CONTRETEMPS IN WYOMING SOCIETY
[From the Sheridan Post.]
No finer dressed party of men and women ever assembled together in this city than those who took part in the ball given by the bachelors of Sheridan to their married friends. Many of the costumes deserve mention, but the Post man is not capable of describing them properly. The supper and refreshments were of the kind that all appreciated, and was served at just the right time by obliging waiters, who seemed to enter into the spirit of the times and make every one feel satisfied. Only one deplorable thing transpired at the dance, and it was nobody’s fault. Dr. Newell had the misfortune to lean too far forward when bowing to a lady and tear his pants across the seams. He had filled his program, and had a beautiful partner for each number, but he had to back off and sit down.
MERCIFULLY SEPARATED
Sir: A fellow-gadder is sitting opposite me at this writing table. It seems that some old friend of his in Texas, out of work, funds, and food, has written him for aid, and he is replying: “Glad you’re so far away, so we sha’n’t see each other starve to death.” Sim Nic.
Freedom shrieked when Venizelos fell. But Freedom has grown old and hysterical, and shrieks on very little occasion.
The attitude of the Greeks toward “that fine democrat Venizelos” reminds our learned contemporary the Journal of the explanation given by the ancient Athenian who voted against Aristides: he was tired of hearing him called “the Just.” It is an entirely human sentiment, one of the few that justify the term “human race.” It swept away Woodrow the Idealist, and all the other issues that the parties set up. If it were not for the saturation point, the race would be in danger of becoming inhuman.
The allies quarreled among themselves during the war, and have been quarreling ever since. A world war and a world peace are much too big jobs for any set of human heads.
ACADEMY NOTES
Sir: If there is a school of expression connected with the Academy I nominate for head of it Elizabeth Letzkuss, principal of the Greene school, Chicago. Calcitrosus.
Members of the Academy will be pleased to know that their fellow-Immortal, Mr. Gus Wog, was elected in North Dakota.
We regret to learn that one of our Immortals, Mr. Tinder Tweed, of Harlan, Ky., has been indicted for shooting on the highway.
TO MARY GARDEN – WITH A POSTSCRIPT
So wonderful your art, if you preferred
Drayma to opry, you’d be all the mustard;
For you (ecstatic pressmen have averred)
Have Sarah Bernhardt larruped to a custard.
So marvelous your voice, too, if you cared
With turns and trills and tra-la-las to dazzle,
You’d have (enraptured critics have declared)
All other singers beaten to a frazzle.
So eloquent your legs, were it your whim
To caper nimbly in a classic measure,
Terpsichore (entranced reviewers hymn)
Would swoon upon her lyre for very pleasure.
If there be aught you cannot do, ’twould seem
The world has yet that something to discover.
One has to hand it to you. You’re a scream.
And ’tis a joy to watch you put it over.
Postscriptum
If there be any test you can’t survive,
The present test will mean your crucifying;
But I am laying odds of eight to five
That you’ll come thro’ with all your colors flying.
It is chiefly a matter of temperament. And more impudence and assurance is required to crack a safe or burglarize a dwelling than to cancel a shipment of goods in order to avoid a loss; but one is as honest a deed as the other. Or it would be better to say that one is as poor policy as the other. For it is not claimed that man is an honest animal; it is merely agreed that honesty profits him most in the long run.
ACADEMY JOTTINGS
J. P. W.: “I present Roley Akers of Boone, Ia., as director of the back-to-the-farm movement.”
C. M. V.: “For librarian to the Immortals I nominate Mrs. Bessie Hermann Twaddle, who has resigned a similar position in Tulare county, California.”
This world cannot be operated on a sentimental basis. The experiment has been made on a small scale, and it has always failed; on a large scale it would only fail more magnificently. People who are naturally kind of heart, and of less than average selfishness, wish that the impossible might be compassed, but, unless they are half-witted, or are paid agitators, they recognize that the impossible is well named. Self-interest is the core of human nature, and before that core could be appreciably modified, if ever, the supply of heat from the sun would be so reduced that the noblest enthusiasm would be chilled. The utmost achievable in this sad world is an enlightened self-interest. This we expect of the United States when the peace makers gather. Anything more selfish would be a reproach to our professed principles. Anything less selfish would be a reproach to our intelligence.
