Part 22

If you are hanging a picture from a nail in the wall instead of from the picture-molding, you can save the wall by using a very small, thin wire nail. If it is driven in without “wobbling” and downward at a narrow angle with the wall a small nail will hold a surprisingly large picture.

_Save your Eyes_

Do not sleep with a strong light shining into your eyes. In sleep the eyes are relaxed and, closed though they are, suffer from too strong a light. The sun shining into them before you wake in the morning is especially bad. Never read or put the eyes to a strain before breakfast.

_To Reduce Weight_

A physician gives the following foods as a broad and common-sense diet for those wishing to reduce their flesh: lean mutton and beef, veal and lamb, soups not thickened, beef-tea and broth, poultry, game, fish and eggs, bread in moderation, greens, cresses, lettuce, etc., green peas, cabbage, cauliflower, onions, fresh fruit without sugar.

_Peeling Onions_

It is said that if when peeling onions one holds a needle or any small piece of polished steel between the teeth, the steel will attract the acid fumes of the onion and save the eyes.

_To Keep Lemons_

1. Cover with buttermilk or sour milk and change once a week. This will also freshen dry lemons.

2. Put in clean white cask or jar, cover with cold water, change every other day and keep in a cool place. This method will keep lemons fresh for months.

_To Clean Knives_

Many are unfamiliar with this old-time method: Take even portions of fine coal ashes and soda, mix with a little water, rub the knives briskly with the preparation, wash in tepid water without soap, and wipe dry.

_Floor Polish_

One quart turpentine, six ounces yellow beeswax, four ounces white resin. Melt the beeswax and resin together over a _slow_ fire and when partly cool add the turpentine. Bottle for use.

_A PRIZE FOR THE BEST TRUE STORY._

_Every month the Department will publish a little story of heroism in the home—not any one act of heroism, but the tale of how some one lived heroically, lived self-sacrifice, in everyday life. It must be true and must be about somebody you know or have known or know definitely about. It must not have over 500 words. The shorter, the better. Whoever sends in the best story each month will not only have it printed but will receive a year’s subscription to WATSON’S MAGAZINE sent to any name you choose. Tell your story simply and plainly._

The Wickedness of Worry

“Worry is one of the worst curses of modern life. I say of modern life, not because people a thousand years ago did not worry, because as civilization advances men become more highly strung, more sensitive, and less capable of detachment. Thus, we often say, in a very expressive phrase, that a thing ‘gets upon our nerves.’ Something distressing happens to us, and we cannot shake it off. Some one treats us rudely, harshly, or unkindly, and the word or deed rankles in our minds. We think it over until it is magnified into a grievous and intentional insult. We take it to bed with us, and no sooner is the light put out than we begin to recall it, and turn over in our minds all the circumstances that occasioned it. We sleep feverishly, haunted all the time with the sense of something disagreeable. We wake, and the accursed thing is still rankling in our minds. This is one form of worry, which is very common among people of sensitive minds.

Another form of worry is the tendency to brood over past errors. The business man, or the public man, is suddenly overwhelmed with the conviction that he has made an awful mess of things. The worst of all calamities is the lack of energy to grapple with calamity, and in most cases it is worry that breaks down a man’s energy.

A third, and perhaps a more common form of worry, is the gloomy anticipation of future calamities. There are some men who, however happy they may be today, are perpetually frightening themselves with the possibilities of a disastrous tomorrow. They live in terror. When actual sorrow comes upon us, most of us discover unexpected resources of fortitude in ourselves. But nothing sickens the heart so much as imagined sorrow. Of this form of worry we may well say, “It’s wicked!”

I have no doubt that most of my readers know by experience what some of these things mean. No doubt also many of them have many real causes for anxious thought, and they will ask me how I propose to deal with it. One of the best ways is to be content to live a day at a time. Sydney Smith counsels us with rich wisdom to take short views of life. Each day is an entity in itself. It is rounded off by the gulf of sleep; it has its own hours which will never return; it stands separate, with its own opportunities and pleasures. Make the most of them.

