Library of Congress Subject Headings

Languages Used:

• English
• French

LC Subject Headings:

• North Carolina -- Humor.
  
• Avery, Isaac Erwin, 1871-1904.
  
• City and town life -- North Carolina -- Charlotte -- Anecdotes.
  
• Charlotte (N.C.) -- Anecdotes.
  
• Charlotte (N.C.) -- Social life and customs -- Anecdotes.
  
• Manners and customs.
  
• American wit and humor -- North Carolina -- Charlotte.
  

Revision History:

• 2002-08-30,
  Celine Noel and Wanda Gunther
  revised TEIHeader and created catalog record for the electronic edition.
  
  
• 2002-01-18,
  Natalia Smith, project manager,
  finished TEI-conformant encoding and final proofing.
  
  
• 2001-12-18,
  Andrew Leiter
  finished TEI/SGML encoding
  
  
• 2001-11-20,
  Apex Data Services, Inc.
  finished transcribing the text.
  
  

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IDLE COMMENTS

IDLE
COMMENTS

BY

ISAAC ERWIN AVERY
Late City Editor of the Charlotte Observer

CHARLOTTE, N. C.
THE AVERY PUBLISHING COMPANY
1905

Copyright, 1905
By GEORGE STEPHENS
Publishers' Printing Company
New York

PREFACE

        IMMEDIATELY after Mr. Avery's untimely and tragic death, there was a demand throughout the State that there should be published a memorial volume consisting of selections from his writings. Mr. D. A. Tompkins, Mr. George Stephens, W. H. Twitty and Mr. Chase Brenizer, all of Charlotte, appreciating the importance of the suggestion, assumed the financial responsibility of such a volume. In addition, they conceived the idea that, by the sale of the book, memorial scholarships might be established at Trinity College, Mr. Avery's alma mater. They asked the undersigned board of editors to prepare the volume.

        The editors now present what is, in their judgment, the best work of this gifted man. We have endeavored to make the selections of such a varied interest as to show at once the versatility of his mind and to appeal to all classes of readers. There has been no revision of his work--with a very few unimportant changes the selections are just as he wrote them. There is no better evidence of his genius than the fact that writing, done at times with such great haste and with the pressure of night work upon him, should be so strikingly free from infelicities of diction.

        It is the opinion of the editors that the present volume is evidence at once of Mr. Avery's literary ability,

and a record of life in North Carolina such as has not been published in the State. We believe, too, that he treated local affairs and local characters with such an unerring knowledge of human nature that his writings will appeal to men of other sections. We bespeak for the volume of a hearty reception by those who knew him in the flesh and felt the charm of his personality; by those who never saw him, but followed his words as eagerly as those of an intimate friend and a genial philosopher; by those who, not having known him before may find here the revelation of a very rare spirit.

EDWIN MIMS,

J. P. CALDWELL,

C. ALPHONSO SMITH,

PLATO DURHAM,

J. W. BAILEY.

ISAAC ERWIN AVERY

        ISAAC ERWIN AVERY was born at the ancestral home of the Averys, at Swan Ponds, about four miles from Morganton, in Burke county, N. C., on the first day of December, 1871, and died at Charlotte, on the second day of April, 1904. He was the second son of Hon. Alphonso C. Avery and Susan Morrison Avery, and was descended from families whose members were prominent in the country's history. His parents moved to Morganton when he was very young, and there his boyhood days were spent, attending the primary schools. He was prepared for college at the Academy of Morganton by Rev. John A. Gilmer, now the Presbyterian minister at Newton, N. C., and might have entered college at the age of sixteen, but remained at home for a while, devoting most of his time to reading. His fondness for reading developed when a mere boy, as did his propensity for writing humorous letters and compositions. He spent some months in the service of the Western North Carolina Railroad Company, at Morganton and Hot Springs. For six months or more prior to entering college he served as collector for the Bank of Morganton. He entered the sophomore class of Trinity College (then located in Randolph county, and later moved to Durham) in 1890, and his course

there was marked by a special fondness for history and literature. He was an excellent football player, and was universally esteemed by faculty and students. During his senior year he read law under his father, the dean of the law department of Trinity, and when licensed, in September, 1893, was, to say the least, as well prepared as any candidate in the large class which went before the Supreme Court.

        While he was regarded by all who came in contact with him as possessing a mind especially fitted for the law, his tastes and talents were constantly driving him toward newspaper and more general literary work. He had made good progress along this line before leaving college, as editor of The Trinity Archive and as correspondent for different papers in the State. His first contribution which earned him money was a paragraph of about thirty lines sent to Town Topics, without hope of reward, during the Christmas vacation of 1892. For this he received ten dollars. This incident led to dreams of making reputation and support some day as a writer.

        Soon after receiving his license to practice law, Mr. Avery returned to Morganton and was employed by Mr. W. C. Erwin as associate editor of The Morganton Herald. Here he exercised a free hand in writing for the paper, and attracted considerable outside attention by his original methods and the excellent humor in many of his articles. Upon the invitation of Mr. Thomas P. Jernigan, then a citizen of Raleigh, who had been appointed by President Cleveland consul-general at Shanghai, Mr. Avery left for China in

March, 1894, as secretary to the consul-general. In less than a year he was appointed vice consul-general at Shanghai, which office he filled until the spring of 1898, when a new consul-general was named by President McKinley. In China Mr. Avery did some writing for American newspapers, but decided not to continue the work, owing to his connection with the consular service. He was, however, during a large part of his stay in Shanghai a regular contributor to The North China Daily News, the leading English paper in the Orient. While residing in Shanghai, Mr. Avery was prominent in the leading social circle among the foreign residents and absorbed a rich fund of information which stood him in good stead later, and made him a most interesting talker not only about things in the Far East, but in the world at large.

        When he returned to North Carolina, he took up active newspaper work after a few months, reporting the proceedings of the State Senate in the Legislature of 1899 for a number of newspapers represented by Col. Fred A. Olds, of Raleigh. He also had charge of Colonel Old's news bureau for a month or more while he was on a trip to Cuba. About May 1, 1899, he went to Greensboro, where he established a news bureau, representing a number of leading papers in North Carolina and elsewhere. As a result of his activity as a reporter, Greensboro became especially prominent as a news-dispensing centre, and Mr. Avery's reputation as a writer began to expand. On January 1, 1900, he became city editor of the Charlotte Observer, which position he filled until his death. It was

while here that his unusual literary gifts to some extent gained the recognition which they really deserved.

        Personally he was the most engaging of men. Handsome as Apollo, with a countenance clear-cut and proclaiming in every line his gentle birth; tall, massive of frame, he combined with these physical attributes a manner as genial as the sunshine. His cultivation was that of the schools, that acquired by the reading of the best literature and of close association with, and acute observation of, the great world of men. His gifts of conversation were equal to those with which he had been endowed for his profession, and thus he was with these, and his commanding presence, the centre of every group in which he found himself. His popularity was unbounded. In his great heart was charity for all mankind, and it was ever open to the cry of distress. None who knew him or followed him in his work will ever forget him or cease to mourn that his life, so rich in promise, should have been cut off before its sun had nearly reached meridian.

        During his four years' sojourn in Charlotte Mr. Avery became thoroughly identified with the best phases of the city's life, and was a recognized leader in almost every movement that promised benefit to the people. While he was a leader in the best social life of the city, he was popular with all classes. He was especially sought after by those in trouble, whether friends or strangers, and though his time was generally taken up to a large extent with his newspaper work and calls made upon him by society, he always took that necessary to offer counsel to those who called on him.

Though exceedingly patient and genuinely anxious to aid all who appealed to him, he would, on rare occasions, remark with a sigh that he wished he did not know of so much unhappiness--had not been made to put himself in the places of so many people in distress. But this feeling was only momentary, for he would immediately turn his thoughts to other things and become again the possessor of that sunny disposition which was one of his most charming characteristics.

        While Mr. Avery was designated as "city editor" of the Charlotte Observer, he was in reality much more, for he was given freedom to criticise or commend the public acts of men which came under his observation, and while he never failed to write what he thought, he did it in a way that made him few enemies, even among those whose actions suffered most at his hand. While he was most widely known because of his manner of handling stories of human interest, either pathetic or humorous, as a miscellaneous news-gatherer he was eminently successful, thus combining gifts rarely developed in the same nature. So famous did his writing become that it was not unusual for papers published hundreds of miles from Charlotte to reprint his reports of events which, written in the ordinary manner, would interest none save those residing in the immediate vicinity in which the incidents detailed occurred. Another rather unusual combination noticeable in his newspaper work was his ability to write pathetic as well as humorous articles. He could do either with equal readiness, yet his natural propensity was toward that of humor--the clean, sweet and yet sharp and

sparkling kind that would cause a laugh, and do more. In his general newspaper work, where he was confined to no special class of events, but had the entire field at his disposal, he seemed never at a loss as to how a story should be written, and he made remarkably few mistakes. This statement is, of course, intended to convey the idea that Mr. Avery was a student of human nature. In fact, he seemed to know men at first sight, and his ability to pick out a fraudulent scheme when first unfolded to him--no matter how well clothed--was noticeable on many occasions, and the value of this clear-sightedness in his work as city editor was incalculable.

        Mr. Avery could not only gather the news which was on the surface, so to speak, and put it in the proper shape to go before an intelligent public, but he could readily induce people to give out particulars that are legitimate matters of publicity, but which are often withheld by those who possess the information desired. Therefore, he was preëminently known among his newspaper associates as the best of interviewers. Whenever an occurrence of special importance came to light, no matter where, the first thought in the Observer office was that Avery should be on the ground, and whenever it was possible to do so, he was sent at once to the scene. Who can ever forget his stories of the mill disaster in South Carolina? or his account of the Greensboro reunion? His paper received numerous requests to have him assigned to out-of-town meetings and other events which it was desired should be handled in a masterly manner.

        In exercising the prerogatives of his position, it often fell to his lot to pass unfavorable criticism upon men or systems. He did this in such manner as he thought appropriate, and now and then a controversy would develop, but he invariably contented himself with merely stating his position clearly, being satisfied to let the public draw its own conclusions. On a few occasions his humorous references to people brought them to see him, to protest that they should not have been referred to in the manner which he had seen fit to employ. Here, too, he was especially gifted, for without any semblance of a compromise, he would make peace in a way that would sometimes provoke envy in his newspaper associates, and in rare instances disappoint them when they thought he might have to essay the role to which by nature he seemed especially fitted in a physical sense, owing to the bellicose vein into which the aggrieved party had brought himself on reading Mr. Avery's description of him.

