Chapter III: The Origin of the Pacer (3)

Here there was fairly good grazing for our horses and moderately good foraging opportunities for the men. It was here, and in the month of February, that we had our Christmas dinner. Somewhere and somehow (it was not for me to know or to ask) our mess had secured a turkey, maybe a wild one which had been killed in trying to bite some of our boys, and under the skillful hands of Private Sam Wood, of Company I, the most expert cook in the regiment, this turkey was roasted over a fire of live coals, which Sam, with the utmost care, had prepared and arranged. The turkey was suspended from a rigging of poles at the proper distance from the fire and by the dexterous hand of Sam was kept gently turning around and around, that the roasting process might properly proceed. Out of the sky had dropped a mess of sweet potatoes, along with some pickled cabbage, much like sauerkraut, which went to complete our Christmas dinner. Our mess, composed of the colonel, the surgeon and the adjutant, sat close by to watch proceedings, and to “shoo away” self-invited guests who had been attracted to our camp fire by the aroma of the roasting turkey, and incidentally to frequently wipe our watering mouths and ask Sam if he could not hurry matters along a little faster, as we had our appetites with us. It seemed to us hungry souls that never before did it take so long to roast a turkey.

As we were nearing the completion of the repast a little rain storm passed over, but soon the sun shone brightly, showing the tops of the mountains tipped with snow. We were all in a frame of mind to enjoy this beautiful but fleeting scene, when Sam, the cook, pointing to the snow-capped mountains, said, “Gentlemen, there is ice cream for dessert, help yourselves.”

As I look back now through the vista of more than forty years, never before or since did a Christmas dinner taste so good as that one of turkey, sweet potatoes and sauerkraut, all topped off with ice cream on the mountains!

THEODORE F. ALLEN.

The Devil’s Wagon.

It was plain from the old man’s demeanor that he was “up against” something unusual.

“What’s the matter now,” I asked; “did you lose out in the crap game, or has Taylor sent for you?”

Taylor is Judge of the Criminal Court, and, according to Uncle Jake, when any colored citizen is guilty of an offence against the peace and dignity of the State, Taylor very promptly sends for him.

Uncle Jake, however, is a leading member of Bethel church, and prides himself on his ability to keep out of scraps which are likely to involve him in trouble with Taylor.

Ordinarily the old man would have answered my banter good-humoredly; as it was he only shook his head and sighed. It was evident that he had had a very extraordinary experience. I continued, however, in my same tone: “Oh, you’d as well tell me; I haven’t ever refused to go on your bond, have I?”

“Has I ever axed yer ter go on my bon’? Naw, sah, an de nex’ time yer hear frum me I ain’t axin yer nuther, case I ain’t aimin’ ter git inter nothin’ to need no bon’.”

The old man was plainly in no joking humor. So I said, “Well, tell me about it anyway; you surely haven’t got into anything you’re ashamed of, have you?”

“Naw, sah, I ain’t,” he answered, very positively. “Naw, sah, I ain’t, case I’m plum dead shore ef I’der had my sayso erbout hit, hit never der happened. Yer see hit ’us dis er way: De yuther night atter I’d et my supper I saddled up my little ole mule, Jack, and started to de sto’. When I’d got up on de yuther side er de creek, all ’twonst I seed er light flare up ergin de telephone wires, en fore I had time ter think erbout enything tall, dar come ober de rise de awfullest lookin’ thing I eber seed in my life.”

“What did it look like?”

“Well, sah, de best I can tell yer, hit looked like er great, monstros inseck, wid eyes er flah as big as the head uv er sugar bar’l, an’ jest er comin’ er gittin’. I say, ‘Jack, I specks we’d better be goin’ back.’ Well, we started back, Jack er doin’ his levelin bes’, but shucks! t’wawnt narry biter use; that thing jes crope right up on us like we’d er bin stanin’ still. And all de time I could hear it sayin’ right fas’ like hit meant it, ‘Gittin’, gittin’, gittin’, gittin’. Purty quick Jack, he seed ’twant no use ter try ter git erway, en jest stopped an’ turned ’round facin’ the thing. I looked at hit de bes’ I could an’ I’s jes plum shore hit’s de debil’s own wagin. When hit gunter git up purty clost, all ’twonst Jack he ’menced buck-jumpin’ right todes the thing, an’ fore I knowed whut wus er happenin’ he throwed me er plum somerset and sot me down in de thing right side er de man whut wus drivin’. I looked er ’roun’ sorter kurful like, en bless Gracious! hit wan’t no man.”

“Wan’t no man!” I exclaimed in feigned surprise, “what was it?”