Another good and simple rule is never to take our griefs to bed with us. ‘Easy to say, but how difficult to do,’ will be replied. But it is largely a matter of will and habit.

John Wesley once said that he would as soon steal as worry, for each was equally a sin. To worry is wasteful and foolish; we have also to recollect that it is wicked.”—_W. J. Dawson._

_Lemon Pie (Old)_

Two lemons, five eggs, two teaspoonsful of melted butter, eight large spoonsful of white sugar. Squeeze the juice of both lemons and grate the rind of one. Stir together the yolks of three eggs and the white of one, with the sugar, juice and rind, beat well, add one coffee-cup of cream and beat well for a few minutes longer. Pour the mixture into the waiting crust dough. Bake until pastry is done. Meanwhile beat the remaining whites of eggs to a stiff froth and stir in four spoonsful of white sugar. Spread on top and brown slightly. This is enough for two pies.

_Simple Pudding_

(No eggs or milk needed) Slice some good bread rather thick, cutting away the crust. Butter on both sides, lay in a deep dish and fill it up with molasses after seasoning with ginger, cinnamon or lemon.

_Irish Potato Pie (Old)_

Two good pints of potatoes after they are boiled and mashed. Put through a sieve while warm. Add small cup of butter, milk enough to make a batter. Cinnamon, lemon, spices and sugar to taste. Four eggs beaten separately, stirring in the whites after the yokes. This is enough for four pies.

=The Social Secretary.= By David Graham Phillips. The Bobbs-Merrill Co., Indianapolis.

An exceedingly clever novel, dealing chiefly with the effort of a Congressional family to break into good society in Washington, D. C. The Congressman is a Western man with a lot of money, and with a wife who has lots of horse sense and a sound heart.

They need a pilot to steer them into the realms of fashion and influence. To this position comes a beautiful, spirited and accomplished girl who belongs to a well-known family which is eminently respectable but is in reduced circumstances.

The campaign mapped out by the Social Secretary in behalf of the Congressional family is finally crowned with success, and the heroine marries the son of the Congressman, as a natural, logical result.

In the course of the campaign, the author gives us many an enlightening glimpse of what goes on in Washington “behind the scenes.” This little item for instance: When President Roosevelt is called away from the dinner-table by some urgent matter which requires instant attention, Mrs. Roosevelt, all the ladies, and all the gentlemen rise as the President rises and remain standing until he returns.

I, for one, was quite surprised to know that our sturdy lion-hunter, bronco-busting President had fallen into snobbery of that description. I hope it isn’t so.

=A Maker of History.= By E. Phillips Oppenheim. Little, Brown & Co., Boston, Mass.

A book which catches hold of you and takes you right along. It is original in its plot, dramatic in its incidents, absorbingly interesting in its narrative.

A young Englishman, by accident, happens to witness a meeting between the Emperor of Germany and the Czar of Russia—a meeting which elaborate precautions had been taken to keep secret. Another accident puts into the possession of the young Englishman a page of the secret treaty between the two Emperors. The scheme of this treaty is that Russia shall give England a _casus belli_, that Germany shall come to the assistance of Russia, and that Great Britain shall be despoiled. The young Englishman is suspected, and his footsteps are dogged by German spies. Later he talks imprudently in a Parisian restaurant, and becomes an object of intense interest to the French Secret Service. He suddenly and mysteriously disappears. His sister arrives in Paris, is astonished at the disappearance of her brother, and starts out to search for him. Then the sister disappears.

After a time everything turns out happily for hero and heroine, but in the meanwhile many an event of thrilling interest happens to keep the reader wide awake and wondering what the outcome will be.

=The Greatest Trust in the World.= By Charles Edward Russell. The Ridgway-Thayer Company, New York City.

This book is made up of the articles which were published in _Everybody’s Magazine_, and which created such a profound impression by their calm, relentless exposure of the most cruel and most lawless and most despotic Trust on earth. Not even the Standard Oil Company grinds the common people as the Beef Trust does, for the latter deals with food products which are indispensable to life, and the Beef Trust can and does say to the people, “Pay my price or die.”

