Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 226
“Did you see where those fellows out on Lake Erie got lost on the ice?” cheerily interrupted a man who hadn’t spoken yet. “Certainly a corker, wasn’t it.”
“I mind the time,” said the old man in the corner, “when I’ve seen the whole of Lake Erie frozen across, right from Port Stanley over to Cleveland.”
“For the matter of that,” said another, “you take those big lakes up north, even the great big ones, they all freeze solid, — Temagami and Mistassini — all of them.”
“They say they’ll have a hard time for ice this year, though,” said another man, shaking his head, “there were a lot of places where the cut was no good — couldn’t get more than eight inches or a foot.”
“Well, I don’t know,” said the man who spoke just before. “Why use lake ice at all? You can get factory ice now nearly everywhere; in our business we’re putting in a frozen air plant that will cut out ice altogether.”
At this point, just providentially and without design, there fell a little pause and the Adventure Man got started again.
“Well, anyway,” he resumed, “I kept going through the bush as hard as I could peg, on my snowshoes, for I knew if I didn’t meet the other man before dark I couldn’t do it at all. You see after a while the trail wasn’t broken at all and it wasn’t blazed, — it was just straight going in a compass line. . . .”
Some of the listeners nodded and grunted. The word “compass” caught their fancy for a moment.
“Well, I began to reckon by the distance I had gone that I must pretty soon meet this other man and just then I came to a spot where the trees thinned out a little so that there was a sort of open spot with the last of the daylight showing on it. And there I saw right bang in front of me, say fifty yards away, not one timber wolf but about a dozen of them. They were all packed together, and all working away at something that was lying in the snow. I stood stockstill in my tracks. I didn’t dare move. And then just for a minute I got a glimpse of what was lying in the snow, and I can tell you my blood just ran cold when I saw what it was that was attracting those wolves.”
The speaker stopped with a dramatic pause, challenging attention. Then he lit his pipe, quietly and firmly, to lend emphasis to what he was going to say. But he was too late.
“I see the Ontario government are going to raise the bounty on wolves,” said one of the others quietly.
“I don’t think they need to,” said another. “As a matter of fact the wolf’s pelt is quite worth while in itself. Of course there are some of the timber wolves that are apt to be in poor condition (I’m in the fur business) and you can’t use the pelt. But with others there’s good value in it.”
“They’re not in it with fox,” said a third man, and there was another chorus,— “I’ve seen the time when black foxes were as thick — —” “I tell you it’s all right if you can get them in the bush, but this fox farm industry is all off.”— “All off! Why, there was a fellow down home that got, for a single pair, a single pair mind you, two thousand dollars!”
It took some time for the speakers to remember the Adventure Man. But at last he managed to start again. “I knew it was my turn next,” he said. “I had no gun on me, but I had a sheath knife. I reached down quietly and I cut the thongs of the snowshoes. There was a big pine just beside me and by good luck a branch not more than seven or eight feet off the ground. I got all ready for a spring but just at that very moment . . .”
But just at that very moment the car conductor put his head in through the doorway ——
“Ottawa! Ottawa!” he called. “All change, gentlemen.”
“Great Cæsar!” exclaimed all the crowd at once. “Ottawa, all ready!!”
And with that they broke, scattered and dissolved.
But no doubt the Man with the Adventure Story is still telling it somewhere, somehow, to somebody.
Short Circuits in Education
A Year at College AS REVEALED IN THE NEWER COMIC JOURNALISM
THE DISCOVERY HAS recently been made that a college is a comic place. People who were never inside the gates of a university, and who think that a simultaneous equation is a medicine, now spend their time reading the new college comic magazines and building up from them their ideas of what college life is like. After they have read enough about it and seen enough pictures of it, they get crazy to go to the comic college.
Here is what it seems like to such readers:
A college itself is represented by the edge of a beautiful building with little clouds floating past it, and two college girls walking in front of it. One of the girls is called Tootsie and the other is called Maisie, and Tootsie is saying to Maisie:
“What is the name of your new fiancé?” and Maisie answering:
“I don’t know. I forgot to ask.”
If Tootsie and Maisie are not seen walking in front of the college, they are presented sitting up in one of the dormitory rooms. One of them at least always sits on the window-sill and she has a comb in one hand and a looking-glass in the other.
It is really the old picture of the sirens who sat on the rocks to coax Ulysses, but as the man who drew it never went to college, he doesn’t know that. And it doesn’t matter anyway. The sirens have got nothing on Tootsie and Maisie. They belong with the Nautch girls of Nautchia and the Hitchi-Kitchi girls of the Marquesas Islands. In fact they are all right — except for their passion for repeating little jokes.
“Why did you let Gussie kiss you last night?” asks Maisie.
“Because I didn’t know it was Gussie,” says Tootsie.
After which they go on combing their bobs and eating “fudge.” These are the standing occupations of a comic college girl.
If Tootsie and Maisie are not called by those names, they are designated Fitzie and Nessie or Totsie and Flotsie — or, in short, anything that suggests the Marquesas Islands.
