Judge — October 6, 1917 — page 11: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

ogra CLIMBED a mountain peak so high it pushed its summit I through the sky. There was no sense in doing that; I labored like an acro- bat, and strained my muscles and my thews and spoiled a good new pair of shoes. I fell off cliffs and slipped on stones, and broke a lot of collar-bones, and got a spavin on my neck, and made myself a gloomy wreck. A thousand chumps had climbed before that mountainside, with muscles sore, had stood as I did, on the top, and watched the clouds around them flop. If I had been the first to climb, I might not then have wasted time, for all Chautauqua’s wel- come freaks who were the first on dizzy peaks. Why, then, you ask, did I ascend that blooming hill that stood on end? The energy expended there, while clawing up the granite bare, if I should use for purpose good, would saw a thou- sand cords of wood. With less of stern heartrending toil, I'd plow a hundred miles of soil. Why did I climb the gorgeous mount, when all the work was no account? The tourist mountainsides ascends, so he may bore his weary friends. He comes back, when his outing’s done, with fearful stories by the ton. All day I tell how I have scaled a peak at which the natives paled. I track some friend or neighbor down, some chap who had to stay in town and labor hard that he might meet the rising cost of things to cat; I stand before him in his lair, and tell him yarns that lift his hair. “The heights I saw would take your breath, and often I shook hands with death. While you were dwelling here in peace, protected by the town police, I climbed a mountain nine miles high, and wrote my name upon the sky. I sought the frozen solitudes, where sullen nature ever broods, remote from every human door, where man was never seen before. I chased the bounding mountain goat——” My friend here takes me by the throat, and bats me with his office chairs, and kicks me down three flights of stairs. But this won't stop a bore like me; to some one else I promptly flee, and start again my dreary yarn of lonely gorge and gloomy tarn. Oh, is it strange that people hate the everlasting tourist skate who wants to tell of things he’s seen, on mountain, shore or woodland green? A SENSE OF HUMOR “VY I agree with you, Lou, that it is a good thing to have a sense of humor,”’said May as she began to peel off her gloves after she and Lou had seated themselves at the restaurant table. “The only trouble with me, Lou, is that I have too keen a sense of humor. I often wish that I didn’t have so much. It often makes me laugh when I should not. Last Sunday in church I thought I should die when an old woman near me fainted in church and the time they had lugging her out. Her bonnet fell off and her hair came down! You never saw anything so comical in your life!’ Then the other day I saw a woman racing like mad to get out of the way of an auto and down she went kerflop right on the muddy strect! She was the awfullest-looking object when they picked her up. I nearly split my sides laugh- ing! And the other day I was in a car when a woman went to move over to make room for some one to sit down beside herand if she didn’t move over too far and sit down on the floor! Well, I thought I should die! And yesterday I was walking behind a woman who was wheeling a baby carriage and all of a sudden she wheeled it off the edge of the pavement and over it went! Well the way that woman and the baby both screeched was the funniest thing you ever did hear! Talk about a sense of humor I only wish that I didn’t have so much of it! I see the funny side to everything, don’t you know?” = —Max Merryman. The Congressional Onion Jones—A man’s luck is never so bad that it couldn’t be worse. Brown—For example? Jones—He might be married to 2 White House picket. A Pioneer in Orthography HE professor explained: “All my lifetime, it seems, Public sertiment surely has run to extremes. Now phonetic spelling’s the fad; as a rule, T vas flogged years ago when I used it in school.” ; — Eugene C. Dolson. “Excuse me, sir, does this drama really convey a great lesson?” “Yes, that one should think twice before spending $2.50 for a ticket. comichooks.