When I was young and fresh and ruddy, and full of snap and vim, my parents used to make me study until my head would swim. I sat upon the schoolhouse bleachers, with pencil, book and slate, while sundry bald and weary teachers drilled knowledge through my pate. For some quick method I was yearning, some easy path to tread; "there is no royal road to learning," the bald old teachers said; "stick closely to the printed pages, all idleness eschew, and then, perhaps, in future ages, you'll know a thing or two." And when I left the school and college, to climb life's toilsome hill, I found my little store of knowledge would barely fill the bill. But nowadays the world moves quicker than in the long ago; old-fashioned methods make us snicker, they were so crude and slow. By sending seven wooden dollars to Messrs. Freaks and Freaks, they'll make our children finished scholars, and do it in three weeks. So let us close the schools and leave 'em to ruin and decay, and take the books and maps and heave 'em a million miles away; for now the kids take erudition in three-grain capsule form; the teacher loses the position that he so long kept warm. _Duke and Plumber_ Samantha Arabella Luke has gone abroad and caught a duke--a nobleman of gilded ease, who has a standard blood disease. She'll build again his stately halls, and pay for papering the walls; she'll straighten up his park and grounds, and buy him nags to ride to hounds; she'll tear the checks from out her book, to pay the butler and the cook, whose wages have been in arrears for maybe twenty-seven years. In fifty ways she'll spend the scads, the good old rocks that were her dad's; and all the nobles in the land will greet her with the arctic hand, and snub her in her husband's lair, and pass her up with stony stare. And ere a year has run its course, the duke will hustle for divorce, and Arabella's tears will drop upon the marble floors, kerflop! Samantha's cousin, Mary Ann, has hooked up with the plumber man, a gent of industry and peace, whose face is often black with grease. They dwell together in a cot surrounded by a garden plot, and there she raises beans and tripe, while he is fixing valve and pipe. He takes his money, like a man, and hands it o'er to Mary Ann, and she is salting down his wage where it will help them in old age. O reader, who has made a fluke? Samantha with her pallid duke, or fat and sassy Mary Ann, who gathered in the plumber man? _Human Hands_