Meanwhile, while Tootsie and Maisie are getting ready for their college day, we step across into one of the men’s dormitories just the other side of the little clouds, and here, seated also on window-sills are two “College Men” — Gussie and Eddie.
The comic college man has a face cut square, like a strawberry box, a shoulder like a right angle, and a coat shaped like the forty-fifth proposition in Euclid. His face is drawn in a few lines, with the brains left out, and if he ever knew algebra, he gives no sign of it. In short, he is a nut.
When we see them, Nut No. 1, Gussie, is seated on the window-sill playing a ukulele, and Nut No. 2 has his ukulele ready to play as soon as Gussie runs out of ideas and jokes. The college man sleeps with his ukulele.
Gussie and Eddie have apparently the same passion for little dialogue jokes as Tootsie and Maisie. These jokes, a generation ago, were put into the mouths of negroes and were called “coon jokes”; or else they were divided up between “Mike” and “Pat” and called “Irish humor”; but now they are known as “college wit,” and every man at college cracks one every ten minutes.
Consequently, when Gussie the Nut has finished his tune on the ukulele, he lays down the instrument and:
Gussie— “Have a cigarette, old man?”
Eddie— “What’s wrong with it?”
Then they take their flasks out of their hip pockets, have a drink, and hit up another tune on the ukulele. This is the way in which the comic college man prepares for his college day.
When the second tune is done and another joke cracked, Gussie and Eddie set out from their room to cross the campus and their walk is always timed so that as they come into one side of the picture, Tootsie and Maisie come into the other.
The campus is represented by two trees and one bird, and a piece of a college window and the edge of a professor’s gown, but away in the background are a group of little figures — nuts and sirens drawn very small — which are intended to indicate that something is going on. Most likely there is a college rush, because college life is so arranged that there are “rushes” and “pushes” and “hustles” going on from September to June.
Any one who studies the college in the comic papers knows that the session begins with the big “Freshman rush” that lasts two weeks and is followed by the “Sophomore push” that goes right on till the football “hustle” begins; after that there is the Christmas Rush and the New Year’s Hootch, and the “scram” and the “prom” and the “punch,” ending with the grand final “rush” at commencement time. All these keep poor nuts Gussie and Eddie pretty busy with their little ukuleles and their flasks, and Tootsie and Maisie hardly have time to keep their hair done.
When they meet in the morning on the campus, all their eight eyes (they have eight among them) are turned at the same sort of angle, four to meet four. This stands for “college love,” and it means that Gussie and Eddie have a “crush” on Tootsie and Maisie, and Tootsie and Maisie have a “smash” on Gussie and Eddie. College love is always pictured as a series of concussions.
When they go past one another, either set of two (whichever has the turn gets off a dialogue joke):
Maisie— “Don’t you think that Gussie looks awfully like Eddie?”
Tootsie— “He does. But Eddie doesn’t look a bit like Gussie.”
This joke was once considered one of the best in Alabama, but now it has been changed to a piece of college wit.
When they have finished their walk across the campus, Gussie and Eddie and Tootsie and Maisie next appear all seated in a terribly comical place called a classroom, taking part in a comical performance called a “recitation.” This is carried on under the guidance of a “professor” or “prof,” and everybody who reads the college press knows exactly what he looks like. He has a bald head and a face like a hard-boiled egg with the shell off, held upside down, and much the same expression as the map of Africa.
A recitation apparently consists of another set of “coon jokes” just like the ones used up in the dormitories. Thus:
Gussie (coming in late for the class)— “What is the Prof. talking about?”
Eddie— “I don’t know. He hasn’t said.”
All through the recitation and the dialogue, Tootsie and Maisie are shooting across the classroom at Gussie and Eddie appreciative smiles and glances that would knock a Marquesas Islander out of a bamboo tree at a hundred yards.
College love moves fast.
In fact, you can see it grow from day to day and from picture to picture. Here are Gussie and Eddie and Maisie and Tootsie at a college dance and Gussie is doing the fox-trot — or the dog-walk — with Tootsie and is saying:
Gussie— “What would you say if I asked leave to kiss you?”
Tootsie— “I’ll tell you afterwards.”
Or here they are similarly at an evening reception, or a college “crush,” or a “push,” or at a “prom,” and whatever they are doing the four are always shooting glances at one another and cracking off dialogue, and when night separates them Gussie and Eddie sit up on their window-sill and play the ukulele and drink out of their flasks, and Maisie and Tootsie eat fudge and comb their bobs.
Oh, there’s no doubt it is a great life, the college life. Ever so many people have said that the college “life” is better than the mere study, and I must say I think so too. Give me Tootsie and Maisie and Fitzie and Nessie all around me, and I’ll guarantee never to study again.
But meantime the pictures take on a cast that means that the year is drawing to a close. The dialogue jokes now have reference to the “exams,” and to Gussie and Eddie, the poor nuts, getting “ploughed,” or “flunked,” or “plunked,” or “dropped out,” or “let down,” or “tripped up” — or any of the other things that happen to nuts in comic colleges. Such as this:
Tootsie— “I heard Eddie will have to leave the college.”
