching to the public that they had found the El Dorado of Insurance, that they were furnishing insurance at cost and that the members carried the reserve in their pockets, Messrs. Butler, Robson & Company now come to the front and admit that all this time their scheme has been a fake and a failure. They say the unclean spirit departed from them in May last, but I think he returned to them with seven others worse and they have turned the Arcanum into a madhouse.
I do not have the personal acquaintance of all the seven, but two of them might be called Landis and Barnard, because the condition of the Arcanum is worse than before. Now every member must pay in his $3,000 in the period of his expectancy, and if he lives beyond it he must pay till he dies. The new rates indicate that members must die before reaching 65 years, and if they decline, then they must be fined $192.96 per annum for their refusal to do so.
Any man who enters the order now, in view of what he must submit to at and after the age of 65, ought to have his sanity inquired into. It is high time the State should intervene and protect the public from the schemes of these fraternal orders. The fraternity is humbug, and for every loss paid there are many more losses to society from which it should be protected. The correct scheme of insurance has not yet been discovered or announced, but when it is it will not be gambling or commercialism, but will be simply indemnity—which it should have been from the start.
THE PEOPLE
BY JOHN P. SJOLANDER.
It is well with the world, my masters,
It is well with the world and you,
When we move along with a smile and song,
’Mid the tasks we are set to do.
And the song and the smile of the People
Should be ever your compass and chart.
Oh! ’tis well with you when the song rings true
That comes from the People’s heart.
It is ill with the world, my masters,
It is ill for the world and you,
When our eyes look down, and our faces frown,
’Mid the tasks we are set to do.
Beware of the frown of the People,
Lest their wrath and their patience part!
Oh! let not a wrong ever burden the song
That comes from the People’s heart.
Back To Nature—Part The Way
BY EUGENE WOOD.
About once in every so often, we, as a race, all lay back our heads, shut our eyes, and let out the shuddering shriek: “Back to Nature!” It is so loud and heart-felt a cry that it makes you wonder why we have to go back at all—why we didn’t stay there. If the Get-Strong-Quick professors are right, this thing of our wearing clothes, and dwelling in houses, and eating dainty cooked food three times a day is sheer tom-foolishness, all the more tom-foolish in that once we led the healthy, happy life that inevitably results from fasting three or four days in the week, then dining on goobers and timothy hay; wearing nothing but a nose-ring and a dash of paint, and sleeping in the hollow trees.
For most of us, “Back to Nature” is too long a road to travel—all the way. Nevertheless, the cry is so loud, and so general throughout the civilized world that we cannot dismiss it as impracticable and meaningless. It betokens something. I think I know what, and if it didn’t look so much like serious thinking for you and me, I’d write out what I think it means. I’ll say this, though: If we judge the future by the past this universal impulse to touch the naked earth once more, and so to gather strength and vigor from it, means that the world is pregnant with a great event, and we must be fortified for the labor-pains of it. A new age is struggling to be born. Mark my words.
The timid venture, on the way back to Nature, of a two-weeks’ sitting on the front stoop of a boarding house in the mountains or at the seashore does not satisfy us now. Bold and daring spirits have even gone to live in the wild woods, and have come back to tell us it was bully. We all know it is great fun to play at being boys again, but for most of us the problem is complicated by our having wives and daughters whom we cannot well put in cold storage during our absence. I know that under the pressure of the need to go back to Nature some have even taken the women with them. I—I—I don’t know about that. It doesn’t look very alluring to me. Mind you, I don’t know a thing about living in the wilderness except what I have read and heard, but as near as I can come to it, there seems to be considerable packing to be done. There’s the canoe in the first place. If I were thinking of going into the woods, I shouldn’t stir a stump unless I had a canoe. But you take one fifteen or eighteen feet long, and carry it about three miles through thick-set timber, and I should say along about the last half of the third mile you’d begin to notice it. You’d have to have some kind of a tent, and even when they’re made of silk, I should think they would make something of a bundle. You’d want your gun and ammunition; you’d want your fishing tackle; you’d need a small ax; you’d have to carry a coffee-pot, a frying-pan, a deep pot, a plate, a knife and fork and cup; you’d need at least one blanket and a rubber sheet of some kind; you’d need to pack your bacon and your flour, and erbswurst, and matches, and quinine, and morphine, and rags for bandages in case—you know—and saccharine, and whisky if there are snakes around, and—oh, yes, tobacco; don’t let me forget tobacco—and, oh, I don’t know what all. No women’s fixings in this partial list, you see. I don’t know. I knew a man that took his wife along with him to the woods—but then, don’t you see, it was on their honeymoon. Oh my! It makes all the difference in the world when you’ve been married ten or fifteen years. Yes, I should say so.
