The So-called Human Race

Gentlemen: Will you please send me a specimen copy of the Farm Mechanics. I would like a sample of the Farm Mechanics very much. I sincerely trust that you will mail me a sample copy of Farm Mechanics as I want to see a specimen of your Farm Mechanics very much. Yours very truly, etc.

Although Mrs. Elizabeth Hash has retired from the hotel business, Mrs. Peter Lunch has undertaken to manage the Metropole cafeteria in Fargo, N. D.

POEMS OF SENTIMENT AND REFLECTION

Sioux Falls

[From the Sioux Falls Press.]

What if we don’t have palaces,
With damp and musty walls?
We have the great Sioux River,
And greater yet, Sioux Falls.

We don’t have to go abroad,
God’s beauties just to see,
But stay at home
And take a trip
Around Sioux Falls with me.

We confess a fondness for verse like the foregoing, and hope some day to find a poem as good as that masterpiece —

“I’ve traveled east, I’ve traveled west,
I’ve been to the great Montana,
But the finest place I’ve ever seen
Is Attica, Indiana.”

Another popular pome of sentiment and reflection, heard by L. M. G. in Wisconsin lumber camps, is —

“I’ve traveled east, I’ve traveled west,
As far as the town of Fargo,
But the darndest town I ever struck
Is the town they call Chicargo.”

“USELESS VERBIAGE.”

[From an abstract of title.]

“That said Mary Ann Wolcott died an infant, 2 or 3 years old, unmarried, intestate, and that she left no husband, child, or children.”

INGENIOUS CALIFORNIA PARADOX

[From the Oakland Post.]

The Six-Minute Ferry route across the bay will take only eighteen to twenty minutes.

ALMOST

Sir: S. Fein has put his name on the door of his orange-colored taxicab. Can you whittle a wheeze out of that? R. A. J.

Knut Hamsun, winner of the Nobel prize for literature, used to be a street-car conductor in Chicago. This is a hint to column conductors. Get a transfer.

The Witch’s Holiday

A TALE FOR CHILDREN ONLY

I

Matters had gone ill all the day; and, to cap what is learnedly called the perverseness of inanimate things, it came on to rain just as the Boy, having finished his lessons, was on the point of setting out for a romp in the brown fields.

“Isn’t it perfectly mean, Mowgli?” he complained to his dog. The water spaniel wagged a noncommittal tail and stretched himself before the wood fire with a deep drawn sigh. The rain promised to hold, so the Boy took down a book and curled up in a big leather chair.

It was a very interesting book – all about American pioneers, trappers, and Indians; and although the writer of it was a German traveler, no American woodsman would take advantage of a worthy German globe trotter and tell him things which were not exactly so. For example, if you and a trapper and a dog were gathered about a campfire, and the dog were asleep and dreaming in his sleep, and the trapper should affirm that if you tied a handkerchief over the head of a dreaming dog and afterwards tied it around your own head, you would have the dog’s dream, – if the trapper should tell you this with a perfectly serious face, you naturally would believe him, especially if you were a German traveler.

The Boy got up softly and began the experiment. Mowgli opened an inquiring eye, stretched himself another notch, and fell asleep again. His master waited five minutes, then unloosed the handkerchief and knotted it under his own chin.

For a while Mowgli’s slumbers were untroubled as a forest pool, his breathing as regular as the tick-tock of the old wooden clock under the stair. Out of doors the rain fell sharply and set the dead leaves singing. The wood fire dwindled to a glow. Tick-tock! tick-tock! drummed the ancient timepiece. The Boy yawned and settled deeper in the leather chair.

Tick-tock! Tick-tock!

Mowgli was breathing out of time. He was twitching, and making funny little smothered noises, which, if he were awake, would probably be yelps. Something exciting was going on in dreamland.

Tick-tock! Tick —

Hullo! There goes a woodchuck!

II

The Boy gave chase across the fields, only to arrive, out of breath, at the entrance to a burrow down which the woodchuck had tumbled. He had not a notion where he was. He seemed to have raced out of the world that he knew into one which was quite unfamiliar. It was a broad valley inclosed by high hills, through which a pleasant little river ran; and the landscape wore an odd aspect – the hills were bluer than hills usually are, the trees were more fantastically fashioned, and the waving grass and flowers were more beautiful than one commonly sees.

“Good morning, young sir!”

On the other side of the stream stood a tall man wrapped in a cloak and leaning with both hands upon a staff. He was well past the middle years, as wrinkles and a beard turned gray gave evidence; but his eyes were youthful and his cheeks as ruddy as a farm lad’s. His clothing was worn and dust-laden, but of good quality and unpatched, and there was an air about him that said plainly, “Here is no common person, I can tell you.”

“You are wondering who I may be,” he observed. “Well, then, I am known as the Knight of the Dusty Thoroughfare.”

“A queer sort of knight, this!” thought the Boy.

“And you – may I ask whither you are bound?” said the stranger. “We may be traveling the same road.”

The Boy made answer that he had set forth to chase a woodchuck, and that having failed to catch it he had no better plan than to return home.

At the word “home” the Knight put on a melancholy smile, and cutting a reed at the river edge he fashioned it into a pipe and began to play. A wonderful tune it was. Tom the Piper’s Son knew the way of it, and to the same swinging melody the Pied Piper footed the streets of Hamelin town; for the burden of the tune was “Over the Hills and Far Away,” and the Boy’s feet stirred at the catch of it.

“That,” said the Knight, “is the tune I have marched to for many a year, and a pretty chase it has led me.” He put down the pipe. “Knocking about aimlessly does very well for an old man, but youth should have a definite goal.”

The Boy did not agree with this. With that magic melody marching in his head it was hey for the hills and the westering sun, and the pleasant road to Anywhere.

“What lies yonder?” he queried, pointing to a deep notch in the skyline.