        More significant than his work as a reporter or an interviewer or an editorial writer was his "A Variety of Idle Comment,"--a department of the Observer which appeared on Monday mornings--and upon this department his fame largely rests. A man of the world, of contact with all sorts and conditions of humanity, he had closely studied his fellows and looked "quite through the deeds of men." A commentator upon their virtues and vices, their merits and weaknesses, he brought to every discussion the subtlest analysis, and with perfect, sometimes startling, fidelity, "held the mirror up to nature." His pen was adapted with utmost

facility to every subject he touched, and he touched none but to adorn or illumine it. Amiable, sweet of spirit, he yet might feel that a person, a custom or an institution called for invective or ridicule, and he was a torrent. Anon a child, a flower, a friendless one appealed to him, and his pen caressed them, as his heart was attuned to the music of the spheres. His humor was exquisite; his pathos tear-compelling. He was the master of a rich vocabulary--the master; that is the word. It responded immediately to every demand upon it, and thus he attempted no figure that was not complete; he drew no picture that did not stand out on the canvas in colors of living light. The writer professes some familiarity with the contemporaneous newspaper writers of the South, and is sure that he indulges no exuberance of langage, that personal affection warps his judgment not at all, when he says that for original thought, for power or felicity of expression, Isaac Erwin Avery had not an equal among them.

CONTENTS.

• CHAPTER
  I. IN AND ABOUT A NEWSPAPER OFFICE . . . . . 1
• II. CHARLOTTE AND HER NEIGHBORS . . . . . 20
• III. CHARACTER SKETCHES . . . . . 46
• IV. NEGRO TYPES . . . . . 73
• V. WOMAN AND HER WORLD . . . . . 86
• VI. CHILDREN . . . . . 115
• VII. ANIMALS . . . . . 129
• VIII. CHRISTMAS . . . . . 143
• IX. SOUTHERN LIFE AND MANNERS . . . . . 153
• X. ANECDOTES . . . . . 168
• XI. OBSERVAVIONS ON LITERATURE . . . . . 181
• XII. IDEALS OF WRITING AND SPEAKING . . . . . 194
• XIII. MUSIC AND DRAMA . . . . . 211
• XIV. REFLECTIONS ON LIFE AND DEATH . . . . . 227
• XV. MISCELLANY . . . . . 252

        THE violets again--little wet violets, and there is the clean, sweet breath of spring. One would lift his head and drink deep--taste this newness, this grateful freshness that is about. There is a quicker leap of life, and Nature seems to stir with a kind of tenderness. There is deeper glow on the faces of children--easier happiness on a tiny, nestling face. . . . Girlhood comes to outward whiteness again--the cool, crisp sign of spring. And in all is the subtle charm of violets--little human, tremulous things, gentle as love's whisper, pure as purity. Restful, quaint little flower, too--simple, appealing. . . . Flower to lay on a baby that has died--to give as seemly tribute to womanhood--to press against the face as easement for tired heart. . . . Such a dear, peaceful little flower, all alone in flower-land--emblems of the world's simplest and best, and waiting to mock a false face or adorn the beauty that comes from the soul.

IDLE COMMENTS

CHAPTER I
IN AND ABOUT A NEWSPAPER OFFICE

        How the News Was Sent

        THE public is probably now able to understand the strain that has been upon newspapers in recent days. The burden of a great crisis has rested severely upon the daily press. Its members, part of the machine, have had personal feeling, also, but everything with them had to be subordinated to the ever-pressing task of conveying correct intelligence to the world.

        Blessed with favorable service, The Observer was one of the only two papers in the State that sent out from their own towns early yesterday morning the news of the President's death. The statement is made not boastfully; for the mere purpose of this writing is to explain what the fateful news meant to a morning paper in Charlotte, far removed from the more densely populated centres.

        The sending of the news and the manner of the sending

was not a little thing, and there is pardonable pride in this saying. Early in the night the despatches had showed that the end was to be expected at any time, and in preparation for the sad certainty, all matter outside of press service was ordered to be rushed, and was rushed.

        There was but little talk in the print shop. Every man waited--and waited.

        At 2 o'clock the forms from which the paper is printed were scattered lead and iron. A fateful wire was to decide the exact mode of their arrangement and until it came there could be but indecision. And the time for carrying those forms to the press room, in some shape, was drawing nigh.

        At 2:17 o'clock the paper's Associated Press operator received the wire announcing the death of the President.*

        * President McKinley

        The mailing clerk had received orders that would require The Observer to issue the largest edition ever sent out. The staff and the mechanical force knew that the paper, to make the mails, must go to press an hour earlier than usual, and this demanded all that mind and quickness could do.

        System won out. Every man kept down nerves and worked for what he knew he must do and do quickly. The minutes passed--and the press downstairs waited.

        And the paper won out. In just exactly an hour after the telegram was received the forms were in the press. No mail was missed, and, at every point that The Observer

reached, its distribution was unprecedented in its history.

        The Night Gang

        To-day Mr. Howard A. Banks will cease to be managing editor of The Observer and will become editor of The Evening Chronicle. For eleven years he has done most of his work at night and his best work after midnight; but now he is privileged to eat breakfast and labor with a work-a-day world. He will join the throng that becomes drowsy at noon and shakes its head when it looks at the toilers of the night. Mr. Banks is to be a white man indeed, and he welcomes the change--doubtfully. He must learn to become a-weary at an hour that seems too soon--must learn to sleep too quickly. He must overcome the habits of the long years. He will do this, for man is an adaptable animal and yields easily to change. But, mayhap, he will not live so long that he can forget the charm that was while a world slumbered. He has been part of a coatless crowd that loitered on the deserted streets and feasted and lied cheerily every morning just before daylight. 'Twas such a little crowd. Month after month and year after year there were the same men who touched elbows, felt a common excitement, got closer together--found intense existence in the great stillness. Aye, Banks will be a white man, but he will not forget. Night work eats into the brain and body. 'Tis fascinating. There is charm in the late, quiet hours, in the view of a resting city, in the fine, loud silence of the night. Peace broods, and here is a time for thought. Night! Ah, night breaks too often into day. It is the blessed boon that comes after the

fretfulness and bother that one sees under sunlight. It is too precious for sleep; and it is sweetest and purest after midnight. But Banks will try to forget this. He has broken the ranks and shed his raiment of Bohemianism. He, as good a comrade as ever watched the sun rise, may learn to pity the children of the night, though he knows they wish for no pity. He is the first deserter--the first to become civilized, and his going seems almost as if someone or something had died. There is no one who has a readier sympathy than Banks--no one who has such a profound appreciation of pie at 4 o'clock in the morning.

        The Red-headed Foreman

        It is strange to note the contrasting elements in one mere man. Look at Dick Allen, the red-headed foreman up stairs. Whenever he wants to give himself a treat he sends over to the restaurant and buys a pickled pig's foot and a cream puff. He must always have the two things together and at once. They appeal to both sides of his nature. The pig's foot soothes the part of him that chews tobacco and swears at the devil; while his love for cream puffs is akin to the thing in him that sets him to roaming, as a disciple of Izaak Walton, by the side of little rivers. The foreman is a contradiction and knows it. He is the sort of a man who likes both garlic and silk suspenders. Mr. Howard A. Banks, of the paper, has a fashion of throwing open his window at eventide in order that he may be fully bathed in the glories of the dying sun. "And I want to say, Mr. Banks," said the foreman, "that since you have been looking so much at these sunsets I am working me up a

taste for the things myself." That was a cream puff mood--the foreman at his highest sentimental ebb; and yet even then he would have been far more appreciative of the sunset if he had held a stout pig's foot in his right hand. Such is the composition of Dick Allen, foreman.

        The Newsboy

        In the biographies of some of the modern big men the statement is frequently made that "he began life as a newsboy," the suggestion being that the man not only commenced at the bottom rung of the ladder, but that he surprised everybody by his rise from such an humble calling. The truth is that the lad who sticks to the work of carrying papers for a morning newspaper shows grit enough to accomplish anything. Every morning the carriers troop in here about 4 o'clock with sleep still heavy in their eyes. Summer and winter it is the same; they never fail; and yet they are little bits of chaps between 10 and 14 years of age. It is no small thing, and it is more than a man's work, to leave a comfortable bed before daybreak and go out into the darkness, and toil. The newsboy is a most reliable employee, and the thing in him that keeps him at his arduous task generally makes him a successful man in the long run. The young men in Charlotte and elsewhere who have been newsboys have done well in business life. They had pluck to begin with, and their training as paper carriers equipped them with the right sort of stuff for a struggle.

        There is a little bit of a chap who gets up early in the morning and sells this paper, and he is around again in

the afternoon to sell The Chronicle. He is a serious-eyed boy who doesn't seem to enjoy life very much, but he is a hard worker and makes a good deal of money out of the sales of his papers. He is devoted to his mother and wishes to take her every cent he makes, and he does this except when his father gets his money and spends it for drink. He cuffed the child on the streets a few days ago, led him home and emptied his pockets, and forced him to appear here next morning, shamefaced because he couldn't make a settlement for his papers and was too loyal to tell what had happened. This sort of treatment is almost an every-day occurrence, and it might as well be stopped. There is no law to act in the matter, but the next time the father mistreats that child or steals money from him to spend in drink, the writer, who will learn the truth, is going to print the name of the father and indulge in the nauseating task of dissecting him as a species of vampire parent. The father will read this and will understand exactly what is meant. He can very easily go to work and let that boy alone. Otherwise he will be exposed to the public for being the sort of brute that he really is.

        Mr. Frank Johnston, 12 years old, seller of newspapers and denizen of The Observer press room, goes over to the restaurant and quarrels if his poached eggs are not cooked to his notion. He throws down a dollar in payment and carelessly jams the change into his pocket. And the man who watched him found a thing that was wrong. Mr. Johnston has grown old too quickly. He has learned the sweetness of independence, but he is

missing the rarest joy of living. For now there is no one to give Mr. Johnston a quarter, and a quarter would not quicken his pulse one beat if 'twere given him. Despite his tender years, he can never have the most hallowed experience of childhood. To be given a quarter on a Saturday, say! To feel the keen little thrill in the blood; to trot down the walkway--trying not to run--to face the open street and the stores with a whole quarter in one's pocket! Man, do you remember? And have you ever been satisfied with any amount of money that you had except just that childhood's quarter? It meant mental revelry, the great, beautiful gloat--the sureness of purchasing the coveted things in the world. It meant transcendent cause for envy--an admitted superiority over all the other little boys who hadn't quarters. A quarter marked the chiefest epoch in life; it showed you to be a bit of a king with a chattering troop in your train--unquartered subjects who gazed on you admiringly, wistfully. Your small heart well nigh burst with exultation--surging so in its fresh pæan of bliss.

        Ah, you lose, Mr. Johnston. God bless you, Mr. Johnston, you have lost.

