Friday, December 6, 1895
THE melancholy days have come,
The saddest of the year;
Of freeze and sneeze and shaking knees,
And buzzing in your ear. Ex.
A LITTLE farm well tilled;
A little wife well willed;
Their good effects can all be killed
By a little corn distilled. – Ex.
WILLIAMS RIVER
November 20 opened the snowstorm season of this section. We have had very pleasant weather during the fall, with very little rain, which enables lumbermen to get in straight time.
Williams River will be burdened with lumber as it never was before when the water comes. The splash dam at the “Dead Water” will help greatly to drive the heavy logs along over the numerous large rocks.
The typhus fever that caused such alarm has about subsided, and the general health of this section is good. – NOX
YELK
The long dry summer is ended and winter seemed to be here last week; we had quite a blizzard and some of our hunters like to have went crazy.
Messrs. Samuel Gibson, C. W. Showalter and Randolph Hamrick got after a bear and followed it while the snow lasted. Don’t ask me how they looked when they came back. They lost a hound and came very near losing themselves.
The merchants in this part are getting in their stock before the weather gets bad.
There seems to be quite an attraction on Elk for N. B. Hutton. It must be the Elk honey.
Samuel Sheets, of Dunmore, was on Elk last week, but we won’t tell on him.
Football is quite an interesting game. It is worth anyone’s time to go to see a game played. – Ginne Lynn
DUNMORE
MR. JEFFERSON MOORE, near Dilley’s Mill has been a very successful hunter. He has killed as many as seven deer in one day. Upon two occasions he brought down two at a shot, thus killing four fine deer with two bullets. For twenty-five years he has been a member of the Board of Education for his district, and is enthusiastic in the public school interests, by which his family has been much benefitted.
LAST WEEK a man sold four fattening hogs at Frost, and they were so poor you couldn’t stick a fork in the gravy.
WEEK before last, 3,450 turkeys were driven from Monterey and McDowell to Staunton.
A FEW days ago a girl wrote to her lover and told him that whenever she got a letter from him it made her heart jump up and down like a churn dasher.
THE little boys and girls have lots of fun now a days blowing up hog bladders, etc.
HOME NEWS
ACCORDING to the Monroe Watchman, cholera is playing havoc with the hogs of that county. One man having lost 35 head.
DIRECTLY after the war, a citizen of the county bought a rifle for $12, executing his note for the purchase money. The note was renewed from time to time, and it was settled a short time since for $42. This is an object lesson of what a terrible thing is interest.
The Greenbrier river was frozen across on Wednesday morning. This was owing to the low stage of water. Water will be scarce if the winter closes in on us without rain, and the lumber and coal barge interests of West Virginia will be in imminent danger of great pecuniary loss from the ice.
Things in General
One afternoon, one of my occasional rambles took me to the cliffs overlooking Marlinton. These are rarely interesting crags from the fact that, altho they have been here since creation, there is no tale of any rash Indian or civilized lover hurling himself over them in a fit of despair. Show me another cliff without its own peculiar tragedy!
“Lives there a man with soul so dead,” I wonder, who could not enjoy the glorious view from these rocks. As I sat up there and gazed abroad, my thoughts took a threatening turn, and I almost had a tendency, as Silas Wegg says, to “Drop into poetry,” and let off a warm little volley verse; perhaps one of those contortions of the lyric muse that would cause my friends to believe I was ready to destroy myself with passion over the beauties of nature.
I was really getting along. I had decided on the first word of the first line of the only verse, when I looked to Marlinton for inspiration to carry me on, and I got no further.
There was an exhilarating sight going on below.
A Frenchman, I think, said that Americans are the most unconsciously humorous people in all this world. I do believe it. Long I sat there on that romantic, I mean, rheumatic-pains inducing ground, and watched some twenty football kickers as they galloped up and down, revolving rapidly, twirling about after that ball, almost destroying themselves with excitement and for lack of breath, in their painful intensity to give it a kick. Fearful earnestness was in every movement of that squirming, scrambling, struggling mass of players.
One tall, slim player stood out distinctly to view and riveted my attention. He moved through the figures. All went well until he got caught between two more violent players, who wound themselves about him, then cast him from them with most unfeeling emphasis. Exceedingly limp and apparently lifeless, he fell from their clutches on the ground, but after a while bobbed up serenely as ever and rushed in where there was an “opening for a young man” to kick the ball.
Now a shaggy-haired, short boy, who goes about with an “if you’re kicking, call me early” expression on his face, dashes down the field. He has evidently got away with somebody’s ball, and they’re after him with a mighty roar. One infantile youth of eight summers hops about, waving his hands frantically, and in an agony of excitement shrieks, “Stop him, O, stop him!” The players band together, and an indescribable mix-up follows. I shut my eyes and wait for the lamentations for the slain to go up from the homes of Marlinton, but a joyful howl rends the air as the ball bounds through the goal.
Long they played, and I watched in solitary state, until across the meadows and up the mountain side there pealed –
That all-softening, over-powering knell;
The tocsin of the soul – the supper bell –
And the players fled precipitately. I, too, came down from my lofty perch, and drifted homeward with the reflection:
“Whatever may happen in after years,
There was never a game like that. – S. A. P.