Chapter I: STOOD on the bridge at midnight, and looked at the sizzling town,

where the pleasure seeking people were holding the sidewalks down. The moon rose over the city and shone on the dames and gents, but the glare of the lights electric made it look like twenty cents. The windows of homes were darkened, for no one was staying there; the children, as well, as grownups, were all in the Great White Glare. Deserted were all the firesides, abandoned the old-time game; alas, that the old home circle is naught but an empty name! The father is out chug-chugging, the mother is at her club, the kids see the moving pictures, and go to hotels for grub. How often, oh, how often, in the days that seemed good to me, have I looked at the children playing at home, where they ought to be! How often, oh, how often, in those days of the proper stamp, have I gazed on the parents reading, at home, by the evening lamp! But the world has gone to thunder, forgotten that elder day; and I took up the bridge and broke it, and threw all the chunks away.

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MR. CHUCKLEHEAD

HE shuts the windows, and shuts the doors, and then he lies in his bed and snores, and breathes old air that is stale and flat—the kind of air that would kill a cat. He says next day: “I am feeling tough; I’ll have to visit old Dr. Guff, and buy a pint of his pale pink pills, or I shall harbor some fatal ills.”

He fills his system with steaks and pies, and never indulges in exercise. He eats and drinks of the market’s best, until the buttons fly off his vest; he’s grown so mighty of breadth and girth that when he gambols he shakes the earth. “I’ll see Doc Faker,” he says; “that’s flat; I’ll get his dope for reducing fat. Doc Faker says he can make me gaunt, and let me eat all the stuff I want.”

He sits and mopes in his study chair, while others toil in the open air. He quaffs iced drinks through the sultry day, electric fans on his person play. “I feel despondent,” he murmurs low; “I lack the vim that I used to know; my liver’s loose and my kidneys balk, and my knee joints creak when I try to walk. I’ll call Doc Clinker and have him bring his Compound Juice of the Flowers of Spring.”

His head is bald where the tresses grew in the long gone days when his scalp was new. He won’t believe that the hair won’t grow where it lost its grip in the long ago. He tries all manner of dope and drug; he buys Hair Balm by the gallon jug; he reads the papers and almanacs for news concerning the Mystic Wax which surely maketh the wool appear on heads gone bare in the yesteryear.

The more he uses of patent dopes, the more he worries, the more he mopes. And all he needs to be blithe and gay is just to throw his old jugs away, to do some work, as his fathers toiled, to let in air that has not been spoiled, to rest his stomach and work his thews, quit pressing coat tails and shake his shoes. If Chucklehead and his tribe did this, they’d soon find health, which is short for bliss; and old Doc Faker and all his gang would close their offices and go hang.

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IN THE SPRING

IN the spring the joyous husband hangs the carpet on the line, and assaults it with a horsewhip till its colors fairly shine; and the dust that rises from it fills the alley and the court, and he murmurs, ’twixt his sneezes: “This is surely splendid sport!”

In the spring the well-trained husband wrestles with the heating stove, while the flippant-minded neighbors go a-fishing in a drove. With the pipes and wire he tinkers, and his laughter fills the place, when the wholesome soot and ashes gather on his hands and face; and he says: “I’d like to labor at this task from sun to sun; this is what I call diversion—this is pure and perfect fun!”

In the spring the model husband carries furniture outdoors, and he gaily helps the women when they want to paint the floors; and he blithely eats his supper sitting on the cellar stairs, for he knows his wife has varnished all the tables and the chairs. Oh, he carries pails of water, and he carries beds and ticks, and he props up the veranda with a wagonload of bricks, and he deftly spades the garden, and he paints the barn and fence, and he rakes and burns the rubbish with an energy intense, saying ever as he labors, in the house or out of doors: “How I wish my wife and daughters could suggest some other chores!”

In the spring this sort of husband may be found—there’s one in Spain, there is one in South Dakota and another one in Maine.

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BE JOYFUL

YOU’D better be joking than kicking or croaking, you’d better be saying that life is a joy, then folks will caress you and praise you and bless you, and say you’re a peach and a broth of a boy. You’d better be cheery, not drooling and dreary, from the time you get up till you go to your couch; or people will hate you and roast and berate you—they don’t like the man with a hangover grouch. You’d better be leaving the groaning and grieving to men who have woes of the genuine kind; you know that your troubles are fragile as bubbles, they are but the growth of a colicky mind. You’d better be grinning while you have your inning, or when a real trouble is racking your soul, your friends will be growling, “He always is howling—he wouldn’t touch joy with a twenty-foot pole.” You’d better be pleasant; if sorrow is present, there’s no use in chaining it fast to your door; far better to shoo it, and hoot and pursue it, and then it may go and come back never more.

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GOOD AND EVIL

THE poet got his facts awry, concerning what lives after death; the good men do lives on for aye, the evil passes like a breath. A noble thought, by thinker thunk, will live and flourish through the years; a thought ignoble goes kerplunk, to perish in a pool of tears. Man dies, and folks around his bed behold his tranquil, outworn clay; “We’ll speak no evil of the dead, but recollect the good,” they say. Then one recalls some noble trait which figured in the ice-cold gent. “He fixed the Widow Johnsing’s gate, and wouldn’t charge a doggone cent.” “Oh, he was grand when folks were ill; he’d stay and nurse them night and day, hand them the bolus and the pill, and never hint around for pay.” “He ran three blocks to catch my wig when April weather was at large.” “He butchered Mrs. Jagway’s pig, and smoked the hams, and didn’t charge.” Thus men conspire, to place on file and make a record of the good, and they’d forget the mean or vile for which, perhaps, in life you stood. The shining heroes we admire had faults and vices just like you; when they concluded to expire, their failings kicked the bucket, too.

