Part 6

Ex-Mayor Henry C. Robinson, of Hartford, Conn., if I am not mistaken, suggested a school of journalism at least twelve years ago, but it did not meet with immediate and practical indorsement. Now Cornell comes forward and seems to be in earnest, and I am glad of it. The letters received from day to day by editors, and written to them by men engaged in other pursuits, practically admit and prove that there is not now in existence an editor who knows enough to carry liver to a bear.

That is the reason why every means should be used to pull this profession out of the mire of dense ignorance and place it upon the high, dry soil which leads to genius and consanguinity.

The above paragraph I quote from a treatise on journalism which I wrote just before I knew anything about it.

The life of the journalist is a hard one, and, although it is not so trying as the life of the newspaper man, it is full of trials and perplexities. If newspaper men and journalists did not stand by each other I do not know what joy they would have. Kindness for each other, gentleness and generosity, even in their rivalry, characterize the conduct of a large number of them.

I shall never forget my first opportunity to do a kind act for a fellow newspaper man, nor with what pleasure I availed myself of it, though he was my rival, especially in the publication of large and spirited equestrian handbills and posters. He also printed a rival paper and assailed me most bitterly from time to time. His name was Lorenzo Dow Pease, and we had carried on an acrimonious warfare for two years. He had said that I was a reformed Prohibitionist and that I had left a neglected wife in every State in the Union. I had stated that he would give better satisfaction if he would wear his brains breaded. Then he had said something else that was personal and it had gone on so for some time. We devoted fifteen minutes each day to the management of our respective papers, and the balance of the day to doing each other up in a way to please our subscribers.

One evening Lorenzo Dow Pease came into my office and said he wanted to see me personally. I said that would suit me exactly and that if he had asked to see me in any other way I did not know how I could have arranged it. He said he meant that he would like to see me by myself. I therefore discharged the force, turned out the dog and we had the office to ourselves. I could see that he was in trouble, for every little while he would brush away a tear in an underhanded kind of way and swallow a large, imaginary mass of something. I asked Lorenzo why he felt so depressed, and he said: "William, I have came here for a favor." He always said "I have came," for he was a self-made man and hadn't done a very good job either. "I have came here for a favor. I wrote a reply to your venomous attack of to-day and I expected to publish it to-morrow in my paper, but, to tell you the truth, we are out of paper. At least, we have a few bundles at the freight office, but they have taken to sending it C. O. D., and I haven't the means just at hand to take it out. Now, as a brother in the great and glorious order of journalism, would it be too much for you to loan me a couple of bundles of paper to do me till I get my pay for some equestrian bills struck off Friday and just as good as the wheat?"

"How long would a couple of bundles last you?" I asked as I looked out at the window and wondered if he would reveal his circulation.

"Five issues and a little over," he said, filling his pipe from a small box on the desk.

"But you could cut off your exchanges and then it would last longer," I remarked.

"Yes, but only for one additional issue. I am very anxious to appear to-morrow, because my subscribers will be looking for a reply to what you said about me this morning. You stated that I was 'a journalistic bacteria looking for something to infect,' and while I did not come here to get you to retract, I would like it as a favor if you would loan me enough white paper to set myself straight before my subscribers."

"Well, why don't you go and tell them about it? It wouldn't take long," I said in a jocund way, slapping Lorenzo on the back. But he did not laugh. I then told him that we only had paper enough to last us till our next bill came, and so I could not possibly loan any, but that if he would write a caustic reply to my editorial I would print it for him. He caught me in his arms and then for a moment his head was pillowed on my breast. Then he sat down and wrote the following card:

Editor of the Boomerang:

Will you allow me through your columns to state that in your issue of yesterday you did me a great injustice by referring to me as a journalistic bacteria looking for something to infect; also, as a lop eared germ of contagion, and warning people to vaccinate in order to prevent my spread? I denounce the whole article as a malicious falsehood, and state that if you will only give me a chance I will fight you on sight. All I ask is that you will wait till I can overtake you, and I am able and willing to knock great chunks off the universe with you. I do not ask any favors of an editor who misleads his subscribers and intentionally misunderstands his correspondents; a man who advises an anxious inquirer who wants to know "how to get a cheap baby buggy" to leave the child at a cheap hotel; a man who assumes to wear brains, but who really thinks with a fungus growth; a man the bleak and barren exterior of whose head is only equalled by its bald and echoing interior.