I SHOT AN ARROW INTO THE AIR, IT WENT RIGHT THROUGH MISS BURROUGHS’ HAIR
[From the Dallas Bulletin.]
We quote Miss Burroughs: “I don’t think B. L. T. is so good any more – it takes an intelligent person to comprehend his meaning half the time.”
The world is running short of carbonic acid, the British Association is told by Prof. Petrie. “The decomposition of a few more inches of silicates over the globe will exhaust the minute fraction of carbonic acid that still remains, and life will then become impossible.” But cheer up. The Boston Herald assures us that “there is no immediate cause of alarm.” Nevertheless we are disturbed. We had figured on the sun growing cold, but if we are to run out of carbonic acid before the sun winds up its affairs, a little worry will not be amiss. However, everybody will be crazy as a hatter before long, so what does it matter? Ten years ago Forbes Winslow wrote, after studying the human race and the lunacy statistics of a century: “I have no hesitation in stating that the human race has degenerated and is still progressing in a downward direction. We are gradually approaching, with the decadence of youth, a near proximity to a nation of madmen.”
AS JOYCE KILMER MIGHT HAVE SAID
[Kit Morley in the New York Evening Post.]
“The Chicago Tribune owns forests of pulp wood.”
– Full-page advt.
I think that I shall never see
Aught lovely as a pulpwood tree.
A tree that grows through sunny noons
To furnish sporting page cartoons.
A tree whose fibre and whose pith
Will soon be Gumps by Sidney Smith,
And make to smile and eke ha ha! go
The genial people of Chicago.
A tree whose grace, toward heaven rising,
Men macerate for advertising —
A tree that lifts her arms and laughs
To be made into paragraphs …
How enviable is that tree
That’s growing pulp for B. L. T.
“Remake the World” is a large order – too large for statesmen. Two lovers underneath the Bough may remake the world, remold it nearer to the heart’s desire – or come as near to it as possible; but not a gathering of political graybeards. For better or worse the world is made; all we can do is modify it here and there.
THE SECOND POST
[A Swedish lady seeks congenial employment.]
Madam: A few days ago I were happy enough to meet Mrs. J. Hansley and she told me that you migh possible want to engauge a lady to work for you. I am swede, in prime of like, in superb health, queite of habits, and can handle a ordinary house. I can give references as to characktar. If you want me would you kindly write and state wadges. Or if you don’t, would you do a stranger a favour and put me in thuch wit any friend that want help. I hold a very good situation in a way, but I am made to eat in the kitchen and made to feel in every way that I am a inferior. I dont like that. I dont want a situation of that kind. They are kind to me most sertainly in a way, but as I jused to be kind to my favorite saddle horse. I dont want that kind of soft soap. Yours very respecktfully, etc.
A WISCONSIN PARABLE
[From the Fort Atkinson Union.]
A friend asks us why we keep on pounding La Follette. He says there is no use pounding away at a man after he’s dead. Maybe we are like the man who was whaling a dead dog that had killed his sheep. “What are you whaling that cur for?” said a neighbor. “There is no use in that; he’s dead.” “Well,” said the man, “I’ll learn him, damn him, that there is punishment after death.”
Another way to impress upon the world the fact that you have lived in it is to scratch matches on walls and woodwork. A banged door leaves no record except in the ear processes of the persons sitting near the door, whereas match scratches are creative work.
Lives of such men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Match-marks on the walls of time.
HE SHOULD
Sir: Mr. Treetop, 6 feet 2 inches, is a porter at the St. Nicholas Hotel, Decatur. Would he add anything to the landscape gardening surrounding the Academy of Immortals? W. N. C.
WHY THE EDITOR BEAT IT
[From the Marengo Republican-News.]
Baptist Church, 7:30 p.m. – Popular evening service. Subject, “Fools and Idiots.” A large number are expected.
Speaking again of “experience essential but not necessary,” it was a gadder who observed to a fellow traveler in the smoker: “It is not only customary, but we have been doing it right along.”
“Even now,” remarks an editorial colleague, “the person who says ‘It is I’ is conscious of a precise effort which exaggerates the ego.” No such effort is made by one of our copyreaders, who never changes ‘who’ or ‘whom’ in a piece of telegraph copy; because, says he, “I never know which is right.”
