Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 79, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 April 1916 — Page 2

CAP and BELLS

SCHEME FOR MAKING MONEY Irving Bacheller, Head of Newspaper Syndicate, Would Buy Up All Great Auk Eggs in Existence. When Irving Bacheller was running a newspaper syndicate and publishing a juvenile magazine in New York he always sat in a large porch rocking chair before a fat desk so heaped with letters that every few minutes a little epistolary avalanche would shoot down from it to the floor. One day Orson Lowell, the artist, who was a partner in the magazine, found him in a more than usually meditating mood, and said to him. “What’s the matter, Irving; got an idea?” “Y-e-s,” answered Bacheller, very slowly, “a big one. One that will make us all rich. You know the great auk is extinct, and that there are’only four of its eggs in existence. They are worth thousands of dollars apiece, and a great auk itself would be priceless. My notion is to get these eggs and hatch ’em.” “But how will you hatch them?” asked Lowell. “Oh,” answered Bacheller, visibly annoyed. “I haven’t given that point any thought yet. But it’s a mere detail —a mere detail. The plan is bound to succeed. And it will make us all rich.” —Woman’s Home Companion.

The Practice.

"I have no sympathy with these emancipated women who want to omit the word ‘obey’ from the marriage service, and put themselves on an equality with men.” “Yes, I believe with you, Mrs. Snap, that a man should be the master in his own houqe. By the way, my husband was disappointed that yours did not join his poker club. Why didn’t he?” “Oh, he wanted to badly, but I wouldn't let him.”

Poor Listener.

“What was the lecturer’s subject?” “ ‘From the Cradle to the Grave.’ ” answered Mr. Dubwaite, who escorted Mrs. Dubwaite to the hall under compulsion.” “Was the address worth hearing?” “I can’t say. I fell asleep during the ‘cradle’ part, and when I woke up the lecturer had just spoken the final words in the cemetery.”

Woman’s Way.

"I must say it’s hard to give you up,” said the disappointed suitor, “Well, if it yrill make the parting any easier for you, I’ll introduce you to a friend of mine who will help you to forget me.” “You are very kind.” “But, on second thought, I won’t. If she did that I would never forgive her.”

KEEPING HIS WORD.

She —My husband promised me that I should never hear a harsh word from him in all of our married life, and I never have. He —H’m! How long have you been married? - She—Let me see. Just two days and four hours. -

No Novelty.

"When I took Mrs. Gaddy out for an automobile ride she was nervous all the time for fear we should strike somebody.’ "That was all put on. She's used so mnnihg people down.”

The Vehiele.

"So the fight was suspended for awhile, you say. Did the defendant go home tn the interim?" “No. eU*; he went to the hospital in an ambvlance.” # ■■■■ ■ ■.

JOKE ON A PRACTICAL JOKER

Inoffensive Citizen Turned on Him, Hit Him Between the Eyea and Then Jumped on Him. _ Thei practical joker teas sauntering along in the dusk. The inoffensive citizen was sauntering along in the same dusk, unmindful of the presence of the practical joker. The practical joker, recognizing a friend In the inoffensive citizen, chuckled to himself and quickened his steps to overtake him. The inoffensive citizen was thinking of a story he had read about footpads, and wondering whether anyone would ever try to hold him up. The practical joker suddenly tipped the inoffensive citizen’s hat over his eyes. The-inoffensive citizen wheeled instantly and landed a fine, large blow between the practical joker’s eyes. The practical joker went ddwn. The inoffensive citizen promptly sat on him and hit him again. The practical joker yelled: “For heaven’s sake don’t hit me again. Johri.f JJon’t you know me?” The inoffensive citizen said, “Great Scott!” ■ The practical joker said, in ah injured tone: “Hang it all, John, it’s only a joke.” The inoffensive citizen looked at the practical joker, who now had one eye closed, and laughed. The practical joker angrily asserted that it was no laughing matter. “But you said It was a joke,” returned the inoffensive citizen, “and I think you are right.” And he laughed again. But the practical joker hasn’t been able to see the point of it to this day. Still, it was unquestionably a good joke.