        The Devil and the Eel

        Never was such an eel as the devil caught the other night. The red-headed foreman, who is an authority on such matters, said so, and the fat boy who attends to the engine down in the basement swore that he had caught eels from Town Creek to the Catawba and he had never seen such a fine fish. The incident marked an epoch in the life of the devil. His name is Van

something; he is any age under sixteen, and he goes home to his mother at the break of day. He is the only child-thing among a lot of men who feed on nerves after midnight; and his big, pathetic eyes and cheerful face rebuke all impatience or bad language. He has never known anything but a print shop and his mother, and has had no experiences that were treasurable until the foreman took him fishing and he connected with the eel. After the quick, sharp wrestle on the side of Briar Creek the devil laid down his can of worms and his short pole with the twine string attached and plodded back to the office. 'Rastus was his sub for the night, but for three hours the devil and his eel exercised the prerogatives of the managing editor with right of way over Associated Press stuff and murder specials. In all his young life this was the first time that the devil had done anything that attracted attention. He was the central figure in the shop, which congratulated him as heartily as if he had sand-bagged a whale, and he was so thoroughly happy that he almost cried. The eel travelled everywhere in the building--was dragged through the coal dust down stairs, came in cold, clammy touch with editorial copy, and at one time was in imminent danger of being devoured by a linotype machine; but the fish and the devil came off triumphant. They finally went out on the streets to be saluted by the hack drivers and the policemen, who know the devil and his people. And everybody was gracious enough to say that of all the eels that were ever caught in the whole world, nobody had ever caught such a grand specimen as that carried by the devil.

        It was a big, beautiful night for the devil, and he revelled in his fame. At 4 o'clock in the morning he was curled up in a chair in front of the restaurant with the eel stretched across his knees. His hand clutched the stiffened body, and as he dozed he waked now and then to gaze with rapture into dead fish eyes. At the first streak of day the devil trudged home to his mother, with the calm of a great peace surging through his tired, elated body.

        The Reporter's Problem

        The city editor of the New York Sun was once asked to define news. After some thought he said:

        "If a dog with a tin can tied to his tail runs down Broadway the incident is worth only a few lines, but if a dog with a tin can tied to his tail walks down Broadway the thing is worth a column."

        You see the idea. 'Tis the unusual happening that is attractive in the news world; and, certainly, the action of the four young women was unusual enough.

        Beg pardon for talking shop; but did you ever think about the disadvantages of trying to write interesting stuff in a place like this? Oh, Charlotte is a good, big town, and the living here is probably more interesting than in any other place in the South of the same size, but there is very little that transpires here day after day that is important enough to demand scare head lines. For days the bottom drops out of everything. Bill Jones goes to Greensboro on a business trip. Dr. Stagg returns to Birmingham. The recorder catches a crapshooter. The gentleman who had his appendix removed

is improving gradually. Crops are worse than ever. Somebody buys a gold mine. Delicious refreshments were served at another party. More about the union depot. You know how it runs, don't you? It's orful. There are no assignments as there are in the big cities. Nobody considerately murders anybody else, and people simply won't embezzle or elope often enough. Yet, in the face of all this, the reporter has got to stump around and rack his brain in kicking up something that will interest somebody.

        The test is keener and meaner than in the big cities. Leg work allows a man to exhaust the news field without overmuch difficulty, and then he has to see in happenings things that other people don't see and build stories out of nothing, or with bare ideas as skeletons.

        A cub reporter here is far more interesting than a young hyena. He gets a fresh pad, makes spencerian notes, and after carefully sharpening his pencils he extends welcome to every person who comes to town and sheds a tear over all who depart. He spends an hour in relating that somebody who died has passed away with the tide and was a consistent member of the church and the most beloved man that ever was. Then, the cub reporter, conscious of having done his duty, waits for assignments. Assignments! The only regular kind of assignment that can be given a reporter in a place of this size is to say: "There are 30,000 people here. All of them can talk and some of them think.

Mix with them, think on your own account, and keep your eyes very, very wide open." That's the feature of the game here. The system is relentlessly simple. The cub reporter can learn to see or he can't learn to see. He is absorptive or unreceptive; he brings every scattered word or idea into account, or he gets no impression from the life about him. He can fasten on the quality of interest and he can put it on paper, or he can't. By an indefinable standard he defines his own worth, and he will rise or drop out of the game altogether.

        Take the four women, for instance. They could not fail to be a downright blessing to a newspaper in a town that is so limited in newspaper opportunities as Charlotte. They were respectable women and pretty, and the minute they passed those men in front of the Central Hotel and said "Good evening!" they were worth a column. They could not have done anything that made them worth less than a scare head and a column. They might have been arrested; they might have escaped arrest; they might have gone up in a balloon; or they might have taken the next car for home, but when they electrified a hundred people by speaking to half a dozen they had earned 1,200 words in a newspaper. Two newspaper men saw the women. One reporter was interested personally and waited for some out-and-out notorious sensation. He was disappointed in this, and when asked for his story about the occurrence replied: "It was nothing. Nothing happened. I couldn't get their names, and they got home all right." He is a

good enough man, but his eyes failed to see. The other man, who is using the story for illustration and viewed the whole incident merely as one element in the matter of wage-earning, dropped everything when he saw the women, and from that time until he sharpened his pencil at his desk he formed paragraphs in his head. There was nothing else to do. If the dog walks, walks, mind you, he is worth anything.... The unusual thing had occurred. If Col. Willie Phifer would quit going to Stout-on-the-Seaboard, he would be worth half a column a day. If Osmond Barringer would act like other people, he would be a better space-killer than the cotton market. If Col. Walter Henry wore a shirt-waist instead of his long frock coat, which he is supposed to sleep in, he'd be worth a page.

        And, it is repeated, the cub reporter will see or he won't see. Happenings--you can't depend upon happenings. In the long, wearisome run everything depends just upon the seeing, the understanding and the telling. Red Buck's brother Bob was up in Huntersville a few years ago and he was moved to emulate Red Buck and write a piece for the paper. He saw two snakes fight, and one of the belligerents, a king snake, throttled the other snake. Quoth Bob in a cramped, boyish hand: "That king snake certainly done his duty." The communication called for an editorial and a statement from the Old Man that Bob could go on the free list for five years if he wanted to. Bob had blundered on something unique, and, no matter if he had blundered, he deserved his reward. Red Buck

himself has won success in the reportorial world because his restless eyes are always open to see and he analyzes closely the utterance of every man.

        Unprintable Happenings

        The impulse to write things that should not be written is one of the most fearsome problems in the newspaper business. Murders, hangings, hotel building, tea parties, fights, industrial deals--these and a lot of other matters that are told in the open are chronicled as a matter of course, but the newspaper man pauses, trembling, before the things that happen and yet are discussed in a whisper.

        These are the subjects that you lower your voice to speak of, and you know that if what you were saying were overheard by a certain person you might get your head cracked. Not that you are alone in your knowledge--oh, no. You are quite sure that a lot of men and half the women in town are telling the rest of the population the same sensational story that is related in your undertone.

        Talk of this kind might make a lurid, scare-head story, but, usually, it cannot be touched even with a single guarded sentence. Here enters the possible temptation of the newspaper man. The writer has heard in the club or hotels or elsewhere talk on matters that made his hair bristle with excitement, and then he has had to come here and write that the chamber of commerce had postponed its meeting to some other night or that Col. Willie Phifer had spent yesterday at Stout-on-the-Seaboard. He didn't crave to publish scandal or risque gossip, but he knew a thing or two

that would interest everybody, and he had to tell a tale that might interest nobody.

        The unprintable happenings would be read by the world, no matter if the world's eyes protruded in horror, and nobody knows this any better than a newspaper man. Sometimes the danger line between the questionable and the unquestionable is not clearly defined, and in the hurry of a print shop there must occasionally come an inclination to err in favor of sensation. The writer is positive that he could get out one issue of this paper that would be read and re-read by everybody in the country, but he would never assist in getting out another issue. He'd be killed by a dozen or so different people, though all that he had written would have been true.

        Of course this would be going the limit, but this side of that there are all sorts of pitfalls and dangers. The public, you know, thinks that a man on a newspaper is valued because he knows what to write, but the truth is, he holds his job because he ordinarily knows what not to write. A paragraph below this would contain a dozen lines, could relate an occurrence and a living truth that would cause 30,000 people to sit right straight up and jabber all at once, but the writer would demand a clean, fair start for the other side of the world before that paragraph was printed.

        Once a paper owned a cub reporter who found nothing in the law building, court house or depots, and then he listened to the uppermost topic of conversation at the square. He came to the shop and wrote what he had heard--a lot of simple facts that would have sold

more papers than the burning of the Central Hotel. The story was killed, but the next article by the reporter, which averred that the price of cotton seed in the local market was rapidly rising, was duly published in the paper. The reporter is no longer here. He didn't know the difference between printable and unprintable stuff, and therefore he was more dangerous than a dynamite bomb.

        Ideas? Imagination? No use! All gone with the heat. A story that seemed clever a while ago proved as intractable as Mr. D. Allen Tedder's comical tale about a sensation at the Young Peoples' Baptist Union meeting. Another lynching, or an elopement, or a sizable fight at the square--any of these would have been such a boon, but there was an absolute lack of enterprise. . . . Did you ever pick up a pen and write half a sentence, and then rest your face on your hand and dream about nothing in the world--or at least nothing that is writable or printable? Well, it's like that here--now. Speaking confidentially, these words are just space-killers. One of two things is sure to happen inside the next two minutes. The writer will either become reckless and write something that he knows he ought not to write and has been crazy to write for two weeks, or else he will avoid temptation by strolling over and asking the Old Man to walk to the restaurant and have a pie.

        "Words, Words, Words"

        A poem in yesterday's Observer dealt critically with a certain class of adjectives that are overworked for social purposes, and was in the nature of a plea for new

descriptive words to take the place of "function," "dainty," "delicious," "delightful," and other pink-tea terms. As a protest against tiresome iteration the poem took safe ground for criticism, but it did not suggest--for it could not suggest--substitutes for the hackneyed words. The burden of the wearisome repetition falls most heavily upon the reporter, and yet a correct use of his own tools leaves him helpless in the rut. There must be a "function" as a synonym for party, entertainment or reception, and all of these must, in one way or another, be dainty, or delightful, or delicious, or charming. There must be "beauty" in a wedding; grace in every bride; the ceremony must be impressive; and the presents must be numerous and handsome. "Pleasure" and "enjoyment" are as inevitable as smilax and candelabra. In the social department of a paper, the worn words must move in a circle, doing service overtime and wherever men and women gather in dress clothes. The terms are fixed as fate, as inexorable as the laws of nature, and they do duty at the banquet of the princess and at the Sunday dinner party of the milkmaid.

        It is not given to the writer of social items to do original or sincere work habitually. Occasionally a spectacular entertainment of the Bradley-Martins in New York or a new-game party in the smaller towns allows latitude and imported platitudes in description, but "en règle" and "fin de siècle" and "recherché" are by-the-way pyrotechnics, and for nearly all time in a big cycle the reporter's pencil is pointed at--just "charming" and "delicious" and "delightful."

