Remarks Part 40

Man pa.s.ses through seven distinct stages of being photographed, each one exceeding all previous efforts in that line.

First he is photographed as a prattling, bald-headed baby, absolutely dest.i.tute of eyes, but making up for this deficiency by a wealth of mouth that would make a negro minstrel olive green with envy. We often wonder what has given the average photographer that wild, hunted look about the eyes and that joyless sag about the knees. The chemicals and the indoor life alone have not done all this. It is the great nerve tension and mental strain used in trying to photograph a squirming and dark red child with white eyes, in such a manner as to please its parents.

An old-fashioned dollar store alb.u.m with cerebro-spinal meningitis, and filled with pictures of half-suffocated children in heavily-starched white dresses, is the first thing we seek on entering a home, and the last thing from which we reluctantly part.

The second stage on the downward road is the photograph of the boy with fresh-cropped hair, and in which the stiff and protuberant thumb takes a leading part.

Then follows the portrait of the lad, with strongly marked freckles and a look of hopeless melancholy. With the aid of a detective agency, I have succeeded in running down and destroying several of these pictures which were attributed to me.

Next comes the young man, 21 years of age, with his front hair plastered smoothly down over his tender, throbbing dome of thought. He does not care so much about the expression on the mobile features, so long as his left hand, with the new ring on it, shows distinctly, and the string of jingling, jangling charms on his watch chain, including the cute little basket cut out of a peach stone, stand out well in the foreground. If the young man would stop to think for a moment that some day he may become eminent and ashamed of himself, he would hesitate about doing this.

Soon after, he has a tintype taken in which a young lady sits in the alleged gra.s.s, while he stands behind her with his hand lightly touching her shoulder as though he might be feeling of the thrilling circ.u.mference of a buzz saw. He carries this picture in his pocket for months, and looks at it whenever he may be un.o.bserved.

Then, all at once, he discovers that the young lady's hair is not done up that way any more, and that her hat doesn't seem to fit her. He then, in a fickle moment, has another tintype made, in which another young woman, with a more recent hat and later coiffure, is discovered holding his hat in her lap.

This thing continues, till one day he comes into the studio with his wife, and tries to see how many children can be photographed on one negative by holding one on each knee and using the older ones as a back-ground.

The last stage in his eventful career, the old gentleman allows himself to be photographed, because he is afraid he may not live through another long, hard winter, and the boys would like a picture of him while he is able to climb the dark, narrow stairs which lead to the artist's room.

Sadly the thought comes back to you in after years, when his grave is green in the quiet valley, and the worn and weary hands that have toiled for you are forever at rest, how patiently he submitted while his daughter pinned the clean, stiff, agonizing white collar about his neck, and brushed the velvet collar of his best coat; how he toiled up the long, dark, lonesome stairs, not with the egotism of a half century ago, but with the light of antic.i.p.ated rest at last in his eyes-obediently, as he would have gone to the dingy law office to have his will drawn-and meekly left the outlines of his kind old face for those he loved and for whom he had so long labored.

It is a picture at which the thoughtless may smile, but it is full of pathos, and eloquent for those who knew him best. His att.i.tude is stiff and his coat hunches up in the back, but his kind old heart a.s.serts itself through the gentle eyes, and when he has gone away at last we do not criticise the picture any more, but beyond the old coat that hunches up in the back, and that lasted him so long, we read the history of a n.o.ble life.

Silently the old finger-marked alb.u.m, lying so unostentatiously on the gouty centre table, points out the mile-stones from infancy to age, and back of the mistakes of a struggling photographer is portrayed the laughter and the tears, the joy and the grief, the dimples and the gray hairs of one man's life-tine.

Rosalinde.

In answer to a former article relative to the dearth of woman here, we are now receiving two to five letters per day from all cla.s.ses and styles of young, middle-aged and old women who desire to come to Wyoming.

Some of them would like to come here to work and obtain an honest livelihood, and some of them desire to come here and marry cattle kings.

A recent letter from Michigan, written in lead pencil, and evidently during hours when the writer should have been learning her geography lesson, is very enthusiastic over the prospect of coming out here where one girl can have a lover for every day in the week. She signs herself Rosalinde, with a small r, and adds in a postscript that she "means business."

Yes, Rosalinde, that's what we are afraid of. We had a kind of a vague fear that you meant business, so we did not reply to your letter. Wyoming already has women enough who write with a lead pencil. We are also pretty well provided with poor spellers, and we do not desire to ransack Michigan for affectionate but sap-headed girls.

Stay in Michigan, Rosalinde, until we write to you, and one of these days when you have been a mother eight or nine times, and as you stand in the golden haze in the back yard, hanging out damp shirts on an uncertain line, while your ripe and dewy mouth is stretched around a ba.s.s-wood clothes pin, you will thank us for this advice.

Michigan is the place for you. It is the home of the Sweet Singer and the abiding place of the Detroit Free Press. We can't throw any such influences around you here as those you have at your own door.