HERE IT IS AGAIN
[From the classified ads.]
Saleslady, attractive, energetic, ambitious hustler. Selling experience essential but not necessary. Fred’k H. Bartlett & Co.
Her attractiveness, perchance, is also essential but not necessary.
We see by the lith’ry notes that Vance Thompson has published another book. Probably we told you about the farmer in Queechee at whose house Vance boarded one summer. “He told me he was going to do a lot of writing,” said the h. h. s. of t. to us, “and got me to hitch up and drive over to Pittsfield and buy him a quart bottle of ink. And dinged if he didn’t give me the bottle, unopened, when he went back to town in the fall.”
AFTER READING HARVEY’S WEEKLY
I love Colonel Harvey,
His stuff is so warm,
And if you don’t bite him
He’ll do you no harm.
I’ll sit by the fire
And feed him raw meat,
And Harvey will roar me
Clear off’n my feet.
The Nobel prize for the best split infinitive has been awarded to the framer of the new administrative code of the state of Washington, which contains this:
“To, in case of an emergency requiring expenditures in excess of the amount appropriated by the legislature for any institution of the state, state officer, or department of the state government, and upon the written request of the governing authorities of the institution, the state officer, or the head of the department, and in case the board by a majority vote of all its members determines that the public interest requires it, issue a permit in writing,” etc.
“‘When this art reaches so high a standard the Post deems it a duty to publicly commend it.’ – Edward A. Grozier, Editor and Publisher the Boston Post.”
But ought a Bostonian to split his infinitives in public? It doesn’t seem decent.
Every now and then a suburban train falls to pieces, and the trainmen wonder why. “What do you know about that?” they say. “It was as good as new this morning.” It never occurs to them that the slow but sure weakening of the rolling stock is due to Rule 7 in the “Instructions to Trainmen,” which requires conductors and brakemen to close coach doors as violently as possible. Although not required to, many passengers imitate the trainmen. With them it is a desire to make a noise in the world. If a man cannot attract attention in the arts and the professions, a sure way is to bang doors behind him.
DOXOLOGY
Praise Hearst, from whom all blessings flow!
Praise Hearst, who runs things here below.
Praise them who make him manifest —
Praise Andy L. and all the rest.
Praise Hearst because the world is round,
Because the seas with salt abound,
Because the water’s always wet,
And constellations rise and set.
Praise Hearst because the grass is green,
And pleasant flow’rs in spring are seen;
Praise him for morning, night and noon.
Praise him for stars and sun and moon.
Praise Hearst, our nation’s aim and end,
Humanity’s unselfish friend;
And who remains, for all our debt,
A modest sweet white violet.
We like Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, Kubla Khan, and many other unfinished things, but we have always let unfinished novels alone – unless you consider unfinished the yarn that “Q” finished for Stevenson. And so we are unable to appreciate the periodical eruptions of excitement over “The Mystery of Edwin Drood.” Were we to read it, we dessay we should be as nutty as the Dickens fans.
Mr. Basso, second violin in the Minneapolis Orchestra, would seem to have missed his vocation by a few seats.
MY DEAR, YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN FRED!
[From the Milwaukee Sentinel.]
In this one, the orchestra became a troupe of gayly appareled ballerinas, whirling in splendid abandon, with Mr. Stock as première.
One lamps by the advertisements that the Fokines are to dance Beethoven’s “Moonshine” sonata. The hootch-kootch, as it were.
OFT IN THE STILLY WISCONSIN NIGHT
Sir: California may have the most sunshine, but I’ll bet Wisconsin has the most moonshine. E. C. M.
Did ever a presidential candidate say a few kind words for art and literature, intimate the part they play in the civilizing of a nation, and promise to further them by all means in his power, that the people should not sink deeper into the quagmire of materialism? Probably not.
“Hercules, when only a baby, strangled two servants,” according to a bright history student. Nobody thought much about it in those days, as there were plenty to be had.
Absolute zero in entertainment has been achieved. A young woman recited or declaimed the imperishable Eighteenth Amendment in an Evanston church.
With Jedge Landis at the head of grand baseball and Mary Garden at the head of grand opera, the future of the greatest outdoor and indoor sports is temporarily assured.
