In driving along the road, the writer noticed a large flock of barn-swallows around a small mud-puddle in the middle of the road. As they alighted they kept their wings extended straight up in the air and fluttering, while they drove their bills almost fiercely into the mud. A bystander explained that all their nests had been shaken down and they were rebuilding. To them calamity had come in the loss of their nests, their eggs, and mayhap their little ones. This little indication of common suffering made the feathered family seem much closer to the human. (Text.)
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Suffering, Unnecessary—See [Help Unrecognized].
Suffrage, Woman—See [Retort, A].
SUGGESTION
A few years ago in a certain part of England the weather was so continuously beastly—that’s the term they used—that at last, wearying of looking at the barometers day after day, week in and week out, the entire inhabitants of a certain seaport town, in sheer disgust, gathered up their weather-glasses and dumped them into the old junk shops. Both the weather and the barometers flooded them with disagreeable suggestions. They could not do away with the weather, but they could with their barometers that seemed to serve no better purpose than to accentuate their discontent.—Robert MacDonald.
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Sometimes a word or phrase will do in literature what a sketch will do in charcoal, defining a character and suggesting a whole line of possibilities. An instance of this is in the following from Everybody’s Magazine:
After a certain jury had been out an inordinately long time on a very simple case, they filed into the court-room, and the foreman told the judge they were unable to agree upon a verdict. The latter rebuked them, saying the case was a very clear one, and remanded them back to the jury-room for a second attempt, adding, “If you are there too long I will have to send you in twelve suppers.”