Entries from August 2005 ↓

We group under this heading a pile of leaves that seem, as they lie upon
the desk, to be constantly quivering with horror lest some form of tobacco
might be used in their vicinity. We are quite safe critics in this respect,
as the weed does not flatter and tone down feelings of the highest propriety,
and we write at a pinch, but not in consequence of one. Perhaps it would
be presumptuous to hint that we ruminate only “the cud of sweet and bitter fancies.” There was a period in our college career — if considerable
careering may be thus strictly designated — when a cloud seemed to us, as
to Ixion, loveable: but, profiting by the disappointments of that unenlightened heathen who did not appear to smoke his error, we tried to learn
to blow our own cloud. How we used to recline, with eyes half shut in a
surmise of pleasure, to wink out of consciousness our one-armed and stiff-runged family rocking-chair, and a much stiffer exercise of differential calculus: for in those days we could not ride to the pure mathematics on a pony or with a coach; and the only “joker” we knew was the instructor who
pretended that calculus was learnable. But our efforts at narcotizing the
entire absence of cushions to our chair and rank to our course, were always
closed suddenly by searing the lips or extinguishing the right eye: we
could never learn to shift our cigar along the “hedge of the teeth” with
that Olympic abandon of the born smoker; it had to be held with great circumspection, the drift of the curls to be narrowly watched, all talk suspended on pain of choking, all thought centred upon each judicious whiff.
We remember faintly that occasionally our delicious repose was marred
by a revulsion of feeling that expected to find something timely in the
closet: that day we smoked no more, nor read, for that matter, either. On
the whole, we never fought our way through the jungly belt of Terai up to
the cloud-land where your predestined smoker lies pillowed upon his fatuity, “careless of mankind.” Indeed, it became with us a question whether the
pituitary glands would continue to moisten Mrs. Scrimpflint’s otherwise
unboltable rations, or whether we should grow up capable of spitting upon
any politics or theology we might despise.

We are ready, therefore, to take high ground upon the matter of tobacco,
and to declare its essential incompatibility with the moral sense. Here we have “an appeal to Lord Renfrew, the Prince of Wales, on the
pernicious eiiects ot his cigar and pipe.” He is addressed as “a prospective monarch,” whose “likeness is among us in daguerreotypes by thousands:” he is told that his habit may not only disable him, but, through
him, future kings on his throne, — “we desire no extinction of this royal
line” — drop therefore “your meerschaum and its affinities.” If we knew
what effect this appeal has had upon the Prince, we should feel more competent to recommend the series of papers to untitled smokers.

Wood-cuts are also pressed into the service of Mr. Trask’s crusade.
Here is a picture of a “boy who first smoked a paper cigar, then a grape-vine, then the real article,” — favored child, in these days of oak-leaves and
fillings: he is confessing at his mother’s knee, but he does not look haggard enough to satisfy our own vindictive recollections of the vice.

Here are “Twenty Reasons why ministers of the everlasting gospel
should not use Tobacco.” And we are told that “dying saints, well nigh
suffocated with the poisonous odor, have, with trembling hands, waved
pastors from their bedsides.” Alas, Mr. Trask, if dying saints would only
wave from their bedsides the suffocating doctrines that their pastors bring,
we should be inclined to waive the matter of a smoke whose torment does
not ascend forever and ever.

Well might a saint say to his pastor,—

“O, search beyond this earth — search regions of the blest;
Can ye not find some place where we unsmoked may rest?”

But clergymen are warned upon one point of considerable importance.
”Many tobacco-users fall dead suddenly. You may fall dead in your pulpits. Some preachers have.” Yes, how many, and they stay stone-dead,
not knowing it, but without having used tobacco! It occurs to us to ask
whether in such cases the use of tobacco might not act, as ammoniacal
salts, or burnt feathers, and wake the preacher from his deathly swoon. It
would be certainly legitimate to try a post-mortem experiment of this
nature. Several kinds of Siberian and Flat-head wizards prophesy under
fumigation. Let it be tried, as a last resort before sepulture, wherever
there is a pulpit whose recumbent has ceased to breathe the breath of
life. Goethe has a verse, in his West-Easterly Divan, that hints how the
original process of informing bodies with souls, might be cheaply imitated
by us with a pinch of snuff alone:

“The Elohim into his nose
With best of spirit breezing,
Some sign of life the creature shows
By hearty fit of sneezing.”

The subject is however too grave for jesting. Wherever under the present condition of the clerical profession, we could find a live minister, we
should be tempted, notwithstanding our old grudge at honest smokers, to
attribute some etherial influence to his cigar.

But let us not be misunderstood. We like clean and healthy ways. And
we like to see a tract upon some pernicious habit written without cant and
coarseness, so that laughter might not come in to half betray the cause.
These little papers are too evangelical for us, and are pitched to the senses
which cannot appreciate “the real article” of tobacco or theology. What
benefit, for instance, will the Republic reap from such a verse as this,
thrust into the hand on every railroad, and proffered at the street-corners?