The book treats of the might of this monopoly; of the great yellow car, the bandit of commerce; of the manner in which the Trust intimidates the railroads; of the manner in which the Federal Government white-washed the Trust; of the union between rotten business and rotten politics.

It is a book that all should study.

=American Diplomacy.= By John Bassett Moore. Harper & Brothers, Publishers, New York City.

My own impression has been that “American Diplomacy” has never amounted to much, and I cannot say that Dr. Moore’s book has convinced me to the contrary.

The only apparent triumph of American Diplomacy was the securing of French aid in the Revolutionary War; and as to that most students will agree that “diplomacy” had nothing to do with it. France saw an opportunity to strike at her hereditary foe, Great Britain, and she sent an emissary to the American Congress to drop certain hints which led to the sending of Dean, Lee and Franklin to Paris. Where France was already so eager, “diplomacy” could claim no triumph.

It is to be regretted that Dr. Moore fails to mention John Laurens in connection with French aid. The fact is that Washington and Congress became dissatisfied with Franklin, and that John Laurens was despatched to France to hurry matters up. He did so. He got the money with which Washington made the decisive Yorktown Campaign, and brought it home with him. Surely Dr. Moore ought to have mentioned the name of John Laurens.

In the famous Jay treaty, “American Diplomacy” made a craven surrender to Great Britain, and in the Treaty of Ghent we certainly won no laurels. Andrew Jackson and his Southern volunteers threw the only crumb of comfort which the situation could boast when they shot the life out of Wellington’s veterans at New Orleans.

In the various negotiations concerning the Northwestern boundary, “American Diplomacy” has yielded up an Empire to British bluff and shrewdness. During the Civil War, “American Diplomacy” ate humble pie with a vengeance more than once; and even in the Venezuelan affair when Cleveland’s attitude seemed so heroic, England, it would appear, packed the arbitration board and got pretty much everything that she wanted.

In the last tilt between us and the mother country, touching the Canadian boundary, we were assured that the arbitration was a mere matter of form, and that Great Britain could not possibly get anything at all. Yet when the award was made, it developed that Great Britain had got slices of stuff all along the line—the land line and the water line.

American Diplomacy?

Bah!

Look at the manner in which Great Britain used us as her depot of supplies during the Boer War.

She held John Hay in the hollow of her hand, and with our aid crushed the republics of South Africa.

=Fables and Symbols.= By Clemence De La Baere, Sacramento, Cal.

Those who love truth and humor served up in the literary form of the fable, will find this an entertaining little volume. There is much wit and wisdom packed away in these stories; and they reveal a thorough knowledge of human nature and of present conditions.

=Garrison the Non-Resistant.= By Ernest Crosby. The Public Publishing Co., Chicago.

When a Southern writer eulogizes such a bitter foe to his people as was William Lloyd Garrison, his words will bear the same discount as must be given to the words of a Southern ex-Brigadier, when he goes North and tells pleased audiences, “I am glad you whipped us.”

The truth is the South does not love Garrison and is _not_ glad she was “whipped.”

When Mr. Crosby frankly states, as he does in this book, that Garrison had no sympathy whatever for the sufferings of the white laborers of the land, he put his finger upon the trait which caused Garrison’s great unpopularity in the South.

He was narrow and fanatical, and while he hated slavery for its own sake, he hated the South about as much as he hated slavery.

Wendell Phillips, after the negro was freed, went on broadening in the scope of his sympathies and his work. He became one of the stalwart champions of the rights of white labor. He studied its case, denounced its wrongs, demanded better things for the millions of toilers who were being exploited and destroyed by insatiable commercial greed.