“Ay Lawd, don’t ax me, case I don’t know. He had des one big glass eye right in de middle er ’is for’ed, an’ dat thing whut ’es on des er fryin’ an’ er stewin’, en er goin’ right on down de road. I tell yer, I’s sheer fer sho’ nuff; en I say, ‘O please, Mars Debil, hab mussey on me!’ En he sorter ris up, he did, and say, plum savage like, ‘Here, you ole black rascal, you git outen my ’cheen, fore I knocks all de flah outen yer!’ En, sah, I didn’t take time ter say er nother word; I des fell outen de hine een er dat thing right flat er my back in de middle er de big road, en hit like ter busted me wide open. Time I got up an’ sorter scratch de grabel outen my years, I could hear dat thing er spit-spitten, en er git-gitten way on down dar erbout de creek, des clar gone. I gunter sorter look er roun’ fer Jack, en ’ud you bleeve it? dat ole mule wus down dar er grazin’ side de road, des es innercent as er lam’ in de spring er de year. I went on down dar, I did, en tuck hol’ ’im an’ I say, ‘You ole hippercrit, I’ll larn you how ter ’have de nex time we meet de debil an’ hees wagin.’ An’ I gib dat mule de awfulest beaten!”

STERLING C. BREWER.

Jim and the Old Pacer.

It’s a cold day, indeed, when a drummer has not got a good yarn up his coat-sleeve, and the narrator of this swears to its truth in every particular.

We were sitting around a good fire the other evening when the subject of last winter’s cold spell came up and how much fun the boys over the line were having on the path; and, incidentally, how greatly the interest in snow races among gentlemen drivers was increasing each winter.

“But, say,” said the drummer, who was selling cigars and had just passed around some to sample, “talking about the fun the boys had up North on the snow last winter reminds me how a farmer and an old pacer, up in a fashionable little town in the State of York, where I happened to be last month, hit the snow enthusiasm of that class of fellows who thought they owned the best snow horse in the world with a blizzard that will cool them off till the spring time comes, gentle Annie. At least, they hadn’t got over it when I left two weeks ago,” he laughed. “We didn’t have any snow until after Christmas, and when the cold wave, with snow, did come, you bet they were all waiting for it. Fellows with fine sleighs bought in October and put in the carriage house began to think they would have to wait another year, while the trotters and pacers were eating their heads off, and hundreds of friendly wagers lay in pigeon holes, waiting for the snow. Well, when it came, it was a dandy, and the snow path soon saw dozens of races a day, with fine rigs and fun galore.

“I’ve got a driver friend who lives near the big town mentioned—runs a training stable in the suburbs. You’d know him in a minute if I’d call his name, for he has driven many a good one to victory, and he’s got a pacer you’d know, too, for he has a mark below 2:12. But this pacer is an onery-looking thing, if I ever saw one. He wouldn’t sell on his looks for fifteen dollars, yet he won thirty-five hundred dollars last year clear of expenses. My friend bought him out of a log-wagon—a curby-legged thing, with log spavins and splints in swarms, but gee whiz, how he could pace! Jim—that’s my friend’s name—loves a little fun about as well as anybody. He didn’t go out on the snow path the first week until he found out just who could go and how fast, and then he just laid for the whole gang with that old pacer. The boys drove out to his stable time and again and bantered him, guyed him, made fun of him and all that, but he laid low and said nothing. One evening he sent for me and whispered:

“‘Want to make your winter oats tomorrow?’

“‘I don’t care,’ I laughed, ‘if it’s a dead sure thing. Haven’t got any money to burn up in an experiment.’

“Jim laughed and handed me a hundred in ten-dollar bills. ‘This shows my faith; play it for me on the farmer and the old pacer to-morrow, any way or odds you want to, and if you don’t make some yourself while you’re at it, why, it’s your own fault.’ And then he took me in the harness room and told me a little tale that made me laugh all over.

“Well, to-morrow meant there was going to be several races on the snow, and all the fashionable end of town was to be out. One or two fellows with pretty good horses had beat everything and were looking for more worlds to conquer. Just after dinner Jim put on snow goggles, a hayseed hat, the rustiest coat he could borrow, clapped that curby-legged pacer in an old sleigh that looked like it had stood up in a mouldy carriage house for fifty years, with harness to match, put a few bundles of oats, farmer like, in behind to save feed, of course, in town, and jogged on in with a sort of an ain’t-been-to-town-for-ten-years look written all over the whole turnout.