Lorenzo Dow Pease.

I looked it over, and as there didn't seem to be anything personal in it, I told him I would print it for him with pleasure. He then asked that I would, as a further favor, refrain from putting any advertising marks on it and that I would make it follow pure reading matter, which I did. I leaded the card and printed it with a simple word of introduction, in which I said that I took pleasure in printing it, inasmuch as Mr. Pease could not get his paper out of the express office for a few days. It was a kindness to him and did not hurt my paper in the end.

There are many reasons why the establishment of a department of journalism at Cornell will be a good move, and I believe that while it will not take the place of actual experience, it will serve to shorten the apprenticeship of a young newspaper man and the fatigue of starting the amateur in journalism will be divided between the managing editor and the tutor. It will also give the aspiring sons of wealthy parents a chance to toy with journalism without interfering with those who are actually engaged in it.

HIS GARDEN

|I ALWAYS enjoy a vegetable garden, and through the winter I look forward to the spring days when I will take my cob pipe and hoe and go joyously afield. I like to toy with the moist earth and the common squash bug of the work-a-day world. It is a pleasure also to irrigate the garden, watering the sauer kraut plant and the timid tomato vine as though they were children asking for a drink. I am never happier than when I am engaged in irrigating my tropical garden or climbing my neighbor with a hoe when he shuts off my water supply by sticking an old pair of pantaloons in the canal that leads to my squash conservatory.

One day a man shut off my irrigation that way and dammed the water up to such a degree that I shut off his air supply, and I was about to say dammed him up also. We had quite a scuffle. Up to that time we had never exchanged a harsh word. That morning I noticed that my early climbing horse-radish and my dwarf army worms were looking a little au revoir, and I wondered what was the matter. I had been absent several days and was grieved to notice that my garden had a kind of blase air, as though it needed rest and change of scene.

The Poland China egg-plant looked up sadly at me and seemed to say: "Pardner, don't you think it's a long time between drinks?" The watermelon seemed to have a dark brown taste in its mouth, and there was an air of gloom all over the garden.

At that moment I discovered my next-door neighbor at the ditch on the corner. He was singing softly to himself:

O, yes, I'll meet you;

I'll meet you when the sun goes down.

He was also jamming an old pair of Rembrandt pants into the canal, where they would shut off my supply. He stood with his back towards me, and just as he said he would "meet me when the sun went down," I smote him across the back of the neck with my hoe handle, and before he could recover from the first dumb surprise and wonder, I pulled the dripping pantaloons out of the ditch and tied them in a true-lover's knot around his neck. He began to look black in the face, and his struggles soon ceased altogether. At that moment his wife came out and shrieked two pure womanly shrieks, and hissed in my ear: "You have killed me husband!"

I said, possibly I had. If so, would she please send in the bill and I would adjust it at an early day. I said this in a bantering tone of voice, and raising my hat to her in that polished way of mine, started to go, when something fell with a thud on the greensward!

It was the author of these lines. I did not know till two days afterward that my neighbor's wife wore a moire antique rolling-pin under her apron that morning. I did not suspect it till it was too late. The affair was kind of hushed up on account of the respectability of the parties.

By the time I had recovered the garden seemed to melt away into thin air. My neighbor had it all his own way, and while his proud hollyhocks and Johnny-jump-ups reared their heads to drink the mountain water at the twilight hour, my little, low-necked, summer squashes curled up and died.

