[p 6]
]THE SECOND POST.
(Letter from an island caretaker.)
Dear Sir: Your letter came. Glad you bought a team of horses. Hilda is sick. She has diphtheria and she will die I think. Clara died this eve. She had it, too. We are quarantined. Five of Fisher’s family have got it. My wife is sick. She hain’t got it. If this thing gets worse we may have to get a doctor. Them trees are budding good. Everything is O. K.
Just as we started to light a pipe preparatory to filling this column, we were reminded of Whistler’s remark to a student who was smoking: “You should be very careful. You know you might get interested in your work and let your pipe go out.”
It is odd, and not uninteresting to students of the so-called human race, that a steamfitter or a manufacturer of suspenders who may not know the difference between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—who may not, indeed, know anything at all—is nevertheless a bubbly-fountain of political wisdom; whereas a writer for a newspaper is capable of emitting only drivel. This may be due to the greater opportunity for meditation enjoyed by suspender-makers and steamfitters.
[p 7]
]Janesville’s Grand Hotel just blew itself on its Thanksgiving dinner. The menu included “Cheese a la Fromage.”
“It is with ideas we shall conquer the world,” boasts Lenine. If he needs a few more he can get them at the Patent Office in Washington, which is packed with plans and specifications of perpetual motion machines and other contraptions as unworkable as bolshevism.
HEARD IN THE BANK.
A woman from the country made a deposit consisting of several items. After ascertaining the amount the receiving teller asked, “Did you foot it up?” “No, I rode in,” said she. H. A. N.
The fact that Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and other great departed whose names are taken in vain every day by small-bore politicians, do not return and whack these persons over the heads with a tambourine, is almost—as Anatole France remarked in an essay on Flaubert—is almost an argument against the immortality of the soul.
Harper’s Weekly refrains from comment on the shipping bill because, says its editor, “we have not been able to accumulate enough knowledge.” [p 8] />]Well! If every one refrained from expressing an opinion on a subject until he was well informed the pulp mills would go out of business and a great silence would fall upon the world.