Part 2
Then the cynical U. L. See (who is really the janitor at the blind asylum) grumbles about useless expense, and finally draws out from the teeming brain of Constant Reader a long, flabby essay, written on red-ruled leaves, cut out of an old meat-market ledger, written economically on both sides with light blue ink made of bluing and cold tea. This essay introduces, under the most trying circumstances, such crude yet original literary gems as:
Wad some power the giftie gie us, etc.
He also says:
The wee sma' hours ayant the twal.
And farther on:
Breathes there a man with soul so deal.
Who never to himself hath said, etc.
His essay is not so much the vehicle of thought as it is the accommodation train for fragments of his old school declamations to ride on.
But to Veritas we owe much. I say this because I know what I am talking about, for am I not old Veritas himself? Haven't I been writing things for the papers ever since papers were published? Am I not the man who for years has been a stranger to fear? Have I not again and again called the congressman, the capitalist, the clergyman, the voter and the philanthropist everything I could lay my tongue to, and then fought mosquitoes in the deep recesses of the swamp while the editor remained at the office and took the credit for writing what I had given him for nothing? Has not many a paper built up a name and a libel suit upon what I have written, and yet I am almost unknown? When people ask, Who is Veritas? and where does he live? no one seems to know. He is up seven flights of stairs, in a hot room that smells of old clothes and neglected thoughts. Far from the "madding crowd," as Constant Reader has so truly said, I sit alone, with no personal property but an overworked costume, a strong love for truth, and a shawl-strap full of suggestions to the overestimated man who edits the paper..
So I battle on, with only the meager and flea-bitten reward of seeing my name in print "anon," as Constant Reader would say. All I have to fork over to posterity is my good name, which I beg leave to sign here.
Veritas.
THE DRUG BUSINESS IN KANSAS
Hudson, Wis.
|MR. BILL NYE.--Dear Sir: I hope you will pardon me for addressing you on a matter of pure business, but I have heard that you are not averse to going out of your way to do a favor now and then to those who are sincere and appreciative.
I have learned from a friend that you have been around all over the west, and so I have taken the liberty of writing you to ask what you think would be the chance of success for a young man if he were to go to Kansas to enter the drug business.
I am a practical young druggist 23 years of age, and have some money--a few hundred dollars--with which to go into business. Would you advise Kansas or Colorado as a good part of the west for that business?
I have also written some for the press, but with little success. I inclose you a few slips cut from the papers in which these articles originally appeared. I send stamp for reply and hope you will answer me, even though your time may be taken up pretty well by other matters. Respectfully yours.
Adolph Jaynes,
Lock-Box 604.
Hudson, Wis., Oct. 1.
MR. Adolph Jaynes, Lock-box 604.--
DEAR SIR: Your favor of late date is at hand, and I take pleasure in writing this dictated letter to you, using the columns of the Chicago Daily News as a delicate way of teaching you. I will take the liberty of replying to your last question first, if you pardon me, and I say that you would do better, no doubt at once, in a financial way, to go on with your drug business than to monkey with literature.
In the first place, your style of composition is like the present style of dress among men. It is absolutely correct, and therefore it is absolutely like that of nine men out of every ten we meet. Your style of writing has a mustache on it, wears a three-button cutaway of some Scotch mixture, carries a cane, and wears a straight, stand-up collar and scarf. It is so correct and so exactly in conformity with the prevailing style of composition, and your thoughts are expressed so thoroughly like other people's methods of dressing up their sentences and sand-papering the soul out of what they say, that I honestly think you would succeed better by trying to subsist upon the quick sales and small profits which the drug trade insures.
Now, let us consider the question of location.
Seriously, you ought to look over the ground yourself, but as you have asked me to give you my best judgment on the question of preference as between Kansas and Colorado I will say without hesitation that, if you mean by the drug business the sale of sure-enough drugs, medicines, paints, oils, glass, putty, toilet articles, and prescriptions carefully compounded, I would _not_ go to Kansas at this time.
If you would like to go to a flourishing country and put out a big basswood mortar in front of your shop in order to sell the tincture of damnation throughout bleeding Kansas, now is your golden opportunity. Now is the accepted time.
If it is the great, big, burning desire of your heart to go into a town of 2,000 people and open the thirteenth drug store in order that you may stand behind a tall black-walnut prescription case day in and day out, with a graduate in one hand and a Babcock fire-extinguisher in the other, filling orders for whisky made of stump-water and the juice of future punishment, you will do well to go to Kansas. It is a temperance state, and no saloons are allowed there. All is quiet and orderly, and the drug business is a great success.
You can run a dummy drug store there with two dozen dreary old glass bottles on the shelves, punctuated by the hand of time and the Kansas fly of the period, and with a prohibitory law at your back and a tall, red barrel in the back room filled with a mixture that will burn great holes into nature's heart and make the cemetery blossom as the rose, and in a few years you can sell enough of this justly celebrated preparation for household, scientific, and experimental purposes only to fill your flabby pockets with wealth and paint the pure air of Kansas a bright and inflammatory red.
