Sidewalk Rubbish.
Caspar Careless kept a general store in Centerville. One day he swept a lot of dirt and miscellaneous rubbish from his store on to the sidewalk.
Along came Newton Neat, one of the street commissioners, and noticed the rubbish.
Entering the store, Mr. Neat accosted Mr. Careless. "Sweep up that stuff on the sidewalk," he said, "and put it in ash-barrels in your cellar. If you don't I'll have you arrested. There's a city ordinance against it."
Said Mr. Careless: "I am no worse than others. I have a dozen friends who sweep out their rubbish in the same way. With Jones it is complaints of poor health; his symptoms are tossed out wherever he is. With Brown it is profanity. With Robinson it is vile stories. With Smith it is gossip and slander. With Alexander it is business worries. With Symonds it is family troubles. With Masters it is office quarrels. With—"
"Dry up!" commanded Commissioner Neat. "All that is merely mental rubbish, very different from the litter on your sidewalk."
"Not so very different," said Mr. Careless; "only worse."
But the commissioner summoned a policeman, and Casper Careless had to give up. My own opinion, however, is that his argument had something in it.
"Well, Be Good!"
The first time that I heard that slang form of farewell, "Well, be good!" I was startled. The words sounded like Sunday, the tone was of Friday. I have grown accustomed to it now, and am no longer astonished by it even when it appears in the fuller form which is perhaps the original form, "Be good to yourself!"
Is this a permanent addition to our stock of farewells? At any rate, it is better than "Ta-ta!" Anything is better than "Ta-ta!"
We have two lovely forms of adieu. "Farewell" itself is a prayer: "May things go well with you." "Good-by" is another prayer: "God be with you." But we have so few forms that we have imported the French "Adieu," for the sake of variety, and some of us would like to import the German "Auf wiedersehen," "Till we meet again" or "see each other again." Perhaps it will be well enough to add another to the collection, and "Be good!" will answer very well. It will supplement "Good-by"—"God be with you"; being good is the result of that.
But what I set out to say is this, that it behooves a thoughtful man not to use carelessly any form of speech, still less a form so often used as those of salutation and good-by. Let us know what we mean and say what we mean. Few things are more conducive to mental honesty than a knowledge of the exact meaning of words. An instructed person, if he were absolutely sincere, would hardly be able to say "Good-by" other than reverently, and as for jerking out "Be good!" in a flippant adieu, he would as soon jerk out his tongue.
Am I too strict and old-fashioned?
Well, there is nothing more old-old-fashioned than truth, and truth is pretty good company to keep.
The President "Called Down."
President Wilson, making a long shot on a Washington golf-ground, incautiously sent a ball whizzing dangerously near the head of another player. This man, ignorant of the identity of the culprit, rebuked him in no measured terms; in the words of the reporters, "cussed him high and low." Without a word, the President left the links. The irate player was overwhelmed with confusion when he discovered whom he had abused, and sent President Wilson a most humble letter of apology, to which the President courteously replied that his correspondent was within his rights according to the rules of the game.
Doubtless both men received a lesson from the incident: next time the President will look before he makes his plays, and the other man will look before he makes his remarks.
Making an Impression.
You are making a carbon copy on your typewriter.
You are in a hurry.
You slap together the front paper, and the sheet of carbon paper, and the back paper.
You roll them all into the machine, and you begin to hammer away.
Tap, tap, tap, rattle, rattle, rattle, ting, ting, ting, one line, two lines, half a page, a whole page, and you whirl the completed sheets from the machine with a gratified sigh. So much done.
But, alas! it isn't.
The back page is a beautiful blank, unsullied as when it entered the typewriter.
The front page is very much written upon, a neat copy on one side, and on the other a copy reversed, like Alice's looking-glass writing.
What has happened?
Few, in these days, need to be told. You put the carbon paper in wrong-side-to; that's all.
Such a mistake, absurd and provoking as it is, rendering necessary the wearisome duplication of the work, is nevertheless a pleasant affair compared with a like error in another sort of effort.
You are making a speech.
