Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 54, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 March 1917 — KNOW UTILE CARE [ARTICLE]

KNOW UTILE CARE

BHANTY BOATMEjN" CERTAINLY LIVE A HAPPY LIFE. Will Sometimes Work, Though Pleasure Is the Real Business of Existence——Not Bothered About Rent or Taxes. If a man were privileged to choose his own manner of living, sorting over the whole collection of life’s various - forms,- ©f---existence, E »hd choosing the one he liked best, no matter what anybody or everybody said, it is likely that in all that strange collection he could find nothing more charming than the life of the shanty boatman, remark* the Indianapolis News. The shanty boatman lives anywhere, according tohis Inclination and the season. Be lives, anyway, according to his - desires. It sets you dreaming of all the faraway places to think of him. He moors his little house on the cool northern streams In the sumjnet, and drifts down the warm blue southern rivers during the winter. He is not averse to a bit of work now and then, enough to keep him In coffee and bacon, but he can choose his work as he goes, and leave it when he grows tired of it. Work is his avocation, and, as an avocation, work is not. an unpleasant thing. His real business is living, smoking, fishing, drifting. He pays neither rent nor taxes. He owns only a bit of an old shack, somehow made watertight and balanced so that

It will float. It is even 'possible, you must understand, for him to enter Into the life of city men, entering into it, however, with no sense of necessity or restraint. „ . A shanty boatman was not so long ago a resident of this very town. With a proper sense of the fitness of things he tied his boat to a fence. In line with the houses on the shore and even painted a number over the front door, It was a jolly looking little home, with the smoke coming out of the pipe in the roof and lamplight shining from the edge of the curtains, and, for all we know, he may have a regular job and have taken to city life very contentedly for a while. The advantage he had over the rest of us, of course, was that to get away to the faraway places, he had only to untie his boat and drift, accepting now and then a bit of "BT ttft-from « friendly craft; The thing that is likely Tq bother us, however, in choosing this sort of existence, is the question as to whether we. should really be a shanty boat-, man, or just pretend to be one. Stevenson was a sort of shanty boatman. At least, he did drift about through the country in a boat, and lived very contentedly and lazllyon the way. But Stevenson has written a book about his wanderings, and he was not really a shanty boatman at all. It is just the difference you may say, between art and vagrancy. Vagrancy has an idle jannnd, and art is a tempting thing. The very point In being a shanty boatman, however, Is in not having to try to be anything else, and, perhaps the best thing about it is the fact that it is so far removed from art as to be very nearly real.