Life — December 1, 1900 — page 34: what you’re looking at

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

“EEE could have prompted “the giver in bis Christmas act. We must sce that he was actuated by no material or worldly con- sideration, and as we put the gift away in some safe place where we may never sce it more, our hearts fill with gratitude to think that the good old Christmas traditions are still being preserved. A great many people—perbaps the majority—have the right idea, and, zuided by blind instinct, can usually be relied upon to make Christmas presents that are useless and ambiguous enough for general purposes. But there is always a small but persistent band of misguided folk who persist in using their taste, and who endeavor to find out what the recipient would realiy like. It behooves, then, those of us who have been so weak and erring beforehand as to give the things we thought might be wanted. to gird up our loins and achieve by care and diligence that disinterestedness and lack of premeditation which should be the Ultima Thule of all Curistmas givers. Let us school ourselves in the right direction, For one thing, there is always material enough. Useless gifts for man, woman and child abound. We are apt to strike the right thing even by chance. But we must do better than this. We who have not the natural talent to select the utterly inane and inappro- priate gift offhand, must study our friends, that we may be sure to know what they do not want. For it is better, even by premeditation, to avoid giving anything that might be useful, rather than, even by accident, to violate the glad spirit of Christmas. A Large Stock. GURST CLUBMAN: What kind of beauty in woman appeals to you most ? Secoxp Do.: [hardly know yet; you see, there are seven huncred and sixty-three million different kinds. The Judgment 2f the Polite World SECONDS THE DECISION OF PARIS, WHICH AWARDED TO THE WHITING PAPER COMPANY THE HIGHEST PRIZE EVER GIVEN TO ANY AMERICAN WRITING-PAPER MANUFACTURER, THIS MEANS THAT The Whiting Papers FOR SOCIAL AND HIGH-GRADE BUSINESS CORRESPONDENCE, AND FOR INVITATIONS are the Byest in the World THIS HAS BEEN TRUE ALL THE TIME. THE AWARDING OF THE GRAND PRIZE MERELY CONFIRMS A REPUTATION ALREADY WON. PARTICULAR MEN WILL FIND OUR PAPER PERFECT FOR THEM OWN SOCIAL CORRESPONOENCE. Whiting Paper Company, 148, 150 and 152 Duane St., NEW YORK, Also HOLYOKE, MASS., PHILADELPHIA and CHICAGO. The Way It Goes. «¢] TS kinder funny, when you come to think about it,” mus- ingly said the Old Codger of Kohack, in one of his Tuminative moods. ‘‘ that when a man has got as far along on the journey of life as his fiftics or sixties and polished bald- ness and red-noscdness and double-cbinnity and rheumatica- bility and chronic kickity aad constitutional crabbedness, and so on and so forth, he begins by degrees to discover that the girls of the present day ain't half as pretty and gentle and swect as they were when be was a bashful, red-necked young buck with big feet and superfluous hands on him; the boys don’t have a decent fraction of the good, common horse-sense and able-bodied git-up-and-git concealed about their persons that they had then ; the songs of to day ain’t got none of the pure, genuine, pulse-stirrin’ melody in ’em that they had when he was young and half-baked and thought he could sing some ; the orators nowadays wouldn’t know what real, downright eloquence was. if they should happen to meet it in the middle of the highway at noonday with its visitin’ card outstretched in its hand; the preachers of the present give us weak and worthless imitations instead of good, honest hell- fire; the fashions of to-day ate ridiculous when compared with those of the long ago, the statesmen are all dead and buried, politics have gone to the devil on greased skids, the hills pear to be smaller and the streams shallower and narrower than they once were, and that he ate up all the good things thirty or forty years ago. “Funny, ain't it, or, wouldn't it be, if it wasn’t sort of pathetic, some way, if you happen to look at it just right ?” Tom P. Morgan. J ACKSON : I think Roosevelt will make a good Vice- ~ President. Currie; I didn’t know there was a possibility of any- body being a bad one. obtained the only GRAND PRIZE awarded solely for Toilet Soap at the Paris Exhibition 1900 This is the Highest Award obtainable for anything. PEARS’ SOAP has obtained 21 International Awards. The Highest Award for Toilet Soap at the /as¢ Paris Exhibition in 1889 was a Gold Medal, and the only Gold Medal awarded solely for Toilet Soap was then gained by PEARS. Do not be imposed upon by injurious imitations ‘OmIc.