If you sincerely and earnestly yearn for a field where you may go forth and garner an honest harvest from the legitimate effort of an upright soda fountain and free and open sale of slippery elm in its unadulterated condition, I would go to some state where I would not have to enter into competition with a style of pharmacy that has the unholy instincts and ambitions of a blind pig. I would not go into the field where red-eyed ruin simply waited for a prescription blank, not necessarily for publication, but simply as a guaranty of good faith, in order that it may bound forth from behind the prescription case and populate the poorhouses and the paupers' nettle-grown addition to the silent city of the dead.
The great question of how best to down the demon rum is before the American people, and it will not be put aside until it is settled; but while this is being attended to, Mr. Jaynes, I would start a drug store farther away from the center of conflict and go on joyously, sacrificing expensive tinctures, compounds, and sirups at bed-rock prices.
Go on, Mr. Jaynes, dealing out to the yearning, panting public, drugs, paints, oils, glass putty, varnish, patent medicines, and prescriptions carefully compounded, with none to molest or make afraid, but shun, oh shun the wild-eyed pharmacopoeia that contains naught but the festering fluid so popular in Kansas, a compound that holds crime in solution and ruin in bulk, that shrivels up a man's gastric economy, and sears great ragged holes into his immortal soul. Take this advice home to your heart and you will ever command the hearty co-operation of "yours for health," as the late Lydia E. Pinkham so succinctly said.
THE PERILS OF IDENTIFICATION
Chicago, Feb. 20,1888.
|FINANCIAL circles here have been a good deal interested in the discovery of a cipher which has been recently adopted by a depositor and which began to attract the attention at first of a gentleman employed in the Clearing House. He was telling me about it and showing me the vouchers or duplicates of them.
It was several months ago that he first noticed on the back of a check passing through the Clearing-House the following cipher, written in a symmetrical Gothic hand:
_Dear Sir: Herewith find payment for last month's butter. It was hardly up to the average. Why do you blonde your butter? Your butter last month tried to assume an effeminate air, which certainly was not consistent with its vigor. Is it not possible that this butter is the brother to what we had the month previous, and that it was exchanged for its sister by mistake? We have generally liked your butter very much, but we will have to deal elsewhere if you are going to encourage it in wearing a full beard. Yours truly, W._
Moneyed men all over Chicago and financial cryptogrammers came to read the curious thing and to try and work out its bearing on trade. Everybody took a look at it, and went away defeated. Even the men who were engaged in trying to figure out the identity of the Snell murderer took a day off and tried their Waterbury thinkers on this problem. In the midst of it all another check passed through the Clearing House with this cipher, in the same hand:
_Sir: Your bill for the past month is too much. You forget the eggs returned at the end of second week, for which you were to give me credit. The cook broke one of them by mistake, and then threw up the portfolio of pie-founder in our once joyous home. I will not dock you for loss of cook, but I cannot allow you for the eggs. How you succeed in dodging quarantine with eggs like that is a mystery to yours truly, W._
Great excitement followed the discovery of this indorsement on a check for $32.87. Everybody who knew anything about-ciphering was called in to consider it. A young man from a high school near here, who made a specialty of mathematics and pimples, and who could readily tell how long a shadow a nine pound groundhog would cast at 2 o'clock and 37 minutes p.m., on groundhog day, if sunny, at the town of Fungus, Dak., provided latitude and longitude and an irregular mass of red chalk be given to him, was secured to jerk a few logarithms in the interests of trade. He came and tried it for a few days, covered the interior of the Exposition Building with figures and then went away.
The Pinkerton detectives laid aside their literary work on the great train book, entitled "The Jerk-water Bank Bobbery and Other Choice Crimes," by the author of "How I Traced a Lame Man Through Michigan, and Other Felonies." They grappled with the cipher, and several of them leaned up against something and thought for a long time, but they could make neither head nor tail to it. Ignatius Donnelly took a powerful dose of kumiss, and under its maddening influence sought to solve the great problem which threatened to engulf the nation's surplus. All was in vain. Cowed and defeated, the able conservators of coin, who require a man to be identified before he can draw on his overshoes at sight, had to acknowledge if this thing continued it threatened the destruction of the entire national fabric.
About this time I was calling at the First National Bank of Chicago, the greatest bank, if I am not mistaken, in America. I saw the bonds securing its issue of national currency the other day in Washington, and I am quite sure the custodian told me it was the greatest of any bank in the Union. Anyway, it was sufficient, so that I felt like doing my banking business there whenever it became handy to do so.