I once read a most fascinating series of articles by a woman who had this delightful experience. The intention was to chirrup: “Come on, girls! It’s perfectly elegant!” But she didn’t fool me. I could see that whenever there was anything that was arduous, or tedious, or mussy in the housekeeping line “the gentlemen of the party eagerly volunteered.” Yes. M—hm. I can just see ’em. Mind you, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that a woman in the woods is a darn nuisance. No indeed. Only—Well, I tell you. Her husband may be eager to play Injun, but I don’t believe she would be very keen to play squaw. That is, and “tote fair.”
There is this in favor of taking ’em along: Not every man can cook. I know that out there in the forest, when you make camp as the shadows lengthen after a long day’s tramp, when every muscle aches, but aches with glad fatigue; after a day in which your lungs have drunk in the pure air thinly fragrant with the vague odors that the glazed leaves distill, as it were offering incense to the god of day; when you have quenched your thirst from a spring in the bottom of whose earthen bowl the sands are reeling and staggering in the delirium of glee; when you have hearkened to the wild beauty of some unknown bird-call echoing through the lofty Gothic aisles; when the western sky flames into undreamed-of glories and then fades away until the lonely stars come out, I know they say that you can choke down any old mess and relish it. Maybe so. I am as good a hand at eating pancakes as anybody else, but I don’t know about them for every meal and every day; bacon is my favorite vegetable, but there comes a time; fish once a week is all I care for. No. It doesn’t seem alluring to me.
They tell me hemlock boughs make a fine mattress. Yes? I know where I can get better for less money. They tell me that sleeping on the ground with the high sky for a ceiling is simply great. If it comes to that, I have slept on the ground, and the morning after I knew exactly where my hips and shoulders were. I don’t mind granddaddy long-legs tracking over my face. They’re kind of interesting. But I have never been able to put away the thought that if it should turn chilly in the night, and some snake should come and crawl in bed with me, and smuggle his cool slimy body down my back, it would probably break my rest. I shouldn’t fancy it, I’m positive.
I tell you. I compromised the matter thus last summer. I got back to Nature—part the way. Not so far though as to get out of touch with the milkman. I had things cooked to suit me; I slept high and dry upon a Christian bed, and yet I wasn’t indoors a minute of the time the whole enduring summer. And I’m never going to be another summer under a wooden roof if I know how to help it. I’ll tell you about it if you like.
There were five of us that wanted to live in the outdoor air for twenty-four hours out of every twenty-four. There was the Honest Man who went to gainful business every day; there was the Lazy Man who didn’t do one tap the summer long, though often besought to do so, who now takes his pen in hand to drop you these few lines; there was the Honest Man’s wife; and there were the Lazy Man’s Wife, and his growing Daughter.
The Honest Man already had in stock a 12 × 14 tent, and a small A-tent. The Lazy Man bought a 10 × 12 tent for himself and wife, and the next size smaller for his daughter. Each family brought bed-clothing and personal apparel. (It was a first-rate opportunity to wear out old clothes.) The communal property, dishes, oil-stove, egg-beaters, and all such were paid for half-and-half. It stood the Lazy Man for outfit just $49.27 all told, and the outfit is now down cellar waiting impatiently for summer to come again, when it will be as good as new and won’t cost anything.
The summer previous, the Honest Man had gone exploring and found a spot on the Canadian shore of Lake Erie within an hour’s ride on the steamer from his business. A whopping big maple tree, thick and umbrageous, stood a hundred feet or so back from the water’s edge, on a sand slope carpeted with wild grape vines. The beach was of fine white sand, without a pebble bigger than a moth-ball, and it slanted so slowly into the water that breast-deep was fully a hundred yards from shore. This made it rather poky for the men-folks when they went in swimming, but it was ideal for the women, to whom a foot of depth is drowning depth. The lake being soft water, nobody can adequately express the joy the women had in washing their hair. This favored spot was a shade more than a mile away from the steamboat pier at which, six or eight times a day, excursion steamers unloaded revelers who sought the pallid ecstasy of a non-alcoholic pleasure resort. (It was Canada, remember, and while you might go in swimming on the Lord’s day, you could not ride upon the giddy-go-round. A district attorney from the smoky city on the American side presumed to fish on Sunday, and got sassy to the constable who said he shouldn’t. Thereupon they snaked him off to a neighboring village to the hardware store where the ’Squire kept court and fined him $20 and the costs.) We were far enough away on the long board walk to miss the transients, and by looking carefully through the trees you could just see one house from our place, the castle of our landlord. I am aware that it’s nice to be exclusive, and get away from common folks, but it’s so blamed expensive. Even millionaires when they want to make sure of getting any place have to travel with the cheap crowd. You can think that over. You will find it’s so, although I haven’t time to work it out in detail.
