Judge — August 27, 1921 — page 19: what you’re looking at

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

AND THEY DON’T HEED ME WHEN I Cry, “THIS IS MY BUSY DAY,” The. Busy Day HIS is my busy day, my friend, T this is my busy day; and I re- gret I cannot lend an ear to what you say. I have to bear the toiler’s load until the day expires; I have to write a stirring ode concern- ing rubber tires. For I have many aunts to feed, I hear them ery for bread, and every passing hour I need, until it’s time for bed. I’m interrupted every time I*take my pen in hand, and one can’t sing a song sublime when bores around him stand. If someone journeyed to my den, and said, in accents low: “I come to pay the iron men I borrowed long ago,” then I would clasp him to my breast and kiss him on the brow, and say to him: “Sit down and rest—I am not busy now.” I’ve ne’er been interrupted yet by any Jack or Jill, who hastened to me in a sweat to pay some ancient bill. No man has ambled to my door, to cry, in cheerful tones: “I’ve trav- eled from a distant shore to pay you fifteen bones.” My visitors are dreary hicks who have some scheme to air; they say By Watt Mason Illustration by RALPH BARTON that eating ice cream bricks corrupts the young and fair. Young people haunt the gilded hall where ice cream bricks are sold; and from that place they promptly fall to depths of vice untold. How many male and female sticks who now in jail repose can trace their fall to ice cream bricks, and cones, and things like those? How many lunatics who scream and rave in padded cells went wrong by eating pink ice cream in gilded candy hells? And so, my visitors explain, this evil must be cured; too long it’s sapped the human brain, too long it’s been endured. And now a bunch of godly men have organized a band to fight against the ice cream den and drive it from the land. How many beans will I chip in, how many bucks unfold, to help to close the haunts of sin where ice cream bricks are sold? Oh, all the cranks beneath the sky are bound to come my way, and they don’t heed me when I cry, “This is my busy day.” But no one, urged to noble deeds, comes prancing to my shack, to say, “You lent me twenty seeds, and I have brought them back.” 19 I’ve staked a lot of busted jays with coin, at divers times, but they don’t break into my days, or inter- rupt my rhymes. But many cranks my den invade, and spoil my useful day, to say that drugstore lemonade is sending boys astray. The boys should spend their nights at home perusing helpful tracts; each youth should strive to stuff his dome with elevating facts. Instead of which the kids parade to Jimpson’s Pharmacy, and quaff a bowl of lemonade, and sometimes two or three. And when they've drunk this sort of slop a quarter of a year, it’s but a step to bottled pop, and then to ginger beer. They leave the drugstore’s gaudy scene for John D’s filling joint, and there, with sparkling gasoline their vitals they anoint. Soon tiring of this deadly drink, for stronger dope they try, and we behold them sipping ink and turpentine and lye. And won’t I hand out seven scads, they ask me, in my room, to save our young and tender lads from fifty kinds of doom?