I asked for a certificate of deposit for $2,000, and had the money to pay for it, but I had to be identified. "Why," I said to the receiving teller, "surely you don't require a man to be identified when he deposits money, do you?"
"Yes, that's the idea."
"Well, isn't that a new twist on the crippled industries of this country?"
"No; that's our rule. Hurry up, please, and don't keep men waiting who have money and know how to do business."
"Well, I don't want to obstruct business, of course, but suppose, for instance, I get myself identified by a man I know and a man you know and a man who can leave his business and come here for the delirious joy of identifying me, and you admit that I am the man I claim to be, corresponding as to description, age, sex, etc., with the man I advertise myself to be, how would it be about your ability to identify yourself as the man you claim to be? I go all over Chicago, visiting all the large pork-packing houses in search of a man I know, and who is intimate with literary people like me, and finally we will say, I find one who knows me and who knows you, and whom you know, and who can leave his leaf lard long enough to come here and identify me all right. Can you identify yourself in such a way that when I put in my $2,000 you will not loan it upon insufficient security, as they did in Cincinnati the other day, as soon as I go out of town?"
"Oh, we don't care especially whether you trade here or not, so that you hurry up and let other people have a chance. Where you make a mistake is in trying to rehearse a piece here instead of going out to Lincoln Park or somewhere in a quiet part of the city. Our rules are that a man who makes a deposit here must be identified."
"All right. Do you know Queen Victoria?"
"No sir; I do not."
"Well, then, there is no use in disturbing her. Do you know any other of the crowned heads?"
"No sir."
"Well, then, do you know President Cleveland, or any of the Cabinet, or the Senate or members of the House?"
"No."
"That's it, you see. I move in one set and you in another. What respectable people do you know?"
"I'll have to ask you to stand aside, I guess, and give that string of people a chance. You have no right to take up my time in this way. The rules of the bank are inflexible. We must know who you are, even before we accept your deposit."
I then drew from my pocket a copy of the Sunday _World_ which contained a voluptuous picture of myself. Removing my hat and making a court salaam by letting out four additional joints in my lithe and versatile limbs, I asked if any further identification would be necessary.
Hastily closing the door to the vault and jerking the combination, he said that would be satisfactory. I was then permitted to deposit in the bank.
I do not know why I should always be regarded with suspicion wherever I go. I do not present the appearance of a man who is steeped in crime, and yet when I put my trivial, little, two-gallon valise on the seat of a depot waiting-room a big man with a red mustache comes to me and hisses through his clenched teeth: "Take yer baggage off the seat!" It is so everywhere. I apologize for disturbing a ticket agent long enough to sell me a ticket, and he tries to jump through a little brass wicket and throttle me. Other men come in and say: "Give me a ticket for Bandoline, O., and be dam sudden about it, too," and they get their ticket and go aboard the car and get the best seat, while I am begging for the opportunity to buy a seat at full rates and then ride in the wood box. I believe that common courtesy and decency in America needs protection. Go into an hotel or a hotel, whichever suits the eyether and nyether reader of these lines, and the commercial man who travels for a big sausage-casing house in New York has the bridal chamber, while the meek and lowly minister of the Gospel gets a wall-pocket room with a cot, a slippery-elm towel, a cake of cast-iron soap, a disconnected bell, a view of the laundry, a tin roof and $4 a day.
But I digress. I was speaking of the bank check cipher. At the First National Bank I was shown another of these remarkable indorsements. It read as follows:
_Dear Sir: This will be your pay for chickens and other fowls received up to the first of the present month. Time is working' wondrous changes in your chickens. They are not such chickens as we used to get of you before the war. They may be the same chickens, but oh! how changed by the lapse of time! How much more indestructible! How they have learned since then to defy the encroaching tooth of remorseless ages, or any other man! Why do you not have them tender like your squashes! I found a blue poker chip in your butter this week. What shall I credit myself for it? If you would try to work your butter more and your customers less it would be highly appreciated, especially by, yours truly, W._
Looking at the signature on the check itself, I found it to be that of Mrs. James Wexford, of this city. Knowing Mr. Wexford, a wealthy and influential publisher here, I asked him today if he knew anything about this matter. He said that all he knew about it was that his wife had a separate bank account, and had asked him several months ago what was the use of all the blank space on the back of a check, and why it couldn't be used for correspondence with the remittee. Mr. Wexford said he'd bet $500 that his wife had been using her checks that way, for he said he never knew of a woman who could possibly pay postage on a note, remittance or anything else unless every particle of the surface had been written over in a wild, delirious, three-story hand. Later on I found that he was right about it. His wife had been sassing the grocer and the butter-man on the back of her checks. Thus ended the great bank mystery.
I will close this letter with a little incident the story of which may not be so startling, but it is true. It is a story of child faith. Johnny Quinlan, of Evanston, has the most wonderful confidence in the efficacy of prayer, but he thinks that prayer does not succeed unless it is accompanied with considerable physical strength. He believes that adult prayer is a good thing, but doubts the efficacy of juvenile prayer.
