Jasper County Democrat, Volume 18, Number 61, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 October 1915 — GANDERBONE’S FORECAST. For November. [ARTICLE]

GANDERBONE’S FORECAST. For November.

November gets its name from the Latin novem (nine), and was placed in the calendar by Numa Pompilius. Numa was a great lover of Indian summer, and he inserted November into the calendar for the purpose of prolonging it. He said it was not good for the Romans, who were rapidly leaving the country and going into the city, to lose that homely relish for life which had always characterized them in the fall. He said that if all men were like Lucullus, who dined with his friends every night upon broiled lobster and patie-de-foi-gras, it would not' be long until the empire would not have any stomach and people like the Goths and Vandals would overcome it. He set everybody an example by supplying the royal table with everything that makes appetizing the autumn. He had a royal smokehouse, and there was nothing finer in the evening than the perfume of hickory wood and sugar ham floating through the crevices of that institution. He kept pigs feet in brine. He had a barrel of cider on his north porch. He prized chitlins, and could eat cracklings. His apple butter was imitated in all the big grocery stores. He was the inventor of the Roman-beauty apple, and it was customary during affairs of state fa him to dive into his mahogany desk and get out a big red apple for everybody. ,He could eat a hatful of persimmons, and it was onp of the humors of Rome to watch for him on his tiled porch in the early morning turning his pawpaws. He was a man attuned to all the romance of nature, and to see him stealing ouj at lunch for a piece of pumpkin pie was to assure all Rome of his profound ' democracy. A good many Romans thought it impossible to prolong Indian summer; but Numa thought it could be done, and it generally can.

November was greatly loved by the Romans. It was then the great generals like Caesar got in their deadly work upon the enemies of the empire.. There was no mud to get stuck in. Soldiers were full of vim and vigor. Horses danced. Much the same spirit that possesses a football team animated the Roman army. The soldier could see his breath on the air. He had to jump around lively to keep his feet warm. He arose in the morning with a spring in—his , back, and when he swung his shield on his left arm and took his sword in his right hand he was a bear. Rome was a conquering nation. She tried to maintain three or four fronts all the time, and in the Fall she always made a big drive into the four cardinal points of the compass. If it were easy in Egypt, she shifted troops to Spain, where it was probably hard. Thus it was that with each year the Empire grew larger, and when the Romans sat down to their Thanksgiving dinner they had great things for which to be thankful. That theory of life fell into decay after Rome fMI, but it is coming back now. The Kaiser is making everybody in Europe believe in it. pretty fast, and we are beginning to believe it over here. It is a question whether it is the correct theory of life. No man can say. Caesar thought so, and in a debate with the pacifists in the Roman Forum he beat them so badly that Brutus and two or three others assassinated him when he left the hall. Marc Antony said this clinched the argument for Caesar, but he subsequently concluded that this was small satisfaction to Caesar and had his murderers executed.

The festive calf will sniff the breeze And spring the hinges in his back, And helping out the plumber's ease. The plumbing will begin to crack. The wild goose tooling down the sky Will hit it up another speed, The furnace will begin to sigh Against the coal provider’s need, The lusty hired man will bawl For thicker blankets on his bed, The quail will sound his plaintive call ' Before the hunter shoots him dead. The village loafer will bestir Himself indoors with some regrets, And the girls wij( show us bits of fur “ Just peeping from their lettes.

It does beat all what styles become, and what the womenfolk wiL *ear. It keeps the world from getting glum and yielding wholly to despair. A season they are cov and sweet, another season fierce and bold. They keep it up from head to feet as long as men provide the Wild. A bit of fur is what they feel they ought to wear this year of grace, or whether flying from the heel, or maybe glued upon the face. One sees it waving in the breeze from bonnets, collars and from socks; it may be seal from Greenland’s seas, or nothing more superb than