Rensselaer Journal, Volume 10, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 May 1901 — Picked Up Around Town [ARTICLE]

Picked Up Around Town

“I don’t care to be rich,” said a friend the other day, “for then I would not have the appetite I now enjoy. lam now so hungry for every meal that I could eat a graven image, and that is the sort of an appetite I enjoy.”

There are Jews and Christians, sheep and goats, and there are figs and thistles, and the poor we always have with us. But there is a girl in this town who is such an admirer of the books of James Lane Allen that she knows only two classes of people, or rather, people are divided into two classes, tnose who like James Lane Allen and those who do not like him. * * «

A man said the other day that unless you belong to some organization nowadays, there wouldn’t be enough people come to your funeral to bury you decently. That would be rather tough, to have to stand around waiting for some one to give you burial long after you had passed in your checks.

The man who takes “too many papers now” came in the other day. He said: “I like your paper firstrate, but I take so awful many papers that I can’t read them all nohow.” We braced ourselves against the side of the house, for from long experience we knew what was coming. He continued: “Now I don’t want you to think that I have got anything agin your paper, for I hain’t.” Up to that we feared he was going to do something to us. We do qot like to have things done to us by people who think they have been offended. Our health is not any too robust this summer, anyway. Then the man wbd thinks some day he will run tor the legislature, said: “I take nine papers?’ But we couldn’t see how that helped us out any. So be said he might take our paper again some day and we were restored. Up to that time we had expected to supend business. It is always very considerate of wise and great people of that sort to tell you that you are running such a good paper, but that they are taking so many papers that they can’t afford to take them all. We have yet been unable to discover how that buys print paper and ink and keeps clean office towels for us. Now, some day that man’s homely daughter will get married and this paper will not say that she was accomplished and handsome and well educated and kindhearted, but this paper will say that she was so ugly that she had to get up nights to rest her face. And that she couldn’t write her name without sticking her tongue out. This paper will say that she had a heart no bigger than a chicken’s and that her feet are so big she has to get her shoes made to order. When his son gets through school, this paper will say he is one of the brightest boys that ever came down the pike. He is so bright that the cows bite him as he walks along the streets, and when the old man runs for the legislature, this “vile sheet” will rake up the incident where he turned his «cows into the cemetery and let them eat the grass on his mother’s grave. And when he dies, this paper will discover what has been the matter with the neighbor’s chickens, that so many have Come up missing. And the community’s loss will be the henhouse’s gain.

A man told us the other day that he had but one regret of his youth. It is not that he was a bad young man nor that he hooked watermelons nor that he used to get his skates on. Nothing of the kind at ail. Indeed, he was not what you would call a wild man, and he never sowed any wild oats, although he is full of regret for what he did. He says about all the worry be has is bis youthful shortsightedness. He wishes he could recall the lines he wrote in autograph albums. Did you ever write in autograph albums ?

A man in this town calls Ben Davis apples hypocrites, because they are not nearly as good as they look.

One of our neighbors is very much afraid of being pecked by setting hens. He wanted to place some eggs under an old hen who persisted in

A man said the other day that he had been bothered a great deal “with that there gumbo.” It was figured afterwards that he meant lumbago.

setting. She wss bound to set, anyway, and be thought it would pay better to let her hatch out some chickens rather than to waste all her youth trying to hatch out a market garden by setting all summer -on a barrel of onions. So he invented a *way to get the eggs under her without danger of getting pecked. He took a corset box and removed both ends. This made a shute, which he placed under biddy; then he dropped an egg in the slot and allowed it to roll to place. Thus he got all the eggs where they would do the most good, and yet did not risk his life by getting henpecked.