He has wanted a Jersey cow for a good while, and tried prayer, but it didn't seem to get to the central office. Last year he went to a neighbor who is a Christian and believer in the efficacy of prayer, also the owner of a Jersey cow.
"Do you believe that prayer will bring me a yaller Jersey cow?" said Johnny.
"Why, yes, of course. Prayer will remove mountains; it will do anything.
"Well, then, suppose you give me the cow you've got and pray for another one."
A FATHER'S LETTER
|MY DEAR SOX: We got your last letter some three days ago. It found us all moderately well though not very frisky. Your letters now days are getting quite pretty as regards penmanship. You are certainly going to develop into a fine penman your mother thinks. She says that if you improve as fast in your writing next year as you have last, you will soon be writing for the papers.
In my mind's eye I can see you there in your room practicing for a long time on a spiral spring which you make with your pen. I believe you call it the whole arm movement. I think you got the idea from me. You remember I used to have a whole arm movement that I introduced into our family along in the summer of '69. You was at that time trying to learn to swim. Once or twice the neighbors brought you home with your lungs full of river water and your ears full of coarse sand. We pumped you dry several times, but it did not wean you from the river, so I introduced the whole arm movement, one day and used it from that on in what you would call our curric kulum. It worked well.
Your letters are now very attractive from a scientific standpoint. The letters all have pretty little curly tails on them, and though you do not always spell according to Gunter, the capital letters are as pretty as a picture. I never saw such a round O as you make when you hang your tongue out and begin to swing yourself. Your mother says that your great-uncle on her side was a good writer too. He could draw off a turtle dove without taking his pen from the paper, and most everybody would know as soon as they looked at it that it was a turtle dove or some such bird as that.
He could also draw a deer with coil spring horns on him, and a barbed wire fence to it, and a scolloped tail, and it looked as much like a deer as anything else you could think of.
He was a fine penman and wrote a good deal for the papers. Your mother has got a lot of his pieces in the house yet, which the papers sent back because they were busy and crowded full of other stuff. I read some of these letters, and any one can see that it was a great sacrifice for the editors to send the pieces back, but they had got used to it and conquered their own personal feelings, and sent them back because they were too good for the plain, untutored reader. One editor said that he did not want to print the enclosed pieces because he thought it would be a pity to place such pretty writing in the soiled hands of the practical printer. He said that the manuscript looked so pretty just as it was, that he hadn't the heart to send it into the composing room. So the day may not be far away, Henry, when you can write for the press, your mother thinks. I don't care so much about it myself, but she has her heart set on it. Your mother thinks that you are a great man, though I have not detected any symptoms of it yet. She has got that last pen scroll work here of yours in the bible, where she can look at it every day. Its the picture of a hen setting in a nest of curly-cues made with red ink, over a woven wire mattress of dewdads in blue ink, and some tall grass in violet ink. Your mother says that this fowl is also a turtle dove, but I think she is wrong.
She says the world has always got a warm place for one who can make such a beautiful picture without taking his pen off the paper. Perhaps she is right. I hope that you will not take me for an example, for I am no writer at all. My parents couldn't give me any advantages when I was young. When I ought to have been learning how to make a red ink bird of paradise swooping down on a violet ink butterfly with green horns, I was frittering away my time trying to keep my misguided parents out of the poor-house.
I tell you, Henry, there was mighty little fluff and bloom and funny business in my young life. While you are acquiring the rudiments of Long Dennis and polo and penmanship, and storing your mind with useful knowledge with which to parlize your poor parents when you come home, do not forget, Henry, that your old sway-back father never had those opportunities for soaking his system full of useful knowledge which you now enjoy. When I was your age, I was helping to jerk the smutty logs off of a new farm with a pair of red and restless steers, in the interest of your grandfather.
But, I do not repine. I just simply call your attention to your priviledges. Could you have a Summer in the heart of the primeval forest, thrown in contact with a pair of high-strung steers and a large number of black flies of the most malignant type, "snaking" half-burnt logs across yourself and fighting flies from early dawn till set of sun, you would be willing, nay tickled, to go back to your monotonous round of base ball and Suffolk jackets and pest-house cigarettes. .
We rather expected you home some time ago, but you said you needed sea air and change of scene, so you will not be home very likely till the latter part of the month. We will be glad to see you any time, Henry, and we will try to make it as pleasant as we can for you. Your mother got me to fill the big straw-tick for your bed again, so that you would have a nice tall place to sleep, and so that you could live high, as the feller said.
I tried on the old velocipede pants you sent home last week. They are too short for me with the style of legs I am using this Summer. Your bathing pants are also too short for me, so I gave them to a poor woman here who is trying to ameliorate the condition of her sex.