Do not despair, Rosalinde. Some day a man, with a great, warm, manly heart and a pair of red steers, will see you and love you, and he will take you in his strong arms and protect you from the Michigan climate, just as devotedly as any of our people here can. We do not wish to be misunderstood in this matter. It is not as a lover that we have said so much on the girl question, but in the domestic aid department, and when we get a long letter from a young girl who eats slate pencils and reads Ouida behind her atlas, we feel like going over there to Michigan with a trunk strap and doing a little missionary work.

The Church Debt.

I have been thinking the matter over seriously and I have decided that if I had my life to live over again, I would like to be an eccentric millionaire.

I have eccentricity enough, but I cannot successfully push it without more means.

I have a great many plans which I would like to carry out, in case I could unite the two necessary elements for the production of the successful eccentric millionaire.

Among other things, I would be willing to bind myself and give proper security to any one who would put in money to offset my eccentricity, that I would ultimately die. We all know how seldom the eccentric millionaire now dies. I would be willing to inaugurate a reform in that direction.

I think now that I would endow a home for men whose wives are no longer able to support them. In many cases the wife who was at first able to support her husband comfortably, finally shoulders a church debt, and in trying to lift that she overworks and impairs her health so that she becomes an invalid, while hor husband is left to pine away in solitude or dependent on the cold charities of the world.

My heart goes out toward those men even now, and in case I should fill the grave of the eccentric millionaire, I am sure that I would do the square thing by them.

The method by which our wives in America are knocking the church debt silly, by working up their husbands' groceries into "angel food" and selling them below actual cost, is deserving of the attention of our national financiers.

The church debt itself is deserving of notice in this country. It certainly thrives better under a republican form of government than any other feature of our boasted civilization. Western towns spring up everywhere, and the first anxiety is to name the place, the second to incur a church debt and establish a roller rink.

After that a general activity in trade is a.s.sured. Of course the general hostility of church and rink will prevent ennui and listlessness, and the church debt will encourage a business boom. Naturally the church debt cannot be paid without what is generally known through the West as the "festival and hooraw." This festival is an open market where the ladies trade the groceries of their husbands to other ladies' husbands, and everybody has a "perfectly lovely time." The church clears $2.30, and thirteen ladies are sick all the next day.

This makes a boom for the physicians and later on for the undertaker and general tombist. So it will be seen that the Western town is right in establishing a church debt as soon as the survey is made and the town properly named. After the first church debt has been properly started, others will rapidly follow, so that no anxiety need be felt if the church will come forward the first year and buy more than it can pay for.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PUGILISM IN RELIGION.]

The church debt is a comparatively modern appliance, and yet it has been productive of many peculiar features. For instance, we call to mind the clergyman who makes a specialty of going from place to place as a successful debt demolisher. He is a part of the general system, just as much as the ice cream freezer or the b.u.t.tonhole bouquet.

Then there is a row or social knock-down-and-drag-out which goes along with the church debt. All these things add to the general interest, and to acquire interest in one way or another is the mission of the c.d.

I once knew a most exemplary woman who became greatly interested in the wiping out of a church debt, and who did finally succeed in wiping out the debt, but in its last expiring death struggle it gave her a wipe from which she never recovered. She had succeeded in begging the milk and the cream, and the eggs and the sandwiches, and the use of the dishes and the sugar, and the loan of an oyster, and the use of a freezer and fifty b.u.t.ton-hole bouquets to be sold to men who were not in the habit of wearing bouquets, but she could not borrow a circular artist to revolve the crank of the freezer, so she agitated it herself. Her husband had to go away prior to the festivities, but he ordered her not to crank the freezer. He had very little influence with her, however, and so to-day he is a widower. The church debt was revived in the following year, and now there isn't a more thriving church debt anywhere in the country. Only last week that church traded off $75 worth of groceries, in the form of asbestos cake and celluloid angel food, in such a way that if the original cost of the groceries and the work were not considered, the clear profit was $13, after the hall rent was paid. And why should the first cost of the groceries be reckoned, when we stop to think that they were involuntarily furnished by the depraved husband and father.

I must add, also, that in the above estimate doctors' bills and funeral expenses are not reckoned.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

A Collection of Keys.

I'm getting to be quite a connoisseur of hotel keys as I get older. For ten years I have been collecting these mementoes of travel and cording them away in my key cabinet. Some have square bra.s.s tags attached to them, others have round ones. Still others affect the octagonal, the fluted, the hexagonal, the scalloped, the plain, the polished, the docorated, the chaste, the Etruscan, the metropolitan, the rural, the cosmopolitan, the shirred, the tucked, the biased, the high neck and long sleeve or the decolette style of bra.s.s check.

I have, so far, paid my bills, but I have not returned the keys to my room. Hotel proprietors will please take notice and govern themselves accordingly. When my visit to a pleasant city has become a beautiful memory only, I all at once sit down on something hard and find that it is the key to my former room at the hotel. Sitting down on a key tag of corrugated bra.s.s, as big as a buckwheat pancake, would remind most anyone of something or other.