The speech impresses you very much. As you run off its neatly turned sentences, you purr to yourself, you pat yourself on the head. "Good boy!" you say to your inner consciousness. "Good boy! Not everyone could do that," you say.
And, of course, you want to impress your auditors.
In fact, you think you are impressing them. You haven't a doubt of it. When you are through, you look for that impression with the greatest confidence.
And you don't find it. Minds a perfect blank. Evidently couldn't tell a thing you have been saying. Evidently don't care, either.
You have been making all the impression on yourself. You have turned the carbon paper the wrong way.
Analyze this embarrassing occurrence, and you will find that you have been thinking of yourself in the process of preparing that speech, of yourself in the process of delivering it, and that, in fine, the usual attitude of your mind is inward rather than outward. The carbon paper is turned toward yourself, and not outward, away from yourself.
Therefore, if you want to make an impression in the world, THINK OF THE OTHER FELLOW.
Stop, Thief!
Stop thief, before you steal any more of the time of the next speaker! You are in full swing?
In the old days you would have swung for it; they hanged thieves then.
You haven't reached your main point?
The man who is to follow you hasn't reached his first point.
The audience wants you to go on?
Then they are particeps criminis. And only one man of the audience has any right to invite you to go on. And he isn't doing it. Not very much.
In justice to your subject, you really must make one more observation?
In justice to your successor, you really must stop right where you are.
You didn't realize that thirty minutes was so short?
Poor fellow! I suppose you have no watch, to practice by!
It isn't late, anyway?
But it will be late, by the time the next speaker gets through; and he isn't the last.
The next speaker can encroach on the time of his successor, as you are doing?
No, he can't. He happens to be an honest man.
The program committee ought never to have given so big a subject (and, inter nos, so big a man!) so little time?
But you made the bargain, didn't you, and with your eyes open? No, sir! These excuses are empty folly, every one of them. What you are doing is stealing. S-t-e-a-l-i-n-g. Understand English, hey? Stop, thief! Not another word.
STOP!
Street-Cars and Prayer Meetings.
The company which runs the Boston street-cars teaches its conductors proper enunciation. This Boston idea is appropriate to the modern Athens, but would be valued if transplanted to other cities. The instruction given applies as well to public speakers under all circumstances; for instance, in our prayer meetings. The directions say, for instance:
"Speak to someone.
"Speak to the one farthest away. "Breathe before speaking.
"Keep the lungs and throat as open as possible when speaking.
"Keep the muscles of the face, the jaw, and the throat relaxed.
"Speak with decision from the front or tip of the tongue.
"Find the natural key to your voice.
"Study yourself, how you can speak most easily and pleasantly; and always face the person spoken to."
These suggestions are as good for the King's business as for the streetcar business.
Right Side up.
My fountain pen likes to talk. It is not easy to shut it up. It will talk in my hand to a sheet of paper as long as I will let it, and then, if I will permit, it will keep right on talking after it has left my hand.
You don't know what I mean? You would know if you had ever put your fountain pen away in your vest-pocket, or anywhere else, upside down, Every jerk of your body as you move is an invitation to the all-too-willing fluid, and out it pops, a little at a time. Take off the cap of the pen, and fie, what a sight! Ink everywhere—ink on the pen proper, and all around it, and filling the cap, and all over your hands, too, by that time; and you are lucky if it has not also got on your clothes and the carpet. That is what happens when you let gravity aid your fountain pen to keep right on talking after you are through with its talk. That is what happens when you carry your fountain pen upside down.
I ought not to blame my fountain pen when it acts that way. I ought not to scold it or even look at it crossly, for it is so like its master! My mind is a fountain pen, you know,—a full reservoir of notions that want to express themselves; and the tip of my tongue is the nib of the pen. And—dear me!—how hard it is to carry my mind right side up! How hard it is to talk only when I ought to talk, and keep still when I ought to keep still! Sometimes I wake up to the fact that I have been carrying my mind upside down. My tongue, for no one knows how long, has been running on in an irresponsible fashion quite by itself. I have been spluttering out a mass of spiteful thoughts, and mischievous thoughts, and silly thoughts, and poisonous thoughts, and ignorant thoughts, and boastful thoughts. I am all covered with them, and I have spattered them all over the people around me. What a mess! That is what happens every time when I carry my mind upside down.
