Anyway, now we have got him, we will bring him up, though it seems as though he would resemble a truss bridge or a refrigerator car, as much as a dog, when he gets his growth. For fear he will fall off a wagon track we tie a knot in his tail.
[A SAFE INVESTMENT.]
Up to the present time the Sun has struggled along from infancy to middle age without a safe in its office. It has never needed one. It does not need one now, but custom has to do with these things. The associations that surround one, go far towards making these changes. When we look at the immense safes in the office of out neighbor, filled with bonds and mortgages, we feel that a safe will look well. So we purchased a sort of an iron range, with a nickle plated knob, and a lock with as many figures on it as a tax list or a lottery advertisement, and placed it where it will strike the visitor on his first entrance. Ah, what an imposing affair it is! As we lean back in a chair and 1ook at it, and close our eyes, we can see millions in it, in our mind. It is a cross between Alex. Mitchell’s safe and a child’s bank. It is not full, but it has evidently been taking something. It is a grand feeling to walk along the streets and feel that your head contains the secret which opens the safe. No one but yourself and your maker, and the maker of the safe knows the three numbers which will cause it to open. The numbers are safe with you, and the All Seeing Eye you have confidence will not give it away, so that the only show a burglar has is to get solid with the maker of the safe.
What a piece of mechanism is the lock of a safe! The man we bought it of gave us the programme that opens it. You go to the dial turn the knob, put your finger by your nose and wink. If you leave out the wink, the safe will not open, but we never leave out the wink. The trouble is, if there is a lady customer in with a bill, and we go to open the safe, we wink too many times and have to go all over it again. Then we place the numbers in their order, 4-11-44, and when the “four” is exactly opposite the dipthong, we turn the knob back three revolutions, light a cigar, and walk three times around the room. That is to give the mechanism in the Inside time to coalesce. Then we put the “eleven” in its place, turn the knob forward one revolution, and put on our hat and go out and take a drink. That is in the programme, and we sometimes think the inventor of the lock is interested in a brewery. Then we come back, wipe our mustache on the tail of a linen coat, place the figures “44” directly over the pointer, whistle “There’s a land that is fairer than this,” place the right foot forward, then turn the knob, the door swings on its hinges, and the untold wealth of the Indies lies before us, in our alleged mind.
O, safe, are you honest? Are you true to us? You look pure and chaste, and your new overskirt of varnish, and your puffed ruching of gold and blue sets you off to good advantage, but you may not be impregnable. You have always gone in good society, and no scandal has ever been attached to your name. Your purity and innocence has been remarked by all who have met you, and there are none who would dare to intimate but that you would maintain your reputation against any attack, but sometimes we think we should hesitate to leave you all alone, with the light turned down all night and over Sunday, in the company of an eloquent, persuasive, good-looking burglar armed with a jimmy, and we fear that his warm hearted can of powder would strike a responsive chord in your impulsive nature, and that you would yield up the jewels confined to you, and your honor, your reputation, your standing among safes would be forever ruined. And yet we may be wrong.
But what would it profit a burglar to gain the whole contents and wear out his soles. If he got in that safe, he would find a package of bills that we tried for a year to collect, and we would give him the bills if he asked for them, and he could save his powder. He would find one bill of sixteen dollars, with an indorsement that one dollar is paid, after thirteen dollars worth of shoe leather had been worn out. And yet the burglar would have a soft thing on cigars with that bill, for every time he visited the doctor he would tell him when to come again, and give him a cigar. Another thing the burglar would find would be a protested draft from a great Philadelphia patent medicine advertiser. The burglar could take a tie pass that is in the safe, and walk to Philadelphia, and trade out the twenty-five dollar draft by taking buchu on account.
But no burglar that has any respect for himself, we feel sure, will ever do us the injury to scrape the paint off of that safe.