Thursday, March 30, 1900
All Newspaper Men Will Tell You So
The editor may read the proofs of a newspaper four times and pass repeatedly over the same error without seeing it, says an exchange. All newspaper men will tell you so. But just as soon as the paper is printed in its complete shape, there stands that error out in front of you so big that you cannot see anything else. It is a strange fact. And this is the reason that it is so easy to edit a paper after it is printed.
SANCTIFICATION
We hear a great deal about sanctification, and our ideas on the subject, it may well be believed, were very murky and uncertain. Lately, we have been looking the matter up and have come to the conclusion that a sanctified man is merely a Christian who is “sot in his ways.”
If a man is really sanctified, you can trade horses with him without looking in his horse’s mouth. As there is no way of knowing whether he is sanctified or not, it is better to look in the mouth anyway as an ordinary business precaution. If the man claims to be sanctified, it is best not to trade horses with him at all, for when an individual gets so puffed up in his own conceit that he believes he has lost the art of sinning, he is a dangerous man in the community. He will skin you alive and give God the glory. He will set himself up as a standard measure of everything by his narrowness, and be dead to faith, hope and charity,
TIMBER
It is hard to make people believe what wonderful forests we have in Pocahontas. We have known many a man to pass through the county, following a road along the top of the river ridges or through a farming section, and go away thinking has some idea of the county. He will say that the timber of Pocahontas is highly overrated. It takes time to know this county, and it is so large that probably no man can say he knows it thoroughly.
There are many thousand acres of oak in this county in the burnt woods sections that do not amount to much, but on the other hand, there are vast sections where the forests are so dense and dark that a forest fire has never been known.
Last year, Colonel Dan O’Connell, cutting on the headwaters of the Greenbrier river for the West Virginia Pulp and Paper company, took four and one half million feet of spruce off of 100 acres, an average of 45,000 feet to the acre, and three and one half million off of 200 acres, an average of 22,500 feet to the acre.
On the head of Wiliams River, some Pennsylvanian lumber dealers measured average acres of timber on the stump and found an average yield of 65,000 feet to the acre. They measured a tree which was not unusual for its size, which was 19 inches at the butt and at the height of 85 feet was still over seven inches in diameter. The timber of Pocahontas represents many millions of dollars.
A DOCTOR’S JOKE
We asked a doctor the other day what he thought of the old adage, “At forty, every man’s a physician or a fool.” He said he did not know about that, but he did know of some who were both.
A DASTARD’S DEED
The delicate gold refiner’s scales showed the weight to be two pounds. A frog hair would have brought the bar down. The purchaser turned over a certified check of $2,000 and the title papers to two Marlinton lots, making the price paid for the golden treasure that of a king’s ransom. He concealed the precious package under his cloak and stepped out in the night. But, the beady eyes of Bitter Creek Bill, the desperado, had been fixed upon the transfer through the plate glass window, and when the unsuspecting citizen turned his steps homeward, the outlaw followed with stealthy tread. At the darkest turning, the fatal knife was lifted, and it descended and was driven home and Percival Timberly, a Marlinton millionaire, was no more. Clutching the two-pound roll of butter, for which he had shed blood, the villain fled to the fastnesses of the mountains.
Mrs. Percival Timberly had been a Biltsinger and, with that haughty house, it was considered a disgrace not to have butter on the table. To a Biltsinger, disgrace was worse than death. For his high resolve to have butter on the table at all hazards, Percival Timberly sacrificed his life and property in the spring of 1900.
Mrs. Percival, being left butterless, did not long survive her husband.