“He wasn’t looking for the first suckers he did up, though. He heard a jingling of bells behind him some two miles out, and came very near being run over by a happy lot of young fellows with their girls on a bob-sleigh, drawn by four spanking horses. The fun they had over Jim and his queer turnout was immense—for about five minutes. They dashed up beside him, asked him the price of oats, and all that and finally hollered out:

“‘Get out of the road, old man, or we’ll run over you!’

“‘But I be goin’ to town, too,’ Jim drawled out in the nasalest twang that ever came out of a down-easter’s nose. Then he shook up the old pacer just enough to stay tantalisingly in front in spite of everything they could do. The bob-sleigh crowd couldn’t go in six minutes at a trot to save their necks, so they put the teams out in full run, but that was just fun for the old pacer. They never came in twenty yards of his oats in the rear of the sleigh. After teasing the babies enough, Jim turned at the first good stretch, looked back, winked his off eye, and said: ‘Yes, chillun, I be goin’ to town, too, so good-bye to you babies, an’ heaven bless you,’ and he shot away and left them.

“You have heard of blackbirds chattering in a tree, and then all of them suddenly stop, haven’t you? The silence is painful. Well, that’s the way it was in that bob-sleigh.

“But Jim was after bigger game than that, though he couldn’t resist the temptation to have a little fun with every nobby turnout he met.

“‘Cawn’t you pass that old fellah, James,’ the male occupant of a swell rig would call out to his coachman, after Jim would wiggle along, half asleep, beside the fancy turnout.

“‘Oh, yes, your ’oner,’ James would say, and swell up in the true English style and pull at his ’ackneys and spread around blustering, and cast withering glances on the innocent looking hayseed rig. Then Jim would wake up, shake the old pacer, and leave them like Mark Twain’s coyote on the desert left the ambitious dog—a gray crack in the air and he was gone while the English coachman cussed those “low-down Hamerican ’osses” with the best mixture of Billingsgate and flunky at his command.

“But he got off the best one on two young fellows who thought they had a fast trotter. They came tearing down on Jim, intending to go by him like a flash. But just as they came up Jim shook up the old pacer, and he threw up his tail for all the world like he was frightened nearly to death, and with that wild look that made Jim afterwards declare he really believed the old rascal was onto the game himself, he would dart away, threatening to break and go all to pieces every minute. This would make the trotting fellows come faster, and Jim would make it worse by looking like he was ‘skeered’ nearly to death, and shouting out:

“‘Gentlemen, hold up, please; you’ll skeer the old hoss to death. He allers runs away at a pace when he’s skeered. Hold up. Hold up, for heaven’s sake!’

“Jim would let them chase him that way for a mile, till their horse was blown and would go to a break before they’d catch on, and try to sneak away down some side street. Then Jim would holler out:

“‘Gentlemen, don’t never do that no more—don’t never do it ergin, on your life! This old hoss might ’er run erway an’ ruined me! He always would run away in a pace when he got skeered. Learned it when he was a colt—got skeered at a trottin’ hoss haulin’ a load of manure through the medder lot, where he was grazin’, an’ he can’t stan’ it to this day!’ Then he would chuckle out loud and throw this parting shot at them: ‘But, say, young fellers, don’t you wish sumpin’ would skeer that thar trotter of yours, good, once?’

“But the meanest thing Jim and that old pacer did was to break up a love match. It was a young fellow and his girl, and Jim says when he came up behind them their horse was in a slow walk, like they wanted that ride to last forever—and they were so interested in looking in each other’s eyes, and holding hands under the robe, and they never knew that it was daytime and that it was the sun, and not a low-turned gas jet, that was burning overhead. Jim knew the young fellow, and the horse he was driving, too. The horse was quite a fancy looking trotter, just pretty enough to catch anybody’s eye that wanted a Sunday-go-to-meetin’ kind of a horse. He had once taken a tincup record of 2:26¼ by some hook and crook, and on the road for a quarter of a mile, he could trot a buzz-saw clip, as long as he thought he was beating all creation, and didn’t get another crotch in his head—for he had clock works, with a chimes attachment there, and no mistake. There was plenty of room for Jim to go around and let those young people alone, but he saw too good a chance for fun, and that’s what he was out for. He wiggled up right behind the hand-holding pair, and, pulling out a red silk handkerchief, he blew his nose with a terrible blast. He did it to attract their attention and let them know that the rest of the world ‘do move, too,’ but it was more effectual than he had hoped. That chimes-headed horse must have thought it was Gabriel’s trumpet, for he jumped ten feet when Jim gave that blast, shook the lovers like an earthquake and banged the girl’s best hat up against the back of the sleigh. The young fellow pulled his horse down and looked back daggers at Jim, then touched him up and lit out to leave him. This was just what Jim wanted, and he sailed after them in great shape. It was an awful pretty race for about two hundred yards, and then Jim let the old pacer glide up nose and nose with the trotter, who was walling his eye around and already showing signs of quitting with a little more collaring. When Jim did that he heard the girl say excitedly, ‘Oh, Harry, is that horrid old horse going to beat Sir Charles Grandeville?’

