Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 233
First question for you: —
John has 87 marbles, but he gives seven-ninths of them to Edwin, who in turn gives Arthur four-fifths of the difference between what he keeps and what John had at the start. How many marbles has Edwin?
What! You can’t answer it? But, my dear sir, that’s the kind of thing that your little son of ten is doing every day. What? You say you will get your stenographer to do it. Yes, but in school you don’t have a stenographer. Come along, try another.
Mary is twenty years old. Mary is twice as old as Anne was when Mary was as old as Anne is now. How old is Anne?
Stuck again? And yet you are so fond of explaining to the children at home what a whale you were in arithmetic. I’m afraid that your chance of getting out at four is beginning to look mighty poor. No game of golf for you to-day. Not if that man eleven feet high knows it.
Well, let the arithmetic go. Perhaps next time you see your children working out “homework” in a corner of the living room, you’ll be a little more compassionate. But just before we leave arithmetic, would you like to realize about how much of it you really have left? This — the following — is about your present size:
A and B play billiards. A, having made eleven points, gains three more. How many has he now?
Or perhaps you might even manage this:
A and B play bridge. A, having lost 67 cents, offers in payment one dollar. How much must B return to A in order to equate the difference?
So you can see just where you stand as compared with these wonderful children of ours. Let’s go on to the next class. Oh! you’d like to stop a few minutes and light a cigar! Can’t be done. Don’t you remember that in the dear old happy days, school never stopped. You’d like to telephone? You are not allowed to telephone. You’ve just remembered that you wanted to go down the street and buy some fishing tackle? Well, you can’t go down the street. Not till after four and perhaps not even then. Come on into the next class and let’s go on with the dear old happy days.
This time it is geography. We are going to learn the rivers of South America. Don’t you remember how fascinating it was?
Let’s begin now. Just say them over a few times — the Amazon with its branches, the Madeiro, the Puro, the Ukayale, the Ukuleke ——
What? you’ve forgotten the first one already? Start again — the Madeiro, the Madingo, the Colorado Claro, the Hari Kari, the Berri-Berri.
Eh! how’s that? It just occurs to you that all these fool names are crazy and that there’s no sense in learning them. You can just as well tell your stenographer to call up the express company and ask them. Yes, but don’t you remember that in the dear old school days, you had to learn this kind of stuff by the yard? Never mind, we’ll let you off the remaining forty minutes of geography. Come along and let’s have a whirl at English literature.
Ah! now you really brighten up. It’s a favorite theory of yours that the literature class was a real treat, or at least that if you only had listened to your teacher properly, you would have got something for your whole life.
Let’s see. This is the class in English poetry and the children are to study Gray’s “Elegy.” Now sit tight in your seat and listen for the questions. First of all the teacher will read out a verse ——
“The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike the inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”
Now come the questions: —
“Boast — first boy, how do you distinguish boast from boost?”
“Would it be an improvement, second boy, to say, ‘The boost of heraldry’? Distinguish this again, third boy, from ‘the booze of heraldry.’ ”
“Heraldry — fourth boy, what is Greek for this?”
“Now in the next line, fifth boy, ‘all that beauty.’ All what beauty? and in the line below, sixth boy, ‘lead but to’; explain the difference between but to and but in.”
“Now for the whole class — take your exercise books and write a life of the poet Gray, being particular to remember that his grandfather was born in Fareham, Hants, or perhaps in Epsom, Salts.”
Well, well! You can’t stand it any more! You want to break away and make a rush for your club. How cozy it will feel when you seat yourself opposite a large beefsteak and when you light up a cigar as huge and dark as the Amazon itself. How glad you are that the waiter will not suggest that he will cut you off five-eights of two-thirds of the steak and keep the rest warm for twice as many minutes as half the time needed to eat the remainder.