Deeply Moved.

“Your lawyer made an eloquent plea in your defense. He evidently believed you Innocent.” “No, he didn’t,” answered the defendant. . . “But you must have said something to him that strongly influenced him in your favor?” “So I did. I showed him my bank roll and said: ‘Fifty-fifty if you get me out of this.’ ”

A Happy Thought.

“I heard you holding gay converse with the janitor this morning.” “Yes.” “ ’Tis seldom the great man unbends.” “Quite true, but this morning I had occasion to borrow a corkscrew from him and I invited him up to my apartment to see that highly useful device in operation.”

HIS REVENGE.

“Y6s; she quarreled with Tom and returned all his presents!” “And he hers?” “Every one of them. Why, he even went so far as to send her half a dozen boxes of face powder with a note explaining, that since he first met her he must have taken that much home on his coat.”

Keeping Up Appearances.

“How about some hair tonic ?” suggested the barber. “What for?” inquired Mr. Growcher. “So as to preserve your hair, of course.” “Let it fall out. I’m too old to be handsome, and my only hope of looking Intellectual is to become baldheaded.” '

Not to Be Trusted.

Grandmother—-Did you get a letter from your husband this morning? Young Wise —No; I expected one, but the carrier tells me the mails have been very irregular this week. Grandmother —This week fiddlesticks! They always have been that way; you can’t trust one of ’em out of your sight.

A Sure Way.

The meeting of the suffragette club was on in deadly earnest. “How can we keep man at a distance?” howled the woman in sawedoff skirt. “By eating onions,” replied the female in the plaid waist.

Worse Still.

“Is there anything more pathetic than the low-browed husband of- a high-browed wife?” “Oh, yes,” answered the advocate of culture. “I can’t imagine what it is.” “A husband and wife who are both

You Never .Can Tell.

“What business do you thipk your son will adept?" "Can’t say, but judging by the hours Josiah keeps, I shall say he was hat> urally content to be » mtllnnah.” j l

THE EVENING REPUBLICAN, RENSSELAER, IND.

BAD RAILROAD WRECK IN FRANCE

Wreckage of the Calais-Boulogne express after the recent disaster in which 17 persons were killed and 40 injured, it was one of the worst wrecks that ever occurred in France.

LINEMEN BRAVE WINTER PERILS IN MOUNTAINS

Face Cold, Snow and Avalanche to Fix Breaks in Wire Communication. HAVE MANY NARROW ESCAPES One Lineman Is Trailed for Hours by a Mountain Lion —Another Is Rescued From Avalanche After Harrowing Experience. Seattle, Wash. —Sometimes after a big storm in the mountains readers of the newspapers learn that “telegraph and telephone lines are down.” Usually the next day after reading such a dispatch, sometimes but a few hours later, the patron of a telephone or telegraph line will learn that the line is again open. It is a terrific storm that can cripple the wires of a big telegraph or telephone corporation more than 24 hours. The public has become accustomed to this thing. It expects as a matter of course that the lines will be open after only a few hours. In fact, actual interruption of traffic over message lines is very rare, for business may be routed perhaps half way round the American continent to avoid the trouble zone, but it will reach its destination some way. That’s what the superintendents of telegraph and telephone operating departments are paid for. i But who fixes these lines in the snow fields? How is it that they are seldom closed more than a few hours? Men do that work, for it is a man’s job—a job to try the quality of the bravest man. When some winter morning the rain clouds part and show for a moment the Cascades shining white in newfallen snow be reasonably sure that up along those wind-harassed sum-

mits, following the lonely trails, defying the menace of the gale and the avalanches, are the figures of men on snowshoes, patroling the wires that chatter incessantly with the gossip of the world these workers serve but seldom see.

At Seattle and Spokane the wire chiefs stand at the switchboards Watching the working conditions of every wire. Fifty miles away a storm swoops down on Snoqualmie pass. In the pass the world is suddenly blotted out by the white hand of the gale. The stinging snow and the wind screeches. And now and again the shrill key of the wind is blotted out by a roar that blocks the mountains as an avalanche sweeps over the cliffs. Trees fall and wires and poles go down.