“‘I’m just feeling him, now,’ Harry replied. ‘Wait a minute, darling, and I will make him sick. There’s nothing on this road can beat Sir Charles!’

“Jim chuckled and let out a link or two, and the old pacer forged ahead.

“‘Oh, Harry, but he is beating us—hurry up, dear, let him show that 2:20 clip, or lock, or whatever you told me about Just now. O-o-o-o Harry!!’

“This last remark was caused by Sir Charles going into as many different breaks as there are pieces in a jointed snake, while Harry laid the whip on him with something that sounded, under his breath, like ‘Whoa! Dash blank your jumping-jack, white-livered hide! I’ll teach you how to quit every time an ox cart tries to pass you!’

“And as Jim sailed away he heard the girl haughtily and freezingly saying:

“‘Mr. Harry Smith, I’ll thank you, sir, to put me out at the first house you pass! I’m glad I found you out in time. Any man who will beat and swear at his horse as you have done will beat and swear at his wife, and I’ll never marry you, sir, never!’

“As I said above, that was the meanest thing Jim did that day.

“Well, we harvested our winter oats two hours afterwards, when Jim entered his pacer in the free-for-all down the boulevard. Some few had caught on, but I found enough that hadn’t to cover Jim’s hundred I held and another for myself, and when the old farmer and the pacer beat the gang further than any of them cared to tell about afterwards, as I said before, it brought on a blizzard that cooled all the racing enthusiasm in that town up to the time I left, and many of them hadn’t discovered then that they had been racing green horses and two-thirty roadsters against one of the best known drivers in the East, up behind a pacer who started ten times last year, won eight first moneys and two seconds, and took a mark close down to 2:10.”

“I see from the paper,” he said, as he pulled out a local paper, “that they are racing there on the snow path this week, but I’ll bet my winter overcoat they have taken the precaution to bar all hayseeds and curby-legged pacers in the country.”

OUR PAGE OF POETS

THE LYNCHERS.

A thousand yelling savages proclaim
Their swift advance. What voice or hand can tame
The maddened multitude? With curses loud,
With guns and halters armed, the frenzied crowd
Has rushed the guard. A lurid bonfire shows
The prison walls they storm, while passion glows
In many an eye, alike, of grizzled Age,
And ruddy Youth, aroused to brutal rage.

Their sentries overcome, a quick retreat,
The soldiers make to cover. Sledges beat
And crash through iron doors before the eyes
Of city officers. And flames that rise
From heaps of furniture and fagots, blended,
Upon the stair the soldiers have ascended,
A roaring furnace make the prison hall;
While wild alarms the fire department call.

The screams of prisoners, in terror, swell
The clamorous noise to sounds as harsh as hell,
As firemen, driven by shots and brandished knives
And dynamite—to save their precious lives—
Desert their posts; and Manhood weakened falls
In darker ruin than wrecks of battered walls;
For men, once held courageous, quail and cower,
While Anarchy, unchallenged, seizes power.

At last the desperate prisoner released,
But chased and caught again, like savage beast,
Is dragged before the self-appointed court
Whose blear-eyed judge enjoys the awful sport.
In reckless impudence, like beggars ride,
He sits—with oaths where Justice should preside
Condemns. About the wretch his followers close,
With threats of death, if aught their will oppose.

In protest Wisdom lifts her voice in vain;
With jeers and ribald shouts and high disdain,
The Mob uprears his front; but Justice stands,
And, arm uplifted, solemnly demands:
Think you, because I’m slow as God is slow,
That any can escape me? Nay, the low
And high alike I reach. Though lame, I smite
At last all who defy my sovereign might.

With hunger wild, ferocious beasts obey
Their lust for blood—pursue and rend the prey;
But baser far than beast or fiend or ghoul,
Unfit to dwell in caves where tigers prowl,
Or live where lions lick their bloody paws,
And rule the jungle-world with ravenous jaws;
Incarnate Savagery, athirst for gore,
Begone! and show your hideous face no more.

