I once knew a most exemplary woman who became greatly interested in the
wiping out of a church debt, and who did finally succeed in wiping out the
debt, but in its last expiring death struggle it gave her a wipe from
which she never recovered. She had succeeded in begging the milk and the
cream, and the eggs and the sandwiches, and the use of the dishes and the
sugar, and the loan of an oyster, and the use of a freezer and fifty
button-hole bouquets to be sold to men who were not in the habit of wearing
bouquets, but she could not borrow a circular artist to revolve the crank
of the freezer, so she agitated it herself. Her husband had to go away
prior to the festivities, but he ordered her not to crank the freezer. He
had very little influence with her, however, and so to-day he is a
widower. The church debt was revived in the following year, and now there
isn't a more thriving church debt anywhere in the country. Only last week
that church traded off $75 worth of groceries, in the form of asbestos
cake and celluloid angel food, in such a way that if the original cost of
the groceries and the work were not considered, the clear profit was $13,
after the hall rent was paid. And why should the first cost of the
groceries be reckoned, when we stop to think that they were involuntarily
furnished by the depraved husband and father.
I must add, also, that in the above estimate doctors' bills and funeral
expenses are not reckoned.
[Illustration]
A Collection of Keys.
I'm getting to be quite a connoisseur of hotel keys as I get older. For
ten years I have been collecting these mementoes of travel and cording
them away in my key cabinet. Some have square brass tags attached to them,
others have round ones. Still others affect the octagonal, the fluted, the
hexagonal, the scalloped, the plain, the polished, the docorated, the
chaste, the Etruscan, the metropolitan, the rural, the cosmopolitan, the
shirred, the tucked, the biased, the high neck and long sleeve or the
_decolette_ style of brass check.
I have, so far, paid my bills, but I have not returned the keys to my
room. Hotel proprietors will please take notice and govern themselves
accordingly. When my visit to a pleasant city has become a beautiful
memory only, I all at once sit down on something hard and find that it is
the key to my former room at the hotel. Sitting down on a key tag of
corrugated brass, as big as a buckwheat pancake, would remind most anyone
of something or other.
I generally leave my tooth-brush in my room and carry off the key as a
kind of involuntary swap, so far as the hotel proprietor is concerned, but
I do not think it is a mutual benefit, particularly. I cannot use the key
to a hotel 500 miles away, and so far as a tooth-brush is concerned, it
generally has pleasant associations only for the owner. A man is fond of
his own toothbrush, but it takes years for him to love the tooth-brush of
a stranger.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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