Rome toddled before its fall.
The Delectable River
I. – DOCTOR MAYHEW’S SHOP
Stibbs the Grocer zigzagged like a dragon-fly about his crowded store. Within the hour the supplies for our woodland cruise were packed in boxes and tagged, and ready for transportation. It was a brisk transaction; for Stibbs it was only one incident in a busy day. Outside the trolley clanged, and a Saturday crowd footed the main street of the Canadian city by the falls of the Saint Mary. It was hard to realize that solitude and a primal hush were only a few hours away.
I contrasted the activity in the store of Stibbs with the drowse that hung over another shop in the North Country where, in earlier years, I used to buy my supplies. Doctor Mayhew kept the shop, which flourished until a pushing Scandinavian set up a more pretentious establishment; after which the Doctor’s shop faded away like the grin of Puss of Cheshire. One could not buy groceries of the Doctor in a hurry; one had no wish to. I always allowed the forenoon, as there was much foreign gossip to exchange between items, and the world’s doings to be discussed. The Doctor was interested in the remotest subjects. The pestilences of the Orient and the possibility of their spreading to our shores, and eventually to the North Country, gave him much concern; the court life at St. James’s and the politics of Persia absorbed him; – local matters interested him not at all.
“Ten pounds of flour?” … The Doctor would pause, scoop in hand; then, abruptly reminded of a bit of unfinished business at the warehouse, he would leave the flour trembling in the balance and shuffle off, while I perched on the counter and swung my heels, and discussed packs with Ted Wakeland, another pioneer, who, spitting vigorously, averred that packing grub through the brush was all right for an Indian, but no fit task for a white man. Through the open door I could see the gentle swells of the Big Water washing along the crescent of the beach and heaping the sand in curious little crescent ridges. The sun beat hotly on the board walk. There were faint sounds in the distance, from the Indian village up the shore and the fishing community across the bay. Life in this parish of the Northland drifted by like the fleece of summer’s sky.
“And three pounds of rice?”
The Doctor was back at the scales, and the weighing proceeded in leisurely and dignified fashion. Haste, truly, were unseemly. But at last the supplies were stowed in the brown pack, there were handshakings all round, and a word of advice from old heads, and I marched away with a singing heart.
Outfitting in the Doctor’s shop was an event, a ceremonial, a thing to be housed in memory along with camps and trails.
II. – THE RIVER
He who has known many rivers knows that every watercourse has an individuality, which is no more to be analyzed than the personality of one’s dearest friend. Two rivers may flow almost side by side for a hundred miles, separated only by a range of hills, and resemble each other no more than two women. You may admire the one, and grant it beauty and charm; but you will love the other, and dream of it, and desire infinite acquaintance of it.
These differences are too subtle for definition. Superficially, two rivers in the North Country are unlike only in this respect, that one has cut a deep valley through the hills and flows swiftly and shallowly to its sea, and the other has kept to the plateaus and drops leisurely by a series of cascades and short rapids, separated by long reaches of deep water. Otherwise their physical aspects coincide. The banks of archaic rock are covered with a thin soil which maintains so dense a tangle that the axe must clear a space for the smallest camp; their overhanging borders are of cedar and alder and puckerbush and osier; their waters are slightly colored by the juices of the swampland; following lines of minimum resistance, they twist gently or sharply every little way, and always to the voyager’s delight, for the eye is unprepared for a beautiful vista, as the ear for a sudden and exquisite modulation in music.
So winds the Delectable River —
“through hollow lands and hilly lands” —
idly where the vale spreads out, quickly where the hills close in; black and mysterious in the deep places, frank and golden in the shoal. In one romantic open, where the stream flows thinly over a long stretch of sand, the bed is of an almost luminous amber, as if its particles had imprisoned a little of the sunlight that had fallen on them through the unnumbered years.
The River was somewhat low when I dipped paddle in it, and the ooze at the marge was a continuous chronicle of woodland life. Moose and deer, bear and beaver, mink and fisher, all the creatures of the wild had contributed to the narrative. Even the water had its tale: a line of bubbles would show that a large animal, likely a moose, had crossed a few minutes before our canoes rounded the bend. There were glimpses of less wary game: ducks and herons set sail at the last moment, and partridges, perching close at hand, cocked their foolish heads as we went by; two otters sported on a bit of beach; trout leaped every rod of the way.