Maisie— “No, the college will have to leave Eddie.”
Or else:
Maisie— “What degrees is Gussie going to take?”
Tootsie— “About ninety degrees Fahrenheit. He’s got to work in a coal mine.”
All this stands for final scholarship. With it are another set of little jokes that indicate the culmination and crown of college love.
Maisie— “Are you and Gussie engaged?”
Tootsie— “No, but he is.”
And then, just as we expected, there duly appears the presentation of the final comic event of Graduation Day, with Maisie and Tootsie in graduation gowns straight from the Marquesas Islands and the two nuts with high collars on (the kind they use in Spain to kill criminals) and flat mortarboards, and they are all going to get their degrees after all, and they are all going to get married, and play the ukulele and live happily ever afterwards.
It’s a great life, this college stuff.
So let us bless the new comic magazine, after all. It has performed once again the magic literary trick of making the picture better than the reality. I am all for it.
The Unintelligence Test WHAT A WELL-EQUIPPED MAN OUGHT TO KNOW
A GREAT AMERICAN banker, speaking the other day in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (it was not his fault), talked of the requirements of modern banks and the type of man needed. “We don’t want,” he said, “young men who come to us thinking that they know it all; young men who have studied banking in a correspondence course and suppose that they understand it. We want men who will begin with us from the beginning. The less they know, the better.”
In the same way, one of our biggest railway men (290 pounds) is reported as saying recently: “We don’t want young men who know anything about a railroad when they come to us. I’d rather take in a boy who didn’t know one end of a box car from another, than a boy who had ‘studied railroading.’ ”
On the same topic, a leading steamship man spoke with something like heat, or at least, steam: “We can’t get the young men we want. They are not ignorant enough.”
And the president of a steel company: “They know too much. When I entered the steel business, I knew nothing. I couldn’t even add up a column of figures; I still can’t. How is it that we can get no young men like that to-day?”
In fact, in one shape or other, the same cry goes up all over the country.
So it occurred to me that it might be a good thing to try to meet this demand at the source and stop it. I have, therefore, opened a bureau — or rather I am just going to open a bureau — where young men properly disqualified may find unsuitable occupation.
My plan is something like this. First of all, I intend to sift out the candidates by a series of questionnaires. These are based on the different sets of questions that I see in all periodicals proposed as tests of how much people ought to know. The only difference is that my questions are a little more advanced, more technical. They will run something as follows:
EFFICIENCY QUESTIONNAIRE
How Many of the Following Questions Can You Answer?
Write Plainly. Use Ink. Enclose Ten Cents.
(1) Who is President of the United States?
(2) How many legs has a dog?
(3) What large country is situated between Canada and Mexico?
(4) What is the French for the following: adieu, omelette, pâté de foie gras?
(5) What relation is the Prince of Wales to his father, George V?
(6) How much is 1 and 1?
All the applicants will be put through a thorough drill on questions of this sort. If they show any signs of answering them, they are out of it at once and I go no further.
But if the candidates have been thus drilled and brought to a high pitch of equipment, there is just one other detail to which I shall attend before sending them out into the world. They must not ask for money. I notice that all the great authorities I have just quoted — the railway presidents, and the bankers, and so on — lay stress on this. Young men, they say, must not be anxious about their initial salary. They must start low.
My young men are going to start so low that they will be right down on their uppers.
Then when I get them into shape, I will send them out with letters of recommendation composed in the following fashion:
THE NEW EFFICIENCY
Sample Letter of Presentation for Young Man Entering Bank
To the President,
The First, or Last, National Bank.
Dear Sir:
Allow me to present to you as an applicant for suitable employment my young friend, Mr. Edward Edwin Beanhead. He is anxious to fill a post in your bank. Mr. Beanhead assures me that he has never been inside a bank in his life, but thinks that he would know a bank if he saw it, and in any case would soon get to recognize one at sight. Mr. Beanhead knows absolutely nothing of money, has no knowledge of bookkeeping, and can not count. As to salary, just give him what he is worth, no more. I enclose a list of questions whose answers he doesn’t know.
P.S. Don’t let him into the safe, he couldn’t get out.
Letter of Commendation
for
Young Man Entering a Railway
To the President of the American Pacific Railway (or, give it to the Ohio Central, or the Trans-Siberian if you can’t use it).
This is to commend to your consideration a young man filling all requirements for railroad services as laid down by yourself and others. He is anxious to enter the service of a railway — either steam or horse, he doesn’t care. I asked him if he knew one end of a box car from the other, and he answered, “Which end?” So I think he comes up to standard. But be careful not to run over him.
P.S. I can send his pedigree if you want it.
The recommendations of the bureau that I wish to establish will not be confined entirely to brain-workers. It will include also those without brains, who apply for positions not involving work. For example, I am prepared right at the start to offer an applicant for the post of night-watchman, as in the form letter below:
