The So-called Human Race. Taylor Bert Leston

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СКАЧАТЬ ho!” she cried, seizing Jack by the arm, “you’re the young scamp who sold me that lightning cleaner last week. I’ll just keep you till you take the spots out of my husband’s Sunday pants. If you don’t, he’ll knock the spots out of you!”

III

      While the Giantess spoke she dragged Jack into the castle. “Into this wardrobe,” said she; “and mind you don’t make the smallest noise, or my man will wring your neck. He takes a nap after dinner, and then you’ll have a chance to demonstrate that grease-eradicator you sold me last week.”

      The wardrobe was as big as Jack’s yacht, and the key-hole as big as a barrel, so the boy could see everything that took place without. Presently the castle was shaken as if by an earthquake, and a great voice roared: “Wife! wife! I smell gasoline!”

      Jack trembled, remembering that in tinkering around his car that morning he had spilled gas on his clothes.

      “Be quiet!” replied the Giantess. “It’s only the lightning-cleaner which that scamp of a peddler sold me the other day.”

      The Giant ate a couple of sheep; then, pushing his plate away, he called for his talking harp. And while he smoked, the harp rattled off a long string of stuff about the equal liability of all men to labor, the abolition of the right of inheritance, and kindred things. Jack resolved that when he got hold of the harp he would serve it at a formal dinner, under a great silver cover. What a sensation it would cause among his guests when it began to sing its little song about the abolition of the right of inheritance!

      In a short time the Giant fell asleep, for the harp, like many reformers, became wearisome through exaggeration of statement. Jack slipped from the wardrobe, seized the harp, and ran out of the castle.

      “Master! Master!” cried the music-maker. “Wake up! We are betrayed!”

      Glancing back, Jack saw the Giant striding after him, and gave himself up for lost; but at that moment he heard his name called, and he saw the Fairy, Polly Twinkletoes, beckoning to him from a taxicab. Jack sprang into the machine and they reached the beanstalk a hundred yards ahead of the giant. Down the stalk they slipped and dropped, the Giant lumbering after. Once at the bottom, Jack ran to the garage and got out his man-killer, and when the Giant reached ground he was knocked, as Jack had promised, into the middle of the proximate month.

      Our hero married the Fairy, much against his mother’s wishes; she knew her son all too well, and she felt certain that she should soon come to know Polly as well, and as unfavorably. Things turned out no better than she had expected. After a month of incompatibility, and worse, Polly consented to a divorce in consideration of one hundred thousand dollars, and they all lived happily ever afterward.

      A LINE-O’-TYPE OR TWO

      “Fay ce que vouldras.”

“FAY CE QUE VOULDRAS.”

      Do what thou wilt. Long known to fame

      That ancient motto of Thélème.

      To this our abbey hither bring,

      Wisdom or wit, thine offering,

      Or low or lofty be thine aim.

      Here is no virtue in a name,

      But all are free to play the game.

      Here, welcome as the flow’rs of Spring,

      Do what thou wilt.

      Each in these halls a place may claim,

      And is, if sad, alone to blame.

      Kick up thy heels and dance and sing —

      To any wild conceit give wing —

      Be fool or sage, ’tis all the same —

      Do what thou wilt.

      That was an amusing tale of the man who complained of injuries resulting from a loaded seegar. He knew when he smoked it that it was a trick weed, and knew that it would explode, but he “didn’t know when.” He reminds us very strongly of a parlor bolshevist.

      “Man,” as they sing in “Princess Ida,” “is nature’s sole mistake.” And he never appears more of a rummy than when some woman kills herself for him, in his embarrassed presence. His first thought is always of himself.

      A history exam in a public school contains this delightful information: “Patrick Henry said, ‘I rejoice that I have but one country to live for.’”

      Time travels in divers paces with divers persons. There are some who, like a certain capable rounder, lately departed, have time to manage a large business, maintain two or more domestic establishments, razz, jazz, get drunk, and fight; while others of us cannot find time in the four and twenty hours to do half the things we wish to achieve. Although your orator has nothing to do but “write a few headlines and go home,” as Old Bill Byrne says, night overtakes him with half his chores undone. Time gallops withal.

      “They know what they like.”

      There are exceptions. The author of “Set Down in Malice” mentions a number, the most conspicuous being Ernest Newman. And we recall an exception, Mr. Jimmie Whittaker, merriest of critics, who was so far from knowing what he liked that he adopted the plan, in considering the Symphony concerts, of praising the even numbers one week and damning the even numbers the following week.

      Like Ernest Newman, we shall never again hear the Chopin Funeral March without being reminded of Mr. Sidgwick’s summary: “Most funeral marches seem to cheer up in the middle and become gloomy again. I suppose the idea is, (1) the poor old boy’s dead; (2) well, after all, he’s probably gone to heaven; (3) still, anyhow, the poor old boy’s dead.”

      Our readers, we swear, know everything. One of them writes from La Crosse that Debussy’s “Canope” has nothing to do with the planet Canopus, but refers to the ancient Egyptian city of that name. Mebbe so (we should like proof of it), but what of it? – as Nero remarked when they told him Rome was afire. The Debussy music does as well for the star as for the city. It is ethereal, far away, and it leaves off in mid-air. There is a passage in “Orpheus and Eurydice” which is wedded to words expressing sorrow; but, as has been pointed out, the music would go as well or better with words expressing joy.

      “Lincoln,” observed Old Bill Byrne, inserting a meditative pencil in the grinder, “said you can fool all the people some of the time. But that was in the sixties, before the Colyum had developed a bunch of lynx-eyed, trigger-brained, hawk-swooping, owl-pouncing fans that nobody can fool for a holy minute.”

      Fishing for errors in a proof-room is like fishing for trout: the big ones always get away. Or, as Old Bill Byrne puts it, while you’re fishing for a minnow a whale comes up and bites you in the leg.

      Whene’er we take our walks abroad we meet acquaintances who view with alarm the immediate future of the self-styled human race; but we find ourself unable to share their apprehension. We do not worry about lead, or iron, or any other element. And human nature is elemental. You can flatten it, as in Russia; you can bend, and twist, and pound it into various forms, but you cannot decompose it. And so the “new order,” while perhaps an improvement on the old, will not be so very different. Britannia will go on ruling the waves, and Columbia, not Utopia, will be the gem of the ocean.

      “Woman’s Club Will Hear Dr. Ng Poon Chew.” – Minneapolis News.

      We believe this is a libel on Dr. Poon.

      The Greek drachma is reported to be in a bad way. Perhaps a Drachma League could uplift it and tide it over the crisis.

THE DELIRIOUS CRITIC[From the Sheridan, СКАЧАТЬ