And never a sign of man or mark of man’s destructiveness; nor axe nor fire had harmed a single tree. A journey of unmarred delight through a valley of unending green.
III. – SMUDGE
“This,” you say, as you step from the canoe and help to fling the cargo ashore, “this looks like good camping ground.”
The place is more open than is usual, comparatively level, and a dozen feet above the river, which, brawling over a ledge, spreads into an attractive pool. The place also faces the west, where there is promise of a fine sunset; a number of large birches are in sight, and an abundance of balsam. “And,” you remark, stooping to untie the tent-bag, “there are not many flies.”
Instantly a mosquito sings in your ear, and as you still his song you recall a recent statement by the scientist Klein, that an insect’s wings flap four hundred times in a second. The mind does not readily grasp so rapid a motion, but you accept the figures on trust, as you accept the distances of interstellar spaces.
Very soon you discover that you were in error about the fewness of the flies. They are all there – mosquitoes, black-flies, deer-flies, and punkies, besides other species strictly vegetarian. So you drop the tent-bag and build a smudge. Experience has taught you to make a small but hot fire, and when this is well under way you kick open a rotted, moss-grown cedar and scoop up handfuls of damp mould. This, piled on and banked around the fire, provides a smudge that is continuous and effective. We built smudges morning, noon, and night. Whenever a halt was called, if only for five minutes, I reached mechanically for a strip of birchbark and a handful of twigs. At one camping place the ring of smudges suggested the magic fire circle in “Die Walküre.” Brunhilde lay in her tent, in a reek of smoke, while Wotan, in no humor for song, heaped vegetable tinder upon the defending fires. More than once the darkening forest and the steel-gray sky of a Canadian twilight have set me humming the motives of “The Ring,” and I shall always remember a pretty picture in an earlier cruise. “Jess” was a stable boy who drove our team to the point where roads ceased, and during a halt in the expedition this exuberant youth reclined upon a log, and with a pipe fashioned from a reed sought to imitate responsively the song of the white-throated sparrow. He looked for all the world like Siegfried in his forest.
“Smudge.” It is not a poetic word – mere mention of it would distress Mr. Yeats; but it is potent as “Sesame” to unlock the treasures of memory. And before the laggard Spring comes round again many of us will sigh for a whiff of yellow, acrid smoke, curling from a smoldering fire in the heart of the enchanted wood.
IV. – “BOGWAH.”
We have been paddling for more than an hour, through dark and slowly moving water. Two or three hundred yards has been the limit of the view ahead, as the stream swerves gracefully from the slightest rise of land, and flows now east, now north, now east, now south again. So long a stretch of navigable water is not common on the Delectable River, and we make the most of it, moving leisurely, and prisoning the everchanging picture with the imperfect camera of the eyes. Presently a too-familiar sound is heard above the dipping of the paddles, and the Indian at the stern announces, “Bogwah!” – which word in the tongue of the Chippewa signifies a shallow. And as we round the next bend we see the swifter water, the rocks in midstream, and the gently slanting line of treetops.
“Bogwah” spells work – dragging canoes over sandy and pebbly river-bottom, or unloading and carrying around the foam of perilous rapids. For compensation there is the pleasure of splashing ankle-deep and deeper in the cool current, and casting for trout in the “laughing shallow,” which I much prefer to the “dreaming pool.” They who choose it may fish from boat or ledge: for me, to wade and cast is the poetry of angling.
Assured that the “bogwah” before us extends for half a mile or more, we decide for luncheon, and the canoes are beached on an island, submerged in springtime, but at low water a heap of yellow sands. And I wish I might reconstruct for you the picture which memory too faintly outlines. Mere words will not do it, and yet one is impelled to try. “All literature,” says Mr. Arnold Bennett, in one of his stimulating essays, “is the expression of feeling, of passion, of emotion, caused by a sensation of the interestingness of life. What drives a historian to write history? Nothing but the overwhelming impression forced upon him by the survey of past times. He is forced into an attempt to reconstitute the picture for others.”
