The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, November 20, 1904, Page 11

THE SAN FRANCISCO SUNDAY CALL. ' N the course of one day I recovered ] from the jar occasioned by female duplicity in the restaurant; forgot all about it in the great good for- tune of becomin t only an em- ploye but a boarder in & large city like Omahs. That was hustling some for a half-baked kid a from home the first t!me. My job lay in a foundry on the outskirts of the town, and the boss malder, moved to pity by my youth and innocence, tock me to live in his own select family at the rate of four a0e notes per week. My roommate was the Irish gentle- pig fron et the foundry, and we were very good iends indeed. When we entered boudoir together it was necessary for one of us to crawl under the bed, order to make room for closing the door 1 enthused over my advencement in life. It isn’t often & mere Yoy can become a boarder and send out twenty cents’ worth of laun- dry nearly every week. Next to politics and the practice of law foundry work is the dirtiest job I know of, but the money is clean, and the molder carries with him that re- which is one reward of honest foreover, the unplugged pores ker in molten metal fllter his He can sleep at night and pounds of liver and bacon . To be sure, doesn’t make him rich. He lleges and race tracks, py, and that oconscience. eat several gy n I'm able to blow so much ct is that the a mater. My igh what there is of it such as it is— 1S FACE WAS ADORNED WITH A TIFIC_SMILE AND TWO CIGARS RED AND GOLD CORSBTS ON was amassed in those institutions, scattered over an area extending from Maine to California and from Canada to the Guilf. At one time all foundries looked alike to me, and it was a source of great pleasure and some food to be identified with one. Any old building will do for a foundry. Broken walls and roof and window- less windows for smoke and heat to escape in summer and to admit the cold in winter. Clammy earthen floor, plles of black sand, huge gibbet cranes, with rasping chains and open molds; great pots of liquid iron swing in the air, spluttering furnaces that shoot constellations of hot stars and sulphur fumes into the dull atmos- phere, heat that cracks the skin, ex- plosions of gas and choking vapors, half-naked figures groping and steam- ing—hell with the lid on. So fervid is the zeal of youth that all this was but the limelight of fame to me, and the dirtier I got the more popular I was with myself when visit- ing friends of the owners came in to look at the employes. Sometimes I wondered what those persons would say if they xnew I boarded with the boss. But that was too much to hope for so early in the game. From candle light in the chill win- ter morning until casting time in the evening I molded the iron framework for modern school desks, then coming into vogue. Thus did the memory of precious hours wasted at school come back to me, and I shoveled sand with increasing ardor to make up that lost time. The man next to me worked under a crane, the gearing of which did the heavy lifting. He made large n arches to support the whaleback masonry in sewers, and I envied the greater quantity of sand he handled, with the expert aid of a polish helper. Frequently hen visitors were around I went over and leaned on the e in picturesque attitudes and a of overalls, just as if the hoist longed to me and was about to 1f lifting the top off one of v molds. A dopey old age s me long for the foundries of vouth but, alas, they are gone. 1 gloried in my open pores, but I beef because they boost my dry bills. Not the least exciting Items in my curriculum were the home and social gides of life in Omaha. I found both pleasure and comfort in the home circle nd plunged into all the gayeties that came my way. The foreman, with whom I lived, was an Englishman, and his three sons had followed in his foot- steps to the extent of being English and molders. One of the sons—a bov of my own age—had trouble with his vocal chords. He thought he could sing, which suspicion was shared by the entire family. At noon we all went home to dinner. For that meal the mother invariably set out to each man a robust English meat pie, or pasty, baked in a crust. Once now «Our habit was to eat all we could, bite our monograms on the top crust, and inherit the same pasty for supper. So thoroughly was this system maintained that during a period of four months I do not recall a single fight at supper. immortal Shakespeare, or emg Hard me B othey man of the same name, is our authority for the statement that the quality of mercy is not strained. We men- tion this matter at this point merely by way of calling attention to the fact that the same things cannot be said of the quality of honesty. In fact, some of the latter is strained so fine that there is little left of the original composition. There are as many different kinds of honesty as there are people working at it. Some people are so honest that they are afraid no one will find out about