Thursday,
July 27, 1916
TOP ALLEGHANY
A little too wet for haying but fine growing weather.
Someone in an automobile ran over a fine ewe of Lee Wilmoth’s Sunday, injuring it fatally. We think people who run cars should be very carful about running over property for it is a serious loss to the owner and no gain to the one who kills it, and it is the tax on such property that helps keep up the road.
Shorty McCoy and the mule made a flying trip to Durbin Tuesday.
Dora, youngest child of Charles Spencer, aged about two years, died July 16, after a very brief illness. It was buried at the Wilmoth graveyard. The parents have the sympathy of the entire neighborhood in their sad bereavement.
Jim and Joe Phillips and Talvin Varner have finished a job of peeling hemlock for the Virginia Lumber Co. on Hellebore Ridge.
Lee Wooddell is working in the woods to develop his muscles for school work.
Charles Wooddell will soon have his new house completed.
Jesse Judy passed through here Saturday in his car, enroute to Franklin.
HILLSBORO
At a congregational meeting held in Oak Grove church last Sunday morning the pastor’s salary, by unanimous vote, was raised from $700 to $1,000.
A new fence has been put up around the manse, a cement walk leading from the street to the front door, the old trees removed from the front yard, and a new coat of snow white paint is being put on which makes everything look very homelike.
Coming across the bridge over the Greenbrier river the other morning, our attention was fixed by what appeared to be leaves on the floor of the bridge. Knowing that it was not time for the leaves to fall, we looked again and saw what we took to be leaves were really the wings of the dobsonfly or hellgrammite fly, that grey ghost that flies at night in such vast numbers that we would be terrified could we but see them. It is a harmless insect but in some countries its presence noted in the dry time is taken as a sign that the potato crop will fail. It has four wings each about the size of a willow leaf and shaped like that leaf. The cause of the great mortality the other night was that the hellgrammites had been flying to the powerful electric light which stands on the bridge on the edge of the walk way overhanging the water. Fully as many must have fallen outside the works making great fish bait for the bass…
As soon as the bass season opened the small boys took to fishing from the bridge immediately below the electric light and it was a matter of some conjecture why they always fished there and not at other places that seemed to be more favorable for fish. The reason is plain that the fish had been feeding upon the nocturnal insects that fell with singed wings from the light and the place was baited. Trust a boy to find where the fish are lurking…
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We are having an old time summer. Hot weather and lots of rain. A wet summer with all its interruptions of farm work is more to be desired than gold, yea than much fine gold, sweeter also than the honeycomb. Give us the wet summer in the woods and in the grass country every time. It is good for our health and spirits. Everything flourishes and the barber will tell you that the beards of his customers grow faster in a wet summer…
One of the hottest days this summer, the summer boarders were walking up the grade and met the Italian section boss who took notice of his fellow creatures, so out of his limited English, he remarked genially: “Hot! I sweat!” and that describes this summer between showers…
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For a good many years the advances in the means of swift locomotion has presented the road question in a new phase. Whereas road building has been a matter of townships, counties and states, with the coming of motor cars capable of crossing the continent in a few days, it must follow that roads are bound to become a national question. The wildest dreams of the Victorian era are the facts of today, and the time is soon coming when Congress will be called upon to regulate and build and maintain the great turnpikes that connect the states. It may be that with the passing of the tariff as a political question that the next great issue in America will be on the question of roads.
THE NATURE FAKIRS
But if any provide not for his own and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel. I Timothy 8.
He only who forgets to hoard has learned to live – Kingsley
THE PROVIDERS
Hoarding is confined largely to the man animal with whom it is almost a religion. It goes to such a great length that in a majority of cases the man is richest when he dies, just as a hog is fattest when he is butchered.
With animals those who take thought for the future are the exceptions to the rule but it is a significant fact that they are wisest of all the animals. The bee, ant, squirrel and beaver are right at the top in the list of intelligent animals…