        A dead line blocks the way out of the thralldom of words. Through long usage the adjectives must continue in use; and it is a daring spirit who is simple and direct in his phrase. When Mrs. B., a prominent society woman, entertains, it may be presupposed that she gave a course dinner, that everybody had enough to eat, and that pleasure was rampant, yet these things must be said, and in saying them it is not easy to bar words like "charming," "delightful," "dainty." The reporter may seek for other verbiage, he may cudgel his poor brain for tricks of inversion and novel, piquant speech, but in the long run his intellect will be socially swamped and "charming" will again rise up and rest before "function."

        And why not? Why not welcome the old words--dear, social levellers which bless the hospitality of the rich and the poor alike? "The bride, fair to see, wore a diamond sunburst, the gift of the groom. She looked regal, charming, graceful, winsome. . . ." Let them all stand. The only proper way to tell a thing is the simplest way, and yet the world looks leniently upon a speech that must make every "personality" "delightful" and every "function" a "decided social success." And "charming"? Why, "charming" is the best of the lot; it is so easy, so natural, to say "She looked charming as she recited her marriage vows," or "She gave a charming card party," or "We hope that the charming young lady from Concord will visit the city again ere long." Aren't these averments all right? Mr. Mantalini, the most "delicious" of social frauds, always

played a trump card when he called a woman a "demned chawmer."

        There comes to memory the pitiable fate of one reporter who sought to be too simple and original. Describing the costumes that were worn at a big party, he said: "Mrs. A. had on nothing that was remarkable." The printer man found a period too many, and the sentence appeared in the paper: "Mrs. A. had on nothing. That was remarkable."

        The Comment Man

        Certainly hope you won't think anything personal is intended, any way. The writer is tired of being jacked up about abstract pleasantries. Once he ventured to say something in a jesting way about the particular brand of society that likes to nibble oranges on the streets, and the next day he got icy glares from half a dozen people who had really learned to eat ice cream with a fork and olives without a fork several years ago. Words--poor, misused and misunderstood words--are ever falling about and striking in the wrong place, causing hearts to quake or grow hot; and half the universe, thinking on idle speech, curses the other half all the time. Generalities become personalities in a sermon, or on a printed page, or after passing the second mouth on the streets, and you can't be an independent pigmy and slur at mankind without getting the credit of trying to jab the pruning fork into your neighbor around the corner. And, verily, that's what you are trying to do no matter how much you may deny it. No man ever uttered a general criticism without remembering

the color of another man's eyes. All Athenians are liars, say you, and you see only Bill Athenian, who said a malicious thing about you. Life is a poor, weary game and people are tiresome, say you, and through the immovable mist you are gazing upon the faint outline of one woman--and only one woman.

        "Copy all In"

        "No big, pompous tombstones, no high-sounding epitaphs for me," said A. B. Williams, editor of The Richmond News-Leader. "All I want'em to put above my head is:

        "'Copy all in.'"

        To me that expresses everything--the end of the game. You know what it means, of course. At the end of so many weary, weary nights I have scrawled the words as the finale of toil and as the good-by to my men. 'Copy all in'--and sleep! That is all--the last of life, and then--the rest.

CHAPTER II
CHARLOTTE AND HER NEIGHBORS

        A View from the Tower

        The thing to do for the stranger within the gates is to betake him to the tower of the D. A. Tompkins Company building. The citizen of Charlotte who thinks he has kept pace with its growth and knows how big the town is ought to go up there and have his eyes opened. The big, square structure, with observatory platform under its very roof, holds its head above all the steeples and domes in the city. It looks high from the street, but a realization of its loftiness is to be gained only by a trip to its top, and really the ascent to the Tompkins tower is one of the treats of Charlotte.

        The tower is equal in height to a fourteen-story building and the ascent up to within four floors of the top is made by an electric elevator. All visitors desiring to make the ascent are met by a polite official in the store room on the first floor, where they register their names. There an attendant is assigned them, who accompanies them to the elevator and to the top and designates all the interesting objects in the landscape.

        The view from the tower is an extraordinarily fine

one. North, south, east and west, it covers every street and house in Charlotte, and the suburban towns are as plain as pictures on canvas. Out over the town on all sides the range of vision extends for distances, varying according to topography, from twelve to thirty miles. One building near Davidson College is clearly indicated, as are also farmhouses about Sharon church. The view of the mountains is surprisingly fine. Not only are a dozen or more individual peaks clearly outlined, but back of them and towering high, but in a paler blue, is seen the Blue Ridge range. The peaks and the range are visible to the naked eye.

        The best view of the mountains is to be obtained in the forenoon, when the sun shines upon them, but at any hour of the day the view from the Tompkins tower is an interesting one. At first the visitor is struck with the oddity of the roof effect of Charlotte, and next with the intensified volume of the roar of traffic. The bang and rattle of a loaded truck passing in the street below seems tenfold greater at this height than it does on the street level. The clatter of horses' hoofs and the exhaust of steam engines come up with piercing keenness.

        The charm of the view, however, is the picture of moving life, the living current of people and vehicles, the smoke from the factories and the exhaust of the railroad engines on the four sides of the town. The long, curved trestle from Fourth street to Mint street, with the shifting engines going to and fro over it, is strikingly like a section of elevated railroad. In whatever direction one looks, the horizon is blotted with

factory smoke. Closer in on the north, south, east and west the black puffs from railroad engines is pierced by the ascending columns of exhaust steam. A beautiful picture of a busy and thrifty city is framed in the white and black of the steam and smoke of industry.

        This view of Charlotte and surrounding country is entrancing in itself, but if the visitor happens to be in the tower in the late afternoon, there is injected in the landscape to the south something that is worth looking at. It is the coming of the local train from Atlanta. If the afternoon is still, there will be seen on the western horizon, rounding King's Mountain, a puff of black smoke which slowly rises, spreads and hangs in the air. Then another will rise in front of it, and a short distance nearer still another. That is the trail of the incoming train. The black smoke is emitted as the train is coming up the grades, and when it is first seen the cars are perhaps two miles in front of it. The course of the train can be outlined by the overhanging clouds of smoke until suddenly the engine darts into view through the deep cut on the Dowd farm two miles distant. It is down grade there, and the train comes flying into sight with black smoke and white steam streaming back like ribbons over the roofs of the cars. In a few seconds the whole train comes into view as it crosses the big trestle to the west of the city, then it is alternately hidden as it goes through cuts and under the foliage of trees, until three blocks away it is seen creeping into the train yard. For many minutes after it has reached the depot the route of the train is outlined in the western

skies by a lazily rising, sinuous cloud of smoke. The Charlotte citizen who has not been on top of the Tompkins tower does not know Charlotte at all.

        The Earmarks of a City

        The unconscious action of the inhabitants, and not a flattering census or a few more millions in investments, indicates the transformation of a place from a town into a city. By virtue of certain unmistakable tokens Charlotte has passed through the transition stage and has become a sure-enough city. A strange woman wearing a Parisian gown, her body at a forward incline of forty-five degrees, and a poodle in evening dress, may parade the streets without causing a block in traffic or bringing all the shopkeepers to their windows. Recently a revival and a ball were in progress on the same night; and the city officials do not drop their work and follow a brass band. Residents who travel abroad and return are no longer surrounded at the square and eagerly questioned about the private life of the King or the Pope. Each street offers, without undue vanity, tailor-made and hand-embroidered exhibits; and a whole week, instead of a day, may be required to carry a choice bit of scandal into every part of the town. And the preachers no longer attend courts; plenty of people stay away from funerals; you may dodge a creditor for days without remaining in hiding; the country mules do not shy at automobiles or silk hats walking around on week days; every other woman doesn't speak to every other baby that she meets, and no one thinks about fainting when a Charlotte woman goes off to get a Ph.D. vocal degree and comes home

singing in a high Dutch or broken Eye-talian. In fine, Charlotte has all the ear-marks of a city.

        Excursionists

        The excursionists had possession of the town last week and, apparently, were the happiest people in the place. Most of them came from the thinly settled wayback districts, and when they landed here they found novelty and pleasure in each step of investigation. They fixed a new valuation on the street cars and on the smooth excellence of the macadamized roads; they inspected the old Spanish cannon in front of the post office with greedy curiosity; in pleased way they clustered around the iron slab at Independence Square; they read, with eager interest, the names on the monument in front of the court house; they gazed with awe upon the ponderous proportions of Col. Tom Black, of the police force; they became satiated epicures at the soda fountains; and they returned home tired but filled with content.

        One was allowed to see the perfect excursion, which can never leave a city or carry city folks. The ideal excursionist owns no Panama hat or private bath tub, and he is unacquainted with the fascination of a highball. He demands nothing as of right and has no unflattering comparison to make; and he is delighted and satisfied with all he sees and gets. He is youthful, with the chief capacity for tending cows, or he is the toiling head of a household, with scant knowledge of the world outside his own country. The excursion represents a new phase of living or marks an epoch in his life; it stands for a great want that comes but seldom in a lifetime;

and the dusty ride and the sights and the strange multitude at the end of the journey appease the want and fill the traveler with new sensations and impressions.

        To fully appreciate the joys of an excursion one must have lived in a small town and owned a very particular best Sunday suit of clothes. Then an excursion is glorified like Christmas, and, anticipating it, the blood quickens in the veins and sleep does not come easily. The excursionist goes forth with the pleasure-heart, and no untoward event can debar perfect happiness. He is healthy enough to feel the great Want, and the hurly-burly and unfamiliar excitements gratify the simple bigness of his wish. The denizens of the place that he visits may look upon him in an amused or compassionate way, but he knows, and the gods know, that he is blessed by the gods. If the pleasure that he found right here were infectious the whole town would fall to laughing and shaking hands, and there would be token of the millennium of peace and good-will. An excursion is a twentieth-century trip to Wonderland, which offers weariness and boredom to the inhabitants only.

        Cosmopolitanism

        You notice that Charlotte people are going to Europe. For a long time they did most of their sightseeing in New York, but ten or fifteen years ago a resident spent three months in Germany and came back speaking broken English, and in recent years another resident returned from England, saying, "I seen the Queen." Since then the exodus to Europe has been steady, and it is singular that as travel increases there is less talk in Mecklenburg of the wonders of the foreign lands. The

grand trip has become a matter-of-fact, every-day sort of a proposition, and the village query, "What did you see while you were gone?" seldom has birth here. But the injection of a be-travelled cosmopolitan element into the community is already doing good. It strikes a blow at conceit, narrowness and the provincialism that is satisfied to sit eternally in a small area and judge surely and dogmatically the world and the things of the world. Every man who is not a fool is a better citizen after he goes far enough from his bailiwick to realize his smallness and utter ignorance.