it and therefore they are willing to go a mile out of their way to explain how unnecessarily scrupulous they are. When you meet a man like that you had better hold your watch with one hand and yell for a policeman with the other. Then there is the other kind of honesty which makes a man afraid that no one will discover how big a rascal he is. In such a case you will be safe in wagering that most of that man's wickedness consists in get- ting leave to print. ‘We might run_on in this way in- terminably, which would be quite a while, if it were not that our fell in- tention when we began the collection of these few choice thoughts was the revealing of the true inwardness of the life of Diogenes J. Browne. Mr. Browne was a Capitalist, with a large C. 1If there is any one present who objects to our devoting so much of our valuable time to the problems of the vulgar rich, that person is hereby in- formed that we are fond of speaking «of the things which understand and that if there is one thing we know all about it is the woes and shortcomings of the capitalist. Haven't we walked down Wall street many & time and oft? Well then! While we have been satisfying the pertinacious individual on the back seat Diogenes J. Browne has been walting patienfly in the wings. - We shall now continue our lecture. Dio- genes took the position that the only thing this countiry needed was more and better honesty. If this country were suddenly to receive all the only things it needs it would be ready for the kind offices of the undertaker and the sexton. Fortunately for the rest of us the men who know exactly 'how\ the Government should be saved never get a whack at it. Our purpose in pass- ing in our usual hurried but gracefui manner over the principal events in the life of Diogenes i8 that we may show in what manner the quality of honesty may be strained. A great hobby with Diogenes was attention to trifles. The descent to Avernus Is not only quite facilis, he LuckTales and D - By Charles Dryden ' Each boarder got what was left of his own pasty, besides other things, and if he didn’'t care for the pasty it could be placed on file and carried over to another meeting under the head of unfinished business. In other ways this good wife and mother knew jow to make home at- tractive. She held the finances. lald in the provisions and kept her husband at home on Saturday night by a scheme more fascinating than any yet touted close by the stove. He talked shob, and I liked that. Attired in shirt sleeves and slippers the old man sat stiff-backed and alert. with the keg lying ‘on a chair in front of him. One hand held a short- stemmed garbage burner, and in the other he supported a half gallon tin pail with one horny finger hooked over the rim. His patiént wife stood by bearing a fistful of pipe lighters made of twisted paper, for the oracle gotten, and the tales rolled on until time to fire up again. ‘When I think of it now that woman was a marvel. She actually delighted in turning the spigot and stoking the pipe, and she knew the stories even better than he, having heard them often enough. Sometimes Mommer coached Popper when he started a yarn in the middle or left out an im- portant paragraph. If it were a funny story she gave me my cue to WE FOUND MR. THOMAS IN A DRIFT, SURROUNDED BY THE BLIZZARD. on the woman's page. On Saturday night she gave him a dime for a shave. and when he came back with a manl- cured face she sat him down to’a small keg of beer in the kitchen. The keg was all his. - Many a night I loitered with him until the keg yielded nothing but bubbles. Beer did not appeal to me+ then, but words of wisdom from the lips of that master mechanic held me to a,painful seat on a little stool O # I. $ % S | | | taKes; pooon | would point out, but the slope begins very gently and in a manner not cal- culated to arouse the suspicion of any one. The young man who begins by doing the street railway company out of the b cents coin of the realm which is lawfully due it for services rendered is in a fair way to grow up to rob a — to refuse to recognize you on the street the other day. It is not the first time, either, that he has been so discourteous. It cannot be that he did not know you, for you have talked with him a half a dozen times. It must be that he is an aristocrat, pure and simple. 