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Image provided by: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library, Chapel Hill, NC
Newspaper Page Text
Volume XL An Old Familiar Hymn, Alas, and are my breeches tore? And is my shirt in strings? And shall I go in debt for more, Or do without such things? Was it for this, since I've been grown, I cast my sovereign vote? Amazing shoes, with socks unknown! And, oh, you tattered coat! Weil might a piece of tow-sack hide My poor old naked skin ! The way them politicians lied, It surely is a sin! But drops of grief can never pay The grocery bills I owe. Kext time I'll vote a different way Hang-takedif that ain't so! A Soldier's Monument If I could have the designing of a soldier's monument to be erected in the public square of every city and town, I would not design a general on horseback with waving sword and flashing medals to make war look fine and respectable. No, I would make my design represent a private soldier crawling on his hands and knees, with one side of his face shot away, and his guts dragging ten feet behind him as ke crawled. That would represent war as it really is, and I think the people would soon get so sick of looking at it that they would never permit another war to come. Them-Thar Books. Well, honey,. I ain't got them books published yet, but I am still trying. Have got something like a hundred pledges for "Pearson's Poems," and about the same number for the book of Fool-Killer selections. But that is hardly a start. I must have lots more 1 T 1 A -v . , pieages oeiore 1 can start wors on the books. Send your pledge if you haven't already sent it. The price will not be more than $1.50 each. Just say you will take the books, and that you will send the money when I get ready for it. 1 would lifee to tell you more about my plans for publishing these books, but the Postoffice Department won't let me. They want to call everything "advertising1 ' and charge me 8 cents a pound for postage on it. Boomer, North Carolina, August, 1921. PARISWITH HERBREECHES OFF Some of us have to go nearly naked because we can't get any thing to wear; while others go aaked for a different reason be cause they seem to enjoy the sensation and probably think it looks nice. If it were true that the dead could know wThat is going on in this world, old Mother Eve would be calling up the city of Paris on he weeiv board and telling it where to get fig-leaves, for they sure do need something of that sort in rotten old Paree. If you don't believe it, just grab your modesty with both hands and choke it till it turns black in. the face, and then read the fol lowing: Paris, France, June 16. "The Year One of the Second Heathen Era" was ushered in by Latin quarter students with the annual four arts ball. Five thousand artists, m4any prominent in the social world, went back to sav agery and Carthage at a leap. While all were supposed to be "cos- turned" in Carthaginian style, hun dreds solved the problem of "what to wear" by wearing nothing. Witnesses of the revelry at 4 o'clock in the morning saw no fewer than 300 nude women, chiefly models. An American art student, wearing only crimson bathing trunks, was nearly rejected by the reception committee because she "had too much on." Toward morning thousands of the unclad stormed the near-by Bois de Boulogne where they indulged in Neroesque revels while a special force of police gazed at them, smil ing. At 7 a. m , the procession passed through the fashionable section of tfce Champs-Elysees, seizing taxicabs aijd private cars and forcing every policeman to be kissed. Aged artists said the night was the wildest in tfhe history of Paris. So that's the kind of "civiliza tion" that we sent our boys over there to fight for! That's what we've got to show for nearly a hundred thousand killed and near ly twice as many crippled for life, besides thVuncountable waste I in wealth andjnioian energy. I supposelthat is some of the we were going to get. Well, we are getting it in great hunks. But democracy and civilization would look a li;tle better with their clothes on. There is nothing in the Leegonashuns covenant that provides for going naked in public, There is nothing nastier record- ed in all the history of Rome, even in its nastiest days. A page of refined'reTe1ry from Quo Vadis is ary jitney snorting along down modest in comparison. Carthage the journalistic pike with its cut never went farther in open defi- out open and its omniverous mouth ance of decency. It does not help matters any to say that the actors in this per- formance were Bohemians of the art world, and that they did not represent Paris. So much the worse. They represented the art of Paris and of the world. And turthermore, the policemen rep- resented Paris, and they smiled at it and let it pass. After going through such a bap- tism or blood, it seems that h ranee n . .1. 1 ought to be pretty well sobered, I5ut evidently she is not. one is plunging deeper than ever into sin and shame. Uh, what is to Decome 01 a na- tion and a world that never can learn any sense? I have always wondered why it was that the preachers encouraged the bad boys to go to the war and get killed, believing (as they pre- tend to believe) that the boys would go straight to a place of endless torment. If the preachers expect to go straight to heaven when they die, why didn't they go and do the dying themselves Four years from today Warren Give-us Hardtimes will be much more unpopular than Woodpile Wilson was last November. Just wait and see. Number 6. Now I Reckon You Know. Well, I'll be mortally confhmi- dingbusted! Sometimes I think Henry id has got a little sense, and then again it appears that he is just as big a consarned nincompoop as the rest of the block-headed brag- garts ot wicKea wealth. - 4 Of course Henry don't write the stuff that appears in his week- ly paper, but he is supposed to sorter keep his eye on it and know what sort of dope it prints. Well, here comes Henry's liter- uttering great big feather-legged words like a campmeeting of bull-frogs taking a dive into a last year's mill pond. And so the Dearborn Independ end hitches up its gallus another notch and lets out the following weepy wail: 1 "it wouia oe aimcuit to name, either in church or state, a leader of tne oia-time quanues ; one inspiring in the crowd any passionate devotion to an ideal and full consecration to- the work of its actualization. Where is the Jefferson or the Hamilton, th Lincoln, the Webster, the , Sumner,, the Llovd Garrison or Wendell Phil lips, the Wesley, the Beecher or the Roosevelt of our time? Where is the leader whom the common people follow gladly?" Why, yoa poor old ignoront cuss, what is the use to ask such fo1 Question? Everybody knows where that great Jeader of the common people is. He is in the Atlanta Federal Prison. Now what else do you want to know? Little old Delaware's swap of Senators reminds me of the hen that swapped her teeth for a chaw of sweetened wind. She didn't have anything to start with, and after the swap she still didn't have anything.