492 
THE KUJKA.L, NEW-yOKKEK 
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|| Short Stories of Human Nature [j 
Things to Think About—Out of the Usual Run 
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A VALUABLE TABLECLOTH.—Ex- 
Sen ;t tor Clark of Montana has a table¬ 
cloth which cost him $7,000. It was 
made at a famous school of lace makers 
in Venice. It cost $1,500 at the school, 
hut it was said to he worth about $0,000 
as tablecloths go. When it was imported 
to this country, it was valued at $1,500, 
but the government claimed that it was 
worth more and sued the Senator to col¬ 
lect the full amount of duty. lie finally 
offered the government $1,700 to settle 
the suit, and it was accepted, so that the 
tablecloth was actually spread for a New 
Year’s feast in the Clark home. Seven 
thousand dollars for a tablecloth is more 
than most of us would care to put up. 
It is worth about three farms, and those 
who care to do so, may figure out how 
many loaves of bread this tablecloth 
would buy for tin* men who stand in the 
bread lines here in New York. 
A “Lazy Husband’s” Law. —It is 
said that the Indiana Legislature has 
passed a hill known as the “lazy hus¬ 
band’s law.” This law provides that 
every husband who neglects to support 
his wife, and provide for her properly, 
shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, 
and fined not more than $500, and also 
put at hard labor in the county jail for 
six months. The same punishment is 
decreed for any person having a hoy 
of 10 years or a girl of 17 depending 
upon them for support, who willfully neg¬ 
lects to furnish the necessary food, cloth¬ 
ing, shelter and medical attendance. In 
a way we think such a law is going too 
far. The average boy of 10 and the aver¬ 
age girl of 17 of reasonable health and 
strength ought to be able to provide at 
least in part for themselves. To compel 
a man to provide for lazy hoys and girls 
of that age, would be a punishment for 
the man, but a very much worse punish¬ 
ment for the children, for it would be an 
incentive to them to grow up into lazy, 
worthless characters, so long as the old 
gentleman was compelled by law to take 
care of them. There are many of us 
now of middle age who were obliged to 
go to work, and take care of ourselves by 
the time we were 14, and as we look 
back upon it now, it was in a way a 
good thing for us. We have very little 
sympathy today for these laws which 
compel a parent to take care of a big 
child who is abundantly able to go out, 
and take care of himself. Such laws will 
be likely to take the spirit and ability to 
work out of many lazy children. 
Giving Away Shoes. —According to a 
story from Chicago, the average man 
should be very careful how he plays a 
practical joke with garments which be¬ 
long to his wife. The story goes that a 
man who was in the habit of doing this, 
gave a pair of his wife’s shoes to a 
male friend. lie thought he was playing 
a good joke on the man, and also his 
wife. When he gave away an old pair 
of shoes that belonged to her that were 
found in the closet, he expected to have 
great fun with his companion when he 
next saw him wearing these shoes. When 
the wife came home, however, she nearly 
fainted at her husband’s information, for 
in these old shoes, she had packed away 
and hidden her wedding ring, and jewelry 
to the value of $100. That was put in 
the shoe for safe keeping, as some good 
women have a way of leaving valuables 
about in unexpected places. On receiv¬ 
ing this news the joker made a run for 
the police station, but his friend had 
promptly disappeared, taking this jewelry 
along with him. It is safe to say that 
there is one man at least who will be 
very careful in the future to let things 
that belong to his wife, entirely alone. 
Roasted Ostrich. —The latest delicacy 
is roasted ostrich. It may be that the 
following report is issued by the Burbank 
Society for the purpose of booming the 
ostrich business, but we are told that a 
baby ostrich five months old was recently 
cooked in Los Angeles, California, at a 
Y. M. C. A. dinner. It is said that each 
drumstick of this bird weighed 1G pounds. 
We have some boys at home who can 
clean up ordinary drumsticks and then 
drum for more. We would like to try 
them on one of these ostrich sticks. It 
is said that in cooking the bird 105 
pounds of dressing were used. This was 
made up of 50 pounds of chestnuts, 50 
pounds of butter, ’25 pounds of onions, 
50 pounds of bread, 25 heads of celery 
and one pound of mixed spices. An oven 
six feet square was required to roast 
the ostrich. This story can be believed 
or not according to the decision of the 
reader. The ostrich certainly is a re¬ 
markable bird, and evidently there is a 
future in the ostrich business in some 
parts of the Southwest. In New Jersey, 
however, we shall stick to the Rhode 
Island Reds, and be surely contented with 
a drumstick which will quite satisfy one 
hungry boy. 