'Lk’young woman who conversed so volubly at the boarding-house table the other night, in fact monopolizing the conversation and dealing chiefly in frivolities, surely cannot stand for much in the intellectual or moral realm. A pity it is that so many of our American girls are glven over to dress, display and soclety chitchat, with no interest in better things. How lacking in neighborhood spirit is that family which moved into the big house on the boulevard a few months ago. The members do not seem disposed either to make or to re- turn calls. They seldom show them- selves at public gatherings. Evidently they consider themselves quite above the ordinary run of their fellowmen and are entirely lacking in community spirit. Is there any stingier man in town than the rich merchant who turns down so many subscription papers pre- sented to him at his office? He could easily afford to subsidize almost any of the causes which seek his charity. He must be hoarding all his money for his distant relatives, since he has no near ones. Thus we go on adding snap judgment to snap judgment, ng our impres- slons on a very limited acquaintance, bank or hold up an express train. As the children’s poet put it so/long ago: Little peculations, Pennies now and then, Lead the way to bigger crimes, ‘Which land us in the pen. Itggs suspected that Diogenes was the ol nator of the early Sunday school book idea that the boy who starts in life by extending his surrep- titious sphere of influence to include the outlying portions of his meigh- Half the world is living From the other half’s mis- The former halfis living For the latter half’s sweet { Half the world is singing % While the other half weep; The former half is bringing I Joysthatserveuswellto Keep. So you find halfliving . For the weaKer half’s sake; The former half is giving o e was too busy to strike matches. For hours he drank from the pail and told stories of shops he had bossed, of. strikes and people he had licked, and of his early days in England, all of which was of massive ‘Interest to me. 1f, by mistake, he carried the pipe to his face the alert wife stuck a paper roll into the 'stove and gave him a light. After one puff the pipe was for- Mistakes. die. reap. v : taKe. bor’s orchard is in a fair war to per- ish in a vile dungeon, if not on the scaffold. In a voice that quivered with righteous indignation he would lecture the young culprit on the enor- mity of the offense, especially if it happened to be his own orchard in which . the youngstéer was surprised. HAT an ungracious thing it and not hesitating to circulate our was In that dignified banker opinion broadcast. facts? The courtly old banker is really every inch a gentleman. He would never knowingly slight any one. But he often gets absorbed in trains of thought which so preoccupy his mind that, as he walks along the street, he practi- cally sees no ore, or if his gaze hap- pens to rest upon others they have no more individuality than the lamp posts. Tt may be an unfortunate habit. but it gives no true idea of his real dis- position. She whoin you denominated frivolous Snap S | udg’l_nents By the Parson. was trying to liven up a rather somber company around the dinner table, and she was especially anxious to lift her aunt, whose protegée she is, out of the dumps. This is the reason why her conversation rippled along. She was trying to recall the interesting and laughable incidents of the day for the sake of others when it would have been much more agreeable to her to keep sllent. The truth is, she is a wide reader and a thorough student. She gives an afternoon each week to visit among the poor. She dresses well, but why shculdn’t she? She has plenty of money. But she is far from belng a heartless society girl. He was also very stern with the mis- erable little thieves who were hauled up before the bar of justice for walk- - ing off with; sequestering and other- wise misappropriating the personal property of others’ It is necessary, he would indicate to’ an expectant world, that the lower classes should be taught to respect the rights of the upper, and the most fundamental of the rights referred to above was that * X Half the world is waKing While the ather half sleep; The former half is maKing Hay, while others hope to ELEONORE E. HOEFT. Now what are the aloof from the life of - to ex laugh at the proper place by bursting into a merry peal, whereat the old man's eyes sparkled and he swore by the ghost of Vulcan every word was gospel truth. By and by when the keg and stock of anecdotes ran dry she helped her man to bed, where he shook the roof bellowing ‘the songs of his youth until he fell asleep. He had toiled and Ol 1L Half the world is smiling a While the other half sigh; The former half is whiling While the latter choose to v, Hints the latter can’t mis- of the use, disposition of a man's own property in his own way. Things had come to a pretty pass, he thought, when a man could not be sure of wearing his own overeoat or carrying his own gold headed cane for more than two days in succession. All such And that family that holds itself so the town has its own special sorrow. There are good and eufilcient reasons why they do not invite people to their home or mingle in the life of the neighborhood. Some time the skeleton in the closet will depart and then their neighbors will know how good and friendly they really are. The stingy curmudgeon who turns down the subscription papers gives every week far more money than mest of his eritice give in ten years. He has' a large number of private charities; he' makes a gpecialty of widows and or- phans. He bestows many gifts where the name of the donor Is never known: to the recinient. He is averse to sub- scription papers and he does mot care, ploit his own personality by affix- inz his name to libraries, schools and coileges. . Let us beware of snap judgments. Let us construe our fellowmen, their motives and actions in a large, gener- ous fashion. If it is possible to infer something to their credit from their be- havior, even though on the surface it might appear rather discreditable to them, let us seek, if possible, to dis- cover and promulgate a more favorable interpretation and in cases where that more favorable construction does not, easily appear, why not suspend judg- ment for a while? Remember, too, that we are all liable to be the victims of snap judgments. The great teacher of Nazareth spoke: golden words when he said to his dis- ciples, “Judge not, that ye be not 1udga for with what measure ye mete it shall be measured to you again." N A A A A A A against the sacredness of property should be punished severely. Diogenes’s favorite newspaper took a high moral stand on all such ques- tions and whenever it recounted with grim satisfaction the fact that Slippery Mike, the son of Mincing Moll, a pro- fessional inmate of Sing Sing and other resorts, had been found treading in his mother’s footsteps and had even gone the length of following enjorment and ultimate , sweated all week and enjoyed a bully, bang-up time on Saturday night at trifling expense. He got tanked, did all the talking and pulled off a lot of goreless mind fights. And during the spree and when it wound up Mommer knew where he was, just what he had been doing and she had the weekly wage. The lady of the house knew her business. This system made a deep dent in my tender Intellect, and. I resolved if des- tiny so’ shaped my future to adopt it and become an ideal toiler. But so far there is nothing doing. I don’t smoke, . and the man in the white jacket turns the spigot for me. One Saturday night following a snow- fall of three feet, and in the height of a blizzard of exceeding flerceness, our gentle landlady sprung a charley horse. Rheumatism put her out of the domes- tic game for that evening. Popper Thomas said he would take a chance with the storekeepers, so with a list of verbal instructions covering one hour he was sent off to do the marketing. ‘With his side whiskers neatly curried and the light of noble resolve shining in his eyes my boss departed, carrying two baskets and one $10 bill. It was long after midnight when the shopper returned, minus the baskets, but bear- ing a load that was a peacherino. The success of his expedition to busy marts of trade awoke me and the rest of the employes and aroused startled interest in the neighbors. Every item but one Mr. Thomas had purchased was concealed under his belt, yet. we knew the exact nature of his contents. His face was adorned with a beatific smile and two unlighted cigars, with red and old gold corsets on them. Mr, Thomas never used cigars except on special occasions, at which time he became- a real sport. Removing one of the cigars, my boarding boss shifted the other hard a-port and started fo warble a plaintive ditty about a bloom- ing spafrow that crawled up a bloom- ing spout. The lady of the house grabbed the shopper and shook him. “Is this the way I brought you up,” she demanded. “Trained you by the kitchen fire, with your keg and your pipe. Where’s the money, the grocerles and the baskets?"” “There came a blooming rainstorm and washed the blooming sparrow out,” sang Mr. Thomas, with a faraway look in his eye. “Husband, what did you do with the baskets?” implored the exasperated lady. ‘Smashed ’em in a fight,” sald Mr. Thomas, emerging from the realms of melody. ght scab . boilermakers tackled me, and I licked 'em all. And when the blooming sun came out and dried the blooming rain, the bloody, blooming sparrow—"" With desperate fear at her heart, Mrs. Thomas shoved her man into a corner and searched him. He yielded nine cigars—five of them broken and the rest bent—and one half-pound can of salmon, with a picture of the fish’'s face on the can, like that of the man who makes the talcum powder. In a dim way Mr. Thomas had thought about us while shopping, and the sal- mon was to tide a household of twelve over a frozen Sunday in the wilds of Omah: He was a good provider. “="It was much too much. Mrs. Thomas gave vent te a cry of rage and despair and threw the can at her husband’s head.