“The jaws then give a flirt,
The tongue, too, takes a tuck;
The pucker lets a squirt,
That drains it of the truck.”

      J. W.

according to Col. William C. Hunter,

One of the prime requisites to a successful career is concentration of thought. Few things will dissipate thought as much as over-reading of newspapers.

The newspaper starts in with the first page, and by the time you have finished the last column on the last page you may have read a hundred articles, each one of these articles touching on a different line of thought. The daily newspaper contains climaxes of all kinds. Each article is a distinct change of thought. The daily newspaper gives us statistics, sorrow, laughter, crime, passion, death, lies, humor, and so on all through the gamut of the scale of human experience.

The man who craves the newspaper soon finds his line of thought frequently interrupted, side-stepped, drawn, cut off and dispersed.

Already complaining of “too much information” in 1908. What would Col. Hunter say about blogs?

(thanks to a DPer for pointing this out!)

Connor Magan’s Luck and Other Stories, by M. T. W. Published 1881. A group of juvenile short stories, probably originally printed in some 19th century periodical. They generally exhibit “good moral character.” M. T. W. is unknown.

It has many charming illustrations, and at least one very odd one.

Thanks to Pilar Somoza for Post Processing this book!

Point Lace and Diamonds, published 1893, by George Augustus Baker (1849-1906).

Here’s a contemporary review in The Atlantic Monthly (Vol 36, Issue 213):

Mr. Baker has a cleverness which, without being too fine or deep, is pleasant; and his pretty book of society verses is one that you may read with a fair degree of “cheerfulness and refreshment.” Our fashionable life affords scope enough for the more amiable sort of light satire, and Mr. Baker is fortunately not a satirist who cares much to moralize his theme. He does not begin to exhaust his material; the situations he suggests or portrays are not the most unhackneyed, but then, he does them with dramatic skill, and he renders without unnecessary vulgarity the tone and talk of the kind of stylish girls whose souls are in their clothes…

Thanks to Melissa Er-Raqabi for Post-Processing this book!

Two German scientists who observed the recent solar eclipse from Monte Rosa, in the Pennine Alps, state that at the culminating point of the obscuration the glaciers and snow fields became suffused with a wonderful azure light, while the shadows of the mountains produced most weird effects.

There is an excited but happy father and mother in Pittsgrove, N. J., and a wondering child and a number of astonished neighbors, says the New York Advertiser. The parents are happy because their baby was given back to them apparently from the dead. Nobody is wondering its mother clasps it to her breast and cries over it half a dozen times a day, and the neighbors are astonished to think that a doctor and experienced nurse should lay the child out for burial when it was alive. The case is a remarkable one of suspended animation. To all appearances the child died, and then, after being unconscious nearly twelve hours, it came back to life. The child belongs to Louis Erdner. Early Tuesday morning it was taken sick and a physician was summoned. The doctor treated the little one, but after a time pronounced it dead. The body was laid on a cot and covered with a sheet. The mother then sent word to her husband, who was at work a couple of miles from home. On his way to the house in the evening Erdner stopped at the office of Undertaker Evans and engaged him to care for the body. The father selected the coffin and made all the arrangements for the funeral. About two hours later the undertaker with and ice box, arrived at the house. Instead of finding a grief-stricken family the undertaker found and excited by joyful one. Shortly after the return of the father the child, which had previously been cold, showed signs of life and again became warm. The doctor was summoned in haste, and he with but little effort restored the child. It was weak and pale all night, but yesterday it seemed to recover all of its health and was crawling about the rooms as though nothing unusual had happened.

The house had been picked up by a tremendous cyclone and hurled and whirled and crashed through tree tops and over fields until at last it fell in an old buffalo wallow, and was riven to kindling wood. There was a slight commotion among the debris, and at last the Kansas man crawled out, stunned and bleeding.

He looked about with a dazed air at the new surroundings, two counties away from home, but, suddenly brightening up, he cried:

“Mr. President and gentlemen of the convention, I withdraw my name.”–Exchange

The Fat of the Land, The Story of an American Farm, by John Williams Streeter. Copyright 1904. John Williams Streeter (1841-1905) isn’t well-represented on the web. He wrote at least 2 other books. This is his first in Project Gutenberg.

It is a semi-autobiographical story of a physician who leaves medicine and starts a farm.

“While you are at home I will give you daily instruction in this most wholesome and independent business, which will be of incalculable benefit to you, and which, I am frank to say, you cannot get in any agricultural college. College, indeed! I have spent thousands of hours in dreaming and planning what a farm should be like! Do you suppose I am going to let these visions become contaminated by practical knowledge?”

Thanks to Janet Blenkinship for Post-Processing this book!