Not so Garrison. The negro freed, the South reeking with her own life-blood, her homes in ashes, her soul crushed in utter desolation, Garrison was happy. His work was done. White men, white women, white children might groan and suffer and die in a worse slavery than had afflicted the blacks of the South, but Garrison did not sympathize—did not lift a finger, did not utter a word in their behalf. Another trait in Garrison’s character was just the trait to stir the dislike of a Southern man. He carried to such an extent his doctrine of non-resistance, that he declared he “would not defend by force his own wife in case of an assault.” In other words, rather than forcibly resist the criminal who sought to violate his own wife, he would stand idly by and permit the crime to be committed. I do not know how many Northern men endorse a sentiment of that kind. In my judgment they are few, very few. But I do know that there is not a respectable man in the South or West, who would not feel disgraced by the utterance of such a doctrine. Mr. Crosby deserves great credit for his courage and candor in admitting that while slavery was wrong, the war waged upon the South was wrong. Of course it was wrong. The whole negro race, here and throughout the earth, were not worth the frightful cost of the Civil War. Mr. Crosby’s book would have been more valuable had he omitted the last two chapters. The author is a very talented man but he cannot get to know the true status of the South by listening to the talk of loafers in the office of the hotel where he happens to stop.

=Sidney Lanier.= By Edwin Mims. Houghton, Mifflin & Company, Boston and New York.

A more interesting biographical work than this it would be difficult to name.

The author is temperate in his estimate of the genius of his subject, and relates the life struggles of the Georgia poet with sympathetic spirit.

As the years go by the fame of Sidney Lanier will grow. That he wrote some poems which have little merit is true; that his peculiar and unfortunate mannerism mars the beauty of other poems which do possess merit is also true; but after all this is conceded, it can be confidently claimed that he sometimes rose to the heights of Keats and Shelley, and that his art sometimes equalled the marvelous skill of Edgar Poe.

Here and there, throughout Lanier’s poems, can be found gems of thought and expression which in loftiness, purity and exquisite form lose nothing by comparison with the higher work of the best English poets.

Nor will the story of his life ever lose interest. It is so full of innate nobility; he met the most exacting duties so cheerily, so bravely; he fought the battle for bread with such manly confidence, such sweet sympathy for others; he gave to the world so much more than he asked from it; he was so independent and yet so companionable; he so long held at bay, with buoyant pluck, the ghastly White Terror, Consumption; he was so refined and strong and lovable and valiant and nobly aspiring that always and everywhere the simple facts in the life of this Georgia boy, Confederate soldier, painstaking lawyer, aspiring author, heaven-endowed musician, original poet, will move the hearts of men to respect, to sympathy, to admiration and love.

=Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama.= By Walter L. Fleming. The Columbia University Press, New York, Publishers. The Macmillan Company, Agents.

All things considered, this is the most valuable contribution that has yet been made to the literature of the Reconstruction Era.

The book contains some 800 pages, and the mass of important data is a monument to the industry of the author.

Not only are we given a full account of the manner in which Secession was brought about, not only do we get the story of military operations during the Civil War and Carpet-Bag operations afterward, but we are given illuminating pictures of social and economic conditions, the unspeakable rottenness of negro government; the cotton frauds and stealings; the troubles in the churches; the movements of the Ku Klux Klan (which Tom Dixon most unaccountably traces back to the clan life of Scotland); the struggles of the native whites to throw off the carpet-bag and negro yoke; the upbuilding of an educational system; the gradual creation of a new industrial system; and the final triumphant vindication of Alabama of the right of local self-government and white supremacy.

Mr. Fleming has done a great and beneficent work in the gathering of the mass of facts which he embodies in this volume.

Compared to his, every other book on the same subject seems fragmentary.

=Frenzied Finance.= By Thomas Lawson. The Ridgway-Thayer Co., New York.

No matter what Mr. Lawson’s motive may have been, he has done a public service in the exposure of the methods of Wall Street which cannot be overestimated. For thirty years the story which Lawson has told has been asking for an audience. Time and again, books and magazine articles were published warning the people of the ways of the system. As far back as the days of Peter Cooper, loud voices of clear-eyed men were raised in the effort to rouse public attention. The literature of the Greenback movement, of the Farmers’ Alliance movement, and of the People’s Party movement was full of notes of warning, full of statements of fact exactly on line with Lawson’s revelations.