Fountain pens are fine contrivances. It is good to be able to write so easily without having to dip into the ink-bottle twice in a sentence. But there are disadvantages even in a fountain pen, and one disadvantage certainly springs from this very facility. When your old goose-quill was wiped dry and laid up on its support, you felt sure of it. Nothing more would be heard from it till you dipped it again in the inkwell. But no one can wipe a fountain pen dry. The more you wipe it, the better the ink flows. The only way to hush up a fountain pen is to turn it nib uppermost.
And what a wonderful faculty is speech! And what a faculty still more marvelous is thought! And how miraculous is our ability to think and talk quite automatically, without being obliged to ponder every word and run to the dictionary for its meaning! What if it were as difficult to extract a thought as a tooth, and what if squeezing out words were as hard as squeezing a lemon!
Let us rejoice in our common mercies, and not the least in this readiness of thought and speech; but let us remember that the more powerful and facile the agent, the more carefully it should be watched and controlled. Let us keep a strong hand (as it were on our tongues. When this fountain pen of our minds has said what it ought to say, and what we want it to say, let us turn it right-side up, nib determinedly away from the center of gravity, and let us keep it stoutly in that position until we are sure we have something more that really has to be said. For there is almost nothing a man can do that is quite so silly and mischievous as to set his tongue going, and then run off and leave it alone.
The Shutters That Would Not Shut up.
Once the shutters on a certain window got an exaggerated idea of their own importance, and resolved to impress themselves upon the world.
They said, in the words of a famous orator, "We will be heard!"
And so they slammed, and banged, and pounded, and rattled, all day and all night, and many days and nights.
The owner of the house tinkered with their fastenings, but did not stop their noise. He stuffed newspapers back of them. He stuck slips of wood into their fastenings. He even, in despair, nailed them to the side of the house. Still they slammed and banged and pounded and rattled, all day and all night.
"We will be heard!" said the shutters. "We have a future! Perseverance wins!"
But at last the owner took the shutters down and put them up attic. "I never used them on that window, anyway," said he.
Moral: Those whose only way to get a hearing is by their much speaking are not, in the end, heard at all.
When Nearly Dry.
However you may explain it, it's a fact that my fountain pen pours out the ink most freely when it is most nearly empty. Perhaps it is because then the ink has the most air behind it. Perhaps there's no vacuum holding it back, sucking it up into itself. I state that reason with becoming modesty, not being a physicist, even in elementals. Correct me if you want to, wiseacres. Anyway, it's so.
The superior fluency of my pen at such times is frequently annoying to me, because those times so frequently occur. It has cost me many a blot, many a manuscript spoiled as to looks and occasionally as to thought. For, though one desires a certain fluency in a fountain pen, one does not want it to be too fluent; one does not want all its ink at once.
I am the last of men, however, to rebuke my fountain pen. For I do precisely the same thing.
When my head is nearest empty, that is, then my tongue runs the most freely!
The demons are in it; for you see I myself recognize the danger, and try, in my feeble way, to guard against it. I've got into too much trouble already from the tendency. I have no desire for another experience. And yet I am quite sure that the very next time I have thought least on the topic under discussion, and have observed least, And am least sure of my ground, and have, in short, the very least to add to the discussion, I shall plump in voluminously, a big flow of confident sentences, and the first thing I know there will be a perfectly ridiculous blot on my reputation (if I have any) for common sense and good judgment.
So I'll not scold my fountain pen for the trick; at least, not yet.
Clean Fire.
Bituminous or "soft" coal is a very good thing, but when it is poorly burned it is a very bad thing.
The strike in the anthracite region greatly increased the use of it in Boston, until now the city burns annually more than a million tons.
