Life — March 17, 1927 — page 17: what you’re looking at

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

IT used to be the cus- tom in American public schools, and perhaps still is, for little boys to pick out quotations from a se- lected list, and to recite the chosen quo- tations at the opening of the morning ses- sion. One of the favorites was “Lives of great men all remind us, we should make our lives sublime,” and how the re- citer did stress the word “our,” to be sure. But Mr. Lytton Strachey be- gan to change all that over ten years ago, ond now comes Captain Peter Wright, and what he doesn’t say about William Ewart Gladstone, Major Rupert Hughes does say about George Washington, or vice versa, with the result that Lives of Great Men in two volumes now remind us to wear false whiskers and pull our hats well down over our eyes or we shall suffer the penalty of Great Men and be exposed at five dollars a volume, postage twenty-four cents extra. * * * HERE is, of course, always the possibility that Captain Peter E. Wright is the victim of a curious mistake and that what he overheard Lord Milner saying was something about Casanova and not about Glad- stone. However, he insists that at Bournemouth he once met a man called Cecil Gladstone who strongly resembled the late Prime Minister, although in .all probability he is con- fusing Christian names and surnames so that the person he really met may perhaps have been William Ewart Chesterton, a stout young man with a collaterally inherited fondness for paradox, but who nevertheless wore high-standing collars and chopped down trees for recreation. It re- minds one of the builder in A. Neil Lyons’ “Love Us All” who converted plain glass windows into stained glass windows by the application of a sort of decalcomania. He had in stock two motives: ‘Moses in the Bulrushes” and ‘Nelson Kissing Hardy,” but by a judicious combina- tion of both, he was able to produce a third motive, namely: “Moses Kissing Hardy.” * * * [LONG-DISTANCE telephone calls in France are exceedingly cheap. Last summer, at the prevail- ing rate of exchange, one could hold a three-minutes’ telephone conversa- tion over a distance of six hundred miles for less than thirty-six cents, at least in theory. In practice, how- ever, if a subscriber in Cannes wants to speak to a subscriber in Paris, and is determined to use the telephone, the only thing for him to do is to take the train to Paris and ring up the Paris subscriber from a Paris pay-station. Even then, the connection will probably not be made in less than fifteen minutes, and it may take as long as an hour. The difference between the French long- distance telephone rate and the American rate is therefore to be ex- plained by the story of the butcher who quoted corned beef at thirty cents a pound, “Why, Schwartz across the street (Continued on page 3+) WHERE THE RIVER SHANNON FLowS f/f THE HARP THAT ONCE THRU TARAS HALLS y 27 BY KILARNEYS LAKES AND FELLS THE WEARING OF y THE GREEN THIS. IS STATION A-O-H — YOU HAVE UUST LISTENED TO A GROUP OF IRISH SONGS SUNG BY THE CELEBRATED TENOR MR.ISADOR GOLDSTEIN Paddy's Irish Rose Up comicbooks.com