Most every year yet I made a garden. I pay a man $3 to plow it. Then I pay $7.50 for garden seeds and in July I hire the same man at $3 to summer-fallow the whole thing while I go and buy my vegetables of a Chinaman named Wun Lung. I've done this now for eight years, and I owe my robust health and rich olive complexion to the fact that I've got a garden and do just as little in it as possible. Parties desiring a dozen or more of my Shanghai egg-plants to set under an ordinary domestic hen can procure the same by writing to me and enclosing lock of hair and $10.

WRITTEN TO THE BOY

Asheville, N. C., Feb. 10,1887.

|MY DEAR HENRY: Your last issue of the _Retina_, your new thought vehicle, published at New Belony, this state, was received yesterday. I like this number, I think, better than I did the first. While the news in it seems fresher, the editorial assertions are not so fresh. You do not state that you "have come to stay" this week, but I infer that you occupy the same position you did last week with inference to that.

I was more especially interested in your piece about how to rear children and the care of parents. I read it to your mother last night while she was setting her bread. Nothing tickles me very often at my time of life, and when I laugh a loud peal of laughter at anything nowadays it's got to be a pretty blamed good thing, I can tell you that. But your piece about bringing up children made me laugh real hard. I enjoy a piece like that from the pen of a juicy young brain like yours. It almost made me young again to read the words of my journalistic gosling son.

You also say that "teething is the most trying time for parents." Do you mean that parents are more fretful when they are teething than any other time? Your mother and me reckoned that you must mean that. If so, it shows your great research. How a mere child hardly out of knee-panties, a young shoot like you, who was never a parent for a moment in his life, can enter into and understand the woes that beset parents is more than I can understand. If you had been through what I have while teething I could see how you might understand and write about it, but at present I do not see through it. The first teeth I cut as a parent made me very restless. I was sick two years ago with a new disease that was just out and the doctor gave me something for it that made my teeth fall like the leaves of autumn. In six weeks after I began to convalesce my mouth was perfectly bald-headed. For days I didn't bite into a Ben Davis apple that I didn't leave a fang into it.

Well, after that I saw an advertisement in the _Rural Rustler_--a paper I used to take then--of a place where you could get a set of teeth for $6.

I didn't want to buy a high-priced and gaudy set of teeth at the tail end of such a life as I had led, and I knew that teeth, no matter how expensive they might be, would be of little avail to coming generations, so I went over to the place named in the paper and got an impression of my mouth taken.

There is really nothing in this life that will take the stiff-necked pride out of a man like viewing a plaster cast of his tottering mouth. The dentist fed me with a large ladle full of putty or plaster of paris, I reckon, and told me to hold it in my mouth till it set.

I don't remember a time in all my life when the earth and transitory things ever looked so undesirable and so trifling as they did while I sat there in that big red barber-chair with my mouth full of cold putty. I felt just as a man might when he is being taxidermied.

After awhile the dentist took out the cast. It was a cloudy day and so it didn't look much like me after all. If it had I would have sent you one. After I'd set again two or three times, we got a pretty fair likeness, he said, and I went home, having paid $6 and left my address.

Three weeks after that a small boy came with my new teeth.

They were nice, white, shiny teeth, and did not look very ghastly after I had become used to them. I wished at first that the gums had been a duller red and that the teeth had not looked so new. I put them in my mouth, but they felt cold and distant. I took them out and warmed them in the sunlight. People going by no doubt thought that I did it to show that I was able to have new teeth, but that was not the case.

I wore them all that forenoon while I butchered. There were times during the forenoon when I wanted to take them out, but when a man is butchering he hates to take his teeth out just because they hurt.

Neighbors told me that after my mouth got hardened on the inside it would feel better.

But, oh, how it relieved me at night to take those teeth out and put them on the top of a cool bureau, where the wind could blow through their whiskers! How I hated to resume them in the morning and start in on another long day, when the roof of my mouth felt like a big, red bunion and my gums like a pale red stone-bruise.

