Though staggered a little, it must be confessed, By the “customer” coming it rather too free, Yet, smilingly granting the modest request, The dealer responded, “Well, what shall it be?”
“Wal, a drop of Madairy I reckon ’ul pass: I’ve been used ter thet, see, ever since I was born.” The storekeeper handed a bottle and glass, And his customer poured out a generous horn.
For a moment he eyed the gratuitous dram With the air of a man who must something resign; Then blandly remarked, “Do you know that I am Very partial to mixing an egg in my wine?”
“Oh, well, let us finish this matter, I beg: You’re very particular, though, I must say,” The storekeeper muttered, and handed an egg— The identical one he had taken in pay.
On the rim of the tumbler the man broke the shell— “It’s cert’inly handsome, the way yer treat folk:” He opened it deftly, and plumply it fell With a splash, and no wonder—it held double yolk!
The customer saw, and a long breath he drew: “Look, mister, that egg has two yolks, I declare! Instead of one needle, I’ve paid yer for two, So hand me another, an’ then we’ll be square!” William L. Keese, in Our Continent.
THE LABOR QUESTION.
Let me tell you why I am interested in the labor question. Not simply because of the long hours of labor; not simply because of a specific oppression of a class. I sympathize with the sufferers there: I am ready to fight on their side. But I look out upon Christendom, with its three hundred millions of people; and I see, that, out of this number of people, one hundred millions never had enough to eat. Physiologists tell us that this body of ours, unless it is properly fed, properly developed, fed with rich blood and carefully nourished, does no justice to the brain. You cannot make a bright or a good man in a starved body; and so this one-third of the inhabitants of Christendom, who have never had food enough, can never be what they should be. Now, I say that the social civilization which condemns every third man in it to be below the average in the nourishment God prepared for him, did not come from above: it came from below; and, the sooner it goes down, the better. Come on this side of the ocean. You will find forty millions of people, and I suppose they are in the highest state of civilization; and yet it is not too much to say, that, out of that forty millions, ten millions at least, who get up in the morning and go to bed at night, spend all the day in the mere effort to get bread enough to live. They have not elasticity enough, mind or body, left, to do any thing in the way of intellectual or moral progress.
I believe in the temperance movement. I am a temperance man of nearly forty years’ standing; and I think it one of the grandest things in the world, because it holds the basis of self-control. Intemperance is the cause of poverty, I know; but there is another side to that: poverty is the cause of intemperance. Crowd a man with fourteen hours’ work a day, and you crowd him down to a mere animal life. You have eclipsed his aspirations, dulled his tastes, stunted his intellect, and made him a mere tool, to work fourteen hours, and catch a thought in the interval; and, while a man in a hundred will rise to be a genius, ninety-nine will cower down under the circumstances.