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BROWN OCTOBER ALE

HOW many ringing songs there are that celebrate the wine, and other goods behind the bar, as being wondrous fine! How many choruses exalt the brown October ale, which puts a fellow’s wits at fault, and lands him in the jail! A hundred poets wasted ink, and ruined good quill pens, describing all the joys of drink in gilded boozing kens. But all those joys are hollow fakes which wisdom can’t indorse; they’re soon converted into aches and sorrow and remorse. The man who drains the brimming glass in haunts of light and song, next morning knows that he’s an ass, with ears twelve inches long. An aching head, a pile of debts, a taste that’s green and stale, that’s what the merry fellow gets from brown October ale. Untimely graves and weeping wives and orphans shedding brine; this sort of thing the world derives from bright and sparkling wine. The prison cell, the scaffold near; such features may be blamed on wholesome keg and bottled beer, which made one city famed. Oh, sing of mud or axle grease, but chant no fairy tale, of that disturber of the peace, the brown October ale!

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DELIVER US

FROM all the woe and sorrow that bloody warfare brings, when monarchs start to borrow some grief from other kings, from dreadful scenes of slaughter, and dead men by the cord, from blood that flows like water, deliver us, O Lord! From fear and melancholy that every death list gives, from all the pompous folly in which an army lives, from all the strife stupendous, that brings no sane reward, but only loss tremendous, deliver us, O Lord! From seeing friend and neighbor in tools of death arrayed, deserting useful labor to wield the thirsty blade; from seeing plowshares lying all rusty on the sward, where men and boys are dying, deliver us, O Lord! From seeing foreign legions invade our peaceful shore, and turn these smiling regions to scenes of death and gore, from all the desolation the gods of war accord to every fighting nation, deliver us, O Lord!

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DOING ONE’S BEST

ONE sweetly solemn thought comes to me every night; I at my task have wrought, and tried to do it right. No doubt my work is punk, my efforts are a jest; however poor my junk, it represents my best. If you, at close of day, when sounds the quitting bell, that truthfully can say, you’re doing pretty well. Some beat you galley west, and bear away the prize, but you have done your best—in that the honor lies. And, having done your best, your conscience doesn’t hurt; serene you go to rest, in your long muslin shirt. And at the close of life, when you have said good-bye to cousin, aunt and wife, and all the children nigh, you’ll face the river cold that flows to islands blest, with courage high and bold, if you have done your best. No craven fears you’ll know, no terrors fierce and sharp, but like a prince you’ll go, to draw your crown and harp. So, then, whate’er the field in which you do your stunt, whatever tool you wield to earn your share of blunt, toil on with eager zest, nor falter in that plan; the one who does his best is God’s blue-ribbon man.

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A LITTLE WHILE

A FEW more years, or a few more days, and we’ll all be gone from the rugged ways wherein we are jogging now; a few more seasons of stress and toil, then we’ll all turn in to enrich the soil, for some future farmer’s plow. A few more years and the grass will grow where you and the push are lying low, your arduous labors o’er; and those surviving will toil and strain, their bosoms full of the same old pain you knew in the days of yore. Oh, what’s the use of the carking care, or the load of grief that we always bear, in such a brief life as this? A few more years and we will not know a side of beef from a woozy woe, an ache from a bridal kiss. “I fear the future,” you trembling say, and nurse your fear in a dotard way, and moisten it with a tear; the future day is a day unborn, and you’ll be dead on its natal morn, so live while the present’s here. A few more years and you cannot tell a quart of tears from a wedding bell, a wreath from a beggar’s rags; you’ll take a ride to the place of tombs in a jaunty hearse with its nodding plumes, and a pair of milk-black nags. So while you stay on the old gray earth, cut up and dance with exceeding mirth, have nothing to do with woe; a few more years and you cannot weep, you’ll be so quiet and sound asleep, where the johnnie-jumpups grow.

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THE IDLERS

MEN labor against the hames, and sweat till they’re old and gray, supporting the stall-fed dames who idle their years away. We’ve bred up a futile race of women who have no care, except for enameled face, or a sea-green shade of hair, who always are richly gowned and wearing imported lids, who carry their poodles ’round, preferring the pups to kids. And husbands exhaust their frames, and strain till their journey’s done, supporting the stall-fed dames, who never have toiled or spun. We’re placed in this world to work, to harvest our crop of prunes; Jehovah abhors the shirk, in gown or in trouserloons. The loafers in gems and silk are bad as the fragrant vags, who pilfer and beg and bilk, and die in their rancid rags. The loafers at bridge-whist games, the loafers at purple teas, the hand-painted stall-fed dames, are chains on the workers’ knees. The women who cook and sew, the women who manage homes, who have no desire to grow green hair on enameled domes, how noble and good they seem, how wholesome and sane their aim, compared with that human scream, the brass-mounted, stall-fed dame!

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LITERATURE