Lest brooding Terror bring the she-wolf days
Again, and men afraid, for safety raise
Above their lawless heads a sceptered hand
To rule with iron Freedom’s bleeding land.
The rule of ruffians, who would bear, instead
Of low-bred Tyranny, with hydra head,
The nations choose them kings to give the measure
That men will use, of Freedom’s priceless treasure.

The seed of crime from every halter flies,
When multitudes of murderers arise
To execute the laws; by every stake
Where lawless lynchers direful vengeance take,
Abundant harvests grow. Beware! The strains
Of high Arabian blood, upon the plains,
By Spanish conquerors left, to mustangs fell—
Surprises of the future, who can tell?

O, men! with Southern hearts, unselfish, brave,
Go hunt this monster down—the negro save:
And save your land, your homes: it is your place
To save from hurt the fair Caucasian race;
As men of Anglo-Saxon blood you claim
A primacy. But hear: Except you aim
To hold such leadership by lofty deed
And high ideal, you will not always lead.

If Justice, grieved, shall tear her temples down
And cast aside from country, city, town,
Her pillars, church and school—as courts and jails.
Dismantled, fall, our great Republic fails.
With insults, Wrong exults o’er Right exiled;
The smiling field reverts to tangled wild;
To violence and blood, unhappy men,
Abandoned, turn the home to beastly den.

—J. THOMAS COOPER.

AT SUNSET ON TENNESSEE RIVER.

Majestically, from the pearl-faced gate
Of eastern skies, the mighty stream doth pour
A crimpling current through the golden door
Of western bounds; nor doth our boat abate
Aught of its strife with tides, and night doth wait
Ambushed in shadows yonder crag throws o’er.
And foam-capped waves, which lap the willowed shore,
Are chasing us like hungry hounds of Fate.

What name hast thou, O, Spirit brooding here?
Elusive thou, as creatures of a dream,
Or phantoms of the mist, gone with a breath.
We know not if we must adore or fear
This mystery that holds the land and stream—
And yonder shades; bescreen they Life or death?

WILL MITT SHIELDS.

TROTWOOD’S MONTHLY
Devoted to Farm, Horse and Home.
TROTWOOD PUBLISHING CO., Nashville, Tenn. Office 161 Fourth Ave. North.

JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE, Editor-in-Chief.

E. E. SWEETLAND Business Manager.

GEO. E. McKENNON President.
JOHN W. FRY Vice-President.
EUGENE ANDERSON Treas.
WOOTEN MOORE Sec’y.

TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION: One Year, $1 00; Single Copy, 10 cents.
Advertising Rates on application.

NASHVILLE, TENN., DECEMBER, 1905.

With Trotwood

It is the unexpected in life, as has often been said, that happens. The rejected stone throughout the centuries has always been the keystone in the arch of fame, and genius and greatness always have and always will come from the bosom of Mother Earth. The best legacy a boy can have is an honest ancestry and a condition that forces him to work. And, therefore, I am always sorry for the young man who “has a fine start in life.” He has as many chances for failure as the “brilliant young lawyer” has for mediocrity and a bar-room clientage. Success despises assistance and fame hates caste and titles as the gods do salt water. Mediocrity, like a faint hearted hound, may always be found running up and down the river of his purpose, fearing to plunge and doubting the ford, while success plunges in and crosses, or dies trying. Two generations of idleness will breed crime, while two generations of shirt sleeves mean wealth. If the world would stop working a year God would have to destroy it with fire and brimstone.

* * * * *

Poetry should be brought back to the uses for which it was intended. The metaphysical school that is trying now to control it, and whose object seems to be to make it a science instead of a pleasure and beautiful way of expressing our thoughts, should be driven from our standard as they have always been from our hearts. We must go back to first and natural principles again, and by demanding imagination, simplicity, beauty and naturalness, make poetry a vehicle of the pure and the beautiful, and so simple that ordinary minds can read it with pleasure and understand what they read. The story age of Spencer, Shakespeare and Burns should be received and much of Browning’s stuff flung to the dogs, where it belongs. God has given us poetry to be enjoyed, to be understood, to make us wiser and better, to take to our hearts and firesides. Its principle is all but universal and there are few who do not, in some shape, enjoy it. It was not intended to be an intellectual puzzle, a metaphysical science to be gobbled up by a few abnormally developed protoplasms and denied to the world of yearning hearts. Imagine Homer reciting his glorious stories of Agamemnon and Ulysses, of “Ox-eyed Juno” and Penelaus, “tamer of horses,” to the Greek philosophers; imagine Shakespeare giving “Romeo and Juliet” in a barn to the learned of Europe. Of Burns lying in the dew of the haystack watching the morning star quiver like the soul of Highland Mary and then writing his deathless song for the ears of those people who live in palaces and never saw a morning star, nor felt the kiss of an honest love in their lives.

