Such was the early history of the country where now cultivation and education and refinement run rampant and people sit up all night to print newspapers so that we can have them in the morning.
The land on which the Old South stands is very valuable for business purposes, and $400,000 will have to be raised in order to preserve the old landmark to future generations. I earnestly hope that it will be secured, and that the old meeting-house-dear not alone to the people of Boston, but to the millions of Americans scattered from sea to sea, who cannot forget where first universal freedom plumed its wings-will be spared to entertain within its hospitable walls, enthusiastic and reverential visitors for ages without end.
Knights of the Pen.
When you come to think of it, it is surprising that so many newspaper men write so that any one but an expert can read it. The rapid and voluminous work, especially of daily journalism, knocks the beautiful business college penman, as a rule, higher than a kite. I still have specimens of my own handwriting that a total stranger could read.
I do not remember a newspaper acquaintance whose penmanship is so characteristic of the exacting neatness and sharp, clear cut style of the man, as is that of Eugene Field, of the Chicago News. As the "Nonpareil Writer" of the Denver Tribune, it was a mystery to me when he did the work which the paper showed each day as his own. You would sometimes find him at his desk, writing on large sheets of "print paper" with a pen and violet ink, in a hand that was as delicate as the steel plate of a bank note and the kind of work that printers would skirmish for. He would ask you to sit down in the chair opposite his desk, which had two or three old exchanges thrown on it. He would probably say, "Never mind those papers. I"ve read them. Just sit down on them if you want to." Encouraged by his hearty manner, you would sit down, and you would continue to sit down till you had protruded about three-fourths of your system through that hollow mockery of a chair. Then he would run to help you out and curse the chair, and feel pained because he had erroneously given you the ruin with no seat to it. He always felt pained over such things. He always suffered keenly and felt shocked over the accident until you had gone away, and then he would sigh heavily and "set" the chair again.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE RUIN.]
Frank Pixley, the editor of the San Francisco Argonaut, is not beautiful, though the Argonaut is. He is grim and rather on the Moses Montefiore style of countenance, but his hand-writing does not convey the idea of the man personally, or his style of dealing with the Chinese question. It is rather young looking, and has the uncertain manner of an eighteen-year-old boy.
Robert J. Burdette writes a small but plain hand, though he sometimes suffers from the savage typographical error that steals forth at such a moment as ye think not, and disfigures and tears and mangles the bright eyed children of the brain.
Very often we read a man"s work and imagine we shall find him like it, cheery, bright and entertaining; but we know him and find that personally he is a refrigerator, or an egotist, or a man with a torpid liver and a nose like a rose geranium. You will not be disappointed in Bob Burdette, however, You think you will like him, and you always do. He will never be too famous to be a gentleman.
George W. Peck"s hand is of the free and independent order of chirography. It is easy and natural, but not handsome. He writes very voluminously, doing his editorial writing in two days of the week, generally Friday and Sat.u.r.day. Then he takes a rapid horse, a zealous bird dog and an improved double barrel duck destroyer and communes with nature.
Sam Davis, an old time Californian, and now in Nevada, writes the freest of any penman I know. When he is deliberate, he may be betrayed into making a deformed letter and a crooked mark attached to it, which he characterizes as a word. He puts a lot of these together and actually pays postage on the collection under the delusion that it is a letter, that it will reach its destination, and that it will accomplish its object.
He makes up for his bad writing, however, by being an unpublished volume of old time anecdotes and funny experiences.
Goodwin, of the old Territorial Enterprise, and Mark Twain"s old employer, writes with a pencil in a methodical manner and very plainly. The way he sharpens a "hard medium" lead pencil and skins the apostle of the so-called Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, makes my heart glad. Hardly a day pa.s.ses that his life is not threatened by the low browed thumpers of Mormondom, and yet the old war horse raises the standard of monogamy and under the motto, "One country, one flag and one wife at a time," he smokes his old meerschaum pipe and writes a column of razor blades every day. He is the buzz saw upon which polygamy has tried to sit. Fighting these rotten inst.i.tutions hand to hand and fighting a religious eccentricity through an annual message, or a feeble act of congress, are two separate and distinct things.
If I had a little more confidence in my longevity than I now have, I would go down there to the Valley of the Jordan, and I would gird up my loins, and I would write with that lonely warrior at Salt Lake, and with the aid and encouragement of our brethren of the press who do not favor the right of one man to marry an old woman"s home, we would rotten egg the bogus Temple of Zion till the civilized world, with a patent clothes pin on its nose, would come and see what was the matter.
I see that my zeal has led me away from my original subject, but I haven"t time to regret it now.
The Wild Cow.
When I was young and used to roam around over the country, gathering water-melons in the light of the moon, I used to think I could milk anybody"s cow, but I do not think so now. I do not milk a cow now unless the sign is right, and it hasn"t been right for a good many years. The last cow I tried to milk was a common cow, born in obscurity; kind of a self-made cow. I remember her brow was low, but she wore her tail high and she was haughty, oh, so haughty.
I made a common-place remark to her, one that is used in the very best of society, one that need not have given offence anywhere. I said "So"-and she "soed." Then I told her to "hist" and she histed. But I thought she overdid it. She put too much expression in it.
