The So-called Human Race

Considering “A Treasury of English Prose,”—prose that rivals great poetry—Mr. J. C. Squire came to an interesting conclusion—that “there is an established, an inevitable, manner into which an Englishman will rise when his ideas and images lift into grandeur; the style of the Authorized Version.”

Auguste Comte listed five hundred and fifty-eight men and women who could be considered great in the history of the world. An English writer, striking from the list names that he had never heard of before, arrives at the “astounding [p 314] />fact” that since the dawn of history fewer than three hundred and fifty great men have lived. We too are astounded. We had no notion there were so many.

“Great Britain,” says Lloyd George, “must be freed of ignorance, insobriety, penury, and the tyranny of man over man.” That ought not to require more than three or four glacial periods.

The Woman’s Club asks for “jingles for the jaw.” Well, here are two from C. L. Edson. Try them on your jaw:

THE TREE TOADS.

[p 315]
THE RIDER AND THE ADDER.

One of our readers was dozing in the lobby of a Boston hotel when he was aroused by an altercation near the cigar stand. A was wagering B that the name of the heroine of “The Scarlet Letter” was Hester Thorne, B maintaining that it was Hester Prim. The manager of the hotel was about to call the police, forgetting that there were none, when the gum-chewing divinity behind the case awarded the decision to B, and the crowd reluctantly dispersed.

[p 316]
We have on hand a column of favorite wheezes sent in response to our invitation, and the only reason we have not printed them is the preponderance of our own stuff. Naturally, or not, we are better amused by the wheezes of contributors. Frexample the following evoked a smile:

“On the train running into Tulsa,” wrote a gadder, “a native was fooling with the roller curtain, when suddenly it flew up with a snap. He looked bewildered, stuck his head out of the window, and finally said to himself, ‘Well, I reckon that’s the last they’ll see of that derned thing!’”

As we have been informed, and as we repeat for the benefit of the School of Journalism, there is nothing to running a column except the knack of writing more or less apt headlines. And so for the instruction of students whose ambition may be vaulting in that direction we will reopen a short court in head-writing. See what you can do with the divorce suit of Hazel Nutt against John P. Nutt, filed in a Florida court.

As to the divorce suit of Hazel Nutt vs. John P. Nutt, M. M. C. offers, “Shucks!”

Another happy headline for the Nutt vs. Nutt divorce suit, suggested by Battle Creek: “Two Nutts Will Soon Be Loose.”

[p 317]
The hand-painted baby-blue pencil for the best headline last week goes to the artist on the San Francisco Chronicle for the following:

“Prehistoric Skulls Found Digging Wells.”

We see by the paper—our favorite medium of information—that Duluth is to have an evening of “wrestling and dance.” A keen eye can probably tell the difference.

The drawn-work decanter, prize for the best headline for the Nutt vs. Nutt divorce case, is awarded to G. C. H. for his inspiration, “Nutts for the Lawyers.”

LIMERIK.

Received by a Missouri teacher: “Please excuse Frank for being absent. I kneaded him at home.” In the woodshed? Ouch, Maw!

How could the teacher rebuke Emil when she read this excuse from his father? “The only excuse I have for Emil being late was nine o’clock came sooner than we expected.”

[p 318]
For our part, we are moved to protest against the growing practice among parents of rebuking their children for playing with the children of prohibitionists. We should not visit upon the little ones the sins of their intemperate progenitors.

“Attention, Members!” postcards the house committee of the Chicago Real Estate Board. “Get your feet under the table and you are putting your shoulder behind your board.” This is another good reducing exercise.

With the return of the railroads to private control, we look for an immediate improvement in the service. For, as the dining-car waiter said, when requested to brush the crumbs from a table: “We’s workin’ for the government now. We don’t have to brush no crumbs off no more.” Well, he’ll brush some crumbs off some more now, or he’ll be fired.

One may send “harmless live animals” by parcel post, with the chances eight to five that the animal will be reduced to pulp or die of old age.

THE CHIGGER.

A VERSATILE CHAP.
[From the Turton, S. D., Trumpet.]

Victor LaBrie gave several fine selections on the piano. Victor is a splendid musician. When he plays he has full control of the piano, and has splendid harmony to his selections.

Victor LaBrie started dragging Monday afternoon. He used the tractor and stated that it worked up fine.

“Seeing is believing,” says the vender of a piano player. But perhaps you would prefer auricular evidence.

“The only fad I have had for the last twenty-six years is my husband.”—Mrs. Harding.

This is one of the very few really worthy fads that women have ever taken up.

ACT II., SCENE II.

JULIET.

ROMEO.

Mr. Sink having resigned as plumber to the Immortals, we are recommending in his place the plumbing firm of Jamin & Jerkin, of St. Petersburg, Fla.