Trailed by a Lion. At his' switchboard the wire chief suddenly loses Spokane. He connects up his Wheatstone bridge, a device which measures wire by the electric resistance. The bridge tells him how many miles away that break is. Strung along the .line through the mountains are the trouble hunters. They are quartered at ranches and emergency cabins, about six miles apart. The wire chief takes the key and summons the linemen just west of the break. A muffled figure on snowshoes, weighted down with 30 pounds of climbing irons and tools, pushes out into the storm. An hour later, perhaps a day later, this same lineman climbs some pole that leans into the abyss. The wind lashes him with a thousand stinging whips. It pounces upon him like a beast of prey and seeks to shake him to destruction. The lineman “cuts in” his little pocket telegraph and, bent low against the shrieking wind, calls his chief. “Chief? This is Smith from Heldrfdges. Wire O. K. here. Anything more? ’ “Huh? Yes, pretty nasty here. Been a mountain Hon following me through the brush all morning. It’s so close now I cart smell -its pesky wet hide. Guess he’s waiting, doyn At the foot of the pole for his breakfast. "Shoot it? So I would if the cuss would come out into the open and fight” - Then the lineman splices his wire, descends the pole and plods on to some fresh break the “bridge” has located, or, if he la very lucky, back

home to dry out and warm up, ready for the next call. To the linemen it has ceased to be a miracle that a man in the perils of the wilderness may cling buffeted to a pole and chat with men sitting warm and safe a hundred miles or more away, taking his instructions as the problems arise, getting word to cheer his lonely trail. ■ Perhaps the most unusual incident of this sort is told by the Post-Intel-ligen'cer as occurring a few years ago to a telephone lineman in the Cascades. Connecting a break in the line he was working just beneath a trembling avalanche. Without warning the snow slid upon it. It might have been his own voice or the shrillness of his whistle that disturbed the mountain’s equilibrium, or perhaps nothing greater than the snapping of a twig. Whatever it was caused the slide; in a second’s time the lineman was buried. When he dug his way out of the drift he saw at a glance that his trail to safety had been swept away. So delicately was the snow poised above an abyss that he dared not cross it. But by some miracle the line remained unbroken and a few feet of the pole yet protruded from the drifts.

Rescued From Avalanche. The lineman did the only thing possible—climbed the pole and cut in his portable telephone. He reported his plight and settled down to wait for help. Throughout the long day, while the storm raged about him, he talked to the operators in the towns. It needed all a man’s courage and endurance to cling to that pole and wait, wait, wait. Few men could have done it, and fewer still could have done it without-the stimulus of the friendly voices that came to him across the wires. Rescue did arrive at last. The res' cue party paused at the edge of the avalanche, They saw they could not cross on foot. There was a consultation. Finally they rigged up a bos’n’s chair, the little portable seat which linemen often hook across the wires and slide along on as they work between poles. In this rig hung to the wires a volunteer ventured out across the. avalanche. He brought back Iris companion, half dead from exposure. Nor is it always the men who suffer. Sometimes mountain linemen are married. There is the story of Mrs. N. B. Mayo of Laconia, a good example of what the women have to endure. The Postal Telegraph company has line patrolmen all along its right

“BALL OF THE GODS”

Mr. David Wagstaff of Tuxedo, N. Y., as “Siva,” one of the high gods of India, as he appeared In the Hindu division of the grand pageant at the “Ball of the Gods,” No more elaborate function has ever been arranged in New York than this one by the "Society of Beaux Arts Architects.” Two thousand persons representing the very elite of society, and hailing from practically every state in the Union, joined in making this affair, one which will- be remembered tor blage L whether the individual played the part of god or goddess, priest or priestess or whether they were there simply as the lowly vassals of the great, each wore a fancy costume. No one at the ball wore any other costume, than-, that prescribed by Hindu, Grgek or Egyptian of a bygone period.

