PLANTING A TREE
TO be in line with worthy folk, you soon must plant an elm or oak, a beech or maple fair to see, a single or a double tree. When winter’s storms no longer roll, go, get a spade and dig a hole, and bring a sapling from the woods, and show your neighbors you’re the goods. What though with years you’re bowed and bent, and feel your life is nearly spent? The tree you plant will rear its limbs, and there the birds will sing their hymns, and in its cool and grateful shade the girls will sip their lemonade; and lovers there on moonlight nights will get Dan Cupid dead to rights; and fervid oaths and tender vows will go a-zipping through its boughs. And folks will say, with gentle sigh, “Long years ago an ancient guy, whose whiskers brushed against his knee, inserted in the ground this tree. ’Twas but a little sapling then; and he, the kindest of old men, was well aware that he’d be dead, long ere its branches grew and spread, but still he stuck it in the mould, and never did his feet grow cold. Oh, he was wise and kind and brave—let’s place a nosegay on his grave!”
DREAMERS AND WORKERS
THE dreamers sit and ponder on distant things and dim, across the skyline yonder, where unknown planets swim; they roam the starry reaches—at least, they think they do—with patches on their breeches and holes in either shoe. The workers still are steaming around at useful chores; they always save their dreaming for night, to mix with snores. They’re toiling on their places, they’re raising roastin’ ears, they are not keeping cases on far, uncharted spheres. They’re growing beans and carrots, and hay that can’t be beat, while dreamers in their garrets have not enough to eat. Oh, now and then a dreamer is most unduly smart, and shows he is a screamer in letters or in art; but where one is a winner, ten thousand dreamers weep because they lack a dinner, and have no place to sleep. There is a streak of yellow in dreamers, as a class; the worker is the fellow who makes things come to pass; he keeps the forges burning, the dinner pail he fills, he keeps the pulleys turning in forty thousand mills. The man with dreams a-plenty, who lives on musty prunes, beside him looks like twenty or eighteen picayunes.
SPRING SICKNESS
THIS is the season when the blood, according to the learned physician, is thick and flows as slow as mud, which puts a man in bad condition. Spring sickness is a fell disease, according to our time-worn notions, and, having it, the victim flees, to blow himself for dopes and potions. “I have to thin the sluggish stream,” he says, “which through my system passes; it’s thicker now than cheap ice cream, and flows like New Orleans molasses.” From all spring ills he’d have release, if he would tramp his potions under, and get a jar of Elbow Grease, the medicine that’s cheap as thunder. To get out doors where breezes blow, and tinker ’round to beat the dickens, would make a lot of ailments go, and thin the blood that winter thickens. Instead of taking pale pink pills which are designed for purple parties, go, plant the spuds in shallow hills, and you’ll be feeling fine, my hearties! We are too fond of taking dope, while in our easy chairs reclining, when we should shed our coats and slope out yonder where the sun is shining.