- Mer epening shot was wide and high. The can crashed into a pictorial family tree on the. wall and jarred three generations from the branches. This was dolng pretty well, as the slaughtered relatives belonged to his side of the house. A return shot by Mr. Thomas, whose aim was not steady, broke the tail off a plaster of puris pug dog viewing the ' carnage from the mantel. Wheever got the can first had the next throw. Five times the deadly canned fish hurtled through the windows, but as the outside shut- ters were closed the combatants got them up the river to the place where the strines change not neither do they fade away, Diogenes smiled com- placently at the thought of another malefactor put away where he could do no harm to any one, but himself. If some jealous countryman of Chris- offenses toforo Colombo inserted his knife be- tween the ribs of a rival for the smiles of some dusky Giuletta, the same edi- torial Pharisee, and Diogenes after it, would announce in loud and solemn tones that the wages of sin are death, as though that had anything to do with it. Having given a faint, far away glimpse of the peculiarities of Dio- genes' makeup we shall give our gen- tle readers—we never admit any other kind—three guesses at that gentleman’s occupation. He might have been a preacher, except that he wasn't. A really good preacher usu- ally finds out before he has been in the game very long that human na- ture is liable to error and that the man who starts out on a campaign of .stone throwing is likely to discover before night that what he thought was a solid steel-arched roof over his head is only glass, and poor glass at that, Perhans Diogenes was a law- yer? Guess again! You don't catch a lawyer who understands his busi- ness doing or saying anything to di- minish the average annual output of crime. We won't say why this is so; the mere statement of the sad fact must suffice at the present moment. The last try Is that he was a doctor. Wrong again! + Since evervbody gives it up we shall have to answer the question ourselves. Diogenes J. Browne was an operator on Wall street, who made his living by selling questionable stocks to peo- ple who were too foolish to ask the right kind of question. He not only sold watered stock. but he adulterat- ed the water. In his hours of leisure he devoted himself to the building up of an establishment in Jersey for the manufacture of patent medicine which was warranted to cure anything from cold in the head to cold feet; from liver eomplaint to tuberculosis of the hair. The principal ingredients were pine-tar for flavor and old shoes for body. Diogenes may or may not be aware of any discrepancy between his words and his acts and it doesn't make any difference to us whesher he is or not. The fact which we have been en- deavoring to establish is that the pop- ular conception of honesty depends on the scale of a man’s operations and . whether or not he is caught and that a fellow-feeling instead of making us wondrous kind often makes us act as though we were of an entirely differ- ent kinéd n and Off the Bread Wagon oings of an. AmateurHobo their ammunition back by reaching into the shattered panes. In the midst of the battle the woman fell back on her wrongs and burst into noisy tears. JThat was Popper's cure, and, in a voice that dulled theé storm outside, he said he was a ruined me- chanpic. “Disgraéed and bulldozed in my own home, what have I to live for?" howled Mr. Thomas. “Nothing whatsoever, I'll end it ali!” Tearing off his coat and, hat, the out- raged parent and provider, pale with the resolve of death by his own hand, lunged out of the house and slammed the door. “Help! Save him—Lewellyn, back!” wailed the wife. “Oh, killing himself. Help!"” All hands hustled to the rescue. The gentleman who boiled the pigiron, two molders boarding there, one son-in-law, three grown sons and 1 ¢ comprised the party. We found Mr. Thomas standing in a drift surrounded by the blizzard. One leg, slightly in advance of the other, was bent at the knee, and his arms were folded across his chest. In the ghostly light of the storm he re- sembled Mr. Washington standing in the bow of the boat the night that hero crossed the Delaware. Snowflakes fall- ing on Lewellyn's hot bald scalp melt- ed, trickled into his hair and froze. His flowing side whiskers retained the snow, with lace-curtain effects, until his face presented a birdseye view of a parlor window. “Don’t touch me,” Mr. Thomas said, in hollow accents, as the rescue party se: in. “I'm freezing myself to come he's “Oh, Lewellyn, don't do it,” begged the wife. “Come in by the fire, like a good man. “Never!"” hissed Mr. Thomas. “I freeze to a corpse right here. Fare- well.” Turning so that the blizzard smote him in the teeth, the suicide waited for the end. I was appalled, never having witnessed violent death in any form. But ere his gentle spirit fled two sons fell on Popper from behind. The rest tackled him all over, and in a few min- utes the back yard was cleared of snow and Mr. Thomas. Snatched from the brink of the grave and bestowed by the fire, with the loving arms of his wife about him, Mr. Thomas shed some sloppy tears. He had been cruelly abused in his own home, but bore no malice. Forget and forgive was his motto, and Lewel- lyn made good by falling asleep and forgetting that he ever lived. All this happened long ago that I forget just what did become of the can of salmon. In the next chapter I am among those present at a Polish wedding and observe the lady with the high insteps. - | HABIT W OUR TOBITE OUR MONO GRAM . UST.