STUDYING BOOKS
WITH deep and ancient tomes to toil, and burn the midnight Standard oil may seem a job forbidding; but it’s the proper thing to do, whene’er you have the time, if you would have a mind non-skidding. If one in social spheres would shine, he ought to cut out pool and wine, and give some time to study; load up with wisdom to the guards and read the message of the bards from Homer down to Ruddy. How often conversation flags, how oft the weary evening drags, when people get together, when they have sprung their ancient yawps about the outlook of the crops, the groundhog and the weather. How blest the gent who entertains, who’s loaded up his active brains with lore that’s worth repeating, the man of knowledge, who can talk of other things than wheat and stock and politics and eating! Our lives are lustreless and gray because we sweat around all day and think of naught but lucre; and when we’re at our inglenooks we never open helpful books, but fool with bridge or euchre. Exhausted by the beastly grind we do not try to store the mind with matters worth the knowing; our lives are spent in hunting cash, and when we die we make no splash, and none regrets our going.
STRANGER THAN FICTION
IT’S strange that people live so long, remaining healthy, sound and strong, when all around us, everywhere, the germs and microbes fill the air. The more we read about the germs, in technical or easy terms, the stranger does it seem that we have so far dodged eternity. No wonder a poor mortal squirms; all things are full of deadly germs. The milk we drink, the pies we eat, the shoes we wear upon our feet, are haunts of vicious things which strive to make us cease to be alive. And yet we live on just the same, ignore the germs, and play our game. Well, that’s just it; we do not stew or fret o’er things we cannot view. If germs were big as hens or hawks, and flew around our heads in flocks, we’d just throw up our hands and cry: “It is no use—it’s time to die!” The evils that we cannot see don’t cut much ice with you and me. A bulldog by the garden hedge, with seven kinds of teeth on edge, will hand to me a bigger scare than all the microbes in the air. So let us live and have our fun, and woo and wed and blow our mon, and not acknowledge coward fright of anything that’s out of sight.
THE GOOD DIE YOUNG
BESIDE the road that leads to town the thistle thrives apace, and if you cut the blamed thing down, two more will take its place. The sunflowers flourish in the heat that kills the growing oats; the weeds keep living when the wheat and corn have lost their goats. The roses wither in the glare that keeps the prune alive, the orchards fail of peach and pear while cheap persimmons thrive. The good and useful men depart too soon on death’s dark trip; they just have fairly made a start when they must up and skip. A little cold, a little heat will quickly kill them off; a little wetting of their feet, a little hacking cough; they’re tender as the blushing rose of evanescent bloom; too quickly they turn up their toes and slumber in the tomb. And yet the world is full of scrubs who don’t know how to die, a lot of picayunish dubs, who couldn’t, if they’d try. Year after year, with idle chums, they hang around the place, until at last their age becomes a scandal and disgrace. And thus the men of useful deeds die off, while no-goods thrive; you can’t kill off the human weeds, nor keep the wheat alive.