What Is Needed.
I was having a wretched time with my typewriter. The miserable machine hitched and clashed and stuck and squeaked. It skipped letters. It hit letter on top of letter. It printed s for d and d for f. It balked. It shied. It kicked. It did everything a mule could do, and then some other things.
I studied the contrivance. I looked for screws loose, for cogs slipped, for dust in bearings, for springs run down. I wriggled this and pounded that. I read the instruction book. I brushed the machine all over and made it shine. I cleaned the type. I loosened the ribbon. Then I tightened the ribbon. I did everything I could think of except to swear at it—audibly.
And still it stuck and skipped and hitched and clashed and squeaked and balked and shied and kicked.
I was on the point of giving it up as a bad job and betaking myself to my trusty (?) fountain pen, with the prospect of lugging the typewriter, later, to the city sixty miles away, when I remembered a previous experience. "Perhaps," said I to myself, "that is what it needs; but it can't be."
Nevertheless, I got a bottle of oil and a broom-splinter, took a drop of the mollifying liquid, and dropped it upon a tiny steel projection that plays in a central slot. Then I tried the typewriter once more, and—glory!—it worked as smoothly as if it had just come from the factory.
It had needed that drop of oil, and that was oil it had needed.
"Making It Go."
A photographer whose beautiful and conspicuously successful work is my admiration, Mr. H. F. Ruhl, of Manheim, Penn., once sent me a curious photograph. It is a group of children; what queer children, and what peculiar surroundings! It seems like a view from "Alice in Wonderland," or like the images of concave and convex mirrors all twisted up together. Here a boy's legs are lengthened out till they look like the poor little skeleton legs of India famine boys. Here again, the boy's legs are puffy as if they were Dickens's Fat Boy's. On the left is a pretty girl who has shot up like Alice when she nibbled the wrong side of the mushroom—or was it a cake?—and found her head on a long snakelike neck, writhing around above the treetops. The wall has caved in here and is bulging out there, and as for the window shutters, they have managed to contrive the most bow-legged warp a respectable shutter ever achieved in this world.
"Have I lost my senses? Can I see straight?" I cried on first looking at this astounding picture. Then I turned it over, and read what Mr. Ruhl had written on the back: "The result of 'making it go.' The negative was set in the sun to hurry the drying."
The secret was out! The glass plate on which a photograph is taken is coated, you know, with a thin layer of gelatin, whose chemicals receive and register, in a marvelous way, the image thrown upon them by the camera lens. But this film must be treated with various acids and salts, and washed in many waters before the picture is "developed" and made permanent, so that the last step in the process is to dry it in order that paper may be laid upon it and not stick to it. Now this drying cannot safely be hurried. It is possible to pour alcohol over the plate to absorb the water, but if you put the plate in the hot sun, thinking to hasten the process in that way—look out! Some portions will dry sooner than others, they will pull on the others, the film will shrink unevenly, and the result will be just such a fantastic series of contortions as you see in Mr. Ruhl's picture.
Now, of course, the moral sticks out of this recital so plainly that it hardly needs to be mentioned. Every twisted face and distorted limb in that photograph seems to say, "Don't hurry! Keep cool! Make haste slowly! If you want a symmetrical life, if you want a life that will form a pleasing picture in the eyes of men and of angels, keep it out of the hot sun of worldly ambition, work quietly with God, let His providences take their time, and merely make sure that you are ready for them when they come."
Many thanks, Mr. Ruhl; we will try to remember the lesson.
A Slow-Speed Record.
I have before me an interesting account of a recent performance of the Climax automobile. I call it the Climax because I know of no automobile of that name, and suppose it is not proper to advertise here the real machine.
The Climax was being tested in Seattle, on a level pavement. It carried five passengers and was run on high gear. For a distance of twelve hundred and eleven feet its average speed was only one and eighty-six one hundredths miles an hour. It traversed the twelve hundred and eleven feet in eight minutes, and eight and three-fifths seconds. During part of the little trip the speedometer registered only a mile an hour, and at no time did it register more than two miles an hour. Thus the Climax moved much more slowly than a man walks. Indeed, for an entire block, the driver, having left his seat, walked backwards, in front of the crawling machine, which steered itself in a straight line.
This was on a level; next they tried a hill. Still carrying its eight hundred pounds of passengers, and still on high gear, the wonderful machine moved up an eight and nine-tenths per cent grade for four blocks so slowly that a sixth man walked leisurely ahead of the car the whole way. Starting at seven miles an hour, the automobile was running as slowly as five miles an hour before the top of the hill was reached. Altogether the performance is said to be unexcelled.
If you are inclined to laugh at this account, you show that you are not the driver of an automobile. To be sure, it is the popular idea that chauffeurs are crazy for speed; and yet every automobilist can easily get all the speed he wants, and what he really longs for is motion that is decidedly slow, a mere crawl, just short of a full stop.