And so you are to imagine a marshy, brushy open, circular in shape, from which the hills and forest recede for a considerable distance, and into which a lazy brook comes to merge with the Delectable River; a place to which the moose travel in great numbers, as hoofmarks and cropped vegetation bear witness; a wild place, that must be wonderful in mist and moonlight. Now it is drenched with sunrays from a vaporless sky, and the white-throat is singing all around us – not the usual three sets of three notes, but seven triplets. Elsewhere on the River, days apart, I heard that prolonged melody, and although I have looked in the bird books for record of so sustained a song, I have not found it.
V. – FINE FEATHERS
There is a certain school of anglers that go about the business of fishing with much gravity. You should hear the Great Neal discourse of their profundities. Lacking that privilege, you may conceive a pair of these anglers met beside a river, seeking to discover which of the many insects flying about is preferred by the trout on that particular morning. There is disagreement, or there is lack of evidence. It is decided to catch a trout, eviscerate him, and obtain internal and indisputable evidence. For the cast any fly is used, and when the trout is opened it is learned that he has been feeding on a small black insect; whereupon our anglers tie a number of flies to resemble that insect, and proceed solemnly with their day’s work. Though the trout scorn their fine feathers, they will not fish with any fly.
With the subtleties of this school I have no sympathy. They might be of profit on waters that are much fished, but they are wasted on the wilderness, where the trout will rise to almost any lure. When I make an expedition I take along two or three dozen flies, for the mere pleasure of looking at them, and rearranging them in the fly-book; but I wet less than half a dozen. On the Delectable River we cast only when trout are needed for the frypan. You are to picture canoes drawn up on a sandbar, and a ribbon of black smoke curling from a strip of birch bark that marks the beginning of a fire. It is time to get the fish. So I set up my rod and walk upstream perhaps a hundred yards, casting on the current where it cuts under the farther bank. Almost every cast evokes a trout; this one takes the tail fly, a Silver Doctor, the next one strikes the Bucktail dropper; any other flies would serve. The largest fish is taken on my return, from under the stern of one of the canoes. Where trout are so plentiful and so unwary, there is no call for the preparatory work of the evisceration school of anglers.
My reason for using a dropper fly is not to offer the trout two counterfeit insects differing in shape or color; as commonly attached to the leader, the dropper swims with the tail fly. “Sir,” said the Great Neal, in the manner of Samuel Johnson, “when the dropper is properly attached, as I attach it, two aspects of the lure are presented to the fish, the one fly moving through the water, the other dancing an inch or so above. This, Sir, is how I tie it.”
And sitting at the Oracle’s feet, ye learn “all ye need to know.”
VI. – THALASSA!
Trails there are that one remembers from their beginnings to their ends, because of the variety and charm of the pictures offered along the way. Monotony marks the trails that fade from memory; they represent hours of marching through timber of a second growth, or skirting hills where dead sticks stand forlorn and only the fireweed blooms. Of rememberable roads the last stage of our journey to the Great Water is the one I have now in mind. It is the longest carry, two miles or less, sharply down hill, though less precipitate than the river, which, after many days of idling, now flings itself impatiently toward the shore. We linger where it makes its first great leap. Many have come thus far from the south, and, looking on the shallow pool beyond, have decided that there is no profit in going farther; or they have explored a bit and, encountering bogwah, have reached the same conclusion. Who would conjecture that past the shallows lie leagues of deep and winding waters, reserved by nature as a reward for the adventurer who counts a glimpse of the unknown worth all the labor of the day? We who have come from the headwaters know that nature has as wisely screened the river’s source. Where the lake ends is a forbidding tangle of water shrubs and timber; the outlet is an archipelago of sharp rocks, and the stream, if found, is seen to be small and turbulent.
The last carry keeps the Delectable River in view; foam, seen through the firs, marks its plunging flight. And then we draw away from it for a space, and cross an open thickly strewn with great stones, a sunlit place, where berries and a few flowers are privileged to exist. A little time is spent here in picking up the trail, which has spilled itself among the stones; then, the narrow footway regained, we drop as quickly as the river, and presently our feet touch sand. We break through a fringe of evergreens and cry out as the Greeks cried out when they saw the sea. The lake at last! —
The river, done with wandering,
The silver, silent shore.