“Buy a communication ticket,” advises a restaurant. This, understands E. S., gives you the privilege of talking with the waitresses.

“Every American man has a mental picture of his wife standing behind the door with a rolling-pin.”—Blasco Ibanez.

We fear the gifted Spaniard has acquired an idea of American domestic life from Mr. Tom Powers’ sketches and other back-page comics.

A reader wonders what we can find in a book so childishly egotistical as Margot Asquith’s Autobiography. Answer: much that is interesting. When we read an autobiography we are interested in the people written about rather than in the writer. There are exceptions, of course; for example, Henry Adams and Jacques Casanova.

[p 321]
THE JANITOR ENTERTAINS.
[Iowa City Item.]

An unusual function for men in business circles was that which John Voelkel, janitor of the First National bank, supervised, Saturday evening. He gave a dinner, card party and a smoker to all the officers of the bank. Invitations were issued to every member of the staff, from president to clerk, and those who assembled at the custodian’s home made merry for several hours at an event probably without a duplicate in banking history in Iowa City.

VARIANT OF THE V. H. W.

Sir: Please send me a copy of the famous valve handle wheeze. I have heard so much about it. I hope this reaches you before your limited supply is exhausted. O. G. C.

P. S.—One of the fellows in the office just told me the joke, so you need not bother to send me a copy. O. G. C.

CRUELLE ET INSOLITE.
[Transfer slip, Peninsular Railway Co.]

This ticket is good for one continuous passage only in the direction shown by conductor’s punch in the face hereof.

[p 322]
HIGH, LOW, JACK, AND THE GAME.

Sir: While visiting in a New England family I accused them of being “highbrows,” and they gave me these modern synonyms for highbrow and lowbrow, taken from a Boston paper:

Highbrow: Browning, anthropology, economics, Bacon, the string quartette, the uplift, inherent sin, Gibbon, fourth dimension, Euripides, “eyether,” pâté de fois gras, lemon phosphate, Henry Cabot Lodge, Woodrow Wilson.

Low-highbrow: Municipal government, Kipling, socialism, Shakespeare, politics, Thackeray, taxation, golf, grand opera, bridge, chicken à la Maryland, “eether,” stocks and bonds, gin rickey, Theodore Roosevelt, chewing gum in private.

High-lowbrow: Musical comedy, euchre, baseball, moving pictures, small steak medium, whisky, Robert W. Chambers, purple socks, chewing gum with friends.

Lowbrow: Laura Jean Libbey, ham sandwich, haven’t came, pitch, I and her, melodrama, hair oil, the Duchess, beer, George M. Cohan, red flannels, toothpicks, Bathhouse John, chewing gum in public. E. S.

A bachelor complains to us that prohibition has ruined his life. His companions have deserted their haunts—all, all are gone, the old familiar faces—and he can find no one to talk [p 323] />to; and he talks very well, too. Now, we have as much compassion for him as it is possible to have for any bachelor, and yet we do not esteem his case utterly hopeless. As Mr. Lardner has suggested, when he repairs to his hotel at night he can open the clothespress and talk to his other suit of clothes.

Tolstoi’s “Power of Darkness” reminds P. G. Wodehouse of a definition of Greek tragedy—the sort of drama in which one character comes to another and says, “If you don’t kill mother, I will!”

“The jehu of the rubber-neck wagon,” reports a gadder from Loz Onglaze, “called out: ‘We are now in the center of the old aristocratic center. That palatial residence on our left is the home of Fatty Arbuckle.’”

MORNING IN IOWA.

AN EVENING WITH SHAKESPEARE.

Sir: Overheard at the Studebaker: “What’s put him off his nut?” Lady, answering: “He ain’t really bugs—it’s a stall. The old guy [Polonius] thinks he’s got something on him.” P. S. D.

YOURS, ETC.

Sir: The height of efficiency is attained by Mervin L. Lane, Insurance Service, New York, who prints on his letterhead, “Unnecessary terms of politeness as well as assurances of self-evident esteem are omitted from our letters.” E. A. D.

“It costs 30,000 Lenin rubles a day for food alone,” says Prof. Zeidler of Viborg, referring to so-called life in Russia. Apparently, then, Lenin has not yet succeeded in making money utterly worthless.

[p 325]
HE OUGHT TO BE DEPORTED.

Sir: Gum Boot Charlie, an Alaska native, was discussing the present h. c. l. with a group of citizens of Yakutat, and while condemning the present administration and conditions generally, he was interrupted by a Swede who said: “You dam native, if you don’t like this country, why don’t you go back where you came from?” W. W. K.

A Carbondale youth was arrested for hunting out of season, and the possession of a gun and a dog is considered, by the Free Press, “facsimile evidence.”