        Mr. Roosevelt In Charlotte

        The scene at the depot when the President's train pulled in was an animated one. The crowd filled the train yard from end to end, and the number of ladies present was a conspicuous feature. Although ample notice had been given of the coming of the President's train, no arrangement had been made for his reception by the depot people. It was the same old Southern depot, with baggage and express trucks here and there, cars standing on the tracks in the yard, and the same dim, dingy and gloomy lights casting their shadows over it all. When the President's train came to a stop, the rear coach was far below the depot and several detached passenger coaches were on a track alongside of it. The crowd had to squeeze between these cars and the President's coach, and an immovable jam ensued. Only the few who could crowd into the narrow space were fortunate enough to either see or hear the President.

        Mr. Roosevelt went to the rear platform as soon as his

train came to a stop and seemed to take in the situation at a glance. He leaned out and looked forward over the great mass of people. Holding his silk hat in his right hand and waving command with his left, he said: "Now come along here, quick. You people who are in front move around this way to the rear and right of the car. Move along! Step lively! That's it!" The crowd surged about until the President saw that there was not a foot more of space. "Well," he said, "this seems to be about the best I can do. I am afraid if I keep on I'll spend all my time trying to get the crowd arranged and not get to saying anything, after all."

        "What about the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence?" some one in the crowd shouted.

        Quick as a flash, and in tones as clear as a bell, came the response: "The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence is all right."

        "Ladies and gentlemen," continued the President, "I cannot express the pleasure it has given me to meet the people of the South, and I can scarcely find words to express my appreciation of the reception that has been accorded me. Some one has just now asked me what I think of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence. Here in Charlotte was made the first Declaration of Independence ever made in the United States." The President then spoke of the spirit that animated the people of this section in the early days of the country and of the part they took in the revolutionary struggles. He praised the patriotic spirit of the South as evidenced in the Spanish-American war, and singled out North Carolina as worthy of particular credit. "In

Charleston yesterday," he said, "I reviewed your provisional regiment of troops, and it was as fine a body of soldiers as I ever saw."

        Just at this point the President's train began moving out. Abruptly breaking off his speech, he shouted so that almost everybody in the train yard could hear: "I want to say this: During the Cuban campaign I once had occasion to select twenty sharpshooters. Two of the twenty were North Carolinians!"

        These were the President's final words. As the train pulled out, Mr. Roosevelt leaned over the railing of the platform, waving his hat and bowing. Mrs. Roosevelt stood by his side, smiling in thorough delight at the cordiality of her husband's reception in Charlotte.

        In Sunday Clothes

        Standing at the square yesterday in the forenoon, one saw nearly all Charlotte going to church. 'Twas a grand sight--a well-dressed multitude. The place is still small enough for every one to know the Sunday clothes of every one else; and yesterday there was a pleasant rustle of new silks and the creak of new shoes. Sunday clothes! They're martyrdom up to fifteen years of age; an embarrassment until 20; a joy until 30; and after that just a necessity and a disillusionment. Sunday clothes mean the big, hallowed moments of youth and the philosophy of the after years. The light-gray suit is as the vital presence of the fresh glories of springtime, the quick-pulsed blood and the faint perfume of a slender girl's hair; but the light-gray suit blushes under the cool glare of the long, dark, dignified coat, which has ceased to garb pleasure and vanity and looks scornfully

on the pampering of frail tabernacles. Sunday clothes pick up the happiness that is lost when one ceases to go barefooted; they contain or reflect the rarest happiness until eyes lose lustre, and then Sunday clothes go to funerals--all sorts of funerals.

        But--

                         "Manhood has no joys so lustrous;
                         Nothing that so gladsome seems--"
As the first pair of trousers.

        Music at the Club

        The Southern Manufacturers' Club in this city is making some odd experiments in music. It has a piano and a Cecilian, and gets pretty much all the latest music by a system of swapping old tunes for new tunes. About fifty members of the club keep the Cecilian working from 8 o'clock in the morning until 11:30 at night. It has been discovered that everybody gets tired of even the best pieces of modern music in about ten days. The members have run the gamut of all the light operas, ragtime music, and the most celebrated output of modern composers, and always retire each of these inside a fortnight. Isadore Rush sang "Egypt," and the club sent a special delivery for that song. It was played 704 times the first day it arrived, a fortnight ago, but was played only once yesterday. This week "Egypt" will die. In a word, the Southern Manufacturers' Club, a representative organization of this cultured section, has decided that no piece of music that has been written in the last four or five years is worth living. The Cecilian has tried almost everything, and it has made that piano

do more hard work than any other piano ever did in a quarter of a century. Up there where a man betrays a soulful expression by the movement of the muscles in the calves of his legs, only three pieces of music have been selected to live, the "Intermezzo," "La Paloma," and "The Last Rose of Summer."

        Beds of Violets

        In front of the residences on the principal streets--or all the streets--in this city there are living violet beds; and it is to be hoped that the town will never grow so large or so citified as to prevent the growing of these tender, country violets right in its very heart. They are, in some way, a symbol of daintiness, freshness, purity. They best become a maiden or a womanly woman, and they are a silent rebuke to a woman who is bad. And one knows, somehow, that a woman who goes out and fusses over violet beds and really loves the little human things has the right kind of a soul. There is no reason for saying this; it is another one of the just-so things. All other flowers are--flowers, but violets grow and whisper in the innocent realm that can only be seen by a baby's eyes and are the first offering in the kingdom where love must give the right gift to love.

        Small Towns

        The small towns in this State are interesting affairs. People living in them have such an unlimited amount of things to talk about. In the bigger places folk sometimes get tired of conveying intelligence to other folks, but in little towns people cease conversation only when they go to bed. It is a very happy existence. One may be tired for a while, but after the first few months he

whittles sticks with the rest of the population and becomes a fixture. Wentworth, down in Rockingham county, is an ideal hamlet for that sort of thing. Wentworth surrendered to Cornwallis and fought Cotton Mather's doctrines, but since then other men have surrendered to Wentworth and have garnered cobwebs and lived in peace. Right now in Wentworth there are men who sit around open fires with their coats off who might be running the Government or assisting Panama. In Wentworth and larger North Carolina towns there is such an incessant amount of matters to get excited about, apart from the growth of weeds in court-house yards or an unfortunate remark that was dropped at a Sunday-school social. This is no criticism of small towns. Bless them all! They breed the biggest men, the rarest news, and the biggest liars. And such love is awakened in small-town citizenship! What is Boston to Hillsboro, Paris to Morganton, or St. Petersburg to Lincolnton? What is a metropolis compared to a town where one has speaking acquaintance with every dog that he meets, knows every face in a congregation, and is permitted to add his hush-note to the last dear song of gossip. The privileges of a small town are many and each one has an interrogation point after it. But when you're sick, they all send you things to eat, and when you die the heartfelt sob is heard above the wail of the little organ. One would go back to the small town just as the stag goes back to die at the place he was 'roused.

        Lincolnton

        Lincolnton need not get worried over being called sleepified. A compliment was intended. The Lincolnton

people have plenty of money and cotton mills and enterprise, and they can lead the universe in cooking beaten biscuits; but the town is sleepified just the same. Nice sleepified! There are no end of moss-covered wells there, and shade trees and vine-covered porches; there is an insectish drone in the atmosphere; a mule standing in front of the post-office drops into slumber; the voice of a woman calling a child arouses one like a challenge and can be heard a mile; a gentleman from the country tilts his chair against the side of a store and snores. That's Lincolnton--bless it! Stay there a month and time may hang heavily on your hands; stay there two months and you never want to live anywhere else. When you're well, everybody knows what you have to eat; when you're sick, everybody sends you things to eat. That's Lincolnton--dear, old sleepified Lincolnton.

        Taylorsville

        The new court-house at Taylorsville, Alexander county, will have no bell. The old court-house has a bell, which the writer has previously emphasized as the most interesting bell in North Carolina. Formerly that bell rang whenever a beef was killed--rang out the tidings of salutations and felicitations. The residents of the community might be drowsing of a peaceful summer day, but when the bell pealed forth there was a sudden and remarkable activity as all hands sprinted to view the cow that had died; and, as the residents ran, many were the joyous bets as to whether the late deceased was a heifer or a plain, unvarnished bull yearlin'. With the next court-house that dear old bell will

go forever--alas! An Alexander cow must die silently, with a bitter tear in her eye.

        Circus Day

        All of the circus was not under canvas.

        The day was unusual. It was, as Col. Tom Black predicted, a record-breaking circus day. Fourteen thousand people saw the afternoon performance, and such attendance was considered marvellous, even in a city where the circus numbers its devotees from the oldest to the youngest member of every household.

        And certainly 10,000 people--and may be 20,000 people--got drenched--not wet after the usual fashion, but wet in a cosy, complete way that caused the proud crests of women's hats to droop soggily, sent their bedraggled skirts under their heels as they walked, and caused the color of a man's hat to show in the hurrying raindrops as they fell from the tip of his nose.

        Bunched in front of the circus tent were the besoaked; bunched they were in town; and betwixt and between they scurried like so many dismal, rain-reeking sheep, or like a multitude of principals who were returning from a colossal baptizing.

        Such is a cursory view of the main features of yesterday in Charlotte.

        In gala day attire and mood Charlotte turned out en masse, but Charlotteans were hardly to be recognized in the scurrying throng. In a night and a day a new population had sprung up; had come here on trains, in carriages, wagons, and in all manner of vehicles; had

walked here. Strangers strolled familiarly on the streets, and took major part in the festivities. They came from all near-by towns and from distant places; and they appeared in silk hats, in celluloid collars, and in the homespun clothes that mark the mountaineers from Yancey, Mitchell, Wilkes, and other mountain counties. The city had lost its complexion. It was a mere bump on the earth where humanity disported itself like a seething mass of ants, and forgot dull care in a thirst for a sight of the elephant and Pierrot gambolling in the aroma of clean, sweet sawdust.

        By daylight the visiting gentlemen from Bakersville, Burnsville, and North Wilkesboro had fed their horses and had taken positions where they might get an undisturbed view of the grand parade. The great majority of these came here just to see the parade; rode the best part of two days and suffered the inconvenience of camping out to enjoy the pleasure of seeing their lordships the lion and the kangaroo ride past in stately splendor and to sit in critical judgment upon the new melodies that were to be wafted from the steam piano. To them the parade was the beginning and end of all things wonderful. Fifty cents meant admission into the Place Beautiful, where the monkey claims a lawful and honorable place in man's estate, and where a woman, who stands on one foot on a flying horse and kisses the tips of her fingers, may become a more enduring vision than the most fantastic conception of beauty that might come to one who stood on Pisgah's top and saw heaven in the majesty of the rolling clouds.