Just then I heard something crash through the window of the barn and fall with a dull, sickening thud on the outside. The neighbors came to see what it was that caused the noise. They found that I had done it in getting through the window.
I asked the neighbors if the barn was still standing. They said it was. Then I asked if the cow was injured much. They said she seemed to be quite robust. Then I requested them to go in and calm the cow a little, and see if they could get my plug hat off her horns.
I am buying all my milk now of a milkman. I select a gentle milkman who will not kick, and feel as though I could trust him. Then, if he feels as though he could trust me, it is all right.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE WILD COW.]
Spinal Meningitis.
So many people have shown a pardonable curiosity about the above named disease, and so few have a very clear idea of the thrill of pleasure it affords the patient, unless they have enjoyed it themselves, that I have decided to briefly say something in answer to the innumerable inquiries I have received.
Up to the moment I had a notion of getting some meningitis, I had never employed a physician. Since then I have been thrown in their society a great deal. Most of them were very pleasant and scholarly gentlemen, who will not soon be forgotten; but one of them doctored me first for pneumonia, then for inflammatory rheumatism, and finally, when death was contiguous, advised me that I must have change of scene and rest.
I told him that if he kept on prescribing for me, I thought I might depend on both. Change of physicians, however, saved my life. This horse doctor, a few weeks afterward, administered a subcutaneous morphine squirt in the arm of a healthy servant girl because she had the headache, and she is now with the rest of this veterinarian"s patients in a land that is fairer than this.
She lived six hours after she was prescribed for. He gave her change of scene and rest. He has quite a thriving little cemetery filled with people who have succeeded in cording up enough of his change of scene and rest to last them through all eternity. He was called once to prescribe for a man whose head had been caved in by a stone match-box, and, after treating the man for asthma and blind staggers, he prescribed rest and change of scene for him, too. The poor asthmatic is now breathing the extremely rarified air of the New Jerusalem.
Meningitis is derived from the Latin Meninges, membrane, and-itis, an affix denoting inflammation, so that, strictly speaking, meningitis is the inflammation of a membrane, and when applied to the spine, or cerebrum, is called spinal meningitis, or cerebro-spinal meningitis, etc., according to the part of the spine or brain involved in the inflammation. Meningitis is a characteristic and result of so-called spotted fever, and by many it is deemed identical with it.
When we come to consider that the spinal cord, or marrow, runs down through the long, bony shaft made by the vertebrae, and that the brain and spine, though connected, are bound up in one continuous bony wall and covered with this inflamed membrane, it is not difficult to understand that the thing is very hard to get at. If your throat gets inflamed, a doctor asks you to run your tongue out into society about a yard and a half, and he pries your mouth open with one of Rogers Brothers" spoon handles. Then he is able to examine your throat as he would a page of the Congressional Record, and to treat it with some local application. When you have spinal meningitis, however, the doctor tackles you with bromides, ergots, ammonia, iodine, chloral hydrate, codi, bromide of ammonia, hasheesh, bis.m.u.th, valerianate of ammonia, morphine sulph., nux vomica, turpentine emulsion, vox humana, rex magnus, opium, cantharides, Dover"s powders, and other bric-a-brac. These remedies are masticated and acted upon by the salivary glands, pa.s.sed down the esophagus, thrown into the society of old gastric, submitted to the peculiar motion of the stomach and thoroughly chymified, then forwarded through the pyloric orifice into the smaller intestines, where they are touched up with bile, and later on handed over through the lacteals, thoracic duct, etc., to the vast circulatory system. Here it is yanked back and forth through the heart, lungs and capillaries, and if anything is left to fork over to the disease, it has to squeeze into the long, bony, air-tight socket that holds the spinal cord. All this is done without seeing the patient"s spinal cord before or after taking. If it could be taken out, and hung over a clothes line and cleansed with benzine, and then treated with insect powder, or rolled in corn meal, or preserved in alcohol, and then put back, it would be all right; but you can"t. You pull a man"s spine out of his system and he is bound to miss it, no matter how careful you have been about it. It is difficult to keep house without the spine. You need it every time you cook a meal. If the spinal cord could be pulled by a dentist and put away in pounded ice every time it gets a hot-box, spinal meningitis would lose its stinger.
I was treated by thirteen physicians, whose names I may give in a future article. They were, as I said, men I shall long remember. One of them said very sensibly that meningitis was generally over-doctored. I told him that I agreed with him. I said that if I should have another year of meningitis and thirteen more doctors, I would have to postpone my trip to Europe, where I had hoped to go and cultivate my voice. I"ve got a perfectly lovely voice, if I would take it to Europe and have it sand-papered and varnished, and mellowed down with beer and bologna.
But I was speaking of my physicians. Some time I"m going to give their biographies and portraits, as they did those of Dr. Bliss, Dr. Barnes and others. Next year, if I can get railroad rates, I am going to hold a reunion of my physicians in Chicago. It will be a pleasant relaxation for them, and will save the lives of a large percentage of their patients.
Skimming the Milky Way.
THE COMET.