Then, as D. B. B. reminds, there are the writers of apostrophic verse who skip lightly from ‘you’ to ‘thou’ and ‘thee,’ and from ‘thy’ to ‘your.’ A language less rugged than the English would have been destroyed long ago.

We learn from the Monticello, Ind., Journal that a couple narrowly escaped being asphyxicated by gas from an anthricate coal stove. Young Grimes must be reporting for that gazette.

Overheard in an osteopath’s office: “When does it hurt you most, when you set or when you lay?”

[p 326]
NOTES OF THE ACADEMY OF IMMORTALS.

The following nominations have been received:

For greenskeeper on the Academy links: Mr. Launmore of Pittsburgh. Nom. by S. C. B.

For bugler: Mr. Mescall of Chicago. Nom. by Circle W.

For legal counsel: Atty. Frank Lawhead of Detroit. Nom. by H. D. T.

For any vacancy: Mr. Void Null of Centralia, Mo. Nom. by E. J. C.

Miss Seitsinger is organizing a chorus and glee club in the schools of Northwood, Ia. Yes, very.

BUTCHER TO THE ACADEMY.

The membership committee of the Academy has received numerous protests against the admission of Charles Ranck, the skunk trapper of Ellsworth, Neb., and J. K. Garlick, the “practical horseshoer” of Sublette, Ill.

ACADEMY NOTES.

The nominations were considered of Ananias Deeds of Guthrie Center, Ia., and Mrs. Tamer [p 327] />Lyons of Upton, Ind. The Academy then resumed work on the Dictionary of Names.

“For goodness’ sake!” exclaims Frank Harris in Pearson’s, expressing his joy in the growth of Lenine’s state, “for goodness’ sake let us have new experiments on this old earth.” For goodness’s sake, let’s! But why not have one on a grand scale? Let’s dig a hole a mile deep and a mile across, fill it with dynamite, and see whether we can’t finish the world in one good bang.

“Learned Class of Europe In Hard Straits.”

They are in hard straits everywhere. The more learned you are, the worse you’re off.

“Budapest Hungriest of Cities in all Europe.”—South Bend Tribune.

The headliner must have his little joke.

WE DON’T LIKE TO THINK OF IT!
[From the Cambridge Review.]

Think of the portrait that Rembrandt painted of his mother hanging in the living-room of his parents’ simple home.

Our blithesome contemporary, F. P. A., is not disturbed by the steel strike, as he uses a gold pen; and for a like reason our withers are unwrung. Eugene Field of fragrant memory used a steel [p 328] />pen. A friend of ours was speaking of having dropped in on the poet just as he was fitting a new pen to the holder. “You can’t write anything new,” said Field, “unless you have a new pen.”

THE SECOND POST.
[Received by a mail order house.]

Dear Sir: The peeaney you shipped me sum time ago come duly recd. My, is we souposed to pay the frate charge onit. When we bot this peeanney you claimed to lie it down to me. I want you two send me quick as hell a receet for 2.29 for same. Besyds the kees on sum dont work a tall. Is them ivory finger boards. Are dealer here sed we got beet on this deel. Wer is the thing you seet on? Is it eeen that box on the platform at the depo? That luks two small for it. Yours truely, etc.

P. S.—Wen you rite tel me how two tune it.

Fireplace heating, says Dr. Evans, is the most wasteful. True. And the most agreeable. So many things that make life endurable in this vale of tears are wasteful.

“Since her tour of the Pacific Coast,” declares a Berkeley bulletin, “Miss Case has made strident advances in her art.” The lady, it appears, sings.

[p 329]
THE SECOND POST.
[Received by a Birmingham concern.]

Dear Sirs and Gents: Would say this lady i got the Range for had applied for a divorce and was to marrey me but she has taken her soldier husband back again and changed her notion so i don’t think it right to pay for a range for the other man. let him pay it out if she will live up to her bargin i will pay and could have paid at the time but was afraid this would happen as it has she has never rote or communicated with me since i left there dont think it right or justice that i pay for it and perhaps never see her again had they of rote to me i would have kept up the payments can first see the parties what they expect to do. Very Respect, etc.

You have observed the skinned-rabbit hair-cut. The barber achieves a gruesome effect by running the clippers half-way up the skull. But did you know that it originated in Columbus, O.? “Yes, sir,” said the Columbus barber to Col. Drury Underwood, “that started here. We call it the two-piece haircut.”

CUPID CARRIES A CARD.

H. H. Lessner, of Alton, Ill., known as “Alton’s Marrying Justice of the Peace,” carries a union label on his stationery.

[p 330]
“I am reading Marcus Aurelius now,” confides Mme. Galli-Curci to an interviewer. “One can never really grow tired of it, can one?” Well, if you ask us, one can.

“Are we going crazy?”—Senator Smoot.

“Wanted, man or woman to give me a few lessons on ouija board.”—Denver Post ad.

So it seems.