        So visitors from the backwoods districts and thousands

of others waited only on the feast that came with the parade and found therein satisfaction to the utmost.

        By nine o'clock dense crowds of people lined the thoroughfares along the length of South Tryon street and down North Tryon street as far as Ninth street. The crowd thickened, and yet more people came out to wait and see. At eleven o'clock traffic along the line of march was almost completely blocked. At the square men touched elbows on every foot of space. Sidewalks, bulging with humanity, thrust loads into the streets, and every porch, every window, every veranda was packed.

        Good nature was everywhere manifested. The day was unseasonably warm, and men jostled one another at every step, and yet the spirit of jollity was writ large on every face, and laughter rang out above the hum of conversation.

        The parade, coming shortly after noon, brought the noiseless appreciation that betokens success. There was no applause. "Going to see a circus," remarked the Old Man, "is like periodical drinking. No man would care to see a circus two days running, but once a year the world gets hungry for the sight of a clown."

        And so, along the long line, there was the quick gasp of delight that surcharged the atmosphere. The eyes of the aged citizen glistened; the face of the little boy radiated silent joy. The clown was as glorious as the bearded king who rode on his chariot, and who, indeed, would have been bold enough to choose between a bear and a red brass band?

        The show did not begin until two o'clock, but an hour

and a half before that time an army of people began entrance into the portals of the big canvas. The crowd adjusted itself perfectly and never seemed to get in its own way; and which the large first tent containing the animals and the free attractions was full at all times before the performance began, yet the congestion was constantly being relieved by the tide that swept on and deposited its human freight in the spacious ampitheatre.

        But the reporter paused and communed with the animals and lingered to hear the words that fell from the lips of the bearded lady.

        The parade indicated what the menagerie of Barnum & Bailey's would be. It is solid--as solid as wealth and wide experience can devise--as solid, in point of instruction, as a book on natural philosophy. There were no frills. There were monkeys, but not enough monkeys to raise unseemly chatter, while there were not too many remnants of extinct species to arouse suspicion. The six and twenty elephants fixed the standard for the menagerie. Everything was elephant-strong and elephant-good--good as twenty-carat gold--good enough to check levity and bring sober, respectable interest to a sea of faces.

        The reporter drifted with the crowd and cursed bitterly because he was denied the gift to paint the fresh, human pictures that faced him wherever he looked.

        The animals inside the cages deserved the attention given by those outside. After satisfying his curiosity, one passed by the Red River hog of West Africa and the

Collar bear from Thibet, and paused in front of the cages that held the trained lions from Nubia and the tigers from India. The sight of these lions alone was worth the price of admission. They were grave, stately beasts, not fussy, but dignified, gazing into nothingness with a far-away expression in their eyes. Their severe demeanor seemed to rebuke the fretfulness of the puma and others of the lesser cat tribe who roamed up and down in near-by cages. The lion--one of nature's few perfect-looking creatures--made all things human under the canvas look feeble, ineffectual. Such majesty towered there, finding strange harmony in the tiger's sinuous grace--in that incarnation of suggestive and actual beauty.

        The crowd wavered, and broke, and went on, but one figure stood silently in front of the cage of the hippopotamus. This was Col. Henry C. Cowles, of Statesville, whose love for the hippopotamus has been previously adverted to in this paper. Living nearly always in Iredell county, Colonel Cowles has a natural liking for a mule; he fancies a good horse; he is fond of a dog; and has affection for a good cow; but since he was a boy he has selected the hippopotamus as an animal upon which he lavishes a wealth of interest and affection. "Samantha," said a countryman on one occasion to his wife, "this is the hippopotamus cow, and my! ain't she plain?" But Colonel Cowles finds only beauty lines in the broad, wet back and sees tenderness and domestic traits in the expansive countenance of the large animal. If he had gone no farther than the one big cage, he would have been repaid for his visit to Charlotte yesterday.

With enraptured face he watched the keeper feed the hippopotamus on wet bran, and his hand went out involuntarily as if he would wish to stroke the dripping nozzle. "Above all the animals that are," said Colonel Cowles, "give me the hippopotamus cow--the noblest of all the wild beasts in the world."

        Every man to his own choice; and Rob Reinhardt, of Lincolnton, and several little Reinhardts who tugged at his hand, foregathered with the camels--just stood and gazed into the eyes of the herd of camels and seriously nodded their approval. A man across the way yelled that the albino gentleman would now proceed to throw his backbone out of joint, and even as he spoke the gentleman who has no hands at all began to write a spencerian hand with his two large toes; but Bob Reinhardt only leaned down on the ropes and scrutinized more closely the camels. There was more or less pathos in his expression, and a great deal of dejection in his bearing, as he turned away after a few minutes' conversation with the keeper of the animals. Mr. Reinhardt and the little Reinhardts had failed in their purpose to purchase a camel that they could take back to Lincolnton and drive in a buggy, and hitch to the stake in front of the post-office and thus breed envy into a peaceful hamlet.

        There were lots and lots of other animals. Zebras, emus, trained sheep, gnus, kangaroos, antelopes, buffaloes, bears, monkeys--these and others were present. And one giraffe! Tall, slender, graceful he stood--one of the rarest of the wild creatures. "You see, sir," said his keeper, "they don't live long. They get pneumonia,

or some other ailment, on the slightest provocation, and they don't stand captivity well. Excepting a female that is in the North and is about to give birth to a little one, this is the only giraffe owned by Barnum & Bailey. Mr. Bailey has a standing offer of $10,000 for a giraffe, and it doesn't seem that the order is to be filled."

        Two dozen elephants stood in a semicircle, and across the path stood a mother elephant who munched hay and gazed reflectively upon a baby that had recently become her very own. The elephants are well mannered, and they neither receive nor ask for the edibles that are popularly supposed to be handed out by the small boys and the intoxicated patrons. "There is something pathetic to me about an elephant," said Mr. W. D. Coxey, the genial press representative of the show. "He is a wise fellow and he bears captivity stolidly and sensibly. He is like the Hindoo; he does the best he kin do; and yet I want to cry when I see him, the big, sturdy thing, doing infantile stunts and then walking out of the arena with a subdued expression in his eyes and his trunk fastened around the tail of the elephant in front of him. Yet they get ugly sometimes, and when an elephant does get mean there is but one thing to do with him--kill him. Yes, we have had to kill four in recent years. How? Well, the method is rather unique and almost invariable. We stake the elephant firmly to the ground, pass a long chain around his neck, fasten two stout elephants to each end of the chain, and they become the executioners by a choking process."

        The free list attractions in the centre of the tent were

attractive up to the point where unsightliness caused something akin to nausea. The programme states that Grace Gilbert, the bearded lady, is gentle, delicate, and intensely feminine in all her characteristics, and yet at the age of twenty-six years she has a beard "of an average of about ten inches." It is also averred that she has refused many proposals of marriage. Poor bearded lady! One saw the well-rounded figure, saw the slender woman's hands, glanced up and imagined the transports of embracing Esau, and turned with relief to the four-hundred-pound fat lady who is the breathing, peaceful image of Charlie McCord.

        There was the dear old dog-faced boy. Only they dignify him by calling him the lion-faced boy now. Dear old reminder of childhood's days; furnishing the best term to sneer at ill-favored, unlikable folk. The man with the hard head, the human telescope, Miss Leah May, the American giantess, the living skeleton, the whirling Dervish, the needle-eater and the fire-eater, the albino dislocationist, the human pincushion, Eli Bowen, the legless acrobat, Charles Tripp, the armless wonder--aye, these and more were all there. A rare collection of freaks. A little bit of a boy threw his arm around his father's neck and wept as if his heart would break. "Oh, sonny," said the father, "don't cry. That's only poor old Krao, the missing link." But sonny couldn't reason very clearly about evolution, and every time he and Krao exchanged glances he bawled the louder. One is enlightened to note in the programme that Krao is a she. Most anywhere she would be taken for a he, or a plain, every-day him.

        "Just look at the midgets," said Mr. Coxey. "To me they are the most interesting people in the show."

        The biggest midget is a woman, shapely, rather pretty. "And quite refined," said Mr. Coxey. "Different? No, she is for all the world just like other women--has the same ideas, the same desires." There were four other midgets; two comparatively tallish little fellows, and two tiny little chaps and the tiniest sort of a little woman. She was dressed in evening costume and had lots of pretty hair that was gracefully arranged. She strolled up and down the platform with her hand on the arm of the smaller of the two littlest midgets, but her eyes kept turning to the larger of the two. "That's a sad case," said Mr. Coxey. "She is crazy about that little fellow. To her he is the biggest, boldest, bravest man in the world. She has been in love with him for a long time. When we were in Budapest last year, they announced their engagement, and a number of us, including some German newspaper men, gave them a pre-nuptial banquet. After the toast of the evening had been made the bridegroom-to-be rose to his feet, and, in responding, said that he was not so sure about being married after all. He said he would have to think it over for a while. What a bombshell his announcement caused, and how that little woman did suffer! But since then they've been getting friendlier, and I fancy the thing will end in marriage. She's quite daffy about him, and to her he is tall and stately and more beautiful and heroic than all the princes of the fairy tales."

        The circus itself! What is there to say about a circus? As the years pass they change a bit and grow larger, and yet the essentials must remain the same. Pleasure builded above the sawdust that contains the clown, the elephant, the acrobats, the bareback riders, the long whirl of a body from one trapeze to another, the chariot races--such things are to be the eternal fabric of a circus. Sometimes there is more; sometimes less; always a circus gives better return for money than any other form of amusement. And yesterday it was more. Three pulsing rings made the eyes swim and tired one's brain. The only risk, in pleasure's name, was in surfeit. Four hundred women came out and gave the spectacular "tribute to Balkis," a rhythmic, harmonious spectacle that delighted the eye and pleased the senses. After that--after the end of a gorgeous prelude--event followed event in mad succession, and the spectator was entertained in half a dozen different ways at once. There was an inner cry to stop the thing so that each act could be examined in detail. The elephants were wonderfully clever; the horse-back riding was attractive, if not particularly thrilling; the acrobatic work and the other athletic features, including the exhibition of Japanese jugglers; the tight-rope walking; the beautiful trained horses and dogs, the horse racing and then the chariot racing--all these and the dozens of other features were very good indeed. If one were called upon to select the cleverest part of the show he would at once point to the work of the two aerialists, the Clarkonions, one of whom turns a double sommersault and then turns his body completely

round, in mid-air, before catching the arms of the other performer, which hang down from a high trapeze. In a word, the big show had everything that a show ought to have, and it is the most complete circus that has ever visited the South.