A year ago, Henry, about two-thirty in the afternoon I think it was, I left that set of teeth in the rare flank of a barbecue I was to in our town.

Since then I have not been so pretty, perhaps, but I have no more unicorns on the rafters of my mouth and my note is just as good at thirty days as ever it was.

You are right, Henry, when you go on to state in your paper that teething is the most trying time for parents.

Ta, ta, as the feller says.

Your father.

ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS

George E. Beath, Areola, Ill.,-writes to know "the value of a silver dollar of 1878 with eight feathers in the eagle's tail."

It is worth what you can get for it, Mr. Beath. Perhaps the better way would be to forward it to me and I will do the best I can with it. There being but eight feathers in the eagle's tail would be no drawback. Send it to me at once and I will work it off for you, Mr. Beath.

"Tutor," Tucson, Ariz., asks "What do you regard as the best method of teaching the alphabet to children?"

Very likely my method would hardly receive your indorsement, but with my own children I succeed by using an alphabet with the names attached, which I give below. I find that by connecting the alphabet with certain easy and interesting subjects the child rapidly acquires knowledge of the letter, and it becomes firmly fixed in the mind. I use the following list of alphabetical names in the order given below:

A is for Antediluvian, Anarchistic and Agamemnon.

B is for Bucephalus, Burgundy and Bull-head. C is for Cantharides, Confucius and Casabianca. D is for Deuteronomy, Delphi and Dishabille.

E is for Euripedes, European and Effervescent. F is for Fumigate, Farinaceous and Fundamental.

G is for Garrulous, Gastric and Gangrene.

H is for Hamestrap, Honeysuckle and Hoyle.

I is for Idiosyncrasy, Idiomatic and Iodine.

J is for Jaundice, Jamaica and Jeu-d'esprit.

K is for Kandilphi, Kindergarten and KuKlux. L is for Lop-sided, Lazarus and Llano Estacado. M is for Menengitis, Mardi Gras and Mesopotamia.

N is for Narragansett, Neapolitan and Nix-comarous.

Q is for Oleander, Oleaginous and Oleomargarine.

P is for Phlebotomy, Phthisic and Parabola.

Q is for Query, Quasi and Quits.

R is for Rejuvenate, Regina and Requiescat.

S is for Simultaneous, Sigauche and Saleratus.

T is for Tubercular, Themistocles and Thereabouts.

U is for Ultramarine, Uninitiated and Utopian.

V is for Voluminous, Voltaire and Vivisection. W is for Witherspoon, Woodcraft and Washerwoman.

X is for Xenophon, Xerxes and Xmas.

Y is for Ysdle, Yahoo and Yellowjacket.

Z is for Zoological, Zanzibar and Zacatecas.

In this way the eye of the child is first appealed to. He becomes familiar with the words which begin with a certain letter, and before he knows it the letter itself has impressed itself upon his memory.

Sometimes, however, where my children were slow to remember a word and hence its corresponding letter, I have drawn the object on a blackboard or on the side of the barn. For instance, we will suppose that D is hard to fix in the mind of the pupil and the words to which it belongs as an initial do not readily cling to memory. I have only to draw upon the board a Deuteronomy, a Delphi, or a Dishabille, and he will never forget it. No matter how he may struggle to do so, it will still continue to haunt his brain forever. The same with Z, which is a very difficult letter to remember. I assist the memory by stimulating the eye, drawing rapidly, and crudely perhaps, a Zoological, a Zanzibar or a Zacatecas.

The great difficulty in teaching children the letters is that there is really nothing in the naked alphabet itself to win a child's love. We must dress it in attractive colors and gaudy plumage so that he will be involuntarily drawn to it.

Those who have used my method say that after mastering the alphabet, the binomial theorum and the rule in Shelly's case seemed like child's play. This goes to show what method and discipline will accomplish in the mind of the young.

"Fond Mother," Braley's Fork, asks: "What shall I name my little girl baby?"