I tell you, sir, that as you sit there with your napkin to your chin and look at the spring sunlight on the young leaves, you have reason to feel happy that your school days are over. You are wondering whether you will take half an hour’s nap before you take the train to the golf club. And meantime the little boys are just going back to school, to give the Amazon another crack.
Won’t you henceforth, my dear sir, drop that stuff about the happy school days, and try to make it up to the little sufferers when the holidays begin again?
The Fall Fair and the Autumn Exposition A COMPARISON OF MIDGEVILLE IN 1880 AND MIDGE CITY IN 1928
LET US CONSIDER the 1928 season for the Fall Fairs. The first one opened up at Moose Factory, Hudson’s Bay (first turn to the left after Halifax), on August the first (close of the summer); and the last one is to be held at Bahia Todos los Santos (Lower California) on December the sixth (first day of autumn).
Meantime, though people fail to notice it, the Fall Fairs, like everything else in this world, have been undergoing a constant process of change and evolution. The man who first put a fat woman in a tent and called her a side-show was a real Christopher Columbus; and the genius who first arranged a (high) bicycle race in which one of the contestants could break his neck, was second only in influence to Thomas Edison.
If one wants the proof of it, let us turn back a moment and compare the Fall Fair as it was and the Autumn Exposition as it is. We can take as our basis of comparison the fair that was held in Midgeville in 1880 and the exposition that is to go on this autumn in Midge City. They are really the same place except that in such a long time changes have come. Where the Methodist church used to stand, there is now the Pandemonium Building; and on the corners where you used to go into a saloon to buy your drinks, you now go into a drug store.
FALL FAIR AT MIDGEVILLE
Anno Domini 1880
The Fall Fair at Midgeville was advertised by a distribution of circulars which lasted for about one afternoon. That is to say, a man drove out with a horse and buggy and a little packet of printed notices, which he handed out to each of the country stores that had a post office in it. He covered a radius of five miles in each direction, and beyond that the Fall Fair was just a rumor. The advertisements just said:
MIDGEVILLE FALL FAIR NEXT TUESDAY
Now compare what happens in 1928.
The Big Fall Show (The Autumn Exposition) at Midge City is preceded by a campaign of advertising which starts in the spring and never stops till the Big Show is pulled off in October. It is conducted by a publicity manager and a staff of college students who have taken a course of two semesters and a half on Fall Fair Advertising and it reaches all the way from the Middle West till the waves of it lap New York itself. It is done with placards such as
ARE YOU GOING TO MIDGE CITY?
But even that is rather inferior advertising. Much better is simply a placard
ARE YOU GOING?
That starts the people in New York thinking (a hard thing to do), and then later when they see in some other place a hundred miles away, another placard
MIDGE CITY! RAH! RAH!
they can hardly keep away from the Fall Fair.
THE AGRICULTURAL EXHIBIT
In the old days, at Midgeville in 1880, the main thing, in fact, the chief idea of the Fair, was the Agricultural Exhibit. It was placed in a long wooden shed and you didn’t need to ask where it was. You knew where it was as soon as you came within a hundred yards of it. You didn’t need to see it either. You would have known it was there in the dark. And you didn’t need to hear it. You just somehow were quite sure that this was it.
When you went in, you saw a huge hog in a pen and a farmer looking at the hog while the hog looked at the farmer. This was the farmer who had raised the hog and he had already looked at it all summer. But at present he is one of the judges of the Show and he is judging the hog. This is terribly hard to do because it is the only hog in the Show.
Next to that is a pen with a huge cow, and a farmer looking at the cow, and as they both have blue ribbons on, you know that they have taken the prize.
The whole Agricultural Exhibit was done that way. But compare: —
MIDGE CITY AUTUMN EXPOSITION
THE BEAUTY SHOW
Do they have a show of fat hogs at the Midge City Autumn Exposition of to-day? Well, I should rather guess not! There is perhaps a shed somewhere away in the back of the place with a hog or two in it. But that is merely to draw off the farmers and keep them away from the Show.