I generally leave my tooth-brush in my room and carry off the key as a kind of involuntary swap, so far as the hotel proprietor is concerned, but I do not think it is a mutual benefit, particularly. I cannot use the key to a hotel 500 miles away, and so far as a tooth-brush is concerned, it generally has pleasant a.s.sociations only for the owner. A man is fond of his own toothbrush, but it takes years for him to love the tooth-brush of a stranger.

There are a good many a.s.sociations attached to these keys, like the tags. They point backward to the rooms to which the keys belong. Here is a fat one that led to room number 33-1/2 in the Synagogue hotel. It was a cheerful room, where the bell boy said an old man had asphyxiated himself with gas the previous week. I had never met the old man before, but that night, about 1 o'clock A.M., I had the pleasure of his acquaintance. He came in a sad and reproachful way, and showed me how the post-mortem people had disfigured him. Of course it was a little tough to be mutilated by an inquest, but that's no reason why he should come back there and occupy a room that I was paying for so that I could be alone. He showed me how he blew out the gas, and told me how a man could successfully blow down the muzzle of a shot-gun or a gas jet, but both of these weapons had a way of blowing back.

I have a key that brings back to me the memory of a room that I lived in two days at one time. I do not mean that I lived the two days at once, but that at one period I occupied that room, partially, for two days and two nights, I say I partially occupied it, because I used to occupy it days and share it nights with others; that is, I tried to occupy it nights. I tried to get the clerk to throw off something because I didn't have the exclusive use of the room. He wouldn't throw off anything. He even wanted to fight me because I said that the room was occupied before I got it and after I left it. Finally, I told him that if he would throw a bed quilt over his diamond, so I could see him, I would fight him with buckwheat cakes at five-hundred miles. I took my position the next morning at the place appointed, but he did not appear.

Extracts from a Queen's Diary.

January 1.-I awoke late this forenoon with a pain through the head and a taste of ennui in the mouth, which I can hardly account for. Can it be a result of the party last evening? I ween it may be so. We had a lovely card party last evening. It was very enjoyable, indeed. Whist was the game.

January 3.-Yesterday all day I was unable to leave my room, owing to a headache and nervous prostration, caused by late hours and too much company, the doctor said. It is too bad, and yet I do so much enjoy our card parties and the excitement of the game. To-night I am to take part in a little quiet game of draw poker, I think they call it. I have not had any experience heretofore in the game, but trust I shall soon learn it. There has been some talk about 1 ante and 5 limit. I do not exactly understand the terms. I hope it does not mean anything wrong.

January 4.-Poker is an odd game, indeed. I think it quite exciting, though at first the odd terms rather confused me. I had not been accustomed to such phrases as "show down," "bob-tail flush," and "King full." I must ask Brown, as soon as his knees are able to be out, to explain the meaning of these terms a little more fully to me. If poor Brown's knees are not better soon, I shall be on kneesy about him. [Here the diary has the appearance of being blurred with tears.] A bob-tail flush, I learn, is something very disagreeable to have. One gentleman said last evening that another bob-tail flush would certainly paralyze him. I gather from that that it is something like a hectic flush. I can understand the game called "old sledge," and have become quite familiar with such terms as "beg," "gimmeone," "I've got the thin one," "how high is that?" "one horse on me," "saw-off," etc., etc., but poker is full of surprises. It seems so odd to see a gentleman "show out on a pair of deuces" and gather in upward of two pounds with great merriment, while the remainder of the party seem quite bored. One gentleman last evening showed out on a full hand with "treys at the head," putting 3 12s. in his purse with great glee, while another one of the party who had not shown up, but I am positive had a better hand, became so angered that he got up and kicked four front teeth out of the mouth of a favorite dog worth 20. I took part in a spade flush during the evening and was quite successful, so that I can easily pay my traveling expenses and have a few shillings to buy ointment for poor Brown. It was my first winning, and made me quiver all over with excitement. The game is already very fascinating to me, and I am becoming pa.s.sionately fond of it.

January 6.-I have just learned fully what a bob-tail flush is. It cost me 50. I like information, but I do not like to buy it when it comes so high. I drew two to fill in a heart flush last evening, and advanced the money to back up my judgment; but one of the hearts I drew was a club, which was entirely useless to me. I have sent out a sheriff with a bulldog to ascertain if he can find the whereabouts of the party who started this poker game, I do not know when I have felt so bored. After that I was so timid that I allowed a friend to walk off with 2 on a pair of deuces. I said to him that I called that a deuced bore, and he laughed heartily.

I find that you should not be too ready to show by your countenance whether you are bored or pleased in poker. Tour opponent will take advantage of it and play accordingly. It cost me 8 10s. to acquire a knowledge of this fact. If all the information I ever got had cost me as much as this poker wisdom, I would not now have two pennies to jingle together in my purse. Still, we have had a good time, take it all in all, and I shall not soon forget the evenings we have spent here together buying knowledge regardless of cost. I think I shall try to control my wild thirst for information awhile, however, till I can get some more funds.