He is a lay preacher of the Baptist Church, and it is often a surprise to those who have heard only his humorous sayings to hear him speak with earnestness and serious persuasiveness of the deeper things of life, for he is a man of deep experiences and of pure ideals.
His most popular lectures have been those on “The Rise and Fall of the Mustache,” “Home,” and “The Pilgrimage of the Funny Man.” He has published in book-form, “The Rise and Fall of the Mustache and Other Hawkeyetems” (Burlington, 1877), “Hawkeyes” (1880), “Life of William Penn” (New York, 1882), a volume in the series of “Comic Biographies;” and “Innach Garden and other Comic Sketches” (1886).
He has been a frequent contributor to the Ladies’ Home Journal and other current literature, and he has recently written a convulsive description of “How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle,” which appeared in the Wheelmen.
He has for some years made his home at Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, and he enjoys a large circle of friends.
THE MOVEMENT CURE FOR RHEUMATISM.[¹]
[¹] Copyright, R. J. Burdette.
NE day, not a great while ago, Mr. Middlerib read in his favorite paper a paragraph copied from the Præger Landwirthschaftliches Wochenblatt, a German paper, which is an accepted authority on such points, stating that the sting of a bee was a sure cure for rheumatism, and citing several remarkable instances in which [♦]people had been perfectly cured by this abrupt remedy. Mr. Middlerib did not stop to reflect that a paper with such a name as that would be very apt to say anything; he only thought of the rheumatic twinges that grappled his knees once in a while, and made life a burden to him.
[♦] ‘peo-’ replaced with ‘people’