I have said a good deal about the dog, pro and con, and I am not a rabid
dog abolitionist, for no one loves to have his clear-cut features licked
by the warm, wet tongue of a noble dog any more than I do, but rather
than see hydrophobia become a national characteristic or a leading
industry here, I would forego the dog.
Perhaps all men are that way, however. When they get a little forehanded
they forget that they were once poor, and owned dogs. If so, I do not
wish to be unfair. I want to be just, and I believe I am. Let us yield
up our dogs and tack the affection that we would otherwise bestow on
them on some human being. I have tried it and it works well. There are
thousands of people in the world, of both sexes, who are pining and
starving for the love and money that we daily shower on the dog.
If the dog would be kind enough to refrain from introducing his justly
celebrated virus into the person of those only who kiss him on the cold,
moist nose, it would be all right; but when a dog goes mad he is very
impulsive, and he may bestow himself on an obscure man. So I feel a
little nervous myself.
CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS.
Probably few people have been more successful in the discovering line
than Christopher Columbus. Living as he did in a day when a great many
things were still in an undiscovered state, the horizon was filled with
golden opportunities for a man possessed of Mr. C.'s pluck and ambition.
His life at first was filled with rebuffs and disappointments, but at
last he grew to be a man of importance in his own profession, and the
people who wanted anything discovered would always bring it to him
rather than take it elsewhere.
And yet the life of Columbus was a stormy one. Though he discovered a
continent wherein a millionaire attracts no attention, he himself was
very poor.
Though he rescued from barbarism a broad and beautiful land in whose
metropolis the theft of less than half a million of dollars is regarded
as petty larceny, Chris himself often went to bed hungry. Is it not
singular that the gray-eyed and gentle Columbus should have added a
hemisphere to the history of our globe, a hemisphere, too, where pie
is a common thing, not only on Sunday, but throughout the week, and yet
that he should have gone down to his grave pieless!
Such is the history of progress in all ages and in all lines of thought
and investigation. Such is the meagre reward of the pioneer in new
fields of action.
I presume that America today has a larger pie area than any other
land in which the Cockney English language is spoken. Right here where
millions of native born Americans dwell, many of whom are ashamed of the
fact that they were born here and which shame is entirely mutual between
the Goddess of Liberty and themselves, we have a style of pie that no
other land can boast of.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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