Thursday, October 20, 1898
Lost: At the merry-go-round in Marlinton, Saturday night, September 14, a small purse containing $40 in two twenty dollar bills, belonging to James Kirkpatrick. The finder will secure a liberal reward by returning same to owner.
– – –
The Independent in speaking of the late J. E. Bell, Esqr., mentions a characteristic incident. When a boy, Mr. Bell rode behind his father from Goshen, Rockbridge county, to Lewisburg, and was entered as a pupil of the Lewisburg Academy. Upon leaving for home, the father gave his son fifty cents for pocket money, and when the school closed he had half of it left. This was one secret of his successful life, he had early learned the knack of making a little and saving a heap.
THE TRUCE OF THE BEAR
Rudyard Kipling’s latest and perhaps greatest poem is “The Truce of the Bear,” published by Harper Brothers in Literature. It is inspired by the proposal of the Czar of Russia that a “Peace Congress” be held looking to the disarmament of the nations, and Kipling shows his distrust of Russia in this poem. He has never given Russia the credit of being an enlightened nation of Europe, but regards it as distinctly Asiatic and the natural enemy of the European nations. The poem is the tale of an old blind beggar, who warns a party of hunters of the bear that had cost him his sight. He had had this bear in his power; had chased it until it was so tired it could hardly move. Then, as he was about to shoot, the brute raised on its hind legs and in a beseeching attitude so moved the hunter to pity that he did not fire.
“Nearer he tottered and nearer, with paws like hands that pray –
from brow to jaw the steel-shod paw, it ripped my face away…
This is the time to fear
When he stands up like a tired man, tottering near and near.”
Kipling has said that the Russian is an irreclaimable barbarian; that he will do very well until he “tucks in his shirt,” meaning until he tries to act like a European.
The poem ends:
“There is no truce with Adam-zad,
“The bear that looks like a man!”
BIOGRAPHIC NOTES
Soon after the War of 1812, there came to our county one of the most interesting and eccentric personalities that our older people remember anything about, Mrs. Diana Saunders, late of Rocky Point, on Dry Branch of Swago. She was the widowed mother of four children, Anna, Eleanor, Cyrus and Isaac. Her cabin home was built near the head springs of Dry Branch, almost in speaking distance of the Rocky Point school house, and just below…
As to her personality, she had been formed in “nature’s choicest mould,” and in her youth must have been the peer of Edgar Allen Poe’s “rare and radiant maiden.”
The compiler recalls one or more of her granddaughters as among the most perfect models of feminine form and feather that he has ever observed anywhere.
From the way Granny Saunders used to speak of Jim Madison, Jim Monroe and Tom Jefferson, and wonder how such finicky, limber-jointed, red headed, fiddling and dancing customers had ever been made Presidents of our United States, it is inferred that her blooming youth must have been passed in Orange and Albermarle atmosphere…
Persons yet living remember the reply she once made to the salutation, “Well, Granny, how are you today?”
“Poorly enough, to tell you the truth. O, dear me, I am just here and that is all. I have pains in the top of my head, pains in my face, pains in my ears, at the back of my neck, between my shoulders, in my arms, in my breast, in my body, in my knees, in my ankles, in both of my big toes.”
Then pausing a moment, as if trying to think of more places for pains, she would raise her eyes toward heaven and devoutly exclaim, “But, praise the Lord, bless His Holy Name, I have a good appetite.”
Few persons have left their impress upon the writer’s memory more vividly than Mrs. Diana Saunders.