Humorous stories, American; United States -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
[Illustration]
If you will knock the top off this trunk you will discover the clothing
of a mean man. In case you can not knock the lid entirely off, burst it
open a little so that the great, restless, seething traveling public can
see how many hotel napkins and towels and cakes of soap he has stolen.
[Illustration]
This is the trunk of a young girl, and contains the poor but honest garb
she wore when she ran away from home. Also the gay clothes she bought
after a wicked ambition had poisoned her simple heart. They are the
gaudy garments and flashy trappings for which she exchanged her honest
laugh and her bright and beautiful youth. Handle gently the poor little
trunk, as you would touch her sad little history, for her father is in
the second-class coach, weeping softly into his coarse red handkerchief,
and she, herself, is going home on the same train in her cheap little
coffin in the baggage car to meet her sorrowing mother, who will go up
into the garret many rainy afternoons in the days to come, to cry over
this poor little trunk and no one will know about it. It will be a
secret known only to her sorrowing heart and to God.
A MEDIEVAL DISCOVERER
XXI
Galilei, commonly called Galileo, was born at Pisa on the 14th day of
February, 1564. He was the man who discovered some of the fundamental
principles governing the movements, habits, and personal peculiarities
of the earth. He discovered things with marvelous fluency. Born as he
was, at a time when the rotary motion of the earth was still in its
infancy and astronomy was taught only in a crude way, Galileo started in
to make a few discoveries and advance some theories of which he was very
fond.
He was the son of a musician and learned to play several instruments
himself, but not in such a way as to arouse the jealousy of the great
musicians of his day. They came and heard him play a few selections, and
then they went home contented with their own music. Galileo played for
several years in a band at Pisa, and people who heard him said that his
manner of gazing out over the Pisan hills with a far-away look in his
eye after playing a selection, while he gently up-ended his alto horn
and worked the mud-valve as he poured out about a pint of moist melody
that had accumulated in the flues of the instrument, was simply grand.
At the age of twenty Galileo began to discover. His first discoveries
were, of course, clumsy and poorly made, but very soon he commenced to
turn out neat and durable discoveries that would stand for years.
It was at this time that he noticed the swinging of a lamp in a church,
and, observing that the oscillations were of equal duration, he inferred
that this principle might be utilized in the exact measurement of time.
From this little accident, years after, came the clock, one of the most
useful of man's dumb friends. And yet there are people who will read
this little incident and still hesitate about going to church.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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