Thursday, September 7, 1899
Our State has suffered from the illicit sale of liquor if ever a State did, but so far as we know the only plan taken to prosecute the sellers is by the time honored grand jury route, and the number of indictments vary with the personnel of the different grand juries. Some sets of men will not want to “spoil the lick.”
DIED
Dr. Robert W. Hazlett died at Wheeling last Saturday night in his seventy-second year. He is to be remembered as the discoverer of coal and oil in West Virginia. He had a fondness for geological study and while roaming the mountains in quest of health, he noticed that the Appalachian system was underlaid with coal to a marvelous degree, and this led to the development that now contributes so largely to the wealth of West Virginia…
MOTHER GOOSE
“I have just been reading the honorable works of one of your famous female English poets,” said the educated Japanese, “and I cannot understand her so exceeding popularity. I refer to the Mother Goose. There is one of her poems of celebrity in which she acquaints us of twenty-four blackbirds that sang after they had been beforehand baked into a pie. The Mother Goose, I regard and consider as one of the greatest liars of the English speaking antiquity.”
– – –
The oriental is not the first who has tried to find some consistency in the famous verse:
“Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye.
Four and twenty blackbirds
Baked in a pie.
When the pie was opened
The birds began to sing,
Wasn’t that a dainty dish
To set before the king?”
We remember somebody pointing out the beauties of the above verse and calling it on allegory.
The interpretation of the most inconsistent part, and the passage the Japanese had the most trouble, is all we can recall. The pie, with 24 blackbirds was our 24-hour day, and when the pie was opened was morning, and the birds that sing were not the birds that had been baked, but the birds generally, which sing in the morning.
The above has so taxed us that we cannot with any certainty give the hidden meaning of
“Hey, diddle diddle,
The cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon;
The little dog laughed to see such sport
And the dish ran away with the spoon.”
We will attempt, however, to unravel it. We believe it bears on the condition of things today. “Hey, diddle diddle” is the essence of political stump speeches; “The cat and the fiddle,” the only two classes, the crafty and those who seek enjoyment; “The cow jumped over the moon” – one man rich enough to own all the property in a State; “The little dog laughed to see such sport” – the attitude of the daily papers. “And the dish ran away with the spoon” – the public, the dish, allowing itself to be seduced by the manufacturer’s trust.
Mother Goose was a great philosopher. The wisdom is couched in such language that it is handed down from mother to child, and will never be lost.
BURDETTE TO HIS SON
“There are young men who do not work, my son, but the world is not proud of them. It does not know their names even. It simply speaks of them as Old So-and So’s boys. Nobody likes them, nobody hates them; the great busy world doesn’t even know that they are there.
So find out what you want to be and do so, and take off your coat and make a dust in the world.
The busier you are, the less deviltry you will be apt to get into, the sweeter will be your sleep, the brighter and happier your holidays, and the better satisfied will the world be with you.”