The result is—ugh!—smoke! Not that Boston is a Pittsburgh yet, by any means. Our air is still breathable, and our buildings still give indications of their original color. Our parks are still open to the sunlight, and our suburbs have the blessed country air. Our pictures are not yet ruined, our books are not yet smirched, our window curtains are clean at the end of a day and even a week, and it is possible to wear a collar down street all day and look quite presentable on the way home at night.
How long this will last, however, no Bostonian knows, for the clouds are settling down upon us, and denser every year.
Therefore we are all praying our legislature to pass a certain measure. It requires the various boards of health to bring action whenever "dark smoke or dense gray smoke" is discharged from a Bostonian chimney, and it fines the owner of the offending chimney $100 a week so long as the nuisance is maintained.
The fact of the matter is that smoke may be prevented, by proper firing, proper furnaces and chimneys, and the use of smoke-consumers. And, when smoke is prevented, it means a decided saving of fuel, every time.
And the moral? (You know I never talk without a moral—don't believe in it.)
Don't smoke!
I don't mean that you should abstain from tobacco (yes, I do mean that, too!), but that you should live a life so ardent, clean, sufficing, that it shall not be a nuisance to the neighbors.
There are some folks, you know, that you cannot approach without becoming wrapped straightway in a dense, choking, acrid, gaseous cloud of their worries, their fears, their doubts, their animosities, their dislikes, their piques, their frets, their anxieties, their forebodings, their misanthropies, their weariness, their whining, their trials, and their woes! You know the kind I mean. Don't be that kind.
And as for those disagreeable folks, we can't pass a law referring them to some spiritual board of health; but would they might be made to realize how much they are wasting, of time and strength and courage and character, in thus pouring out smoke instead of burning all their carbon in the furnace of a glowing faith!
An Anti-Slang Society.
Is that California anti-slang society still in existence? I hope it is, and that many other societies of the same purpose have sprung from it.
Surely our country is the slangiest on the face of the earth. We are fairly free from the dialects that perplex the visitor to England, but our slang constitutes an outrageous dialect which varies within the narrowest limits, and changes incessantly. It is only by shrewd guesses that one can catch the drift of the conversation of many college boys and girls. Many of our newspapers and not a few of our popular novelists would be unintelligible to Dickens or Scott. It has become a matter of pride with innumerable persons, young and old, to rattle off the latest language enormities as if they were born to them. There is a new lingo every year, and each is more absurd than the last.
Some slang, of course, out of this abominable mess is bound to survive into permanent English and even to become classic; but our language does not need enriching in this fantastic way, and gets more harm than good from it. The devotee of slang, indeed, speedily and surely loses his sense of good English. He ceases to value it, even to understand it. Correct usage sounds affected to him. He is out of his element when he is with slangless people. He has exiled himself from the society of the thoughtful and refined. He has become an intellectual sot.
Test yourself, and see whether this description applies to you or not. Doubtless you use slang; are you its master or its slave? Can you speak correct English with entire naturalness and comfort? Is it your meat and drink, and the slang only an occasional glass of soda-water? If not, then form an anti-slang society of one, and keep it in continuous session! Determine that you will be a follower of Benjamin Franklin rather than of Chimmie Fadden.
Stop Boring.
Senator Beveridge of Indiana once attended a Fourth-of-July celebration in Indianapolis where the orator spoke for three mortal hours and a half-hour thrown in for good measure.
Later in the day he was asked how he liked the oration.
"Well," answered Beveridge, "they have a saying in Adams County that I'd like to call to this orator's attention. The saying runs, 'When you've struck oil, stop boring.' "
That would be a tip-top motto to print in gold letters wherever men exhort their fellows,—yes, even above the pulpit, and certainly in the prayer meeting room, not to speak of the lecture-platform.
The orator's is a noble art, but he is responsible for a sad amount of suffering. He can uplift, but he can powerfully depress. He can exhilarate and cheer, but he can weary to the verge of frenzy. When he bores, he is a dreadful bore. Striking oil is sufficient warrant for it, but if he strikes oil and still continues to bore, he ought to be treated as oil-wells sometimes are treated; he ought to be—shot.