of May through the Cascades. One of the stations is at Laconia, at the summit of Snoqualmie pass. The winter of 1912 will long be ren embered by mountain railroad men and mountain linemen. It 'brought "snows that tied up traffic of all sortsr Trains were stalled everywhere by the big drifts Rotaries got lost and buried by the slides. One freight train ’was'llTteT'Bodily off"its shelf on the mountainside and thrown into the bed of the Snoqualmie river at the foot of the cliff by a snoysllde. Lineman Mayo went out into one of the worst storms of that January. Wires to the east of his station had gone down and it was his job to get them up. When he left the storm was at its height, but it was his job to keep that line open. A railway man and a line patrolman are alike in one thing. In times of stress they have an obsession stronger even than religion—come what may, the line must be kept open.

So Mayo, who Is a husky young mountaineer, kissed his wife and three babies good-by and, strapping on his snowshoes, stepped outside the door of his little cabin at Laconia. When he had shuffled ten feet from the door he was lost to the sight of those anxious watchers in the tiny home. The wife turned back to her housekeeping and the care of her babies. And the snow fell. The day passed and the night passed and the snow fell, but the hours brought ho word from Mayo. The drifts rose above the windows of the little house at Laconia. No longer could the doors be opened. Imprisoned by Snow. Another night and another day and the snow falling steadily. The railway was tied up and the rotary crew worked all hours. There was no idle man or woman to dig paths for Mrs. Mayo or even to see how she fared. Now tlffe snow was above the' eaves of the little house. It was quite dark inside and the wood was running out. The wood pile was ten feet from the back door, but it might as well have been ten miles. Worse still, the snow had pushed open both doors and the woman could not close them. A week after Mayo left J. L. Coyle, district foreman for the Postal, got to Laconia. He knew the general direction in which the little company house was located. Looking across a plain of white he saw a tiny black speck, the gable end of a roof. A little curl of blue smoke marked the spot. It was there the lineman’s wife was waiting word of her husband. When Superintendent Coyle arrived* at the home and dug his way in he found the last of the fuel had been put into the stove. He brought the first word that Mayo was safe but storm-bound at the next station east of Laconia. He had been there a week, called to safety by orders- of the wire chief. That was one time that the line stayed down a while and at least one woman won’t forget It for a long time. Four years ago Lineman W.-Hull was stationed at Wolf’s cabin on Lake •Keechelus. Somewhere to the east the wires went down. The snow Was deep and still falling. Hull got instructions to locate the break. He got Wolf to accompany him. The two started east on snowshoes. The wire chief, watching his board at Seattle, noted a second break in the line not long after the men left Keechelus. The bridge showed the new break to be behind the men. They were cut off from communication east or west, somewhere out in the storm. Ben Hunegardt was the lineman at Easton. He was sent west with a helper. At noon the helper turned back. j. “You may be a fool, but I’m not going to have toy fyiends standing around and saying, ‘Don’t he’ look natural,’ after they find my body,” he declared.-

“All -right, Bill; good 7 by,” said Hunegardt briefly. He set his face to the storm and shuffled on. Refuge in Deserted Cabin. 4 Night came and the storm closed in about him. He stumbled forward. It was past midnight when Hunegardt made out a dark shape in the snow. It proved to be a portion of the roof of a deserted cabin. The weight of the snow had crushed in one end of the building. The gable of the standing end, which also held the fireplace chimney, stuck bravely above the drift. Hunegardt burrowed into the drift and, crawling under the wreckage, reached the unharmed portion of the cabin. He started a fire in the fireplace and stripped his socks to dry them. Sitting in the warmth he grew drowsy. Fight as he would he could not keep his eyes open. When he awoke with a start he found that morning- had dawned. The fire had burned to ashes on the hearth and his socks had burned with it. Sockless, Hunegardt thrust his feet into his heavy mountain shoes, strapped on the snowshoes and set out again, his face to the west. At about eleven o’clock that morning he found Hull and Wolf in a deserted cabin, where they had taken shelter. They had broken a pair of snowshoes and were helpless prisoners' of the storm. They weren’t alarmed. They knew help would come. These aje but a couple from the thousand and one tales of winter nights. Linemen tell them before the snow. They are part of theirj'shop talk.” To live these adventures and to return to tell them over constitute the “fun” of a lineman’s job. Whether they return to tell the talq or whether they perish in the doing they have but one ambition—-to keep the line open.