* * * * *

The world is wild for prose stories. The reason is obvious. The stories have been shut out of poetry by the metaphysical school, and, being unable to get them in the language of the heart, of the imagination, the world which must have them is taking them in the language of the commonplace. And thus is the true and the beautiful being destroyed to give way to the double meaning and the sensational. The so-called poetry of to-day is not new. The only reason a lot of metaphysical poetry has not been handed down to us is because it did not live to get to us. Five hundred years hence the people who will know Burns will have to hunt around in a sheepskin encyclopoedia of biography to find out who Howells and Henry James were. We must not forget that contemporary criticism placed Ben Jonson ahead of Shakespeare, Pope above Milton, Scott above Keats. And yet Pope and Scott did a world of harm to poetry. They helped to drive it out by disgusting people with the sameness of its flow and the smoothness of its rhythm. As if the wind roars ’round the house by a foot and a meter measure as Whitmore expressed it, as if the mountain looms up by a law of rising and falling, or the waves thunder like a church organ.

But the grave of truth is never the theme of fraud but for one generation—the next one finds truth on the monument and wrong in the grave. Let us get back to truth; though dead, she is a sweeter mistress than a living and bedecked and bespangled lie. As Romeo said over Juliet’s body, so with poetry:

“Death that hath sucked the honey of thy breath,
Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty.
Thou art not conquered: beauty’s ensign yet
Is crimson on thy lips and on thy cheeks,
And death’s pale flag is not advanced there.”

* * * * *

Trotwood loves to throw a bouquet—he believes they are more easily gathered in the sunshine around us and leave a more pleasant memory than some other things which might be cast, such, for instance, as bricks and stones. Especially does he love to throw them when they are intended for a lovely woman. And we have known her long—Miss Minnie McIntyre, editor of the new horse show paper, The Bit and Spur, of Chicago, and so we know whereof we speak when we say that in her class she is simply an “only,” and her monthly, The Bit and Spur, is a gem of its kind, and an inspiration. It is beautifully illustrated, its workmanship is the finest, and is the best edited magazine of its class in the whole country. If you love the horse shows you cannot afford to miss its monthly visits. This is written deliberately and with charity aforethought, and while it may have the flavors of the village sanctum sanctorum, yet when a woman gets into the strenuous fight around her and with her bright mind and pen rises to the very top, there is always growing in Trotwood’s garden a bouquet of sunflowers for her.

* * * * *

Concerning Southern magazines, it is the fact that none has ever been able to live in the South. We appreciated that fact with all its force when we launched Trotwood’s Monthly. But we think we have studied the situations thoroughly enough to know the reason of this: First, they have all been feeble imitations of Northern magazines—a field so well and ably filled already. Every section of our country has its own character, its own atmosphere, its own earmarks. People North and West, when they buy a Southern magazine, want the South to be in it—its stories, traditions, its sunshine, its fields, its very air. They want to hear of the land which is harvesting and sowing, while they are in the far-off snow, waiting to see the good, glad earth again; the land where the average farmer does not spend all he makes in the summer keeping himself and his stock warm in the winter; the land that is Southern—the great, undeveloped country of the future. Trotwood’s Monthly is trying to do this. In the second place, Southern people are not great readers. There are too many chances to get out of doors—any time and all the time. Like the petted children of indulgent parents, kind Nature does so much for them—they do little for themselves. And a child will never leave the joyous out-doors for the study, the schoolroom or the work shop. In literature the great South is but a child. But last and chiefest, no magazine has ever been launched in the South to supply a practical demand, instead of creating a supply. Sentiment is a great thing, but like blue litmus paper, it changes quickly if it meets an acid. And sentiment meets an acid every little while. Trotwood’s Monthly is supplying practical demand, not trying to create a supply, dependent on local sentiment. It is weaving the Southern atmosphere around a practical subject—a subject in demand all over the world, as our subscription list, which now has reached a goodly number in every State in the Union, in Canada, even to faraway Nova Scotia, in South Africa, Honolulu and Australia. Around this practical subject for which there is a positive demand, we will weave the Southern literature and life, and in that way do we hope to live. Sentiment alone will carry no magazine beyond the first year, and the story of the literature of every people—aye, of every literary workman among the people—is that the practical staff must go with the first efforts long before he who runs, learns how to read.

* * * * *

Trotwood’s Monthly is going slow, but with the staff of the practical for support.

