“A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.”
As a rule, traveling salesmen manage to extract and radiate as much joy and mirth as any class of citizens that I know of. But even these genial spirits have their own sorrows.
A drummer was sent by his house, shortly after his marriage, on a long trip to the Pacific coast. Some time after his departure the young wife was seized with appendicitis, was hurried off to a hospital, operated on, and recovered all right. The strain, both mental and financial, had been great, but she was well again. Joe had remitted by check for surgeon’s fee, special nurse, hospital charges, and a few other items amounting to a hundred or so, and his spirits were just beginning to rise again as he worked towards Los Angeles, where mail from home would await him.
The “gang” from the 9:10 train hurried up to the office of the “Link-Schmidt.” The night clerk handed each his quota of these ever-welcome missives.
In the reading room Joe was seen to turn deathly pale. Several at once approached. “What’s matter, old boy?” “Bad news from home?” “Anything out of whack?” and kindred interrogatories were fired at him from all directions.
Some griefs are too poignant for expression. Carefully folding back the first and last parts of a page, Joe exhibited, without comment, only this paragraph of its perfumed surface: “I am not feeling as well, dearest, as when I wrote you at Pasadena. Sallie is coming over to-morrow and we are going to have our kimonos cut out.”
Reader number one passed it down the line. Silence, that was stifling, settled over the group. Then, moved by a common impulse, a solemn procession filed out and lined up before a rosewood counter, in front of which ran a massive gilt rail. “Martini,” “Black and White High Ball,” “Wilson,” “Same.” In the land of the high ball a poet once sang:
“Inspiring, bold John Barleycorn!
What dangers thou can make us scorn!
Wi’ tu’penny we fear nae evil;
Wi’ whiskey straight we’d face the divil.”
It was so in this instance. Joe came to first. “Ain’t that ——” (from the youngest in the bunch). “Say, Joe, the repair bills of you married men must be something fierce.”
“Oh, come on, boys, let’s go to supper.”
H. K. A.
Mr. Wallace Mistaken.
Editor Trotwood’s:
I have read with much interest your history of that remarkable family of pacers. If the Hal family of pacers can’t produce world’s record-breaking trotters, the theory that extreme trotting speed comes from the pacer, or originated from the pacing gait, must go to the wall.
Mr. Wallace was certainly misinformed when he was told that the dam of Vermont Black Hawk was a pacer. I hunted up the man who had charge of her for upwards of eight years, and he assured me that the dam of Vermont Black Hawk was as square gaited a trotter as he ever saw, and that she never paced a step during all the time she was owned in the Twombly family. This man was Mr. Shadrak Seavey, a grandson of Ezekiel Twombly, and men who knew him personally assured me that no man’s reputation for strict veracity was superior to that of Mr. Seavey. Horsemen who knew this mare agreed unanimously with Mr. Seavey in describing her color, size, conformation and gait.
The man who misled Mr. Wallace got on the track of the wrong mare. He was the same man (Allen W. Thompson, of Woodstock, Vt.) who strenuously contended that Vermont Black Hawk was by Paddy, and Ethan Allen 2:25½ was by Adams’ Flying Morgan, in spite of the fact that the stud book of Sherman Morgan showed that the dam of Vermont Black Hawk was mated with him May 14, 1832, and I learned from Mr. Seavey that Black Hawk was foaled about the middle of April, 1833.
The stud service book of Vermont Black Hawk shows that the Holcomb mare, dam of Ethan Allen, was mated with Black Hawk July 9, 1848. It is a matter of history that Ethan Allen was foaled June 18, 1849. These facts were known to Thompson, but because Ethan Allen was bay in color, Thompson was sure there must have been some mistake. He did not succeed in winning Mr. Wallace on that point, but touched a responsive chord when he hit upon the pacing mare as the dam of Vermont Black Hawk.
I read your Monthly Sundays, when, I suppose, I should be at church. If your publication is as great a success financially as in all other respects, you will have a bank account when you reach my age that will enable you to live comfortably the remainder of your days. That such may be the case is my sincere wish.
Pardon me for the length of this epistle. I won’t do it again. Very truly yours,
S. W. PARLIN.
Boston, Mass.
As to Football.
Editor Trotwood’s:
In college and university circles, during the year 1905, one of the vital questions receiving its share of attention was, as some one has aptly phrased it, “Is football to be mended or ended?” This and similar questions open the subject for discussion, in the progress of which a number of very caustic criticisms have been leveled at the game by the presidents of some of our great universities and colleges and members of their respective faculties. The president of Columbia University, the first to abolish the game, recently declared that football as now played is no longer a sport, but a profession, and, like other professions, demands prolonged training, complete absorption of time and thought, and is inconsistent, in practice, at least, with the devotion to work which is the first duty of college and university students. He also calls attention to the “figure” “gate receipts” cuts in the conduct of the game, which, says he, “marks the game as in no small degree a commercial enterprise.” President Wheeler of the University of California, brings his indictment against the promoters of the modern game for “having changed the gridiron into a multiplication table,” and otherwise tampering with it, until to-day “American intercollegiate football has become a spectacle, and not a sport.” The president of the College of the City of New York reviews the evolution of football, and makes a strong plea for a return to the game of earlier times, “when football was rather primitive; few practice hours, few out-of-town games; no training table; no excuse from regular university work, and the boys led a normal student life.” However, whatever may be the opinion of certain scholastic dignitaries, and however incompetent the “rank outsider” may be to judge the game, a reasonable survey of the situation reveals the fact that public opinion, the most powerful factor with which we have to deal, is now concentrating its forces preparatory to “bucking the centre” of the game as played, or, with the “flying wedge” of reform, dash through its lines and destroy the dangerous features of the “mass play.”
That there should be provision for physical culture in the course of every educational institution is, of course, universally conceded, but the question now up for solution is, what character of exercise, or what system of physical development will come nearer meeting the demand for such training. The champions of the great American game answer, “football.” And yet, when we consider the question in the light of all its pros and cons—and, like all other questions, it has its pros and cons—its three sides—i. e., your side, the other side, and the inside—we are led to believe that it specializes athletic sports to such a degree as to exclude the student body from participation in them. The systematic development of the physique was first given a pre-eminent place in the training and discipline of young men by the ancient Greeks, who sought in ............