The main big feature is the Beauty Show, at which the award is made as to which of the twelve girls is to have the honor of being “MISS MIDGE CITY,” and having her photograph in the papers all the way from Kansas City to Toronto. You don’t need to talk of fat hogs when you look at this contest. They are not in it with this. And the judges are not farmers. Any man capable of judging this contest wouldn’t stay on a farm a week.
Not that there was no variety at all in the Midgeville Fall Fair of 1880. It was understood even then that the human mind needs diversion and that the lighter shades must mingle with the graver side of life. No man can look at a hog all day without feeling the need of a change.
THE SIDE SHOWS IN 1880
That was why they all had a Flower Show in another shed, a smaller shed on the other side of the grounds from the Agricultural Hall. In this shed you could see the most beautiful sweet peas raised by Daisy Murchison, and the most wonderful chrysanthemums grown by Flossie Fitzgerald, the minister’s daughter: and, what was better still, Daisy and Flossie themselves looking at the flowers. So that wasn’t so bad.
But, as a matter of fact, there was even more excitement than that in 1880. There were always two or three other little tents with banners over them; on one of them was the legend
FAT WOMAN: COME IN AND HAVE A LOOK
In 1880, everybody, it seems, was crazy to have a look at a fat woman. Now nobody cares. Thin women are all the rage, and a fat woman would starve to death in her tent.
But in 1880 there she was sitting on a little camp stool on a raised dais; she weighed 375 pounds and round her stood a little group of rural people, with their mouths open and a hush of awe upon them much like the attitude of people in the basilica of St. Peter’s at Rome.
The fat woman didn’t have to do anything or say anything; and the people didn’t say anything; they just looked at her. But even at that the morality of the whole thing was doubted; it was generally felt in 1880 that after a certain stage of fat a woman’s place was at home.
After you had seen the fat woman, there was still in 1880 the Living Skeleton, and the Albino Boy, and the Man Born Without Ears, and a few other diversions of that sort. In 1880, the line between horror and amusement was not carefully drawn.
THE SHOWS OF 1928
DESPERATE DEATH STUNTS BY DARE-DEVILS
But now in contrast with this the side-shows and side-lines of the Midge City Autumn Exposition of 1928. The side-shows have long since eaten up the show. In fact, nowadays they are the show. People don’t care any longer to see a hog stand still or a trotting horse trot. They come in the hope that one of the aviators will break his neck, or that the parachute man’s parachute will fail to open and that he will be dashed to pieces on the ground.
That, of course, is what all the wild advertising is aimed at; you see in the publicity publications, for instance: —
DEATH-DEFYING DIVE BY DIVINE DIVER
and you will find that one big feature of the fair will be a dive by Señorita Marguerita Marcosa from a platform a hundred and fifty feet high, through flames of gasoline, onto a passing airplane, and from that to a parachute. If they could think of anything else to dive her through, they’d put her to it. The thing is to come as near to killing the Señorita as the law allows, with a half hope of the real thing. Hence all the fireworks, and the airplanes and speedway stuff.
Little do the people realize that the Señorita is really Daisy Murchison, the same girl who sold the flowers in 1880, or, if you like it, her daughter. But she learned calisthenics at the Midgeville High School, and now she’s doing stunts. They only call her Señorita because that sounds better in case she gets killed.
In any case, Daisy isn’t the only one taking a risk round the Midge City Autumn Exposition of 1928. The air is full of aviators leaping out of their machines, and women in mid-air hanging on to ropes with their teeth, and parachutes flying round like shingles on a windy day.
And the earth is as bad as the air. On the speedway there are motors and motorcycles whirling past at such a terrific rate that you have a fine chance any afternoon of the Fair to see a really terrible accident. Add to that the Human Fly crawling up the edge of the Midge City Pandemonium Building and killing himself (by statistics) one day in every twenty-five, and you see that the opportunity is excellent.