For every occasion when he really needs to go extraordinarily fast there are ten occasions when he needs to go phenomenally slow. These occasions are most frequent, of course, on the crowded city streets. There it constantly happens that the driver must engage in a slow race, back of an ice cart on a hillside, perhaps, or waiting a chance to dash through a blockade, or creeping along till a policeman gives the signal to cross a street. Lacking the power to move slowly, as slowly as a horse pulling a heavy dray, the chauffeur will either crash into the car ahead, or stall his engine. His high ambition is to keep moving, but so slowly that the turning of the wheels is scarcely perceptible. That proves his machine a fine one, and himself a good driver.
Every owner of an automobile soon discerns its human qualities, and certainly in all this it is very like us men and women. Time and again in every life comes the necessity for "slow speed." Someone is in the way. We come across a blockade. The road is full of workmen. We cannot do what we would. Our plans conflict with the plans of others. The time is inopportune. We must wait.
Well for us if we can go ahead-but slowly! Doing thus, we hold to our purpose, we do not lose momentum, our life engine is not stalled. We are ready to dash ahead at the very first favorable opportunity. That is the proof of a good brain and heart engine, and the proof also of a good driver thereof.
It is trying, when ice carts get in our way, when policemen hold up imperative hands, when some slow poke of a 1909 model occupies the narrow road in front of us, and will not, possibly cannot, let us go by. We may fret a little, but soon we perceive a fine chance to show our skill in a new way, practicing "slow speed." So we throttle the engine down, put on the brake just a little now and then, and-keep moving! When we are free of the obstacle how proudly we turn on the gasoline, let the engine out, and whirl on our way at thirty miles an hour!
The race of energy will be conducted with greater zest because the race of patience was run so well.
Animators.
To make moving pictures out of drawings requires far more labor than to make them out of photographs. The moving pictures of the Katzen-jammer Kids or of Mutt and Jeff, for instance, call for about two thousand drawings in a set, each drawing showing the characters in poses very slightly different from the drawing before it or the one to follow. The original artist makes only a few drawings, those showing the leading scenes, and the action working up to each scene is depicted by two or three scores of patient artists called animators. Without these collaborators the drawings would never move upon the film.
Now we sadly need more "animators" in life. Of course we must have men to originate, plan, and control; but we have equal need of men who will fill in with routine labor and mere drudgery. Such men animate what would otherwise be quite lifeless. They put vitality into ideas and give permanence to plans. They do not make a show, their names are not seen on the program or printed on the reel; but they appear on a far more important Record, and there they will remain forever.
Examining Roots.
Once a small boy received a bulb and was told what would happen if he planted it. With great delight he followed instructions, and went about promising blossoms to all his friends. But at the end of a week he went to his mother and complained that he had been lied to. "They told me it would grow and have pretty flowers," he said, "but it doesn't grow a bit, for I have dug it up every day to see."
That is just what we do with our plans, and with God's promises. We will not let them rest quietly in the ground. We will not wait patiently for the working of the elements and the unfolding of the strength and beauty God has placed in the bulb. Roots are not for examination; they are for trust. Energy is well enough for a life, but often the best energy is spent in faith-filled waiting.
The Use of a Mastic.
The vulnerable part of an automobile is the tire. Rubber is perishable under the best of conditions, and sun and rain, stony roads and sharp holes, and the thumps and heavy pressure of many hundred pounds, make conditions that would try the stoutest of materials. No wonder that the fragile rubber succumbs to the wear!
Therefore the wise driver of an automobile will look heedfully to the first cracks that appear in his tires, and will fill them carefully with mastic. This mastic is a puttylike compound, which, when hardened, unites fairly well with the sides of the rubber crack. Nine cents' worth of "filler," promptly used, may save nine dollars' worth of tire.
Having learned this, the motorist will be foolish if he does not go farther and learn the use of the less material, but no less real mastic of the spirit. When the cracks of temper appear, when the rough jostling of business, or of home life, or of society, make ugly rifts in friendship, in trust and confidence and affection, then apply the mastic! Here also a little "filler" may save a whole tire, for these cracks rapidly deepen and widen. And we all know of what the mastic is made—of patience, forbearance, humility, and love.
Profits in Smoke.
A large railroad roundhouse was a nuisance to its neighborhood because of the vast amount of smoke which its locomotives constantly emitted. Someone hit upon the idea of condensing the smoke, so it was all led to a tank filled with water, from which the gas escaped, leaving the carbon behind as a scum on the surface of the water. This soot was skimmed off and dried, five barrels of it a day, and was then sold for lampblack. It is possible to evolve a similar process for all the smoky, sooty, stifling frets and fumes and worries and crossness that annoy us. Pass them through the bath of patience, and lo! the smoke will all be transformed into profit.