The Honest Man having lived on this spot the summer before, the floors were laid of boughten lumber, and the frames were up. Also, the private walks, made of such bits of board as the Good Lord had pleased to send upon the rolling waves, nailed upon saplings from the wood back of the camp, were still in place, so that there wasn’t much to do, a circumstance that grieved the Honest Man no little. He liked to be busy. The Lazy Man was patient under this affliction. He did help when there were things to do. He got the nails and handed the hatchet, and generally fetched and carried, knowing full well what are the drawbacks incident to being a heaven-gifted literary genius, such as not being of the least account about a place.
Among the triumphs of the Honest Man’s saw and hammer were the tables, prime among them being the dining-table under the same maple tree, whereon we ate our every meal from July 2 until September 3. It is fitting that in this public manner I should return thanks for our kind and considerate treatment by the weather. I can cheerfully recommend it to all and sundry. It rained at times, I won’t deny. It had to. I can see that. But I must say it was most forbearing in the matter, and rained only out of meal hours. Once or twice it was plain to see that it strained a point in our behalf, for example, that time we had to have our Sunday ice-cream in our tents, and the two or three occasions when the breakfast dishes were practically storm-washed.
This dining-table, the serving-table, the table in the cook-tent, and the china-closet—Oh my yes! We had a china-closet. It was made out of a packing box, had shelves in it, and four plank legs—these articles of furniture were covered with marbled oil-cloth, and the door of the china-closet was of the same rich material, being secured with loops and nails. The cook-tent reared its lofty A on a frame with a waist-high board-wall, lined with shelves. It was so studded with nails that for once in their lives the women were speechless of complaint that there weren’t places enough to bestow the junk without which, so it seems, life in the kitchen is insupportable.
Hard by the china-closet was the refrigerator, in whose construction, let me say, the Lazy Man bore his part. He dug the hole in the sand in which was sunk a barrel with a perforated bottom through which the melting ice drained off. The women professed they lay awake nights listening for the things piled upon the ice to topple over into smash. They had to worry about something. There wasn’t a thing else for them to do but cook, and make the beds and wash the dishes.
I suppose that cooking by a camp-fire is the extreme of picturesqueness. It is also mighty hard upon the back, to say nothing of its blinding you with smoke, and frying the grease out of your face, even after you have learned that it isn’t really necessary to have a conflagration big enough to melt the nose off the coffee-pot, but that a cupful of live coals and a tiny bunch of twigs will do the trick. You have to stand over such a fire to keep it going, and when it rains it is the deuce and all. So we had a blue-flame oil-stove with an oven, and had everything cooked in the highest style known to the art, just as it was before we started on our way back to Nature. There was just one thing the women missed. Endless hot water laid on. Their heaviest burden was to remember “the dying woman’s advice.” Don’t you know what that is? “Sally,” she whispered with her latest breath, “always put on the dish-water before you sit down to your victuals.”
But if the Lazy Man could not bring his mind to penning deathless Literatoor, he could at least tote water from the lake, so it wasn’t so bad after all.
The need of cooking was great indeed. In no spirit of carping criticism I desire to say that I have seen the Honest Man, many and many’s the time, wolf down six big potatoes at a meal and other things accordingly. We others did our feeble best, but we never quite compassed that. I did eat six ears of green corn once, but you must remember that they were right off the vines, as you might say, and you know how good green corn is when it’s fresh.
