Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 190, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 August 1917 — WAS PRISONER IN A CROCK [ARTICLE]

WAS PRISONER IN A CROCK

Boy's Plight Analogous to That of Many Whose Heads Are Stuck Fast In Worries. An earthenware crock which a boy, playing policeman, had put on his head as a helmet, slipped down and stuck fast The boy made a record resignation from the police force, and his muffled howls attracted prompt attention. His alarmed mother tugged at the crock until the boy’s face was sorely bruised; then excited neighbors took turns until his neck was . painfully twisted. / Meanwhile the howling boy was suffering terrifying visions of lifelong imprisonment, as secure as In a dungeon, and of his head from year to year growing larger and tighter In the crock. The poor boy’s trouble shut him in from all the rest of the world with an ingrowing Imagination. But that Is only what anyone’s trouble of any sort Is apt to do for one, observes the Christian Herald. The mother, the father, who had been sent for, and a half hundred neighbors, who had invited themselves under the delusion that curiosity is sympathy, finally settled down to solemn conclave and decided that, since the crock had slipped on it must be possible for it to £e slipped off again, but that only a skillful surgeon could perform the delicate operation. A delegation was on its way with the boy to a surgeon’s office, when a resourceful motorman, seeing the situation, smashed the crock with his controller handle. Thus, by the simplest of processes, the boy’s trouble was suddenly ended. And it is by equally simple and direct processes that most of the troubles of most of us may be ended. With our heads stuck fast in worries, we rack our brains over a thousand roundabout ways of slipping them off—and the harder we tug at them the more they hurt—but we overlook the simple expedient o. smashing the crock. Like the lad, we -ce terrifying visions of the f.<- °; we suffer our feelings t r - be cruelly lacerated and our bodes to be twisted and torn in mental anguish and despair; we run here and there for symsithy and advice and help; and It does not occur to us how easy it is Just to break the crock. z Most of the erocks that seem to slip down over our heads are merely imaginary, anyway. They require no street car controller handles to smash them. All they call for is a mental controller handle. Did it ever occur to you that most of our troubles come, as this lad’s did, through trying to appear what we aren’t?