She demurred to this on the ground that our acquaintance had been so brief, and that we had never been thrown together before. I told her that this would be no objection, and that my parents were so far away that I did not think they would make any trouble about it.
She said that she did not mind her parents so much as she did the violent temper of her husband.
I asked her if her husband had ever indulged in polygamy. She replied that he had, frequently. He had several previous wives. I convinced her that in the eyes of the law, and under the Edmunds bill, she was not bound to him. Still she feared the consequences of his wrath.
Then I suggested a desperate plan. We would elope!
I was now thirty-seven years old, and yet had never eloped. Neither had she. So, when the first streaks of rosy dawn crept across the soft, autumnal sky and touched the rich and royal coloring on the rugged sides of the grim old mountains, we got out of the shaft and eloped.
On Cyclones
I desire to state that my position as United States Cyclonist for this Judicial District is now vacant. I resigned on the 9th day of September, A.D. 1884.
I have not the necessary personal magnetism to look a cyclone in the eye and make it quail. I am stern and even haughty in my intercourse with men, but when a Manitoba simoon takes me by the brow of my pantaloons and throws me across Township 28, Range 18, West of the 5th Principal Meridian, I lose my mental reserve and become anxious and even taciturn. For thirty years I had yearned to see a grown up cyclone, of the ring-tail-puller variety, mop up the green earth with huge forest trees and make the landscape look tired. On the 9th day of September, A.D. 1884, my morbid curiosity was gratified.
As the people came out into the forest with lanterns and pulled me out of the crotch of a basswood tree with a “tackle and fall,” I remember I told them I didn’t yearn for any more atmospheric phenomena. The old desire for a hurricane that would blow a cow through a penitentiary was satiated. I remember when the doctor pried the bones of my leg together, in order to kind of draw my attention away from the limb, he asked me how I liked the fall style of Zephyr in that locality.
I said it was all right, what there was of it. I said this in a tone of bitter irony.
Cyclones are of two kinds, viz: the dark maroon cyclone; and the iron gray cyclone with pale green mane and tail. It was the latter kind I frolicked with on the above-named date.
My brother and I were riding along in the grand old forest, and I had just been singing a few bars from the opera of “Whoop ‘em Up, Lizzie Jane,” when I noticed that the wind was beginning to sough through the trees. Soon after that, I noticed that I was soughing through the trees also, and I am really no slouch of a sougher, either, when I get started.
The horse was hanging by the breeching from the bough of a large butternut tree, waiting for some one to come and pick him.
I did not see my brother at first, but after a while he disengaged himself from a rail fence and came where I was hanging, wrong end up, with my personal effects spilling out of my pockets. I told him that as soon as the wind kind of softened down, I wished he would go and pick the horse. He did so, and at midnight a party of friends carried me into town on a stretcher. It was quite an ovation. To think of a torchlight procession coming way out there into the woods at midnight, and carrying me into town on their shoulders in triumph! And yet I was once only a poor boy!
It shows what may be accomplished by anyone if he will persevere and insist on living a different life.
The cyclone is a natural phenomenon, enjoying the most robust health. It may be a pleasure for a man with great will power and an iron constitution to study more carefully into the habits of the cyclone, but as far as I am concerned, individually, I could worry along some way if we didn’t have a phenomenon in the house from one year’s end to another.
As I sit here, with my leg in a silicate of soda corset, and watch the merry throng promenading down the street, or mingling in the giddy torchlight procession, I cannot repress a feeling toward a cyclone that almost amounts to disgust.
The Arabian Language
The Arabian language belongs to what is called the Semitic or Shemitic family of languages, and, when written, presents the appearance of a general riot among the tadpoles and wrigglers of the United States.
The Arabian letter “jeem” or “jim,” which corresponds with our J, resembles some of the spectacular wonders seen by the delirium tremons expert. I do not know whether that is the reason the letter is called jeem or jim, or not.
The letter “sheen” or “shin,” which is some like our “sh” in its effect, is a very pretty letter, and enough of them would make very attractive trimming for pantalets or other clothing. The entire Arabic alphabet, I think, would work up first-rate into trimming for aprons, skirts, and so forth.
Still it is not so rich in variety as the Chinese language. A Chinaman who desires to publish a paper in order to fill a long felt want, must have a small fortune in order to buy himself an alphabet. In this country we get a press, and then, if we have any money left, we lay it out in type; but in China the editor buys himself an alphabet and then regards the press as a mere annex. If you go to a Chinese type maker and ask him to show you his goods, he will ask you whether you want a two or a three story alphabet.
The Chinese compositor spends most of his time riding up and down the elevator, seeking for letters and dusting them off with a feather duster. In large and wealthy offices the compositor sits at his case with the copy before him, and has five or six boys running from one floor to another, bringing him the letters of this wild and peculiar alphabet.
Sometimes they have to stop in the middle of a long editorial and send down to Hong Kong and have a letter cast specially for that editorial.
Chinese compositors soon die from heart disease, because they have to run up stairs and down so much in order to get the different letters needed.
One large publisher tried to have his case arranged in a high building without floors, so that the compositor could reach each type by means of a long pole, but one day there was a slight earthquake shock that spilled the entire alphabet out of the case, all over the floor, and although that was ninety-seven years ago last April, there are still two bushels of pi on the floor of that office. The paper employs rat printers, and as they have been engaged in assorting and distributing this mass of pi, it is called rat pi in China, and the term is quite popular.
When the editor underscores a word, the Chinese compositor charges $9 extra for italicizing it. This is nothing more than fair, for he may have to go all over the empire, and climb twenty-seven flights of stairs to find the necessary italics. So it is much more economical in China to use body type mostly in setting up a paper, and the old journalist will avoid caps and italics, unless he is very wealthy.
Arabian literature is very rich, and more especially so in verse. How the Arabian poets succeeded so well in writing their verse in their own language, I can hardly understand. I find it very difficult to write poetry which will be greedily snapped up and paid for, even when written in the English language, but if I had to paw around for an hour to get a button-hook for the end of the fourth line, so that it would rhyme with the button-hook in the second line of the same verse, I believe it would drive me mad.
The Arabian writer is very successful in a tale of fiction. He loves to take a tale and re-write it for the press by carefully expunging the facts. It is in lyric and romantic writing that he seems to excel.
The Arabian Nights is the most popular work that has survived the harsh touch of time. Its age is not fully known, and as the author has been dead several hundred years, I feel safe in saying that a number of the incidents contained in this book are grossly inaccurate.
It has been translated several times with more or less success by various writers, and some of the statements contained in the book are well worthy of the advanced civilization, and wild word painting incident to a heated presidential campaign.
Verona
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