The Joint Bank Account. —A cur¬ 
ious question regarding a wife’s savings 
recently came up in a Brooklyn court. 
The lniband gave his wife a definite 
amount of money as a family allowance. 
She saved a part of this and deposited 
it in a savings bank in a joint account 
with her husband. This couple had trou¬ 
ble and separated, and the woman 
claimed the entire amount in the savings 
account, because it represented what she 
had saved from her household allowance. 
The court decided that under the cir¬ 
“Tiie Grand Old Mountain.” 
cumstances, she had no right to any of 
this money, but. that it all belonged to 
her husband, since he had paid it origin¬ 
ally to her for household expenses, and 
as she had left the household, she for¬ 
feited the right to her share. The hus¬ 
band appears to have been in some re¬ 
spects a model, for after this decision, 
finding that his wife could legally have 
nothing, lie offered to give her half of 
the account, which she accepted. Al¬ 
though it may be said that he rubbed it 
in by saying that he did it from a sense 
of justice—which was a sense usually 
lacking in women! 
Domestic Experts. —Montclair, New 
Jersey, according to the newspapers is 
getting to be headquarters for new house¬ 
hold ideas. The latest scheme is a school 
for housemaids. That is a place where 
servant girls may be properly trained for 
domestic service. There is no question 
about the fact that skill in cooking and 
serving food is as necessary and probably 
as rare as expert service among other 
lines of workers, and if girls can be 
trained so as to become experts in this 
line, it will be a remarkable thing for 
them. 
A Dangerous IIen. —It seems to take 
these Connecticut women to do remark¬ 
able things with hens. One of them has 
just set up the novel plea that she killed 
a hen in self defense. The owner missed 
the hen and finally found it comfortably 
stewing in a pot on a stove in her 
neighbor’s kitchen. It was easy to prove 
the identity of the hen, and when the case 
came to trial, the accused woman said 
the hen attacked her, and nearly picked 
her eyes out. In self-defense, she was 
obliged to kill the hen, and the excite¬ 
ment attending this contest so unnerved 
her that before she knew it, the hen was 
stewing in the pot, and well on its way 
to chicken pie. 
The Head of Mount Hood. 
"Mount Hood looks wonderful today!” 
The sun shone brightly on an Oregon 
hop field; men and women were hurrying 
up the picking for it was Saturday after¬ 
noon, and that was the last day of pick¬ 
ing in the yard. The day was warm, and 
a glance now and then at the eternal 
snow and ice of the grand old mountain, 
75 miles away, was as refreshing as a 
glass of water, because of the suggestion 
of its coolness. It seemed a step across 
to it. By looking beyond the level hop 
fields down the little valley, the massive 
mountain seemed to rise from a level 
plain. It looked like a pleasant after¬ 
noon walk to reach its sides. Thirty 
miles nearer the mountain, from the 
heights of Portland, the mountain ap¬ 
peared no larger, and even further away. 
The hops were all gathered. The wet 
season set in. Men rode horseback here 
and there in the drizzling rain. Two and 
three teams of mules wallowed in the 
bottomless roads to pull the heavy loads 
of milk to the condensery from over Col¬ 
umbia River way. Mount Hood was 
most always lost to view. Toward 
Christmas the hills surrounding our little 
valley were white with a light snow, for 
in the Coast country but little snow ap¬ 
pears, and only in high places. Now and 
The Head of Mount Hood. 
then the bleak form of Mount Hood could 
be traced, it seemed, far up in the sky. 
We looked forward to Summer when, 
from the dinner table through the kitchen 
door, miles beyond, we would see the 
grand old mountain. W. J. 
Short Human Stories. 
I1E POETRY OF LIFE.—The “At¬ 
lantic Monthly” is printing a series 
of “Letters on an Elk Hunt” by a woman 
homesteader. It is the real thing—the 
scene being laid in Wyoming. At one 
point in the desert they found a sad-eyed 
tired woman living with her two children 
in a small cabin while her husband was 
away at work. She told of tin- drought 
and famine and how the two faithful old 
horses, Fanny and Nick, finally died of 
starvation. There is deep human pathos 
in this: 
“Pa hated as bad as we did to lose 
our faithful old friends, and all the Win¬ 
ter long we grieved, the kids and me. 