This was no lonesome wilderness wherein we had to scuffle for our food. The milkman came right after breakfast with the morning’s milk. The morning’s milk remember, not the night before’s. Then came the iceman. I want to tell you about him. I had seen him pushing the lawn-mower on a green velvet lawn before a mansion up the beach a ways. I thought he was turning an honest penny taking care of it for some one else. Bless your heart, he lived there. He had a fine big farm behind it, but it was all seeded down in grass, because the harvest of ice from the lake before him in the winter brought him more money for less work than the rich loam behind him could raise in summer crops. Then came the grocer from the village back in the country. He always brought us kerosene, sometimes he brought us groceries, and all too seldom he brought us the flat loaves of the Italian baker in the village, flat and crusty loaves, which the grocer scornfully called “dog-bread.” There was “the bearded lady” that brought us home-made bread just once—just once. Evidently she had confused the relative proportions of the yeast and flour. Then came the old man with the broken hand, talk about which shortened the day for him and us; also, his wife, a dear old soul, who sold us from time to time bouquets picked from her garden, old-fashioned flowers made up so round and hard that if a man were clouted on the head with a nosegay you’d have to take him to the hospital. There was “the bonnet lady,” a sweet-faced Dunkard in the habit of her faith. There were several whom we came to know right well, and after they began to suspect that, like as not, we weren’t as crazy as we seemed, living in tents—Did you ever hear the beat of that?—they showed they were just folks, same as anybody else. But the one I liked the best was the man that came on Saturdays to fetch us eggs and butter. I aroused his interest by telling him that where I came from they sold eggs by quarter’s worth; so many for a quarter, more when eggs were cheap, fewer when eggs were dear. Well sir, he like to never got over that. It was like the returned missionary, telling how the poor heathens live in China. He was a very conscientious man. “I’m sorry,” he would say, “but I’ve got to charge you 21 cents for them there eggs. They ain’t worth it. No eggs is worth that much, no time o’year. They ortn’t to be more’n 18 cents at any time. But the others is sellin’ ’em for 21, and I s’pose I got to, too.”
One and all, as soon as ever they could in decency get round to it, had this one question to ask: “What do you do when it rains?” They’d ask it with such a now-I-got-you look that it was funny to see how set-back they were when we made answer: “We do the same as you, we go in out of it.” But on the rebound you could notice the doubt forming itself in their minds as to whether we knew enough to do that. I’m sure they drove away thinking we were kind of be-addled in our intellects. I’ll have to own up to having asked: “What do you do when it rains?” in the beginning; and also, “What do you do when it blows?” But now I am convinced that a canvas tent well staked is equal to any weather, and I believe that if it had a red-hot stove in it, a body might be right cozy in a tent even in zero weather. I am going to preserve that conviction unshaken by never putting it to the test.
I said that the grocer from the village inland stopped. You notice that I didn’t say the butcher. He wouldn’t. You might go out and “holler” at him: “Hay! Hay there! Hay you! I want to talk to you. Hold on a second.” He never let on he heard you. I didn’t have a revolver, or I should have held him up. I did corner him once down at the Grove, and he explained to me he really could not be bothered with our money for his meat. He and his two men had all they could attend to now, what with their regular trade and the two hotels and the boardinghouses down along the beach. If he sold to private customers, he’d have to hire more help. When I suggested that he do that very thing and make more money, he smiled at me as one smiles at the foolish prattle of a child. Nup. He was awful sorry he couldn’t accommodate me, but—. And that ended it.
So for awhile, whenever we paddled down to the Grove in the canoe for the mail we stopped at the meat-shop. The Grove was where the giddy-go-round was; the razzle-dazzle air-ship, the whistle of whose tiny engine squealed like a frightened pig; the cake-and-coffee shop, the “red-hot” stand; the high-class “vawdvill,” admission ten cents, children five; the dancing floor, patronized by youth and beauty in duck jumpers and sleeves rolled high on red and peeling arms, ragged with strips of tissue-paper hide, each mouth distorted with an “all-day sucker” whose pine stem appetizingly protruded; the combination barber-shop and post-office where they were all out of two-cent stamps for weeks together, and “Joe’s.” I’ll get round to “Joe’s” in a minute if you’ll just be patient, but now I must tell you about the meat-shop. He was a fine fellow, the first butcher, much sought after when he had got into people’s confidence. There was the landlord that rented him the shop; there was the landlady where he roomed and boarded; there was the man he bought his meat of; there was the man he bought his twine and paper of; the man he borrowed $20 of and the man he borrowed $5 of—all seeking him and not finding him. He was—and then he was not. It was one of those mysterious disappearances you read about.