        "Where do our performers come from?" said Mr. Coxey. "Why, most of them are from England, a good many from Germany, and others from France and Bavaria. The Americans are not as good circus performers, not as good riders or acrobats, as the Europeans. The American temperament is impatient, and the ordinary American hasn't the patience to spend a lifetime trying to learn to do a certain kind of work. And so much as that is required of a circus performer. It is strange enough that most of the midgets and the other freak people come from Bulgaria or Bavaria. Most of our performers are grouped in families. Those seven women who are doing turns in the far ring are French Jewesses--the mother and daughters and cousins. Those in the next ring are a German and his wife and his daughter and her husband. Certain families seem to be producing circus performers. This promotes morality; and a circus is not half so immoral as it is popularly supposed to be. The family idea is strongly opposed to anything wrong, and I'll tell you another thing: It is the lazy life which contains no exercise that leads oftenest to physical wrong-doing. Where you find a lot of people who must keep sober and are continually taking a lot of the right sort of exercise you are not apt to find vice or viciousness."

        There was a start of surprise, and the show was over.

The concert was a whit better than the usual catchpenny aftermath; and the side show owns one exhibit alone that is worth going many miles to see. This is the giant--the best looking and the biggest giant that any one ever saw. He is 7 feet 9 inches high, wears a No. 36 shoe, weighs 400 and some odd pounds, and is well proportioned. But he seems to be a most unhappy giant. He creates the impression that he is lonesome, and a man who makes the sad error of growing to be that big is apt to be more or less lonesome all his days. He conversed with the fat lady and the lady who toys with the reptiles, but he always kept that weary look in his sensible and sensitive kind of eyes. One has an idea that the giant is apt to die an old bachelor, and probably he broods about the matter. The other things and people in the side show were scarcely worth while, though it is observed that humanity at large does take a morbid sort of pleasure in looking upon ungainly or ghastly sights and malformations that go to make up the exhibits in the conventional side show.

        But there is another brief chapter to add to the events of yesterday. This embodied the rain. And such rain! The storm came in a heavy, noiseless down-pour shortly after the show began and held up at intervals during the performance. After the show was over, the people who caught the first cars to town escaped a wetting, but those who were forced to linger almost swam to town. Thousands of people, seeing the congested condition of the street cars, set out to walk to town. Not one man in twenty had an umbrella. The rain

fell insidiously, just as if to tempt pedestrians to brave it for a while, and then suddenly it was coming down in torrents. In a few minutes, a thick, straggling line from Latta Park to town was wet to the skin, and then the march to the city was made recklessly. In the space of a mile and a half, probably four thousand women strode in the blinding rain and more than that many men were so badly caught that they could afford to disregard further hurt from the elements. No civilized land ever before presented such an untidy picture.

        With outer skirts tucked around their waists, and with white skirts muddied their entire length women splashed through deep puddles, buried their feet in red clay, pushed wet, dishevelled hair back from the eyes, and finally began to laugh and enjoy the adventure. The entire town seemed to be caught unawares. The wave of recklessness seemed everywhere; a sympathetic something that made all men and women dare to walk out and get thoroughly soaked. The stragglers, coming to town, found a bedraggled population wandering hither and thither, taking no thought to protection.

        Then all Charlotte--and may be the strangers--undressed and toasted its feet, and put on clean clothes, and declared that the day had been entirely good and that the joyous crowd that was scattered abroad in the local land was even larger than the audience that faced Mr. William Jennings Bryan when he first visited this city. And no one seemed to care because the presence of the Nebraskan had ceased to mark the high ebb of population in the Queen City of the South.

CHAPTER III
CHARACTER SKETCHES

        "The Bull of the Brushies"

        Ex-Congressman Romulus Z. Linney, of Taylorsville, better known as the Bull of the Brushies, arrived in town yesterday, and will be here for several days. From the time he entered the lobby of the Buford Hotel until he retired last night, he was always surrounded by a crowd; and generally he was the spokesman, though the attentive pricking-up of his ears and the narrow closing of his eyelids indicate that as a listener he is a genius--a man that the world likes to whisper to.

        Among all the odd men who are grown on the highland health in western North Carolina, Mr. Linney is the strangest, the most distinctive. Even Dickens never knew his kind, or fashioned a type that is near akin to the Bull of the Brushies. He is older now than he used to be, but his rotund figure is as active as of yore; the eyes just as emotional; the voice as quick and strong, and ready as ever to speak language like that of no other man in the universe.

        Most men who read literature hold it in reserve as mere ornate punctuation or emphasis for every-day speech, but Mr. Linney breathes composite rhetoric at

breakfast. The cadence of "Locksley Hall," the quaintness and subtle charm of Coke, the common-sense phraseology of John Stuart Mill, the rareness of Shakespeare--all these blend in single sentences when words fall from the lips of this strange man of genius. In congressional halls he has caused laughter by the use of colloquialisms that are his birthright; while in the far-back rural districts he has combined, in furious speech, Spencer, the Old Testament, Bill Nye, Blackstone and the Constitution, and aimed them with telling force at an audience that was moved to weep blind tears.

        And he is notable everywhere he goes. You will mark him on the streets if you see him. People in Washington and New York used to turn and gaze upon him; they knew not why. A costly frock coat, the product of an expensive tailor, is on his back, and does not conceal fancy corduroy trousers that are both serviceable and splotched.

        Ever since he ceased to be a Democrat, Mr. Linney has been a Republican. That's a way he has of doing things. He is a positive character, and is pretty apt to be one thing or another. Just now he is preparing to obtain the Republican congressional nomination in the eighth district, and he is quietly trying to further his chances by foregathering with the hordes of Republicans who are here in attendance upon the District Court. Mr. Linney explained the matter in another way in answer to a question of the reporter.

        "Why do I come here, sir?" he replied. "I come here, sir, to attend a meeting of the patriots; and only

Republicans are patriots. I come here, sir, to be present at a love feast; to be an humble factor in a reunion that stirs the soul and warms the heart." He waved his hand benignly over a circle that included Judge Boyd, Gus Price, Mr. S. Wittkowsky, Col. H. C. Eccles and a few others.

        "Do I expect to get the nomination in the eighth district? I do. I expect to thunder out the truth to the good people of that district; and I shall expect to defeat for the nomination my friend, Spencer Blackburn.

        "Yes, if I am nominated I shall hope to run against Mr. Theo. F. Kluttz. Will that give me pleasure, sir? Pleasure? Why, I will be honored in meeting such an eloquent, courteous gentleman.

        "But disturb me not with these minor matters and let me reflect in peace upon the beneficence of that God-fearing citizen, Marcus Hanna. Sir, I look upon him not so much as an ordinary man, but I love to think on the qualities of his great soul. Here hero-worship has no taint of sacrilege. And I may add that my tribute is incomplete without grouping alongside Mr. Hanna two other Christian gentlemen, Grosvenor, of Ohio, and President Theodore Roosevelt. Each challenges hero-worship--receives it. Yes, I think Roosevelt will be the next President."

        "What do you think about Judge Boyd's ticket: Roosevelt for President and Judge W. S. O'B. Robinson for Vice-President?"

        "Judge Robinson is a brilliant man and is determined to make a reputation for himself," said Mr. Linney, who is a diplomat.

        The sublime mood flickered for a moment on the mobile face, and comical curves worked at the corners of his mouth. "Happy?" he said. "Yes, I am happy. You should have been with me, sir, recently. I have been in the Second Paradise, out yonder in Watauga county, on the top of Ritch Mountain, six thousand feet above the level of the sea." Eloquence flashed once again in the merry, passionate eyes, and then died, and the Bull of the Brushies was trailing on the level.

        "I have come down here to meet with the clansmen," he said with a grin, "and it reminds me of the rubbing of dead shad together."

        The Original Dugger

        Prof. Shepherd Monroe Dugger came to the city not with the loud heralding that should have announced his approach, and when he would have lectured in the court-house last evening he found himself facing only a few persons, and therefore he determined to postpone his discourse until Thursday night, when he will speak in the Y. M. C. A.

        Professor Dugger is very anxious to speak before a representative Charlotte audience, and it is to be hoped that he will be greeted with a large audience when he rises up to speak on "How to Make Sober Men and Happy Women." The nominal charge of fifteen and twenty-five cents should not be a strong enough barrier to keep any one from tasting the eloquence of the famous author of "The Balsam Groves of the Grandfather."

        Professor Dugger is modestly proud of his lecture and the effect that it has had upon residents of Gastonia and

upon people in other places where he has been recently. He was permitted to speak in churches, and he said he gave offense to no one, and that people invited him around to dinner and expressed their appreciation of his efforts. "I am not so green at the business as I once was," he said. "I have learned many things since the time I used to lecture up there in the mountains. I can feel how my audience is feeling, and if I am about to go too far I can see the danger in the eyes of the first young woman whose eyes I happen to see."

        Prof. Dugger explained that the theme of his lecture was so narrowed that it did not deal with a great variety of subjects. Intemperance in all its branches, the usefulness of honest work, the right sort of domestic life, love, courtship, marriage, and the humor that is injected into side-line jokes--these and just a few other topics are reckoned with in his lecture. "And I am not so crude a stick of material as formerly," asseverates Professor Dugger. Which means that his lecture is a refined thing that will tickle a sensitive palate without causing the least bit of nausea.

        His friends here who have seen Shepherd Monroe Dugger on his native heath, standing hard by his beloved Grandfather Mountain and emitting bold, wonderful, weird and volcanic words, entertain the fear that, may be, the fierce, primitive genius has become too softened by the search for refining influence. Has Dugger become tame? That is the question. Is this the same Dugger who said roughly, "I don't want to talk to any audience whose faces look like a carload of bruised watermelons"? That's the Dugger that the

people wish to hear; that's the Dugger who won fame that spread to the furthermost confines of the nation. Let him speak further, if he pleases, of the boil on the old lady's back; let him find and hurl to the startled winds more and yet more of his perorations which overwhelm one with terrific unfathomableness. His friends here venture to express the hope that the original and only Duggerism will manifest itself here Thursday night.

        Let the professor spout the great clarion lingo that came to him and possessed his soul as he and the Grandfather Mountain slept side by side. Let him do this, and the Charlotte audience, which is ever heroic in patience and courage despite unfair handling, will endeavor to rise to the point of understanding and, even if appalled, will yet be grateful for having heard unadulterated, unlassoed and untamable Duggerism.

        There must be no restraint for Prof. Shepherd Monroe Dugger, and this counsel comes at the behest of his friends who have seen him moving and speaking as an untrammelled scion of the Blue Ridge. He now wears a long frock coat and shakes hands rather too high in the air. He refused yesterday to say "ain't," and picks his words with a preciseness that caused nervousness. He claims to be an apostle to intellectual reformation, and the claim causes regret. The great Dugger must not learn away from his early creed and language. Let him say, "My darlin' Mihilda, Mahulday, Mahishla Jane, if you'll allow me to implant upon your cavernous mouth some faint evidence of my inconsiderable ability as an osculatory artist, I'll cure your toothache."

