OCR Text |
Show "Yes, this cold weather may be very fine," says the small boy; "it may kill the fevers, and make the air clear, bracing, and wholesome, but I take notice that it doesn't benefit me much. I have to split twice as much wood and carry up four times as much coal, and get up five times as early to light five times as many fires, and go on four times as many errands in the bleak wind as I do in the summer; and if I come in with snow on my shoes, or leave the door open, I am treated as though I have committed some henious [heinous] crime. Oh, give me the summer, the calm golden summer when I can go swimming eight times a day, and play hookey, and go bull frogging, and steal under circus tents, and decorate dogs with kettles, and rob bird's nests, and fall out of trees into creeks, and have a good time generally. I don't want any winter in ??. I want summer from my head down, and my pleasure trade-mark is the traveling circus, and the Sunday-school picnic." HERE we have a poet. He writes for the country newspaper. The paper does not pay him anything for writing. He writes for glory. See how pale and thin he is. Perhaps glory does not agree with him. At night he walks without a hat to let the starlight soak into his brain. He never gets full. Nobody ever asks him to. He was not born a genius. At a very early age he fell out of the garret window, and when they picked him up be was a poet. Poets are therefore made, not born. This is why flats are built eight and ten stories high. IT TAKES eight hundred full blown roses to make a single tablespoonful of the famous perfume, and you can get enough perfume out of an onion to drive a dog on a gallop out of a slaughter house. And yet we admire the rose more than we do the onion. WHEN a Boston girl is presented with a bouquet, she says: "Oh, how decidedly sweet. Its fragrance impenetrates the entire atmosphere of the room." A Kansas girl simply says, "It smells scrumptious; thanks, Reuben." MORE than one hundred men and boys have been killed by hunting accidents within the last six weeks. While sympathizing with the friends of these men and boys, one cannot help feeling like congratulating the game just a little. AMBITIOUS boy "How is a good way to start a circus?" Why, you just get a girl to write a love-letter addressed to your father, and put it in the old man's pocket, where your ma'll find it, and there'll be circus enough to make happy the neighbors for two miles around. |