The Gift of God

By REV. W W. KETCHUM

Director of Practical Course Moody Bible Institute of Chicago

TEXT—The gift of God Is eternal life through Jesus jChrlgt our Lord.—Romans 6:23. A gift is something for which we do not work. It Is something that is

eternal life, when the text says that the free gift of God is eternal life. Eternal life —what is It? It •is the opposite of eternal death. Not eternal death does not mean nonexistence any more than eternal life means continued existence. God’s word teaches that the soul never dies, in the sense of going out of existence. It does say that “The soul that sinneth, it shall die,” but we must Interpret the words of the Bible by the Bible. Tbe-Blble, you know, is not only .IL book,. .that gives us the truth, but it defines the truth that It gives, and when It talks about eternal death it does not mean the annihilation of tjie soul. It is a truth that whatever exists always exists, so the scientists tell us, and the Bible says that the human soul lives forever. Well, what is eternal life then, and what is eternal death? Perhaps we might say that eternal life means being born of God, having the life of God. It is not our natural life prolonged into endless duration. It is the divine life Imparted to us, the very life of God himself communicated to a human soul.- To put if ih another way, we might say that eternal life is right existence, while eternal death is wrong existence, or, to put it in still another way, eternal life is living in the presence of God, while "eternal death is having the wrath of God abiding on one. Now, God’s gift is eternal life. Our text says that he offers us this life through Jesus Christ our Lord, that is, Christ is the medium through whom eternal life comes. What a wonderful thing it is to know that God has planned to give the human race, dead in trespasses and in sins, eternal life through his son. What is involved in that truth? A great deal, my friends. First of all, that on the cross Christ died for our sins. Secondly, that there upon the cross God laid upon Christ all our sins. Thirdly, that all our sins will be forgiven us on condition of our simple acceptance by faith of his Son, and the one who thus receives his Son, we are told, is born; “not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor. of the will of man, but of God.” I have met many people who were striving to get eternal life. I have even met Christians who have had the idea that eternal life becomes theirs, not through faith, but by works of righteousness which they do.

I shall never forget preaching in a little church in the Catskills, and talking about the way of salvation, when a brother arose and controverted what I said about the simple way of having eternal life through the acceptance by faith of Jesus Christ as one’s Savior. Another brother, thinking he would pour oil on the water, which was very troublous just then, told about two theologians who were crossing a stream. One of the theologians was arguing that salvation was by works, and the other that salvation was by faith,- when the oarsman, listening to the argument, began to row with one oar, and the boat went -round and round, when they said, “What are you doing?” and he replied, “Don’t you see, that oar with which I am rowing is works, and 2 ! don’t get anywhere,” and then he took the other oar and rowed with that, and went round and round in the other direction, and he said, “That oar, you see, ia faith, and when I row alone with that we do not get across the stream. To reach the other shore we must row with both oars.” That was a good story, but a poor illustration, for, while it sounds very plausible, the trouble is it is not scriptural. The Bible tells us that it is "not by works of righteousness that we have done, but according to his, mercy he saved us.” Change the illustration and have it true to the Scriptures. Jesus Christ is the oarsman, and is rowing the boat of salvation from earth to heaven, and <f we would reach the t other shore what we must do is by simple faith to get on board. I go down to the ferry slip in New York. Now. if I wish to go across to* the other side, _what I^must-dQ-M----step upon the ferry boat. The moment I do that I have trusted myself to the ferry, and it is for the ferry now, by its own power, to take me over. This crudely illustrates Christ’s work of salvation for us. We commit ourselves to him, and he, by his own power and work saves us.

not naturally our just due. It is something that someone graciously gives us because he or she is Interested in us. This text in the revision speaks of this gift as the free gift of God. Now there are many people who expect to pay their way into heaven —many who expect to compensate God for