After he went away, we summer folks ungratefully conspired to ruin the land that sheltered us. You know there is no quicker and surer way to do that to a country than by shipping valuables into it. The more iron and steel and wool and chinaware and diamonds—all kinds of things you pay money for—the more of them are brought into a country, the poorer it gets. If it were possible to cover the ground knee-deep with all that heart could wish but brought from another country, the inhabitants would have to give right up, and everything would go to smash. Conversely a country which imports nothing is always immensely rich and prosperous. You know how that is in private life. The man that raises everything he eats; that does his own butchering, makes his own shoes, whose wife spins all the flax and wool the family needs—such a man is always well-to-do; he’s independent. While those who have to buy everything are always poor and forlorn. We all know this, but such is the depravity of the human heart, we want to buy things without asking whether they are made in our country or not. If it wasn’t for our wicked hearts prompting us to want things, we could easily keep out the foreign goods. So as to sort of even up the injury we do our country, it is arranged that whenever we thus sinfully buy foreign wares we pay a fine for it. The fine for ruining Canada by bringing in fresh meat to eat is six cents a pound. Now I want to tell you that when we had no butcher and the village butcher wouldn’t stop for us, there were people so selfish that they not only ruined Canada by bringing over fresh meat, but they smuggled it! Yes sir! Smuggled it. And King Edward needing the money so badly, with all the expense he is under.
The United States is just as up and coming, though, as Canada. Every bit. We don’t propose that our fair land shall be devastated by a flood of cheap Canadian mutton (it is most mighty good mutton; I’ll say that for it), so there is a fine on anybody that brings it over. The Beef Trust has expensive families to send to college too.
In response to popular demand, the baker consented to run the butcher-shop. If you found the place locked up, you stamped on the stoop and yelled awhile. He would come out, rolling the dough off his fingers and cut you off some meat. Sometimes, though you’d have to wait until he got those pies out.
He was as good-hearted a man as ever lived, but he caused me many a sleepless night. I’ll tell you how it was. One day I didn’t go for the meat. The Honest Man’s Wife went. She got a roast, five pounds and a quarter it was, at 18 cents a pound. The man figured on the cost. He put it down 70 cents, but that didn’t look quite right to him, so he set down a figure 1.
“Dollar seventy,” he said.
Now the Honest Man’s Wife had taught school, and was right good at ciphering.
“Would you mind,” she asked as innocent as a cat lapping milk, “would you mind figuring that out for me?”
“Sure thing, lady,” said the baker-butcher. “Five pounds and a quarter. There’s your 5¼, at 18 cents. There’s your 18. Five tums 8 is 40. Put down the aught and carry 4. Five tums one is 5, and 4 is—is—er—er—Five times 8 is 40. Put down the aught and carry—Hold on. I guess I made a mistake. Call it 97 cents.” He smiled pleasingly.
“Seven cents,” mused she. “M—, won’t you please figure out for me how one-fourth of 18 is 7?”
Well now. I had been paying for meat without ever figuring it out. Considering that with his limited arithmetical powers he was certain to make mistakes, and considering that those mistakes were equally certain to be all in his favor, can you wonder that I have tossed and tossed for hours upon a sleepless couch trying to recall the times I bought meat of him, how much it weighed and what I paid him?
I promised to speak of “Joe’s.” Behold I show you a mystery. I saw a billhead of his. His initial was M. Try my best I couldn’t make out to spell Joe with an M. Yet everybody called him Joe. I asked the Signora, his mother-in-law. She pressed her lips strongly together and wildly shook her head. “Eena Cannodda dey gotta no sensea,” she exclaimed. “Eesa nemma notta Joe. No. Eesa nemma Mike. Michaele. Seguro. Surea tinga. Cannodda mans ee say: ‘Eh Joe? Youra nemma Joe? Eh?’ Ee know dey gotta nuss sense a eena Cannodda. Ee say: ‘Sure a-tinga.’ Eesa neema notta Joe. No. Eesa nemma Mike. Michaele. Seguro. Surea tinga.”
At Joe’s you could buy all things necessary to support life from ham to hairpins, including Canadian tobacco, which needs a protective tariff if ever anything does in this world. Not because it is a weakling though. It biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder. Funny thing about that Canadian smoking tobacco. Sometimes it puts you in mind of sauerkrout, and sometimes it puts you in mind of boneset. I don’t think it is quite as bitter as boneset, though.