Every time the coyotes yelped we knew 
they were gathering to gnaw pore old 
Nick and Fan’s bones. And pa, to keep 
from crying himself when the kids and 
me would be sobbin’, would scold us. ‘My 
goodness,’ he would say, ‘the horses are 
dead and they don’t know nothin’ about 
cold and hunger. They don’t know 
nothin’ about sore shoulders and hard 
pulls now, so why don’t you shut up and 
let them and me rest in peace?’ But 
that was only pa’s way of hidin’ the tears. 
“When Spring came the kids and me 
gathered all the bones and hair we could 
find of our good old team, and buried ’em 
where you see that green spot. That’s 
March 27, 
grass. We scooped all the trash out of 
the mangers, and spread it over the grave, 
and the Timothy and the Red-top seed in 
the trash came up and growed. I’d like 
to have put some flowers there, but we. 
had no seed.” 
A Musical Cat. —A reader in Vir¬ 
ginia sends us a newspaper account of 
a musical cat. lie says that this animal 
was found before the open piano sitting 
on a music stool with one paw on the 
keys, playing accurately such tunes as 
“Home Sweet Home.” “America” and the 
Doxology. There may have been other 
tunes on her list, but a call for dinner 
brought her away from the stool, and 
she has not shown her ability since. We 
owned one of those musical cats some 
years ago. The piano was left open at 
night, and long after midnight, the fam¬ 
ily were wakened hy sounds of music 
which seemed to come from the piano. 
Of course when one is wakened rudely 
from sleep, his musical ear is not at its 
best, but some members of the family 
were sure that they heard remarkable 
chords from that piano. We were read¬ 
ing not long before an account of the 
great musician, Beethoven, who as a 
child was missed from his bed; a care¬ 
ful search found him in the attic playing 
most beautiful music on an old piano. 
At first, thought the wild possibility flash¬ 
ed through the family mind that one of 
the children might be doing a similar 
thing under some sudden inspiration. A 
careful search, however, conducted with 
candles and clubs, revealed the grey cat 
walking up and down the piano keys. He 
was quickly put out of doors as the most 
suitable place for a cat concert. The 
next, day, however, when admitted to 
the piano, he went straight for the keys 
and again began marching up and down 
them. This was repeated for several 
days, and we began to think we really 
had a musical cat, until one of the sharp¬ 
eared children close to the piano heard 
a peculiar sound inside. Investigation 
proved that a mouse had built her nest 
right behind the key hoard, apd there 
was a fine family of little mice all ready 
to provide choice steak for a cat. The 
cat had no musical inclinations, but she 
had been smelling those mice, and her 
wandering up and down the keyboard 
was not to provide music hut to find a 
way of getting inside to her dinner. The 
chances are that when we hear of musical 
cats or horses or hens, we shall find that 
the call comes from the stomach, and not 
from the musical hump. 
Hens And Gold Mines. —Whenever 
newspapers wish to tell some remarkably 
strong story, they bring in a chicken. 
The latest story is how a hen worth 50 
cents found a gold mine which nets her 
owner $100 a day. It seems, the story 
goes, that a ranchman in California got 
hungry for chicken pie. He killed one 
of his fine Plymouth Rocks, and found $5 
worth of gold in her crop. Being a bright 
man, he concluded that if he watched his 
hens, they would lead him to the spot 
where the gold was found. So as the 
story goes, the hens walked half a mile 
to the bed of an old brook, and there be¬ 
gan picking up pebbles. A rooster was 
particularly active in this work, and the 
miner by chasing the rooster found nug¬ 
gets of pure gold on the bed of this 
stream. We know many humans who 
show a row of solid gold on their teeth 
whenever they open their mouths. The 
hen’s teeth are said to be in her gizzard, 
and are composed of sharp stones. Why 
should not a rooster have a gold crown 
on his teeth if he knows where to go and 
find it? Our advice is to stay at home 
and clean the henhouse rather than chase 
the rooster after gold mines. 
A Legal Dishwasher. —A Michigan 
man was recently sentenced by the Cir¬ 
cuit Judge to wash dishes for his wife 
for fourteen months. This man had 
pleaded guilty to a violation of the local 
option law. Ilis excuse was that he had 
been unable to get work for 14 months, 
although his wife had been hard at work 
all that time. The judge asked the man’s 
wife how much he did at home to help 
her. Carrying water and coal seemed 
to be the limit of his exertions, and so he 
is out on probation under promise to 
wash the family dishes for 14 months or 
go back to jail. A regular course of 
kitchen work well enforced would be the 
making of a large number of gentlemen 
in both town and country. 
