Democratic Sentinel, Volume 9, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 October 1885 — A Boy’s Hat. [ARTICLE]

A Boy’s Hat.

Nothing on this clod of sin ever gets used up quicker than a boy’s hat, unless it may be a Congressman’s reputation or wealth in a powder mill, and no sight between the nursing bottle and the winding sheet is more rare than one with the semblance of newness in active service on a week day. There is something in a boy’s soul that rebels and kicks in mutiny at having to wear a hat of nnmarred shape, and the only possible chance of preserving the shape of a new one unimpaired during the first <lay o i its use, would be to strap the boy’s arms fast to his sides, pinion his legs, push the hat down to his ears, and make him stand in an empty flour barrel, amply isolated from all walls or shrubbery against which he could bunt his head. This may be a little rough on the boy, but it will save the hat. If any other plan has been adopted with success we have not been apprised of it, or furnished with working plans of the same. We have seen a boy who had been carefully nurtured—with both shingle and slipper—go forth in the morning under a hat of gladsome look and expensive texture, and in the evening of the same day we have seen that same child of destruction march into the house with all the glory of Icliabod taken out of the thing on his head as completely as a combination trip-ham-mer and threshing machine could have done it, without spraining itself in the attempt. What agency compassed this terrible condition of tattered eollapsiveness so speedily mortal man knows not, and probably never will until the tree of knowledge has been plucked bare, and its very roots worked up into tea for brain stimulant. It doesn’t matter a pin how lamblike a boy may be, and we don’t care a gnat liow blue his eyes are. or how much sunlight lingers in his hair, he is the remorseless foe of all new hats, as you will find to your cost by the time he ift big enough to throw a stone through a light of glass in tho kitchen window. If you have a boy whose bones are not composed entirely of milk, who doesn't fulfill this forecast, slip your hand down the back of bis neck, and examine the points of uis shoulder-blades for incipient wings. They ought to be discernible in that neighborhood somewhere. Why this is thus is beyond our depth, but that it is so is expensively apparent to every parent who has small pantaloons in the family. The nature bottled up in a boy seems to differ evon more than day and night, or man and wife, from all other known forms of motive force outside of a street-car stable, in not being amenable to the same law 3 that seem to control the remainder of the universe, and, although boys have for centuries been nearly as abundant as stars in the Milky Way, we know ten times as much about the movements of the faintest point of light in that celestial footpath as we do about the devious ways of our own male progeny. We understand the causes of eclips.e, wind, rain, and the election of Cleveland, and we know to the proximity of well-grounded certainty that Ben Butler became cockeyed from squinting through the fence at the girls when small; but, men and brethren, what do we know about the origin of that inexplicable cause which prompts every child on the Adam side of the house of David, and Goliath, too, mayhap, to wage such unrelenting war upon everything in headgear with the smell of the shop still upon it? It is humiliating to confess that, with all our knowledge about heaps of things that will never bring us any money, we are still as much in ignorance on the boy question as the man in the moon himself. How much consolation can we find in the fact that we know why a planet stays in its orbit, if we are to remain forever ignorant about the goings and comings of our own masculine descendant, and what the mischief he’s beem doing with his hat? Will it prolong ithe color and tenacity of your hair and promote its growth, to say nothing of removing dandruff and giving life to the scalp, to know that it takes light a million years to get here from headquarters in some instances, if you are to remain in the dark ever more concerning matters that occur with exasperating frequency within a yard of your own no.-trils? There may be a science or two that we have not yet found time to fully master, or some of the lumbermen in Michigan may possess information not yet sent to the front; but from all the data in hand at present we very much doubt if the sum of all earthly wisdom —in addition to what is already known in Chicago and conjectured in Milwaukee —is equal to the call made upon it by the question of juvenile depravity as applied to hats. Or, to state the matter with still greater condsenessj it is the opinion of one bumble toiler in the hive of popular thought, that at sunrise this morning there was not sufficient informati n above high-water mark to make it as clear as a sunbeam why a boy feels more at home under an old disbrag of a th ng not fit for a gun-swab, than he does with a hat on his head worth two of the hardest dollars ever minted. There may be some things that we know fully, and with a good deal more comprehensiveness than a bachelor understands thut a baby is a baby; but on this foggy question we are still tossed about by the deluge of ignorance. and don’t know any more about the why and the wherefore of the same than we do about the ring price of wheat on the planet £>aturn at this minute.— Chicago Ledger.

* Energy is acquainted with nothing but success; voices of discouragement are strangers to it; it never yields one iota in its determination; though it may perisU under an avalanche of difficulties, yet as its lamp goes out it is, still contending for its ideal.