Trotwood’s Monthly wants good stories and poems. Write them, but let them be life, for literature, if real, is but the true interpretation of life. Write of the life around you, not of that in some other State or country.

* * * * *

If you fail to get your Monthly promptly, be sure to write and let us know. The Monthly comes out on the 15th of each month. We always have extra numbers for those which miscarry in the mails. Drop us a postal if you fail to get yours promptly.

* * * * *

Mr. A. D. Shamel, physiologist in charge of Tobacco Breeding In the Bureau of Plant Industry, United States Department of Agriculture, Washington, D. C., sends the following appreciative letter: “I appreciate the high character of your Monthly, and know that it will be of great service in promoting the best interests of the agricultural interests which it represents. In the great agricultural awakening taking place in the South and the development of her great resources, there is certainly a great field of valuable work.” Prof. Schumel will favor us soon with a valuable paper.

* * * * *

Men seem to be animals which would not only betray other men, but their own children, if there was no higher power to prevent. One of the curses of the South is child labor—another form of slavery and race suicide. In the new era dawning in the South, this curse has come in with the spindle and the money behind it has been so great that in some Southern States, like South Carolina and Georgia, the friends of the child and of humanity have been unable to pass child labor laws. The legislators are bought by the money of the corporations. The South is making a strenuous effort to correct this evil, but it is met by graft and bribery, evasion and contempt of the law, and the shame goes on. Take from anyone’s life its untrammeled childhood, and what is left? Not even the memory of a sweetness. White child slavery in the cotton mills of the country to-day is worse than negro slavery ever was. After many fruitless efforts, Alabama, which has rapidly taken first rank among all the Southern States, succeeded two years ago in passing a child labor law, the age limit being twelve years. On the day this law went into effect, one hundred and twenty-five children, all white, walked out of one mill at Lannett, Ala. The most of the children, perhaps, had never been to school in their lives and never would have had the opportunity. Not only that, but half of them would never have lived to maturity, and these, at twenty, would look like middle-aged, decrepit, ambitionless folks from whom the life had been crushed. The use of child labor not only promotes race suicide and all manner of narrow injustice, but encourages laziness in the parents, as in nearly all cases the children support the parents in idleness. The law is now rendered almost null by the fact that the parents do not hesitate to swear falsely to the age of their children in order to put them to work in the mills.

* * * * *

What is a thought—an idea? The most valuable asset in the brain of man. Not common, ordinary thinking, but a new thought—a thought which no one else ever originated. There is such a thought in the letter below, and I am publishing it, taken from many other letters to Trotwood, because of that particular thought and not on account of the nice things the author is kind enough to say. I have underscored the thought I have selected. Read it and tell me, are you doing your work because you must do something, or are you doing it because it is the something you must do. Think and find out, for on it depends whether your life will be a success or failure:

Medicine Lodge, Kan., Oct. 30, 1905.

Dear Trotwood:

The first and second number of the Monthly have come and, to
tell you how much we have enjoyed them, I must use a big word
and say immensely. The farmer who will follow their counsel
will soon have to pull down his barns and build greater, while
he will have treasures laid up where neither moth nor rust doth
corrupt; it is the only magazine I know of giving advice about
this world and the next.

So old Solomon could not resist the Influence of beauty, his
namesake of old fell at the same place.

I think you have established the origin of the pacing horse.
Poor fellow, he has fought his way to fame, but like nature’s
gentleman,

“He may not have ancestral fame
His pathway to illume;
The sun that flings the brightest ray
May rise from mist and gloom.”

After all, it is the irrepressive in either man or horse that
makes him great.

When you see a man go to work because he must do something,
very likely you will never hear about him or the work; while
another goes at a work because it is something he must do, then
look for something great.

This will hold good in regard to the newspaper jingle you spoke
of, written by someone anxious to see his name in print. Burns
could not help writing about Mary, and so immortalized the name
a second time. I venture the assertion, Trotwood’s Monthly is
not written because he must do something, but rather because it
is something he must do.

And now, about the Dakota hunt. Well, for beauty of sentiment
and sublimity of style, it surpasses anything that has been
written on the like subject hitherto.

I have read it over and over again until I became spellbound by
the magic of the scene. It brought before my mind the memory
of other days when I, too, saw something similar, only in a
smaller way, on the fields of Kansas. I feel I have wearied you
with much talking and will ask the same forgiveness that Mr.
Stone granted you when you shot first.

Sincerely yours,

ROBT. HAMILTON.