Someone is said to have invented a platform which can be depressed by marbles running in grooves from the seats of the listeners. As each listener comes to the conclusion that the speaker has talked long enough he quietly inserts his marble. When enough of these have accumulated a lever is moved by them, and the speaker swiftly disappears beneath the floor.
A grand contrivance! The climax of our inventive centuries! Put into operation, it would soon work a noble reform. In fear of the marbles every orator would soon become as considerate of his audience as is Senator Beveridge himself, and would earn the twentieth-century beatitude, "Blessed is he that speaks briefly, for he shall be invited to come again."
Advice From Mrs. Wickersham.
Mrs. George W. Wickersham, wife of a former Attorney-General of the United States, proposes some "don'ts" for the conversation of women. They are beautifully alliterative. Don't talk about
disease,
descendants,
domestics, and
dress.
There is a fifth "don't" which Mrs. Wickersham would doubtless have added, if she could have brought it into her scheme of d's, namely,
gossip.
Certainly when women cease to discuss sickness and symptoms, their children, their "help," their dress, and their neighbors, the millennium will have arrived in full force.
A sarcastic editor asks what women are to talk about, if not these things? What else, he inquires, do they know about? Art? Theosophy? Philosophy? "No, no, madam; it is unthinkable. Let us cling to the things whereof we know."
I am more gallant; rather, I am more truthful. There are five topics for women's conversation which are the themes of the future, though no one would venture to say that they are the predominant themes of to-day. But women will grow into them, and that before long. And they are all allied to the topics which Mrs. Wickersham condemns.
Instead of disease, health. Women are the natural prophets of hygiene. They will come to talk eagerly about foods and food values, about the proper care of houses, about the avoidance of sickness by wise preventive measures.
Instead of petty anecdotes about their children, women will come to talk wisely and shrewdly about the best manner of educating them, the right course of studies, the true way to bring them up to manly and womanly maturity.
Instead of domestics, the whole range of social relations. Women's insight is sorely needed to solve the problems of labor and capital, which are difficulties of the heart more than of the head.
Instead of dress, the beautiful adornment of the home, the town, the community life. Women are the natural guardians of beauty, and in time they will turn their minds from the mere adorning of themselves to the beautifying of the world.
Instead of gossip, politics. Politics in the widest sense, the sense of civic duties, of world-wide responsibilities. It is a fascinating field, which only few women as yet have entered. It is the field of growth, of power, of delight, of the larger life. As women enter it, they will for the first time receive with men their share of the inheritance of the world.
These are my "do's" to place alongside Mrs. Wickersham's "don'ts."
Oil That Spoils.
What is the purpose of lubricating-oil?
To save friction and the wear it causes, and so to increase speed and preserve machinery?
Yes, if you have the right sort of oil; no, if you haven't.
For instance, some airplanes were to fly from Amiens in France to Paris. One of the aviators was approached by some rascal with lubricating-oil to sell, and he bought a supply. He had enough without it, but gave some of it to two comrades. The latter used it on their motors and sailed off. Both of them were obliged soon to examine their motors, perceiving that something was wrong. They discovered them to be badly eaten and seriously damaged. A strong acid had been mixed with the oil.
It is fortunate that the trick was discovered in time to prevent an accident, with the loss of life quite certain to result.
Since reading this I have been thinking that there is another kind of oil that may be mixed with acid. I mean the oily words of praise and consolation and advice and alleged friendship that some folks present to us,—words that seem all right on the surface, but have eating acid in the heart of them.
You know just what I mean, for you have suffered from it more than once: approval, to be sure, but sharpened by just a whiff of unjust criticism; advice, to be sure, but advice that depresses instead of inspiring; consolation, to be sure, but comforting that leaves us more disconsolate than before; friendship, to be sure, but friendship that, we feel, goes no deeper than the top layer.
O, it is such a joy to purchase, without money and without price, the gracious oil that is soothing all the way through, that preserves and lubricates, and sends us speeding on the way of life!