Let him say that if he wants to. Let him gurgle as wildly as the raciest mountain stream; let him roar with the untutored majesty of Linville Falls. Break forth, Dugger--be the old Dugger! Howl, sing, lash yourself in the dear old way and make everybody sit up. Fifteen cents "per" entitles the local world to no big demand; but, in the name of Bullscrape and by the sacred beard of the Grandfather, it is your duty to bust loose and warble the same song that used to shake and overturn intellects in the high hills.

        With his hair disordered, his cravat askew, and his eye--both eyes--in fine frenzy rolling, Prof. Shepherd Monroe Dugger, lecturer, and author of "The Balsam Groves of the Grandfather Mountain," strolled into The Observer office yesterday and, striking himself on the chest, said loudly:

        "The only and original Dugger, the bard of Banner Elk, still lives!

        "Read this," said the only authorized spokesman for the Grandfather Mountain--"read this and know that Duggerism still survives." Here was the offering:

        "Yesterday's Observer says: 'In the name of Bullscrape and by the sacred beard of the Grandfather it is your duty to bust loose and warble the same song that used to shake and overturn intellects in the high hills.'

        "Let me answer my friends in Charlotte that I still possess the lingo that sighs in the balsams of the Grandfather. The Linville Falls are pouring as vividly in my cranium as when I lifted the speckled beauties flaunting in their white spray. The rhododendrons continue

to bloom in the horizon of the forests as the borealis of the floral kingdom. Every crystal fountain is a silvery tongue of the mountain bubbling poems from its orifice; pouring torrents, dallying through twisted gyves, steal the hues of the rainbow and paint them on the sides of their fishes, and the blood from angels' wounds, still falling from the battle in heaven, leaves its formula and sad muse upon the autumnal leaves."

        As these words were read the fine raiment of the poet of Banner Elk seemed no longer to conceal the strange personality of that Dugger who, as foreman for all the road-working forces in Watauga county, had once proudly termed himself "The Colossus of Roads." With the murmur of such eloquence there was wafted to aroused senses a long, sweet breath from the high hills, the cry of the owl under the moon, the far whisper of gurgling streams, the scent of wet green things.

        The old Dugger, the real Dugger, is alive and not dead.

        Nat Gray

        Once more the theatrical season opens in this city, and the voice of Col. Nathaniel Gray is silent. For many years he was the engineer of the gilded, tinselled art--the manager of the opera house that saw the great Booth and mocked cobwebs and discomfort by the parade of lesser lights. All of talent that came he brought and revelled in. As the proud patron of it all, he laughed for years with Pierrot, sighed with Cinderella, languished with Romeo, and wept with Brutus. So much did his office enter into his daily life that he said "Gadzooks" in the little barber shop that he owns on

West Trade street, and he tried to teach his little dog to emulate the proud manner of the distinguished lion that brought fame to the opera house season before last. But the place beautiful is even now almost forgotten. That brilliant curtain with the sixteenth-century figures, the Arabian horses, and the nineteenth-century hotel in the left-hand corner--where is that curtain? Where the spluttering purple lights and pink lights--where the green garden scene that has contained King John, Rupert of Hentzau, Petronius, Hamlet, Richelieu and Wild Bill? Where the sacred seats that witnessed so long the tales of greatness and heroism? Gone! "The wind has blown them away." Swept is the histrionic dust. An eerie sound is there. Ghosts may rehearse by ghostly limelight, and the shade of the princess who wore the imitation silk may curtsey to the king who wore gaiter shoes, that were marked down to $1.98; a Roman legion can appear in misty array, but the spirit of the old house, that so gloated over its changing throng, is dead in silence. The manager is out of business. Retired! He raises chickens in Utopia--which is Dilworth. Raises chickens and beets--and things. And so finds happiness for a later life. Out into the darkness he looks peacefully, hopefully. Close to nature he is; the keen, sweet breath of the forest is wafted to him; he hears the last tuneful carol of the lark at eventide; he looks deep into the eyes of the youthful chickens, and finds rest, surcease of sorrow. It is given to him, even as it is given to Col. Jeems Howie, to know the blessings of the quieter living; to know that in ruraldom poverty is as

precious as affluence. Here, he knows, all men must live alike. And he has found, as Colonel Howie found, that--

        "Them that has no hired hands blows the dinner horn just the same as them that has."

        Kid Sloan

        Kid Sloan died yesterday afternoon at 4:30 o'clock at St. Peter's Hospital. The cause of his death was alcoholism. It would be no kindness to Kid to try to let him down light by saying that he died from some other sickness. As he had anticipated, he passed out the liquor way, and if he had any voice in the matter now he would sneer at an effort to disguise the truth.

        This history of Kid Sloan--or David Wilson Sloan--was published in The Observer a few days ago. He was a waif who was hurled around the world laughingly but violently. He knew nothing but a print shop and humanity, and he knew both well. He was thirty-eight years of age--old in experience, young at heart, and one of the swiftest compositors in the United States.

        Kid was born in Stanly county, but he had lived in almost every part of America, and he knew the manners and sayings of many peoples. In a Bohemian sense he was a thorough man of the world and his fund of anecdote was enormous. He absorbed color at every point he touched and put it to no use except to amuse his friends. He had lost the faculty of being surprised at anything in the world, but his sense of humor kept him blithe and fresh until his being was finally engulfed in rum. After his death it is remembered that he was the quaintest and the most interesting personage in the

town. He accomplished nothing that was worth while, but he was utterly fascinating.

        Kid was a morphine fiend, an opium fiend, and a drunkard, but he never did a mean or a malicious thing in his life. He was the sort of a man who would pick up a strange, friendless dog and carry it home and give it half of his last crust. He never had much to give, but he was always perfectly willing to give all that he had. When his body writhed bitterly with the torture of self-punishment, he yet radiated laughter. He was ever the chiefest figure in every group that opened to receive him, and, no matter what hell he placed upon his own soul, he spent the best part of his thirty-eight years in giving mirth that was sweet and wholesome by essence and strength. No man who ever met Kid Sloan can forget him--can forget that tiny, warped form or the droll, incisive speech that fell from the thin, seamed lips. Kid might have been an eastern philosopher transplanted. He was out of place here--a weird little personality that understood everything about and was never understood; a pitiful little chap who laughed and made others laugh, harmed no one but himself, and died without ever having grieved or lost a friend.

        Kid would have understood this obituary, for he liked plain speech and hated "slopping over." He never lied about anything and he shall not be lied about.

        The immediate particulars relating to his death are briefly told. He used morphine and cocaine for many years, and there was hardly a part of his body that had not been pricked by the hypodermic needle. He was one of the few men who ever managed to quit the king

drug. After he shook off the drug habit he alternately worked and drank whiskey. Two weeks ago he indulged in a colossal spree and topped it with overmuch laudanum. Before he had time to recover himself or put up another of his brilliant, laughing fights, his heart was as good as a dead one and the doctors who looked at him shook their heads.

        To quote Kid's own use of the vernacular, he had "pied his form." In describing the unpleasant duties incident to the work of a sheriff in a certain wild section of Utah, Kid once said that the sheriff's office was "on the hook." And the blurred story that told Kid's life has been lifted from the hook by the Master Foreman.

        Who shall say that mercy will not follow the reading?

        A Dead Clown

        A dead clown! The words sound odd, don't they? They do not pretend to give a sure-enough picture. They are, in fact, used for an opposite purpose. Can you imagine a clown's dying? Hardly. All other men are credited with human feelings, with power to love and hate, but one cannot imagine that even death could bring dignity to a clown. For Pierrot must be none other than Pierrot, and can one be quite serious when thinking of the final, agonized twitches of that pitiful, painted face? 'Twas ever so, and it is recorded that men of long ago have laughed naturally when court jesters have died of broken hearts. There be many men who would gravely assist their Maker in taking care of the multitudes of swagger, pretentious fools who bustle on every side, and yet would jeer at the tragedy that befell him who, willingly, had worn the pointed

cap and played above the sawdust. A clown dead--a clown suffer? You see the picture as it must be, and it is funnier so. You have already seen him weep, and 'twas his most comical trick. The face was fashioned only for merriment, and death's sweat trickling down his painted lineament would have merely 'roused humor to a shriek of appreciation. No, the mind refuses to permit Pierrot to die or be unmirthful. There are such and such clowns, but a clown in a coffin? The sweet, sweet jest! Even Old Scrooge came at length to laugh and the world approved. Other men have changed from grave to gay, from laughter to tears, and this demeanor is seemly, but to one poor figure the end of lifelong frivolity is a shroud of great, baggy clothes, with fun-paint to distort a ghastly pallor. So the world thinks; clinging to an old world's idea.

        The vision changes, and the humor, for all its certainty, is not free from pathos. Looking back on the centuries one sees the crumbled castles, the cobwebs above decayed biers of emperors, the profound, eternal hush above splendor--sees these with awe, and then remembers, in faint sadness, that even the jesters have died. The stately halls that rise in imagination can do more than give back tomb-like echo. The crown is but dust; and in the far mouldy corner are Pierrot's rotted clothes and bells lying in a dishevelled heap. . . . Seeing a life that has been lived, one is stirred yet again by pleasure that was; mourns, if but slightly, over the sorrow that came; and then recollects, with a sigh, that death has also crept under the old and smaller canvas,

and in claiming that dear old painted figure has really stifled the little bright-eyed boy who sat there with his heart attuned to ecstacy and whose eyes found only beauty and peace in the world. Wandering among the things that are dead, man feels regret at every stride--here for mistakes; there for pleasures that have passed; and yet mirth must arise at the clown's sepulchre. Mirth? Aye, mirth always; tears sometimes. So. . . . Pierrot is dead and must die--he and the little child and the perfect sunshine.

        The train of thought was suggested by the fate of Leno Wills, the veteran clown, who is now in the county jail serving a thirty-days' term for drunkenness. He was an old-fashioned clown, and one of the best, it is said. He was a star in the ancient one-ring circus, and probably thousands of men and women remember the vast pleasure he brought to their childhood. They would hardly recognize Leno now--such a wreck is he. He is never far from the gutter--when he isn't behind prison bars. Lectures, kindness, moral suasion have no effect. Out of prison in the morning, he is purple-faced at night. The mocking tribute to his former calling is paid by small boys who jeer at him when he is in his cups, and call him by that absurd soubriquet, "Dolly-My-Leg's-Broke." The street scene is familiar: the children crying derisively; the old clown goaded and weeping under the taunts. Homeless, friendless, cheerless, a confirmed dipsomaniac--so the poor old jester nears the end. As he gathers his tatters about him and stands close to the new-made grave, he still must

hear the laugh. Only a clown is passing. What matter?

        Flashes from the Mire

        He came into the restaurant again the other night. He gets more wretched every day. He had a good collegiate education--was a first-honor man, and other men pointed to him and said: &