* * * * *

The publisher of a disreputable sheet in New York, which makes its living by holding up society and dishing out scandal about men and women, has sued that splendid and fearless paper, Collier’s Weekly, for libel, the occasion of the exposure by Collier’s was a venomous attack by the sheet aforesaid upon the President’s daughter. Collier’s, with its characteristic ability, laid the sheet open to its knife, showing how it held up people for hush money and lived in the gutters of things bad. For all of which it was sued for $100,000 by the aforesaid sheet. In a recent editorial on the subject, Norman Hapgood, the able editor of Collier’s, says: “Men submit to blackmail to protect their wives and sisters from such sheets as this, for in the North the pocketbook has replaced the pistol.”

The South, to people who do not know her, has many faults. One of these is the quickness and certainty with which her men have always meted out tragic justice to the brute, black or white, who tears down the barrier between his own vile passions, whether of malice or murder, and a woman’s purity. Nor has any court or any jury ever convicted the man who used his pistol to protect the name of his women. In such cases, the law considers the man to be temporarily insane, at the sudden destruction of his home and happiness, and though it also recognizes what is called “cooling time” for such frenzy, an old Georgia judge years ago expressed the sentiment of the entire South on this subject when he declared in such a case that “cooling time with this court means ninety-nine years.”

Many sheets of the kind mentioned have tried to build their foul nest in the South, forgetting that here the pocketbook is not the god it is where people live only for money. Its end is invariably the same and the curtain drops to the rapid fire of pistol shots, “and the rest is silence.”

This has come from the old South which taught that money was not all of life, that a man’s word was his bond and a woman’s good character her crown. And words being bonds, men were careful of them, for the man who has to redeem his words with his pistol instead of his pocketbook is more careful how he uses them. We wish Collier’s a speedy vindication. Indeed, we predict the trial will prove something of the same kind of a farce as that of the windy Prof. Trigg, of the Chicago University, who taught the classes that Rockefeller was greater than Shakespeare, that our hymns were all doggerel and much else that was false. He was unwise enough to bring suit for libel against a New York daily which held him up to ridicule. On trial he proved by his own testimony that he was even more ignorant and ridiculous than the defendant had supposed.

* * * * *

And we appreciate greatly the letter below from so distinguished a source as Mr. Spillman, in the Bureau of Plant Industry, Washington, D. C.:

Mr. John Trotwood Moore, care Trotwood Publishing Co.,
Nashville, Tenn.

My Dear Sir: Your favor of October 19 has remained unanswered
thus long on account of my absence from the office.

I have read the copy of Trotwood’s Monthly with a great deal of
interest, and wish to congratulate you on its high character.
You are certainly striking out in a new line compared with our
present agricultural literature. None of our farm papers have
heretofore attempted the literary excellence of Trotwood’s
Monthly, confining themselves more particularly to the
instructional side of farming. I am much interested in your
venture and hope that it may meet with the highest success. Our
farmers have been a little too much inclined to look at the
financial side of their business and they need something that
will help in other directions. This you seem to be able to give.

While reading your magazine I was struck by the fact that my
own work has nearly all been directed toward the financial side
of farming, but you have given me a new idea and one which I
hope will have its effect upon my future work. I shall take
pleasure in sending you once in a while anything I may be able
to write which I think will be of interest to your readers.

Wishing you the highest success, I am

Yours very truly,

W. J. SPILLMAN, Agriculturist.

* * * * *

A man named Fessler, who ran an apiary in the North, conceived the idea of making honey the year round. In the fall he loaded his hives upon a flatboat and floated to the land of perpetual sun. But the bees, finding it always summer, ceased to lay up honey at all and Fessler had his expense for his experience.

Lessons are easily drawn from a thing like this. Since the world was made, the experience of life is the nearer the sun the less the work. But the real lesson is deeper. Cannot the farmer who works the soil year in and year out, with no chance for a rest and no returns to the soil see it?

* * * * *

We want a good live agent in every town in the United States for “Trotwood’s Monthly.” Write for terms to agents. Address Trotwood Publishing Company, Nashville, Tenn.

* * * * *

CHEAPER RATES SOUTHWEST.

Less than one-way fare for the round trip on Oct. 3 and 17, Nov. 7 and 21, Dec. 5 and 19. To points in the Southwest, via Memphis or Cairo, and Cotton Belt Route.

You can afford to go now, nearly as cheap traveling as staying at home.

Write for maps and literature on Southeast Missouri, Arkansas, Northwest Louisiana, Texas. Also cost of tickets, time of trains, etc.

W. G. ADAMS, T. P. A., Nashville, Tenn.
E. W. LaBEAUME, G.P. & T.A., St Louis.
COTTON BELT ROUTE.