The comet is a kind of astronomical parody on the planet. Comets look some like planets, but they are thinner and do not hurt so hard when they hit anybody as a planet does. The comet was so called because it had hair on it, I believe, but late years the bald-headed comet is giving just as good satisfaction everywhere.
The characteristic features of a comet are: A nucleus, a nebulous light or coma, and usually a luminous train or tail worn high. Sometimes several tails are observed on one comet, but this occurs only in flush times.
When I was young I used to think I would like to be a comet in the sky, up above the world so high, with nothing to do but loaf around and play with the little new-laid planets and have a good time, but now I can see where I was wrong. Comets also have their troubles, their perihilions, their hyperbolas and their parabolas. A little over 300 years ago Tycho Brahe discovered that comets were extraneous to our atmosphere, and since then times have improved. I can see that trade is steadier and potatoes run less to tows than they did before.
Soon after that they discovered that comets all had more or less periodicity. n.o.body knows how they got it. All the astronomers had been watching them day and night and didn"t know when they were exposed, but there was no time to talk and argue over the question. There were two or three hundred comets all down with it at once. It was an exciting time.
Comets sometimes live to a great age. This shows that the night air is not so injurious to the health as many people would have us believe. The great comet of 1780 is supposed to have been the one that was noticed about the time of Caesar"s death, 44 B.C., and still, when it appeared in Newton"s time, seventeen hundred years after its first grand farewell tour, Ike said that it was very well preserved, indeed, and seemed to have retained all its faculties in good shape.
Astronomers say that the tails of all comets are turned from the sun. I do not know why they do this, whether it is etiquette among them or just a mere habit.
A later writer on astronomy said that the substance of the nebulosity and the tail is of almost inconceivable tenuity. He said this and then death came to his relief. Another writer says of the comet and its tail that "the curvature of the latter and the acceleration of the periodic time in the case of Encke"s comet indicate their being affected by a resisting medium which has never been observed to have the slightest influence on the planetary periods."
I do not fully agree with the eminent authority, though he may be right. Much fear has been the result of the comet"s appearance ever since the world began, and it is as good a thing to worry about as anything I know of. If we could get close to a comet without frightening it away, we would find that we could walk through it anywhere as we could through the glare of a torchlight procession. We should so live that we will not be ashamed to look a comet in the eye, however. Let us pay up our newspaper subscription and lead such lives that when the comet strikes we will be ready.
[Ill.u.s.tration: TYCHO BRAHE AT WORK.]
Some worry a good deal about the chances for a big comet to plow into the sun some dark, rainy night, and thus bust up the whole universe. I wish that was all I had to worry about. If any respectable man will agree to pay my taxes and funeral expenses, I will agree to do his worrying about the comet"s crashing into the bosom of the sun and knocking its daylights out.
THE SUN.
This luminous body is 92,000,000 miles from the earth, though there have been mornings this winter when it seemed to me that it was further than that. A railway train going at the rate of 40 miles per hour would be 263 years going there, to say nothing of stopping for fuel or water, or stopping on side tracks to wait for freight trains to pa.s.s. Several years ago it was discovered that a slight error had been made in the calculations of the sun"s distance from the earth, and, owing to a misplaced logarithm, or something of that kind, a mistake of 3,000,000 miles was made in the result. People cannot be too careful in such matters. Supposing that, on the strength of the information contained in the old time-table, a man should start out with only provisions sufficient to take him 89,000,000 miles and should then find that 3,0000,000 miles still stretched out ahead of him. He would then have to buy fresh figs of the train boy in order to sustain life. Think of buying nice fresh figs on a train that had been en route 250 years!
Imagine a train boy starting out at ten years of age, and perishing at the age of 60 years with only one-fifth of his journey accomplished. Think of five train boys, one after the other, dying of old age on the way, and the train at last pulling slowly into the depot with not a living thing on board except the worms in the "nice eating apples!"
The sun cannot be examined through an ordinary telescope with impunity. Only one man every tried that, and he is now wearing a gla.s.s eye that cost him $9.
If you examine the sun through an ordinary solar microscope, you discover that it has a curdled or mottled appearance, as though suffering from biliousness. It is also marked here and there by long streaks of light, called faculae, which look like foam flecks below a cataract. The spots on the sun vary from minute pores the size of an ordinary school district to spots 100,000 miles in diameter, visible to the nude eye. The center of these spots is as black as a brunette cat, and is called the umbra, so called because it resembles an umbrella. The next circle is less dark, and called the penumbra, because it so closely resembles the penumbra.
There are many theories regarding these spots, but, to be perfectly candid with the gentle reader, neither Prof. Proctor nor myself can tell exactly what they are. If we could get a little closer, we flatter ourselves that we could speak more definitely. My own theory is they are either, first, open air caucuses held by the colored people of the sun; or, second, they may be the dark horses in the campaign; or, third, they may be the spots knocked off the defeated candidate by the opposition.
Frankly, however, I do not believe either of these theories to be tenable. Prof. Proctor sneers at these theories also on the ground that these spots do not appear to revolve so fast as the sun. This, however, I am prepared to explain upon the theory that this might be the result of delays in the returns However, I am free to confess that speculative science is filled with the intangible.