Altogether I don’t know which was best, the little old fair with the hogs and the flowers and Flossie Fitzgerald and the Fat Woman or the Big Show of 1928 with the noise and racket and sputtering fireworks and brain-curdling death stunts.
But I rather suspect that they are much the same thing. Human nature being still human nature, the people of 1880 probably got more or less the same feeling out of it all as we do now. But with that I leave it to the psychoanalysts.
Extinct Monsters ALL THAT WILL BE LEFT OF OUR HOUSEHOLD PETS IN 1,000 YEARS
TRAINED OBSERVERS, SUCH as the readers of this book, who notice anything that comes under their eyes even at a distance of six inches, cannot have failed to realize that our household animals are doomed to extinction. “I doubt,” said an eminent social theorist the other day, himself one of the keenest of contemporary observers, “whether there are as many horses on Fifth Avenue as there are motor cars. Certainly there are none in the larger hotels.”
It is a subject of equally common remark that the dog is vanishing. Hydrophobia on the one hand and the motor truck on the other are breaking up the long-standing compact of friendship between man and the dog. “I doubt very much,” says a contemporary writer on social science, “if it is possible henceforth to raise pups on Fifth Avenue.”
In the same vein, a brilliant writer in a magazine of last month, in an article on The Passing of the Dog, declares that in a half hour’s walk in New York he did not pass a single dog.
Nor are the horse and the dog all. The decreasing numbers of the house-fly struck a first note of alarm last summer. The bat, once a familiar feature of the American home, is now seldom found except in an aviary. The moth can only be kept alive at an inordinate cost in camphor.
In short, it requires no great effort of the imagination to see that in a few more generations our household pets of the present will be the extinct monsters of the past. There will be nothing left of them except the kind of information that will be handed out somewhat after the following fashion:
I
THE HORSE
(As viewed in the light of extracts from the current press of the year 3000 a.d.)
New York, Jan. 1, 3000 a.d. — Visitors to the Zoölogical Gardens (Extinct Animals Section) should not fail to take advantage of the unique opportunity now offered of seeing an actual living horse, perhaps the last specimen of its species. This interesting survival of a past age was found attached to what has been deciphered as a taxicab — itself a relic of unknown purpose — in the interior of China. Through the energies of the directors of our municipal museum, the animal was secured from its owners and flown yesterday to New York.
The horse is open to the public daily from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m., and is attracting large crowds of sightseers. In shape, it resembles somewhat an earlier type of helicopter flying machine, the legs being pivoted at the corners, though seemingly in a position too rigid for successful flight.
Professor Plink, the famous authority on the zoölogical remains of the twentieth century, is of the opinion that the horse was unable to fly. “It is difficult,” he said, in a lecture delivered in the monkey-house of the Zoo last evening, “to conceive that the horse’s legs could make more than three revolutions to the second.”
The same authority explained that the horse was clearly distinct from the cow and the bull, there being features of difference easily recognizable by the expert.
It appears that the horse for many centuries was used by mankind as an engine of locomotion. When the animal was put into use, the pilot seated himself midway on its back, using his heels against its sides as a form of gear control. Contrary to many misleading historical references, no gasoline was put into the horse. A speed of three and even four miles an hour is said to have been maintained.
The last known use of the horse appears to have been in connection with the mounted policemen who were a familiar feature of civic life during the Age of Bandits in the earlier twentieth century. Experience showed that a policeman on the ground offered too easy a mark and could easily be teased or even kidnapped, whereas a policeman on horseback was elevated into a position of relative security.
Old prints of the period depict for us the mounted city police in their quaint uniforms asleep on their horses.
It is announced that the enterprising directors of our Metropolitan Museum may shortly be able to secure for us a perfect specimen of a cow, including the peculiar apparatus by which it produced gasoline.
II
(From a Young People’s Encyclopedia of Useful Knowledge, a.d. 4026)