Shelter, and food, and water and tobacco being thus accounted for, there remains another prime necessity of life, and that is, sleep. I don’t believe there is one person in a hundred that knows the real luxury of sleep. Consider the uncounted hordes that live in terror of “night air.” Consider the more enlightened that raise their bedroom windows just a trifle, to calk them up as soon as ever it turns a little cool. But even when wide open, a bedroom with a window in it is not by any means the same thing as a tent to sleep in, a tent by the lakeside, its front all flaring open, and its sides and top working like bellowses with the breeze. We had regular wire springs and to the wooden frames we nailed pieces of 2 × 4 for legs. On these were mattresses and bedclothes, plenty of them. For when we read of city folk dying of sunstroke and rolling off their roofs where they had gone to get a mouthful of the lifeless air, robbed of its ozone before it reached them, we were snuggling under one and sometimes two pairs of blankets. And then, I had the pleasure (a small and tepid pleasure you may think it, but very real to me) of trying to prop my eyelids open every night, as I lay stretched out upon my bed, till I could thrust my hand out between the sidewall and the baseboard, and feel the glossy leaves of the cool grapevine, and try to unkink a tendril before I lost consciousness. Sometimes I couldn’t get that far. We’d stay up till all hours, nine and even ten o’clock, fighting off sleep. It was a nightly problem with us which we’d rather do, go to bed and get that lovely sleep, or stay awake a minute or two longer staring at the “friendship fire.”
I have vainly tried to think which held the greater fascination for me: The lake as it shifted its hues before my eyes from reddish brown to vivid apple-green through leaded gray and royal purple, the farther shore now so sharp and clear that you could see the houses on it, now but a thin slice of pearl against a pearly sky, the water between us and it now a floor veined and streaked like marble, and now ridgy with billows, that practised, as it were, their scales upon the yellow beach, their hand-backs remembering what the teacher said, “no knuckles,” and their finger tips dancing in the white froth: or, the fire of evenings, fluttering its ribbons of orange taffeta against the back log, snapping its blank cartridges in sport at us, the red coals so many heaps of glowing jewels in an Indian prince’s treasure-house. The lake enthralled me in the day-time. It numbed my brain; it paralyzed my pen-hand, and left me only the still and speechless joy of living. When the darkness fell, the firelight drew me with the master-spell. From the lake I now and then could turn my eyes. The fire was jealous. Not for a full minute would it let me go. In its genial warmth and light our souls expanded, and we sang the old songs that everybody knows, the songs that lie so near the heart its strings must thrill in concord with them, but, through all, our eyes were fastened on the fire. What magic it must be that thus can charm unhaltingly through all the long, long centuries that have drifted by like mist since first men gathered about the friendly flame! The wonder of it! The wonder of it! Without the Fire there could never be the Family, with all that means to us; no Hearth, no Home, with all that means to us. The first priestess was she that kept the coals alive; an altar is but a cooking-place. Lineal descendant of the first flickering blaze fed with twigs is all our god-like industry, all that has made us lords of earth and sea. Back to nature we may go, but farther back than fire we dare not, lest we perish body and soul.
Perhaps it was the dumb fear of this, the heritage of pre-historic ancestry that made us sigh when the time came to tear the logs apart and quench them for the night.
How happy were those dear idle days! Happy, not only in the retrospect, but each moment savoring pleasant to the taste. Once I thought that Heaven must be rather bore-ous with nothing left to strive for, no ambition, no anxiety. I know better now. I could live on and on forever in that camp and never wish for anything but to live. As I write, the pictures of the sweet, calm evenings out upon the placid lake in the canoe return to me. It heaves in gentle swells, the umber water netted on its ripple-crests with soft reflections of the flushed sky fading into tints too delicate for words of color. Black against the lucent edge of heaven march the slim poplars. The stars are struggling out, and taking pattern from them, the riding-lights of yachts shine yellowly. The waves plash gently on the shell that holds us, and the water gurgles against the paddle that urges onward, or tinkles in drops like tiny bells. Something catches in the throat. It is too beautiful, too heavenly for earth-born. From far across the waters comes Caruso’s voice, by magic reproduced, sweet to suffocation.
“Un regal serto sul crin possarti
Ergerti un trono vicino al sol.
Ah! Celeste Aida! Forma divina.”
On the taffrail of the departing steamer we leaned and watched the spot until the darkness and the distance smothered the pale gleaming of the tents where our friends lingered yet a little longer. We sighed; we could not help it. A little more and tears would have flowed.
I want to go back there. I want to go back! Back to Nature—or at least part way.