Jasper County Democrat, Volume 20, Number 83, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 January 1918 — PHILOSOPHY OF WALT MASON [ARTICLE]

PHILOSOPHY OF WALT MASON

There ought to be some sort of law, forbidding noises rank and raw, at night, when people would repose, and do some snoring through the nose. At 10 o’clock I soak my head and straightway toddle off to bed, and hope to give my life new zest by having one good slice of rest. An old gray cat prowls round my shack and splits the welkin up the back. Joy riders scoot along the street and raise pink thunder and repeat. A young man with a cheap guitar comes singing where the damsels are, and their abode is just next door-—how can a weary mortal snore? The milkman’s wagon jolts along; the milkman smites his brazen gong, and makes the night a discord fierce, while selling cowjuice by the tierce. And now a dog lets out a wail; there’s tinware fastened to its tail, and like a shot I hear it scorch beneath my open sleeping porch. All through the night the uproar goes; one must be dead to find repose, and when at dawn I leave my couch, I have a large and lasting grouch, my head is sore beneath my tile, and I forget t,p sing and smile.

Mystery still attaches to certain explosive sounds, heard in various parts of the world and known to science as “brontides.” On the coast of Belgium! these sounds seem to come from the sea, and are called locally mistpoeffers.” In the Ganges delta of India, similar sounds are called “Barisal guns.” Brontides are well known in some parts of Italy, where they bear a great variety of names. In Haiti a sound of this character Is known as the "gouffre,” while In parts of Australia it is called the "desert sound.’’ Brontides mostly take the form of muffled detonations, of indefinite direction. Probably they are of subterranean origin. Studies of eccentricities in the transmission of sound through the atmosphere lead to the conclusion that some of the sounds hitherto reported as brontides were really due to cannonading or blasting.—Popular Science Monthly.