Why then did the revelations of Lawson sound like a new trumpet and rouse the country so quickly and so universally? Because Lawson spoke from the _inside_: because Lawson was one of the kings of finance himself: because Lawson had played the game himself: because Lawson drew to himself that peculiar attention which attaches to the witness who “turns State’s evidence.” A robber who has worn the mask and ridden with the band on many a midnight marauding foray is always listened to with breathless interest when he enters the box and tells how the robbery was planned, how the crime was committed, and now the spoil was divided. This is but natural. No matter how much proof one may have to establish the guilt of the accused, one feels, always, that there are details which none but the criminal can supply. Here Thomas Lawson’s value is beyond dispute and beyond price. That the methods of Frenzied Finance are substantially what Lawson says they are, can no longer be a matter of doubt.

“=When You Were a Boy.=” By Edwin L. Sabin. The Baker & Taylor Co., New York.

It seemed impossible that another successful book on school-life and boyhood days could be written, but the author has shown how easily one may be mistaken about a thing of that sort. Here is no story of a fascinating but impossible “Little Lord Fauntleroy”; here is no coarse, witless, stupid “Stalky & Co.,” here is no “Huckleberry Finn” or “Tom Sawyer,” or “Tom Brown,” or “Peck’s Bad Boy,” or “Master William Mitten.” The hero of “When You Were a Boy”—is you. The author has looked into his own heart and drawn your picture to life. You had your little “fist and skull” fights—and here they are in this book. You had a pet dog who did all sorts of funny, aggravating, endearing things, and then died while you were off from home; and the author tells of it, intimately. Your first experience with your father’s shot-gun, your savage rapture over the first thing you killed—here it is in the book. And the first fishing trip, the first “party” you attended, the first girl you “saw home,” the first sweetheart—it is all put down, accurately, vividly. Even that time—you mean little whelp!—when you determined to punish your parents by “running away from home,”—the author found it out on you, and you will hang your head once more, and your eye will dim, as you read about it, in the book. The author does not preach and does not prose, and does not sentimentalise—but “When You Were a Boy” is one of the most life-like delineations of the American boy—his character, his feelings, his habits, his fun and frolic, his passions, his standards—that has ever been put in a book.

=Bossism and Monopoly.= By Thomas Carl Spelling. D. Appleton & Co., New York.

An exposition of the evils of the twins—Bossism and Monopoly. Mr. Spelling brings the record of trust robbery and boss despotism down to date, and while he necessarily has to treat the same facts and conditions which so many other writers have handled, none of them has a firmer grip upon the subject than he—nor have any of them produced a more essentially useful book. He is the only writer who has seized upon and utilized the tremendously important facts set forth by Albert Griffin in the financial articles which he wrote for this MAGAZINE some months ago. What Mr. Griffin calls Hocus Pocus Money another may call fictitious values, unsupported credit, wild-cat inflation, or any other name, but the fact as first pointed out by Mr. Griffin is that the Privileged Few in the Banking world are taxing the people to an enormous amount for the use of bogus money.

Mr. Spelling also deals with the Railroad problem in a masterly way, advocating, as all sane men will soon be found doing, Government Ownership.

=The Coming Crisis.= By Gustavus M. Pinckney. Walker, Evans and Cogswell Co., Charleston, S. C.

This is a book to read closely and to think about. It is full of solid fact and sound reasoning. Its tone is calm, but its thought is deep, and it deals with matters of gravest import.

A quotation will give some idea of the scope of the work:

(1) “Society under government naturally tends to fall into two parties, one attached to the consumption of taxes and increase of power, the other attached to the decrease of taxes and to the limitation of power.

(2) The tendency of the first party is to absorb the rights and property of the second: the tendency of the second is to resist the process.

(3) Remaining unchecked, the first will steadily encroach and absorb until the second is compelled in self-preservation to resist by tendering the issue of force.”

That’s a clear bold statement and a true one.