That will depend upon yourself very largely, "Fond Mother." Very likely if your little girl is very rugged and grows up to be the fat woman in a museum, she will wear the name of Lily. When a girl is named Lily, she at once manifests a strong desire to grow up with a complexion like Othello and the same fatal yearning for some one to strangle. This is not always thus, but girls are obstinate, and it is better not to put a name on a girl baby that she will not live up to.

Again, "Fond Mother," let me urge you to refrain from naming your little daughter a soft, flabby name like Irma, Geraldine, Bandoline, Lilelia, Potassa, Valerian, Rosetta or Castoria. These names belong to the inflammatory pages of the American novelette. Do not put such a name on your innocent child. Imagine this inscription on a marble slab:

TRIFOLIATA,

BELOVED DAUGHTER OF

GERALD AND VASELINE TUBBS,

DIED MARCH 27,1888.

SHE CAUGHT COLD IN HER FRONT NAME.

I have seen a young lady try faithfully for years to live down one of these flimsy, cheesecloth names, but the harsh world would not have it. A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches, and while I can imagine your little girl in future years as a white-haired and lovely grandmother, wearing the name of Mary or Ruth, with a double chin that seems to ever beckon the old gentleman to come and chuck his fat forefinger under it, I cannot, in my mind's eye, see her as a household deity, wearing a white cap and the name of Rosette or Penumbra, or Sogodontia, or Catalpa, or Voxliumania.

THE FARMER AND THE TARIFF.

|ON BOARD a western train the other day I held in my bosom for over seventy-five miles the elbow of a large man whose name I do not know. He was not a railroad hog or I would have resented it. He was built wide and he couldn't help it, so I forgave him.

He had a large, gentle, kindly eye, and when he desired to spit he went to the car door, opened it and decorated the entire outside of the train, forgetting that our speed would help to give scope to his remarks.

Naturally, as he sat there by my side, holding on tightly to his ticket and evidently afraid the conductor would forget to come and get it, I began to figure out in my mind what might be his business. He had pounded one thumb so that the nail was black where the blood had settled under it. This might happen to a shoemaker, a carpenter, a blacksmith, or almost any one else. So it didn't help me out much, though it looked to me as though it might have been done by trying to drive a fence-nail through a leather hinge with the back of an ax, and nobody but a farmer would try to do that. Following up the clew, I discovered that he had milk on his boots, and then I knew I was right. The man who milks before daylight in a dark barn when the thermometer is 28° below zero, and who hits his boots by reason of the uncertain light and prudishness of the cow, is a marked man. He cannot conceal the fact that he is a farmer unless he removes that badge. So I started out on that theory, and remarked that this would pass for a pretty hard winter on stock. The thought was not original with me, for I have heard it expressed by others either in this country or Europe. He said it would.

"My cattle has gone through a mowful o' hay sence October and eleven ton o' brand. Hay don't seem to have the goodness to it thet it hed last year, and with their new process griss mills they jerk all the juice out o' brand, so's you might as well feed cows with excelsior and upholster your horses with hemlock bark as to buy brand."

"Well, why do you run so much to stock? Why don't you try diversified farming and rotation of crops?"

"Well, prob'ly you got that idee in the papers. A man that earns big wages writing 'Farm Hints' for agricultural papers can make more money with a soft lead-pencil and two or three season-cracked idees like that 'n I can carrying of 'em out on the farm. We used to have a feller in the drug-store in our town that wrote such good pieces for the _Rural Vermonter_, and made up such a good condition powder out of his own head that two years ago we asked him to write a nessay for the annual meeting of the Buckwheat Trust, and to use his own judgment about choice of subject. And what do you s'pose he had selected for a nessey that took the whole forenoon to read?"

"What subject, you mean?"

"Yes."

"Give it up!"

"Well, he'd wrote out that whole blamed intellectual wad on the subject of 'The Inhumanity of Dehorning Hydraulic Rams.' How's that?"

"That's pretty fair."