Thursday, May 7, 1897
Now comes the gladdest month of the whole year. May is the month of the apple blossoms; of the happy green fields, vocal with strains, etc, etc.– Hartford Times, in a moment of rhapsody.
Now comes the baddest month of the whole year. May is the month of minnesingers and various other poets in Hartford and elsewhere, but what is it as a matter of sharp fact?
The humbug of the calendar, the charlatan among months, the three-card monte man in the procession of the seasons. Cold with an unpardonable perversity, or hot with a premature and infernal heat. The fomenter of rheums and rheumatism, May begins with a sore throat and ends with a sunstroke. If poets could be sued for misrepresentation of essential facts, their remarks about this month of May would send all the harps in the world to the pawnshop every year. Take the Hartford flatterer of May.
Was he roaming through the happy green fields, vocal with the rains, yesterday? Was he dancing a coranto on the lawn? Did he have posies around his occiput and a branch of blossoms in his harp hand?
Not much.
He was sitting by a wood fire, smoking a Connecticut cigar, which drew no better than the chimney. He had a flannel garland around his neck and inquired anxiously for his overshoes. Such are the fictions of the hymners of May in these latitudes.
A Chance for a Fortune in Maple Sugar
Newlin Williams tells in The Forester how a fortune was once made in maple sugar and may be made again. He writes:
“Some members of the New Jersey Forestry Association may have seen a man who, twenty years or more past, travelled on the Delaware Valley lines of the Pennsylvania Railroad, bent on selling maple sugar. His article was so much in demand that he made a comfortable fortune in selling it, which having been accomplished, he immediately invested his accumulations in the oil bubble, then inflating, and lost it to a dollar. Where he got the crude sugar is not known, but by some process, either borrowed from New England or originated with himself, he clarified it, moulded it, and sold it in pairs of oblong cakes done up with colored papers into attractive packages. Old folks and children alike professed that they knew no such delicious morsel.
The sugar was dark-colored, hard, dry, brittle and free from grit, of fine strong flavor and as clear as the red and yellow candies so popular with the children at the holidays. The secret seems to have perished with the man, for no one has seen so choice a product before or since.”
Mr. Williams concludes that a fortune awaits the man who shall discover this lost process, and he commends the matter to the consideration of sugar producers.
LITTLE LEVELS
We are having a regular Kansas blizzard here just now, and great fears are entertained for the fruit and wheat.
Frank Maxwell and brother are in this section for the purpose of buying some cattle.
Contractor McKeever, of North Carolina, is here again trying to persuade someone to carry Uncle Sam’s mail bags on the Academy and Renick’s Valley route.
Mr. Parker, of Virginia, was here last week looking at the Pocahontas marble. He thinks the quantity, as well as quality, cannot be surpassed. He hopes to be able to help our people, who own it, to get it on the market. – Bumblebee
LOBELIA
William Dean’s house and nearly its entire contents were burned Wednesday in a few minutes. Mr. Dean had the best house in this part of the county. Loss about $2,000 – no insurance. W. B. Hill got there in time to save about $100 worth of outbuildings. The family was away at the time, except the mother, one girl and a small boy. The fire started on the roof near the flue, but let me say to the public that they are dangerous. Harvey Morrison’s house caught fire the day before and it was saved only by the best of management. Fire was carried by the wind 250 yards to the mountainside and fired the woods at different places. The people had to fight this about two days.
Some tramps have been seen in the county.
We agree with our Dunmore man about the roads and bridges between Dunmore and Huntersville being in a dangerous condition. – Observer
An Editor Gone Wrong
According to the Staunton News of Tuesday, V. A. McCreery, editor of the Waynesboro Sentinel, has disappeared with a pretty Staunton girl.
Mr. McCreery landed in Staunton some time ago as a tramp printer. He claimed to be of Richmond, of respectable parentage and to have studied medicine. He did odd jobs of printing until a few months ago, when he leased the Waynesboro Sentinel, which he ran up to the time of the incident, which has brought him into notoriety.
McCreery left Staunton at eleven o’clock Saturday night and drove to Waynesboro, and took the 2 o’clock train, presumably for Richmond. The daughter of a worthy citizen of Staunton accompanied him. McCreery has a pass over the C & O, and it is presumed that he secured one for his wife to be.
A letter from a substantial citizen of Lovingston, Nelson county, was shown to the news man in which it was stated that McCreery had to leave the county on account of some trouble, and that he left a wife and child behind him.
The New Women
Here lies a poor woman who always was busy.
She lived under a pressure that rendered her dizzy.
She belonged to ten clubs and read Browning by sight,
Showed at luncheons and teas, and would vote if she might.
She served on a school board, with courage and zeal,
She golfed and she kodaked and rode on a wheel.
She read Tolstoy and Ibsen, knew microbes by name,
Approved of Delsarte, was “Daughter” and “Dame.”
Her children went in for the top education;
Her husband went seaward for nervous prostration.
One day on her tablet she found an hour free –
The shock was too great and she died instantly.
